Re: [Marxism] Behe in the Times

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 16:18:48 GMT "acpollack2@xxxxxxxx"
<acpollack2@xxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> Yeah, it occurred, it just needed a little nudge now and then from
> God. Give me a break.
>
> -- Scott Palmer <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> --- "acpollack2@xxxxxxxx" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> (( giving such space to an opponent of evolution ))
>
> It's important not to argue against straw men.
>
> Prof. Behe states in his column that
> intelligent-design proponents "do not doubt that
> evolution occurred."

I think that he like most of the other intelligent-design
proponents is being very slippery here.  Unlike the
more old fashion creationists, he denies being
opposed to evolution but the thrust of his arguments
is that the apparent design of living organisms cannot
be accounted for in terms of evolution by natural
selection, or to be more specific, he argued that
the existence and natures of living cells cannot
be explained through natural selection, indeed
cannot be explained in naturalistic terms, period.

This is of course, simply a resucitation of the old
arguments from design that William Paley had
presented back in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries  - the sort of thing that Charles Darwin
had studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge,
and which he later refuted in his *The Origin
of Species*, and which for that matter had
already been refuted by David Hume years
earlier.  The intelligent-design people like
Behe and Dembski, claim to present a
more sophisticated version of these arguments
than did Paley since they claim to be able
to give their arguments a rigorous mathematical
formulation, which Paley had never done.
However, the old saying that computer
programmers have, "Garbage in, garbage out"
applies just as well to such applications of
mathematics as it does to computer software.

And the fact is that Richard Dawkins had
already provided an elegant refutation of
the sort of logic embraced the intelligent-design
folk in his book, *The Blind Watchmaker*, even
before the intelligent-design movement had
gotten off the ground.



>
> Scott
>
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