In Re: ID's exciting, comprehensive, publicly funded
scientific research program for the 21st century! (was ID)
On Sat Jun 10 2000 - 19:56:59 EDT,
Stephen E. Jones (sejones@iinet.net.au) wrote:
>Reflectorites
>On Tue, 6 Jun 2000 09:44:56 -0700, billwald@juno.com wrote:
>[...]
>SJ>to be a split in science, with funding being taken off
>>>materialists and granted to IDers.
>
>BW>Funding to do what? Do a computer search of junk DNA
>to see if somehow the first 3 chapters of Genesis is
>encoded?
>[...]
>I thank Bill for this question, which gives me the
>opportunity to lay out what I see as ID's exciting,
>comprehensive, publicly funded scientific research
>program for the 21st century! I would state however
>that I am not among the leadership of the ID movement,
>so the above is just my personal vision for the ID
>movement:
>
>Materialistic-naturalistic science's (NS) basic
>assumption is that prior to the advent of humans
>there were only unintelligent causes.
Does the chief designer have to be intelligent being at
all? Long before intelligent design was formulated people
proposed "creative forces" being behind evolution or the
development of life. These "creative forces" are not a
well-defined being, e.g. God, but indefinable and
unnamable basis of all being. A geologist friend, noting
how the vast majority of intelligent design proponents
inevitably advocate our God as being the chief designer
behind intelligent design, see the Dembski quote at the
end of the article as an example he gave me, half
jokingly suggest that he should push his own version of
"intelligent design" in which it is simply an expression
of the Tao.
I find it interesting how the chief designer who is
responsible for intelligent design can be argued
to be any of a number of beings, e.g. Krishna,
Yahweh, God, Allah, and creative forces, e.g. the
Tao, yet Johnson already knows that our Christian
God is the chief designer. Go see, "Re: The
Wedge of Truth : Splitting the Foundations of
Naturalism by Phillip E. Johnson" in which the
following part of a review is quoted:
"In the end, Johnson prophetically concludes
that the walls of naturalism will fall and
that the Christian gospel must play a vital
role in building a new foundation for thinking
--not just about science and religion but about
everything that gives human life hope and meaning."
Does Johnson have scientific proof that the chief
designer is our Christian God? I imagine that Muslims,
Jews, Taoists, Buddhists, and people of other religions
have something also pertinent to say about the role
that their religions have building this new foundation
for thinking. Or are non-Christians excluded from
Johnson's grand scheme of re-educating the world
to give "human life hope and meaning?"
The one that bothers me, is that intelligent design
seems to assume that biological systems have intelligent
design, while non-biological systems are not expected
to show intelligent design. If intelligent design
is real, then both non-biological and biological
systems should both show evidence of detectable
intelligent design. A person should find intelligent
design in sequence stratigraphy and plate tectonics,
as well as DNA and finch beaks. The other explanation
is that Old Earth creationists find their religious
beliefs and morally threatened by evolution, but
not by billion year old Earth and plate tectonics.
Thus, they feel a need to attack evolution, but
not geology.
>ID's basic assumption is that prior to the advent of
>humans: 1) there were *both* unintelligent and
>intelligent causes; and 2) the latter are, at least
>in principle, empirically detectable.
If intelligent design is more than a means of attacking
evolution, than it should be applicable to nonbiological
systems, not just the origin of the universe, as well as
biological systems. A should person be able to detect
intelligent design in geological systems, as well as
biological systems. One difference between geology and
biology, is that either side of the debate cannot use
the jargon and mathematics of information theory
to create scientific-sounding technobabble.
(How many non-specialists actually understand any of the
information theory arguments being debated? How many
really care, just as long as they have specialists and
scientific-sounding arguments which justify what they
believe to true, both anti-evolutionist and evolutionist,
is true and the are being "scientific" in their beliefs?)
In something as comprehensive of the intelligent design
of the universe, why should it be only detectable in
biological systems?
>Therefore, ID's research program will be to look for
>emprical evidence of intelligent causation prior to
>~100 kya. The obvious place to look is where
>NS is having major problems with explaining the
>evidence.
Again, the age shouldn't matter. In fact, the
younger the age the more data and chronological
control that a person has which constrains the
data. For example, the quality and quantity
of information available for evolutionary events
in the Wisconsinan Stage of the Pleistocene is
many orders of magnitude greater than for the
Cambrian Explosion. In case of the latter, it
would a lot harder to falsify intelligent design.
because the data is far more ambiguous and
fragmentary than in the former. The farther
a person looks back in time, the easier it is going
to explain a particular theory in terms of the
available data and the harder it will be to falsify
it or any other theory conclusively. For example,
look at the debate about a meteorite impact causing
the Permian extinction versus the debate about the
cause of the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous
and the sketchy data available about the former
and the abundance of data about the latter.
If one wanted to detect intelligent design, it
seems like Cenozoic foraminifera would be better
at testing it than soft-bodied Cambrian faunas.
In fact, the younger the time period, the better
the database to work from and the better one can
falsify a hypothesis. This might be the very
reason that intelligent design people concentrate
in the Cambrian and Precambrian. In the younger
strata, there might be too many embarrassing facts
that can falsify something that they want to
be able to argue is true.
[SIDE NOTE: A person can explain the Cambrian biomeres
in same way that the proponents of intelligent design
explain Cambrian Explosion. In the biomeres, fully
developed families of trilobite appear out of nowhere
at each extinction event without any antecedents. I
have yet to read of any person attributing that to the
cause. Geogres Cuvier likely would had he known about
them. Georges Cuvier would also be very happy with how
the proponents of intelligent design interpret the
Cambrian Explosion. :-) ]
... text deleted ...
Yours
Keith Littleton
littlejo@vnet.net
New Orleans, LA
"Information-the information that God speaks to
create the world, the information that continually
proceeds from God in sustaining the world and acting
in it, and the information that passes between God's
creatures-this is the bridge that connects transcendence
and immanence. All of this information is mediated
through the divine Logos, who is before all things and
by whom all things consist (Colossians 1:17). The
crucial breakthrough of the intelligent design
movement has been to show that this great theological
truth-that God acts in the world by dispersing
information-also has scientific content. All
information, whether divinely inputted or transmitted
between creatures, is in principle capable of being
detected via the complexity-specification criterion.
Examples abound:
The fine-tuning of the universe and irreducibly
complex biochemical systems are instances of specified
complexity, and signal information inputted into the
universe by God at its creation.
Predictive prophecies in Scripture are instances
of specified complexity, and signal information
inputted by God as part of his sovereign activity
within creation."
-- "The Act of Creation: Bridging Transcendence and Immanence"
Access Research Network William A. Dembski Files - William
A. Dembski, Presented at Millstatt Forum, Strasbourg,
France, 10 August 1998.
http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_actofcreation.htm
evolution@calvin.edu
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