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.
Yes. Evil exists.
Fine, that is a rational conclusion.
And God could have prevented evil.
Fine, that is a rational conclusion as well, so long as God does not consider it evil.
Instead He chose to permit it to exist to demonstrate His power and glory.
Then he must consider its existence good if it exists at his discretion.
The existence of evil demonstrates that choice is real. Evil cannot defeat God.
That would seem to follow, if evil exists at God's discretion
He is proving His ability to overcome evil and transforming evil into good.
To overcome evil? To transform evil into good? Why does god need to prove any of that? Either evil exists at his discretion, or it does not. You seem to claim that it exists entirely at his discretion, in which case it exists because god wants it to exist.
None of that is irrational. What is irrational is your apparent conclusion that: Evil exists entirely at god's discretion although he doesn't want it to exist. That is not a rational statement.
If that is true, that is a capricious or an irrational god, and we cannot reason out the whims of such a god, so he is irrelevant to us from a practical standpoint.
> The Bible does not dispute science.
Those who believe that God created Man via evolution are in conflict with neither the Bible nor science.
I believe every attempt has resulted in problems, causing glaring contradictions, and empty support for faith. The example I like to use is how Thomas was dumb-founded at Jesus' re-appearance. He says he can't believe it, until he touches the wounds... So Jesus says (like) "Go ahead and touch them if you want, but I've returned, with or without this evidence you need."
I don't think Thomas was wrong to want evidence (heck, Jesus GAVE it to him. He didn't say "no, no evidence for you!"), rather Jesus said that science isn't needed if you have faith.
So.... if you're looking for "truth"... all we will ever know for certain (until we die maybe) is our own small lives, the wonderful people in it, the ugly sins that we see all over the place... The "here and now", like sitting down for breakfast, or a lunch-time burger.
God bless the mundane. That's the only truth I really care about, and it's essentially why I'm a Republican. I don't ever want to be like the liberals who have something to prove in life by acting flashy, moving to the city for recognition, or going to cocktail parties so they can scoff at the lower class. (I'm being rather abstract, but it all makes sense to me.)
Exactly.
Do you have children?
Oh, I see what your game is. The common statement that god is "infinite" does not refer to infinite in the sense of "greater than any arbitrarily large value"; it refers to infinite in the sense of "unlimited in spatial extent." If that wasn't clear before, now it is, and it's a self-contained statement.
You are still basically arguing that God doesn't exist because you exist. That a God that would create you must be evil.
It's a no win argument. If you win a Just God will undo the evil He caused and destroy you.
If you lose, then either you will agree that God is good despite having made you and your having chosen to be evil, and you will therefore logically agree God's judgement on you is just. Or...
You will cease to be evil, and therefore prove God good for having created you.
The only way you win is by stopping this nonsense and becoming obedient to God.
There is no game. You need to prove a statement you made.
"Then he must consider its existence good if it exists at his discretion."
Either that or he considers "choice" good, and so He leaves us not with Evil, but with Choice.
You can't take care of a horse without dealing with it's crap.
It's not scientists or skeptics who go ape when you say something like "God used evolution to create Man." Read through the Freeper Crevo threads, and you'll find the same Creationist/IDers going nuts at the very notion of evolution. Non-believers liek myself find nothing argue-worthy over "God did it via evolution," since God cannot be scientifically ruled out. However, science pretty much *has* ruled out Creationism.
That is an article of faith. It does not follow from reason.
God can be infinite (i.e. omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent) without bein omnicontrolling and without forcing His will on beings created by Him to have free will.
Nonsense. Refer back to the discussion on the finiteness of free will. I linked it for you already. Free will is not absolute, and so if it was created, it had limits forced upon it.
Yes, why?
"However, science pretty much *has* ruled out Creationism."
If you're talking about the Biblical interp of Creationism I would disagree. If you're talking about "6 days and God said 'poof' and that was it" then yes, I would go with you.
Do you love them?
Well, I have done so. An unlimited god is all-encompassing. If a god is not all-encompassing then he has limits. I am clearly using "infinite" as the opposite of "limited" - period.
By example, the set of odd numbers has limits, even though it is infinite. It doesn't include any even numbers.
Sorry for snapping at you a bit. It just annoys me when people turn a discussion into tedium for no reason other than as a rhetorical tactic.
Yes, why?
Very true! Well, I have to bow out of this discussion. It's already taken up a lot more of my day than I had time to waste. See ya around!
God is not a contradiction.
I think I see where you are going, but I'm watching you reel him in.
Do you want them to be harmed?
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