Robin Wilton's esoterica

« The Political Spectr... | Main | Britain's Oldest... »

26 Sep · Mon 2005

Complexity and Intelligent Design

Well, following on from the last blog entry, and mindful of the families who have just gone to court against the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania, no prizes at all for guessing which side of the Intelligent Design argument I come down on. I'm aware that a post like this risks crossing some boundaries --- so if you find 'anti-creationist' arguments offensive, please don't read on. I don't wish to offend, but neither am I comfortable with the thought that children are being told, by their teachers, to suspend their critical faculties. Arthur C Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That doesn't mean it is magic, though. But that's pretty much the level of the ID argument, it seems to me. "Any sufficiently advanced function is indistinguishable from magic and therefore that's just what it is". The human eye is so fantastic it must literally have been created by magic. Or a divine creator. There's no other way. I guess I don't win the unpredictability prize for citing Richard Dawkins, either, but he wrote a book called "Climbing Mount Improbable", in which he gives examples of complex end results which are produced by very simple incremental steps. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who had a Spirograph as a kid. Or, come to that, anyone who has studied fractals. They are produced by very simple mathematical functions, yet the results are unimaginably complex. The argument from complexity is not compelling. Not only is it undermined by examples of 'simple steps, complex outcomes', but it is also too dependent on the idea of our inability, at a given moment in our evolution, to understand the complexity in question. That's only a couple of rungs down the ladder from saying "the indisputable proof of God's existence is that I am stupid." Which is strange, given that I would bet you the majority of ID-ers believe that humans are created in the image of said creator. Better people than me have advanced the argument that the ID people and the geneticists are just not answering the same question. To say "these are the things which happen observably in the natural world, and here's my hypothesis as to how it works" is a testable proposition susceptible to rational proof over time. To say "these are the observed natural processes and here's my view as to why this all happens" is another matter. Ultimately that's a question of asserted belief. Of faith. If the existence of God could be scientifically proved, religion would necessarily be something other than what it is. Are there any atheist proponents of the Intelligent Design argument?

Posted by racingsnake @ 10:05 PM GMT+00:00 [ Comments [6] ]

Comments:

I particularly enjoy the argument favouring equal treatment of evolution and ID in schools that, as evolution teaches that organisms must battle to survive and ensure an existence for their descendants, ideas must be examined and allowed to battle to determine which are the 'fittest'. Of course, this ignores that some ideas are born stunted & feeble and would not survive beyond the maternity ward without heroic medical measures from their 'family'. Do you read Pinker, e.g. Language Instinct or Blank Slate? Paul p.s. looking at my location in the political spectrum (http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulmadsen/47088775/), I find it emazing that we can even talk, we are so far apart :-)

Posted by Paul Madsen on September 27, 2005 at 12:06 PM GMT+00:00 #

Wow. Talk about opposites attracting! ;^)
I haven't read any Pinker yet, but it sounds like I soon will. Thanks for the pointer.

Posted by Robin Wilton on September 27, 2005 at 12:10 PM GMT+00:00 #

[Trackback] Robin Wilton asks whether it is possible for an atheist to believe in Intelligent Design. Well, it is certainly possible for atheists to believe in central planning. There are science fiction worlds in which central planning is carried out by a supreme...

Posted by SOAPbox on September 27, 2005 at 02:29 PM GMT+00:00 #

Thanks Richard -
Well nearly... I think the question of whether an atheist can believe in Intelligent Design is slightly different from what I was wondering, namely whether any ID proponents are actually atheists...
Second, Chandler Howell may be right that Central Planning is the best available analogy for corporate organisation, but it's deficient in a couple of significant areas. The 'social contract' is very different from an employment contract, and citizens tend to want a far broader range of rights than employees...

Posted by Robin Wilton on September 27, 2005 at 06:06 PM GMT+00:00 #

Thought this might make a useful contribution to the debate: http://www.qwantz.com/index.pl?comic=635. If you haven't seen Dinosaur Comics before - go there and take a look. You have to look at a few to understand the real genius here...

Posted by Superpat on October 11, 2005 at 05:07 PM GMT+00:00 #

Presumably you don't quite mean "atheists who believe in ID"- sort of an oxymoron. However, former atheist Anthony Flew (he used to argue against C.S.Lewis) is no longer an atheist (apparently) because he believes in ID. David Berlinski is not a theist. Also, there is no shortage of atheist scientists who dissent from conventional "Random Mutation and Natural Selection". Is it Crick who believed in directed panspermia? As did Hoyle and Wickramasinge? Lynn Margulis?

Posted by Paul Fernandez on October 22, 2005 at 01:37 PM GMT+00:00 #

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
« December 2009
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Today