>
> > >>>Jack Sullivan: From The Emergence of Life On Earth, by Iris Fry,
> Rutgers
> > U. Press, 2000, p. 205:
> >
> > "Various arguments were brought in the past to counter the use of
> analogy in
> > promoting the idea of intelligent design. Among the best known were those
> > presented by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume in his
> > Dialogues concerning Natural Religion... Among other arguments, Hume
> > indicated the fallacy in inferring from a limited human mind and its
> ability
> > to produce artifacts the existence of an infinitely powerful divine entity.
> > Furthermore, the analogy between an intelligent human mind and an
> intelligent
> > supernatural designer, said Hume, cannot be tested empirically and thus
> > cannot be verified. (Hume 1966 [1779], pp. 15-25, 37-39).
> >
> > ****************************************
> > DNAunion: Yep, which does not go againt ID. If you will remember, ID does
> > not claim to know who the designer is or the attributes of the designer.
> > Unlike Creationism, ID is not locked into the designer being the
> supernatural
> > God of the Bible (or being only a single designer, etc.).
>
>How convenient for the IDiots. With no "G" word attached to their
>designer, they
>hope to get their creationistic (The designerdidit instead of Goddidit)
>program
>into the public school classroom despite the Constitution and the courts.
>It is
>only creationism with a coat of whitewash. Designer = God, or ET?
>
>I still agree with Hume (and Fry): with our limited knowledge and
>experience it
>is premature and presumptuous for us to start postulating disembodied
>deities or
>designers to explain what we either can't or choose not to. And since
>there is no
>verifiable evidence for a designer other that some weak and refutable
>arguments
>about things being supposedly "irreducibly complex," Hume (and Fry) are
>right on.
Chris
Besides, they lie. The very things they use to claim as evidence of design
can *only* be evidence of certain *kinds* of designer, with certain goals
(such as to fool rational humans into believing in naturalistic evolution).
Though the range of designers for any claimed designed thing is technically
infinite, it is not exhaustive. A designer who does not design life, for
example, is excluded. Further, they would not be devoting half of their
energy to attacking naturalism if they truly accepted the possibility that
there was a designer and that the designer was merely an alien race. There
may be a few design theorists who actually do accept such a possibility,
but none of them are Behe, Dembski, Johnson, or their gangs of followers.
Further, even if we take them at their word, the range of possible
"designers" becomes so broad that, as even Dembski half-way admits, it
could be nothing more than the forces of Nature, selecting and refining
from a vast array of naturally-occurring variations on the theme of
self-replicating bags of molecules. Thus, by rejecting purely naturalistic
evolution, and by the specific facts that they claim as evidence of design,
they *do* claim a designer of a certain very general kind: One that is not
cognitively undirected Nature, one that acts repeatedly *over* time (not
all at once, like the Deist God), and one that has been around for at least
3.8 billion years, and one who is constantly *tinkering* with his designs.
Further, that they use the term "designer" exclusively in the singular
indicates that they reject the aliens-did-it theory; their designer is
singular, not a member of a species of naturalistically-occurring beings
who may be using us as a science fair experiment or growing us for food.
The hypocrisy and dishonesty shines through, even at the level of mere
terminology.
Scientists, *as* scientists, would never state such a hypothesis in that
way. They would never *assume* that there was only one designer, because
that limits the category to single aliens doing it on their own -- and God
or some God-*like* (i.e., supernatural) being. Since whether a designed
thing was designed by one designer or by billions of designers working
together cannot be *empirically* determined by looking at the designed
things, no honest *scientist* would claim that there was *a* designer, but
rather that he had no idea whether the designed things were designed by one
or many. Indeed, a project as large as life on Earth might be guessed to be
the work of *many* beings, simply because it is such a large project.
Frankly, I'm going to have a hard time accepting their claims to neutrality
about who/what the designer is until they:
1. Clean up their terminology,
2. Clean up their scientific methodology,
3. Drop all the attacks on naturalism.
4. Drop the anti-scientific (in this context) attempts to promote
supernaturalism.
5. Clean up their epistemology
6. Cut *way* back on the rampant inversions of burdens of proof
7. Take Occam's Razor as more than an annoying thing their opponents bring up.
8. Accept the fact that there is no *empirical* way by means of which a
supernatural being could distinguish himself from a naturalistic being.
> > And from the same book you quoted from, from page 211:
> >
> > "My claim is that origin-of-life scientists, purposefully or inadvertently,
> > implicitly or explicitly, by the very act of conducting their research are
> > making a philosophical decision and taking a metaphysical stand. They
> commit
> > themselves to a picture of a natural world in which material processes of
> > self-organization could have produced life, and by doing so they reject the
> > contention of the new creationists that the "high information content"
> > embodied in living systems, including the most primitive, could have
> > originated only by an act of intelligence. ... I maintain that it is as a
> > result of their philosophical commitment to naturalism that researchers
> > logically insist on pursuing the study of the origin of life when no
> > satisfying solution to the problem has yet been found."
> >
>Jack
>Yep. It's called the scientific method. You check your Bibles and Behes at the
>lab door.
Chris
Besides, the epistemological light's better in the natural world. It's
something we *can* study. We have the epistemological means of doing so
because we *live* in the natural world. We *don't* live in any supernatural
world that we can demonstrably show the existence of via empirical means.
Supernatural designers are *not* something we can study, because we can't
get a hold on them to study them. Atoms and molecules and such *are* things
we can study. If it eventually turns out that they *can't* do what we think
they can do, then we'll have to go further afield, and start considering
aliens and such, because, at least in principle, *they* could be studied,
too. And, like us, they would face constraints that we can understand,
because, like us, they'd have to *understand* Nature (at least
superficially) to command it. God -- er, the Designer, would not have any
known constraints other than the laws of logic (which His very definition
violates in all mainstream forms).
Further, we could not know His purposes (which might totally invert the
sense of Pascal's wager and make all theists *wish* that they had been
atheists), but we *might* at least make *some* sensible hypotheses about
what aliens might seek in designing life on Earth (what purposes would be
met or promoted by taking 3.8 billion years to create a biosphere that they
could presumably create in a few years with some good technology, for example).
Of course, many scientists may be atheists, and some scientists even make
the mistake of claiming that scientific facts demonstrate general
philosophical claims such as atheism. This is a philosophical mistake.
Science does not rest on either theism or atheism *as such,* as is
demonstrated by the fact that some great scientists have also been theists.
What it does rest on is the idea that the Universe we are scientifically
studying is rationally knowable, sufficiently coherent as to be studied and
understood by scientific means. *If* there is some transcendental realm, it
is simply *irrelevant* to science and it can never be *made* relevant
(because, no matter *what* "miracles" and such happen, they can always be
more easily attributed to naturalistic beings than to supernatural ones).
Since it is irrelevant, scientists, if they are theists, are wise to leave
their theism at the door, along with their copies of the Koran or the works
of Anton LaVey.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Dec 27 2000 - 18:49:37 EST