Irrefutable Design

New York Times ^ | 2/7/2005 | Behe, Michael

[snarks_when_bored]

>> If this is what ID amounts to, one wonders what its proponents do to occupy their time.<<

Instead of wasting their lives trying to figure out what made the legos, they spend their time making things with the legos. 8^>

First, the essence of the scientific enterprise is to figure out how things work and how they came to be. Second, what has any ID'er made (aside from a few headlines)?

[js1138]

1. The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature.
   
   It is uncontroversial only when we know the history of an object, or the object mirrors the materials and style of known objects. There are many controversies over supposed arrowheads and other ancient artifacts. There are numerous geological formations that have been claimed as evidence of ancient civilizations.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   These staments, when read together, negate points one and two. First he says the perception is uncontroversial, then he says it is controversial.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   By foundation of life, I assume he means biogenesis. That is true in the same sense that physicists have no accepted theory that merges quantum effects with relativity.
   
   
4. 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.
   
   This would be controversial because no sane person would conclude that the lack of an explanation supports Woton as the creator. Or any of the other 2000 deities. Lack of explanation justifies nothing except the search for an explanation.

[RobRoy]

" Design is against my religion. I want to believe in dumb luck only!"

8^>

[RobRoy]

What have the scientists trying to figure out how the legos came to exist "made."

I leave it to the reader to determine for themself, via a library or Google, what practical results have availed themselves from scientists studying creation and whether or not those scientists believed in ID or not.

Meanwhile, my post was a response to a hypothetical question, to which I thought I gave a more than ample hypothetical answer in the form of an analogy.

[metacognative]

js1138...at least you THINK about your replies.
I can imagine an intelligently designed object which we do not know the history of....the slab in 2001.

[snarks_when_bored]

I'm sure you've got a point. Well, pretty sure.

[Kirkwood]

"Then why do the ID'ers complain so much when it's pointed out that the designer did a lousy job in many cases; and that any designer would have needed another designer to design her. She seems rather cruel to have designed tsunamis and Huntington's corea."

I guess you are suggesting that all ID'ers believe that a master plan perfectly accounts for everything in the world. I'm not so sure that needs to be the case and I think there are many ID'ers who take a more scientific approach to this and accept things as they are and not force what they see into a religious context. I know of many scientists with a view that something made the universe what it is, but don't ascribe to any specific religion.

There is no need to mix up any religion whatsoever into the concept of a master plan. One could just as easily suppose that the master plan was simply to "flip a switch" and thereby create a universe of matter and energy with specific properties. How it evolved beyond that was a matter of chance. Of course, it begs the question as to where the so-called designer of matter/energy came from, but that is true for all theories of the origin of the universe, both religious and scientific.

[Servant of the 9]

Intelligent design and evolution do not have to be mutually exclusive.

True, but Inteligent Design and Science are mutually exclusive.

So9

[Buggman]

However, the theory of evolution is at least based on extrapolation from known natural processes, whereas design almost be definition cannot be. That alone will rule out design as a subject for scientific evaluation.

That narrow view of science would kinda throw archaeology out the window, wouldn't it? Obviously, we can and do evaluate designed structures scientifically all the time, so the whole "positing an intellegent designer as the cause of life is by definition unscientific" argument is fallacious from the get-go.

[RightWhale]

The watchmaker argument was published in 1800. There is nothing further to be resolved. The evolution of the species does nothing more than ID, but it organizes the bewildering array of lifeforms in a taxonomic order that allows much easier comprehension of the whole. It is simpler and more powerful, that's why it is useful. ID is not useful.

[metacognative]

I find Paley's argument convincing. I wouldn't refuse to admit that a watch had a maker.

[gdani]

Can Intelligent Design explain nipples on male humans?

[RightWhale]

Rev Paley made excellent points. We could still go with ID except that we have a more powerful system in evolution. Evolution also does nothing but allow for presentation of observation results in neat tables and charts. ID lacks that organization, unless evolution is counted as an extension of ID. There wouldn't be a problem with that, even if invoking the anthropic principle in our particular universe.

[metacognative]

I know darwinists would explain male nipples as common descent. Think about that!

[metacognative]

Cosmic balance requires that we accept where the evidence leads...not stretch for so-called 'explanations' like Deleterious mutations can make an ape into a man

[Doctor Stochastic]

If the Designer thought that the male humans were only a tiny reflection of Her own glory.

[RightWhale]

We did not descend from apes. Apes are just as modern as we are. Common ancestor? They use dashed lines toward the base of the tree. A guess for the purpose of cataloging observations. Who knows what happened way back then? We may never know, it may be impossible to know since life tends to eat everything and there may be nothing left of the origins. We {life} ate it all.

[snarks_when_bored]

Behe has had his little say. Now a true giant among evolutionary theorists should be heard from: Ernst Mayr (who died just a few days ago).

Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought

[Uncle Fud]

would kinda throw archaeology out the window, wouldn't it

I don't think so.

Starting with the hypothesis that (for example) Stonehenge is not a naturally occuring rock formation, we can look at the stone pillars and trace where they could have been quarried from, carbon-date organic material found buried on the site, examine the types of tools and materials known to exist in prehistoric Britain, and develop some reasonable descriptions as to how it was built and when.

In 1700, the state of archaeolgical scholarship would not have permitted us to arrive at those descriptions - today it does.

A "design oriented" approach to biological structures would have to do something similar, rather than just saying that the designer automagically willed those structures into existence.

In other words I am willing to accept the possibility that a "designer" was able to produce biological structures using principles of nature which we do not yet understand. I can't accept a designer who stands entirely outside our current -or our potential- knowledge of nature.

Let me say in addition that I have the greatest respect for the Christian faith in general (particularly where it stands in opposition to the bureaucratic state), however, I just can't personally accept the supernatural in any way.

[general_re]

Obviously, we can and do evaluate designed structures scientifically all the time, so the whole "positing an intellegent designer as the cause of life is by definition unscientific" argument is fallacious from the get-go.

Not at all - we evaluate human-designed structures all the time, which we can do because we have some idea of how human designers work, what their methods are, and what their artifacts tend to look like. We have no such thing at all for the natural world - no idea what designed versus undesigned objects look like, no idea what the tools or methods of a non-human designer might be, and no way to gain such knowledge, particularly when it's repeatedly hinted that the designer is somehow ineffable.

The only reason we can evaluate designed artifacts is because of our experience with human designers. There exists no such pool of prior knowledge for non-human-designed biological "artifacts", and hence no means whatsoever of evaluating design in biological structures.