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.
What a silly comment. Of course you can.
The second law of thermodynamics applies globally, that is entropy globally must increase. However, it can decrease locally. What do you think the Helmholtz Free Energy is?? Learn some physics before you make insipid posts.
http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html
The arguements using statistics that say that the chances of the flagellum, the eye, the human gene code, whatever, falling together are "one chance in ten to the bajillion" are pure nonsense... because that's not how evolution works. Evolution doesn;t start with a puddle of amino acids and assemble a complete organism in one shot, but through multiple steps. And by going in a stepwise fashion, the time it takes to go from goo to you is vastly reduced.
Things Break, and other things become Dysfunctional, Sophomoric, Arrogant and/or Narcisstic... its all in my book...
"The Devolution of Mankind and other things"... Evolution is a Utopian vision of Dialectic Materialism.. with DNA as the material as Sophistry as the dialectic..
Exactly what is missing in the theory of evolution........hard evidence and LOGIC.
Those who do NOT believe (at least) in Intelligent Design, have a gaping hole in their brains where the logic is supposed to be.
There could exist nothing but that which an omnipotent, omniscient god considers good, because the absence of anything would also be a decision of said god. In other words, if he considered the absence of something to be evil, it would no longer be absent unless he were evil at least in part, because to permit its continued absence would be to engage in evil.
bump
Entropy is the natural logarithm of the number of accessible quantum states. It is a measure of disorder. Entropy increases over time. The salt crystal is ordered. Where did that order come from?
Again, you cannot create order from nothing.
But life didn't start from "nothing", and nobody claims it did.
Any scientist will come out and tell you that.
I am a scientist and I'm telling you you're flat-out wrong.
If we turn around your statement to include the teachers unions and the NEA (perversion-belching liberal agenda promulgators), are we discussing reality yet?
From the content of this article, he knows JACK about statistics either; or maybe he's just not being truthful.
I apologize if I disrupted the thread.
I thought I would inject a little casual conversation into the usually charitable and compassionate conversations that occur on crevo threads.
I will withdraw now.
>>Yeah, and I'm the Pope.<<
Liar. You haven't been chosen yet. Do you have your hat in the ring? 8^>
Back! Back to the philosophy department!
Yes, of course it is, because creating the option to engage in evil is evil.
Yes, to the extent that God gives us free will, He has limited Himself.
And there is no rational way to assess his limitations. More importantly, he would be a dualist god, in which case there is no rational way to assess his credibility. He would be a dualist god because before he chose to limit himself he would know the outcome of his actions would be evil.
But, going back to the point, what I said is that an omniscient, omnipotent god would not rationally and intentionally create evil. In other words, no evil can exist in the judgment of such a god. If evil does not exist, then we cannot transgress, and so god is irrelevant from a practical standpoint - whatever we do will be satisfactory. If evil exists that is beyond the god's control, then the universe itself is not under his control.
Such gods are not practically relevant to us because they are not rationally relevant to us - in other words, we cannot reach a rational determination of what the god might require, if anything, and of what the god has the power to enact, if anything.
I'm stealing that one.
That nice, but then so what? Do you jump from this statistic to say "aha, there must be a God who designed this and THAT'S why it works so" or do you say, "yes, we don't understand all of the answers yet and thus we must think and study harder to try to understand how such a thing could've occured." ID is an intellectual dead-end. It's basically saying "this is TOO HARD. I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT. I know, I'll say God did it all and then I don't have to think anymore."
FWIW I'm a theist (Catholic), but ID is nothing new. Cultures have preached ID from the dawn of time. Can't figure out why the stars and planets move the way they do? Hey, it's ID! Those stars and planets are really Gods and they move hither and yon and they wish. Of course, if you want to ditch ID and figure it out (y'know do the HARD work) well maybe you'll discover the theory of gravity.
Oh, and free will is what now?
To claim God, there must also be "Not God"
I know the salt/water method.
Order cannot arise from disorder by 'random reactions'. (In pure probability it can, but the numbers are so infinitesimally small that physics regards the probability as zero.) So you go to the Dead Sea and say, "I see these orderly salt crystals. You're telling me that God's there making each crystal?" No. That's not what I'm saying. But the salt crystals do not arise randomly.
They arise because laws of nature that are part of the creation package force salt crystals to form. The laws of nature guide the development of the world. And there is a phenomenal amount of development that's encoded. God created those laws. It doesn't just happen by chance. It can't.
So what?
Keep up the good work, sir :-)
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