This is a very astute observation. Religious people have been honing their rhetorical skills for centuries in arguing over various interpretations of scripture. The “winner” is often the one who can most cleverly turn a phrase or find the most “authorities” to quote. Most ID-Creationists haven’t realized that approach just doesn’t work in science which demands real, tangible, physical evidence to reach a consensus. As a result we get the same empty rhetorical arguments repeated ad nauseum along with the common practice of dishonestly quote-mining actual scientists.
I see no easy way to get ID-Creationists to understand mere words won’t make their scientific case. All we con do is explain and explain and explain until the light bulb comes on.
First of all @J.E.S, this is exactly the kind of post we need to work through. If people actually want to have a dialogue and work towards mutual understanding, one of the most important things we can have is empathetic thinking – that is being able to place yourself in another person’s understanding. It’s not agreement, but rather understanding. To my mind, the best “debates” are those where each side first represents the strongest version of the other, acknowledges the strengths of the other side and the weaknesses of their own, and then carefully makes their case and lets the audience decide.
So, first, with my moderator hat on, this is going to get unruly and nasty if it becomes a fight over each of the responses to the question. Let’s try to stick to either answering the question in good faith, or asking clarifying questions of each other, but avoid launching into long back-and-forth battles over things we know we’re not going to agree on.
Secondly, to answer @J.E.S’s excellent question, where my PhD work is in photo-driven reaction dynamics and molecular machinery, I think one of the things that I can appreciate about Intelligent Design is the emphasis on the amazing complexity and “wonder” of life. I am truly blown away every time I try to understand how even simply biological processes work. I does seem incredible. In some sense I see ID as most effective at establishing “reasonable doubt” in that way.
I also think, similar to @swamidass, that within Christocentric worldview, intelligent design (lowercase version) is a given, the rest of the argument is just the details (which are not insignificant or devoid of consequence). Perhaps then it’s the teleology that becomes the more interesting component of ID.
I don’t particularly find the fine-tuning arguments to be all that interesting. I don’t really have much interest in theism as a general concept. I’d rather be an atheist than generic theist in the sense of some cosmic force or unknowable great being that started the universe spinning and then took off.
The best arguments I have seen are by Meyer and Behe which points out observations in the universe that we know a mind can produce and where any or all of the four forces are unlikely to be the ultimate cause. This assumes the existence of the four forces whose origin is also a case for design.
Purposely arranged parts (living organisms) and chemical sequences (DNA and Proteins) are examples.
I’ve never found the argument that ‘living organisms are more complicated than anything we’ve designed therefore they are designed’ particularly convincing.
Jesus rose from the dead, therefore I trust the Bible, which tells me that through Jesus all was made that has been made. Ergo design.
The trustworthiness of the Bible does not follow from Christ’s resurrection. Here’s why:
(i) the Bible isn’t one book, but 66 (if you’re a Protestant) or 73 (if you’re a Catholic). Only six books of the Bible record Jesus’ resurrection appearances (the Gospels, Acts and 1 Corinthians). The reliability of these six books in no way guarantees that of the remaining books;
(ii) about half of the books in the New Testament are now considered forgeries by many scholars: that is, they claim to be written by people who did not in fact write them;
(iii) the fact that a book testifies to Jesus’ resurrection doesn’t make it inspired or inerrant.
I understand that William Lane Craig himself is of the view that the resurrection does not imply that the Bible is true.
Finally, the claim that “through Jesus all was made that has been made” does not imply that everything was intentionally designed: the most we can say is that everything God made was foreseen by Him. Foresight and intention are two very different things. (Think of mosquitoes.) Design requires the latter.
But how would we do that? How could we distinguish natural evolution from unnatural evolution? Even if we evolve life from nonlife in the lab, how do we know that we didn’t just observe God creating a new organism?
Note that both of these arguments fail since they are both just arguments from ignorance based personal incredulity.
The arrangement of parts and the formation of new chemical sequences are both fully explained by known evolutionary processes. Calling them “purposeful” is another unsupported personal opinion.
For what it’s worth, I think the most convincing arguments for Intelligent Design are (i) the unexpected beauty of the laws of nature and (ii) the fact that even a multiverse would need to be “well-designed” in order to produce life-sustaining universes. These arguments have been ably advanced and defended by Dr. Robin Collins here.
On the subject of the multiverse: proponents argue that it is a corollary of cosmic inflation, but what they fail to recognize is that inflation itself requires fine-tuning - a point confirmed by New Atheist physicist Sean Carroll, in reply to an email I sent him on the subject. (Dr. Carroll thinks there’s a 50/50 chance that inflation is true, by the way.) So trying to explain away fine-tuning by appealing to the multiverse merely kicks the problem up one level. Cheers.
sure its a bit tricky but i think that we can test scientific scenarios not only by the abillity to falsify them, but also by the abillity to prove them. as i said with the self replicating watch arumgnet- i think that we can prove them in that case.
Think all you want, but what’s your justification for that opinion? How can we test anything when God could be causing anything that happens? Perhaps you’re saying that if life doesn’t evolve in the lab, that proves it couldn’t have done so in nature?
Known evolutionary processes are empirically observed capable of producing new functional information so merely observing the occurrence of new functional information is not evidence for ID.
You made an argument by analogy - self-replicating watches are designed, cells (life, whatever) have characteristics we see in watches, thus design. The controls for this sort of argument would be other entities (preferably living, but this is problematic) known to be both self-replicating and designed, and entities (again, preferably living, something that is going to be problematic) known not to have been designed but bearing some semblances to self-replicating watches (to varying degrees). If the argument by analogy fails to identify the former, or mis-identifies the latter as designed, then we have a sense of how conclusive the argument is.
An alternative is to show that the analogy between, say, watches and life is perfect in every detail. This is also a difficulty.
For me, a good argument using analogies would include frank and open discussions about these difficulties, and about the limits of the approach.
