ID proponents = MAGIC proponents.

If you really think magic is scientific, you're an idiot.

Do you know of any scientist who doubts the facts of evolution who has contributed anything important to biology?

I didn't think so.

Do any of your pro-magic fake scientists not work for the Dishonesty Institute or some Bible college?

I didn't think so.

"most vocal scientific opponents of Intelligent Design that I can think of (let me know if I've missed anyone,"

Missed anyone? How about the entire scientific community, especially every competent biologist in the world.

Look it Mr. Idiot, scientists don't invoke magic. Also, calling magic "intelligent design" doesn't make that idea any less childish.

Greetings, "bobxxxx". One of the rules you agreed to when posting was to avoid ad hominem fallacies -- that is, making an argument by saying nothing more than "you're an idiot!" But I'm going to let your comment stand as a as a testament to how irrational certain people become when you poke at their sacred cows. :-)

Do you know of any scientist who doubts the facts of evolution who has contributed anything important to biology?

1. ID people don't dispute "the facts" of evolution as much as the unproven bits. (For example, evolution has nothing to say about the genesis of life.) And while a few ID proponents focus on evolution (Behe, for example) others focus on the genesis of life, cosmology and the characteristics of the universe, mind-brain interaction, etc.

2. Look at each name on the pro-ID list with a biology-related PhD -- each has written a doctoral dissertation which extended the mainstream body of knowledge in biology. Many have done postdoctoral research as well.

In contrast, look at Dawkins. A zoology degree? He's certainly a popularizer who writes about the discoveries of others, but where's his own hardcore biological research? Odd that you wouldn't apply your own litmus test to the people you'd trust most.

Do any of your pro-magic fake scientists not work for the Dishonesty Institute or some Bible college?

Aren't you an expert in this sort of thing? You should know already, right? Behe is a professor at Lehigh University (35th best national university according to US News rankings, 2009), Bradley Monton is an associate professor at University of Colorado, Boulder. David Berlinski taught mathematics at the University of Paris, and was a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France. Jeffrey Schwartz is a groundbreaking researcher in neuroplasticity and the treatment of OCD, neurology at UCLA School of Medicine, and has authored about 100 scientific publications on the subject.

These are not, last I checked, "bible colleges." (Berlinski and Monton don't even believe in God.)

I'm sure most of them are affiliated with the Discovery Institute, in some fashion. So? All that means is what I said already: they're either sympathetic to, or directly supportive of ID.

If you seriously think "wow, they're affiliated with an organization I don't like!" passes as proof they're wrong, you're only demonstrating you can't spot a logical fallacy when it's clinging to your face, trying to implant its eggs in your abdomen.

How about the entire scientific community, especially every competent biologist in the world.

Where "competence" is undoubtedly defined as "agrees with bobxxxx about ID". Now you're trotting out the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Nobody who is disagrees with you is competent, because competence is defined as agreeing with you. (Never mind the circular reasoning! :-))

Look it Mr. Idiot, scientists don't invoke magic...

Are you kidding? Physicists have no idea how half the stuff they're describing came about (or how it works). Even those who came up with the idea for a "multiverse" don't bother coming up with physical descriptions of how it came to be. Asking someone to believe "The universe (or multiverse) appeared out of nothing" sounds pretty 'magical' to me.

Second, IDers, at least those I've listened to, don't claim to be proving "God" is the intelligent designer. All they're asserting is that science should be able to distinguish signs of intelligence (would you say it can't?). Although many of them are theists (as are many of their opponents) they say the identity of the designer is not something they say they can answer directly.

(Francis Crick (discoverer of the DNA structure), for example, argued that life arose on earth though the actions of intelligent aliens ("Directed Panspermia"). Well, if you're saying you believe that, you're saying you believe that an intelligence put DNA on earth. This is not an uncommon theory in the world of biology: Leslie Orgel, for example, who helped model DNA also agrees with Crick. Even Richard Dawkins said he believes such a conjecture is valid.)

Third, either science can answer questions about whether "magic" happened, or it can't. If it can't, then your own opinions on magic not occurring are exactly as unscientific as those you oppose. On the other hand, if science does have some criteria by which "magic" could be detected (or refuted), then how are you so sure it's never been detected? People are pointing to some pretty good arguments, it seems to me. You have better answers?

For example, note that multiverse theory was proposed (largely by atheists, mind you) as an answer to what they saw as the appearance of fine tuning. Are you saying they were wrong?

Also, calling magic "intelligent design" doesn't make that idea any less childish.

If what you're trying to do is categorize and detect signs of intelligence, "intelligent design" seems like a reasonable description.

(This from someone who apparently thinks name-calling is a devastating form of argument. :-))

Love to see if you'd dare to answer.

From a nationally-representative survey of professors in all fields and types of higher education institutions, accessible at:
http://religion.ssrc.org/reforum/Gross_Simmons.pdf

"Our question asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “The theory of intelligent design IS a serious scientific alternative to the Darwinian theory of evolution.” Overall, 84.1 percent of professors surveyed disagreed with the statement, with 75.3 percent registering strong disagreement. Agreement was strongest at community colleges, where 30.6 percent of professors see intelligent design as a serious scientific alternative, and weakest at elite doctoral universities, where just 5.6 percent of professors do."

In other words, PhDs at our most prestigious academic institutions disagree with the notion that Intelligent Design is a legitimate scientific theory.

Interesting trend. Especially since the actual taxonomists I've known (small sample, but I interned at an herbarium at one point) were more conservative than other scientists I'd known, especially compared to my professors in the biological sciences.

Part of me wonders if the trend tim sees are selected for because of the objections that exist. I mean, Kirk Cameron is also a very vocal critic of Darwinism, but he doesn't get the attention that others do specifically because he doesn't have the hard science background.

But when the dominant paradigm is neo-Darwinian an author may have more opportunity to act as an aggregator of other people's work. Just speculation on my part.

Oh, I'm not saying there are no ID critics who do hard science work. In fact, I'd completely agree with those who tend to imply that if you do a survey of those doing research, even in the areas in question, probably most would say they disagree with ID.

Good heavens, I'm on record as previously disagreeing with ID. I'm just trying to learn more about it, and keep an open mind.

That said, I sometimes suspect, like me, even those researchers haven't understood what the IDers are actually saying, haven't asked the harder questions, and, in some cases, may have a pre-existing metaphysical commitment to defend. (In short, that much of the accusations of inserting beliefs into science are projection. There's quite of bit of data supporting the content that most scientists are atheists, and were before they chose science as a career, rather than vise-versa. But that's a separate argument.)

My point is more, as some have correctly said, that if we look at the more vocal types, who have emerged from the scientific community, it is primarily those who have done some of the hardest thinking who end up supporting ID. In contrast, the vocal types who are most ardently anti-ID end tend to be a bit, shall we say, fluffy.

Perhaps I'm making a mistake by listening to those from both sides, but on the podcasts I've been hearing from Discovery, the story I keep hearing, over and over, is from people who were doing hardcore research into issues of biology and physics, were confronted with what they felt to be evidence for design, and then changed their minds on the issue.

In short, that the devil (in Screwtape's sense, here, I think) seems to lurk in the details: Most the materialists are engaging in what seem to be hand-waving explanations: "Well, perhaps there are other ways this could have happened. Well, perhaps you haven't included all possible forms which could have resulted in life. Well, perhaps there are innumerable other universes which render these arguments from probability stupid..." — while their opponents seem to be trying to take the issue very seriously, and not conflate a desire to see their view prevail with the outcome. "Well, I used to be a neo-Darwinist atheist, but then I started doing research..."

For example, Dr. Rebecca Keller, who has a PhD in biophysical chemistry, and who has done research in neuroscience and cell biology:

During my undergraduate career I mainly studied chemistry and I was a believer in the Darwinian view of how life got started because that was the only thing I was taught.

When I got to graduate school and I began working on transcription machinery, it really kind of started to settle in: how did these molecular machines, and this really sophisticated network of machines function? And how did they get there? And there were just a lot of gaps in the Darwinian explanation for how a molecular machine would have been produced via random chance and mutation? .... Nobody could tell me what a Darwinian mechanism would be for these machines... that was one of the things I began to question.

One may agree or disagree, but my point is that it was exposure to the evidence, the details, the machinery, and asking serious questions about it, convinced her to become an advocate of ID — not some "bible college." (To the contrary, she was swimming against the environment to draw such conclusions, and likely incurring some professional risk.)

This strikes me as an odd argument. Not only is there the appeal to numbers, but, there is the implicit appeal to authority without substantial warrant; Feynman not providing any warrant whatsoever.

When the ID researchers present evidence and positive scientific demonstration of a truth claim about the agency of a designer working at the level of biology or organic chemistry, then, obviously, their research program will revolutionize biology.

It is revealing that--as far as I know--ID researchers are not working on the central thesis of their offshoot discipline. Short of this, one would hope ID research might land a valuable paper in a mainstream journal.

Alas, the current standing of ID is that, even if you disregard the jaw-dropping tautological feature of all the research presented so far, a close reader is still left with the fact that every such paper gets published and is quickly debunked by outside experts.

Not a single such paper has been left standing.

In light of that, the appeal to a specific kind of credential found in a sample, itself given by a selection bias, (that the members of said sample are well-known,) is, to me, a very odd approach, is not nutritious, and is mildly startling--considering that the overwhelming majority of biologists aren't working to discover the hand of the designer in biological evolution.

Of course, that such a majority exists doesn't prove anything either, but the divide between great and tiny numbers of researchers is an aspect of the context for the above argument, one that violates two principles of logical argumentation.

Dr Puck! Even though I'm about to disagree with you, I sincerely thank you for your comments and input!

Not only is there the appeal to numbers, but, there is the implicit appeal to authority without substantial warrant...

I think you're misreading the post. I didn't say, at any point: "Intelligent design must be true because their people have more hard-science PhDs", or anything of the sort. I personally think most such arguments are fallacious: an argument stands or falls on its own merits.

But I found this an important point to make because ID critics seem to use such fallacious reasoning all the time. (For example, both the critics who have responded here.) And, in addition, typically woefully represent where ID proponents are coming from.

When the ID researchers present evidence and positive scientific demonstration of a truth claim about the agency of a designer working at the level of biology or organic chemistry, then, obviously, their research program will revolutionize biology.

Oh, don't be silly. Nothing of the sort should be expected.

First, presenting and proving something true makes no difference at all in a non-receptive environment. The Chinese invented the compass — and used it for divination. The Romans invented the steam engine — and viewed as a mere toy. A physician demonstrated for decades that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, not spicy foods, stress, etc. To precisely zero effect among his peers who should have been, by all expectations, keenly interested in an effective cure.

This is the whole point of Thomas Kuhn's work on the structure of scientific revolutions: New ideas don't take hold when they're "proven", but more when the old guard who's closed to the new ideas dies off.

Second, IDers largely have a negative criticism. If I point out that "anthropogenic global warming" is wrong, and provide evidence to that effect, assuming such were even believed, we wouldn't expect such to "revolutionize" the field of meteorology. Finding out you're wrong on some point is, at best, a single step in the right direction — it's not a magic panacea which instantly turns the world around.

It is revealing that--as far as I know--ID researchers are not working on the central thesis of their offshoot discipline.

p.s. The "Physics vs. Stamp Collecting" quote was probably not original to Feynman. Ernest Rutherford is credited with saying something almost identical. I can't get a date for when, but the man died 1937.