How would intelligent design be taught in practice? Are there mathematical equations for the rate of creation?

Question

To clarify, I want to know how it would be taught in primary and secondary school, not at higher levels of education.

Answer 1

In Sunday school.  This will never be taught in public schools, except for the occasional school district which has a strong, influential religious right wing, along with a weak board of education, and a lack of professional consultants on the matter.

Intelligent Design doesn't fool anybody any more.  I think pretty much everybody knows that it is just creationism in dishonest disguise.  You will NOT be allowed to commandeer the curricula of public schools to indoctrinate young, impressionable children to your foolish, anti-scientific, anti-reason, anti-truth religious beliefs.

Edit: I am familiar with some of the claims and those arguments "questioner" linked to, and the ones I am familiar with have been debunked.  They are all either lies or gross errors.  Their arguments and pseudoscience have become quite sophisticated, as you can see.  But the beliefs they promote are just as stupid and wrong as they ever were.

Let me see, now.  You didn't exactly come here to get my kind of answer, did you?

Okay, I get it now.  Somebody, no doubt using multiple IDs, has been going down my list giving three thumbs down to all my answers lately.  Get a life.

Answer 2

ID could be fit into a course on comparative religion, a bit abstruse for primary or secondary school. There is no way that an intelligent, honest scientist could believe in ID after learning a little bit about either the Irish elk or George W. Bush.

Answer 3

Reliable methods for detecting design exist and are employed in forensics, archeology, data fraud analysis, and SETI.  These methods can easily be employed to detect design in biological systems.

As Dr. Stephen Meyer said (when being interviewed by Nightline), “From the evidence of the information that’s embedded in DNA, from the evidence of the nanotechnology in the cell, we think you can infer that an intelligence played a role.  In fact, there are sophisticated statistical methods of design detection that allow scientists to distinguish the effects of an intelligent cause from an undirected natural process. When you apply those statistical measures and criteria to the analysis of the cell, they indicate that the cell was designed by an intelligence.”

Design theorists often employ several methods of design detection, including specified complexity, irreducible complexity, and Bayesian probability approaches.

Here is a brief overview of the scientific case for ID: http://www.arn.org/docs/positivecaseford...

And for those who put so much faith in peer-review, check this out: http://www.discovery.org/a/2640

Here is a growing list of scientists who signed “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism”: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/...

If you want to learn more about ID, I would go to these:

Intelligent Design:

http://www.intelligentdesign.org

http://www.arn.org

http://www.discovery.org/csc

http://www.researchid.org

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Edit:

So many people these days (like Vincent G) are confusing biblical creationism with intelligent design.  "Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence" (Dr. William Dembski). That's it; it says nothing of who the creator is and how he/she/it/they did it. Intelligent Design encompasses every "creation" story, even aliens seeding life on this planet (directed panspermia).  The God of the Bible is just one possible candidate.  Some creationists (like those at Answers In Genesis) don’t like the ID movement because they say it divorces the Creator from the creation.

Answer 4

Many scientists and people of faith through the centuries have marveled at the miracles of creation, and taken the next, speculative, step of "inferring" a creator--it may even be true (I hope it is.)  However, the questioner is asking how to teach it as science.  If there is no way to disprove an idea, then you can't call it science.  Intelligent Design proponents, even if they throw unrelated scientific observations in, are just trying to repackage creationism to sneak it into secular education.  They are to creationism what the moment of silence is to prayer in school--a way to break down the separation of church and state and impose their religion on your child.

In my opinion, the right way to teach intelligent design is in a philosophy class--the divine watchmaker proof of God. Grade school might be a little young for this, but high school students would be fine.  

Answer 5

Intelligent design should not be taught at all because, despite its name, it is STUPID, and based on the interpretation of a silly fairy tale book. To teach it as some "alternate" controversial view should be, for the sake of fairness and completeness, be done alongside such things as:

-ancient Greek mythology

-Egyptian mythology

-the various native American creation stories

-the flying spaghetti monster (pastafarism)

among many others, who all share with so called "intelligent design" a complete lack of scientific basis.

"Questioner" above should do some more research: no proponent of so called "intelligent design" can be considered non-creationists, and as such, cannot be anything but religious fundamentalists. Here is another quote from Dembski:

"My thesis is that the disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ ... The point to understand here is that Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory but always the completion."

And this one: "The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God."

All "ID" proponents are creationists; that some creationists are anti-ID is their problem, and is irrelevant in this context. Directed panspermia is not addressing the issue, it is just moving it further down: who created the aliens?

Answer 6

No, there aren't any mathematical equations for the rate of creation, nor could there be, because that would require there to be a measurable creative "force".

ID proponents are very careful not to call this creative force "God", since doing so would immediately reveal ID as a front for Biblical Creationism.  They claim that the creative force could be aliens or God or even trans-dimensional circus clowns, for all we know.  Regardless of who you think the creator is, however, there is a common thread: none of these creators is known to exist.  Invoking an uncertain factor into a scientific theory is a violation of the principle of parsimony, known as Occam's Razor.

Essentially, Occam's Razor says that whenever two theories exist to explain the same phenomenon, the theory that makes fewer unsupported assumptions is the one to be preferred.  By assuming the existence of a creator, ID takes a flying leap from the cliffs of parsimony and plunges into the ocean of pseudoscience.  Okay, enough with that analogy...I'm starting to get vertigo.

The reigning theory that ID seeks to discredit, the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, makes no such unsupported assumptions.  The entire theory is built from the ground up on massive pillars of evidence.  At no point does the student of evolution need to make a miraculous leap from one conclusion to the next; Intelligent Design has at its very foundation a miraculous leap.

So how would ID be taught?  As an example of pseudoscience, I would imagine.  I could also see teaching about ID in a psychology class, since it perfectly outlines the very human tendency to see design where none exists.

I hope that helps.  Good luck!

Answer 7

"Intelligent Design" cannot be taught, it can only be preached.  When you attempt to 'academize' it, as Dr. Stephen Meyer has, you run into a big problem...throughout observable biology, there is a preponderance of "unintelligent design", which means either ID is bunk, or God is an idiot...  

Answer 8

Why would you want to teach something to primary and secondary school children, that is absolutely *rejected* at higher levels of education (in the Universities) and in the *scientific community* (in scientific journals, research papers, books, conferences, etc.)?  Why would you want to teach children something that has NO support among real scientists?   The only possible reason would be that you don't care what the world's scientific community thinks *about science*, you would like to *redefine* science (as it is taught to children) to be more in line with *your* religious views.

But I'd really like to address Questioner's really deceptive answer:

>"Reliable methods for detecting design exist and are employed in forensics, archeology, data fraud analysis, and SETI. These methods can easily be employed to detect design in biological systems."

"Easily"?  This is where Questioner is being deceptive.   These are all very specific techniques designed for very specific contexts with very specific assumptions.  For example, some numerical sequence that would be difficult to explain in astronomy (and thus would be of interest to SETI), might be very explainable in biology using known biological principles that have no need for 'design'.  Or the archaeological techniques used to distinguish (say) arrowheads from rocks already have the pre-existing information that there are intelligent beings that make arrowheads (and we're just trying to determine where and when), and is NOT applicable to looking for evidence of an intelligent being that we have no pre-existing information about (like a supreme 'Intelligent Designer').

>"Design theorists often employ several methods of design detection, including specified complexity, irreducible complexity, and Bayesian probability approaches."

And how many of these things does a child in primary or secondary school have any grounding in?  None.   This is precisely why these arguments have no place in a primary or secondary school curriculum (which was this asker's question) ... unless of course the goal is to *confuse* children.

These things are all well understood by very smart people with PhD.s in specialized fields like complexity theory, mathematical probability, information theory, chaos theory, informatics, emergence, etc. and for some reason the Intelligent Design theorists have been unable to get even a fraction of 1% of these people to be persuaded of evidence of Intelligent Design.

So unable to convince the PhD.s they would be perfectly happy trying to convince (or at least confuse) 8th-graders and 10th-graders with arguments about "Bayesian probability approaches"!

>"So many people these days (like Vincent G) are confusing biblical creationism with intelligent design. "Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence" (Dr. William Dembski). That's it;"

And Vincent G blew this quote out of the water with Dembski's further quotes.   (And I have more if you're curious.)  Dembski is the *worst* person to be quoting because he is more than willing to talk about the religious foundations of ID when talking to religious fundamentalists, and reserves the "secular" tone quoted by Questioner for when he's talking to school boards and courtrooms.

But all that does is refute Questioner's quote from Dembski ... it is unfair to paint Dembski as the spokesperson for the entire concept of ID (just as it is unfair to say that all of evolution rises or fails on the words of Charles Darwin).  It may very well be that Creationists like Dembski are an unwelcome millstone around the neck of the ID advocates.  Perhaps the advocates of Intelligent Design accept the vocal support of Creationists only reluctantly, because (since they have almost zero support coming from within the scientific community) without support from the Creationist community they would have no support at all.

But the fact remains that the more ID advocates try to disengage themselves from Creationism ... i.e. trying to avoid connecting the 'Intelligent Designer' with God ... then the more ID fails to say anything at all!   The more they try to leave the identity of the Designer vague, ambiguous, and undeclared, the more ID turns into meaningless mush.

So ID is either religious dogma masquerading as "science", or meaningless mush that offers nothing in the way of increasing *understanding* of Biology.

Either way, why would you want to teach it to schoolchildren??

Answer 9

what is the math for a oxymoron?,or the math for exact opposites.