Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Who Designed the Designer?

William Dembski
April 29, 2005
Intelligent Design
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“I’ve always been troubled by the claim that Mt. Rushmore was carved by sculptors. After all, where did the sculptors come from?”
— Jay Wesley Richards

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I am just testing the html code this blog uses. bold italiacs
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underlindJehu
August 14, 2006
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Bill Dembski has a blog So Intelligent Design theologian Bill Dembski has a blog now. He writes:I've always been troubled by the claim that Mt. Rushmore was carved by sculptors. After all, where did the sculptors come from?My friends, is this "science" or "religion"? I s...ICTHUS
May 5, 2005
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This reminds me of a parable Michael Scriven once told me when he was visiting UNLV in the mid-90s and I was on the faculty there. Here's what he said. Suppose someone asks you, "where's 7-Eleven," and you answer, "4th and Vine." And then you are asked, "where's 4th and Vine." And you answer, "In Los Angeles." You then answer every subsequent "where" question in the following way: "Where's Los Angeles?" In California "Where's California?" In the U.S. "Where's the U.S." In Norht America "Where's North America?" On Earth "Where's Earth?" Third planet from the sun in our solar system. "Where's the solar system?" In the Milky Way Galaxy. "Where's the Milky Way Galaxy?" In the universe. "Where the universe?" Uhhh! "See, I knew you couldn't tell me where 7-Eleven is." Frankfbeckwith
May 2, 2005
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The logical necessity for a first cause never goes away. It merely moves from one field of inquiry to another. Biologists shove it downhill from them to organic chemists. The biologist isn't concerned with where life comes from before there were living DNA-based cells for mutation/selection to act upon. The organic chemists shove it downhill to physicists, leaving it up to them to explain how the elements came to exist. The physicists shove it downhill to the cosmologists, leaving it up to them to explain where time, space, and energy came from. The cosmologists, all tied up in superstrings, basically throw up their hands and say God only knows (wink) where it all came from because the realm of superstrings is so high energy we can't possibly imagine a particle accelerator able to test our hypotheses. IDers don't push the logical necessity for a first cause off their own plate. Good for them. It takes guts to face a problem head-on when you have the option of letting it become someone else's problem. There's always a logical necessity for a first cause in a causal universe and at the moment it's mystery and might always remain a mystery. Learn to deal with that uncomfortable situation. It won't go away by pretending it doesn't exist. DaveScot
May 2, 2005
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I have a similar response to Dr. Wesley Elsberry at antievolution.org http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=4270b3a31551ffff;act=ST;f=14;t=10;st=20 "Basically, I'm pointing out that the claimed analogy between known designers with whom we have experience and unknown designers operating in unknown ways is illegitimate." -- Wesley R. Elsberry I responded with: Are there known designers to these artifacts? If you know who is the designer please enlighten us, the world would like to know. [Pictures of Stone Henge, Crop Circles,...] The fact is you don't know who the designers are for these artifacts and yet I am sure you would agree they are designed. Do you know how they were designed? The answer again is no. There are a lot of speculation and some of them are pretty good but the fact again is that no one knows for sure how they were design, constructed and for what purpose. So again how is it legitimate for you to compare these artifacts to known designers and claim that they are designed? For someone like you who has studied and written about “intelligent design”, you should know that ID unlike Darwinism does not invent stories of putative mechanisms to explain the biodiversity of life on earth. Intelligent Design works purely on the empirical basis of science to identify if an artifact is a result of design. Certainly ID can speculate how or even why the artifact was design in a particular way, but without direct information from the designers it would be impossible to ascertain the actuality of the events. This is where Darwinism fails as a legitimate science. It moves from empirical evidence onto speculation of some putative process. As Ken Miller said IDist lack imagination, like Nicholas Matzke who imagine his pathway to evolve a flagellum, without any empirical science to back it up. The Darwinists just blindly eat that up as if it was ordained truth. They start quoting him all over the internet as if it was some empirical fact. Ken Miller put it in his book. ID does not deal with fantastic imagination. ID just deals with the facts of empirical science, period. ID knows that the best that we can do is to identify if an artifact is a result of design or natural processes. When you are thinking of ID, you must think outside of imaginary mechanism of Darwinism and think empirical science.teleologist
April 29, 2005
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