First, I appreciate the lengthy response and the thought behind it.

Some specific points that particularly interested me:

ID offers immense potential for science – in medicine for example, we can see that human biological structures have a particular purpose. As such, we can then determine the optimal benefits behind these structures, leading to potentially new therapies and cures. Scientists would do well to abandon their metaphysical assumptions and pay attention, as many already have.

What is stopping this from happening? If ID could produce a set of superior disease cures the general scientific world would have a fairly rapid attitude change. Are those scientists who have abandoned their metaphysical assumptions having better results in solving practical problems in their labs? If not, how do you expect the others to follow?

You mention concern about ID. Well there should be concern if one is committed to a philosophy of ’scientism’ that doesn’t really work, and offers no insight into how our bodies work, and why they work as they do.

Science never claims to have all the answers, but to say it “doesn’t work” seems a little strong. On the other hand, how many past attempts to combine the supernatural with the natural have produced measurable results? Doesn’t mean that it can’t happen, of course, but one tends to be healthily skeptical.

ID and ToE are both historical scientific theories. As such, neither of them are going to (nor can) offer us rigorous proof.

Why? The ToE is necessarily historical because it depends on long periods of time to operate. It was stated several times in this thread that ID is independent of timeframes – it could support a YEC view for example. Why not last month? I haven’t seen any detailed description of how a designer creates species, so how do we know the designer is not needed continuously?

I think you would benefit from an understanding of the history of Western science. Most, if not all of the Western scientists prior to Darwin were theists. Theism presented the basis for Western scientific assumptions before Darwin. Why? Because it was seen that God is logical and systematic. As such, the cosmos, and everything in it should reflect that characteristic of the designer.

I’m not sure how this illuminates the current discussion. God being logical and systematic is belief – firstly in the existence of God and secondly in assumptions about God’s nature. Many people happily believe that the universe is logical and systematic without God. Many others believe that God is highly offended by what happens in your bedroom and intervenes in your life daily. AFAIK, ID has not come off the fence on who the designer is – do we have proof that the designer is logical?

This is ridiculous, since the existence of a designer would first of all explain the existence of all else.

Why? How do we know the designer isn’t just some entity that likes to play with living systems? It seems you have determined already the identify and nature of the designer.

Take my previous example of C14 dating – your view is that the designer, being a logical and systematic entity, wouldn’t arbitrarily interfere with the dating process. Yet ID proposes that this entity does intervene in biology. Why is C14 dating immune? You mentioned the fine tuning of the universe. Why stop there? Any entity that can select fundamental physical constants certainly has the ability to pick and choose which C14 tests are accurate and which aren’t.

A person designs a computer, and leaves it in a field. A primitive person discovers the computer (and just so happens to have access to electricity – that’s the cheat). This person plugs in and turns on the computer, and learns over the course of several months that it calculates, and does many wonderful things for him. He is at a wonder that nature should create such a miraculous device.

He is curious as to how such a device works, so he takes it apart, and learns through intuitive processes and logic, all the workings of the computer. Now he is even more amazed that blind natural processes could create such a divice, but he comes up with a theory, that it was assembled over time through gradual selective processes, and it just happened to be at it’s current complexity when he came across it in the field.

OK, he’s mistaken about how the computer came to be, but he is not limited in what he can learn about the computer and it’s workings based on that mistake. His science about the workings of the computer does not necessarily change when he discovers that the computer was designed by a person not unlike himself – with a reasonable mind, intuition, and a propensity for logical thinking. All that changes are his assumptions about how the computer came to be.

You both stated that if proof for a designer immerges, then we would have to re-examine pretty much all of science.

This is ridiculous, since the existence of a designer would first of all explain the existence of all else. Furthermore, such a designer would have a logical mind, which would form the basis for the science you suppose we should need to re-examine. Also, maybe our scientific understanding is incomplete due to naturalistic assumptions, but such a designer also designed our intellect, which is looking at the evidence he created. It still stands, therefore, that we can have a perspective about nature without belief in a designer. As such, we don’t really need to re-examine everything that we currently know – only those assumptions about reality for which we were mistaken. The true benefit in this is that we will gain insight into life and the cosmos, which our metaphysical assumptions prevented us from gaining.

So the only thing that changes is our perspective, not the science behind existence, which already existed with the designer’s hand.

Your assumption is based on methodological naturalism. Prove that natural forces are all that exist, and you have an argument. Otherwise, you are hopelessly mistaken.

“From an ID perspective, I think this is valid and probably accepted by many ID proponents.

From an non-ID perspective, I don’t think it captures the level of concern about what ID represents.”

And that’s exactly what we are dealing with: perspectives.

You have to ask yourself: “is the Darwinian evolution perspective solely based on evidence, or is it based on a metaphysical assumption of methodological naturalism as the driving force behind science?” If the former, then there’s really no problem (except for the false predictions ToE has already made). However, if methodological naturalism can have even a potential of being incomplete, then one can question the whole Darwinian perspective.

In addition to the ID literature, the posters here at UD have done a phenomenal job at showing that the Darwinian perspective based on methodological naturalism is not only potentially incomplete, it is incomplete.

Consider these issues:

The mind and where it comes from.

DNA and biological information – where does it come from?

Irreducible complexity in cellular structures, and how they formed.

The fine tuning of the universe.

There are quite a number of other issues, which a simple concept of ID explains better than the monstrosity of Darwinian assumptions based on methodological naturalism. Parsimoniously, ID is more on track than the whole Darwinian solution. True, it is incomplete, but it presents the basis for a theory that offers far more explanatory potential than blind natural forces can ever offer.

ID offers immense potential for science – in medicine for example, we can see that human biological structures have a particular purpose. As such, we can then determine the optimal benefits behind these structures, leading to potentially new therapies and cures. Scientists would do well to abandon their metaphysical assumptions and pay attention, as many already have.

You mention concern about ID. Well there should be concern if one is committed to a philosophy of ‘scientism’ that doesn’t really work, and offers no insight into how our bodies work, and why they work as they do.

“If ID was to suddenly be proven correct by some chain of events,”

ID and ToE are both historical scientific theories. As such, neither of them are going to (nor can) offer us rigorous proof. As Dr. Stephen Meyer stated (paraphrase), we have to judge historical theories based on inference to the best explanation.

If you are looking for some magical proof of ID, you will be disappointed. You have to weigh the arguments between ToE, which loses it’s explanatory power the more detailed and complex the evidence shows, and ID, which grows more credible the more detailed and complex the evidence. We are headed towards more detailed and complex evidence. Guess which theory will win out.

In # 48 you state: “If we have solid proof that God intervenes in natural processes, how can we not question everything we’ve learned about those processes?”

I think you would benefit from an understanding of the history of Western science. Most, if not all of the Western scientists prior to Darwin were theists. Theism presented the basis for Western scientific assumptions before Darwin. Why? Because it was seen that God is logical and systematic. As such, the cosmos, and everything in it should reflect that characteristic of the designer.

I’m not saying that without theism we wouldn’t have science, but without theism, Western society would not have developed the perspective that the cosmos reflects logic and systematic processes. We would not have figured out the laws that govern scientific principles. We would still perceive the workings of the universe as mystical.

So when you posit that a god acting in nature forces us to re-examine everything we have learned, you are ignoring the history of Western science.

The reason we know that miracles are miracles, is because they defy the logical laws that define the limits of our reality. Only a god (or one appointed by a god) can thus perform them, because he is the author of such laws. Miracles as we understand them from a theistic perspective are not the norm. Natural processes are the norm, but that does not detract from the sustaining power and interaction in nature of a designer.

We can’t directly observe events that are understood to have occurred billions of years ago.

So the theory of evolution is history rather than science.

Got it.

Which is why the DI goes up & down the country trying to make politicians enact new laws to exclude/demote evolution in favour of ID/Creationism?

No one is doing that.

Also ID and Creation are not the same.

The only people who conflate them are the people on an agenda who don’t have a clue about either.

Mikeb6, you are under a misconception. God is not ‘manipulating’ anything. He sustains all. He pervaved all. All is contained within Him.

I’m not sure how this impacts my previous comments. If we have solid proof that God intervenes in natural processes, how can we not question everything we’ve learned about those processes?

For example, we don’t need uniformitarianism for pracitical sciences like engineering where we can observe our process from start to finish.

We assume that concrete has the same properties as it had in the last bridge we built, or that the chance of a packet being lost as you read this website is a result of various random traffic effects rather than a designer deciding to drop your packets specifically.

I should also point out that we can’t also rule out the possibility of an unknown natural cause for this type of change.

Sure – but we can assume that such natural causes don’t play favorites. Many of these factors are discovered and compensated for in calibration. We assume, however, that they don’t change on odd-numbered Wednesdays because a designer wishes it.

-At the edge of science is theology. Between them is the connective tissue of philosophy with its language of mathematics.

If ID was to suddenly be proven correct by some chain of events, science would have to examine not just evolution, but basically every scientific theory we currently hold. If we have incontrovertible proof that some supernatural entity is manipulating our environment, we would be forced to consider that a confounding factor in all analyses. Why just biology? What about Geology? Physics? Engineering? Statistics? and so on.

Last comment on this thread for me!

“The only way you can say “obviously these areas of study have not been affected” is because you’ve assumed (like science) that such a supernatural entity doesn’t arbitrarily interfere.”

This is true. But you’ve taken your scope too far.

For example, we don’t need uniformitarianism for pracitical sciences like engineering where we can observe our process from start to finish. With (some) dating techniques including Carbon 14 we are forced to make an assumption about the process since we couldn’t know if the rate of those processes had changed in the past.

I should also point out that we can’t also rule out the possibility of an unknown natural cause for this type of change. We can measure forces like gravity but, at least to my knowledge, the reasons for these forces are not well understood.

This is really a silly argument. If we found out later that there is a supernatural source to our universe, how could that possibly impact physics, engineering and statistics?

ID does not propose a supernatural source that started things and then backed away. It posits a designer who is actively involved in influencing the course of events on Earth in some yet-to-be-determined way.

Think about it. If you found out, for example, a timeless God does exist, then you would only now becoming aware of an eternal God who has existed all this time and obviously these areas of study have not been affected.

Let me suggest an example. There have been discussions on this thread about dating techniques. We know that C-14 dating works because it can be calibrated against events of known age and it follows physical properties that are predictable. Therefore, we can use it to date objects where we don’t know the date.

However, what if we now know that there is a supernatural being that impacts events on Earth? How do we know that that “designer” hasn’t interfered with the results of the C-14 dating for some particular reasons we don’t understand? How can we trust any C-14 readings made in the past or future?

The same problem works for other areas. If we measure the path of an object in space and it doesn’t follow the orbit we expect (which is how we found Pluto, for example), how do we know that there’s a physical cause and it’s not some designer screwing with things? If we search for a cause and don’t find anything, do we just stop and say “ahh well, must be design”, or do we keep looking for an answer?

The only way you can say “obviously these areas of study have not been affected” is because you’ve assumed (like science) that such a supernatural entity doesn’t arbitrarily interfere.