Re: The status of ID and a personal reflection

On 2/23/2025 5:43 AM, MarkE wrote:

ID is described as "a pseudoscientific argument" on Wikipedia [1], there's clearly no love for it here, and as far as I know ID has limited recognition within mainstream science. The general public's awareness and support of ID I believe is higher but still constrained.

You always seemed to agree that ID was basically a scam from the beginning.  You never seemed to buy into the scam even after it became the main creationist topic on TO.  I do not recall any overt claims of adhering to the ID scam tactics.

 ID has been accused of being a creationism Trojan Horse, and at times it seems to have pursued a political agenda, especially with education.  From to time to time, the Discovery Institute and Evolution News promote a misplaced right-wing perspective.

Everyone should understand that ID is just warmed over scientific creationism.  The Scientific creationists used to use the same Top Six best evidences for the ID scam.  The Big Bang, fine tuning, origin of life, the flagellum as a designed machine, the Cambrian explosion, gaps in the fossil record, and human evolution were all scientific creationist god-of-the-gaps denial arguments.  Gish would routinely use most of them in his Gish Gallop against his scientific opponents.  He would try to cram as much denial into his 10 minutes as he could squeeze in.

 Personally, I have a degree of ambivalence toward ID. For example, I think the 'information problem' claimed by ID is real, but I'm a bit surprised that people like William Dembski have not been able to progress it further after several decades (I've briefly but fruitfully corresponded with him regarding this in the past). More recently, on the topic of junk DNA, I get the impression that Casey Luskin and the Long Story Short episode on this may have oversimplified and/or overstated arguments against junk DNA (I've made a corrective comment on LSS's YouTube channel in relation to this).
 ID itself is a broad-ish church, for example with a range of views on common descent and the extent of evolution (e.g. from micro to macro).

For political purposes the ID scam has tried to propagate a "Big Tent" approach where they falsely claim that ID is open to all creationist religious beliefs.  If ID were more than the psuedoscience propagated by the ID creationist scam artists they would have been more honest about what real science is all about.  Real science is just the study of nature.  There is only the one nature and cosmos that we have to study at this time.  This simple fact means that the ID perps have lied about the Big Tent creationist effort from the start of the ID scam.  ID died on TO when the last supporters could no longer live with the lie.  The ID perps were stupid enough to give the rubes their best evidence for ID in the order that those gaps must have occurred in this universe, and it turned out that this universe is not Biblical.  Pagano tried to go into denial and claimed that the Top Six were not the best IDiotic evidence, and that Dembski's scam arguments that had been rejected by even the IDiots long ago (Dembski had already retired from the ID scam as an abject failure before the Top Six were presented, and none Dembski's junk made it into the Top Six).  The denial was even too much for Pagano and he quit posting.  Bill claimed that he had never supported the ID creationist scam.  We all know that, that isn't true.  What Bill likely meant was that he had never supported what the ID scam had always existed, and that he had never really supported the Top Six god-of-the-gaps IDiotic denial obfuscation arguments.  ID still had supporters on TO when they were just feeding the rubes the Top Six as independent bits of denial that were used by the scientific creationists as fire and forget denial arguments.  The Top Six were never supposed to have been taken together and demonstrated to have existed in a non Biblical universe.
Uncommon descent could never deal with the Top Six in an honest and straight forward manner, and it is now defunct.  The Reason To Believe old earth creationists used to claim that they were IDiots who supported ID science, but you can go to their web site now, and you would have a difficult time trying to find any evidence for their past with the ID scam.  They had always claimed that they did not want to teach the junk in the public schools, but that they wanted to use the ID science to develop their Biblical creation model.  It turned out that they could not use the ID science to accomplish that.  The creation as it exists is not Biblical, and science has to deal with what exists.

 So, given all this, why would I speak in support of ID and claim it has gained and sustained traction [2]? My comments here are somewhat subjective, but with supporting references where applicable. To be clear, this is intended as a more a personal reflection and not a rigorous treatise (in contrast to other TO posts where I believe I attempt to argue consistently and from evidence).

Tour claims to understand that ID has been a scam for decades (He admits that he can't figure out how to do any ID science) but he still supports the gap denial.  Gap denial was never going to make the ID scam into any science that the majority of IDiotic creationists (most are still YEC) would want to support.  Taken together, in their logical order in which they must have occurred in this universe, the Top Six will never support a Biblical creation.  Even Tour's current denial about just one of the Top Six (the origin of life) should tell anyone that the existing creation is not Biblical.

 First, the question of origins - either life on earth or the universe itself - is all-encompassing, multi-disciplinary, multi-faceted, complicated, etc. One would expect strengths and weakness with opposing arguments and interpretation of evidence, as fallible humans grapple with these ultimate questions. So the shortcomings of ID are not in and of themselves unexpected or disqualifying.

The denial will never get you to where you want to go.  You still have to accept that the creation is not Biblical in order to claim that some god did it.  It was not the god described in the Bible, and you are still left with how that god did it.  Denton claims that, that god did it by creating a universe with the Big Bang and making sure that everything needed to allow life in this universe was provided by this creator at the beginning.  Denton understands that it took over 8 billion years to produce the carbon and other elements that our solar system is made of to make a planet like our earth with the materials needed to have life exist on this planet.  Denton doesn't care about any of the fine tuning bull pucky because he understands that it isn't needed, and would be difficult to demonstrate that some god would take 8 billion years to make our planet in the right place with the right composition to harbor life.

 At its best, I think that ID correctly and non-deceptively infers a non- specific intelligent agent from an interpretation of scientific evidence (while acknowledging many ID proponents are Christians). This aligns with my own position and I suspect a growing number of Christians who sit somewhere between YEC and theistic evolution.

You are likely wrong.  All the ID scam artists came at the problem from the point of view that some god existed.  As pointed out the need for that god is difficult to demonstrate, and even explain.  IDiots need to answer the question of why it would take 8 billion years to fine tune our planet so that life could exist here?  Why does it look like it just happened naturally without any intervention.

 The traction that ID has I think partly flows from this genuinely "agnostic" stance when it comes to comes to inferring a designer. This enables it to focus on the science alone.

The traction that they have is stockholm syndrome believers, that can't give up no matter how badly treated they have been by the ID creationist scam artists.  The bait and switch has been run on 100% of the creationist IDiots that believed the scam artists when they claim to have the ID science to teach in the public schools.  Everyone should know by now that the ID science never existed, and that the bait and switch will continue to go down, but we still had West Virginia last year.  Not a single creationist rube has ever gotten any ID science to teach in the public schools from the ID perps, zero.  Zero is how many supporters the ID scam should have at this time.  The ID perps continue to claim that the Kitzmiller decision was wrong, and that it is still legal to teach IDiocy outside of Dover, but what happened to the West Virginia creationist rubes that believed them?  The ID perps got them to remove mention of ID from the Bill that they had previously sent to the Governor (they were able to run the bait and switch because the Governor did not sign the bill that had ID in it, and the one that was signed did not mention ID nor creationism, but the stupid author of the act kept claiming that it would allow teaching ID in West Virginia public schools after the Governor has signed the scam legislation.  Luskin had to keep claiming that the West Virginia rubes should not teach the ID science (what could they teach?) and try to run the bait and switch on the stupid legislator again.

 Something that needs to be understood is the inherent asymmetry between the positions of naturalism and supernaturalism in terms of how each applies science. Naturalism is seeking to prove a positive, i.e. to identify at least one plausible naturalistic explanation of origins. Supernaturalism, in this context, is required to prove a negative, i.e. on the basis of science demonstrate that all possible naturalistic explanations are impossible or extremely doubtful.

Science does not include supernaturalism because of the 100% failure rate for the propositions.  They cannot be scientifically tested and they are only falsified when we have done the hard work to demonstrate that such actions are not needed.  There is no god that opens up the firmament every once in a while to let the rain fall through.  No matter what the Bible claims, what we found out were things like the water cycle, cloud formation and precipitation.  Where do babies come from? Who makes the seasons change?  Is some god responsible for sunrise and sunset?  Was any god responsible for the spontaneous generation of life?   What did Pasteur demonstrate?  The Reason to Believe creationists are still claiming that some god is recreating life on earth on a regular basis, and the recreations make it look like life evolved on this planet for billions of years.
The simple fact is that supernaturalism has a 100% failure rate in terms of the explanation of nature.  Unfortunately, the ID perps have never demonstrated that all possible naturalistic explanations are impossible.   Extremely doubtful is still a losing proposition when weighted against the 100% failure rate for the alternative.  All that you would need is to have one god did it success to make god did it part of science, but that has never happened.  The 100% failure rate is what supernaturalists have to deal with.

 One misunderstanding of this logical asymmetry is demonstrated by the supposed counter-argument, which says that positing God merely shifts the question to 'Who made God?', which is declared to have no explanatory power, and therefore can be discounted. Dawkins is fond of this approach. Sorry Richard, but you can't make God vanish in a puff of pseudo-logic and disingenuous wishful-thinking.

It is only "logical" if you ignore the 100% failure rate.  Not a single success in the history of human kind that can be verified.  You don't have to worry about "Who made god?" when there isn't any evidence that such an entity is involved in doing anything in this universe.
Was the universe created in 6 days or periods of time as described in the Bible?  It turns out that those things did not happen in that order.   What good does it do for you to try to figure out if some other god was involved in doing things that the Biblical god obviously did not do.
It turns out that Christianity never relied on what is described in the Bible about the creation.  Saint Augustine was likely battling flat earth Biblical creationists when he admonished Christians that were trying to use to Bible to deny things about nature that we could figure out for ourselves.  Eratosthenes had estimated the circumference of the earth using physical measurements a couple centuries before Christ was born.  Later Saint Augustine's admonishment was used to reconcile things like Heliocentrism and even biological evolution.

 In any case, ID has endured now its modern form for about three decades, and of the various creationism streams is, as far as I'm aware, by far the most credibly and substantially engaged with current science. The DI claims a research program and over 250+ peer-reviewed papers published in mainstream journals [3]. Of course, the validity of these may be disputed - as are most perspectives and papers in contentious areas (e.g. string theory).

The peer reviewed science papers do not support ID.  In spite of the ID perp claims both Behe and Minnich admitted that there were no peer reviewed publications supporting the ID creationist scam.  Can you find a single peer-reviewed paper published in main stream science journals that supported the ID scam in those 250+ papers?  Religious and sociology journals that include religious cultural aspects should not count as scientific journals, nor as any scientific support for the ID creationist scam.  Phillip Johnson apparently got the movement funding and the ID scam unit started around 1995 at the Discovery Institute. The original Wedge Document put out in 1998 had their religious and political mission described along with their goals like having 10 states teaching ID within 5 years.  They came to national attention with the Santorum "amendment", supposedly written by Johnson, to the No Child Left Behind bill in 2000.  Creationists started to take notice, but the ID perps decided that they didn't have any ID science worth teaching, so they started running the Bait and Switch on creationist rubes in Ohio in 2002.  I recall that within a few months they had to run the bait and switch on Minnesota, Wisconsin and Montana.  My guess is that they might have hit their 10 state 5 year goal, if they had not decided to make ID into a creationist bait and switch scam.  Since 2002 ID has only been used as bait to sell the rubes the ID perp's obfuscation and denial switch scam that does not mention ID, nor creationism ever existed.

 While ID has not delivered a knock-out punch (obviously), it does seem to continue to track progress in science and develop its arguments accordingly. Examples include:
 1. OOL. Although I've mentioned some specific criticisms of the Long Story Short video series, overall the fact that they can be made today is revealing. The series critiquing naturalistic abiogenesis [4] (claimed to made by five "PhD scientists") directly challenges OOL on the basis of current science, and exaggerated claims of progress (IMO). Along with this are books like The Stairway to Life [5], and many others. And James Tour has waded in to this issue, as an ID sympathiser at least, and despite his shouty and sometimes dismissive manner, I think his work very much reinforces what ID is saying [6]. YMMV.

This is just denial and not support for the ID scam.  Tour understands that he isn't supporting the ID scam with his origin of life denial, so this doesn't matter with respect to the ID scam in light of the 100% failure rate for any IDiotic claims in the past.

 2. Stephen Meyer on most things. He is now the public face of ID, and its most prominent intellectual spokesperson, debater, and book author. His guest appearance on Joe Rogan confirm his popular positioning. His genteel conversations with skeptic Michael Shermer I think point to the substantive arguments ID presents. And Meyer's books have deserved infleunce and impact across topics like first-case, fine-tuning, OOL, complexity, information, Cambrian explosion, macroevolution, etc.

When the bait and switch started to go down Meyer was the biggest cheer leader for teaching the junk in the public schools, but he personally ran the first bait and switch on the Ohio creationist rubes.  At that time he was director of the ID scam unit, but still held a teaching position at a religious college.  It was likely difficult to walk down the academic halls after running the bait and switch on Ohio, so Meyer quit his teaching job and started running the bait and switch scam full time.  For a period of time after Ohio Meyer dropped out of the public view, and West had to step forward to publicly push the ID bait and switch scam forward.  During that time the Bait and switch went down on every single school board and legislator that wanted to teach ID in their public schools.  The bait and switch has continued to go down 100% of the time, and Meyer became what he is now, the face of the Bait and Switch effort.

 4. The whole complexity thing. Yes, I understand (for example) PZ Myers' frustration with ID veering toward "complexity therefore design". However, the complexity problem is real and growing. Science is discovering more and more complexity in living cells and living things. This correspondingly increases the challenge to OOL and macroevolution, and ID knows this and is rightly pressing the point.

IC died at the turn of the century.  Behe admitted to his critics that IC systems could evolve (I recall his example was a lever and fulcrum could occur by chance) but his IC systems had something more.  He first claimed that "well matched" parts were important, but he could never measure well matched to any degree so that he could claim that his systems had enough to be IC.  Later he gave up on multiple interacting parts and started his 3 neutral mutations as making a system IC.  These would have to happen in a single protein within a certain amount of time, but he could never find any examples.

 4. Behe's IC, and more recently his waiting time problem analysis. Your mileage well vary on this one.

His edge of evolution argument where he admitted that he could not find the 3 neutral mutations that he needed, but he could find examples that were on the "edge" of evolution that required 2 neutral mutations.  It was a stupid argument, but he kept claiming that all evolution could do was what he could demonstrate had been done, but it could not do the evolution requiring 3 neutral mutations that his IC systems would need. He could not find the 3 neutral mutation examples that he needed, but biological evolution still could not explain nature because all he could find were examples that could be accounted for without designer interference.

 5. The information issue. Biology is as much about information storage, processing and maintenance as it is about physics and chemistry. Naturalism has not come to grips with this IMO, and I think ID is on the right track with the focus it has on this.

Biology is not about information storage.  If anything, life exists because of the propagation of previously existing life.  The ID perps have never been able to define the information that they claim that some designer is needed to propagate.  The ID perps make claims about DNA and some code, but the DNA isn't the information that life depends on.  The DNA only does things like make RNAs that do things, and that can produce proteins.  DNA sequences that are used to regulate genes, and make functional RNA products are not part of the DNA code that produces proteins.  The information that life depends on to propagate is not the code for amino acid sequence, but the information in the protein sequence produced.  This information isn't in the amino acid sequence, but in the 3 dimensional structures that that sequence can form. Proteins have evolved that help other proteins take their functional 3D shape.
As life exists today, it requires the structural information involved in producing a life form capable of reproduction.  We still have to put synthetic genomes into a living cell to get those genomes propagated. Just having the DNA isn't enough to propagate life.

 6. ID taking on first-case, fine-tuning, OOL, complexity, information, Cambrian explosion, macroevolution, etc.

ID is just limited to the gaps.  If ID were a useful scientific endeavor it would be used to deal with what we already understand and be able to better our understanding of our existing knowledge about nature.  As Behe admitted ID is useless for science as ID currently exists.  His only lame use for ID was that if his IC systems did infact require designer interference to be created, that it would be a waste of time to study the evolution of something like the flagellum.  Critics have always claimed that ID was just a science stopper, and Behe admitted that, that is all that ID can be. Really, Behe's example was that if his flagellum was really IC that no one should waste their time studying how it evolved because god-did-it.

 That's an incomplete and uneven summary. As I hope I've made clear, YMMV; I acknowledge that. This post is not an opportunity to dive down the hundred rabbit holes that this overview touches on. That is something I've been demonstrably (laboriously) willing to do in many other threads. Rather, this is an invitation for conversation about your own journey, perspective, doubts, convictions etc. I'm happy to consider correction and criticism, within the framework described.

You need to reevaluate what the ID scam has been and always was.  It was likely never an honest effort, and started off as just renaming creationism so that they could have an excuse to keep trying to get the creationism into public schools.
They initially wanted to continue the scientific creationist effort to teach creationism in the public schools because they believed that, that was the best means to recreate the theocracy that likely never existed in the US.  They believed that science was messing with their religious beliefs, and needed to reverse the perceived negative impact that science was having on those beliefs.  When they came to understand that what they had was never going to pass off as science they decided to replace the ID scam with a stupid and senseless obfuscation and denial switch scam that does not mention that ID nor creationism ever existed. All ID has been since 2002 is bait.  They keep putting out the bait in order to force the creationist rubes to take their obfuscation and denial switch scam.  Nearly all the rubes have dropped the issue instead of try to teach the switch scam because they do not want to teach the kids enough science for them to understand what they need to deny if they can't tell them why they are lying to the students.
Ron Okimoto

 If you are convinced that ID (or creation in general) is not something that can be meaningfully discussed with reference to science, this is probably not the thread for you.

You, should understand that the ID scam has always been creationism. Why come out in support of the ID scam at this time, when you have always been reserved and seemed to be suspect of ID from the start of your posting on TO?  Really, I do not recall you ever supporting the ID scam like Nyikos, Glenn, Kalk, etc.  You were obviously a creationist, but you seemed to understand what a creationist scam ID was.  The ID perp creationists (all have admitted to be Biblical creationists) have been running a bogus bait and switch scam on their own creationist support base for over two decades.  That is all that they have accomplished.  Look at their only successes.  Louisiana, Texas, and now West Virginia have switch scam legislation or state school board switch scam stupidity.  No one is claiming to be teaching ID, and Louisiana has had the bait and switch run on it at least 3 times with Texas at least twice.  Even after bending over for the switch scam both states have wanted to teach ID in their public schools and have had to have the bait and switch run on them repeatedly.  The ID perps are running the bait and switch scam that is all that they have accomplished.  They have had zero scientific successes supporting ID.  All that they have successfully used ID for is as bait.
Ron Okimoto

 If I haven't been able to convince you in some of my previous posts that my own faith is definitively not dependent on ID being correct, so be it, but that's not my interest here.
 Thank you for reading this far if you've managed that. As always, I welcome open-ended, open-minded civil dialogue.
 _______
 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
 [2] From a recent TO post of mine titled "To sum up":
"And what of the Origins debate? My contention is that progressive discoveries with the complexity and precision of life are making Mt Improbable higher and higher. ID has gained and sustained traction because this trend is real. I would add to this arguments relating to first-cause, fine-tuning, the Cambrian explosion, etc."
 [3] Discovery Institute - ID research and responses to criticisms:
https://www.discovery.org/id/research/
https://www.discovery.org/f/10141
https://www.discovery.org/id/responses/
 [4] Long Story Short - YouTube playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR8eQzfCOiS0AfFPsMAUYr_VVkpU13uv9
 [5] The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check
https://www.amazon.com.au/Stairway-Life-Origin-Life-Reality/dp/1734183705
 [6] James Tour cf. William Bains
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/RwhAxtqls4A/m/eQFJbd-5AgAJ