William Lane Craig talks about ID theory

_{Denyse O'Leary

May 4, 2015

Intelligent Design, News}

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William Lane Craig Here. One refreshing comment for sure:

So in response to your questions:

1)What is your definition of intelligent design? This is not the right question. We need to let ID theorists speak for themselves and not impose our meanings on their statements. That’s part of the problem! I’ve tried to explain above what they mean by Intelligent Design.

2) Is intelligent design something that Christians should believe in?Certainly, Christians must believe in (lower-case) intelligent design, since we believe in a provident God who has a plan for this world He has created. But belief in ID as a theory is not obligatory. One must assess the case ID theorists make and then decide whether to adopt all, some, or none of the tenets of ID, especially in application to biology. More.

Shocka! He thinks people should actually read and consider evidence for design in nature instead of dismissing it in favour of empty-headed Jesus-hollering on Sunday, and metaphysical naturalism, including its creation story Darwinism, all week long otherwise?

Bad Craig, bad, bad…

Along those lines, see also: If anyone cares, Biologos (Christians for Darwin) will now actually review Darwin’s Doubt. (Just opposing it, unread, didn’t help much when lots of people had read it, and knew something was going on.)

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Comments

'It is obvious that we make such design inferences all the time. A teacher who finds that a student’s term paper reproduces sections from Wikipedia realizes that this is not the result of chance but of deliberate plagiarism. Archaeologists excavating a site readily discern the difference between the products of sedimentation and metamorphosis and human artifacts. A beachcomber who comes upon a sandcastle recognizes that it’s not the result of the action of the waves and the wind but of intelligent design.' As Craig indicates, without any satirical intent, the more serious the topic and the points being made, the greater the scope for hilarity at the 'intellectual' antics of atheism's finest. While the same ground is, perforce, often covered again and again on this forum, I never tire of this unintentional, 'through gritted teeth', knockabout humour, at the lunacy of the fugitive atheists' contortions, with their variations on the theme, 'Nature just APPEARS artfully designed.'Axel_{May 7, 2015
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Carpathian: What I showed you was that biological ID is also improbable. No, you've merely assumed it. You claim that ID is improbable because it requires seeing into the future. Yet you have been able to compose many posts here at UD lacking the foresight to know they would actually appear here. Shall we conclude your posts are the product of something other than an intelligent agent? As usual, your argument is self-refuting. You have no way to know for sure anyone will read your post yet you post anyways. Or maybe you have godlike powers to see into the future.Mung_{May 6, 2015
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Silver Asiatic:
As above, to successfully design a universe (with its matter, energy, laws, constants, symmetries) you need information about many things.
Very true. That was my point. Human beings or any creatures need more than intelligence to perform ID. They need the ability to do more than simply design.Carpathian_{May 6, 2015
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kairosfocus: What you showed me was that random evolution is improbable. What I showed you was that biological ID is also improbable. Why is it acceptable for one side to use an improbability argument but not the other? If you can show me how to get the information defining a future environment, you will have solved half of the problem with biological ID.Carpathian_{May 6, 2015
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Carpathian I think in order to have biological design at all, you need a planet capable of sustaining (and in the case of earth of the diversity of) biological life. You therefore need a universe. Our universe is finely-tuned to sustain life - thus, more evidence of Intelligent Design (ID is not limited to biology).
To successfully design an organism for a future environment, I need information about the future.
As above, to successfully design a universe (with its matter, energy, laws, constants, symmetries) you need information about many things.Silver Asiatic_{May 6, 2015
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Carpathian, I gave you a concrete case, and your response was to restate an a priori dismissal. That tells us all we need to know. KFkairosfocus_{May 6, 2015
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Silver Asiatic: I use intelligent design on a daily basis, but I use the capitalized form, Intelligent Design, to refer to biological design, and that, I or anyone else without foresight, cannot do successfully in my opinion.Carpathian_{May 6, 2015
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It seems highly unlikely anyone without an ability to see the future or control it, could successfully use ID.
I think people use Intelligent Design very successfully every day.Silver Asiatic_{May 6, 2015
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kairosfocus: While random biological evolution seems highly improbable, ID suffers from the same problem at a higher level. To successfully design an organism for a future environment, I need information about the future. Where do I get that? It seems highly unlikely anyone without an ability to see the future or control it, could successfully use ID.Carpathian_{May 6, 2015
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As was pointed out by the preacher I listened to on Sunday past (in the middle of Manhattan, NYC no less) . Science is concerned with “How” and “When” while the author of Genesis is telling us “Who” and “Why”. I didn’t even hear any Jesus-hollering at all. Only that it was He (Jesus) who created the universe for Himself, so we might want to keep that in mind the rest of the week.
Science may be concerned with the how and the when, but currently the operating principles for a majority of scientists methodologically exclude certain answers for how. It is difficult to say that they have the how correct when they are a priori committed to certain types of answers. I don't think anyone in the ID movement is against people investigating and coming to whatever conclusions they feel are warranted. The problem is excluding certain conclusions a priori because of methodological concerns.johnnyb_{May 6, 2015
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Carpathian, simply consider a common phenomenon, digitally coded functionally specific information --dFSCI (a subset of CSI) -- such as is found in the text of your post or mine. Once it is beyond 72 ASCII characters, the functional specificity of the information in it is such that the 10^57 atoms of our sol system, acting as search devices each exploring 10^14 configurations of 500 coins per s [or if you fuss about that, consider a paramagnetic substance of 500 atoms in a weak B field], for 10^17s, will not be able to search as much as 1 straw to a haystack comparably thick as our galaxy. Move up to 143 characters, and the comparable stack would dwarf our observable cosmos. The needle in haystack search for such coded strings is not plausibly feasible. The only adequate cause of such digitally coded, functionally specific information is design. Accordingly, we routinely take such to be a strong sign of design. Now, compare the D/RNA code for a typical protein of 300 AAs, involving 900 bases each capable of storing two bits due to the four states. We are now dealing with 1,800 bits of coded, algorithmic information; not just 1,000. Can you show us a blind watchmaker, chance and necessity process capable of writing that code, demonstrated by observation? No, this is another case of the same dFSCI, and there is just one known cause of such, intelligently directed configuration. Nor can talking points on not knowing the future answer to that. dFSCI is routinely created by designers. Now, consider OOL. One needs to account for some 100,000 - 1 mn bases, in a gated, encapsulated metabolising automaton using molecular nanotechnologies, and incorporating an integral von Neumann kinematic self replicator, which is code using. This is strong evidence for design of life from the first living cells on. To have good reason to reject this inference to best empirically grounded current explanation, you need to bring forth credible demonstration of blind chance and/or mechanical necessity per our actual observation, producing the requisite dFSCI. This, on long experience, I am highly confident you have not done, nor can you do so. All you have to do, is show a solid counter example. Failing such, I and others are fully entitled to SCIENTIFICALLY infer per empirically grounded inductive grounds, that the dFSCI in the D/RNA of the living cell is solid grounds, a convincing sign, that it was designed. And successfully, too. KFkairosfocus_{May 5, 2015
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Shocka! He thinks people should actually read and consider evidence for design in nature instead of dismissing it in favour of empty-headed Jesus-hollering on Sunday, and metaphysical naturalism, including its creation story Darwinism, all week long otherwise?
As was pointed out by the preacher I listened to on Sunday past (in the middle of Manhattan, NYC no less) . Science is concerned with "How" and "When" while the author of Genesis is telling us "Who" and "Why". I didn't even hear any Jesus-hollering at all. Only that it was He (Jesus) who created the universe for Himself, so we might want to keep that in mind the rest of the week.awstar_{May 5, 2015
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kairosfocus:
In fact the issue is whether there are reliable empirically observable signs that point to design as causal process; for which the answer is, yes.
There are also signs that show that ID is improbable, the main one being that we cannot foresee the future and that is a requirement for ID. Look at what happened to the bee population with insecticides. Can you imagine what might happen if we released modified bacteria into the world? This is weighted evidence against ID occurring without a designer powerful enough to know all future ramifications. The designer must be powerful enough to perform ID. If there is no such designer, ID is not possible. While we claim we can recognize biological design, we humans could never actually do it.Carpathian_{May 5, 2015
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Carpathian, nope. In fact the issue is whether there are reliable empirically observable signs that point to design as causal process; for which the answer is, yes. That is a distinct question from asking concerning a designer.Designs do support the existence of designers, but that something is in that class generally is not at all the same as an inference to a designer. Especially, to a particular designer. KFkairosfocus_{May 5, 2015
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kairosfocus:
I would suggest that empirically grounded inference to design as causal process is not equal to inference to a designer, much less to particular potential candidate designers.
The two cannot be separated as one demands the other. Secondly, ID needs an incredibly powerful designer with the ability to foresee the future of an ecosystem before and after he installs a new organism.Carpathian_{May 5, 2015
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PS: I note Craig: My greatest reservation, for example, is the claim that the inference to a designer is supposed to constitute a scientific theory. I would suggest that empirically grounded inference to design as causal process is not equal to inference to a designer, much less to particular potential candidate designers.kairosfocus_{May 5, 2015
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News: I do find Craig refreshing:
I think it advisable to capitalize “Intelligent Design" (ID) in order to signal that we are using the words in a technical sense, rather than in the sense accepted by every Christian. Broadly speaking, we may say that ID is a theory of justifiable design inferences. That is to say, it’s a theory which seeks to answer the question: what justifies us in inferring that design is the best explanation of some phenomenon? It is obvious that we make such design inferences all the time. A teacher who finds that a student’s term paper reproduces sections from Wikipedia realizes that this is not the result of chance but of deliberate plagiarism. Archaeologists excavating a site readily discern the difference between the products of sedimentation and metamorphosis and human artifacts. A beachcomber who comes upon a sandcastle recognizes that it’s not the result of the action of the waves and the wind but of intelligent design. Some of these inferences are so obvious that it never even occurs to us to ask why we are justified in making such inferences to design. But philosophically, it’s no trivial matter to provide a theory of what makes a design inference justified. The theory of Intelligent Design seeks to provide just such an account. As an account of justified design inferences, Intelligent Design theory is of interest to a wide variety of fields: for example, to cryptographers who are trying to discern whether a sequence of letters is just meaningless jibberish or an encoded message; to crime scene investigators who want to determine whether the fire was a result of natural causes or of arson; to searchers for extra-terrestrial intelligence who are trying to make out whether the signal they’re receiving is just random noise or a message from an extra-terrestrial intelligence, and so on and so forth. ID theorists have offered a number of accounts of what justifies a design inference. Undoubtedly one of the most sophisticated which has been offered comes from the mathematician William Dembski in his book The Design Inference, which appeared in Cambridge University Press’s monograph series on Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory. Dembski argues that a design inference is justified when two conditions are met: first, the event to be explained is extraordinarily improbable and, second, the event corresponds to an independently given pattern. In its most fundamental sense, then, Intelligent Design is a theory of design inferences which is applicable to a number of diverse fields. While disagreement may exist over which theory of design inference is correct, this is hardly the point at which Intelligent Design encounters heated opposition. Rather controversy arises when the theory of Intelligent Design is applied to the field of biology. For Dembski and other ID theorists have made the controversial claim that biological organisms exhibit just that combination of high improbability and conformity to an independently given pattern that justifies an inference to intelligent design. Accordingly, they maintain that we are justified scientifically in inferring that biological complexity is best explained by Intelligent Design.
I can think of a long list of folks who should pay close attention to that. KFkairosfocus_{May 5, 2015
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