Carrie Underwood

Finals Top 4 Performance 2 (Gamble and Huff Songs) - "If You Don't Know Me by Now" (O.A.: Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes). Intelligent design critics also say that the intelligent design doctrine does not meet the criteria for scientific evidence used by most courts, the Daubert Standard. Finals Top 4 Performance 1 (Nashville Songs) - "Sin Wagon" (O.A.: The Dixie Chicks). In light of its apparent failure to adhere to scientific standards, in September 2005 38 Nobel laureates issued a statement saying "intelligent design is fundamentally unscientific; it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent."^[58] And in October 2005 a coalition representing more than 70,000 Australian scientists and science teachers issued a statement saying "intelligent design is not science" and called on "all schools not to teach Intelligent Design (ID) as science, because it fails to qualify on every count as a scientific theory."^[59]. Finals Top 5 Performance 2 (Billboard top 40) - "Bless the Broken Road" (O.A.: Rascal Flatts' version of Marcus Hummon's "Bless the Broken Road"). Typical objections to defining intelligent design as science are that it lacks consistency,^[53] violates the principle of parsimony,^[54] is not falsifiable,^[55] is not empirically testable,^[56] and is not correctable, dynamic, tentative or progressive.^[57]. Finals Top 5 Performance 1 (Leiber and Stoller Songs) - "Trouble" (O.A.: Elvis Presley). The fewer which are matched, the less scientific it is; and if it meets only a couple or none at all, then it cannot be treated as scientific in any meaningful sense of the word.

Finals Top 6 Performance (Songs of the 21st Century) - "When God Fearin' Women Get the Blues" (O.A.: Martina McBride). For any theory, hypothesis or conjecture to be considered scientific, it must meet most, but ideally all, of the above criteria. Finals Top 7 Performance (70's Dance Music) - "MacArthur Park" (O.A.: Donna Summer's version of Richard Harris' hit). For a theory to qualify as scientific it must be:. Finals Top 8 Performance (Songs from Contestants' Birthyear) - "Love Is a Battlefield" (O.A.: Pat Benatar). Intelligent design proponents have often said that their position is not only scientific, but that it is even more scientific than evolution, and want a redefinition of science to allow "non-naturalistic theories such as intelligent design".^[52] This presents a demarcation problem, which in the philosophy of science is about how and where to draw the lines around science. Finals Top 9 Performance (Broadway Musicals) - "Hello Young Lovers" (O.A.: Johnny Mathis). The scientific method is based on an approach known as methodological naturalism to study and explain the natural world, without assuming the existence or nonexistence of the supernatural.

Finals Top 10 Performance (Songs of the 90's) - "Independence Day" (O.A.: Martina McBride). with the theory of evolution [within] the borders of scientific theory". Finals Top 11 Performance (Billboard #1's) - "Alone" (O.A.: Heart). An example is Cardinal Schönborn who sees "purpose and design in the natural world" yet has "no difficulty.. Finals Top 12 Performance (Songs of the 60's) - "When Will I Be Loved" (O.A.: The Everly Brothers). Many religious people do not condone the teaching of what is considered unscientific or questionable material, and support theistic evolution which does not conflict with scientific theories. Semi-Final Performance 3 (Women Top 8) - "Because You Love Me" (O.A.: Jo Dee Messina). From a strictly empirical standpoint, one may list what is known about Egyptian construction techniques, but must admit ignorance about exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids.

Semi-Final Performance 2 (Women Top 10) - "Piece of My Heart" (O.A.: Faith Hill's version of Janis Joplin's classic). The inference that an intelligent designer (a god or an alien life force)^[49] created life on Earth has been compared to the a priori claim that aliens helped the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids.^[50][51] In both cases, the effect of this outside intelligence is not repeatable, observable, or falsifiable, and it violates Occam's Razor. Semi-Final Performance 1 (Women Top 12) - "Could've Been" (O.A.: Tiffany). Even though evolution theory does not explain abiogenesis, the generation of life from nonliving matter, intelligent design proponents cannot infer that an intelligent designer is behind the part of the process that is not understood scientifically, since they have not shown that anything supernatural has occurred. Hollywood 2 - "Independence Day" (O.A.: Martina McBride). Indeed, intelligent design proponent Michael Behe concedes "You can't prove intelligent design by experiment."^[48]. Hollywood 1 - "Young Hearts (Run Free)" (O.A.: Candi Staton)". Furthermore, intelligent design is neither observable nor repeatable, which critics argue violates the scientific requirement of falsifiability.

Louis Auditions - "I Can't Make You Love Me" (Original Artist: Bonnie Raitt). They allege that intelligent design has substituted public support for scientific research.^[47] Furthermore, if one were to take the proponents of "equal time for all theories" at their word, there would be no logical limit to the number of potential "theories" to be taught in the public school system, including admittedly silly ones like the Flying Spaghetti Monster "theory." There are innumerable mutually-incompatible supernatural explanations for complexity, and intelligent design does not provide a mechanism for discriminating among them. St. According to critics, intelligent design has not presented a credible scientific case, and is an attempt to teach religion in public schools, which the United States Constitution forbids under the Establishment Clause. Some allege that this larger debate is often the subtext for arguments made over intelligent design, though others note that intelligent design serves as an effective proxy for the religious beliefs of prominent intelligent design proponents in their efforts to advance their religious point of view within society.^[44][45][46]. Many intelligent design followers believe that "Scientism" is itself a religion that promotes secularism and materialism in an attempt to erase theism from public life, and view their work in the promotion of intelligent design as a way to return religion to a central role in education and other public spheres.

Teaching both, intelligent design supporters argue, allows for the possibility of religious belief, without causing the state to actually promote such beliefs. Supporters also hold that religious neutrality requires the teaching of both evolution and intelligent design in schools, saying that teaching only evolution unfairly discriminates against those holding creationist beliefs. Proponents say that evidence exists in the forms of irreducible complexity and specified complexity that cannot be explained by natural processes. Intelligent design proponents argue that naturalistic explanations fail to explain certain phenomena, and that supernatural explanations provide a very simple and intuitive ^[43] explanation for the origins of life and the universe.

Johnson, calls "theistic realism",^[42] and what critics call "methodological supernaturalism," which means belief in a transcendent, non-natural dimension of reality inhabited by a transcendent, non-natural deity. Intelligent design proponents seek to change this definition^[40] by eliminating "methodological naturalism" from science^[41] and replacing it with what the leader of the intelligent design movement, Phillip E. Natural science uses the scientific method to create a posteriori knowledge based on observation alone (sometimes called empirical science). The intelligent design controversy centers on three issues:.

A key strategy of the intelligent design movement is in convincing the general public that there is a debate among scientists about whether life evolved, seeking to convince the public, politicians, and cultural leaders that schools should "teach the controversy."^[38] However, there is no such controversy; the scientific consensus is that life evolved.^[39]. The two leading intelligent design proponents, Phillip Johnson and William Dembski, cite the Bible's Book of John as the foundation of intelligent design.^[35][36] Barbara Forrest contends that such statements reveal that leading proponents see intelligent design as essentially religious in nature, as opposed to a scientific concept that has implications with which their personal religious beliefs happen to coincide.^[37]. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ."^[33] Dembski also stated "ID is part of God's general revelation..." "Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology (materialism), which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I've found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ."^[34]. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ.

However, in his book intelligent design; the Bridge Between Science and Theology Dembski states that "Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don't have a clue about him. For example, William Dembski in his book The Design Inference^[32] lists a god or an "alien life force" as two possible options for the identity of the designer. The conflicting claims made by leading intelligent design advocates as to whether or not intelligent design is rooted in religious conviction are the result of their strategy. The preponderance of leading intelligent design proponents are evangelical Protestants.

Meyer, are Christians and have stated that in their view the designer of life is God. only then can 'biblical issues' be discussed."^[30] Johnson explicitly calls for intelligent design proponents to obfuscate their religious motivations so as to avoid having intelligent design identified "as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message."^[31] The principal intelligent design advocates, including Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells (actually a member of the Unification Church, headed by Reverend Moon), and Stephen C. Johnson emphasizes "the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion" and that "after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact .. Johnson has stated that cultivating ambiguity by employing secular language in arguments which are carefully crafted to avoid overtones of theistic creationism is a necessary first step for ultimately reintroducing the Christian concept of God as the designer.

Phillip E. Intelligent design arguments are carefully formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid positing the identity of the designer. She has written that the movement's "activities betray an aggressive, systematic agenda for promoting not only intelligent design creationism, but the religious world-view that undergirds it."^[29]. Barbara Forrest, an expert who has written extensively on the movement, describes this as being due to the Discovery Institute obfuscating its agenda as a matter of policy.

In statements directed at the general public they state that intelligent design is not religious, while they state that intelligent design has its foundation in the Bible,^[28] when addressing conservative Christian supporters. Leading intelligent design proponents have made conflicting statements regarding intelligent design. Johnson, considered the father of the intelligent design movement, stated that the goal of intelligent design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept.^[26] All leading intelligent design proponents are fellows or staff of the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture.^[27] Nearly all intelligent design concepts and the associated movement are the products of Discovery Institute which guides the movement in follows its wedge strategy while conducting its adjunct Teach the Controversy campaign. Phillip E.

Intelligent design proponents allege that science shouldn't be limited to naturalism, and shouldn't demand an adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses any explanation that contains a supernatural cause out of hand. Leaders of the intelligent design movement say intelligent design exposes the limitations of scientific orthodoxy and of the secular philosophy of Naturalism. The intelligent design movement arose out of an organized neocreationist campaign directed by the Discovery Institute to promote a religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes employing intelligent design arguments in the public sphere, primarily in the United States. Answering "what designed the designer?" leads to an infinite regression from which intelligent design proponents can only escape by resorting to religious creationism or logical contradiction.

The new question raised by the explanation is as problematic as the question which the explanation purports to answer."^[25] Critics see the claim that the designer need not be explained not as a contribution to knowledge but as a thought-terminating cliché. Invoking an unexplained being to explain the origin of other beings (ourselves) is little more than question-begging. Asserting the need for a designer of complexity also raises the question, "what designed the designer?" Intelligent design proponents say that the question is irrelevant to or outside the scope of intelligent design,^[24] but Richard Wein counters that the unanswered questions a theory creates "must be balanced against the improvements in our understanding which the explanation provides. for artistic reasons, to show off, for some as-yet undetectable practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason." Coyne responds that in light of the evidence, "either life resulted not from intelligent design, but from evolution; or the intelligent designer is a cosmic prankster who designed everything to make it look as though it had evolved.".

Odd designs could, for example, "have been placed there by the designer.. For example, Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago, asks why a designer would "give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes" and why he or she wouldn't "stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species." Evolutionists point to the fact that "the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different" as evidence that species were not placed there by a designer.^[23] Behe argued in Darwin's Black Box that we are simply incapable of understanding the designer's motives, so such questions cannot be answered definitively. Critics argue that existing evidence makes the design hypothesis appear unlikely. Intelligent design proponents, such as Dembski, have implied that an alien culture could fulfill these requirements, but since the authoritative description of intelligent design^[21] explicitly states that the universe displays features of having been designed, Dembski concludes that "no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life."^[22] Furthermore, the leading proponents have made statements to their supporters that they believe the designer to be the Christian God, to the exclusion of all other religions, and thus there exists a well-established link to Genesis and Creationism.

They do not state that God is the designer, but the designer is often implicitly hypothesized to have intervened in a way that only a God could intervene. Intelligent design arguments are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid identifying the intelligent agent they posit. They also suggest that many of the stated variables appear to be interconnected, and that calculations made by mathematicians and physicists suggest that the emergence of a universe similar to ours is quite probable. The claim of the improbability of a life-supporting universe has also been criticized as an argument by lack of imagination for assuming no other forms of life are possible; life as we know it may not exist if things were different, but a different sort of life might exist in its place.

Critics of both intelligent design and the weak form of anthropic principle argue that they are essentially a tautology; in their view, these arguments amount to the claim that life is able to exist because the universe is able to support life. Other scientists respond that the argument cannot be tested, is not quantifiable, and is poorly supported by existing evidence.^[20]. Intelligent design proponent and Center for Science and Culture fellow Guillermo Gonzalez argues that if any of these values were even slightly different, the universe would be dramatically different, with many chemical elements and features of the universe like galaxies being impossible to form.^[19] Thus, they argue, an intelligent designer of life was needed to ensure that the requisite features were present to achieve that particular outcome. These features include the values of physical constants, the strength of nuclear forces, and many others.

One of the arguments of intelligent design proponents that includes more than just biology is that we live in a fine-tuned universe, with many features that make life possible that cannot be attributed to chance. They argue that this procedure is flawed as a model for scientific inference because the asymmetric way it treats the different possible explanations renders it prone to making false conclusions of design.^[18]. John Wilkins and Wesley Elsberry characterize Dembski's "explanatory filter" as eliminative, because it eliminates explanations sequentially: first regularity, then chance, finally defaulting to design. The conceptual soundness of Dembski's specified complexity/CSI argument is strongly disputed by the scientific community.^[17] Specified complexity has yet to be shown to have wide applications in other fields as Dembski claims.

Critics say that this renders the argument a tautology: Complex specified information (CSI) cannot occur naturally because Dembski has defined it thus, so the real question becomes whether or not CSI actually exists in nature. Dembski defines complex specified information as anything with a less than 1 in 10¹⁵⁰ chance of occurring by (natural) chance. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified."^[16] He states that details of living things can be similarly characterized, especially the "patterns" of molecular sequences in functional biological molecules such as DNA. A long sentence of random letters is complex without being specified.

He provides the following examples: "A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex. Dembski states that when something exhibits specified complexity (i.e., is both complex and specified, simultaneously), one can infer that it was produced by an intelligent cause (i.e., that it was designed) rather than being the result of natural processes. The intelligent design concept of specified complexity was developed by mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski. Furthermore, they argue that evolution often proceeds by altering preexisting parts or by removing them from a system, instead of by adding them; this is sometimes referred to as the "scaffolding objection" by an analogy with scaffolding which can support an (irreducibly complex) building until it is complete and able to stand on its own.

Intelligent design advocates assert that natural selection could not create irreducibly complex systems, because the selectable function is only present when all parts are assembled. The removal of any one piece destroys the function of the mousetrap. A mousetrap consists of several interacting pieces — the base, the catch, the spring, the hammer — all of which must be in place for the mousetrap to work. Behe uses the mousetrap as an illustrative example of this concept.

(Behe, Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference). ...a single system which is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. In the context of intelligent design, irreducible complexity was put forth by Michael Behe, who defines it as:. Counter-arguments against such criticisms are often proffered by intelligent design proponents, as are counter-counter-arguments by critics, etc.

The following are summaries of key concepts of intelligent design, followed by summaries of criticisms. Johnson went on to work with Meyers, becoming the program advisor of the Center for Science and Culture, and is considered the "father" of the intelligent design movement, as a part of its wedge strategy. Johnson following his 1991 book Darwin on Trial which advocated redefining science to allow claims of supernatural creation. The book was published in 1989 and is considered to be the first intelligent design book.^[14] The term was promoted more broadly by the retired legal scholar Phillip E.

In drafts of the book Of Pandas and People, the word 'creationism' was subsequently changed, almost without exception to intelligent design. Meyer, cofounder of the Discovery Institute and vice president of the Center for Science and Culture, reports that the term came up in 1988 at a conference he attended in Tacoma, Washington, called Sources of Information Content in DNA.^[13] He attributes the phrase to Charles Thaxton, editor of Of Pandas and People. Stephen C. Aguillard, ruled out creationism in public school science curricula in 1987.

The term was again resurrected when the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Edwards v. The phrase was coined again in Humanism, a 1903 book by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller: "It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of evolution may be guided by an intelligent design," and was resurrected in the early 1980s by Sir Fred Hoyle as part of his promotion of panspermia.^[12]. For the cause of this cause we have sought in vain among the physical forces which surround us, until we are at last compelled to rest upon an independent volition, a far-seeing intelligent design.^[11]. No physical hypothesis founded on any indisputable fact has yet explained the origin of the primordial protoplasm, and, above all, of its marvellous properties, which render evolution possible—in heredity and in adaptability, for these properties are the cause and not the effect of evolution.

Though unrelated to the current use of the term, the phrase "intelligent design" can be found in an 1847 issue of Scientific American, in an 1868 book, and in an address to the 1873 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by Paleyite botanist George James Allman:. Dover Area School District court ruling held the latter to be the case. The Kitzmiller v. Whether this was a genuine feature of the concept or just a posture taken to avoid alienating those who would separate religion from science-teaching has been a matter of great debate between supporters and critics of intelligent design.

While intelligent design itself does not name the designer, the personal view of many proponents is that the designer is the Christian god. Intelligent design deliberately does not try to identify or name the specific agent of creation – it merely states that one (or more) must exist. In the past, examples that have been offered included the eye (optical system) and the feathered wing; current examples are mostly biochemical: protein functions, blood clotting, and bacteria flagellum (see irreducible complexity). As evolutionary theory has expanded to explain more phenomena, so the examples held up as evidence of design have changed, but the essential argument remains the same: complex systems imply a designer.

Intelligent design in the late 20th century can be seen as a modern reframing of natural theology. This movement fueled the passion for collecting fossils and other biological specimens that ultimately led to Darwin's theory of the origin of species. In the early 19th century such arguments led to the development of what was called Natural theology, the study of biology as a search to understand the "mind of God". The most notable forms of this argument were expressed by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae^[10] (thirteenth century), design being the fifth of Aquinas' five proofs for God's existence, and William Paley in his book Natural Theology (1802), where he uses the watchmaker analogy, which is still used in intelligent design arguments.

The use of this line of reasoning as applied to a supernatural designer has come to be known as the teleological argument for the existence of God. 43 BCE) stated, "The divine power is to be found in a principle of reason which pervades the whole of nature."^[9]. 106–c. In his de Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) Cicero (c.

384–322 BCE) also developed the idea of a natural creator of the cosmos, often referred to as the "Prime Mover" in his work Metaphysics. Aristotle (c. 347 BCE) posited a natural "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the creator of the cosmos in his work Timaeus. 427–c.

535–c.475 BCE), a Pre-Socratic philosopher, and is briefly explained in his extant fragments.^[8] Plato (c. The philosophical concept of the "Logos" is typically credited to Heraclitus (c. The first recorded arguments for a natural designer come from Greek philosophy. For millennia, philosophers have argued that the complexity of nature indicates the existence of a purposeful natural or supernatural designer/creator.

Note that intelligent design studies the effects of intelligent causes and not intelligent causes per se." In his view, one cannot test for the identity of influences exterior to a closed system from within, so questions concerning the identity of a designer fall outside the realm of the concept. Dembski, in Signs of Intelligence, states "Proponents of intelligent design regard it as a scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent causes. Intelligent design proponents say that while evidence pointing to the nature of an "intelligent cause or agent" may not be directly observable, its effects on nature can be detected. This stands in opposition to mainstream biological science, which relies on experiment and collection of uncontested data to explain the natural world exclusively through observed impersonal physical processes such as mutations and natural selection.

Design proponents argue that living systems show one or more of these, from which they infer that some aspects of life have been designed. The most commonly cited signs include irreducible complexity, information mechanisms, and specified complexity. Proponents of intelligent design look for evidence of what they term "signs of intelligence" — physical properties of an object that they assert necessitate design. William Dembski, one of intelligent design's leading proponents, has stated that the fundamental claim of intelligent design is that "there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence."^[7].

The stated^[6] purpose is to investigate whether or not existing empirical evidence implies that life on Earth must have been designed by an intelligent agent or agents. Intelligent design is presented as an alternative to purely naturalistic forms of the theory of evolution. . Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science and is essentially religious in nature.

An overwhelming majority^[3] of the scientific community views intelligent design not as a valid scientific theory but as pseudoscience or junk science.^[4] The U.S. Intelligent design (ID) is the concept that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."^[1] Its leading proponents, all of whom are affiliated with the Discovery Institute, say that intelligent design is a scientific theory that stands on equal footing with, or is superior to, current scientific theories regarding the origin of life.^[2]. The gap is filled with acts of God and therefore proves God. There is a gap in scientific knowledge.

Whether the teaching of such theories is appropriate and legal in public education. Whether the evidence supports such theories. Whether the definition of science is broad enough to allow for theories of origins which incorporate the acts of an intelligent designer.