Hello, Aquaticus. Thanks for the kind words about my writing. I try to be as clear as I can, and that involves work, so it’s good to know that the work is appreciated.
I have no problem with your being an atheist. At times in my life I have been at least an agnostic, and I fully understand and even sympathize with the movements of thought in a person that can lead to agnosticism or atheism. And certainly in my youth, almost all of the popular science I read (Asimov, Sagan, etc.) was written by scientists who were agnostics or atheists, but I learned a love of the study of nature from such authors. Of course, belligerent, angry atheists, who have a personal axe to grind against religion, can be difficult to converse with, but your conversational manners (as shown here and on BioLogos) don’t resemble those of P.Z. Myers, etc., so there is no problem there.
The analysis you give is one that has often been given by TE/EC folks, especially on BioLogos, but I think it’s based on a misunderstanding of what the ID people have written, and is not really pertinent to what I wrote above.
Let’s start with what I wrote above. All I was trying to show was that one can detect design without having to affirm miraculous intervention. I wasn’t trying to show that the world is divided into God-designed things and non-God-designed things. Indeed, my analysis of the Pyramids (or of a house, or of, say, some strange machine we might find lying around on Mars) doesn’t need to bring in God at all. I wasn’t trying to deal with the extent of God’s involvement in nature, or whether God created some parts of nature but not others, etc. I was arguing only that the set of tools for “design detection” aren’t identical to the set of tools for “miracle detection.”
But since you have raised the question of whether ID pushes God out of nature, giving him less and less to do as science progresses, let’s talk about that. First, are you aware that this is exactly the ID critique of TE/EC, especially in the form promoted at BioLogos? The ID folks think that TE/EC quite frequently is “Deistic” in the sense that all God has to do is create some natural laws, and then he can retire (beyond “sustaining the natural laws”), because gravity, chemical attraction, mutation, etc. – all conceived as wholly explicable in natural terms by TEs such as Dennis Venema, etc. – then can produce stars, galaxies, planets, oxygen atmospheres, life, vertebrates, primates, and man without any further action by God. That may not be the idea BioLogos is trying to convey, but it is certainly the picture that easily emerges from the way its proponents talk, and it’s not just ID people who read it that way, but all kinds of people in Protestant churches across the USA, which is one reason why TE/EC is a hard sell in those churches. So if you want to make the complaint that ID pushes God out of nature, you have to deal with the widespread Protestant evangelical perception that TE/EC does so even more thoroughly!
But now let’s leave ID objections to TE/EC, and just talk about how some ID proponents have conceived things. I think that confusion has arisen over the fact that ID often focuses on particular parts of nature where it believes design is most easily detectable. From that fact, some have inferred that ID only sees design in those places, and nowhere else. But it’s not part of ID thinking that design exists in nature only in the places where ID methods have so far been able to detect it. ID doesn’t rule out the possibility that everything in nature is designed, even if we could only demonstrate the design in certain cases.
Let’s take a simple example, which any English or History or Philosophy teacher has had to deal with: plagiarism. A teacher can often be sure that parts of a paper are plagiarized, from certain clues, but the teacher can’t always tell whether the whole thing is plagiarized; the design-detection tools for plagiarism aren’t refined enough for that. For example, I might be able to tell that a student, who has so far proved to be on the doltish side, with limited vocabulary and limited facility with English prose, has copied a passage that reads like Bertrand Russell or John Stuart Mill, but there might be parts of the student’s essay that could have been written by the student. So I can say for sure “there is some plagiarism in this essay” without being able to say for sure “this whole essay is plagiarized”. Yet I remember a case where I told a student frankly that parts of his essay were plagiarized, and later (when I found the book he used by sheer chance) discovered that all of it was plagiarized.
Well, under ID theorizing, nature is like that. We might well be able to show that certain parts of nature are designed, but it doesn’t follow from out inability to show that all of nature is designed, that all of nature is not in fact designed. Just as my demonstration that “the student copied at least some of this” didn’t rule out “the student copied all of it”, so showing that at least this part of nature had to be designed doesn’t rule out the possibility that all of nature is designed.
So when Behe argues that the bacterial flagellum was designed, he isn’t implying that everything else in nature wasn’t designed. He’s making no claim about the other things one way or the other. But he has suggested (I can’t find the quotation at the moment, but I’ve read it many times) that design may go much deeper into nature than we have heretofore suspected. That means that many things beyond the flagellum may well be designed. And Michael Denton, another Discovery Fellow, has more boldly argued that design permeates everything, that the known properties of nature as discovered in astrophysics, physics, geology, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and the rest all indicate a complex web of overlapping design which facilitates the existence of creatures like us.
So while ID is compatible with “some things are designed but others aren’t”, it is also compatible with “some things are designed, and maybe everything is, but we can only demonstrate it in some cases”, and with “all things are designed and we can demonstrate it in most or all cases”.
So the point is: The criticism of ID that you have given, i.e., that it implies a God who is responsible for only some parts of nature but not others, is not a fair criticism. Nothing in ID’s assumptions or methods rule out the possibility that God has designed every last property of every atom, every natural law and constant, to produce exactly the universe we live in. And in fact if you ask ID proponents what they personally believe about God and the details of the world (i.e., what they would say speaking not narrowly as design theorists but as Christians or Jews or whatever), I think you will find that a large number of them will say that God’s design is everywhere, pervading the universe from the macrocosmic to microcosmic levels. I haven’t met many ID proponents who imagine that large parts of the universe are left to sheer chance, with God occasionally jumping in to arrange a few things here and there. That simply is not what they think, when they put their religious hats on.
In fact, I have seen more evidence of belief in a zone of nature where God is not involved, where God leaves nature “free”, in the statements of TE/EC writers than in the statements of ID writers. At various times, Darrel Falk, Dennis Venema, and commenters such as Chris Falter and beaglelady have indicated that they think there are results of evolution that God does not predetermine or even care about, but leaves to chance or nature’s freedom. And of course, theologians who have been showcased on BioLogos, such as Polkinghorne and Oord, are well-known for saying that God leaves parts of nature free and “open”; Ken Miller has said similar things. So the idea that ID people leave too much of nature out of the control of God, whereas EC/TE folks keep all of nature within God’s control, just does not match the documentary data. If anything, the case is the reverse.
