What if Dembski’s book was ‘The E.T. Inference’ also in support of panspermia?
First of all, I didn't miss the humor there :-)
Panspermia doesn't require a designer; it simply puts the origin of life elsewhere. (Directed panspermia is another thing entirely). Panspermia wasn't met particularly kindly by the scientific community. I think, because Crick and Orgel suggested it, it was not greeted with the mixture of 9 parts neglect and one part derision that fringe ideas usually are met with, but a lot of people don't take it seriously. Even so, it does make testable predictions - for example, I've seen ingenious experiments where people fired bacterial spores at high velocity into the air to see if they'd survive, cooked them inside rocks to simulate meteorites, etc.. Personally, I'm extremely skeptical.
Contrast that with design - most scientists don't agree that there is something inherent in design that makes it detectable (barring something like a long, encoded message) , and certainly we have no working algorithm that distinguishes reliably between design and spontaneous order. And design necessitates a designer. I wrote a long time ago that if the human genome is designed, the designer must have been drunk at the time. I was accused of offending the beliefs of Christians. You can't have it both ways.
I would say, that if Dembski comes up with a computer program that allows me to distinguish a designed gene from a gene constructed by some sort of random mutation/natural selection method, then ID will be scientific. We can then crank that baby through all the genomes. But it doesn't exist, and I'm skeptical it could exist, so I'm not holding my breath.
The scientific community is also skeptical because we know Dembski's motives -he's never tried to hide them; and we know the motives of many of the people who are pushing to get ID into schools. After all, by and large this is the same group that put Scopes on trial.
Register at ARN.org and ask him; he's been hanging out on the threads quite a bit lately. :)
In the strong version of panspermia, Darwinian evolution can produce variation that results from one or two point mutations, and can, by natural selection, lead to adaptation, or microevolution. But this is not the same as macroevolutionary progress requiring whole new genes that differ from known predecessors by dozens to hundreds of essential nucleotides. In strong panspermia, those new genes must be supplied from elsewhere.…In its strongest version, panspermia holds that intelligent life can only descend from prior intelligent life. Logically, therefore, intelligent life must have always existed, and what we have called “evolutionary progress” would actually be the local development of pre-existing, highly evolved life. This theory is fully scientific; there is nothing supernatural about it. I am attempting to name it Cosmic Ancestry. It responds to the informed criticism that Darwinism does not account for evolutionary progress.
Furthermore, Cosmic Ancestry does not extend science beyond its proper realm. Science can never answer some questions, like “Why is there anything at all?” According to Cosmic Ancestry, “Why is there intelligent life?” is another question that science cannot answer. Intelligent life appears to have always existed. Until evolutionary progress in a closed system is demonstrated, that’s as far as science can pursue the matter. Meanwhile, creationists are free to call intelligent life a miracle. Dissolving the disagreement between science and religion, we can turn to new questions. For example,
• Under what circumstances, if any, is evolutionary progress in a closed system possible?
• How could the big bang theory accommodate life from the eternal past?
• How does intelligent life arrive and develop?
Some of this sounds familiar, eh? BTW, Do you know of any peer reviewed papers on panspermia?
I see the use of panspermia often when abiogenesis problems are put forward.
The scientific community is also skeptical because we know Dembski's motives -he's never tried to hide them; and we know the motives of many of the people who are pushing to get ID into schools. (last part edited and/or ignored)
This is more of a thought experiment in the sense that you need to imagine the motives of both authors to be only for 'good old purely natural science' via panspermia. Anyway, I think you know what I’m going with this by asking ‘How would they be received differently by the scientific community and people on this forum and why?’