Re: [asa] STATEMENT ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN BY IOWA STATE

I suppose someone could argue that Biblical revelation gives us knowledge of what to expect from a supernatural designer.  But of course ID doesn't dare go there or it loses its claim to 'nobody-here-but-us-scientists'.

BTW Keith, I second Randy.  Your point was very well stated.

Karl

**************

Karl V. Evans

cmekve@aol.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Randy Isaac <randyisaac@comcast.net>
To: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 6:00 am
Subject: Re: [asa] STATEMENT ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN BY IOWA STATE

That's an excellent point and well stated. The argument that there is an analogy between detectable design of human agents and detectable design of supernatural agents falls short precisely because we have no reference design known to be the result of a supernatural agent. Other than, of course, the entire universe itself but that's no longer a scientific design analysis.

Randy

----- Original Message -----

From: Keith Miller

To: American Scientific Affiliation

Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 11:15 PM

Subject: Re: [asa] STATEMENT ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN BY IOWA STATE

So why not start with what the ID folks point to: SETI, identifying

hominid/human fabricated tools, forensics that lead to a conviction

vs. those that don't, etc.? Are any of these "scientific"? Why or why

not? How, in principle, do they differ from the ID enterprise in

molecular biology? What about Sagan's fanciful example in Contact--

wasn't it something like the digits of pi communicating some message?

The critical comparison is between natural agents and supernatural agents.   

It is central to any coherent understanding of design that the purposes and capacities of the designer be known.  However, ID advocates argue that design can be recognized in the absence of any knowledge of the designer.  They further argue that human and divine designers are effectively equivalent from a scientific perspective.  Our ability to detect design by humans is used as a demonstration that supernatural design can be similarly recognized scientifically.

However, this claim is clearly false.  We must have some conception of the capabilities (and limitations) of potential causal agents before they can be invoked.  We do in fact know much about human designers as a class of potential agents, even if we do not know the specific individuals.  We recognize human artifacts because we understand human capacities and purposes.  Similarly, we recognize the products of other natural volitional agents such as non-human animals.  We can search for the signals of ETs, but only to the extent that we assume some specific capabilities and purposes on their part (usually modeled after our own).  Divine agents on the other hand have no constraints, and their purposes and capabilities cannot be defined.  We do not know a priori how a divine agent might work in nature. An agent that can do anything, does not provide any explanatory power to a scientific hypothesis.  It is effectively equivalent to current ignorance. 

Keith

________________________________________________________________________
AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Jun 5 15:04:34 2007