From: Iain Strachan (iain.strachan.asa@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 07:09:06 EDT
----- Original Message -----
From: Dick Fischer
To: ASA
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2003 4:51 PM
Subject: Re: "Design up to Scratch?" (The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Roberts)
Lain Strachan wrote:
Both Behe and I, as trained biochemists, acknowledge the role of chance (i.e., in mutations, etc.). We simply argue that chance is not sufficient to explain many of the complex processes or structures of living organisms.
Here is a point where I agree with Lain. I made this point in my book:
A point of information to the list. My name is Iain not Lain, and I am not a trained biochemist, as the above out-of-context quotation from my original post seems to indicate. I was quoting Wells, which should have been clear. I am a computer scientist, which a specialist area in machine learning, neural networks, and (for a brief while) genetic algorithms.
I am therefore not well qualified to discuss Dick's lengthy quotation from his book. I will merely restate that I don't believe Behe was denying God's provenance in the appearance of non-irreducibly complex organisms. I think the best way of attacking the ID argument is to attack the premise, not the conclusion. Richard Dawkins states that to argue that a so-called "irreducibly complex" organism could not have evolved in a sequence of small steps is simply an argument from ignorance; or the "argument from personal incredulity". To my mind this is a much more effective criticism than the main thrust of Roberts' paper. I don't happen to agree with it personally, but at least it attacks the real scientific issue.
Iain
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