Re: Commentary: Typical Objections to Intelligent Design


Jason Spaceman wrote:
> From the article:
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> In the past few weeks I've found my attention drawn time and again to
> the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. As always, I must give my
> disclaimer that I am not an expert in biology, chemistry, geology,
> etc. However, I do think I'm pretty good at analyzing arguments, and -
> as I've said before on this site - the more I look into this stuff,
> folks, the more I think that the ID people are on to something, while
> the proponents of Darwinian evolution are missing the point. In the
> present article, I want to quickly discuss several typical objections
> to ID.
>
> CREDIBILITY
>
> Time and again, neo-Darwinists (the somewhat poor term I shall use to
> describe the defenders of the orthodox view) have accused Michael Behe
> and other IDers as completely ignorant and/or deceptive. Obviously I
> can't speak for the entire movement - there are liars associated with
> every group of people - but from my limited investigations I don't get
> the sense that Behe is either. Here is Behe himself responding to the
> charge of ignorance, leveled by posters at the talkorigins website:
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Read it at http://www.lewrockwell.com/murphy/murphy102.html
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> J. Spaceman

Your article is fairly well-written, but not persuasive. For example,
you wrote:

Beyond being merely wrong, ID allegedly fails to qualify even as a
scientific theory at all. Science invokes only natural causes to
explain things in the natural world, and hence (the objection runs) ID
is unscientific when it invokes an unseen "designer" to explain, say,
the irreducible complexity of the human nervous system.

William Dembski has dealt this objection a decisive blow when he
explains the potential for ID in bioterrorism forensics. At some point
in the not too distant future, we will probably see outbreaks of
genetically engineered viruses or bacteria. After a given outbreak,
people will need to be able to determine whether the deaths were due to
natural causes, or were instead homicides. Now whom should we ask to
perform this task for us? Priests? Philosophers? Or scientists? And if
you agree that it should be the scientists who figure it out, how
should they proceed? Wouldn't they, oh I don't know, take samples
of the viruses and see if they could've been produced by Darwinian
processes, and then (if not) report to the government that we've got
some terrorists out there designing killer microbes?

(end quote)

It is of course quite plausible that a scientist could be called in to
determine if a virus has been genetically engineered. It is not even
*remotely* plausible that his/her conclusion would be based on
"irreducible complexity." Presumably they would look at the new virus
*against the backdrop of known visuses* and compare two scientific
hypotheses:

1) the virus has evolved naturally (and would thus would (probably) fit
in phylogenic trees of known viruses in a predictible way)

2) the virus has been engineered *by known* methods of genetic
engineering (so that the DNA would thus look like sections of DNA from
different viruses spliced together, along with individual genes added
or deleted)

Then the scientist would decide which of these two possibilities better
fit the data.

If the ID position were true and a scientist were to (somehow - but
how?) show that a certain virus could not, even in principle, have
evolved - wouldn't that count as evidence that *God* sent the virus to
punsih the world? Not at all implausible, given the Bible.

Sorry, bioterrorism forensics would need science, not ID
religion/philosophy.

-scattered

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Commentary: Typical Objections to Intelligent Design
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