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I share, here, something of a preemptive response from the Evangelical Protestant philosopher Douglas Groothuis to critics of the notion of \u201cintelligent design\u201d and, specifically, to skeptics of William Dembski\u2019s \u201cdesign inference\u201d:<\/p>\n
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[S]ome reject design explanations in principle, claiming that they use the failed \u201cGod of the gaps\u201d strategy \u2014 invoking the supernatural instead of working out a sufficient naturalistic explanation.\u00a0 Put another way, the God of the gaps brings in God only to cover our ignorance of the physical world as a kind of deus ex machina to explain certain phenomena.\u00a0 Isaac Newton famously postulated divine causation to explain some of the gaps in his theories of planetary motion.\u00a0 But this divine explanation was later dispensed with when more data and a better theoretical model were advanced to cover the previous ignorance.\u00a0 Stories like this have been used to construct a narrative for science in which a naturalistic scientific explanation always trumps any explanation depending on factors beyond the physical world.\u00a0 However, this narrative is naive and often begs the question in favor of naturalism.\u00a0 While it has sometimes been shown that an explanation requiring divine intervention has been adequately replaced by one that appeals to natural laws, this does not rule out the possibility that a divine explanation may be a better explanation for some natural phenomena.\u00a0 In fact, . . . naturalistic explanations for cosmology and biology are becoming increasingly strained and untenable.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Although much more can be discussed about this issue, suffice it to say that the design inference is not based on ignorance<\/em> of the natural world but on knowledge<\/em> about it, especially given recent discoveries in physics (fine-tuning) and biology (the nature of the cell and DNA).\u00a0 Those who reject all design explanations in principle have committed the logical fallacy of begging the question in favor of naturalism; if so, their naturalistic theories become unfalsifiable and impervious to counter-evidence \u2014 traits that are hardly theoretical virtues in the philosophy of science.\u00a0<\/strong> (246-247)<\/span><\/p>\n (Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith<\/em>\u00a0[Downers Grove: IVP and Nottingham: Apollos, 2011], 246-247.)<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The two paragraphs above will, I realize, upset some of my readers very much and could even give them severe indigestion.\u00a0 That saddens me.\u00a0 So, in order to cheer them up, I\u2019ve elected to conclude this blog entry with a topic that they might find more congenial \u2014 mass extinctions:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNewly Discovered Mass Extinction Triggered the Dawn of the Dinosaurs\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHow Much Should We Spend to Avert Our Own Extinction?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n
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\u00a0 \u00a0 I share, here, something of a preemptive response from the Evangelical Protestant philosopher Douglas Groothuis to critics of the notion of \u201cintelligent design\u201d and, specifically, to skeptics of William Dembski\u2019s \u201cdesign inference\u201d: \u00a0 [S]ome reject design explanations in principle, claiming that they use the failed \u201cGod of the gaps\u201d strategy \u2014 invoking the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9409,14528,14551,4135,16233,16236,10253,71,8307,16196,120,16193,596,16245,16239,10127,545,11155,2601,4619,677,123,16242,16483,16480,10130,16199],"class_list":["post-88154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-appearance-of-design","tag-cell","tag-complex","tag-complexity","tag-contingency","tag-contingent","tag-cosmic","tag-cosmology","tag-cosmos","tag-dembski","tag-design","tag-design-inference","tag-dna","tag-event","tag-explanatory-filter","tag-fine-tuned","tag-fine-tuning","tag-gaps","tag-god","tag-id","tag-intelligence","tag-intelligent-design","tag-object","tag-specification","tag-specificity","tag-universe","tag-william-dembski"],"yoast_head":"\n