[extropy-chat] Intelligent Design -- take *this*...

[gts]

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 17:34:08 -0500, Hughes, James J.  
<james.hughes at trincoll.edu> wrote:

> I'm glad they lost but
>
> (1) ID could be by "natural" causation, i.e. superintelligence

The court considered and rejected that argument:

"Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer
could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious  
alternative to
God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including
Defendants’ expert witnesses. (20:102-03 (Behe))."

This is not to say that we here should not consider a natural designer.  
However Behe, Dempski. and the Discovery Institute clearly have a  
religious agenda. The movement came into existence as a response to the  
rejection of old-style Creationism. ID is essentially a stripped-down  
version of Creationism -- a desperate attempt to wedge religion into  
science class.

> (2) ID does not require irreducible complexity, only statistically
> unlikely complexity

Behe's version requires irreducible complexity, but perhaps not Dempski's?

> (4) Indeed, proving the central proposition of statistically unlikely
> complexity in the peer-reviewed arena is what is important

I think the enormous stretch of time over which life has evolved presents  
a mental obstacle. It is almost impossible for the mind to fathom things  
in the hundreds of millions, much less billions.

Personally I subscribe to a sort of universal darwinism. Though it falls  
short of a theory of everything, darwinism in general helps to explain  
everything from the evolution of galaxies to the evolution of culture and  
knowledge. I consider even a multiverse scenario in which ours is one fit  
enough to have survived.

-gts