I guess i keep thinking you will find a more coherent context for this scenario.
I would be surprised if someone like @Agauger would accept this idea as a standard feature of I.D.
So i am inclined to think this is YOUR view of I.D… and maybe Denton also adopts this view.
But it doesnt seem to be a popular characteeization of I.D.
@swamidass, can you think of an I.D. proponent that thinks 100% natural law is the usual view of that position? nu
Very likely. But he may have got it indirectly.
Interesting. Part II of Shapiro’s book is entitled, “The Genome as a Read-Write” (RW) Storage System". It occupies 62 pages, over 40% of the main text of the book. The title is at the top of every odd page in the chapter.
So I guess we can infer that John Harshman hasn’t read Shapiro’s book.
I guess we can also infer that it is possible, without reading what a scientist considers his magnum opus, in which he most fully sets forth his principles and their justification, to determine that the scientist is a nut.
Correct on both counts. A summary of some of the main points can be sufficient. There are plenty of nuts whose books I have not read, and plenty more whose books I have read but knew they were nuts going in. I haven’t, for example, read Fred Hoyle’s paper proving that Archaeopteryx was a fake, yet I know that Hoyle was a nut (despite being an eminent astronomer, I should add).
Context, Joshua, context. I was of course responding to George’s framing of ID, not setting forth a full and proper account of it. George wrote:
Picking up on “natural law by itself”, I followed up with “natural law alone”. George thought that “natural law by itself” needed supplement by miracles; I pointed out that in ID natural law needs supplement by design – which may or may not involve miracles, depending on which ID person you ask.
Whether initial conditions and unexplained contingencies are also involved in the explanation of order, is not the subject George was discussing; therefore, I did not discuss them either. I focused merely on establishing that “design” is not the same as “miracles”.
Why would she, when, as I’ve conceded, it’s a minority view within ID? I never claimed it was standard; I claimed it was one version. The statement we disagreed over was this:
“that all ID folks insist on miraculous interventions”
I said the generalization was false, and you protested that it was true. One counter-example is enough to falsify a generalization, and I’ve provided that. But there are others. Dave Scot, who used to run UD, was a front-loading supporter. Mike Behe grants it as an ID possibility, without identifying it as his own position (but without explicitly calling for miracles, either, despite the fact that most people read Behe that way).
George, you always accuse me of prolonging debate for too long, but you could make discussions shorter by simply conceding overstatements instead of trying to justify them. All you have to do is say that you overgeneralized, and that you are willing to surrender the word “all”, and substitute “most”, and we can end up in agreement with no further waste of time or energy on either of our parts.
In fact, i would reject the idea that it has anything to do with the fundamental aspect of I.D. - - in the same way that one wouldnt consider the “day/age” interpretation a “minority position” of ID.
“The fundamental aspect of ID” is that it attempts to infer intelligent design from the arrangements of nature. Everything else is subordinate to that: miracles vs. natural causes, Christian vs. non-Christian, literal Genesis vs. figurative Genesis. An ID proponent is someone who takes seriously the possibility of inferring intelligent design from the arrangements of nature, and any position on any of the other matters is allowable within the broad ID tent. But someone who thinks it is in principle impossible to infer design from the arrangements of nature cannot be an ID proponent.
There is no need for you to keep guessing and conjecturing based on hearsay what ID is about, when there are several articles spelling it out on the Discovery website. Also, reading some books by ID writers would help.
And yet this while line of discussion was triggered by your attempt to characterize one form of “front loading” as part of I.D.
In fact, it is anti-ID. If everything unfolds naturally via natural law… then there would be zero reason to suspect a threshold of complexity that requires God’s (so-called) “intervention”… or any intelligent engagement by a Designer - - because such a presumption requires even the anonymous Designer to be completely hooked into the chain of natural law and causation!
George you can continue to speculate without knowledge of these authors all you like. It’s evident from your misstatements that you haven’t gone to the authoritative sources and read what they say. You haven’t consulted the numerous articles on the Discovery site offering definitions of ID. It’s evident from our past conversations that you haven’t read a single book by even a single ID author all the way through. You are now trying to argue that Denton’s view in Nature’s Destiny is not an ID view, even though you haven’t read even two pages of the book. You don’t have the slightest conception of how Denton relates natural laws to design in nature over four hundred pages of careful argument. You are flying by the seat of your pants, instead of doing homework to ascertain the facts. Your arguments can’t be taken seriously, because they are based on inadequate familiarity with the literature you’re commenting on. Natural wit is no substitute for careful study, and you’re trying to substitute the former for the latter. I won’t respond to you again on this point until you show clear evidence that you have actually read extensive passages from Denton.
Is William Dembski “mainstream ID” enough to count in this?
“Accordingly, even in a world that is causally closed and fully deterministic, God, by carefully arranging the world from the start, could achieve all intended effects, up to and including acts of particular providence that appear to require direct, real-time intervention (though, in fact, they have been ‘front-loaded’). Note that even a full-throated physical determinism need not obviate libertarian free-will: God could have arranged the physical world to reflect the freely made choices of free agents that have physical bodies.”
He subsequently argues against that being the actual situation on the grounds that the universe is simply not set up with that much “built-in determinism” (citing philosopher Holmes Rolston). But throughout his writing, his focus is on design as final causation, not as process - he is philosophically indifferent to the question of intervention, though he concludes it must be necessary.
Surely not everything one finds in an ID book is something uniquely ID. Sometimes other topics are included and covered to provide context or background!
Case in Point: if he promotes (or describes) a natural model where everything that happens is the unfolding of natural law… then by definition there is no “Irreducible Complexity” issues!
If, if, if … the point is that you don’t know what he says, or why he says it. Read his book – or, if you refuse to read it, at least have the kindness to spare the readers here your guesswork.
Fred Hoyle pushed the Steady State theory and thought that new matter just emerged spontaneously everywhere within the universe. I don’t have to read a 300 page book written by Fred Hoyle to know that he was wrong.
We could probably argue back and forth about the philosophical and theological implications of the claims made by ID proponents, but they seriously lack a scientific model. Very recently Ewert began an attempt to start constructing an ID model that would at least attempt to explain the patterns of shared and divergent morphology among species, but it has a long way to go. The model also needs to tackle DNA sequence which doesn’t look promising. However, at least some people within the ID circle realize that they lack a scientific model and are at least attempting to create one.
Patrick, the red/red-brown skin tone is only one genetic marker and it is found among people of L (mtDNA) and R (Y-DNA) Haplogroups.
I am unable to make sense of this statement.
You keep trying to assume the role of my Instructor. You are not.
If you want to mail me his book, i will read it.
If you dont… then do everyone a kindness and tell me im wrong if i’m wrong… or ignore me if i’m right.
I was addressing Patrick. The red skin tone mentioned in the Bible in reference to the rulers Esau and David is because the biblical writers understood that the oldest ruling lines were characterized by a darker skin, which is generally true of archaic peoples, not just the Horite Hebrew.
BAM! TAKE THAT GEORGE.
I have spent the afternoon reading this discourse and had a bit of a chuckle. Since many of us believe that the God who made the universe is I AM That IAM, That is He has always existed, independent from all who try to control or explain Him, and according to Scripture in reference to the works of the Holy Spirit, will accomplish His goals in different ways according to His and His volition alone.
…would it not be a laugh if after all of this energized discussion we have all enjoyed from time to time (im guilty as charged) found out that God created the dog, human and giraffe amongst others by either speaking them into existence in the beginning of the earths history and others during the span of earths history, the croc, zebra, and oak tree and also others through a series of theistic evolutionary means from lower species where He contolled the mutation, and then perhaps that infamous platypus, ant eater and others came to be via a more chance mutation/ selection neo darwinian style of evolution post fall of man…if this were true and God who was sovereign over it all was peering down from heaven watching all of us where we were all pretty much wrong to take any exacting stance and foolish to have wasted all of this time bantering about what we know and how others are wrong when we probably know not very much at all…and God must be thinking “Oh my how surprised they one day will be.”
I have said this before that alot of what we have all been guilty of ( i again am guiilty) in trying to explain how God acts and thinks totally reminds me about the purported oldest book in the Bible, Job. Jobs friends were all doing exactly what we are but in their case arguing for explaining Jobs trials and putting words into God’s mouth. I think i will just lean towards His Words out of His mouth for now and will look forward to having Him one day fill in the details.