A Question for Barbara Forrest

_{Cornelius Hunter
June 16, 2009

Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design}

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In her recent paper, The Non-epistemology of Intelligent Design: Its Implications for Public Policy, evolutionary philosopher Barbara Forrest states that science must be restricted to natural phenomena. In its investigations, science must restrict itself to a naturalistic methodology, where explanations must be strictly naturalistic, dealing with phenomena that are strictly natural. Aside from rare exceptions this is the consensus position of evolutionists. And in typical fashion, Forrest uses this criteria to exclude origins explanations that allow for the supernatural. Only evolutionary explanations, in one form or another, are allowed.

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Kellog/Khan, If the 'effects' of intelligence can be quantified, then the 'effects' of intelligent design can also be quantified. i.e. information, earth, sun, moon, [breaktime-Gabriel, where's ma coffee?], information, water, bacteria, insects,[breaktime -egg salad on rye, please?], information, plants, animals,[k, looks pretty good, now for that ice cold brew. Ahhhhh]. Life is Good. Kellogg:
For “result,” you can read “effects” — so the effects can be quantified. Ergo, it is not supernatural by the stipulated definition.
Khan:
..because things like heart rate and breathing are controlled by “the mind (aka the brain)” and are clearly measurable. and so is intelligence.
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---David Kellogg: "Also, my in-laws used to love that show “Tripped by an Angel.” I like that.StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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David - you're tripping.pubdef_{June 16, 2009
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“How could a study of the supernatural be replicated?” You reject this question. OK, how could a study of the immaterial be replicated?David Kellogg_{June 16, 2009
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---pubdef: “I find this whole brouhaha about the mindful carpenter astounding, and I can’t really get a handle on where to start on it. But I’ll start with Stephen B’s assertion that the human mind cannot be quantitatively measured.” You can begin by telling me if you agree with your colleagues on the following proposition: The carpenter's act of using his immaterial mind to design a house constitutes a supernatural event. That calculation, by the way, is a necessary result of believing that anything that cannot be measured is, by definition, supernatural, which is the argument they have presented. Since that is the essence of the dispute, how about weighing in on it. -----pubdef: “Don’t we know something about how learning takes place, how to treat some mental illness with pharmacology, why people with frontal lobe deficiencies have poor impulse control? How did we learn those things? Didn’t we gather data about minds?” You seem to be forgetting about the role of the brain and its mysterious relationship with the mind. True, some believe that mind/body dualism is “rubbish,” but others would argue that, while the mind depends on the brain to operate some extent, it can, nevertheless, do things that the brain cannot do [exercise self control, produce the “placebo effect” etc]. ----“”How could a study of the supernatural be replicated?” As has become clear, Darwinists cannot successfully identify the boundary between supernatural and natural. That would not be a crime except for the fact that they presume to use it as the definitive line of demarcation between science and non-science.StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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pubdef, under certain pharmaceutical conditions, the difference between a trip and an angel is minimal. Also, my in-laws used to love that show "Tripped by an Angel."David Kellogg_{June 16, 2009
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#102 -- Right; the only difference between a trip and an angel would be what to do next. Would you look on the floor to see what you tripped over? Or would you ... what? By and large, we're not talking about the world of answers and possibilities; we're talking about what we can do with science. All you other guys -- what's the problem with the answer that "the mind is what the brain does?"pubdef_{June 16, 2009
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I had some things to say about ID and supernaturalism in "Intelligent Design and Evolutionary Computation" (Garry Greenwood, coauthor; excerpts available here), which appears in Design by Evolution. Prior to the "Nature of Nature" conference, people like Dembski and Meyer openly acknowledged that ID was not naturalistic science, and argued that naturalism was an arbitrary commitment to a metaphysical stance. ID holds that there exists something that creates information out of nothing, and uses the term intelligence to name whatever that something is. The post-conference stance of many IDists has been that intelligence is natural, but not material. The approach now seems to be to measure information of some special type on material processes, infer that there is too much of that information to be accounted for strictly by materialistic mechanism, and to declare the source of information -- intelligence -- natural, no matter that it is non-material and unobservable. It is crucial to the approach that information be physical. I have seen no ID measure of "special" information that does not involve logarithms of probabilities. In other words, the probabilities must be physical for the measured information to be physical. To my knowledge, there is no notion of physical probability (chance, propensity) that is not linked to repeatable experiments. The material processes and events to which IDists want to impute design are one-shot occurrences. It seems to me that the very notion of creation of a novel design (information) runs counter to repeatability of a "design experiment." IDists have not given a coherent account of intelligent change of physical probabilities -- the abstract probabilities in the math of Dembski and Marks, for instance, are not linked to nature. The notion that intelligence creates out of nothing something that has not existed before and introduces it into nature must be regarded as supernaturalism.T M English_{June 16, 2009
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StephenB, if the mind is an immaterial causal agent, (a) how would you go about testing that immaterial action, and (b) how would you exclude other immaterial forces? There's no reason to exclude immaterial forces from anything: I could fall down and break my leg because I tripped, or I could be pushed by an angel.David Kellogg_{June 16, 2009
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---David Kellogg: "Well, I think the mind is product of material forces. I may be wrong. But I do think — and you seem to agree — that any science of mind will be a materialist science." The issue is whether or not the scientist can, as a scientist, acknowledge the possibility that the mind is a causal agent or whether he must assume, as the materialist does, that only matter can influence matter.StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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Clive asks, "Do you keep assuming that the mind is material?" Well, I think the mind is product of material forces. I may be wrong. But I do think -- and you seem to agree -- that any science of mind will be a materialist science.David Kellogg_{June 16, 2009
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Clive Hayden says something extraordinary:
As far as I know, science cannot establish the non-materiality of anything, for all it can do is study material.
Witness Clive (a) embrace methodological naturalism and (b) implicitly classify The Spiritual Brain as unscientific.David Kellogg_{June 16, 2009
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I find this whole brouhaha about the mindful carpenter astounding, and I can't really get a handle on where to start on it. But I'll start with Stephen B's assertion that the human mind cannot be quantitatively measured. Don't we know something about how learning takes place, how to treat some mental illness with pharmacology, why people with frontal lobe deficiencies have poor impulse control? How did we learn those things? Didn't we gather data about minds? Shifting gears somewhat -- can anybody say anything about how nonmaterialist science could work? How could a study of the supernatural be replicated?pubdef_{June 16, 2009
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----iconofid: "How would you measure the effects of the minds of unknown creatures who are not part of our life system? If there were minimalists with a distaste for too much complexity interfering in our world, how would I.D. detect their effects?" ID measures, or attempts to measure, design patters that arise from intelligence of any kind. Design patterns vary greatly in their level of complexity. A DNA molecule is a lot more complex than a sand castle. In any case, ID doesn't claim to be able to detect all design. It just says that if it thinks it has detected design, it most likely has.StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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David Kellogg, ------"You keep assuming that this “mind” is not material." Do you keep assuming that the mind is material?Clive Hayden_{June 16, 2009
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----David Kellogg: I’m not getting it. The effects of the mind can be measured. How do you think science should study the mind?" [A] I would begin by explaining to Darwinists that, if, in their judgment, a carpenter building a house qualifies as a supernatural event, then their methodology is violently skewed and their perspective is seriously warped. {B] I would also explain to them that the academy cannot choose a scientist's methodology for him, because every problem requires a different approach, and only the scientist knows what problem he is trying to solve. This is simple, no?StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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David Kellogg, ------"I’m not getting it. The effects of the mind can be measured. How do you think science should study the mind? In other words, how would science establish the non-materiality of the mind if science worked the way you think it should?" Science cannot study the mind, for even if we used science as a tool it would still be the mind studying the mind, for "science" doesn't exist without a mind to use it. As far as I know, science cannot establish the non-materiality of anything, for all it can do is study material. It is the mind itself, through powers of reasoning, that would determine the non-materiality of something. All science could do with the subject is study the brain, but you would still need a mind to study the brain. Material studies of the brain will have some results, like weight and distance and length, but none of that will tell you anything about the mind itself. Scientists cannot study material events and determine mindful things. They would always, in the end, have to compare those material movements with the subjective correlations of the person's experience, which is coming from their mind, and not from the movements themselves. If the mind were to be studied scientifically, we should be able to determine thoughts and emotions from physical movements such as speed and distance, but this is a category mistake, for it is exactly like determining an ought from an is, which is impossible.Clive Hayden_{June 16, 2009
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StephenB "Mind, as agency, cannot be measured, but the effects of mind can be measured." How would you measure the effects of the minds of unknown creatures who are not part of our life system? If there were minimalists with a distaste for too much complexity interfering in our world, how would I.D. detect their effects?iconofid_{June 16, 2009
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----David Kellogg: "You keep assuming that this “mind” is not material." Yes, of course. The mind I speak of, and the one which is ruled out by Darwnist methodology, is non-material. If I was positing a "material mind," Darwinists would be fine with it.StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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I'm not getting it. The effects of the mind can be measured. How do you think science should study the mind? In other words, how would science establish the non-materiality of the mind if science worked the way you think it should?David Kellogg_{June 16, 2009
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---David Kellogg: "I’m not evading the issue Stephen. You’ve said that research validating the non-material mind is excluded from science. I’m asking what research you think supports the non-material mind. How, in other words, do you tell scientifically that the mind is non-material?" I am using the same definition for exclusion that you and Khan have already admitted to. [A] If it can't be measured, then it is supernatural and science can't address it. The mind cannot be measured, therefore it falls into the realm of the supernatural and, by your lights, cannot be an object of scientific investigation. Are you getting this yet?StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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You keep assuming that this "mind" is not material.David Kellogg_{June 16, 2009
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----CYankee: "I really don’t think that intelligence is really a good example of something that cannot be measured. After all, we are supporting Intelligent Design, and if ID cannot be measured, then we really have no argument." I understand your concerns, but You are confusing the term "intelligence" as in intelligent quotient, with mind as agency. Mind, as agency, cannot be measured, but the effects of mind can be measured. All this talk about "measuring intelligence," as in, {how smart are we] is a purposeful distraction from the fact that Darwinists are equating human agency, as in "mind," with the supernatural----and only because they were forced to admit it. That admission was not made readily.StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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I'm not evading the issue Stephen. You've said that research validating the non-material mind is excluded from science. I'm asking what research you think supports the non-material mind. How, in other words, do you tell scientifically that the mind is non-material?David Kellogg_{June 16, 2009
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"I haven’t seen anybody expelled from the academy for not being a Darwinist." There are plenty of non-Darwinists in the academy, that is true. There's just one rule that pertains to them exclusively - "Thou shalt not teach science - particularly Biology."CannuckianYankee_{June 16, 2009
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----David Kellogg: "How do you tell that a mind is non-material. The closest I can come is Leonard Cohen: “He’s touched her perfect body with his mind.” Once again, you evade the issue. You are confusing what we know with what we are permitted to consider as a hypothesis. If I had to defend your position, I, too, would claim ignorance about the meaning of "mind."StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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"because naturalists insist that “material” and “natural” are one and the same" I have to laugh at myself here for confusing naturalist with materialist - the very point I was attempting to make.CannuckianYankee_{June 16, 2009
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Stephen, I really don't think that intelligence is really a good example of something that cannot be measured. After all, we are supporting Intelligent Design, and if ID cannot be measured, then we really have no argument. I think it's safe to say that intelligence cannot be measured as precisely as other phenomenon, but it can be measured within certain criteria. We determine that a person who has an IQ of 70 or below is mentally retarded, and this number determines the type of funding that a person can receive as a developmentally disabled person. If intelligence could not be measured, then we wouldn't have a way of determining who gets funding or not. But I understand the point you are trying to make. "Supernatural" is really a man made term (as are all other terms :) ), for a concept that is really outside of our current understanding. I can understand therefore, how the term can force us into a kind of thinking that reality does not enforce. Perhaps what we call "supernatural" is really natural, but outside of a material realm. I say "material," because naturalists insist that "material" and "natural" are one and the same. Yet, we don't really know, do we? And so we have to at least be open to the possible existence of phenomenon outside of material causes and effects in order to properly do science. The materialists are wrong in equating methodological naturalism as being equal with the scientific method. I think the ID theorists HAVE demonstrated that intelligence is quantifiable in its effect in nature, and that's the whole point. Darwinists will never really understand the strength of the arguments for design until they first reject methodological naturalism as the prime directive for doing science. It blinds them from reality. It's the drunkard's street light from Joseph's #1 post.CannuckianYankee_{June 16, 2009
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I haven't seen anybody expelled from the academy for not being a Darwinist.David Kellogg_{June 16, 2009
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---David Kellogg: "Your own high view of that statement, however, has not escaped me at all." Well, my views are not so high that, unlike your Darwinist colleagues, I would expel anyone from the academy for disagreeing with me.StephenB_{June 16, 2009
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