JB:==
>You mistake shared experience with shared belief. Have you experienced
>biological evolution? Did you used to be a mollusk?
>
>Seriously, that's the difference. No one has shared the "experience" of
>macroevolution. It's a belief. Your inertia is self-imposed, an a priori
>mistake. It's time to move...on.
>
BH:==
><<We have a great deal of experience with and knowledge of intelligent
>designers capable of making watches. Very little with intelligent
>designers capable of making turtles.>>
>
JB:==
>Really? Is it because you don't *see* the intelligent designer at work on
>turtles? Or is there another reason.
BH<<Jim, it is absolutely amazing that you could write this immediately
after writing your paragraph above about macroevolution. I had
thought we might have a reasonable discussion.>>
Brian, this is eminently reasonable, and I think you've just made (albeit
tacitly) one of the more important points in the entire discussion.
As a theistic realist, I argue that not being able to "see" a designer does
not rule one out. And I accept that an element of faith, though reasonable
faith, is required to move beyond that.
But evolutionists exhibit EXACTLY the same kind of faith. But for them it is
macro-evolution which, I say again, is not part of anyone's "common
experience."
Your "amazement" should tell you, then, that evolutionism is a faith as well.
That's the main point Johnson is making in RITB, and one I make in TDC. This,
I truly believe.
You made a point about watches and turtles, and I asked which was the more
complex system. Was this an unreasonable question? I noted that this was
Paley's argument, still potent in my mind. And I am backed up in this by many.
Most recently, Davin Berlinsky wrote:
<<Paley offered examples that he had on hand, a pocket watch
chiefly, but that watch, its golden bezel still glowing after all
these years, Paley pulled across his ample paunch as an act of
calculated misdirection. The target of his cunning argument lay
elsewhere, with the world of biological artifacts: the orchid's
secret chamber, the biochemical cascade that stops the blood from
flooding the body at a cut. These, too, are complex, infinitely
more so than a watch. Today, with these extraordinary objects now
open for dissection by the biological sciences, precisely the
same inferential pattern that sweeps back from a complex human
artifact to the circumstance of its design sweeps back from a
complex biological artifact to the circumstance of its design.>>
[David Berlinsky, "The End of Materialist Science" Forbes ASAP, December 2,
1996]
Not unreasonable, Brian. Indeed, it is compelling logic.
Jim