People have asked to formulate my views on ID so here we go.
Design: Can ID formulate a hypothesis that allows us to reliably detect
design? Can ID once, design is infered, exclude natural forces as a designer?
My answer would be: Not reliably so far and no it cannot exclude natural
forces.
1. Dembski's Design Inference
As has been argued convincingly by Wesley Elsberry, the statement that there
are no false positives in the design inference needs some work. Wesley also
provided a design inference which appears to be more intuitive and includes
"we don't know" as a category. Richard Wein also has written on this topic
and his arguments show that there is some equivocation about design and
intelligent design.
"Well, first of all, Dembski is equivocal about what he means by "design". He
initially defines design to be the "set-theoretic complement of the
disjunction regularity-or-chance", or, in other words: "To attribute an
event to design is to say that it cannot reasonably referred to either
regularity or chance" (p. 36). By this definition, the EF is tautological,
but Dembski promises that he will later provide us with a means of
determining which cases of "design" can be attributed to "intelligent
agency". Or is he going to attribute *all* cases of design to intelligent
agency? This is where Dembski starts to equivocate.
i) On page 36, he writes: "The principal advantage of characterizing design
as the complement of regularity and chance is that it avoids committing
itself to a doctrine of intelligent agency. In practice, when we eliminate
regularity and chance, we typically do end up with an intelligent agent.
Thus, in practice, to infer design is typically to end up with a "designer"
in the classical sense." Dembski's use of the word "typically" strongly
imples that not all cases of design can be attributed to intelligent agency,
i.e. that design does not necessarily imply intelligent agency.
ii) In Section 2.4, "From Design to Agency" (starting p. 62), Dembski
returns to this issue and attempts to establish a connection between design
and (intelligent) agency. I'm not going to address the issue of whether he
succeeds in doing so. All I'm interested in for now is whether he claims to
establish a *necessary* connection, i.e. that *all* cases of design can be
attributed to agency. The answer is that he does. In the final paragraph of
the section, he summarizes: "It's now clear why the Explanatory Filter is so
well suited for recognizing intelligent agency: for the Explanatory Filter
to infer design coincides with how we recognize intelligent agency
generally." And again: "It follows that the filter formalizes what we have
been doing right along when we recognize intelligent agents. The Explanatory
Filter pinpoints how we recognize intelligent agency" (p. 66).
iii) In case anyone should try to reconcile the contradiction of (i) and
(ii) above by claiming that "typically" should be read as something like "to
all intents and purposes", let me point out that Dembski actually gives an
example of a situation where the EF (according to Dembski) indicates design
but we where we cannot (according to Dembski) infer an intelligent agency.
The example is on page 226, and I'll give details if anyone is interested.
But I think it's sufficient to note Dembski's conclusion: "Thus, even though
in practice inferring design is the first step in identifying an intelligent
agent, taken by itself design does not require that such an agent be
posited. The notion of design that emerges from the design inference must
not be confused with intelligent agency." (Note that the terms "design
inference" and "Explanatory Filter" appear to be synonyomous. One might have
assumed that DI = EF + the mysterious extra criterion that allows us to
distinguish between simple design and intelligent agency, but the last
sentence quoted shows that this cannot be the case.)
So despite, the claim to the contrary on page 66, it seems that the EF on
its own is not sufficient to identify intelligent agency. In that case, what
additional information is required? Dembski continues (p. 227): "When the
design inference infers design, its primary effect is to limit our
explanatory options. Only secondarily does it help identify a cause. To
investigate a cause we need to investigate the particulars of the situation
where design was inferred. Simply put, we need more details. In the Caputo
case, for instance, it seems clear enough what the causal story is, namely,
that Caputo cheated. In the probabilistically isomorphic case of Alice and
Bob, however, we may have to live without a causal explanation..." So, in
order to attribute the Caputo case to design, we need to know the causal
design story (he cheated). But the whole purpose of the design inference was
to give us a way of identifying design *without* knowing the causal story.
Dembski has just shot himself in the foot! "
2. Behe's IC
Behe claims that an IC system cannot arise naturally through evolutionary
steps. However he does later on admit that indirect pathways might exists
although he considers such pathways unlikely. Behe reaches this conclusion
without any calculations why such pathways are unlikely, this is especially
important since they are the likely paths of evolution. Based on the absence
of (direct) evidence to support an evolutionary pathway, design is infered.
This seems a lot like an argument of false dualism. Absence of evidence of
evolution is evidence in favor of design. But what about IC'ness is that not
evidence of design? No, since we have evidence of IC systems that arose
naturally as well as through "intelligent design" we cannot rely on IC-ness
by itself to infer design. Especially since Behe himself admits that a
natural pathway may exist. So how is design infered independently of absence
of evidence ? So far I see no evidence that design can be reliably infered
because it is based on the absence of evidence. For example it has been shown
how IC systems could arise naturally. Behe interjects that he does not see
how each step would be advantageous, but that is not a requirement of
evolution. Furthermore he seems to reject indirect evidence and requires
evidence to include actually observation of an IC system arising naturally.
Science has identified several pathways through which IC systems could arise
and for several of the IC systems identified by Behe (speculative) pathways
have been formulated based on the evidence.
So let's assume that design is infered reliably, what does this mean for the
designer? Since ID'ers are quite adimant about ID saying nothing about the
designer, they also cannot argue against the argument that nature can be a
designer. Nature indeed can give rise to design, often referd to as apparant
design. The apparancy of design can be shown by identifying natural pathways
that lead to the system. Can ID show that natural forces can be excluded ? Or
more relevantly can ID'ers support their prefered "designer"?
Some enthusiasm seems to have arisen among Christians that ID shows evidence
of "design" but they are lead to believe in a form of design that does not
necessarily support their view of design. I believe that this equivocation of
the term design and intelligent design has lead to a lot of confusion about
ID.
So far it has not been shown that design can be reliably infered, certainly
in case of biological systems, evidence of design is infered from absence of
direct evidence for evolutionary pathways. Although indirect evidence seems
to support evolutionary pathways, Behe's IC systems are limited to systems
for which likely no record exists to help us study its progress over time.
But we can still infer a lot from comparing similar systems among various
species or even from our understanding of IC systems in a certain organism.
Certainly this is not direct evidence but it adds to the difficulty of
excluding natural forces as a designer.
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