I would categorize this in the second group, along with pantheism and panentheism. I’d rather use the term “Alien”. It’s another being that didn’t always exist, isn’t human, isn’t from this planet. I’d prefer the term “Alien”. If you’d rather use “God”, that’s fair.
Reply 1 of 2 or maybe 3
i kind of figured you’d put it your group two. It does not belong there. I actually have an alternative God-concept which does not fit into available categories.
The word “God” invokes specific ideas in the minds of both believers and disbelievers, so I can understand your preference for an alternative. However, “alien” is even more loaded and way too broadly used to be useful. Which aliens? The little green men from Roswell or the illegals smuggling themselves and their dope across the Arizona border?
I invented a word, “Geon” which is specific to my god-concept. I don’t use it in normal communications because it takes a few chapters to lay the groundwork for its explanation. You and I could use it for these discussions if it works for you.
Also, as a strict constructivist, I see Behe’s argument as a very clever and subtle non-scientific argument couched in scientific terms. I am open to the possibility that I am wrong in this. My question about intelligent design is: how can it be falsified? What prediction does intelligent design make that, if it is not observed in a certain system, establishes that there was no intelligent designer?
This is a worthy conversational point.
I don’t know what you mean by “strict constructivist.” It invokes the image of an anally retentive dogmatic atheist wearing a John Locke Halloween mask. Please, no!
You are probably right about Behe’s arguments in Darwin’s Black Box. He does better in The Edge of Evolution, but I guess that you’ll have the same complaint. But consider the subject with which he is dealing.
I’ll assume that you’ve read Darwin’s Origin of Species as well. His arguments are identical in nature and quality to Behe’s. While Darwin cites considerable scientific data in support of his theories and tells us everything we wanted to know about finches but were afraid to ask, none of his data actually applies to his theories. He is a true magician, waving evidence of overwhelming diversity before his audience with one hand, then bringing out his hat and extracting the rabbit with the other.
Darwin’s rabbit, notions like “survival of the fittest” a.k.a. “natural selection,” and random mutation, are not scientific principles. Natural selection is a simple marketing rule. explaining why you cannot find cut-up dodo birds in a supermarket meat case, and why you don’t drive to the supermarket in your new Edsel. It has zero predictive value.
Although I do not pore over the biological literature and therefore may have missed something, to the best of my knowledge there are no experiments which demonstrate that random (except for a few single-point) mutations are capable of generating useful, long-term variations, much less species change.
Admittedly, these changes do occur. Scientists and atheists have already discarded the notion of intelligent engineering, so for them, random mutations are the default cause. But that is hardly scientific.
Suppose (this is an example for the sake of argument, not of my own ideas) that God exists and created little gremlins to design life. Programmed, tiny energy-beings like the nanobots our scientists are currently working on, except that God’s gremlins are designed to understand DNA coding and are capable of snatching selected nucleotides from a DNA segment and replacing them with others, just like a modern computer programmer selects a desired bit-sequence.
These gremlin programmers are responsible for all the useful DNA changes,
i cannot prove the existence of these gremlins. I cannot devise an experiment in which we film them changing a DNA sequence, any more than you can watch or record random mutations at work building new proteins and biological motors.
i think that we can accept the available evidence for random mutations of DNA. We can show that quasi-random mutations do occur (fruit fly irradiation) but we cannot prove that random mutations produce
useful changes. More to the point, the only useful changes to DNA of which we know the cause, for certain, were made by human engineers.
That would make intelligent design the
only known cause** of useful genetic changes. Yet, I.D. is unscientific. In the meantime, mysterious, random changes which occur without cause, are treated as a scientific force to be reckoned with. Go figure.
I propose that in terms of verifiability, my gremlin theory is on the same playing field as Darwinian mutations, and that the game is still in progress.
(Remember, Gremlin Theory is a temporary invention for the sake of argument. My actual theory involves potentially verifiable gremlins.)
This argument can be summed up thusly: Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory, and neither is neo-Darwinism.
Your proposal for the standard by which intelligent design can be verified is worthless. Was it a test? Suppose we apply your standard, “
What prediction does intelligent design make that, if it is not observed in a certain system, establishes that there was no intelligent designer?” to the original Apple Computer engineering department (Steve Jobs’ garage). Steve is clearly intelligent, by any standards. Could you have predicted the Apple Computer,or the success of the business he founded? Could you have predicted what Steve would not have engineered?
Is there any way that you could have lurked outside Steve’s garage, or Joe Blow’s garage, and determine the existence, or not, of an intelligent designer within on the basis of what did not emerge?
