Journal pudge's Journal: Non-Interventionist Intelligent Design 17
I noted that the notion of ID does not require interventionism, but I had trouble finding specific assertions either pro or con from ID proponents themselves (although this excellent, and very long, article, about the philosophy of science and the evolution debate, agrees with me).
So, I pulled out a book I read over a decade ago (how time flies), called The Creation Hypothesis, edited by J.P. Moreland, a professor of mine. It's a well-known book in ID circles. The foreword is from Phillip E. Johnson, and it includes a chapter on Intelligent Design by William Dembski. All are prominent ID proponents, and all believe in interventionism.
Moreland notes in the introduction:
Second, [as a response to the idea that evolution proves design is implausible], theists can grant, for the sake of argument, that the general theory of evolution is true, and go on and build a design argument based on broader features of order and purpose, even on the existence of the mechanisms of evolution. It can be claimed that evolution merely explains how God designed the living world; it does not remove the need for a Designer. This response grows stronger the more we discover that living things are even more complicated than was believed to be the case during the time of Darwin. As the intricacy of organisms becomes more apparent, it becomes less plausible to believe that the processes of evolution could mindlessly produce life, and it becomes more plausible to believe they were guided by an Intelligence in such a way as to overcome the improbabilities of life arising in the first place.
The main problems with this response are that it is hard to square with the early chapters of Genesis and with the empirical facts of science itself. So while the response could be adopted merely for the sake of argument, the authors of this book do not utilize it.
(Emphasis added.)
There are two points I wish to highlight here. First, Moreland explicitly acknowledges that such a view constitutes a design by an intelligence. Being that this is only 1994, the phrase "Intelligent Design" is not often used, even by authors in this book (except Dembski), but clearly Moreland is saying that this is a reasonable alternative response to naturalism.
Second, his only objections to it are not on the grounds that it doesn't fit Intelligent Design, but that it doesn't fit his theology, nor science; but the former objection is irrelevant to the idea of whether the idea is properly a part of what is known as Intelligent Design (which is explicitly nontheological, as stated by most of its proponents), and the latter is simply an argument against Darwinism itself.
So in the opinion of the editor of one of the most prominent ID collections in the last 20 years, it seems to me that my definition of ID as being not specific to interventionism is perfectly reasonable.
Also, just because that is my definition of ID, that doesn't mean that I don't believe in interventionism. I don't, but that's only because I am unconvinced. It is why I prefer a notion that doesn't limit me: I believe God designed us, but I have no clue when and how. Maybe God intervened along the way, possibly by just BOOM creating humans, and maybe it happened gradually through a natural process that God designed. I don't know, but either way, I am convinced God designed us.
I find the non-interventionist explanation a bit more compelling though, for two reasons. First, because I believe God created a universe we can understand. Maybe not one we can figure out the origins of, but one that we can figure out since then. Maybe I am wrong, of course, but that's the idea that has driven science for thousands of years, until recently: that God is order, and created order, and we can discover that order.
Second, because I just don't see why God would need to be an interventionist. Not that I need to be able to for it to be true, of course, but God is certainly powerful and knowledgable enough to design it beforehand -- as the preacher Henry Ward Beecher said in the 1800s, in response to Darwin, "design by wholesale is grander than design by detail" -- so why the need to intervene?
My next post: the TV show "The 4400" as an analogy to non-interventionist Intelligent Design! Or not. Just imagine it.
Sure (Score:2)
I take issue with evolution based on one thing- original sin as the cause of death. Prior to sin there was no death. Death is a product of man's willful rebellion against God. In evolution death is not a direc
You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:1)
The viewpoint I've seen repeatedly echoed and which I agree with is that intelligent design as a concept, as something required to be part of the curriculum, is entirely an attempt to sneak religion in the back door. It is wholly motivated by the desire to suggest to impressionable minds the possibility of a Greater Being being the potential cause fo
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:2)
No, it is not. It is also a reaction to something else, a competing philosophy.
A commonly taught concept in schools is that of what some people c
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:1)
Evolution is the best explanation we have based upon observation and repeatable experimentation(microevolution). ID makes a basic assumption, that there is a higher power of some sort, an unproveable stance btw, and from there at best makes conjectures based upon the evidence. The nature of science is counter to this. And yes, in a certain sense Science is a philoso
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:2)
I agree with much of what you said -- and have stated those things here and in the previous JE -- but I don't agree with this. I know of people who know far more most people -- including me, and probably most people in this forum -- about evolution, and who still are convinced that ID should be taught in science classes. There are various reasons for that, some of
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:1)
That changes the question then. We teach science in public schools because it's the method that has thus far worked for technological advancement. Their problem is not with evolution, but with the nature of the method, or with the nature of education. Is the public school arena the right place to pursue such an agenda?
I agree to a certain extent on the education point. We increasingly teach to memorize by rote as oppo
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:2)
Change from what? Certainly much of what Einstein and Darwin did could not be falsified, at least, not at first (and in fact, both refused to allow their theories to be falsified, which according to Popper, makes them pseudoscientists).
A lack of integration of science with philosophy, and restriction only to what may be falsified or empirically measured, is a relatively recent phenomenon.
So it's not about changing scienc
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:1)
You don't understand Evolution: it is NOT random. Randomness is just the means for generating source material for natural selection , which is highly non-random.
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:2)
No, it is not that I don't understand evolution, it is that you don't understand what I wrote. The "random occurrences" I referred to were the mutations, not the selections. That should be obvious to anyone engaged in a discussion such as this.
And of course, given the topic at hand, and the context in which I wrote it (and given your misunderstand
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:1)
Not so. It is very easy to demonstrate that adaptive mutations occur all the time in nature quite without a designer. It happens all the time in the bodies of AIDS patients, for example. Of course, if you believe in a deity that intervenes in all these cases, or that matter in every Petri dish in which like experiments are conducted, then I claim
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:2)
No. It's actually impossible. Literally. There is no possible way to scientifically demonstrate this.
What's funny is that if this were possible, then that would make Intelligent Design falsifiable, which would make Intelligent Design, according to the theory of falsifiability, a valid scientific theory.
The very notion that ID is not falsifiable, which is used as the primary reason it is no
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:2)
Can you proove by an experiment (which is a repeatable serries of events) that evolution cased the creation of the first life? No. No one can. We can extrapolate that curret species cam from what looks like common ancesters... but we cannot say "ahhh look... this dish of chemicals just suddenly formed an amino acid and then dna."
Neither approach to the origin of all life can be tested. Both are guesses based on observations o
Re:You're correct, but perhaps wrong (Score:2)
Or... (Score:1)
It was the mice. There is the non-interventionist hypothesis of HyperIntelligent Design [slashdot.org]. Sure, it hasn't yet connected all the dots, but neither has interventionist ID, and they have much thornier problems.
4400 (Score:2)
Oh, good. We're not the only ones watching this show. :)
We're getting it on an extreme delay, though; we've cancelled our satellite service and loaned our Tivo with DVD recorder to my in-laws, who are recording the show for us. We're up to about the sixth episode of the second season.
Re:4400 (Score:2)
But still, even to where you are now, it is obvious that the future people have set in motion a series of events that are (so far!) inevitably leading to certain conclusions. Discarding the notion that they could have just gotten lucky with their guesses about how these intricate events would combine to result in seemingly unlikely conclusions, I see only two other possibilities.
First, they are omniscient. That is extremely unlikely, as they are supposedly future humans.
Secon
Moo (Score:1)