Let’s try this again.
In a recent post here at TSZ Elizabeth Liddle made the following statement:
What undermines the “case for design” chiefly, is that there isn’t a case for a designer.
Odd, I thought. Surely she knows better. All that time spent over at UD and never a case for a designer? Is this claim believable? I thought not.
This was later followed by yet another comment from Elizabeth:
I haven’t really taken to the “atheist” label, much although I don’t reject it – but it [the atheist label] implies that my non-belief in god or gods is something categorically different from my non-belief in unicorns or toothfairies, or in the proverbial orbiting teapot.
But it is categorically different. No one believes orbiting teapots design anything and an orbiting teapot would be an instance of design not an instance of a designer.
Given the trajectory of the original at thread I think it’s reasonable to believe that Elizabeth’s claim that there is no case for a designer should be understood as a claim that there is no case for the existence of God. I won’t even call this a transition, because I can’t detect a transition from “designer” to “god” that consists of any distinction.
Elizabeth Liddle:
Can you give me some arguments for the existence for a god of some sort?
Elizabeth Liddle:
…compared to the time when I acted as though it were true that an omipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God existed, I am no longer faced with the problem as to why bad things happen, nor how a person could possibly think, feel or act or experience after their brain had ceased to function. So I now have a more parsimonious model, which means that not only do I not have to fill my head with unnecessary non-useful beliefs, I no longer have to solve the problems that those earlier assumptions presented.
It’s not that there’s no case for a designer [God], but that now Elizabeth doesn’t have to think about what the existence of a designer [God] entails. It’s not that she did not have a model based upon her beliefs, but that now her model is “more parsimonious.”
And now for the kicker…
Elizabeth Liddle:
I know there are such arguments. I find none of them persuasive.
Directly contradicting her earlier statement.
Why would a case for the existence of God not qualify as a case for a designer?
What is the difference between these two claims: 1) there is no case for a designer, and 2) there is no case for the existence of God?
When Elizabeth asserted there was no case for a designer, did she simply mean to assert that she found no case for the existence of a designer that compelled belief?
A designer or a Designer? Big difference for communicative purposes.
Human beings design, make, build, create, compose, craft, turn out, produce, construct, fabricate, assemble, manufacture, etc. Is that in doubt? Do any ‘skeptics’ here disagree? No. Human beings can be properly called ‘designers’, at least to some extent.
Why then, oh why won’t Mung buckle-up and publically admit that the IDist fantasy double-talk of swinging liberally, haphazardly, secret pact-like between ‘designer’ and ‘Designer’ is an intentional DI communications policy that is ultimately destined to failure? stcordova, one of the active builders of IDism’s IDEA network, just did this capitalised/uncapitalised flip-flopping in a recent thread here at TSZ and simply would not answer when called out on it.
Do you really think people are blind not to notice the double-talk, Mung?! If not, then why not admit the DI’s devious PR strategy?
The DI’s double-talk policy is an insult to all theists who reject IDT. (But Mung seems only to care about arguing with atheists and agnostics, so who cares what insult he perpetuates to theists?) And following the lead of many other theists who have made the important and consequence-filled distinction between uppercase Intelligent Design vs. lowercase intelligent design, I heartily reject the Discovery Institute’s uppercase (‘strictly scientific’) Intelligent Design ideology.
The proper place for this discussion is within the field of science, philosophy AND theology/worldview. Even Elizabeth Liddle, the quasi-Buddhist, ex-catholic, wanna-be Quaker, loosely ‘faithful’, mix and match interdisciplinarian would likely agree to that. It doesn’t even matter if any atheists here don’t agree about this fruitfully collaborative field because atheism falls into the ‘worldview’ category. So it really only means that some atheists by character and history desire to avoid philosophy that brings people back to their Creator.
Everyone here can agree that there undoubtedly and unskeptically *is* a case for designers that not only compels belief, but requires it; that is who ‘we’ are, i.e. human beings. Nobody has a problem with identifying the ‘designer’ of a ‘design’ if the designer is known. But that is not IDism’s precious or patented domain because it insists by fiat that one simply cannot identify the Designer.
Atheists’ rights, however, should be protected too. They should be allowed to disbelieve in a ‘Designer’ / ‘Creator’ if they so choose, e.g. to make the disenchanted (and admittedly sometimes convoluted) arguments that Elizabeth Liddle does here at TSZ. The DI doesn’t seem willing to address the ‘rights’ of such people to disbelief, even still a significant minority in the USA, with its blatantly anti-atheist IDism.
IDism has become simply a bigoted, bullshit ideology, hiding behind ‘neutral science’, that is willfully funded by narrow-minded, almost entirely right-wing USAmerican protestant fundies, whose ‘proponentsists’ actually want to stand science on its head, thus quacking ‘Revolution!’ (Dembski is a dream-deity!) in a country where ‘revolutions have become rare’. Even Occupy Wall Street failed to have a lasting value. Is the USA an ‘intelligently designed’ nation-state? Not in so far as it actively breeds under-educated, anti-science creationists and neo-creationists like IDists by the hundreds of thousands.
Yet, folks, that sociological category is in fact Mung’s preferred advocacy group, his ‘homies’, his supporters, his backbone, which is rather an apologetics pity. If Mung would ever change his tune and would like to join a higher cause with credible scholars and scientists, showing respect instead of disrespect to his fellow theists, then he should ditch IDism at the earliest opportunity. For the health of the country, if not just for his own skin.
Why does Mung’s IDist ‘Creator’ now look so little?
Indeed. I think we can find a few examples of disingenuousness in the writings, say, of Casey Luskin, were we to look.
And the justification for claiming “Design” while claiming the who, how, when of the “Designer” is not germane is the daddy of all disingenuous positions
Mung,
It’s a case of using whatever semantics and phrasings deny the point at the time, even if they contradict other things they have said before. I don’t think anti-IDists know they’re doing it most of the time. The cognitive bias on display is remarkable, but then you know all you need to know about the opposition right off the bat on several fronts. The semiotic system on display in DNA translation is a smoking gun, even if one can simply deny the apparent design throughout observable biology.
You cannot argue against those who refuse to admit what their own eyes tell them to protect their particular worldview myths.
No, it isn’t.
That must be why ID is making such good progress in science, schools and with the general public.
There is no opposition. You’ve already lost. Opposition would be like what’s happening in astronomy with dark matter. An unknown data point has several competing explanations in play.
Nobody denys apparent design. Don’t you get even that yet after all these years? Things looks like they were designed because they *were* designed. Just not by your designer is all.
Yes, because not caring about gods or invisible beings that can do *unknown stuff in an unknown way* is protecting a myth.
The problem is simply that Mung (and now apparently William) is unable to see the difference between:
You cannot infer A from B
and
There is no case for A.
And comparable problems recur, where people accuse me of saying “contradictory” things (and you have suffered the same thing yourself William) and the problem is simply that the reader has missed the key distinction. Which could be the fault of the writer, but could also be the fault of the reader.
But I have already clarified: I do not think the case that we can infer a designer from biological organisms holds up. Nor do I think the case that we can infer a designer from “fine-tuning” holds up.
That does not mean that I do not think there is a case for god, although I personally do not find them persuasive.
What William I think does not understand is that a real scientist does not want to protect their “worldview myth”, quite the opposite in fact. He has an odd view of what science is I think, probably because of his “don’t need to evidence to believe something” worldview – perhaps the opposite of what he is presuming to critique.
Who has ever won a Nobel for protecting the status quo?
And I’d have to say that what, to William, looks like “convincing evidence” apparently does not look so convincing with a bit of biological learning in you. Otherwise all the top biologists would be theists because of what they’ve seen in their daily life! But, of course, they are not.
William J. Murray,
They got nothin’ … can’t even see their own ideological blinkers … go to sleeeeep …
Ain’t that the truth!
Nice to see WJM has absorbed UB’s ‘semiotic’ nomenclature though. Published nowhere, of course, because either
1) there’s a conspiracy of suppression.
2) it’s not really significant.
Upright will soon launch his website, where you’ll be able to subscribe to, er, um, buy my book?
Question for you William, have you heard of chemistry?
You still seem unaware that there “being arguments for God” is not like “making a case for design.” Ignoring the pretense that ID isn’t about God, of course.
UD is a great example of how the case for design isn’t made by a whole lot of incredulousness and evidence-free attacks on the integrity of scientists.
Glen Davidson
As an interpretation of Murray, that seems quite badly false. I think that Murray is fully aware that a good scientist is under a special sort of obligation to test his or her hypotheses. It’s simply that he does not think that the vast majority of biologists qualify as good scientists. That’s pretty much the ID credo: that biology has become corrupted by materialism.
Usually a Nobel is given to someone long after their discovery has become the new status quo.
Nothing is helped by aiding and abetting the conflation of design and theism. Whether there is good evidence for design of biological phenomena (BID, or biological intelligent design) is one question; whether there is either good evidence or a good a priori argument for God is a separate question. One can, with full consistency, reject ID and accept theism, or the other way around.
There’s a huge epistemological difference between the ID/evolution debate and the theism/atheism debate. The problem with BID is that it is untested and untestable, so it’s a failure as a scientific explanation. Evolutionary theory has survived some tests, and failed some tests, and in some highly controversial areas it has not been tested. But since both atheism and theism are not even a scientific theories to begin with, they must be evaluated by quite different standards.
What’s the evidence for that? How about dealing with facts, rather than broad, unsupported attacks?
Gee, I wonder why they don’t know it? Doesn’t William ever make a good case for it, rather than merely asserting baseless claims?
.
Oh, I see… They’re utterly biased. You’re not. You just know it.
Should I wear sackcloth and ashes, now that you’ve laid bare all truth, sans any real evidence for it?
What apparent design? Why isn’t the coding of life much like a language? Why, for Chrissake, isn’t any human (non-artificial) language “digital,” like DNA is? How would life evolve to handle information relatively simply without using a code like DNA? Why is RNA not only an information carrier, but also in some cases a catalyst? Does human language act like a catalyst (not asking for metaphor)?
Yes, that’s why you never tell us what design purpose is solved by the heavy dominance of vertical transmission in larger life, and why you never quite get around to explaining the design of the “semiotic system.” Funny how ID fails to explain anything, especially the plain evidence of unintelligent evolution permeating life.
It’s impossible to avoid the conflation of design and theism, since that’s what the “ID movement” is all about. Or, is it wrong to avoid the conflation of design and theism in the case of Paley?
One can reject ID and accept theism, but the opposite is well-nigh impossible (design might be possible to accept, not ID). The whining at UD is directed at “materialism” and “atheism,” while God is held to have made the entire universe. There are some non-ID notions of beings who may have made the universe sans God, but clearly IDists aren’t telling us that this is some experiment or simulation by “other-dimensional beings” or some such thing.
Indeed, how does a “bad design” argument go? Someone treats ID like it’s a real design idea, and says, well, why would a fantastically-intelligent designer (to design the complexities of life would require a “god-like” intelligence) make bipedal humans largely like quadrupedal apes, or some such thing? And the response, you’re doing theology, trying to say what a Designer should or shouldn’t do. No, it was exactly the opposite, it was non-theological assessment of “design,” but IDists make it into theology because, shocker, it’s really about God. And God is inscrutable, except that we know that God wouldn’t have made junk DNA (never quite got the reasoning…).
ID is always about God. Design isn’t necessarily about God, but it’s impossible to discuss design and life with an IDist (99% +, at least) without it being about God.
Glen Davidson
And if OMagain had written, “What William I think does not understand is that a good scientist does not want to protect their “worldview myth”, then you might have a point.
But OMagain actually wrote” What William I think does not understand is that a real scientist does not want to protect their “worldview myth “.
[real != imaginary]
Which is an entirely accurate portrayal of William’s deluded view of what researchers actually do.
Examples available upon request…
But why does he think that? He thinks that because they don’t say what he thinks they should say!
But only because they are so biased. Which he knows full well without troubling with finding good evidence for it.
Glen Davidson
Can a “more” tag be inserted after the first paragraph. Mung’s post fills a huge space on TheSkepticalZone front page with practically the whole post displayed. It crowds out the contribution of other authors.
The basics of a protein manufactory are provided by a simple carrier-tRNA charging system. By activating amino acids and attaching them to tRNA (via an amino-acyl ATP intermediate), the peptidyl transferase reaction proceeds in a thermodynamically favourable direction. This is because the tRNA-acid complex provides for more stable orientation, as well as possessing bond energy that can be donated to the peptide bond. Given these, the activation energy is lowered. There’s nothing ‘semiotic’ about this, In fact, there is not even a tRNA anticodon, nor mRNA. There is no specification; there is simply chemistry.
If you dock the tRNA against mRNA, however, you gain still more energy. The binding energy of the anticodon and the mRNA codon drive the reaction more strongly in the condensation direction. Is this semiotic now? Not really. The mRNA codon does not ‘mean’ the amino acid on the other end of the tRNA. It wasn’t even involved initially. It’s a physical stabilisation mechanism, which optimises peptide bond formation.
Of course, if one has multiple tRNAs, with a different acid and anticodon on each, one has something with apparent coding. But at what point did the system become semiotic? With the first additional tRNA? Why? The system works by exactly the same mechanism as one. A former STOP codon, terminating extension, may become a site for attachment if a tRNA arises that fits it. But that codon does not suddenly come to ‘mean’ the acid on the other end. The existence of the novel tRNA anticodon simply causes binding where previously its absence caused termination.
Maybe. But I’ve certainly not seen where he demanded it of IDists.
Glen Davidson
Mung wrote:
OK, let me spell this out as clearly as I can. Your first quote of me was taken from this post (and thanks for now providing links):
As can be seen quite clearly from the context, the quoted sentence refers to the case for inferring a designer from biology
Here is my key point (and I’ve made it several times):
Nothing in biology provides evidence for a designer having been there, or done something – unlike, for instance, the situation in archaeology. It’s that lack of any evidence that an external designer comes into cells, tinkers with the nucleotides, moves molecules around by some unknown force, leaves bootmarks, or tools lying around, or whatever.
That undermines the case for design as inferred from biology – lack of evidence that a designer actually did something.
That is quite different from saying there is no “case for God”. There are lots, from the “how come there is something rather than nothing?” argument, to the “cosmological argument” (which is slightly different), to the “well where did the ghost in the machine that we all experience come from?” arguments.
Those may or may not have some force, but they are not empirical questions.
Finding evidence of the designer who might have made a crop circle or sent a SETI signal is.
And so far we nobody has provided any evidence that of a designer’s fabrication paraphernalia, or whatever, in biology
So can we have less of the oh they just contradict themselves to cover their tracks stuff.
My view is simply that there is no empirical case for a designer of biological organisms. There may be a metaphysical case for a creator God.
EL said:
There is, of course, an empirical case for a designer. Whether or not one finds it convincing is not the issue. If “what seems to be” – as SETI puts it – a phenomena only known to be accountable via artificial generation is found, that would be at least a prima facie case for designer inasmuch as a designer is implied by the finding of a design.
The cognitive bias double standard is evident when anti-ID advocates will allow SETI to get away with a far more vague explanation than they would any ID advocate. Other than in the cell, semiosis is only known to be produced by humans in language and mathematics, and, to borrow SETI’s terminology, it seems nature is not up to the task of setting up an irreducible semiotic system. If a “narrow bandwidth signal” is operationalized intelligence enough for a case, semiosis is far, far harder to explain without reference to intelligence. It’s not just a signal, but a deciperable code that translates into how to build functional nonotechnology.
KN said:
I never said that. All people suffer from cognitive biases. Whether or not a scientist is “good” may be utterly unaffected by their biases. Data is data – when conducting an experiment, scientists unearth data. For most practical use, the materialist account has little or no impact until it comes to how their worldview affects their expectations. There are many cases in the history of science where worldview was more important than the empirical facts (cases I illustrated in the thread where I advanced the idea of changing “methodological materialism” to “methodological pragmatism”).
As it stands now, though, many scientists (as Lewontin’s maxim illustrates) insist upon a certain worldview interpretation of the data. That kind of ideological baggage really cannot help but, at some point, cause problems.
I think that most IDists consider most scientists in any field to be good scientist, but many of them – especially the anti-ID ones – are bad philosophers and just don’t have the philosophical tools necessary to recognize how their philosophy, which many of them don’t even recognize as such, can easily bias their work.
The vast majority of scientists are simply trying to earn a living, which often depends on getting funding, which may depend on protecting the status quo of those who are providing the funding and their prior work, findings, product viability or government office. When livings and reputations are at stake for those that sit on editorial boards and funding committees, idealistic views of the institution of science are sadly naive.
EL said:
Until you can tell us where else in nature we can find a semiotic system, or tell us in principle how nature can generate a semiotic system, it’s at least as good a prima facie case as SETI’s “narrow band signal” theory.
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf
The Lancet, April 2015:
Well, maybe I’ll have to revise my view that most scientists are good scientists but bad philosophers; looks like quite a few are bad scientists and bad philosophers. Looks like more than just cognitive bias going on; looks more like a collective willful neglect of proper procedure and good-faith work.
And what do you think is the element that is skewing scientific research compared to times past? Let me suggest it is economics. Time was when pure research was an end in itself, a voyage of discovery. These days, research, especially medical research, is expected to generate revenue.
Nonsense!
All speculation as to what SETI might find is just that until there is an anomalous signal to look at. SETI is the opposite of ID. They are looking for evidence first and don’t need to worry about theories until they have it. ID is all puffery and no evidence.
PS
Using “semiotic” twice in one comment. I’m impressed! 🙂
Alan Fox said:
Actually, it is ID that has the evidence, not SETI. SETI is still looking for their evidence; ID has found theirs.
William J. Murray,
Did that here.
Happy to answer any questions.
Then why is it a secret?
I don’t see how what you wrote meets either challenge. “Where else in nature…” means other than in biology, and describing what occurs in the semiotic system in question doesn’t answer how, in principle, nature can (let me add “plausibly” – appeals to brute chance not accepted) generate a semiotic system.
Where have you been for the past 20 or so years? What do you think so many of the threads here have been debating? There’seven several recent threads here debating the evidence for ID.
Not the evidence for “Intelligent Design” because there isn’t any.
Nonsense. Is this were true, you should be able to link to the specific claim that some data is positive evidence for “Intelligent Design”. There’s no such thing as there’s no hypothesis that makes any testable prediction.
You know, it’s like God, it just stays invisible.
Until you just decide that because DNA is a code it must have been designed. You don’t need evidence when you just know that it had to be designed, and you ignore the massive evidence for unintelligent forces driving evolution.
It’s more or less the manual for pushing ID. Ignore what you don’t like, and keep saying that what life needs to exist is necessarily evidence that it was designed.
Glen Davidson
William J. Murray,
Courtier’s response for the win!
Let’s put it this way: Science finds DNA’s structure and coding. That’s what you call a fact of nature.
Actual science then asks, how did it arise? And it finds evidence of the non-poof evolution of nucleic acid polymers and for the coding found on them.
ID says, it’s a code, humans make codes, therefore an intelligence unlike any we’ve ever seen must have designed it.
Then the IDists accuse science of bias.
Glen Davidson
William J. Murray,
I didn’t attempt the first challenge, but the second – the one I tailed off into ellipsis.
Adding the word ‘plausibly’ sounds awfully like ‘to my satisfaction’. That is impossible. I described precisely how nature could produce ‘a’ semiotic system from a non-semiotic one (in this case the very system you were talking about). Nowhere did I appeal to ‘brute chance’, whatever that is. Of course there would need to be selective advantage to the steps, and I can provide plausible advantage to flesh it out (not definitively – we’re still talking ‘in principle’, right?).
Care to make a more incisive critique? “No, that’s not what I had in mind” is not good enough. The sketch I made is precisely why people with some knowledge of biochemistry do not regard the apparent chicken-and-eggness of the genetic code to be an unanswerable challenge. The people with whom you find common cause – the chemists, the engineers, the programmers – are happy to stop there, and I don’t doubt you are too. But there is nothing fundamentally implausible about my sketch from a biochemical point of view. It’s no good asking a computer programmer, or William Lane Craig, if I’m talking bollocks. Ask a biochemist.
What’s implausible? Pick a step and analyse it.
When it translates the representation of a thing encoded in one substrate (DNA) through a set of protocols into a functional effect in a different substrate (protein).
Not so simple in terms of evolving the chemical process in the first place without chemicals designed, I mean structured, to make it possible. There is no aminoacyl tRNA synethetase protein with out the animoacyl tRNA synthetase gene, and there is no aminoacy tRNA synthetase gene without the aminoacyl tRNA synthetase protein to help make the proteins that duplicate that aminoacyl tRNA synthetase gene. Chicken and egg paradox.
No need to invoke the question of semiotics or information theory (I keep telling ID proponents to drop this argument, oh well).
The chicken-egg-paradox interdependencies, irrespective of chemistries, makes certain systems improbable as a matter of principle. Evidence of that my characterization is correct is that we don’t see protein translation or any comparable kind of translation pop up in sterile testubes with biotic pre-cursor chemicals. Observed results agree with predictions.
In sum, “simple” is subject to interpretation.
William J. Murray,
So you accept that I have in fact sketched a plausible pathway from non-semiosis (no involvement of RNA-RNA binding in peptide bond formation) to semiosis (the involvement of RNA-RNA binding)?
stcordova,
Yes, always with the ‘yebbut where did that come from? 😀 Given an assumption of non-protein coding replicators, it is possible to evolve protein coding, by a mechanism such as that outlined. Where they came from is not ‘evolution of the genetic code’, it is ‘evolution of something else’.
Been through this. I hope I don’t have to keep typing it out. First aaRS functionality (tRNA charging) provided by RNA ribozymes. Subsequent takeover by protein enzymes, once protein manufacturing became sufficiently flexible and established.
Been through this too. Only yesterday I believe. I don’t subscribe to proteins-first. You need to wheel out a different set of objections.
One of the characteristics of a code (as opposed to a physical process) is that it can be transferred to a different medium and interpreted without alteration.
For example, Java code and Javascript run on a myriad of CPUs and operating systems.
Chemistry can’t be moved to a virtual environment. There is no virtual interpreter. There is no way to read a genome and tell what it is doing. Not even for short snippets. there is no way to tell what a copy error will do.
To quote my original post to you, William what undermines the case for ID is lack of evidence for that designer.
It wouldn’t undermine the case for an alien designer if we were to receive a putative SETI signal, because we would not, at that stage, know anything at all about the environment from which that signal originated.
But we DO know where life originated, and we’ve looked, and there is no evidence for a designer around. No alien footprints; no lab; no transmitters; no tools; nothing except regular molecular forces.
No, what is evident, frankly, is the ignorance of ID proponents about firstly, the nature of scientific methodology, and, secondly, the nature of scientific claims.
“There was not a designer” is not a claim made by scientists.
“There was a designer” is the claim made by ID proponents.
Therefore, the onus is on ID proponents to provide the evidence.
I’m calling your bluff, William, Please cite where any scientist from SETI has suggested that “nature is not up to the task of setting up an irreducible semiotic system”. Or where anyone from SETI has said that they are looking for one.
No, it isn’t. Nor is a “narrow bandwidth signal” actually.
You need to find out more about SETI.
SETI is fussier.
It isn’t a semiotic system.
Not that that matters. Biology is perfectly capable of generating semiotic systems, and has done, but first it has to evolve organisms capable of thinking symbolically.
Much more to the point is that, as I have pointed out many times, biology is most certainly special. The question is: what do the systems that created biology and the systems by which humans create far cruder artefacts have in common?
I’d say: iterative processes with feedback loops. Foresight is a neat trick if you can pull it off, but it’s not essential, as long as you’ve got plenty of time and resources. It’s just that you will be largely stuck with nested hierarchies, whereas with foresight you can jumb lineages. The downside is that you explore a much more limited area of search space.
You might not have liked my characterisation of you in the first response to this OP, Elizabeth, but nevertheless, the logic of distinguishing between ‘designer’ and ‘Designer’ is quite clear and easy. Will you not improve the clarity of your communication here by distinguishing them instead of mirroring the flip-flop tendencies of IDists?
No, there was a Designer is what they mean. The existence of a lowercase ‘designer’ is a claim made by thousands of design theorists & designers around the world. I was at a conference in Copenhagen in 2012 where over 2,000 scholars were discussing ‘design & displacement’. I brought up IDism in one of my talks & laughed along with the audience at the narrow meaning IDists use, combined with their double-talk (which nobody has yet refuted or even acknowledged here).
If you really want to face Mung’s OP, that’s the ticket that you need to punch.
Are you willing to confirm that indeed, many scholars focus on design and designing processes, rather than ‘Design’ and a ‘Designer’?
IDists understand ‘scientific methodologies’ and ‘scientific claims’ quite well enough. The IDM’s leaders (rather than the rank & file IDists like those at UD) hold degrees from some pretty good universities and were trained to know their opponents. They simply think those methodologies & claims are too limited, too narrow. They want ‘Intelligence’ allowed in natural-physical (not only lowercase ‘intelligence’ in human-social) sciences.
Your use of ‘the nature of’ betrays you in this case. It comes across as naturalistic and even hints of anti-theism. This may suit Elizabeth’s current worldview just loosely, until she opens her quasi-Buddhist, Quaker wanna-be, ‘respect’ for religion diatribes.
That’s a fair question, to which should be added: what is not in common?
I’ve already addressed this simply and most precisely in distinguishing two categories: ‘design’ and ‘Design.’ It is not a surprise that neither of the dancing partners here pays it any attention. You’d rather trouble with simply muddled and heterodox ‘theist’ WJM than open up science, philosophy, theology/worldview discourse with a non-IDist who accepts the classical ‘design argument’ as still essentially valid.
Mung was previously playing & hinting that *everything* is an ‘artefact’ in his IDist pomo fantasy, even (and especially) nature.
But one should be careful about attributing too much power to ‘systems’ them-‘selves’ (or as autonomous ‘selves’). Artefacts are intentionally manufactured by human persons/agents within social systems. This distinguishes them from IDism’s quasi-teleological natural science that seeks to promote the same ‘objectivist’ attitude to ‘Design’ that has led to scientism.