Reply #98: Good questions

[Stunster]

Anyway, to *me* ID seems to be a very incomplete theory. On its best days it runs close to the edge of an being no more than argument from ignorance.

Substitute 'Darwinian evolution' for 'ID' in the sentence above, and ask yourself how complete DE is. A lot of DE runs along the lines of, "Assume just genetic variation and natural selection....we don't know how exactly this would have produced all the data.....but it might well have... we're not exactly sure of the details". In other words, it says that species could have been produced solely by Darwinian mechanisms. It doesn't show that all species actually were in fact produced in that manner.

Let's go back a bit, though, and just ask a scientific question. What is the correct science of design? We know that welcome signs and cars and watches and watchmaking factories are intelligently designed. What is the scientific basis of this knowledge? Well, one might say we simply observe intelligent designers designing these things. But how do we know that what we are observing is an instance of intelligence design? When we look at a watchmaker at work, for instance, what do we literally see? We see a body in complex forms of motion. We don't literally 'see' the watchmaker's intelligent consciousness. And when we see subhuman species, that's also what we see---bodies in complex forms of motion. We very naturally infer that the watchmaker's bodily motions and actions and the watches he produces are determined by the activity of a conscious intelligence. What properties do complex bodily motions, actions, and products have to possess in order to license an inference to the existence of an intelligent consciousness?

Artificial Intelligence is a young science that suggests we could design an intelligent and, in some versions of AI, conscious physical structure. This idea in turn suggests that there must be some scientific way of deciding whether some physical structure is living (since I take it that if something is intelligent and conscious, it is living), and artificially and intelligently designed and produced. If that idea is on the right lines, then there must be some scientific answer to this question. Let's say there is such an answer. Ok, let's take that answer and apply it to the realm of pre-human biological history. I don't see anything unscientific about such a project in principle.

How would we know the difference between something "designed" by a complex interaction of natural processes, and the work of a theoretically free-willed sentient designer? Is design by humans simply a complex version of natural design? Is there, ultimately, a difference between a skyscraper and a coral reef, or a termite mound? or do termites count as designers as well?

Very good questions, and precisely to the point. Is there a possible science that would give us the answers? And if so, can this science be applied to the task of detecting the presence of design in biological history? Again, I see nothing wrong or unscientific with such questions in principle.

Do humans design? Are our designs different, in kind, from the designs of waves lapping at a beach? Doesn't their idea of design require free will, something that sets off the work of designers that are "like us" from the designs of a colony of termites? Or are we akin to the termites, but with our own biology directed by a truly free-willed entity? Is there any scientific basis for any of this whatsoever?

All very good questions. Notice that if science is capable in principle of answering all meaningful questions about reality, and if these are meaningful questions (which I believe quite firmly they are), then science ought to be capable of answering them in principle.

ID theory can be construed very simply as asking 'what is the correct science of intelligent design?' We know, or think we know that there is such a thing as intelligent design in reality (signs, cars, watches, skyscrapers, AI robots, etc). If this is true, then there ought to be some scientific way of differentiating instances of intelligent design from instances which are not those of intelligent design. What are the differentiating criteria? We don't know yet, is how I would answer. But there might well be some such criteria which a science of intelligent design could discover. If there are, and we discover what they are, then we could look at the data of biology to see if they are present in those data.

As the regards the nature and origin of an intelligent designer, those are whole other questions. But there is a good argument for thinking that order must be primitive at some level. Here it is in a nutshell.

1. For natural selection to work at all, it must work upon some domain.

2. To identify any domain whatsoever in the first place, science must find order of some kind pertaining to that domain.

3. Hence, every domain upon which natural selection is to operate must already be ordered in some way.

4. Hence, natural selection cannot be the sole explanation of order in nature, unless one posits an infinite unobservable or an infinity of unobservables, which defeats the purpose of relying on natural selection in the first place, which was to explain phenomena without positing anything infinite and/or unobservable.

I.e. Some order, at some level of scientific analysis, must be primitive. It can't all be generated by natural selection. Or else, one must posit an infinity of some kind, which by definition must be scientifically unobservable by finite scientists.

But returning to the more specific idea of natural selection with respect to living species... Suppose we found that when magnified sufficiently, the subatomic particles making up living organisms repeated a pattern which we could read as saying "Hi there. My name is God---yeah, that's right, Yahweh/Adonai/Father of my only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ. I intelligent designed this and all other living species". What would we have to say, as a matter of scientific conclusion from this data? That it was a coincidence? Hmmmm. If that's what would or should be said, how would Darwinian naturalism be a falsifiable theory? And if it's not, how can Darwinian evolution be considered genuinely scientific?

Of course, no such discovery of messages from Yahweh seems even remotely likely. But still, the thought-experiment raises a crucial issue, which is not unknown in science already, as any Egyptologist would tell you.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Darwinian evolutionary theory says that no intelligent design was involved in the emergence of living species, and that it all happened solely via random genetic mutation, natural selection and genetic drift without any conscious purpose being a causal factor. Isn't that the basic idea--the claim that no conscious design was involved---which people understood Darwin to be implying, and hence made Darwin and Darwinism so controversial?

If that is a genuinely scientific claim, as against a philosophical one, then it ought to be falsifiable and so Darwinian scientists ought to tell us what kind of evidence would tend to falsify it--preferably in advance of any such evidence being found. If it is the case that what appeared to be subatomic written messages from Yahweh could always be arguably explained by a natural selection mechanism, then how could Darwinian naturalism ever be falsified--and if it can't be, then how does it count as a genuinely scientific theory?

As standardly taught, Darwinian evolution says 'no intelligent design--it all happened without that.' Ok, well what would tend to falsify that claim? Well, evidence of intelligent design, of course. And so it's absolutely crucial that we have a clear idea of what such evidence would look like, were it ever to be discovered. Without that clear idea, then it strikes me that Darwinian evolution is just as incomplete and philosophically biased as ID is accused as being--unless it actually shows that all living organisms not only could have, but really did come to be without any intelligent design involved. But I really don't see how it has shown that. In which case, it's not much more than a working hypothesis.

Some will retort, "NO! It's not just a working hypothesis. It's a fact!" What they usually mean is that evolution of some kind is a fact. But one can accept this fact without accepting that it's a FACT that all evolution occurred without the involvement of any intelligent design, and solely on the basis of purposeless genetic variation and purposeless natural selection. I.e. evolution may well be a fact, but the nonexistence of any intelligent design doesn't strike me as being a fact at all, let alone a scientifically established fact, because we don't as yet seem to have any mature science enabling us to distinguish between structures that are intelligently designed and structures that aren't.

If the question, "Does anything observable ever count as evidence of intelligence or intelligent design, and if so, what exactly?" is in general a respectable scientific question (which I believe it is), then all the ID theorists are doing in principle is asking, "Does anything observable in the world of biology ever count as evidence of intelligent design, and if so, what exactly?" If the first and general question is legit, then so is the second, specific one.