We can wonder at the tenacity of Darwinists in resisting paradigm review but when we look at the ID movement at its slyest we need hardly wonder. To be sure, the ID critique of Darwinian selection theory and its statistical illusion is a solid mass of debate and the Darwinists seem incapable of grasping the point.
But at the same time the design argument is subject to its own brand of abuse. The passage below shows the danger: we may infer design but we may not infer from that the existence of a transcendent mind or finally as below the inference to Christian doctrines of god. We can have sneaky suspicions but we can’t prove anything. We end up the same way Marx and Hegel ended up: wrong and wronger or vice versa.
That crosses the famous old red line in the reverse confusions to Darwinian pseudo-science. You might infer a non-random process of design but it is very hard to infer anything beyond that. The point can be seen in the grafting of design arguments onto biblical theology and the Hebrew idea of ‘god’, that is Canaanite pagan worlds of animal sacrifice and the rest of it, along with Christian theological idiocy taken to an extreme makes any design inference a free license to theological thugs, religious domineering, politically right churches that will certainly use ID research to manipulate congregations and terrorize with hell fire any who don’t accept the design inference as biblical revelation. In a way the question is hopeless: religion in the history of Israelitism shows, we forget, the whole history of constructing design arguments. The results have not been pretty. Small wonder scientists balk. But it is true that even history shows design. So what is the answer: I might suggest a look at the eonic model.
The design inference crowd has to choose: either design as Biblical religion or design as a potential science, in which case you must set aside religion and belief and stick with the evidence. This they will not do because they have allowed design argument to escape from the lab and remorph as theological apologetics. And there the great philosopher Kant shows the limits of design arguments and his warnings are amply vindicated in the futile metaphysical exhaustion over design ambiguities.
But time has run out for the abuse of design arguments. We can see that an ‘atheist’ (in quotation marks perhaps) has an equal to better chance of trying to infer design processes than the Christian obsessives with the Biblical monkey on their back.
Let us note the irony of AI tech: this can’t be applied directly to evolution except to suggest we not jump to conclusions. A dead machine using AI might be able to bootstrap from zilch to amoebas and onwards in a paradox of self-constructing ‘Frankentstein’. Again the proof is elusive, but twenty years ago an AI factor wasn’t even a card in the deck. To assume that mind requires a theistic starting point of cosmic intelligence is not proven. But even so the future will start over and rescue the design gambit beyond traditional religion.
Let us note the betrayal of the insight of the primitive Israelites who warned with a warning not taken that to speak of ‘god’ will backfire and enjoined point only to a glyph IHVH. Monotheists have betrayed their own starting point from the beginning.
In any case, an increasingly secular is strangely ready for design arguments: the theology gulch has been bypassed and the question lurks in its bare simplicity: how explain design in nature? ‘God’ is not an argument.
Since antiquity, scholars have debated whether the appearance of design in life was the product of a transcendent mind or undirected natural processes. The latter view rose to dominance after the scientific community largely embraced Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In the last few decades, the hegemony of the standard model for evolution has started to wane. Recent discoveries have forced biologists to replace evolutionary assumptions with design-based assumptions, language, and methods of investigation. This trend is to a large extent driven by the observation that the same engineering motifs and patterns employed in human creations are pervasive in living systems. What is becoming increasingly clear is that engineering principles far better explain nearly every aspect of life than does evolutionary theory. This conclusion perfectly coincides with the central Christian doctrine that life was designed by God and not an unintended accident of nature.
Source: Engineering Explains Biological Systems Better | Evolution News
1848+: The End(s) of History 