"Making the Case for I.D."

At an RTB meeting over the weekend, Dr Fuz Rana lectured on making a case for Intelligent Design, based on his new book "Creating Life in the Lab" (geared towards, as he said, "apologetics junkies and nerds" ;-) ).

The Three Pillar approach he presented included:

• Probabilities - like the example that there has not been enough time in history to be able to evolve the 1.4 x 10^70 existing genetic codes.  While probabilities provide essentially a negative argument, in that it likely is, because probability shows it can't have happened by chance; it is used in direct response to the naturalistic evolution argument that things that appear to be designed are evolved, and can be a good argument.
• Analogies - with similarities to other codes that have an intelligent agent, by analogy, so must genetic code.  While analalogies like the Watchmaker example were challenged by people like Hume for comparing dissimilar systems, when there are numerous identical properties, examples, and multiple similarities; analogies can be an effective positive argument and is the most common way to reason, often used in science and law.  Interestingly, Simon Conway Morris has said that genetic code in nature displays eerie perfection and startling evidence of optimization.
• Empirical - this is becoming more common, with the rise of synthetic biology (e.g. post-translation modifications to proteins to re-engineer for other useful purposes) and is the argument introduced in his book.  Essentially, since it takes a lot of intelligent effort to create a crude mimic of life in a lab (i.e. knowledge, clever strategy, expert execution, etc); Life really must be have an Intelligent Designer.

 There were, of course, details of the lecture that flew over my head; but, at least I was able to learn a term that if I could repeat, would be quite impressive - "chloramphenical  acetyltransferase"   ;-)