Faith Well Grounded

In comments here lately I have professed the fathers of modern science as working within a creationist framework. This is in response to the claim that ID is not science, and my making the point that the recent definition of science that bars the supernatural as a potential cause is just that-- recent. The fathers of modern science worked within a creationist's framework, and you can't separate their science from this framework. You just can't-- especially when they went through great pains to prevent us trying.

In my recent defense of Dr. Michael J. Behe, I revisited the court transcripts of the Dover trial and it struck me that there was a lot of philosophy being doled out in the name of the law. Now, please bear in mind that this post isn't written to answer whether it's right for the bench to be used to choose between philosophies. This post is written to point out that Judge Jones' philosophy was just bad.

This is the promised follow-up to the peer review blog post found here. It's a copy of the senior adviser's review of his submission to a science journal, and Behe's response (copied and pasted from http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_correspondencewithsciencejournals.htm). I thought it interesting.

ID scientists have often been disparaged here by commenter(s) because of their lack of peer review. The subject was a major part of yesterday's post, so I thought I'd continue the theme and let one of the founding scientist/authors of ID speak to it, in his own words. The material I will be quoting can be found on Michael Behe's author's page at arn.org (http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_correspondencewithsciencejournals.htm. It's fairly dated, but that shouldn't affect the subject matter at all.

In a blog here late last year, it was floated that Michael Behe can't be trusted because he lied under oath (Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board). Since I have little connection with seeking ID taught in schools, I kind of let it drop there, doing little more than asking the commenter for more details and getting none.

A word about directionality: Evolution does not have a direction. Organisms can go towards complexity or simplicity. It's all determined by the environment and selection pressures. Just because humans are complex multi-cellular animals doesn't mean we've had the most evolution. Every living creature today is the result of the same amount of evolutionary time.

With all of the talk of information in the genomes, the natural question arises:

If DNA is a storage medium for information, doesn't that indicate a designer? DNA encodes and decodes information based on an alphabet. It even contains error-checking.

DNA as a natural process is like accepting the natural formation of the TCP/IP protocol.

I was recently taken to task for making reference to the fabled 747/tornado argument during a discussion of abiogenesis.

The comment read:

Please don't bring that old canard up. It's really beneath you. Anyone who thinks that is analogous to the way evolution (and these hypotheses of abiogenesis) works is only displaying a profound lack of understanding of the most basic concepts.

The various discussions here centered around evolution have often come back to my (and others') distinction between micro and macro evolution. EDogg stated the evolutionist's mindset very well in a recent comment, in that he makes no distinction between micro and macro evolution. We see changes now, thus these small changes over a vast amount of time equate to macro evolution. Small changes add up.

The Evolutionists: the Struggle for Darwin's Soul, Richard Morris, pg 97...