Johan Liebert
Active Member
The scientific method is one of discovering truth by finding out what works, what doesn't, and what fits together. All ideas are tested, and only the ones with merit survive. This leads to the eventual discovery of truth.
The idea of intelligent design disregards the scientific method right off the bat by having a pre-drawn conclusion. It is not a hypothesis that they surmise a creator exists, but rather, an answer to which they expect and hope to arrive at. This is the worst, and most useless way to approach science. The second you start having a bias toward what the outcome will be, you begin skewing facts and figures, trying to make things point in the direction you want them to point. Sure, if you want to believe there was a great flood, you could change the way real science works, create your own method of dating, and then explain away the Grand Canyon as something which could happen in 40 days. OR, you could say, "what we have here is a big hole...the dirt in the bottom is X years old, and the dirt at the top is Y years old. We can now tell that weathering had to have taken places over Z amount of years in order to create the situation we have before us now."
What science currently speculates is that at the time of the singularity, there was a disproportionate amount of matter to anti-matter, and at some point a mass of chemicals collected and combusted into the explosion we know as the Big Bang. Matter began to explode outward from a central point (we have the math and graphs to reinforce this idea), and after 14 billion years, we are standing (to borrow a phrase from Carl Sagan) at the shores of the Cosmic ocean. "Recently," he said, "we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. The journey for each of us begins here. We are going to explore the cosmos in a ship of the imagination, unfettered by ordinary limits on speed and size, drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies. It can take us anywhere in space and time. Perfect as a snowflake, organic as a dandelion seed, it will carry us to worlds of dreams, and worlds of facts."
The idea of intelligent design disregards the scientific method right off the bat by having a pre-drawn conclusion. It is not a hypothesis that they surmise a creator exists, but rather, an answer to which they expect and hope to arrive at. This is the worst, and most useless way to approach science. The second you start having a bias toward what the outcome will be, you begin skewing facts and figures, trying to make things point in the direction you want them to point. Sure, if you want to believe there was a great flood, you could change the way real science works, create your own method of dating, and then explain away the Grand Canyon as something which could happen in 40 days. OR, you could say, "what we have here is a big hole...the dirt in the bottom is X years old, and the dirt at the top is Y years old. We can now tell that weathering had to have taken places over Z amount of years in order to create the situation we have before us now."
What science currently speculates is that at the time of the singularity, there was a disproportionate amount of matter to anti-matter, and at some point a mass of chemicals collected and combusted into the explosion we know as the Big Bang. Matter began to explode outward from a central point (we have the math and graphs to reinforce this idea), and after 14 billion years, we are standing (to borrow a phrase from Carl Sagan) at the shores of the Cosmic ocean. "Recently," he said, "we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. The journey for each of us begins here. We are going to explore the cosmos in a ship of the imagination, unfettered by ordinary limits on speed and size, drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies. It can take us anywhere in space and time. Perfect as a snowflake, organic as a dandelion seed, it will carry us to worlds of dreams, and worlds of facts."
