Posted on 09/17/2004 7:09:02 AM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
Very well said, basically said verbatim my personal position on the subject, though I could never write it that well.
In your statement, you use the word "natural." What, precisely, does that word mean? In the sense of the origins of life on Earth (the only kind we know about), does "natural" preclude the possibility of a designer intevening at one or more points in the process of evolution?
Me, I'm pretty much waiting until this election is over to get back into trashing Chuck Darwin. Right now, Dan Rather is in more need of trashing...
No. I have made no such claim. I only pointed out that one must have explanations rather than ID's claim of additional turtles.
bmp for later
As you know I have never had a problem accepting evolution as a possible explanation for what we see around us, to me its just another tool in the tool bag. In fact, to me, it fits the design of the world as I understand it.
What evolutionary theory would tell us is that intelligence has not been retained at the center, but delegated and distributed out to the tip ends. Evolution is the means by which life adapts to local circumstance. That to me is not evidence of blind mindlessness but of a very well designed system.
Still, in the question of whether or not this is science, I'm not sure it matters. Philosophy is the means by which we look out beyond the edges of science. When scientists are out at the edge, staring out beyond the lights, are they engaged in science, or philosophy? If you understand the relationship between the two, its not an either-or.
We have a tendency to see philosophy as that debased creature taught in colleges, when in reality it is something else entirely, and the Intelligent Design research, and Evolutionary Theory too, for that matter, falls into that category. When you attempt to make sense out of data that you gather, when you make predictions about what future data will look like, you are in an area where science and philosophy meet.
Its not surprising that one philosophical school of thought might think competing schools of thought are illegitimate, but I wouldn't worry about it. A school of thought is legitimized by how well it predicts future data, or future events. ID researchers should just do what they do, their work isn't any more or any less true based on whether their friends agree with them or not, if you are out at the edge, at the beginning no one is going to believe you. If all scientists agree with you, and you are safely within the pack, you may be a good student but you aren't doing science.
At some point, if you're right, your predictions are more accurate than those based on competing models, and your critics will find ways to incorporate your model into their own. People never admit they were wrong, you've won the argument when your rival's model starts to look a lot like yours. And as you find data that isn't successfully explained by your model, you adjust it and keep moving.
It is called the ultimate cause:
the "uncaused cause" based on reasoning and logic developed by Greek philosphers 2500 years ago and still used as the basis for scientific reasoning today, if only in intermediate logical formulas, such as finding agens, or causes for diseases. One example is trying to find a protein
that locks up a virus. Science can manufacture the protein, but who wrote the rules for putting the protein together?
Protein manufacturing adheres to formulation rules; whence originated these "rules"?
Or how does the genetic rule for growing an eye know how
design a lens for perfect focus on a curved retina?
Nothing designs itself unless it is pre-programmed to do it by someything else or someone else.
...nice quotation. Appropriate.
>>"We aren't sure HOW the genetic matieral came to be, or what EXACTLY caused the frog to leave the ocean, but we KNOW IT WASN'T GOD!"<<
THAT is a "Dan Ratherism" if ever I heard one.
Did you actually read the post? The article defending ID in question is not being attacked on scientific fronts (which would, after all, be completely fair and part of the process), but instead certain Darwinists are attacking the publication that reviewed and published it for having done so at all, delcaring the article to be shoddy science a priori.
Scientific dogmatism at its worst.
Thanks for the ping!
The only reasonable definition of natural it processes that are unchanging in character over time, as opposed to miracles. That's a loose definition, so I expect it to be nitpicked. I don't care.
Actually, you have made the claim, even if you didn't mean to. The only logical alternative to "ID's claim of additional turtles" is that there are no "turtles." Put another way, either there was/is a designer, or there was/is not. To imply that there are "no turtles", logically leads to the requirement that there is no designer at all.
And yet, there does not appear to be any logical reason to exclude a designer from the set of possible answers for questions such as, "how did life on Earth begin?" or "how did life on Earth get to this point?"
You dismissed ID as "not testable." That is a ridiculously naive statement: it most certainly is testable, and in fact we humans have essentially been testing it for thousands of years. The basic question to be tested is this one: can X have been created by an intelligent designer? And the answer is quite obviously yes.
For example, somebody above posted something about the knee. Could an intelligent designer design a knee? Of course -- it's no different from any of the thousands of other engineering problems that intelligent human machine designers have successfully solved.
Could an engineer design an eye? Of course they already have -- along with any number of other environmental sensing instruments.
What about species? Well, humans have been using selective breeding to manipulate species of plants and animals literally for millenia, and the modern science of genetic engineering stands as further proof of our ability to manipulate life forms.
I think that even the thornier question -- could a designer actually create life from scratch -- is easy to answer with a "yes," albeit it would require some pretty advanced (by our standards) capabilities.
In other words, I think the basic requirements for ID have been tested, and passed with flying colors. It's just flat-out obvious that ID has very strong scientific merits, because the evidence is literally all around us in the form of human achievements.
Which brings us back to the Evolution vs. ID argument. The "evolution side" of the argument apparently flat-out rejects the possibility that life on Earth came about as a result of the actions of a designer, and is instead looking for "natural causes." The underlying assumption, of course, is precisely that there is no designer, which leaves only the possibility that the causes are "natural." It remains only to discover by which "natural" mechanisms life came about.
I note also a different tacit assumption: that life on Earth is unique in the universe. Fred Hoyle dealt with that one....
IMO, it's not really an argument about the logical possibility of there being a designer; rather, at root it is a question of there being a Designer.
(yeah, I know, rhetorical question)
The question of "Could a designer have designed life?" is testable (and the answer is not in dispute, obviously yes). The question of "DID a designer design life?" is not testable. To rephrase, what observation would make you believe that life was not designed?
Would you consider FR (and the infrastructure behind it) to be a miracle? How about a car? How about the fact that you have your choice between a 2lb teacup poodle or a 200lb mastiff?
It would appear that your definition of "natural" is that set of things which do not come about as a result of intelligence. By that definition, pretty much everything you own qualifies as a miracle.
The underlying question in this debate is: could (biological) life on Earth have come as a result of actions by an intelligent designer? As I noted above, the answer is an unqualified yes -- it could have done so. We humans are apparently on the verge of being able to do it ourselves.
We know darned well that ID is a viable theory, because we test it all the time. I'd be willing to bet that, if given the problem of inventing a "robust, self-replicating entity to live on planet X", you could personally come up with at least two different approaches that do not use "biology."
It seems to me that the real scientific problem is on the other side of the debate.
I suppose that's an interesting theological designer, but it's a silly question overall. There is no way the answer to that question or any similar question could ever be no.
An interesting question, and a scientific one would be: ...could (biological) life on Earth have come not as a result of actions by an intelligent designer?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.