[asa] ID question?

William Paley used the 'watchmaker analogy' to demonstrate the idea of intelligent design. We can just tell, by looking at nature, that things are obviously designed by God by fiat, such as man, because of their complexity.

Darwin creates a stir with an alternate hypothesis of man's creation via biological evolution instead. It is a competing hypothesis. Evolution has now won, for explaining the biological creation of man, because of DNA evidence like pseudogenes.

So my question: Isn't Behe's 'moustrap' irreducible complexity the same EXACT situation? It is basically saying since we don't know how it could have evolved, therefore it was intelligently designed (by God or aliens). The only difference is that Behe goes into great detail trying to explain how it can't be done by known "Darwinistic evolutionist" mechanisms, but Paley could have (and maybe did?) done the same thing (explaining why/how known science of his day could not explain evolution for humans).

I would like to know what is so different about Behe, compared to Paley. Paley has a 'complexity' argument with the watch, and Behe introduces irreducible complexity, but both are proposing ID because known science can't explain it... yet.

It is interesting to me that Paley's argument for the biological creation of man is not discarded because it is wrong with the idea of complexity, but because the evolutionary process has evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt." So complexity may still be a valid way to detect ID, yet in this case, it turned out wrong as science accumulated more facts. It could be the same with irreducible complexity. A valid way to detect ID, yet disproven in the future when more facts become available.

But what is the evidence to prove irreducible complexity? It seems like the only evidence is "evolution can't do it or explain it... yet."

...Bernie

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Received on Wed Oct 14 14:17:25 2009