From: Steve Petermann (steve@spetermann.org)
Date: Fri Oct 17 2003 - 18:10:28 EDT
Ted Davis wrote:
> Ted: How does Phil propose that we do natural science? That's a good
> question that I won't try to answer for him--many critics of ID would like
> to see it answered. In vague terms, however, I think he would say, "not
> entirely naturalistically," in other words to have a science in which "the
> design inference" can and will be made, by scientists themselves and
within
> science itself and not simply in philosophy or theology.
George Murphy wrote:
>& once the "design inference" is made - what? Do we investigate the
designer
>(i.e., God) by the methods - or Phil's methods - of natural science? Or do
we just stop
>at that point? Maybe there are other possibilities but I can't think of
them.
Having been design engineer for over 30 years, I don't think that it is an
impossible task to include research on the designer in the ID program. If
the goal of speculating on the designer is to assess both the scientific and
theological reasonableness of ID then suggesting a designer and the
designer's design process might be useful. However, I think the only
fruitful way to investigate the designer is to start with presumptions about
the available tool set and the design environment. Starting from postulating
a type of designer up front, ends up being a force fit exercise in theology.
However, it one starts with the design environment and speculates on a few
things, then perhaps reasonable sketches of possible designers can be drawn.
From there the feasibility of a particular design process could be tested.
For instance if the tool set available to an intelligent designer falls
within the scope of methodological naturalism then the designer will have a
more limited environment to work in than other schemes. In this case the
designer would have to do the design work utilizing the natural openness or
anomalies that science regularly detects. Since design changes would be
small, this designer would be a designer of emergence.
The question of this case would be if this could fit both a scientific view
and a theological view. Is there a way that a designer like this makes
sense?
A good corollary for this type of designer would be a process designer.
Complex process systems are typically built up from functional units put
together and interfaced(small additions and changes). The more complex the
system gets the more careful the designer has to be about changes because
effects become more unpredictable. The designer in this case makes small
changes and then steps back to monitor what will happen. This gives the
designer the opportunity to adjust things before they get out of hand.
Anyway that might be one example of how speculating about a designer might
further assess the reasonableness of the design inference and the
theological implications.
Steve Petermann
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