The following appeared on the Intelligent Design website "Uncommon Descent" in a post entitled: "Frequently raised but weak arguments against Intelligent Design" (See here: https://uncommondescent.com/faq/#gaps_god)
39] ID is Nothing More Than a “God of the Gaps” Hypothesis
Famously, when his calculations did not quite work, Newton proposed that
God or angels nudged the orbiting planets every now and then to get them back
into proper alignment. Later scientists were able to show that the
perturbations of one planet acting on another are calculable and do not in
aggregate skew the calculations.
Newton’s error is an example of the “God of the gaps” fallacy – if we do
not understand it, God must have done it.
ID is not proposing “God” to paper over a gap in current scientific
explanation. Instead ID theorists start from empirically observed, reliable,
known facts and generally accepted principles of scientific reasoning:
(a) Intelligent designers exist and act in the world.
(b) When they do so, as a rule, they leave reliable signs of such
intelligent action behind.
(c) Indeed, for many of the signs in question such as CSI and IC,
intelligent agents are the only observed cause of such effects, and chance +
necessity (the alternative) is not a plausible source, because the islands of
function are far too sparse in the space of possible relevant configurations.
(d) On the general principle of science, that “like causes like,” we are
therefore entitled to infer from sign to the signified: intelligent action.
(e) This conclusion is, of course, subject to falsification if it can be
shown that undirected chance + mechanical forces do give rise to CSI or
IC. Thus, ID is falsifiable in principle
but well supported in fact.
In sum, ID is indeed a legitimate scientific endeavor:
the science that studies signs of intelligence
The foregoing is just a rehash of the "explanatory filter" epistemic used by IDists. I have criticized this rather simplistic epistemic before:
It's not that I particularly disagree with any of the above; the problem lies in where it stops: Once we identify the presence of intelligence, explanation doesn't stop there. For example, we find an object buried in the earth and identify it as of archaeological interest. But then some effort is made to take the matter further: Viz: What kind of minds created it and why? What was the social milieu in which the object was made? What was its purpose? How was it made? Taking the questions even deeper, we may ask ourselves what is it about an entity that classifies it as intelligent? Above all, what processes are entailed by intelligence?
It is questions like this that lead me on to the subject of "intelligent creation", an endeavor which involves at least making an attempt to take the question of intelligence and the nature of the processes behind it a little further. In contrast the IDists have explicitly stated that their task ends once intelligence has been detected, thus leaving a hiatus or "gap"; hence their work very comfortably fits a "natural forces vs divine agency" dualist philosophy (See links below).
The irony is that even atheist evolutionists will tell us that evolution is far from a random process thus implicitly admitting to an information gap an: See here, here and here: This is, in fact, consistent with William Dembski's work. See here. Thus, so-called "natural forces" as conceived by standard evolutionary theory can hardly be classified as "undirected chance and mechanical forces" (sic) if they are sufficiently resourced to do the job of life creation.
As I have said before information can be created, provided we allow exponentially expanding parallelism and teleology to occur "naturally". For example, the human mind is a "natural object" (sic) which generates such information on a routine basis. See here. I also touch on the subject of "Complex Specified Information" (CSI) in the same link.
Links on De Facto ID
De facto ID's God-of-the-Gaps (Small sample)
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/western-dualism-in-north-america.html
Links on De Facto ID
De facto ID's God-of-the-Gaps (Small sample)
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/western-dualism-in-north-america.html
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