Re: Intelligent Design is for lying cowards who deny their God

On Sat, 3 Sep 2005 22:09:17 -0500, "Steven J."
<sjt1957NOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

>If it were up to me, I would not imitate ID proponents by defining the
>theory of evolution by noting that it did not involve "any acts of
>intelligent thought." It is not that the theory rules out intelligent
>intervention; it is only that the known mechanisms, for which there is
>evidence, are not intelligent or directed, and that there is no evidence for
>any hypothesis of intelligent intervention.

I don't think there is even a need to define the known mechanisms as
undirected. As Asa Gray proposed, the variations (mutations) in organisms
may, in fact, be directed by God but in ways that are beyond human
detection. An ineffable God is the equivalent of undirected and random
forces to human understanding.

The real distinction between ID and science has always been ID's refusal to
accept methodological naturalism and ID's real complaint about science is
the claim that it actually practices philosophical materialism. Insisting
that mechanisms that are *apparently* undirected must *be* undirected is a
philosophical, rather than methodological position that would, at least
partly, justify the IDeologists' criticism.

>In fact, ID has no hypotheses
>of intelligent intervention, only flawed arguments that known causes could
>not have produced the observed complexity and diversity of life, and the
>unwarrented (even on their own terms) inference that therefore some
>intelligent designer did it. The theory does not forbid intelligent design,
>any more than it forbids genetic drift, or structuralist "laws of form" as a
>cause of evolutionary change, but there is no reason to accept mechanisms or
>agents which are vacuous and supported only by "god of the gaps" arguments.

But it should be emphasized that the claim is that these mechanisms are
vacuous only in terms of science's methodological naturalism. Whether they
are viable theological or metaphysical positions is something that science
is neither interested in nor capable of determining.

[...]

So maybe it should be: "The species living today are descended, with
modification, from a much smaller number of species living in the past,
which gave rise to many species with diverse adaptions, due to the
different selective pressures of different environments upon *apparently*
random variations over a very long time. There is evidence for other
natural mechanisms that played a part; there is no *scientific* evidence
for intelligent direction or intervention in this process, *but neither can
science rule it out*."

--
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J. Pieret
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In the name of the bee
And of the butterfly
And of the breeze, amen

- Emily Dickinson -

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