Of Monkeys and Men.

Ok. I've been thinking more about the Intelligent Design (ID) thing, and I've decided to split it into four seperate posts, to avoid writing one absurdly long post. There are four main things that I've been thinking about and they are:
1) What's the underlying philosophical basis for ID?
2) What's the scientific case for ID?
3) My own thoughts/opinions on ID (haha, I'll need to have some by then.)
4) How does ID fit into the area of apologetics, and evangelism generally?

Now I've tied myself down to some kind of writing programme, I guess I should try and approach the first point. It's at this point that I'd like to make a disclaimer that I can't promise that what follows will be either accurate or interesting, but I'll do my best.

And so, what is the underlying philsophical basis for ID?
One of the most important concepts that is being disputed is methodological naturalism. What, I head you scream, is methodological naturalism? Well it basically says that when trying to explain physical phenomena you should look for a natural explanation. For example if an apple falls on my head I should try to discover some kind of natural explanation as to why it happened.

This is where the controversy starts. Methodological naturalism actually says you can only look for natural causes to phenomena. Is this a reasonable conclusion? The argument put forward by the proponents of ID is that it is reasonable and normal in our everyday experience to explain phenomena as being the result of intelligent action. This is the basis for fields like forensics where the aim is to determine whether an event had a natural cause or whether there an intelligent agency behind the events. Did they fall or were they pushed?

Other examples given are films like Contact where they receive an extraterrestial broadcast made up of the sequence of prime numbers. The conclusion made is that this must be the result of intelligent action.

Can we extend this logic to the natural sciences? Can we reasonably conclude intelligent action from data that we observe in the world around us? Logically there's no reason as to why we shouldn't.

My conclusion is that there is no underlying philosophical reason as to why we shouldn't be able to make reference to an intelligent agency when we are doing scientific experiments. How does that work in practice? Well, that's another consideration for another day.

In other news it's been fantastic today to have the team returning to Blighty bringing with the them the Salerno team. Great to see y'all.