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.
I said irrational OR irrelevant. By example, a capricious god would be rationally consistent with the observed universe, but would be irrelevant from a practical standpoint because he would be impulsive and unpredictable.
Yet another creationism thread. No science content. No deployment of the ping list.
What is not rationally consistent is an omnipotent, omniscient god who creates anything that he considers evil.
There are alot of physicists out there who explain the terms in seperate terms. Just because they didn't fix the equation in the right way, doesn't nullify his argument.
I've seen many scientists say one billion billion. Or one thousand thousand. They just use certain terms in order to make the case more clearly away from the scientific mathematical world.
> Now that's an interesting statement.
Please note that "interesting" does not equate to "factually accurate."
They you are saying that a rational omnipotent Omniscient God would never create anything with free will.
I've always wondered what mathematical odds were of EVERYTHING in nature happening *just so* to create all the different kinds of life on the Earth.
And the statistics given from the article are for ONE part of a single organism!
PS. Unless the omnipotent, omniscient god creates a self-modifying universe to which he's then indifferent, which would make him an indifferent god, who would be irrelevant to us from a practical standpoint. The same would hold true if the god were not indifferent but ceased to exist (died) for whatever reason. Would be rational, and quite interesting, but irrelevant.
The bible teaches 'reality', not some fantasy. I couldn't imagine a world without a negative. God created emotion in order for us to recognize the fact. Could you imagine if there was no death? We'd immediately tack onto another negative. Wondering why we feel 'pain'.
It says that bad things happen to good people, and vice versa. That's life. It happens.
Oh well.
Come on, surely you can come up with a more reasoned argument than that. You aren't helping your side.
Here is an article you will enjoy:
It contains the information you seek.
G Schroeder
1)Among the structures that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect lenses, intestines. These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the fossil record that they were coming. Below them in the rock strata (i.e., older than them) are fossils of one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and clumps known as the essentially structureless Ediacaran fossils of uncertain identity. How such complexities could form suddenly by random processes is an unanswered question. It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory. Abrupt morphological changes are contrary to Darwin's oft repeated statement that nature does not make jumps. Darwin based his theory on animal husbandry rather than fossils. If in a few generations of selective breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into an ape. The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory.
2)The abrupt appearance in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, "Did Darwin get it all right?" And answered the question: no. The appearance of wings is a classic example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence. And they do, fully formed. We may have to change our concept of evolution to accommodate a reality that the development of life has within it something exotic at work, some process totally unexpected that produces these sudden developments. The change in paradigm would be similar to the era in physics when classical logical Newtonian physics was modified by the totally illogical (illogical by human standards of logic) phenomena observed in quantum physics, including the quantized, stepwise changes in the emission of radiation by a body even as the temperature of the body increases smoothly.
3)The British Natural History Museum in London has an entire wing devoted to the evolution of species. And what evolution do they demonstrate? Pink daisies evolving into blue daisies; small dogs evolving into big dogs; a few species of cichlid fish evolving in a mere few thousand years into a dozen species of cichlid fish. Very impressive. Until you realize that the daisies remained daisies, the dogs remained dogs and the cichlid fish remained cichlid. It is called micro-evolution. This magnificent museum, with all its resources, could not produce a single example of one phylum evolving into another. It is the mechanisms of macro-evolution, the change of one phylum or class of animal into another that has been called into question by these data.
4)The eye gene has 130 sites. That means there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites. Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened by chance. It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes. These data have confounded the classic theory of random, independent evolution producing these convergent structures. So totally unsuspected by classical theories of evolution is this similarity that the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in the Untied States, Science, reported: "The hypothesis that the eye of the cephalopod [mollusk] has evolved by convergence with vertebrate [human] eye is challenged by our recent findings of the Pax-6 [gene] ... The concept that the eyes of invertebrates have evolved completely independently from the vertebrate eye has to be reexamined."
I didn't say that. An omnipotent, omniscient god could very well create free will - although that would require that he limit himself, which would then make him a limited god. However, what I said was that an omnipotent, omniscient god would not rationally create anything that he considers evil, in which case nothing evil would exist to be chosen by free will. If nothing evil exists in the judgment of a god, then there can be no transgression in judgment of such a god, in which case the god is irrelevant from a practical standpoint, because anything that would upset the god doesn't exist to be done.
If a god creates anything that he considers evil then he is a dualist god. Creating the option of engaging in evil is creating evil.
It must be really convenient to rely on derogatory stereotypes to present your argument so as to misdirect the discussion. That technique has been perfected by the DNC. You have provided no evidence, just labels used by the ignorant to avoid intellectual discussion. If evolution is your religion just say so - this isn't the third grade.
Has anybody heard if Kent Hovind has been indicted for tax fraud? Haven't seen a post on him for awhile.
ALL such arguments are spurious. They are arguments against the possibility that the bacterial flagellum "just fell together one day by accident". But since nobody has ever proposed that that's how the flagellum came to be, the argument is completely null and void. Furthermore, if the flagellum demonstrably did come into being that way, it would constitute a counterexample to evolution, and throw the whole theory into question.
It must really suck not to have a sense of humor.
And what do you have against snakehandlers, anyway?
Why do you ask?
PS. And a dualist god is irrelevant to us from a rational standpoint because there is no way to know whether the good or evil dimension is 'speaking' to us - an evil god lies, even if evil only in part. From a rational standpoint, a god who is altogether evil is no different from a god who is altogether not - then it's just semantics - and he is irrelevant for the same reason.
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