kairosfocus

Yesterday, in his “Critics agree with Dembski” post, Eric Holloway raised the issue of a fallacy that is so significant in the design theory context that it deserves its own name: The Fallacy of Creeping Omniscience.

He provided a description that with some minor adjustments, can serve as a working definition:

It is commonly noted that when smart or educated or famous, or wealthy or powerful people or the like achieve expertise or noted success in a certain area, they suddenly think they are experts in many others, even when lacking the necessary knowledge. When listening to smart or educated or famous, or wealthy or powerful people, it is always wise to take this into consideration, and listen most closely to their opinions about what they’re carefully studied. (But, even on those topics where they have genuine expertise, we should note that no expert is better than his or her facts, assumptions and reasoning.)

It is always helpful to give a key example or two, and the now notorious NYRB 1997 clip from Professor Richard Lewontin makes a very good first example: Read More ›

Beaver dams are amazing objects in our natural environment, being shaped from piles of felled trees and stones arranged to block streams and create ponds that protect these busy rodents [easily up to 50 – 60 lbs, over 100 lbs on record] from predators, allow them to build their lodges,  and provide watery highways for them to move about as they do their business. The dams range up to nearly 3,000 feet [a bit under 1 km] in length, and up to 7 ft [2+ m] at base and 14 ft [nearly 5 m] in height. Consequently, the beavers are keystone creatures, affecting the water table, providing handy bridges used by many animals, reducing the tendency of streams to flood, providing refuges for trout and young salmon, and eventually creating characteristic meadows as the ponds silt up.

In a recent comment in a thread discussing his/her claim that ID in inferring design of first life must either face an infinite regress or else tries to explain first life by a self-contradiction [first life from prior life and/or from non-living intelligence], design theory objector FG (in ducking out of further discussion) says:

Barry and I have discovered that we are in agreement that his particular ID argument should only be used on things we can directly observe. It should not be used to answer questions about first life, since we can’t directly observe and investigate this first life.

Limiting the use of his argument in this way takes away my specific objection that triggered this thread.

Of course, the above seems to be a probably inadvertent distortion of what BA has been saying in several threads over the past week.

But what is highly significant lies in its immediate and onward implications: namely, that design theory if it is so constrained cannot properly address either origin of life or of body plans, for neither of these are amenable to direct observation. Oddly enough, FG seems unaware that the whole project of origins science is an exploration of the remote, unobserved past — indeed the unobservable past — on traces and patterns we do observe in the present. So, if the above criterion were consistently applied, we would have to surrender all claims to scientific knowledge of the deep past of origins.

In short, the objection is patently, even trivially,  selectively hyperskeptical.

Read More ›

If you have been following UD over the past few days you will know Dr Nick Matzke, formerly Public Information Project Director of the US NCSE,  has intervened in Dr Cudworth’s thread on the question of evolutionary biology qualifications of leading objectors to design theory.

As a result of this, in the end, even Dr Cudworth has commented on the tangential issue — evolution (especially claimed universal common descent)  vs creationism and design theory with the Of Pandas and People book that featured in the Dover Trial as a significant point of contention , most recently here in response to Dr Matzke here.

I think the whole issue is a polarising, distractive side-track.

Why is that? Read More ›

The above challenge has been thrown down, in rather intemperate language accompanied by more outing misbehaviour.

It is revelatory on the depth of ignorance cultivated by the imposed dominance of evolutionary materialism via its cat’s paw, so-called methodological naturalism, in science education.

First, as was pointed out in the post on Plato’s warning on the amorality and ruthless factionism of evolutionary materialism day before yesterday,  Plato is one of the first to record the rise of evolutionary materialism as a worldview of origins and the nature of reality. In so doing, he plainly showed that the roots of such a view are philosophical rather than scientific, and in fact“evo mat” is thus shown to have the functionally equivalent status of a religion.

And yes, that means that the de facto establishment of evolutionary materialism in the public square and key institutions is tantamount to an undeclared establishment of the functional equivalent of a religion.

An issue that is already plainly of grave import.

To support discussion at the ongoing design inference thread, I briefly clip my briefing note, on the Trevors-Abel FSC concept, a way to visualise CSI: Read More ›