Question:
Does Intelligent Design disprove Evolution? Do you think there is a god?
Grace
2014-12-22 10:24:32 UTC
I've just started researching the Big Bang, Evolution, Intelligent Design, etc. My relative says that Intelligent Design disproves Evolution, so I'm just wondering what everyone's take on it is. Thank you!
Nine answers:
OPM
2014-12-23 18:01:32 UTC
Intelligent Design, also known as Biblical Creationism, is readily disproved. Whether or not there is a god or not has nothing to do with whether or not a fact about the world can be proven or not. Most people are unaware of the errors in Darwin's books, which is ironic. As creationists are so anti-evolution, they should be pouring over his books to find the mistakes. The way we know he made mistakes is that science doesn't treat anything as sacred and tests everything.



The reason I bring up Darwin's errors is that showing they are false also happens to disprove creationism as well.



In the 1920's there was a geneticist by the name of RA Fisher. Fisher had a terrible dilemma. He was sure Darwin was wrong and Gregor Mendel was correct, but had no clear way to show this. There were others he also lumped into the "wrong" category. He then took a cue from Aristotelian logic, which you were likely taught in high school as truth tables, and devised a clever test. This test, when repeated, proves that creationism is false. It also disproves intelligent design as well, but intelligent design didn't exist in the 1920's.



There is a concept called modus tollens in logic. It is operationalized in high school math as "If A then B" and "Not B" therefore "Not A."



The A is called a null hypothesis and it is in particular called the "no effect" hypothesis. You assume the opponent is the only one who is correct and that everything you believe is false. This, of course, creates a giant mountain you have to climb if you start off with you being false as the given truth.



Fisher assumed that Mendel's laws have no effect and that ANY other explanation including intelligent design and creationism and Darwin's ideas and Lamarck's ideas could be the true one. All other ideas were in the "possibly true" category and Mendel's laws were in the "perfectly false" category.



Well, the neat thing about assuming Mendel's laws are false is that you can test that. To do so, their falseness has to create a prediction about how the data must appear if they are false. If the data appears far away, it may still be true, but that chance events caused you to grab a weird set of data. So Fisher devised away to calculate a worst case statistical distribution to account for the worst possible case of chance.



He then tested the data and the null hypothesis was excluded by the data alone. The data excludes everything except evolution.



Every time a biologist tests evolution, they do so by assuming evolution is the false idea and the data rejects this idea that evolution is false.



It doesn't matter if there is a god, it is nearly perfectly certain, given 150 years of data, that evolution is absolutely true.



Using the same tools you can, and biologists have, disprove intelligent design as well.



The nice thing is that you don't have to "research" any of this. You can do these experiments for yourself. Mendel grew peas. Undergraduate biology students regularly do tests like this. If you watch tv shows like CSI, you are watching tests built on evolution.



The Big Bang is an entirely different thing. And a post on it on top of evolution would be too long, but the way you can tell the Big Bang is true is two-fold. First, if you tune a radio to a particular set of frequencies, you can hear the echo of that initial rapid expansion. You would have to look it up. It sounds like the static on the radio between stations. The second is that if you use GPS to travel a great distance, then you are trusting Relativity, of which the Big Bang is part of.



If you drive a car from Maine to Kansas and get to where you are going, then you can trust the Big Bang.
Old Man Dirt
2014-12-24 06:04:18 UTC
Reality disproves evolution! One mechanism that is proposed only results in genetic abnormalities that are termed by medical science birth defects. In over 4000 years none has been observed in the human specie as being an improvement. The birth defects that result in additional DNA material or the deletion of DNA material are considered sterile and can not reproduce with others of the same parent specie.

The other mechanism is called cancer by the medical profession. Cancer kills- there has been no observed deviation from this rule in all of recorded history.

Attempts to create a new specie have failed when the attempt is made to use normal methods of reproduction. Case in point- the mule. While a Jenny might be fertile (most often not) the Jack never is or at least has been sense men first started breeding mules.

Evolution is an attempt to reverse engineer the events of the past. If something can be reverse engineered then it was engineered.

The average atheist has not kept up with science. For example they will fault the Bible for saying the suns course is charted. Well it is- the sun had a starting place and it is moving through space (and time) to it's ultimate demise. The objection is based on the model of Galileo that modeled the universe orbiting around the sun. While Galileo's model is still credited to him- it is highly flawed and all of the reasons given at his trial have been proven to be valid. Atheist that reference science in their reasoning ignore the implications of the big bang in their other models. Recent discoveries concerning the type of hydrogen found in comets are also ignored.

The more science discovers the more it points out to me the inherent failures of science and the willingness of some to believe a lie.
Questioner
2014-12-24 12:26:44 UTC
You need to watch the debates with some of the guys like Dr. Stephen Meyer, Dr. William Lane Craig, and Dr. John Lennox.



You also need to watch some of the Intelligent Design DVDs:

Unlocking The Mystery Of Life (Illustra Media)

The Privileged Planet (Illustra Media)

Darwin's Dilemma (Illustra Media)

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Premise Media)

Icons Of Evolution (Coldwater Media)

The Case For A Creator (Illustra Media)



After that, you will be able to make a much more informed decision.
trevor
2014-12-22 13:33:46 UTC
No intelligent design dose not disprove evolution rather it works along side evolution. Basically intelligent design says a higher being designed life on earth as it evolved. Evolution states that live has evolved over time. Neither one disproves the other one just ads God into the equation while the other dosent.
?
2014-12-22 11:24:41 UTC
Intelligent design is just a way to adapt more discoveries in science to a non-scientific theory. Intelligent design itself is just a way to adapt creationism to the world to prevent it from becoming extinct. (HEY! even creationism must evolve to survive!)





Evolution is just change over time. Everything much change or adapt in some way. Life is pretty screwed up, and is filled with faults that were great in the past, but unnecessary in the future. Think of the appendix. If we were intelligently designed, there would be no need to put it in our body. But our species ancestor's needed it. We have that remnant of our past. Same with extra nipples (they are just pop ups from our past). We have nerves that loop from the heart up to the head, and back down (that's a pointless yet harmless remnant from fish!)



If life was intelligently designed, we would be far more perfect. Just because life is complex, doesn't mean it took an intelligent designer. Like the quote in Jurassic park "Life finds a way".
Zardoz
2014-12-22 10:43:50 UTC
Intelligent Design disproves Intelligent Design. It's little more than ad hoc, piecemeal contention aimed to support a preconceived notion. It avoids intelligence like a plague.
busterwasmycat
2014-12-23 04:04:55 UTC
Intelligent design is an effort to show that evolution cannot proceed by chance alone. In my view, my opinion, ID fails in its attempts to do that. Fundamentally, the very idea of ID is that a miracle happens and poof! a thing results. For me"miracles", intervention from outside of nature, are not possible, they do not happen. Everything that has been called a miracle can be shown to be just the normal operation of nature.



To declare "miracles" as a cause of anything in nature is to declare that you fail to understand nature; simply because you do not understand does not mean that it was miraculous. the logic is false.
anonymous
2014-12-22 10:26:25 UTC
The thing about "intelligent design" is that it will be proven--or disproven--when one sees God. The worst of them just can't seem to have the patience and need some god-awful answer now.

Just tell these morons to have patience.
roger
2014-12-22 11:01:13 UTC
So, Who created God?


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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