Posted on 04/11/2005 10:25:55 AM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
"Intelligent design." It's been in the news a lot lately. Lawsuits over textbook stickers, the presentation of evolution and the legality of presenting alternatives, have thrust the term into public awareness.
But just what is intelligent design? To hear some folks talk, you'd think it's a scam to sneak Genesis into science classrooms. Yet intelligent design has nothing to do with the six days of creation and everything to do with hard evidence and logic.
Intelligent design (ID) is grounded on the ancient observation that the world looks very much as if it had an intelligent source. Indeed, as early as the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher and astronomer Anaxagoras concluded, "Mind set in order … all that ever was … and all that is now or ever will be."
After 2400 years, the appearance of design is as powerful as ever. That is especially true of the living world. Advances in biology have revealed that world to be one staggering complexity.
For example, consider the cell. Even the simplest cells bristle with high-tech machinery. On the outside, their surfaces are studded with sensors, gates, pumps and identification markers. Some bacteria even sport rotary outboard motors that they use to navigate their environment.
Inside, cells are jam-packed with power plants, assembly lines, recycling units and more. Miniature monorails whisk materials from one part of the cell to another.
Such sophistication has led even the most hard-bitten atheists to remark on the apparent design in living organisms. The late Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's structure and an outspoken critic of religion, has nonetheless remarked, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved."
Clearly, Crick (and others like him) considers the appearance of design to be strictly an illusion, created by naturalistic evolution. Yet it's also clear that this impression is so compelling that an atheistic biologist must warn his colleagues against it.
In contrast, ID theorists contend that living organisms appear designed because they are designed. And unlike the design thinkers whom Darwin deposed, they've developed rigorous new concepts to test their idea.
In the past, detecting design was hampered by vague and subjective criteria, such as discerning an object's purpose. Moreover, design was entangled with natural theology--which seeks, in part, to infer God's character by studying nature rather than revelation. Natural theologians often painted such a rosy view of nature that they became an easy mark for Darwin when he proposed his theory of evolution. Where they saw a finely-balanced world attesting to a kind and just God, Darwin pointed to nature’s imperfections and brutishness.
Since the 1980s, however, developments in several fields have made it possible to rigorously distinguish between things that "just happen" and those that happen "on purpose." This has helped design theory emerge as a distinct enterprise, aimed at detecting intelligence rather than speculating about God's character.
Dubbed "intelligent design" to distinguish it from old-school thinking, this new view is detailed in The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1998), a peer-reviewed work by mathematician and philosopher William Dembski.
In contrast to what is called creation science, which parallels Biblical theology, ID rests on two basic assumptions: namely, that intelligent agents exist and that their effects are empirically detectable.
Its chief tool is specified complexity. That's a mouthful, and the math behind it is forbidding, but the basic idea is simple: An object displays specified complexity when it has lots of parts (is complex) arranged in a recognizable, delimited pattern (is specified).
For example, the article you're now reading has thousands of characters, which could have been arranged in zillions of ways. Yet it fits a recognizable pattern: It's not just a jumble of letters (which is also complex), but a magazine article written in English. Any rational person would conclude that it was designed.
The effectiveness of such thinking is confirmed by massive experience. As Dembski points out, "In every instance where we find specified complexity, and where [its] history is known, it turns out that design actually is present."
Thus, if we could trace the creation of a book, our investigation would lead us to the author. You could say, then, that specified complexity is a signature of design.
To see how this applies to biology, consider the little consider the outboard motor that bacteria such as E. coli use to navigate their environment. This water-cooled contraption, called a flagellum, comes equipped with a reversible engine, drive shaft, U-joint and a long whip-like propeller. It hums along at a cool 17,000 rpm.
Decades of research indicate that its complexity is enormous. It takes about 50 genes to create a working flagellum. Each of those genes is as complex as a sentence with hundreds of letters.
Moreover, the pattern--a working flagellum--is highly specified. Deviate from that pattern, knock out a single gene, and our bug is dead in the water (or whatever).
Such highly specified complexity, which demands the presence of every part, indicates an intelligent origin. It's also defies any explanation, such as contemporary Darwinism, that relies on the stepwise accumulation of random genetic change.
In fact, if you want to run the numbers, as Dembski does in his book No Free Lunch, it boils down to the following: If every elementary particle in the observed universe (about 1080) were cranking out mutation events at the cosmic speed limit (about 1045 times per second) for a billion times the estimated age of the universe, they still could not produce the genes for a working flagellum.
And that's just one system within multiple layers of systems. Thus the flagellum is integrated into a sensory/guidance system that maneuvers the bacterium toward nutrients and away from noxious chemicals--a system so complex that computer simulation is required to understand it in its entirety. That system is meshed with other systems. And so on.
Of course, what's important here is not what we conclude about the flagellum or the cell, but how we study it. Design theorists don't derive their conclusions from revelation, but by looking for reliable, rigorously defined indicators of design and by ruling out alternative explanations, such as Darwinism.
Calling their work religious is just a cheap way to dodge the issues. The public--and our students--deserve better than that.
Mark Hartwig has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in statistics and research design.
>a model for the origin of the bacterial flagellum by N. J. Matzke
Out of curiosity, I did a search and came up with this, which claims Matzke's original data was faulty ;
Evolving the Bacterial Flagellum Through Mutation and Cooption by Mike Gene
A common criticism of design inferences is that they tend to boil down to the assertion of “it looks designed.” Yet it should be apparent that the major thrust of Matzke’s hypothesis is to present the bacterial flagellum in a manner where it looks like it could have evolved. To do this, Matzke offers the F0F1 ATP synthetase as something that looks like a precursor/homolog of the type III secretory machinery. However, given that the sequence data does not support this inference, Matzke turns to other data. CDART analysis succeeds in linking only one proposed example of homology (FliH/F0b), but even here, the link is extremely tenuous (as explained in the section on FliH).
(snip)
As can be seen clearly, the range used by Matzke draws from the most commonly sized proteins. Size might be a significant factor if we were talking about six proteins that were each over 500 amino acids in length, but we're not. We’re talking 70-270 amino acids. And what’s more, Matzke tolerates rather significant ranges in size where, for example, F0b is only 65% the size of FliH.
And that is the issue. Many biological systems must be assembled completely in one shot or they don't work at all; you can't assemble them in multiple steps.
"I don't think people should even be asking those questions unless they have an answer ready."
Oh, ok. So we should never have asked "why do certain chemicals explode" (and then proceed to use them for generation in China for visual displays and scaring enemies) because we didn't know about complex chemical reactions at the time.
Gotcha.
Free Will exists: Find out "why" isn't one of those?
Non-living things don't have free will. So why would we even have a perception of such a thing?
Then what are you doing trying to change minds that have no free will? Your argument, though consistent with the dementia called materialism, is self-refuting.
And of course YOU know, Physicist, that "order" and "organization" -- particularly self-organization -- are not the same things. "Order" pertains to non-living systems, where organization (self-organization) pertains to living systems. Or so I heard.
Great post, Michael_Miachaelangelo -- very informative and helpful. I appreciate the lack of "jargon." Thanks so much for putting this up!
I've already answered that. Because such a god would be either:
All of those are irrelevant from a practical standpoint either because they are inherently so or because we cannot make a rational determination about them based on what evidence we have.
Any other formulation that preserves free will is irrational. The absence of free will would make the nature of god irrelevant from a practical standpoint because no decision would be our own.
Excuse me? That's a weird definition. Entropy is the movement of energy from high enthalpy to low enthalpy, commonly referred to as heat death.
A crystal has higher entropy than the ionic solution because the atoms are in a lower energy state.
It is not rational to believe that anything - a god by example - created itself or was non-created. I already said arguments that gods exist are irrational or irrelevant of their own accord, so what's your point?
BTW, thanks for the ping and all the posts!
(I really should show more gratitude)
I am not trying to change anyone's mind about this. Someone asked me a question and I answered it, and then was asked to defend my answer. It is you people that are trying to change my mind. Feel free to leave me alone if you want. LOL
You continue to refute yourself, but you can't help it because you have no free will.
Fine, define it however you like. If evil is the lack of god and nothing more, then an omniscient, omnipotent god who creates the lack of himself is evil at least in part.
How do you structure free will without the potential for evil? Without that potential, it's not free will.
That God chose to introduce free will into the Universe, does not make Him evil.
The bottom line is that God is the Creator. His instructions for you are that you "depart from evil and do good". If you fail to do that, you will answer to Him. He will not answer to you. The sooner you understand that basic truth, the better off you are.
Job 28:28 - And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the LORD, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.
Psalms 34:14 - Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.
Psalms 37:27 - Depart from evil, and do good; and dwell for evermore.
Proverbs 3:7 - Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.
Proverbs 13:19 - The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul: but it is abomination to fools to depart from evil.
Proverbs 16:6 - By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the LORD men depart from evil.
Proverbs 16:17 - The highway of the upright is to depart from evil: he that keepeth his way preserveth his soul.
Micah 6:8 - He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Regardless of what philosifical arguments you want to bring against God, the bottom line is that you will answer to Him, for the things that you have done and the things that you have failed to do. A pardon is available if you are wise enough to accept it.
So we either have God, or God?
What you said would also imply that
A) God made us, thus he gave us freewill.
or
B) God made us, thus we don't have freewill.
but
C) Nothing made us, we formed ourselves.
would be wrong then, because freewill (even the illusion of it) would not exist, as we wouldn't have "not freewill" to compare it to.
Given that we have (even if it is an illusion) freewill, we must assume we have a God that gave it to us.
And if we DIDN'T have freewill, who's will would it be?
> Dembski and Behe maintain the flagellum, being irreducible
Which it's not.
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html
Since they are wrong from first principles, the rest of their arguement can be dispensed with.
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