You know that, dear Heartlander; I know that.
But try to explain that to a materialist who has already decided that all this "evidence of a designing intelligence" is something to ignore in principle. ID is ruled off the reservation, because in the minds of its critics, it can only mean (bottom line) an overt or covert search for "proof" of the existence of a creator god.
The creator god, of course, is in their minds merely a primitive superstition of ignorant mankind. To blast the ignorant out of their complacency, they love to point to the absurdity of "special creation," wherein the creator god is presumed to have made all things, as James S. Trefil puts it, "laboriously, piece by piece."
But it seems to me that "special creation" might rather be understood as referring to a particular, unrepeatable event that initiates, ex nihilo, an evolving Cosmos from a singular beginning of space and time, of "matter," of life and mind, of the basic organizational rules physical and moral that maintain the Order of this Creation over time. Thus to me, the Big Bang/Singularity/Inflationary Universe model does not seem inconsistent with the idea of the creative Word (Logos) of God in the Beginning.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.But design theory per se is really not involved in such disputes, which are philosophical and theological at bottom. It's just trying to explain the accumulating evidence that the universe really cannot be exhaustively explained on the premises of materialist reductionism and mechanism. Life and mind (consciousness) seem to resist explanation on these terms.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men. — John 1:1–4
But hey, that's just me, just my view from where I stand. People see what they see from their own particular vantage point. But as Einstein reminds us, the physical laws are the same for all observers, regardless of where they stand.
I can see the other POV — the materialist one premised in reductionism. Here's James Trefil again [in The Moment of Creation: Big Bang Physics from before the First Millisecond to the Present Universe, 1983]:
We stand, in fact, on the verge of the ultimate triumph of the reductionist idea. Within a few years, we may very well realize that if we probe deeply enough, we will find a universe that is the ultimate in simplicity and beauty. All of the apparent complexity we see will be understood in terms of an underlying system in which particles of one type interact with each other through one kind of force. If this sort of theory is actually developed, it will be the culmination of a philosophical quest that began over two millennia ago in the Greek Ionian colonies....Thus the noble aspiration. But does it hold water? Certainly Trefil takes "simplicity" and "beauty" very seriously. But on the other hand, what in materialist reductionism can account for this, his particular personal predilection for/attraction to simplicity and beauty? And by what criterion are they to be defined?
The "instinct" for simplicity and beauty would seem to me to be irreducible to materialist terms. Thus I "hit the wall" of the same problem that keeps the design theorists up at night. (So to speak.)
Notwithstanding, I highly recommend Trefil's valuable book. He strikes me as an intellectually honest man. Responding to the hypothetical question "What About God?" (not the best-formulated question I've ever seen), he writes:
When I talk to my friends about the fact that the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed relentlessly back toward the moment of creation, I am often asked about the religious implications of the new physics. That there are such implications is obvious, particularly in the speculations about how the universe came into existence in the first place. Physicists normally feel very uncomfortable with this sort of question, since it cannot be answered by the normal methods of our science [Trefil is professor of physics at U-VA]. For what it is worth, I will give my own personal views on the subject here, with the caveat that these views may not be shared by other scientists.Just some "grist for the mill!" Must leave it there for now.
It seems to me that the unease people feel when they think about the sort of scientific advance implicit in the new physics arises from the notion that applying the techniques of science to the creation of the universe is somehow encroaching on terrain that has been staked out by religion....
...No matter how deeply we probe into any scientific subject, we will always find something unexplained and undefined....
...It now appears that our new discoveries of the laws that govern the nature of elementary particles may allow us to push the frontiers back to the very creation of the universe itself. This does not, however, alter the fact that there is a frontier. All it does is transfer our attention from the material form of the universe to the laws that govern its behavior. [Ed. note: Jeepers, that's what I thought design theory was doing....] I can hear a twenty-first century philosopher saying, "Very well, we agree that the universe exists because of the laws of physics. But who created those laws? [Ed. note: a bit of "question-begging" there IMHO; for we need not stipulate a "who" in advance; hypothetically, it could be a "what" {though ultimately, I personally doubt it}] And even if, as some physicists have suggested, the laws of physics we discover are the only laws that are logically consistent with each other (and therefore the only laws that could exist), our philosopher would ask, "Who made the laws of logic?"
My message, then, to those who feel that science is overstepping its bounds when it probes the early universe is simple: don't worry. No matter how far the boundaries are pushed back, there will always be room both for religious faith and a religious interpretation of the physical world.
For myself, I feel much more comfortable with the concept of a God who is clever enough to devise laws of physics that make the existence of our marvelous universe inevitable than I do with the old-fashioned God who had to make it all laboriously, piece by piece. [Ed. note: sorry to litter up the landscape with the "Ed. notes"; but I do have quibbles with some of Trefil's statements.... Itals added for emphasis]
Thank you so very much, dear Heartlander, for the ping — and for introducing me to Denyse O’Leary. Verrrrrry interesting! [Though I'm kinder to Max Tegmark than she is.]
"Hitting a wall" seems an ironically materialist matephor to be using :).
Intelligent design is not creationism, nor is it a religious position. It is the application of design theory to the natural and living world. Intelligent design theorists point to the existence of precise physical laws and the fine tuning of universal constants, the staggering complexity and nanotechnology of the living cell, and the digitally-coded information content of DNA as evidence for a designing intelligence.
Spirited: If ID is limited to “the application of design theory to the natural and living world” then it logically follows that it is but another closed system (one-dimensional naturalism) expressed in terms such as Watery Chaos, Nu, universal substance, World Soul, Mind of the Universe, Vacuum, Quantum Void, Ein Sof, Dialectical Matter, Brahman, and Gnostic Pleroma in close connection with mechanical systems of development i.e., emanation, evolution, unfolding.
CS Lewis aptly described such systems as “boxes closed off” to the living, personal God of Revelation.
All closed systems ultimately reject the Revealed Word perspective (Authority of God) and reside in the reason and mystical experiences of men. Because closed systems ultimately reduce to matter and energy, they are anti-human, meaning they are expressions of nihilism.