Design: All The Way Down
| September 30, 2007 | Posted by GilDodgen under Intelligent Design, Science |
It’s not turtles all the way down; it’s design all the way down: from the constants of physics, to the production of life-permitting chemical elements in supernovae that are coincidentally unstable and spew out these elements to produce rocky planets on which life can exist, to the characteristics of carbon formed in a very narrow window of opportunity in stars, to the characteristics of water and light, to the fact that metals can be refined and smelted in temperatures reachable in carbon-based fire which made technology possible, to the electrical properties of conductors and semiconductors that made electronics and computers possible, to the fact that habitable planets represent the best platforms for cosmological discovery, to the fact that living things contain the most remarkable computer program ever written, the profundities of which we have not even begun to understand.
I presume that the picture at this point should be obvious. Design screams from every corner of modern scientific discovery. The real question is, Why do so many (especially academic intellectuals) work so hard to deny the obvious?
I have an answer to that question, and it should be obvious as well.
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Religious prof:
thanks for taking my little test. I would have thought you would score at about 60. It would be interesting to know which questions you split the difference on, but it was gracious of you to humor me.
Presumably some of the lengthy posts above can be cited as justification for my point…my point about why I tend to keep my comments short here and say “See my blog for more”!
I am happy to give further details on my score. I already mentioned (1). I gave myself full points for #2, since as a Baptists I think that the separation of church and state is one of the reasons the church in the U.S. is vibrant when its European equivalents tend not to be. I also do not want my kid or anyone else’s having someone in a school dictating to them how they should pray. I don’t have particularly strong feelings for or against Kant and more than most philosophers. I don’t see why someone would want to suggest that violence is relatively unimportant. I am persuaded that there is value in other religions, but I say that from the perspective of someone who has had the experience of being born again in the Christian tradition, and thus am evaluating other traditions from my own biased viewpoint. So not equal value (10 points), since I could never hope to know that without abandoning the faith tradition that has nurtured me, but certainly value (5 points). I am not thrilled with everything the present pope has done (I preferred his predecessor, to be honest), but I’d choose him over Stalin in a heartbeat.
I think that’s long enough. BTW, I particularly like what happened to your #8 when a parenthesis is added – if nothing else, you taught me how to make another smiley!
A few thots:
It is worth noting a few points on naturalism, design and ID, noting on UD along the way.(While I try to get used to the annoyances of Vista. As for Explorer 7, forget it . . . ise be lookin Linux now, and hopin Mac prices come down . . . )
1] Patrick:
Saw your comment on the spam filter loving me. Any ideas on why? (Did someone submit a malicious complaint, with intent to get me classed as a Tr^oll?)
2] metaphysical and methodological naturalism
Above, RP tries to make/assumes a distinction, but — we should note — this is in fact a distinction without a material difference.
The reason is that the latter in praxis reduces to the former, as soon as one works out a few implications. For, in effect, it tries to confine the domain of “knowledge” and “research” to entities that arise on the evolutionary materialist account of the cosmos from hydrogen to humans — however excused. So, methodological naturalism boils down to implicit evolutionary materialism, and thus begs the metaphysical naturalism question. It is metaphysically naturalistic, if one is consistent.
A better approach on the design issue, is to ask, what is the reliably known source of complex, specified information in our experience.
The answer [cf my always linked] is obvious — even evo mat thinkers accept design once they can see a designer within the circle of the cosmos as they accept it. Properly, this sharply shifts the burden of proof back to the evo mat advocates, to show that chance and necessity without agency can credibly account for the cosmos from hydrogen to humans.
This burden has never yet been met, but given the institutional power and cultural influence of evo mat worldviews, it is easy to beg the question.
3] Design all the way down:
We have a cosmos that, at many levels, exhibits functionally specified, complex information well beyond the Dembski type bound on what chance can search out. This is obvious in the world of technology; and its origin is equally obvious in all directly known cases.
The astonishingly parallel world of the information-driven nanomachines of life is a telling further case in point. (Do you think that the mere fact that we werte not there to see the origin and macro-level diversification of life suddenly means that suddenly chance and necessity alone can search out config spaces to find islands of functionality that are on the relevant math unreacheable within the ambit of the observed cosmos? Cf my nanobots example in my always linked.)
Then, when we push back to the finely tuned, co-adapted system of physics that is a requisite of the existence of such life, we see that this too screams out for a designer.
4] The real issue:
But, if one is committed to a fixed naturalistic worldview, one will reject the conclusion as a start-point for rejecting the premises that lead up to it. So, “design” is ruled out ahead of time through implicit or explicit question-begging.
The multiverses view of course — apart from being simple metaphysics not science — simply moves the design question up one level, as the issue is, how do we get a cosmos as a whole that diligently searches out the space of possible worlds to get those that are life-habitable. (And, an infinite set of sub-cosmi that exhaustively searches out the set of possibilities is a very special metaphysical claim indeed, aside from raising the thorny question of an actual infinite; cf Hilbert’s hotel for the resulting paradoxes.)
Okay
GEM of TKI
The only other theory possible for the universe’s creation, other than a God-centered hypothesis, is a naturalistic theory based on blind chance.
Nope.
Nabbed again by the pile
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