In a message dated 10/5/2000 11:25:11 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
Nucacids@aol.com writes:
> << Sounds right to me. It still sounds like an oxymoron to say that that an
> NATURAL selection is an intelligent designer. >>
>
> Indeed. Natural selection is a tinkerer, a jury-rigger, a blind watchmaker
> that uses whatever is laying around and gives no thought to what it is
> making. It simply happens to stumble upon something, anything, that also
> happens to increase the likelihood that the stumbled-upon state will
> increase
> its representation in the pool. It is not an intelligent designer.
>
Then please explain why ID cannot eliminate it as such? Merely defining it
out of existance because it is inconvenient to think of ID as intelligent
designer hardly makes for a satisfying argument. Show why natural selection
can be excluded as a designer when design has been infered.
Wesley Elsberry:
"The apparent, but unstated, logic behind the move from design to
agency can be given as follows:
1. There exists an attribute in common of some subset of objects
known to be designed by an intelligent agent.
2. This attribute is never found in objects known not to be designed
by an intelligent agent.
3. The attribute encapsulates the property of directed contingency
or choice.
4.For all objects, if this attribute is found in an object, then we
may conclude that the object was designed by an intelligent agent.
"This is an inductive argument. Notice that by the second step, one
must eliminate from consideration precisely those biological
phenomena which Dembski wishes to categorize. In order to conclude
intelligent agency for biological examples, the possibility that
intelligent agency is not operative is excluded a priori. One large
problem is that directed contingency or choice is not solely an
attribute of events due to the intervention of an intelligent agent.
The "actualization-exclusion-specification" triad mentioned above also
fits natural selection rather precisely. One might thus conclude that
Dembski's argument establishes that natural selection can be recognized
as an intelligent agent. "
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html
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