Table Of Content
It's understood that if you want to be about science, you have to be supportive of this theory. So that's been going on all these years, and yet the people are not convinced. The mandarins of science, the high priests at the university level, will tell you it's because the people are ignorant and prejudiced.
William Dembski: Specified complexity
They could have been serving other purposes when they were chosen as advantageous for their current function. And so in that sense, just as I'm in a sense the father of the intelligent-design movement, I'm the father of the wedge concept. In the sense in which I have explained it, that it is a matter of my particular kind of logical arguing expertise at the beginning, to be supplemented and eventually replaced by [the expertise of] people with greater scientific knowledge and competence. That's the metaphysics of religion and science that is taken for granted in the universities. So while there can be arguments over the details, there can be no argument or discussion over the fundamental principle that only natural—which is to say unintelligent—causes were involved.
Historical Comments
For example, forensic scientists and pathologists regularly determine whether a death was due to natural causes or intelligent causes. If somebody dies of a purported heart failure, and then they do an autopsy on the body and find signs of arsenic poisoning, they say this was not a death by natural causes; it was a poisoning. Say we have almost 99 percent of our genes in common with chimpanzees. We also have at least 25 percent of our genes in common with bananas. Do they point to a common evolutionary process or a common creator? Now, at this point the absolute certainty, the dogmatic insistence with which the Darwinists told their story, began to have a boomerang effect.
The Mystery of Life’s Origin
Therefore, a more complex species -- one that contains more information -- could not have evolved from a less complex species [ref]. In biology, Behe sees the bacterial flagellum as an irreducibly complex system. I'm glad for an opportunity to explain the wedge strategy, because I conceived it. I know it can be made to sound like something sinister and conspiratorial. But the wedge strategy as I have explained it is quite simple and innocent. We need somebody who can get a debate started, and then we need people who have the expertise to answer the questions that come up as the debate gets started.
It seems to me that besides the lack of physical or experimental evidence, just logically one would expect that random mutations would never build up biological information. They would tend to tear it down, even if it was already in existence. Now, if the intelligent cause turns out to be supernatural, that's a determination that is outside of science. But that you need intelligence is not a determination that's outside of science. It's the regular business of science, like deciding whether a drawing on a cave wall is a painting by prehistoric cavemen or a product of natural erosion and chemistry in the wall.
Then the scientific approach is to decide between these two hypotheses on the basis of evidence and logic. If evolution by natural selection is a scientific doctrine, then the critique of that doctrine, and even of the fundamental assumption on which it's based, is a legitimate part of science as well. The Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court ruling held the latter to be the case. The protein-machines produced by our DNA are often “irreducibly complex.” Irreducible complexity is a purposeful arrangement of parts, where if any part is removed or mutated, the structure ceases to assemble or function properly. For example, the “bacterial flagellum,” is a rotary-engine on bacteria which fails to assemble or function properly if we mutate any one of its approximately 35 protein components. Natural selection cannot account for this irreducible complexity because it only preserves structures which provide a functional advantage.
Insurance fraud investigators detect certain “cheating patterns” that suggest intentional manipulation of circumstances rather than natural disasters. Cryptographers distinguish between random signals and those that carry encoded messages. Dembski’s work showed that recognizing the activity of intelligent agents constitutes a common and fully rational mode of inference.
Essential to all these methods is the ability to eliminate chance and necessity. When all historical questions are left officially out of the ID platform, then it becomes very difficult for critics to see what actually counts as legitimate science inside the tent on such matters. In the absence of any such standard, then someone like Cornelius Hunter can simply sit back taking pot shots at evolution and various other parts of natural history, without offering any alternative explanations of his own or identifying any parts of natural history that are (in his view) well supported. A studied skepticism of this type amounts to a profound agnosticism about all things natural historical, and anyone who is really that agnostic about that much science has in my view undermined their own credibility as a critic of scientific explanations in those disciplines. Others, because they wished to see the theory of intelligent design taught in schools as an alternate to the theory of evolution, avoided all explicit reference to God in order to maintain the separation between religion and state. The intelligent design (ID) movement promotes the idea that many aspects of life are too complex to have evolved without the intervention of a supernatural being — the intelligent designer.
Intelligent Design Passes Peer Review - Breakpoint - BreakPoint.org
Intelligent Design Passes Peer Review - Breakpoint.
Posted: Fri, 16 Oct 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Intelligent design and its critics
That’s the rock bottom question here, and there simply is no consensus—neither among Christians nor even among atheists, for that matter. I defended it myself several years ago in a brief exchange with Phillip Johnson, who had written a letter in reply to my review of three ID books, including one of his, which ran as a cover story for Reports of the National Center for Science Education. Dive deep into the peer-reviewed biochemistry, paleontology, and cosmology that supports intelligent design. According to Dembski, a biological system is clearly designed if it exhibits specified complexity. In this article, the term "scientific community" means the body of working scientists in the world who have published in peer-reviewed journals, utilize widely accepted scientific principles and are actively applying the scientific method in laboratory settings.
Finally, in the early 1990s, precise measurements from NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite indicated that the universe was filled with radiation having the exact properties predicted by the Big Bang theory. The next time an ambulance drives past with its siren blaring, pay attention to the pitch of the sound. As the ambulance approaches, the pitch is high, but then as it screams past, the pitch suddenly drops. He has produced over 20 movies and TV shows, managing thousands of employees in the process.
Larry Witham provides the best overview of intelligent design, even-handedly treating its scientific, cultural, and religious dimensions. As a journalist, Witham has personally interviewed all the main players in the debate over intelligent design and allows them to tell their story. For intelligent design’s place in the science and religion dialogue, see Giberson and Yerxa. For histories of the intelligent design movement, see Woodward (a supporter) and Forrest (a critic). See Behe and Dembski to overview intelligent design’s scientific research program.
Nevertheless, the purposes of a designer lie outside the scope of intelligent design. As a scientific research program, intelligent design investigates the effects of intelligence and not intelligence as such. This doesn’t mean that no scientists believe in miracles; quite the contrary—probably tens of thousands of American scientists (including many TEs) believe that miracles are possible and that some have happened.
Creationism typically starts with a religious text and tries to see how the findings of science can be reconciled to it. Intelligent design starts with the empirical evidence of nature and seeks to ascertain what inferences can be drawn from that evidence. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design does not claim that modern biology can identify whether the intelligent cause detected through science is supernatural.
I know quite a bit more about the history of each of the other four positions I’ve presented, and (to be frank) I would rather punt this one, referring readers to several histories of ID by authors more qualified than me on this particular topic. An excellent place to start is an article about Phillip Johnson’s unique place in the development of ID, written by historian Donald Yerxa, whose book (with physicist Karl Giberson) Species of Origins came out a few months later. Consequently, at least a few important ID authors are not Christians. Here the best known example is undoubtedly Jonathan Wells (read more here and here), a follower of the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The recipient of earned doctorates in both Molecular and Cell Biology (Berkeley) and Religious Studies (Yale), he also has a degree from the Unification Theological Seminary (Barrytown, NY).
They simply don’t believe that miracles can be part of scientific explanations. Even proponents of the YEC view don’t invoke miracles in what they call “operation science” (or “experimental science” or “ordinary science”), reserving them only for “origin science” (or “historical science”). Numerous predators eat their prey alive; parasites destroy their living hosts from within; in many species of spiders and insects, the females devour their mates.
Therefore, the presence of this feature in living systems points to intelligent design as the best explanation of it, whether such systems resemble human artifacts in other ways or not. Intelligent design was widely perceived as being allied with scientific creationism, the notion that scientific facts can be adduced in support of the divine creation of the various forms of life. Supporters of intelligent design maintained, however, that they took no position on creation and were unconcerned with biblical literalism. Consequently, they did not contest the prevailing scientific view on the age of Earth, nor did they dispute the occurrence of small evolutionary changes, which are amply observed and seemingly work by natural selection. Like earlier proponents of creationism, they wrote statutes or initiated lawsuits designed to permit the teaching of their view as an alternative to evolution in American public schools, where instruction in any form of religion is constitutionally forbidden. Thus, Michael Behe has inferred design not only because the mechanism of natural selection cannot (in his judgment) produce “irreducibly complex” systems, but also because in our experience “irreducible complexity” is a feature of systems known always to result from intelligent design.
No comments:
Post a Comment