To imply that I was arguing that any irreducibly complex object is a product of supernatural forces is incorrect. I was saying that when ic is applied to an object found in nature and known not to be created by humans or another animal you are EITHER appelaing to a natural event for which there is no evidence or a supernatural force.

Sorry, but it just doesn’t follow that irreducible complexity is supernatural.

Your computer is irreducibly complex. Ostensibly, according to the theory of evolution you espouse, the intelligence that created your computer is natural.

You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too. If human intelligence evolved naturally then intelligent design is also natural.

No wonder you don’t want evolution questioned in 9th grade biology classes. Even kids can see the illogic in it.

Does ID reject irreducible complexity?

What then Josh does ID say. Irreducible Complexity is an appeal to the supenatural or a natural event we have no evidence for. Specified Complexity does not necessitate the supernatural although I would say Dembski’s application of it to evolutionary theory makes several unfair or unrealitic assumptions. should I ignore Behe’s work or just some of it?

that is not what ID argues.

you’ve mentioned an appeal to the supernatural many times in other threads, and i’ve noted that this is not what ID says.

IF ID is simply an inference of design in the universe then it does not contradict anything in science. If, on the other hand, you believe that a human eye or a bacteria’s flagellum is irreducibly complex then you are arguing for supernatural intervention which is something that is completely unscientific. The fact that it is unscientific has no bearing on whether it is true or not. It simply means that science ceases to be a tool in explaining certain aspects of how our universe works.

At any rate appeals to the supernatural do not belong in a science classroom. Now I supposse that a natural agent could have some how inserted humans on this planet with our irreducibly complex eyes in place, or they could have seeded the planet with life long ago. The problem is that there is not a shred of evidence for such an event. So you are either appealing to the supernatural or to an event that we have absolutely no reason, as of yet, to believe in.

What ID needs to do to challenge evolution in the classroom is propose an alternative natural mechanism that explains the spread of life on Earth. Until it can do that it may warrant research but not class time.

“When we start with the premise that all the design we find in nature is just apparant (as opposed to real), then we have no reason to set out deliberately seek and explore extraordinary design for what we may learn. We view it all as accidental, cobbled at best and unfinished. We doubt that the haphazard constructs of nature could be any better than our own.”

Scientists marvel and mimic nature’s design all the time. Your statement could not be farther from the truth.

Even today, we have many scientists who want to see the hand of God. Even Einstein made that comment and why he did science…yet, he was speaking more of a deism type force in nature as God, not a personal God. But still, pretty strong words no matter. I have respect even for young earth creation scientists- you can say that starting out with the Bible makes it a non-science, but you can’t deny they do science all the time…they study the world, they interpret the evidence, etc. They are well qualified in most cases, with Ph.D’s and lots of experience and work under their belts. I don’t think I agree with their position in general (I’m no scientist…I’m merely taking the words of all scientists together and figuring out what makes sense and what doesn’t.), but I still think there are many of them out there and they do their work for God and to learn how his own work…and I don’t see them throwing their hands up and saying ‘I don’t get it, the end.’ Many of them are doing some big time work in many fields. I would think that a more atheistic approach would be more likely to make people say, ‘who cares?’ I mean, if you lean towards an atheism approach and think it’s all purposeless and meaningless, that it’s all an accident- why would you care? I personally wouldn’t care why things work the way they do if I didn’t find the overall evidence for God to be strong.

I would think that, in general, people’s search for purpose and meaning would be one of the biggest motivators into studying science…and that purpose and meaning is closely related to God, the divine, and all that stuff.

As for science throughout history- I haven’t studied the topic, but from what I do know, it doesn’t seem that most scientists, when the majority were strict creationists and the like just stopped productive work at any point. I’d say that many of them discovered natural laws that we know are in effect today and probably always have been, and they saw it as an act of God. I don’t think a lot of these guys were waiting for an actual hand of God to be found…but rather, laws that God put into motion working their wonders. To a lot of them, I think God was right there in the wonders of the laws and the workings of the laws within nature.

In regards to knowing more…I think, in general, we know a very tiny fraction of all there is to know, in any sense- not just in a scientific sense. I doubt anyone will ever get anywhere close to figuring out half of what there is to know and discover, let alone learn MOST of it. I think Edison said something about men always think they know much more about the world than they really do. I think science a lot of times takes on an elitist attitude, an arrogant stance. Science is great annd all, but it need not be put on a pedestal above all other branches of knowledge, I don’t think. Even then, there’s so little we truly do know, and so much more to know- it’s pointless to be arrogant in any sense.

I think there are many brilliant men and women out there who will continue to assume design and a divine nature in the universe and use that to go out and discover the mind of God. As for apparent design or real design- I think it’s safe to say that many more scientists than are willing to admit, believe the design we see is real and not an illusion of design. Politics stops many of them, and many of them hold so strongly to naturalism that they fear looking like fools. Human designers use nature all the time (I’d say most designs by people are copied from nature), and I think that says a lot…they see the design, and use it for their own designs, but aren’t always willing to admit it, and others just don’t realize what they’re seeing.

Well spoken! I’ll have to concede that somewhat.

Lets look harder at this: the vision above certainly does apply to many of the early grand old masters of the enlightenment. It even appeals to me romantically. For a long time it certainly worked pretty well for physics and math, maybe not quite so well for evolution and some of the later sciences that intertwine with it. It certainly worked easier in the days when virtually everthing you could look at contained obvious mysteries — why does the sun rise? how can it emit heat and light for so long? what could possibly explain a rainbow?

Early scientists could hope to find the virtual hand of God, almost just around the next corner. Then for quite a while, it turned out to depend on something else quite interesting around that corner, and maybe God was just one more step away. And so the pursuit continued.

Originally the investigation stopped, just accepting the hand of God made what you saw and the workings beyond that were bound to be inscrutable. At long last finding out there were a few more levels made the chase very exciting. Eventually however, it became clear that there were layer after layer of causes explaining the layers above them. And these causes, laws of physics or whatever, didn’t seem to be the direct hand of God which was always another layer down.

Sometimes even the most brilliant of scientists were stymied by their own conviction, such as the famous “God does not play dice”. At that point that speaker stopped doing productive work. It became clear the the best policy was just to presume there was no meddling with the rules at intermediate levels, and until you got to the bottom of things, which might never happen, so the best policy was to presume no devine interference. The same holds for ID. I strongly suspect, one by one, all the apparent imposibilities of evolution will yield to further research, however motivated, and only the very deepest levels of physics will be left to wonder about.

Here’s one more, perhaps somewhat petty point: Many of the great masters of present science have yet to be properly appreciated. Time had spotlighted the masters of a hundred years ago and further back. More science has been done in the past 50 years than in the entire history of mankind before that. The quantity and wealth of detail makes it harder to realize how many people of the caliber of Newton are alive today. Less and less of those researchers of today have been motivated by wanting seeing the “devine” in the next level of depth of understanding, they just want to see what is around the next corner, whatever the reason for it. Boundless curiosity, and not a small bit of plain ego, are what mostly motivates research today — aside from the salary and tenure…

The beginnings of science, the basis, was the springboard from which a more neutral approach became dominant, and even more successful. And the basis of the motivation evolved.