What about us IDists who do NOT want “to make the connection between theodicy and ID tighter”?

I am an IDists because it keeps “God” and religion out of the discussion.

It is an a-religious approach to the issue.

If you want religion then become a creationist.

is there something in ID theory that necessarily requires that there be only one “intelligent designer”?

No. There may be more than one. We do not know.

It does NOT matter to ID how many designers there are/ were.

Ya see the ONLY possible way to answer that question without designer input or direct observation is by studying the design.

does ID theory necessarily entail a “designing entity“, as opposed to an “intrinsic design process in nature”?

From whence nature and that design process?

Nature cannot be responsible for its own origin.

The Big Tent gets smaller the more details you attach to it. At its biggest it includes all those critical of Darwinism, it narrows when you include those who would permit ID to ask its question: Can we detect design? It narrows again if we officially answer that question in the affirmative.

Many traditional Judeo-Christians happily add ID to their repertoire of evidence. But like the First Ammendment which was meant to keep America’s Big Tent big, limiting ID to asking and, if you like, answering the “Can we detect design?” question keeps our tent big.

All the other questions are perfectly valid, but the genius of ID was to pinpoint the biggest question of them all: Are we designed? Answer that one way or the other and everything else will fall into place—but of course not without a lot of argument. So rather than let ID devolve into endless squabbles of lesser import—the age of the earth, divine versus human design, theodicy—we are wise to keep the ID tent Big.

But of course this does not mean that groups within ID cannot involve themselves with those questions.

The key to knowledge is liberty.

Maybe it’s that religious people tend to divide between Biblicists and Gnostics. For the former God is squarely in the mix, grounded in history and responsible for more deaths than man or nature. No one need apologize for the Biblical God who commands fear and says, “I am who I am” (or maybe better, “I will be that which I will be”).

Thus for the Gnostic the God of the Torah is an evil and lesser deity. The high God, which for Ken Miller would be Darwin’s God, is above all that. But by making their God aloof from creation, the Gnostics make him into an impotent by-stander, and they remove themselves from his image. I say Gimmie that Old time Religion—the Bible’s profound wisdom and earthiness fits reality better than the theodisic wrestlings of the theologians.

However we need both the Greeks and the Hebrews. It’s just that when it’s Greeks only you end up with Darwin’s god.

It seems an important point that is lost on many people.

A device with “planned obsolescence” is going to look amazingly sub-optimally designed if you think it is supposed to last forever.

And how stupid would DRM look if you evaluated it from a perspective of “customer usability” ?

That is just two obvious examples that come to mind.

It doens’t prove that a design isn’t suboptimal if someone claims it is, but it does at least put the claim in context and at the very least it means they should shoulder a burden of evidence to argue why their criteria of purpose is reasonable and not just assert that it is.

A design with appear optimal or sub-optimal given the criteria that are used. This simple reality seems to be lost on those that delight in pointing out bad design. Do they realize how ignorant they look ?

Jason, in a similar vein Francis Collins, in The Language of God, refers to the label “junk DNA” as “an act of hubris.”

Great point.

A numbering change in the posts, which occurred after I wrote #14 above, may conceal the fact that I was addressing post #14 partly to you. “Regarding 11 and 12 above” should now be “Regarding 11 and 13 above”.

I’d be interested in your response.

Thanks.

T.

I would note that I always find the arguments from dysteleology to be some what strange and they are clear evidence that the people putting them forward don’t really understand the nature of design and engineering in the real world.

I mean, how can anybody claim that a design is sub-optimal ? To do so requires that a person knows what the original design criteria are. Without that information you can’t actually assess the optimality of a design you can at best only guess at it.

A design with appear optimal or sub-optimal given the criteria that are used. This simple reality seems to be lost on those that delight in pointing out bad design. Do they realize how ignorant they look ?

ID science must remain silent on the matter and therefore must allow for either possibility.

Only traditional philosophy can approach that problem (modern philosophy doesnt’ care).

The story goes something like this:

A “principle,” cannot create or cause, only a being can create or cause. A creator may use a principle to create, but the principle itself has no causative power nor does it have any ontological standing. That is why it is dependent on being. A principle can be a formula, psychological construct, or even a kind of theorem, but it doesn’t do anything. To say that a “principle” can create is like saying that that Euclidian Geometry created the pyramids.

Nor can we attribute creative power to a “law.” Since all of empirical reality is changing, and since physical laws are unchanging, the origin of those laws must transcend that changing reality. If the laws and the creator of those laws were part of that changing reality, (immanence, pantheism, materialist Darwinism), then they too would always be changing.