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.
---Evil acts obviously exist, but that doesn't mean that god considers them evil, only that we judge them to be evil.
If an infinite god exists, those things that we consider evil cannot be evil in his view. That is my conclusion. Nothing can be other than that which an infinite god wants it to be.---
Looking at the religious text that has been applied, God is 'us' in the present/moving forward state. We do not see 'God', we can only see his traces(past actions). Moses said so in his comments(I wish I could remember the true context).
Do you think that God would see shooting someone point blank as 'not-evil'? Evil in 'his' view, is evil in 'our' view. He is us. He is everything in existence. Our actions are judged as we see them, as God sees them.
We know that acting with evil deeds produces negative results. The fact that 'it' exists proves that the evil is in fact there, and evil.
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
We also tend to have a sense of humor lacking in the ID movement.
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
This is understandable, of course... we recognize that scientific understanding is occasionally incomplete or flawed, and when new data comes in, we adjust.
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
OK, I think I got the hang of it.
And you just provided evidence for our conciousness.
Very objective and rational post. :\
I don't follow your reasoning. (and in your case that doesn't surprise me LOL)
There are an infinite number of even numbers. There are an infinite number of odd numbers. There are an infinite number of positive integers. There are an infinite number of negative integers. Get the picture?
You are missing the point. I'll rephrase it one more time.
If god is pure evil, then he can only enact evil. If god is pure good, then he can only enact good. If god is dualist, then he can enact both good and evil in whatever proportion his essence contains each.
If god is infinite (i.e., omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent), nothing can be other than what god wants it to be, regardless of god's nature. That includes all your actions and all your decisions, including the decision of whether to believe in him or not.
If god is contrary to the above formulation, god is not rational from our perspective, and therefore cannot be fathomed by our reason.
> I think I got the hang of it.
Doesn't really look like it. But don't worry about it. Humor is a difficult concept - you learn by doing. Keep trying, and eventually you'll come to see how amusing the ID movement really is.
I find it to be the highest comedy that people can reject the concept of an evolving world of life, yet imply that it was intelligent design that put all things here. The very moment I "buy into" the I.D. thesis, I must immediately recognize that the Intelligent Designer(s) undoubtedly wrote 'function_to_evolve()' into their designs.
What designer among us, doesn't create 'things', be they machines, computer programs, organizational systems, philosophical treatises, or roads & structures that are 'flexible'? Especially programmer-types. Most of us work awefully hard to write code that doesn't just serve one specific use, but can be recycled with minor-or-no modification into a completely different use.
My mechanical-engineering friends are always ensuring that their creations have the ability to be 'upgraded', or 'extended' or 'scaled' to higher dimensions, to far larger purpose than imagined. It is the sign of a good design(er) when the thing not only serves its intended purpose, but has a so richly outfitted 'depth' that it can serve a number of other purposes.
I feel cheated to hear the I.Design group forever rejecting that evolution could have produced much if not all of the complexity observable today, and somehow impuning such self-propelled transformation as being not something that the Great Designer(s) would have put into their creation(s). Cheated.
The Elephant-in-the-living-room is that people who vehemently argue that ID is on equal basis with EoS do so positioning ID as an alternative to EoS. Bull. If there is ID at all, then EoS is built into it, for whatever truly incredible and terrible level of intellect that should have designed all of the underlying systems, will most certainly have endowed its creations with the ability to evolve, to adapt to the changing environment, to survive its catastrophes and to change their 'function' in the system to accomodate the changing needs of the thing itself. No intelligent designer with the capability to 'write the code' for all of this stuff would possibly have left out 'evolution' as either unnecessary, impractical, or "oops... forgot that".
GoatGuy
If god is everything in existence, then us and all our actions up to now and in the future are part of god, and he would not see them as evil unless he sees a part of himself as evil. If the latter were true, then the part of himself that is evil would presumably not see those actions as evil since they would be a part of that part of god.
If god is infinite, nothing can be apart from god.
> wouldn't making a cosmic, unifying sense of "scientific" and "theological" schools of thought just lead us closer to what "Truth" is?
Not necessarily. Assume for the sake of arguement that Christianity is Right, Correct And Entirely Factual. Unifying science with Islam would then not necessarily get one closer to "The Truth." Or, better: assume Lovecraft's mythos is the truth... Shudder...
Sure, I get the picture, but I still don't follow your reasoning that "the set of odd numbers is not infinite" follows from "if anything is apart from a god, then the god is not infinite."
"If god is infinite..."
Then He can do whatever He pleases. He can put things out of His reach. He can also go and get them later if He desires, but then, He can put Himself above His desires.
You need to prove that statement.
You are contrary to the above formulation, and while you are not rational from our perspective, you can be fathomed by our reason. So why couldn't God be contrary to the above formulation? And why does the above formulation necessarily imply what you think it does?
There are several false assumptions in your setup.
When you quit trying to pigeonhole God for argument's sake and start paying attention to what He told you to do, then you might stand a chance.
There are always gaps in a scientific theory. There are gaps in Germ Theory as well, but you don't see a serious effort to bring a God-based replacement for Germ Theory into the classroom.
Yet it's taught as science. Why?
Because it is a testable, disproveable theory that best explains the process of speciation and has withstood the test of time. Almost every serious biologist in the world, the Catholic Church, and the best minds of our time accept Evolution as the most likely way that life on Earth developed from simpler to more complex forms.
So, go down one path, and see where it leads. If it meets with another, and theyu are both going towards Truth, then you know they are both right.
The Bible does not dispute science. It may irk scienTISTS from time to time, but it still does not disagree.
George Cantor call your office.
LOL :^)
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