Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy, with brief comments

Denyse O'Leary
November 14, 2009
Darwinism
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Intelligently Designed Nanotechnology

As Casey Luskin reveals in this episode of ID the Future, eminent biologists have said that they must continually remind themselves that what they see in biology evolved, and was not designed. But now engineers are turning to biology to replace human technology because biological pathways provide superior solutions to biomedical-technological needs. Is this trend more consistent with an evolved biosphere, or an intelligent designed one? Listen to this podcast and decide for yourself.

Listen here.

Yes, but sometimes people don’t see the forest for the trees. The majority of humans think, where it is safe to do so, that there is a God, based on personal experience. No surprise there. If there is a God, he can communicate with humans when he wishes to do so, just as Elizabeth, Queen of England, can do*. And she would be the first to say that her rank is at a fundamentally much lower grade.

The question is, why is this controversial? Why should it be any surprise? Why do I keep running into efforts to prove it is not true?

If the alternatives are really science (space aliens, multiple universes), I could not distinguish them from witchcraft or some other foolishness. I think we’d just get more done if we accepted, with Antony Flew , that There IS a God and got on with useful projects in science, like cures for AIDS and non-polluting sources of energy. Oh, and weight loss programs for people who used to suffer from famine but are now afflicted with obesity – an outcome of modern science.

*I still have my father’s commission, courtesy Elizabeth’s father, advancing him to the rank of officer.

Also: Chris Mooney’s War on Intelligent Design

Listen here.

On this episode of ID the Future, CSC’s Rob Crowther interviews Casey Luskin about his in-depth response to Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, correcting fourteen major factual and logical errors in Mooney’s chapter on intelligent design. How can Chris Mooney be so wrong on this issue? Listen in and find out.

Read the original response to Mooney here.

Well, I don’t know why anyone should be surprised. Darwinism has morphed into a major public enterprise and anyone who wants his finger in the pie … I think we can wait a long time before a guy like Chris Mooney even needs to get anything about intelligent design right.

Comments
Denyse, you should have separated Casey’s podcast from the exchange with Mooney, since the latter is old news, whereas the former raises issues that don’t get discussed here very much – i.e. the sense in which biotechnology might support ID. Casey’s rhetoric is interesting in that he starts by hinting at a common descent argument (back to God) between the outboard motor structure of the flagellum and the rotary outboard motor of humans, but then argues that the biological version may be better for certain medical purposes that can be put to work via nanotechnology (as ‘nanobots’). All of this fine, and in fact should be stressed more in ID defences. However, the role of human intelligence in constructing the actual nanobots out of the natural flagella should not be underestimated. It would be a mistake to hear what Casey is saying as implying that somehow natural forms are inherently superior to artificial forms, just because the natural version of the flagellum works well for medical purposes. An additional layer of design is necessary to construct the appropriate nanobots, and that does not happen in the wild. In other words, less stress should be placed on the superiority of natural design and more on how natural design can be redeployed to serve human ends, which in turn could be understood as evidence for at least some overlap in how human and divine intelligence work.Steve Fuller
November 15, 2009
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Luskin's paper is good. He touches on most of the common fallacies against ID that Mooney uses. Almost all of the good ones are there. -Fallacy by authority. -Calling ID a God of gaps or argument from ignorance, -Saying there are no peer reviewed papers -claiming Darwin got it all right -saying ID is not science because mostly Christians believe and advocate it (notice that the contrary is not true: that IDists do not argue that Darwinism is not science because it is largely advocated by atheists) -he misrepresent the Dover case -he misrepresents Meyer's paper -he claims the controversy is manufactured by political and religious interests and not scientific ones -and he gives a straw man version ID representing it as a dead psudo-theory that has already been falsified and proven unsound etc. Everything was in this paper except for just ignoring and dismissing ID, refusing to even discuss it solely on the basis of it being "creationism".Frost122585
November 14, 2009
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