In a message dated 5/5/01 4:14:35 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
RDehaan237@aol.com writes:
(in reply to Howard Van Till)
> Here is what Bill Dembski wrote in his forthcoming book, _No Free Lunch_
> about the meaning of design;
>
> "How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at
> least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A
> designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that
> purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute
> the plan, the designer specifies building materials
> and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer
> or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions
> to the building materials. What emerges is a designed
> object, and the designer is successful to the degree
> that the object fulfills the designer's purpose.
> <SNIP>
>
> Does this satisfy your desire for the leadership of ID to come forward and
> declare whether design is just the creative thought, or the implementation
> of
> it as well?
>
I can't speak for Howard, but my guess is that it is not satisfactory. I say
this because it looks to me like Howard's "fully gifted creation" view would
satisfy the 4-part criterion, yet I'm pretty sure Dembski does not consider
such a view to count as "design."
The main problem arises in step #4. In Howard's view, the "surrogates" of
the designer that carry out the assembly would be the raw material itself
(and the laws of physics) that the Designer had created and gifted with all
its potentialities at the beginning. I suspect that, for Dembski, the
"surrogates" in step #4 must be intelligent agents external to the process
who intervene in the assembly. So that not only the design but also some
aspect of the assembly must be imposed from outside by an agent.
Dembski or others in the ID movement could clear things up on this count if
they would cease dodging the questions that have been addressed to them about
cases where the assembly of God's design is entirely explained through
natural processes. Is the Sun "designed"? Are carbon atoms "designed"? If
the answer is "yes," then by the same logic one could say that life was
"designed" even if there were no external interventions in the evolutionary
process. If the answer is "no," then they are misleading people when they
use the term "design" because they are also requiring interventionist
assembly which is not part of its normal meaning.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Allan H. Harvey, Boulder, Colorado | SteamDoc@aol.com
"Any opinions expressed here are mine, and should not be
attributed to my employer, my wife, or my cats"
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