Faith/Science Conference (Discovery Institute) near Philly

Brandon, this is an excellent summary. Thank you for sharing it with us.

This captures my basic issue with ID: from a scientific standpoint, we have no idea what a divine designer could do. There is no agreed-upon, rigorous scientific definition of “meaning” or “intention” or “purpose” or “intelligence” (although to be fair, some people such as @EricMH attempted to do so: see Do Heat Seeking Missiles Have Teleology? - #4 by EricMH). Neither do we have a model on how exactly the Designer interacts with the evolutionary process. Without any of these things, ID is not really a scientific theory.

On the other hand, we use all of these terms in everyday speech. As some others (such as Josh, if I remember correctly) have pointed out, we make design inferences regularly in everyday life - even divine design inferences (for religious people). It is more of an intuitive inference, similar to how we deduce that other minds besides ours exist. So, maybe it is not surprising that ID may have more appeal with laypeople who do not worry about the scientific specifics.

2 Likes

Doing the science requires working in the lab or in the field. ID is a lot easier; as we’ve seen with Behe, it doesn’t even involve an in-depth reading of the literature.

ID also has the same handy benefit provided to its proponents as straight YEC does - you get to make up s**t as you go along. :wink: