Steve Meyer is the author of Darwin’s Doubt
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
See also: A free discussion guide to Darwin’s Doubt
13 Replies to “Steve Meyer: What is intelligent design?”
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Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Steve Meyer is the author of Darwin’s Doubt
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
See also: A free discussion guide to Darwin’s Doubt
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Dr. Meyer also mentioned that Dr. Dembski and Dr. Gordon were at that conference. But I could not find their lectures listed. Does anyone know if the videos are available somewhere?
Meyer hasn’t advanced his story one millimeter for decades, replaying the same old, worn out theory. The real ID theory will be recognized by the new blossoms every year.
Meyer’s core problem is that his “intelligent designer” is transcendental, perfect deity, which shortcircuits any development beyond that point, it is the end of his story (analogous to neo-Darwinian “randomness” also short-circuiting further inquiery). Without a scientific (falsifiable, empirically backed) hypothesis about the embodiment and implementation of the intelligence behind cellular nano machines and biological evolution, his version of ID is going to remain sterile.
Wow. ID is not about the designer. ID is about the DESIGN. The DESIGN exists in the physical world and can be studied. And in the absence of designer input or direct observation the only possible way to scientifically answer any questions about the who and how is by FIRST determining intelligent design exists and then studying it and all relevant evidence.
The science of ID is in the detection and study of intelligent designs in nature. There is plenty to study, so ID is far from sterile.
Perhaps Nightlight should have actually watched the video, instead of his strawman version of it, to see what Dr. Meyer actually stated?
I recommend the 46:00 to 58:00 minute mark for him. Particularly this quote,,,
And exactly what “Theological proposition” does the information in life happen to provide support for? Well, the following verse comes to mind,,,
Perhaps Nightlight would also like to criticize Anton Zeilinger, (one of the world’s leading experimentalists in quantum mechanics), for stating that the findings of Quantum Mechanics support Christian propositions?
I have watched the video, while skipping over the old stories I already heard before from him, and didn’t notice anything new. The Seattle ID “theory” is scientifically sterile i.e. it is not a science.
The kind of fruitful theories that will replace neo-Darwinism will be extensions of Natural Genetic Engineering by Shapiro or similar ideas, where intelligence, which is always active, comes from inside the nature, and not via Meyer’s capricious external interventions by transcendental being helping out the “nature” every now and then, when it gets stuck.
Nightlight,
BA77 raised a valid point @4.
Sorry to disappoint you, but the 3rd Way daydreamed extensions are just wishful thinking at best. They are doomed to the same fate that the neo-Darwinian ideas had. Completely discredited for MACRO-evo, even by the 3rd Way folks themselves, who desperately try to puff up very modest results in order to rescue the outdated 19th century MACRO-evo ideas. Eventually they will come up with the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th ways in search of the magic solution to no avail.
The key thing is the explanation of the origin of the complex functional information observed in the biological systems.
The best empirical explanation for the origin of the functional complexity of the observed complex functionality in biology is intelligent purposefully meaningful design by a conscious agent. Anything else is speculative cheap chat.
“Have they never heard the phrase non sequitur? As strange as it may seem to people outside the charmed circle, many Darwinian biologists find it difficult to distinguish the question of what occurred in biology from the question of how it occurred.” —Dr Michael Behe (Cited here)
Nightlight states
What a confused bit of hogwash. First off, science itself is based on, and finds its origins in, Christian Theism, not in any other worldview.
As Calvin Beisner points out in the following article, “science—not an occasional flash of insight here and there, but a systematic, programmatic, ongoing way of studying and controlling the world—arose only once in history, and only in one place: medieval Europe, once known as “Christendom,” where that Biblical worldview reigned supreme.” And that modern science arose precisely because Christians believe, “a personal, rational God designed a rational universe to be understood and controlled by rational persons made in His image.”
And as was pointed out in the following article, “Real science arose only once: in Europe”—in Christian Europe. “China, Islam, India, and ancient Greece and Rome each had a highly developed alchemy. But only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry. By the same token, many societies developed elaborate systems of astrology, but only in Europe did astrology develop into astronomy.”,,,
And as Dr. Michael Egnor points out in the following article, “The scientific method — the empirical systematic theory-based study of nature — has nothing to so with some religious inspirations — Animism, Paganism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Islam, and, well, atheism. The scientific method has everything to do with Christian (and Jewish) inspiration. Judeo-Christian culture is the only culture that has given rise to organized theoretical science.”
And as Professor Koons points out in the following article, “Far from undermining the credibility of theism, the remarkable success of science in modern times is a remarkable confirmation of the truth of theism. It was from the perspective of Judeo-Christian theism—and from the perspective alone—that it was predictable that science would have succeeded as it has.”
And as the following article points out, “That the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again.”
Besides modern science, Christianity also gave rise to Hospitals, Universities, The abolition of slavery, Representative government, and many other blessings.
Thus Christianity itself has been very fruitful for the world and certainly has not been sterile. In fact, all the fruit of modern science itself owes its very existence to the ‘tree of Christianity’.
Nightlight claims that biological ID, i.e. assuming the Intelligent Design of biology in particular, is sterile and is not a fruitful scientific theory. Again, that claim is a confused bit of hogwash on Nightlight’s part. Intelligent Design, far from hindering science, is found to be a ‘driver of science’:
Dr. Stephen Meyer, at the 38:00 minute mark of the following recent video, gives several examples where ID presuppositions are pushing science forward and fostering breakthroughs. (James Tour research on targeting cancer cells, via biomimetics, is particularly interesting)
Nightlight shuns Darwinism, which is all fine and well since Darwinism has hindered scientific research with its predictions of junk DNA and vestigial organs, (not to mention Darwinian implications being a catastrophe for societies at large, i.e. Nazis, Communists etc..), but Nightlight also falsely claims that Natural Genetic Engineering, where ” intelligence, which is always active, comes from inside the nature” will be the fruitful theory that replaces Darwinism.
That claim simply is not true. ID, and Christianity in particular, certainly does not claim that God is not always active.
The claim that God is not always active is Nightlight’s own strawman version of Christianity and of ID in particular. ID, as a scientific theory, merely claims that the information found in life is best explained by Intelligence, not by natural processes, and does not claim anything about exactly when the Intelligence was active. Moreover, the claim from Nightlight that the intelligence that is creating biological information ‘comes from inside of nature’ is simply false.
At about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Wells, using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, information must somehow be added to the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method.
The following article adds weight to Dr Wells assessment and states: “the process of development should be thought of as being controlled by an “algebraic structure outside space-time itself”
To provide further evidence for information coming into the developing embryo from ‘outside space-time itself’, it is also important to note that ‘non-local’ quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,,,
And these quantum correlations which somehow arise from outside spacetime, are now found in molecular biology on a massive scale. In every DNA and Protein molecule,,,
Moreover, the following article points out that the unresolved enigma of protein folding, that is to say, the unresolved enigma for how a protein might achieve its basic 3-dimensional form, can be easily explained if the process of folding is a quantum affair.
Besides quantum information providing direct empirical falsification of neo-Darwinian claims that say information is emergent from a material basis, as well as falsification of Nightlight’s claim that ‘intelligence,, comes from inside nature’, the implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, or course, being the fact that we now have direct physical evidence strongly indicating that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies.
As Stuart Hameroff notes in this following video, “the quantum information,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Thus, Christianity, far from God being an aloof, capricious, tinkerer as Nightlight strawman caricature of God implied, and with these recent breakthroughs in quantum biology,,,
,,,Christianity is found to be very well supported in its claim that God has formed each of us in our mother’s womb. i.e Christianity is found to be, contrary to Nightlight’s strawman caricature, very well supported in its claim that God is always presently active in the world.
Verses:
Nightlight clearly doesn’t understand ID and clearly doesn’t know what science entails. Intelligence cannot and does not come from inside of nature, unless nature is the mind of the intelligent designer.
Excellent presentation by Dr. Doug Axe on evidence of design in nature.
“Judeo-Christian culture is the only culture that has given rise to organized theoretical science”
For any person willing to deal honestly with the evidence (I pause here to nod morosely in memory of what the darwinists did to poor Stephen J Gould for daring to admit that the fossil record denies gradualism most emphatically) this is a slam dunk, but you’re dealing with people who pretend to themselves that the cry of “Coincidence!” is a philosophical get-out-of-jail-free card …
By which I mean to advise, don’t hold your breath waiting for them to deal honestly with the evidence. Were they so willing we’d not be having this discussion; it simply would not be necessary.
On the subject of Intelligent Design, it’s a bit like Christianity in this sense: it’s a big tent, capable of housing a great diversity of views.
For example I’m an unashamed creationist, what once was termed a fundamentalist, while many IDers are believers in deep time, common descent with modification, mostly uniformitarian in their views on the physical sciences, and etc, with their primary dissent from modern scientific dogma being about the source of the information inherent in the modifications. Some of these latter IDers are also Christians of various sorts.
I have no particular beef with them, preferring to speak of such matters with those who are interested rather than shouting at random strangers as they pass by.
It’s just that as a creature I worship a creator not an engineer.
My take on ID is that it means there must be other causal mechanisms besides chance and necessity. Namely, there must be causes that exhibit teleology. Intelligence is one, but there are other sorts of logically possible teleological causes. For example, the discarded idea of vitalism is one such cause, that there is some kind of ‘life force’ that guides creatures towards goals. Instinct is another such view. Aristotelian functionalism yet another. The medievals summarized this concept that love is what makes the universe go around, the notion is that teleology and love are the same thing.
For a currently accepted form of teleology within science we have things like gravitation and magnetism. So, in that sense, the teleological aspect ID is already a well established scientific theory.