In my recent post, On the impossibility of replicating the cell: A problem for naturalism, I argued that naturalism, even if true, cannot be shown to be true or even probable – in which case, I asked, why should rational people believe it? The responses of my critics reveal a real poverty of thinking on the part of those who believe evolution to be a totally unguided process.
The “naturalism” that I criticized in my post was not methodological naturalism (which makes no claims about the nature of reality, but merely states that non-naturalistic explanations of reality don’t properly count as scientific ones). My target was a more robust kind of naturalism, which I termed “scientific naturalism”: namely, “the view that there is nothing outside the natural world, by which I mean the sum total of everything that behaves in accordance with scientific laws [or laws of Nature].” Defenders of this view – whom I’ll call “scientific naturalists” – not only claim that their view is true; they also claim that their view is rational, and that everyone should be a scientific naturalist. That arrogant assertion gets up the noses of a lot of people, and I thought it deserved to be taken down a peg.
The thrust of my post was that before a viewpoint can be shown to be rational, it must be shown to be true or at least probable. And if the viewpoint in question depends on other assertions being true, those assertions must be backed up in the same way. Scientific naturalism requires us to accept that life could have arisen from non-living matter via totally unguided processes – in other words, that the theory of abiogenesis is true. However, there are good grounds (which I summarized in my post) for believing that it will never be possible, even in principle, for scientists to construct a model demonstrating that abiogenesis is true (i.e. that a feasible pathway leading from inorganic chemicals to the first cell actually exists) or even probably true (i.e. that such a pathway probably exists). Nor is it a truth of logic or mathematics that life must have arisen via an unguided process. This is an important point, as scientific naturalists are also prone to asserting that there are two and only two reliable sources of knowledge: all knowledge claims, they say, must be supported by either a rational demonstration from the axioms of logic or mathematics, or empirical facts which scientists can investigate. But we have seen that abiogenesis cannot be demonstrated in either fashion. That being the case, I concluded that since abiogenesis is a presupposition of scientific naturalism, it necessarily follows that scientific naturalism cannot be shown to be true or even probable – from which I drew the conclusion that scientific naturalism cannot be described as rational, in the sense of something we ought to believe.
Readers will notice that I did not argue that scientific naturalism was false. I merely argued that even if it were true, there can be no way of showing that we ought to believe it to be true. A scientific naturalist who was impressed by my demonstration could still go on believing naturalism to be true, but (s)he could no longer argue that scientific naturalism is a more rational worldview than its rival, supernaturalism.
It should also be noted that although I remarked in my post that a detailed model of the cell – assuming one could be built – would be a very effective way of making the idea of Intelligent Design appealing to people, I made no attempt to argue that the theory of Intelligent Design was more rational than scientific naturalism. Consequently, even if someone could show that Intelligent Design was no more rational than scientific naturalism, that would still leave the possibility that neither view was rational, and that in the end, one has to make a fundamental choice to either accept or deny the reality of a supernatural Being. That’s a viewpoint known as fideism, and it has its defenders. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, has argued that even if someone had no good grounds for believing in God, it would still make sense for that person to adhere to a belief in God, as a “properly basic” belief. (By contrast, belief in a “Great Pumpkin” or a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” doesn’t qualify, as pumpkins and spaghetti are by definition natural objects, and are therefore incapable of explaining the existence of the natural world.)
Does my argument commit the “Tu Quoque” fallacy?
Keith S, a well-known ID critic from The Skeptical Zone, responded that my argument could be used equally well against Intelligent Design. After all, if scientific naturalism shouldn’t be called “rational” because it can never be demonstrated, even in principle, then by the same token, its contrary, supernaturalism, shouldn’t be called rational either, because it can never be demonstrated either. As he put it (see here, here and here):
I keep offering free advice to IDers that they never accept. I tell them “if you think you’ve found a whiz-bang argument against your opponent’s position, stop for a minute and ask yourself a simple question: Could this argument be used against me?”…
I replied (briefly) to Keith S by pointing out that I wasn’t attempting to argue for Intelligent Design, but against scientific naturalism, and I added that my reductio only worked if we assume (as scientific naturalists do) that logic and empirical facts were the only two valid sources of knowledge. Intelligent Design theorists don’t make this restrictive assumption, so the same argument cannot be deployed against them. Keith S was not impressed. He contended that if I believed there were other valid sources of knowledge, then I needed to justify them, and he demanded to know precisely how the Intelligent Designer had made the first cell. Where, he asked, were the nitty-gritty details? In his own words (see here, here):
You evade your own argument only if you can demonstrate the existence and reliability of your third source of knowledge. Merely believing in it is insufficient…
Says Barry [Arrington], who of course can supply all the “steenkin’ details” about how the designer designed and implemented the cell. Right, Barry?…
Do you think that naturalism and theism are both false, since neither can supply the “steenkin’ details” you require?…
In reply: I believe there are at least two additional valid sources of knowledge: metaphysics (which is not required in order for Intelligent Design arguments to work, but which is often appealed to in the classic philosophical arguments for God’s existence) and abductive logic, or inference to the best explanation, which is commonly used in law courts, in detective and forensics work, and by scientists formulating hypotheses (especially in the field of archaeology). The justification of metaphysics is that the scientific enterprise presupposes the truth of certain basic facts about the world which cannot be tested by science, but must be assumed by it, in order for scientific investigation to work at all. These metaphysical truths, which are presupposed by science, imply the existence of a Creator of the cosmos (see here for a post of mine explaining why, with reference to the problem of induction). The justification of abductive logic is that scientific methodology – and for that matter, law – relies on the practice of inference to the best explanation (see here for a discussion).
Another commenter, Learned Hand, offered a similar criticism:
Come to think of it, we also can’t model an intelligent being creating a cell. No intelligence we have ever observed is capable of it. If we apply your standards, why would we prefer that impossibility over any other?
Now, it’s certainly true that no intelligent human being has ever created a cell from scratch, or even a complete simulation of one. But there’s no reason in principle why a super-intelligent being outside our universe couldn’t do so – especially if that being had a big enough computer! And for that matter, scientists have managed to put the synthetic copy of DNA into a living bacterial cell from which the natural DNA had been removed, although that is still a long, long way from building life.
A metaphysical illusion?
Another commenter, RDFish, weighed in with a critique of Intelligent Design methodology:
The essential confusion of ID is the assumption that there are two different types of causes in the world. ID calls the first type of cause “natural causes”, meaning “causes that proceed according physical law”. The second type of cause it calls “intelligent causes”, which is supposed not to follow physical law. ID attempts to show that certain features of the universe cannot have arisen by means of “natural causes”, and this supposedly justifies the conclusion that these features are best explained by “intelligent causes”.
The mistake, of course, is the assumption that there is any such thing as a cause that somehow transcends physical cause. ID often refers to physical processes as “unguided”, implying that in contrast “intelligent causes” are guided” by something that is not itself a physical process…
Once you remove this metaphysical assumption from ID, what ID is left with is “Certain features of the universe cannot currently be explained by means of any known cause. Therefore, some other, currently unknown cause must be responsible”.
First, even if this criticism were correct, it would have absolutely nothing to do with the question I posed in my original post, which was: if we cannot know that scientific naturalism is true or even probably true, then why should we believe it?
Second, RDFish’s assertion that ID proponents assume that intelligent causes are non-physical is factually mistaken. What we assume is that intelligent causes have the distinguishing property of being able to create highly improbable patterns which can, nevertheless, be described very succinctly in words. That’s an assumption that has been repeatedly validated by experience.
Finally, the conclusion we draw is not that “some other, currently unknown cause must be responsible” for the specified complex patterns we find in Nature, but that an intelligent cause capable of describing these patterns, representing them to itself, and constructing them in accordance with its own specifications, must be responsible for their occurrence in Nature.
Building the cell: Problem solved?
Keith S provided an interesting topic for discussion when he claimed that scientists had already built a simulation of a simple bacterial cell, thus refuting my claim that we can’t build a replica of the cell, down to the atomic level:
As others have pointed out, it’s rarely necessary to simulate at the atomic level, and in fact it’s usually wasteful to do so. Smart modelers adjust the granularity of the simulation to fit the problem they’re tackling.
In any case, computational biologists have already managed to do some amazing things with their simulations. See this New York Times article from a couple of years ago:
Software Emulates Lifespan of Entire Organism
The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules — including DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules known as metabolites, which are generated by cell processes.
“The model presented by the authors is the first truly integrated effort to simulate the workings of a free-living microbe, and it should be commended for its audacity alone,” wrote two independent commentators, Peter L. Freddolino and Saeed Tavazoie, both of Columbia University, in an editorial accompanying the article. “This is a tremendous task, involving the interpretation and integration of a massive amount of data.”
I’d like to make three brief points in reply here. First, the skeptical question I posed for scientific naturalists in my post was not, “Can we model the cell?” but “If we have no hope of ever proving the idea that the cell could have arisen through unguided natural processes, or even showing this idea to be probably true, then how can we possibly be said to know for a fact that this actually happened?” and finally, “Since we cannot know that scientific naturalism is true unless we know that abiogenesis occurred without intelligent guidance,… then why should we believe it?” Not even Keith S claims that scientists have shown how a bacterial cell could have arisen from non-living chemicals; all he claims is that scientists have simulated the workings of such a cell. Even if that were true, it doesn’t address my skeptical question about abiogenesis and about the rationality of scientific naturalism.
Second, Keith S’s claim that scientists have built a simulation of a bacterial cell turns out to have been grossly exaggerated. I’m not blaming Keith S; in this case, the fault lies with the New York Times, whose sloppy reporting trenchantly criticized by Professor Jonathan A. Eisen, of the University of California, Davis. Professor Eisen’s research focuses on the “phylogenomics of novelty” in microbes. On his blog, Eisen attacked the New York Times report:
Umm – claims of first full computer simulation of an organism seem, well, way way overhyped…
one of the worst NY Times science articles I have seen in a while…
I do not think they made a complete model …
Another commenter, Steffen Christensen, voiced his agreement:
Aye: a model is NOT a complete simulation…
There are what, 1000s of molecule types in a typical cell, and their model tracks <30?!?
They might’ve done a better job of it. You know, modeled spatial interactions, 1000s of moieties, etc…
As it is, I just feel… disappointed. At science reportage, mostly.
Finally, Keith S’s contention that it’s not necessary to simulate the cell at the atomic level invites the obvious retort: “What level do you think is required in order to demonstrate the chemical feasibility of abiogenesis, and why?” The chemists I have met are not shy of talking about atomic interactions. Nor are the scientists who get their names published in the New York Times for describing a plausible chemical route to the synthesis of a nucleotide (itself consisting of a mere couple of dozen atoms) shy of talking about what goes on at the atomic level. Where else could one begin, if one is addressing the problem of how life could have formed spontaneously, via a step-by-step unguided series of processes?
I’d now like to discuss the various ways in which a sophisticated scientific naturalist might have responded to the argument in my post.
Scientific naturalism as a provisional working hypothesis?
One way in which a sophisticated scientific naturalist might have answered my argument would have been to respond: “You’re right: scientific naturalism is not something we ought to believe to be true. Nevertheless, it is quite reasonable for a scientist to adopt it provisionally, as a working hypothesis.”
That’s not a bad response, but there’s an obvious objection to it: another scientist, who was impressed with the arguments advanced by Dr. Douglas Axe regarding the astronomical unlikelihood of a Darwinian explanation of protein folds, might well decide to adopt the contrary hypothesis of Intelligent Design as a provisional working hypothesis. (After all, we do know that intelligent designers are capable of creating complex structures which fold up in a very specific way.) Which scientist is behaving rationally? Or are neither of them being rational?
Is agnosticism a viable scientific option?
Another response that a sophisticated naturalist might make would be to suggest that scientists should conduct their investigations of the riddle of life’s origin in a spirit of agnosticism. One commenter who argued for this view was Alicia Renard, who wrote (see here, here and here):
Who is claiming that life on Earth got started via purely physical and chemical processes is a fact? Being only able to detect material processes ourselves we cannot rule out the possibility that something goes on “invisibly”, “in other planes of existence”, immaterially” of which we are completely unaware… As soon as you postulate a material effect from an immaterial source, you have an observable phenomenon that you can look for. If the unmoved mover moves something, at that moment, the physical laws of the universe must be violated – an apparently uncaused cause – a reaction without an action…
Perhaps one day, an ID proponent will move beyond the mantra of “I can see no possible physical pathway for this phenomenon to arise, therefore design” to some suggestion of modus operandi. Until then, we are all left with our uncertainty. “I don’t know” is always a possible answer…
Remember the theory of evolution makes no prediction about how life on Earth got started, it merely proposes a mechanism (or suite of mechanisms) for how life could have diversified subsequently.
Even spawn-of-Satan Richard Dawkins does not rule out the possibility of God’s existence. He only gives his certainty level as 6 out of 7….I don’t know exactly how life got started on Earth. No matter how hard we look we can’t seem to find that spark, that élan vital that, according to some, we should find in vivo but not in vitro.
Current research leaves you, me and everyone to speculate as wildly as they wish.
I would like to commend Ms. Renard for her intellectual honesty and her spirit of scientific modesty. She is to be applauded for not ruling supernaturalism out of court, as a hypothesis which scientists might adopt. Incidentally, I should point out in passing that if an Unmoved Mover were to move something, the physical laws of the universe would not have to be violated: that would only follow if we envisage the Unmoved Mover as pushing particles around. In a universe where Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle holds sway, we could imagine such a Being imposing patterns of arrangement on a particular group of particles in the cosmos, while maintaining statistical randomness – e.g. an equal number of particles being scattered in this direction by a colliding photon as in that direction – for the cosmos as a whole.
Regarding Ms. Renard’s proposal: one could certainly imagine a community of scientists carrying out their investigations in a spirit of open-mindedness, as Ms. Renard envisages. In practice, however, scientists are flesh-and-blood mortals like the rest of us, searching for practical answers to life’s big questions: “Whence came we?”, “What are we?” and “Whither go we?” Scientists are also as liable to “group-think” as the rest of us are. So it is hard to envisage a scientific community remaining in a state of total agnosticism for very long. Sooner or later, a methodological bias would emerge in the hypothesis they tended to favor – naturalism or supernaturalism – when investigating life’s origins. And eventually, one suspects that this methodological bias would harden into a metaphysical bias: either scientific naturalism or supernaturalism would become the default scientific worldview.
Finally, Ms. Renard apparently regards the inability of Intelligent Design theorists to suggest a modus operandi for the Designer as being just as great a difficulty for supernaturalism as the inability of biologists to come up with a plausible chemical pathway leading to the emergence of life is for scientific naturalism. While both of these problems are indeed difficulties for their respective hypotheses, the difficulty facing naturalism is much, much greater than that facing supernaturalism. The reason is that natural processes are inherently constrained in their range and magnitude, whereas intelligence per se faces no such constraints. For instance, there is no finite set of all possible ways of designing an object. But there is a finite set of all chemical processes existing in Nature. As our scientific knowledge steadily advances and continually fails to uncover any new chemical processes that might plausibly have led to the emergence of life, the hypothesis of scientific naturalism has fewer and fewer “unknown processes” left, to which it can appeal. Naturalists can run, but they cannot hide. With the hypothesis of a supernatural Designer, on the other hand, we are positing the existence of an Intellect which is far greater than our own, given our inability to model life in all its complexity. It is hardly surprising, then, that the modus operandi of such a great Mind should continue to elude us. Or as Charles Darwin himself memorably put it in a letter to Asa Gray: “A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”
Can scientific naturalism be justified without appealing to abiogenesis? Two tactics
Another, more subtle response would have been to attack my claim that scientific naturalism presupposes the truth of abiogenesis. If one could demonstrate the truth (or probability) of scientific naturalism on independent grounds, without having to address the question of life’s origin, then this would be an effective rebuttal of my argument. There are two ways in which a scientific naturalist might go about doing this.
(a) Are there any good a priori arguments for scientific naturalism?
First, one might argue that the very concept of a supernatural Being – by which I mean a Being Who is not subject to the laws of Nature – is logically absurd and incoherent, or alternatively, that there is something logically flawed in the enterprise of invoking such a Being as an ultimate explanation of Nature. Second, one might try to argue that we already have strong empirical evidence – either positive or negative – which tells heavily against the hypothesis that a supernatural Being exists, and because this evidence is so conclusive, we don’t need to first address the question of how life arose in our cosmos.
Taking the first tack would have meant constructing an a priori argument against the possibility of a supernatural Being or alternatively, against the possibility of such a Being serving as an ultimate explanation of the natural world. Such a move is highly risky: there’s no a priori argument against the very possibility of a supernatural Being that currently commands general assent among philosophers. And while many philosophers reject supernaturalism on the grounds that the classical arguments for theism strike them as unpersuasive, few philosophers would argue that it is logically absurd to suppose that the natural world might have a supernatural Creator (or creators).
Seversky was one of the critics responding to my post who tried this first tactic, by appealing to Richard Dawkins’ “Who designed the Designer?” argument. As he put it (see here and here):
If complexity implies a designer, who designed the designer, who must be more complex than the designs we observe? Or is it designers all the way down?…
Anyone who thinks the dilemma of Infinite Regress (IR) versus uncaused first cause (UFC) (or “Who designed the designer” or “What caused God”) has been settled does not understand the arguments.
In the case of Infinite Regress, although our minds instinctively rebel against the concept because it is impossible to grasp, there seems to be no logical contradiction involved…
“Who designed the designer?”, “Who created the Creator?”, “What caused God?” are all perfectly good questions. Many clever people have worked hard to answer them over the last couple of thousand years or so but, the fact is, so far no one has managed to nail it.
Seversky’s reply actually refutes the very argument he is making. For if (as he maintains) there is no inherent impossibility in an infinite regress, then it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that there really are “designers all the way down,” as he humorously suggests. Why not, after all? Such a solution neatly answers Dawkins’ question, “Who designed the designer?”
I should add, however, that I believe there is a certain kind of infinite regress which is impossible: namely, an infinite regress of explanations (as opposed to prior conditions, which might go back to infinity). It seems obvious that an infinite regress of explanations explains nothing: if I were to ask, “Why did Jones murder Smith?” I would not be satisfied until I arrived at an explanation of the murder – e.g. Jones wanted Smith’s money – that made perfect sense in its own right, without needing to appeal to any further underlying explanation. If the continued existence of the cosmos is a fact that requires an explanation, like a murder, then that explanation requires an explanatory terminus. Now, Seversky might reply that one can imagine an infinite regress of partial explanations, with each explanation E having a prior explanation which is more general and hence “bigger” in scope. In that vein, one might imagine that we live in an infinite “Russian doll” cosmos, with each universe being embedded in a bigger one having more general natural laws, but with no “biggest universe.” However, it seems to me that we can still speak meaningfully of the total set S of all universes – each embedded in a larger one – and ask, “Does the set S have a property (call it P) which requires an explanation?” For instance, are there laws of Nature which apply to the set as a whole, and are these laws fine-tuned? I might add that Dr. Robin Collins makes a powerful case in his essay, The Teleological Argument, that a multiverse would still need to be designed, in order to generate even one universe like ours.
If an infinite regress of explanations doesn’t work, then we are back with the question, “Who designed the Designer?” One commenter, called Logically_speaking, attempted to counter this question by asking, “Who painted the painter?” However, I have to say (reluctantly) that I don’t think this move works. Seversky’s argument was that any Designer of the cosmos would necessarily possess the very trait – complexity – which we posited the existence of a Designer in order to explain. By contrast, the reason why we assume that paintings have a painter (as opposed to a designer) is that the material called paint has no built-in tendency to arrange itself into a picture. All we can conclude from this is that the painter of a picture cannot be made of paint. But the design argument isn’t an argument about this or that raw material; it applies equally to all materials, and indeed to anything composed of parts arranged in an astronomically unlikely fashion.
A better reply to the “Who designed the Designer?” argument is that the supernatural Designer of the cosmos is not complex in a way that warrants an inference to its having a Designer. Seversky argues that such a Designer must be more complex than the designs we observe. But the notion of complexity he is appealing to is not a probabilistic one – which is the notion that Intelligent Design proponents appeal to – but a structural or functional one: presumably he thinks that a Designer would have to have a Mind composed of multiple parts and/or capable of multiple functions. That may be so, but if such a Mind exists outside space-time – as it would have to, if it designed the cosmos – then by definition, the probability of its having originated via unguided processes (i.e. its probabilistic complexity, as defined by ID) cannot be computed, because such a Mind would have had no origin in the first place. Seversky might reject the notion of a timeless (or atemporal) Designer as absurd, but to quote his own words against him, “there seems to be no logical contradiction involved” in such a notion. The contemporary philosophers Paul Helm and Katherin Rogers are two doughty defenders of the doctrine of Divine atemporality. If Seversky finds their arguments unconvincing, he needs to explain why.
Another critic, Evolve, argued for a different kind of fatal flaw in the hypothesis of supernaturalism: it explains nothing. As he put it:
The supernatural designer is a purely fictitious, undefined entity. One can fit him into any scenario one wants! Such a designer has zero explanatory power.
Now, if Evolve had wanted to argue that the hypothesis of a supernatural Designer has zero predictive power, then he would have had a valid point – unless, of course, we could make a shrewd guess as to what the Designer’s motives were. (And if the fine-tuning argument is correct, then our guess might be that the Designer’s motive was the creation of intelligent life-forms, in which case we would predict that the Designer would try to prevent these life-forms from becoming extinct, by designing a cosmos in which such an eventuality was very unlikely or impossible.) But even in the absence of a motive, it is simply incorrect to assert that the hypothesis of a supernatural Designer has zero explanatory power – just as it would be incorrect to assert that the hypothesis that an unknown designer produced a giant, mathematically regular monolith discovered on the Moon had zero explanatory power. Whoever the designer of the monolith is, or was, we know that he/she/it has an understanding of mathematics. One can make the same argument for the Designer of the cosmos: the Designer’s intelligence is what explains the mathematical beauty of the cosmos.
(b) Is there any empirical evidence for scientific naturalism?
The second argumentative tack that a scientific naturalist might adopt in order to circumvent the requirement that abiogenesis must be shown to be true or at least probable – namely, that of appealing to strong empirical evidence telling against the hypothesis of a supernatural Designer – was also deployed by Evolve, who wrote (see here and here):
Scientific naturalism is not an assertion, it is an observation. We have never observed any supernatural force tinkering with nature, past or present. On the contrary, we have copious data supporting naturalistic evolution and the evidence keeps on growing by the day as predictions made by the theory are confirmed by multiple disciplines of science. All supernatural alternatives to evolution, including ID, have spectacularly failed to propose testable hypothesis that can de-seat evolution.
Natural evolution best explains the data. This is what school kids must be told about in science classes…
Science HAS NO EVIDENCE for anything OUTSIDE nature —> Scientific Naturalism.
Why should we disregard claimed miracles? Because we have naturalistic explanations for the said miracles. Simple. Done.
The short answer to Evolve’s claim that “Science HAS NO EVIDENCE for anything OUTSIDE nature” is that the emergence of life on Earth is the very evidence that he is looking for. I have many times cited the work of Dr. Douglas Axe (which I recently summarized in non-technical terms here) and of evolutionary biologist Dr. Eugene Koonin (an atheist, whose his peer-reviewed article, The Cosmological Model of Eternal Inflation and the Transition from Chance to Biological Evolution in the History of Life I discussed here and here) as evidence for my claim that the emergence of life on Earth – or for that matter, anywhere in our universe – was an astronomically improbable event. That’s very powerful prima facie evidence against scientific naturalism – especially when combined with Dr. Robin Collins’ argument that a multiverse capable of spitting out even one life-friendly universe like ours would itself need to be fine-tuned, and hence designed. Life itself is the miracle that Evolve is demanding, and try as he might, he cannot disregard it, for it exists everywhere on Earth.
Finally, Evolve’s appeal to “copious data supporting naturalistic evolution” is also irrelevant, as the probabilistic hurdles involved in microevolution – which is the only kind of evolution scientists have actually observed – are much lower than the hurdles involved in the astronomically unlikely emergence of life on Earth.
A final objection from Keith S
I’d like to conclude this post by responding to a question by Keith S, who attempts to rebut what he sees as my argument:
His argument amounts to this:
1) Assume design by default.
2) If you can explain every single detail of, well, everything in terms of natural processes, then accept naturalism; otherwise stick with design.The obvious question is: Why should design be the default?
Vincent hasn’t justified this unparsimonious move.
I’ll keep this simple. I have listed papers by respected scientists – including an atheistic evolutionary biologist – who have calculated that the emergence of a simple life-form, or even a folding protein, as a result of unguided natural processes, was an astronomically improbable event. On the other hand, we know that intelligent human agents are capable of understanding how living cells work. Although building an atomic replica of the cell is beyond the capabilities of human scientists, they are presumably capable of making a cell from carefully selected ingredients, via an intelligently guided series of pathways. By default, then, we should assume that the first living cell arose by a process of intelligent design, since it is the only process known to be up to the job.
Keith S may not like my “design default.” But if he wants to change the default, it’s up to him to specify an unguided process that is capable of doing the job. Simple as that.
Keith S adds:
Vincent is being unfair by demanding naturalistic explanations of everything before agreeing to accept naturalism.
Science is a long way off from being able to explain everything. In the meantime, we should accept the best available explanation, even if it is incomplete. And since unguided evolution is trillions of times better as an explanation versus ID, any rational person will choose it over ID.
I’m not demanding “naturalistic explanations of everything” before agreeing to accepting to accept naturalism. I’m asking why Keith S thinks we should accept naturalism, notwithstanding the fact that there is a huge probabilistic hurdle confronting the hypothesis of scientific naturalism, which scientists have no hope of ever resolving. Moreover, Keith S’s outlandish claim that “unguided evolution is trillions of times better as an explanation versus ID,” by his own admission, does not apply to the origin of life but of the nested hierarchies that we find in living things today. Citing the evolution for common descent – even unguided common descent – as evidence for abiogenesis manifests fundamentally mistaken thinking. Finally, the “best available explanation” for the origin of life is intelligent design. At least that’s an adequate cause for the job.