I find I am starting to forget what we agree on and what we dont. Its all starting to sound the same.
Freaky, innit? Converging on the truth with someone you thought was out to philosophically gut you and stick your head on a pike.
I do have sympathy for your views. But sympathy, limited concurrence, and complete agreement are quite different things.
Goddidit is a statement of the fact that, at some level, we dont have better explanations for why, is valid. But, it is vague. We just arent always clear to what level the mystery can ever be removed. But, if you look at the mystery of the flagellum, even after Ken Miller, quite a bit of mystery remains. With the example of the singularity, there is again, at least a virtually unknowable quantity.
Let me teleport you to my humble room in Canberra, three days ago. I'm analyzing about an hour's worth of video taken through a microscope a few days before. The research concerns optical vortices: basically, little rings of light that attract beads (in the sample) to them and whirl them around, like Calvin slinging up a snowball at unsuspecting Susie.
As I examine the videos and jot down observations a strange fact emerges. It seems that smaller beads go around the vortices
slower, up to a certain radius. What's stranger still is that past a certain radius, bigger beads also go around the vortices slower. It is as if you, slinging rocks around your head (for some reason - maybe you are facing down a Philistine giant, or preparing to) with the same strength found that rocks two inches across would go the fastest, and that
smaller rocks go around slower! Quite counterintuitive.
I don't quite have a heuristic explanation for why this happens, much less a quantitative one.
What if you (since you have been teleported to the moment of my confusion) had told me "Look, shernren! You can't figure out how the time of revolution around an optical vortex is related to the radius of the bead used. You don't have a naturalistic explanation!
Goddidit!"
Of course it doesn't fit.
Positively speaking, I think there's some sense in which we all intuitively get that feeling of the sacred around life, around art, around mystery. And insofar as ID is an attempt to explore that (i.e. when it doesn't turn into a silly political attempt to smuggle creationism into schools), I think it needs a little credit. But it also needs a big push in the right direction. I don't feel the sense of the sacred when I come across optical vortex behavior that I can't explain. And yet this is the same guy who has a sneaky suspicion that God threw in fairy dust some time during His creation process. What's the difference? It's
not just in inexplicability. We don't automatically feel God whenever we're faced with a problem science can't solve. What makes us feel God? That's the real question ID ought to be answering.
But negatively speaking, there are a few problems with the idea of Goddidit as you describe it.
Firstly, I always was sure that it's God who pushes the beads around the optical vortex, whether I understand how He does it or not. I may not
feel particularly impressed watching Him do it, of course. But it's a theological truth that is there, whether or not I can explain the beads going around. God was doing it all the time. It was just a matter of whether I could figure out His pattern or not.
Secondly, "Goddidit" isn't how Christian scientists operate in real-life, anyhow. Tomorrow I'm going to go into the lab, try to replicate the experiment with even more beads of different sizes, and see how those fit onto the graph I have. There's nothing inherently irreverent about that, is there? Nothing godless about trying to find the pattern. Indeed, I will probably more thankful to God if I
do figure it out, not if I don't!
Thirdly, "Goddidit" isn't going to get me anywhere. If I fervently believe that somehow God is behind my chaotic little beads and pray hard before I go to bed tonight, that isn't going to help me get a good grade on this summer project (much less publish a paper, which seems pretty far out of reach at this point anyway). It might even make me a better Christian somehow (though like I said, I'm hoping for a miracle of understanding
) but it definitely wouldn't be science.
I hope that answers your question:
With virtually unsolvable questions, I still dont see how Goddidit is inferior to any other explanation for what appears to be virtually impossible to measure and understand. Goddidit doesnt explain much, but it does put the pursuit of science in proper perspective. Relative to the full truth, we are way short of it. How is that a bad thing?
I try much harder when I can't figure out why beads are going around laser rings, and other scientists try much harder when they can't figure out why all life uses DNA or cytochrome c. It's how science works.
=========
Here's a question that's always ready-to-reheat whenever the topic of education and ID comes up. What does the ID syllabus look like?
The force of this question is that in any scientific subject at high-school level, the syllabus is (or should be) a series of falsifiable propositions. Take physics, Newtonian mechanics. My teaching outcome would be: students ought to know Newton's three laws. My teaching method would be: get students to do experiments that demonstrate the truth of Newton's three laws.
The only kind of principle an experiment can demonstrate is a falsifiable one. For example, I want to teach the kids Newton's first law: a body at rest tends to stay at rest, or a body in motion maintains its velocity, in the absence of external forces. "Okay kids, let's throw some stones into the air. (*Crash* goes the window.) They didn't follow straight lines, did they? What went wrong? Is Newton wrong?" All of a sudden a four-hundred-year-old law looks vulnerable. Truth up for grabs. Can we fix it?
Any science course has experiments that demonstrate falsifiable hypotheses. What does the ID course look like? What experiments can be run in the lab? I think the attempt to answer that, by itself, is a pretty good answer for why ID shouldn't be taught in the classroom.
