Natural or Designed?
Posted on 02/07/2005 8:16:39 AM PST by metacognative
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Design for Living By MICHAEL J. BEHE
Published: February 7, 2005
ethlehem, Pa. — IN the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design. As one of the scientists who have proposed design as an explanation for biological systems, I have found widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what it is not. Advertisement
First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments. For example, a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. That's misleading. Intelligent design proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the deep structure of life. But they do not doubt that evolution occurred. And intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.
Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims. The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.
Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as designed. Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too. The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.
For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, once wrote that biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved. (Imagine a scientist repeating through clenched teeth: "It wasn't really designed. Not really.")
The resemblance of parts of life to engineered mechanisms like a watch is enormously stronger than what Reverend Paley imagined. In the past 50 years modern science has shown that the cell, the very foundation of life, is run by machines made of molecules. There are little molecular trucks in the cell to ferry supplies, little outboard motors to push a cell through liquid.
In 1998 an issue of the journal Cell was devoted to molecular machines, with articles like "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines" and "Mechanical Devices of the Spliceosome: Motors, Clocks, Springs and Things." Referring to his student days in the 1960's, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that "the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered." In fact, Dr. Alberts remarked, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory with an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. He emphasized that the term machine was not some fuzzy analogy; it was meant literally.
The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence. Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time. Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.
Scientists skeptical of Darwinian claims include many who have no truck with ideas of intelligent design, like those who advocate an idea called complexity theory, which envisions life self-organizing in roughly the same way that a hurricane does, and ones who think organisms in some sense can design themselves.
The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life. To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.
The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.
Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore. Besides, whatever special restrictions scientists adopt for themselves don't bind the public, which polls show, overwhelmingly, and sensibly, thinks that life was designed. And so do many scientists who see roles for both the messiness of evolution and the elegance of design.
Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, is the author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
I do love your image. Back a couple of years ago we played a formal game of natural-or-designed. I thought the best possible test of Behe's assertion would be an image of something where NO ONE knows the actual history, but which will be known within some of our lifetimes.
O heavens no. The point is that we can recognize the pyramids, like Mount Rushmore as a conscious effort to build something and not just the result of an earthquake. This illustration only treats of the point that we are able to tell the difference between things built by nature and things built with the conscoius effort of an intelligent being.
I was speaking of fame among non-scientists. Is the DNA X-ray diffraction image the one that Watson worked from? (And didn't he swipe it?)
Are you one of those priests who asks the parishoners' opinion as to what they do or do not want to hear? Better to protect them from exposure to heresy. Better not to trouble the drones.
New York's canyons are also a dubious call
He only wants to pounce on 'creationists' who don't argue science.
Try your hand at the crystal images I posted. Natural or designed?
It's all designed. It's all sustained. It all behaves exactly the way it is supposed to. Every particle you will ever see and know.
If everything's designed, why waste time with worthless stuff like irreducible complexity? Why do you need to look for IC to spot design if everything is designed in the first place?
At least he can back up the claim of being able to tell the difference -- there is none. That ends the controversy.
IC is simply a numerical, logical, mechanical fact, so get used to the "waste of time" (as if you even know for certain what time is). Who designed the universe and for what purpose is generally the object of theology and philosophy. By and large, however, since science operates within laws created by God, it is something of a joke to watch its attempts to remove or explain away the One in Whom we live, move, and have our being and still call itself "science."
If we've established that, someone should alert Dembski that the Design Inference is worthless, specified complexity is useless, and the Explanatory Filter doesn't explain anything at all...
Not according to Behe - according to Behe, IC is how you know something's been designed. Of course, the existence of a test suggests that some things aren't designed - otherwise, you don't need a test to begin with. But now we've gone way beyond that and we can clearly show that Behe and Dembski and the rest of the crew are doing work of no value at all - we don't need tests, or Filters, or Inferences, or any sort of test or criterion or benchmark or methodology at all. They'll probably be a bit disappointed - Behe and Dembski seem to think that we need a formal method to spot design - but what can you do? What do they know, anyway?
So what DO you think of the crystals? Are they the product of natural laws, like snowflakes, or are they designed? Can you think of a way to distinguish between the two cases?
Natural or Designed?
As far as I can tell, only his first point treats of those objects which are apparently the result of a conscious, human effort at design. The picture gets less clear as one gets closer to "nature." Apparently a closer look at living cells demonstrates capacities so remarkable as to demonstrate a conscious effort at design. I do not know because I am not a molecular biologist but a janitor.
You tell me. Are living cells more complicated, more difficult for a human to produce, than Mount Rushmore? I guess we could ask the fellow who carved Mount Rushmore how long it would take him to design and produce a living cell.
Adherents to the philosophy of evolution have their own trump card, scince any fact of reality can easily be explained apart from intelligence. It really comes down to the propositions each individual is willing to receive as truth. It is a matter of faith.
That's the only kind.
I read your post. There is no other excuse for such idiotic writings other than a troll from DU.
They are both. There is no conflict between design and natural laws, nor is there any conflict between intelligence and natural laws. Design can manifest itself in any manner or degree. Thank God it is not all the same, or else we would have nothing to study.
Gee. I guess it's time to call in the mods.
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