(replying to Steve and myself)
[...]
[about panspermia]
> In all my reading on the origin of life I'm really hard pressed to
> think of anyone (actually working in the field) who takes it
> seriously. The basic criticism that one hears over and over,
> and rightfully so, is that this theory doesn't really deal with
> the origin of life since it doesn't explain the origin of the
> green little women.
Of course not. But the ID hypothesis doesn't explain the existence
of the designer (if you think about it for a bit, you can see that
ID implies something we'd probably call God, although not necessarily
to explain life *here*). If the goal is to figure out an explanation
for any and all life in the universe, the criticism is appropriate.
If we are concerned only with life on Earth (or maybe the solar system,
now), then external intelligent designers of life (or unintelligent
designers) can be invoked by *either* naturalists or non-naturalists.
This was the point I was making: that in the question science sets
for itself--to figure out a story about how life came to exist on Earth,
methodological naturalism, contrary to the declarations of ID theorists,
does not rule out external influences/forces/designers/contaminators/etc.
[...]
> >to thinking that an advanced civilization on another world might
> >design an artificial cell from scratch. This scenario still leaves open
> >the question of who designed the designer-how did life originally
> >originate? Is a philosophical naturalist now trapped? " (Behe M.J.,
> >"Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution", Free
> >Press: NY, 1996, pp248-249)
> >
>
> I think Behe traps himself with this last statement. Either
> ID suffers the same drawback as Panspermia or the intelligent
> designer really is the Intelligent Designer which Intelligent
> Design supposedly doesn't require.
As I alluded to above, ID *does* require an Intelligent Designer, if
you are interested in life in the universe as a whole: where did the
intelligent designers of life on this planet come from, after all?
One would hope they were intelligently designed themselves, right?
And how about *those* designers? This regress can only stop in some
sort of First Cause (First Designer?) that we would probably call God.
The question of who designed God would probably be answered that
God designed God, right?
> >GB>That is, it seems to me that the goal of the intelligent design
> >>advocates is more ambitious than a demonstration that some
> >>biological features were designed purposefully by some person--
> >
> >No. There is simply no way that "intelligent design" can be
> >"more ambitious than a demonstration that some biological features
> >were designed purposefully by some person". If you claim that
> >ID is doing this, you need to supply quotes from their writings
> >that they are. :-)
> >
>
> How about this:
>
> "So if there is an Intelligent Designer who is outside of
> nature, the methodological naturalist cannot admit it and
> still do science." -- Steve Jones
And as I hope I argued successfully above, ID necessarily appeals
ultimately to some sort of self-designing, final Cause for complexity
which maps pretty well onto the classical ideas of the attributes of
God. This seems somewhat more ambitious than the demonstration
mentioned.
I can't persuade myself that ID is not an argument from design for
the existence of God. Is this something ID people readily agree
to, or should I still try?
-Greg