I'm not really interested in starting a debate on this here, primarily because the debate is often fruitless, but I do want to preserve for myself, on this site, some comments I made at this blog. My closing point:
I agree that the driving force behind modern evolutionary science is a deep-seated conviction that naturalistic philosophy is absolutely true. But it is better science. (not great, but better) Evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and his intellectual progeny argue from observations backwards. Lacking any religious convictions, they trust their senses, and assume things we see on a small scale today (development of antibiotic resistance, variation in finch beaks, etc.) account for the large scale variation we see in the world.
ID unfortunately has a fundamental problem: they are approching from the other end. ID guys assume there is a creator and look for evidence of him/her/it. They insist this isn't the case, but the only defense they have of their actions if they truly aren't arguing from a first cause is intellectual laziness, a refusal to probe that black box on the empiricist terms set by modern science.
The difference between the two, and why ID will never win the debate, is that naturalists don't assume anything more than observation as a basis for their proposals. They may be wrong in their assumption, but they are based in a simplistic, empirical worldview. ID-ers must assume something outside the test tube, and in so doing, they make pure scientists nervous.
Oddly, perhaps, I am much more in the ID camp than the naturalist camp, but that stems from my religious convictions. I just am willing to admit that.
The key that the ID camp is missing is that they are attempting to win a debate on empiricist grounds, using rules defined by empiricists. What they ought to be doing, and what people like Philip Johnson do well, is attack that empiricist mindset, show the logical inconsistency of the rules as they exist. They can't win by saying it is science. What they can do is say that our perception of what science is must change.
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3 comments:
Nate, I posted another thought on the issue in some semblance of detail on my site. Thanks for the post. daglof! <-- that was my word verification.
S.Lee, thanks for letting me know. I like your thoughts on the matter too.
MrStandfast, you're wrong.
You're missing my point. Showing that the theory of evolution is riddled with holes is no problem. Evolutionists do that all the time. That's what spurs research, the knowledge of a hole in our knowledge. What ID does is assume that hole cannot be filled, an assumption anathema to the "Enlightenment spirit" which wants to fill in all the blank spaces on the map. I should clarify though, that the assumption is that the hole cannot be filled with anything we can observe. A creator, or designer, is by its nature removed from the natural world. Enlightenment science is based in the natural world. Therefore the assumption of a creator has no place in Enlightenment science.
What I think you might have missed is my closing. Philip Johnson is a logician, and his work is largely concerned with pointing out the logical holes in an empirical worldview. That is fine, and it's the only way ID is going to make any headway. Because they can't win the debate without fundamentally redefining what science is. Because science means rationalism. And if rationalism is untenable, by all means prove it. But you can't win a debate with a rational empiricist, on their terms while you are defending a concept which is not empirical.
Not to be cantankerous... :)
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