As some of you may know, I received my undergraduate and graduate training at University College Dublin (Ireland). Now it seems that there is at least one gullible and uninformed supporter of ID in that esteemed university. John Feehan is a lecturer who works on agricultural management systems and in the Jesuit journal Studies has the following to say:
Proponents of 'intelligent design’ posit a rather directly interventionist role for God. Michael Behe has presented a compelling case to the effect that Natural Selection, as we understand it - the progressive accumulation of small mutations - simply cannot account for the complexity of such microbiological structures as the cilium, the blood coagulation cascade, the operation of antibodies or the synthesis of AMP. Neither Dawkins nor anyone else has really answered the arguments he presents.
Wrong, Dr Feehan. Horribly, horribly wrong. There is no "compelling case" and the arguments have been answered. The rest of the piece is equally as inane, with talk of "progressive realisation of Life’s inherent potentiality" and New Age mumbo-jumbo:
Just the as Uncertainty Principle (of Heisenberg) means that the more accurately we define the position of the electron, the less accurately can we know its momentum - so it is with our affirmation of the ultimate Ground Of Reality when we have to use words such as 'God’...Faith is the capacity to see the holism hiding at the very deepest level, to know that the most truly rational response to creation is Yes.
Feehan may want to remember the words of John Henry Cardinal Newman, founder of the university that would become UCD - "I believe in design because I believe in God; not in God because I see design" (Letter to Brownlow, April 13th 1870).
[Hat tip to Martin Corcoran for passing this on to me.]
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Feehan's article is in an issue of the magazine that focuses on Science and Religion. It is interesting that they have just two scientists writing pieces for this issue (the rest of the writers seem to be theologians or philosophers) who both talk about one subject, Intelligent Design. The other writer, William Reville, a biochemistry lecturer from University College Cork, takes a much more mainstream approach to ID, "Intelligent Design, then, would seem to hypothesise a designer - when the scientific facts of developing complexity do not require one.".
re: Behe:
I thought Judge Jones did a fine job:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District_….
"Professor Behe's only response to these seeming unsurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies." (p.81)
I also loved Behe's admissions of lack of peer-reviewed research to support his position (p.88).
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Heisenberg: eek! I'm not sure if it's New Age or another infection of postmodernist physics envy, i.e., as shown in the Sokal Affair. It sure reads a bit like content from "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."