Expelled-No Intelligence allowed
Filed Under: Intelligent Design, Theo/Philo by Mike Godfrey — 2 CommentsMarch 6, 2010
Last week I saw the UK premier of the controversial American film ‘Expelled -no intelligence allowed’ featuring Ben Stein and concerning the freedom of enquiry within Science .Specifically the freedom to infer an intelligent cause in the origin of life and its diversity.
This film was shown by premier radio ,with Justin Brierly as host, at Imperial college London, right next door to the natural Science Museum.
The Intelligent design inference ,like the naturalistic material inference which is the current default position for Science have metaphysical implications -it is these implications that make the subject of intelligent design and Evolution such a hot baked potato.
After the screening of the film there was a panel of 4 people, 2 on each side of the argument debating the film and its implications followed by a Q&A session.
On the panel was Dr Steve Fuller and Dr Alistar Nobel support ID, opposing them was Dr Keith Fox and Dr Susan Blackmore .
Dr Fox presented the argument that Intellegent design was a show stopper for Science; paraprhasing he said : all we can say is God did it ..then what , where does the research go then ?
In reply to this a few thoughts come to mind -:
1.Science largely arose from a Theistic perspective for 2 reasons:
a.Man was sinful therefore his faculties were suspect -he had an epistemological crisis-to over come ,which the scientific method provided via evidence and experimentation.
b.The universe is rational therefore a rational mind can comprehend it.
2.Science should follow where the evidence leads even if it leads towards design rather than blind chance, ascribing chance to a phenomena instead of design may be the show stopper -particularly if the phenomena in question was actually designed.
For further arguments go here ideacenter.org
Dr Alistair Nobel quite rightly kept bringing up the specified information content found within DNA in the cell was not unlike computer code,which needs an intelligence source to write it . The similarities betweeen code and DNA were used to imply Intelliegnt design as a reasonable inference .
Stephen Meyer:
‘Thus, oddly, at nearly the same time that computer scientists were beginning to develop machine languages, molecular biologists were discovering that living cells has been using something akin to machine code or software all along. To quote the information scientist Hubert Yockley again “The genetic code is constructed to confront and solve problems of communication and recording by the same principles found…in modern communication and computer codes.” Like software, the coding regions of DNA direct operations within a complex material system via highly variable and improbable, yet also precisely specified, sequences of chemical characters. How did these digitally encoded and specifically sequenced instructions in DNA arise? And how did they arise within a channel for transmitting information?
How indeed ?
Information is separate from the medium or substrate that carries it:
George Willams (Evolutionary Biologist) “evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains:that of information and that of matter…The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA is the medium not the message”
-no chance event has ever produced specified information yet there is a presupposition towards chance as the bringer of complexity that can not only produce a code and give meaning to the code but can also produce the means of transcribing and translating that code -Chicken and egg come to mind.There is much more to the film including the a link between Natural selection and the Nazi regime.
A great day out thanks Premier radio for the event .
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