My fellow Telician Mike Gene recently reposted his answers to some questions from The Panda's Thumb, and "keiths" suggested that all of the Telicians posted their answers to the questions. I agree with Mike's answers, so instead of just writing a bunch of me-too's, I thought I'd do something slightly different. So in this post, I'll be answering some questions I've made up myself, inspired by many discussions with critics. You'll also be able to find a link to this post from my profile.

Where do you infer design?

Along with Mike, I think the origin of life presents the best case for intelligent design. Structures such as the bacterial flagellum, the DNA replication machineries, and signal cascades show signs of design, and were probably present in the first lifeforms. So, I envision the first cells being produced by one or more intelligent designers with the future in mind, so that they could evolve into the many complex organisms we see today. This is a hypothesis initially proposed by Mike, and is known as Front-Loaded Evolution (FLE).

Some ID supporters think the cosmological constants are designed. Where do you stand on that?

Physics isn't my strongest suit, and although I find it reasonable on an every-day level, I recognize that it is the subject of a very techical discussion that I don't have the expertise to evalue. So when it comes to cosmological ID, I can only respond by shrugging my shoulders and saying, "Who knows?"

Who do you think the designer is?

I don't know. As an agnostic, I don't have any preferences either way. I think a lot of the objections against a supernatural designer fail (for reasons explained by Del Ratzsch), but I also think that the possibility of natural designers has been given a bum rap (for reasons explained by Mike Gene). I also considered Michael Behe's suggestion of time-travelling scientists to be a possibility, but a disappointing night at the Time Traveler Convention made me abandon it.

If the universe is designed, wouldn't the designer have to be supernatural, thereby making intelligent design a religious hypothesis?

Depends on what you mean by "supernatural" and "religious". If we ever get the technology required to create a new universe (maybe using a black hole) and set its cosmological constants, will that make us supernatural? Are "multiverse theories", positing the existence of multiple universes outside this one, religious? If not, why should it be the case for cosmological design hypotheses?

Do you think intelligent design should be taught in schools?

No, not at the present time. There does not yet exist a scientific theory of intelligent design, and trying to shoehorn the concept into a public school system to which everyone is compelled to pay, is only going to give ammunition to those who want to portray intelligent design as a threat to science and democracy. Instead of lobbying the education system, ID supporters should work on fleshing out the scientific potential of intelligent design. If they are succesful, intelligent design may one day be included in the public school curriculum at the demand of the scientific community.

Stop lying to me! We all know you're just a bunch of fundamentalist post-modernists, quoting scientists out of context and using the Wedge to turn the US into a theocracy and send all of our jobs to Taiwan. And besides, who designed the designer?

OK, the interview stops here. Cut his mike!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Intelligent Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The trackback link is: http://telicthoughts.com/qa-with-krauze/trackback/