Posted on 12/12/2005 8:01:43 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Occasionally a social issue becomes so ubiquitous that almost everyone wants to talk about it -- even well-meaning but uninformed pundits. For example, Charles Krauthammer preaches that religious conservatives should stop being so darn, well, religious, and should accept his whitewashed version of religion-friendly Darwinism.1 George Will prophesies that disagreements over Darwin could destroy the future of conservatism.2 Both agree that intelligent design is not science.
It is not evident that either of these critics has read much by the design theorists they rebuke. They appear to have gotten most of their information about intelligent design from other critics of the theory, scholars bent on not only distorting the main arguments of intelligent design but also sometimes seeking to deny the academic freedom of design theorists.
In 2001, Iowa State University astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez’s research on galactic habitable zones appeared on the cover of Scientific American. Dr. Gonzalez’s research demonstrates that our universe, galaxy, and solar system were intelligently designed for advanced life. Although Gonzalez does not teach intelligent design in his classes, he nevertheless believes that “[t]he methods [of intelligent design] are scientific, and they don't start with a religious assumption.” But a faculty adviser to the campus atheist club circulated a petition condemning Gonzalez’s scientific views as merely “religious faith.” Attacks such as these should be familiar to the conservative minorities on many university campuses; however, the response to intelligent design has shifted from mere private intolerance to public witch hunts. Gonzalez is up for tenure next year and clearly is being targeted because of his scientific views.
The University of Idaho, in Moscow, Idaho, is home to Scott Minnich, a soft-spoken microbiologist who runs a lab studying the bacterial flagellum, a microscopic rotary engine that he and other scientists believe was intelligently designed -- see "What Is Intelligent Design.") Earlier this year Dr. Minnich testified in favor of intelligent design at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial over the teaching of intelligent design. Apparently threatened by Dr. Minnich’s views, the university president, Tim White, issued an edict proclaiming that “teaching of views that differ from evolution ... is inappropriate in our life, earth, and physical science courses or curricula.” As Gonzaga University law professor David DeWolf asked in an editorial, “Which Moscow is this?” It’s the Moscow where Minnich’s career advancement is in now jeopardized because of his scientific views.
Scientists like Gonzalez and Minnich deserve not only to be understood, but also their cause should be defended. Conservative champions of intellectual freedom should be horrified by the witch hunts of academics seeking to limit academic freedom to investigate or objectively teach intelligent design. Krauthammer’s and Will’s attacks only add fuel to the fire.
By calling evolution “brilliant,” “elegant,” and “divine,” Krauthammer’s defense of Darwin is grounded in emotional arguments and the mirage that a Neo-Darwinism that is thoroughly friendly towards Western theism. While there is no denying the possibility of belief in God and Darwinism, the descriptions of evolution offered by top Darwinists differ greatly from Krauthammer’s sanitized version. For example, Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins explains that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” In addition, Krauthammer’s understanding is in direct opposition to the portrayal of evolution in biology textbooks. Says Douglas Futuyma in the textbook Evolutionary Biology:
“By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”3
“Evolution in a pure Darwinian world has no goal or purpose: the exclusive driving force is random mutations sorted out by natural selection from one generation to the next. … However elevated in power over the rest of life, however exalted in self-image, we were descended from animals by the same blind force that created those animals. …”5
Mr. Luskin is an attorney and published scientist working with the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash.
Actually, genetic engineering is just cut and paste with existing materials. It is not design any more than stringing Shakespeare quotes together is writing.
What ID lacks, and what it could genuinely use, is understing of how the materials work, how the blueprints lead to organisms. You really can't do design without understanding your materials.
I am puzzled why design advocates aren't conducting research toward demonstrating that design is possible.
I think you have answered the question. Anyone who hedges on the question of whether they would behave well without fear of punishment or expectation of reward really doesn't have any internalized moral compass.
I am assuming you are referring to design and intelligence in the phenomena being studied. Are you suggesting that all phenomena are designed?
You will not be allowed to proselytize edible idolatry to our children. Let the holy wars begin, noble equine vs. Spaghetti-Os. Bring it on!
You mean, will I behave virtuously or not?
That depends on the concept virtue, i.e. understand its origin and application. Again, you'll need more details to get a good answer.
By your own definition of virtue, naturally. You currently have a sense of what is "moral" versus what is "immoral", correct? Will you continue to live according to that sense, or not?
Who is hedging? And on what point?
Just answer the question. Would you behave differently if you were certain there would be no personal consequenses for being altruistic or selfish?
No, this is not self-evident. You have already removed one of the conditions for virtue in the initial question and thereby excluded my understanding of elements involved in virtue. So I need your understanding of virtue.
Methodological naturalism is the stance almost all of us adopt almost all the time these days. We put more confidence in physicians than in faith healers; in meteorologists rather than seers; in radar rather than divination. Our experience is, that as knowledge and understanding of our universe grows, so the domain of the supernatural shrinks.
To the contrary, I assert that the natural is part of what you would consider "supernatural" and indeed, the natural declares that God exists. For instance, that there was a beginning, that the universe is intelligible at all, the unreasonable effectiveness of math, the existence of information in the universe, that order has arisen out of chaos (the void), willfulness, autonomy, semiosis and so on.
What you are speaking to is causation. Where you have looked you have found physical causation. Science depends on physical causation to understand nature, so that is not surprising.
But I doubt you have weighed the full concept of causation. For instance, were it not for A, C would not be. Were it not for space/time, events would not occur, etc. Or as Physicist remarked on another thread, existence exists.
To that I would add that everything we observe ought to be understood in that context. Intentionally not doing so, leaves one in worse shape than a blind man in the elephant metaphor (from post 529)
Considering your credentials and fields of interests which I have discerned from your postings on the forum over the years, I also suspect there are many anomalies you have not yet weighed.
For instance, you mentioned prophesy. Here's a simple one which is not part of either a Jewish or Christian canon. Consider that the book of Enoch was dated by Laurence “before the rise of Christianity, most probably at an early period of the reign of Herod” because it prophesied the reign of King Herod the Great which began 37 B.C. and was quoted by Jesus Christ and His apostles. In other words, the presumption of scholars is that prophesy cannot be true and therefore if something prophesied actually happened, it must have been written after the event mentioned. That is a false presupposition which leads to error. In this case, a copy of the manuscript was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran – fragment 4Q208 – and was dated with a paleographic age 200 B.C. and was carbon-dated, calibrated 166-102 BC and 186-92 BC.
We could examine other prophesies in Scripture - but to do so would involve much more discussion, sources, etc. But if you are interested in such things, we can set them up and proceed to examine them one at a time.
You can put aside your whip. This is a discussion forum, not an interrogation.
I said to Bedfellow that the question is unclear on the starting points. If you have a deductive argument, conclusions will differ, depending on the starting points.
Nah. Look at medicine. Once the plague was a supernatural visitation. Now it's a medical condition. One excludes the other.
The fact that you have to ponder this says something about you as a person.
In any case, a medical condition does not exclude divine agency.
Would you behave any differently than you do now?
I'll take that as a compliment. Dogma and simplification (scientific and philosophical) is politically dangerous. And the compliment belongs to Socrates, who taught me to ponder.
A good scientific theory must explain the data, but it must also be vulnerable to the data. The validity of the theory must be put at risk when we make observations or do experiments. There must be things that, apart from the theory in question being true, we would reasonably expect to observe, but which are prohibited by the theory.
However you said here, in response to your correspondent's complaint that ID "is compatible with *any* pattern" of evidence, "that makes it the best theory then, because it best fits most of the evidence."
This is wildly perverse. It's saying that a theory can be consistent with any possible observation -- that is be invulnerable to the data and therefore untestable, and still be good theory. This is most emphatically not the case.
When organized matter is found to behave in accord with predicatable laws, then it is reasonable to attribute this to intelligent design. What is intelligent design but taking matter and then organizing it to behave according to predictable laws?
Actually this is the opposite of ID. Propents of ID claim to infer "intelligent design" in precisely those case that (they assert) CANNOT be accounted for by the natural behavior in the form of predictable laws!
What's more you're taking a presupposition shared BY all scientific theories (the uniformity of natural law) and saying it's a prediction OF a particular theory.
Supernatural is by definition what is not natural.
Consider that the book of Enoch was dated by Laurence “before the rise of Christianity, most probably at an early period of the reign of Herod” because it prophesied the reign of King Herod the Great which began 37 B.C. and was quoted by Jesus Christ and His apostles.
Please identify the verses from Enoch that prophesy Herod the Great.
" In any case, a medical condition does not exclude divine agency."
It's not that calls to divine action aren't possible after the natural causes of the medical condition are discovered, it's that they are no longer necessary. Why bring in a supernatural explanation when a natural, testable one will do perfectly well?
If the intersection of sets A and set B is zero, and if the union of A and B is C, and we move elements into set A, from within C, then we must subtract the same elements from B.
In any case, a medical condition does not exclude divine agency.
It does if you accept a naturalistic explanation for disease.
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