A small gripe, but... "Intelligent Design" is a tautology

There's no such thing as design without intelligence. It's like saying someone was burned with "hot fire".

These people are intellectually lazy and undisciplined. They force us through belligerent laziness and their refusal to shift their arses to use the brains chaos gave them to do their damn thinking for them.

Science, by definition, is the formation of testable theories and hypotheses. Science is also peer reviewed and objective. The scientific community (the peers) has rejected intelligent design because it flies in the face (again, by definition) of what science is.

How does one test whether or not 'God did it'?

My frustration is that 60% or more of Americans are too ignorant to understand how intelligent design is not compatible with science.

We are the laughing stock of the world, because of this.

I can see where you can read that. Design as a word implies a designer. That it was designed. I would say however, that just because something is designed it doesn't mean it was done intelligently, or by someone with intelligence.

Design... teleological, then? Design by accident?

Okay, I'll buy that potential use of the word "design"

ACCIDENTAL DESIGN!

I like it! It's snappy and, well *true* of evolution.

I know that there are indeed biological equivalents to the sort of situation where architects forget to allow for ramp access in parking garages (this actually did happen in Oxford, England, a few years ago ... they did include a ramp, but its width and positioning made it impossible for most vehicles to negotiate the turn).

One physician friend of mine has referred to the human knee as "an accident just waiting to happen" -- the same could be said about the appendix.

I guess one could take the view that God just hopes the accidents will be cleared away ... but that would open the door to accusations that the Supreme Being is incompetent AND uncaring.

Or that God is totally cool with the concept of natural selection.

Short sightedness
Hydatiform moles
Colour-blindness
Sickle-cell anaemia
Up to and including the propensity to waste all an island's resources on building giant heads.

Worrying, really.

... whether we haven't actually been through some of this before, with "environmental determinism". I'm oversimplifying quite a bit, but a lot of that was an interpretation of Darwin's theory which presupposed that there was some kind of reason for everything. It was fashionable in biology a century ago ("if you're color-blind, it's actually an adaptation because it allows you to see certain wavelengths more clearly") -- and got transferred to the social sciences via anthropology ("all Inuit are short and plump because it helps them conserve body heat").

And before we knew it, there were fake scientists running around, saying that "black people are lazy because they come from tropical climates", and even worse, using this to justify policies such as apartheid and eugenics. When in reality, they'd just picked out what would prop up their pre-existing biases -- not really "scientific" at all. (The Inuit changed in appearance after they switched to a globalized diet, but one still hears bioclimatological "laws" being cited.)

Up until fairly recently, the possibility that something might be a coincidence was either ignored in many cases, or shoved into a pigeonhole ("there must be some unknown mechanism behind this, which we haven't detected yet"). Random or stochastic factors (e.g. the initial gene pool of a group of animals that colonizes an area) are being modelled now, and chance does seem to play a role in many situations, like weather events (see chaos theory, etc.).

A science supply company has a T-shirt, "If I hadn't believed it I never would have seen it", which I thought was pretty appropriate!

I was explaining this to my Dad a few days ago, peacock tails would probably work just as well as a courtship aid of they were half the size, but the process has no "goal" or definable end-point. It's just a series of ratchets.

He would have suited your T-shirt a few years ago but I think Ive almost managed to cure him. He *was* a big fan of Lamarckism on the grounds that if such a mechanism ever appeared it would simply take over...

Ah, me, logic is such a precious and fragile thing.

The propping up of pre-existing bias is so awfully common that I'm surprised no enterprising and imaginative logician has popularised and memed a fashionable counter-agent...

Unless, of course, that slogan is *it*. :-). Neat.

I *shall* propagate that.

There are those who believe in malevolent design.

Are there some, now?

Those who advocate ID apparently assume that human concepts like "intelligence" and "design" can even be applied to an entity like whatever "God" may be. It goes back to that pathetically inadequate "Sky Father" conception of God--an old man in a white toga waving his hands and making life appear on Earth (and ONLY on Earth, dammit).

...to understand what they've done when they' postulated the existence of an external "God", how alien it could be, what its motives might be, all such things are entirely unknown and so all cards are on the table including beliving that there IS an all-powerful father God and that he's WRONG even though he wants the best for humanity.

They just want to stop being responsible for the consequences of their actions so they don't have to think about them too hard. That's why they want howdy-doody babyish *morals* instead of ethics, morals are small and didactic and aren't meant to analysed, they can fit in nursery rhymes and be told to small children lie sweets. *Ethics* are hard, they have to be worked out and tested and sometimes they don't work.

It's just PURE. LAZINESS.

between real scientists and the great legal minds of ID. It was a strange mix since it skewed the matter to center only on legal points with the lawyers able with glee to be completely inconsistent about science, philosophy and theology so long as they scored points.

The main problem is theological. Incredibly these great mind quoted pagan philosophers, ancient theology of natural religion and cosmology, 18th century anti-Church deists. These anti-intellectual(at best) amateurs
have built shibboleths of lies in order to sneak in the back door. That some of the luminaries of fanatical sophistry are catholic probably prompted a swift response from the Vatican. The RC fundies by the way generally despise their Protestant counterparts at least for their rigid anti-Catholicism. The whole mess is rife with dishonesty on every level.

These people care not whit about science or education or even the mischievous ID "theory". It is about advancing themselves over everyone else and inflicting the punishment once jealously guarded by Satan's torturers. Their lawyers are in for the usual reasons. The pols ditto. The scientists as usual are left defending the truth when a lot more of society has a larger stake in this fight than they will admit.

Providence. There is nothing new under the sun, verily I say unto you: Intelligent design is not a new idea.

He's put the argument against "Intelligent Design" as science more succinctly than anyone else I know: whenever you have to invoke some supernatural force or entity in order to explain something, you're no longer in the realm of science.

(Logic)
if A implies B
and B implies C
therefore A implies C

(Not Logic)
A=omnicience/omnipotence
C=something mindbogglingly complex
therefore A implies C

BZZT! Try again.

And decided to doo something about the Japanese, who were intelligent designers indeed!

The Pinto was dropped from the sky by a giant white turkey. Most of them exploded.

I see plenty of Design without Intelligence every single day at work.