Scott
Puritan Board Graduate
Thoughts on this article?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/magazine/20WWLN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/magazine/20WWLN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Attack on Intelligent Design
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Scott
Puritan Board Graduate
Unintelligent Design
By JIM HOLT
Published: February 20, 2005
Recently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth-grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent designer? To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory -- creationism dressed up as science -- its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point. As one Pennsylvania teacher observed: ''The first question they will ask is: 'Well, who's the designer? Do you mean God?'''
From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.
But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.
Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?
The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.
And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.
It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait -- benevolence or omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three. But what if the designer did not style each species individually? What if he/she/it merely fashioned the primal cell and then let evolution produce the rest, kinks and all? That is what the biologist and intelligent-design proponent Michael J. Behe has suggested. Behe says that the little protein machines in the cell are too sophisticated to have arisen by mutation -- an opinion that his scientific peers overwhelmingly do not share. Whether or not he is correct, his version of intelligent design implies a curious sort of designer, one who seeded the earth with elaborately contrived protein structures and then absconded, leaving the rest to blind chance.
One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed, ''Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.'' But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too. That is why Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been ''proven true'' and that ''truth cannot contradict truth.'' If God created the universe wholesale rather than retail -- endowing it from the start with an evolutionary algorithm that progressively teased complexity out of chaos -- then imperfections in nature would be a necessary part of a beautiful process.
Of course proponents of intelligent design are careful not to use the G-word, because, as they claim, theirs is not a religiously based theory. So biology students can be forgiven for wondering whether the mysterious designer they're told about might not be the biblical God after all, but rather some very advanced yet mischievous or blundering intelligence -- extraterrestrial scientists, say. The important thing, as the Pennsylvania school administrator reminded them, is ''to keep an open mind.''
By JIM HOLT
Published: February 20, 2005
Recently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth-grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent designer? To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory -- creationism dressed up as science -- its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point. As one Pennsylvania teacher observed: ''The first question they will ask is: 'Well, who's the designer? Do you mean God?'''
From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.
But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.
Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?
The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.
And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.
It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait -- benevolence or omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three. But what if the designer did not style each species individually? What if he/she/it merely fashioned the primal cell and then let evolution produce the rest, kinks and all? That is what the biologist and intelligent-design proponent Michael J. Behe has suggested. Behe says that the little protein machines in the cell are too sophisticated to have arisen by mutation -- an opinion that his scientific peers overwhelmingly do not share. Whether or not he is correct, his version of intelligent design implies a curious sort of designer, one who seeded the earth with elaborately contrived protein structures and then absconded, leaving the rest to blind chance.
One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed, ''Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.'' But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too. That is why Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been ''proven true'' and that ''truth cannot contradict truth.'' If God created the universe wholesale rather than retail -- endowing it from the start with an evolutionary algorithm that progressively teased complexity out of chaos -- then imperfections in nature would be a necessary part of a beautiful process.
Of course proponents of intelligent design are careful not to use the G-word, because, as they claim, theirs is not a religiously based theory. So biology students can be forgiven for wondering whether the mysterious designer they're told about might not be the biblical God after all, but rather some very advanced yet mischievous or blundering intelligence -- extraterrestrial scientists, say. The important thing, as the Pennsylvania school administrator reminded them, is ''to keep an open mind.''
BlackCalvinist
Puritan Board Senior
Did you expect anything less, Colleen ? This is just Romans 1:18-24 all over again....
BlackCalvinist
Puritan Board Senior
No, you're right it's not. I kinda pity him.
But.... God changes hearts and opens the eyes of the blind.... even the most rebellious. For all his arrogance, he's still no pre-Christian apostle Paul. Just another blowhard with newspaper space.
[Edited on 3-9-2005 by OS_X]
But.... God changes hearts and opens the eyes of the blind.... even the most rebellious. For all his arrogance, he's still no pre-Christian apostle Paul. Just another blowhard with newspaper space.
[Edited on 3-9-2005 by OS_X]
VirginiaHuguenot
Puritanboard Librarian
JohnV
Puritan Board Post-Graduate
I would ask him if he were sloppily designed, perhaps. The very fact that he can stand in judgment of the design begs the question, don't you think? As a Darwinian, there is no question to beg for him; and his observation is just as valid as if all he did was sputter and spit, and utter unitelligible words. As a descendant of unitelligent creatures, and ultimately of mere matter itself, what do his musings amount to but mere noise? What validity can be given to knowledge or understanding?
On the other hand, to argue against design is to presuppose design. The order is not design? Is order itself denied? Is everything random then? Are the thoughts of the Darwinian also random then? Or is there even the suggestion of design in the Darwinian order of things? If so, then we are still at the Design Argument, even as a Darwinist. It cannot be avoided. The question would still be, "Who, then, designed the Darwinist scheme?"
On the other hand, to argue against design is to presuppose design. The order is not design? Is order itself denied? Is everything random then? Are the thoughts of the Darwinian also random then? Or is there even the suggestion of design in the Darwinian order of things? If so, then we are still at the Design Argument, even as a Darwinist. It cannot be avoided. The question would still be, "Who, then, designed the Darwinist scheme?"
Poimen
Puritan Board Post-Graduate
Interesting. Scientists today attack creationists for not being able to explain 'anomalies' or aspects of creation which do not fit with their beliefs. They make the accusation that if creation scientists cannot explain these anomalies they simply fall back on the idea of the 'mysterious' creator without having to give a real or scientific answer.
But then evolutionists turn around and say things like the author did in his paper: male nipples prove that there is no intelligent creator because they are superfluous (or so called vestigial organs). It must be nice to fall back on your assumptions without actually doing any research. There used to be hundreds of organs classified as vestigial. Now there are only a handful. If science is supposed to give us answers to everything why couldn't we assume that eventually we will know what those organs are for, as we have done in the past?
In other words, they rest on their laurels as much as creationists, if not more.
They then also rest on assumptions and limit research into such scientific questions.
Furthermore, in the vein of John V's post, how can they claim that anything is proof of a lack of intelligent design? This is to assume infinite or unlimited knowledge. Again, a 20 foot recurrent laryngeal nerve in a giraffe may be warranted for reasons we haven't figured out yet. Since we are finite we cannot see or understand all the possible variables in having a nerve that was one foot.
In other words, scientific or not, he wants to be god and decide what is good and what needs work in our Lord's creation. All I will say about that is that he can ask God about these things on judgment day, but I don't think the answer he will get will satisfy him.
Oh yeah, one more thing: "One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows." Okay, let's tally things up: abortion, euthanasia, Naziism and communism (the short list). Millions and millions of deaths, maybe even a billion due to the teaching of evolution. Yes, that sounds a lot like freedom.
But then evolutionists turn around and say things like the author did in his paper: male nipples prove that there is no intelligent creator because they are superfluous (or so called vestigial organs). It must be nice to fall back on your assumptions without actually doing any research. There used to be hundreds of organs classified as vestigial. Now there are only a handful. If science is supposed to give us answers to everything why couldn't we assume that eventually we will know what those organs are for, as we have done in the past?
In other words, they rest on their laurels as much as creationists, if not more.
They then also rest on assumptions and limit research into such scientific questions.
Furthermore, in the vein of John V's post, how can they claim that anything is proof of a lack of intelligent design? This is to assume infinite or unlimited knowledge. Again, a 20 foot recurrent laryngeal nerve in a giraffe may be warranted for reasons we haven't figured out yet. Since we are finite we cannot see or understand all the possible variables in having a nerve that was one foot.
In other words, scientific or not, he wants to be god and decide what is good and what needs work in our Lord's creation. All I will say about that is that he can ask God about these things on judgment day, but I don't think the answer he will get will satisfy him.
Oh yeah, one more thing: "One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows." Okay, let's tally things up: abortion, euthanasia, Naziism and communism (the short list). Millions and millions of deaths, maybe even a billion due to the teaching of evolution. Yes, that sounds a lot like freedom.
Larry Hughes
Puritan Board Sophomore
It certainly is true absolute "intellectual freedom" for it is void thereof. Irrationality and contradiction is truly free from intellect.
Anton Bruckner
Puritan Board Professor
attacking intelligient design using an organized essay with logic 
the guy is living proof that intelligient design is valid.
but then again I don't waste time speaking to those types. Their very statements using language with properly constructed sentences of subject object agreement and tenses show the vanity of their minds.
the guy is living proof that intelligient design is valid.but then again I don't waste time speaking to those types. Their very statements using language with properly constructed sentences of subject object agreement and tenses show the vanity of their minds.
VirginiaHuguenot
Puritanboard Librarian
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