Posted on 03/29/2006 7:53:52 PM PST by SampleMan
Last year, the intelligent design movement burst onto the national scene, causing all manner of outrage from the guardians of science and right thinking. All the major media covered this upstart idea challenging Darwinian evolution's theory of the origin of life. Everybody has been piling on, even conservative pundits like George Will and Charles Krauthammer. The cultural elites were appalled when the yahoos on the Kansas Board of Education voted to "teach the controversy" to high-school students. In Dover, Pa., a judge outlawed the mere mention of I.D. theory in school science classes. Like a fierce game of whack-a-mole, wherever I.D.'s politically incorrect head pops up, its opponents rush to smack it back down.
I am enjoying all this tremendously. What makes it so much fun to watch is that so far not one of the critics understands it. Without exception, they simply dismiss I.D. theory as nothing more than stealth religion creationism by another name. They say that all I.D. does is insert God to explain what science has not yet figured out. While they all lose their collective minds about it, warning darkly that the fundamentalists are coming, support for I.D. theory will continue to grow because it is good science. I want to explain why, so that when you hear the intelligentsia loudly denouncing it, you, too, can have a good laugh. Even better, you will understand why intelligent design theory is going to become a major force for good in the battle to rescue our collapsing culture because the way we think about origins affects the way we think about nearly everything. (More on that later.)
Meanwhile, the debate rages on, all the while opponents keep insisting there is no debate.
Despite its pretensions to objectivity, science has always been political. That's why scientific revolutions have often met initially with resistance and ridicule, because the old order stands to lose if the new becomes accepted. But the great thing about science is that eventually the weight of evidence breaks through. Think Galileo (opposed not only by the church but by fellow academics), or Lister (ridiculed for disinfecting surgical rooms to prevent infection), or the Wright Brothers (man will never fly). So all this hand wringing about intelligent design is a good sign that the revolution is under way. The old order is being challenged, and they are freaking out.
I.D. not religion
First, what I.D. theory is not: It is not creationism. Full disclosure here: I am a creationist. As a Christian, I believe God is the author of life. But I.D. theory is a science-driven enterprise. It is not a deduction from Scripture but an inference from observation. It says that the intricate design found in living things and in the universe itself is best explained by an intelligent cause. Darwinism, on the other hand, says that undirected natural processes led life to arise spontaneously; then evolution by natural selection (survival of the fittest) resulted in living things that appear to be designed, but really aren't. The question boils down to this: When considered objectively, where does the evidence actually lead?
Drawing heavily on Nancy Pearcey's great apologetic book "Total Truth," I'm going to focus on two of the most powerful arguments for intelligent design. Her book contains many more. I wish every Christian (and every thinking person) would read her masterful defense of Christianity as total truth about all of reality. But just reading this column will make you far more knowledgeable about I.D. than nearly all of its opponents.
It's true that by far the dominant theory of origins is the evolutionary one. It goes something like this: It all began billions of years ago in some sort of chemical soup (a "warm little pond," as Darwin put it) which, when zapped with an energy source, led to the chance formation of amino acids. These acids somehow self-organized into proteins and then morphed into the first living cell. All living things descended from that first cell, evolving from simple into increasingly complex organisms, all the way up to man.
Just one problem
In Darwin's time this was easier to imagine, because it was thought that cells were mere blobs of protoplasm. It fit in nicely with his idea that life could have first appeared as a simple cell. There's just one problem. We now know that there is no such thing as a "simple" cell. Recent advances in microbiology have demonstrated that the cell is literally a miniature factory town, with its own chemical library containing blueprints that are copied and transported to molecular assembly lines that manufacture everything the cell needs. Nancy Pearcey compares it to " a large and complex model train layout, with tracks crisscrossing everywhere, its switches and signals perfectly timed so that no trains collide and the cargo reaches its destination precisely when needed."
Just one cell is vastly more complex than anything ever created by human engineering. And your body contains 300 trillion of them, each one "knowing" exactly what it is supposed to do within itself and in relation to all the other cells.
Microbiologist Michael Behe has coined the term "irreducible complexity" to describe this. That is, the cell consists of coordinated, interlocking parts that must all be in place simultaneously, or it won't function at all. You can't improve the cell through one random mutation at a time because if you change any one aspect, the whole thing will crash. For evolutionary change to occur, every single piece of its Rube Goldberg-like factory would have to mutate at exactly the same time, and each single mutation would have to be beneficial, or the cell would just die.
Darwin himself understood what today's evolutionists refuse to admit:
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
That is exactly what Behe has done. As Pearcey puts it:
"An aggregate structure, like a pile of sand, can be built up gradually by simply adding a piece at a time. ... By contrast, an organized structure, like the inside of a computer, is built up according to a pre-existing blueprint."
Since living systems are organized wholes, they had to have been put together in the first place by a pre-existing design.
Darwinists cannot explain irreducible complexity. They keep saying that it poses no problem for evolution, as if repetition would make it so. They insist that just because we don't yet understand how evolution can work in light of this doesn't mean that we won't figure it out eventually. But they will never figure it out, because irreducible complexity makes evolutionary change at the cellular level logically impossible.
(Note: Natural selection clearly occurs within species as an adaptive mechanism. I.D. theory does not deny or even address this, nor does it address the question of whether natural selection could lead to the development of entirely new species. I.D. theory is concerned with the origin of life only.)
Not by chance
Even more powerful evidence comes from the genetic code. DNA is a kind of language consisting of four chemical "letters" that combine into an astonishing variety of sequences to spell out a message. It contains a mind-boggling amount of information. Where did it come from?
Darwinists say that DNA resulted from chance mutations operated on by natural selection. Really? As theologian Norm Geisler quipped:
"If you came into the kitchen and saw the alphabet cereal spilled out on the table, and it spelled out your name and address, would you think the cat knocked the cereal box over?"
In fact, chance events tend to scramble information, like typos in a page of text. Even if some kind of more complex molecule somehow did appear in the supposed chemical soup, the same random processes that produced it would continue to insert "typos," soon scrambling any coherent message that might have occurred. Again, it's not that we don't yet understand how chance could create complex information; it's that in principle this cannot happen.
Nor by physical law
If chance cannot do it, perhaps some yet-undiscovered physical law can. That's what scientists excited about complexity theory are hoping. They are studying self-organizing structures like snowflakes and crystals, searching for clues to how similar natural processes might also give rise to the complex information found in DNA. But they won't find any.
That prediction stems not from ignorance or hubris, but from the nature of physical laws, which by definition are regular and repeatable. Those properties enable the brilliant engineering students at MIT to enjoy shoving a piano off seven story high Baker House roof every year. They know that gravity makes things fall, every time.
But the information found in DNA is quite different. When you decode one section it tells you nothing about what comes next. The letters are free to combine into an unimaginably vast quantity of information. By contrast, the physical laws being explored in complexity theory are simple instructions, able to create complex patterns but not much information certainly not enough to account for the fact that each cell in your body contains more information than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.
This is not at all like saying man will never fly because God didn't give him wings. It's not that I.D. theorists can't imagine how a physical law could create information. It's because in principle, law-like processes cannot generate complex information. Some things really are impossible.
Information, information, information
It turns out that life is not primarily about matter, but information. Commenting on the failed attempts to create life in the lab, astrophysicist Paul Davies writes:
"Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won't work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level."
Common sense tells us that information does not occur without an intelligence to organize it, any more than the hardware of a computer can create its own software. Even scientists know this. Otherwise, how could SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers ever hope to distinguish between radio signals generated by some natural process and those sent from the hoped-for aliens? Again, we see that the most plausible explanation for the information in DNA is an Intelligent Designer put it there.
But for Christians, we knew that, didn't we? "In the beginning was the Word (Logos)." Behind everything is the Logic, the Wisdom, the Intelligence of God.
Darwin's irony: cultural devolution
Currently, only a minority of scientists holds to intelligent design theory, but the number is growing. To date, over 400 scientists have signed a document entitled "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism." Many of these scientists are not Christian, and some are outright hostile to it, which is further evidence that I.D. is not religion. A scientific revolution is just beginning, but almost nobody recognizes it, least of all its opponents.
And not a moment too soon, since evolutionary theory did not stay in the scientific realm but oozed into all the sciences, the liberal arts and out into culture, with horribly destructive results. The biblical view of man as a spiritual being created in God's image has been replaced by the view that man is nothing more than a highly evolved animal struggling to survive in a meaningless universe. Scratch any social ill and you will find Darwinism underneath.
One of the worst consequences has been the devaluation of human life. It is no exaggeration to say that Darwinism has led to the killing of untold millions of human beings. To highlight just a few examples: eugenics (philosophical Darwinism) inspired Margaret Sanger to found Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion movement. Eugenics helped Hitler convince an entire country to follow him in his attempt to wipe out the "inferior" Jews, not to mention the toll in blood it took to stop him. These days Peter Singer, a Princeton professor of bioethics, advocates that parents be allowed to dispatch their imperfect infants up to 30 days after birth. The misguided "right to die" movement is rapidly becoming the "right to kill" movement, as last year we watched severely disabled (but not dying) Terri Schiavo starve to death by court order, while a large portion of the country approved of it. Meanwhile, more than a million babies continue to be aborted every year. None of these horrors could have occurred in a culture that understood each human life to be a unique creation of God, stamped with his image.
Darwinism is also behind the sexual revolution (just doing what comes naturally), radical feminism, family breakdown and normalization of homosexuality (gender roles are social constructs we can discard as we "evolve" as a society). Darwinism removed the foundation for a transcendent moral Truth that stands outside of our personal preference. Now we make it up as we go, "re-imagining" everything. Even many Christians consider their faith to be purely personal. It's "true for me, but maybe not for you." No wonder assertions that Jesus is the only way to God meet with such outrage. And why so-called progressives are deeply offended when Christians try to bring into the public square what they view as nothing more than our particular rabbit's foot. Rejection of God is the root cause of our cultural degradation, but Darwinism has been its indispensable support, giving intellectual cover for all the evil we want to do.
Reversing the damage
But intelligent design is on the move, and this is a great gift to everyone, especially Christians. It's only a matter of time before it becomes accepted as a legitimate competing theory of origins, and as it does it will unleash enormous changes for good, not only in science but all of culture because if people understand that there is (or at least could be) a Designer, then we can once more ask, what is the purpose of that design? What are things for?
For example, conservatives and Christians are having a difficult time making the case against homosexual marriage. Thousands of years of exclusively heterosexual marriage mean nothing to those with a Darwinist worldview. Why, they are far more evolved than those benighted cultures in the misty past. To them, tradition is oppressive; destroying it is progress. Why shouldn't people be able to "love" whomever they want? How will it hurt your marriage?
The truth is that homosexual marriage is wrong because it violates God's design and purpose for us, with inevitably negative consequences. But for an exercise in frustration, just try to discuss design with someone steeped in the evolutionary mindset. Point out the functional biological differences between male and female, and they will dodge, deny or change the subject. Press the issue, and they will become angry at your attempt to "impose" your personal values. What they will never do is engage the substance of your argument. They can't. Their worldview will not allow them to admit the obvious.
Multiple research studies documenting the need that children have for a mom and a dad are probably the best defense we've got, but in a nation full of divorced or never married single parents, and with a media quick to promote "gay" families, it's a tough slog. So far, a majority of the public opposes homosexual marriage, but it's mostly instinctive and traditional. People say things like, "I wasn't raised that way." But younger generations, raised on books like "Heather Has Two Mommies" and subjected to Darwinist dogma throughout their schooling, have no tradition left to hold them. And any common-sense instinct they might have to resist faces an incessant cultural onslaught that brands such thoughts as hateful prejudice.
For the older generations, watching defenders of marriage viciously attacked in the press is very confusing. Having never reasoned out something so basic as marriage, they, too, will begin to doubt themselves. Unless something dramatic changes, public opposition will eventually crumble, and we will see the destruction of marriage as one more nail in the cultural coffin we are building for ourselves.
It was a rural population. They lived on farms and had poor transportation. But just about everybody knew the Bible.
You're off by a couple thousand years. Christianity wasn't in existance when the Midianites were. So what's the point of that statement?
Observing it in *micro-evolution* is not enough evidence to say that it can happen in *macro*. It can imply it, and people can deduce it, but that's speculation and conjecture.
If you are right, then the Khmer butchers referenced in the article that follows are going to Heaven; and most of their victims are doomed forever to a more horrible place than the Killing Fields:
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Khmer Rouge embraces Jesus
The Khmer Rouge followed a harsh brand of communism, killing nearly two million people in their bid to return Cambodia to Year Zero. Now they have a new faith: evangelical Christianity.
Hundreds of former fighters have been baptised in the past year. The Khmer Rouge's mountain stronghold, the town of Pailin in south-west Cambodia, has four churches, all with pastors and growing congregations. At least 2,000 of those who followed Pol Pot, the guerrillas' former leader who died six years ago, now worship Jesus.
Many new converts were involved in the bloody battles, massacres and forced labour programmes that led to the Killing Fields. Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge sought to eradicate religion, ripping down the country's biggest cathedral...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1254908/posts
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Does that seem loving and merciful, in your opinion?
It ain't the YOU being 'right' that we have to worry about: but whether GOD is right in saying it.
As has been seen on MANY threads, YOUR idea of a 'just and merciful god' is vastly different than the one the bible describes.
Ebola cure found, but many refuse it for it tastes bitter at first. Many still cling to hope in a sugar-water cure that their friendly witch-doctor makes for them.
"Born....
Well no, because the Christian God you worship had allegedly ordered their extermination.
This is sort of like killing your parents and then asking for clemency because you're an orphan.
No, but you just tried another dishonest argument. Not that that's new.
I don't think you can hold myself or others responsible for the actions of someone you've had a quarrel with in the past.
So you're saying that the moral strictures of the Bible are open to a wide range of intepretations? Too bad Genesis isn't, eh?
Guess what!
Nothing's changed!!!
Sheesh, some people's fantasy lives!
Michael J. Behe was born in 1952 and grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 1974 he graduated from Drexel University in Philadelphia with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry. He did his graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1978 for his dissertation research on sickle-cell disease. From 1978 to 1982 he was a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health where he investigated DNA structure. From 1982 to 1985 Behe was Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Queens College in New York City, where he was awarded a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health. In 1985 he moved to Lehigh University where he is currently Professor of Biochemistry. Behe has authored over forty technical papers.
So, what are your credentials?
Ok, I'm going to reiterate the point that IDers do make testable predictions. I'm no scientist, but I read the following article and it makes the case that they do indeed advance verifiable, empirical predictions. The case seems compelling. If I'm missing some profound insight that the methodological naturalists can call me on, then please let me know. Here's the article:
Intelligent Design is Empirically Testable and Makes Predictions
By Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt
Among the many, many errors in Judge John Jones Dover vs. Kitzmiller opinion is the charge that intelligent design (ID) makes no empirically testable claims (see pp. 66 ff.). Similarly, other ID critics assert that intelligent design makes no testable predictions.1 In fact, intelligent design fulfills both criteria since it makes numerous empirically testable predictions.
Its true that theres no way to falsify the bare assertion that a cosmic designer exists. Nevertheless, the specific design arguments currently in play are empirically testable, even falsifiable,2 and involve testable predictions.
Consider the argument that Michael Behe makes in his book Darwins Black Box. There he proposes that design is detectable in many molecular machines, including the bacterial flagellum. Behe argues that this tiny flagellar motor needs all of its parts to functionis irreducibly complex. Such systems in our experience are a hallmark of designed systems, because they require the foresight that is the exclusive jurisdiction of intelligent agents. Darwins mechanism of natural selection and random variations, in contrast, requires a functional system at each transition along the way. Natural selection can select for present but not for future function.
Notice that Behes argument, contra the assertions of Judge Jones and the ACLUs expert witnesses, rests not on ignorance or on a purely negative argument against Neo-Darwinism, but on what we know about designed systems, the causal powers of intelligent agents, and on our growing knowledge of the cellular world and its many mechanisms.
Behe predicts that scientists will not uncover a continuously functional Darwinian pathway from a simple precursor to the bacterial flagellum and, moreover, any detailed evolutionary pathway that is articulated will presuppose other irreducibly complex systems. How does one test and discredit Behes claims? Describe a realistic, continuously functional Darwinian pathway from simple ancestor to present motor. The flagellum might still be designed, but Behes means of detecting such design would have been falsified.
Darwinists like Kenneth Miller point to the hope of future discoveries, and to the type III secretory system as a machine possibly co-opted on the evolutionary path to the flagellum. The argument is riddled with problems, but it shows that Miller, at least, understands perfectly well that Behes argument is testable.
Miller tried to sidestep this obvious point in his expert testimony at the Dover trial by conceding that Behes argument was testable but insisting that it was a purely negative argument against Neo-Darwinism, not a positive case for intelligent design. This is mere wishful thinking on Millers part. Behes argument is also based on positive evidence for design. Behe points to strongly positive grounds for inferring design from the presence of irreducibly complex machines and circuits. This testable evidence is so powerful, so nearly ubiquitous, that it is often overlooked. Go out and find irreducibly complex machines, then find out, where possible, their causal history. Again and again one will find that the irreducibly complex machines (mousetraps, motors, etc.) were designed by intelligent agents. Indeed, every time we know the causal history of an irreducibly complex system, it always turns out to have been the product of an intelligent cause.
Miller has conceded that Behe's irreducible complexity argument is testable. And we see that Miller's assertion that scientists have tested and falsified Behe's argument is itself false. Finally, Behe and other design theorists like Scott Minnich and Stephen Meyer have offered positive evidence for the design of the flagellum based on standard uniformitarian reasoning, reasoning well established in science.
To move from biology to astronomy and cosmology, in The Privileged Planet, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards describe how to falsify their design argument. They suggest that there is a correlation between the conditions needed for life and the conditions needed for diverse types of scientific discovery, and suggest that such a correlation, if true, points to intelligent design. They write:
The most decisive way to falsify our argument as a whole would be to find a distant and very different environment, which, while quite hostile to life, nevertheless offers a superior platform for making as many diverse scientific discoveries as does our local environment. The opposite of this would have the same effectfinding an extremely habitable and inhabited place that was a lousy platform for observation.
Less devastating but still relevant would be discoveries that contradict individual parts of our argument. Most such discoveries would also show that the conditions for habitability of complex life are much wider and more diverse than we claim. For instance, discovering intelligent life inside a gas giant with an opaque atmosphere, near an X-ray emitting star in the Galactic center, or on a planet without a dark night would do it serious damage. Or take a less extreme example. We suggested in Chapter 1 that conditions that produce perfect solar eclipses also contribute to the habitability of a planetary environment. Thus, if intelligent extraterrestrial beings exist, they probably enjoy good to perfect solar eclipses. However, if we find complex, intelligent, indigenous life on a planet without a largish natural satellite, this plank in our argument would collapse.
Our argument presupposes that all complex life, at least in this universe, will almost certainly be based on carbon. Find a non-carbon based life form, and one of our presuppositions collapses. Its clear that a number of discoveries would either directly or indirectly contradict our argument.
Similarly, there are future discoveries that would count in favor of it. Virtually any discovery in astrobiology is likely to bear on our argument one way or the other. If we find still more strict conditions that are important for habitability, this will strengthen our case.
So contemporary arguments for intelligent design in both biology and the physical sciences are not only testable; they make predictions and are falsifiable in principle. Of course, if the arguments are true, then they are falsifiable only in principle, but not in fact (hardly a weakness in a scientific theory). We have given only two examples here. There are many other design arguments in biology, origin-of-life studies, and paleontology that are also empirically testable and that make predictions. Therefore, honest commentators should stop claiming that ID is empirically untestable, or that it makes no predictions. The claim itself has been tested and falsified. Its time to move on to other and more pertinent aspects of the debate over intelligent design.
NOTES:
1. Philosophers of science now know that "prediction" is too narrow a criterion to describe all scientific theorizing. Empirical testability is the more appropriate criterion.
2. "Empirical testability," "falsifiability," and "confirmability" aren't synonyms. "Empirical testability" is the genus, of which falsification and confirmation are species. Something is empirically testable when it is either falsifiable, confirmable, or both. Moreover, something can be confirmable but not falsifiable, as with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) or the existence of a cosmic designer. Both of these claims are still empirically testable. Further, recent work in the philosophy of science has revealed the degree to which high level scientific theories tend to resist simple refutation. As a result, Karl Poppers criterion of falsifiability, which most commentators seem to presuppose, was rejected by most philosophers of science decades ago as a litmus test for science. Nevertheless, its certainly a virtue of scientific proposals to be able to say what evidence would count against it.
Hello again. I really am enjoying this. By the way, I appreciate your input and assessment of these articles. I hope that I'm not inconveniencing you by asking you to read these brief articles. I do have a very brief article that seems to refute the claim that ID is "purely negative". I'd like to post them here (instead of starting a whole new thread), because they seem relevant to specific objections raised here. Here is the link:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=546
Please take a quick look (I'd enjoy your feedback).
With regards to the information in http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=546 There isn't much not easily refuted there.
The bottom line is that the author has worked backwards to prove his points by taking easily proved, observable facts and manipulating them to support his argument.
It's akin to saying "If the sun is hot then ID is correct" - hmm, the sun is hot! Great!
Evolution has simpler and more logical explanations for most or all of what he's using to support his ID opinions and none of what he proposed is actually testable in a real way.
Thank you for reading it. Sometimes I hate it when other posters give me a mound of material to read instead of explaining something briefly themselves.
I want to mention one last point, and then I'll drop the whole discussion (It's almost bedtime). What I want to focus on here is not the testing of Darwinism and design against the broad body of biological data, but the related question of which theory can accommodate the greater range of biological possibilities. Think of it this way: Are there things that might occur in biology for which a design-theoretic framework could give a better, more accurate account than a purely Darwinian and therefore non-teleological framework? I think the answer is "yes". But that's just my humble opinion.
Last but not least, let's be clear that design can accommodate all the results of Darwinism. Intelligent design does not repudiate the Darwinian mechanism. It merely assigns it a lower status than Darwinism does. The Darwinian mechanism does operate in nature and insofar as it does, design can live with its deliverances. Even if the Darwinian mechanism could be shown to do all the design work for which design theorists want to invoke design (say for the bacterial flagellum), a design-theoretic framework would not destroy any valid findings of science. To be sure, design would then become superfluous, but it would not become contradictory or self-refuting. ID may turn out to be a flash-in-the-pan. But I'd like to see where ID scientists take their arguments in the future. Below is a list (which I hear is growing) of scientists/researchers who are quite skeptical of methodological naturalism/Neo-Darwinism:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=660
Again, thanks for the feedback. G'night.
So-called "micro-evolution" is EVOLUTION. The observed changes of an organism, as a result of better suitability for survival due to a specific trait, IS THE VERY MECHANISM postulated by Darwin, and since confirmed by generations of scientists.
You can see it happening, folks. It isn't speculation and conjecture; it's observed fact. It is happening in the very short terms in the case of bacteria; drug-resistant strains have evolved in response to the use of antibiotics, as an example.
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