If your point is that miracles can conceivably occur, then okay. But if we observe an unexplained irregularity, then the scientific answer is we don’t know. *Poof* is not a valid scientific hypothesis.

This from the same Zachriel who argued against StephenB and the law of causality by asserting that quantum particles “poof” into existence without a cause. That’s consistent. (sarcasm)

I am astounded that you cannot see the point of the alien sculpture example. The point is simple: we can be certain that the sculpture is an artifact produced by intelligent design, not a product of chance collisions, natural processes such as erosion, etc. It does not matter if don’t have a clue who carved it, what technology was used to carve it, what the purpose of the sculpture is, etc. We can be sure that it was the product of design, not necessity and chance alone. If there was not a single trace of intelligent life anywhere in the universe, and all we had to go on was that one sculpture, we could infer the existence of intelligent life from that one sculpture alone.

If I were to argue that the sculpture was carved out by erosion, lightning, etc., you would think me a fool — and rightly so. And if you asked my reason, and I said that my reason was that I was unwilling to allow that there might be intelligent designers (other than human beings) anywhere in the universe, and therefore the sculpture *must* have been carved by natural forces and chance, and that it is the job of science to determine *how* natural forces and chance did it, not *whether* natural forces and chance did it, you would think I was dogmatic and not open to the evidence for a designer.

Yet this is exactly what neo-Darwinians do when they can come up with only the most strained, stretched, forced and improbably explanations for the eye, the cardiovascular system, etc. They are determined that there shall not be a design explanation, and that there shall be only a “chance and natural laws” explanation. They could see the ludicrousness of the metaphysical bias in the Martian sculpture example, but they can’t see it when it comes to their own favoured theory.

Regarding the bones in the inner ear — and by the way, I hope you aren’t under the illusion that in employing these standard examples you are informing us for the first time about the evidence for evolution; most of us here could recite such examples chapter and verse without your help — you are making an argument from homology to history, i.e., you are assuming from similarity of form and number of bones that there is a historical progression. It does not follow logically; there might be alternate developmental patterns based on common design elements that do not require recourse to historical transformation. It is logically conceivable that each alleged historical stage was a special creation employing a certain variation on the possible developmental patterns for the bones. Thus, only if you have ruled out design in advance is the argument from homology decisive. Otherwise, it is just one explanatory option, special creation of each different variation being another.

And, lest you should jump all over this last response, remember — I am making only a *logical* point about special creation. My position does not in fact require special creation. Indeed, I am not attacking “evolution” as such. I am attacking only the idea that evolution could have been entirely unguided and/or unplanned. So I am not against the idea that the bones of the reptilian jaw became inner ear bones. I am against the idea that this could have happened by plain dumb luck — even dumb luck aided and abetted by natural selection. Clearly, if this transformation happened, there was a “set-up” of some kind, in which the developmental processes which produced jaw bones were made “switchable” to produce other coherent sets of possibilities. How do we account for this set-up? The answer is, of course, design.

So we have three possibilities:

1. The homologies indicate an actual historical progression which was caused by blind natural laws and sheer chance.

2. The homologies indicate the use of common design elements, slightly varied each time, by an intelligent creator.

3. The homologies indicate an evolutionary process, but one guided or front-loaded by an intelligent creator.

I regard both 2 and 3 as possible. I regard 1 as irrational and unsubstantiated by the evidence.

If you reject my argument here, if you are holding out for position 1, you have an easy recourse — simply show me how the transformation you are discussing could have occurred by chance. With the details.

T.

I’ve requested no “shielding” from your comments. If moderators are preventing your comments from coming through, I would hope that it is not to protect me from your arguments — I fear none of them — but because you have violated some rule of discourse established here, regarding language or ad hominem comments or false accusations against the Discovery Institute or the like. As long as you stay within the bounds of normal politeness and stay away from false accusations, I would like to get all your arguments, in their full force, as soon as you post them, without delays. But it’s not up to me. I am not a moderator here. The moderators are authorized to make the call whether or not something should be posted, and I have to trust their judgment. All that I can do is try to respond to whatever gets through, and respond in good faith, trying to answer your questions. I hope you will do the same with mine.

For example, I am still not satisfied that you have dealt with the epistemological question I posed. How can two propositions, one affirming the competence of random mutations and natural selection to build complex new machinery, and the other denying it, have different epistemological status, i.e., how can the affirmative be a scientific statement but the negative not be a scientific statement also? I cannot see any way to maintain such preferential distinctions. And that means that Behe’s denials have the same status as Dawkins’s affirmations, not necessarily regarding their truth but regarding their “scientific” character. If Darwinian theory is scientific, then the denial of Darwinian theory (in the terms I described) will be the same. Scour Behe’s books and find me any spot where he relies upon a religious or theological premise to overturn one of Dawkins’s scientific claims. You won’t find one. His denial is cast in exactly the same language as Dawkins’s affirmation.

I didn’t “reject” your proposal for a new thread. I’m not a columnist here — I can’t start new threads, at least, if by “thread” you mean a new topic with its own title. I can of course divide up our arguments into several different topics, and keep them in separate postings, and this I have offered to do. I think I have been very reasonable.

Regarding the “strong consensus” of “the science community”, you may not know every corner of “the science community” as well as you think you do, and there may be more dissent than you think. In fact, there is considerable dissent regarding Darwinism, and there always has been a strong minority voice against it, since Darwin’s day; further, long before the ID movement of the current day got started, design ideas were “in the air” among serious thinkers about nature and even among the life scientists. But the pedagogical point to be made is that high school science teachers, the good ones, anyway (and keep in mind that I was educated in a different country, where the idea of “teaching” may be less mechanical than in the USA), often stimulate students by throwing in bits that are not strictly required by the curriculum, but which shed light on the nature of science, or on some frontier area of science which may in the long run prove important.

Also, you fail to see that discussing ID could be very useful even if ID is regarded as complete non-science — pointing out exactly *why* ID is non-science could help high school students better understand the nature of science. For example, the teacher could wax eloquent about the alleged failure of ID theorists to grasp “methodological naturalism”, and turn this into a tidy little lesson on the role of methodological naturalism in modern science. So why wouldn’t a good high school teacher seize on the opportunity of an event in the news which has already caught some of his students’ attention (e.g., the Dover Trial), to illuminate the nature of science? That is exactly what a sharp, on-the-bit, non-mechanical, non-drone science teacher would do. But maybe you never had any high school science teachers who were that pedagogically alert.

It may well be that many people who would like to see ID in the schools are animated by non-permissible motives. What of it? If there are cases where there are no such motives, where ID is discussed out of the pure love of knowing the truth about nature, those are the cases I am interested in. Those are the cases where I see no harm in teaching ID. I’m not defending the teaching of ID as a sly way of slipping six-day literalism or Protestant theology into a science classroom. People who want to teach such things should do it after school hours, in voluntary religion classes, or in parochial schools. But pointing out the incredible orderliness of the living cell, or pointing out the astronomically low odds of a shrew-like animal accidentally turning into a bat, has nothing to do with six-day creationism or Protestant theology.

In your complaint against one book (Of Pandas and People) that was referenced (not even used, but merely referenced) by one school board, you overlook the fact that “intelligent design” in lower-case letters long preceded “ID” in upper-case letters. In fact, ancient Greeks were proposing “intelligent design”, and opposing it to ancient proto-Darwinian theories, long before any Greek knew anything about the Bible, which proves that Christian religion need not be the motivation for such arguments. I don’t see why a non-fundamentalist, thoughtful science teacher in Cleveland should be prevented from raising some difficulties with Darwinism simply because some fundamentalists in Dover had the wrong motivations.

As for your claims at the end about how evolution works, I would welcome a separate post from you, focusing exclusively on that subject, with some of the details that I have asked for, and that you have not yet provided. If you write such a post, I will stay entirely on topic in my reply to it, and will not wander into constitutional or pedagogical questions. So the ball is in your court.

T.

If your point is that miracles can conceivably occur, then okay. But if we observe an unexplained irregularity, then the scientific answer is we don’t know. *Poof* is not a valid scientific hypothesis.

What Barry quoted from Chesterton

If anything is possible then nothing is impossible. In that case, evolution is possible along with Intelligent Design or even the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I am no philosopher; I just wonder if Immanuel Kant would agree.

We do not live in a rational universe; astrology is science and magic is a reality. Or not?

BEGIN QUOTE: “There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity. . . . But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened — dawn and death and so on — as if THEY were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. . . . they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions . . . When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC. . . . All the terms used in the science books, “law,” “necessity,” “order,” “tendency,” and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. . . .” END QUOTE

Clive Hayden: My point is that description of nature never amounts to an argument against proscription of nature.

It seems you would be arguing the converse, that one seeming generality doesn’t impose restraints on all of nature.

Science is its own paradigm, and its claims are subject to verification through scientific methodology. Perhaps the world is not what it seems, or it may change tomorrow, or it was created Last Tuesday. But science is as science does.

If your point is that miracles can conceivably occur, then okay. But if we observe an unexplained irregularity, then the scientific answer is we don’t know. *Poof* is not a valid scientific hypothesis.

This didn’t seem to be your earlier point. You’re just pointing to the problem of induction, but scientific claims still stand (or fall) because induction is encompassed in the methodology.

My point is that description of nature never amounts to an argument against proscription of nature. This is the point, and it is a philosophical position that Darwin and you have that you even understand, as explanations, a description, and think that you can therefore provide against other explanations, when you cannot, for you do not possess a knowledge, based on reason, between the descriptions, only that there are descriptions (which doesn’t amount to an explanation). In reality there could or could not be extraneous entities behind every force, but we could never know one way or the other by studying an effect or describing the force’s effect. You cannot answer the why question, so you cannot answer the why not question.

Clive Hayden: … all we can say of these observations is that they have been observed and have certain descriptions …

Not quite. We can make and test predictions based on the hypothesis.

Clive Hayden: It cannot rule out other forces, for there is no rule that it adheres to logically.

This didn’t seem to be your earlier point. You’re just pointing to the problem of induction, but scientific claims still stand (or fall) because induction is encompassed in the methodology.

Timaeus: I see no evidence that lightning is guided. Its behaviour can be explained fully without reference to any redundant hypothesis of guidance.

Notice that Timaeus doesn’t invoke extraneous entities to explain lightning, though your argument could just as easily apply to that.