Kantian Naturalist
Posts: 72
Joined: Mar. 2013
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Murray's latest strongly suggests that he's never really observed or studied how human beings create and design. He's only applying the individualist, anti-materialist ideology to which he's always been committed. And so he utterly fails to see the point of Liddle's challenge, which wasn't about metaphysics but about verificationist epistemology: the question isn't, "what kind of thing is intention?" but "how is intention measured?"
The inability to provide a verifiable, operationalized criterion for "intent" is precisely why design theory utterly fails as a scientific theory, and it's of one piece with their "we don't know how the designer was!" or "the identity of the designer is not a scientific question!". This is because the identity of the designer -- its capacities, motives, interests, goals, and limitations -- is itself built into the hypotheses that are brought to empirical confirmation. If one abjures from all claims about the identity of the designer, then one has no scientific theory at all.
It's deliciously ironic that, in order to make creationism watered-down enough for public schools and secular universities, the ID movement has produced a pseudo-theory with no scientific content at all. At lest creationism was a genuine scientific theory, albeit a decisively refuted one.
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