I’m a retired hardware/software design engineer. At this point you’ll need to take up Dembski’s mathematical theorems with someone else.
The compelling evidence of design for me is irreducible complexity in molecular machinery, particulary the digital genetic code, the information it encodes, and the ribosome which together form a robotic protein assembler able to produce all the 3 dimensional components required to reproduce itself. It’s so complex we haven’t even cracked the algorithm for protein folding yet which is something of a holy grail in bioengineering. Digitally programmed machinery is something I spent a successful and lucrative career designing. I know a design when I see one and until someone can demonstate to me in a plausible, detailed, and laboratory verified manner how a self-replicating protein factory can self-organize then I consider Intelligent Design to be not just a live option but the only reasonable explanation for how it came into existence. This should not be censored from 9th grade biology students by tortured interpretations of the establishment clause. It isn’t quite rocket science and to call it religion is an act of desperation by someone who knows he’s obviously wrong.
Update: Wittingshire has a good roundup of recent ID/Evo posts.
2 comments:
If you could not have written it better, then you are less of an engineer than I gave you credit for. From the top:
"Robotic" is used to describe something that is not a robot (by convention and according to the dictionary, a mechanism operating by the manipulation of the flows of electrons). Something that is not an algorithm is called one. The reason we do not have good models for protein folding is due to the size of the simulations involved, not want of theory. Design inference from observation is enormously error-prone due to our hard-wired pattern recognition faculties -- remember the "face" on Mars that so many people took as evidence of intelligent life?
While serious scientists continue to research the (separate) fields of abiogenesis and evolution, your heroes in the anti-science brigade will continue to conflate them and make ridiculous claims about 10^120 probability bounds while proposing no testable mechanism for the design to have occurred.
The demand that ID proponents name the designer and their modus operandi is a red herring; the designer's identity is strictly a historical question. And questions of history (or archaelogy etc.) are not nescessarily answerable. If I read in an extract of Livy that Caesar crossed the rubicon, I don't need a particular theory about Ceasar's military logistics to believe that he did, in fact, cross the rubicon; if the texts don't tell me then I don't know. Likewise if in light of archaeological evidence I conclude that prehistoric man made use of fire, I don't need a particular theory of how fire was discovered to be reasonable in my conclusion; it's likely that there simply isn't extant evidence sufficient to form such a theory. Similarly, the recognition that life exhibits the hallmarks of design doesn't require a particular theory of who or how that design was carried out.
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