The Design Spectrum
He seems to be saying, “well it may be true, but it is not good politics.”

None of this is to say that the conclusions the ID movement draws about how life came to be and how it evolves are intrinsically unreasonable or necessarily wrong. Nor is it to deny that the ID movement has been treated atrociously and that it has been lied about by many scientists. The question I am raising is whether this quixotic attempt by a small and lightly armed band to overthrow ?Darwinism? and bring about a new scientific revolution has accomplished anything good.

Overthrow Darwinism is NOT what ID is about. Show the limits of Darwinian mechanisms is part of it. That is very valuable.
I agree with this comment:

Charles H. Davis says:
As one who studied theoretical physics under Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine in the early ’60s, I respect Professor Barr’s opinion — and have in the past appreciated much of his writing. I walked away from this article a bit perplexed, however, as to the principal objective of the piece. Was it to point out that Christians would be better served by eschewing the logic and claims of ID? Or was it that Christians would have more friends in the scientific community if they would abandon ID? Perhaps it was both. The piece did not, however, deal with criticism of ID on its merits, which, it would seem to me, should be the basis for determination of how it should be viewed — whether by the scientist or by the layman.
Respectfully,
CH Davis, PhD

Barr is right on point concerning ID as natural theology.

pds,
Technically you are right – ID makes the hypothesis that design is empirically observable. It does not state where the design must be found.
On a practical basis however, the majority are, in fact, interested in dumping Darwin. More time and effort goes into disputing evolution than into the search for design. If the emphasis was pro-design rather than anti-Darwin the newsletters etc. would be structured in that fashion. But they are not. If the emphasis was combating ontological naturalism – as discussed in the previous post, the output would be structured in such a fashion, it is not.

ID “theory” has never NOT been about overthrowing Darwinism – or, more properly, evolutionary theory, as Darwin is technically out of date. ID was developed as an alternative to classic Creationism in order to be placed into science curricula without violating separation of Church and State, and did not exist beforehand. It avoids this separation issue simply by refusing to specify a particular Creator.
ID is nothing more or less than an argument that anything of more than a certain complexity – that level chosen merely by preference – must have been created. It has no scientific underpinnings, cannot be demonstrated, and can make no usable predictions. It is essentially another excuse for the teaching of religious dogma to our children, with mandatory attendance under penalty of law and without parental approval, same as nearly all efforts to get creationism into the public school curriculum.

As with many others, he suggests that ID is only negative in its arguments. He focuses on one prong of the argument and ignores the positive prong:
http://thedesignspectrum.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/the-form-of-design-arguments-from-nature/
He also calls ID anti-science. Wrong. ID is science without the “anti-design” shackles, which is also why it is absolutely necessary.

Intelligent Design failed to offer help to science, philosophy and religion. Science needs to focus in methodological materialism while philosophers and theologians may focus on criticizing philosophical materialism. For example, John Leslie does a great job of proposing a god hypothesis in the context of philosophy, which is exactly where a God hypothesis belongs. (I wish I had more time for this.)

Aquinas vs. Intelligent Design, Michael W. Tkacz
…What about the apparent conflict between notion of creation from nothing and the scientific principle that for every natural motion or state there is an antecedent motion or state? Seeing a conflict here, Thomas Aquinas says, is a result of a confusion regarding the nature of creation and natural change. It is an error that might be called the Cosmogonical Fallacy.
Yet, what about the apparent conflict between notion of creation from nothing and the scientific principle that for every natural motion or state there is an antecedent motion or state? Seeing a conflict here, Aquinas says, is a result of a confusion regarding the nature of creation and natural change. It is an error that might be called the Cosmogonical Fallacy.
…In light of this sketch of the Thomistic account of creation and natural cause, one can perhaps understand the reluctance of contemporary Thomists to rush to the defense of ID theorists. It would seem that ID theory is grounded on the Cosmogonical Fallacy. Many who oppose the standard Darwinian account of biological evolution identify creation with divine intervention into nature. This is why many are so concerned with discontinuities in nature, such as discontinuities in the fossil record. They see in them evidence of divine action in the world, on the grounds that such discontinuities could only be explained by direct divine action. This insistence that creation must mean that God has periodically produced new and distinct forms of life is to confuse the fact of creation with the manner or mode of the development of natural beings in the universe. This is the Cosmogonical Fallacy.

dopderbeck,
I also think his comment about natural theology is a good one.
The way ID is talked about by some seems to suggest that evidence of design is found only where science fails. This just misses the point. Evidence of design – the working of God – is found everywhere. It is seen most clearly in “the beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony found in the world that God had made.” Barr sees it in astronomy and particle physics (his specialties) – but we also see it in biology and in the natural processes of biology. I don’t think that evolutionary connections are any less part of this beauty, order, and lawfulness.

pds,
I just don’t see how an argument based on analogy with human experience and human creations is a “positive prong” or evidence for design. Many who are thinking about ID are looking for positive evidence – but analogy isn’t the place to find it.

Just to keep it simple for those that make simple statements that specific, informational, intelligent code is created by natural means. No! such information cannot be created by natural means!
Now you are suppose to say that the specific, informational, intelligent code found in the living cell can be created by using this scientific method. Then describe that scientific method so other scientists can try to duplicate that scientific method.
It has been scientifically shown that the code structure actually exists in the DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA, genes, nucleotides, ribosomes and the like, so the problem is not for Intelligent Design, but for Darwinists to show that they can prove such information can be created by natural means.
We know using the scientific principles including probability theory that such information cannot be created naturally by accident in a trillion years, certainly not possible in 3 or 4 billion years.
So your task is to prove those scientific mathematical theories are in fact wrong and demonstrate how billions of bits of meaningful, specific, functional code can be created by accident. For example: demonstrate how the ?Signature in the Cell? or ?Edge of Evolution? can be produced by watching dirt, water, ink, trees and all elements as they accidentally come together and form a book with the same message with the same words, correct spelling and grammar.
Then you can prepare to receive your Noble Prize.

I have to step in here; while Stephen Barr’s words are strong, I find the accusatory nature of the responses too strong.
Why not just keep to what he says and whether it’s accurate?
We’ve been having conversations about intelligent design for a month or so now, and those posts have had vigorous exchanges but this one for some reason has gotten a little caustic.
Thanks for hearing me out.

As ID is rejected by some scientists, those very men and women will continue to ride on the backs of those who built the western scientific world, because of their presupposition of an Intelligent Designer. As Oxford professor of Mathematics, John Lennox stated, “The great pioneers of science such as Galileo, Kepler and Newton, expected to find law in nature because they believed in a Lawgiver…The biblical teaching about Creation was the cradle in which modern science was born.” Some men have enough blind faith to believe that the 3.5 billion character code on a single strand of DNA happened to come together because random chance had enough time! I could never muster that much faith. But as the one who helped write that code down (National Institutes of Health head, Francis Collins) said to our President, “It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”
We continue to reap the benefits of the understanding that there is Intelligent Design, whether we admit it or not!

Paraphrased: “Gravity pulls the planets to the Sun, but there is no known mechanism for setting the planets in motion. Therefore, God did it.”
– Sir Isaac Newton.
Paraphrased: “There is no known mechanism for the code of DNA to evolve naturally. Therefore, God did it.”
– Tfagan
“To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”
? Isaac Asimov
Only one of these statements is correct.

tfagen says, “Now you are suppose to say that the specific, informational, intelligent code found in the living cell…”
But no such code is found in a living cell. The genetic *code* was created by scientists to label the many parts of DNA. You have put the cart before the horse; no matter how closely you look, you will not see tiny, coded labels on amino acids.
Scott Leonard is impressed by John Lennox’s remark that, “The great pioneers of science such as Galileo, Kepler and Newton, expected to find law in nature because they believed in a Lawgiver…The biblical teaching about Creation was the cradle in which modern science was born.”
Even if true, so what? They were simply wrong about why there is order in nature. If a small child is asked, “Can the sky fall?”, and she answers, “No, because it’s held up by balloons,” the first word of her answer is correct but her explanation is wrong, not because she’s stupid, but because she doesn’t have all the facts.
Galileo, Kepler and Newton were brilliant, they just didn’t have all the facts.
Science has no trouble explaining order, it’s *disorder* that is hard to explain. If physical laws varied wildly around the world, now *that* would be evidence that there were capricious gods running everything, because such a world could only hold together with the constant intervention of powerful beings.
As for the claim that Christianity is the cradle of science, I’ve heard that before, and it’s true only in the sense that it was an accident. The Church hardly encouraged freethought – as the aforementioned Galileo could testify – the only science it wanted was that which supported church teachings. Sadly, science kept uncovering things that undermined humanity’s special place in the universe. Bummer, huh?
But science got away from under the church’s thumb, and with every new discovery about evolution and cosmology the need for a god to “explain” anything grows smaller and smaller.

RJS and Dopderbeck,
Your complaint is against some form of “pop ID,” not serious ID like that discussed by Stephen Meyer.
RJS #9,
The positive evidence is the stunning nano-machinery in the cell and the highly complex computer software in the DNA. It is hard for me to understand why you don’t see that as positive evidence.
http://thedesignspectrum.wordpress.com/

RickK (Thanks Scott Leonard for your comment),
You invoke the God-of-the-gaps as a way to put down ID. In this spirit, you quote Isaac Asimov:
“To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”
I?d like to restate Asimov in a more appropriate manner: “To surrender to ignorance and call it ?unintelligent naturalism? has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”
While you suggest that IDers are stuffing God into the gaps, I think it more appropriate to charge that naturalists are stuffing unintelligent laws into the gaps. While we all agree that phenomena occur according to formula and law, there is not one whit of evidence that these laws are natural and unintelligent. Instead, it makes far more sense that these laws all find their origin in the mind of God:
1. Our experience uniformly demonstrates that the cause must be greater than the effect. Intelligent causation is greater than non-intelligent causation. Therefore, supernaturalism (ID) must be the preferred hypothesis.
2. Supernaturalism (transcendence) is a better explanation than Naturalism (materialism) for the immutability of the physical laws. Something must transcend our expanding universe of molecules-in-motion. (Where do the ?natural? laws come from?)
3. Supernatural Transcendence is also a better explanation than localized materialism for the uniform operation of these laws throughout the universe.
4. Supernatural Oneness is more parsimonious than the idea of myriads of independently operating natural laws. It better accounts for the stability and regularity of the physical world.
5. Although we all agree that phenomena occur formulaically and predictably, there is absolutely no evidence that the laws that govern are natural as opposed to their being part of a Super-Intelligence.
6. Naturalism is utterly inadequate to account for many phenomena ? life, DNA, consciousness, freewill, the fine-tuning of the universe, reason and logic ? while Supernaturalism is adequate.

tfagan,
We are discussing Meyer’s book – a post last Thursday Signature in the Cell 6 considered Meyer’s argument for design. We will continue this Thursday.
But the comparison between the origin of the cell and “watching dirt, water, ink, trees and all elements as they accidentally come together and form a book with the same message with the same words, correct spelling and grammar” really misses the point. This would be incredibly unlikely, but isn’t the problem that needs to be solved.
In your illustration the message, not the spelling or grammar is what counts. What we need to consider is the development of some language (need not be English or even alphabet based) and then the conveyance of the message.

pds (#15),
I do see the biochemistry of the cell as evidence of design – but I don’t see is as inexplicable by God’s normal natural mechanism. It is evidence for design in the sense Barr discusses in the 4th-8th paragraphs of his essay.
If ID is a “claim is that certain biological phenomena lie outside the ordinary course of nature” – then the biochemistry of the cell and the information in DNA isn’t the place to look. This is explicable, although not yet totally understood. Abiogenesis may be a place to look – but this is a puzzle yet and I rather doubt that it will remain a mystery in perpetuity.

Wow. A ton of brilliance in these posts, on all sides. My present digression may, for a few wise souls, shed invaluable light on why there is always an impasse….Huxley said he struggled with the prospect of giving in to the evidence for God, because if he did, he would have to give up his sexual freedom. That mundane admission (or similar ones–replace sexual freedom with the idol of your choice) echoed the words in Romans 1 that both describe and predict why we struggle to find God behind the design. As one man put it, it has nothing to do with evidence or lack thereof. Rather, we can’t find Him for the same reason a thief can’t find a cop! Have a great day.

Scott Leonard, you write, As ID is rejected by some scientists, those very men and women will continue to ride on the backs of those who built the western scientific world, because of their presupposition of an Intelligent Designer.
And astronomy’s development was inextricably tied to astrology… but we don’t still cast birth charts.

Daniel Mann #16:
Addressing your points:
1) I’m afraid your premise is not what we see in real life. We see quite plainly, in nature and in labs, that simple processes can progressively add complexity. This is fact, incontrovertible, and happens without any divine intervention.
2) When Newton said “only God could put the planets in motion”, he was proved wrong by later understanding of cosmology, stellar evolution and planetary formation. Your statement that only a transcendant being could create the natural laws is no different. I hope we some day understand it, but there is nothing whatsoever to indicate the existence of a guiding intelligence.
3) See 2. Also, we have the additional data of thousands of years of divine or supernatural explanations being replaced by natural explanations, and NEVER seeing the reverse occur.
4) I have no idea what “supernatural oneness” means. What I do know is that it only matters to those who believe in it.
5) You’re right – if your premise is that a super-intelligence created everything and made it look like everything happens naturally, nobody can disprove that. Nor can you disprove that we’re living in the Matrix. Nor can you disprove that there is an incorporeal dragon in my garage. Nor can you disprove that a china teapot is orbiting Betelgeuse.
All are equally disprovable, and equally meaningless.
6) If you lived 1000 years ago, you’d say naturalism was completely unable to explain the nature of stars, why tides happen, and what causes disease. There have always been limits to our current knowledge, and there have always been people like you who point to those limits and say “God did it”.
Naturalism has a long history of providing useful, predictable, explanations for natural phenomena – explanations that can be demonstrated, proved, built upon, and agreed regardless of someone’s world view. No matter what your faith, you can agree what organism causes malaria.
Supernaturalism by contrast has utterly failed to provide useful, predictable, explanations for natural phenomena. Supernatural explanations have collapse one after another for thousands of years. And agreement on supernatural explanations is never achieved. Every tribe prays to a different god to protect them from malaria.
With all due respect to your beliefs, we have millions of points of evidence for, and NONE against, the following premise:
“Natural phenomena have natural causes”
I’m not being dogmatic – I’m following the evidence. When you have evidence of supernaturalism – not some rehash of a 2000-year-old philosophical rationalization, but an actual example of supernatural causation in nature, I’m ready to follow that evidence too and change my starting premise. Until then, the above premise works and works well.

The Design Spectrum
The more I thought about Barr’s post the more I felt my earlier comments were not strong enough. He is calling for the “end of ID,” and using misinformation to do it. ID proponents have been constantly misrepresented, attacked and marginalized by many in our culture, and Barr is piling on with offensive rhetoric. I have sometimes wondered why there aren’t more ID proponents commenting here. Promoting a piece like this is perhaps one reason why.
Barr is quite the culture warrior. That is not what we need.

RJS,
I?m having a bit of trouble getting my mind around your statement: ?I do see the biochemistry of the cell as evidence of design – but I don’t see is as inexplicable by God’s normal natural mechanism.?
Here are my perplexities:
It sounds like evolutionists are saying opposite things when they try endorse evolution ? NATURAL selection, RANDOM mutation ? and then attempt to say that God is using RANDOM means. Doesn?t RANDOM and NATURAL imply isn?t involved?
You state that God does His work through a ?normal natural mechanism.? If God is performing the work, aren?t you contradicting yourself in calling the process ?normal? and ?natural?? Shouldn?t we instead attribute the outcome to intelligence and design?
(Thanks once again, Scott Leonard!)

Our experience uniformly demonstrates that the cause must be greater than the effect. Intelligent causation is greater than non-intelligent causation.

Actually, my experience is different. I’ve seen a 286 laptop with 1MB of RAM come up with clever design tricks that took me quite a bit of time and effort to understand. (See the URL below my name above.)

Supernaturalism (transcendence) is a better explanation than Naturalism (materialism) for the immutability of the physical laws.

Bertrand Russell addressed this a while back: “the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave…” Electrons don’t behave a certain way because they are commanded to. We call things that behave a certain way electrons!
This actually addresses 2-5 of your points.
As for 6, you appear to be committing what I call Haldane’s Error.

PDS,
I certainly agree with you. In fact, I think that ID has made many important contributions, whether we regard Behe?s ?irreducible complexity? or Gonzalez?s work (?The Privileged Planet?).
In fact, Anthony Flew, the leading atheist of his day, credits the revelations of ID as the basis of his ?conversion? to theism.

Ray,
In your attempt to explain how natural laws can create something greater than itself, you responded, ?Actually, my experience is different. I’ve seen a 286 laptop with 1MB of RAM come up with clever design tricks that took me quite a bit of time and effort to understand.?
Let me assure you that anything that your computer spits out is based upon information that has already been programmed into it. As a seed gives rise to the incredible edifice of a tree, so too can the info programmed into a computer, but also, in the same way, the complexity and functionality of the tree is completely reflective of its initial input of data.
Your Bertrand Russell quote is either unintelligible or fails to address the issue??

Daniel (#23),
Random mutation (and other means of genetic modification) and natural selection is essentially a search algorithm looking for solutions to some “problem,” exploring the available space. The problem may be survival of the “selfish gene” or something more complex. I don’t think that the result is contingent or unpredictable. The fact that men have mustaches and women don’t is a trivial tag-a-long – but the appearance of the complex machinery to produce thinking conscious beings capable of abstract thought and the search for God is not a contingent accident. It is part of the nature of the universe and the world.
If you want to claim that there is intelligent design in the universe – some here will disagree with us, but I won’t disagree with you. If you claim, as ID generally does, that evolution isn’t true and that certain biological processes require supernatural interventions rather than explanation as a “normal” part of God’s “natural” means – I will disagree. The evidence is overwhelming.

The comments under the article itself are fascinating. The question I would like answered is what happened between 2004 (when Barr endorsed The Design Revolution by Dembski) and today?

Mr. Mann – I’m not willing to accept your assurance that “anything that [my] computer spits out is based upon information that has already been programmed into it.”
Seeing as I’m a computer programmer, and I wrote that program, and it still came up with design tricks that I didn’t think of or bake in. And I know I didn’t, even subconsciously, because as I said, the clever ideas “took me quite a bit of time and effort to understand.”
Did you even read what I linked to?
As to the Russell quote, your confusion over the difference between human laws and natural laws leads to your apparent surprise at “the immutability of the physical laws”. Electrons don’t have a particular charge and mass because they are pinned to that value. If they had any other value, they wouldn’t be electrons! For example, a particle with an opposite charge and vastly larger mass isn’t a wicked, wayward electron – it’s a proton.

Daniel Mann,
It sounds like evolutionists are saying opposite things when they try endorse evolution ? NATURAL selection, RANDOM mutation ? and then attempt to say that God is using RANDOM means. Doesn?t RANDOM and NATURAL imply isn?t involved?
See my post (#7) on Thomas Aquinas and the Cosmogonical Fallacy of which you fall victim to like many Christians.

Wow, what a fascinating conversation! This conversation was like a runaway train. I myself lean towards supernatural transcendence but I don?t have enough scientific knowledge to contribute much to this conversation. I would also like to hear the answer to Bob Porter?s (#28) question.

Ray,
You responded, ?Seeing as I’m a computer programmer, and I wrote that program, and it still came up with design tricks that I didn’t think of or bake in. And I know I didn’t, even subconsciously, because as I said, the clever ideas “took me quite a bit of time and effort to understand.”
In a similar way, the theorems of Euclidean geometry are all gloriously derived from four basic axioms. Does this mean that these four axioms CREATED all the resulting theorems? Of course not! Instead, they were already inherent within the truths of those axioms, waiting to be manifested, like a seed becoming a human.
I still fail to understand the relevance or the meaning of your Russell quote!

Bob,
To answer your question, please read W. Dembski’s response to Barr at the Uncommon Descent blog.

Mann –

In a similar way, the theorems of Euclidean geometry are all gloriously derived from four basic axioms. Does this mean that these four axioms CREATED all the resulting theorems? Of course not! Instead, they were already inherent within the truths of those axioms, waiting to be manifested, like a seed becoming a human.

But this kills ID completely. If an unthinking process can explore a design space and find the interesting nuggets that inhere therein (which, by your argument, my program did)… then biological evolution’s got no problem discovering neat, complex, branching and layering adaptations, too.
This also seems to be a beautiful example of the greater (‘glorious’ Euclidean geometry) arising from the lesser (four simple axioms). Look up the Mandelbrot Set sometime. Take multiplication and addition of complex numbers, apply iteration, and you get… a literally infinitely complex (and endlessly beautiful) shape.
As to the Russell quote, I honestly don’t know how to explain it any more clearly. Natural laws are not immutable – they conform to the behavior we actually find, because they are descriptions of what we actually find. If you think we should find something different than we actually do find… well, what do you expect, and on what basis?

Ray,
You wrote, ?But this kills ID completely. If an unthinking process can explore a design space and find the interesting nuggets that inhere therein (which, by your argument, my program did)… then biological evolution’s got no problem discovering neat, complex, branching and layering adaptations, too.?
Of course, geometry is unthinking, but how do we explain its incredible symmetry and elegance? How is it that the basic rules that Euclid posited/discovered can unfold into the Pathagorean theorem and many others like it? The question reduces to this ? ?Do we encounter here the products of chaos and chance or ID??
When we regard the elegant laws of physics ? E = MC squared ? are we looking at something that just happened or are we beholding Design? In this regard, I like what Donald DeYoung wrote:
? ?Scientist have long wondered about the factor of [superscript] 2 in this expression. It simply looks ?too neat.? In an evolved universe, one would not expect such a simple relationship. For example, why isn?t the distance factor 1.99 or 2.001? The gravity force has been repeatedly tested with sensitive torsion balances, showing that the factor is indeed precisely 2?Any value other than 2 would lead to an eventual catastrophic decay of orbits and of the entire universe? (Astronomy and the Bible, 137-38)
E = MC squared is even more incredible. It demonstrates the fact that energy, the speed of light and mass are all inextricably related and relative to each other. When we contemplate the fact that these laws don?t change, are we going to resort to chance molecules-in-motion or do we reason that there must be something that is unchanging that supports all of these laws.

Let me add my two cents. I think what Prof. Barr is saying in his post is that the value of ID is in its utility in science (and perhaps lesser degree, making friends in science), and not on its truth claim. Most major proponents in ID, I believe, want to focus on its truth claim. If ID’s utility is what Prof. Barr want to focus on, then it is quite irrelevant and unfair to those ID proponents. This is also hurting to those who want to bear witness to that there is a Creator in this world.

Mann – Of course, geometry is unthinking, but how do we explain its incredible symmetry and elegance? How is it that the basic rules that Euclid posited/discovered can unfold into the Pathagorean theorem and many others like it?
Um… how could they be different? How could those axioms lead to anything else? How could they possibly be “designed”?

1 vote evolution thankyouverymuch

Curious,
You are definitely right in writing, ?This is also hurting to those who want to bear witness to that there is a Creator in this world.?
This is the very thing that Scripture declares ? that God made the universe in such a way that we are accountable:
? ?The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.? Romans 1:18-20
To deny ID makes us culpable before God, who claims that we are without excuse because of the evidences He’s put in place. How then can Christians dismiss ID when it is so thoroughly Biblical? I find this very troubling.

Ray,
You say, ?Um… how could they be different? How could those axioms lead to anything else [but incredibly elegant theorems]??
You are a computer programmer. I?m amazed that you would say something like this. Can you write any nonsense program and expect it to work. No! Instead, it must be carefully designed. Must we not then conclude that geometry and all of the self-discovery and creativity we find within this system must also have been designed?

Mann –

You are a computer programmer. I?m amazed that you would say something like this. Can you write any nonsense program and expect it to work.

Let’s be clear, here. You’re saying that God could have designed math in such a way that it didn’t contain the Mandelbrot Set? Or that God could have made 2+2=fish?
You know, most theists are generously willing to grant that God can’t make a Euclidean right triangle with more than 180 degrees – it being generally accepted since at least Aquinas that it’s not a limit on omnipotence to be unable to do the logically impossible – but you’re a more robust theist, aren’t you? :-> (Honest, RJS, I’m not being insulting, it was just too funny to pass up.)
In other words, the laws of mathematics are not a computer program, nor even analogous to one. The laws of math and logic, whatever status they may have ontologically, are not the kind of things that can be termed “created”.

How then can Christians dismiss ID when it is so thoroughly Biblical? I find this very troubling?
This article and subsequent reply to a letter to the editor of Catholic.com answers your question, from which this is taken:
As for creation, it cannot be that God creates sequentially or episodically, nor does he create by intervening in nature. St. Thomas? point is that this is incompatible with God?s transcendent perfection. If one conceives God as a sequential or episodic Creator, then one is not thinking of the Christian God. The God of revelation is the reality that ontologically grounds all nature, without which nature would not exist. This is argued by St. Thomas in many writings, and one need only to consult these texts to see that this is authentic Thomism.

Ray,
Granted, the laws of math aren?t the same as a computer program. However, we find such elegance in math as we do in the universe. In fact, we find such a high degree of fine-tuning among the physical laws ? laws that are peculiarly calibrated to allow for life ? that some set the probability of this unlikely concurrence at one chance out of 10 followed by a hundred zeros. Consequently, John Wheeler, formerly Professor of Physics at Princeton writes:
? ?Is man an unimportant bit of dust on an unimportant planet in an unimportant galaxy somewhere in the vastness of space? No! The necessity to produce life lies at the center of the universe’s whole machinery and design…..Slight variations in physical laws such as gravity or electromagnetism would make life impossible.?
Tim Folger, writing for Discover Magazine, writes:
? ?Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life?.The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn?t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non?religious explanation for what is often called the ?fine-tuning problem??the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life. (?The Multiverse Theory,? Dec. 2008)
Is the multiverse a viable scientific postulate? How could it be? There is not even a shred of evidence for even a second universe. However, as Folger admits, giving up the idea of a multiverse places the atheist back into the grasp of a demanding God.

Hampton,
From the article you refer to on Thomists view, it seems that it continues to mischaracterize ID as a ?god-of-the-gap?, which ID proponents consistently say it is not, including Meyers recent book on cell?s design. How can it be still fair to ID? I think what ID proponents are saying is that a witness to the creative power requires an objective empirical substance that can be forcefully shared. That is why it is proposed as a scientific program.

RHampton,
Please don?t turn Thomas into an evolutionist. He would point his accusing finger right in your face:
?The first formation of the human body could not be by the instrumentality of any created power, but was immediately from God.? (Summa Theologiae I:91:2)

Daniel Mann, curious,
What you refute as impossible is standard Catholic ideology.
(February 11, 2009) A leading official declared yesterday that Darwin?s theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith, and could even be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. ?In fact, what we mean by evolution is the world as created by God,? said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture. The Vatican also dealt the final blow to speculation that Pope Benedict XVI might be prepared to endorse the theory of Intelligent Design, whose advocates credit a ?higher power? for the complexities of life…
Darwin?s theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, Monsignor Ravasi insisted. His rehabilitation had begun as long ago as 1950, when Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans. In 1996 John Paul II said that it was ?more than a hypothesis?.
Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, said that Darwin had been anticipated by St Augustine of Hippo. The 4th-century theologian had ?never heard the term evolution, but knew that big fish eat smaller fish? and that forms of life had been transformed ?slowly over time?. Aquinas had made similar observations in the Middle Ages, he added.

RHampton,
I truly grieve these proclamations. They have damaged the RCC profoundly.

Mann – It’s true that “we find such elegance in math as we do in the universe.”
But as I’ve pointed out, math wasn’t – couldn’t be – ‘created’. If anything is eternal and uncreated, logic and mathematics would have to qualify. Why does complex numbers plus iteration lead to the Mandelbrot Set? Because it couldn’t not do so.
Now let me turn your analogy around on you.
Once upon a time, the unique properties of water were remarkable – actually increasing in volume when freezing, being such a good solvent, it’s particular freezing and boiling points, and so forth. It was possible to imagine everything else being the same, but water having a different freezing point.
But we understand chemistry and atoms a lot more deeply now. We see that you simply couldn’t change the behavior of water without changing almost everything else about chemistry. Water is the way it is because of more fundamental properties, and couldn’t be otherwise.
What if the laws of physics turn out to be like the laws of mathematics – they couldn’t be otherwise? (Einstein famously asked the question with his usual quasi-religious bent: “Did God have any choice in creating the universe?”)
It’s true that we don’t have any convincing evidence of other universes (though some people interpret quantum computation as evidence of multiple universes) – but this is a problem for the fine-tuning argument, too. The fine-tuning argument depends critically on there being no necessary reason for the laws to be as they are now, that they could have been different. But if we only have one universe to observe, how can we know the laws could have been otherwise?
As you (inadvertently) point out, we have examples of uncreated elegance in mathematics. So applying that to universes doesn’t strike me as a priori impossible.
I’m sort of agnostic on the whole thing. Before Benjamin Franklin’s experiments, was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Zeus, or Seth, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response to “What causes lighting?” was “Darn if I, or anyone else, knows.” I’d sure like to know how (or if) the universe got started… but I haven’t seen good evidence to pick from any of half a dozen proposals. I have a suspicion that nobody’s had the right insight yet to get a handle on it.

Ray,
I certainly agree with you that there is a necessary reason why the laws are the way they are. As you point out:
?What if the laws of physics turn out to be like the laws of mathematics – they couldn’t be otherwise? (Einstein famously asked the question with his usual quasi-religious bent: “Did God have any choice in creating the universe?”)?
In a sense, I must agree with you. The laws are so intimately intertwined that they must be what they are or they would bring chaos. However, this observation ? rather than disqualifying ID ? supports the idea of a grand design.
You ask how the laws could be any different. Instead, I think the question should be, ?Why are they just right?? Walter L. Bradley, Professor of Engineering at Baylor University, writes:
? ?If the strong force constant [inside the nucleus] were 2% stronger, there would be no stable hydrogen, no long-lived stars, no hydrogen containing compounds. This is because the single proton in hydrogen would want to stick to something else so badly that there would be no hydrogen left!
? If the strong force constant were 5% weaker, there would be no stable stars, few (if any) elements besides hydrogen. This is because you would be able to build up the nuclei of the heavier elements, which contain more than 1 proton.
? ??So, whether you adjust the strong force up or down, you lose stars than can serve as long-term sources of stable energy, or you lose chemical diversity, which is necessary to make beings that can perform the minimal requirements of living beings.
? ?When cosmological models were first developed in the mid-twentieth century, cosmologists naively assumed that the selection of a given set of constants was not critical to the formation of a suitable habitat for life. Through subsequent parametric studies that varied those constants, scientists now know that relatively small changes in any of the constants produce a dramatically different universe and one that is not hospitable to life of any imaginable type.
? ?The design requirements for our universe are like a chain of 1000 links. If any link breaks, we do not have a less optimal universe for life — we have a universe incapable of sustaining life! ?I must conclude that it takes a great deal more faith to believe in an accidental universe than to believe in an intelligent creator, or God who crafted such a marvelous universe and beautiful place of habitation in planet Earth, and then created life (including human beings) to occupy it.?

Mann – The laws are so intimately intertwined that they must be what they are or they would bring chaos. However, this observation ? rather than disqualifying ID ? supports the idea of a grand design.
Again, I assume you’re talking in this passage about the laws of physics, not the laws of mathematics. I flatly do not concede the laws of mathematics could be different.
However, there are two different problems with your later statements, such as: “If the strong force constant [inside the nucleus] were 2% stronger… If the strong force constant were 5% weaker”.
The point that I’ve been laboring to make to you here is that asking, “What if the strong force were 2% stronger?” may be just as incorrect as asking, “What if 2+2=4.08?” – and for the same reason. We have nothing to rule that idea out right now, and my water example above gives us some historical reasons to suspect that the laws we see now have an even more fundamental basis.
Then there’s the other, complementary reason – even if the physical constants could be different (and again, we’ve only seen one universe, which offers no evidence that they could be), that doesn’t automatically rule out life.
Consider your initial example for elegance – Euclidean geometry. One of its postulates is that given a line, and a point not on that line, exactly one parallel line can be drawn through that point. It was thought for centuries that if that were changed, it would lead to chaos.
And yet, it was discovered that changing it led to geometries that were strange, but consistent and not at all chaotic. Hyperbolic geometry allows more than one parallel line. Elliptical geometry allows no parallel lines. Yet they work, and indeed, after Einstein it appears that our universe is Hyperbolic after all.
Given just the Euclidean postulates, it’s obviously hard for humans to figure out all the implications. (We still haven’t after a millennium or two…) While we can say that our particular complex chemistry would be impossible given other constants, it’s not at all clear that no other support for organized complexity would be possible in universes with other physical laws.
As an example, when varying more than one constant at a time, it turns out the existence of stars is not quite as unlikely as previous calculations have found. One study varied three different parameters at once and found stars in at least 25% of the possible universes, and star equivalents in at least 15% more.

Ray,
Thanks for your thoughts on the subject.

If a rare sort of moss grows only in a crevice of rock on the side of a giant mountain, and that one crevice is the ONLY place where the conditions are just exactly right for that variety of moss to grow, was the mountain designed for the moss?

Let’s go back to Prof. Barr’s essay on ID. It seems to me despite how you view ID as a scientific theory, it has made an important mark in the scientific culture world-wide. The many aspects of ID discussion seem to have transcended the rigidity of the Darwinian thought which has become quite rigid. This is a dose of flesh air in the biology thinking. Hence the impact of the notion of design in general, in science as well as the general post-modern culture still remains to be seen.

curious said: “The many aspects of ID discussion seem to have transcended the rigidity of the Darwinian thought which has become quite rigid.”
Only a creationist’s caricature refers to evolutionary theory as “rigidly Darwinian”. Modern evolutionary theory has moved well beyond Darwin. Modern evolutionary theory recognizes variation through factors other than random differences in offspring – factors like symbiosis, horizontal gene transfer, etc. Modern evolutionary theory is now aware of the dynamics of population genetics and punctuated equilibrium. All of genetics and all of molecular biology is post-Darwin.
To characterize evolutionary biology as “rigidly Darwinian” is just portraying a strawman.
The ONLY place where you might criticize current evolutionary biology for being “rigid” is the fact that it assumes as a starting point that:
Natural phenomena have natural causes.
But this is a fairly reasonable assumption, since it has been 100% correct throughout the history of rational investigation of nature. And every challenge to this assumption by supernaturalists has failed, without exception.
And, as we know, there are many examples in the past of apparent design in nature that turned out to have natural causes.
So the simple, logical assumption for science to take is that the complexity and design we see in life is entirely from natural causes without supernatural intervention. And, since we’ve SEEN natural mechanisms add complexity and add apparent “design” through the very mechanisms of biological evolution. Since we’ve WATCHED it happen, then we can have a fairly high confidence that evolution occurs naturally.
Finally we’re making steady progress understanding the complexity and mechanisms of biological evolution. Look at how much we’ve learned in the last 50 years – a mere instant of time.
Of course, if ID-proponents get their way and push God back into public school science, then our rate of discovery will certainly slow. And if you critize that statement as a strawman, I point you to Stephen Meyer’s “Wedge Strategy” where he states his goals to do exactly that – use “design theory” as a wedge to make public policy and public education more open to the Christian god.

RickK,
I rather doubt that ID will slow the rate of discovery. That kind of K-12 content simply does not have such a great impact, and ID impacts very small part of the total science curriculum.
I think that rate of discovery will slow in the US because students are told to go to experts, and are not taught to think, create, build, improvise – we remove shop and art and design as unnecessary peripherals. Dissection is considered “cruel” (and not by Christians). We need smart, creative, innovators.
But now I’ve moved way off the topic of this post.

“I think that rate of discovery will slow in the US because students are told to go to experts, and are not taught to think, create, build, improvise”
I’m curious, is there any greater appeal to authority than saying a divine unknowable intelligence did it all?

I should not call it ‘rigid’ for the Darwinian crowd. It should be ideological, culturally speaking, and very condescending at that.