Reading all of the other posts here I realized that no one mentioned the film's two key points:

1. intelligent design is not synonymous with creationism as is often ascertained in the media's 'boilerplate' standard storyline (Yes, the Fray post 'Can 2 theories on the same subject co-exist?' thread does make a different distinction but without referencing the film itself)

2. an individual's worldview forms the framework which his/her own experience is then forced into compliance with.

My personal favorite scene of 'Expelled' was when Ben Stein uses a backscratcher during a class lecture.

It will now be entertaining but not enlightening to see who attacks what I did not write and how they attack it. One can only guess at why (Oh yeah, and with all these 'pen names' also guess at who).

Good! Here you are, and you've seen the movie, so you can EXPLAIN to us exactly what ID IS! I've read and heard quite a bit about it, I've even ARGUED with many people about it, but I don't know what it REALLY is and I've never heard anyone say.

For example, I DO know that those who epouse ID wish to claim that there is evidence that aspects of living organisms have been intelligently designed. But....if they were designed, and then IMPLEMENTED in the living organism, doesn't that mean they were CREATED?

When you design something and then "manifest" it: you have CREATED it. If you design it and do not implement it then it doesn't exist! (unless you get someone else to build it--I've never heard THAT idea mentioned from ID'ers).

So, I'd like to hear an explanation of how intelligent design EXISTS if nothing was CREATED.

How does ID COMBINE the idea of intelligent design with the diversity of life, without any act of creation?

To continue....

This is especially interesting because MOSTLY what I hear from those who espose ID is all about the failings of evolution. OK, so if evolution didn't happen, then animals are here and were designed, but were NOT created (via a process that can be called "creationism," then what does ID have to say about where they came from?

I see. Wait until I have had some Guinness and Scotch and then corner me for an answer. Crafty.

I speak for no one but myself. I studied philosophy for a year and was no good at it. David Hume made me feel a chill through my soul when he made me know that what I thought I knew was bunk. I'm no better off now.

I know my own ability to understand the origin of life is totally inadequate and I am humbled. I trust those who study biology and say it is exceedingly complex. The likelihood that the conditions for life just appeared haphazardly are diminishingly small, negligible.

Some principle of order must be invoked to explain how the minimum requirements for life can be met. 'Expelled' used CG graphics to demonstrate the type of complexity involved. It said our DNA is a 1-Gigabyte equivalent set of 1-dimensional instructions for assembling and operating a 3-dimensional self-sustaining and self-replicating nano-factory, a living cell, the basic unit of life.

There is no analogy. Life at its most simple level defies description. I think intelligent design is a way to express the exceedingly difficult nature of trying to explain the order which is seen in the basic living cell. It is not itself an explanation of that order or of its origin. Only an acknowledgement of the uncanny difficulty of such an explanation. It asks how can this be?

More to the point of your distinction between 'design' and 'implementation' of the design I refer us all to Gilbert Ryle and the 'category mistake'.

The fundmental error, according to Ryle, is a category mistake made when philosophers talk about mind and matter as if they were "... terms of the same logical type". Ryle claims that while it does make sense to talk about mental processes and events, that the "... phrase 'there occur mental process' does not mean the same sort of thing as 'there occur physical processes', and, therefore, that it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two". For Ryle, Cartesian dualism makes the mistake of assuming that it is sensible to ask of a given cause, process, or event, whether it is mental or physical (with the implication that it cannot be both).

This concept is futher illustrated by some of Ryle's examples in the text. When a prospective student visits a university, he or she will see the library, the labs, the sports arena, but then may very well ask the tour guide, "but where is the university?", having been under the assumption that it is a different place altogether. According to Ryle, the mistake made by the student is a failure to realize that "university" and "library" are terms that belong to different logical categories. (WikiQuickFacts article, link at <link> ).

wmccomninel writes: I know my own ability to understand the origin of life is totally inadequate and I am humbled. I trust those who study biology and say it is exceedingly complex. The likelihood that the conditions for life just appeared haphazardly are diminishingly small, negligible.

Leroy: First of all, most evolutionary scientists do NOT study the 'origin' of life--they study the HISTORY of life. And about that, we have accumulated a great deal of knowledge (yes, KNOWLEDGE) over the past few centuries, knowledge that should be passed on to the next generation. More importantly, though, is the fact that intelligent design 'theory' suffers from two fatal flaws. First is the empirical flaw: living organisms exhibit many UNintelligent aspects of design, to such a point that the whole idea should really be called STUPID DESIGN THEORY. Do you think an intelligent designer would really come up with the platypus? Is she some kind of cosmic joker? Second, I.D. suffers from a serious philosophical flaw, which is this: complexity is not even EVIDENCE of design, let alone 'proof'. The central claim of intelligent design 'theorizers' is that complexity demands and requires a designer. Not so. Consider: the American economy (and still more the world economy) is, like even the most primitive life forms, exceedingly complex. Well, then, who designed it? Alan Greenspan? Mr. Greenspan would be the first to scoff at the very notion.

Darwinian natural selection is the primary reason for the 'order' we see in living organisms. Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' of the market is the primary reason for the order we see in the workings of the American economy. There are deep similarities between both mechanisms: both are spontaneous, impersonal, and generate order out of chaos. The analogue to intelligent design 'theory' in the realm of economics would be the centrally planned economies of the former Communist world: those did not work so well. In fact, they mostly collapsed, simply because any modern economy is far too complex to be planned or designed from some central point.

An interesting question to ask would be this: Where in the world do people get this nutty idea that if something is extraordinarily complex, it must mean that someone, somewhere designed it? As your post indicates, even people who have studied some serious philosophy fall prey to this basic fallacy.

Steve Martin on philosophy:

"It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about nonsequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!'...If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life."

comes to the conclusion that the variety and variation of species on the earth can be explained quite succienctly and without a lot of detailed explanation by positing Ocram's razor to the problem - namely, that the simplest explanation for the observation is the most likely explanation.

Intellegent Design by a metaphysical being becomes very complex, since the parameters of metaphysics requires extensive explanations and qualifications in order to explain the non-metaphysical processes inherent in biology - e.g. where does design begin and end and why and how do we tell?

Evolution is relatively complex as well. Reference any of the more hysterical posts below.

That leaves the simple answer - we are a high school science fair project for a student that comes from a highly advanced alien planet and whose father actually did most of the project.

I think he (she? it?) got a C-.

LeRoy_Was_Here:

...An interesting question to ask would be this: Where in the world do people get this nutty idea that if something is extraordinarily complex, it must mean that someone, somewhere designed it? As your post indicates, even people who have studied some serious philosophy fall prey to this basic fallacy.

You are making analogies where I think that analogies are not adequate or appropriate, they are like red herrings which divert our attention and inquiry. You appeal to exceedingly large scale complex phenomena to explain exceedingly small scale complex phenomena.

There may be similarities which the two share but just as well the principles of organization at work could be scale dependent and not similar at all. I simply do not claim to know what those principles of organization are. I only think, without possessing the ability to prove, that they must be present to make living cells behave as they do.

Further when I think that the complexity seen in the function of a living cell requires that some principle of order be invoked I do not give that principle an anthropomorphic character. It could be the result of purely physical laws interacting in ways which result in the observed complexity. Those laws may be all known already but their interactions too complex to model or there may be effects not yet discovered as often happens in science and engineering.

I do not understand the physical laws at nano-scale but there are unusual effects which are predictable enough to be exploited in the manufacture of solid state electronics and electro-optics. A living cell is not a solid state system and could possess processes which are both dynamic and ephemeral (exceedingly fast and short lived in duration) which exist only at those exceedingly small scales. Description and modeling of such interactions and the principles of organization which they collectively exhibit is beyond the present ability of science to fully address.

It used to be said that hitting a bullet with a bullet is impossible. Now it is used in missile interceptors. This analogy like yours is not appropriate to describing the function of cells but it is helpful as a reminder that even a simple system which defied scientific solutions may yield over time. But only if the possibility is not off-handedly dismissed as being impossible. Or nutty.

Archaeopteryx:

Steve Martin on philosophy:

"It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about nonsequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!'...If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life."

Both comedy and philosophy take courage. The goal of comedy is to be laughed at, or with. The goal of philosophy is to be laughed at and to keep on trying to understand more fully anyway.

It could be the result of purely physical laws interacting in ways which result in the observed complexity.

There is nothing about living organisms which appears to necessitate the invocation of a supernatural creator for explication.

Especially if it denies or contradicts that which we can see and touch.

You apparently ignored what I wrote. I had nothing to say about evolution at all. My observations were about the possibility of explaining the origin of life with our present ways of doing scientific inquiry.

I have nothing to say about evolution here and now, in times past or in the future. If you think that what I wrote is about evolution then you did not understand what I wrote.

wmccomninel,

Here I thought I was responding directly to what you originally posted, and then you completely sidestepped me in your response.

Now I see from your response to others that you seem to state that you're NOT INTERESTED in evolution! That's just FINE from my perspective--and I dearly wish that those who promote ID would lose interest in evolution. But they don't appear to, and instead continue to try to "disprove" or in some other way invalidate evolution (and evolution has NOTHING to do with how life was created: evolution says, in a nutshell, that life reproduces in such a way that descendents can possess MODIFICATIONS from their progenitors, and that those modifications can and have drifted and accumulated to an extent that the process has produced new species, and that ALL life very likely results from a single common ancestor far in the past, that single ancestor sprouting forth the diversity we now see through that process).

So, now I will continue, if you'll allow, to try to discover WHAT it is you're trying to discuss, by making another guess what is your proposal regarding life's presence and diversity:

Are you now saying that an intelligent designer/creator designed and created the FIRST CELL (or the first "spark" of life), and then life proceeded to evolve from that point onward to the diversity we see today?

I reiterate that in order to discuss this topic I must know what you're SAYING about it.

wmccomninel now says:

You are making analogies where I think that analogies are not adequate or appropriate, they are like red herrings which divert our attention and inquiry. You appeal to exceedingly large scale complex phenomena to explain exceedingly small scale complex phenomena.

LeRoy: Actually, with respect to your last sentence here, that is EXACTLY what the intelligent design advocates are doing. Presumably their intelligent designer is some 'large-scale complex phenomena', unless you are prepared to make that argument that God is small and simple (and simple-minded?). Nor do they ever bother to grapple with the question of where their putative designer originated. (Who designed God?) Such questions, one senses, would perhaps be regarded as bordering on blasphemy. It rapidly becomes a matter of 'it's turtles, all the way down!'

wmccomninel continues:

There may be similarities which the two share but just as well the principles of organization at work could be scale dependent and not similar at all. I simply do not claim to know what those principles of organization are. I only think, without possessing the ability to prove, that they must be present to make living cells behave as they do.

LeRoy: Well, we understand that one of the major principles of organization of living cells is nothing more than Darwinian natural selection. After all, non-functioning cells would not be able to reproduce. Are there other 'principles of organization' at work in living cells that we have not yet discovered? Perhaps, but if so, you have certainly not suggested any. Are you prepared to do so?

wmccomninel continues:

Further when I think that the complexity seen in the function of a living cell requires that some principle of order be invoked I do not give that principle an anthropomorphic character. It could be the result of purely physical laws interacting in ways which result in the observed complexity. Those laws may be all known already but their interactions too complex to model or there may be effects not yet discovered as often happens in science and engineering.

LeRoy: If the complexity of a living cell is due to "purely physical laws interacting in ways which result in the observed complexity", then your argument is a universe removed from the arguments that intelligent design thinkers make. In fact, I daresay that very few biologists would disagree with this characterization of living cells. In contrast, the I.D. 'theorists' are specifically invoking a conscious and intelligent entity to 'explain' the complexity of life, not 'purely physical laws'. Moreover, in the past few decades we have come to understand an enormous amount about the interactions that occur in living cells, in terms of those physical (and chemical) laws. Are there things we still don't understand? Sure. But that is hardly a reason for invoking a supernatural intelligent designer. To do so is to fall into the same trap as the ancients who needed gods to explain the lightning bolts in the sky that they did not understand.

wmccomninel continues:

I do not understand the physical laws at nano-scale but there are unusual effects which are predictable enough to be exploited in the manufacture of solid state electronics and electro-optics. A living cell is not a solid state system and could possess processes which are both dynamic and ephemeral (exceedingly fast and short lived in duration) which exist only at those exceedingly small scales. Description and modeling of such interactions and the principles of organization which they collectively exhibit is beyond the present ability of science to fully address.

LeRoy: Yes, since I worked in the integrated circuits industry for many years, I know a great deal about the 'effects which are predictable enough to be exploited in the manufacture of solid state electronics'. We are nearly at the same point in our understanding of biological systems, at least at the cellular level. Craig Venter, the man behind the human genome project, believes we are at the beginning of an era of biological manufacturing, in which we will be synthesizing new life forms from basic biological building blocks. Therefore your last sentence here is highly questionable, to say the least.

wmccomninel concludes:

It used to be said that hitting a bullet with a bullet is impossible. Now it is used in missile interceptors. This analogy like yours is not appropriate to describing the function of cells but it is helpful as a reminder that even a simple system which defied scientific solutions may yield over time. But only if the possibility is not off-handedly dismissed as being impossible. Or nutty.

LeRoy: Natural selection is not an 'analogy'. It is an empirical fact of the world, repeatedly demonstrated in both laboratory experiments and in the field. The analogy I was drawing was between natural selection and the price mechanism that results from the 'invisible hand' of the market. Some people deny the existence of that, as well. The analogy was deliberately chosen to demonstrate that the primary claim of intelligent design thinkers, that the mere fact of complexity implies a designer, is philosophical rubbish. You certainly haven't convinced anyone otherwise.

Archaeopteryx:

It could be the result of purely physical laws interacting in ways which result in the observed complexity.

There is nothing about living organisms which appears to necessitate the invocation of a supernatural creator for explication.

I only invoke some principle of order, not specifically or necessarily a creator or an anthropomorphic being. I clearly state that what the principle of order consists of presently is not answered by any explanation whether scientific, religious, philosophical or otherwise.

The label 'intelligent design' evidently means many different things to many different people and I have tried here to limit it to what I think are the minimum requirements of a directed inquiry into what the origin of life is.

Conflating that limited inquiry into what the organizing principle of the origin of life is with other more grandiose speculations is not helpful. It obfuscates the inquiry itself by misappropriating it to other agendas none of which I personally or professionally subscribe to.