Posted on 11/12/2005 8:19:25 AM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo
In 1995, a solar eclipse he saw in India made him think about Earth’s unique place in the universe — a place designed to be able to study such phenomenon. Though there was no “Eureka!” moment, Gonzalez felt strongly that chance couldn’t explain Earth’s privileged position. And last year, Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, another fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, published The Privileged Planet.
Currently, Gonzalez has been busy fighting intellectual battles on campus (See sidebar.) and continuing his own research on the Galactic Habitable Zone — the part of the galaxy that seems to have the right conditions to support life: conditions that all together, he says, are very rare.
Taking time out of his astrobiology studies and stepping out of the debate for a moment, Gonzalez talks about why he is an intelligent design astronomer and how that lets him travel in an unbounded universe.
What is your definition of intelligent design?
Intelligent design is the study and search for objective evidence of design in nature. It holds that certain features of nature are best explained by an intelligent cause.
When did you start thinking about intelligent design?
It’s hard to pin a precise year on it. I gradually became interested in the idea of possible evidence of design in nature, in astronomy in particular. I was interested in reading about fine-tuning.
The fine-tuning argument basically is that the concept of physics requires being set within certain narrow ranges for the possibility of life in the universe. And so fine-tuning makes this a very low-probability universe.
And with the anthropic principle, you have to come to terms with that observation.
Basically there are two camps: One camp says that it’s just an observer selection effect. And we’ve just selected this universe out of a vast ensemble of habitable universes. The other camp says that intelligent design is the best explanation, since we have no evidence for any such vast ensemble of universes.
How do use intelligent design in your research?
My argument that I wrote up with Jay Richards we presented in our book, The Privileged Planet; it’s a completely original argument. We present the discovery that I made around the late ’90s, where I noticed that those places in the universe that are most habitable for life also offer the best opportunities for scientific discovery. That seems completely unexplainable in terms of the usual naturalistic causes. So, intelligent design is the only alternative.
We actually drew that out a bit and further implied that the universe is designed for scientific discovery. So science is built into the fabric of the universe from the very beginning.
What is the most compelling example of design in the universe?
The first example I thought of was the solar eclipse. The conditions you need to produce a solar eclipse also make Earth a habitable planet.
The other one that really intrigues me is being able to detect microwave background radiation. Microwave background radiation is the leftover radiation from that early epoch when the universe was much hotter and denser. It was the deciding observation between the steady-state theory and the big-bang theory. Our ability to discover it and then measure it subsequently is very sensitive to our location in the galaxy, and also the time and history of the universe that we live in.
What does using ID allow you to do that current scientific inquiry doesn’t allow for?
I asked and continue to ask kinds of questions that a naturalist wouldn’t ask. For example, if we were living on a different planet, or around a different star, or in a different place in the galaxy, how would things look different, and what kind of scientific progress would we have?
It’s a perfectly reasonable set of questions — it’s just a set of questions that hasn’t occurred to anybody else to ask. I think it’s because they haven’t been open to the possibility of design, or getting an affirmative answer, which would point to design.
How would you construct a research program around this?
I could imagine having a student do a Ph.D. thesis asking the question: What is the best time in the history of the universe to be a cosmologist? They can modify that using the standard cosmological models. They can find out if we are, in fact, living at the best time, or if it’s a distant time from now. It’ll be interesting to find out the answer to that.
How does your faith affect your research?
I am a Christian. I’ve had a strong intuition from a very early age that there had to be something behind all this.
It makes me open to discovering the possibility of design, but I don’t impose my faith on the data. I’m constantly reminding myself of my own personal biases so I don’t inject them into research. But at the same time, I have a very open mind to seeing evidence that may not fit into the nice, neat categories provided by naturalism.
Why does science need the concept of intelligent design?
It’s not something that a priori needs the concept of intelligent design. Here’s something I stumbled upon and I discovered this pattern in the universe. It just screams out for another kind of explanation. It’s not that I’m saying that the universe must display evidence of design, or I must be able to find something to fit that. I stumbled upon this and I can’t explain it in the usual terms.
How does this alternate explanation of design in the universe lend itself to theology?
I’d like to try to keep my work in intelligent design separate from discussions of the implications of intelligent design. As an ID researcher, I know my limitations. You can say, “Okay, I think I’ve identified design in the universe, and here is the evidence.” And that’s it. I can’t identify the designer uniquely.
If you want to partake into the theological discussion, let’s bring in theological elements into it. Then it becomes broader than intelligent design.
I can imagine expanding this discussion, writing a second book just discussing the implications — bringing in aesthetics, philosophy and theology, which are less objective. But in our book, we wanted to keep the theology separate from the science.
Why do you need an intelligent >design paradigm to explain the natural world?
As a scientist looking out at nature, I want to be open to possible evidence that a designer exists. If I say ahead of time, “Well, I’m not going to allow the universe to present objective evidence,” then you’re never going to be open to it. It’s like the SETI [Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence] researchers who say, “The probability of life in the universe may be small, but if we don’t look we’ll never know.”
At the beginning of the 20th century, virtually all scientists believed the universe was eternal. Then came the shock of the big-bang theory with the evidence of the expansion of the universe. They had to actually consider the possibility the universe had a beginning. So, the universe can surprise us. I would rather be more open to the possibility of being surprised.
Is this the suggestion you would give the scientific community about intelligent design?
Scientists, who may not even be design-friendly, may stumble upon design evidence, and I’m just hopeful that they’re open-minded enough to just present it and admit that they stumbled upon it.
Julia C. Keller is the science editor of Science and Theology News.
Thanks, I was wondering where to begin searching because I know we (LDS) believe that a day to Heavenly Father is a thousand years to us.
Evolution(survival of the fittest) = Atheist Dialectic Scientific Materialism
Creativism = a belief in the simple without being simplistic..
The problem is lots of people think(?) the "free expression"
of religion is the same as "establishing" it!
Soon, exchanging marriage vows with the opposite sex
will be seen as discriminatory "anti-same sex marriage language" and therefore banned (if you follow the same type of idiotic logic)
Well-said! Too long for a tagline, but not too long for my homepage.
FRegards!
My post was in response to a person who said, "there was no separation of church and state in the Constitution". My reply was that he was wrong and I point to the First Amendment as proof.
So... why would I bring up the clause "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" in my argument? I also left out free speech, press, peaceable assembly and petitioning the gov't because they had nothing to do with my "separation of church and state" argument.
I am sorry I don't understand you, can you clarify?
For that matter, why do you choose to ignore "Congress shall make no law"?
If you ever go to Phila, please... please... please... go to the new Constitution center and educate yourself. Serious...
You do know, don't you, that some of the states that ratified the Constitution had established churches at the time of ratification, and that disestablishment was not expected of them (although they all eventually did)? But that's not even relevant to Batrachian's point. Batrachian was suggesting a return to conditions that existed as recently as 45 years ago.
Right. How is teaching religion in school the same as congress passing a law?
You might as well say that the constitution guarantees a right to privacy and therefore abortion has to be legal. I'll bet that's exactly what you believe. Are you sure you're in the right forum?
Is your objection to the theory of evolution based on scientific grounds, or is it based on your religious convictions?
ping
Well-said!
Even though it's a complete and transparent lie?
The ridiculous nature of this falsehood can be seen by the fact that the *majority* of American evolutionists are Christians.
For that matter, a great deal of conservative Freepers are evolutionists as well.
So why don't you guys stop lying about us and try to start discussing something resembling reality for a change?
I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but this one isn't very good. In fact, it's downright goofy.
He says something that doesn't make a lot of sense and we comment on it and we're arrogant?
Whatever. Have a nice life.
There is the famous line by one of those folks that was the 'shot across the bow', so to speak--the phrase 'conservatives are retards'--that has me casually determined to show those folks for what they are. They exhibit similar characteristics to trolling behavior ( or at least flame baiting )--posting a thread, laying on the insults prety thickly, then, when called on it, leave that particular thread and move on to another.
The shameful part is, there are some very sharp folks on this forum that appear to have allowed themselves to be shanghaied into lending credibility to such behavior. A word of warning to those folks--while it is unfortunate, guilt by association is still a human failing, and it would be a good thing to take stock of that before ( rightly or wrongly ), people begin to hang the same label on you as they are on the more egregious elements.
"And the way evos behave on the FR board lead me to believe that it is priesthood they are after--they want to preach what they want to preach and deal with no heresies. Watching them here over the past few years, looking at their posting histories (they generally post to few threads other than evo-crevo issues) and their arrogant tone--they don't even seem to be interested in conservatism itself, just in having the opportunity to find conservative Christians and rattle their cages."
Amen Mamzelle;
That's why I believe we have visitors from DU here, especially the one's who are great at calling everyone a liar who doesn't walk lock-step with them.
I sure wouldn't want to be in their shoes when they come face to face with our AWESOME God!
There is no constituional reason local school boards can't teach what they want. Where is in written in the Constitution that the federal government is in charge of local education? If communities want to have religion classes and no one there complains, what business is it of the federal government?
"And the way evos behave on the FR board lead me to believe that it is priesthood they are after--they want to preach what they want to preach and deal with no heresies. Watching them here over the past few years, looking at their posting histories (they generally post to few threads other than evo-crevo issues) and their arrogant tone--they don't even seem to be interested in conservatism itself, just in having the opportunity to find conservative Christians and rattle their cages."
I couldn't agree more.
You have to remember context. I think the first chapter of Genesis is clear that a day is what we think of us a day. Otherwise, why would it be repeated so often?
I can't help but notice that ID is never brought up at my kids' school where they have separate science and religion courses (of course, it's not a public institution).
I would think the laws of mathematics and music, the golden mean, the Fibonacci series, the Divine Proportion or Golden Section, etc. and the sheer complexity of life itself argues for an intelligence at work.
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