Over at Biologos, an evangelical theologian named Robin Parry has written a hit piece titled, God is More Than an Intelligent Designer. Now, I have no problem with someone criticizing Intelligent Design. But I do have a problem when someone criticizes it without getting out of his armchair and taking a look at the evidence for and against it. My own position is that Intelligent Design theory should be evaluated on strictly scientific grounds. Parry, unfortunately, criticizes it for all the wrong reasons, which can be summed up in a single, dismissive phrase: “Your God is too small.”
Is Parry right? Let’s have a look at his arguments.
God of the gaps?
The problem with Intelligent Design (ID) is its tendency to look for God (or simply a “designer”) in the gaps of scientific explanations. So-called irreducible complexity, for instance, is seen as evidence of this “designer” because science cannot (in principle, we are told) explain it in terms of natural processes. But if future science did actually explain any alleged instances of irreducible complexity, then such instances would cease to be evidence of the “designer”. (Emphasis mine – VJT.)
Well, of course. That’s the whole idea. Science stands or falls on the evidence. ID claims to be a scientific theory, so it has to be falsifiable.
Parry appears to be making an incorrect assumption, however: he seems to think that Intelligent Design requires the “designer” to intervene in, or tinker with, the physical world, overlooking the possibility that God might have “front-loaded” the cosmos, setting up its initial conditions so that life (including complex organisms) would emerge naturally. (Front-loading the laws of Nature wouldn’t work.) Parry should be aware that several leading figures in the Intelligent Design camp – including Professor Michael Behe – have argued that no tinkering by the designer is necessary. Indeed, in his book, The Edge of Evolution (pp. 229-232), Behe describes in some detail how the design of life could have been accomplished without any interference. [To be sure, philosopher and ID advocate Stephen Meyer disagrees: he argues that if chemistry can’t explain the origin of DNA, neither could the initial conditions of the universe; but this is a fallacious argument, because it compares apples and oranges: the laws of chemistry aren’t specific enough to account for DNA, but that doesn’t mean the initial conditions of the cosmos couldn’t possess the requisite specificity.] What this means is that in order to falsify the claim that irreducible complexity points to a designer, it isn’t enough to show that irreducibly complex structures could have arisen naturally. One also needs to make a plausible scientific case that no “bias” in the fundamental parameters or initial conditions of our cosmos would have been required, in order to generate these structures. (If biological complexity could only be explained by appealing to cosmic fine-tuning, that would be merely pushing the question of design one step further back.)
I might add that ID theorists have never claimed that phenomena which cannot be explained in terms of unguided natural processes are (a) evidence for the existence of God (as opposed to an unknown Designer), let alone (b) the only possible evidence for God. So the “God of the gaps” accusation is simply a baseless canard.
The designer: just another being?
The problem here is that the “designer” — which almost every ID advocate thinks is the biblical God — is pictured as one being among others (albeit a more intelligent and powerful one) acting as a cause in the world in the same manner as other causes act in the world.
Most ID advocates do indeed identify the “designer” with the biblical God, for philosophical and theological reasons – but not for scientific reasons. And no, the “designer” is not pictured as “acting as a cause in the world in the same manner as other causes act in the world,” for the simple reason that Intelligent Design theory is silent regarding the designer’s modus operandi. No-one knows how the designer acts. Nor does any ID advocate claim that the designer is but one being among others. Indeed, it is difficult to see how an ID proponent who upholds the fine-tuning argument for cosmological design (as many writers over at Biologos also do) could regard the designer of the cosmos as “one being among others.” At the very least, such a designer would have to be something lying beyond the cosmos – in other words, transcendent. The “one being among others” objection looks plausible only if we confine our attention to biological design.
God doesn’t act like that
The reason that this is a problem, at least for Christians, is that classical theology does not picture God in this manner — as one cause or being among and alongside others. Rather, divine Being is of a fundamentally different kind from creaturely being, and divine causation acts at a different level altogether. God is the one who imparts be-ing to the whole of created reality and who enables all of the powers of causation within creation. So God was the explanation for the whole, but was not to be found in the gaps.
There is nothing to prevent God from being both the One who imparts being to created reality and Someone Who intervenes in history. Indeed, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all insist that He is precisely that, for they ascribe various miracles to the Creator. Christians, for instance, believe in the virginal conception of Jesus. I fail to see how a theologian could gladly accept the virginal conception but balk at the idea of God bringing about a few divinely guided mutations in the lineage leading to human beings.
God and science don’t mix
The explanations of the empirical sciences function at the level of secondary causation within the created order, and pay no attention to metaphysical questions of primary causation. As such, God does not feature in scientific explanations. This is unproblematic so long as scientists don’t imagine that reality can be encompassed within the realm of what science can explain — that road ends up collapsing in on itself. Treating some things in the world (but not others) as the result of God rather than of inner-creational causes is to mix up these different levels of explanation. Setting divine and creational causes up in opposition as some kind of zero sum game is unhelpful.
To deal with the last point first: it is a myth to claim that Intelligent Design sets divine and creational causes up in opposition to one another. Rather, what it does is set guided and unguided causal processes in opposition to one another. Now, it is certainly possible for a theologian like Parry to maintain that all law-governed natural processes – including the processes leading to the formation of carbon (which is required by all living things) in the early history of the cosmos – are ultimately guided by the Creator. He is entirely correct, of course; but that kind of statement would cut no ice with a scientist. However, if one could show that the formation of carbon was itself a highly fine-tuned process, then he might conclude, as the late Sir Fred Hoyle did: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” Hoyle was hostile to religion, but he was courageous enough to follow the evidence where it led.
Parry asserts that God does not feature in scientific explanations. That would have been news to Sir Isaac Newton, whose Intelligent Design arguments I’ve documented in detail here. And in case someone wishes to object that Newton lived 300 years ago, when the rules of science were different, then how about the late nineteenth-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who put forward a scientific argument for the existence of a Creator and who insisted that science didn’t rule out talk of a Creator; it merely ruled out discussion of his modus operandi? Heck, there have been at least 31 great scientists who made scientific arguments for the supernatural.
But if nineteenth-century scientists don’t impress you, then how about some prominent twenty-first century scientists who reject methodological naturalism? Here’s atheist cosmologist Sean Carroll:
Let’s imagine that there really were some sort of miraculous component to existence, some influence that directly affected the world we observe without being subject to rigid laws of behavior. How would science deal with that?
The right way to answer this question is to ask how actual scientists would deal with that, rather than decide ahead of time what is and is not “science” and then apply this definition to some new phenomenon…
There is a perfectly good question of whether science could ever conclude that the best explanation was one that involved fundamentally lawless behavior. The data in favor of such a conclusion would have to be extremely compelling, for the reasons previously stated, but I don’t see why it couldn’t happen. Science is very pragmatic, as the origin of quantum mechanics vividly demonstrates. Over the course of a couple decades, physicists (as a community) were willing to give up on extremely cherished ideas of the clockwork predictability inherent in the Newtonian universe, and agree on the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. That’s what fit the data. Similarly, if the best explanation scientists could come up with for some set of observations necessarily involved a lawless supernatural component, that’s what they would do.
And here’s New Atheist and evolutionary biologist Professor Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True:
I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.
And here’s P. Z. Myers, a biologist and critic of Intelligent Design, who regards the very concept of God as nonsensical, but who thinks that scientists could still discover and investigate causes that fall outside the natural order:
My position is that we cannot find evidence for a god, that the God Hypothesis is invalid and unacceptable, because “god” is an incoherent concept that has not been defined…
By the way, I do agree with Coyne on one thing: I also reject Shermer’s a priori commitment to methodological naturalism. If a source outside the bounds of what modern science considers the limits of natural phenomena is having an observable effect, we should take its existence into account.
Parry’s insistence that science has no place for God-talk strikes me as a trifle dogmatic, to say the least, when leading contemporary scientists who are also vocal atheists disagree.
Who designed the designer?
Let us continue with Parry’s piece:
Furthermore, the most that ID could ever demonstrate is that certain things in the world (but not the the world as a whole) were designed by a very intelligent (though not omni-intelligent) and powerful (though not all-powerful) being (or groups of beings). But such a being is more like an archangel than God. And of such a being we may still ask, “Who designed it?” for it would certainly not be the kind of thing that could explain its own existence. This intelligent designer would be as infinitely removed from God as a flea.
I’m sure Parry has heard of the fine-tuning argument. For advocates of Intelligent Design, this argument constitutes evidence for the design of the cosmos, while arguments relating to biological complexity point to life’s having been designed. So I don’t know why Parry thinks Intelligent Design can only show that “certain things in the world (but not the the world as a whole) were designed.” (And in case Parry wishes to object that our universe might turn out to be just a small part of some larger multiverse which was not designed, I should inform him that fine-tuning advocates have anticipated that objection: Robin Collins argues that a multiverse that could generate a universe like ours would itself have to be designed. Physicist Paul Davies also has a killer argument against the multiverse as an explanation for everything.)
I have a question for Parry. Assuming that the fine-tuning argument does point to the universe’s having been designed, would he agree that the designer of the universe would have to be omni-intelligent and all-powerful? If not, why not? (I’m asking because theologians and philosophers don’t agree on the definitions of these terms, and I’d like to know what Parry’s definitions are.)
What of Parry’s final point, that one could always ask who designed the designer, since “it would certainly not be the kind of thing that could explain its own existence”? For my part, I wonder what basis Parry has for his assurance that the designer of the cosmos “would certainly not be the kind of thing that could explain its own existence.” Why not? At the very least, one could argue that a transcendent designer of the cosmos might be self-explanatory. I’m not sure how Parry thinks an archangel could design a cosmos.
But as I have mentioned before, Intelligent Design theory doesn’t deal with the identity of the Designer. It is perfectly consistent to hold that scientific arguments can never establish that the designer is a self-explanatory Being, but that philosophical arguments can be marshaled to show that the designer of the cosmos is either a self-explanatory Being or a being kept in existence by a self-explanatory Being.
Dragons?
I am not for one moment suggesting that those who believe in God should not look at complex systems within creation and marvel at how they manifest God’s goodness and power — after all, such complex systems live and move and have their being in God, manifesting the Divine Logos — but that is a very different issue from seeking to find them as evidence of direct divine intervention. There be dragons!
I’ve dealt with the claim that Intelligent Design requires divine intervention above. Lastly, the problem with Parry’s “There be dragons!” dig at the ID movement (a reference to the medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures on uncharted areas of maps) is that most of the arguments for Intelligent Design were unknown to people in the Middle Ages, who believed in the spontaneous generation of life, and even fairly complex animals such as rats, mice and crocodiles from non-living matter. It was not until the invention of the microscope that we see Intelligent Design-style arguments appearing in the writings of scientists such as Robert Boyle. As for the universe, people in the Middle Ages were quite familiar with the Aristotelian view that it had always existed. No-one knew about the Big Bang or the fine-tuning argument. In other words, the “dragons” in the Intelligent Design account of the world are not old ones, but very new ones. The dragons may of course be slain, as new explanations for life and the cosmos are put forward – but my plea is this: let science, and not theology, do the slaying.
I think science is doing quite an acceptable job of explaining our universe. So far, “intelligent design” has been an attempt to inject religion, or at least the sort of magical thinking associated with religion, into a discipline where it adds nothing useful. Be patient, and science will continue slaying imaginary dragons so long as it is not forcibly redirected. Science will doubtless do a capable job of addressing gods as soon as any evidence suggests they exist. Until that time, force-mating science with religious faith is premature.
That seems to make it theological, contrary to your post title. You are, in effect, suggesting intelligent design done in a way that science cannot investigate.
And to be falsifiable it needs to make positive statements. After all these years we still have no idea what ID is all about. So without any positive explanations all there’s left are arguments from ignorance: God of the gaps. In fact you’ve made or endorsed arguments like that before, like Paul Nelson’s on HOX genes.
So your counter to Parry’s argument is to claim that God “may” not need to intervene? maybe, maybe not… ID won’t tell us! so much for it’s scientific merits
…is indeed a very small God, constrained and limited by laws of nature he couldn’t have possibly designed if FT is true (as pointed out many many times before)
Or, in other words, in a way that cannot be told from no designer at all (I’m agreeing with you, in case it’s not obvious). But be prepared for a load of “fine tuning” convoluted crap.
Do you not see the problem with ID not making any specific claims at all, other than ad hoc claims (like very little junk DNA) made to try to hijack recent findings? The entire point of ID is theological, which is why it could be about “front-loading,” or about six days of creation. There’s no consistency, it’s all a theological big-tent strategy.
We do criticize ID on science grounds, but that’s only because we’re willing to make the design claims that IDists strain not to make–mainly because organisms don’t have the expected marks of design that someone like Paley thought were there. Indeed, life lacks the kind of independent selection of structures for function that we’d expect of actual designers, rather, the “selection” is based on heredity.
Really? What about his complaints about Archaeopteryx possibly being a fraud? Those were rather meritless claims that appear to have no basis other than his anti-evolution stance. Sorry, it isn’t enough to quote some “authority” who managed to have some bewildering hang-ups, and to baptize him as “courageous enough to follow the evidence where it led.” How does carbon nucleosynthesis lead to any kind of designer and/or God? Hoyle’s right because he said what you believe?
Glen Davidson
Oh, and here we have the extended version of ID as an “explanation” for life, the cosmos, and the laws of nature themselves. There you have it: a theory of everything that essentially consists in “a super-intellect monkeyed* with it all”
* or maybe not
This to me is scientifically and intellectually obscene
interesting link…
It would appear that some (by no means all) Evangelicals are finally catching up to the Catholics.
http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/449/Gould%20Nonoverlapping%20Magisteria.htm
Vacuous.
I do not think that Gould’s take on NOMA is “vacuous”.
OK – I can understand why some will disagree, but vacuous NOMA is not.
As far as I am able to discern, the Evangelicals are converging on the asymptote of NOMA. The Jews got there first, the Catholics took a long time to catch up and finally the Evangelicals are cottoning on.
Maybe this is the end of days – and Moshiach’s arrival is immanent.
If that’s the case, then ID is based on a false dichotomy, or on loaded premises.
What do you mean by guided? Are gravitational effects guided or unguided? They have definable directions. Is that how you define guided? If so, then the guided/unguided division is meaningless in terms of ID. From your reference to Hoyle, you seem to think that gravitation qualifies as guided in ID terms:
That looks much more like poor philosophy than following the evidence where it leads. If everything is guided, then it’s impossible to tell guided from unguided. We’d have no contrasts to make. We would not be able to form the concepts at all. Where would you find any examples of unguided phenomena in a world where the whole thing is guided?
Just to remind readers, when I asked VJ how he can reconcile a belief in unguided evolution, with a belief in a divine God, which has a special relationship with man, his answers were essentially: “May be guided sometimes, I have no idea how much. God might have started with a relationship with Heidelberg man, or Denisovans, or Neanderthals, but probably with homo-sapiens, not sure…”
Giving this appalling lack of a coherent philosophical belief, as well as a scientific belief, is VJ really the person to tell us what science or what religion should do?
phoodoo,
While I agree with the sentiment, I also think it’s understandable that, when someone becomes aware of some cognitive dissonance, adjustments have to occur. I doubt that those adjustments can be done by mindlessly rejecting uncomfortable facts. At least not in all honesty. So, I prefer to look at VJs “incoherent philosophy,” than at someone whose supposed philosophical coherence is kept by remaining incapable of reading for comprehension. (No attack intended.)
gmh.entropy,
Your posts are completely lacking any informed or original thought whatsoever. If parrots could type, I would presume you to be a parrot. (No attack intended).
Wait, some parrots can type.
Re guided vs. unguided:
While I hold on philosophical grounds that the laws of Nature are guided, I would never assume that for scientific purposes. Such a position has to be argued for, using empirical data.
Re phoodoo’s query on evolution: since most mutations are neutral or near-neutral, it is hard to speak of them as being guided. Re the direction of evolution: Jews, Christians and Muslims would agree that God intended the appearance of (a) life; (b) more specifically, plant and animal life; and (c) human beings, but whether God intended the arrival of each and every species is another matter. Of course, I’d agree that any creature required to support the existence of intelligent life must have been intended by God, but most species are not that essential: we could survive without them. On the other hand, we have the Biblical statement that creatures were made by God after their kind, suggesting a greater degree of divine oversight, but the notion of a kind is an imprecise one. I’d be happy enough to say that the various families of creatures were all part of God’s plan. If phoodoo thinks this answer is too vague, what is his own?
When perusing your posts, my bilingual Canadian filters immediately scream “canard” as opposed to “parrot”
You amaze me phoodoo
… not only have you failed to rise to the standard set by John Paul II, you have even been eclipsed by Pope Pius XII and Humani Generis
Most IDist claim ID to be scientific theory, but I don’t and neither does Mike Gene. I think IDist should drop that claim.
Are you saying that what you call the laws of nature can be distinguished from “the rest of nature”? In other words, if something looks regular, then that’s one (or more) of the laws, when something is not regular, then that’s unguided? Is there such a thing as an unguided feature in nature by your definitions? (Trying to understand.)
Either way, I don’t see how you could use empirical data to argue for what you call the laws of nature to be guided (and thus designed). All the empirical data would be “contaminated” by some degree of “law.” You’d be contrasting guided phenomena with guided phenomena. Guided features with guided features. I cannot think of something in nature that we cannot think of as having one kind of regularity or another. It might look stochastic at one level, but another level might reveal a regularity. For example, DNA mutations, even if phenotypically neutral, would still contain nucleotides (a regularity of DNA). You’d be assuming your conclusion from the very ground.
Its not just that it is too vague, it is more that it just a bunch of slapped together sentences, with no apparent consistency at all. God just let’s mutations happen without any guidance, and yet he knew it would create man, which is created in his image, and which has a divine place in the universe? God believes in sin, for some versions of intelligent beings, somewhere around the time of Heidelberg man? Slightly less intelligent creatures than Heidelberg man, they are on their own?
Intelligence is the ultimate evolution, after that we are done? What if some paradigm was a better strategy for surviving than intelligence, couldn’t we skip intelligence then? Would that leave God with nothing to do?
Furthermore, I have no idea what you mean (I am not sure you do either) with the concept of God intending some animals but not others. I doubt Muslims or Jews would know what you mean either.
There are a whole host of other problems with you scrapped together philosophy, but to me the most glaring is that you have these claims about empirical data, and you want to tie them together with metaphysics. Well, the fact that they are “meta” means that they are outside of the forces of physics and empiricism. So how can you expect to be able to find empirical data in the physical world, for things which exist outside the physical world, and then complain if it can’t be explained through physics?
Its abundantly clear that your ideas about God and science are in total flux, and you yourself have no real idea what you believe. Which is certainly fine, but I think perhaps it would be useful if you would be a little more upfront about your own confusion, instead of trying to turn your confusion into a tool which you think is useful in debunking other arguments.
I am perfectly OK with the idea that a metaphysical God can’t be completely explained or understood within the limits of our physical space. You don’t seem to be OK with accepting that limitation, thus your ideas are just this weird hodgepodge of unconnected thoughts, which have no logical congealing.
And then you try to throw the bible into this uncooked stew, and then seem surprised that it makes no sense to others.
Right after evolutionists do the same.
There was no need to confirm your inability to read for comprehension. While the attack wasn’t meant, you were keen to show that the shoe fits you all right.
gmh.entropy,
And if I call you a parrot, its not meant as an attack. I am different than VJ, I think God loves all creatures. There are other things besides intelligence.
Now if VJ called you a parrot, that would be insulting.
I can’t disagree.
Even if you are a parrot (not an attack), that doesn’t make this untrue.
Is the chick in the picture a iD or ID critic?
Anyways.
There is no SCIENCE. its just people(tailless primates for some) trying to figure things out.
Not many and not done much yet.
These dudes trying to say complexity in biology etc is not evidence for a creator is absurd.
How can they say YES there is a God but no biology doesn’t hint/prove it!!
You mean god was just watching the show? Pass the popcorn? Can’t wait for the ending?!
Saying that evolutionists etc have shown how the complexity and diversity of the glory, yes glory, of biology came, aw shucks, from small tiny steps , errors in replication no less, is just unreasonable.
Even if right they would be far from having shown it. In fact its really just a grand line of reasoning from after the fact data points.
Its dumb. its not science (whatever that is).
Its now coming to a end JUST because a tiny number of Degree ed folks questioned it and became famous.
ID is famous and feared simply because of paying attention to the eetails of evolutionary biology claims.
YEC always stressed the great conclusions and debunked it but not the details to debunk it.
Irreducible complexity is a concept in details. IIts very successful and persuasive to thoughtful people otherwise never having questioned evolutionism.
more to come in the next year. This was another great year for iD/YEC.
phoodoo,
Again? I already understood that you cannot read for comprehension. No need to show off. It’s not something to be proud of.
I’m still impressed that you failed to understand such a small comment.
Really?
Most evolutionists have at least an idea what it would take to disprove evolution…
I’m just curios, what is your idea of what it would take to prove ID to be a scientific theory?
Oh, so you can read and understand some stuff! That’s progress. Maybe we can have indirect conversations instead.
Can you explain why this shouldn’t be possible?
Because consciousness is outside the realm of biology.
Not only does it seem silly to believe that God is interested in having a relationship with a bag of chemicals, but it also flies in the face of how people hold their own beliefs. If you really believed that all you were was the sum of your chemicals in a membrane, you would hardly make moral judgements about what other chemicals do.
No one actually believes that, so their own beliefs are a contradiction.
You didn’t present a single argument there. All you did was assert, assert and more asserting.
Also you didn’t even answer my question. In fact God could have “guided” every single mutation and we would still be a bag of conscious chemicals.
So let me reword my question: why shouldn’t it be possible for God to create men through purely random processes (and then perhaps insert a soul or whatever makes us conscious according to you)?
Well, annoyingly enough, “evolution” is being used here with two different meanings. One is as a term referencing a set of related observations, and the other refers to a set of proposed explanations of those observations. One can make a truly extensive set of related observations, a huge sack of factoids, without doing any science at all.
Attempting a coherent explanation for all those factoids, which includes all of them and doesn’t just cherry-pick some of them, is the task of science.
So which of these are what you claim “evolutionists” fail to do? The raw observations are there for anyone to see. And proposing even a WRONG explanation for them is still science. Are you saying evolutionists should pretend there are no observations, or pretend there are no proposed explanations?
phoodoo,
mind you I also thought it was self defeating to believe the outcome of a random process can be known in advance, but for an omnipotent being it seems impossible to argue for that without begging the question
I would like to think that, but alas … It used to be true that even haredi (“black hat”) orthodox Jews had ways of making evolution fit their worldview. But political pressures have changed that. While acceptance of evolution is quite high among the U.S. Jewish population, nearly as high as for Buddhists and Hindus, the Religious Right within Judaism has been going backwards.
I have heard local haredi Orthodox teachers give arguments that are copied straight from Answers in Genesis. These days they are mostly copying their arguments from right-wing fundamentalists, just as right-wing Muslims have been doing.
Oh, come on! You were doing so well on that comment. You failed to read your own post.
dazz,
If you read the paragraph you referenced you’ll see that it continues:
(Emphasis mine). It’s incoherent that mutations would be unguided, yet conform to a plan. It’s either a plan or it isn’t. It’s not a problem with foreknowledge, but a problem with the idea of humans being a divine plan.
There is no scientific theory that explains why there is something rather than nothing. Try again.
It’s not our fault that you don’t pay attention.
Say again please. Wasn’t paying attention
LoL. This explains so much.
Why is it incoherent? It’s only incoherent if we assume an omnipotent being can’t produce things or people as planned, using unguided processes, which obviously begs the question
Joe – I must respectfully disagree
One of the closest friends I ever made was yyk of chabad.org who was patient enough to respond to one of my tongue-in-cheek queries citing Kafka about Moshiach’s arrival occurring the day after his arrival was no longer necessary.
We struck up a long friendship and I learned much Chasidus and remain in his debt. Every Jahrzeit I pause to remember him.
He once asked me to help him on an essay about evolution being false – and I responded that he had asked the wrong guy. We had a long debate that lasted over two years and I was privileged to even read some of the Rebbe’s correspondence which was not public domain. Frankly I was impressed! For example, the notion of the centre of the universe was very nuanced and simultaneously connected to Kabbalah and Big Bang. I was reminded of The Dancing Wu Li Masters & Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I hammered out a long essay about a theoretical gentile atheist scientist in dialogue with a devout Hassidic rabbi about the origins of the universe and evolution. Yyk published it!!! … and I am proud to say my efforts attracted no little attention in the Lubavitcher blogosphere even though it gave prima facie endorsement to the empirical version of evolution as fact and theory.
I am chagrined to discover I had only really reinvented the wheel to a great degree and much of what my former teacher and I had hammered out was already elucidated in varying degrees by Gould earlier in his treatise on NOMA.
I agree with Gould:
http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/449/Gould%20Nonoverlapping%20Magisteria.htm
Seems kind of missing the point, to criticize science for something outside the boundaries of science. I’m confident (and you should be too) that as soon as some evidence is found for WHY there is something rather than nothing, it will be examined and investigated with all due rigor.
(And it would probably be honest of you to point out that beyond bald assertion, there is no such explanation forthcoming from any source.)
TomMueller,
That’s as may be, but empirically, if you survey guys with black hats and fringes, most of them will regurgitate talking points from the U.S. creationist movement. Your essay may make a better case in terms of the teachings of their own tradition, but Gould is wrong: there is not just an “occasional orthodox rabbi” who does that. Most of them do. You may be the better theologian but your views are not prevailing among them, any more than the corresponding views are convincing reactionary mullahs in Islam.
Because planned implies guidance (though not viceversa). It would be a contradiction of terms. But that’s it in that regard. If now you want to discuss the problems with the concept of omnipotence, you don’t need to convince me of anything.
That’s an incoherent question. It’s not the job of science to point that out.
This seems to be lost on dazz.
Yet you claimed that science can explain the universe. Maybe what you meant to say was that science can explain some stuff, but can’t explain other stuff. Whoop dee do.
Could you make any less sense? It’s not the job of science to point what out, which questions are incoherent?
Anyone one else here agree with gmh that:
1. It’s not the job of science to point out which questions are incoherent.
2. Why is there something rather than nothing is an incoherent question.
Huh? Why are you telling me this?
I said there is a problem with VJ’s idea that there is no plan, and at the same time there is a divine relationship with man. Now you are just repeating that this is a problem.
And you suggest I don’t comprehend?
Or maybe you aren’t suggesting that, maybe you are just typing, without saying anything. In that case-Want a cracker?
Unfortunately that is only a necessary, but not sufficient condition for ID to be science.
I wrote:
Here’s the problem with one person saying what would convince them, its meaningless.
If we heard and saw a great voice in the sky, some people would believe that and some wouldn’t. If all the clouds in the sky spelled out “I AM GOD” some people would believe that and some would say we were all doped, or the CIA did it, or who knows what. How is one person being convinced, enough to change a scientific premise?
To enough people there is evidence of a GOD all around them. And some still aren’t convinced.
Who decides what convincing? Without such a metric, ID is every bit as much science as evolutionary theory.