Skip to main content

Tom McKnight contra ID

During a talk sponsored by the Veritas Forum, where he is the principle speaker in opposition to Hugh Ross and another creationist, Tom McKnight points out that intelligent design has its origin in a theory called" interlocking complexity," developed by Herman Miller (a Noble prize winner at Rice University). According to this theory, things evolve together independently until they form a complexus, which then performs a function that no part could do alone.

McKnight also gives a funny comparison of ID: a four-legged horse, says McKnight, is irreducibly complex because, should you remove one of its legs, it won't be able to go anywhere, or at least it won't be able to go fast.

The same fellow also quoted Augustine's criticism of the misuse of Genesis AND cited the source of the idea of ID... must find that talk and get his name!

p.s.: I contacted McKnight and he sent me some interesting links. One is to a website that also contains information about Herman Miller, mentioned above:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...