02.08.08

Designed ambiguity of ID challenge

Posted in Evolution at 6:56 pm by nemo

James and Hucklebird comment on ID only about rejecting evolution?

In theory the ID movement is only challenging natural selection theories, but in practice their arguments seem designed to be ambiguous, playing to several audiences.

James said,

February 7, 2008 at 6:00 pm · Edit

Are you kidding me? How can you claim with a straight face that ID proponents aren’t trying to inject theism into science? This is from an interview with Dembski:

“4. Does your research conclude that God is the Intelligent Designer?

I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God.”

http://www.citizenlink.org/content/A000006139.cfm

Also, in the Berlinski link I provided, he describes what Dembski means by design. It sure sounds like Creationism to me:

“In developing his argument, Mr. Dembski has a certain model in mind. The design comes first, expressed perhaps as a blueprint, agenda, schedule, or even a system of thought. Next comes the designed event or object. “How a designer,” he writes in No Free Lunch, “gets from a thought to a thing is, at
least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute that plan, the designer specifies the building materials and assembly instructions.
(4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions
to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer’s purposes.”

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=387

Stephen P. Smith said,

February 7, 2008 at 6:13 pm · Edit

Just another comment, no disagreement: We need to stop thinking about dictionary definitions, and start thinking about the innate tensions that are being felt (on both sides). Otherwise, the argument between ID advocvates and Darwinists is only about a word game: changing blue to red, red to blue, republican to democrat, democrat to republican, while leaving everthing else unchanged, and solving nothing. It is only that the tension seeks its resolution, meanwhile the literalists that are stuck on their joint equivocations and are clueless of the addictive nature of dualistic thinking. I say this while noting that most ID advocates are not pure to their own realization that Dembski’s said “intelligent causation” is undeclared.

3 Comments »

  1. Stephen P. Smith said,

    February 8, 2008 at 8:01 pm

    In other words, there is an emotional unwillingness to see ID as a simple contradiction of Darwin’s theory; and this unwillingness is apparent in both ID advocates, and Darwinists.

    The innate equivocation is presented as a contrivence, an agenda that is full of dirty tricks, or what has come to be known as intelligent design with all the self-evident tension that ID brings, where the covert middle term is hidden beyond the synthesis of the representation and its recognition.

    I really don’t understand why we disagree in regard to my Trinity hypothesis!

  2. James said,

    February 12, 2008 at 11:07 am

    I don’t wish to totally condemn the ID movement. Some of their negative arguments against Darwinism have been very useful and have genuinely contributed valuable information to the debate.

  3. Darwiniana » Top post this month from James (and Hucklebird) said,

    November 23, 2009 at 5:45 pm

    [...] One of this month’s top post so far, with over two thousand hits, is from James and Hucklebird: Designed Ambiguity of ID Challenge [...]

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