It’s been a while sorry, but here’s my latest:
Quote of the Month: Robin Collins on why ID isn’t a part of science
Serving The Intelligent Design Community
It’s been a while sorry, but here’s my latest:
Quote of the Month: Robin Collins on why ID isn’t a part of science
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I seriously don’t see Collins concern. Atheistic Materialists have been, for several decades now, fiercely trying to falsify a transcendent origin of the universe. Trying to get back to some type of materialistic vision of universe that has always, i.e. ‘eternally’, existed. All their efforts have failed. Those concerted failed attempts at falsifying a transcendent origin of the universe is exactly what makes the ‘generic Designer’, God, scientifically testable.
If a transcendent origin of the universe were not falsifiable, then the claim that a transcendent ‘generic’ Designer created the universe would not be science. As Popper stated:
If anything, and as George Ellis pointed out, it is the opponents of Intelligent Design, in frustration at their failure to falsify the transcendent origin of the universe, who have left the field of scientific inquiry and have tried to redefine science so that it no longer includes falsification as a primary criteria for doing science.
A few relevant quotes:
Might I also suggest to Dr. Collins that his ‘internal workings’ complaint against a ‘generic’ transcendent Designer is not quite as scientifically inexplicable as he presupposes?
Evolutionism posits a transcendent, generic designer; just a mindless one.
What technical specifics do we have on the process of evolution? What set of X in RM + NS + X is official? What specifics and predictions do we derive from such? Historically, when X is proven insufficient, don’t we always invent an additional term Y?
Evolution happened because reasons that it can somehow interpret and respond to without ever separately, explicitly structuring; that is the sum of the theory.
It’s the demand that the working design processes of a designer will necessarily be structured implicitly in the operation of the systems it’s building and their interaction with the environment; with results we intelligent designers still dream of mimicking.
Part of what ID sets out to show is that this is practically impossible. You need context structuring and recursive heuristic navigation processes as well as trial and result memory independent from the operations and data of the result space; that can pick and reduce general N-dimensional problems to singular contexts and yield one-dimensional evaluations with trial space elimination a la Dawkins’ Weasel; and do so in an order that moves towards a remote, Nth order goal.
Such a process does not naturally arise by the operations and data of a result space lacking at least an equally sophisticated and so capable precursor configuration that can modulate such a descendant/product structure. Thermodynamically unnecessary configurations consistently reduce to the thermodynamically necessary in this little universe of ours. Just as in Conway’s Game of Life.
I agree and would like to add that ID, contrary to what Collins believes, does not postulate a “transcendent designer.”
Now a short comment on naturalistic science which Collins aims to protect from ID.
Even science which attempts to abide by the rules of methodological naturalism cannot exist without intelligent design. Absent intelligence — in case science is exclusively produced by blind physical processes — we would never be able to tell if a scientific statement is true or not. If all our scientific beliefs are suspect — because blind physical processes produced them — we cannot judge between truth and falsity, since any such judgment would be just as suspect as what it seeks to adjudicate.
Put another way, if all our beliefs inside the circle are suspect, we cannot judge between truth and falsity, since any such judgment would be just as suspect as what it seeks to adjudicate. We would have to seek another argument, another chain of reasoning, another set of beliefs, by which we can judge the judgment—and a third set to judge the judgment of the judgment, ad infinitum. But if blind physical processes exhausts reality, then at no point can we step out of the circle to a transcendent standpoint that would allow us to reject some beliefs as tainted while remaining untainted ourselves.
Bottom line, the whole attempt of science by methodological naturalism is a non-starter.