A few years ago I wrote (follow up here):
Suppose that you find a watch in the forest. If you know there is
no watchmaker then the theory of evolution is a brilliant and
compelling explanation for the presence of complexity without design.
But suppose that you know a watchmaker exists then surely the simplest
and most compelling explanation is that the watchmaker made the watch.
Any other explanation, particularly one so improbable
as evolution would seem to be preposterous and beside the point.Thus for someone who knows, really knows, that
god(s) exists (and there are many people who claim to know that god(s)
exists) then some form of creationism follows as a
rational deduction from the premises. It’s no point telling these
people that creationism is unscientific because given the premise that god(s) exists creationism is scientific.
If god(s) exists then evolution is almost certainly false, if not in
every particular then surely in the grand claims of a undesigned
nature.
Not surprisingly the argument created a firestorm of opposition (see the many nasty comments on the two original posts). Thus, I am quite pleased to see that renowned philosopher Thomas Nagel writing in Philosophy and Public Affairs has recently made the same argument. Nagel writes:
What [Intelligent Design] does depend on is the assumption that the hypothesis of a designer makes sense and cannot be ruled out as impossible or assigned a vanishingly small probability in advance. Once it is assigned a significant prior probability, it becomes a serious candidate for support by empirical evidence, in particular empirical evidence against the sufficiency of standard evolutionary theory to account for the observational data…
…Judge Jones cited as a decisive reason for denying ID the status of science that Michael Behe, the chief scientific witness for the defense, acknowledged that the theory would be more plausible to someone who believed in God than to someone who did not. This is just common sense, however, and the opposite is just as true: evolutionary theory as a complete explanation of the development of life is more plausible to someone who does not believe in God than to someone who does.
Nagel has much more of interest to say about teaching science given that ID is scientific if one accepts belief in god.
Hat tip to Robin Hanson’s post, Intelligent Design Honesty, at Overcoming Bias.
← Previous Comments
Last time I checked inductive reasoning/proofs require underlying assumptions akin to assuming God(s) exist.
Ceteris paribus anyone?
No. The evidence is inconsistent with any form of intelligent design that is stronger than God a) creating a world of scientifically comprehensible rules b) nudging the process of evolution occasionally.
Anything else would be to ignore the realities of evolution.
The idea that the existence of God implies the reality of either Creationism or ID is wrong.
Creationism makes specific claims (in the extreme, that the Earth is only 6000 years old) that can be refuted by evidence. The same is true to a lesser extent of ID.
The only counter-argument is (in the case of extreme Creationism) that God created a deceptive universe that appears to any scientific observer to barely need a creator. In the case of ID, there are no-creator-necessary mechanisms for evolution, and the counter arguments are either that the Creator “guided” evolution or that he/she/it/they were so subtle that the guidance looks like no creator was involved.
In either case, a Deist sort of God who kicked things off and then took a long vacation (an ongoing one) is difficult or impossible to refute, but that isn’t the claim being made by either Creationists or IDists.
Believing that God exists does not excuse one from providing evidence or believing the evidence that exists.
Yuck. It seems to me you’re more in love with the dialectic than with the search for the best models of reality.
wintermute: Sure. But don’t conflate cause and effect.
“In the context of ontological naturalism, “supernatural” means “undetectable”.”
God, the cause in this case, would be supernatural (undetectable) under this definition. The effect (say, something created by God) would natural (i.e., measurable). Assuming that it is logically possible to have an undetectable cause of a measurable effect (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be), those would be effects that can’t be explained by science. A scientific theory depends on the untestable premise that these effects do not exist in the universe. Faith depends on the premise that they do.
Does that make more sense?
No.
Let me put it like this: We can’t (directly) detect X-rays. We can detect their effects, such as fogging a photographic plate, or causing cancer.
Do we label X-rays as being supernatural because we can detect the effects but not the cause? Or do we extrapolate from the effects to determine what the cause is and how it works, and predict new effects it will cause that we can study?
X-rays have effects that we can detect, therefore they are natural, and amenable to scientific study.
You claim that God has effects that we can detect. Therefore, God is natural and amenable to scientific study, even if we can’t directly detect God himself.
A supernatural entity by definition does not interact with the detectable universe in any measurable of quantifiable way.
If you allow for a God as a base hypothesis, then anything that follows is religion and casting ID as science is a case of renaming religion as science.
For Wintermute,
Even if I believed that gravity is negative energy, you still have the problem with the second law of thermodynamics. Negative energy and positive energy would still need to break down into no energy. This no energy would be higher entropic state. So at the starting of the universe, one or both of those laws did not apply. This does not necessarily suggest an ID, but it is generally accepted in science that those laws would not be applicable at the starting or ending of the universe. Also to suggest that gravity is negative energy as you have, you would have to show that energy and gravity could be combined to have at least some missing energy. I am not aware of any scientific evidence which suggests this to be the case. I’m not suggesting that your idea of negative energy is not true, simply that I am unaware of any research that would suggest that it is true and would like to be provided with this evidence.
← Previous Comments
Comments on this entry are closed.