Is Intelligent Design a Rational or Irrational belief (Part 4)

To proceed, instead of dealing with a strawman, let us first consider Intelligent Design as defined, argued and researched by the actual community of scientists who advocate such a position : "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. " [1] "Argument 1) Natural causes are our default position." This is a strawman, again, from the actual scientists who perform the design research : "Through the study and analysis of a system's components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. " [2] Note, is able to determine, not "proceeds from the assumption that". "Argument 2) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." While popularized by Sagan, this quote originates from Truzzi who stated it as : "In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. " [3] Ironically, this was part of an argument where Truzzi was noting that some skeptics would make negative claims without bearing the burden of proof. But again, this is a strawman, no design theorist has ever asked for acceptance without experimentation, nor do they submit papers for review, in peer reviewed journals, and ask for exemption from the peer review process. They are judged, as are all scientists on their merits alone. "Claiming that an all knowing, all powerful, all good, uncreated being created the universe is an extraordinary claim, but where is the extraordinary evidence ?" Again, strawman, and again from the actual scientists who do design research : "Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design does not claim that modern biology can identify whether the intelligent cause detected through science is supernatural. "[4] "Argument 3) Ignorance does not support a supernatural cause." Again, strawman, see immediate point above. "Argument 4) Improbability is not the same as Impossibility" Finally an actual argument. Now the core argument when design is advocated is that a natural phenomenon is examined and design is concluded by rejecting all known undirected causes. Note undirected, that is what makes design - design, direction. Con argues (paraphrase) "Well at most they can conclude that it is unlikely not impossible.". That is exactly true, however that is all any scientist can even conclude when they look at experimental data and perform a correlation analysis. Let us take the most basic experimental method of analysis, rejection of the null hypothesis by the student-t test[5]. All this does is look at a set of data and compare how likely there is no correlation vs correlation (or a similar paired hypothesis). When this test is performed by a bit of basic number crunching there will be a result which is similar to "The null hypothesis is rejected with a p value of < 5%". What this means is that there is less than 5% than the null hypothesis is true. Now 5% was picked for a reason, that is the default level of significance in most of the physical sciences (biology is typically 1%). Thus if Con is really going to argue point four they are over turning the most fundamental of all physical experimental tests. Thus if a design theorist was judged consistently, all they would have to show was that an undirected cause had a less than 5% probability and they would be valid in rejecting it. Note a lot of care has to be taken here, as with all of statistics - this does not mean anything less than 5% of happening through unguided causes has to be designed, that would be a farce. The actual experiment would look at the expected number of results vs the observed and compare both models. Again, Con makes a strawman, that is not how actual design theorists frame an argument. Now as to how the arguments are actually presented, lets continue with the affirmative. With all of Con's arguments shown to be trivially refuted, a very short and simple argument for Pro. Intelligent Design is argued by actual research scientists who publish in peer reviewed journals such as Douglas Axe's recent paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology[6]. Now if a research scientist, who has a Phd from CalTech, can make an argument for Intelligent Design which is accepted by a prominent peer reviewed journal then how could it possible be argued that the position is irrational. Now it is not the case that this is the only paper, example after example can be given, but just consider the simple fact that all of science starts with just one paper. I would argue that even if one paper was published in a peer reviewed journal under proper circumstances (mistakes are made even in science - oh noes), then by the definitions noted in the above it has to be concluded that the position is one of reason as that is exactly how science defines knowledge, in fact it is how science is actually defined as the body of knowledge which comes from the method of science. "Science is both a body of knowledge and a process."[7] Now once you are peer reviewed and published essentially it is part of science. Of course it could be later over turned, that happens, but this does not make it not science. Thus the counter argument is again very simple, actual scientists with real and relevant academic degrees publish ID papers in actual peer reviewed journals - thus the ID movement is inhernetly rational by the univeral metric by which science itself generates and even more so defines knowledge.It is only irratonal if science itself is declared to be irratonal. [1], [2], [4] http://www.intelligentdesign.org... [3] Marcello Truzzi, On Pseudo-Skepticism, Zetetic Scholar, 12/13, pp3-4, 1987 [5] http://www.socialresearchmethods.net... [6] "Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds" (Axe, J Mol Biol 341, 1295-1315, 2004). [7] http://undsci.berkeley.edu...