On Sat, 19 Jun 1999 22:34:40 -0700, Brian D Harper wrote:
[...]
>SJ>Therefore, if there is no real limitation of science to study the *effect*
>>of an Intelligent Designer on the natural world, but Intelligent Design continues
>>to be ruled out of consideration anyway, then what is really being maintained
>>is not methodological naturalism but *metaphysical* naturalism.
BH>Yes, you are correct. The instruments and methods of science could detect the
>effects that an Intelligent Designer has on the natural world.
Thanks to Brian for this affirmation.
BH>Let's take
>it from there. Suppose we observe some pattern in the natural world and
>hypothesize that this is an effect of an Intelligent Designer.
Let there be mo misunderstanding ID does not just claim that "some
pattern in the natural world...is an effect of an Intelligent Designer." ID
claims that the *whole* "natural world...is an effect of an Intelligent
Designer"!
However, materialist-naturalists can still deny design by claiming that
natural processes alone are sufficient to account for the evident design
of the living world. This would still not rule out design, but it would
not establish it either. What the ID movement is trying to do is to establish
that there are some natural processes that *only* Intelligent Design could
plausibly explain.
BH>What next?
What will happen if "Intelligent Design" can be established scientifically is
unclear. No one in the ID movement thinks it will make everybody become
Christians. It might even help New Age and pantheistic type religions. In
pre-Darwinian England and USA, a lot of intellectuals believed in design
but were Deists. But there is no doubt that the re-establishment of design
would also help Christianity enormously.
It would also help society. It is pretty clear that materialistic Western
society is is deep trouble. Having been an atheist in my teens and still
remembering vividly the sense of hopelessness that brought, I am not
surprised that young people who are taught in school that they are just
cosmic accidents turn to drugs, violence, murder and suicide.
It would also help science. No longer need scientists feel they had to deny
design to do good science, as Darwinist `thought-police' like Crick try to
maintain:
"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not
designed, but rather evolved." (Crick F., "What Mad Pursuit,' 1990, p138).
Finally, if "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist"
(Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," 1991, p6), then the re-establishment
of design would make atheism even less intellectually fulfilling than it is
now!
Steve
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"...chance has no power to do anything because it simply is not anything. It
has no power because it has no being...Chance is not an entity. It is not a
thing that has power to affect other things. It is no thing. To be more
precise, it is nothing. Nothing cannot do something. Nothing is not. It has
no `isness.' Chance has no isness. I was technically incorrect even to say
that chance is nothing. Better to say that chance is not. What are the
chances that chance can do anything? Not a chance. It has no more chance
to do something than nothing has to do something." (Sproul R.C., "Not a
Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology," Baker:
Grand Rapids MI, 1994, p6)
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