Who Are The Ones Wallowing In Ignorance?

Pontificating about ID while displaying an abject ignorance of what it actually says is really not the way to win the argument. But do keep it up.

Telic Thoughts quotes a fairly high profile critic as follows:

Another practice that isn't science is embracing ignorance. Yet it's fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

There are many good comments to the post in response to this. Here's one:

Seriously, is this even worth wasting the time and bandwidth to respond to? What an utter moron. Its like some fundy preacher "preaching to the choir" when it doesn't really need to make sense and certainly dosn't have to be true.

What if you were to apply each of his statements to the flagellum?

I don't know what this is.

False.

I don't know how it works.

False.

It's too complicated for me to figure out.

False.

It's too complicated for any human being to figure out.

False.

So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

Um, no. That's not how the argument proceeds you dimwit.

Here's another:

Tyson wrote:

I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

There are a couple of possible flip-sides to this remark.

A

I don't know what this is.

I don't know how it works.

It's too complicated for me to figure out.

It's too complicated for any human being to figure out.

So it doesn't exist.

This is essentially the tack taken by eliminative materialists with respect to consciousness. But it's also the basic reasoning used by many, such as Dawkins, to arrive at atheism.

B

I know what this is.

I know how it works.

It's not too complicated for me to figure out.

It's not too complicated for any human being to figure out.

So the Empire State building must not have been intelligently designed.

Oh, wait, um.

Hold on.

Let me think about this…

Yeah, and while you're at it, you might want to ask yourself this: if intentional rational thought itself is to be understood, must it be understood only in terms of non-intentional non-rational non-thought?

I don't see why that need be the case at all. I don't think intentional rational thought is a 'problem'. It's only a problem if you try to give a materialist reduction of it. But I wouldn't try such a reduction.

Why think that rational and moral mindhood needs to be or can be explained, if by 'explained' you mean 'explained in terms of something else which doesn't possess mindhood'? It's the materialist who thinks mind, consciousness, reason, normativity, moral and aesthetic and emotional value, needs to be explained in terms of non-mind, non-reason, non-consciousness, non-normativity, non-value. The anti-materialist ist is saying that doesn't need to be done, nor can it be done; and that it's wrongheaded to think otherwise. Theists hold that it's ultimately mind that explains why matter exists and has the properties it has––it was intelligently designed—-not the other way round.

The mind of the creator is THE basic truth about reality, because it is itself the basic reality. All other realities reflect this basic truth by being themselves rationally ordered in their design. And some of these created realities are endowed with reason and value, and with the capacity for moral agency.

The explanation for that just is that a transcendent creative mind pre-eminently endowed with reason and value, is the fundamental ontological and explanatory fact about reality.

It is senseless to say that this 'doesn't explain anything' in precisely the same way that it would be senseless to say that if materialism is true, positing impersonal material forces as the fundamental fact about reality, 'wouldn't explain anything'.

Mind works this way…..consciousness, reason, intention, purpose, knowledge, etc. Matter works this way…occupying space, rest mass, inertial motion, etc etc. Why hold that mindstuff is more 'mysterious' than matterstuff?

It strikes me that our conscious mental lives are the most obvious, matter-of-fact, taken-for-granted, intuitively indubitably self-evident realities there are, and that it's things like curved spacetime, energy fields, quarks, and suchlike that are the 'mysterious' things.

The central fact which grounds and mediates anyone’s access to any facts about curved spacetime, energy fields, etc, whatsoever is the fact of rational consciousness. And the central observation we can make about the fact of rational consciousness is that it’s unlike any physical fact we know. Indeed, consciousness, through which we encounter whole realms of the nonphysical such as rationality, morality, aesthetics, and meaning, is intrinsically unlike anything else in the physical universe, a fact reflected in physics textbooks which purport to explain everything about the universe but say nothing, far less explain anything, about rational consciousness.

Meantime, it's only fair to point out that materialists have a hard time accounting in their own terms for the central presuppositions of science–—namely, rational observership, rational inference, and rational agency——without appearing to endow matter with magical properties.

Another major difficulty for materialists is to account for why matter appears to obey 'laws' or behave with regularity—-laws and regularities of remarkable mathematical (and hence rationally intelligible) elegance and beauty. How can the matter now present in the universe control its own future, so to speak——especially if we conceive of it as being devoid of teleology? If 'laws' are posited to explain regularities, must not they themselves be immaterial entities that transcend and govern the universe's material entities? And is it not the case that the only plausible candidates for being immaterial entities are only ever encountered as the contents of minds?

Perhaps Tyson knows how to figure all that out without positing an intelligent designing mind as the universe's and life's creator. If so, I'm all ears.

But perhaps instead he will, er, embrace ignorance with all the passion of a promissory materialist:

"We don't know how this occurred. But we, er, know it occurred without an intelligent designer being involved at any stage."

In contrast to the scientist Tyson, it does look like at least one Senator knows what he's talking about. Sam Brownback sounds like someone who's actually bothered to study up on the topic, as evidenced here.