I would encourage Bertvan and others to check out this document
http://inet2.agiweb.org/agi/gap/legis106/id_update.html
Johnson's rethoric on priesthood
"Creation Myths and Priesthoods
Phillip Johnson explained that Darwinism is not so much a scientific theory
as a creation story. Every culture has a creation story jealously guarded
by a priesthood. The triumph of Darwinism is the replacement of one
priesthood -- the clergy -- with another of scientists and intellectuals, a
process now complete in Europe but still being contested in the US. According
to Johnson, the Darwinian creation story finds its essential support in
certain philosophical rules, the main one being that natural selection has
enormous creative power from bacteria to redwood trees to people. He
called it a marvelous story but asked what it has been seen to do? Change the
size of some finch beaks in the Galapagos Islands? He argued that it
has never been seen to create anything."
Johnson is trying to imply that Darwinism is not scientific but religious. He
is correct that for some Darwinism might have become a religion but Darwinism
is also a very good example of a scientific theory. As Lamoureux and others
have shown, Johnson's understanding of evolution and its mechanisms seem to
be severely lacking.
When confronted by Lamoureux, Johnson refused to discuss the scientific
merrits of Darwinism and the scientific arguments raised by Lamoureux.
Lamoureux has done an excellent job in this book. Not only has he shown that
the scientific arguments by Johnson are often erroneous but also by showing
that Johnson's confusion of naturalism with ontological naturalism makes for
a poor argument especially when it employs ad hominem arguments (pp. 33
Lamoureux)
Or Nancy Pearcey's non sequitors
"Confronting the Darwinian Worldview
Nancy Pearcey spoke on the worldview implications of Darwinism, noting that
many people apply Darwinism to every walk of life. She cited the book A
Natural History of Rape, which portrayed rape as an evolutionary adaptation
strategy rather than a pathology. She found this example helpful in spelling
out the logical consequences of Darwinism. The key battleground is education,
which in the hands of Darwinists is no longer a search for truth. Instead,
ideas are now merely problem-solving tools."
Rape might very well be an evolutionary adaptation strategy but that hardly
means that we need to accept rape in our society. If one uses such poor logic
then we should also embrace slavery based on the biblical record?
My question remains again: Is this rethoric all that ID has to offer? Where
is the research supporting their flailing theses?
Behe's IC has been shown to not be a reliable indicator of intelligent
design. But if IC is not a reliable indicator of ID then IC systems need to
be looked at one by one to determine if their ICness is evidence of an
intelligent designer that can exclude natural selection.
But Intelligent designers have been shown not to be eliminated by Dembski's
ID filter.
"ID identifies design, not the designer. This means that ID cannot exclude
natural forces as the intelligent agent of design.
Wesley Elsberry:
"The apparent, but unstated, logic behind the move from design to
agency can be given as follows:
1. There exists an attribute in common of some subset of objects
known to be designed by an intelligent agent.
2. This attribute is never found in objects known not to be designed
by an intelligent agent.
3. The attribute encapsulates the property of directed contingency
or choice.
4.For all objects, if this attribute is found in an object, then we
may conclude that the object was designed by an intelligent agent.
"This is an inductive argument. Notice that by the second step, one
must eliminate from consideration precisely those biological
phenomena which Dembski wishes to categorize. In order to conclude
intelligent agency for biological examples, the possibility that
intelligent agency is not operative is excluded a priori. One large
problem is that directed contingency or choice is not solely an
attribute of events due to the intervention of an intelligent agent.
The "actualization-exclusion-specification" triad mentioned above also
fits natural selection rather precisely. One might thus conclude that
Dembski's argument establishes that natural selection can be recognized
as an intelligent agent. "
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html"
Dembski has yet to specify evidence of CSI in nature and explain why apparant
and actual CSI exists and how they can be separated.
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/ae/dembski_wa.html
ID has yet to propose any pathways to structures that are considered
"intelligently designed". Since ID however is infered through the absence of
evidence not positive evidence for ID, ID really has little to add to science
other than to fill the category of "we don't know". Indeed as Wesley has so
carefully argued, a category of I don't know is a far better filter thatn
Dembski's design inference.
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html
"For comparison, I will propose an alternative explanatory filter and discuss
various points of difference with Dembski's. My alternative explanatory
filter works as follows. An event that cannot be statistically distinguished
from a random event is classified as due to chance. An event that conforms
to properties of known law-like physical processes is classified as being due
to regularity. An event that conforms to known properties of similar
events that are due to intelligent agents are classified as due to design.
Any event which has not yet been classified is now classified as being due to
an unknown cause. "
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