What is "intelligent design"?  And how is it different from creation (religion) and evolution (science)?
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Intelligent Design is basically saying that some intelligent being (God or some alien from outside this Universe) created our universe and life as we know it.  Its basic philosophy is that our universe is too complex to have happened by accident.  Particularly that even the simplest form of life could never have come into existence randomly.\n\nAn example used is the "watch theory".  If you put all the necessary parts of a watch in a jar, and shook the jar randomly, even in four billion years the watch would never put itself together.  The same is said of life: a bacterium is much more complex than a watch, so how could it have randomly appeared?\n\nI see Intelligent Design as a crossover between the "Big Bang" theory and the "Seven Days" theory.  The universe was created by God, who also created the laws of Physics.  So the Bible is right that God created the Universe, and scientists are right that it didn't suddenly appear in its present state...parts were created, and parts evolved.\n\nSo both theories are valid in Intelligent Design.  But yes, I have heard both Evolutionists and Creationists mock the Intelligent Design theory.\n\nIntelligent Design is one argument widely used by creationists.  It has taken on popularity as discoveries in biology and physics reveal how intricate our universe and we, ourselves, are.
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My view is the same as the scientific mainstream.  Evolution is by far the best explanation for the change of life through time and for most similarites among organisms seen today.\n\nSince creationism is in the news today, I'll add this:\n\nA religion is a set of beliefs and practices that are believed in despite the fact that they cannot be proved to most people's satisfaction. Adhering to a religion requires a "leap of faith" by its adherants.\n\nScience is a set of self-correcting methods for discovering how nature works, and the body of knowledge developed using those methods. A theory is a concept that has been tested against scientific knowledge and does a good job of explaining it. Most people agree upon the explanation given by a scientific theory.\n\nEvolution does not explain the origin of life. It explains how life developed over time. Evolution has nothing to say about the existence or nonexistence of God or any other supernatural being. A large proportion of scientists, including evolutionary scientists, believe in Christianity or another religion.\n\nEvolution is in conflict with Genesis Chapter 1, the other creation stories in the Old Testament, and with the creation stories of other religions. That is not because creation stories claim to explain the _origin_ of life; evolution does not address the _origin_ of life. It is because creation stories explain the origins of species, or "kinds," or whatever terminolgy you use, separately from each other and evolution explains that each species arose from an earlier species by natural selection acting upon random mutations.\n\n(Did you know that the Old Testament contains several versions of the creation story and that these versions are in conflict with each other?)\n\nIntelligent design is a variety of the pseudoscience of creationism, which was created by Christian fundamentalists.\n\nThe Christian doctrine of creation, as understood by mainstream Christians, teaches that God created and sustains the universe. It does not specify whether the original creation was accomplished by divine creation (creation ex nihlo), the Big Bang, or by another means.\n\nFundamentalists believe that the Bible is inerrantly and infallibly true. They fear that if any aspect of the Bible is not "literally true" (that it doesn't mean what they interpret it to mean), then the salvation promised by Jesus was a lie.\n\nThis extreme belief, coupled with general knowledge of science, has led fundamentalists to create a set of beliefs to rationalize their interpretation of the Bible with their knowledge of science. That set of pseudoscientific beliefs has evolved from creationism to scientific creationism, to intelligent design.\n\nBy far, the large majority of Christians do not link the factual correctness of the Bible to the spiritual truths it reveals and the promise of salvation made by Jesus.\n\nThus, by a wide margin, most Christians believe in the doctrine of creation, but do not believe in the pseudoscience of creationism, whatever name it goes by.
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There is plenty of unintelligent design to dismiss this idea.\n\nAn irreducibly complex system can be built gradually by adding parts that, while initially just advantageous, become - because of later changes - essential. The logic is very simple. Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added because it helps A. This new part isn't essential, it merely improves things. But later on, A (or something else) may change in such a way that B now becomes indispensable. This process continues as further parts get folded into the system. And at the end of the day, many parts may all be required."\n\nH. Allen Orr\n\nIntelligent design does not discount everything in evolution, and so they would agree with mainstream science on the answers to most of your questions. Intelligent design allows boils down to God planned it that way.  That's why it can't be taught alongside evolution, because it involves belief, not evidence.\n\n"ID advocates are very keen to give the impression that they have the support of scientists. It is true that a number of scientists support ID, as indeed there are scientists who support Young Earth Creationism and many other pseudosciences. But they are a tiny number in relation to the total number of scientists, the vast majority of whom support evolutionary theory."\n\n...\n\n"What are the "scientific" arguments used to support Intelligent Design?\n\nA. The arguments for Intelligent Design are primarily arguments from ignorance, also known as god-of-the-gaps arguments. ID advocates also claim to have positive evidence of ID, in the form of "specified complexity" and "irreducible complexity", but these arguments turn out to be disguised arguments from ignorance. In addition, ID advocates sometimes make an argument from analogy. A lot of their effort is also devoted to attacking specific aspects of evolutionary theory, rather than giving support to their own ID hypothesis.\n\nhttp://www.talkdesign.org/introfaq.html
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ID tries to establish a divine being as a creator rather than forces of evolution.  It is bad religion AND bad science.
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First off, creationism is not a scientific theory.  Please don't elevate it to that level with the term "scientific creationism."  Creationism is religion, not science.\n\nEvolution is a scientific theory that explains the origin of the diversity of species (note that it does not, and is not intended to explain the origin of life). The basic idea of evolution is that mutations result in genetic diversity in a population, and consequently different traits, and different selective pressures favor certain traits over others. In a diverse population, some individuals are better suited to the environment than others, and the individuals that are better suited are more likely to survive to reproduce and thus pass their genes on to the next generation. Consequently, the next generation will have more of the "good" genes and fewer of the "bad" genes than the generation before it. Because the environment is constantly changing, the definition of "good" and "bad" genes is also constantly changing. Something that used to be an advantage can become a disadvantage, and vice versa. More often, however, neutral traits will become either good or bad. Changes in environment can include not only changes in weather or resources, but also competition from other species.\n\nAs the environmental pressures change, the population of organisms changes with it. Over time, the little changes start to add up, and eventually the population will be so different from the ancestral state that it will be considered a different species. The diversity of species results from splitting of populations. If a population is separated by some geographical or reproductive barrier, the two subpopulations will likely evolve in different ways, to become two separate species. Eventually the two species may be reunited, but they will no longer be able to interbreed. Instead, they will compete with each other, and likely diverge even more.\n\nThe theory of evolution is supported by considerable scientific evidence, and is accepted by the vast majority of the scientific community. It is the ONLY scientific theory currently in existence that explains the diversity of species. Some people claim that "intelligent design" is an alternative theory for the origin of species. However, intelligent design is not a theory in the scientific sense. It is not supported by scientific evidence and can never be tested experimentally (not because we don't have the tools yet, but because it is theoretically impossible). Intelligent design provides an alternative to science, not an alternative scientific theory.\n\nScience is not about finding a single piece of evidence to conclusively prove a theory. It's about constructing theories to fit the existing evidence and gathering new evidence that supports or refutes existing theories. Evolution is supported by a preponderance of evidence. While no one point conclusively proves it, when all the evidence is considered in the context of existing scientific knowledge evolution is a well substantiated theory. Intelligent design is not.  What follows are brief explanations of some of the evidence that supports the theory of evolution.\n\n1. Vestigial structures\n\nOne example of a vestigial structure in humans is the appendix. It has no function. Removing it is harmful only in so far as any surgery is associated with certain risks (so I wouldn't have it removed just for fun, but it's because of the surgery not the absence of the appendix). An appendix is found in several mammals. In humans it is small and has no known function. In rabbits and many other herbivores it is large and is used in the digestion of cellulose.\n\nAnother example of a vestigial structure is the hipbones of snakes. Snakes evolved from quadrupeds, and some species still retain not on pelvises, but tiny protrusions of bone in a location that corresponds to the location of the legs in other quadrupeds.\n
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No. In fact, the whole point of Intelligent Design is merely to cause a public debate on evolution. The fact is that Intelligent Design starts with a conclusion (Creationism), then works out a package which was designed to be school-friendly, and provide "evidence" which might trick people who are unfamiliar with the real science of the situation. The ID movement's claims that ID is intended to be non-specific in its creator is revealed by the Wedge document to be a lie.
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To dismiss it because of its religious origin would be the same as dropping American history because the founders believed the Bible to be true.\nhttp://www.schneblin.com/studies/pdfs/our_founding_fathers.pdf\n\nYou do not have to bring in the Bible to teach Intelligent Design. You can postulate the possibility as "another view" which can be used as a counterpoint to evolution. You can even postulate the ET theory with aliens dropping off life on an inhabitable planet--anything. But to forbid its teaching is just as much a crime as the Roman Catholic Church condemning Galileo for saying the earth orbits the sun.\n\nI will repeat my argument here:\n\nImagine you are a secular scientist. A meteor falls to the earth and you go to examine it. Upon scraping the crust away, you find that it is a ball of pure, mirrored metal. Back at the lab, you find that you can open an airtight access door. Inside are extremely complex gyros, camera systems, computer processors and propulsion system. \nNow what would you, a secular scientist, be your first scientific conclusion? A.) Imagine how many years this must have been in space to evolve? or B.) This is far beyond our abilities to create, it must be from an extraterrestial source!! \nWith only the evidence of a complex machine, with no way of knowing or testing its origin, of course, no contest, B would be the secular scientist's response. \nBecause some people have "faith" that there is life on other planets, they are not catagorized as "religious" so are free from ridicule. But because we see the complexities of the human machine and proclaim "designer" we are thrown out of schools by the judges, demeaned by scores of people on this forum and others, and debased as mindless lemmings.\n\nDNA is a very complex organic computer program that could never evolve. So either you believe in the ET seed theory, or in a Designer. Evolution requires billions of years to even get to the simple cell. Sorry, the sun would have been too hot only a million years ago to sustain life. So why do fundamentalists oppose it? Because it is not science, it's theory with very little evidence. I have not even gone into the fact that the human body is an intrigate closed-system with a fantastic balance system, ability to heal, think, imagine, love and reproduce.\nSo, as a scientist who cannot go back in time and document the origin of such complex lifeform, what are you to think?
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Wow.  There is a staggering amount of ignorance exhibited in this thread.\n\nEvolution can be taught as science because it actually *is* science. Intelligent Design/Creationism is merely a faith based leap to "God did it!" Science is about observing, modelling, and predicting the universe around us.  Creationism is closing your eyes to the world and explaining everything by magic.\n\nHere's part of an answer I posted in another thread that addresses many of the same questions raised and misinformation spewed by some of the responses\nabove:\n\n---------\nThe trouble with most Creationists- scratch that. ONE of the troubles with most Creationists is that they seldom actually argue against evolution as it really is, but against straw-man charicatures of evolution. Rather than actually educating themselves about the subject they ask inane questions like "If man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" and then pat themselves on the back thinking they've scored points rather than revealing their ignorance about the subject. And then the choir they are preaching to nod their heads and agree.\n\nHere's a few simple things to remember:\n\n1. Evolution is NOT the study of how life began.\nhttp://www.origins.tv/darwin/abiogenesis.htm#Origins\n\n2. Evolution does NOT say man came from monkeys.\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/\n\n3. There will be no "intermediary forms" if by that you expect to see a half-this/half-that critter, nor does evolution say there should be.\nhttp://www.origins.tv/darwin/transitionals.htm\n\n4. Evolution is not incompatible with religious faith. Plenty of scientists believe in both God and evolution. It is only incompatible with the literalist view of Genesis espoused by young earth creationists. Of course, these folks' views run counter to geology, physics, paleontology, archeology, and astronomy as well.\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/interpretations.html\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-god.html\n\n\n5. While there is vigorous debate about some of the mechanisms and features of evolution, there is no doubt in the scientific community that evolution is real. OF COURSE you will find some cranks out there on the fringe who will fight against evolution (most making a tidy living giving talks to fundamentalist religious groups), just like there are historians who insist the Holocaust didn't occur. Every large enough group will have it's nutballs.\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/credentials.html\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-creationists.html\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/\nhttp://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/edwards-v-aguillard/amicus1.html\n\n\n6. Yes, speciation has been observed.\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html\n\n7. "Theory" means something entirely different in scientific language than in colloquial use. In science, a theory is a well-tested model of how things work, not "just a guess."\nhttp://www.skeptictank.org/hs/factfaq.htm\n\n8. Evolution is not guided solely by random chance.\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/chance.html\n\nI personally don't care if somebody wants to believe that God, Allah, or the Tooth Fairy created the universe. What does bother me are those people who argue against a "cartoon" view of evolution because they feel that it threatens their faith, or because they are too lazy to learn what evolution is before choosing to try and smear it.\nSource(s):\n\nhttp://www.talkorigins.org/\nhttp://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Main_Page\nhttp://www.origins.tv/darwin/evolution.htm\n----------------------\n\n\nFollowup:  Ummm.... You DO understand that Darwin was *ages* ago, and that the field of evolution has advanced light years beyond his notions right?  Darwin's ideas were formed in the 1830s-1850s, and he was unaware of genetics, radiometric dating, protein synthesis, plate tectonics, and a host of ot
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The term "evolution" originally refered to a very different idea.  The idea was that Eve was created with egg cells, which contained new human beings.  Inside the mini-females were even tinier egg cells, some of which contained females with yet still tinier egg cells...\n\nIn short, Eve contained at creation every human being who would ever be born.  God had even known who each of those women would sleep with so that he could give them egg cells containing children that just happened to look like the father!\n\nBy the time Darwin worked out natural selection, evolution was a discredited theory, along with the parallel homunculus idea which was sort of the same thing only with Adam containing all the later generations of humans...  With the idea it referred to rejected, the term "evolution" was left hanging.  Few people really spend a lot of time referring to discounted theories..\n\nDarwin did not use the term evolution at all in the first several printings of his book.  he used "descent with modification".  Well "descent with modification" is, while accurate, not eactly easy on the tongue.  It's just too much.  People started to use the term evolution (or, sometimes "the new evolution") to cover it.  Darwin personally hated the term, since his theory was specifically NOT evolution, since there was no pre-defined scroll to unroll.  It was exactly that connotation that he wanted to avoid!\n\nHe fought the use of the term for years before giving up and recognizing that, appropriate or no, there is no arguing with linguistic descent with modification, and including it in some of the later editions of "Origin of Species".\n\nIronically, "creationism" originally referred to something else as well.  It first refered to the doctrine that souls were created by god specifically for each human, as opposed to the idea that God created souls at the dawn of time (or whenever) and kept them in storage until a new child was formed.\n\nIt amuses me that original creationism is quite compatible with evolution, but original evolution is a creationist doctrine.\n\nFor more information on creationism and evolution, see:\n\nhttp://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Main_Page
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I am a Christian and I have found remarkable facts that have bolstered my faith in Intelligent Design. To name one, Irreducable Complexity. It is the fact, (Not Theory) that the simplest cell in our body was created completely in a moment's time, instead of a gradual evolution. It is like a mouse trap. There's a board, spring, lever, and latch. The cell, like the trap, has components that compliment each other in the same way the trap does. If you took one component away the trap would be defective, likewise if the cell is left without all the necessary systems it will perish leaving no time for evolution.
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Ah yes.... the uncaused causer...\n\nBy raising the question of the need for a designer for objects with irreducible complexity, intelligent design also raises the question, "what designed the designer?" Richard Dawkins has argued that "If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the intelligent designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation," since such an answer would be unscientific. With religious creationism, the question "what created God?" can be answered with theological arguments, but in intelligent design, the chain of designers can be followed back indefinitely in an infinite regression, leaving the question of the creation of the first designer dangling. As a result, intelligent design does not explain how the complexity happened in the first place; it just moves it.\n\nElliott Sober says that by intelligent design's own arguments, a designer capable of creating irreducible complexity must also be irreducibly complex: "Any mind in nature that designs and builds an irreducibly complex system is itself irreducibly complex" Sober says that this an argument that intelligent design proponents still need to respond to.\n\nIf intelligent design proponents invoke an uncaused causer or deity to resolve this problem, they contradict a fundamental assumption of intelligent design that design requires a designer.
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There is a creator.  Without intelligent design, we would be.... what?  EVERYTHING is evidence of intelligent design.  Even a worm cannot be made by a man.  That tells you something, right? Even a person who has not read Genesis can figure out that they cannot 'create' anything.  We can only take the created raw materials and mix and match them around to make something... but never CREATE anything.  God is not a creature... he always WAS, so that is why he can create.
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Evolution is just a theory. Now scientists have come up with another theory of Intelignet being because they are unable to answer many questions with the help of Evolution alone.\nWho is this inteligent being ? This is surely God.\n\nThe earth as it is today has evolved over billions of years (as claimed by the theory of evolution) itself is just like saying that\nyou can build a 747 Boeing aircraft by placing all the componets in a building and all the parts get entangled due to a storm and viola a plane is born.
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evolution is just mans way of trying to understand how life got here and is how it is. Its a theory and not a proven fact. People just refuse to believe a higher power created them.\nI believe in breeding and that's it. God created basic life on the planet and then through breeding of those animals we got several different species in one classification of such.
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Evolution and intelligent design can't co-exist because evolution didn't and doesn't happen. Science itself refutes Darwinism. Science is disproving evolution more every day. There is less evidence for evolution today than there was when Charles Darwin first came up with the theory. There are a lot of scientists that don't believe in evolution, and more are changing their beliefs all the time. Here is a partial list of Creationist scientists\n(past and present).\n http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-scientists.html\nWith all the evidence against it I really don't see how any open minded intelligent human being could believe in evolution. With the lack of proof for evolution it takes more faith to believe in evolution than it does to believe in creation and intelligent design. There is a lot more evidence for intelligent design than there is for evolution. Science is actually disproving evolution.\n\n* The Big Bang \nAbout fifty years ago, American astronomers studying the galactic star clusters, stumbled on evidence that the entire Universe is blowing up before our eyes. According to their observations, all the galaxies in the Universe are moving away from us and from one another at very high speeds, and the most distant are receding at the extraordinary speed of hundreds of millions of miles an hour.\n\nFirst there was nothing and it blew up and then there was everything and scientists have calculated that it all happened in 1043 of a second. The echo of that explosion can still be heard bouncing around in space. Scientists claim that in the big bang all of the fundamental particles necessary for life were formed. All of the complexity we see around us is the result of this massive explosion.\n\n"The new finding hit the scientific world like a thunderclap." It meant that the idea of an ultimate beginning was no longer merely religious dogma. Science itself now indicated that the universe burst into existence at a particular time in the remote past.\n\nIn 1992 measurements by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and by the Hubble Space Telescope seemed to confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that the Big Bang cosmology is indeed correct. George Smoot, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Principle Investigator of the COBE team which made the discovery, said regarding these new observations, "What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe . . . It's like looking at God."\n\nWorking backwards, the evidence implies that there was a time when the universe was infinitesimally small. The evidence from general relativity also indicates that it was not merely a case of the matter in the universe being concentrated at a particular location, but that space itself was this tiny. At a sudden instant in time all of the energy and mass in the universe was located at this infinitesimally small point and exploded. The currently observed outbound motion of the galaxies from each other is a continuing effect of that explosion.\n\n"The scientific community is prepared to consider the idea that God created the universe is a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years," Frederic B. Burnham, science historian, declared.\n\nHowever, some die-hard secularists propose that the universe goes through endless cycles of expansions and collapses. Hence, eternity becomes nothing more than an eternal succession of big bangs followed by big crunches followed by big bangs followed by big crunches over and over again and again forever.\n\nBut this violates the second law of thermodynamics, the law of decay, that implies that the universe is in a process of gradual disintegration - running down, like a wound-up clock. And if it is running down, then there must have been a time when it was wound up. Once the big bang takes place and the universe begins its expansion, entropy starts to increase. From this point on it will never be able to go
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Creationism and evolution are unrelated theories, describing entirely two different things. Creationism says that god created the universe and life on earth.\n\nEvolution says that once life started on earth, however that may have happened, certain natural processes started taking place in which new species evolved. This is undisputable and supported completely by the fossil record. HOW the new species came about has not been completely shown and is a matter of much contention among scientists. It is possible that some supernatural force is behind it, but we will likely never know.
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Most scientists now believe in intelligent design. Because of the new discoveries on DNA etc. they have rejected the evolution theory.