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| Picture from: https://www.discovery.org/ |
On several counts I can give a cautious endorsement to the North American Intelligent Design (NAID) movement. But this is a very qualified endorsement as I have criticisms of both their intellectual and cultural posturing. See for example my criticism of Casey Luskin in this series. Moreover, my acceptance of the intelligent design argument for God is very cautious compared to NAID culture; for given that we are extrapolating from our experience with the designs of human and animals (& aliens?) who work within the created context to a very Alien Totalizing Being who is postulated to be The Context of creation, it seems a bit of a stretch to claim that we can make an induction from human and animal intelligence to the intelligence of God. However, I would certainly concede that given the remarkable organization of our cosmos, which for me is most forcibly emerges in the descriptive effectiveness of the elegant algorithms of physics, there is a compelling intuition that by analogy the cosmos itself has its origins in an all embracing intelligence. This feeling is further reinforced when set against the arguments of arrogant blowhard R. Carrier who deludes himself with his misconceptions about probability theory as he attempts to account for physics as an aspect of randomness.
However, as I have suggested in this short paper, I nevertheless take a rather reserved attitude toward the simple extrapolation of design arguments to God based on Bayes theorem. For me a faithful & personal God is an a priori feature of my world view, a feature which not only promotes a successful epistemology but also makes ultimate sense of a seemingly senseless world, a world whose contingent organization is otherwise destined to remain an enigma. On this account God is not a simple inductive extrapolation from observation but rather the initial step in an abductive approach which gives anthropic meaning and purpose to the world (*1). Without this sense making world view one is left with little but a bleak absurdity where nothing makes sense (see Brian Cox). So whilst I'm in sympathy with the general thrust of the NAID movement (but not their politics) I would want to point out that they have backed the wrong horses on the following counts.....
1. The so called explanatory filter: OK when applied to human, animal and even alien activity the filter works within the creation but all too easily leads to naive "God of the Gaps" arguments when applied to divine activity. This has mislead NAIDs to commit to needless "God of the gaps" arguments as evidenced on their total commitment to anti-evolutionism.
3. Anti-evolutionism? OK some theists might from a theological point of view find evolution difficult to stomach. But we cannot rule evolution out on the basis of the category mistake that there is such a thing as "blind natural forces". If the Divine is as totalizing as Christian theology suggests then there is no such thing as "blind natural forces" that constitutes an explanatory gap that needs filling with divine intervention. If the process of evolution as commonly conceived has taken place in relatively short cosmic times then it is itself a remarkable work of creation. If you are going to argue against evolution it must be from empirical grounds not on the basis of a God of the gaps intuitions about the inability of "blind natural forces" (sic) to fill a gap that can only be filled with divine hocus-pocus.
2. Anti-Junk DNA?: There is no obliging need for theists to commit themselves one way or the other on this question. Who can tell just what a contextually totalizing Being would or would not want to do with redundant/random coding in his DNA. My own uncompiled computer code is usually littered with the developmental legacy of historical but now redundant coding, so who knows what the great unknown of the divine mind might do.
4. Information can't be created by "blind natural forces"?. This is false: See here. Grumpy atheist PZMyers has recently & rightly taken NAID Stephen Myer to task on this one. See here: I have to roll my eyes when a creationist says information!
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The notion that only enigmatic intelligence can create information may be abased on the idea that somehow human intelligence should be categorized as a mysterious incomprehensible and transcendent process. To support this NAIDs may point to Roger Penrose's ideas about intelligence making use of non-computable processes.
I have critiqued Penrose's work here. This work appears to have its origin in the fact that no finite system can fully be self-aware. Full-self-awareness, for finite systems, opens up the potential for self-referencing contradictions. However, an outside perspective of an ontology external to a subject intelligence can be fully aware of the processes of that intelligence.
Footnote
*1 Christianity has a strong existential component to its evidences ; that is, Christianity is partly dependent on the testimony of personal experiences. This slant toward anecdotal evidence, of course, cannot qualify as being on the same footing as the formal and sharable evidences of science.
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