The ID debate (V)

(Following on from The ID debate I, II, III and IV, here is Peter’s third [and, to date, final] contribution.)

For a defence of premise (a) of the argument for ID you really should read some of the work by William A. Dembski on ‘specified complexity’. I recommend starting at the beginning and reading The Design Inference (Cambridge). For Dembski’s application of the design filter to biology, and his extended defence of Irreducible Complexity as a specific example of specified complexity, and which also considers your objection to irreducible complexity, cf. Dembski’s book No Free Lunch.

Specified Complexity (albeit in less fulsomly outworked forms than that provided by Dembski) certainly seems to be widely accepted as a reliable design detector by scholars on all sides of the design debate. cf. Richard Dawkins in Climbing Mount Improbable, Basil Mitchell in The Justification of Religious Belief, Denis Alexander in Rebuilding the Matrix, William Lane Craig, etc. etc.

Would you claim that, contra Dembski, either in principle or in practice, there is no scientific way to rule in ‘intelligent design’ as the best explanation for anything? If so, you would presumably have to say that SETI was in principle impossible? And what about cryptography, forensics, etc? If, on the other hand, there are ways of ruling in design as the best explanation, why is it in principle illegitimate to apply these methods to the things studied in physics/biology? If they can be applied, then presumably to deny ID one would have to deny premise (b) rather than premise (a).

I must confess to being confused as to the nature of your theological ‘dualism’ critique of ID, and would value a clarification of what you think the problem is. The thing is, on the face of it your theological critique seems to be quite different from fellow theistic evolutionist Denis Alexander’s theological critique – so perhaps I am getting the two confused in my mind! What is wrong with positing two modes of divine action, one of which is describable in terms of secondary causes, exactly as the theistic evolutionist describes it (hence you can’t object to my description of these causes, although you and Denis do seem to have an internal disagree about this!), and the other of which is not describable in the same way? Isn’t this exactly what scientists do in many fields already – describe event x as due to ‘natural causes’ (which the theist sees as created and sustained by God) and event y (a message in a radio signal, a murder, a chipped flint arrow head, etc) as due to intelligent design. Now, if we were determined to interpret the intelligence in question as God rather than as any of the alternatives… But I see no principled difference between such a case and the debate, for example, between directed panspermia ID and theistic ID…

But of course, as Dembski points out, detecting intelligent design is not the same as proposing an explanation of how the design was implimented, just as it is not the same as proposing who the design was implimented by. If both premise a) and b) are true, then theists had better do the best they can to find a theologically satisfactory interpretation of the scientific facts!

Yours with thanks for continued dialogue,

Peter S. Williams

Article posted at 10:26pm on 20 April 2006
Category: Faith, Musing, Science