![\"NebulaHelix\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/572\/2015\/10\/NebulaHelix.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe Helix Nebula:\u00a0700 light-years away; photograph taken by European Southern Observatory\u2019s VISTA Telescope (7-1-13). It was used in the\u00a0Hidden Universe<\/em> IMAX film<\/span>\u00a0[Wikimedia Commons<\/a> \/\u00a0\u00a0Creative Commons<\/a>\u00a0Attribution 4.0 International<\/a>\u00a0license]<\/span><\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n This dialogue (myself against five\u00a0atheists or agnostics, as usual) came from the combox of my post,\u00a0<\/span>Atheism: More Rational & Scientific than Christianity?<\/a>\u00a0The words of catfink<\/a> will be in blue<\/span>; those of JD Eveland<\/a>\u00a0(agnostic) in green<\/span>, \u00a0TheMarsCydonia<\/a> in red<\/span>, Brad Feaker<\/a>\u00a0 in brown<\/span>, and JGravelle<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0in\u00a0purple<\/span>. \u201cID\u201d = \u201cintelligent design.\u201d<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Yes \u2013 the good old argument from ignorance. \u2018Gee \u2013 I do not understand\/believe this is possible \u2013 must be -insert god(s) here-<\/span><\/p>\n I know the feeling. The<\/span> \u201catoms \/ time of the gaps\u201d<\/a> is the most amazing instance of this \u201cgaps\u201d stuff.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Indeed, because every time a phenomenon, like say rainbows, the tides, etc. was attributed to God, science always found that indeed God was responsible, not natural phenomena.<\/span><\/p>\n Hence why it is irrational to think there might be an natural explanation to any phenomenon and we should instead just say \u201cGod does it\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n As Bill O\u2019Reilly said: \u201cTide comes in, tide comes out, you can\u2019t explain that\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n Should I add \/s or was it obvious enough?<\/span><\/p>\n You guys say, \u201cGod couldn\u2019t have possibly done it. It has<\/em>\u00a0to be all natural causes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n How is that less dogmatic than a primitive, scientifically unsophisticated Christian explaining natural phenomena by God? At least he is half-right, as all Christians believe that God not only set natural laws in motion<\/em> (to run on their own) but also sustains<\/em> the universe in some sense on an ongoing basis.<\/span><\/p>\n So if a Christian says that \u201cGod did it,\u201d he is right. God simply did it (in most cases) via the laws that He made<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n We like<\/em> science; we love<\/em>\u00a0it; always have. We<\/em> invented it. One day you\u2019ll figure this out.<\/span><\/p>\n Please help me figure it out:\u00a0Which Christian scientists ever inserted \u201cGod did it\u201d as an explanation to phenomenon and turned out to be right?<\/span><\/p>\n I mean, if you are to continuously argue that \u201cGod did it\u201d is rational and \u201cnatural mechanism\u201d is irrational, there must be occurrences where the former rather than the later was proved to be true.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s not an either\/or. Christians centuries ago still believed in creation ex nihilo<\/em>, while atheists thought the universe was eternal.<\/span><\/p>\n Therefore, they may have said that God was the Creator, minus hard facts. Now the Big Bang comes along, which is perfectly consistent with that and refutes the eternal universe notion.<\/span><\/p>\n Michael Behe<\/a> makes very elaborate biochemical arguments for irreducible complexity and dares to say that God designed it. None of his neo-Darwinist critics can show him a better explanation for how these structures evolved (but are awful good at a multitude of insults), so his conclusion remains the most rational one, in our present state of knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n Seriously? Then why hasn\u2019t the scientific community accepted Behe\u2019s \u201cmost rational\u201d conclusion? The answer is obvious: because his critics are correct.<\/span><\/p>\n The answer is because his critics are methodological or metaphysical naturalists and therefore don\u2019t allow the word \u201cGod\u201d or \u201cdesign\u201d to be considered at all.<\/span><\/p>\n Naturalism is the orthodoxy of the day, and we know that orthodoxy is not<\/em>\u00a0to be questioned, right? Behe dares to think out of the box, and so he is a pariah.<\/span><\/p>\n If, as you claim, Behe\u2019s conclusion is \u201cmost rational,\u201d why hasn\u2019t the scientific community rejected \u201cmethodological or metaphysical naturalism\u201d in favor of Behe\u2019s conclusion?<\/span><\/p>\n Because that would be a<\/span> \u201cparadigm shift\u201d<\/a> (Kuhn<\/a>) and those are fairly rare in science and huge changes of existing presuppositions.<\/span><\/p>\n Materialist scientists are also dreadfully fearful that any<\/em>\u00a0concession to design or God at all would lead inexorably to young earth creationism. It\u2019s stupid, but that is how it is.<\/span><\/p>\n Same old same old . . . it\u2019s all based on putting people into a box and refusing to recognize that science has boundaries and limitations, and that mere mention of God won\u2019t overthrow science at all.<\/span><\/p>\n So you\u2019re now claiming \u2014 without offering any argument to support your claim \u2014 that the basic paradigm of modern science is fatally flawed, and that the scientific community is somehow blind to this fundamental problem that you and Behe and a few other religiously-motivated critics have identified.<\/span><\/p>\n What were you saying about plausibility?<\/span><\/p>\n Methodological naturalism<\/em> is flawed; not science itself<\/em>. It doesn\u2019t have much effect on actual scientific endeavor, since it deals with matter, anyway, but it does whenever we get to a place where science inadequately explains things: such as at the Big Bang, or some discussions in quantum mechanics or irreducible complexity.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m in the process right now of collecting good articles about this and many questions, precisely because of people like you who demand documentation at every turn (makes my job a lot easier, as I have not figured out how to obtain an infinite amount of time). So you wanna read about this, huh? Here you go:<\/span> [1 ]<\/a> [2]<\/a> [3]<\/a> [4]<\/a> [5]<\/a> [6]<\/a> [7]<\/a> [8]<\/a> [9]<\/a>.<\/p>\n These are all philosophers, and some of the best Christian ones (Dembski also has a doctorate in mathematics).<\/span><\/p>\n From the judge\u2019s ruling in<\/span>\u00a0Kitzmiller v. Dover<\/a>, the case involving the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classes:<\/span><\/p>\n \u2013 A significant aspect of the IDM [intelligent design movement] is that despite Defendants\u2019 protestations to the contrary, it describes ID as a religious argument. In that vein, the writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2013 The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2013 We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation;\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n (3) ID\u2019s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.<\/span><\/p>\n Who cares what a judge thinks about the philosophy and nature of science, anyway? He has a legal mind, not a scientific or philosophical one.<\/span><\/p>\n Law is simply philosophy played for real money. Legal reasoning and philosophical inference (at least the logico-deductive versions thereof) are remarkably similar processes.Where these differ from religious reasoning is that they do not admit of supernatural causation. If an empirical cause remains murky, it\u2019s consigned to the category of \u201cwe don\u2019t understand it yet, but we ought to be able to sometime\u201d; it\u2019s not consigned to the supernatural. In practice, things we don\u2019t understand are treated as \u201cerror variance\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n A judge certainly ought to be able to weigh in on this, particularly as there are significant issues of public policy at stake in the case. That\u2019s why we have judges; they connect philosophy to practice.<\/span><\/p>\n Sure; he can weigh in, but he is not particularly an expert on issues having to do with science and philosophy. Neither am I, which is precisely why I massively cite philosophers and scientists in these areas.<\/span><\/p>\n Then I\u2019m accused of merely throwing out links and being lazy, etc., and asked to summarize and dumb-down. :-)<\/span><\/p>\n One thing you said is incorrect as a generalization or purported statement of fact:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cphilosophical inference (at least the logico-deductive versions thereof) . . . [does] not admit of supernatural causation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n That only holds true, of course, for the atheist or agnostic philosopher. It\u2019s not true at all of Christian and otherwise theistic philosophers, of whom there are many these days.<\/span><\/p>\n If it were<\/em>\u00a0true, no philosopher could argue for the existence of God, and you know that many do that, both now, and all through history. That\u2019s the whole point of the cosmological<\/a> and teleological <\/a>arguments: about which I have recently compiled many, many links.<\/span><\/p>\n I ought to have said \u201c\u2026,certain kinds of philosophical inquiry\u201d. Of course there are philosophical schools that do contain the supernatural. As I suggested, law represents the union of philosophy and applied economics.All legal reasoning is philosophical, although not all philosophies are included in the law.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019d also suggest that the judge knows his own limitations as an expert; that\u2019s why the opinion is chock full of references to scientific experts, including the large numbers that testified. Part of his responsibility was to determine who was and who was not a scientific expert. His criteria were pretty clear.<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve read the whole opinion; I have; it\u2019s really quite tightly reasoned and well supported. I think the judge did a pretty good job of becoming as expert as he needed to be to resolve a case of applied public policy.<\/span><\/p>\n His ruling is based on expert testimony presented at trial. That evidence overwhelmingly refuted the claim that intelligent design is science.<\/span><\/p>\n Dogmaticians always defend dogma. This should surprise anyone?<\/span><\/p>\n As I said, there is hysteria that ID is merely creationism in a different guise. This is untrue.<\/span><\/p>\n Michael Behe, for example, has made it clear again and again, that he accepts evolution by common descent. Nor is it merely \u201creligious.\u201d This is real academic work by real scientists like Behe and philosophers like Dembski and Collins and Plantinga.<\/span><\/p>\n If science is defined as materialistic; that it can never mention God at all (though many scientists have done so, including Darwin), then yes, ID wouldn\u2019t be science. But I deny that premise. The history of science also firmly denies it.<\/span><\/p>\n Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science. These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief. Documentation offered in support of these claims is typically limited to the special publications of their advocates. These publications do not offer hypotheses subject to change in light of new data, new interpretations, or demonstration of error. This contrasts with science, where any hypothesis or theory always remains subject to the possibility of rejection or modification in the light of new knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences<\/a><\/p>\n Darwin was treated like dirt because he had a new theory. We all have heard of Galileo.<\/span><\/p>\n So we would expect that folks who have a few new ideas would be treated the same way today. It\u2019s how it always is. Einstein was initially controversial, as was quantum mechanics. When punctuated equilibrium<\/a> came along (1972), that was hugely controversial because it challenged neo-Darwinist gradualist orthodox dogma.<\/span><\/p>\n String theory<\/a> is new and controversial today, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n Read Kuhn<\/a> and Gould <\/a>on the history of science and paradigm shifts.<\/span><\/p>\n You\u2019re really grasping at straws now. The idea that Behe is some kind of modern-day Darwin or Galileo or Einstein is ludicrous. The work of Darwin and Galileo was resisted not because it lacked scientific merit but\u00a0because it challenged religious orthodoxy<\/i>. Einstein\u2019s work on relativity was briefly controversial because it was such a radical revision of Newtonian mechanics. Intelligent design is just the most recent attempt to put a scientific veneer on religious creationism. As the quotes I provided make clear, ID is not science. It\u2019s religion.<\/span><\/p>\n By the way, it is rather amusing that you attempt to recruit Gould for your cause as he was perhaps the single most famous\u00a0critic<\/i>\u00a0of intelligent design and other forms of \u201ccreation science,\u201d and is one of the authors of the National Academy of Sciences report I quote from above.<\/span><\/p>\n I didn\u2019t technically equate<\/em> him with those people. I merely noted that \u201cwe would expect that folks who have a few new ideas<\/em> would be treated the same way<\/em> today. It\u2019s how it always is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n It was an analogy, but analogies are not necessarily equivalent in every aspect. They can be partial, as this was. What is the same is the hostility to any \u201cnew\u201d idea.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe work of Darwin and Galileo was resisted not because it lacked scientific merit but because it challenged religious orthodoxy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Exactly! Now you\u2019re starting to get it. Behe and ID generally are opposed because they challenge the present fashionable scientific orthodoxy<\/em> (i.e., radical materialism or naturalism).<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIntelligent design is just the most recent attempt to put a scientific veneer on religious creationism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s hogwash, as I have already pointed out to you. The ID school contains some creationists, no doubt, but it doesn\u2019t define<\/em>\u00a0the movement. Behe accepts evolution. I myself am agnostic about evolution. I have no intrinsic<\/em> objection to it at all. I believe that if<\/em>\u00a0it is true, God had to be involved somehow, since present-day science has not adequately accounted for macroevolutionary change and creation of new anatomical structures.<\/span><\/p>\n My primary concern is regarding materialism<\/em>, not evolution. God could very well have created in that way. No problem whatsoever (and this is official Catholic teaching as well).<\/span><\/p>\n Michael Denton<\/a> is another ID advocate. He\u2019s not a creationist, either:<\/span><\/p>\n Denton still accepts design and embraces a non-Darwinian evolutionary theory. He denies that randomness accounts for the biology of organisms, he has proposed an evolutionary theory which is a \u201cdirected evolution\u201d in his book Nature\u2019s Destiny<\/em> (1998).<\/span><\/p>\n The same holds true for another prominent ID advocate, Robin Collins<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n Regarding evolution, he accepts the claim that all life on earth came about by a process of evolution (descent with modification) from the first cell, but is open to the possibility that God might have guided this process at various points. He is skeptical of the claim that all the complex biological structures we find in living things can be fully explained by blind, unguided chance plus natural selection, and thus thinks that the issue of whether Darwinian evolution (without God\u2019s guiding control) can adequately account for the structure of life should be vigorously explored.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n His criticism of presently orthodox materialistic evolutionary theory there is exactly my own.<\/span><\/p>\n I cited Gould for the purpose that I explained. He writes about how scientists are persecuted when they come up with something against the currently accepted orthodoxy. It happened to him<\/em>, too (punctuated equilibrium).<\/span><\/p>\n Gould wrote, e.g., about a guy like anthropologist and anatomist Raymond Dart<\/a>, who first discovered a specimen of Australopithecus africanus<\/em>, and how he was atrociously treated because he had a different theory.\u00a0All of that analysis is perfectly consistent with my argument here. But you can\u2019t receive<\/em> it, because you are too dogmatic and set in your ways to even comprehend what I\u2019m saying.<\/span><\/p>\n Gould also wrote similarly about geneticist Richard Goldschmidt<\/a>, of \u201chopeful monsters\u201d<\/a> fame. His ideas went against the grain of fashion, and so Wikipedia notes:<\/span><\/p>\n Goldschmidt presented his hypothesis when neo-Darwinism was becoming dominant in the 1940s and 1950s, and strongly protested against the strict gradualism of neo-Darwinian theorists. His ideas were accordingly seen as highly unorthodox by most scientists and were subjected to ridicule and scorn. However, there has been a recent interest in the ideas of Goldschmidt in the field of evolutionary developmental biology, as some scientists are convinced he was not entirely wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n