Thursday, 1st of September, 2005

Dan Dennett, probably my “favourite philosopher” (yes, what an odd idea that is), weighs in on the current discussion about Intelligent Design (ie creationism dressed up as science) at the Edge site.
The article was originally published as an NY Times op-ed but it’s a bit easier to read on the Edge.

Edit: There’s also an excellent article by Richard Dawkins (with Jerry Coyne) over at the Grauniad.

In other Dennett news, I just finished reading Sweet Dreams, Dennett’s latest exposition on the state of consciousness studies. It’s a little annoying because it’s a collection of lectures from different venues, so there’s a fair bit of overlap and also little attempt made to give much background to the issues. For someone like me, who’s read most of Dennett’s works and agrees with most of what he says, it’s full of great wonders (such as the section on Frank Jackson’s terribly tempting thought experiment about Mary the colour scientist)… but it’s hard to recommend to people who haven’t read Dennett previously.
I guess it’s just up to people like me to try and explicate the scientific materialist position. Maybe I’ll write my own thoughts about Jackson’s Mary and why it proves nothing in a blog post sometime soon…

One Response to “Dennett on Intelligent Design”

1. cyphunk says:
   September 5th, 2005 at 3:50 am

   QUOTE:
   “The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.”

   First, before I respond I’ll say that my beliefe is that the theory of evolution is the best working theory we have from this point going all the way back until “it” all began, at that point the theory does not cover beyond. That is, what the theory does not cover is how the first instance of whatever started everything came into existence. What he points out in his comment above is that if people thought that explaining that missing peice were viable than scientists would be working in their labs on it. And the reason scientists are not doing this I believe is because they have no need. Our current theory deals with everything we require of it. Why tackle explaining how something can come from “nothing” when it has no real application in any form of science other than evolution and explaining the very beginning. Perhaps the tools developed to examine it would be of use in other fields that deal with the same form of infinitism (quantim physics has some realms), but really, what is the use otherwise?

   While this is a reason why it isn’t being done, it is not proof that it is not nescisary. I can agree with everyone that evolution is likely fact, but I cannot ignore the truth that we cannot explain the very beginning. Any religious person that were to come to me and say “I think god created that first something” I couldnt mock him or prove him wrong. I do believe in a meta-physical realm to our world, how everything is connected. I happen to believe it is an element of nature we as yet do not understand (as apposed to claiming it is some intilligent spiritual being). So i cannot tell anyone that they are wrong, i can only say lets open the debate on that specific issue to see if we can find tools to analyze it with. In suprises me that this line of thinking freaks out most scientists. In fact with some they get so defensive that they come accross to me as lost from the point as the same people running around trying to prove some form of intelligent design in the first place, both afraid of the other.