From: hampday@earthlink.net
Date: Tue Apr 26 2005 - 09:04:41 BST
Mark, Ian, Charles, and all:
Mark, it's obvious to me that you enjoy the role of devil's advocate, and
are not about to make any concessions on the ID issue.
I've said before that man cannot prove the existence of a creator by reason.
(That principle itself is built into the design.) So long as the value of a
philosophy is regarded as the ability of its author to provide proof of its
truth, we are caught in an intellectual game of "prove me wrong". If we
insist on restricting ourselves to this kind of "one-upmanship", we are not
philosophers but analytical deconstructionists looking for the next idea to
knock down.
I think philosophy has more to offer than that. For me there is value in
opening our minds to new concepts -- whether or not they come with proofs --
and seeing where they take us. I think scientists on the frontiers of our
universe do more of this kind of conceptualizing than the general public
gives them credit for. It's called "exploration", and it not only broaden's
man's horizons but reveals new approaches to knowledge that invariably lead
to useful, practical results.
Analogies can be an effective way to communicate abstract ideas, but of
course if we take them as logical propositions they can be picked to pieces
and lose all descriptive meaning.
msh said:
> Yes, 21st century guys like Behe and other ID proponents are taking
> the argument to a new level whereby they claim to have discovered a
> scientific principle that proves certain biological structures are
> too complex to have been produced by evolution, the so-called
> principle of "irreducible complexity." . . .
Researchers like Michael Behe and William Dembski haven't "discovered a new
scientific principle"; they've simply come to the realization that increases
in system complexity are a rare event in Nature, and that when the dynamics
are such that the system is capable of generating the specified complexity
that exists in biological organisms, intelligent design is implied.
> . . . Obviously, in order to
> criticize this recent incarnation of the design argument we must
> bring to bear scientific information that was not available to David
> Hume.
See, there's the deconstructionist attitude again. Now Mark is insisting
that if Hume only had access to this new information, he'd have been able to
refute this design argument too.
Ham said;
> I don't think you can reasonably deny that this house analogy and
> Paley's watchmaker analogy both provide evidence that a Creator is
> more probable than no Creator.
>
msh replied:
> The house and watch are evidence that the house and watch had a
> Creator. The inference cannot extend to the Universe because the
> analogy doesn't hold.
The point of Paley's "watchmaker" analogy, which you are apparently either
unable or unwilling to grasp, is not that the design of the watch is
analogous to the design of the universe. It's that the complexity of the
design is specific to its function. That is what is meant by "intelligent
design". You can "build" a house by layering logs of a certain shape and
size along the perimeter of a rectangular area and topping it off with a
roof. Nature creates a canyon over time by the flow of a river through a
high plateau. You can't create a watch by simply dropping pieces of metal
into a case; the end design is the "intelligence" that determines the
sequence and components of its construction.
Nature didn't create a dolphin by evolving larger lampreys; the specificity
of the dolphin is intrinsic to all its parts -- right down to the genes in
its cells. You can say that the design is implicit in Nature rather than a
"supernatural" creator, but you can't deny that a specific intelligent
design is necessary to create a living organism, whether it is an amoeba, a
dolphin, or a man.
msh disagrees:
> It's obvious that natural phenomena do not require creative
> intelligence to occur. Perfectly symmetrical crystals of quartz,as
> well as dozens of other minerals, will form during the cooling of
> silicon rich magma, and this process is understood without reference
> to intelligent design.
The universe in its totality, including the physical laws define it,
exhibits intelligent design. How does the simplicity of quartz crystals
refute the ID principle?
Ham said:
> I agree, but I don't see this an objection to the ID argument.
>
msh says:
> The point is that appearance of design is no proof of
> design.
The appearance of design is what we call empirical proof. It should be all
we need.
msh asserted:
> Even if signs of intelligence are everywhere, it does not follow
> that intelligence created the universe.
>
Ham replied:
> This only works as an objection if the intelligence "seen everywhere"
> is regarded as primary evidence. Of course the evidence can not be
> primary because someone had to design it. So this is an argument
> from a false premise -- which may explain why it is your "favorite" .
msh says:
> You are attaching some significance to the notion of primary evidence
> that I do not understand.
[Previous snip]:
> Even if signs of intelligence are everywhere, it does not follow
> that intelligence created the universe.
>
> This is my personal favorite of Hume's objections. Think of the
> rovers NASA has landed on Mars. They send back their data and
> eventually "die." Now imagine that intelligent life evolves on Mars,
> say several million years down the road, and a smart Martian stumbles
> across one of NASA's rovers. To her, the rover is clearly too
> complex to be anything other than the result of intelligent design.
> Is she logically justified in offering the rover as proof of the
> intelligent design and creation of the universe?
Since you chided me for failing to include this paragraph in my previous
critique (shall we call it the "MSH Argument"?), I'll address it now. Like
your friend Hume, you've set up an analogy on the false pretense that it
proves something about the universe. All it proves to Marcia is that
intelligent creatures inhabited Mars (or -- if Marcia happens to be a smart
anthropologist -- some other planet) at an earlier time. If she's that
smart, she'll know that the universe is the creation of an intelligent
designer without having to infer it from the rover.
msh, still trying:
> Fortunately, since the publication of Behe's book in 1996, there have
> been literally dozens of scientific and philosophical criticisms of
> Behe's principle.
Thanks for the references, Mark. But, you see, I'm really not interested in
ID criticisms because they won't change my mind, no matter how clever or
rational they may seem. And if it is impossible for you to sense the
intelligent design of the universe without a logical syllogism to confirm
the principle, why are we engaging in this sophistry?
Essentially exhausted,
Ham
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