Cameron Wybrow wrote:
Here is the problem that you TEs have created for yourselves. In order
to combat both Dawkins-Darwinism (atheism) and ID on the one hand,
you've adopted the methodological/metaphysical naturalism division.
But while you can employ that against ID and atheism, it's powerless
against YEC. In fact, it's worse than powerless. It positively
enables YEC. Once you've adopted that division, you *can't* say that
YEC explanations are *wrong*, i.e., false to reality, unless you bring
in metaphysical naturalism. The *most* that you can say is that if a
naturalistic explanation is available, it is to be preferred to the
non-naturalistic one, because God generally seems to work through
secondary causes. But you are then *compelled*, by the terms of the
division, to acknowledge that in any particular case (e.g., the
creation of man), the naturalistic explanation may be the false one and
the non-naturalistic explanation the true one. So to fend off atheism
and ID, you've empowered YEC, and you've cut off your nose to spite
your face. Smooth move.
Cameron
I don't see how ID is much better. They also reject metaphysical
naturalism and have allowed "The Designer did it" to be a scientific
explanation. How do they differentiate between "The designer did it"
and "I don't know" as far as science goes?
Since ID also tells me that the designer is not necessarily God how
does ID get out of the infinite regress in terms of the origin of
life? In fact it almost sounds to me like ID also uses the
methodological naturalism rule when they say that the designer did it
rather than God.
Personally I am not all that concerned with fending off ID people like
Behe. Sure I would rather he kept his opinions on the
unevolveability of certain IC forms as part of his world view or
metaphysics but it is not that big a deal. However, I think he has
done science a favor by raising the IC issue. Having read his book I
did not really understand the point he is raising about IC until you
explained it in one of your notes. Even co-option to make some more
involved artifact is hard to explain in a gradualist approach unless
the artifact being co-opted is very similar in structure to the new
artifact.
Dave W
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Received on Sun Jun 21 19:23:55 2009