RE: My article "Intelligent Design on Trial"

It seems that you're expecting far too much from ID. Kuhn's argument about paradigms is not the issue. Evolution may be used to explain "dinosaurs and the moon and the Milky Way," but does it explain human-made things? This is what I'm interested in. Pattern recognition and specifying complexity can be (it seems) safely unconcerned with the age of the earth. Can't they? The paradigm-shift thing is buying into Johnson-Dembski 'revolution' rhetoric. Their 'science' just doesn't back them up. Please note that I'm not 'defending ID' in saying this, but asking for the possibility that evolution is not what people are saying it is. Scientists will not 'abandon evolution' unless they have an alternative theory/model/framework/explanation. O.K. But 'which evolution' can possibly be abandoned if it is a 'theory of everything' as Ted suggests it is? Is another 'theory of everything' the only way? Where/when/how those human-made items items mentioned earlier 'evolved' into existence has
  nothing
 to do with 'age of earth' or 'origins of life.' They are like juicy steaks thrown down to distract the watchdog of the mind.

  g.a.
   
   
  p.s. Ted, we are fully agreed about the wheels and the wagon (big tent collapse), even if the destiny of the IDM (as a social movement) can be studied as having nothing to do with 'age of the earth'
   
  
Ted Davis <tdavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
>>> Gregory Arago 03/03/06 6:56 AM >>>asks me the
following question:

Ted wrote in his article "Intelligent Design on Trial":
"In order for ID to provide a plausible alternative to evolution, its
proponents would have to address the one issue they least want to face: the
age of the earth and the universe ." (Winter 2006 Issue)

The question 'which evolution' has been asked, but no one has yet
responded. If (big if) ID (hypothetically) limits itself to pattern
recognition and specifying complexity, for example, I see no reason why it *must* address the issue of the age of the earth. Likewise, it may provide an alternative to a specifically defined type of evolution, say, information evolution, but not others.

Can this be agreed upon or would it redefine what ID is trying to do too
far from reality?

Ted responds:
The context in my brain (and in the unedited, longer version of my
published essay) is as follows. I buy Kuhn's idea (p. 77 in Structure of
Scientific Revolutions) that scientists abandon a paradigm only when another paradigm is sitting there as a more plausible alternative. We can argue about that, but I agree with hit and its a premise for my claim. Thus, if evolution presently functions as a "theory of everything" that can tell us when/where/how things have come into being, such as dinosaurs and the moon and the Milky Way, then ID will need to do the same thing in order to become a new paradigm. ID will need to spell out an age for the universe, etc.
And when they do, as I've told my ID friends many times, the wheels will come off the wagon. Popular support will largely disappear, as the many creationists who support ID will no longer do so; and the leading IDs themselves will no longer agree on parts of their "paradigm" as they articulate it.

t
                
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Received on Sat Mar 4 19:26:32 2006