Re: Plantinga: Whether ID [Intelligent Design]

Terry wrote:

> Pim,
>
> So let me be the "devil's" advocate for a minute. Just suppose for
> the sake of argument that God did something like the IDer's claim--
> say, directly cause a flagellum to form in such a way that it is
> unexplainable using normal scientific explanations. Call it a
> miracle or whatever you like. But now it's part of our normal world
> and is propagated in normal ways, but came into being via some
> extraordinary divine act.
>
> Again, for the sake of argument, let's not simply dismiss it by
> saying that God doesn't work this way.
>
> What would or could we say about this scientifically?
>
> TG

I have addressed this in a couple of my essays. Below is an excerpt
from my essay published in the Georgia Journal of Science.

"ID advocates believe that the exclusion of God from scientific
description
unnecessarily restricts the search for truth. It does nothing of the
sort. If God
acted in creation to bring about a particular structure in a way that
broke
causal chains, then science would simply conclude that: “There is
presently
no known series of cause-and-effect processes that can adequately
account
for this structure, and research will continue to search for such
processes.”
Any statement beyond that requires the application of a particular
religious
worldview. Science cannot conclude “God did it.” However, if God acted
through a seamless series of cause-and-effect processes to bring
about that
structure, then the continuing search for such processes stimulated
by the
tentativeness and methodological naturalism of science may uncover those
processes. Using an ID approach, the inference to “intelligent
design” would
be made, and any motivation for further research would end. Thus, ID
runs the
risk of making false conclusions, and prematurely terminating the
search for
cause-and-effect descriptions when one wasn’t already at hand.
Furthermore,
how would a gap in our knowledge be filled unless there was a continued
effort to search for possible “natural” causes? Thus even the
verification of
gaps requires research conducted using MN assumptions." (p. 178)

I also have a similar statement in my essay "Design and purpose
within an evolving creation" in P.E. Johnson and D.O. Lamoureux,
Darwinism Defeated?

Keith

Keith B. Miller
Research Assistant Professor
Dept of Geology, Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506-3201
785-532-2250
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
Received on Sat Mar 18 13:56:24 2006