Perry Dane wrote:
That said, though, one needs to be fair here. The claim of intelligent design theory is not that NO features of the biological world can be explained by evolution through natural selection. Nor is it, as I said before, that the biological world is, according to one or another criterion, well-designed. It is, rather, that there are certain features of the biological world (irreducible complexity and all that) that point to at least those features having been designed by an intelligence.
Actually, this depends on which ID advocate you're talking to at the time and that fact points up the lack of a coherent ID model. Some ID proponents, like Nancy Pearcey and Paul Nelson, are young earth creationists. For all practical purposes, they do take the position that there is nothing in the biological world, save perhaps bacterial adaptation for immunity to antibiotics, that can be explained by evolution through natural selection. That's precisely why there can't be an actual ID model for the natural history of life on earth, as there is for evolutionary theory. Does ID mean that all life forms in the earth's history were created simultaneously? Maybe. According to many ID advocates, yes. Does it mean that life on earth evolved through common ancestry but with the designer having to step in every now and then to design some particularly complex bit that can't evolve on its own? That appears to be Behe's position, at least.
But those are radically different propositions, and the inclusion of both of them under a sort of "mimimalist" or "bare bones" ID assertion that *some* designer did *something* at *some point* is one major reason why ID cannot be considered a scientific theory, because it does not make any positive statements that the evidence might either confirm or refute. At least with the young earthers, they have offered a model from which we can derive testable hypotheses - the world is ~6000 years old, all animals lived on the earth simultaneously, most of them were killed off in a global flood around 4500 years ago, all of the features of the geological world are the result of that flood, and so forth. Those are all statements that lead to risky predictions that the evidence may either confirm or refute (in this case, all of them are of course soundly refuted by the evidence). So frankly, I don't think we can make statements about what "intelligent design theory" says or doesn't say about evolution or about natural history because there is no theory, just a very vague and minimalist statement and a set of arguments against evolution.
Ed Brayton _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
