Okay, that's a fair question.
Ever since I was a little guy, I always wondered "why is it harder to build a house of cards, than to knock it down?" Well as you know, the structure of the house depends on the nature of the cards (size, shape, rigidity), and the order they are arranged (how they are stacked). When you build the card house, you are using the qualities of the cards to maintain the arraignment. Now the arraignment is not a quality inherent to the cards, but they will maintain the arraignment within certain parameters. And just like d@mn near everything else in the universe, the complexity of the cardhouse is inversely proportional to its stability. The bigger I make it, the more careful I have to be, because it's easier to knock over. The tolerance for error gets tighter and tighter the further along I get.
So flash forward to chemistry class. I find out that each and every chemical, or molecule if you will, works exactly the same way. In concept, I can think of them like building blocks with a wide variety of characteristics. Sure there's all kinds of different ways for them to bond, and some are solid as a rock once you get them together. But for the most part, they too fall apart easier than they go together. A few classes later, I find out that organics are some of the most complex of any molecular structures, and the organics themselves have to be in very tight arraignments in order for qualities inherent to very specific chemicals to form mechanisms. And so on up the ladder it goes from these molecules, to organelles, cells, tissues, organs, and organisms.
All the while, I've been growing up with the theory of evolution, and that makes perfect sense to me too. Except for one thing, I notice that I never hear a critical discussion of evolution...ever. And I expect that I should because there are alot of details I ask about that seem to get my teachers real frustrated. So I ask myself "if these guys are so sure about how life started, how come they can't make it in a pitri dish or something?" Add that to the fact that no one ever seriously questions the idea and I start to think this needs some looking into.
Well the only other game in town was the whole Adam and Eve thing, which I never gave much credit after I got into grade school. But like I said, it's the only other explaination that people who actually comb their hair seem to consider a possibility, so that's the direction I started looking. Eventually I listen to a lecture by a guy named A.E. Wilder-Smith who has credentials out the ying yang and his topic is what he calls "the great debate." In this lecture, he explains exactly how Huxley the evolutionist beats Bishop Wilburforce the creationist, and he does it in a way that makes perfect sense. He then procedes to explain exactly what dodge ( a very subtly faulted analogy relating to the nature of chemical equalibria) it was that Huxley used to win. Much to my surprise, his explaination is an expansion of what I figured out on my own about card houses. He also says Huxley's argument is still the one used today by evolutionists everywhere.
Now everytime I would ask someone, who'd swear on his mother's grave evolution was a proven fact, how they explained biogenesis they'd treat me like a Doctor being asked about Chiropractors. So I put them in roughly the same catagory. For most things, my M.D. is pretty good, but sometimes there are things he just can't fix. So I just keep quiet to the MD. I know, for whatever reason, he'd rather let me overdose trying to figure out what pill HE can give me that will work, than admit the Chiropractor can help anything at all.
A few more years go by and I hear about "Darwin's black box" by Behe. He says that not only is biogenesis a real loser for evolutionary theory, but he introduces a concept he calls "irreducable complexity" and procedes, step by step, to explain exactly what he means. And it makes alot of sense.
Finally, I hear of this guy Dembski. He uses the same math used in the building of computers, the actual guts part (if I understand correctly), to evaluate the kind of actual information resident in biological structures. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember when I read his papers, he explained step by step, exactly what he was talking about. And it made alot of sense.
So what really convinces me the ID theorists are right and Evolutionists are wrong, is the ID guys don't seem to have any problem explaining exactly what they mean. And the Evolutionists always act like it's my fault when they don't want to lay out their refutations, step by step, like the ID guys. The only reason I can think of that explains why none of them ever do this is because they can't.
If you do, you'll be the first.
One very funny and true line from an outstanding post (#102).
Johnson's book "broke the dam" for me.
I remember a three day running argument I had with a friend over time being an absolute. I tried to show him time is a physical property of matter, and he was having none of it. He insisted he wasn't going to buy it till he saw it in print. I kept trying to tell him "Dave,you can work it out for yourself! You don't need to see it in print."
"You believe E equals MC squared, right?"
"You believe in Algebra, don'tcha?"
"Can't you isolate 'time' in the equation?"
And "can't it vary according to the other factors?"
"Then how can you say it's absolute?"
This guy spent three days reaching so far up his butt searching for come-backs, I'm surprised he didn't toss me a molar or two.
He finally relented when I brought him a xerox copy of a page out of the encyclopedia that verified what I was saying.
The point is...he already had all the tools he needed to convince himself, he just wasn't going to risk it unless someone with a lot of letters after their name said it was okay.
It's alright to take the word of authorities, but not when they start trying to convince you two plus two doesn't have to equal four. Isn't that what being a conservative is all about? Don't we thumb our noses at "educators" whose sole claim to authority seems to be they're "professional," because our homeschool kids are running rings around theirs? We can pi$$ around all day long about quantum mechanics and causality, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus, and we know how they act. Heisenberg doesn't have a thing to do with it. Molecules just don't act the way evolution says they *must*.
I'm not gonna go for a bunch of baloney about how "x must have y'd" when you can't show how "x" "y"s all the time, or even why "x" would bother to "y" aside from it supports your theory of "x""y"ing. I'm still trying to get some kind of answer on how the he!! you evolve an instinct. That's *nothing but* information. "Random" information?...hardwired into animals? Unless someone can explain to me why that's *not* doubletalk, as far as I'm concerned, "it walks like a duck."
You guys are plenty smart enough to evaluate what both sides have to say without someone telling you it's okay.
Finally, I hear of this guy Dembski. He uses the same math used in the building of computers, the actual guts part (if I understand correctly), to evaluate the kind of actual information resident in biological structures. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember when I read his papers, he explained step by step, exactly what he was talking about. And it made alot of sense.
So what really convinces me the ID theorists are right and Evolutionists are wrong, is the ID guys don't seem to have any problem explaining exactly what they mean. And the Evolutionists always act like it's my fault when they don't want to lay out their refutations, step by step, like the ID guys. The only reason I can think of that explains why none of them ever do this is because they can't.
Cool. I'm good you have found a place where you are happy with your philisophical choices. It takes cajones to post exactly what you think here, come to think of it, you are the first IDer to do so.
So let me tell you why I think the way I think, and you can go where you want to go with it.
I don't think that ID is a serious scientific field yet. There are a number of reasons behind it, and they all have to do with the way I have been taught as a scientist to filter out data to formulate scientific opinions on ideas that I read.
In 1993, as an junior in Astrophysics, I discovered a thin little book in our Astronomy library titled "Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies" by an author named Dr. Halton Arp. I discovered rather quickly that the book was a book on an alternative theory on quasar origins. I spent some time talking with professors, and some more time wading through papers by both Arp and Burbidge, as well as other authors that hold the prevailing view, that quasars are cosmological. Arp had a compelling argument that projection effects disprove the concept of cosmological redshifts, and that quasars were simply objects propelled out of normal and Seyfert galaxies in a symmetric manner. For someone who didn't have a highly detailed scientific background, that was an interesting argument. Then I read arguments by other scientists who did very detailed studies of quasar distribution over the sky as well as redshift distribution around clusters of normal galaxies. Through some pretty complex statistics that I didn't quite understand at the time (I do now), they showed that statistically there is no real clustering of quasars, that they are essentially isotropic and homogeneous in the universe, and that they don't tend to cluster at all, which is theoretically impossible using the Arp theory.
So here we have a theory that looks to be true in concept, but when you dig deeper and perform more tests on it, it doesn't seem to quite pan out right. The predictive model doesn't give the answers you see in the universe. Arp's idea is unique in that it actually saw print in a journal. There are a bunch more ideas that have seen print in non-referreed books by others that have never seen print, they never made it through the peer review process. There are a large subgroup of people that used to post to usenet that lived for posting their theories. Alexander Abian, Charles Cagle, Robert McElwaine, Archie Plutonium, Ted Holden, and quite a few others posted arguments that never made it through the process, so some of them published books, some made elaborate websites, some write letters to universities, and some just still post there today. But all of them have never published their newer ideas in a prominent peer-reviewed scientific journal. Most of them complained of grand conspiracies of scientists preventing them from publishing. I've seen some pretty wacked ideas out there in today's journals, I don't buy that argument one bit.
So lets dance onto ID. Here we have a theory that has a very appealing concept to some, that life was designed by some. It's a good idea in practice, but how does it work when presented in a scientific setting, when poked and prodded in different angles?
Scientifically, we don't know. Certainly, people have performed some tests, with results that are quite ambivelant, depending on your views. But there hasn't been a comprehensive look at ID in a setting conducive to intense scientific debate. I submit to you that ID still has to get past that basic concept stage yet.
Intense scientific debate only really happens in a few places. Scientific meetings and peer reviewed papers are the two most prevalent settings. In a scientific setting, terms have an exact definition. One has to define terms exactly...it saves time from virtually needless debate. Then you have the advantage of many minds working on a project, and people can help develop ideas. More minds working on a concept develops the concept faster, and opens it up to criticism. It's the way science gets done.
So why publish a book first? Most scientists have published in journals first, then written books later. Why the cart before the horse? Why not publish? It makes him look dreadfully crackpottish. If he has a valid idea, it should be tested.
So, through my experience in Astrophysics, good valid theories are ones that survive the scientific method. The best way to do this is to publish your ideas in a journal, or give talks at scientific meetings. It is at locations like this that give you the best "mind-space" to plant the seeds of your idea. In a journal, the responses one gets aren't going to be childish flames, they are likely going to be responses as reasoned as your original work. Those responses are going to be as peer reviewed as the original work. Books simply don't see that kind of review over things like terminology and logic.
it's getting late, and I'm beginning to ramble. I think this post should show why I feel the way I do about ID. ID could be for real, but we won't know until it submits itself to some real scrutiny. Until then, I'll give a lot more credibility in work that has been peer reviewed. I'll read other scientific works, but I don't let them meaningfully shape my scientific opinion.