In a paper entitled, "On the Very Possibility of Intelligent Design," published in the book, The Creation Hypothesis, back in 1992, William Dembski offered the following thought experiment: Read the rest of this entry »

In a comment within the Misusing Science thread Keiths made the following brief remark:

If immaterial souls exist "” particularly souls of the kind that most people envisage "” then there are testable empirical consequences.

The logic of the statement indicates that if we could observe what are reasonably inferred as consequences of an immaterial soul then we would have cause to suspect a soul exists and that the lack of such expected consequences would be evidence against the existence of a soul. I'm not going to explore what those consequences might be or whether the linkage is appropriate but instead want to focus on another implication inherent in the statement.

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Over at Behe's amazon.com blog, in the question and answer section, this question comes up:

In Edge of Evolution you indicate that some of the evidence supporting common ancestry is pretty persuasive. Yet a number of scientists have questioned some of the evidence for common ancestry. Do you think it is beyond the pale for them to do so? In your mind is it scientific to question common ancestry?

Behe's response is intriguing:

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Professor Allen MacNeill of Cornell University, a friendly critic of ID, offerred an interesting argument on the post about Behe's book, The Edge of Evolution, that I thought was worth a second look:
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I found a post by PZ Myers, about biologists eventually being able to design living organisms, which inspired me to offer the following inductive argument:
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Here is a short clip where Dawkins tells us his feelings about God:

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There are apparently some very real psychological barriers to the "New Atheist" agenda of converting humanity to scientism (while 'eradicating' religious beliefs). Chris - a cognitive psychologist - blogs about this over at Mixing Memory: Thinking About Evolution [Cognitive Factors That Get in the Way]. The factors are:

I've presented three factors that make the job of biology teachers more difficult when they're trying to teach evolution, either to children or adults.

1. Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences about complex kinds or under conditions of uncertainty; intuitions that can be reinforced culturally to an extent that it may be almost impossible to overcome them by the time we reach adulthood.
2. Intuitive essentialism, which causes us to believe that biological kinds have hidden internal essences which determine what they are, how they will behave, and what features they should have, and which may make us interpret evidence of adaptation in transformationalist, rather than Darwinian/modern biological varationist terms.
3. The role of explanatory power in determining the value of beliefs, and the fact that we may resist explaining our most cherished beliefs in order to avoid devaluing them.

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Several times over the years I've seen ID critics say they might begin to take ID seriously if supporters could show some prime number signatures in genomes (or other such stuff, mostly in response to Mike Gene's perennial question: what would it take for you to take a serious look?).

And in truth, a telic view of life (and its genomes) should provide some actual predictability, which the walled-off origins end of Neodarwinism cannot provide. Who can predict anything that's causally random? So I was interested to find that since the many genome sequencing projects have been bearing fruit, and the 'new' science of quantitative genomics seeks algorithms that can provide predictability that's been obviously missing from NDS, that there really is a numerical "signature" in genomes that we're used to seeing in macroscale form/function, but haven't previously sought in the genomes that produce such beauty in nature.

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The people at SETI have several useful lessons to teach when it come to detecting non-human design.
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Okay, who wrote this?

Suppose you sit at a beach and pick various pebbles. Most of them have an irregular shape, with a rough surface, with their color varying from spot to spot, and their density also varying over their volume. Suppose that you come across one particular piece which, unlike all other pebbles, is of a perfectly spherical shape, its color and density perfectly uniform all over its volume and its surface polished mirrorlike. Obviously, the rational conclusion is that the perfectly spherical piece is an artifact, a result of an intelligent effort, including design, planning, and a set of actions aimed at achieving the goal of producing that perfectly uniform ideal sphere. While we don't know the purpose of the designer of that spherical artifact, we have to admit that its spontaneous appearance is unlikely.

We know that only a supporter of intelligent design would be so stupid as to claim that design could be inferred without knowledge about the intent of the designer, so that should narrow the field. The author also talks about the unlikelihood of the "spontaneous appearance" of the pebble, so that's a strike of "argument from ignorance" right there. If you can't guess the author of this blatant piece of religious propaganda, look beneath the fold.

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