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 stated it later in the discussion, with quotes from the Bible.
No it is stated that way for a reason.
This is Genesis.
Gen 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Gen 1:4 And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
If a god remains both omnipotent and omniscient (and also actively engaged) then free will is an illusion. In the absence of free will, god is irrelevant to us from a practical standpoint because there is nothing for us to decide. Nothing happens that is not precisely what the god wants to have happen. |
We agree entirely. I wasn't trying to prove God, since I believe(know) that is not possible.
Thanks for understanding! I have a major deadline on April 22 and am actually quite worried that I won't have enough waking hours between now and then to get the work done (that's definitely my fault). I really shouldn't be posting today at all; I told myself last night I wouldn't (so much for that).
I could ramble on about these topics all day because I find them of intense interest, so that's why I need to get them out of my head and go! See ya! :)
Which I agree with fully.
My biggest contention, I guess, is the origin of the 'spark' of life. What started it all?
For thousands of years, people across the globe credited the existence of the world to a higher being (or beings).
Barely 150 years ago, Darwin started his theory of evolution and the argument began between the evolution / ID factions.
Scientific theory is supposed to become fact once proven....but 'proven' to who? How much evidence is enough? Who gets to decide?
Why can't it be accepted that something we cannot identify started *life*, then evolution took over from there?
Why can't school teach just the study of organisms without expounding on either theory to the originating *spark*?
(Somebody famous said this once; didn't he?)
It is more correct to say that evolution does not address origins. It addresses the variety of life we see today as well as forensic evidence of past life forms. It does not attempt to answer how life began, only that once it had begun how life changes over time.
Why is it not possible that evo IS the intelligent design? Right along with the laws of thermodynamics, or gravity, or mathematical constants?
This is a very interesting speculation, of course, and the subject of many thought experiments. One could make the same sort of conjecture about gravity or any process we observe in nature.
There is nothing wrong with making this supposition. My point is simply that this is not science's purpose. The purpose of science is to describe the physical world in concrete terms, such that we may make predictions based on earlier observations. Take for example Einstein's theory of special relativity. For the longest time there was no known practical application of Einstein's theory. However, today the system of global positioning system satellites makes direct use of Einstein's predictions. Each satellite contains a very accurate atomic clock, and receiver units calculate position based on the time discrepancies in the signals received from several satellites. Einstein's theory of special relativity does not seek to answer why there is this 'time dilation' effect. One could postulate it is because the Creator made it this way. But again, this is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one.
Obviously the universe operates under a strict system of rules or laws.....where did they come from? At least ID has an answer.
Sure, much the same can be said about cosmology. The study of astronomy and cosmology doesn't answer the really big metaphysical question of where the universe came from, just as evolutionary theory doesn't answer the really big metaphysical question of why did life come about. This is not their purpose.
It is this misunderstanding which causes religion and science to be painted as being in some sort of opposition, when they're really not.
Evolution has nothing to do with the originating "spark"...it's about the origin of SPECIES, not life.
And the way it's taught in schools has nothing in particular to do with the origin of life; it's simply teaching that over millions of years various species evolved from other species.
The most amazing thing about the whole debate is one entire side (the creationist/ID side) doesn't have the foggiest idea of what the debate is actually about.
But why DON'T they then??
Could there be a hidden agenda here?
Surely they could get a LOT of folks off their backs, for recent polls show MORE than half believe in Creation over Evolution.
"Time is Nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once."
Why can't it be accepted that something we cannot identify started *life*, then evolution took over from there?
Ironically, you've just put your finger on the source of much needless contention. Evolutionary theory does not attempt to identify what started life. Only, as you say, that it took over from there.
Great article. Thanks for posting it.
I think you mean natural selection, specifically. There are some good theories of how biochemistry gets started from the presumed brine of planetary chemistry.
yes, some smart feller
Wouldn't that be Freud? The same one who stated America was a mistake?
Some smart feller.
His only contribution to the world's wisdom was that he focussed on sex.
Freud on the other hand recognized a good racket when he saw it
Freud was a fraud. His ideas were childishly incomplete and his theories lacked background. That's how he came to be so well known in the modern psychological world: as a joke.
As for Neitzsche, his predictions have been echoed through time. Yet not only is Christianity the strongest religion on the planet, but the numbers of the faithful of all faiths ahve only increased since his foolsih words were uttered.
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