Re: What my tiny little brain was thinking... [was Re: [asa] Two Amino Acid Difference in Gene May Explain Human Speech]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com>wrote:

> Murray said:
> "So what, precisely, is the debate about? Frankly, I no longer see it. It
> makes no sense to me whatever."
>
> That is because ID is vague and confusing.
>
> The debate is this:
>
> Corner 1: TE: Evolution happened, and it happened naturally. God could
> have directed it, imperceptible to human understanding. Or it could have
> unrolled naturally from God's upfront design.
>
> Corner 2: ID: Evolution couldn't have happened naturally, and God did some
> 'de novo' work in there somewhere. Where? That is the point of Behe's book
> "The edge of evolution." These people think that if evolution happened
> naturally, then atheists win and God is out of a job. Their term for
> "natural evolution" is "Darwinian evolution."
>

I don't think the second one is quite right. It's the TEs who see the
unnecessary high stakes of the ID argument and not the ID proponents. More
on this in a moment. ID says that if evolution didn't happen naturally then
atheists are out of a job. According to ID, TEs who argue that evolution did
happen naturally are thinking like -- and in Johnson's opinion are worse
than -- atheists. What they don't see is the contrapositive of their
position which you noted. The reason why the contrapositive holds is because
by and large ID commits the excluded middle fallacy. In other words, ID
argues that theism and the evolutionary process as understood by modern
biology are mutually exclusive. This is the biggest difference in my
opinion between ID and TE. TE sees these as potentially compatible (and so
does the two premier scientific societies in America, the NAS and AAAS). So,
disproving ID in essence proves atheism. The New Atheists understand this
intuitively and have jumped all over this.

And this brings to the second major issue that TE has with ID. In addition
to creating the high stakes ID v atheism either/or environment, they produce
lousy arguments making it easier for the atheists to win. Even if ID in
theory could produce a good argument, the arguments currently being
promolgated leave -- shall we say -- much to be desired. And that is why I
have been very critical of their lousy arguments here. Not because I am in
any way siding with the atheists but because I am four-square against them.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Fri Nov 13 13:25:48 2009