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The Flawed Philosophy of Intelligent Design
Tech Central Station ^ | 11/17/2005 | James Harrington

Posted on 11/17/2005 11:27:22 AM PST by Nicholas Conradin

The time has come to be blunt. The problem with Intelligent Design is not that it is false; not that the arguments in its favor reduce to smoke and mirrors; and not that it's defenders are disingenuous or even duplicitous. The problem with Intelligent Design is that it is dumb. I would contend that ID is dumb biology; even if it is on to something, what it is on to has no connection and does no meaningful work in biology (or physics). However, and more significantly, ID is dumb philosophy.

First, and despite the claims of its defenders, ID is a position in natural theology. And, despite its name, natural theology is not a branch of theology or of science, but of philosophy.

Natural theology lives on the boundary of natural philosophy (science) and metaphysics. The fundamental question of natural theology is: given what we know about the world from natural science, is the best available metaphysical picture of the universe one according to which the objects of natural science form a closed system or, alternatively, one according to which at least one entity fundamentally different from the objects of natural science is required to explain the structure of the natural world.[1]

Once we recognize that ID is a metaphysical position, we can recognize that ID has two principle competitors: metaphysical naturalism and global non-naturalism. Both of these frameworks compete with ID as fundamental perspectives for understanding the world.

First, let us consider metaphysical naturalism. Roughly, a metaphysical naturalist claims that the world per se is roughly the way that the world is portrayed in the natural sciences. The first, but not principle advantage, of naturalism is its profoundly elegant simplicity; at its heart rests the intuition that the world simply is the way that it seems to be. However, to really understand the power of this intuition pursued to a philosophical conclusion we must be willing to embrace its power to drive David Hume's war against superstition and moral privilege. The power of the tools that naturalism puts at our disposal for understanding who we are and why we are the way we are; for understanding the real place of human beings in the cosmos; and for elevating the dignity of the ordinary, both ordinary human beings and the ordinary world, cannot be overestimated. If you don't feel the pull of naturalism, then even if you ultimately find it inadequate, as I do, you just don't get it.

On the other hand there are a wide variety of non-naturalist cosmologies. General characterizations of non-naturalism fall together much less straightforwardly than do such characterizations of naturalism. This is, at least in part, because of the much greater historical depth of non-naturalism. Although, today, naturalism does feel like the default metaphysical position for those who begin their metaphysics with natural science, that is a quite recent phenomenon. Unfortunately, not being naturalists is about the only thing that the various non-naturalists have in common.

Fortunately, the virtues of non-naturalism can be usefully characterized as just the opposing virtues to those of naturalism. The best non-naturalist cosmologies derive from a very real sense on the part of their defenders of the messiness of the world; a sense that, contrary to naturalist expectations, things don't come together when we look deeper. That is, naturalism seems to require that there be a scientific picture of the world. Instead, claim their opponents, things just get weirder. Whether we are looking at quantum theory; at the strange fact that stars ever manage to light their fusion engines; at the weird and totally unexpected patterns that crop up in the fossil and evolutionary record; how can anyone who really digs down, even if they don't ultimately agree, fail to feel the pull of a metaphysical picture, which, at least, explains how all of this weirdness manages to fit together into a WORLD?

And, what do the ID types want to set against these? Some kind of bastard child of naturalism and non-naturalism. According to ID, the world perked along perfectly fine for several billion years according to the rules of physics. Over most of space-time the naturalists have it basically right, things just sort of go the way they seem they should. Then, a couple of billion years ago, along came The Designer, not itself the product of those processes. It showed up and decided to take a bunch of these otherwise perfectly natural chemicals and put them together to make bacteria and then designed in a replication system. Then it left it alone for another several million years and decided, "Hey, I've got these bacteria around, let's collect them into these other things." And, so forth.

But, this is just dumb! It takes the real virtues of both real alternatives and turns them on their heads. If naturalists value metaphysical simplicity, the simplicity of ID becomes simplemindedness. The ID theorist response to any puzzle is to demand a simple solution, even if the simple solution amounts to deus ex machina. This isn't just lazy philosophy; it's lazy fiction. On the other hand, if non-naturalists have a valuable sensitivity to the messiness of the real world, the ID theorists goal is to make that messiness go away. Pointing at every gap in our understanding and saying, "See there goes God, or whoever." isn't sensitivity to complexity; it's just stupidity.

Consider one of the most fully developed alternative evolutionary cosmologies; that of Teilhard de Chardin.[2] De Chardin, one of the most celebrated paleo-anthropologists of his generation, noticed certain patterns in the evolutionary record available to him. In particular, he noticed what seemed to be patterns in the evolutionary record related to the evolution of central nervous system complexity, i.e. thought, that seemed to be surprising if the only constraints operating on biological evolution were basic physics, the physical boundary conditions and natural selection.

Trying to summarize his conclusions from this is just about as possible -- that is, it's not possible to do fairly -- as would be attempting to summarize, for example Richard Dawkins' attempt at an evolutionary account of vision. However, what follows should at least give the reader a taste.

Teilhard thought that he could "derive" the operative constraints on evolutionary systems necessary to generate the patterns he discerned. He argued that those constraints pointed to a global teleological structure for the entire universe. Roughly, these constraints are equivalent to postulating the evolution of conscious awareness, the noosphere, as a cosmological endpoint for all natural processes.

This is probably wrong, but it is real philosophy; you could spend years struggling with everything you need to really get a handle on in order to see where Teilhard goes wrong.

And this is the first thing to notice; unlike ID, Teilhard's cosmology is not a shortcut to anywhere. Teilhard's cosmology does not close off questions; it opens them up. And, if it is right, it really does help us make metaphysical sense of everything about the universe without having to abandon real science at any point in the process. That is, for Teilhard, as much as for any naturalist, we understand the universe by looking at the universe; not outside of it. In Teilhard's universe there are no dei ex machina; things happen in the universe because that's the way they happen in this universe. The difference is that this universe is not quite as straightforwardly self-subsistent as the naturalists would have it be.

And instead of attempts to really work through these problems, we are offered ID.

Consider the following example. Imagine yourself as a visiting alien; when surveying "Africa" you discover large termite mounds. Most of the crew gets right down to the business of studying termites and figuring out how they manage to produce their nests. But, a few make a different claim. Given that the termites are clearly not sentient, they decide that the termites could not possibly have built their nests in the absence of an independent sentient nest designer -- The Termite Farmer. Therefore, they take off and go looking for The Termite Farmer instead of studying what termites actually do.

Among what I would call "real" termite biologists there can be both naturalist and non-naturalists. That is, some of them think that what you see is what you get; others think that there is something more subtle going on with the termites. However, unlike the design theorists, they both think that you learn about termites by studying termites. Not, by wandering around looking for hypothetical termite designers. However, it's actually worse than that. It's as if the believers in termite-mound designers didn't just go around being pains in the neck to real biologists by pointing out the places they don't quite understand yet; problems with which the real termite biologists are, of course, already perfectly familiar. Instead of either getting down to work or getting out of the way, they go around crowing that termite biologists get it all wrong because the termite-designers tried to make it look as if they, the designers, didn't exist. That is, ID theorists need to claim that, although life looks like a fundamentally natural process subject to natural explanation, that naturalness is an illusion. But, this isn't just bad science or bad philosophy; it's a conspiracy theory fit for The X-files, and thus, while it may not be religion, it certainly is just dumb!

The author is Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Loyola University, Chicago.

NOTES

[1] There is another branch of "natural" theology, one that operates from an a priori basis. This family of arguments attempts to prove that possession of certain concepts or the ability to make certain judgments implies the existence of a "divine" being. Anselm's argument, what Kant calls the Ontological Argument, is the quintessential example.

2 Despite the claims of many naturalists, de Chardin does not make an argument from design in the sense at issue here. See Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea : Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).for an example of this mistake. See Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology for a (roughly) naturalist engagement with Teilhard which avoids this mistake.


TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: buffoonery; id; idiocy; ignornanceisstrength; intelligentdesign; naturalism; naturalphilosophy; naturaltheology; science; teilhard
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To: dmanLA
If you can show me evidence of that really happening, I would have to completely rethink evolution. ;)

So would I, since it would completely disprove evolution. Sadly, this is the type of 'proof' being demanded by those that don't understand that 'macro' evolution is not a single large change, but a long series of small, 'micro' evolutionary changes compounded over thousands of generations.

221 posted on 11/18/2005 12:06:45 AM PST by Antonello
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"Creationist websites rot your brain" placemark
222 posted on 11/18/2005 12:08:12 AM PST by dread78645 (Sorry Mr. Franklin, We couldn't keep it.)
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To: Antonello
Antonello,
I think you're straining at a gnat when you try to say that the fossilized bones show subtle differences proving the mutative alteration of life forms from one major class to another, when in fact an animal with a blend of organs/radical-skeletal-features would be the only acceptable proof of that.
There are no animals in the fossil record showing a fish-becoming-a-land-walker, or any other intermediate animal that MUST exist between the major divisions of life forms for this absurd idea to be true.
If evolution explained the different forms of life on the planet, then there would be PLENTY of fish with arms and legs in the fossil record, and that goes for all the other supposed transitions between major life forms as well. The fact that these fossils are utterly lacking by itself makes the evolutionary model impossible.

There are many other points that make evolution impossible, statistically random damage (mutations) cannot create ever growing improvements, a SINGLE amino acid requires a chain of data hundreds of bits long, but THOUSANDS of amino acids are required for one full gene, to say nothing of DNA strands. This immense amount of precision cannot just happen randomly by itself.
That famous bit about a monkey typing all of Shakespeare's works given enough time is complete trash. We must be mature enough to admit that a monkey cannot type Shakespeare's works, and "evolutionists" cannot be allowed to bury impossible flaws by this cheap claim concerning the magical effects of infinite time.

I'm not a creationist (not Christian that is), but on the other hand I see from recent developments that evolution is a false, and frankly, childishly simple, ridiculous idea.
223 posted on 11/18/2005 12:58:42 AM PST by starbase (One singular sensation.)
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To: WildHorseCrash
In the first three lines of Genesis 1, I count 5 false statements and an unsupportable one made twice...

Really......?

Would you be so kind as to list them?

224 posted on 11/18/2005 4:20:03 AM PST by trebb ("I am the way... no one comes to the Father, but by me..." - Jesus in John 14:6 (RSV))
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To: thomaswest
We definitely reject teaching them superstitions as being equal to science.

So why teach evolutionary theory? At least ID corresponds with the overwhelming evidence of design in nature.

Another thought question. Should SETI be considered a scientific endeavor?

225 posted on 11/18/2005 4:44:30 AM PST by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: thomaswest
There is a clear answer to this. We, as a society, believe it is important to educate children, and we voluntarily pay taxes--lots of taxes--for this purpose. Even people who do not have children pay.

Mmmm... Answer me this. Who should be a child's primary educators, his parents or society?

226 posted on 11/18/2005 4:53:18 AM PST by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: thomaswest
If "evolutionary theory is largely materialist dogma", then aren't the germ theory of disease, the theory of gravitation, astronomy, and the laws of aerodynamics equally "materialist dogma"?

Have you noticed that no one argues about theories that are supported by evidence?

227 posted on 11/18/2005 4:54:28 AM PST by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: JamesP81
I would prefer to not pay taxes into something that teaches things that are against my belief system. But you seem to have a problem with that.

You're correct. A taxpayer has no right to withhold taxes legally due because what it is being spend on hurts his feelings.

228 posted on 11/18/2005 5:16:09 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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To: thomaswest
According to polls, 63% of us Americans prefer to believe in talking snakes than in evolution.

*shrug* Even if everyone believed it, it'd still be wrong.

229 posted on 11/18/2005 5:17:36 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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To: YHAOS
*sign* You don't understand. Learn the difference between what you want and what the law requires, and you will understand two things: Just because you don't like something, doesn't mean that it is agaisnt the law or should be.

What did the 9th Circuit actual hold in that child education decision? That there was nothing unconstitutional or illegal about what the school system did. That's it. Not that the schools had to do it, not that the government had to let the schools do it; just that it was not unconstitutional that they did it. Don't like the effect that law has? Then change the damn law. Nothing in the decision says that the schools have the unalterable right to do that, just that the parent's objections didn't make it unconstitutional.

Look at Campaign Finance Reform. The Court didn't say that what they passed was required by the Constitution, only that the objections didn't show that what they passed was unconstitutional. (I personally disagree, but that's nothing new.) Don't like the CFR, then change the damn law.

Look at the recent eminent domain case. The Court held that it was not unconstitutional for a municipality to consider solely the economic impact in determining whether the exercise was for the public good. Many people don't like the effect of that decision. What did they do? Pass a law that says the municipalities aren't to exercise the eminent domain power in that manner. Problem solved.

But now let's look at the Dover case. Contrary to your beliefs, passing this law, in the manner they did, for the reasons they did was a religious act. They are intent on imposing ID or other junk religion and opposing the science of evolution in order to advance their backwards religious dogma regarding creation. That is unconstitutional.

You say, wait for the voters to get a crack at them. (And it was great to see all those idiots tossed out and that flaming moron Pat Robertson put his head up his own ass.) But here's the difference. The problem isn't that what they did was unwanted by the voters but not a constitutional matter, as is the case with the 9th circuit decision and the CFR, it was unwanted by the voters and unconstitutional. It was, in short, against the law. The fact that the voters voted out those people is irrelevant to the question of whether the policy is illegal. And it should be ruled upon so as to prevent any other school board from taking the same illegal action.

230 posted on 11/18/2005 5:54:42 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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To: trebb
In the first three lines of Genesis 1, I count 5 false statements and an unsupportable one made twice...

Really......?

Would you be so kind as to list them?

Sure. (Mind you, I'm taking about errors in the King James Bible. I don't speak Hebrew, so some of these errors might not exist in the original. But, I've read enough times on this thread that the King James version is the God-inspired bible for English speakers, so I'll just assume that the Hebrew is the same...)

1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Here's the first instance of the unsupported statement. There is no evidence of any kind of the existence of a single god or multiple gods. Thus, the assertion that there was one "in the beginning" is unsupportable and must be believed on faith.
2: And the earth was without form...
This is the first error. The earth was never without form. Its form changed, from the grains and atoms which would condensed to form the planet to present day, there was never a point in which the earth was without form.
...and void...
This is the second. Not only was there always form, but there was always substance. The earth may have been void of things--both things that would come later and things that would never come--but the earth itself was never void.
...and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
The third error. Light existed from the beginning of the universe (See below). There was never a time when the earth was entirely dark, as both visible and invisible light will hit the earth, regardless the direction "the deep" is facing in space or the local atmospheric conditions.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Again, here is the unsupported God taking action. This is the second instance of that unsupported assertion. Also, the fourth error is the existence of water prior to the creation of light in Gen. 1:3. Light preceded water in the universe.
3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Here, I made a mistake. There were actually three mentions of the unsupported assumption that there is a God, not two. Further, the fifth error, of course, is the assertion that light was "created" after the earth was formed. The existence of light preceded the formation of the earth by billions of years.
231 posted on 11/18/2005 6:18:15 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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To: Aquinasfan
Have you noticed that no one argues about theories that are supported by evidence?

If you say that the millions upon millions of data points that support the theory of evolution don't exist, you're either ignorant, crazy, stupid, insane, lying or brainwashed.

232 posted on 11/18/2005 6:21:25 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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To: Aquinasfan

SETI is not sitting around pretending that the booms in the sky is the gods getting angry. ID, essentially, is just that.


233 posted on 11/18/2005 6:23:04 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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To: WildHorseCrash

All your assumptions are based on there being no God and I don't see how you could possibly prove your assertions that the Earth was never without form or that light always existed. Even the Big Bang theory calls for all matter to be super-compressed in a void before detonation. If there is no God that exists outside of time, exactly how did it really all start? Isn't it a leap of faith to just believe that the universe always existed? How can you possibly argue that "it all just happened" and not have a nagging itch of doubt?


234 posted on 11/18/2005 6:29:13 AM PST by trebb ("I am the way... no one comes to the Father, but by me..." - Jesus in John 14:6 (RSV))
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To: thomaswest
We reject lots of notions because they do not make sense.

That's why I reject the theory of evolution.

But I'm sure you think that is dumb. LOL

235 posted on 11/18/2005 6:35:16 AM PST by MEGoody (Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.)
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To: Secret Agent Man
Your majory error here is the belief that DNA is encoded information. It is not. It is one, big, long, complex biochemical problem.

Language, include binary computer language, is coded knowledge. The word "cat" in English is an arbitrary code to stand for the animal, as is "gato" in Spanish, "Katz" in German, "chat" in French, etc. It is simply encoded knowledge. We've agreed that the code "cat" will stand for the fuzzy little carnivore.

Not so in genetics. For example, the RNA codons "GGA GGC GGG GGU" stands for "glycine," not because it is some arbitrary code like language (like, in fact, the sequence of Latin letters G-L-Y-C-I-N-E is an arbitrary code, standing for the amino acid), but because when you line up the nucleobases guanine, guanine, adenine, guanine, guanine, cytosine, guanine, guanine, guanine, guanine, guanine, and uracil, in that order, run it through the magical RNA machine, you actually get the amino acid glycine. You actually create the stuff. It doesn't stand for it, it actually makes the actual thing. It is not a code, it is not coded information. It is chemistry.

236 posted on 11/18/2005 6:53:48 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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To: WildHorseCrash
SETI is not sitting around pretending that the booms in the sky is the gods getting angry. ID, essentially, is just that.

I think your understanding of Intelligent Design theory is, um, lacking. If you want to argue against ID, you might want to familiarize yourself with their arguments.

A good resource here.

237 posted on 11/18/2005 7:00:34 AM PST by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: WildHorseCrash
If you say that the millions upon millions of data points that support the theory of evolution don't exist, you're either ignorant, crazy, stupid, insane, lying or brainwashed.

Then coming up with one piece of irrefutable evidence shouldn't be a problem.

The first 22 years of my life was uninterrupted evolutionary dogma. I assumed that evolutionary theory was as much a fact as the rising and setting of the sun. Then I read, "Darwin on Trial," and the whole thing collapsed like a house of cards.

Of course, you're free to believe whatever you want. Just don't ram it down my kids' throats.

238 posted on 11/18/2005 7:03:36 AM PST by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: 1stFreedom
"Natural Selection" literally means a selection, which requires volition, is made naturally

This conversation is meaningless. You say that "natural selection" means something that it doesn't mean. There is no volition in evolutionary theory. You can say that there is until you're blue in the face, but you'll still be wrong.

239 posted on 11/18/2005 7:25:25 AM PST by Alter Kaker (Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one’s nose.-Heine)
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To: trebb
All your assumptions are based on there being no God and I don't see how you could possibly prove your assertions that the Earth was never without form or that light always existed.

The existence of God, as I say, is unsupported. I haven't ever seen even the slightest bit of proof that he exists. However, I do recognize that this utter lack of evidence is not dispositive, so I am agnostic.

And my confidence in the statements regarding the fact that the earth always had form, and that light preceded the formation of the earth or water is based on science, (observations confirming theoretical understanding.)

Even the Big Bang theory calls for all matter to be super-compressed in a void before detonation.

But if matter was super-compressed, it would not be a void, but merely super-compressed matter.

If there is no God that exists outside of time, exactly how did it really all start?

That is a complete non-sequitur. Even if we never know the answer to that question, that lack of knowledge is no evidence of the existence of the supernatural.

Isn't it a leap of faith to just believe that the universe always existed?

I don't know. I don't believe that it always existed (at least in this form.) And it would also depend on how you define "faith." If you mean belief in the absence of evidence, then no, it would not. If you mean belief in the absence of definitive proof (although you'd be insane to define it that way), then every belief about everything is "faith," and you've defined yourself out of coherence.

How can you possibly argue that "it all just happened" and not have a nagging itch of doubt?

It isn't a matter of having doubt. My belief is a conditional acceptance of what the data indicates and the reasonable inferences derivable therefrom. I don't expect to be free of all doubts of any kind. That's an impossible standard.

My question is how can you possibly believe in Christianity (or any one religion) and not have more than just a nagging itch of doubt? I mean, given the fact that the creation of religious stories appears to be a standard human "primitive" past-time, isn't it irrational to belief any religion in the absence of substantial proof of its truth? And isn't the multitude of religions in the world prima facie evidence that there is no such substantial proof about any of them, lest the adherence of the other religions convert?

240 posted on 11/18/2005 7:27:41 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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