Hi Bob
You quoted Bill Dembski's definition of design in his soon to be released book
(how did you get a copy?) "No Free Lunch"
> "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. In
> the case of human designers, this four-part design
> process is uncontroversial. Baking a cake, driving a
> car, embezzling funds, and building a supercomputer
> each presuppose it. Not only do we repeatedly engage
> in this four-part design process, but we've witnessed
> other people engage in it countless times. Given a
> sufficiently detailed causal history, we are able to
> track this process from start to finish....
I am happy with this concept of design. It places no a priori restrictions on
how the design might be actualised. It also engages all four levels of Aristole's
causal theories.
>
>
> "Nevertheless, when it comes to living things, the
> biological community holds that a very different type
> of causal story is required. To be sure, the
> biological community admits that biological systems
> appear to be designed. For instance, Richard Dawkins
> writes, "Biology is the study of complicated things
> that give the appearance of having been designed for
> a purpose." 1 Likewise, Francis Crick writes,
> "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what
> they see was not designed, but rather evolved." 2 Or
> consider the title of Renato Dulbecco's biology text
> -- The Design of Life.3 The term "design" is
> everywhere in the biological literature. Even so, its
> use is carefully regulated. According to the
> biological community the appearance of design in
> biology is misleading. This is not to deny that
> biology is filled with marvelous contrivances.
> Biologists readily admit as much. Yet as far as the
> biological community is concerned, living things are
> not the result of the four-part design process
> described above. "
>
>
This is an interesting comment for several reasons. I agree some biologists are
indeed very hostile to teleology (when I was an undergraduate, with
anthropomorphism it was the great forbidden concept). But, despite Dawkins and
Crick (and Dembski's "biological community"), not all biologists feel this way
and, whatever the proportion, such statements by them are philosophically
flawed. However, just because the ideas are flawed at the level of primary or
formal cause does not entail that their ideas on efficient and material causes
are similarly flawed.
These are Dembski's (and PJ's) errors: 1) To believe that the biological
community has a single opinion in this area and that people like Crick and
Dawkins are their spokesmen. 2) To believe that because their metaphysics is
faulty, therefore their science must be equally faulty. 3) To legitimately ask
the question as to why people like Dawkins why "when it comes to living things,
the
biological community holds that a very different type of causal story is
required" but not ask why the ID community similarly sees a discontinuity between
biological and non biological causality, even though the core principles of ID as
he has articulated them no not postulate such a discontinuity.
Many people, even myself have asked this last question of various ID folk
repeatedly and never, to my experience and knowledge, got a straight answer. I
suspect the reason is because ID, as framed by the DI and PJ is not a scientific
or philosophical endevour, but a social and political one, and admitting that
there need be not tension with a theory of design and the causal mechanisms (even
evolutionary ones) is seen to undermine the social and political effort.
Jon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat May 05 2001 - 19:38:03 EDT