Faith Well Grounded

In another thread , an argument for an intelligent creator was questioned.

Let's see if I have the argument straight: a type of biological complexity (human intelligence) is the only known cause of manufactured complexity, therefore a supernatural intelligent agency must be responsible for biological complexity. It's a non sequitur, as I'd like to think Newton would agree.

I answered:

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.

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

CS Lewis, in "Miracles", proposed that we can not trust our rationale if it is the result of mindless, unplanned, irrational causes. In other words, if the string of rationality is broken in the cause-effect string going back, then there is no rationality.

The implication is that if our logic and rationality is the result of naturalistic evolution, then we can't trust that logic and rationality. If our rationality is thus caused, then the rationality of naturalism has no basis and is self-defeating and internally inconsistent.