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142 of 154 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Former ID Skeptic?, August 22, 2009
I've gone back and forth on whether or not I should review this book. Why? Because this is a topic where the rhetoric and shallow discourses can drive one insane. I tire of the endless screeds of "Science has disproven God" or "My Bible proves your science wrong." Both arguments show little actual knowledge of the fields they are arguing for and against. To be honest, I typically find myself in the camp of those who see no disconnect between theology and the findings of science (I just lost 33% of readers who are about to click that this review wasn't helpful). I'm an evangelical, informed in scientific theology by readings in Polkinghorne, McGrath, Peters and T.F. Torrance. Thus, intelligent design naturally rubs me the wrong way (there go another third of the readers).
Despite this, I highly respect the philosophical work of Douglas Groothuis, and decided to pick this book up solely on his recommendation. Furthermore, I started to question if there was something to the fact that Coyne, Dawkins, Myers, etc. usually resort to ad hominem (IDiots, pseudoscience, etc.) and handwaving instead of actually dealing with whatever case ID supporters were making (there go the final third...). This lack of critique, yet rather vehement rhetoric made me interested in what Meyer and the rest were actually saying that would cause such angered rhetoric.
After downloading the Kindle version, I can honestly say that I was surprised at the depth of philosophical insight, scientific knowledge and quality of writing. The tellings of some of the greater discoveries of the last century were entertaining and the personal recollections of discussions with some of the world's greatest philosophers and scientists were likewise interesting. If nothing else, the book should be recommended for the fact that it attempts to accurately portray its opponents, something that is rare in our culture and particularly rare in regards to this topic. Sure, Meyer has an agenda just like every other writer and shares his assessments throughout, yet in doing so, he shows respect and understanding of the opposing viewpoints.
Despite a wonderful stroll through the history of genetic research, and the current theories, I believe the book ultimately seeks to as the question, "What is science?" This is by no means a settled question, and even the most ardent opponents of intelligent design differ greatly in their answers. You may think you know the answers Meyer will offer before opening the book, but travel through the 600 or so pages and see if you are right. You may be surprised.
Am I convinced of the entirety of Meyer's thesis? Not necessarily, as I'll have to continue to think through the issues. I'm definitely more open to the idea of intelligent design than I was before reading the book. I particularly found the responses to critics helpful for assessing the quality of my personal issues with the movement. In the end, I was impressed with the quality of research and argument in this book and recommend it for those who are currently supportive or opposed to the intelligent design movement.
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74 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Creationist Tract? A Rehash? An Argument From Ignorance? I Think Not!, August 13, 2009
While the vast majority of reviewers are clearly impressed with Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell (and rightly so!), apparently an intransigent minority will not be swayed by any amount of argument or evidence. Although Meyer's origin of life thesis is compatible with creationism, it is not in itself a creationist argument that relies in any sense upon the revealed theology of Genesis. In fact, Meyer goes to great lengths to point out precisely the opposite: "As I explained repeatedly to reporters and cable-news hosts, the theory of intelligent design is not based on a religious text or document, even if it does have implications that support theistic belief . . . . Instead, intelligent design is an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution" (p. 4). Indeed, as Meyer explains later on that same page, "the theory of intelligent design holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause--that is, by the conscious choice of a rational agent--rather than an undirected process." So those who claim this to be "a creationist tract" are simply spinning a false charicature of Meyer's ideas.
Others claim this to be "a rehash"--it is not. Meyer's book applies several sound methodologies (esp. Dembski's specified complexity and probabilistic resources) against the random chance and necessity formulations of origin of life theories. What Meyer finds is that when held up to close scrutiny, chance and/or necessity fails to account for biological origins on earth. This was an issue that Darwin failed to deal with in any of his work, but he was aware of his glaring omission, once musing to Joseph Hooker in 1871, "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine [sic] compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." Meyer has found "that warm little pond" and discovered that it contained specified information, information encoding life. This is NOT the abiogenic chemical soup that Darwin had hoped for!
Now as to the so-called "argument from ignorance," Meyer deftly handles this charge by stating (after an exhaustive review of origin theories old and new), "the inadequacy of proposed materialistic causes [for the origin of life] forms only part of the basis of the argument for intelligent design. We also KNOW from broad and repeated experience that intelligent agents can and do produce information-rich systems: we have positive experience-based knowledge of a cause that is sufficient to generate new specified information, namely, intelligence. We are not ignorant of how information arises. We know from experience that conscious intelligent agents can create informational sequences and systems. . . . Experience teaches that whenever large amounts of specified complexity or information are present in an artifact or entity whose causal story is known, invariably intelligence--intelligent design--played a role in the origin of that entity. Thus," Meyer concludes, "when we encounter such information in the large biological molecules needed for life, we may infer--based on our KNOWLEDGE of established cause-and-effect relationships--that an intelligent cause operated in the past to produce the specified information necessary to the origin of life" (pp. 376-377).
Now I suspect that what is really sticking in the craw of most of these Meyer-bashers is that Signature in the Cell offends their hidebound reliance upon methodological naturalism as the only thing that "counts" in science. Indeed, for them, methodological naturalism (the notion that the physical world is self-contained and operates strictly by blind random/chance laws explicable only in antiteleological ways) IS science. There are two significant problems with this view of science. First, historically speaking most Western science has NOT proceeded with an assumption of methodological naturalism. As Francis Schaeffer long ago correctly pointed out, most scentists in history (e.g., Newton, Kepler, Boyle, Virchow, Pasteur) "believed in the uniformity of natural causes. What they did not believe in was the uniformity of natural causes IN A CLOSED SYSTEM. That little phrase makes all the difference in the world. It makes the difference between natural science and a science that is rooted in naturalistic philosophy" (Schaeffer, Escape from Reason: A Penetrating Analysis of Trends in Modern Thoughts (Ivp Classics), p. 36). This brings up the second problem with methodological naturalism as the sole arbiter of science, namely, it is not scientific. As William Lane Craig has astutely noted, "What is striking about methodological naturalism is that it is a philosophical, not a scientific viewpoint. It is not an issue to which scientific evidence is relevant; it is about the philosophy of science. As such, it is notoriously difficult to justify" (see his "Naturalism and Intelligent Design," in Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue, p. 67). Thus, the battleground is really not in the realm of science but rather in the area of the philosophy of science; it is about which philosophical perspective has the most logical coherence, explanatory power, and heuristic value. Critics who claim that this book is "not scientific" or that it is "religious" reveal more about their own commitments to philosophical materialism and methodological naturalism than they do about either Meyer's work or science. Remove these a priori commitments and prejudices and the Signature in the Cell becomes a compelling alternative to the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian "science" and its accumulating anomalies.
In the end, Meyer's case is thorough and convincing. His book will be a landmark in origins research and science for years to come. Those who deny its importance by merely waving it off with camp phrases and knee-jerk reliance upon speculative notions of what they think science should be will find Meyer's arguments difficult to answer. Cut through cries of "foul" and look for substantive replies to Meyer's exhaustive analysis and you're pretty much left with the sound of crickets chirping.
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126 of 145 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a goldmine of information, June 29, 2009
This book contains a goldmine of information in 612 pages and almost 100 pages of notes and references. Meyer, who did his PhD in the origin of life area at Cambridge University, effectively deals with many of the critiques of Intelligent Design in a very readable but convincing way. The many diagrams included are very helpful in communicating to laypersons the complex ideas involved in the origins controversy. Meyer covers the many failed attempts to produce life in the laboratory, including the Miller-Urey experiment, and shows that the design of life leads to one conclusion, intelligence. He also covers the question "is ID science" showing that the word science is now used to distort the debate, not by proving ID erroneous, but by excluding it from the discussion. My favorite definition of science is "science is what scientists do" but the historical definition "the search for, and synthesis of, empirical knowledge" is more specific. As to predictability, Meyer also gives several examples where ID had made predictions that turned out to be correct. No doubt some of the material in this book was from Meyer's Cambridge PhD thesis rewritten in first person and in laymen's terms for this book. The opponents of ID will, no doubt, attempt to respond to this trailblazing work and all I can say is I wish them luck because they will need it. The book also gives much history of the ID movement found no where else, and an excellent response to the many false claims about the movement. No one can claim to be informed about ID without reading this excellent book written by an insider.
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