Finally, ThiChi, you managed to get around to posting something substantive about "Intelligent Design". Unfortunately, you didn't write it, but plagiarized it from someone else.
: Here is why I feel ID may have merit:
ID may have some merit, but not for the reasons you've posted. In fact, it's obvious that you didn't write the material below (and don't even understand it), but cut and pasted it from another disussion forum, without attribution. That's called plagiarism. I'll point out why this is obvious, along with problems in the argumentation itself.
: 1. A method for design detection.
The clipped English shows that this is a snippet from a larger discussion that introduced the five listed points.
: There's much discussion about the validity of specified complexity as a method for design detection, but judging by the response it has elicited over the last four years, this method is not going away. Some scholars (like Wesley Elsberry here)
Elsberry originated the Usenet News group talk.origins around 1989, and now maintains the talkorigins.org website. The reference to "like Wesley Elsberry here" proves that this stuff is cut and pasted from somewhere else. Where is "here"?
: think it merely codifies an argument from ignorance.
Elsberry is correct. A careful reading of ID literature shows that this is all that ID boils down to: "I can't see how this could have evolved by itself; therefore God did it." ID author Michael Behe's notion of "irreducible complexity" is the epitome of the argument from ignorance. ID author William Dembski's notion of "the design inference" is another form of arguing from ignorance, but happens to be couched in difficult-to-understand language, and is therefore difficult to debate point by point. These notions have often been called "argument by lack of imagination". I consider ID, as defined by Phillip Johnson, Behe, Dembski and others in their camp, to be little more than a rhetorical theory with almost nothing empirical to back it up.
: Others (like Paul Davies) think that it's onto something important.
Davies is a prominent physicist. He lends absolutely no support to the claims of Intelligent Design proponents such as Phillip Johnson. In my above post to Simwitness, I showed what Johnson's real motives are: to promote his religious views. Davies believes that some sort of God (obviously not the Christian God) created the universe initially and then let it go its merry way. Indeed, he believes that life arose without intervention from this God. In his Templeton Prize address, Davies said (full text at http://www.origins.org/articles/davies_templetonaddress.html ):
So where is God in this story? Not especially in the big bang that starts the universe off, nor meddling fitfully in the physical processes that generate life and consciousness. I would rather that nature can take care of itself. The idea of a God who is just another force or agency at work in nature, moving atoms here and there in competition with physical forces, is profoundly uninspiring. To me, the true miracle of nature is to be found in the ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos, a lawfulness that permits complex order to emerge from chaos, life to emerge from inanimate matter, and consciousness to emerge from life, without the need for the occasional supernatural prod; a lawfulness that produces beings who not only ask great questions of existence, but who, through science and other methods of enquiry, are even beginning to find answers.
This is pure Deism. Johnson and his buddies have said that they completely disagree with it.
: The point is that there are major players who are not intelligent design proponents who disagree.
Disagree with what? Here's that typical creationist fuzziness again, that mercurial inability to focus on specifics.
: Such disagreement indicates that there are issues of real intellectual merit to be decided and that we're not dealing with a crank theory (at least not one that's obviously so).
Unspecified disagreement doesn't allow further comment. The fact that you plagiarize this stuff without understanding, ThiChi, further reinforces my point that you don't know what you're talking about and don't know enough to connect the dots.
: 2. Irreducibly complex biochemical systems. These are systems like the bacterial flagellum.
Behe's example in 1996 in Darwin's Black Box has been shown to be incorrect. He gave as an example of "irreducible complexity" the mechanism of operation of the flagellum of a certain bacterium. Since then, several types of bacteria have been found that are missing some of the parts that Behe claimed were necessary for the flagellum to work. This proves that his notion of "irreducible complexity" is highly subjective and subject to change as the knowledge of the claimant changes. Indeed, when bacteria with simpler flagella were pointed out to the ID community, they simply reformulated their claims and now say that it's the simpler bacteria that are irreducibly complex. Obviously they don't really have a grip on their notion. This reformulation proves once again that the notion of "irreducible complexity" is just an argument from ignorance.
: They exhibit specified complexity.
The above example of reformulation after new information comes along shows that "specified complexity" is a pipe dream.
: Moreover, the biological community does not have a clue how they emerged by material mechanisms.
An argument by lack of imagination. Once upon a time, the biological community was ignorant of the mechanisms of heredity. Various Christian apologists argued that man would never know the mysteries of heredity, and therefore the mechanisms were a miracle from God. All that changed in 1953 when Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. Certain biologists in the 1930s who studied the way bees fly wrote a paper that said that, according to then-understood aerodynamic flight mechanisms, they should not be able to fly. Various creationists, including the JWs, often used that as an example of how dumb scientists are. In recent years, advances in understanding of aerodynamics have changed all that, and certain biologists now understand bees' flight mechanism quite well. So the mere fact that scientists do not now understand something does not mean they never will. And history demonstrates that resorting to the "God of the Gaps" whenever scientists have gaps in understanding is a sure way to be embarrassed by continual retrenchment.
: The great promise of Darwinian and other naturalistic accounts of evolution was precisely to show how known material mechanisms operating in known ways could produce all of biological complexity. That promise is now increasingly recognized as unfulfilled (and perhaps unfulfillable).
Actually quite the reverse has taken place. It is simply not known very well yet. For example, using a combination of random variations and selection according to specified criteria, engineers have optimized the design of certain airplane wings, the turbine blades in certain jet engines, and so forth. One scientist produced an electrical circuit, using these methods, that outperformed anything anyone had designed before -- and no one could figure out how the circuit worked.
These examples are, of course, but baby steps on the road to fully understanding the mechanisms of natural variation acting in conjunction with natural selection, which produces organisms "designed" better to survive the specific environment in which they live. When this environment changes, so does the structure of the organisms. Creationists will argue that such examples don't apply to evolution because the selection process is guided. But they miss the point. The point is that random variation, selected by some selection process -- deliberately set up by scientists or set up by nature herself by the vagaries of a changing environment -- can result in better results than deliberate design. And that's exactly what evolution by natural selection is all about.
: Franklin Harold, not a design proponent, in his most recent book for Oxford University Press, The Way of the Cell, states "There are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations."
Indeed, scientists are at present ignorant of the precise mechanisms. Lack of imagination is at work again here.
: AlanFs "Ifs"?
You're the only one who used a bunch of unjustified "if" statements, ThiChi.
Is your mind so fuzzy that you can't even keep track of what you said?
: Intelligent design contends
ID proponents "contend" a lot. They have yet to prove anything, and they have yet to embark on a program of scientific research. Its proponents attend and host conferences, travel and give speeches (usually to general, not scientific, audiences), and write apologetic books. Their own journal, Origins & Design, rarely contains research articles about intelligent design. Instead, it contains theological arguments and critiques, and articles that address the design issue in general but do not detail any original research that supports Intelligent Design. In other words, rather than provide positive evidence for their own position, Intelligent Design theorists try mainly to find weaknesses in natural selection and other parts of the theory of evolution, or they say, "I can?t imagine how that structure could have evolved," then claim that Intelligent Design must be true because it?s the only other plausible explanation.
: that our ignorance here comprises not minor gaps in our knowledge of biological systems that promise readily to submit to tried-and-true mechanistic models, but rather indicates vast conceptual lacunae
"Lacunae"! That's a good word! Did you look up its meaning before plagiarizing it?
: that are bridgeable only by radical ideas like design.
"I can?t imagine how that structure could have evolved!"
: 3. Challenge to the status quo. Let's face it, in educated circles Darwinism and other mechanistic accounts of evolution are utterly status quo. That has advantages and disadvantages for proponents like yourselves.
Another indication of cut and paste from another discussion board.
: On the one hand, it means that the full resources of the scientific and educational establishment are behind you, and you can use them to squelch dissent.
A standard YEC and ID refrain. No substance, but they repeat it a lot.
: On the other hand, and especially to the extent that you are heavy-handed in enforcing materialist orthodoxy, it means that you are in danger of alienating the younger generation, which thrives on rebellion against the status quo.
The facts of science do not depend on the alienation of a group of people. They depend on realities in the world around us.
: Intelligent design appeals to the rebelliousness of youth.
Ah. So the facts of science ought to be determined by catering to rebellious young people and perhaps to politics. A typically dumb argument from a non-scientist.
: 4. The disconnect between high and mass culture. It's the educated elite that love evolution and the materialist science it helps to underwrite. On the other hand, the masses are by and large convinced of intelligent design.
The masses are also convinced of astrology, UFOs, channeling, ESP, ghosts and so forth. It's sad that someone claiming to have good things to say has to resort to such a stupid argument. But it's about all that true ID proponents really have.
Actually this claim about "the masses" isn't even correct. Most people outside the circle of "the educated elite" don't know anything about ID. It certainly was news to most of the 300 people who attended the conference where I presented material on ID. Most had never even heard of it.
This is a tactic that ID proponents are using to get publicity for themselves -- they declare that they have wide support when they actually have only a tiny circle of people who happen to be extremely outspoken.
: What's more, the masses ultimately hold the purse strings for the educated elite (in the form of state education, research funding, scholarships, etc.). This disconnect can be exploited.
Ah. Just like the YECs want to do. Force scientists to do religion instead of science.
: The advantage that biological evolution has had thus far is providing a theoretical framework,
Certainly an advantage over ID, which provides no theoretical framework at all.
: however empirically inadequate, to account for the emergence of biological complexity.
Only according to YECs and IDers.
: The disadvantage facing the intelligent-design-supporting masses is that they've had to rely almost exclusively on pretheoretic design intuitions.
This is gobble-de-goop.
: Intelligent design offers to replace those pretheoretic intuitions with a rigorous design-theoretic framework that underwrites those intuitions.
Somehow this sounds like forcing schools to teach religious ideas and violate the Constitution.
: 5. An emerging research community.
That's rich! What research community are we talking about? Certainly not anything run by Phillip Johnson and his close associates.
; Intelligent design is attracting bright young scholars who are totally committed to developing intelligent design as a research program.
Hardly any, actually. The only such person I'm aware of wrote a Ph.D. thesis about the conceptual development of ID, and turned it into a book. It's quite poor, and is really mostly about defending religious ideas.
: We're still thin on the ground,
This guy is a master of understatement.
: but the signs I see are very promising indeed.
Ah, the enthusiasm of someone not yet faced with reality.
: It's not enough merely to detect design. Once it's detected, it must be shown how design leads to biological insights that could not have been obtained by taking a purely materialist outlook.
A key point indeed. But the ID community has not yet provided us with any such "biological insights". Their writings so far have been either religious, philosophical, or negative criticsims of evolution. Zip, zilch, nada in favor of ID.
: I'm beginning to see glimmers of a thriving design-theoretic research program.
What I see is a lot of hype, which is beginning to attract the attention of good scientists, who are now writing solid criticisms. Remember that it took about 15-20 years for scientists to really get going on writing criticisms of YECism, but when they did, it was devastating. YECs are viewed as jokes by all good scientists, including Christians and those with leanings toward ID. Once the intellectual vacuousness of ID becomes well known, and the fact that it's just another attempt to force religion into the practice of science, it will wither as an intellectual force, just as YECism has.
AlanF
