Del Ratzsch gets ID

From "Nature, Design and Science", on Behe:

Michael Behe in Darwin's Black Box has been widely misunderstood ... as holding a [God of the] gap account for what he calls "irreducible complexity." His conclusion from that is not that nature could not produce irreducible complexity, but that if (perhaps since) nature has produced it then Darwinianism (as gradualist and selectionist) is simply wrong. (Behe does not even necessarily reject common ancestry - that is not really his issue.) I do not believe that Behe wishes to rule out supernatural intervention, but it is not essential to his more basic contention, which is that certain types and degrees of complexity (irreducible complexity) in and of themselves constitute evidence for design regardless of how they were produced.
(Notes on Design in Nature, p.187)

And on Dembski:

... imagine that we have a complete causal explanation back to the Big Bang of the present moon crater jumble, an objective measure of inherent complexity of the jumble array, and that we know the probability of precisely that jumble being produced. Now, without changing any of that, imagine that we discover that the present jumble in actual fact spells out "John 3:16" in Martian script. With no changes in causal history, degree, or type of inherent complexity, the special mind correlativity now visible gives the case a vastly different complexion. On the other hand, suppose that human written language had developed in totally different directions, so that the inscription "John 3:16" carried no meaning whatever. In that case, nature's generating of that pattern in moon craters would have generated no surprise at all (or at least much less). Obviously, the unexpected match between our inscripted language and nature's production is a key element of the situation. This is related to the concept of specification in William Dembski's The Design Inference. It seems to me, however, that Dembski never gets beyond a purely formal indication of specification, which leaves the term without any of the content necessary to support actual design conclusions.
(Notes on Design in Nature, p.187)

Which seems to be the objection that many other people have to Dembski - or one of them, to be more precise. In defence of Dembski at this point, I think it may be worth saying that he has regarded his work hitherto as representing a mathematical foundation for more applied investigation into systems - biological or otherwise - and it is possible to see at least in principle how the idea can be applied. Indeed, I started doing just that for both biological systems and random texts, but my lack of time and my limited grasp of the maths somewhat hampered me. Nonetheless, I would suggest that, given Dembski's rules about probability boundaries, my proposition that a gene must initially code for a protein which is less than 7000 amino acids long is a non-trivial example of a prediction based on his theoretical work.

Del Ratzsch - an alternative to Dawkins

I've been reading "Nature, Design and Science", by Del Ratzsch. It's not an easy read. Ratzsch is a professor of philosophy, so this book is formal and careful, where "The God Delusion" is conversational but correspondingly casual. However, almost every paragraph has weight.

There is a widely held, vague supposition that the discovery that a phenomenon is purely natural removes any prospect of its being designed. That something is a product of unaided nature [Ratzsch terms this "pronautral"] does entail that its history does not involve any intervention into the historical course of the cosmos (i.e., that it is neither artifact nor natrifact [a term he uses for phenomena that are part of nature but which show signs of supernatural intervention]). But sinceboth the pronatural and the natrifactual can be intended results of agent activity deliberately aimed at producing the manifested patterns, the distinction between them is not one of presence or absence of designedness. Discovering a wholly natural process for producing some phenomenon in nature entails only that if it is designed, the relevant agent activity is primordial.

This distinction between design resulting from intervention and design produced by the unaided outworking of initiating structures has an extremely long history. Bacon, for instance:

God ... doth accomplish and fulfil his divine will [by ways] not immediate and direct, but by compass; not violating Nature, which is his own law upon the creation.

And in Whewell one finds explicit recognition of some of the implications - for example, that discovering purely natural processes for producing phenomena does not entail absence of design, but would involve a shift in the location of agent activity:

We have shown, we trust, that the notion of design and end is transferred by the researches of science, not from the domain of our knowledge to that of our ignorance, but merely from the region of facts to that of laws.

It is worth noting that both of the above quotes predate 1859. Contrary to common myth, this move was not simply and ad hoc attempt at salvaging some bit of design, while in forced retreat from Darwin.

In the absence of primary marks, there are relatively few means by which designedness could be identified. One of the possibilities is agent-initiated communication ....
Nature, Design and Science p.55

So much, in such a short extract. A couple of quick thoughts - I still have much reading to go, and I don't know where he is taking all this yet. This relates more to a deistic designer, rather than a theistic one. However, he is making the philosophical point already that whether or not there is empirical evidence for a designer does not necessarily have a bearing on whether such a designer exists, or is necessary. This is an answer from a philosopher to those people who say, "Show me the evidence".

This understanding of the nature of the universe doesn't logically rule out agent intervention in the universe - it just suggests that there may be no direct evidence of agent intervention in observable and measurable phenomena.

The last sentence is a bit of a teaser. Schaeffer covers similar ground in an essay called "Is propositional revelation nonsense?" - and the Bible makes a similar point, of course. Why would such a designer make himself invisible? Perhaps the nature of the universe is such that people will naturally look for a designer - it looks artifactual - something acknowledged by Dawkins (the word he uses is "designoid"). And if we are looking for a designer, but the evidence from the universe is ambiguous (why should there be so much evil and suffering, for example?) then perhaps we need a clearer self-revelation. Okay then, so let's look for one ....