scientific reasoning among ID’ers. It seems as if Intelligent Design is not so much a theory as it is one really silly argument against evolution: Life is to complex to have happened at random.
I am still poking the pile of manure looking for the pony. This poking is spurred on by my jealousy of those with true faith. How wonderful it must be to believe that our existence is not due to an accidental confluence of coincidences, but the work of some higher intelligence—a benign and loving intelligence. So, instead of fighting evolutions, why don’t ID’ers see evolution as God’s tool? Imagine what they could make of Punctuated Equilibrium!
This type of Intelligent Design would fit quite nicely into my Horton Hears a Who Agnosticism. Nobody knows that there isn’t a Creator. In fact, you could be a god putting into existence millions of new universes every time you boil water. Or that our whole universe doesn’t exist in between the fibers of some immense being’s sweater? How can we know we aren’t creating or destroying universes every time we open up an atom and all this junk comes falling out? How do we know this immense being is poking the little bugs in his petri dish with a stick?
As Dan O’Neill said… How do we know we’re in God’s mind? Maybe we’re in his little toe! What if a snapping turtle bit it off! Look out for snapping turtles, God!
More seriously: if “intelligence” can only come about by “intelligent” design, then you have a recursion paradox. But if “intelligence” (and oak trees and gall wasps and all the nifty things in our ecosystem) can come about by other processes, the paradox vanishes.
The key is energy. “The flow of energy through a system tends to organize that system.” Harold Morowitz. Look at a system of sand dunes. The flow of wind over the sand “organizes” that system into vast orderly patterns (visible only from the air…hm…)
The existence of order does not require an intelligent organizer.
Most AI research today consists of studying emergent complexity. We have neural nets that can do remarkably intelligent things, considering that there is no design to them at all, much less intelligent design. More intelligent beings can, in fact, spring from the foreheads of less intelligent ones. Fact is, entropy is a fun concept, but useless when applied to religion, or anything else except thermodynamics.
The problem with Intelligent Design as it is proposed by those sites I linked to is that the basic premise is so demonstrably false. Complexity can and does arise from randomness.
Order does not require an intelligent organizer, but order does not preclude one either. The creationists dropped the ball here, I think, by basing this “theory” on something so clearly wrong and completely unnecessary. There’s no need to prove evolution wrong for a working theory that there was a Creator.
If you base your whole theory on the premise that a complex biosystem can only come about through “intelligence” then, yea, you’ve got a “who designed the designer” problem. If you grant that the complexity of life on Earth could have come about in many ways, then this problem disappears.
Scientists have the same problem of origin. Where did the Universe and all the matter in it come from? How do you explain abiogenesis?
There is no reason to disprove evolution to prove there is a Creator. This is why I am agnostic and not atheist. We do not know what lies beyond our Universe and have no way of knowing.
Why does it make a difference whether it is Earth or the Universe? Saying that complexity of life can only arise through chance is just as wrong as saying it can only arise through design. We humans have the power to design life and have done so. Why couldn’t a Creator do the same?
It’s the who designed the designer pardox that you mentioned earlier. To say that life in the universe can ONLY arise thru design has the paradox. ONLY thru chance does not. In that sense, the two statements are not “just as wrong”.
I think crux of ID is the fallacy “I don’t know how nature could have made this; so God must have.”
I don’t understand the leap from “I don’t know” to “God did it”. I don’t know how a lot of things in nature are done (the majority of things, actually), but I realize that doesn’t mean it has a supernatural origin.
I thought this link might be of interest. Basically, it’s an essay by a victim of Behe’s quote mining, explaining what he really said. http://bostonreview.mit.edu/br22.1/coyne.html
BTW, Behe came to speak at my university last week. It was amusing to hear him sit in a packed auditorium in a major research institution, complaining that scientists won’t listen to him…
In many cases, these aren’t leaps: they are the exact same expression.
But I wonder if people who fear evolution, even YECs, realize that there are two entirely different issues, only one of which they really need to be opposed to. The first is the plausibility of evolution and/or abiogenesis: could it relaly have happened, and can this possibility be explained and matched to what we know of physical reality? The second is the question of whether evolution and abiogenesis were historical events: DID they actually happen in THIS case.
Now, oftentimes, these things are conflated, because ultimately we learn about plausibility mostly from studying empirical reality, and that includes history (we have to look to how we think it DID happen to learn enough to then understand how it plausibly COULD happen: whether it really did or not!). But in terms of straight up logical possibility, there’s nothing incoherent about asserting that, yes, evolution and abiogenesis COULD have happened: they are entirely plausible explanations in theory, but they DIDN’T happen in this case: God’s creation did.
Now, I still can’t necessarily respect that position on the face of the overwhelming evidence that evolution happened (abiogenesis is mostly speculation at this point: almost entirely about physical and temporal plausibility and not empirical history), but it is interesting that you needn’t deny evolutionary theory AT ALL to assert that intelligent design or even creationism DID happen.
If their ultimate purpose is to assert that there is an intelligent Creator, then attacks on evolution are utterly unecessary. Some CIA agent COULD have killed Kennedy (evolution could be a plausible explanation for the development of life from single celled replicators): but the historical fact is that Oswald did it (an intelligent designer specially directed evolution in a certain way). The fact that all most ID people have to go on is trying to prove that the CIA couldn’t have possibly killed Kennedy ever in any reality (they only owned harmless water guns, aliens would have prevented them, etc.), without ever presenting evidence that Oswald did it… well that suggests a not very strong case at all. It CERTAINLY gives them no right to label a movement that consists almost entirely of criticisms of particular evolutionary pathway speculation a movement about “intelligent design,” because there is no there there. Even if their criticisms are right, and evolution is hogwash, that puts us back at the starting line, not two miles down the road of “intelligent design.”
Wow Ben: that is a pretty major, and pretty devious misquote. Makes me even more suspicious of Behe’s honest motives.
For summary, the quote as used by Behe is lifted out of context so that it basically convey to a layman "here are some respected evolutionary scientists saying “I am suprised to conclude that the evidence for (some weird prefix)-Darwinism is weak, theoretically and on the evidence.”
But, in context, what the quote is actually saying is simply that there’s little evidence for the neo-Darwinian idea that all adaption progresses via small-step gradualism. In other words, all the quote is really saying is “we don’t know for sure that major mutations don’t also play a role in evolution, and there isn’t enough evidence to prove that it doesn’t.”
This is a very important point, Apos. I’ve noticed it too: creationists seem to go beyond trying to prove that evolution did not happen, to proving that evolution is a theory so stupid that even God couldn’t make it true.
And yes, I think it’s ultimately an indication of how weak their position is. It seems like creationists can almost never come up with any positive evidence to support their view- all they can do is invoke God-of-the-Gaps over and over again, dressed up in different disguises.
In fact, I think it’s a good sign that GOTG has now gotten such a bad name that people like Behe and Dembski are desperate to assure people that ID isn’t God-of-the-Gaps. This time, when they say “you can’t explain it, therefore God did it,” it’s different somehow, you see.
**
Well, I disagree, to an extent. “Abiogenesis” is actually a very, very big subject, and I think some parts are making more headway than others. I think it’s pretty clear that the “RNA world” hypothesis is true, for example- there’s just too many molecular fossils of RNA.
Actually, at Behe’s talk a number of my colleagues commented during the Q&A that his criticisms seemed on target, to the extent that he’s identified details of evolutionary theory that are at the moment very puzzling and need to be worked out. But when they asked him to explain how ID is anything but a dead end, “God done it” explanation, he didn’t have much to say. (Specifically, he said ID isn’t a dead end for science, because he feels that evolutionary biologists can keep trying and failing to find a naturalistic explanation for the evolution of the clotting cascade. But no, he didn’t explain how one could take ID beyond “I’m right, you’re wrong, God exists, nanny nanny boo boo.”)
I should also point out something else Behe said which I found interesting. Behe argued that any complex involving 3 or more proteins working together can’t evolve. When someone countered that many proteins involved in such complexes were clearly produced by exon shuffling, Behe replied- and I do not exaggerate here- that ID still wins unless you can prove that exon shuffling is really random, rather than secretly being controlled behind the scenes by an intelligent designer in a way that looks like a natural, random process. Yeesh!
He also complained at length that people assume that his ideas are religious propaganda, just because he’s a church-going Christian. He took great pains to state that he’s just trying to do science, and that he’s willing to leave the implications of his work to philosophers. It’s a funny thing- I found a website which quoted a talk he gave to a church, in which complained that our children are being corrupted into becoming atheists because they’re teaching evolution in schools…
See, this is just philosophically indefensible. It’s one thing to suggest that the mechanism of evolution couldn’t have done the job, and we have to look for other possibilities. But it’s entirely another to assert that everyone else must DISPROVE his thesis or else it wins by default: a thesis he’s putting exactly no argument or explanation behind!!! Litterally, the assertion of a deus ex machina designer with no description at all of how it came to be and why is simply no more or less plausible than asserting that certain things happened just because that’s the way this universe is. One can respond that, isn’t it wildly impluasible that the universe is that way? But the response is simply “isn’t it just as, if not more, impluasible that there would be a being who wanted exactly this, and not something else?”
My crackpot theory is that when an animal dies, the contents of its brain are uploaded to the Great Internet Server in the sky. There the data is combined with that of other critters of the same type to produce a complete picture of what they’re up against in their current environment. This informs the “research and develpoment” department as to the threats and opportunities that can be responded to with evolutionary change. This is consistent with “punctuated equilibrium” which holds that evolution occurs rapidly in small localized populations who then spread throughout the environment.
As for intelligence, if such sophisticated examples as ourselves can come into existence so apparently effortlessly, what are the possiblities give more than three dimesions and much longer time frames. Higher intelligences could be interested in developing intelligences on a smaller scale just as we are, with the actual course of develpment dictated by practical considerations i.e. the hopitability of planetary environments. Perhaps there is a singular intelligence responsible for all life in the universe, perhaps there are subdivisions for each inhabited planet, or perhaps each species has its genetic database managed by its own “design bureau”, whose competition with the others is manifested in the evolutionary competition among the various species.
