Is intelligent design a plausible theory?

[Leela]

And here is Thomas Jefferson’s take on intelligent design … so obvious even to him. in the early 1800s. (From a letter to John Adams)

“The argument which they rest on as triumphant and unanswerable is that, in every hypothesis of cosmogony, you must admit an eternal pre-existence of something; and according to the rule of sound philosophy, you are never to employ two principles to solve a difficulty when one will suffice. They say, then, that it is more simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world, as it is now going on, and may forever go on by the principle of reproduction which we see and witness, than to believe in the eternal pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or creator of the world, a being whom we see not, and know not, of whose form substance and mode or place of existence, or of action no sense informs us, no power of the mind enables us to delineate or comprehend. On the contrary, I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and infinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters, and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, the generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. We see too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos.”

I wonder if it is possible to apply any of the tests for intelligent design to religion itself. What was clear to Jefferson (based on other quotes) is that all religions are designed by human beings. I, however, tend to think of religions as having evolved. Is there a way to decide who is right through ID theory?

Best,
Leela

 

[Touchstone]

I wonder if it is possible to apply any of the tests for intelligent design to religion itself. What was clear to Jefferson (based on other quotes) is that all religions are designed by human beings. I, however, tend to think of religions as having evolved. Is there a way to decide who is right through ID theory?

Best,
Leela

Yeah, I still think quoting Jefferson, even to make such a point, helps to obscure the vacuity of quoting Jefferson (or Einstein, or Darwin, or Dawkins) in the first place, but that’s an interesting point. My reaction to the Jefferson quote above was bemusement; if Jefferson is someone to heed, well what does he have to say about Charlemagne’s Christianity?

Suddenly, Jefferson would become no authority at all, on the merits of Christianity or Intelligent Design, I surmise. His words carry weight when they are found agreeable to one’s point, it seems.

I think you can find cases of design (Scientology springs to mind, and perhaps Mormonism), but evolution seems a better, if imperfect, metaphor for the development of religions in human culture.

-TS

 

[tonyrey]

. I, however, tend to think of religions as having evolved. Is there a way to decide who is right through ID theory?
Leela

I agree that religions have evolved. Primitive man believed in sacrifice to placate spirits and deities. The great world religions teach self-sacrifice and love for others. Since their message is fundamentally the same - that we reap what we sow - they are all right

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Touchstone

… if Jefferson is someone to heed, well what does he have to say about Charlemagne’s Christianity?

Not much, I’m afraid, not much that is complimentary anyway. You will find many Jefferson quotes at atheist websites, as if he were one of their own. But you will never see that lengthy anti-atheist quote above posted at an atheist website, will you?

But Jefferson shares with Christians a favorable sentiment about Jesus.

“To the corruption of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself; I am a Christian in the only sense he wished anyone to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others.” Thomas Jefferson

His words carry weight when they are found agreeable to one’s point, it seems.

No, his words carry weight when they are truthful and seem to resonate with common sense. Jefferson, living two hundred years ago, could use common sense to dispute atheism, as he did in the passage cited above. Where has anyone in this forum used common sense to prove that Intelligent Design does not exist? Newton in this common sense preceded Jefferson (and Aquinas preceded Newton) and Darwin and Einstein followed him.

But it doesn’t take a genius to see order and laws in the universe that were favorable from the start to the evolution of life and the appearance of Man who alone is able to grasp those laws and that order. Atheism is not rooted by a long shot in philosophical or scientific certainty, and Jefferson is making that point for the record.

However, rather than continue this line of exchange, I suggest we leave Jefferson behind. If you’re interested in starting another thread on God and the Founding Fathers, I’ll be glad to join you.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Touchstone

In post #98 you carry on about irreducible complexity as if it were an intellectual disease. Why so? You know very well that evolution is a hopelessly bad explanation for the first appearance of life. That being a bad explanation, what other explanation do you have? Lucky molecules? On the basis of what statistical analysis is that likely? Please name author and book. Remember, you are looking for odds in favor of a lucky genetic lottery, not odds against. If the odds are overwhelmingly against, that is hardly a hopeful sign for atheists.

You want to get out of this dilemma by positing an unknowable environment in which the odds might have been more favorable rather than less, but you can’t do that, because, as you rightly point out, we weren’t there to observe the conditions for the creation of life. You therefore have no case whatever except conjecture. The conjecture of intelligent design, then, is just as valid as your own, except that statistical probabilities will tend to favor intelligent design rather than a self made mousetrap (not to mention that in addition to the five parts of the mousetrap, there has to be a reason to make a mousetrap, and there has to be someone to set the bait, and there has to be some cheese).

Though Einstein wanted to know God’s thoughts, it’s doubtful that God
meant for us to know His mind in its entirety. This is why the secrets of the creation of the universe and the creation of life are shrouded in mystery. In this sense God gives us room to breathe, and free will to accept or reject Him. I never realized until later in life how very important it is to see this. God does not give theists an easy way to prove He exists, and does not give atheists a smoking pistol to prove that God is dead. Rather, it is not through the head that God wants us to know Him, but through the heart. The open heart will accept. The closed heart will reject. In either case, the head will go along.

This is demonstrated in the discussion of this thread. As you have stated in a recent post, and as I maintained earlier in the thread, there is no infallible way to prove that irreducible complexity does or does not lead us to intelligent design. Probability statistics tend to work against the notion of “lucky” molecules. God does not load the dice in favor of the atheist by any means. The likelihood that the first living organism came into being by chance is so remote that we are able to say, without being ridiculous, that it was very unlikely. God grant’s the theist this much of an edge.

But God also grants the atheist his reason to doubt. The atheist can reply: “How do we know?” We cannot know the conditions present on the planet at the emergence of life … how favorable or unfavorable they were to the leap from inanimate matter to animate. No doubt experiments could be conducted, and have been conducted, to see if that was possible. So far these experiments have led to nothing approximating the requirements of a first creature coming together all at once, irreducibly complex, not only able to sustain itself but also to develop a coding system sufficiently complex to include reproduction among its genetic functions. Even so, the atheist can argue and hold out forever. Statistical probabilities aside, anything is possible he will argue (except, of course, a Higher Intelligence).

But God has absolutely blocked the atheist from proving his case. Suppose it were possible that an army of biochemical engineers could somehow and somewhere isolate and replicate the conditions on the planet believed to have prevailed at the dawn of life, and suppose some primitive form of life emerged from the experiment. Nothing would have been proved but that the scientists had to use intelligent design of their own to provoke life out of an immensely complex experiment. But this would be a further hint (no doubt easily rebuffed by hard core skeptics) that there is a vastly greater Intelligence at work behind the creation of life.

And so we come full circle. We are not going to approach God or flee from God by galloping down intellectual highways. God has made sure of that. It is by loving God that we get to know Him, and it is by considering the mere idea of God ridiculous that we will not get to know Him … and will remain, for whatever unknown reason, comfortable with our affliction.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Leela

I wonder if it is possible to apply any of the tests for intelligent design to religion itself. What was clear to Jefferson (based on other quotes) is that all religions are designed by human beings. I, however, tend to think of religions as having evolved. Is there a way to decide who is right through ID theory?

This looks like a subject for a new thread?

 

[Shredderbeam]

Shredderbeam

*Which biological features exist that are demonstrably irreducibly complex? *

Michael Behe’s discussion in *Darwin’s Black Box * might be explored, pp. 69-73 where he treat the case of the bacterial flagellum. Depending on how much of Behe you have already read, you might want to first read pages 42-46 where he starts explaining irreducible complexity with the metaphor of the mousetrap.

To me, a question just as interesting as the one you asked is this:

Since evolution deals only with one life form evolving from another, what mechanism have evolutionists found that explains the likelihood there was a leap from inanimate matter to animate matter? And what are the mathematical odds that this would happen? We’d all like to know, wouldn’t we? Can you help with this?

The bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex: youtube.com/watch?v=K_HVrjKcvrU

The flagellum, minus the whip part, is a “poison injector” of sorts.

There likely wasn’t any great “leap” from non-living matter to matter, rather a series of small steps that blurred the line. I think the current line of thought is in the area of “replicators”, or small, extremely basic bits of proteins that replicate themselves by using material from their environment. Their formation might be unlikely, I don’t know, but it only had to happen once in a window of a few hundred million years.

 

[wasmit]

Charlemagne, why do you keep saying this:

“You know very well that evolution is a hopelessly bad explanation for the first appearance of life.”

When it has already been refuted in this thread?

 

[MindOverMatter]

When it has already been refuted in this thread?

You do know that there are two different kinds of intelligent design arguments?
While Paley’s design and behe’s blackbox fail to really do the business, there is on the other hand observable evidence of very meaningful realities within the structure and function of various systems. Somethings can’t be simply explained away by chance and necessity, or the theory of evolution as a whole.

The first organism, though relatively simple, i think would have been very complex in so far as it would of had to perform functional operations such a self replication and energy transfer in order to be a sufficient farther to all living things. Surely, in terms of physical empirical explanation, we will have to accept that the reality of some functions could not have simply evolved, but rather would have been brute facts regardless of being the immediate product of natural processes?

I think, in so as the first living organism is concerned and the functions it would have to perform, i find it very hard to escape the fact that such a organism would have to be irreducible complex. Why? For the simple fact that it cannot borrow its functions or parts from previous organisms. This would seem to suggest that the strivence for life isn’t a product of evolution itself, but rather it is simply built into physical reality. This obviously leads the question of what built it in, if it was not nature.

By the way, I’m pro evolution.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

*By the way, I’m pro evolution. *

So am I. Nor does the Catholic Church oppose evolution if it is not taken to be a refutation of the Creator and his Creation. No straight thinking scientist would do so, though some crooked thinking scientists have.

 

[reggieM]

This is a great quote from a new book by James Le Fanu:

Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves

When cosmologists can reliably infer what happened in the first few minutes of the birth of the universe and geologists can measure the movements of vast continents to the nearest centimeter, then the inscrutability of those genetic instructions that should distinguish a human from a fly, or the failure to account for something as elementary as how we recall a telephone number, throws into sharp relief the unfathomability of ourselves. It is as if we, and, indeed, all living things, are in some way different, profounder, and more complex than the physical world to which we belong . . . This is not just a matter of science not yet knowing all the facts; rather, there is the sense that something of immense importance is “missing” that might transform the bare bones of genes into the wondrous diversity of the living world and the monotonous electrical firing of the neurons of the brain into the vast spectrum of sensations and ideas of the human mind.

From the book review:

The triumph of science in explaining man’s unique place in the universe might seem almost complete. But in this lucid and compelling account, James Le Fanu describes how in the recent past science has come face-to-face with two seemingly unanswerable questions concerning the nature of genetic inheritance and the workings of the brain–questions that suggest there is, after all, “more than we can know.”

“Scientists do not ‘do’ wonder,” he writes in his introduction. “Rather . . . they have interpreted the world through the prism of supposing there is nothing in principle that cannot be accounted for.” But Le Fanu argues that there is nothing so full of wonder as life itself. As revealed by recent scientific research, it is simply not possible to get from the monotonous sequence of genes strung out along the double helix to the infinite beauty and diversity of the living world, or from the electrical activity of the brain to the richness and abundant creativity of the human mind. Le Fanu’s exploration of these mysteries, and his analysis of where they might lead us in our thinking about the nature and purpose of human existence, form the impassioned and riveting heart of Why Us?

 

[reggieM]

You do know that there are two different kinds of intelligent design arguments?
While Paley’s design and behe’s blackbox fail to really do the business, there is on the other hand observable evidence of very meaningful realities within the structure and function of various systems.

I think there are different ID arguments but they’re all based on the teleological argument – observing design in various systems. The subject matter is different but the idea remains the same whether the focus is on cosmological fine tuning or irreducible complexity in biological structures.

 

[tonyrey]

I think there are different ID arguments but they’re all based on the teleological argument – observing design in various systems. The subject matter is different but the idea remains the same whether the focus is on cosmological fine tuning or irreducible complexity in biological structures.

The strongest argument for Design is the inadequacy of the Chance hypothesis. How can purposeful activity emerge from that which lacks purpose?

 

[Charlemagne_II]

*How can purposeful activity emerge from that which lacks purpose? *

Indeed! Did the universe itself come about by chance? So it would seem according to the atheist hypothesis.

 

[MindOverMatter]

*How can purposeful activity emerge from that which lacks purpose? *

Indeed! Did the universe itself come about by chance? So it would seem according to the atheist hypothesis.

Heres another one. Chance requires the existence of preceding events, since chance is intrinsically related to beings in the sense that chance happens to beings. In other words, there has to be such a thing as being and time before we can speak meaningfully of chance. So how can the Universe as a “whole” (everything physical) arise by chance?

Would it not be more reasonable to suggest that the Universe, its nature and everything it contains including all meaningful information, is absolutely determined by something outside that which is physical?

 

[Charlemagne_II]

*Would it not be more reasonable to suggest that the Universe, its nature and everything it contains including all meaningful information, is absolutely determined by something outside that which is physical? *

It would be reasonable and plausible, but some will still be waiting for the proof. These same people know such proof is not forthcoming so long as the standard they insist upon is required. How do you put the Big Bang in a test tube and watch it explode? You certainly can’t do it by chance, and even if hypothetically you did it by experiment, it would have to be an intelligently designed experiment.

There’s no escaping the real likelihood that the universe and everything in it was designed, rather than a freak accident of something exploding out of nothing.

As Darwin put it, the mind of the Creator is analogous to the mind of man, and that is why we are able to see Him in His creation.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

This may interest the Dawkins disciples.

churchinhistory.org/pages/atheism/atheism.htm

 

[RobbyS]

The bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex: youtube.com/watch?v=K_HVrjKcvrU

The flagellum, minus the whip part, is a “poison injector” of sorts.

There likely wasn’t any great “leap” from non-living matter to matter, rather a series of small steps that blurred the line. I think the current line of thought is in the area of “replicators”, or small, extremely basic bits of proteins that replicate themselves by using material from their environment. Their formation might be unlikely, I don’t know, but it only had to happen once in a window of a few hundred million years.

The “small steps” thing is mere supposition. At what level do you start? Since the first firm distinction of organic and inorganic matter, it has been assumed at the “chemical” level. But we now know that at that level we are dealing with things and “forces” of relatively large size. We know know that the simple atomic theory that was available in 1860 provides a no more accurate picture of all “reality” than the cosmology of that time. The “particles” that we have been able to trace, stand in size in relation to an “atom” pretty much as a bus stands in relation to the solar system. As important are the force fields that fill space, nd whose real nature we still do not know. So the idea of making life in a test tube --which itself proves nothing about how life originated OUTSIDE a test tube-- will involve more than sticking molecules together. Who knows but intelligence itself may be itself a kind of “force”,as the Starwars pantheism would have it, or something that is beyond us, at least at this time.

 

[srlucado]

Is intelligent design a plausible theory?

No. Frankly, it’s just silly.

Just because Darwinian natural selection has flaws does not mean that “Intelligent Design” is remotely close to being an intellectually valid alternative, any more than me coming up with The Tinkerbell Creation Theory is a valid alternative.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Just because Darwinian natural selection has flaws does not mean that “Intelligent Design” is remotely close to being an intellectually valid alternative, any more than me coming up with The Tinkerbell Creation Theory is a valid alternative.

This is not so much an argument as a slur against Tinkerbell!!! :tsktsk: