Speakers debate origins of life
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by William Brown on November 17, 2010 at 10:51 pm under News
SUN Entertainment’s final debate of the semester, Evolution vs. Intelligent Design, took place on Nov. 16 between Michael Shermer, founding editor of Skeptic magazine, and Paul A. Nelson, an intelligent design advocate with a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Chicago.
Shermer, who argued against God’s existence in the debate last month, continued to espouse his views by taking the side of evolution. Nelson took the opposite side in favor of intelligent design.
Shermer, who presented his argument to the audience first, said the question before Nelson and himself concerned how life is designed.
“The question on the table tonight: Is life naturally designed or is it intelligently designed?” Shermer said. “Is it supernatural top-down design or bottom-up natural design? I’ll concede the design point.”
Shermer then went on to say the main issue concerns who life’s designer is.
“The question then really is: who or what is the designer?” Shermer said. “How did the design come to be?”
Nelson, in his opening, addressed the core of his argument: intelligent design.
“What is intelligent design?” Nelson asked. “Well, it’s not what you think it might be. There’s nothing mysterious or spooky about inferring an intelligent cause.”
Nelson went on to illustrate his point with two examples of what he referred to as intelligent causes: a photo of the L.A. Times that was deliberately tampered with, and results of a physics experiment that had been falsified.
“You’re an L.A. Times subscriber — here is your toolkit of explanation. You carry it everywhere you go,” Nelson said. “It’s got natural causes in it and intelligent causes in it, and you use those to explain the world. You pick up the paper, look at it and notice the funny pattern, which must be explained.”
Nelson said once natural causes for the tampering were eliminated, only an intelligent cause remained.
“What remained was the intelligence, the deliberate intent of the photographer,” Nelson said. “So we’ve got a scenario where you have an agent, someone with a mind and intelligence who brings about an effect … that could not have existed without them acting.”
Both Shermer and Nelson argued their points with a common view, that of science.
Shermer said even if you went with the argument posed by intelligent design, there is still an important detail missing.
“If something looks designed, you have to ask yourself: Who designed the designer?” Shermer said. “Surely the designer has a designer, so the intelligent designer has a super-intelligent designer, and ad infinitum. [for infinity].”
Nelson said although science has explained a lot, there is still more to find.
“I think science should be free to follow the evidence,” Nelson said. “And I would have that view even if I were an atheist.”
1 Comment
First of all, science IS free to follow the evidence, and anyone who has any familiarity with the actual scientific research published in professional science journal is familiar with the fact that it does so. So when Paul Nelson says, “I think science should be free to follow the evidence,” his remark is based on the standard creationist pretension that there’s a conspiracy in science against intelligent design creationists.
However, while there certainly is a “conspiracy” in science – it’s by design – it isn’t the conspiracy creationist pretend it is. Science requires that ideas (“hypotheses”) be able to be tested against relevant evidence (“testability” or “falsifiability”). Creationists, including intelligent design creationists, not only shun this fundamental requirement of science, but explicitly seek to redefine science to accept untestable ideas.
The same goes for ideas about intelligent design. The problem is not that scientists are opposed to the general concept of intelligent design per se (see the field of archaeology, for example). The problem is that the ideas about intelligent design that creationists propose are either (1) already known to be scientifically wrong, or (2) are simply not yet known about scientifically, or (3) are untestable in principle in the first place and hence are incapable of being science.
Second, Paul Nelson isn’t just any kind of creationist but is a young earth creationist in particular. So while his statement “I think science should be free to follow the evidence” is indeed laudable and the way science operates in principle and in general practice, we know that it is a principle that Nelson himself as a young earth creationist is diametrically opposed to.
As the leading young earth creationist organization in the world, which has named itself “Answers In Genesis”, explicitly points out about young earth creationist principles: “By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record” (from the “Answers In Genesis Statement Of Faith”), which totally contradicts the idea that “science should be free to follow the evidence.”