[asa] God must design as He creates!

If God is indeed the Creator, surely He must design as He creates. If
so, then the question of design is inexorably connected to the notion of
creation. The existence of design is then an ontological and not merely
a scientific question and so its inference from our theories of Nature
can be so if unadulterated science is integrated with, say,
philosophy/theology or metaphysics in order to include in the
description of Nature the humans themselves who created the theories of
Nature.

Moorad

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Keith Miller
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 11:47 AM
To: American Scientific Affiliation
Subject: Re: [asa] ID without specifying the intelligence?

> A note to Keith Miller:

> Just because an all powerful God COULD design life just like a semi

> intelligent alien biologist does not doesn't mean you have to jump

> to the supernatural before you eliminate the alien.

An "alien" with unconstrained capabilities is indistinguishable from

a supernatural entity. Both are also equivalent to ignorance as

scientific agents, and both equally uninformative. Neither are a

useful part of a scientific description. Only when theoretical

"aliens" are given limited capabilities (when they are basically

viewed as human-like agents with plausible technologies) can their

actions be potentially discerned.

> How would you know a microbe was genetically engineered by a human?

> You certainly don't need to know the motive. One could determine

> that a death was not an accident but a murder without knowing who

> the murderer was or the motive of the killer. ID is not the null

> hypothesis because we don't know exactly how an IDer would act.

But we assume the agent is a human. We know about humans as natural

agents. We can even directly observe human actions. We know their

capacities, and the limitations of those capacities. Human actions

are subject to scientific study for that reason.

> Random mutations is the null hypothesis just like random shuffling

> of chromosomes during independent assortment for genetics. You can

> still continue to look for secondary causes even if you have

> concluded an intelligence is behind it. It doesn't stop science.

> People thought an Intelligence was more directly involved in rain

> production now we know there are more secondary physical causes

> such as evaporation and condensation. With ID we may be getting

> closer to the first cause but there could be radiation or viruses

> carrying genes etc. Science goes on.

Science cannot deal with ultimate or first causes. Its study is

secondary natural causes and agents. In your statement above, ID is

simply a statement of the doctrine of Creation -- which no one here

is disputing. God is the intelligent designed of all that is. What

science seeks to understand is the secondary causes by which God has

acted and continues to act in Creation.

I think that my views have been clearly articulated over the years

both here on this list and in numerous writings. I will end my

comments here as I am very swamped with teaching-related

responsibilities at the moment.

Keith

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Received on Sat Sep 15 12:13:10 2007