Think About It
I know it's shooting coelacanths in a barrel, but here's a fine speech by Ron Bailey of Reason explaining what intelligent design supporters should be asking themselves.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:18 AM
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5 Comments:
I'm not particularly familiar with Intelligent Design arguments, beyond the basic argument that it is hard to believe that everything we observe just sprang into existence without reason or purpose. It seems like the Ron Bailey speech really pokes at arguments the ID people make beyond this original premise, like a belief that evolution was minutely guided over seemingly an enormous period of time.
I had thought Intelligent Design was a modern version of the deism of the 18th century. Belief in a Clockwork universe, where the creator/designer just started things off, with a knowledge of where it would go. Since the creator created the dimension of time at the same time He/She/It created matter, the fact that the creation would play out over billions of years is not really an argument against this design. If the creator exists out of time, then His/Her/Its interventions do not drag out over a long period. Rather it is like a film editor, who can jump from the beginning of the film to the end, go back, make adjustments, and generally coax the final desired result.
But maybe this isn't ID theory.
This is not ID theory.
First, the whole discussion of how the universe started, or even how life first started, is not particularly central to either evolution, nor does it need to be central to ID. Rather, they both focus on how new species start. While evolution claims one species can turn into another given enough small changes and enough time, ID claims there are insuperable gaps between each species, and that these small changes can never, under any circumstances, create a new species. Therefore, you need a controlling intelligence behind each new species.
Bailey is merely pointing out this means this designer, who has to power to create life in any form we know of, has wiped out millions of species over the years, only to create new ones soon after that are only slightly different from the ones just wiped out. Seems like an odd way to spend one's time.
(This is the version of ID that Bailey was arguing against, anyway. ID is not a clear scientific theory, and there are other somewhat different versions of it, I suppose. But if instead the theory is one species can turn into another 99.9999% of the time, but the few cases where ID proponents can't see how particular designs happened means they can only be explained by a controlling intelligence, this would not be satisfactory to quite a few ID fans.)
So ID is basically a counter theory to evolution. Since I pretty much accept evolution as the tool of creation of mankind (whether God is behind it or not), I guess I don't hold with the IDers then. It seems a pretty narrow debate as to whether the evolution we see evidence of is purely the result of Natural Selection, or reflects some nudges here and there by God or the giant purple squid.
Yes, I think that's right. What you were discussing was more whether evolution and certain religious views can be harmonized. ID is more about saying evolution is an incorrect, or at least seriously incomplete, explanation for how a lot of life arose.
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