Charlie Self wrote:

The person who believes mankind is the result of "intelligent design",
or that the earth in general is, needs to take a better look at both
mankind and the world. Both are plenty screwed up, in ways that almost
any kind of sentience could have avoided.


(In the material below, I am not particularly arguing that Intelligent
Design is correct - I don't know it well enough to have a clear position
on the matter. What I *am* arguing is that dismissing ID as
"anti-Scientific" is both naive and reflects a lack of understanding of
both the limits to what Science can ever know, and even moreso, a
misunderstanding of what ID claims. This is based on some cursory
reading of the IDer stuff and may well be wrong or dated in some
areas. But as a general matter, I think my overall impression of
ID is correct.)


But First, A Thought Experiment
-------------------------------

1) Assume that our senses and minds are reasonably reliable - that the science
we know today is more-or-less correct but subject to improvement.
More succinctly: We can know thing about our Universe.

2) Because of 1) we can observe two important things:

a) The Universe is bounded (in size, volume, content ...) The total
energy and matter in the universe is fixed - merely being exchanged
one for another - thank you Albert Einstein.

b) The Universe had a beginning (aka The Big Bang)

i.e., The Universe exists in a *finite* form. It is neither unbounded in size
nor unbounded in duration, nor unbounded in mass, nor unbounded in
energy.

3) Handwaving Philosophy Mode

a) The fact that the Universe exists implies that something (or someone)
brought it into existence. Something that exists does not spring into being
spontaneously out of nothing - at least we have no example of such
phenomena. That is, the (finite) matter and energy that populated the
Universe at the time of its birth did not just magically appear.

If you don't buy this premise, then the burden (philosophically)
lies upon you to demonstrate how something is produced spontaneously
from nothing. Well ... maybe not "demonstrate", but at least
suggest some reasonable model for how Something From Nothing
might work. Every single evidence we have today strongly
argues that Something always comes from Somewhere, not from some
magical puff of smoke.

b) Assume that the something/someone that made our Universe come into
existence it itself bounded somehow, but it merely lives outside or
above the physics that govern *our* Universe. Now apply the observation 3a)
to that thing/person that made our Universe spring into being.
That is, the fact that there is a thing/person that made our Universe
come to be, suggests that it itself has a thing/person that
made *it* come to be.

c) By the recursive application of 3b) upon 3a) we reach an *inductive*
conclusion:

The fact that *anything* exists (or appears to anyway)
suggests only a few explanations:

i) There is an ultimate authorship that transcends time, space,
matter and energy - indeed all the physics we understand.
That is, we reach (via induction) the conclusion that if
*anything* exists, it suggests a (logically) single
point of authorship that is itself "eternal" - it exists outside
the limitations of time, space, and physics.

ia) One variation of i) is that the recursion of authorship
is itself infinite. But this has the problem that it cannot
explain how the whole business got started.

ii) The Universe itself transcends time, space, and all the
rest. This is refuted pretty thoroughly by all
contemporary physics and cosmology.

iii) Nothing actually exists at all, it's all an illusion.

/Handwaving Philosophy Mode

The central fallacy of those who would juxtapose Intelligent Design
and Science is that they attempt to address rather different questions.
Yes, the ID people are trying to "inflitrate" the world of Science,
but that's because they believe they have a Scientific case to make -
read on.

Science - even if we had *perfect* science - at best can only address
questions of *how* and only for observations about things that have
occured since the beginning of the Universe.

Intelligent Design and other "authorship" theories attempt to grapple
with the questions of *from where*, *by whom* (if any), and, possibly,
*why*. As the handwaving logical induction above suggests, these are not
questions that science will *ever* be competent to answer, *but there is
an inductive suggestion as to what an answer would look like - at least
qualitatively*.

One can take several positions here. You might say, "How, From Where,
and Why are unimportant questions and thus not worthy of further
examination." But a lot of us, who are both trained in mathematics, the
sciences, and are otherwise thoughtful, rational people think these
questions are incredibly important and interesting. More to the
point, we're not satisfied with the limitations of what we can
know through Science alone. Even more to the point, the IDers
have an intriguing suggestion - that Science itself is broken
at the moment.

At its core, Intelligent Design is a *philosophical* critique of the
theory of knowledge that is deeply embedded in today's scientific
orthodoxy. More specifically, ID argues that the reductionist models of
contemporary Science are inadequate to *fully* account for what we
observe. They are not saying that Science is inferior to Faith (I don't
think, even though many IDers probably believe this). They are not
saying that all current Science is wrong. They are not suggesting we
discard Science as a means of understanding our Universe. They are
saying that Science, in its current incarnation, has an inadequate
system of knowledge to fully explain what we observe. (By "fully
explain", I mean "in principle", whether or not we ever actually get
around to doing so.) More specifically, they are saying that a core
modeling *method* of Science (reductionism) is the point of inadequacy.

Sidenote: This is hardly a new thing in the world of Science.
Every major breakthrough in Science has had the property
of decimating some Scientific sacred cow that preceded it.
Claiming (and demonstrating) you have a better model
is not "anti-Scientific", is is the essence of how
Science progresses.

In order to make this claim, ID proponents are offering what they
believe to be *Scientific* (not religious, not philosophical) arguments
as to why today's Scientific theory of knowlege is broken. (I note that
they also do have religious and philosophical arguments, but that's not
primarily where they've engaged the debate so far.)

Now, these Scientific claims of the IDers might be right, wrong, or not
yet testable. But, here's where it gets interesting:

If the ID people are bozos, and their "Science" is bogus, then why
doesn't the mainstream Science community offer them a chance to make
their case in peer reviewed journals and refute them trivially? (This
mostly has not happened AFAIK.) What we see instead are ad hominem
attacks on the IDers as they are dimissed as "religious nuts",
"mystics", and all the rest. In other words, if it's so dumb, it should
be trivial to decimate in open court.

The reason for this, of course, is that Science itself has an
Establishment that resists change. The idea that there *might* be a hole
in the boat of the theory of knowledge that drives Science is terrifying
to an awful lot of mainstream scientists - at least that's what it looks
like to me. Otherwise, they'd be happy to engage the IDers, disprove
their claims, and merrily go on their way.

There's no question that the majority of IDers are people of deep
religious faith. But this, in and of itself, is not grounds to
dismiss their claims of *Science*. (Bear in mind, that a good many
of the leading lights of ID are legitimate Scientists in their own
right.) They are arguing that today's reductionist models are
not good enough to discover everything we can know about the
Universe. Why not let them try and make the case.

In any case, whether the IDers are right or wrong, one thing is clear.
Go back and work your way through the thought experiment I described.
If you think about it a while, I believe you'll be led to the same
conclusion I've come to: If anything actually exists, it had to
have a starting point that is not governed by time, space, or any
of the physics known to us. Is it so utterly unreasonable to
suggest that such a starting point is itself ... "intelligent"?
--
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Tim Daneliuk
PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/