I’m even less demanding than that. ID doesn’t have to engage in hypothesis testing to be a serious area of inquiry. (It’s not really science without that, but that’s okay with me.) ID can advance questions about the existence and meaning of design in the biosphere. And, I would argue, ID properly understood does exactly this, or else it wouldn’t be ID. But the ID movement is not about design or even about inquiry. Not even close.
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I agree, and I personally find these questions about design and complex system (flagella, bug gears, etc.) fascinating. I was trained in a gas-phase experimental physical chemistry research group, but these days I find myself much more interested in biophysics and population genetics because of the “big questions”.
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That’s question-begging. You must mean to say the appearance of a purposeful arrangement of parts. Otherwise you’re simply assuming what you are trying to prove.
It’s also how we recognize the work of natural selection. It too gives the appearance of a purposeful arrangement of parts.
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You keep using the word arbitrary in a way that makes it seem like you don’t understand what it means. None of the criticisms you receive are arbitrary.
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This would be true if there was not evidence of purpose in biology. Motion, energy conversion, reproduction are all purposeful activities. Since there is evidential support the argument is solid.
This is an untested hypothesis.
Almost all design criticisms are Arbitrary:
subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one’s discretion: an arbitrary decision. decided by a judge or arbiter rather than by a law or statute. having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government.
The standards of science are rarely considered. The whole mechanism discussion contained mostly arbitrary objections. The whole insistence to identify the designer is an arbitrary objection.
With out an explanation how the objection takes the argument outside the discipline of science the concern becomes arbitrary.
Can I not make equal claim that mutation, gene duplication and resortment, genetic drift, sexual selection and natural selection are all purposeful activities, the purpose being evolution? As there is evidential support the argument is solid.
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Well, in practice ID puts forward arguments that purport to show that natural evolutionary processes cannot achieve particular adaptations. Such as ones of high enough fitness (Dembski’s CSI and NFL arguments), or ones with Irreducible Complexity (Behe’s original argument). They say that these are purely scientific arguments, and technically they are. They don’t actually work, of course, and they are put forward by a political / theological movement for its own purposes. I don’t think that evolutionary biologists should be complacent about these arguments, nor should those who value separation of church and state.
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Im not sure this correctly describe’s Behe’s position.
He seems to claim that God sometimes uses Evolution, and sometimes God doesnt use Evolution.
It is a shame that despite having a whole night with Behe, we still dont have this one question asked and answered!!!
Getting back to the OP, this is exactly one of the aspects of ID which make engaging with it like nailing jello to the wall - the big tent. As has been pointed out, design is a word which is legitimately used with a very broad scope of meaning, and as that is pretty much the common denominator of ID, the movement is really defined more by what it is against than what it shares in common.
ID is all over the map. Are we talking God was responsible for abiogenesis and then let nature take its course? - ID. Is it that God created the phyla and allowed things to run from there? - ID. Did God create every species archetype? - ID. Is ID episodic? Is ID continuous? Is the mechanism of ID so transcendent that it cannot be distinguished from the regular workings of nature, or is it more poofy? All is unspecified. Should not the vaunted hypothesis be more defined than that? In its grasping and never ending search for complexity in nature, ID seems in practice to progressively exclude all natural pathways to complexity, even those which have simple explanations. Without definition, all that remains of ID is really just the denial of natural pathways.
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There is no evidence of any purposeful design in biology. Function does not equal purpose. Why can’t you grasp that simple concept?
No Bill, They can be purposeful activities. They can also just be naturally occurring functions with no underlying purpose as is the case in biological life.
The evolution hypothesis for the unguided production of complexity has been tested for 160+ years and passed every test.
We’ll add arbitrary to the long list of terms of which you don’t understand.
You’ve been given scientific explanations literally hundreds of times Bill. You’ve ignore every last one.
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No that’s the question-begging again. You are just assuming those are for a purpose.
No, natural selection demonstrably produces things that have an appearance of what you call a purposeful arrangement of parts. It produces things that appear to be for some function. Mutations that give antibiotic resistance, for example, are selected because of how they allow cells to live with high concentrations of antibiotic, giving the appearance that they are for that purpose.
So you declare, but you say nothing that substantiates it, you just quote the definition of arbitrary without explaining anything about how it relates to specific criticisms you have received.
The standards of science are constantly and explicitly brought up as a direct consequence of your abandonment or failure to understand any of them.
You constantly misunderstand what hypothesis testing is or how it works, what a testable hypothesis is, what a test is, what models are, how predictions are made, how scientific historical inference is made, how inference to the best explanation is supposed to be done.
All the time you get these wrong. You invent “models” that don’t make logical sense, such as the asinine idea that it is a prediction of ID that “a natural process can’t produce X”.
You think you can just take the statement “it was designed” to be true by default, and demand of others that they disprove it. And you think this would constitute a falsification of the statement “it was designed” to show that it could also have evolved by a natural process.
You don’t understand what a null hypothesis is and think “it was designed” is a useful null hypothesis, apparently not having the slightest clue that a null hypothesis needs to predict something.
You don’t understand that “it was designed” is not even a model or a hypothesis, since it has zero explanatory or predictive content. There is nothing in those three words that says anything about what the data should be like. Hence there is no test possible of the claim.
Most amazingly of it all (and almost impossible to believe coming from a Christian theist) is you seem to not even be able to comprehend that just because you have offered a naturalistic explanation for some phenomenon, that doesn’t actually falsify the proposition that God did it.
I can go on an on.
The great irony is that your knee-jerk “it is arbitrary” response, is actually arbitrary. It seems to be conconcted for no apparent reason, but merely as some sort of quasi-academic-sounding go-to excuse for dismissing valid criticisms of your unreasoned nonsense.
You simply have no idea whatsoever about any of this and are basically just blathering incoherently and in embarrassing ignorance every time, seemingly out of some pathological need to say something, anything, back.
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Permission granted.
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That’s what Joe said, more or less. Though it isn’t clear what “God uses evolution” even means or if it’s something Behe would agree with, I take it to mean the idea that natural — perhaps even Darwinian — processes do operate and can accomplish some results, and Behe agrees with that. The major question is what God is doing when he doesn’t “use evolution”.
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I am referring to his claims (most notably in Darwin’s Black Box) that ordinary evolutionary processes could not explain adaptations that showed Irreducible Complexity. These claims are supposed to be evidence that those adaptations must have been made by Design Intervention. Whether Behe thinks that God “uses evolution” for the other adaptations or whether Behe acknowledges that they happen because of physics and chemistry is a different, and secondary issue. His acknowledgement that evolutionary processes did do something puts him in conflict with his ID movement allies, but if that was all he said then he would not be getting much attention.
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Hi Ron
It appears all over the map as it is the victim of arbitrary objections which are not based in science and misrepresentations. The theories weakness is that it is limited and at this point only works well as an alternative hypothesis for evolution to test against. Behe’s thesis is quite simple.
We recognize design by the purposeful arrangement of parts. A purposeful arrangement of parts is the way- the only way someone -we recognize the work of a mind.
Therefore the alternative explanation to the basket of evolutionary mechanisms is that a mind was directed behind the functional complexity we see in biology.
This is an incomplete understanding of Behe’s argument.
This is all pretty arbitrary 
Years ago I spoke at a summer meeting in New Hampshire, and on a break afternoon we were taken to see the Old Man of the Mountain. He looked quite European. Wen-Hsiung Li was in our group, and he pointed out with amusement that if the OMOTM had been discovered by a group of Chinese people, they would have chosen a viewpoint about 100 feet away, from which the OMOTM looked Asian instead of European.
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My apologies. I can’t imagine how I got the mistaken impression that Behe’s original argument involved Irreducible Complexity. How silly of me – I must have made up that phrase on my own and attributed it to Behe.
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Irreducible complexity is part of the argument. If you leave parts of his argument out you are misrepresenting him. I do not believe this is intentional. His argument in Texas is worth a look. I will repost for you convenience.
