Intelligent Design

I now and then see it claimed that, among its various contributions, one key benefit of Intelligent Design is that it poses a direct challenge to naturalism, or materialism. The problem I have with this sort of talk is that one of the key planks of ID is a kind of metaphysical neutrality – the recognition that any designer or designers responsible for this or that particular design in the natural world can, at least in principle, be (for lack of a better-word) “non-supernatural”.

This is claimed often enough by Dembski, Behe and company, but my favorite quote on this front comes from a post right on this site: ID’s metaphysical openness about the nature of nature entails a parallel openness about the nature of the designer. Is the designer an intelligent alien, a computional simulator (a la THE MATRIX), a Platonic demiurge, a Stoic seminal reason, an impersonal telic process, …, or the infinite personal transcendent creator God of Christianity? The empirical data of nature simply can’t decide.

The problem is that if this is accurate – and frequent, consistent attestation by a number of prominent ID proponents seems to indicate as much – then it seems to me false to think of ID in and of itself as representing a challenge to either naturalism or materialism. Indeed, ID – even if ID inferences are not only strong, but ultimately true – seems entirely compatible with both positions, at least in principle. But I think it’s possible to recognize that, while at the same time explaining how ID can nevertheless represent a challenge to these positions, at least in a qualified manner.

So, let’s get right on that. The explanation I have in mind is simple, but important.

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(Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 found here.) Richard Hoover Despite NASA’s attempt to “control the narrative” on ET, it was Hoover’s paper in the Journal of Cosmology that received 18,000,000 hits in two weeks, making his ET debut a case of “going viral”. Even the staid SPIE where Hoover’s annual conference on Astrobiology publishes his work as conference proceedings, (and charges a cool $18 for each downloaded PDF of Hoover’s earlier publications on microbial meteoritic fossils), were so happy with the income they want to advertise the 14th annual conference this year. NASA, on the other hand, initially said some rather uncomplimentary things about their star scientist, and then has gone strangely quiet. My biology colleagues in Read More ›

An interesting research paper was recently published in the Journal Astrobiology by Gayle K. Philip and Stephen J. Freeland, which asks, “Did Evolution Select a Nonrandom Alphabet of Amino Acids?” Read More>>>

In yesterday’s CNN blog evolutionist Karl Giberson bemoans the influence of religious thinking in beliefs about origins and then, in evolutionary typical fashion, hypocritically mandates evolution’s own religious beliefs.  Read more

I watched the Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig debate today. I have to say, Sam Harris delivered a great argument championing deism. However, when I remembered that Harris was supposed to be arguing for atheism, I realized that Craig had it beat completely.
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It began practically as soon as Origin of Species was published. In the second half of the nineteenth century and even more so in the twentieth century, questioning evolution was cast as anti science. From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense. If evolution is an obvious and undeniable scientific fact, then is not skepticism tantamount to an attack on science itself? But once again, evolution’s criticism is more of a reflection of evolution itself.  Read more

It was the best of times, and the worst of times. NASA was making new discoveries every day, discoveries that would change the course of science forever, and yet, they could not publish them for fear that it would destroy their government mandate, their public image. The discovery of microfossils on comets that made the news a month ago cannot be told without understanding the history of extra-terrestrials (ET) and NASA. It is a curious tale, with Darwinists embarassed and Designers triumphant except when the press show up, and it may still have even more twists to come, but the saga needs to be told for the sake of our children, and their children’s children who may look up through Read More ›

Here and below, Jeff Brown, offers his thoughts on the new pastiche religion that a writer at New Scientist would like to invent.

Brown, a pastor in Nuremberg, Germany, holds a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology. Read More ›

At UD there has been much discussion about Thomism, final causes, and the like. This stuff has been around for centuries, but we have never seen books from people like Barbara Forrest with titles like, “Thomists and Final-Cause Advocates Want to Impose a Theocracy and Destroy Science!” But we have seen such outrage and irrational screaming about ID theory. Why is this? The answer is simple and obvious. ID theory is rigorous. It’s based on the hard sciences of information theory, computation, probabilistic mathematics, and the limits of chemical reactions, stochastic processes, and the Darwinian mechanism to produce what we see in nature — in particular, information-rich systems with the requisite hardware and software. Let’s face it, the reason ID Read More ›

Mazur, author of Altenberg 16, interviews him here.

On the whole, he emerges as a dense, wealthy ignoramus outside his own field and cultural interests. He has a one track mind, backs down when confronted with evidence, then just picks himself up and gets back on the same track again, as if he hadn’t heard. Here’s a snippet or two: Read More ›

The contest was judged here April 16, 2011. Here, a commenter asked O’Leary,As you’ve obviously got your finger on the pulse of the lay of the land and people trust and know you sufficiently well to confide in you such thoughts I wonder if you’d care to proffer a guess as to the time-line for the fall of Darwinism, based on the relative frequency of such encounters with Darwin-doubters?? Commenter JemimaRacktouey is too kind; most people who talk to me just want to bend a pliable ear, and in my trade one learns to just listen. But she has a really good idea there, so I thought, let’s throw it open: What do you see as the timeline for Darwinism Read More ›

How can someone who says, almost proudly, that ethics is an illusion of the genes mesh with Christianity, a religion that puts obedience to God’s word and will right at the heart? In fact, it is not as difficult as it seems, so long as you remember that I am offering a naturalistic account of ethics, and Christianity is a supernatural religion. I am saying that if you ask, “Take God out of the equation and can you still get ethics?” my answer is, “Yes, you can, if you are talking about normative ethics, but when you enter the metaethical realm you find that it is all biology and psychology, with no further meaning. The thought that there is something Read More ›

Some years ago I read a book called “Lying for God”. It was a systematic emotionally laden deconstruction of YEC. I wondered with disbelief at the time, whether people who are YECs really would knowingly lie to promote their understanding of the world. That was a long time ago, and since then I have frequently come across many people who spout what seem to me to be lies to uphold all sorts of worldviews. It was with this background that I was intrigued by a headline in New Scientist “Biologists create self replicating RNA molecule“. This piece of writing is unashamedly designed to promote the RNA world wishful thinking hypothesis of the spontaneous generation of life. The post describes how Read More ›

In a recent and very courteously worded article entitled, St. Thomas and the Inadequacy of Intelligent Design, Professor Beckwith summarizes his main beef with ID as follows:

According to Dembski, we discover design in nature after we have eliminated chance and law… Design, therefore, is not immanent in nature. It is something that is imposed on nature by someone or something outside it.

This means that for Dembski as well as other ID advocates, nature’s order, including its laws and principles, need not require a mind behind it except for in the few instances where the explanatory filter allows one to detect design.

Beckwith sees this line of argument as dangerous, because its case for a Designer of Nature is merely probabilistic rather than certain, and thus vulnerable to being falsified by future scientific discoveries. He later contrasts this view which he ascribes to Professor Dembski with his own theological position, which he believes rests upon a more secure metaphysical footing:

For the Thomist, and for many other Christians, law and chance do not eliminate design. “Design” does not replace efficient and material causes in nature when the latter two appear impotent as explanations (i.e., Dembski’s “gaps”). Rather, efficient and material causes require final causes… What is a final cause? It is a thing’s purpose or end… For the natural processes – even if they are complete and exhaustive – seem to work for an end, and that end is its final cause. This is why, in his famous Five Ways (or arguments) to show God’s existence, St. Thomas includes as a fifth way an argument from the universe’s design as a whole, appealing to those scientific laws that make motion possible…

Here are two quick questions I’d like to ask Professor Beckwith.

1. Which would you regard as the best piece of evidence for God’s existence:

(a) the existence of meaningful instructions in the natural world;
(b) the occurrence of end-oriented processes in the natural world; or
(c) random behavior taking place in the natural world?

2. Which gap do you think is greater:

(i) the gap between (a) and (b), or
(ii) the gap between (b) and (c)?
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