The abstract of a paper by Rene van Woudenberg of the Abraham Kuyper Center and Jeroen de Ridder,
Design Hypotheses Behave Like Skeptical Hypotheses
(or: Why We Can’t Know the Falsity of Design Hypotheses)
It is often claimed that, as a result of scientific progress, we now know that the natural world displays no design. Although we have no interest in defending design hypotheses, we will argue that establishing claims to the effect that we know the denials of design hypotheses is more difficult than it seems. We do so by issuing two skeptical challenges to design-deniers. The first challenge draws inspiration from radical skepticism and shows how design claims are at least as compelling as radical skeptical scenarios in undermining knowledge claims, and in fact probably more so. The second challenge takes its cue from skeptical theism and shows how we are typically not in an epistemic position to rule out design. More.
There is some reason to believe, however, that the critics have moved beyond that: We do;t really think at all and logic doesn’t work.
See also: A scientist on the benefits of post-fact science
and
The war on falsifiability in science continues
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Either the design we see in life, and in the universe, is real or everything is an illusion.
Even leading Darwinists readily admit that life gives an overwhelming ‘appearance of design’. Here are a few quotes to that effect:
As well, many scientists, with no particular theological axe to grind, readily admit the universe also appears to be designed:
Yet, despite the fact that many leading Darwinists admit that life has the overwhelming ‘appearance of design’, all the purported scientific evidence, that is suppose to demonstrate for the rest of us how this overwhelming appearance of design in life came to be by unguided material processes, turns out itself to be ‘illusory’.
Franklin M. Harold, whom I believe is also an atheist, calls Darwinian accounts ‘a variety of wishful speculations’. Specifically he states:
James Shapiro, main founder of the anti neo-Darwinian group “The Third Way”, and who is not an intelligent design advocate, makes an almost verbatim statement prior to Harold’s statement:
The same thing happens with the ‘appearance of design’ for the universe. Although many scientists with no theological axe to grind readily admit that the universe has the overwhelming ‘appearance of design’, all the evidence that is suppose to demonstrate for the rest of us how this overwhelming appearance design came to be turns out to be illusory.
Thus, the overwhelming ‘appearance of design’, that Atheists themselves admit to seeing pervasively throughout life, and the universe, was apparently produced by scientific evidence that itself turns out to be illusory.
Simply put, illusory evidence produced illusory design!
Perhaps atheists can excuse me if I find their illusory scientific argument for illusory design less than compelling?
In fact, I hold that Darwinists, and scientists in general, are naturally detecting the ‘appearance of design’ because of the inherent ‘image of God’ that they have within themselves, and that they are living in denial of that natural ‘design intuition’.
Moreover, this illusory nature inherent to the evidence for atheistic naturalism gets worse for the atheist than just him seeing the overwhelming ‘appearance of design’. Much worse! For instance, although reliable ‘observation’ of reality is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself,,,
,,, Although reliable ‘observation’ of reality is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method, the reductive materialistic foundation that Darwinian evolution rests upon undermines this necessary cornerstone.
To put it more clearly, given materialistic/atheistic premises, not only are our personal beliefs about reality held to be somewhat flawed, and therefore in need of testing, even our perceptions/observations of reality itself are held to be untrustworthy and thus ‘illusory’ given the materialistic premises of atheism.
Richard Dawkins puts the awkward situation between Darwinian evolution and reliable observation like this:
In the following video and article, Donald Hoffman has, through numerous computer simulations of population genetics, proved that if Darwinian evolution were actually true then ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory.
Although Hoffman tried to limit his results to just our visual perceptions, as Plantinga had pointed out years before Hoffman came along, there is no reason why the results do not also extend to undermining our cognitive faculties as well:
Thus, in what should be needless to say, a worldview that undermines the scientific method itself by holding all our observations of reality, and cognitive faculties, are illusory is NOT a worldview that can be firmly grounded within the scientific method!
Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the math of population genetics predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.
Apparently science itself could care less if atheists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory!
Moreover, as Nancy Pearcey alluded to in her ‘Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself’ article, given the materialistic/atheistic premises of Darwinian evolution, not only are our observations of reality itself held to be illusory, but even our sense of self, i.e. the belief that we really exist as real persons, which is the most sure thing we can know about reality, becomes illusory too.
Thus, in what I consider to be a shining example of poetic justice, in their claim that God does not really exist as a real person but is merely an illusion, the Atheistic naturalist also ends up claiming that he himself does not really exist as a real person but is merely an illusion. Here are a few quotes to that effect,,,
Thus, given materialistic premises, people become illusions whose observations of reality are illusory.
And why in blue blazes should anyone trust what illusions having illusions have to say about reality?
(of personal note: Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “A Dream within a Dream” is a fitting reference at this point)
Moreover, as Nancy Pearcey alluded to in her article, free will itself also becomes illusory. Thus, under atheistic naturalism there is not really a real person with the free will to choose to believe in, or to not believe in anything, be it believing in God or be it believing in naturalism. There are only illusions of persons who are fed illusions of free will. Moreover these illusions of free will somehow miraculously coincide with the illusory intentions of the illusory self. How the supposed random jostling of atoms in our brain pulls off all this amazing synchronization throughout our entire life is something that fully ought to be considered a miracle in its own right!
And although Dr. Nelson alluded to writing an e-mail, (i.e. creating information), to tie his ‘personal agent’ argument into intelligent design, Dr. Nelson’s ‘personal agent’ argument can easily be amended to any action that ‘you’, as a personal agent, choose to take:
A few more notes along this line:
Finally, this unconstrained ‘illusory’ nature inherent to naturalism/materialism becomes even more acute when atheists try to explain the origin and sustaining of the universe, i.e. try to explain the origin, fine-tuning, and quantum wave collapse of the universe.
That is to say, every time an atheist postulates a random infinity to try to get around the glaringly obvious Theistic implications of the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and the quantum wave collapse, of the universe, then the math surrounding that random infinity tells us that everything that is remotely possible has a 100% chance of happening somewhere in that random infinity of possibilities that the atheist had postulated. Even an infinite number of Richard Dawkins riding on an infinite number of pink unicorns becomes assured in an unconstrained random infinity:
Thus, basically, without God, everything within the atheistic/naturalistic worldview, (i.e. supposed evidence for Darwinian evolution, observations of reality, beliefs about reality, sense of self, free will, even reality itself), collapses into self refuting, unrestrained, flights of fantasy and imagination.
It would be hard to fathom a more unscientific worldview than Darwinian evolution and Atheistic materialism/naturalism in general have turned out to be.
To reiterate the first sentence of this post, “Either the design we see in life, and in the universe, is real or everything is an illusion.”
Scientists should definitely stick with the worldview that brought them to the dance! i.e Christianity!
Verses, Videos and Music:
Van Woudenberg’s Radical skepticism: I can’t deny that whatever I just said is completely useless.
The only design in the Universe that we can recognize reliably is what we do ourselves. We can certainly rule that design out as the origin of the Universe and the life in it.
Even in our own poor human world, ‘design’ implies intelligence. Otherwise, we could rely on ‘retro-happenstance’. It would be so much cheaper, too. Another crushing blow to poor Ned Ludd, who did know a thing or two.
Seversky, you are begging the pivotal question of empirically grounded signs of design. KF
Sev
We observe things in nature purposefully designed by less-sophisticted non-human, intelligences (beaver dams, bee colony operations). So, when we observe aspects of nature that exhibit more sophisticated levels of purposeful design – the inference to a higher designing intelligence is easy and logical.
Seversky stated:
“The only design in the Universe that we can recognize reliably is what we do ourselves.”
Seversky, I have a question for ‘you’ (assuming that ‘you’ exist). Since Darwinian atheists claim that we do not really exist as real persons, which is the most sure thing we can know about reality, but insist that we are merely ‘neuronal illusions’, why in blue blazes should I trust what your illusory self tells me what is designed and what is not designed?
Sev, if you can’t even be sure that you really exist as a real person, which is something that you directly experience first hand every waking moment of your life, then certainly your judgement is not to be trusted in anything else.
@bornagain77 should have his own column.
F/N: Let’s get back to basics, as it is a patently false and misleading claim to imply or assert that the key design inference is not subject to empirical refutation.
In simple terms, if ever
SA, 9: yup. KF
Yes Sev – Design only from the Creator and those made in the image of Creator. Humans are darn special huh. Specks yes – but unique designing specks. Unique. Specks compared to Creator of course.
Self-referential.
Not scientific.
Andrew
The very feature that disinguishes empirical science from other spheres of knowledge, is that it focuses on the ‘appearance(s)’ of the natural world. Indeed, the very terms, ‘observation’, and ‘measurement’, are used synonymously.
It’s as crazy as the concept of a ‘blind watchmaker’ ! How did he ever get away with it ? Unbelievable chuzpah.
Seems to me that the neo-Darwinians owe the scientific community a response to the following: What differentiates life that is the result of intelligent design from that which is the result of random undirected chemical processes, chance and mutations? If we were to discover life on a distant planet in a different galaxy, how would our scientists be able to differentiate whether the life they discovered was the result of intelligent design (engineered) or the product of evolution? If they could not differentiate one from the other, it is simply impossible for them to know with any certainty that life on earth is not the result of ID. If they CAN tell the difference, they should disclose the distinguishing characteristics of ID life so we can all examine whether it is absent in the life we find on earth.
In all that I have read and studied on the topic, nothing has been offered from the scientific community as to what ID indicators are and how they are clearly absent from earth life. Rather, all that is available are claims that the overwhelming appearance of design should be ignored without any coherent reason to do so.