FRA Debate - Intelligent Design vs. Darwinian Evolution

+1>The Topic - Intelligent Design vs. Darwinian Evolution


And so the debate begins. Please defend your views as openly as possible and give as much justification for them as you can.

The poll can be found http://www.micro-maul.co.uk/IDvsEvo.htmlhere.

Please explain both

OK.. here is my view on all of this..
For the record, I am am atheist, and do not personaly believe in any form of god or supreme being.

ID is an idea put about by those whom out of desperation at failing to impose their narrow minded religious views on the rest of us, have now resorted to this totally frivolous theory that natural evolution / selection on its own cant account for the rich diversity of life that we see around us and therefore a supreme inteligence must be involved.
At no time has any proponent of this theory presented one shred of evidence that would stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny, they conveniently gloss over the wealth of evidence of evolution available in the fossil record and worse still, falsely promote their personal beliefs as science.
Dont misunderstand me, I will defend anyones right to believe in what ever they want, but I object to that belief being forced on others regardless of their own views.
Once you remove the fog of religion from this debate the scientific evidence in support of Darwin is unimpeachable.

So......the way I understand it ID is based upon the fact that all down to God or some other intelligence?? (BTW from what I understand its a WASP god that they think is responsible). However Darwinism is based upon the hope that all things go to plan as far as natural selection goes.
Problem is - neither theory takes Sods Law into account. It is that which has fuelled the origin and evolution of the diverse life on this planet (and others I might add). It doesnt matter in what form Sods Law takes when it happens - it just happens.

Darwinism is based on Natural Selection that in itself sods law plays a large part. It relys on no hope that things go to plan. For example, it would be sods law that humans were wiped out by rapid climate change at the point of which they come to understand the balance of the environment and start to do something to maintain that balance. Darwinism is much bigger than one animal outperforming the other.

Basically, ID bases its foundation on the view that we dont understand how everything came to be and therefore there must be something that does. I.E. that we were put here as we are, and not through a process of billions of years of evolution. In fact the earth could have been created yesterday with everything as it is.

The biggest problem with the arguement is that ID disproves darwinism by the simple statement that some higher being created everything as it is and therefore it would look like everything has evolved, cause thats the way it was designed.

Personally, that is not enough evidence for me.

(Message edited by kane on March 26, 2006)

So in 1 billion years theyll all look back on this and laugh wont they.

Go back one step.

Does everybody/anybody believe in the big bang theory, ie nothing exploded and became something?

Philip, the big bang could be the sum of something that equaled 0. A lot of + and - can account for 0,and still expand.

I myself am inclined to follow the Big Bang theory, and at least take Darwinism in account. Maybe not explaining everything, but its the logical part of it.

If ID is what fueled our origing of the species, the Inteligent Designer wasnt the most smart cookie in the jar.
For example, mamals have the playground between the waste disposal exits...

Or else, what would the inteligent designer think about the human way to adapt species. Dogs spring to mind. We have at one hand, the wolf and on the other hand a Yorkshire Terrier.

And now with genetics we have the fledgling power to create our own species....

ID always falls apart when you ask, who created the Inteligent Designer in the first place. If the answer is it has always existed then that discounts the big bang :), unless our understanding of time is flawed and then it really gets me confussed. So the only logical conclusion (for me) is that Darwens Theory is closer to the truth until something better comes along, but that does not discount the exisitance of a higher inteligent interfering with this planet :)

In my opinion, the Big Bang and God are equally rediculous attempts to explain something we cannot comprehend. The Big Bang has us believe that all the Universe was in this little thing which went BOOM, but doesnt explain where that came from. Religious people never say where God came from, or what he did before he made the world.

I am, however, a firm believer in Sods Law. Really its the only theory that makes sense. The world and everything on it hates you, and wants to make life miserable for you and every oither person on the planet until we explode in a rage at the unfairness of it all and murder one another in each others beds.

Have a nice day:)

We are all just an experiment for a higher race of aliens.

I believe that there are too many flaws in our world for a higher intelligent cloud-being that is supposed to be omnipotential to have created all this mess. If you state that God is infallible, please try to explain to me the occurence of weird natural phenomena like Bush, Blair and earthquakes.

Anyways, I also believe that Darwin wasnt entirely right in his theories as well. He was a man of his time and in the meantime we have discovered, through other men and women, that our world and its history doesnt seem to be entirely as he wrote it down. But that was due to the ideas of his lifetime, not to his theory not being quite right. Besides, the evolutionists have maintained that it is still a theory until proven otherwise with hard facts and those scientists are still looking for them, but in the meantime Darwins theories are a good working tool. The people who advocate Intelligent Design cannot bring one single hard fact to prove their theory, hence it is not a good working tool. That is the difference really. And its all about words and ideas. We find the bones, but we cant find the fingerprints. And certainly not the signature.

I believe the world we live on to be one huge living organism, interacting with other similar organisms in what we call space. Its too huge for us to understand and so we try to create the little image of a invisible cloud-being that we call God so that our poor little brains can at least understand one itty little bit of reality.
We shouldnt be upset about it. We should be nice to Mother who is this world we live on. Would you complain that when Mother bakes cookies they dont look all exactly the same ? Be grateful that Mother spices some dishes and some not, that She lays out nice but different clothes every day, that She breaks and egg and hopes the dog will clean it up for Her.
Thing is, Mother is not nice. But She does love us in Her own way. I can live with that.

I also believe that we live and have a working mind because What Is wanted to experience material life, because It tries to understand Itself and Its purpose. We are all small parts of It: humans, animals, insects, fish and plants alike, even the rocks I guess, and worlds and stars. We are all made of the same stuff and through us What Is experiences all that is.
Aint that nice ? It makes life more interesting for me.
Im writing a book about that, for several years already but sometimes months pass by without inspiration and then I get ideas that require not only writing down but even re-writing something else as well. Its a never-ending story, but its fun. Maybe one day Ill publish it even.

We are all part of a supercomputer, and when we find the answer to life, the universe and everything, we will be blown up to make way for an intergalactic off-ramp.

Well it doesnt say anything about dinosaurs in the bible and that means that God doesnt exist.

My name is not in the phonebook either, but i exist.

I€™m an atheist, But the alien theory is quite compelling :) lol

impose their narrow minded religious views on the rest of us

This is a minority not majority, the amount of people that have said to me i didnt know u were religous is substantial. I choose to accept other peoples beliefs are there own, and mine are mine. I know what i believe and i stick to it. The Bible is open to interpritation if u read everything as it is written and dont see that is is jus a book of stories and views that has evolved over 2000 years. Some facts can be distorted by thousands of people telling them. In fact if u read the bible in latin it makes for very diferent reading.

A hundered or so years ago the religous types would have been throwing eden down your throat over evolution, now its the other way round. I have the freedom to choose what i believe some times it defys logic, but if id of listend to them id never of built Tanto.

Im with Darwin on this. ID had nothing to do with the evolution of my robot.

Does anyone/everyone believe in the law that says in a closed system without the input of energy things go from a state of higher order to a state of lower order

Where did the energy come from to make everything we see. The many and varied theories of evolution have always contradicted the law of entropy IMO.

Nothing exploded just does not do it for me.

Where did the energy come from?

Conservation of energy is the logical consequence of the laws of nature not changing with time. It follows that at the moment of creation of time there can be no conservation of energy.

entropy

You may have misunderstood the law of entropy. The entropy of the Earth and all things on it is not doomed to increase endlessly since excess entropy is radiated into space as heat. Life on Earth takes things with low entropy and converts them into waste materials of higher entropy as a means of maintaining or increasing the internal order of its own structures. The overall increase of entropy with time is always very positive, so no thermodynamic laws are violated. All this extra entropy is removed from life-forms partly through excretion and by far larger amounts into the atmosphere or oceans as waste heat. Space is extremely huge and cold and very nearly empty - it will be able to receive this entropy in the form of low energy photons indefinitely. Were all heat trapped on Earth, life here would quickly become impossible by any means but evolution has essentially no bearing on the viability of this process since every living reproducing thing is similar in this respect.

just my little bit of input to see how people respond.

if you count how many stars, planets and etc are out there, it approximtes infinate possibility (not exactly true, but close enough to make my point) if the odds of a little blue planet being a set distance from a sun like ours, with a moon and all of our conditions existing is 1 in 100 million to the power 1 hundred million, then in an infinite possibility universe, there are an infinate number of this world exactly as it is. reduce the number to less than infinate, and we still have a high probability the we exist more than once. its not ID, its just playing the odds.

also, if there is a universse made of matter and time (simplifying a lot there :) ) then for matter to equal 0 time must be 0, but for anything other than this, for matter to be infinatly small (approximating 0) then time must be approximating infinity. So all time existed at once as matter approched 0. this means that as time approaches 0 (the end of days) matter approximates infinity, meaning that the gravity invloved collapses things to infinate density. this then creates a point of infinate mass, and 0 time, which cannot exist as anything multiplied by 0 = 0, so there must be a reversal as something moves into negativity (reverse time or anti matter?) in a big bang?

just thinking out loud

A higher intellegance kills its own theory really.

if everything was here by gods saying, then fate would be real, god has designed curcumstances to happen. if this was the case we wouldnt have any control over what we do because god would have already decided/designed things for us. that being the case there can be no heaven and hell or good and evil simply because we had no control over our actions so how could we have led a good or bad life as it was gods doing. that being the case why on earth would god send his son down to earth and make us kill him so brutally?

Everything on this earth, and all circumstanses have an explanation. for example the sunami over in india. the plates of the earth are constantly moveing, as 2 collide they slowly over time build up pressure and slip causeing an earthquake in the ocean which in turn causes a tidal wave.

However i would like to have faith in somthing that is stronger than us but not to the extent that i have no control over my life. faith is a humans strongest asset. its what makes us top dog down here and will keep us alive otherwise if there was nothing to have faith in we would all be misserable gits as there would be no meaning to life. just my 2 cents.

I recon not only is the Universe bigger than we understand, its bigger than we can understand!:)}}

the scientific evidence in support of Darwin is unimpeachable Darwins theory of evolution would be called Darwins law of evolution if it was proved. There is no unimpeachable evidence at all.

There has not been a single missing link found that has not been disputed.

There was a program on TV a while back on evolution that said that the complete lack of missing links has lead the scientific community to abandon Darwins Gradualism and replace it with puntuated equilibrium.

Thats it} over my head,

:proud:

so what you are looking for Philip is something that is halfway between a human and an ape....
you obviously havent met me yet then? :lol:

at the end of the day anyone who puts thought into the whole why and how we are here, is that not one of the meanings of life?

thats right, i may not know which sandwich is cheese and which is egg (so i take both) but ive figured out the meanings of life.

reproduction, love, self discovery, happiness and full pressure axes. IMHO

no matter how full pressure u go James ill still blunt ur axe :kiss:

I think its is possible (although I dont) to believe in Darwinism, ID and Big Bang theory. If a god-like being created the universe from the big bang (bear in mind science is still unable to say what caused the big bang). Darwinism could be the guiding of life by some a god. But this then brings the question of fate, if all life and evolution is guided are we free or is our life mapped out for us?

Both.:proud::rofl::lol::mrgreen::):wink::new::-)

Read the Honor Harrington-books of David Weber and you get a more interesting idea of god... the Tester.
Actually the people on the world of Grayson believe in the Tester, the Intercessor and the Comforter. A god who puts tests everywhere on your path, life itself being the ultimate test, and if you havent passed them well... ah well, He will try to help you out and even if that wont work at least Hell console you. Or something like that. They dont believe in pre-determination, but they do believe that too much technology is bad for humanity, especially the technology that made them tinker with our genes. Interesting concept really. You have to read the books Im afraid, if you want more explanation, Im rambling on long enough here as it is.

There have been recent new findings about the history of our species: archeologists found shells with holes drilled in them to form a necklace in a site that was way older than expected, setting the theory of humankinds first aestethic abilities some 50.000 years back in time. Even the Neanderthals, an evolutionary dead-end according to DNA-testing, knew about body adornment and buried their dead with beautiful things. We are still working with theory because it all happened so long ago mankind had no recollection of it and we can only guess as to the meaning of artifacts we dig up or find. Why the cave-paintings ? Why the use of ocre on dead bodies ? What did they look like ? How did they live ? We can only guess.

But the people who advocate Intelligent Design claim that there is only one principle and that one is more than set in stone... their god. They claim something that nobody has ever seen or felt or tasted. But science has to work with the tangible and educated guesses (brought on or shored up by facts). Artifacts tell us that someone long ago liked shells, or knew how to carve a horse from a stick, but there is no artifact that shows us a Higher Being did it or made people do it. The ID-advocates claim that their theory is as valid as Darwins. But Darwin at least could show us the fossils and what descended from them. He never really implied that no god could have been responsible, he simply stated that our world and all that lives on it have evolved from a lower state to a more complex one, and that there have been many changes.
What the ID-advocates hate about Darwin is that he never put the responsibility in the Divine corner. He simply stated facts.
And that is what science is about... no interference from religions, simply researching the facts with all possibilities open. Even for religious possibilities, but you have to prove them with hard facts.
And you know how the God of the Bible is... never showing Himself, but hiding in a burning bush or in roiling clouds or in a flaming pillar... never leaving a trace. How unkind of Him.

Babath raises an important point no interference from religions, simply researching the facts with all possibilities open.

Can anyone interpret scientific facts without being influenced by their own preconceptions? Someone who believes in God will interpret the evidence to include their Christian beliefs. Someone who is an atheist will interpret the evidence with their own religious belief.

Darwin looked at the commonality of life and said we have a common ancestor. A Christian will look at the same evidence and say we have the same creator.

Someone who believes in Darwins gradualism will find a human skeleton with no skin or hair or other soft tissue and draw skin and hair to make the person look like a monkey.

We must be aware of the religious beliefs of those interpreting scientific facts.

Ill just step in fir the first time now in suggesting that your comment Philip that an Atheist will intepret evidence with their own religious belief is somewhat contradictory. Being an Atheist by definition means you are not religious. Because a scientist may be an Atheist doesnt mean that they have any reason to show bias in scientific areas, contrary to what you could say for someone with strong religious beliefs.

An Atheistic scientist will stand against movements such as Intelligent Design and religion moving into science as it has the potential to cause such damage to the scientific community, or in some eyes, to the world. An unbiased scientist is simply defending and standing by the facts.



Anyway guys, Ill close the first poll on Friday, let the debate run on a little and then open another poll to reach a conclusion. Feel free to get anyone who is in the rare breed of ID-Supporters to come along, would be good to balance out the sides.

For those that are being left behind a little by this debate, Ill stick up a definitive guide to Intelligent Design and Natural Selection theories on Friday.

Looking at timothys post, I doubt it was intelligent design.

As far as Im concerned, God and the Big Bang are the same theory dressed in different clothes.

The God theory boils down to a supreme being who was kinda hanging around in the void, and decided to make the Universe one day. Maybe he was bored or something.

The Big Bang theory is basically that there was this thing hanging around in the void, how it got there nobody knows, and it went bang one day, creating the Universe.

Short story shorter I think theyre both rot.

Intelligent Design? Intelligent design? Intelligent design created our species? Get out of town! Whatever created our species must have one sandwich short of picnic.

As a species, Weve run down the planet, cut all the trees, killed all the animals and are arguing amonst ourselves. If we are created in Gods image, hes got a lot to answer for! Mind you he sounds that way, Arrogant, impatient and bad tempered.

Mind you, this int an argument on God.

Should Intelligent Design be taught as science? In my opinion, No. It cannot be proven, therefore isnt science. Darwinism, as obsessive as some people get, can proven to a small scale [ As accepted by the Discovery Institution behind ID.] Therefore should be allowed to be taught.

Personally, As much as Id like to think the entire planet is a sequence of unfortunate accidents, I really couldnt give a flying fart how life began or how the universe began. Id much rather we, as a species, spent the energy getting our heads together to work our way out of the holes weve dug into already! Like, I dont know, the culling of animals? the holes in the Ozone layer? Weve got bigger problems than what happened in the beginning and if we dont act soon well know exactly what happened in the beginning of the end...

On interference from preconceptions, environments or our education:
I have this quote which became one of my favourites when I studied at the Free University of Brussels and was a member of Study-group Henri Poincar, a students organisation devoted to science and Freethinking (which happens to be one of the principles on which the Free University of Brussels was founded). The quote is from Henri Poincar:

Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be.

It is extremely difficult for any scientist not to be influenced by any of the above, but one should endeavour to do so anyway. The problem Freethinkers face is that of dogma: if they adhere to Freethinking principles then they are adhering to a dogma and thus negating their ideals.
Somebody who says she is a Freethinker is not.
Someone who says she tries to be a Freethinker might be.
An observation from my part, derived from Poincars own writings, that my fellow students in the Study-group didnt want to accept and some even hated me for it. Because I shattered their lovely illusion that they were doing better than non-members.
I cannot claim Im free from these influences, and really the worst of them is pride, but one can always try to do better.

The problem that religious people have with Darwin was that he did not allude to a Higher Being in his works. But he did not deny the existence of such either ! He was very careful on that part. But he tried to stick to the facts and he was not trusting the Bible.
If you want to advocate Intelligent Design you should do so in Theology. Not in Biology or History, although in the latter references to religions can be made since religion is a significant part of humankinds history.
Parents who want to have their children reared with the Intelligent Design-theory should not forget that school is not the only institution which rears their children. They forget that they -as parents- have a far greater influence on their children than a school can have, and have a greater responsabillity in rearing their children than a school should have.

Funny though, if parents would instruct their children to accept ID even though teacher says evolution happened without Divine influence you might say that history has come full circle. You see: in the Middle Ages the Church was all-powerful and could dictate what science is and what not. Scholars and scientists who discovered facts that contradicted accepted dogma had to use a system we might nowadays call doublethink. They would teach the students that facts where thus and so, and at the end of the lecture say that Church teaches otherwise and this and that the students had to accept the Church dogma as real, while knowing it is different. The Church did not only allow this, they actually forced people to do this because they very well knew that dogma couldnt account for everything.
Parents who teach ID to their children today are doing exactly the same thing, but in reverse.

Also being a christian I can honestly say that Ive always hated God why, because I like The Devil.

So how does that make you a Christian? Hmm

Anti-Christ? At least what he said makes more sense then the Christians in my class at college who wear pentagram€™s? Go figure...

Ewan, I am happy to call atheism a belief system instead of a religious belief if that is more acceptable to you. I stand by my point that a belief system will effect the way we interpret facts into theories.

An atheist would not look at the scientific fact of the common features of life and put forward a theory that all life came from one creator.

Babeth has addressed this well in her post above.

The proponents of ID are scientists so it does not make sense to say that they are not allowed to talk about science. The press inferred that these people were some sort of fringe dwelling minority of nutters.

I read some of the media reports at the time of the ID court case in the US. Some of the media would quote the proponents of ID and the person would be a professor with a string of qualifications after their name. There are people who dig up fossils and who use the fossil record to support their theory of ID. Why should scientists be locked out of scientific debate?

€œWell it doesnt say anything about dinosaurs in the bible and that means that God doesnt exist.€ Tim, if the bible does mention dinosaurs, would you decide that God does exist. The word dinosaur was only invented recently. The bible does talk about a large animal who makes the earth shake when it walks. The animal is described as having a tail like a cedar trunk.

Fossil records do not support Darwin€™s gradual evolution theory. Recently, in Australia, we discovered two stands of wollemi pines growing apart from one another. This species was said to have become extinct 400000000 years ago. The wollemi pines in both places are exactly the same as the fossil record. There was a fossil of a fish that I saw in a museum that was thought to be extinct for 65000000 years. It was discovered still living. How much had it evolved? Zero evolution.

The fossil record shows us time and time again that there is no gradual evolution from one species to another species. Please note the difference between evolution from one species to another is distinct from evolution within a species. That is why most scientists, who believe in evolution, have moved away from Darwin€™s original idea of gradualism and replaced it with the idea of punctuated equilibrium.

Let me ask again, is there anyone at all who thinks that the big bang theory is 100% probable? If you heard that an astronaut was floating in space and reported that there was an explosion in front of him and a 100 kg robot appeared in front of him with charged batteries and a full tank of CO2, would you say that is possible or the guy is crazy? Would you believe it if something even simpler came from an explosion of nothing? What if he said a M5 bolt came from an explosion of nothing?

What is the probability that goo sitting on a rock somewhere in space accidentally sorted some DNA into a sequence and at the exact same time became surrounded by a membrane and at the exact same time a mechanism to read that genetic sequence formed and at the exact same time became alive?

Darwin€™s gradualism is against the laws of conservation of energy an of entropy. The fossil record does not support it.

In Australia, we must learn three theories of evolution in school. The science teacher quipped that he was about to teach us something that was a minimum of two thirds wrong at the start of the subject. Why not teach ID as well as three theories of evolution and say that the subject is a minimum of three quarters wrong? The subject could deal only with scientifically proved facts and then deal with the theories that emerge from the facts. Is there anything wrong with teaching students to think critically about opposing viewpoints?