It seems to me that when we get to issues like the very origin of life, or the existence of DNA, then we have come to the point where we admit there simply is no naturalistic explanation that would have more explanatory power and scope as well as fit to the data and accord with accepted beliefs as the intelligent design hypothesis.
Except that currently intelligent design doesn't actually
explain anything. ID proponents are still struggling to figure out to properly detect design, let alone begin to tell us anything about it.
When I'm talking about explanatory power, I'm talking getting into the nuts and bolts about how things work. For example, if you take a look at some of the publications on the
The Szostak Lab web site, you can get an idea of what I'm talking about. Or even just the
illustrative examples on this site.
This is what ID needs to do. It needs to be able to get past just detecting design and getting into
how it was done, if ID is going to have any real explanatory power.
Think about it for just a moment. The origin and existence of complex biological information systems ... <snip>
Look, I've been in these discussions/debates for a long time now. I've combed through quite a bit of ID literature in that time. In fact, the very of ID intrigues me which is probably one reason I'm so critical of it.
I'm not impressed by simply pointing to the complexity of life and going, "golly-gee gosh, life sure in complex, guess it must have been some sort of designer!" I'm not impressed by the 'awe and wonder' style of argumentation when it comes to ID. If anything, reading the amount of ID literature I have has made me somewhat jaded towards it.
Complexity alone is not an indicator of deliberate, intelligent design. In fact, relying on complexity as an argument for ID really just boils down to an argument from incredulity. And I see that far too often from the ID camp.
Why? Because that is what a worldview does. Answering questions such as the origin of life is what meta-narratives, by definition, do.
Again, a world view does not
have to have an answer for the origin of life. Not knowing can be part of a world view.
You say so, as if the questions about the nature and purpose of our existence aren't the most important questions we can ask and the ones for which men have been searching for since the beginning of recorded history!
I never said that those questions aren't important. I just said that science isn't necessarily going to provide the answers.
My point is that science plays a part in our search for truth. It is not the be all end all to knowledge. Science has limitations and to use it in a way in which it becomes something other than what it is, is to abuse it.
Agreed. I never said that science was the be all and end all. It's just a tool in the toolbox.
We know that broadcasts containing repeating prime numbers don't just randomly happen. The good old boys over at SETI know that such broadcasts are the result of some intelligent mind, regardless of whether or not they know who this intelligence is, what it is, where it is, how it transmitted the signal, so on and so forth.
Again, I'd like to emphasize that that prime number sequence is coming from
a fictional narrative; it has never happened in real life. The truth is, we don't fully know what an alien signal may look like. And as I mentioned, if that signal isn't deliberately designed for detection (i.e. if it's encoded or using some sort of compression), then we may never be be able to detect it.
The fine tuning found in the initial constants and quantities of the big bang, the irreducibly complex coding and language processing systems found in living organisms are far more complex and intricate than a signal broadcast of prime numbers!
That's entirely contingent on defining "complex". Furthermore, as I already said, complexity alone is not an indication of deliberate design. Natural processes are capable of complex, intricate outputs.
Naturalists work backwards from their metaphysical beliefs to theorizing the existence of multiverses, or postulating that something can come from nothing, or that the universe could exist before it existed and create itself!!!
We're talking about the origin of life here. Let's stay on topic.
If one was to somehow detect that the earliest life on Earth has non-natural origins, it doesn't immediately inform us as to that source. For starters, we don't know if it's supernatural in origin. For all we know, Earth could have been seeded by intelligent, albeit natural beings from another world. We'd still have a long way to go to determine supernatural elements (and good luck proving the existence of the supernatural; philosophers have been trying for millenia).
On top of that, even if you manged to narrow it down to supernatural origins, that's still no guarantee that it would even tie to any theistic belief on Earth. In fact, I'm not even sure how one could explicity tie just the origin of life to any individual form of theism of the thousands that have existed throughout the ages.
Christians for centuries have been defending their beliefs by presenting good arguments, reasons, and evidences for the central truths of Christianity. These apologists didn't just sit back and tell people to take their word for it!
Sure, they went out and spread the message by any means necessarily, including fighting wars over it. Not sure what your point is, though. If you spend some time looking at the history of religious beliefs throughout the ages, they are cultural in nature. And like everything in culture, they evolve over time. Christianity is one of thousands of beliefs that exist or have existed. And it was neither the first belief nor the only belief. Yes, it happens to be dominant in this day and age, but it's still only one of many.
That's why I said it would be a remarkable coincidence if it turned out life had supernatural origins and those origins just happen to be the dominant Western theistic belief of the current age.
No, some just feel the need to ridicule and mock people that aren't methodological naturalists. Those who do this happen to be quite popular and so have a large audience. If the tables were turned, I doubt you would blame those who were subject to such treatment for reacting.
A scientist can lose his job, his reputation, and more just for saying something that doesn't fit neatly within the box naturalists in the academy have constructed. He can be publicly ridiculed and scorned and humiliated just for attempting to disagree with the status quo.
So yes, I would expect people in such positions to react by defending their views and attempting to show those who mock and ridicule where their error lies.
Huh? I think you completely missed my point.
When I spoke of scientific publications regarding evolution not mentioning creationism or ID, I did so because scientists publishing works on evolution don't feel the need to explicitly address creationism or ID. Scientific publications tend to focus on, y'know,
science. IOW, hypothesis, materials, methods, etc. They generally aren't diving into political debates unless it's a paper explicitly geared towards that particular discussion.
You won't find a paper on say, the evolution of
Drosophila melanogaster or an analysis of a
Tiktaalik fossil specimen that ends with "oh btw, we're right, therefore creationists are wrong, neener, neener, neener."
Yet that's the sort of thing that permeates creationist and ID material.