Intelligent Design is science (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 21, 2015, 09:46 (3103 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Look at this 3 minute video:
https://youtu.be/-UHYjgHQBuE
It follows the logic that any information that produces specified complexity indicates design by a planning agent.-It's amazing how language takes on its own impetus. Theists are desperate for their ID theory to be recognized as “science” because that will give it all the scholarly respectability and authority associated with the word. At the same time, they quite rightly cry out that science does not hold the answers to all questions, because it is limited to the study of the material world as we know it. And then we have philosophy of science, which seeks to tell us what science does do, doesn't do, can do, can't do, should do etc. A veritable intellectual industry arising from how we interpret a single word!
 
I would suggest that both theistic and atheistic scientists may study the material world with scientific objectivity (and there may well be a consensus about what they discover), but their theistic or atheistic conclusions are subjectively philosophical.
 
“Intelligent design” is therefore a linguistic trap. Even an atheistic scientist might find it difficult to describe the beautifully functional structure of the cell without using the word “design”. But again, language has its own impetus: “intelligent design” implies an intelligent designer, and that is where scientific objectivity comes to an end, because the term then becomes a philosophical conclusion and not a science. To be true to “science”, one needs neutral terms such as complexity, intricacy, functionality. It is then perfectly reasonable to ask whether such complexity could possibly arise by chance - but the answer will no longer be “scientific”. It will be philosophical.