If you like Telic Thoughts (and I know you do), please check out Bradley Monton's blog.  Monton is a philosopher at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  He's written a book on ID and is trying to get it published.  Here's a brief description:

The doctrine of intelligent design has been maligned by atheists, but even though I'm an atheist, I'm of the opinion that the arguments for intelligent design are stronger than most realize. The goal of this book is to try to get people to take intelligent design seriously. I maintain that it is legitimate to view intelligent design as science, that there are somewhat plausible arguments for the existence of a cosmic designer, and that intelligent design should be taught in public school science classes.

The book is written in such a way that it will have appeal to both non-academics and fellow professors. I anticipate that both proponents and opponents of intelligent design would be interested in reading it. I will be agreeing with a lot of what intelligent design proponents say — I'm trying to be intellectually honest and give the proponents credit wherever credit is due. By rejecting the fallacious arguments against intelligent design, I am helping everyone to understand the issues and arguments more clearly. In the long run, this is what will lend the most support to the cause of reason.

As far as I know, no one has published a book like this, or is even in the process of writing one. There is a fair amount of literature nowadays on atheism vs. theism, and the merits of intelligent design, but that literature has become like a war between two camps, and the point of my book is to transcend that.

I, for one, hope that he does find a publisher.

The following essay was written by Jim Madden and the views/arguments contained within do not necessarily reflect the views of Mike Gene. Mike Gene hosts such essays simply to provoke thought and promote discussion and communication.

Often proponents of ID will argue that a certain kind of teleology is necessary for objective morality. A good example of this can be found in Ben Wiker's book, Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists:

If we, as a part of nature, are ultimately derived from purposeless material forces, morality should be defined as moral Darwinism has defined it. If, on the other hand, we are ultimately the result of an intelligent designer, morality must follow that design. (p. 30)

In my reflections below, I raise some concerns about the claim that ID can play a role in grounding an objective morality, but considering a distinction between two types of teleology made by traditional philosophers.
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Evidence, evidence, evidence. Lots of people like to use this ill-defined and subjective concept to score points, as it allows people to sit in judgment, pronouncing whether or not some data are "evidence" or whether the evidence is "sufficient." It's quite the power-trip to sit in judgment not only of other people, but of Reality. Despite these problems, we cannot ignore the importance of evidence. For example, if we are to convict Jones for the murder of Smith, there had better be evidence to support this contention if we are going to take away Jones's freedom.

Yet this very example serves to make both points. Yes, evidence is important when making decisions about our natural and social world, but relying solely on the evidence may very well deliver only a superficial, or even false, understanding of the world. We know this simply from the fact that in court rooms around the world, judges and juries have followed the evidence before them to determine guilty people are innocent and innocent people are guilty. This holds true even if we rule out corruption and biases.

Consider some movie where you, the viewer, know that Jones killed Smith, because you watched it happen. Jones, of course, subjectively knows that he killed Smith. The police investigator doesn't know this, he simply believes that Jones killed Smith because of some clues. The investigator then privately confronts Jones and accuses him of murder. Jones, privately knowing the investigator is correct, simply replies, "There is no evidence and you can't prove it" and the investigator knows this is true.

Right there, in that scene, we see the difference between evidence and truth. Relying solely on the evidence may very well deliver only a superficial, or even false, understanding of the world.

Meteorites Delivered The 'Seeds' Of Earth's Left-hand Life, Experts Argue is a Science Daily article peppered with a tale about space travel. The travelers were amino acids and the vehicles meteors. The crash landing may explain one of life's unusual features- chirality. As the author explains with rare exceptions "left-handed "L-amino acids" dominate on earth." A five to ten per cent excess in L-amino acids, observed on surfaces of meteorites, inspires confidence in this chirality explanation. Add some meteorite amino acids to the much famed primordial soup, cook in some desert like temperatures, add some water and presto- you get ingredients for a cell.

Given a spate of recent comments advising on the wisdom of doubting the religious persuasions of one's parents and even getting the parents themselves to indulge in this doubt-fest, I thought it might be a good opportunity for some to practice what they preach. After all most religions have an origins story to go with their value systems and other religious matters. Religious critics have their own origins story. Life emerged through tentative but unidentifed processes, formed an initial cell and evolved from there. So this is an opportunity for abiogenesis enthusiasts to weigh in with their own doubts. If you don't have them express them anyway. If doubting one's own religious convictions is healthy, doubting an origins story, which does not live up to its empirical billing, is healthier still.

Some opponents of ID argue that intelligent agency cannot be argued unless a disclaimer is attached specifying the intelligent agency as a conscious intelligence. In effect imposing an added evidentiary requirement about a matter which is metaphysical in nature and likely to remain an unresolvable philosophical argument. The existence of free will is philosophically tenable but it has its philosophical counterpart which denies it. Those advancing the free will objection argue that since free will is not an empirical certainty, it needs to be pointed out that theories pointing to consciously intelligent causation may not reflect reality because a metaphysically based negation of free will would make it impossible to discern ai (artificial intelligence) from conscious intelligence. The metaphysicians take it further and argue that it cannot be shown that conscious intelligence is a sina quo non for generating ai.

Artificial intelligence has been designated as non-conscious as opposed to human intelligence which is conscious. Human intelligence owes its causal genesis to either another conscious intelligence or to an unconscious physical process. My question is whether one should be required to attach a disclaimer when proposing evolutionary pathways to human intelligence in view of the fact that we neither observe nor understand how a physical process would give rise to human-like intelligence? We have a general genetic approach laid out of course but it is lacking in the specifics needed to identify at what point in a physical process human consciousness arises. If free will not being put on an empirical basis is call for a metaphysical disclaimer, should not the emergence of consciousness, being not empirically established, necessitate a like disclaimer? The disclaimer would acknowledge that consciousness presupposes that its emergence results from an empirically unknown process. If emphasizing that it cannot be shown that conscious intelligence generates ai then let it likewise be acknowledged that unintellgent chemical reactions are not known to produce consciousness. Otherwise we are left with a stealth attachment of metaphysics to science.

Engineers Discover In Nature Exotic Structures Envisioned By Mathematicians is the title of a Science Daily summary. Although the article is a few years old its message is timeless. From the article:

Three years before he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, Eugene Wigner published an article entitled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (1960). He marveled at how often physicists develop concepts to describe the "real" world only to discover that mathematicians–heedless of that real world–have already thought up and explored the concepts. His own experience of the uncanny applicability of mathematical insights to the physical reality of quantum mechanics led Wigner to observe "that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it."

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Writing in the journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach, David Zeigler has an article entitled, "The Question of Purpose." Zeigler's argument is twofold: Darwinian science teaches us that there is no purpose or meaning outside of ourselves and teachers can improve evolution education by better stressing the non-teleological nature of evolution and reality. You can read this for yourself here (pdf file). I'm hoping to comment on several aspects, but I thought you'd like to check it out first and have an opportunity to correct me if I have wrongly mischaracterized it.

In his famous Natural Theology William Paley wrote:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive"”what we could not discover in the stone"”that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose…

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Bradford posted about Paul Davies' op-ed in the New York Times on the thread Science and Faith. Which quickly went downhill as our live-in critics decended like vultures to put a quick stop to any real discussion.

The SciBlog community wasn't hampered by such tactics, so came out hot and heavy in defense of their ideology against Davies' observations. Anti-theist PZ Myers insisted that Faith is not a prerequisite for science, but only managed to demonstrate laughable ignorance of the relevant science. My favorite excerpts…

When someone says that life would not exist if the laws of physics were just a little bit different, I have to wonder"¦ how do they know? Just as there are many different combinations of amino acids that can make any particular enzyme, why can't there be many different combinations of physical laws that can yield life?

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This is a little unusual for TT, but I just saw this movie, and I highly recommend it. I haven't seen a truly scary movie for a long time, and I walked into the theater with low expectations. Although I've seen better, I have to say that this tops the list of Stephen King's greatest silver screen adaptations. I feel also that it touches upon issues that are often discussed here and on related blogs. I try not to spoil anything, but I do reveal some parts of the movie. You've been warned.

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