Is Intelligent Design Really Intelligent? A paper I had to do for english
I was given the opportunity to do a paper in my English class on Intelligent Design. I only had 2 1/2 hours to write it and this is what I came up with. I had very limited use of the internet and it was NOT a research paper. The professor is (I think) Christian and knows that I am an Atheist. She was very excited to read my paper. I am posting it here because I would like feed back on the arguments I presented. I told her without proper research my ideas might have a few holes in them and she understood completely, again this was for an English paper.
Any help on the ideas I presented would be greatly appreciated :) I hope this is in the right forum.....
Is Intelligent Design Really Intelligent?
Is life on earth the result of intelligent design or did it all happen by chance? Intelligent design (or ID) is the theory that a superior being put the universe into motion. The majority of people who believe in intelligent design also believe it goes further than that, that God has a hand in our every day life. A smaller percentage believe that we are here due to evolution, that everything happened by chance. From my point of view Chance seems more logical. The ideology of Intelligent design does not justify birth defects; it can not be proven in the science lab; and is not an adequate argument for “gaps” in science.
A disturbing problem with the theory of Intelligent design is the overwhelming amount of birth defects, both structural and functional/developmental. Birth defects are caused by defects in our genes as well as environmental hazards. Intelligent design, with the accompanying belief in God, is that humans should be perfect. We were made by God in his image. Perfect. If that were true then our genetic code would not mutate. Hence there would be no birth defects and/or genetic mutations/mishaps. This however is not the case. The Center for Disease Control states that 120,000 babies in the United States are born with birth defects each year. If you look at this situation through the scope of evolution you will see that mutations in genetic code fit very well into the science of evolution.
The way our species has evolved over time has brought us to become a science dependant race. Everything from understanding our place in the solar system, to the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies, to the types of foods we can safely ingest, we got from scientifically testing theories, which is the reason we have the answers to those questions. Intelligent design is not a probable or acceptable theory due to lack of being able to test it which is why the scientific community does not recognize it.
There are some who view science as a great tool of the human race, however they can not let go of the emotion that accompanies Intelligent Design. They see the gaps in science as unexplainable and therefore attribute these unexplainable instances to ID. This is called using the God of Gaps rationalization. Using this argument is not conducive to science because everyday science is understanding more and more about the universe and the world in which we live. At one point in time science thought the earth was flat, but due to exploration, we came to the conclusion that the earth was in fact round. This is the way that science works.
Intelligent design, as fascinating as it might seem to some, is not a theory of scientific measures at this point in time. It simply plays on the emotions, as opposed to the intellect, of humans. So in the words of Christopher Hitchens I leave you with this “Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.", and Intelligent Design does not give exceptional evidence.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Skycomet the Fallen Angel on -
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Permalink Reply by Skycomet the Fallen Angel on
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God is unjust... good thing he's not real!
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Permalink Reply by Skycomet the Fallen Angel on
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*Throws troll chow*
I REFUSE to bite! This will NOT become flame war on my watch! Watch it! I'm an internet troll slayer! I eat trolls for breakfast! >D
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Permalink Reply by scLovely on -
Elizabeth, from what I gathered by reading your comments, you solidify the existance of your god based on hopes and emotion. All religions do the same. How can you say that your god is real when other people feel and hope that their god(s) is real? They have the same amount of answered prayers as christians, they experience the same "miracles", yet they credit it all to a different god. Lets say that I hope that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is true, and I can feel his prescence. He answers half of my prayers and I have a mother that was cured of cancer. This must mean the Flying Spaghetti Monster is REAL! Do you believe it? You must have faith that he is real because I KNOW that he is! Sounds ridiculous, right?
Ok, now that you see how dumb faith-based beliefs sound, let us focus on something else. You wanted to encourage us to find answers in Genesis. What you don't realize is that most atheists have read the bible. They know more about it than most christians do. Take me for instance: I have read the non-sense that is in there. I have also studied other religions. I grew up christian and I bought into it just like you did. The only thing that sets us apart is that I actually started listening to what the bible had to say. It is completely irrational and illogical. We can start in Gensis if you'd like. On day one, god created day and night. He then waited until the 4th day to create the sun, moon, and stars. Now how does that work? Did he not know what defined day and night? How did day and night exist before a sun, moon, or stars. Furthermore, how did LIGHT occur without the sun, moon, or stars. Light also came about on the first day but there was no source for it until day 4. There are many contradictions just like this one throughout Genesis and the entire bible.
Let us talk Biology. In your Genesis, Jacob wants some striped cows. Aparently, he has just plain old boring colored cows and he'd like to breed some striped ones. So, he makes some stripes on some rods and puts them at the watering hole where he thinks the cows might mate. They come, they drink, they mate and somehow, these cows look at these rods while they are mating. The cows then have striped calfs. Do you think this really works? Would you like to test it in a science lab and see if this is how cows get their traits? I think we should just trust in evolution and leave these 2000 year old hypotheses in the fiction section where they belong.
Also, you want to talk about things happening by chance? You claim a magical sky man came along and said some words and everything magically appeared. That is yet another ridiculous claim. Where did this magical sky man come from? Did he just radomly appear by chance? Where did his powers come from? How about his telepathy? If everything in this world has a cause or a reason, what is his?
One more thing I want to add, all of the christians that I know and even the churches that I grew up in agree that the age of accountability is 8 years old. I still consider this to be a child, so yes, christians agree that children can go to hell. I have not found any particular scripture to back this up, but Church of God (the sect I grew up in) and many southern baptists alike, will tell you that the age is 8.
I am disappointed that you think you can come to an atheist website and get people to convert or agree with you. Maybe you can actually learn something from us. I know some Johnsons from Pickens. Hopefully I will see you around :)
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Permalink Reply by Dark Star on -
Great job on a quick treatment of the subject.
Just a minor nit on the technical-side, but "intelligent design or did it all happen by chance" is a false dichotomy. If the universe is deterministic then it didn't happen "by chance", it happened as a result of following the laws of nature. There could still be questions about the initial conditions, but it changes what is meant by 'chance' pretty substantially.
We don't know if the universe is deterministic or not. There are still interpretations of Quantum Mechanics that allow for determinism [and there are still some questions in the Bell inequalities test results; but even IF they hold up, they only eliminate local hidden variable possibilities].
Current Bell test results are summarized in wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments
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Permalink Reply by Joli on -
Thank you for responding to the discussion at hand, the paper. I used the word chance because that seems to be the way religious people look at it. "It all happened by chance!" you know how they are lol But to be honest, even if it were in fact "chance", I would still be more inclined to believe that over ID.
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Permalink Reply by Jaume on -
that seems to be the way religious people look at it. "It all happened by chance!"
In my experience, they tend to attribute events to God's will, destiny or miracles, rather than to chance. "It was God's will this plane crashed, it was its passengers' destiny to die, it's a miracle the plane didn't crash on an urban area. Thank God I was too late to board that plane!"
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Permalink Reply by Joli on
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No, what I mean is christians think evolution = chance. here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about from that elizabeth johnson chick that's been derailing this discussion:
Well of course there is, it's all around you, it's in you. Are you seriously suggesting that the body in which you now dwell, the miracle of human thought, the very eyes you use to read these words exist from mere chance? Ludicrous.
We may disagree about how we got here, but to believe that all the diversity of life came from a primordial soup seems as far fetched as you claim my beliefs are.This is the exact reason I chose the word "Chance" :)
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Permalink Reply by Dark Star on
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"by natural processes" perhaps? I agree that even if there is a true randomness found it still makes more sense -- and randomness does not prevent order (for an example, look at the behavior of Strange Attractors -- even if you randomly perturb the system it tends into a certain orderly states even though these small chances compound over time to change the state evolution of the system (known as the Butterfly Effect)).
Sorry for my other off-topic posts.
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Permalink Reply by Joli on
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by natural processes? this is the wording I should have used instead of chance? This would have sounded much better :) and I agree with your agreement :)
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Permalink Reply by Jaume on
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I note that, if you teacher happens to really be a Christian, the question might well be a trap, as it can be undertood in two different ways --
* Assuming ID is a theory - is the theory intelligent? I.e., is it sound, falsifiable, scientific, supported by evidence?
* Assuming ID is a fact - is the design itself intelligent? Did God do a good or lousy job?
Being in the dark about the teacher's beliefs and motives, I'd opt for a different angle of attack:
* the hypo-semantic approach: "Intelligent Design is intelligent by definition."
* the raw materialist strategy: "Intelligent Design can't be intelligent, a design is immaterial and thus lacks a brain, and a brain is required for mental processes, such as abstract thought, reasoning, etc., which are associated with intelligence."
* the no-clue non-cognitive gambit: "Mr. Intelligent Design didn't comply with our requests to pass an IQ test yet, it's impossible to know whether or not he's intelligent at the moment."
What's neat here is you can choose the answer first (Yes/No/Don't know) and make your pick accordingly.
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