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

Peter,

A brief respons as it's lunchtime:

> 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?

Well .. a bit of Googling reveals that you organised the UK tour of Snelling
(of AiG) and Johnston tour of the UK in 2005, so I'm assuming that you are a
creationist and/or ID advocate, and what you are arguing against is
evolution, so I'm not singling out a special case, but am in fact addressing
the principle issue of concern. You are an anti-evolutionist, correct?

You then give an example of a process that relies ENTIRELY on chance -
white noise fed into a Schmidt trigger - or equivalently tossing a coin a
very large number of times producing a meaningful result (e.g. the machine
code for Windows XP).

What I'm saying is that there is NO scientific theory that postulates such a
thing happening, and in particular, the theory of evolution does not, as it
has deterministic elements (Natural Selection) as well as random elements
(Mutation). This is no different in principle from the way a musical
instrument picks out the resonances from a white noise source, or how
galaxies form into characteristic structures from a random initial
distribution.

Special pleading involves specifying something as an exception to a general
rule without justifying the exception. I was not doing that, because your
example of order-from-complete-randomness isn't even a general rule because
it is always a case of randomness and deterministic rules in combination.

So ... I'm afraid I have to say that I feel you're still not listening to
me.

Did you have a look at the Ken Miller video on the fusion of chimp
chromosomes in human chromosomes, BTW?

You claim to be unimpressed by Collins. It was reading a Collins paper on
the web that caused me to start turning away from ID dogma. At the time I
didn't particularly want to be convinced away from it, but Collins's
reasoning seemed pretty convincing and reasonable to me. You have to read it
with an open mind and consider the hard evidence he presents on its own
terms, not in terms of your pre-ordained ideas of what the conclusion ought
to be. (This seems common with YEC's, and interestingly the same criticism
was levelled at Dawkins, by H. Allen Orr in his review of The God Delusion
titled "A Mission To Convert").

You can find the Collins paper at

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2003/PSCF9-03Collins.pdf

Orr's review of Dawkins may be found at:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775

Regards,
Iain

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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