How is ID Different?

_{Barry Arrington

October 4, 2014

Intelligent Design}

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Mark Frank writes in a comment to a prior post:

When reconstructing an evolutionary past I would say that scientists are doing two things which correspond to my Bayesian analysis:

They are proposing explanations that

1) might well have happened – the prior probability is acceptable

2) would have a good chance of producing what we observe – the likelihood is acceptable

When reconstructing a biological past I would say that ID scientists are doing two things which correspond to Mark Frank’s Bayesian analysis:

They are proposing explanations that

1) might well have happened – the prior probability is acceptable

2) would have a good chance of producing what we observe – the likelihood is acceptable

Mark Frank, do you agree that ID proponents and Darwinian researchers are employing identical modes of reasoning?

Comments

Is it possible that Random Chance might have been awestruck at the beauty in the variety and complexity of Nature, and thought to itself, 'I am a poet, and didn't know it, as the saying goes'?Axel_{October 6, 2014
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When Billy Bean conceived his idea of 'building a machine to see what it would do', I meant.Axel_{October 6, 2014
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Did random chance have their purposes or functions in mind when building everything in the universe? Or did it, like Billy Bean build them 'to see what they would do'? And was, perhaps, happily surprised at how amazingly they turned out?Axel_{October 6, 2014
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G'moe- As far as you know your position has no such thing. Your position doesn't have anything beyond lies and bald declarations. And I can tell that really bothers you.Joe_{October 6, 2014
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"When reconstructing a biological past I would say that ID scientists" What is the reconstruction of biological past that ID is providing? What "reconstruction of biological past" from ID are you talking about? As far as I know, there is no such thing.Guillermoe_{October 6, 2014
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Mark, Further to my questions in #13... What would you say is the prior probability of the existence of a sub-atomic particle that can't be seen if you do not take into consideration any of the phenomena that seem to make its existence necessary as an explanation?HeKS_{October 5, 2014
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Mark Frank (#12),
I don’t think you need to be able to give a specific prior probability to an explanation (although it helps) but you do have to have something to work with.
Yes, that's exactly what we need; something to work with. So what is it? 1 in 100? 1 in 1,000? 1 in 1,000,000? 1 in 10^27? What number would you start with? Absolute zero?
The prior for a God of gods who wanted to design life? I would put it close to zero – there is no reason for supposing it other than the fact that there is life and it needs explaining. Space aliens not much higher for the same reason.
Yes, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?Paul Giem_{October 5, 2014
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Mark Frank:
I don’t think you need to be able to give a specific prior probability to an explanation (although it helps) but you do have to have something to work with.
And yet your position cannot give us anything to work with respect to the origin of life. The same holds for natural selection being able to produce something like ATP synthase. Nothing. There is definitely no reason for supposing it other than the fact that there is life, it needs explaining and nothing else will do, regardless of the evidence.Joe_{October 5, 2014
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MF
1) might well have happened – the prior probability is acceptable
MF
I don’t think you need to be able to give a specific prior probability to an explanation (although it helps) but you do have to have something to work with.
How do you know the prior probability is acceptable if you don't know what it is?
The prior for a God of gods who wanted to design life? I would put it close to zero –
Mark can you give us the mathematical calculation so we can see how you arrived at close to zero? Vividvividbleau_{October 5, 2014
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@Mark #12 I'm interested ... What if someone had a reason to believe that a non-human intelligence existed that had nothing to do with the existence of life? And what if they thought that their reasons for believing such an intelligence existed were very strong, such that the existence of the intelligence was assigned a very high prior probability for the purposes of Bayesian analysis? How do you think this would affect a Bayesian analysis of the probability that intelligence is the most probable explanation for the appearance of purposeful design in life?HeKS_{October 5, 2014
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#11 Paul I don't think you need to be able to give a specific prior probability to an explanation (although it helps) but you do have to have something to work with. The prior for a God of gods who wanted to design life? I would put it close to zero - there is no reason for supposing it other than the fact that there is life and it needs explaining. Space aliens not much higher for the same reason.Mark Frank_{October 5, 2014
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Mark, Since you think we need a prior probability for our "intelligence" explanation, what do you think is a reasonable prior probability of the existence of space aliens? Of a God or gods? I'd take 100 to 1 against. What do you think?Paul Giem_{October 5, 2014
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LoL@ Mark Frank- Mark's position is different because all it offers are bald declarations and nothing of science. Mark can't even provide any probabilities and it is his position which requires that. Obviously he is too dim to grasp that fact.Joe_{October 5, 2014
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Barry ID is different because it avoids giving an explanation to which a prior probability or indeed a likelihood can be assigned. All it offers is "intelligence". But this is territory which we have covered thousands of times over the years. Do you really want to go over it again?Mark Frank_{October 5, 2014
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mahuna @ 3. You illustrated the point I made in 2 in the very next comment. Thank you.Barry Arrington_{October 4, 2014
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Mahuna:
There are of course other ways for the odd patterns in the rocks to have gotten there, but the other ways are less likely and more complicated. (Um, Fred and Barney etched stones in their backyards and then buried the stones…)
Personally, I think the Fred & Barney hypothesis is many orders of magnitude more likely than the dirt-did-it scenario. But to each his own.Mapou_{October 4, 2014
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That Intelligence, mahuna, doesn't interfere with what happens in the universe at all, because he sustains everything in it all the time, merely by thinking of it. The NON-intervention of the Intelligence remains a powerful argument against the existence of such an Intelligence. It is no distraction or source of mind-numbing boredom for God to watch over each protein and its components in a microbial cell, and indeed over every part of the cell, all the time. On a kind of autopilot, I suppose. Or like the autonomic intelligence that tells us to breathe or blink or sigh. That Intelligence nevertheless chooses not to interfere with our free will - even though for religious reasons, many atheists believe it to be an appalling derelection on his part.Axel_{October 4, 2014
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The NON-intervention of the Intelligence remains a powerful argument against the existence of such an Intelligence.
This is a theological argument. And one based on the lowly creatures knowing what's better than the creating intelligence. Let me give a theological response. Say the creating Intelligence came down every Friday and punished all that violated his principles of a well ordered world, and rewarded those whose behavior help maintained a well ordered world. What type of world would we have? Would this type of world be in sync with what the creating intelligence wanted?jerry_{October 4, 2014
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When reconstructing an evolutionary past I would say that scientists are doing two things which correspond to my Bayesian analysis: They are proposing explanations that 1) might well have happened – the prior probability is acceptable
I am not sure what this means. It sound like sophistry to me. I know of no scenario they propose that has any probability that is microscopically greater than zero. So what explanations are Mark Frank referring to. There are the two issues, OOL which has probabilities so small it is hard to count the zeros after the decimal place there are so many. Then there is changes in life forms once OOL arose. The issue is the origin of novel functional alleles (actually recent research requires that much more than novel alleles have to be accounted for). Again a lot of zeros after the decimal place but not as many as OOL. Neither the probabilities of naturalistic OOL or naturalistic evolution could in any way be called acceptable for any scientist in any other field except evolutionary biology.
2) would have a good chance of producing what we observe – the likelihood is acceptable
Unless someone can put some coherence to this, it is just the same gobbledygook. ID is theoretically capable of producing OOL and novel functional alleles. So given the incoherence of any realistic alternative explanations, it must at least be considered. This in no way means that there may not be a process undiscovered as of yet that may have reasonable probabilities to produce both OOL and novel alleles that produce novel functional proteins. But now there are no acceptable probabilities. And there is good reason to believe that such a process does not exist.jerry_{October 4, 2014
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Well, there is kinda this problem that the first assumption of ID is that some unknown external agency stacked the deck. At one of the Alternate History forums I tried to use (only Socialists need apply), the standard convention for "I can't think of a reasonable intervening event from History" is to blame "alien space bats". This is perfectly acceptable, assuming that the downstream events are then reasonable variations on known facts about the historical events. The problem/challenge with ID is that if an all powerful, all knowing, timeless Intelligence existed and continues to exist, why has that Intelligence interfered so LITTLE in what happens in the observable universe? The NON-intervention of the Intelligence remains a powerful argument against the existence of such an Intelligence. On the other hand, we know NOTHING about thousands of types of life on Earth except what we see in things we call fossils. So we created a theory to explain fossils and The Theory of Fossils seems to hold together pretty good, and The Theory of Fossils explains everything we find in the rocks. There are of course other ways for the odd patterns in the rocks to have gotten there, but the other ways are less likely and more complicated. (Um, Fred and Barney etched stones in their backyards and then buried the stones...)mahuna_{October 4, 2014
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HeKS, of course you are correct. One way of looking at it is materialists skew the priors in order to make the outcome of the analysis inevitably align with their religious beliefs; otherwise they reason in the same mode as ID proponents.Barry Arrington_{October 4, 2014
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Barry, I don't think I agree that they are employing identical modes of reasoning. The primary difference is that ID is not heavily weighting probability measures in its own favor by enforcing compliance with a prior philosophical presupposition (which is integral to the Evolutionary mode of reasoning), which necessarily eliminates undesirable competing hypotheses that do not conform to that philosophical commitment. That said, I think your point is otherwise completely valid.HeKS_{October 4, 2014
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