Francis Beckwith has posted several excerpts from his response to Barbara Forrest in Synthese magazine. Forrest, the crusader against Intelligent Design and logically-challenged scourge of imaginary creationists everywhere, is bound and determined to prove that Beckwith is a creationist, despite the fact that, like, he's not.
One of her arguments is that, since Beckwith thinks that constitutionally-based arguments against teaching about Intelligent Design in schools are unsound, he therefore, must agree with Intelligent Design. Of course, that doesn't logically follow, but Forrest somehow finds it compelling.
I also have a response to Forrest in the works, focused, of course, on her sloppy reasoning. I'm sorry, but it's just hard for me to believe, given the really bad reasoning that characterizes virtually everything she writes, that the woman actually got a Ph.D in philosophy. This kind of thing wouldn't have passed muster in an undergraduate paper where I come from.
But her non-sequiturs are apparently real crowd pleasers at places like Panda's Thumb, don't you know.
Beckwith's blog article on his response is here. Edward Feser's comment is here.
14 comments:
The link for Francis' article leads to Panda's Thumb also. You might want to fix that.
Doesn't much matter if, in his heart, Beckwith is a creationist or not. I can't read his mind. But if he quacks like a creationist by supporting the injection of pseudoscientific creationist arguments against evolutionary theory into science classes, he might as well be. Intelligent design isn't science, its a legal strategy.
Let me attempt to boil the issue down to its essence.
Let's take the universe, or cosmos, or whatever you want to call it -- the entire physical universe. Let's call it a box. We live in the box, and physically cannot see outside of it. Or at least we think we can't, since everything we see is interpreted as though it originates inside the box.
The question is, is the box all there is? Is there something outside the box? More to the point, is there something or someone outside the box that made the box? Let's call this the God proposition.
Since we cannot see outside the box, we cannot observe directly whether the God proposition is true. Should we presume it is true? Should we presume it is false? Should we presume neither one?
But does the absence of direct evidence mean it is somehow invalid to search for clues inside the box that might tend to lead to conclusions about the outside?
Opponents of ID seem to take two stances against it. One stance is that the inquiry is being performed incompetently. The other stance is that no such inquiry should be made, ever.
As for the first stance, I am in no position to judge. For all I know, ID proponents are, as its bitterest enemies allege, the biggest collection of hacks since the days of alchemy.
But I'm pretty sure the second stance is wrong. Even from a scientific perspective, we look for clues of intelligent design all the time, in lots of fields of study, including police forensics, archaeology, and SETI. Why not in biology?
A very nice post I can agree with on most counts, Lee. Unfortunately you resort to a very old and wholly inappropriate canard at the end:
'But I'm pretty sure the second stance is wrong. Even from a scientific perspective, we look for clues of intelligent design all the time, in lots of fields of study, including police forensics, archaeology, and SETI. Why not in biology?'
In the fields of forensics and archaeology, we presuppose that design is involved because we are looking for the evidence of human activity. Based on this presupposition, we can do forensics, because we have a large amount of experience and scientific data as to how humans act and what kind of evidence of this activity they leave behind.
In archaeology, based on the presupposition, we only assign 'design' to objects that resemble objects we have empirical evidence are actually designed by humans (i.e. arrowheads, put shards etc.). For example, if I walk along a beach and I spend half an hour making an arrow head, then pile two rocks atop each other, an archaeologit would recognize the arrow head as 'designed', but not the rocks - even though both were the result of design.
SETI also makes a presupposition about how aliens would be communicating with us: That they would use principles (i.e. parsed signals etc.) that we use ourselves. We would be wholly incapable of detecting signals that may well be very designed indeed, but are outside of our realm of experience in communication.
It is simply not useful or sound to make the same presupposition about biological life, as we have no experience or empirical data at all to support that anyone (human or Godly) can and will create or alter life using - for want of a better word - magic.
If we can make a presupposition about how aliens would communicate with us, assuming they exist, why can't we also make presuppositions about how God would communicate with us, assuming He exists?
'If we can make a presupposition about how aliens would communicate with us, assuming they exist, why can't we also make presuppositions about how God would communicate with us, assuming He exists?'
We all agree that humans exist, right? In fact, we have some pretty insurmountable evidence that says they do. So that is a sound presupposition from which to start. People do not at all agree that God exists or what he/she/it is and in fact there is not an iota of evidence to indicate that any such being exists. So that is not a reasonable presupposition from which to start.
I have already explained upon what we base our presuppositions in forensics, archaeology and SETI. These presuppositions are either founded in empirical evidence, or, in the case of SETI, simply on the limitations of our own experience and methods of communication. We have examples of people killing other people or stealing etc. all the time. We have examples of people amking arrow heads or pots all the time. We have examples of intelligent, conscious beings communicating via parsed signals all the time.
What are your examples of some unknown and presumably immaterial entity influencing the laws of nature or creating biochemical pathways or species from scratch?
Also, there is a categorical error you are making:
For example, in archaeology or forensics, the presuppositions are only made to allow researchers to adress further questions. For example, a team of forensic scientists can say: 'Righ - here's a guy with a gunshot wound in his head. Let's presuppose a human being did this. Who did it? How did they do it? Why did they do it? etc.' (note that it could also have been a freak accident - so forensics ideally should not make any presuppositions, but let's stick with it for arguments sake).
If, in biology, we were to say : 'Right - here's a very complex protein. Let's presuppose God did this.' - not only is that a wholly arbitrary and invalid presupposition as I have outlined above - it also makes answering any of the 'Who, why, how' questions impossible. Its the complete antithesis of science and an admission of complete intellectual failure, as harsh as that may sound.
The easiest way to illustrate this is to ask any ID proponent HOW the designer did his handywork. They will say they don't know. Which is fine. Scientists don't have to know everything. But the problem is that ID in principle does not provide any way of adressing how that design was implemented. All ID boils down to is:
1.) This looks really complicated
2.) I can't imagine how this could have arisen without design.
3.) Therefore, it was designed.
Step 1 is completely arbitrary, step 2 is an admission of ignorance (the only sound step in ID)
step 3 is an argument from ignorance.
Evolutionary theory, like all other substantiated theories, does provide a way of answering the 'how' and the 'why' and the 'who' questions. Natural selection. Therefore, ID is untenable as a science.
It works great as religion, though.
Lee,
But I'm pretty sure the second stance is wrong. Even from a scientific perspective, we look for clues of intelligent design all the time, in lots of fields of study, including police forensics, archaeology, and SETI. Why not in biology?
Love to see the IDists actually do that. But they don't. What they do is to take pseudoscientific arguments against evolutionary theory developed decades ago by "scientific creationists", eliminate all direct references to God, and add some sciency sounding jargon. They've never had an original idea and they don't have a clue about how to search for evidence of God in biology.
You are asked, however, to refrain from the following:
Telling the truth.
That's why I was censored. Liars love censorship. What a surprise!
Singring, it seems to me that if we can presuppose that aliens, whom we do not know to exist, would try to communicate in certain ways, then we can also presuppose that God would. The only difference is that aliens live inside the box, God on the outside.
But that seems beside the point anyway. The idea is that design has certain attributes on its own. If it doesn't, then we should give up on SETI, since we have no idea how aliens might think, and cannot presume they even exist.
I have never read an ID proponent who said that we should presume complexity implies design. I think it goes further than that -- in other words, specified complexity. And I don't think the point is to presume it was designed. They are not saying, we can't imagine how this could happen by accident, ergo it was designed. They are asking, can anyone explain how this happened given only Darwinian mechanisms? Is Darwinism up to that?
KyCobb, you said one thing that was helpful: that IDers don't have a clue about how to search for God. Maybe they don't. But if I spot you the incompetence of the IDers, are you saying that even to search for that clue is wrong?
'Singring [...] then we can also presuppose that God would [communicate].'
1.) To be precise, you would have to say that you would like to presuppose that 'the designer', be it an alien, God or Vishnu, were trying to communicate.
2.) We presuppose that if aliens exist, they will communicate by principles similar to ours. Why? Because we have exactly one replicate of intelligent life we know of - us - ad we just have to go by what we have. Again, it is easily verifyable that we communicate by parsed signals, some of them transmitted by electromagnetic waves. So again, just like in archaeology and forensics, we have easily verifyable data to suggest that this is how our one example of intelligant life communicates.
So I ask you again: What easily verifyable reasons do you have to presuppose that the diversity of life we see around us requires the involvement of a deity of any sort? You must provide at leats one example of life that can be easily verified to have involved 'intelligent design'. Maybe on another planet where we can film it as this involvement is going on? As it stands, we have no such examples - so not only do we not have the faintest clue as to what signs of 'design' we should be looking for, it is moreover simply unreasonable to presuppose that such involvement was even necessary for our own evolution.
'I think it goes further than that -- in other words, specified complexity.'
I have heard this term 'specified complexity' being bandied about so many times - but I have never heard a coherent definition of how we could detect reliably whether any complexity is 'specified' or not. Even Stephen Meyers skirts this issue every single debate he is in. The very best they can do is come up with a roundabout way of saying exactly what I said: 'it just looks designed'. This is what 'specified complexity' boils down to.
Maybe you can do better? So I will ask you, as you bring up the term: How would I be able to detect 'specified complexity'. For example - sticking with our example of archaeology: I find two rocks. One of them is designed. How would I be able to detect 'specified complexity' in one of the two that would tell me which one it is?
'They are not saying, we can't imagine how this could happen by accident, ergo it was designed. '
This is precisely what Behe, Dembski and others are saying: they say 'Our current knowledge can't account for how this came about - so it must be designed.'
'They are asking, can anyone explain how this happened given only Darwinian mechanisms? Is Darwinism up to that?'
Precisely. That is what is called a critique of Darwinism. It does not a scientific theory make, just as critiquing a movie does not make you a director. In science, you have to propose an alternative idea that explains all the data Evolution can explain plus the data you are claiming it cannot or does not explain. ID has done nothing of the sort. It simply says:'I can't imagine how X could have arisen by natural selection - so it must be designed!'. This does not strike me as a very constructive way of doing anything, let alone science.
Lee, it's been a few days and I'm still hoping to get your definition of 'specified complexity' and a methodology by which I can test whether or not a rock has been intelligently designed or not using this concept.
I guess 'specified complexity' is not all its cracked up to be, eh?
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