Skip to main content

possibly embarrassing questions to both sides of the ID. Natural theology considered

To opponents of ID: If someone successfully demonstrated that one feature of nature (I'll call it D below) must have been intelligently designed, then wouldn't this demonstration be able to withstand any number of counter-examplesof parts of nature that manifest either poor design or natural selection?

To proponents of ID: If D is sufficient to demonstrate the existence the intelligent designer, then wouldn't the counterexamples that opponents would doubtlessly mention be relevant to the question of the designer's goodness, power and wisdom? Wouldn't the preference for a natural explanation that goes along with the scientific method require that one who recognized the need for an intelligent designer grant only as much intelligence and power to this designer as would suffice to enable it to produce the observed effects?

My comment: at the end of the day the ID argument proceeds as if God were an engineer of biomechanisms, and those who think evolution disproves God have the same conception of the divine in mind. Both are mistaken.

Classical natural theology bypasses this debate: it attempts to demonstrate on the basis of features present in the world here and now that nature is continuously caused to continue to exist by a Being that is immaterial, infinitely perfect (and whose perfections include knowledge and freedom) and unique. These arguments are in no way undercut by the fact that the world is a bit of a mess. They work with or without evolution. They prove more than could be hoped for by the most ambitious and successful argument for intelligent design ever could.

Comments

臉蛋 said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
3:35 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological
Post a Comment
Read more

continuing the discussion with Tim in a new post

Hi Tim, I am posting my reply here, because the great blogmeister won't let me put it all in a comment. Me thinks I get your point: is it that we can name and chimps can't, so therefore we are of greater value than chimps? Naming is something above and beyond what a chimp can do, right? In other words, you are illustrating the point I am making (if I catch your drift). My argument is only a sketch, but I think adding the ability to name names, as it were, is still not enough to make the argument seem cogent. For one can still ask why we prefer being able to name over other skills had by animals but not by humans. The objector would demand a more convincing reason. The answer I have in mind is, to put it briefly, that there is something infinite about human beings in comparison with the subhuman. That "something" has to do with our ability to think of the meaning of the cosmos. Whereas one might say"He's got the whole world in His han
2 comments
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here.&qu
Post a Comment
Read more