I have a question for our materialist friends.
Often in these pages we meet an argument like the one Allan Keith makes in this post. The thrust of the argument is that since humans are the only known intelligent species, design inferences are valid only if they infer specifically to human intelligence. This argument would preclude inference to a non-human “intelligent agent.” The obvious purpose of the argument is to derail biological ID, because any indicia of design in living things could not have been the result of human intelligence. Therefore, all biological design inferences are invalid.
David Klinghoffer over at ENV brings this post on NPR’s website to our attention: In the article, astrophysicist Adam Frank (University of Rochester) asks fellow astrophysicist Avi Loeb (Harvard) about the future possibility of detecting “techno-signatures” from space. That is, evidence of past or currently existing alien civilizations in the cosmos: “[W]hen it comes to techno-signatures, as our technologies get better we might suddenly find lots of signals from the activity of technological civilizations.”
Now to my question. Do materialists such as Allan Keith believe Loeb is on a fool’s errand? After all, the whole point of Loeb’s project is to find signals from space that would lead to a non-human design inference, which, according to Keith’s logic, is not an inference that can be validly made.
What do you say Allan? Any other materialist is also welcome to jump in here.