On Fri, 14 Aug 1998 08:56:53 -0700, Pim van Meurs wrote:
>SJ>But so blinded is Gould by his materialistic-naturalistic
>metaphysical assumptions that it escapes his notice that built-in
>capacity for the future is the mark of far-sighted *intelligent design*
>not a blind watchmaker.
PM>Is it?
Yes:
"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which
Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for
the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no
purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. IT DOES NOT
PLAN FOR THE FUTURE. IT HAS NO VISION, NO
FORESIGHT, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of
watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker." (Dawkins R., "The
Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p5. My
emphasis.)
PM>The arguments are both quite convincing, only with the added
>problem of requiring an intelligent design. Absent any evidence
>one might wonder why one has to invoke such 'intelligent design'?
See above. There is "evidence" of planning for the future. This is a
*prediction* of Intelligent Design theory and a *problem to be
explained away* by Darwinian theory.
PM>After all, after the fact one can always invoke such argument
>with little predicting power.
You cut out the bit about "Darwin" and "generations of students" in
Gould's classes all wrongly "predicting" that lungs evolved from gills:
"Many readers will be puzzled at this point, as I have perplexed
several generations of students by presenting the argument in this
form. What can be wrong with Darwin's claim? The two organs are
homologous, right? Right. Terrestrial vertebrates evolved from fishes,
right? Yes again. So lungs must have evolved from swim bladders,
right? Wrong, dead wrong. Swim bladders evolved from lungs.
(Gould S.J., "Full of Hot Air," in "Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in
Natural History," Jonathan Cape: London, 1993, pp112-113)
If Darwinism has such great "predicting power" compared to
Intelligent Design (otherwise what is your point?), why do all the
Darwinists get this order wrong first off?
PM>As a scientific explanation, intelligent design loses on many
>fronts. But it does make for an imaginative explanation though.
Pim, we've been through all this before. As I have pointed out to you
many, many times, "Intelligent design" is not even *eligible as a
candidate* "scientific explanation" under the current ruling
materialist-naturalist philosophical orthodoxy. Intelligent Design is
excluded as a "scientific explanation" *apriori* by materialists:
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common
sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between
science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of
the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to
fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of
the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so
stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to
materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science
somehow compel us to accept a material explanation for the
phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that WE ARE FORCED BY
OUR A PRIORI ADHERENCE TO MATERIAL CAUSES to create
an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce
material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how
mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute,
for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." (Lewontin R.,
"Billions and Billions of Demons," review of "The Demon-Haunted
World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," by Carl Sagan, New York
Review, January 9, 1997, p31. Emphasis mine)
On Fri, 14 Aug 1998 09:00:18 -0700, Pim van Meurs wrote:
>SJ>But as Denton shows, redundancy is a major feature of both
>intelligent design and nature:
PM>Indeed. So why the need to invoke intelligent design when there
>is no reason to do so ?
Denton's argument is that the evidence of "nature" is that "there" *is*
"reason to do so".
PM>After all nature itself is quite capable to generate what we see
>and we have yet to see 'intelligent design'.
This is just begging the question, ie. assuming the conclusion in the
premises:
"Petitio Principii (begging the question) This is an argument where
the conclusion is sneaked into the premises....It is a circular
argument, where the conclusion actually becomes a premise. If you
start out with the conclusion as the first premise, it really doesn't
matter what the second premise is, you can still reach the conclusion
you want. We call this "begging the question," because the very
question being asked is given the desired answer before any reasoning
is done." (Geisler N.L. & Brooks R.M, "Come, Let Us Reason: An
Introduction to Logical Thinking," 1990, p100)
We do not *know* that "nature itself is quite capable to generate
what we see". You only *assume* it on naturalistic philosophical first
principles. And as for "we have yet to see 'intelligent design'", we see
it all the time in our own plans and actions.
And in any event, except for the most trivial examples of evolution,
they are as invisible as creation:
"These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and
irreversible. It is as impossible to turn a land vertebrate into a fish as
it is to effect the reverse transformation. The applicability of the
experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes
is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved,
which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter...
Experimental evolution deals of necessity with only the simplest
levels of the evolutionary process, sometimes called microevolution."
(Dobzhansky T., "On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and
Anthropology," Part I, "Biology," American Scientist, Vol. 45, No. 5,
December 1957, p388).
"Moreover, and with complete generality-the "paradox of the visibly
irrelevant" in my title we may say that any change measurable at all
over the few years of an ordinary scientific study must be occurring
far too rapidly to represent ordinary rates of evolution in the fossil
record....if evolution is fast enough to be discerned by our
instruments in just a few years-that is, substantial enough to stand out
as a genuine and directional effect above the random fluctuations of
nature's stable variation and our inevitable errors of measurement-
then such evolution is far too fast to serve as an atom of steady
incrementation in a paleontological trend. Thus, if we can measure it
at all (in a few years), it is too powerful to be the stuff of life's
history." (Gould S.J., "The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant,"
Natural History, December 1997/January 1998, Vol. 106, No. 11,
p64)
PM>It cannot be observed, it cannot be predicted but hey, it only
>requires a little bit of faith to invoke the tooth fairy explanation. It
makes for interesting stories but poor science.
A good definition of Darwinist macro-evolution! Thanks.
PM>After all let's assume there is 'intelligent design'.
Which just further confirm my point that the apriori scientific position
is that "there is" *not* "intelligent design". And the very fact that you
put it 'intelligent design 'between quotation marks shows that you are
still not really assuming that "there is intelligent design".
PM>Who is the designer?
For scientific purposes it is not necessary to identify "the designer" to
accept design. Archaeologists may never know who designed an
artifact but they accept it *was* intelligently designed:
"Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the
role of designer. We can determine that a system was designed by
examining the system itself, and we can hold the conviction of design
much more strongly than a conviction about the identity of the
designer. In several of the examples above, the identity of the
designer is not obvious. We have no idea who made the contraption
in the junkyard, or the vine trap, or why. Nonetheless, we know that
all of these things were designed because of the ordering of
independent components to achieve some end." (Behe M.J.,
"Darwin's Black Box," 1996, p196)
"The scientific community contains many excellent scientists who
think that there is something beyond nature, and many excellent
scientists who do not. How then will science "officially" treat the
question of the identity of the designer? Will biochemistry textbooks
have to be written with explicit statements that "God did it"? No. The
question of the identity of the designer will simply be ignored by
science. The history of science is replete with examples of basic-but-
difficult questions being put on the back burner. For example,
Newton declined to explain what caused gravity, Darwin offered no
explanation for the origin of vision or life, Maxwell refused to specify
a medium for light waves once the ether was debunked, and
cosmologists in general have ignored the question of what caused the
Big Bang. Although the fact of design is easily seen in the
biochemistry of the cell, identifying the designer by scientific methods
might be extremely difficult. In the same way, Newton could easily
observe gravity, but specifying its cause lay centuries in the future.
When a question is too difficult for science to deal with immediately,
it is happily forgotten while other, more accessible questions are
investigated. If philosophy and theology want to take a crack at the
question in the meantime, we scientists should wish them well, but
reserve the right to jump back into the conversation when science has
something more to add." (Behe M.J., "Darwin's Black Box," 1996,
p251)
PM>Another species from outside our worlds ?
Thanks. This is a good example. If a message was received
from "another species from outside our worlds" it would not be
necessary to identify who the sender was to accept that it was
intelligent:
"The inference to design can be made with a high degree of
confidence even when the designer is very remote. Archeologists
digging for a lost city might come across square stones, buried
dozens of feet under the earth, with pictures of camels and cats,
griffins and dragons. Even if that were all they found, they would
conclude that the stones had been designed But we can go even
further than that. I was a teenager when I saw 2001: A Space
Odyssey....There was one scene, however, that I did get quite easily.
The first space flight had landed on the moon, and an astronaut was
going out to explore. In his meanderings he came across a smoothly
shaped obelisk that towered against the moonscape. I, the astronaut,
and the rest of the audience immediately understood, with no words
necessary, that the object was designed-that some intelligent agent
had been to the moon and formed the obelisk. Later the movie
showed us that there were aliens on the planet Jupiter, but we
couldn't tell that from the obelisk. For all we knew by looking at the
object itself, it might-have been designed by space aliens, angels,
humans from the past (whether Russians or inhabitants of the lost
civilization of Atlantis) who could fly through space, or even by one
of the other astronauts on the flight (who, as a practical joke, might
have stowed it away and put it on the moon ahead of the astronaut
who later discovered it). If the plot had actually developed along any
of these lines, the audience would not be able to say the plot was
contradicted by the appearance of the obelisk. If the movie had
contrived to assert that the obelisk was not designed, however, the
audience would have hooted till the projectionist turned the film off."
(Behe M.J., "Darwin's Black Box," 1996, p197)
PM>The Christian God ? Or any of the many other Gods ? They all
>make equally well candidates of this 'intelligent designer', or should
>that be equally poor?
Intelligent design theory is not necessarily religious. One could accept
intelligent design without worshipping the Designer. For example,
Michael Denton and Fred Hoyle do this.
Nevetheless to Christians the Intelligent Designer is *by definition*
the same one true Creator-God that they worship. But that does not
mean that He may also be the same supreme God that some other
religions worship. For example, St Paul affirmed that the Unknown
God of the Greeks was the Christian God (Ac 17:23).
On Wed, 5 Aug 1998 09:17:58 -0700, Pim van Meurs wrote:
PM>Yep I am a believer although I do like to play devil's advocate
>every now and then.
In view of the above, are you being *serious* in arguing against Intelligent
Design, or are you just playing the "devil's advocate"?
Steve
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3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ senojes@hotmail.com
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
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