10.27.08
“It’s like it was designed”
Yet another creationist quotemine
An interesting case of a scientist seeming to make a statement supporting Intelligent Design, quoted thus:
It’s like it was designed…
Almost a gotcha, but this scientist quite naturally later completely disowned Intelligent Design, escaping with his hide after near loss of the ‘seat of the pants’ in dogpatch.
In fact, the polarization of the debate is so stark that the natural perception of design is exploited on one side, and repressed on the other.
It can hardly be otherwise that many natural phenomena generate a spontaneous sense of design. That sense has been confused, if anything, by the claims for Intellligent Design now current. It is completely natural to have a sense of design, but that sense is misleading, and the current debate is really a natural dialectic that arises spontaneously around the issue.
The problem with this ‘natural sense of design’ is that it requires proof, and that has never been achieved. Thus the dialectic is valuable as a way of challenging our natural perceptions.
But this works both ways, and the claims for natural selection are as dubious as those for intelligent design.
Meanwhile…. ‘natural design’ is a perfectly good ‘scientific’ concept, could someone produce an example of a teleological mathematics to correspond to the natural designs we see in a myriad of biological structures. Such a mathematics already exists in a kind limbo in the unexploited potential of non-causal systems. It is hard to know if they could ever be made viable in specific cases.
Science would always proceed in its own way, and the ‘concept’ of teleology is too confused by its history to generate anything along those lines.
But the inability of current science to deal with ‘natural teleology’ is what is making it so vulnerable to the nearly predatory ambitions of design resurgence from religionists.
Here the study of the eonic effect could help: it is not hard to detect ‘directionality’ in history. Whether directionality is evidence of ‘teleology’ is another question. Directionality in a model such as that of the eonic effect, an alternation model, with a Kantian framework suggests that teleological questions correspond to the noumenal aspect of an evolutionary process, while, in the case of the eonic effect, all we detect in a short range frequency pattern corresponding to the phenomenal. Elegant, in a way, yet a disappointment for our hopes of resolving the teleology question. We thus end with a dilemma: phenomena show properties of directionality, and by an inference from their phenomenal properties we suspect teleology, but we can’t really detect that unmanifest aspect.
One can only recommend that scientists protect themselves against pseudo-teleogical metaphysics from religionists with something like an Kantian discipline, and not indulge in pseudo-theories like natural selection to falsely ‘refute’ the existence of teleological arguments.
The eonic model shows one way to do that.