The Chronicle: Colloquy: Responses

I do not take issue with Professor Ryan's argument (http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2001/design/435.htm): "But eventually, the idea that someone designed life on earth must be admitted to be a meaningful idea and not nonsense." Yes, the idea is meaningful and not nonsense. Many people believe it. I think it possible. However, the question for this board is whether or not science could know it. How would science go about investigating the idea? Were we all born with "made by God" stamped on our foreheads, many might be a little less skeptical about our ability to know. Were someone to find remains of a science lab embedded in rock strata billions of years old, with inhumanly-preserved lab equipment and a lab manual with recognizable depictions of DNA, I would say that an ID hypothesis was well supported by the data. The issue, as Professor Ryan has noted, is that there is currently no such evidence. Why I think ID unscientific, not just lacking in supportive data, is that there is also no evidence of the existence of capable intelligent designers at a time reasonable for the origin of life. The same holds for subsequent evolutionary events, such as the development of bacterial flagella. What is even less scientific is the consistent refusal of ID advocates to even speculate on the nature of possible designers, much less suggest why their existence should be suspected or how hypotheses about their existence could be independently tested (in the future, if not by currently-available data). I heard Behe on NPR data likening ID to someone driving by the Black Hills and concluding that those stone faces on the mountainside were designed. I suggest that a true scientist would pull in at the visitor's center and ask about their provenance.

: -- James Swan, Professor, Wichita State University (posted 2/14, 10:35 a.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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Our biological beastliness spawned our cultural greatness. But can our biological greatness save us from our cultural beastliness, asks David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. (Password required; how to get one.)
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