Oh, how ever so clever of you!! 
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.
Oh, how ever so clever of you!!
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winna!
I see. Well, the answer is that you structure free will without the potential for evil by structuring free will without the potential for evil. A god who cannot do that is not omnipotent.
So what? He's the one who's going to judge you. If He says the penalty for sin is death and you choose to remain in sin because you don't believe Him, will...good luck with that.
Can you find fault with His commandment to you to "depart from evil and do good"? No, of course not. So if you fail to do it, what excuse are you going to have? That God was evil increating you with the potential to do evil? Even if you win the argument, God will simply rectify His mistake. This is a tails you lose, heads you lose strategy.
> Many biological systems must be assembled completely in one shot or they don't work at all...
Name one. The "Irreducibly complex" structures produced by the ID movement have all been shown to not be.
http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/icdmyst/ICDmyst.html
My personal favorite are claims that wings are irreducibly complex.
Interesting. You seem to be arguing (please correct me where I misunderstand) that human free will, albeit limited, is conclusive evidence against the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and actively engaged deity.
I have several questions, but for now, please elaborate on why giving someone the choice to commit good or evil is the same thing as causing the evil. I can dictate certain behaviors to my kids but if I wish them to develop into responsible adults, at some point I have to give them some freedom to make their own choices. They will inevitably choose to do evil at some point, but that is their choice, not mine.
Perhaps some understanding of how we might define evil would be helpful. I completely agree with your assessment that a dualistic god is useless. In dualism, good and evil are equal, but they are, practically interchangeable in that context. Also, the 'liar' god is equally worthless to us for exactly the reason you propose.
However, the absence of a god to define the good results in simply every person defining the good for themselves and acting that ought merely tto the degree that they have the power to do so. As Dostoevsky's character put it in the Bros Karamazov, 'If God does not exist, everything is permitted.'
If God, whose very personality and actions define the good, the idea that that God could create entities with free will is not so far-fetched. Were that God to create entities that merely act in accordance with God's will, then he would have created robots. What robots lack is the capacity to love. sitting around for an eternity simply talking with robots sounds pretty boring, even for God. But enjoyoing the company of entities whom you love and who (by virtue of their ability to make choices) can choose to love you or not, sounds infinitely more satisfying. Even if (as DannyTN put it well) there is the risk that those free beings will choose to do evil.
Why do you call free will without the potential to do evil "free"?
PS. I didn't say that I wouldn't answer to god assuming a god exists. I said that the arguments that gods exist are irrational or irrelevent from a practical standpoint. All the stuff you posted are various irrational reasons to believe that the described god exists. You have a capacity to behave in an irrational manner, so by all means don't hold yourself back on my account! (I doubt you require my condonement anyhow)
ROFL!
The evolution/ ID argument was here long before we were, and probably will continue long after we're gone.
Almost everyone realizes you have to have two side to an argument in order to debate, yet only ONE kind of the origin of life theory is ever discussed in schools.
What would be so wrong with having ID (in a philosophy class, if nothing else) offered to the students?
Oh, how ever so clever of you!!
Rather than attempting to be clever, I simply illustrated the absolute absurdity of your self-refuting belief. But you missed it. Or did you? So tell us all, do you hold to the self-refuting belief that there is no free will because you think it is true or because you must in order to be consistent with evolution?
And where did the ability to make the choice come from?
Nothing is wrong with ID in a philosophy class; but it doesn't belong in a science class and THAT is the whole focus of the debate.
Must be looking for you. Or perhaps you are oversensitive. I've only met one or two "hellfire-belching snakehandlers," and the subject of ID was never even broached by them.
As an elective philosophy class, maybe. BIG maybe. But these nuts want to teach it as science, which ID is emphatically not.
"Nothing is wrong with ID in a philosophy class; but it doesn't belong in a science class and THAT is the whole focus of the debate.
"
Would the determination of what constitutes evidence for intelligence/design be a subject for scientific or philosophical inquiry? Leaving aside the grand question of origins, don't we formulate experiments to ascertain causes and effects? If design or intelligence can constitute a cause (and again, I don't mean some cosmic 'first cause') isn't experimentation to examine that a reasonable endeavor for science?
I personally don't see the reason for such a strict 'firewall' between science and philosophy. In fact, I don't believe one is even remotely, logcically or practically possible.
Yes, but an evil god can lie, and there is no rational way to determine whether or not he is lying.
Can you find fault with His commandment to you to "depart from evil and do good"?
Yes, it's meaningless without a definition of good & evil.
That God was evil increating you with the potential to do evil?
An evil god would be rational, we just couldn't make a rational determination of the practical implications....
Even if you win the argument, God will simply rectify His mistake.
Sure, but an omniscient god would know if I had any faith or if I was just carrying on a charade out of "just-in-case" fear. If a god created me, then he quite obviously created me such that I would not believe in him, and who am I to challenge that?
God is the "alpha and omega, the beginning and the end." He knows all things, for all time. He created Lucifer, and since he knows all things, he knew that Lucifer would rebel. He knew that Lucifer would convince Eve to take a bite out of the forbidden fruit, and yet he put the tree of knowledge there anyways. He knew that he was creating evil, and yet he did it anyways.
FRegards, MM
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