My Has Intelligent Design Reached The Tipping Point? touched off an extensive and interesting debate. I suspected it would.
After the equivalent of 50 pages of comments, I made a motion to end the debate ... for now. Sometimes you just need to take a break and ponder and wait for fresh ideas.
Then along comes a fresh idea (new to me anyway). Macht points to an interesting and thought provoking article by philosopher-scientist Dr. Robin Collins called: A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF THE INTELLIGENT DESIGN PROGRAM: AN ANALYSIS AND A PROPOSAL It is 13 pages and worth a read if you are truly interested in the future of I.D.
I maintain that I.D. has indeed reached the tipping point. But exactly where is this thing going? What is the best path forward? Dr. Collins has some ideas that make a lot of sense.
One of the challenges with Intelligent Design is its definition.
I recently had a conversation with my friend Daniel. He had some questions about intelligent design. I asked "what do you mean by intelligent design?". He struggled to provide an answer -- which is precisely why I asked.
Is it science? Is it philosophy? Is it a heuristic? Is it a theory? Is it three theories?
Dr. Collins suggests that it should be considered metascience. What is metascience?
Collins writes, "I shall define a metascientific hypothesis as an hypothesis that serves to provide a relatively broad framework from within which science can be practiced in a certain domain. "
This is helpful. One of the popular objections offered by those who oppose teaching ID in the classroom is ... "that is not science!". Dr. Collins, in effect, agrees with them -- sort of.
To understand Dr. Collins' view, you need to understand another term he uses. Scientific tractability. From Collins' essay:
An hypothesis will be defined as being scientifically tractable if and only if through scientific and empirical means we can develop and test models of its "internal dynamics"--that is, models that flesh-out the details of the structures postulated by the hypothesis.
In a nutshell (which is always dangerous, so don't use this as an excuse to not read his essay), Collins proposes treating Intelligent Design as a framework to enable and encourage the development of scientifically tractable hypotheses. It will provide the necessary infrastructure to develop an hypothesis which is both testable and predictive: but one that uses a framework other than metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism, by the way, is no more scientifically tractable than intelligent design is.
Collins approach is helpful. The successful, scientifically tractable theories developed within the metascientific framework of ID will be the stuff that can be taught in tomorrow's science classrooms.
I would add that the metaphysical framework itself can be taught today, in any classroom that touches on the philosophy of science.
Dr. Collins' essay touches on something else which I have noticed. There is a striking similarity between the seismic shift from Darwinian thought to design, and the shift in cosmology from a static universe to a finite universe that has a starting point. Both were huge metaphysical shifts and metascientific shifts. There are metaphysical aspects of the Big Bang theory that will never be scientifically tractable (i.e. what existed before the Big Bang?). But physics has benefitted from the metascientif
The fact that the shift in cosmology toward Big Bang cosmology has resulted in so many successful, scientifically tractable models in physics should give us great hope that the shift in biology will be equally as fruitful.
I hope Dr. Collins' idea reaches the tipping point. It offers us a fruitful path forward.
(Hat Tip: Prosthesis )
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