Monday, July 28, 2008
Extra! Extra!
This just in!DISCOVERY INSTITUTE LIES!
Film at eleven!
Actually, there is a bit of news involved. It seems that word of the penchants of the Seattle Spew is starting to reach the more rational Right. John Derbyshire of National Review has been on board for a while and now Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs is catching on to something that anyone who pays any attention to the activities of creationists has known for a long time.
Of course, it is of interest that what the DI is lying about is its connection with Islamic creationists. Bruce Chapman swats at strawmen but there's this from the DI's Muslim point man, David Berlinski:
There's a long interesting tradition of design theoretic arguments within Islamic theology that goes straight back to the 9th century. And there are outstanding figures within Islamic theology who participated in these discussions ... there's no reason to be surprised, this is a very rich tradition. We need to get together, we need to talk. There needs to be an exchange, a current needs to flow.
This is a hot issue. We're in the midst of a world-wide religious revival. I mean, historians 500 years from now will talk about the religious revival of the late 20th, early 21st century. There are a billion Muslims out there who are taking Islamic doctrine very seriously. Christianity too.
But wait! ...theology? ... revival? ... That can't be right. ID is all about the science! It has nothing to do with religion!
I know because the Disco told me so.
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I know because the Disco told me so.
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Labels: Designer As God
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Lately, I've adopted the following tactic, just to see what will happen: concede the point that design theory is theologically neutral, on the grounds that Kant was basically right when he argued that one cannot infer that the designer is the God of classical theism. So one must take a leap of faith in order to claim that the designer is God, and in that respect, design theory cannot offer an alternative to fideism.
We'll see what happens!
Sober, on the other hand, argues that design theory cannot yield testable hypotheses in the first place without first specifying the identity of the designer. I find this intriguing and I'm not yet sure what I think of it.
One thing that occurred to me yesterday is that design theory is just as consistent with Gnosticism as it is with mainstream monotheism. That cannot be a good thing for the Christian Right.
We'll see what happens!
Sober, on the other hand, argues that design theory cannot yield testable hypotheses in the first place without first specifying the identity of the designer. I find this intriguing and I'm not yet sure what I think of it.
One thing that occurred to me yesterday is that design theory is just as consistent with Gnosticism as it is with mainstream monotheism. That cannot be a good thing for the Christian Right.
Sober, on the other hand, argues that design theory cannot yield testable hypotheses in the first place without first specifying the identity of the designer. I find this intriguing and I'm not yet sure what I think of it.
I'm just starting on Sober and it's going to take me a while because I'll have to work my way painfully through the math (like Wilkins, I was badly taught math, though in a different way). A quick look forward, though, makes me think that Sober is going for a version of the "critical observation" argument we discussed before. In order to make a "likelihood" argument that design is the better explanation for any feature that exists in the world, you have to be able to make a judgment that the designer would have wanted feature X but not Y. Without an independent reason to believe that, neither the argument from good design nor the argument from bad design (a la Gould and the panda's thumb) work as stand-alone arguments (though either can be used to counter the other). Without that, there is no way to assign any likelihood to any observation as supporting or disconfirming design. With objects of human design (or where you assume human-like design, as in SETI), you have independent criteria.
One thing that occurred to me yesterday is that design theory is just as consistent with Gnosticism as it is with mainstream monotheism. That cannot be a good thing for the Christian Right.
Except they don't care whether the argument "works." The whole purpose of it is to give believers "space" in which to write in their a priori beliefs ... as Dembski put it, to clear the ground for Christianity. They are not seriously concerned that their target audience will chose gnosticism or deism or space aliens.
I'm just starting on Sober and it's going to take me a while because I'll have to work my way painfully through the math (like Wilkins, I was badly taught math, though in a different way). A quick look forward, though, makes me think that Sober is going for a version of the "critical observation" argument we discussed before. In order to make a "likelihood" argument that design is the better explanation for any feature that exists in the world, you have to be able to make a judgment that the designer would have wanted feature X but not Y. Without an independent reason to believe that, neither the argument from good design nor the argument from bad design (a la Gould and the panda's thumb) work as stand-alone arguments (though either can be used to counter the other). Without that, there is no way to assign any likelihood to any observation as supporting or disconfirming design. With objects of human design (or where you assume human-like design, as in SETI), you have independent criteria.
One thing that occurred to me yesterday is that design theory is just as consistent with Gnosticism as it is with mainstream monotheism. That cannot be a good thing for the Christian Right.
Except they don't care whether the argument "works." The whole purpose of it is to give believers "space" in which to write in their a priori beliefs ... as Dembski put it, to clear the ground for Christianity. They are not seriously concerned that their target audience will chose gnosticism or deism or space aliens.
I think that some of them care whether or not the argument "works". Perhaps I'm not as cynical as I should be?
Often when I read posts on Uncommon Descent or elsewhere, I get the impression that Christians who support intelligent design do so because it gives them an empirical basis to their belief.
Ken Miller, for example, is often criticized (and sometimes castigated) for presenting his Catholicism as an ad hoc supplement to his commitment to science. The problem with his view, as many ID people see it, is that there's no empirical relation between his faith and his science.
For those people who are genuinely concerned about such matters, I'd like to point out that if design theory is neutral on the identity of the designer, then it is ultimately just as fideistic as is the theistic evolutionism of Haught or Miller.
None of this speaks to whether ID is good science or not -- it's more about giving the ID crowd enough rope to hang themselves with, by showing that if design theory is theologically neutral (and it has to be, otherwise it would be a violation of church and state to teach it in a public school), then it cannot serve the religious and cultural agenda that its supporters want it to serve.
To you and me this is obvious -- I'm hoping that it's not obvious to them because no one has pointed it out, and not because they don't care about being inconsistent.
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Often when I read posts on Uncommon Descent or elsewhere, I get the impression that Christians who support intelligent design do so because it gives them an empirical basis to their belief.
Ken Miller, for example, is often criticized (and sometimes castigated) for presenting his Catholicism as an ad hoc supplement to his commitment to science. The problem with his view, as many ID people see it, is that there's no empirical relation between his faith and his science.
For those people who are genuinely concerned about such matters, I'd like to point out that if design theory is neutral on the identity of the designer, then it is ultimately just as fideistic as is the theistic evolutionism of Haught or Miller.
None of this speaks to whether ID is good science or not -- it's more about giving the ID crowd enough rope to hang themselves with, by showing that if design theory is theologically neutral (and it has to be, otherwise it would be a violation of church and state to teach it in a public school), then it cannot serve the religious and cultural agenda that its supporters want it to serve.
To you and me this is obvious -- I'm hoping that it's not obvious to them because no one has pointed it out, and not because they don't care about being inconsistent.
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