Philosophy
I just realized what bothers me about intelligent design theory. I wish I would have thought of it before or during the John Adams Society debate last month.
I can’t explain the origin of life; I wasn’t then. As far as I know, nobody was taking notes at the time. I do observe that life exists, and I postulate therefore that life exists somehow.
Intelligent design will insist that it agrees, and that the somehow of the origin of life is an intelligent Designer. Meaning, in so many words, God. (If you are a ‘scientific’ intelligent design advocate, please forgive me using God; it’s shorter to type.)
Here’s the rub: the theory includes God both as proof and proved. Life exists because God designed life and we know that God must exist because we observe that life exists. I reject this because I hold as an axiom that nothing unreal exists.
I do not simultaneously reject the existence of God. Let us assume that God is real, and that God did indeed design life. By some means, God created life where there was none before. We must then realize an implication and a question.
Assuming God is real and God designed life, then intelligent design also begs its own question: What is the origin of God? Is God alive? If yes, then intelligent design is irrelevant because it does not explain the origin of the designer. If no, then what is the nature of God, by which God influences existence? God must possess choice, because the theory requires an intelligent designer, so God cannot be a property of existence, a set of predictable natural laws. Ergo God must exist—must be within existence. The only other possibility is that God does not exist, in which case the theory is disproved.
We are left to consider the implication that God is why life exists, but not how. Since God is within existence, God must be affecting it by some means. At every turn in human history, the unexplained has been attributed to God. Science does not hold that it rains because of God, that volcanoes erupt due to God, or that God, ergo the heavens spin about the earth. Yet these were once held as truth. Is God the reason? Perhaps. Certainly God is not the method, and the history of science should not lead one to hold that POOF is God’s method. Thermodynamics, geology, and celestial mechanics are the methods of precipitation, vulcanism, and day and night. If God designed life and God is real, then intelligent design fails as a scientific theory; intelligent design is a straw man presented in an attempt to shift the question from how life exists to why life exists.
The origin of life may be an unanswerable question. It may be that no record of the earliest life will ever be found. But do not appeal to me that a question is answered because no one has yet figured out the answer; POOF is not a process I will accept.
April 7th, 2006 at 9:04 pm
It is nice to begin to philosophically understand subject and object. God as subjective, not an object to understand, or even prove. While there are objects and processes I don’t understand, I would agree that accepting POOF as a process is not helpful in the long run.
I also would agree that intelligent design is a straw man. I, however, think that intelligent design shifts attention from why life exists to how. That is to say intelligent design makes God’s subjective existence an object which may prove something or be proven.
The revealed God of Hebrew scripture claimed the name “I am.” (Moses and the burning bush.) A philosophical suggestion would be that God is not within existence, God is existence, the “I am.” Apart from this there is no existance.
I am out of the loop. You refer to scientific intelligent design as an entity that has a theory of intelligent design but does not have a God component? Now that boggles my mind.
April 7th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
There’s a reason that I put ‘scientific’ intelligent design in sarcasm quotes. When advocates are trying to get intelligent design taught in schools as science, they claim that God is not necessary to the theory, that any intelligent designer will do. But as I pointed out, if the implied designer isn’t God, then the theory doesn’t answer anything.
I maintain that intelligent design is a how-to-why straw man. The theory is presented as a critique of evolution, evolution attempts to explain a how, therefore intelligent design must either attempt to explain a how or try to sidestep the question.
April 7th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
If God is existence, I think it would be a stronger argument that God is the consciousness of existence. Is consciousness an emergent property of any sufficiently complex system, up to and including everything as a whole? Even if so, it isn’t very plausible that that consciousness influences its physical manifestation by the property of consciousness alone. I hold that it remains worthwhile to pursue understanding the mechanisms—in analogy, the nervous system and musculature of the universe.
April 8th, 2006 at 6:48 am
On a time continuum I think of physical existance preceding consciousness, which is in conflict with my presupposition that God is that which preexists.
On the other hand, I find it helpful in some thought processes to consider that God is outside the time continuum. In that framework God as consciousness may be a helpful model.
April 10th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
I think that of more offense to me is the way that “Intelligent Design” ignores the very scientific method by which we define our world in the age of reason, that which brought us out of the church’s dark ages of faith.
Scientific Method states that you start with a hypothesis, and then poke holes in it, essentially. When there’s enough holes that said hypothesis can’t stand up anymore, we find another hypothesis.
Intelligent Design says that since we can’t find exact fossil records going from modern man all the way back to bubbles of orgranic chemicicals, Evolution can’t be true. That since our existing mathmatics can’t go back further than the billionth of a billionth of a billionth (and so on) of a second after the big bang, the whole theory is a wash.
In neither can is there anything to disprove the theory, only things we can’t explain yet. There are no theories which explain the whole as well without resorting to “poof”. That’s rather a childish way to look at it… If you can’t answer the whole question in one go, throw it all away and say it’s unsolvable.
April 10th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
I also might point out that most ID folks have very little understanding of Evolution, and ignore the fact that we can see it on a small scale all around the world as a living process, not that it was a one time thing and it’s over now.
I think part of the living process idea that scares them is that in the Bible, it’s stated that we were created in God’s image, and if we’ve been specializing and competing even over the past one, two, three, however millenia since then, perhaps God’s image wasn’t so perfect, and/or we’re no longer the things he created.