OrangePhilosophy

I suppose 2500 years ago is new compared to the entire history of the universe. Maybe this was a poke at those young-earthers whom the people calling themselves ID theorists consciously distance themselves from. On the other hand, should we expect the average Newsweek writer to know anything about Plato and Aristotle?

I've turned the URLs into real links, in case you haven't noticed. I don't have the time to check them at the moment, so let me know if they aren't working right.

I've checked the links, and they seem to be working. I've also had a chance to read the articles. It's amazing to me that one side insists that a philosophical argument is religion, while the other calls the same philosophical argument science.

It also amazes me that just about every critique of this I've seen by a non-philosopher deals only with the biological argument. The cosmological constant argument in physics is the much more interesting one, and if it's a bad argument it's bad for much more philosophically interesting reasons. When I teach the design argument, that's the argument I focus on.

I was curious about the age of I.D. You aren't being serious when you say Aristotle was an advocate of I.D. are you? I thought it was a much more recent view and that its defensibility depended on its being a much more recent view supported by Behe and such rather than speculative philosophical arguments about first causes and all that.

There's very particular argument about the nature of the cell that began, I believe, in the mid-20th century or so, and that's what Behe is picking up on. It was originally over how the cell could have come together. The issue was seen to be resolved when they figured out what mechanisms could have led to all the necessary things happening at once. Behe has tried to show that it's worse than it looked in terms of the probability of all those things happenening at once, but he's contributed a new claim in his argument. He thinks there isn't even an explanation for why there would have been the various parts of the cell before there was a cell, since those parts would serve no purpose if they were not all together contributing to what a cell does. I don't know enough biology to evaluate his claim or the claims of those who say he's uttering complete hooey, but that's what's new with him.

There are others in the discussion who have contributed their own original views. Meyer is a mathematician and does stuff on probability that I don't understand. The physicists who talk about cosmological constants and the anthropic principle have been a recent part of the discussion also, though that goes back to the 1980s at least.

Intelligent Design isn't that one argument of Behe's, and it isn't even the set of all ID arguments of our day. It's a cluster of arguments that fall under one heading, the heading of the teleological argument, and that's been around since the ancient Greeks. The way the Stoics talked was remarkably like what some of these current ID people say. I think Aristotle is more of a stretch, because he didn't believe in an intelligent mind designing the universe. The Stoics didn't either, if the mind has to be outside the universe, but who says the ID view requires the mind to be external to the universe? I think the Stoics count as ID theorists.

There is, just for reference, an entire book written to 'deal' with ID, called 'Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism'. It can be found here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/102-6921287-0686521