Touche Alan. Here's me moving something from another thread...
For what it's worth, I am not trying to convince Robroy (or anyone else) to accept scientific principles that might clash with their religious convictions. I am objecting that he attempts to discredit a highly verified scientific by calling it baloney and then providing no evidence. It is my experience that most people who do this (on any well regarded piece of science) do so because they misunderstand the hypothesis, the theory, or even the scientific method. If Robroy or anyone else considers this "spamming" the subject, please accept my abject apology as I was only trying to present an array of evidence which collaborates with the Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
And no, the paper cannot be derided as foolishness any more than Darwin's. Come to think of it, not as much as Darwins. Most of what he posited has been PROVEN baloney.
So let's leave Mr. Thomas S. Szasz be for the time being.
We are getting very off topic now, but where are you getting your information that most of Darwin's theory has been proven to be baloney? There are essentially two pillars to Darwin's theory.
1) Evolution from common decent explains the variety of life on earth.
2) Natural selection is the mechanism that directs evolution.
Every legitimate biologist (admittedly it's closer to 99%) agrees with #1, and agrees that #2 is one of the mechanisms. This isn't to say that every word of the Origin of the Species has born out. Just the fundamental premise accurately predicts genetic, behavioral, and spatial relationships between species. Here's some more information, none of which proves evolution, but the overwhelming body of evidence for and the dearth of evidence against is why evolution has earned the lofty designation as a theory.
I guess what bothers me about a lot of the "intelligent design" and "evolution is nonsense" crew is that they discard a MASSIVE body of scientific evidence because it doesn't fit with their own personal beliefs. Then, when something very occasionally comes along that happens to agree with their beliefs it's immediately grabbed and held up high as the correct approach.
That's not how science works. You don't get to decide which papers or theories to "agree" with based on your own beliefs. That's one of the points of the scientific method - to reduce the effects of personal bias through peer review and other mechanisms.
As has already been mentioned, 99% of scientists are fully on-board with evolution and the main components of it. They're not idiots, and they're not on-board with it because of their own personal beliefs.
While I'm on the topic, the whole "hey, evolution is just a *theory*" thing needs a bullet put through it. There are two practical definitions of the word "theory" in use, and the common use is different to the scientific use.
Theory:
(Scientific) a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity.
(Common usage) contemplation or speculation, guess or conjecture.
So when people say the "theory of evolution", it's not just a guess. Someone didn't wake up, brush their teeth, and guess about the origin of life on earth on the way to work.
I swear, if Einstein's theory of relativity disagreed with a mainstream church's supernatural beliefs or teachings from an old book, we'd have "Intelligent Gravity" as a competing theory in schools. I'm grateful that Thermodynamics has "laws" and not theories because otherwise we'd be pushing god in there too.
Prove to me that gravity isn't caused by the hand of God operating in a way that agrees with the theory of relativity. We have no experimental evidence for the cause of gravitational attraction so it must be God acting directly in the world.
Prove to me that gravity isn't caused by the hand of God operating in a way that agrees with the theory of relativity. We have no experimental evidence for the cause of gravitational attraction so it must be God acting directly in the world.
It must be! Gravity and relativity are just so damn complicated that I can't explain it. So therefore it's, like, God n' stuff.
There are theories that try to explain why something happens and theories that try to explain how something behaves. The "theory of gravity" is predicts how a particular object will behave in the future. But it doesn't attempt to explain the mechanism by which gravity occurs. In that respect the theory of gravity and the theory of intelligent attraction are not incompatible.
Evolution gets a little fuzzy in this respect. The theory of evolution predicts that lifeforms will adapt to their environment, but it doesn't do a very good job of predicting exactly what form that adaptation will take. It also tries to explain why adaptation occurs -- mutations/crossover create variation in a species and natural selection carries the best variations to the next generation. The theory of evolution is pretty "hand wavy" when it comes to the details of this process. Still, progress seems to made in this area.
Theology used to deny evolution in favor of creation: "All life on Earth was created whole cloth out of dirt by God. The idea that a cow could be created from algea using small incremental changes is patently ridiculous."
As the theory of evolution was improved, this argument turned to intelligent design: "God's hand made small incremental changes in organisms to cause something that looks an awful lot like evolution to occur. The idea that algae could randomly evolve into a cow is patently ridiculous."
As experiments continue surrounding evolution, I predict will we build strong statistical models demonstrating how the algae to cow metamorphisis is possible. At that point, the influence of God will be pushed to a new area of non-understanding. Perhaps God will be credited for creating randomness itself. In any case, there will still be people who claim that God guided the random process to produce humans in the image of God. Randomly we could have ended up looking like anything, but since we are in the image of God then he must have guided it.
I believe that argument to be circular, but I've found that people who use circular reasoning to be very difficult to argue with. I've also found that they often accuse science of being circular. Participating in such arguments can be fun but it is not very useful.
For me, usefulness is the real test of any theory. Otherwise, who cares?
There are theories that try to explain why something happens and theories that try to explain how something behaves. The "theory of gravity" is predicts how a particular object will behave in the future. But it doesn't attempt to explain the mechanism by which gravity occurs. In that respect the theory of gravity and the theory of intelligent attraction are not incompatible.
Evolution gets a little fuzzy in this respect. The theory of evolution predicts that lifeforms will adapt to their environment, but it doesn't do a very good job of predicting exactly what form that adaptation will take. It also tries to explain why adaptation occurs -- mutations/crossover create variation in a species and natural selection carries the best variations to the next generation. The theory of evolution is pretty "hand wavy" when it comes to the details of this process. Still, progress seems to made in this area.
I think you might be making a needless distinction between a "why" and a "how". Asking "why" almost always implies intent but it can also imply mechanism, whereas "how" pretty much only implies mechanism.
Regarding why evolution feels "fuzzy", I think it's just because it deals with more complex systems than most other theories. Some scientists were studying birds on an island - I think they may have been the same finches Darwin studied on the Easter Islands - and there was a drought, which put a selective force on the birds. After the drought, the average beak length was something like 1/32 of an inch shorter on average. To predict this result, you would need to anticipate from the beginning that a shorter beak would be beneficial to these particular birds during a drought.
The other thing that seems to really throw people about evolution, is they wrongly believe it is a random processes. Selective pressures are nonrandom, and mutation rates follow well known probabilistic curves. What's interesting about evolution, by the way, is it seems so simple. That's why people of all stripes feel qualified to comment on it. It sounds straight forward, but it isn't. Remember, Newton described gravity and the motion of heavenly bodies over 200 years before Darwin described evolution.
Prove to me that gravity isn't caused by the hand of God operating in a way that agrees with the theory of relativity. We have no experimental evidence for the cause of gravitational attraction so it must be God acting directly in the world.
FWIW, any religious belief which conflicts with evolution is probably equally conflicted with most of our understanding of the cosmos. Our telescopes can see stars which are billions of light years away...well, 6012 is pretty small by comparison. You could disown Einstein over this, but he just seemed so darn smart.
"How" wasn't the best word. By "how" I meant "in what manner". Falling bodies follow a predictable trajectory. That doesn't say anything about why gravity operates the way it does.
God could have created the universe "whole cloth" with photons that seemed to be coming from stars light years away magically coming into existence in the middle of space.
The level to which some people will go to try and support their illogical beliefs and literal interpretation of an old book is simply amazing. There are well funded groups that exist to support these crazy 18th century beliefs.
""The fact is that evolutionists believe in evolution because they want to. It is their desire at all costs to explain the origin of everything without a Creator. Evolutionism is thus intrinsically an atheistic religion.""
"How" wasn't the best word. By "how" I meant "in what manner". Falling bodies follow a predictable trajectory. That doesn't say anything about why gravity operates the way it does.
God could have created the universe "whole cloth" with photons that seemed to be coming from stars light years away magically coming into existence in the middle of space.
Such a theory is not particularly useful.
It seems, you'll always be limited by what is useful as a predictor. Newtonian gravity does well with falling bodies, but fails at some extremes where relativity takes over. In reality, relativity trumps, because it fully supercedes gravity. Of course, with really small things we end up in the quantum world.
It's kind of an onion where every layer down you answer a new why or how. Why don't we fall off the earth? Because of gravity. How does that help? Masses attract each other. Why do they do that? Because they "dent" space-time. How...? Essentially, every answer just creates the next chain of why/how questions.
Essentially, every answer just creates the next chain of why/how questions.
Therein lies the appeal of "Intelligent Design" or Creationism: it's the end of the line. If you "know" God created all, then every line of questioning can end up with "that's how God intended it to be." It's the lazy way to explain things.
And in essence, this has been the way of organized religion throughout history. Limit knowledge of the masses and discourage thought.
I don't really have anything to add here, I just wanted to give a big thumbs up to this discussion, and to say I agree 100% with Notabull's first post.
And in essence, this has been the way of organized religion throughout history. Limit knowledge of the masses and discourage thought.
People tried to come up with the best explanations that they could. The fact that some ideas were wrong is not the same as they weren't thinking. One could argue that the most damage was done by ancient Greeks, who discouraged experimentation. For millenia people simply assumed that heavier objects would fall faster than lighter ones, and no one bothered to check. It wasn't until Galileo performed a trivial experiment of dropping two balls that the means for understanding the universe was unlocked. I don't see the connection to organized religion in why no one had done that experiment before. In the Islam world, there was a decree that it was no use studying science because it was all God's will, but that did not apply in Europe. Judeo-Christian belief has always held that God presented an orderly universe that could be studied to reveal his nature (e.g. Romans 1:20).
Prior to the printing press, there were only 30,000 books in all of Europe. When the cost of producing books dropped, science exploded. That was a technology change, not a change in religion, although of course a change in religion soon followed. In fact, interest in reading was greatly encouraged in Protestant countries in order that people could read the newly available Bible.
Essentially, every answer just creates the next chain of why/how questions.
Therein lies the appeal of "Intelligent Design" or Creationism: it's the end of the line. If you "know" God created all, then every line of questioning can end up with "that's how God intended it to be." It's the lazy way to explain things.
And in essence, this has been the way of organized religion throughout history. Limit knowledge of the masses and discourage thought.
I'm not so sure that Creation "science" is a lazy way out. Can you imagine how much effort it would take to explain away everything out there that seems to indicate a world older than 6000 years?
-Fossils
-Fossil fuel (made from fossils!!!!)
-Radioactive dating
-Continental movement and apparent similarities of species between now-separate continents
It seems that an entire area of study has been created (pun intended) in a desperate attempt to explain some things that the old testament did not.
Basically, the global flood and Noah's ark explains all the, umm, geology n' stuff.
If anything, I think science is the easier way. You don't have to approach a situation with a huge vested interest in the outcome (unless you're testing drugs of course!). You can just look at the world, and say "I wonder how old it is". Formulate an answer using scientific principles, publish your results and see what happens next. The creationist zealots on the other side have the difficult task of "knowing" the answer and then formulating the "science" to prove it. That inevitably makes for an awful result.
Remember how we thought that the planets all orbited the earth? Because of that, we had to come up with some insane rules and orbits to explain the weirdness we were seeing. It turns out to look much nicer if you just accept that we're not the center of the solar system, let alone the universe.
Thankfully that we don't live in a time when you could be put under house arrest for being an "unbeliever" and not going along with the religious dogma of the time.
I don't personally believe in the 6000 year old world, so I won't speak to that, but the geocentric model did not originate in religion. Aristotle developed it, and Ptolemy completed it. Their authority was so great that no one challenged that theory for 1000 years. Of course religious leaders made some serious mistakes, so serious it is hard to imagine how they could have been Christian, but being the dominate institution in the world at that time, they are the ones who would be in a position to make the biggest mistakes.
I don't personally believe in the 6000 year old world, so I won't speak to that, but the geocentric model did not originate in religion. Aristotle developed it, and Ptolemy completed it. Their authority was so great that no one challenged that theory for 1000 years. Of course religious leaders made some serious mistakes, so serious it is hard to imagine how they could have been Christian, but being the dominate institution in the world at that time, they are the ones who would be in a position to make the biggest mistakes.
The geocentric world was created from a perspective that we, on Earth, are the center of everything. I think it's just common sense to think that everything orbits around us. The stars seem to move in that kind of a pattern, and if the earth was moving we'd surely feel it, no? The religious doctrine simply echoed this common sense view, in my opinion.
"In 1633 Galileo Galilei was convicted of grave suspicion of heresy for "following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture,"[26] and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life."
So when a theory/science that threatened scripture came along, the religious leaders at the time attempted to squash it because it didn't agree with the established beliefs. The desire to keep hold of those backwards beliefs caused the world to hold on to the Geocentric model for much longer than it would have had to otherwise.
Copernicus developed the heliocentric model in 1514. Galileo was not persecuted until 1633, so it is not like the Church clamped down hard and prevented thought. What they did was wrong, and the Roman Catholic Church has admitted it. But their first error was to assert the authority of scientists, such as Pythagoras.
I don't think you can really blame religion for supressing thought, or even certain religious people, without also noticing that suppression of thought that comes from people who bash religion. The most flagrant example of this is the claim that Christians believed once believed in a flat earth:
My own belief is that Intelligent Design is in fact true, but that we will never find scientific proof of it, because that is not how God will choose to reveal himself beyond pure faith. But I do find it quite interesting how vehemently ID is attacked, when in reality it is the epitome of the scientific method to consider alternative explanations and perform experiments to resolve the issue. ID has a compelling conceptional foundation that is extremely worth considering seriously. When one considers the huge number of physical parameters that have to be just right in order for life to exist, it is just astounding.
What I find interesting about ID and Science Creationism is that they attempt to incorporate God into natures physical laws. My own personal view is that God transcends nature in ways we are incapable of understanding. He (she? it?) does not need to be a part of nature for it to work any more than I need to be a part of the software I write.
I also think God transcends mathematics (and in fact created mathematics). Christians believe in the holy trinity: The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit. These are not three "parts" of God. They are all separate and yet they are all completely God. How else could this be possible unless God wasn't constrained by such concepts and "one" or "three".
To insist that God must have left evidence of a 6000 years past creation kind of implies a belief in limts on God's abilities. Maybe the world was created 6000 years ago with the appearance that it is billions of years old. Maybe it was created last week. It doesn't matter within this cave of shadows. We are supposed to do what we are supposed to do -- whatever that is. If that means creating theories about what God intended us to see before the creation event then great. If that means questioning those theories based on theological grounds then great. To each their own and life and let life and all that and more.
I stand by my claim that the real litmus test is "is it useful"?
My own belief is that Intelligent Design is in fact true, but that we will never find scientific proof of it, because that is not how God will choose to reveal himself beyond pure faith. But I do find it quite interesting how vehemently ID is attacked, when in reality it is the epitome of the scientific method to consider alternative explanations and perform experiments to resolve the issue. ID has a compelling conceptional foundation that is extremely worth considering seriously. When one considers the huge number of physical parameters that have to be just right in order for life to exist, it is just astounding.
ID is attacked vehemently because it claims to be a science, and it is not. It is not a science because it:
-Is not falsifiable by material science. In other words, you can't disprove it.
-The external "Designer" is not observable or falsifiable, and besides, science is "natural" and not "supernatural".
-The irreducible complexity argument is not scientific, and is an argument from ignorance and not a scientific hypothesis.
Regardless of whether or not you believe in Intelligent Design (and I happen to not believe in it) it is 100% the case that it is NOT science. We know this because we have definitions for science, and ID does not fulfill them.
Given that it is not science and seen by 99.9% of scientists as not science, you cannot teach it as science in a publicly funded classroom. THAT is the issue with ID. Teach it in private school, where the parents pay for everything, or teach it in some religious context.
Again, it's not about whether ID is right or not, and it's not being attacked because it's "wrong". It's being attacked because its supporters claim it's science, which it isn't, and because it's clearly creationism (see link above). Therefore you can't teach it in the science classroom at public schools.
ID is thinly veiled creationism that smells like science so it doesn't look so overtly religious, and so that it appeals to relatively logically and intelligent people.
Copernicus developed the heliocentric model in 1514. Galileo was not persecuted until 1633, so it is not like the Church clamped down hard and prevented thought. What they did was wrong, and the Roman Catholic Church has admitted it. But their first error was to assert the authority of scientists, such as Pythagoras.
I don't think you can really blame religion for supressing thought, or even certain religious people, without also noticing that suppression of thought that comes from people who bash religion. The most flagrant example of this is the claim that Christians believed once believed in a flat earth:
My own belief is that Intelligent Design is in fact true, but that we will never find scientific proof of it, because that is not how God will choose to reveal himself beyond pure faith. But I do find it quite interesting how vehemently ID is attacked, when in reality it is the epitome of the scientific method to consider alternative explanations and perform experiments to resolve the issue. ID has a compelling conceptional foundation that is extremely worth considering seriously. When one considers the huge number of physical parameters that have to be just right in order for life to exist, it is just astounding.
I was with you until the last paragraph...more or less. I believe very strongly, that any regime that threatens freedom of thought should be eyed cautiously. It is no better (nor worst) if the entity is government, religion, or even scientists with vested interest (yes, some do exists, and they do hinder the scientific method, but the system still ends up working...just more slowly).
Now, that last paragraph. Notabull summed up a lot of what's wrong with ID, so I won't repeat that. But I will add this. Darwin introduced irreducible complexity, not ID. Coincidentally, irreducible complexity is the only tenet of ID which is even vaguely scientific. What ID proponents do not realize is that there is plenty of evidence that most evolution is not irreducibly complex, which means the current theory of evolution works in a
vast
range of scenarios. If you found one thing that was irreducibly complex, and if you really could 100% prove that it could not have formed from incremental changes (probably an impossible task), it still would not disprove evolution. All it would do is point out an instance where the theory is incomplete. Rather than destroy evolution, it would cause a frenzy of research to learn of that new and intriguing phenomenon, and the result would just be one additional engine which might drive the evolutionary process.
Here's a link from earlier, which is very interesting in regards to irreducible complexity. It discusses computer algorithms which are designed to evolve. They track every X generations, and they can witness modeled evolution happening in real time, and then go back and trace it. What's significant, is that they have witnessed many irreducibly complex apparatus develop, but each one can be created by a sequence of small steps. Really fascinating.
Regarding vehemence towards ID, I think there are many reasons.
1) It's trying to bypass separation of church and state in a sneaky/unethical way (proven at Dover trials). Here's a hilarious example where creationists evolved to intelligent design. Hint, the missing link is "cdesign proponentsists"
2) It is a waste of time/money. It forces real scientists to waste their time debunking junk science, rather than focus on learning more about our world.
3) It actually discourages asking questions. If you are given two options, told both are good, and one already matches your world view...why even examine the other. This is the point of ID by the way. And it's really successful.
4) It debases real science. In the same way that people don't trust medical science because they screwed up so much in the past, ID is running the good name of real science through the mud.
If you found one thing that was irreducibly complex, and if you really could 100% prove that it could not have formed from incremental changes (probably an impossible task), it still would not disprove evolution.
To me, that is a religion of evolution. Of course work would begin to figure out what was going on, but one cannot discount the possibility that given enough evidence, one could legitimately conclude ID. The evidence so far is that is quite unlikely, and I am pretty unimpressed with the claims of ID proponents, but I am also frequently unimpressed by the responses of numerous scientists in how dogmatically opposed they are to anything religious. Most of my life I was an atheist, so I am very familiar with the reasoning and motivation, but my conclusion was that not only were scientific explanations full of holes, but also the a religious explanation fit the evidence better. That is different than actually experiencing faith, that comes later. But for me the understanding of the systematic limitations of science was a precondition to accepting faith. A lot of writing I see on the science side of the ID debate does not take those limitations into account, and for that reason I support the ID position, even though I am unconvinced by any of the evidence they have come up with so far.
I read quickly over the wiki article on the Dover decision, and my conclusion is that was a case of suppression of valuable ideas if all that was involved was the reading of that particular statement. The board behaved shamefully in the case. But that does not change the fact that important questions were raised about the state of the science.
Oh, man. I really want to hear how an atheist converted to religion. Most of the atheists I've know have been pretty dogmatic about the non-existence of God. I would even say that they are have more confidence in the non-existence of God than most believers have in his existence. Having been raised to believe and God and accepting it as sort of a form of brainwashing, I'm curious what the belief looks like to someone who came to it on their own.
Since you ask, I didn't believe in God until my 40s. I remember in 1st grade I had already decided that the science in school made a whole lot more sense to me that what I was being taught in Sunday School (Reformed Jewish). The more I learned the more convinced I became, although I knew I couldn't prove it. I saw a lot of poorly thought out philosophy based on God, but I enjoyed studying various areas of science and math for enjoyment. However, I began to feel emotionally disconnected and decided to focus my reading on that issue, and found Buddhist reading satisfying for a while because it has a lot of insight into how the mind behaves. I finally married a woman who happened to be a Christian, and started attending Bible studies reluctantly and quite sceptically, although by then I knew how valuable those ideas were historically in bringing about freedom. I also had begun to understand how for many critical questions science simply excluded from those topics from its consideration because experiments are not possible. People with a scientific inclination seem start to consider those areas themselves suspect, when really the limitation is in scientific framework itself. BF Skinner was perhaps the worst in that regard.
After a while we moved to another location and started attending a church that happened to follow a Calvinist teaching. At that point I began to realize that most of what I thought I knew about Christianity was wrong. I found that if you simply ignore the incorrect cruft that has built up, there is a core that is logical and amazingly perceptive.
Coming from a Jewish background, I had learned about many of the atrocities that had been committed by Christians over the centuries. I saw how completely un-Christian those were, and simply separated them from Christianity. I can understand that until someone learns enough about real Christianity, they will be very hostile to it.
So I remain a Calvinist, which is numerically a small percentage of Christians. But I find great comfort in reading Protestant Reformed works, (for anyone who doesn't know, it is totally different from Jewish Reformed). Predestination is a topic I find fascinating, because it says that every moment of my life was designed by God to achieve a purpose. That is so deeply satisifying to me that I have no desire for scientific evidence for it. Calvinism is consistent with ID, but has no need for it.
If you found one thing that was irreducibly complex, and if you really could 100% prove that it could not have formed from incremental changes (probably an impossible task), it still would not disprove evolution.
To me, that is a religion of evolution.
There are two general ways a scientific theory can breakdown. One is total failure. Think geocentric orbits and Galileo.
The second is when one new fact or measurement doesn't fit. It doesn't destroy your theory, but it shows you an edge case that the mainstream theory explain. This is where most real science is done, extending theories so they are more complete. If we cannot, that is when the new information becomes the first type rather than the second.
Even if you found one truly irreducibly complex feature, it would not disprove evolution (at first). It would only suggest that we are missing some additional (and fundamental) feature. Now, if a whole class of these showed up, we would say evolution is clearly not complete. We think it's the best we have, but it fails to describe a huge group of features, and we need a new model. But until you find something that explains the world better, you're stuck using the original and theory which is now known to be incomplete.
None of this involves "faith" or denial of the new facts. So it is in no way religion; rather it's pragmatic. For the record, no such irreducibly complex feature is known, and we have proof that seemingly irreducibly complex features can evolve.
Of course work would begin to figure out what was going on, but one cannot discount the possibility that given enough evidence, one could legitimately conclude ID.
My challenge is what evidence would prove ID? What evidence would even suggest it if you don't start a priori with "God did it"? The fact is, religion was not interested in how we got here (beyond "God did it") until evolution came along. They finally had strong competition for that gap, and ID is just a way to shove the cat back into the bag.
"Contemporary scientists were aware of the problems, but aether theory was so entrenched in physical law by this point that it was simply assumed to exist."
What killed it off was that special relativity explained the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment. If there was a single similar anomalous observation of something so improbable as to defy the statistics underlying evolution, and a coherent explanation with testable predictions, then evolution would fail just as any other theory.
I assume that direct evidence of some miracle or direct revelation would be convincing, so lets skip that.
Irreducible complexity, as I understand it, claims that something could only have happened because of a designer. The descriptions I have read of it are hugely flawed, because they assume things evolve from simpler processes, when evolution often takes a circuitous route of something complex down to something more efficient. The choice of the word "irreducible" by itself suggests a blindness to evolution from a more complex intermediate step down to a simpler one.
Still, a proof of ID might be some model of biochemistry that is able to convincingly show that there is simply no other path to producing a specific molecule that is possible other than the one observed in nature today, which depends on a previous generation producing it.
Achieving that seems extremely unlikely. For example, RSA public key cryptography is enormously simpler than biochemistry, is commercially and militarily important, and yet there is no proof that there isn't a shortcut for cracking it. Proving ID, I think, would be harder than proving RSA is secure. But maybe there is another way, and it does seem like a valid scientific question on a par with other unanswered questions in science and math.
The fact is, religion was not interested in how we got here (beyond "God did it") until evolution came along.
I think this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geber is a good illustration of role of religion in science. Geber developed a large number of the fundamental processes used in chemistry. "Jabir's alchemical investigations ostensibly revolved around the ultimate goal of takwin — the artificial creation of life." And then "The Book of Stones prescribes long and elaborate sequences of specific prayers that must be performed without error alone in the desert before one can even consider alchemical experimentation."
More direct study of life and the solar system had to wait for the invention of the microscope and telescope. By then the authority of religious leaders had already been seriously challenged, but the leading scientists themselves were often involved in important theological discussion as well.
The fact is, religion was not interested in how we got here (beyond "God did it") until evolution came along.
I think this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geber is a good illustration of role of religion in science. Geber developed a large number of the fundamental processes used in chemistry. "Jabir's alchemical investigations ostensibly revolved around the ultimate goal of takwin — the artificial creation of life." And then "The Book of Stones prescribes long and elaborate sequences of specific prayers that must be performed without error alone in the desert before one can even consider alchemical experimentation."
More direct study of life and the solar system had to wait for the invention of the microscope and telescope. By then the authority of religious leaders had already been seriously challenged, but the leading scientists themselves were often involved in important theological discussion as well.
Let's not bring a thousand year old science/religion mashup into the mix. There's no doubt that many scientists were and are religious. However, the role of religion in science today is zero because science is the search for an explanation of the natural and material world.
Note that this does not mean that there is no role for religion in the scientist. Nobody cares what beliefs a scientist has, just that his or her science follows the basic rules of scientific experimentation. ID doesn't follow those rules so it isn't science regardless of whether the few people looking into it have a few scientific looking letters after their name, and regardless of the personal beliefs of the scientist.
I think this quote sums it up quite nicely: "The relationship between religion and science takes many forms as the two fields are both broad. They employ different methods and address different questions. The scientific method relies on an empirical approach to measure, calculate, and describe the natural/physical/material part of the universe. Religious methods rely on sources of divine revelation and supernatural authority to understand the spiritual objects in the universe."
RCC said: "My challenge is what evidence would prove ID? What evidence would even suggest it if you don't start a priori with "God did it"? The fact is, religion was not interested in how we got here (beyond "God did it") until evolution came along. They finally had strong competition for that gap, and ID is just a way to shove the cat back into the bag."
That's exactly right. ID is a pretty desperate and weak attempt to explain something that's already been very adequately explained by another long existing, very well respected, and peer reviewed scientific theory. The conclusion of ID was known from the start as the Creator, oops, no, "Designer", did it.
See this article for an example of the weak attempt to disguise Intelligent Design as science. Note that the book started off as clearly a religious book, which is fine by me as it discusses a religious explanation for the beginning of the world. However, when it was ruled that teaching a particular religion in schools was, umm, not legal n' stuff, the creationists needed to find another method to get creationism into schools.
They did this by attempting to morph creationism into science (which it never was), because the ruling allowed for teaching scientific explanations in schools. So they put their heads together, came up with some pseudoscience, attempted to a poke a few holes in evolution, changed a few words in their Panda book and the rest is history.
What killed it off was that special relativity explained the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment. If there was a single similar anomalous observation of something so improbable as to defy the statistics underlying evolution, and a coherent explanation with testable predictions, then evolution would fail just as any other theory.
The wiki article on luminiferous aether essentially lays out exactly the process I said we would need to go through for the theory of evolution to be discarded. It wasn't just that one experiment, there were several experiments that failed, new and better corroborated hypotheses that required a vacuum, and eventually an entirely new theory that explained all phenomenon as well or better than aether showed up on the scene.
In your example, if we found something so improbable, it would take years for all the effects to fall out. And frankly, it would do nothing to prove ID or any other non-hypothesis. It would, however, open the door to some new theories, which would no doubt be equally unpalatable to those who want the bible to be literally true.
Still, a proof of ID might be some model of biochemistry that is able to convincingly show that there is simply no other path to producing a specific molecule that is possible other than the one observed in nature today
I can promise you now, that no such observation can ever be made. A large part of your (and my) DNA is non-coding. It is entirely possible (and does happen) for a mutation to harm the markers at the beginning or end of a coding region, so that proteins are encoded with additional content. In the land of extremely unlikely events (like your above example actually), it is physically possible to randomly generate any coding sequence you want in that non-coding region, and then have a spot mutation which causes that newly coded protein to form. Now, does that ever happen? I highly doubt it. All I'm saying is that you cannot ever prove the impossibility of any particular protein being coded for with irreducible complexity.
Because evolution is probabilistic, if you found one such case, it might not even be troubling to consider the massively unlikely example I wrote about above. Sometimes, highly unlike events happen. Sometimes, people are dealt royal flushes. This is why I argued that you would probably need several such examples to change things. I just don't see any way that this verifies ID though. It's still an argument from ignorance "if we find something we don't understand, then God did it!" Does God really need us shoving his foot in the door?
Comments
For what it's worth, I am not trying to convince Robroy (or anyone else) to accept scientific principles that might clash with their religious convictions. I am objecting that he attempts to discredit a highly verified scientific by calling it baloney and then providing no evidence. It is my experience that most people who do this (on any well regarded piece of science) do so because they misunderstand the hypothesis, the theory, or even the scientific method. If Robroy or anyone else considers this "spamming" the subject, please accept my abject apology as I was only trying to present an array of evidence which collaborates with the Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
So let's leave Mr. Thomas S. Szasz be for the time being.
We are getting very off topic now, but where are you getting your information that most of Darwin's theory has been proven to be baloney? There are essentially two pillars to Darwin's theory.
1) Evolution from common decent explains the variety of life on earth.
2) Natural selection is the mechanism that directs evolution.
Every legitimate biologist (admittedly it's closer to 99%) agrees with #1, and agrees that #2 is one of the mechanisms. This isn't to say that every word of the Origin of the Species has born out. Just the fundamental premise accurately predicts genetic, behavioral, and spatial relationships between species. Here's some more information, none of which proves evolution, but the overwhelming body of evidence for and the dearth of evidence against is why evolution has earned the lofty designation as a theory.
Evolution experimentally proven in lab.
Bacteria evolves to digest nylon (a man-made substance)
Evolution of the whale is an especially interesting case study with many "missing links" found. Many of them recently. Sorry for the wiki link, it was the most concise link I could quickly find.
Here is a video detailing many well regarded transitional forms between fish and amphibian.
Human chromosome #2 is clearly a mutation of two great ape chromosomes.
But you might still have some doubts. Perhaps you believe that thermodynamics, information theory, or irreducible complexity disprove evolution.
Here's a long answer regarding the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
I didn't vet this thoroughly, but it seems to be a reasonable explanation why information theory does not contradict evolution.
irreducible complexity has been rigorously debunked. Including the eye and the flagellum.
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Scopes Trial
That's not how science works. You don't get to decide which papers or theories to "agree" with based on your own beliefs. That's one of the points of the scientific method - to reduce the effects of personal bias through peer review and other mechanisms.
As has already been mentioned, 99% of scientists are fully on-board with evolution and the main components of it. They're not idiots, and they're not on-board with it because of their own personal beliefs.
While I'm on the topic, the whole "hey, evolution is just a *theory*" thing needs a bullet put through it. There are two practical definitions of the word "theory" in use, and the common use is different to the scientific use.
Theory:
(Scientific) a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity.
(Common usage) contemplation or speculation, guess or conjecture.
So when people say the "theory of evolution", it's not just a guess. Someone didn't wake up, brush their teeth, and guess about the origin of life on earth on the way to work.
I swear, if Einstein's theory of relativity disagreed with a mainstream church's supernatural beliefs or teachings from an old book, we'd have "Intelligent Gravity" as a competing theory in schools. I'm grateful that Thermodynamics has "laws" and not theories because otherwise we'd be pushing god in there too.
It must be! Gravity and relativity are just so damn complicated that I can't explain it. So therefore it's, like, God n' stuff.
It's just a theory, man. A THEORY!
Evolution gets a little fuzzy in this respect. The theory of evolution predicts that lifeforms will adapt to their environment, but it doesn't do a very good job of predicting exactly what form that adaptation will take. It also tries to explain why adaptation occurs -- mutations/crossover create variation in a species and natural selection carries the best variations to the next generation. The theory of evolution is pretty "hand wavy" when it comes to the details of this process. Still, progress seems to made in this area.
Theology used to deny evolution in favor of creation: "All life on Earth was created whole cloth out of dirt by God. The idea that a cow could be created from algea using small incremental changes is patently ridiculous."
As the theory of evolution was improved, this argument turned to intelligent design: "God's hand made small incremental changes in organisms to cause something that looks an awful lot like evolution to occur. The idea that algae could randomly evolve into a cow is patently ridiculous."
As experiments continue surrounding evolution, I predict will we build strong statistical models demonstrating how the algae to cow metamorphisis is possible. At that point, the influence of God will be pushed to a new area of non-understanding. Perhaps God will be credited for creating randomness itself. In any case, there will still be people who claim that God guided the random process to produce humans in the image of God. Randomly we could have ended up looking like anything, but since we are in the image of God then he must have guided it.
I believe that argument to be circular, but I've found that people who use circular reasoning to be very difficult to argue with. I've also found that they often accuse science of being circular. Participating in such arguments can be fun but it is not very useful.
For me, usefulness is the real test of any theory. Otherwise, who cares?
I think you might be making a needless distinction between a "why" and a "how". Asking "why" almost always implies intent but it can also imply mechanism, whereas "how" pretty much only implies mechanism.
Regarding why evolution feels "fuzzy", I think it's just because it deals with more complex systems than most other theories. Some scientists were studying birds on an island - I think they may have been the same finches Darwin studied on the Easter Islands - and there was a drought, which put a selective force on the birds. After the drought, the average beak length was something like 1/32 of an inch shorter on average. To predict this result, you would need to anticipate from the beginning that a shorter beak would be beneficial to these particular birds during a drought.
The other thing that seems to really throw people about evolution, is they wrongly believe it is a random processes. Selective pressures are nonrandom, and mutation rates follow well known probabilistic curves. What's interesting about evolution, by the way, is it seems so simple. That's why people of all stripes feel qualified to comment on it. It sounds straight forward, but it isn't. Remember, Newton described gravity and the motion of heavenly bodies over 200 years before Darwin described evolution.
FWIW, any religious belief which conflicts with evolution is probably equally conflicted with most of our understanding of the cosmos. Our telescopes can see stars which are billions of light years away...well, 6012 is pretty small by comparison. You could disown Einstein over this, but he just seemed so darn smart.
God could have created the universe "whole cloth" with photons that seemed to be coming from stars light years away magically coming into existence in the middle of space.
Such a theory is not particularly useful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism
The level to which some people will go to try and support their illogical beliefs and literal interpretation of an old book is simply amazing. There are well funded groups that exist to support these crazy 18th century beliefs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_ ... n_Research
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Morris
Interesting quote from Henry Morris:
""The fact is that evolutionists believe in evolution because they want to. It is their desire at all costs to explain the origin of everything without a Creator. Evolutionism is thus intrinsically an atheistic religion.""
It seems, you'll always be limited by what is useful as a predictor. Newtonian gravity does well with falling bodies, but fails at some extremes where relativity takes over. In reality, relativity trumps, because it fully supercedes gravity. Of course, with really small things we end up in the quantum world.
It's kind of an onion where every layer down you answer a new why or how. Why don't we fall off the earth? Because of gravity. How does that help? Masses attract each other. Why do they do that? Because they "dent" space-time. How...? Essentially, every answer just creates the next chain of why/how questions.
Therein lies the appeal of "Intelligent Design" or Creationism: it's the end of the line. If you "know" God created all, then every line of questioning can end up with "that's how God intended it to be." It's the lazy way to explain things.
And in essence, this has been the way of organized religion throughout history. Limit knowledge of the masses and discourage thought.
People tried to come up with the best explanations that they could. The fact that some ideas were wrong is not the same as they weren't thinking. One could argue that the most damage was done by ancient Greeks, who discouraged experimentation. For millenia people simply assumed that heavier objects would fall faster than lighter ones, and no one bothered to check. It wasn't until Galileo performed a trivial experiment of dropping two balls that the means for understanding the universe was unlocked. I don't see the connection to organized religion in why no one had done that experiment before. In the Islam world, there was a decree that it was no use studying science because it was all God's will, but that did not apply in Europe. Judeo-Christian belief has always held that God presented an orderly universe that could be studied to reveal his nature (e.g. Romans 1:20).
Prior to the printing press, there were only 30,000 books in all of Europe. When the cost of producing books dropped, science exploded. That was a technology change, not a change in religion, although of course a change in religion soon followed. In fact, interest in reading was greatly encouraged in Protestant countries in order that people could read the newly available Bible.
I'm not so sure that Creation "science" is a lazy way out. Can you imagine how much effort it would take to explain away everything out there that seems to indicate a world older than 6000 years?
-Fossils
-Fossil fuel (made from fossils!!!!)
-Radioactive dating
-Continental movement and apparent similarities of species between now-separate continents
It seems that an entire area of study has been created (pun intended) in a desperate attempt to explain some things that the old testament did not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_geology
Basically, the global flood and Noah's ark explains all the, umm, geology n' stuff.
If anything, I think science is the easier way. You don't have to approach a situation with a huge vested interest in the outcome (unless you're testing drugs of course!). You can just look at the world, and say "I wonder how old it is". Formulate an answer using scientific principles, publish your results and see what happens next. The creationist zealots on the other side have the difficult task of "knowing" the answer and then formulating the "science" to prove it. That inevitably makes for an awful result.
Remember how we thought that the planets all orbited the earth? Because of that, we had to come up with some insane rules and orbits to explain the weirdness we were seeing. It turns out to look much nicer if you just accept that we're not the center of the solar system, let alone the universe.
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect ... totle.html
Thankfully that we don't live in a time when you could be put under house arrest for being an "unbeliever" and not going along with the religious dogma of the time.
The geocentric world was created from a perspective that we, on Earth, are the center of everything. I think it's just common sense to think that everything orbits around us. The stars seem to move in that kind of a pattern, and if the earth was moving we'd surely feel it, no? The religious doctrine simply echoed this common sense view, in my opinion.
Copernicus, among others, had different ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus
"In 1633 Galileo Galilei was convicted of grave suspicion of heresy for "following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture,"[26] and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life."
So when a theory/science that threatened scripture came along, the religious leaders at the time attempted to squash it because it didn't agree with the established beliefs. The desire to keep hold of those backwards beliefs caused the world to hold on to the Geocentric model for much longer than it would have had to otherwise.
I don't think you can really blame religion for supressing thought, or even certain religious people, without also noticing that suppression of thought that comes from people who bash religion. The most flagrant example of this is the claim that Christians believed once believed in a flat earth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
My own belief is that Intelligent Design is in fact true, but that we will never find scientific proof of it, because that is not how God will choose to reveal himself beyond pure faith. But I do find it quite interesting how vehemently ID is attacked, when in reality it is the epitome of the scientific method to consider alternative explanations and perform experiments to resolve the issue. ID has a compelling conceptional foundation that is extremely worth considering seriously. When one considers the huge number of physical parameters that have to be just right in order for life to exist, it is just astounding.
I also think God transcends mathematics (and in fact created mathematics). Christians believe in the holy trinity: The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit. These are not three "parts" of God. They are all separate and yet they are all completely God. How else could this be possible unless God wasn't constrained by such concepts and "one" or "three".
To insist that God must have left evidence of a 6000 years past creation kind of implies a belief in limts on God's abilities. Maybe the world was created 6000 years ago with the appearance that it is billions of years old. Maybe it was created last week. It doesn't matter within this cave of shadows. We are supposed to do what we are supposed to do -- whatever that is. If that means creating theories about what God intended us to see before the creation event then great. If that means questioning those theories based on theological grounds then great. To each their own and life and let life and all that and more.
I stand by my claim that the real litmus test is "is it useful"?
ID is attacked vehemently because it claims to be a science, and it is not. It is not a science because it:
-Is not falsifiable by material science. In other words, you can't disprove it.
-The external "Designer" is not observable or falsifiable, and besides, science is "natural" and not "supernatural".
-The irreducible complexity argument is not scientific, and is an argument from ignorance and not a scientific hypothesis.
Regardless of whether or not you believe in Intelligent Design (and I happen to not believe in it) it is 100% the case that it is NOT science. We know this because we have definitions for science, and ID does not fulfill them.
Given that it is not science and seen by 99.9% of scientists as not science, you cannot teach it as science in a publicly funded classroom. THAT is the issue with ID. Teach it in private school, where the parents pay for everything, or teach it in some religious context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller ... l_District
Again, it's not about whether ID is right or not, and it's not being attacked because it's "wrong". It's being attacked because its supporters claim it's science, which it isn't, and because it's clearly creationism (see link above). Therefore you can't teach it in the science classroom at public schools.
ID is thinly veiled creationism that smells like science so it doesn't look so overtly religious, and so that it appeals to relatively logically and intelligent people.
I was with you until the last paragraph...more or less. I believe very strongly, that any regime that threatens freedom of thought should be eyed cautiously. It is no better (nor worst) if the entity is government, religion, or even scientists with vested interest (yes, some do exists, and they do hinder the scientific method, but the system still ends up working...just more slowly).
Now, that last paragraph. Notabull summed up a lot of what's wrong with ID, so I won't repeat that. But I will add this. Darwin introduced irreducible complexity, not ID. Coincidentally, irreducible complexity is the only tenet of ID which is even vaguely scientific. What ID proponents do not realize is that there is plenty of evidence that most evolution is not irreducibly complex, which means the current theory of evolution works in a range of scenarios. If you found one thing that was irreducibly complex, and if you really could 100% prove that it could not have formed from incremental changes (probably an impossible task), it still would not disprove evolution. All it would do is point out an instance where the theory is incomplete. Rather than destroy evolution, it would cause a frenzy of research to learn of that new and intriguing phenomenon, and the result would just be one additional engine which might drive the evolutionary process.
Here's a link from earlier, which is very interesting in regards to irreducible complexity. It discusses computer algorithms which are designed to evolve. They track every X generations, and they can witness modeled evolution happening in real time, and then go back and trace it. What's significant, is that they have witnessed many irreducibly complex apparatus develop, but each one can be created by a sequence of small steps. Really fascinating.
Regarding vehemence towards ID, I think there are many reasons.
1) It's trying to bypass separation of church and state in a sneaky/unethical way (proven at Dover trials). Here's a hilarious example where creationists evolved to intelligent design. Hint, the missing link is "cdesign proponentsists"
2) It is a waste of time/money. It forces real scientists to waste their time debunking junk science, rather than focus on learning more about our world.
3) It actually discourages asking questions. If you are given two options, told both are good, and one already matches your world view...why even examine the other. This is the point of ID by the way. And it's really successful.
4) It debases real science. In the same way that people don't trust medical science because they screwed up so much in the past, ID is running the good name of real science through the mud.
To me, that is a religion of evolution. Of course work would begin to figure out what was going on, but one cannot discount the possibility that given enough evidence, one could legitimately conclude ID. The evidence so far is that is quite unlikely, and I am pretty unimpressed with the claims of ID proponents, but I am also frequently unimpressed by the responses of numerous scientists in how dogmatically opposed they are to anything religious. Most of my life I was an atheist, so I am very familiar with the reasoning and motivation, but my conclusion was that not only were scientific explanations full of holes, but also the a religious explanation fit the evidence better. That is different than actually experiencing faith, that comes later. But for me the understanding of the systematic limitations of science was a precondition to accepting faith. A lot of writing I see on the science side of the ID debate does not take those limitations into account, and for that reason I support the ID position, even though I am unconvinced by any of the evidence they have come up with so far.
I read quickly over the wiki article on the Dover decision, and my conclusion is that was a case of suppression of valuable ideas if all that was involved was the reading of that particular statement. The board behaved shamefully in the case. But that does not change the fact that important questions were raised about the state of the science.
Since you ask, I didn't believe in God until my 40s. I remember in 1st grade I had already decided that the science in school made a whole lot more sense to me that what I was being taught in Sunday School (Reformed Jewish). The more I learned the more convinced I became, although I knew I couldn't prove it. I saw a lot of poorly thought out philosophy based on God, but I enjoyed studying various areas of science and math for enjoyment. However, I began to feel emotionally disconnected and decided to focus my reading on that issue, and found Buddhist reading satisfying for a while because it has a lot of insight into how the mind behaves. I finally married a woman who happened to be a Christian, and started attending Bible studies reluctantly and quite sceptically, although by then I knew how valuable those ideas were historically in bringing about freedom. I also had begun to understand how for many critical questions science simply excluded from those topics from its consideration because experiments are not possible. People with a scientific inclination seem start to consider those areas themselves suspect, when really the limitation is in scientific framework itself. BF Skinner was perhaps the worst in that regard.
After a while we moved to another location and started attending a church that happened to follow a Calvinist teaching. At that point I began to realize that most of what I thought I knew about Christianity was wrong. I found that if you simply ignore the incorrect cruft that has built up, there is a core that is logical and amazingly perceptive.
Coming from a Jewish background, I had learned about many of the atrocities that had been committed by Christians over the centuries. I saw how completely un-Christian those were, and simply separated them from Christianity. I can understand that until someone learns enough about real Christianity, they will be very hostile to it.
So I remain a Calvinist, which is numerically a small percentage of Christians. But I find great comfort in reading Protestant Reformed works, (for anyone who doesn't know, it is totally different from Jewish Reformed). Predestination is a topic I find fascinating, because it says that every moment of my life was designed by God to achieve a purpose. That is so deeply satisifying to me that I have no desire for scientific evidence for it. Calvinism is consistent with ID, but has no need for it.
There are two general ways a scientific theory can breakdown. One is total failure. Think geocentric orbits and Galileo.
The second is when one new fact or measurement doesn't fit. It doesn't destroy your theory, but it shows you an edge case that the mainstream theory explain. This is where most real science is done, extending theories so they are more complete. If we cannot, that is when the new information becomes the first type rather than the second.
Even if you found one truly irreducibly complex feature, it would not disprove evolution (at first). It would only suggest that we are missing some additional (and fundamental) feature. Now, if a whole class of these showed up, we would say evolution is clearly not complete. We think it's the best we have, but it fails to describe a huge group of features, and we need a new model. But until you find something that explains the world better, you're stuck using the original and theory which is now known to be incomplete.
None of this involves "faith" or denial of the new facts. So it is in no way religion; rather it's pragmatic. For the record, no such irreducibly complex feature is known, and we have proof that seemingly irreducibly complex features can evolve.
My challenge is what evidence would prove ID? What evidence would even suggest it if you don't start a priori with "God did it"? The fact is, religion was not interested in how we got here (beyond "God did it") until evolution came along. They finally had strong competition for that gap, and ID is just a way to shove the cat back into the bag.
Physicists once believed in Luminiferous aether. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether .
"Contemporary scientists were aware of the problems, but aether theory was so entrenched in physical law by this point that it was simply assumed to exist."
What killed it off was that special relativity explained the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment. If there was a single similar anomalous observation of something so improbable as to defy the statistics underlying evolution, and a coherent explanation with testable predictions, then evolution would fail just as any other theory.
I assume that direct evidence of some miracle or direct revelation would be convincing, so lets skip that.
Irreducible complexity, as I understand it, claims that something could only have happened because of a designer. The descriptions I have read of it are hugely flawed, because they assume things evolve from simpler processes, when evolution often takes a circuitous route of something complex down to something more efficient. The choice of the word "irreducible" by itself suggests a blindness to evolution from a more complex intermediate step down to a simpler one.
Still, a proof of ID might be some model of biochemistry that is able to convincingly show that there is simply no other path to producing a specific molecule that is possible other than the one observed in nature today, which depends on a previous generation producing it.
Achieving that seems extremely unlikely. For example, RSA public key cryptography is enormously simpler than biochemistry, is commercially and militarily important, and yet there is no proof that there isn't a shortcut for cracking it. Proving ID, I think, would be harder than proving RSA is secure. But maybe there is another way, and it does seem like a valid scientific question on a par with other unanswered questions in science and math.
I think this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geber is a good illustration of role of religion in science. Geber developed a large number of the fundamental processes used in chemistry. "Jabir's alchemical investigations ostensibly revolved around the ultimate goal of takwin — the artificial creation of life." And then "The Book of Stones prescribes long and elaborate sequences of specific prayers that must be performed without error alone in the desert before one can even consider alchemical experimentation."
More direct study of life and the solar system had to wait for the invention of the microscope and telescope. By then the authority of religious leaders had already been seriously challenged, but the leading scientists themselves were often involved in important theological discussion as well.
Let's not bring a thousand year old science/religion mashup into the mix. There's no doubt that many scientists were and are religious. However, the role of religion in science today is zero because science is the search for an explanation of the natural and material world.
Note that this does not mean that there is no role for religion in the scientist. Nobody cares what beliefs a scientist has, just that his or her science follows the basic rules of scientific experimentation. ID doesn't follow those rules so it isn't science regardless of whether the few people looking into it have a few scientific looking letters after their name, and regardless of the personal beliefs of the scientist.
Interesting article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationsh ... nd_science
I think this quote sums it up quite nicely: "The relationship between religion and science takes many forms as the two fields are both broad. They employ different methods and address different questions. The scientific method relies on an empirical approach to measure, calculate, and describe the natural/physical/material part of the universe. Religious methods rely on sources of divine revelation and supernatural authority to understand the spiritual objects in the universe."
That's exactly right. ID is a pretty desperate and weak attempt to explain something that's already been very adequately explained by another long existing, very well respected, and peer reviewed scientific theory. The conclusion of ID was known from the start as the Creator, oops, no, "Designer", did it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People
See this article for an example of the weak attempt to disguise Intelligent Design as science. Note that the book started off as clearly a religious book, which is fine by me as it discusses a religious explanation for the beginning of the world. However, when it was ruled that teaching a particular religion in schools was, umm, not legal n' stuff, the creationists needed to find another method to get creationism into schools.
They did this by attempting to morph creationism into science (which it never was), because the ruling allowed for teaching scientific explanations in schools. So they put their heads together, came up with some pseudoscience, attempted to a poke a few holes in evolution, changed a few words in their Panda book and the rest is history.
The wiki article on luminiferous aether essentially lays out exactly the process I said we would need to go through for the theory of evolution to be discarded. It wasn't just that one experiment, there were several experiments that failed, new and better corroborated hypotheses that required a vacuum, and eventually an entirely new theory that explained all phenomenon as well or better than aether showed up on the scene.
In your example, if we found something so improbable, it would take years for all the effects to fall out. And frankly, it would do nothing to prove ID or any other non-hypothesis. It would, however, open the door to some new theories, which would no doubt be equally unpalatable to those who want the bible to be literally true.
I can promise you now, that no such observation can ever be made. A large part of your (and my) DNA is non-coding. It is entirely possible (and does happen) for a mutation to harm the markers at the beginning or end of a coding region, so that proteins are encoded with additional content. In the land of extremely unlikely events (like your above example actually), it is physically possible to randomly generate any coding sequence you want in that non-coding region, and then have a spot mutation which causes that newly coded protein to form. Now, does that ever happen? I highly doubt it. All I'm saying is that you cannot ever prove the impossibility of any particular protein being coded for with irreducible complexity.
Because evolution is probabilistic, if you found one such case, it might not even be troubling to consider the massively unlikely example I wrote about above. Sometimes, highly unlike events happen. Sometimes, people are dealt royal flushes. This is why I argued that you would probably need several such examples to change things. I just don't see any way that this verifies ID though. It's still an argument from ignorance "if we find something we don't understand, then God did it!" Does God really need us shoving his foot in the door?