ID in the UK
| January 2, 2007 | Posted by William Dembski under Intelligent Design |
I’d like to encourage people on the ground in the UK to comment on this and what it is likely to mean.
Senior academics support Truth in Science
Monday, 01 January 2007As reported yesterday in the Sunday Times, twelve senior academics have written to the Prime Minister and Education Secretary in support of Truth in Science.
The group was lead by Norman Nevin OBE, Professor Emeritus of Medical Genetics, Queen’s University of Belfast and included Antony Flew, former Professor of Philosophy at Reading University and a distinguished supporter of humanism.
“We write to applaud the Truth in Science initiative,” the letter said. Empirical science has “severe limitations concerning origins” and Darwinism is not necessarily “the best scientific model to fit the data that we observe”.
They concluded: “We ask therefore that, where schools so choose, you ensure an open and honest approach to this subject under the National Curriculum, at the same time ensuring that the necessary criteria are maintained to deliver a rigorous education.”
The other signatories were: David Back, Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Liverpool; Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at Warwick University; Mart de Groot, Director, Retired, Armagh Astronomical Observatory; Terry Hamblin, Professor of Immunohaematology, University of Southampton; Colin Reeves, Professor of Operational Research at Coventry University and John Walton, Professor of Chemistry, St Andrews University, as well as the three University Professors who are members of the TiS Board and Council.
Professor Norman Nevin has authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications on various aspects of genetics, especially single gene disorders and congenital abnormalities. In his distinguished career he has held the posts: Head of the Northern Regional Genetics Service, President of the UK Clinical Genetics Society, member of the Human Genetics Advisory Commission and of the subsequent Human Genetics Commission, member of the European Concerted Action for Congenital Abnormalities, Chairman of the UK Gene Therapy Advisory Committee (GTAC). In 2003 he received an OBE for his services to gene therapy.
On 11 December, Professor Nevin received a response from the Department for Education and Skills’ Public Communications Unit on behalf of both the Prime Minster and the Education Secretary. The support for Truth in Science had been “noted by the Department” but the “vast majority” of enquiries that the DfES received had “expressed concern” about the Truth in Science resource pack.
“Intelligent design is not a recognised scientific theory” the Department claimed “and is therefore not included in the science curriculum. The Truth in Science information pack is not therefore an appropriate resource to support the science curriculum.”
However, intelligent design could discussed in science classes in response to pupil’s questions: “During a science lesson on evolution it is possible that pupils may ask about creationism and intelligent design. In this situation, the Department would expect teachers to answer pupil’s questions about this and other beliefs in a balanced way.”
SOURCE: http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/site/content/view/217/63
72 Responses to ID in the UK
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Evolution debate is that there seems to be very little discussion of what constitutes intelligence.
Febble, how would you define “design”?
Now, you say a sieve is not intelligent. Fair enough, although I don’t think I’d call any tool intelligent. Is a hammer intelligent? Of course, all are designed.
Is it possible to have an undesigned sieve? To get even more philosophical, is it possible to have an undesigned hammer?
@Febble & Davescot: I’m curious what your thoughts would be on the role “free will” plays in this? And just how does one define “free will?” It clearly exists (although many Materialists would argue that it doesn’t), but it seems to be a rather slippery thing to nail down with a definition.
In my completely uninformed, unscientific musings about this, I’ve come up with an idea that “free will” has to do with allegiance and its effects on your goals or purpose. For instance, do you set your allegiance to be with yourself, toward God, or toward something or someone else? IOW, what do you serve? Or put another way, I suppose this allegiance could be regarded as a very narrowly defined form of “love,” and depends on where that form of “love” is directed (self, God, others, etc.). Or I suppose “affinity” might be a term you could use. Then everything else–all decisions, all reasoning leading up to decisions, voluntary motions associated with decisions, etc., would be predicated on whatever that allegiance is and how it might behave in response to events in the environment. I almost started to expand on this, but the post would end up a mile long. Anyway, that’s my amateur philosophizing on the matter.
So what this might have to do with the discussion at hand is free will (and my own construct of it here as a possible definition) as the element missing from a purely physical cause-and-effect materialism.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: in neruoscience is an understanding of cognition and emotion enough? Or is there some driving element behind the cognition besides just chance chemical reactions; something directed and driven by affinity or alliegance to either oneself, to God, or to something else? Something that drives the cognition into one pattern versus another possible pattern, and not just the seemingly random statistical probability suggested by quantum mechanics? Something that because of this affinity drives toward what is perceived as a goal, using cognition and voluntary motion as a means of getting there (and using external stimuli, memory, beliefs, further reasoning, etc. as the roadmap for the journey toward the goal).
I guess what I’m driving at is that there is a specific affinity and associated goals that stand behind what we call “free will” and thus “agency.” The affinity or alliegance is the “driver” so to speak of the will.
So as it relates to the Agency that did the “designing,” is it enough to talk about the “Intelligence” in the design, as there would also need to be some sort of volitional agency combined with the “Intelligence” to bring about the “Design” and the execution of the design?
So if we project something resembling this human-like “free will” onto God–or, er, exucse me: “The Designer”–we might deduce that there is some sort of goal-driven free will behind it that would would need to consider in addition to the “Intelligence.” Does this biological system you’re studying display evidence merely of Intelligence, or Intelligence + Agency? What is the goal that the “Designer” is aiming at, and did He hit it? We can see “specified” complexity, but how is it we ascertain what the “specifications” of the “specified” complexity are?
It would seem that we really are not in a position to ascertain what this goal would be from pure science alone, so we are left with it being a question of faith: the atheist saying “there is no specification/goal, it just happens” and the theist saying “the goal is X,” (maybe based on revelation) or at least “I don’t know what the goal is, but it sure looks looks like SOMEBODY is trying to do SOMETHING.” Or maybe we could be in a position to ascertain what the Agency’s goals are, and I just haven’t thought of how that could be.
So it boils down to: is what we oberve INTENDED to be this way, or did it just happen? And if it is INTENDED by an agency, how do we ascertain whether it was intended and what those intentions were?
Anyway, feel free to call me a crack-pot.
I won’t mind. It’s just one of the things I go around thinking about as I live out the more mundane aspects of my life.
(I’m thinking of refining this and developing it into something. All sorts of “cogs” were turning in my head as I wrote all of that. Hm….)
febble
You’re still making mistakes in describing rm+ns. Saying it learns from mistakes is misleading. It needs constant reinforcement of what it learns or it forgets even faster than it learned. This known as conservation of genomic information. Anything that is not immediately useful (no selection value) is not conserved within the genome forever. The genomic information with no immediate use gets peppered with random mutations and quickly becomes useless as a result. This is really basic stuff you don’t know.
jb (and febble)
How would be know if something was intentional or not? One way has to do with how natural selection is constrained in conservation of genomic information. The following article describes something that natural selection can’t yet account for.
The Sound of Circular Reasoning Exploding
by DaveScot on December 7th, 2006 · 133 Comments
Regarding the subject of randomness, chance, etc., versus determinism, I think there is some ambiguity in the definition that atheists turn around to their advantage through equivocation.
Here are a couple possible definitions for “chance/randomness”
1.) True Randomness: Stuff just happens with no cause-and-effect. Things just pop into existence. Molecules just bop around for no reason at all.
2.) Unpredictability: Things happen in a cause-and-effect relationship, but the causes are so numerous that our finite minds don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of predicting what the effects would be. Additionally, many many very very slight changes in the varous causes can have slight or significant impacts on the effects. Lots of molecules moving around in the atmosphere heated by the sun, affected by chemical reactions, human activity, etc. produce weather patterns. The weather patterns are unpredictable (or only somewhat predictable) due to an overwhelmingly enormous number of effects we don’t fully understand, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have causes.
3.) Lack of Direction: The presence or absence of purposes defined by an Agency (see my “free will” post). When a purposeful Agent is present, things happen “on purpose.” When the purposeful free-will Agent is absent, things happen due to purely physical, unguided cause-and-effect relationships.
Theists (well, some of them), ID’ers, Creationists, etc., think of “chance” in terms of #2 and #3. Atheistic evolutionsists think of “chance” in terms of only definition #2. NOBODY thinks of “chance” in terms of defnition #1, except for atheists who want to present definition #1 as a straw man representing what theists, ID’ers, etc. believe. (and I’m not quite sure what to make of where TE’s fall in what definition of “chance” they would embrace; it seems it might vary depending on which individual TE you talk to).
febble is no longer with us – anyone who doesn’t understand how natural selection works to conserve (or not) genomic information yet insists on writing long winded anti-ID comments filled with errors due to lack of understanding of the basics is just not a constructive member – good luck on your next blog febble
Hello, I’m new to this blog. I am not quite sure exactly what Intelligent Design is, so I am waiting to be convinced that Intelligent design is a better explanation than Darwinism. Over to you….. I reserve a healthy scepticism of all theories
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Lun.....38;s=books
Quickest way to comprehend ID is to read No Free Lunch.
@littlejon
“Finally, to sladjo, I get the feeling you would really be shocked by the low level of respect the Bible carries here in the UK. The consensus seems to be that one “picks & chooses†the nice bits & ignores the “silly†bits (people living to 900, seas parting etc). Church of England bishops here openly doubt virginal birth, for example, and no-one bats an eyelid. As for Catholics & the origin of life, well, that isn’t NDE, is it, as surely that’s only meant to cover the subsequent development of life…”
I’m not shocked, littlejon, I’m just worried… But what you choose is what you will get… You say that your bishops openly doubt virginal birth… I ask myself how much time will pass until they’ll doubt Jesus as a savior, and finally, God… Are they still calling themselves Christians ?…
On page 121 of “What Evolution Is” , Ernst Mayr tells us the following:
Febble wrote:
Febble then goes on to make her case based on the above definition of intelligence as if that is all there is to the meaning of intelligence when describing ID. The above quote from ” Intellligent Design Coming Clean” was not in fact being used to give a complete definition of the word “intelligence” when used by ID theorists to explain ID, rather it was a definition used within the context of making distinction between introspection and intelligence.
Here is the context:
What Febbler has tried to do is take a statement out of the context from which it was being used and then try to use that statement as being all there is to say on the subject of intelligence of the intelligent design theories and theorists. If a person were honest and serious about a critique of ID then they would have first studied in depth ID theory before trying to make a critique. If they would have done that then they would have come to the conclusion early on that the “intelligence” behind intelligent design in ID theory is an intellectual intelligence, not an algorithmic equation that can display signs of choice through a non intellectual process. I am sure Febble had known this to be the case, but instead of dealing with ID theory head on, she instead chose to make some specious semantic arguments.
If you limit the definition of intelligence to “the ability to make choices”, then of course many non intellectual processes can be considered intelligent. A good example is how a phone answering service works. You call a number and then a recorded voice comes on and asks you to make choices. You then select a number or say a phrase and then the answering service program chooses where to send you next. There is no intellectual choice being made by the answering service, but it does have the power and ability to make a choice. Cells and other parts of living things also make non intellectual choices based on biochemistry. There is the research into making computers able to become artificially intelligent. None of those types of intelligence are functioning due to an intellectual desire, they are based on algorithmic phenomena, not on the ability to desire and then make intellectual decisions free from the constraints of mechanical unconscious directives.
You don’t really want comments from Brits, even in support of Intelligent Design do you?