Hi CarolinaGuitarman! Where exactly did Dembski “slip?” When I asked for the source, I also hoped to be clued in on the venue. Context helps to elucidate meaning. Got a direct cite? I’d appreciate it.
When Alamo-Girl said, “Also, because the intelligent design doesn’t specify the designer, it could be an emergent property of naturalistic origins” – she was telling it to you straight.
I gather this is the part you don’t “get.” ID as science is required to stick with observables. That means, it can only look at the design. If God is the designer — as folks like me strongly suspect, not that my opinion matters at all — He is not “an observable.” On the question of origins, probably no designer would be an observable, whatever its nature. For the "blueprint" of the design is itself “prior” to the design, and thus most probably does not “live” in 4D spacetime. And therefore would not be “an observable.”
That only means that the design, if any, must speak for itself.
I get the strong impression that you are somehow quite unsympathetic toward people, like me, who believe in God. And somehow, this attitude appears irrational to me — but then again, all forms of bigotry are irrational.
Do you mean to suggest that people who believe in God are incapable, or untrustworthy, to do science? But that would be totally nuts: The foundations of explicitly modern science were laid by people who were pious believers in God: Copernicus; Galileo; Kepler; Newton; Descartes. The “father” of genetics, Gregor Johann Mendel — was an Augustinian monk — that is, a man “in religious orders.” There are some twelve craters on the Moon named for distinguished Jesuit scientists — more men in orders. I could go on.
If anything, I think the religious scientists are more keenly aware of the problem of “undisclosed initial premises,” and deal with it more rigorously, than the ideological materialist scientists do. FWIW.
My background is philosophy; believing that true philosophy must ultimately reconcile with science, and vice versa. I do not see these disciplines as necessarily antagonistic or mutually-exclusive. Rather, I see them as the two great epistemological “complementarities,” in the sense defined by Niels Bohr, main expositor of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.
For an example of Bohr’s complementarity principle (by a direct analogy): An electron can be either a particle or a wave. The “design of the experiment” will largely determine which is actually being observed. The two are “Lorenz transformable,” in such a way that together they express a unity. The entire description of said electron cannot be given, as Bohr insisted, by either particle or wave. The total description of the electron requires the consideration of both. I think science and philosophy are but different descriptions of one reality that can only be fully explicated by taking both into effect. And thus the “two culture war” is suicidal for mankind.
And this believer in God is also a believer in evolution. It’s just that the Darwinian thesis seems insufficient to me. I do not deny that living systems are physically based, and that they are composed of matter subject to the physical-chemical laws. Not at all. My reservation about materialist reductions/explanations of Nature is that they place far too heavy a burden on “simple” matter, and then too much on randomness. There is plenty of randomness in the quantum world. But the macroworld appears to operate according to law, not accidents.
To put it crudely, my suspicion is matter, left to its own devices, just plain isn’t “smart enough” to organize Life. It is getting some help from somewhere — to speak in “baby-talk” here. (Rupert Sheldrake’s postulation of morphic fields seems a quite interesting idea to me — so just go ahead and call me crazy.) And environmental pulls from outside the organism — because they are quite largely the current “reflection” of the state of the then-existing biota to which the organism itself contributes — seems to make Darwin’s theory a case of circular reasoning that doesn’t really explain much. It always wants to “throw matter back onto matter.” And as we have already alleged, matter is pretty dumb.
Although in my recent readings I have come across such striking ideas as “atomic instincts” and “molecular memory.” Water — good old H2O — seems to have a quite fabulous memory, if the multiply repeated and replicated experiments of F.-A. Popp have anything to say about the matter.
Anyhoot, scientific materialism does not consider the “interior life” of organisms at all. Indeed, being defined as “molecular machines,” organisms are regarded as not having an “interior life” in the first place.
I just don’t want to be put into a “doctrinal straightjacket,” is the long and the short of my critique of mainstream evolutionary theory. You follow the path where it leads; you don’t need people to tell you up-front that the path leads nowhere. The point is, you have to find out for yourself. Honest science has ever done this.
Thanks for your reply, CarolinaGuitarman.
What a magnificient essay-post, betty boop! Thank you so very much!
I would argue that the whole attempt to make ID into a scientific theory is futile from the get go. As you correctly point out, ID as a scientific hypothesis cannot delve into the identity of the designer since the designer is unobservable. You then point out that the design is observable. However, I would contend that design is not an observable property of any system. How do you distinguish a designed system from one that is assembled as a result of strictly natural processes?
For example, (one I have used previously), suppose you have a table with 10 numbered coins. The sequence of heads and tails on these coins could be the result either of someone intentionally placing them on the table in that sequence (design) or someone just dropping them randomly on the table (natural process). How could you tell which is the origin of the sequence just by observing the coin/table system?
Similarly, it is at least possible in principle to build an organism from the sequence of bases in its DNA. Is this sequence the result of design or natural processes? I would contend that there is no way to determine an answer to this by looking strictly at the DNA or the resulting organism. The question of design is therefore a strictly philosophical one.
I would take issue, not only with those who believe that ID is a scientific hypothesis, but also with those who believe that the idea that design is absent is a scientific theory. Evolution simply describes what happens, namely that the DNA of organisms is subject to mutation, these mutations are then selected for based on their capability of surviving to produce offspring, and that this is the primary source of biological diversity. It doesn't actually rule out the notion that this process is a result of intelligent design. I think that those who adhere to ID as something other than simply creationism without theology (and I really think that a small minority of ID'ers really are in this category) are barking up the wrong tree by promoting their idea as an alternative to evolution. There is no possible observational evidence for design, but ID can and should be discussed as a philosophical idea complementary to evolution, rather than opposed to it.