- Feb 17, 2005
- 8,463
- 515
- 38
- Faith
- Protestant
- Marital Status
- In Relationship
A recent discussion here (introduction courtesy of Philadiddle) helped me realize that, in fact, I have been an Intelligent Design theorist for the longest time.
The pertinent paragraphs read like this:
My first response was to show how wrong-headed his argument was. In my reply (which the moderators don't seem to have put up yet - too hot?
) I pointed out that snowflakes carry information too: they can have different sizes, different shapes (pointy or round or in-between), and they can fall at different rates (a large snowstorm would have lots of snowflakes which reach the ground at similar times, while a light drizzle would have very few snowflakes which reach the ground at spaced-out times).
All this is information that can be processed by an information-processing structure - in my example, a ski slope on which the snowflakes fall - to give an outcome that depends causally on the sequence and content of the input information - namely an avalanche, and what kind of avalanche it is.
DNA is processed by cellular machinery to produce life.
"Snow-NA" is processed by a ski slope to produce avalanches.
A complete analogy, and one that shows the intellectual vacuity of ID, I thought.
=========
Then I sat back and realized that this wasn't the first time I had fought ID, not by denying design, but by extending it. I love giving examples of things that may seem designed, but actually aren't. (Or are they?)
Of course, we can always go in the other direction. Evolutionists like to give examples of bad design - the panda's thumb, the giraffe's vagus nerve, where biological features actually appear to be not-designed. I've always found that method a bit inelegant, if only because one cannot simply induce from badly designed features to conclude that all biological features are badly designed. That kind of argument is exactly on the same logical ground as IDers' arguments that since some features appear designed, all biological features are actually designed.
I like to argue for surprising design. I've argued before that aliens from a planet with hard, jagged rocks and no flowing water would find our riverbeds and the smooth stones littering them to be "intelligently designed", artistic even; I'm arguing here that snowflakes are "designed" for avalanches just as DNA is "designed" to produce life. Throw in a third example: God says to Noah that He has placed the rainbow in the sky as a testament to His covenant to not destroy the Earth. If you take that in the conservative hermeneutic - as most IDers are wont to do - you end up having to believe that the rainbow, a clearly physical artefact of optics and the chemistry of water, is actually intelligently designed.
It is a logically adequate argument against ID:
ID-predicate-1: Life appears designed.
ID-predicate-2: Anything that appears designed is actually designed (implicit).
ID-1 + ID-2 => ID-conclusion: Life is designed.
SR-predicate: Some things that appear designed are not actually designed.
ID-1 + SR => SR-conclusion: Life may not be designed.
But it logically does not lead to the conclusion that might appear to be the opposite of ID, namely that life is not designed. All I can say is that life may not be designed. I've always wondered about that.
Last night while thinking about my answer to Lou, I had an epiphany: I've been opposing the IDers, not because I believe less in intelligent design than them, but because I believe it more.
To the IDer, life has detectable design. What is their "null hypothesis", their un-design against which one can detect design? It is the rest of creation! To them, rocks and snow and lightning and the expanse of the starry sky all appear not to be designed. To them, the universe is a vast desert of random, meaningless chaos (their concept, not mine), against which the Earth holds a puny, tiny drop of cosmically insignificant designed life-forms.
I can't live with that. (I'm a physicist: I study these "meaningless" things for a livelihood.)
I don't believe that a God who would, by the IDers' estimation, carefully engineer and design life on Earth, would leave the rest of the starry sky to "chaos" and "chance". I don't believe in attributing rationality and beauty to life if I am to do so by expressly comparing it to "disordered", "simple", and "chaotic" weather - the great clouds that so often give us beautiful sunsets, the lightning that streaks across the sky and the thunder that follows close after like the very voice of God Himself, the delicate snowflakes each unique and unrepeatable.
=========
I am an intelligent design theorist, you see: I believe the universe was intelligently designed, nay, is intelligently designed, intelligently upheld every single moment by the sovereign decree of the Godhead and intelligently prevented from sliding back into the existential chaos of non-being. I believe that the stars and the sky and the clouds and the sea and the land were intelligently designed. Why, that means I believe in more intelligent design than the entire Disco Institute put together. They believe in a small rock covered with a thin film of intelligent design hanging in a vast, dark, stupid universe; I believe in 14 billion cubic light-years of intelligent design and more.
I am an intelligent design theorist. I believe that, just as competent designers today utilize vast arrays of tools to help them design things, God used the vast array of natural laws and processes to design the universe. I do not believe in the impotent god of conventional ID against whom the forces of natural laws are so oppressive and so powerful that he has to hide from the laws of physics and probability to get anything done, a god who has to sneak biological innovation into nature like a smuggler moving drugs into a country whose laws forbid it. I reject the idea that God was so constrained by the laws of nature that He needed a miracle to get things right and produce life; I believe that God created the laws of nature, and that the very laws that ID has to try to reject or bend or break to promulgate its views were in fact the very things that God intelligently designed.
I am an intelligent design theorist. I believe that the human reaction to the intelligent design of the universe is so deep and profound that it cannot be limited to the natural sciences. I believe that every painting of a sunset, whether it is a five-year-old's first doodlings or the masterpiece of a landscape painter, is a testimony to the intelligent design of the Sun with its light source and the Earth's atmosphere that magnificently directs and rearranges its red light into an art form every evening. I reject the cold approach of conventional ID, which characterizes design by the artificial, almost mechanical concept of "specified complexity", which resorts to calculations and models (and politics) to try to pin down design and then for all of that misses the most basic of human responses to the design of the universe, like the obvious joy in a child's face beholding the wondrous scarlet sky at dusk. And I reject conventional ID's craven obsession with the sciences, its haranguing of biology in the same way that a boy full of puppy love will follow a girl around everywhere and yet deny that he is infatuated when asked. Why does ID think that design is a science? The artists and the theologians know a hundred times more about the design of the universe than ID will ever achieve in its (hopefully short) intellectual lifetime.
I am an intelligent design theorist. I take the Bible at face value when it declares, in Psalm 19, that the stars shout God's glory in every language imaginable. I take the Bible at face value when it declares, in Romans 1, that creation leaves men without excuse for rejecting God - and that creation was creation accessible in the first century AD and its science, the creation of dusty jars of clay and donkeys and demons and Paul, the creation where the smallest seed was a mustard seed and the stars were the homes of angels, the creation perhaps even when the earth was considered flat and immobile. I reject conventional ID which has to reduce itself to the tiniest features of disease-producing organisms and the inscrutable coils of genetic code before committing itself to saying that they have found God's fingerprints, straining themselves to hear whispers of God's creation (and really just scratching their own itching ears) while ignoring the megaphone of the backyard sky.
I am an intelligent design theorist, and because I am intelligent I know that truth is born in creation and proven by the slow, steady progress of hard work; not by shrill declarations of right and wrong in law courts and cinemas, not by fatuous connections of good, hardworkins scientists with Nazism and of unfavored judges with animated flatulence, and certainly not by lying to interview sources and censoring opposing views in discussions.
I am an intelligent design theorist. Are you?
The pertinent paragraphs read like this:
Lou said:
My first response was to show how wrong-headed his argument was. In my reply (which the moderators don't seem to have put up yet - too hot?
) I pointed out that snowflakes carry information too: they can have different sizes, different shapes (pointy or round or in-between), and they can fall at different rates (a large snowstorm would have lots of snowflakes which reach the ground at similar times, while a light drizzle would have very few snowflakes which reach the ground at spaced-out times).All this is information that can be processed by an information-processing structure - in my example, a ski slope on which the snowflakes fall - to give an outcome that depends causally on the sequence and content of the input information - namely an avalanche, and what kind of avalanche it is.
DNA is processed by cellular machinery to produce life.
"Snow-NA" is processed by a ski slope to produce avalanches.
A complete analogy, and one that shows the intellectual vacuity of ID, I thought.
=========
Then I sat back and realized that this wasn't the first time I had fought ID, not by denying design, but by extending it. I love giving examples of things that may seem designed, but actually aren't. (Or are they?)
Of course, we can always go in the other direction. Evolutionists like to give examples of bad design - the panda's thumb, the giraffe's vagus nerve, where biological features actually appear to be not-designed. I've always found that method a bit inelegant, if only because one cannot simply induce from badly designed features to conclude that all biological features are badly designed. That kind of argument is exactly on the same logical ground as IDers' arguments that since some features appear designed, all biological features are actually designed.
I like to argue for surprising design. I've argued before that aliens from a planet with hard, jagged rocks and no flowing water would find our riverbeds and the smooth stones littering them to be "intelligently designed", artistic even; I'm arguing here that snowflakes are "designed" for avalanches just as DNA is "designed" to produce life. Throw in a third example: God says to Noah that He has placed the rainbow in the sky as a testament to His covenant to not destroy the Earth. If you take that in the conservative hermeneutic - as most IDers are wont to do - you end up having to believe that the rainbow, a clearly physical artefact of optics and the chemistry of water, is actually intelligently designed.
It is a logically adequate argument against ID:
ID-predicate-1: Life appears designed.
ID-predicate-2: Anything that appears designed is actually designed (implicit).
ID-1 + ID-2 => ID-conclusion: Life is designed.
SR-predicate: Some things that appear designed are not actually designed.
ID-1 + SR => SR-conclusion: Life may not be designed.
But it logically does not lead to the conclusion that might appear to be the opposite of ID, namely that life is not designed. All I can say is that life may not be designed. I've always wondered about that.
Last night while thinking about my answer to Lou, I had an epiphany: I've been opposing the IDers, not because I believe less in intelligent design than them, but because I believe it more.
To the IDer, life has detectable design. What is their "null hypothesis", their un-design against which one can detect design? It is the rest of creation! To them, rocks and snow and lightning and the expanse of the starry sky all appear not to be designed. To them, the universe is a vast desert of random, meaningless chaos (their concept, not mine), against which the Earth holds a puny, tiny drop of cosmically insignificant designed life-forms.
I can't live with that. (I'm a physicist: I study these "meaningless" things for a livelihood.)
I don't believe that a God who would, by the IDers' estimation, carefully engineer and design life on Earth, would leave the rest of the starry sky to "chaos" and "chance". I don't believe in attributing rationality and beauty to life if I am to do so by expressly comparing it to "disordered", "simple", and "chaotic" weather - the great clouds that so often give us beautiful sunsets, the lightning that streaks across the sky and the thunder that follows close after like the very voice of God Himself, the delicate snowflakes each unique and unrepeatable.
=========
I am an intelligent design theorist, you see: I believe the universe was intelligently designed, nay, is intelligently designed, intelligently upheld every single moment by the sovereign decree of the Godhead and intelligently prevented from sliding back into the existential chaos of non-being. I believe that the stars and the sky and the clouds and the sea and the land were intelligently designed. Why, that means I believe in more intelligent design than the entire Disco Institute put together. They believe in a small rock covered with a thin film of intelligent design hanging in a vast, dark, stupid universe; I believe in 14 billion cubic light-years of intelligent design and more.
I am an intelligent design theorist. I believe that, just as competent designers today utilize vast arrays of tools to help them design things, God used the vast array of natural laws and processes to design the universe. I do not believe in the impotent god of conventional ID against whom the forces of natural laws are so oppressive and so powerful that he has to hide from the laws of physics and probability to get anything done, a god who has to sneak biological innovation into nature like a smuggler moving drugs into a country whose laws forbid it. I reject the idea that God was so constrained by the laws of nature that He needed a miracle to get things right and produce life; I believe that God created the laws of nature, and that the very laws that ID has to try to reject or bend or break to promulgate its views were in fact the very things that God intelligently designed.
I am an intelligent design theorist. I believe that the human reaction to the intelligent design of the universe is so deep and profound that it cannot be limited to the natural sciences. I believe that every painting of a sunset, whether it is a five-year-old's first doodlings or the masterpiece of a landscape painter, is a testimony to the intelligent design of the Sun with its light source and the Earth's atmosphere that magnificently directs and rearranges its red light into an art form every evening. I reject the cold approach of conventional ID, which characterizes design by the artificial, almost mechanical concept of "specified complexity", which resorts to calculations and models (and politics) to try to pin down design and then for all of that misses the most basic of human responses to the design of the universe, like the obvious joy in a child's face beholding the wondrous scarlet sky at dusk. And I reject conventional ID's craven obsession with the sciences, its haranguing of biology in the same way that a boy full of puppy love will follow a girl around everywhere and yet deny that he is infatuated when asked. Why does ID think that design is a science? The artists and the theologians know a hundred times more about the design of the universe than ID will ever achieve in its (hopefully short) intellectual lifetime.
I am an intelligent design theorist. I take the Bible at face value when it declares, in Psalm 19, that the stars shout God's glory in every language imaginable. I take the Bible at face value when it declares, in Romans 1, that creation leaves men without excuse for rejecting God - and that creation was creation accessible in the first century AD and its science, the creation of dusty jars of clay and donkeys and demons and Paul, the creation where the smallest seed was a mustard seed and the stars were the homes of angels, the creation perhaps even when the earth was considered flat and immobile. I reject conventional ID which has to reduce itself to the tiniest features of disease-producing organisms and the inscrutable coils of genetic code before committing itself to saying that they have found God's fingerprints, straining themselves to hear whispers of God's creation (and really just scratching their own itching ears) while ignoring the megaphone of the backyard sky.
I am an intelligent design theorist, and because I am intelligent I know that truth is born in creation and proven by the slow, steady progress of hard work; not by shrill declarations of right and wrong in law courts and cinemas, not by fatuous connections of good, hardworkins scientists with Nazism and of unfavored judges with animated flatulence, and certainly not by lying to interview sources and censoring opposing views in discussions.
I am an intelligent design theorist. Are you?
