Thinking Christian

Cornelius Hunter points out serious inconsistencies in a paper by Nick Matzke, beginning with,

Evolutionists say it is a fact that all of biology just happened to arise by accident, and they harshly criticize those who do not agree. But with amazing consistency their criticism is hypocritical—it applies to evolutionary thinking. Consider this recent paper about creationist movements…

The discussion on this really belongs on Hunter’s blog post, so comments are closed here. I encourage you to join me and others in the conversation over there.

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It never ceases to amaze me how some people will blithely burst forth with incoherent convictions of determinism. I acknowledge that Anthony R. Cashmore is an accomplished biologist holding an endowed chair at Penn. But that doesn’t mean he makes sense speaking of free will. The following comes from his January 2010 paper, The Lucretian Swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system.

Cashmore is a full-blown free-will denier:

The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will.

How has he come to that conclusion? The glib answer would be, “not by any choice of his own.” It’s not just glib; if Cashmore’s thesis is correct, then it’s also exactly true. It’s the short form of one of the most basic objections to hard determinism: if determinism is true, then there is no rational choice involved in accepting it. (The same applies to determinism coupled with randomness, which is Cashmore’s position.)

I’ll come back to the bowl of sugar shortly, but first I want to give somewhat more respect to Cashmore’s process of (ahem) deciding that free will does not exist. As much respect as I think it deserves, at least. The word “mechanism” appears fifteen times in this article, revealing Cashmore’s fundamental view of reality:

It is my belief that, as more attention is given to the mechanisms that govern human behavior, it will increasingly be seen that the concept of free will is an illusion….

This information is translated into action via the motor neurons, joined to the muscles and the glands of the body, using a mechanism of both electrical and chemical transmission….

Whereas this so-called Cartesian duality, at least superficially, provides a nice mechanism whereby one could entertain the concept of free will, belief in this mechanism among scientific circles has ostensibly disappeared….

However, as admirably appreciated by Epicurus and Lucretius, in the absence of any hint of a mechanism that affects the activities of atoms in a manner that is not a direct and unavoidable consequence of the forces of GES [genes, environment, and stochasticism], this line of thinking is not informative in reference to the question of free will….

There must be a mechanism by which consciousness does influence behavior.

The mechanistic details of these conscious processes are unknown, and remain the major unsolved problem in biology

This focus on mechanism may have blinded him to the fallacy contained in one of his central refutations of free will:

However, if we no longer entertain the luxury of a belief in the “magic of the soul,” then there is little else to offer in support of the concept of free will. Whereas much is written claiming to provide an explanation for free will, such writings are invariably lacking any hint of molecular details concerning mechanisms.

Obviously I don’t deny there are mechanisms in nature. If there is free will, though, it won’t be found there. Mechanisms don’t choose. If biologists haven’t found free will in molecular mechanisms, that means either (a) there is no free will, or (b) there is free will—which by definition cannot be found by looking for it in mechanisms. (Nice to have options, isn’t it?) You can’t prove something doesn’t exist, if the only place you look for it is where everybody knows it couldn’t exist. He could as cleverly have concluded there is no photosynthesis in nature because he’s looked all over the animal kingdom and can’t find it there.

This is a severe stumbling point for many with a scientific frame of mind. Science is so successful in unveiling mechanisms (also describable as objects, organisms, etc. operating by natural laws or regularities), some people think mechanisms comprise the only sort of causal process there could possibly be. If science doesn’t find mechanisms for free will, then poof! there is no free will; never mind that the whole idea of looking for free will by scientific means is incoherent to start with.

Cashmore’s scientistic assumptions glare like klieg lights from phrases like,

the sparsity of evidence or credible models in support of free will

“Sparsity of evidence”?! How about the evidence that you and I each demonstrate whenever we decide A rather than B? But for Cashmore, that’s not the right kind of evidence, since it can’t be modeled biologically.

He ought to recognize that if free will exists, it will not be known by scientific means. Ergo, if scientific means do not discover free will, that says nothing at all about whether free will exists.

A. Hypothesis: Free will exists
B. Method of testing: Scientific
C. Result of scientific testing: Negative (free will disconfirmed)
D. Relevance of testing method: Nil
E. Validity of testing result: Nil

Cashmore devotes considerable space to research on consciousness, and on the biological correlates of decision-making. He probably knows correlation does not demonstrate causation; but then, he doesn’t use the word “correlation” in this article but just one time. He uses “causation” and its cognates 33 times. Maybe he doesn’t recognize that what he’s talking about actually are correlations, and that his leap to causation is just that, a leap.

Is it possible that something other than mechanisms could cause human decisions and behaviors? How would it do that? Watch out: this so-called interaction problem misdirects the question. Stage and street magicians (my son is one, working his second day at Busch Gardens today) employ misdirection to foster an illusion. The same thing is happening here. Hidden within the “interaction problem” is this tasty philosophical morsel, “If you suggest something other than mechanisms might have an effect on human decisions and behaviors, by what mechanisms do you propose they operate?” Do you see what’s happening there? The questioner is trying to direct you back toward his own beliefs, asking us to accept their truth as steps toward demonstrating their falsehood. Another name for this trick is begging the question.

My answer to the interaction problem is quick and easy: non-mechanical causes affect human behavior non-mechanically, so there is no mechanical explanation. “What kind of explanation is that?” you ask. I’ll answer that if you’ll own up first to the fact that the interaction question implies (demands, actually) a mechanistic answer and thus begs the question. (No pretending, now. You need to really accept that scientistic, mechanistic assumptions and demands are illegitimate in this context.)

Speaking of tasty morsels (two paragraphs up, in case you’ve forgotten already), I’m about to come back to that bowl of sugar. First, though, I need to bring in two further quotes from Cashmore:

From this simple analysis, surely it follows that individuals cannot logically be held responsible for their behavior. Yet a basic tenet of the judicial system and the way that we govern society is that we hold individuals accountable (we consider them at fault) on the assumption that people can make choices that do not simply reflect a summation of their genetic and environmental history.

and…

Many believe that the consequences of a society lacking free will would be disastrous. In contrast, I argue that we do not necessarily need to be pessimistic about confronting a world lacking free will. Indeed, it is quite possible that progress in some of the more vexing sociological problems may be better achieved once we clarify our thinking concerning the concepts of free will and fault.

I think he’s suggesting that we ought to decide to think of ourselves as unable to make free decisions, because it’s more logical, and because then things might get better for us. Three problems there:

1. The aforementioned difficulty of deciding anything if we can’t decide anything.

2. The difficulty of making sense of “ought,” if “individuals cannot logically be held responsible for their behavior.”

3. If we’re just a bowl of sugar, what on earth does “better” mean for us?

Number three is quite a big deal. Don’t rush past it too quickly. If our human ability to choose what we do, what we value, how we treat one another, how we live and die, all turns out to be a meaningless illusion, then why would not the word “better” also turn out to be a meaningless illusion?

The real illusion lies in scientism’s misdirection. Don’t fall for it.

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Ideas, implications, consequences:

With the corrective lens of evolutionary theory, the view that human life is infinitely valuable suddenly seems like a vast and unjustified over-valuation of human life. This is because Darwin’s theory undermines the traditional reasons for thinking human life might have infinite value: the image-of-God thesis and the rationality thesis….

But if human life is not supremely valuable after all, then there is no longer any reason to think that suicide or voluntary euthanasia is necessarily wrong under any or all circumstances.

[From Psychology Today Blogger Says Darwinism Requires Support of Suicide » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog]

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This just might be evolutionary biology’s most fundamental error:

From high school biology exams to university tenure and funding applications, all must work under the umbrella of evolution. New research is not merely described in terms of evolution, the very data are interpreted according to evolution from the first measurement. If a new fossil form is discovered, it is described as a result of gradualism if it is similar to known forms. On the other hand, it is described as a result of punctuated equilibrium if it is unique. One way or another, evolution is the narrative. And while it may be that, in practice, science needs to work in this way, this overwhelming dominance means that, ironically, evolutionary studies often fail to provide evidence for evolution. This is because evolution is assumed in the very interpretation of the data. This logical technicality, however, often does not stop evolutionists from making high claims about the evidence.

The assumption that evolution is true is baked into evolutionary studies. The results are not theory-neutral, and it would be circular to use the results as evidence for evolution.

[From Darwin's God: When Evidence for Evolution is Actually Evolution of Evidence]

Read the rest for the full context.

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Hardly anybody ever mentions it, but two of the most well-known verses in the Old Testament have significant apologetic implications, lending support to the Bible’s supernatural origins. One of them I’m sure will be a surprise to many readers here; the other might also.

I will preview the argument before telling you which verses they are. In brief form it goes like this.

The ancient Hebrews’ conception of God and his relation to his creation was vastly different from that of others in the Ancient Near East. From a philosophical perspective it has been exceedingly successful for millennia since then: it was, in that sense, very highly advanced philosophy. Such uniquely prescient and enduringly successful thinking is not explained by any prior tradition, for there is no indication of advanced thought leading up to it either among the Hebrews or in any neighboring culture. Did it come from nowhere at all? Or did it come by revelation from God?

Or:

The ancient Hebrews were astonishingly advanced metaphysical thinkers. They produced a monotheism that stood in complete contrast to all other systems of thought at the time, that still works philosophically, and that today remains coherent within its own framework. How did these Bronze Age nomads and farmers accomplish that?

I have often heard it asked, “why should we look to ancient Bronze Age or Iron Age nomads/sheepherders/farmers for wisdom? What could they possibly say to us who have the advantage of so much more knowledge and science?” Good question. How could they have known anything at all that would stand the test of centuries of inquiry? But our two “overlooked apologetics verses” have done that. They are, as I said, very familiar:

Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Exodus 3:13-14a “Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”

The creation account in Genesis is astonishingly different from all other creation stories. Quoting from page 32 and following of Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration:

Genesis is quite unlike the Mesopotamian cosmogonies [accounts of the origin of the cosmos], for instance, which are intertwined with theogonies—accounts of the origins of the gods. In them, we are not told so much about how the universe came about—the origin of the worlds is really accidental or secondary in ANE [Ancient Near East] accounts—but how the gods emerged. And in addition to the fact that these Mesopotamian cosmogonies are really concerned with the ancestors of the gods and how they got themselves organized, they do not even identify these gods as creators. So when it comes to the elements of the universe (the waters/deep, darkness), a deity either controls one or is one….

Further, Yahweh simply speaks, thereby creating; in other ANE cosmogonies, deities struggle to divide the waters. Also in Genesis 1, the astral bodies are not gods (as in ANE accounts) but are creations.…

Gerhard von Rad makes the powerful point that Israel’s worldview, as reflected in Genesis, drew a sharp demarcating line between God and the world. The material world is purged of any quality of the divine or the demonic….

In Genesis, we read of something marvelously different than in [Ugaritic cosmogony], with its gods and hostile powers (darkness, the waters/the deep): “These cosmic monsters are no longer primordial forces opposed to the Israelite God at the beginning of creation. Instead, they are creatures like other creatures rendered in this story.” Genesis 1 depicts a “divine mastery” over these forces….

In contrast to ANE myths, there are no rivals to the Creator in Genesis [chapter] 1—let alone preexistent matter…. There is no cosmic dualism or struggle at all.

There is more but I think you can see the point: the Genesis view of God and creation is starkly different from all other views of cosmic origins and of deity. This point extends beyond ANE cosmogonies. I believe it is the case that no other independently developed creation account is even remotely similar to that in Genesis. In all other accounts, either the material world is pre-existent along with the gods (there is something like this even in Plato), it is an emanation of some god or gods, or it is illusion.

Genesis is significant simply for its utter uniqueness. There’s something there that begs for explanation. But the argument I’m presenting is not just that.  There is more to be said. It will fit better, however, once we have look at our second “overlooked apologetics verse.”

We need to approach the Exodus passage through the route of a question. How are humans known? From where do we derive our identities? The answer is, through relationships. First of all we’re known by our families. “Who is your father?” was the question in the ANE; today we’re still identified through our family names and our family heritage. We’re identified by our relationship to maleness and femaleness. As we grow and develop, our personalities are formed in relation to our relatives, our friends, even our foes or (if your school experience was like many) tormentors. Our identity is tied also to the land, also a relational matter (“Where are you from? What nationality are you?”) and to our work (“What do you do for a living?”).

How are gods known in myth? In exactly the same way: by relationship to one another and to the created order, and by what they do. Their identities too are relational.

And so it is with identity in every case. It is always relational. This is what makes Yahweh’s answer in Exodus so remarkable. In biblical culture much more than today’s, a person’s name and identity were wrapped up together with each other. God was known to the Hebrews by many titles, most of which had to do with his role or way of relating to creation: The Almighty, the Lord of Hosts (Armies), The Provider, and so on. But in Exodus Moses was apparently asking for something more: God’s actual name, which would reveal his full identity, his full relatedness. God consented to answer. And to what relationship did he point? “I AM WHO I AM.” He pointed to himself. No other relationship could be adequate to identify him. He was (and is) just who he was (and is).

Down the centuries since then much has been said about monotheism. Much philosophical and theological work has been plowed into exploring what it must mean that there is one God. Now for apologetical purposes we cannot assume that monotheism is true; that would be begging the question most illegitimately. But we can examine its implications: what if it is true? This kind of examination has been done for centuries. One of its most solid conclusions is that God is “self-existent.” He is what he is, without reference to any other being whatever. He is being itself. Blogger niwrad put it this way:

What theology calls “God,” metaphysics refers to as “Being.” And what we call the “universe” or the “cosmos” is simply the “universal existence” or “manifestation” of Being. The universal existence is everything that exists….

In metaphysics it is important to conceptually distinguish between the verbs “to be” and “to exist,” although in everyday language this difference doesn’t matter very much. The verb “to exist” (from the Latin “ex-sistere“) etymologically means “to stay outside.” Thus a thing exists when its principle or “sufficient reason” or cause stands outside itself. This is precisely the situation for all the things in the universe. On the other hand, the ontological verb “to be” has a nobler and more powerful meaning than the verb “to exist,” and for this reason it should be applied to the principle or cause of all that exists, i.e. Being, the First Cause.

The auxiliary verb “to be” is, logically and linguistically, the more important verb, as a consequence of its ontological supremacy. Every other verb, as well as any word or logical term whatsoever, presupposes the verb “to be,” and is, as it were, its consequence or effect.

That’s a very clear introduction to a very technical discussion, ending in the conclusion, God is he who is, to whom the verb to be applies uniquely. “I AM WHO I AM.” It couldn’t be said any better than that.

Whether a technical discussion like niwrad’s is clear to you is not as important for our purposes as this: advanced philosophical reflection concludes that a Bronze Age sheepherder’s name for God is as accurate a name as could possibly be advanced for a monotheistic God. The name of God Moses delivered was God being self-identified in terms of himself, for nothing but God himself is adequate for him by which to identify himself. God IS (from his first-person perspective, “I AM”). The verb to be there is the only one that suffices to describe the pure Being of God.

It would have been easy for Moses to tell the Israelites, “I was sent to you by God, and his name is ___. (Fill in the blank with any name of your choosing, or with a title like The Lord.) He didn’t do that. He said, “I AM has sent me.”

God’s name, his revealed identity, I AM WHO I AM, has never failed from within the context of monotheistic thought. It has stood many centuries’ test of philosophical and theological coherence.

This ties back to Genesis 1:1: God created the heavens and the earth from nothing. Besides himself, nothing was. There was God as pure Being, the totality of all reality. Creation had to be ex nihilo—from nothing (no preexisting matter, no material cause)—if there was to be any creation at all.

There is much I must leave unsaid about these philosophical and theological reflections upon God, and I do not suppose that what I’ve written in these prior paragraphs will be adequate or even understandable in this bare form. Suffice it to say that a very large body of literature has tested conceptions of what God must be like in his being, if there is one God; and although this literature exceeds the Old Testament in technical depth and complexity, and though we learn further aspects of God’s holy character from other biblical revelation, with respect to the being of God, the whole of all these years of reflection amounts to nothing more than footnotes to “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and “I AM WHO I AM.”

I will recap the argument here.

1. The idea of monotheism entails certain metaphysical and theological implications.

2. These implications have taken centuries to sort out and to refine, so that we can legitimately take it today that the art of thinking on monotheism has reached an advanced stage.

3. These centuries of work have confirmed the insights of the author of Genesis and Exodus on God’s self-existent eternal nature.

4. Genesis and Exodus are unique in their statements on these matters. No other ancient cosmogony or theology has had a view remotely similar to that of the books of Moses.

5. The question then is, from where did they derive an insight that would so successfully anticipate such advanced thinking, and endure for more than three thousand years?

Or in short: they did pretty well for simple Bronze Age farmers, coming up with metaphysical insight that would stand for more than three millennia. I think they had help.

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A brilliant article cited at Uncommon Descent.

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The responses to my question, “Why The Debate?” on Intelligent Design and Thomist theology have been most instructive for me. Blogging is for learning, too. Holopupenko disagreed with my characterization of Intelligent Design as a reductio-like approach, asking,

How do you think Meyer or Behe or Dembski would respond if you pressed them to re-characterize their efforts to a reductio argument? How far do you really think you’d get? (With acerbic Dembski, I doubt you’d even be given the opportunity to complete your sentence.)

As came out later in the discussion, I didn’t put Meyer’s approach in the same category as Behe’s and Dembski’s. Whether they would agree with me or not is up to them, and I think Holopupenko is right to say they would be hesitant to accept the appellation I put on them. If they said, “we’re not offering reductio arguments,” I would have to agree; that’s why I called them reductio-like. What they have in common with a reductio is pressing an opponent’s assumptions to see how far they can go. The Thomists’ objection (as it seems to me) is that ID accepts the wrong assumptions. What’s really going on instead, as I see it, is that ID accepts those assumptions for the purpose of testing them, and showing where they fail. If in my earlier post I communicated a stronger resemblance to reductio than that, I stand corrected. (Blogging is for learning, too.)

And since blogging is for learning, with some trepidation I’m going to take the risk of challenging some good Christian philosophers even further. This may be oversimplified, and if it is, then I expect it will be another occasion for learning; but it seems to me the objections to ID on that thread to boil down to two:

1. ID inappropriately plays by the rules of the modern empirical sciences (MESs), and
2. ID is a weak or inconclusive proof for God and/or design.

With respect to the first of these we have Holopunko’s observation,

Nowhere do I see [ID proponents] reducing their efforts to a reductio. (No pun intended.) In fact, quite the opposite is true: they bill themselves as a scientific (read: MES) THEORY. Once they do this, they MUST play by the rules of the MESs.

As well as Luke’s:

I’d have to agree with Holo… something like the MESs have a sandbox (a nice one) but it says nothing beyond the sandbox. IDT attempts to play by the sandbox rules while at the same time incorporating rules from outside the sandbox, which really doesn’t work if you can only join the sandbox by agreeing to its initial rules.

What’s wrong with ID following those rules? Holopupenko says,

One cannot possibly re-characterize ID Theory as a mere reductio argument when ID Theorists themselves are proposing it is much more: ID Theorists are NOT just trying to infer design–they’re trying to observe final causality by means of the MESs by proposing MES-based research directions, etc. NONE of which has produced a shred of strictly-MES based evidence.

The MESs are simply NOT qualified to address teleology or teleonomy.

and

One most certainly CAN infer design from nature, but one can NOT do it directly from the MESs: one needs (1) a rational agent, (2) philosophical reflection. But if that’s the case, then why are IDers hell-bent on introducing philosophical reflection into the science classroom?

…

What possible MES-based research program could be instituted to “see” a final cause–a being of reason only existing in the mind of a rational agent? Answer: none.

I hope that’s enough to represent the case fairly. Now, I have two concerns with this. First, ID is not limited to playing according to the MESs’ rules of naturalism, whether philosophical (which ID roundly rejects) or methodological (which ID, shall we say, handles with caution, since it often bleeds over into philosophical naturalism).

Second, although ID bills itself as science, it does not claim to be purely scientific, i.e., science not philosophically informed. We have encountered scientists here who seem to think science can operate without philosophy, but that is just false, as Holopupenko and other commenters here know very well. I have always understood ID to be both a philosophical and scientific program, as I laid out in some detail three years ago.

I have no idea where the ID literature says it is trying to observe design by means of the MESs. Instead ID theorists in the Dembski-Behe camp, through philosophical consideration, have proposed conditions that accomplish two simultaneous objectives: to support an inference of design, and to defeat a contrary non-design inference. They have proposed philosophically-based answers to, “Are there any conditions that, if they obtained in nature, would support a conclusion of design over against a conclusion of non-design?” Thus the Explanatory Filter; and thus Complex Specified Information and Irreducible Complexity.

Later Holopupenko writes,

It takes a human being (i.e., a rational agent) to demonstrate the existence of God (i.e., Existence itself… and it has been done) through philosophical reflection upon sensory-accessible knowledge.

It seems to me that’s a great description of Intelligent Design. I think he probably intends “sensory-accessible knowledge” to refer to ordinary and everyday experience, but I’m not sure on what basis we can draw a line between that and science for these purposes. The role of science in ID (as in every other context) is to amplify and to refine observations (“sensory-accessible knowledge”), and to draw conclusions therefrom. ID amounts to rational agents observing nature, reflecting upon it philosophically, and inferring design. IDers are not hell-bent on introducing ID into science classrooms, of course; that’s an old misconception. What they do want to do is to correct the philosophical reflections already present in science classrooms, and the conclusion that non-design has been demonstrated by the MESs.

Moving on to the second summary set of objections raised against ID in that thread, we have Holopupenko’s statement,

Later Holopupenko says,

Worse, the question has already been addressed by a realist philosophy of nature and metaphysics: design is fundamentally teleological–end of story. No MES-based arguments can add to or change that truth, and no MES-based knowledge is needed to validate that truth.

And Brandon noted,

If we take the reductio-like approach seriously, with the structure you suggest in 1-4, or something like it, then a striking feature of the approach is that it does not — and cannot — prove the existence of an intelligent designer; rather, it merely identifies gaps in naturalistic explanation. Indeed, neither intelligence nor design shows up in any of the steps. Since it works on naturalistic assumptions, which are to be shown wrong or problematic by the end of the argument, it can’t prove anything positive about the world….

Thus ID requires, by its very nature, a positive inference. In Dembski and, if I recall correctly, Behe it is inductive; in Meyer you note it is abductive. But it has to be there or ID fails to manage to include any intelligence, design, or complete refutation of naturalism. And the positive inference has to be based on a correct view of natural objects and of intelligence; for the Thomist there are serious problems on both points.

I freely grant that ID cannot prove the existence of an intelligent designer. It’s hard to imagine an ID case being made any stronger than it is through cosmological fine tuning, and the naturalists have found a way to evade the design conclusion through multiverse theory. I also freely grant that ID is not needed to add to or change the truths we know about God and design through other means. Or rather, I grant that for some of us, ID doesn’t show us anything we didn’t already know through other means. But it still has considerable value.

For one, it helps focus the issue. If I may be allowed to quote myself,

The psychology, the motivation for it all could hardly be clearer than it is in this from cosmologist Bernard Carr. “If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.”

“Don’t want God.” Indeed.

For another, ID has the potential to speak to those who are not moved by scriptural or other philosophical evidences for God and for design. If some regard it as superfluous, others may not. If it is less conclusive to a Thomist (or a Baptist) than philosophy or Bible, it may be more conclusive to a modernist.

But is its persuasiveness to the modernist based on invalid assumptions or arguments? Perhaps, if its point is to prove God; for ID really cannot do that. But that is not what ID is about. ID is not even about validating truths regarding design, truths that are apparent to thinkers in the Thomist tradition. ID is about making an argument in favor of design, a supporting if not conclusive argument, for those who know little about Aristotle or Aquinas and care about them even less.

God is not proved by ID. Yet if naturalism is proved absurd, self-contradictory, or (more the case here) unreasonably unlikely to have done what is claimed of it, then one is forced to think through what else might explain the universe and its many complex features, especially life. I ask the obvious question: what directions might that lead?

Further, then: What if ID hints at God? And what if its hints are less definite than Scripture (which I certainly hold to be the case) or philosophical arguments for God (or intuitions of design such as Holopupenko wrote of yesterday)? Does ID’s being less conclusive or definite make it contradictory to other arguments? And is there not something to be said on its behalf, in that it employs the very tool, science, that some falsely claim has disproved God?

Does ID provide means for a positive inference, as Brandon says it requires? I think so. I do not agree that in either Dembski or Behe take an inductive approach to it, if by that one means that Dembski or Behe see a cumulative trail of design as such in nature. Instead, as I noted above, they have proposed philosophically based answers to the question, what features in nature, if they obtained, would support an inference of design over against an inference of non-design. They have gone looking for those features, and they think they have found them. Maybe they are wrong, as the Darwinists say they are. If they are, they are not wrong theologically. They are wrong philosophically, having proposed flawed criteria for what features of nature might support a design inference; or they are wrong scientifically, misidentifying the features that they think meet those criteria. But as far as I can tell they are wrong neither philosophically nor scientifically in the way Holopupenko, Brandon, and Luke have suggested they are.

Blogging is for learning. Have I missed something important, perhaps it is in what Brandon was hinting toward here?

Thus ID requires, by its very nature, a positive inference…. it it has to be there or ID fails to manage to include any intelligence, design, or complete refutation of naturalism. And the positive inference has to be based on a correct view of natural objects and of intelligence; for the Thomist there are serious problems on both points.

I await your responses.

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