RE: [asa] Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism

My friends - I just don't get it - sorry!

Those who disagree with my analogy simply are disagreeing. BTW - I do know
what a straw-man is! But what I don't see is anyone explaining, WHY it is
that everything we know about Intelligence and Design (in the engineering
world in my example) is different from the Biological world.

Some of you are saying that it is not circular reasoning or special
pleading. But it is as I see it. Let me explain:

One says "but evolution is clearly nothing like that". Isn't that special
pleading? It is a statement made without evidential support and is of
sweeping generalisation. Simply by claiming that evolution is nothing like
that is unconvincing and would have no evidential merit in a Court for
example. Show me why evolution is not like that?

The circular reasoning is that you assume RM+NS to be evidentially true. So
of course RM+NS is an example of design. But you proved nothing: you simply
made a tautological statement.

So may I propose that before we attempt to move on in this discussion and
consider other aspects I raised about MN and its relationship to ON (or what
some call PN), it would perhaps be helpful to focus on the evidential
aspects of why my analogy with Engineering Design (Software - Hardware
Integration) is false, or a straw-man as someone wants to characterise it?

Blessings

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Dave Wallace
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 4:16 PM
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific
Naturalism

 
Iain Strachan wrote:

> The second point that occurs to me is that, as I'm also a software
> engineer, I'm also well aware of the intelligent design effort that goes
> into a complex piece of software.
>

As a software engineer I agree with Iain's point about problems with the
analogy. As a former lead designer on a large software product
sometimes I would despair as to whether or not some of the design that I
saw coming out of some groups was intelligent or not.

Dave W

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Received on Thu Jul 19 04:28:51 2007