Thoughts in a Haystack

Randal Rauser, and his Food for the Soul blog at The Christian Post, is back at the ol' ID stand peddling nonsense, as he has done before. The interesting part is that, much as he did in criticizing Expelled, he is doing it under cover of reasonableness:

I'm sure that anyone who follows the ID "debate" (read: "dishonest PR campaign") knows where this is going: the poor IDeologists are being "marginalized" from science. Here is the gist of it:

The problem with the first is that, if this "Designer" is not God, why do ID advocates insist the "Designer" can't be identified by science and that its identity is a strictly theological question? If a natural being was the "Designer" there would be no reason to rule out a priori exploring its identity and the means it used to effectuate its design and when it did its designing. Refusing to consider those questions not only demonstrates that they are not taking the non-theistic possibilities seriously, but that they are refusing to do science itself.

As to the second, simply throwing in some fact revealed by science does not make a proposition scientific. If someone argued that the fact that the Earth takes approximately 365 days to orbit the Earth (which, in turn, determines the length of the seasons that happen to be well suited to living things), was grounds to "infer" a designer, need we take that as a scientific argument? William Whewell, an advocate of "Natural Theology," in The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation, did exactly that and Darwin himself pointed out that that life adapting to the length of the seasons was just as valid an explanation (and scientific to boot, in that it could be tested). Whewell's argument was an appeal to a "scientific" fact without being a scientific (rather than theological) argument. Whewell was at least smart enough to know what he was doing and had the intellectual integrity to state so clearly.

The fact that DNA is complex is not, itself, evidence of design. Many things that we consider to be "natural" exhibit complex patterns: weather systems, climate systems, snowflakes, crystal structures, etc. Of course, you can claim that each individual snowflake is "designed" but how would we test it, anymore than we could test design in DNA? What is missing from ID is empiric evidence (the sina qua non of science) for a designer, the way we have evidence for evolution.

All of ID comes down to two arguments: 1) evolution can't work -- all of which claims have been shown to be either outright untrue or not valid objections because they rely on a misstatement of what evolutionary theory holds -- and 2) "boy, that sure looks complex, so it must have been designed!" -- which is not a theory at all, much less a testable one, and, therefore, cannot be scientific.

Scientists are not marginalizing IDers from science ... they have marginalized themselves by doing theology instead of science.
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