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This was triggered by Ed Brayton’s answers to the short ID quiz, and particularly by the first question.

1. On a scale of 0 (diehard disbeliever) to 10 (firm believer), how would you rate your level of belief in Intelligent Design? (Minimal Definition of Intelligent Design: The idea that certain [...]]]>

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This was triggered by Ed Brayton’s answers to the short ID quiz, and particularly by the first question.

1. On a scale of 0 (diehard disbeliever) to 10 (firm believer), how would you rate your level of belief in Intelligent Design? (Minimal Definition of Intelligent Design: The idea that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and not by an undirected process.)

I agree with Ed that this definition isn’t terribly accurate for what is actually presented as intelligent design. I’m regularly told that I must not substitute “God” for “intelligent designer” and that it might, for example, be intelligent aliens who interfered with the process of evolution in order to produce the results we actually have. Design by an intelligent alien would only push the process off into the distance, not solve it.

But it is hard to regard something as a serious theory where a single part can be filled by either God or by a super intelligent alien. Yet for various reasons (PR and politics, in my opinion), ID advocates don’t want to just say God.

On the other hand, if you say God is the designer, then you can quite justifiably call ID a God-in-the-gaps argument. Where we have no known path of evolutionary development, or better, where we believe there can be no such path—always based, as it must be, on current knowledge—then we suppose the involvement of a designer.

Such an argument is subject to tomorrow’s knowledge, and indeed new gaps have been filled. Behe‘s “black boxes” don’t always remain black boxes.

But for me, the main issue is simply that I do see  the universe as designed, and I do so for religious reasons. I do not think the natural laws as we see them exist independently, even for a moment. May problem with Paley’s watch is not that I don’t think it’s designed, but that I think the grains of sand around it are also designed.

God, who created the universe, is quite capable of creating either finished creatures or the processes by which they would come into being, and I don’t see any portion as less (or more) the product of design than any other. At most, ID could produce evidence that God’s process was insufficient to its purpose and required interference.

I absolutely believe in design. I believe everything is designed by God. I believe God is involved in everything. In teaching on this subject I have [...]]]>

Since I hadn’t commented on the Intelligent Design controversy for some time, I want to add a couple of notes to what I said yesterday.

I absolutely believe in design. I believe everything is designed by God. I believe God is involved in everything. In teaching on this subject I have occasionally simply started dropping my pencil on the podium. Someone will surely ask me why I’m doing it. I then ask why the pencil always falls. The 20th or 21st century answer is, of course, gravity. Duh! “No,” I like to say, “The pencil falls because God wants it to.”

What do I mean by that? Do I not believe in gravity? Oh absolutely! Like everything else, I do so because I believe in God. God’s desire is expressed so consistently that we can write it as a law.

I followed the suggestion in one of the comments to the Science and the Sacred post I linked yesterday, and went and read the entire essay in PDF, thus avoiding the wait for the second half. I want to quote a couple of paragraphs.

The first is this:

The point is, different chance hypotheses give different results. Dembski writes, “…opposing chance to design requires that we be clear what chance processes could be operating to produce the event in question.”2 Dembski is very explicit about the necessity of the design inference eliminating all chance hypotheses. But this is a fatal flaw: except in very unusual cases, it is impossible to identify all possible chance hypotheses simply because finite human beings are unable to identify every chance scenario that might be operative. [link added]

This is what I meant in my fumbling, non-mathematician’s statement that I reject the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. We don’t know how the creation of life or certain biological structures occurs, and thus it is not possible to determine the probability of such events.

Again:

Also, suppose an intelligent agent designed a natural process that incorporated chance. Human beings do this frequently …

Even if we accept, as I do, that God is the creator, we don’t know the process, so how precisely to we identify God’s fingerprint? I would also suggest that the claim that God cannot design a process that includes chance is just as limiting to God as any of the many other limitations we try to put on him.

Dr. Bradley further argues that design is one of those points where theology can legitimately contribute to our knowledge of the world. It’s a great essay. I suggest reading it.

I would note another issue I have with intelligent design, which is simply that it is detecting instances of design in a universe that is, I believe, designed. Thus, in some sense it is detecting “more” design in some portions of the universe than in others. This is the problem I have with the design argument going back to Paley. The watch is designed, yes. But the sand is also designed in some sense. (Note that I’m aware the analogy is between the watch and living organisms, not sand. That is, in fact, my problem with it.)  One could almost infer that the design argument tests for the absence of God’s designing work in other places in the universe. Almost, but not quite. This is, of course, a theological argument on my part, but then I have always thought this argument should be theological and philosophical, rather than scientific.

Incidentally, it is my belief that God is involved at all points in the universe that makes theistic evolution a difficult thing for me. For many people it is simply a matter of saying that the Bible tells us God created but science tells us how God created–evolutionary processes. This said, we move on without examining our theological views based on the result. But the idea that the earth is old and that death occurred before before the fall seems to display a God who is quite willing to let sparrows, amongst many other things, fall. That is a challenging gulf to bridge. I cannot agree with many of my friends who say that evolution doesn’t really make much theological difference.

I’ve rejected the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. You can’t determine how likely a chain of events is when you don’t know what events constitute the [...]]]> I’m definitely going to follow this new series on Science & the Sacred. The first post is Why Dembski’s Design Inference Doesn’t Work. Part 1.

I’ve rejected the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. You can’t determine how likely a chain of events is when you don’t know what events constitute the chain. The probability of unknown events is, well, unknown, or so it seems to me.

James Bradley is Professor of Mathematics emeritus at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, and is addressing the heart of the matter.

In the post, he gets into an issue that I have raised before, which is the question of whether we really want to [...]]]> David Opderbeck has an excellent post on the question of whether intelligent design (ID) is religious and how this relates to our view of natural theology. (HT: Through a Glass Darkly)

In the post, he gets into an issue that I have raised before, which is the question of whether we really want to advocate teaching of a sort of “creation lite” (my term) in public school classrooms. I personally say this not form the perspective of keeping religion out of the public school classroom, but rather to keep the state out of the business of teaching religion. I believe that two things generally result from the state trying to teach religion: 1) They do it badly, and 2) They tend eventually to want to enforce whatever it is they have decided to teach.

Opderbeck says:

But even if a plausible argument could be made for the constitutionality of teaching some version of ID in a public school, I personally find this “wedge” strategy pragmatically and theologically suspect….[I'll leave you to go discover the analogy he uses where I have the ellipsis!]

The imagined Christian majority in this country often seems to believe that whatever is taught in the classroom will be acceptable to them. But a review of the differences in viewpoint among Christians on many issues should suggest that it is difficult to create a single course that is acceptable to all. I would not object to a course in the Bible as literature, for example, provided it was clear that this was not a class in the Bible as a source or object of faith.

I think Christians ought to seriously consider whether or not strategies used to get some form of religion taught in the public school classroom might do more damage to faith than their potential benefit (or damage) to the state. Perhaps we should recapture the notion that it is the task of parents to pass on their faith to their children.

Cool, no?

But evolution can�t �allow� things, because it�s unguided. And it can�t make any mistakes, because it makes no decisions. Take note: whenever people try to explain how something happens through evolution, they always resort to the language of design.

Now there are quite a lot of problems with the usage of language that is involved here, one of which is referring to evolution–a process–as an “it[-with-consciousness]” that does or does not do particular things. If we think of evolution as a process, however, without trying to make it into an entity, it’s quite proper to refer to a process “allowing” certain things and excluding others.

While evolution may not be guided, there are things that work and things that don’t. Body forms develop in certain ways, both because those ways work and thus the possessors of the form in question survive, but also because the possible alterations in a form are limited. Perhaps if some different body organizations had survived the Cambrian, we would have a different set of alternatives now.

So evolution can “allow” or “disallow” certain options, provided one is thinking not of the conscious decisions of an acting person, but rather the constraints of a process. Think of a simple filter. Let’s consider a box with a mesh covering the bottom. Gravel and sand is poured into the top, and the filter only allows rocks of a particular size to pass through. It doesn’t make mistakes; what happens simply happens because of the constraints–or lack thereof–in the process.

There are two major ways in which language about evolution gets confused. First, we have a failure to see language in its proper context. The word “allow” has a different sense when used to say, “The mother allowed her son to cross the street alone”, as opposed to saying “the filter allowed the smaller rocks to pass but stopped the larger ones.” The mother may have been mistaken in what she allowed; the filter either works or perhaps some of the wires are broken. But it can’t be mistaken!

The second, however, can be more dangerous. We have evolved language to deal with things in our more immediate environment. For most people, a year is a long time. Long term planners may think in decades. Few think in centuries. But evolution occurs over the course of billions of years. Thus we start with a problem. We have to move to observing the present and inferring things about the past. We see this confusion regularly in discussions of whether evolutionary theory is really science.

But even further, we have to look at natural processes that accomplish results. Now at first, as primitive human beings, we would think of events simply as individual happenings. So language to discuss processes would almost always involve an actor. In fact, when we filled our universe with spirits and gods, they very often fulfilled that need of an actor.

But for a process that simply happens because that’s the way it is, we’re a bit short on words, and we’re often uncomfortable with those that we have invented. Note the insecurity produced by the words “random” or “unguided.”

Yet as a theist who accepts evolutionary theory, I believe that even the unguided processes are not, ultimately, absolutely unguided. They’re just unguided in the sense in which we are used to using the terms. If there is a God who created the laws of the universe, then the processes that are constrained by those laws are ultimately fulfilling his will, even if his will was only that those processes work in that way.

Nonetheless, perhaps we need a language to describe action without conscious intervention. Or, on the other hand, we could just realize that the language of design used in describing unguided or remotely guided processes is metaphorical.

Ultimately, you can see, I don’t believe language makes reality. It just simultaneously makes it possible to discuss something, while also making it a bit confusing. It too evolved with constraints.

If any readers of this blog don’t also read The Loom, you should. But in case some of you don’t, make sure not to miss this three part series by Dr. Ken Miller, (part 2, [...]]]> If it were a court case, Luskin would be getting the book thrown at him when penalty time came.

If any readers of this blog don’t also read The Loom, you should. But in case some of you don’t, make sure not to miss this three part series by Dr. Ken Miller, (part 2, part 3) biologist and author of Finding Darwin’s God and Just a Theory.

His presentation is masterful and comprehensible, a rare enough combination. We need more of this kind of writing in the creation-evolution debate. Carl Zimmer regularly produces excellent work on science that is comprehensible by outsiders, and this guest series is a special treat.

There are many [...]]]> Carl Zimmer has a post on the Loom that discusses irreducible complexity along with some examples. I found it very interesting how we start with a bicycle as irreducibly complex, a claim of an intelligent design (ID) advocate, and then see how the irreducible is reduced through the magic of Google.

There are many ways in which ID is less irrational than young earth creationism. For example, ID requires one to deny things that are much nearer the cutting edge of science, whereas young earth creationism requires one to deny well established theories from a wide variety of disciplines.

But there’s one area in which I think ID has managed to be more destructive to sound science than young earth creationism, and that’s in causing atrophy of the imagination. Because ID provides an answer to many things that are not known, or purports to do so, it tends to make people quit looking or quit trying to imagine what might be. This atrophy of the imagination winds up with ID advocates not even checking to see if the problem they propose has already been solved.

This is simply one instance of a more general problem: Satisfaction with existing answers. There is nothing like being satisfied with the answers you have to prevent you from finding new and better ones. This satisfaction often manifests itself in the “insurmountable problems” attack on any form of new technology. “It doesn’t work now and it never will,” the critics announce with great solemnity. The answer to which, of course, is to overcome the problem.

Similarly, the attack can come in the form of damning with faint praise: “Sure, that will work, sort of, but it won’t solve the whole problem.” In the creation-evolution debate, this argument is repeated over and over in stages.

“There are no transitional fossils.”

So paleontologists find one.

“There are not enough transitional fossils.”

So paleontologists find dozens more.

“Well, you found a few, but there are still not enough.”

It doesn’t end.

Now ID advocates could turn this argument against me, or more purposefully against scientific opponents of ID. Are we too satisfied with current answers? Are we damning with faint praise? Well, I think we’re all safe from the “faint praise” accusation. Successful prediction #1 has yet to be made so that it might be praised faintly and thus damned.

But is there the possibility that satisfaction with current answers is preventing progress? This one is more difficult to tell. The absence of any new answers to actual questions is a bad indicator for ID, but I wish they would go ahead, spend some time in the laboratory, and attempt to produce such an answer so that it could be criticized. Since the beginning of discovery, the proper answer to the critic who says it will never work, or will never provide a satisfactory answer, is to go out and make it work or provide that answer.

As it is, it is the ID crowd who are trying to make us satisfied with an existing answer, and are trying to prevent us from finding a new one.

I’m not a scientist. I don’t work in the natural sciences. But I do read a wide variety of materials from various fields, and I have to say that the field of evolutionary biology looks nothing like the static sort of field stuck in a 19th century theory that hasn’t changed which is described by some (see the Dispatches comment on Steve Fuller.) It isn’t a field that is blocking discovery or trying to defend an entrenched orthodoxy. It is a field that is constantly producing new ideas. In fact, one of the great resources of its critics is the criticism of existing ideas produced within the field.

The ID critics perform an interesting sleight of mind when they both use quotes from various working evolutionary biologists (normally taken out of context, but still!) to show how the whole theory is falling apart, while at the same time say that the whole field is static and is blocking new ideas. That very active criticism and reexamination is the sign of a healthy field of science, involved in serious discovery and growth.

And just what have the ID advocates produced to match? What I see is defense after defense of a static position, one that is much, much more deserving of the epithet “18th century social theory” than is the theory of evolution.