Intelligent Design

I’ve been thinking about the God of the Gaps argument today.  Proponents of naturalism (of both the philosophical and methodological stripe) use this argument in an attempt to discredit design theory as a means of explaining the physical world.  The argument usually goes something like this:  There are many things we formerly did not understand, such as the law of gravitation.  We might have been content to sit back and say “We don’t understand gravitation and we never will; God must have done it so there is no sense in inquiring further.”  But we were not content to rest in our ignorance, and scientists like Newton kept at it until they discovered the law of gravity.  There only seemed to be a gap that we needed to fill with God.  Similarly today, we can be assured that science will eventually fill in the remaining gaps of our scientific knowledge.  Thus, there is never a need to resort to “God did it” as an explanation for any phenomenon.  Read More ›

The Demiurge appears in Plato’s Timaeus as a human craftsman ([correction]demos = common people; ergo = work; hence a human craftsman). But it is interesting to note what David Hume does to the demiurge. Hume in Dialogues, through his character Philo, attacks the notion that there might be an analogy between the designer of nature and human intelligence. However, in section VII, Philo calls for a belief in copulation and generation from Hesiod’s Theogeny and Plato’s Timaeus. In other words, Hume quotes the Timaeus, in which the demiurge appears, to attack the idea that there is an analogy to human intelligence from design in nature – an apparent contradiction. David Sedley comments in Creationism and its critics in Antiquity that the demiurge should be interpreted metaphorically and gives the game away – as does Erasmus Darwin in Zoonomia. Read More ›

 I will be opening the 2009 series of lectures on ‘Darwin Reconsidered’ at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture on Tuesday, 20th January, at 5 pm. My topic is ‘Darwin’s Original Sin: The Rejection of Theology’s Claims to Knowledge’. You can find out more about the series here. The talk will deal with the issues of theodicy that I have been raising in this blog.  

In this instalment, I try to make the connection between theodicy and ID tighter, not only to provide some deeper intellectual grounding but also to make quite plain why even religious people have not been rushing to support ID.

Read More ›

Some of you may know that last year I staged a play at the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, which brought back Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin – who were both born on 12th February 1809 — to reflect on what has taken place since their time. Denyse O’Leary kindly mentioned the play here. It takes the form of a talk show, with all the show biz that entails. At the end Lincoln and Darwin were asked whether they wished to stay in the present or return to the 19th century. One stays and the other goes – but which does which?   The play’s running time is 80 minutes and it covers a host of issues common Read More ›

The BBC is getting excited about Darwin’s 200th birthday with a whole series of programmes on Darwin and evolution. Although a national broadcaster, there doesn’t seem much attempt at balance, preferring for instance to talk about creationists rather than talk to creationists (again – intelligent design is lumped in with creationism). This was the case with the Beyond Belief programme broadcast last night on BBC radio 4 (5th Jan 2009 16:30pm) Beyond Belief in which three Darwinists were brought on from Judaism, Islam and Christianity to tell us what they think creationists and intelligent design supporters believe. Alister McGrath spoke for the Christian faith, informing us that Protestant Christian creationists were in a sort of holy huddle mentality afraid of Read More ›

Read More ›

A friend on his lunch break sends me this – the latest nonsense from “evolutionary psychology”:

Google News Alert

Bruce Schneier: More on the Broad View of Security CSO – Framingham,MA,USAFor example, a lot of the seemingly irrational security trade-offs that the behavioral economists have documented can be explained by the evolutionary …See all stories on this topic

Have you heard? Gossip can be good for you Chicago Tribune – United States Gossiping about neighbors, co-workers and, increasingly, celebrities all grows from the same evolutionary root: survival. Back in the day, if you didn’t …See all stories on this topic

Does religion provide an evolutionary advantage? Science a Gogo – USA He found persuasive evidence from a variety of domains – including neuroscience, economics, psychology and sociology – that religious beliefs and religious …See all stories on this topic

Look at that middle story: I wonder whether a study detailing how gossip isn’t good for you – relative to minding your own business and getting on with the job at hand – would see the light of day … ?

One thing to note about EP is its utter predictability. It always seems to be about whatever foolishness is noised about in pop culture. If the talk show circuit likes it, it is definitely science. And who could possibly argue with that? Read More ›

I haven’t been following this debate at Opposing Views although I was invited to participate and am in frequent contact with those people writing for the ID side.  I believe the debate is closed now.  I declined the invitation because I thought it would simply be a rehash of all the old arguments and nobody ever really wins.   The argument from design, unlike what some people here have claimed, is as old as Plato and Aristotle.  It predates the birth of Christ by several centuries and probably much more.  Evidence of order and design in the universe is abundant and clear to any thinking individual and people have been thinking for a very long time.   The appearance of design is abundant and clear but the nature of the designer is not.  Thus in order to explain the where, why, and how of the design a plethora of creator mythologies have been made up out of whole cloth.  The notion that the modern ID movement is creation science in cheap tuxedo is a lie.  Creation science is a relative newcomer on the scene.   ID doesn’t try to find material evidence for and explanations of things like a global flood, a young earth, the parting of the Red Sea, people turning into pillars of salt, or any of that stuff.

Anyhow, all this is evident in the debate. You see our side is all about math, science, logic, and reason. The opposing side is all about accusing us of being nothing but god botherers wanting to get copies of the holy bible placed in all public school classrooms. The usual suspects and the usual arguments…

Read More ›

In response to an earlier post of mine, DaveScot kindly pointed out this website’s definition of ID. The breadth of the definition invites scepticism: ID is defined as the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. But is there really some single concept of ‘intelligence’ that informs designs that are generated by biological, human, and possibly even mechanical means? Why would anyone think such a thing in the first place? Yet, it is precisely this prospect that makes ID intellectually challenging – for both supporters and opponents.

It’s interesting that not everything is claimed to be intelligently designed. This keeps the phrase ‘intelligent design’ from simply collapsing into ‘design’ by implying a distinction between the intelligence and that on which it acts to produce design. So, then, what exactly is this ‘intelligence’ that stands apart from matter? Well, the most obvious answer historically is a deity who exists in at least a semi-transcendent state. But how can you get any scientific mileage from that?

Enter theodicy, which literally means (in Greek) ‘divine justice’. It is now a field much reduced from its late 17^th century heyday. Theodicy exists today as a boutique topic in philosophy and theology, where it’s limited to asking how God could allow so much evil and suffering in the world. But originally the question was expressed much more broadly to encompass issues that are nowadays more naturally taken up by economics, engineering and systems science – and the areas of biology influenced by them: How does the deity optimise, given what it’s trying to achieve (i.e. ideas) and what it’s got to work with (i.e. matter)? This broader version moves into ID territory, a point that has not escaped the notice of theologians who nowadays talk about theodicy.

Read More ›

I just got through reading Slaughter of the Dissidents, and I must say, it is fantastic. I was a little skeptical at first, simply because the title of the book was so extreme. After reading it, I still think that the title is extreme (there are real slaughters of people happening in different parts of the world), but I can see why it was chosen – the extent to which Darwin skeptics are being persecuted in academic environments is simply astonishing.
Read More ›

In The Ottawa Citizen, Robert Sibley advises

Oh? In the ascendant? In the legacy mainstream media, maybe, but not in the world at large.

In fact, this year – for the first time in a long while – I noticed a decisive pushback against their efforts to stop people from saying “Merry Christmas!”

Be a Christian, don’t be a Christian, … it’s your choice. But December 25 is Christmas Day. In Canada, both December 25 and December 26 are statutory holidays – and pretty popular ones, too, so you need to keep that fact in mind if you intend to try litigation. No one is going to thank you for forcing them to work on one of those days, if they are not in an essential service field.

Anyway, I don’t think the new atheists’ movement is really going anywhere because what they don’t have is any important new ideas.

I mean, once you get past Richard Dawkins explaining to Ben Stein in Expelled that space aliens might have created life – but not God – or Lee Smolin’s zillions of flopped universes, theirs are not new ideas that we can compare with, say, the discovery of neuroplasticity in the brain.

Now THAT was a discovery – oh my heavens, what a discovery! Just think of all the old people who realize that they are not consigned to involuntary senility after all! But that discovery did not help materialist atheism one bit. Neuroplasticity makes way more sense if your immaterial mind is real and directs your brain.

Which reminds me: What discoveries would have helped materialist atheism? Here are some:

Read More ›

At very small scales, the disturbances caused by the random motion of molecules in a liquid is called Brownian motion. This is why bacterial flagella must spin at such high RsPM (Revolutions Per Minute, not Revolution Per Minutes). They must overcome the random motion of the particles in their watery environment. The propeller on the back of a motor boat does not have to deal with Brownian motion. In fluid dynamics there is Reynolds number, with which we must deal in aerospace R&D. What this basically says is that we cannot make small models of an aircraft flying at low altitudes and extrapolate this to large aircraft flying at high altitudes, or vice versa. The leading edge of an aircraft Read More ›