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Comment by camjohnson26 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone with an open mind should read Darwin's Doubt by Stephen Meyer. He looks at possible explanations for the Cambrian Explosion and concludes that Intelligent Design is the best explanation. Evolutionary Biologist Jerry Coyne has written a response to it.

https://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Doubt-Explosive-Origin-Intell...

https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/12/evolution-creation-proof-o...

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"Doctors aren't necessarily scientists."

Too true. A medical education is akin to parrot training; the body of knowledge a medical student must master, the manner of instruction and time frame required renders it impossible for medical students to verify their education. I have had a few scientist type friends attempt medical school, but dropped out because they rejected the lack of verification capability of everything they were being taught. Speaking to many doctors, they are afraid of their own profession. Mix in the American Medical Industry's insistence on profit, and the entire profession falls into suspicion. Doctors are blind, and their opinions need to be treated with respect towards their parrot education and the drumming out of opportunities to question their education and how that impacts a person's critical analysis capability.

Unfortunately, "intelligent design" is not a scientific theory. It doesn't provide any method for categorizing life on Earth (e.g. what actually makes two kinds distinct), and it makes no concrete, specific scientific claims about how and why different forms of life are found in different parts of the world (here's an easy one: why do islands and other isolated regions have such unique life?). The list goes on.

It's also disingenuous to ask people "to have an open mind" when the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence and consensus strongly supports evolution. There needs to be a damn good reason to bother looking at a lonely contrarian argument, especially as it has likely been debunked already.

This kind of meta-argument ("not a theory") rubs me the wrong way. It's a concrete claim about what happened (a mind much like ours but smarter made decisions about what stuff there should be, and then assembed it.) It can't be dispoven because no matter what you find you could say that it was just designed that way, but neither can evolution strictly speaking because there's the anthropic principle to reckon with (no matter how unlikely we were to arise, here we are. There's a nonzero chance of it all just tunneling together, and it's a big universe - if you could somehow show that our existence depended on a one in 10^9999999 chance, we'd just say that it happened.)

Still, I feel that couching Christian or other religious faith in "theory" language is not completely honest. I don't think anyone really supports intelligent design, as opposed to Jesus speaking the world into being design.

It's not really a meta-argument. It's just saying the basic requirements. If you are challenging a strongly supported scientific theory but have no alternative theory, then you are going to have a hard time.

Even a religious theory like intelligent design or creationism should produce abundant physical evidence that could be assessed. And they should attempt to integrate with all neighboring scientific fields of study (geology, anthropology, genetics, etc). But this doesn't seem to happen.

Intelligent design is not specific enough. The equivalent would be saying "random processes" instead of mutation+selection+heredity. Still, with a specific theory of evolution that's supported we can climb back up and say that "random processes" are probably what happened - not because it makes predictions, but because it is a trait of a theory that does make predictions.

Likewise for ID, which is a property shared between many theories which actually do make predictions. Successful predictions? Maybe not but they do count as hypotheses. (building on the point that nobody in practice actually supports ID, but instead supports a more specific genesis story that happens to fall under ID.)

Don't appropriate open mindedness to promote your bullshit.

Not long ago, popular opinion was that God created everything, and anyone claiming otherwise was a fool and a heretic. It wasn't considered open-minded to consider alternatives, because popular opinion had already come to its conclusion.

Now evolution has become the popular opinion. Unsurprisingly, humans continue to be just as closed-minded as before -- unwilling to even consider or debate alternatives.

The alternative, in this case, is the "god created everything" theory that was previously popular opinion. Refusing to continue considering that 'alternative' is not being closed minded, it's being progressive.

It's as if, after discovering the Earth is a sphere, continuing to entertain discussion that the Earth might be flat. It's a waste of time.

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