Reflectorites
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 22:36:27 -0400 (EDT), Keith Littleton wrote:
As this is my first response to one of Keith's posts, a welcome to the
Reflector from me to him.
Maybe Keith would tell us a bit about himself?
[...]
>SJ>Materialistic-naturalistic science's (NS) basic
>>assumption is that prior to the advent of humans
>>there were only unintelligent causes.
KL>Does the chief designer have to be intelligent being at
>all? Long before intelligent design was formulated people
>proposed "creative forces" being behind evolution or the
>development of life. These "creative forces" are not a
>well-defined being, e.g. God, but indefinable and
>unnamable basis of all being. A geologist friend, noting
>how the vast majority of intelligent design proponents
>inevitably advocate our God as being the chief designer
>behind intelligent design, see the Dembski quote at the
>end of the article as an example he gave me, half
>jokingly suggest that he should push his own version of
>"intelligent design" in which it is simply an expression
>of the Tao.
At its most basic, ID only claims there is evidence of intelligent cause in the
effects of nature. It might be possible to within ID maintain that the
designer was not a personal being (e.g. Hoyle's "Intelligent Universe").
KL>I find it interesting how the chief designer who is
>responsible for intelligent design can be argued
>to be any of a number of beings, e.g. Krishna,
>Yahweh, God, Allah, and creative forces, e.g. the
>Tao, yet Johnson already knows that our Christian
>God is the chief designer. Go see, "Re: The
>Wedge of Truth : Splitting the Foundations of
>Naturalism by Phillip E. Johnson" in which the
>following part of a review is quoted:
>
> "In the end, Johnson prophetically concludes
> that the walls of naturalism will fall and
> that the Christian gospel must play a vital
> role in building a new foundation for thinking
> --not just about science and religion but about
> everything that gives human life hope and meaning."
>
>Does Johnson have scientific proof that the chief
>designer is our Christian God?
Johnson and I, as Christians, *assume* that the Designer is the Christian
God. But we cannot *prove* it.
KL>I imagine that Muslims,
>Jews, Taoists, Buddhists, and people of other religions
>have something also pertinent to say about the role
>that their religions have building this new foundation
>for thinking. Or are non-Christians excluded from
>Johnson's grand scheme of re-educating the world
>to give "human life hope and meaning?"
No. Advocates of these other religions can use ID to argue for their point
of view just like Johnson and I can argue for ours.
KL>The one that bothers me, is that intelligent design
>seems to assume that biological systems have intelligent
>design, while non-biological systems are not expected
>to show intelligent design. If intelligent design
>is real, then both non-biological and biological
>systems should both show evidence of detectable
>intelligent design. A person should find intelligent
>design in sequence stratigraphy and plate tectonics,
>as well as DNA and finch beaks. The other explanation
>is that Old Earth creationists find their religious
>beliefs and morally threatened by evolution, but
>not by billion year old Earth and plate tectonics.
>Thus, they feel a need to attack evolution, but
>not geology.
ID does not claim that "non-biological systems are not expected to show
intelligent design". Some IDers like Hugh Ross have focussed on the
evidence of the finetuning of the universe for life to develop a design
argument. But ID's primary focus is on biological systems.
>SJ>ID's basic assumption is that prior to the advent of
>>humans: 1) there were *both* unintelligent and
>>intelligent causes; and 2) the latter are, at least
>>in principle, empirically detectable.
KL>If intelligent design is more than a means of attacking
>evolution, than it should be applicable to nonbiological
>systems, not just the origin of the universe, as well as
>biological systems. A should person be able to detect
>intelligent design in geological systems, as well as
>biological systems. One difference between geology and
>biology, is that either side of the debate cannot use
>the jargon and mathematics of information theory
>to create scientific-sounding technobabble.
See above. ID's primary focus is on biological systems.
KL>(How many non-specialists actually understand any of the
>information theory arguments being debated? How many
>really care, just as long as they have specialists and
>scientific-sounding arguments which justify what they
>believe to true, both anti-evolutionist and evolutionist,
>is true and the are being "scientific" in their beliefs?)
I am not sure what Keith's point is here? Prominent scientists and
information theorists who write for the general public presumably must
think that non-specialists can understand the gist of their arguments.
KL>In something as comprehensive of the intelligent design
>of the universe, why should it be only detectable in
>biological systems?
See above.
>>Therefore, ID's research program will be to look for
>>emprical evidence of intelligent causation prior to
>>~100 kya. The obvious place to look is where
>>NS is having major problems with explaining the
>>evidence.
KL>Again, the age shouldn't matter. In fact, the
>younger the age the more data and chronological
>control that a person has which constrains the
>data. For example, the quality and quantity
>of information available for evolutionary events
>in the Wisconsinan Stage of the Pleistocene is
>many orders of magnitude greater than for the
>Cambrian Explosion. In case of the latter, it
>would a lot harder to falsify intelligent design.
>because the data is far more ambiguous and
>fragmentary than in the former. The farther
>a person looks back in time, the easier it is going
>to explain a particular theory in terms of the
>available data and the harder it will be to falsify
>it or any other theory conclusively. For example,
>look at the debate about a meteorite impact causing
>the Permian extinction versus the debate about the
>cause of the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous
>and the sketchy data available about the former
>and the abundance of data about the latter.
My point about the "age" is that no one denies intelligent causation after
the origin of modern humans.
In any event, all the major design-building occurred well before the origin
of humans.
KL>If one wanted to detect intelligent design, it
>seems like Cenozoic foraminifera would be better
>at testing it than soft-bodied Cambrian faunas.
>In fact, the younger the time period, the better
>the database to work from and the better one can
>falsify a hypothesis. This might be the very
>reason that intelligent design people concentrate
>in the Cambrian and Precambrian. In the younger
>strata, there might be too many embarrassing facts
>that can falsify something that they want to
>be able to argue is true.
If Keith wants to mount a design argument based on "Cenozoic
foraminifera" that would be fine by me!
KL>[SIDE NOTE: A person can explain the Cambrian biomeres
>in same way that the proponents of intelligent design
>explain Cambrian Explosion. In the biomeres, fully
>developed families of trilobite appear out of nowhere
>at each extinction event without any antecedents. I
>have yet to read of any person attributing that to the
>cause. Geogres Cuvier likely would had he known about
>them. Georges Cuvier would also be very happy with how
>the proponents of intelligent design interpret the
>Cambrian Explosion. :-) ]
[...]
Again, I am not quite sure what Keith's point is here. ID makes no claims
about the Cambrian Explosion, except in the sense that the Cambrian
Explosion is a problem for Darwinism, which is the main naturalistic
competitor to ID (see tagline).
Steve
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"Eldredge and Gould certainly would agree that some very important gaps
really are due to imperfections in the fossil record. Very big gaps, too. For
example the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are
the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups.
And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the
very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there,
without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of
sudden planting has delighted creationists." (Dawkins R., "The Blind
Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.229).
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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