That may be true, but historically it is clear that some evidence/arguments have weakened the design hypothesis, especially Darwin’s theory, leading Richard Dawkins to say that
“Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, ….Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
Note that things have changed since Darwin and the years that followed, since the developments of science in the 20th and early 21st centuries makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled theist.
That reply demonstrates my point.
When you said
It would seem that you thought that the idea of “epistemologies in which science alters itself to accommodate theology” was at least sensible. You should not have had to try to come up with any such idea - you should have had one already. Especially when you boast of the time you’ve spent considering epistemology.
2 Likes
If I understand your point, Ron, you are saying that ID lacks a historical dimension, and therefore is not on a level playing field with standard evolutionary theory. I would agree with that. Standard evolutionary theory aims to give a history of life; ID really can give only a phenomenology of life.
1 Like
All scientific discoveries have weakened the claims by some theists whereby God was directly involved in producing the phenomena around us.
1 Like
That betrays a lack of understanding or familarity regarding ID neo-creationism.
One of its most prominent proponents, Michael Behe, attempts to identify specific systems of structures that required the action of the Intelligent Designer. This is explicitly an attempt to provide an historical dimension to this designer’s activity.
To be clear, I am only here referring to what ID neo-creationists attempt or claim to accomplish. I do not mean to suggest, in anyway, that their attempts succeed, nor that their claims are defensible.
1 Like
I think that if ID limited itself to phenomenology, almost nobody would care. It would elicit nothing but yawns. Scornful yawns, perhaps, but yawns. ID pretends to be science, and that’s the problem. If they’d just admit that they have no science, no data, no actual evidentiary reason to ACCEPT their claims, but purely a range of philosophical speculations based upon theological speculations, why would anyone care?
2 Likes
Why are you concealing the person’s name? Is he or she embarrassed to be named as responsible for that paragraph?
This is irrelevant, since I’ve not claimed that accepting “evolution” is unorthodox. Try again, without confusing “descent with modification” with “unguided, unplanned, aimless mechanisms.”
You can go search the BL site if you are that interested.
You are the Master of Confusion, not I. You are the one who hides behind twisted and tortured definitions.
The contrast here is between the natural process of evolution and the supernatural interventionist processes like ID and creationism (i.e. overt miracles).
2 Likes
That is half of it. The other is that by focusing on the final result - the proffered design, ID bypasses mechanism. While ID is free to define its boundaries any way which pleases its constituency, that becomes another conceptual attribute present in evolutionary theory and excluded from ID.
Evolutionary mechanisms such as mutation and natural selection are rooted in more basic chemical statistical mechanics and ecology. Of course, the adequacy of these natural explanations are subject to challenge, but in terms of mechanism the ID argument is “that mechanism is inadequate, therefore design”, as opposed to “that mechanism is inadequate, here is an alternate mechanism”.
I do not offer this criticism as some sort of proof that ID is wrong, but I do suggest that evolutionary theory by contrast embraces the burden of an integral exposition. By contrast, ID’s accommodation of design concepts ranging from deistic fine tuning to young earth ex nihilo creation comes at a severe cost to explanatory power. Reasonable expectations of an origins model can justifiably expect more in terms of history and mechanism.
2 Likes
Yes. And this is evident by the total lack of interest on the part of the ID’ers to even pretend to be figuring out what natural processes might have produced the “design” they insist they have demonstrated to have occurred.
2 Likes
Behe openly contrasts natural processes with intelligent design. His famous example of malarial resistance in falciparum is supposed to model evolution, and he solely points to natural mechanisms. He then states that structures in nature could not evolve through these processes, therefore contrasting intelligent design against natural processes.
OK, that’s enough.