From: Howard J. Van Till (hvantill@chartermi.net)
Date: Tue Aug 19 2003 - 15:23:21 EDT
>From: "Josh Bembenek" <jbembe@hotmail.com>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe in response to you Dembski claimed
> that ID was not incompatible with front-loading in the big bang such that
> life would unravel itself.
It may not be logically incompatible, but Dembski rejects it in favor of
occasional, real-time interventions.
Here is the relevant excerpt from my review essay of No Free Lunch:
According to Dembski, however, intelligent design action does not
necessarily entail a suspension or overriding of natural laws.
(Quoted from Dembski) When humans, for instance, act as [embodied]
intelligent agents, there is no reason to think that any natural law is
broken. Likewise, should an unembodied designer act to bring about a
bacterial flagellum, there is no reason prima facie to suppose that this
designer did not act consistently with natural laws. It is, for instance, a
logical possibility that the design in the bacterial flagellum was
front-loaded into the universe at the Big Bang and subsequently expressed
itself in the course of natural history as a miniature outboard motor on the
back of E. coli.
(Back to hvt text) What does Dembski here mean by "the design of the
bacterial flagellum" that may have been "front-loaded into the universe at
the Big Bang"? In the larger context of Dembskišs argument, I am led to
conclude that "design," used as a noun in this instance, here denotes both a
plan and a provisiona plan for actualizing the flagellum and a provision of
all of the initial conditions and formational capabilities needed to ensure
that the plan would be carried out in detail. Front-loading a universe for
the actualization of some biotic structure appears to be comparable to
providing a computer with both a specific program and all of the
computational capabilities needed to ensure that some particular result
would be generated.
Elsewhere in No Free Lunch, however, Dembski makes it abundantly clear that
he is no friend of this "front-loading" hypothesis. Dembskišs Intelligent
Designer is one who interacts with the universe in the course of time. The
design action posited to actualize the bacterial flagellum, as we shall see,
is an action that occurs long after the Big Bang. Furthermore, since Dembski
argues vigorously that the assembling of E. colišs flagellum could not have
come about naturally, the question is, How could the Intelligent Designer
bring about a naturally impossible outcome by interacting with a bacterium
in the course of time without either a suspension or overriding of natural
laws? Natural laws were set to bring about the outcome, no flagellum.
Instead, a flagellum appeared as the outcome of the Intelligent Designeršs
action. Is that not a miracle, even by Dembskišs own definition? How can
this be anything other than a supernatural intervention?
Josh continued:
> ID is incompatible with maximal naturalism (to
> use the terms correctly) and Dembski I thought agreed to this.
Yes ID is clearly incompatible with "maximal naturalism," which is
inherently anti-theistic.
But ID is also incompatible with "minimal naturalism" (which rejects
coercive, supernatural intervention categorically but is agnostic regarding
non-coercive divine action) and with "naturalistic theism" (which rejects
coercive supernatural intervention categorically but includes non-coercive
divine action as essential to every event) and with the "fully-gifted
creation perspective" (which does not reject supernatural intervention
categorically but posits that such intervention is unnecessary as the means
to actualize new creaturely forms).
Howard Van Till
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