07.31.07
Double contradiction
Panda’s Thumb comments of Korthof review
…If natural law and chance can in fact explain the evolution of life after the instance of ‘creation’, then ID has made itself irrelevant…
This is a good criticism, but the problem is that natural law and chance can’t foot the bill either. This double contradiction resembles the antinomy structure of Kant’s dialectic.
The double contradiction can only be resolved by considering a time-less component to evolutionary theories,whatever that might be.
Korthof shows how Behe’s book does little to explain ‘Intelligent Design’, leaving it once again scientifically vacuous.
More recently I listened to Behe talk about intelligent design, suggesting that the design instance could very well be moved to the moment of ‘creation’. Such a self defeating move was in fact predicted by such visionaries as Wesley Elsberry and others. If natural law and chance can in fact explain the evolution of life after the instance of ‘creation’, then ID has made itself irrelevant and yet ID also argues that there are ‘edges’ which evolution cannot explain and which would require some intervention. However at the same time it also suggests that such interventions may not be needed but then there are no edges left to evolution.
This fascinating self contradiction is what lies at the foundation as to why Intelligent Design has remained scientifically vacuous.
Stephen P. Smith said,
August 1, 2007 at 1:07 am
Every last law of nature comes with a feeling: First the law must be conceived in the mind, and this conception comes with a feeling; Second the law must be confirmed with empirical data, and this empiricism will necessarily involve “detection” from what is provided by scales of measure (what might involve a proto-feeling discovered in nature used as recorder) and this is prior to the perception of these detected measures by our five sense. If laws could not be “felt” it is very doubtful if they could be discovered. If feelings come a-priori to the discovery of laws it must be that the laws indicate a Kant’s synthetic a-priori. Therefore, laws cannot explain feelings as feelings come before, and such explanations are revealed to be only abstraction. The view that life emerged from natural law is misleading, and this view is only a leap of faith.
Stephen P. Smith said,
August 1, 2007 at 11:40 am
My above comment has revealed itself as a feeling that grew into the following.
Don’t we so serious, let the silliness in you say. This too came to me as I woke in mornings dream.
Every Erika moment comes as a great discovery. We discover the laws of nature, but one must be able to discover what came before, letting emotionality and its self doubt point the way. It is that laws were made to be broken, and a new freedom is to be discovered in the silliness. Laws support only what came before and therefore freedom is to be discovered in Kant’s synthetic a-priori. We find our freedom by way of feeling. We lead ourselves to this self cultivation, not by breaking the law but by rising above.
Every last law of nature comes with feelings: first the law must be conceived in the mind, and this conception comes with a feeling; second the law must be confirmed with empirical data, and this empiricism will necessarily involve “detection” (what might involve a proto-feeling discovered in nature and used as a recorder) and detection must avail itself to perception by our five sense (more feelings). If laws could not be “felt” then their prior discovery becomes very doubtful. If feelings come a-priori to the discovery of laws it must be that the laws also indicate Kant’s synthetic a-priori. Therefore, laws cannot explain feelings as feelings come before, and such explanations involving only laws in themselves are revealed to be only abstraction; the leap of faith. The view that life emerged from natural law is misleading. What came before was the feeling, with its sense-certain self doubt.
To discover freedom we follow our emotionality to what came before. We merely return the tension to source. We apply the felt self-doubt to rework our euphoric declarations, bringing them in line with what is revealed. The felt oscilation will take us to what came before.
And so Dawkins (in “The Blind Watchmaker,” page 141) when arguing against God’s handiwork in the miracle of cellular replication should not have wrote: “this is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-defeating.” And he needed to rewrite “any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replication machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself,” to reflect the fact that the God he was talking about is only God as caricature built from laws.
Laws dictate the terms of the puppeteer. But freedom form laws are revealed as we return the tension to source, thereby discovering what came before.