Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Ken Miller the Closet ID Supporter Backpedals and Dissembles

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Thanks to Reed Cartwright at Panda’s Thumb for pointing out Miller’s lame response.

The question and answer as Bill Dembski was given by someone in the audience recalling it wasn’t an unfair paraphrase. The verbage was different but the points were essentially the same.

And whether Ken Miller wants to admit it or not a unverse that was designed so that the evolution of life was inevitable fits just fine into the big ID tent. Miller’s claim that ID supporters all think that constant meddling by a creator is required to make evolution happen is just a big, bold lie made up so that Ken can exclude himself from the tent. Shame on you Ken. Even though you lie about us we welcome you to the tent anyhow.

Bill Dembski’s blogczar for one (me) doesn’t think the creator meddled. Obviously Bill Dembski, the go-to guy for all things ID, must respect my viewpoint if he saw fit to let me moderate his weblog and use it for a soapbox for my front-loaded corner of the big tent. I happen to think the best explanation is that the life that appeared on the earth billions of years ago was placed here by an intelligent agency (whose character is unknown to me) and that first life was preprogrammed to evolve and diversify along a more or less set path from single undifferentiated cell to everything today, much as a hen’s egg is preprogrammed to evolve and diversify from a single cell into a chicken. No meddling required. So there. Now be a man and take back your lie about what all ID proponents believe about constant meddling.

Comments

EJ Klone

Well, you're dead wrong about Miller not misrepresenting me. You obviously didn't read what Miller actually said about intervention:

They think constant intervention on the part of the creator is required to bring about the first life, the first living cell, the first chordate, the first insect, the first bird. In other words, the designer or the creator had to keep tinkering with it.

Now that we have Miller's words in front of us tell me again how this is a fair representation of my view that there was no intervention over the entire course of evolution on this planet.

On the universe being designed - no, there's no reason to keep that separate. If the deck was stacked for life to inevitably evolve the way it did it matters not to ID because the design is still detectable. ID doesn't propose a time or place or method for how complex specified information was created in nature. It only proposes that complex specified information is detectable and that such information can only be created by intelligent agency. A designer of universes could have inserted the information into the arrangement of matter and energy at the instant of creation and never tinkered with it from there. Call it UBER front-loading. I bring the front-loading a little closer to home is all but it's still a one-time front-loading not constant tinkering. A front-loaded universe is essentially the deist view and it is well grounded in reason. Miller appears to making the deist argument to design from reason then shellacking it with bits and pieces of a personal God from the bible. What I don't get is how he manages to shift gears from a God that never interfered with evolution because his creation was perfect to a God that tinkers with the affairs of men through miracles and had to tinker with man's ability to enter heaven by sending down a messiah to save us when we screwed up. Non sequitur. Ken Miller is a very confused ID supporter.

DaveScot
July 8, 2006
July
07
Jul
8
08
2006
06:18 AM
6
06
18
AM
PDT
I think that the universe does have a “design,” and that the design is so grand that it makes the evolution of life not only possible but almost inevitable. The ironic thing is that the proponents of intelligent design actually don’t think that. Because they don’t think that the universe is well enough designed to make the evolution of life inevitable. ... So, in away, In think most biologists look at the universe and have a grander appreciation for the orderliness of the universe based on what many of us regard as the almost inevitability of the evolution of living things.
More nonsense from Ken. Ken himself doesn't believe that the evolution of life is inevitable. But he's going to berate the ID crowd for not thinking the evolution of life was inevitable.Mung
July 8, 2006
July
07
Jul
8
08
2006
04:07 AM
4
04
07
AM
PDT
They think constant intervention on the part of the creator is required to bring about the first life, the first living cell, the first chordate, the first insect, the first bird. In other words, the designer or the creator had to keep tinkering with it.
Ken's confused. This is his view. You know, evolution the tinkerer, with God in the background pulling the strings. It's Ken's God who is God the tinkerer, with evolution as his tinkering tool.Mung
July 8, 2006
July
07
Jul
8
08
2006
04:03 AM
4
04
03
AM
PDT
I, and I think all other evolutionists, would point to the fact that the capacity for life is inherent in matter. Matter is…. Life is a chemical and physical phenomenon.
Matter is what, Ken? The capacity for life is inherent in matter. Matter is ... ? WHAT? I don't blame him for not finishing that. It probably wouldn't have been anything intelligible anyways. So he starts out, he's going to tell us how matter has some inherent capability for life, but then disappoints us with, "Life is a chemical and physical phenomenon." Well, Duh. But is that all it is? Nothing buttery, Ken? So how did you get from there to here, logically that is?Mung
July 8, 2006
July
07
Jul
8
08
2006
03:59 AM
3
03
59
AM
PDT

It is clear to me that an outside agent stepped in on this planet to influence what we see here, but again and again I hear the cosmological ID arguments mixed up with the biological ID arguments. I feel that the cosmological arguments are being used, in effect, to advance a religious notion about the origin of the universe, and the biological reality of intervention in the biological realm are being piggy-backed on them as if they were weaker, somehow.

Kenneth Miller, it seems, believes that the god of his religion could have created the universe so precisely that the evolution of life would be inevitable. This puts evolution squarely into his religion, I might add.

But the biological issue is something else - Miller doesn't accept intervention on the biological scale. Dave makes it clear here that he understands that intelligent intervention occurred, but not adding flagella and blood clotting pathways bit by bit, but by programming it all from the start. I admit, I must disagree with Dave on the issue of Miller misrepresenting him in particular, because programming it from the start is still an intervention.

As for myself, I feel that he has misrepresented me because I don't find it conceptually impossible for life to develop without intervention, I simply think that intervention occurred in our case. So he's still pidgeon-holing IDers!

Anyhow, what do you think, shouldn't the issue of whether life was designed be kept separate from the issue of the universe itself being designed? I know the poseurs at Pandas Thumb keep bringing up the "certain features of the universe" tie-in whenever we try to talk about biological design. I think it hurts the movement.

EJ Klone
July 8, 2006
July
07
Jul
8
08
2006
01:55 AM
1
01
55
AM
PDT
1 2

Leave a Reply