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Originally Posted by pgrmdave
These are two important questions posed to people who believe in intelligent design.
What, if any, predictions does intelliegent design make?
What, if any, testable, falsifiable experiments are possible, as in, what would disprove intelligent design?
Please, to those of you who think that intelligent design is legitimate science, answer these questions.
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I have wondered about Intelligent Design.
How could a rational man possibly argue such a position?
That position can be argued if you approach it properly.
But you would have to junk all pre-conceived notions and abandon any idea that there has to be an ntelligent designer required to produce a self-organizing system.
Instead you must set the parameters for what is possible.
Let us turn to a little logic and see if we can find a circumstance in which the intelligent designer could fit our current understanding of the way reality works.
First, can an intelligent designer exist undetected?
This is possible if the intelligent designer and the intelligent design are one and the same. Exactly one and the same. If there is any deviation in the two sets; then there is information transfer between the two sets and the boundary or the merge between the sets will be seen by an observer.
Second, can an intelligent designer hide in plain sight?
Possible if the intelligent designer built the universe and then moved off leaving it to self-organize, based on a set of pre-set instructions. However he leaves behind two boundary conditions, that an observer would detect eventually in the structure of the creation; even if the observer was on the inside of the creation looking out. On top of that, the very nature of the two boundary conditions would rapidly reveal the exact size and composition of the intelligent designer bringing up the question of what created it?
Third, can an intelligent designer act in plain sight and be undetected.
Not possible. If an intelligent designer changes local created conditions and the observer is present; the observer will notice local condition violations immediately and conclude that there is something screwy occuring.
Fourth, can one even argue that an observer trapped inside a creation can seek for an intelligent designer and prove or disprove the proposition? If you read this, then you obviously know the answer to that question.
Fifth, could an observer detect an intelligent designer if it was an A=A congruence with its creation?(Based on the first condition.) Yes. But the requirement is that the creation and the intelligent designer have an edge or a boundary and be finite. This is so that a reflexive symmetry can be tested and refuted.
Tests
-Violations of any standard universal local condition.(Not seen to date.)
-Discovery of a codified language built into structure that is not explained by chaos theory, principles of self-organized systems, or simple statistical variance.(None of those limiters has been exceeded to date.)
-Discovery of another universe that provides clear data of preset organizational principles.(This is enormously difficult as it requires more than one intelligent designer!)
Based on the above conditions, if that intelligent designer is oiut there, then it must be;
-congruous to creation.(A=A.)
-totally inactive as to present modification of the preset conditions it imposes on its creation.(Call this the blooming flower postulate.)
-not violating local universal conditions.(No miracles folks.)
-be a finite being limited to the existence parameters of its creation.(Remember the intelligent designer has to be exactly congruent to its creation in order to escape easy detection.A=A.).
Given all of the above, is it any wonder that the Occam's Razor crowd looks upon intelligent design with skepticism?
