02.11.10
End of ID, and…the end of unintelligent darwinism
The End of Intelligent Design?
I addressed this essay yesterday: our position here is that we simply can’t answer question about design. We have been consistently critical of the false certainties created by ID arguments. But the usual critiques of ID are by obsessed Darwinians who can’t resolve the question with their equally false natural selection arguments.
Note the strange similarity of design and natural selection arguments. You can often substitute the terms into passages on either side, without any change.
ID proponents confuse the issue by playing on the terms. Natural design is proposed, then there is a bait and switch and an intelligent designer pops into the argument.
Darwinists are really ‘design’ argument folks in disguise: natural selection did everything, designed everything.
These debates go on and on because no one has any answers.
Barr’s critique, it seems, although it expresses a valid frustration, seems to fail because the author really wants to distinguish the ID in the Discovery group and a more general sense of design found in the Bible. Surely that doesn’t work.
Again, I tend strongly to reject ID in the form produced by the Discovery group et al. But design arguments are thousands of years old, come in many forms, and can’t all be dismissed in the same breath.
We distinguish natural and supernatural design, natural teleology and supernatural designers. The current crop of ID hucksters deliberatelfy bait and switch these separate categories.
It should be noted that ID arguments could easily be disciplined to be more effective. Darwinists have too often gotten away with inadequate arguments.
For example, Behe’s irreducible complexity raises an important issue, if it can be extracted from the design debate.
Natural selection is a bad candidate for ultra complex biochemical structures. OK, that said, to bring design/divinities into the discussion totally confused the issue.
But the fact remains that complexity (perhaps not irreducible) is a strong challenge to Darwinian natural selection. Complex nanomachines show a remarkable ‘natural design’ and natural teleology that beggars natural selection myths, but which most probably have a natural mechanism unknown to us.
Here are two traps in this debate.
1. you are a theist. Red light goes on, your argument will probably fail
2. you are an atheist. Red light goes on, your argument will probably fail
Clear?
Darwiniana » Ethics, freedom to act, and scientific naturalism/scientism said,
February 11, 2010 at 2:20 pm
[...] Previous post: end of id…. Granting the abuse of the design argument by its proponents, the fact remains that scientists have obscured the question with their own methodology which leaves all discussion paralyzed. The design debate simply confuse the issue, so considered a different question, the nature of ethics, its relation to science, the nature of its evolution, and its status in the context of so-called naturalism. [...]