We often get some variation of “Until ID proposes a ‘mechanism’ for how the design is accomplished, it cannot be taken seriously as an explanation for origins.”
Here is an example from frequent commenter Bob O’H (who, after years of participation on this site should know better):
If ID is correct, then the design has to have happened somehow, so a “how” theory has to exist.
OK, Bob, once more from the top:
Suppose someone printed your post on a piece of paper and handed it to an investigator. We’ll call him Johnny. The object of the investigation is to determine whether the text on the paper was produced by an intelligent agent or a random letter generator.
Johnny, using standard design detection techniques, concludes that the text exhibits CSI at greater than 500 bits, and reaches the screamingly obvious conclusion that it was designed and not the product of a random letter generator.
“Ha!” the skeptic says. “Johnny did not propose a mechanism by which someone designed the text. Therefore his design inference is invalid. If his design inference is correct, then the design has to have happened somehow, so a ‘how’ theory has to exist.”
Bob, is the objection to Johnny’s conclusion valid?
So the “mechanism” that the random letter generator used was “it just happened to happen”?
Yeah, I see the scientific value in that. 🙄 How pathetic are the anti-ID ilk?
Is evolution, in contemporary applications of the scientific concept, like a random letter generator producing sentences?
No, Larry. Even a random letter generator was intelligently designed. Your mechanism can’t even do that- ie produce letters.
If your side had something of note then we could discuss it. But it doesn’t so you clowns have to attack ID with your ignorance.
Lar:
It depends on what brand of evolutionary theory you are talking about Larry. If you are talking about the Darwinian variety, of course it is random. Otherwise it would be directed toward an end, and the whole point of the theory is to explain why there is no need for direction toward an end. The other half of the Darwinian story is that mechanical necessity (natural selection) works on the randomness (mutations) to produce everything we see in the biosphere. It is a good explanation for small changes (changes in the size of finch beaks, etc.). But it takes a tremendous faith commitment (faith in metaphysical materialism) to swallow down the idea that it can explain how microbes became Mozart. As has been oft-noted, I would love to swim with the current and be a materialist. I just cannot handle faith commitments of that magnitude.
If something was designed then the HOW question is answered simply “designed” and the WHERE question is answered simply “in a mind”.
How was the automobile engine designed?
How was the computer designed?
How was the cell phone designed?
How was the airplane designed?
Sometimes we could mention some auxiliary tools that were used used in the design, but the central design process takes place in conscious purposeful minds that are highly sensitive to meaning.
However, as far as I understand it, the fact that those complex objects or systems were designed is independent of whether one knows how specifically such design processes happened.
It’s my understanding that ID stops at inferring whether something is designed or not. That’s it.
Trying to answer the “how” question in the case of designed objects would lead us to philosophical issues associated with immaterial conscious minds, far beyond the boundaries of natural sciences, where ID operates: Biology, Physics, Chemistry. It would be even beyond the domain of mathematics.
I’m surprised that materialists -to whom the ultimate reality is based on matter and energy alone- insist so vehemently to move the discussions beyond the boundaries of natural science. Actually it seems inexplicable, at least to me.
I believe the issue is not how was it designed, but how was it implemented: what went on the physical world as the design was brought into physical existence.
I have a hypothesis that would explain EXACTLY how you get irreducible complexity, the first self-replicating entity, and the other mysteries of life. It is 100% scientific, makes no reference to God or any other conscious being, and makes testable predictions. It’s probably wrong, of course, but it is in no way frivolous. If you really want a “mechanism,” please contact me and allow me to explain it. If you agree that it is a mechanism that meets your criteria, then please drop this line of criticism.
Does anyone use CSI calculations to infer design? Could CSI alone decide whether the text was some of Bob O’H’s finest or the output of a random text generator? Has that ever been tested?
If the output of an RTG was indistinguishable by normal means from that of a B O’H then I would say it’s a valid objection. Johnny would have to show that CSI alone could decide reliably between ID-generated and AI-generated text if both were above the 500 bit threshold.
PeterA@ 5
If I ask “How was X designed?” and you say “X was designed”, that is a reply but it does not answer my question.
Yes, human designs are the product of human minds but, while the nature of consciousness is still a hard nut to crack, we still have a pretty good idea about how automobile engines or computers or airplanes were – and still are – designed and developed. Boeing didn’t just ask a designer for an airplane and a complete 737 just poofed into existence in his head in a flash of inspiration. It took a lot of very hard, very rigorous design and engineering, a lot of detailed knowledge of materials and physics, to get from the concept to the finished aircraft. Even the concept would have been worked out rationally. That’s the ‘how’ that we’re looking for.
A whole lot seems inexplicable to us as well. How could it be otherwise? We’re not gods or supermen. We are limited beings who are trying to the best we can within those limitations. That’s all we can do. If we don’t know something then we should be honest enough to say so. Is there an alien super-intelligence or a god who designed everything? I honestly don’t know. I can’t rule out such possibilities but, so far, I haven’t seen or heard of anything that persuade me that such exist. Since our current theories, good as some of them are in their own domains, don’t explain everything and apparently can’t be reconciled, there’s something – probably a whole lot – we’re still missing. That’s what science is trying to find out – rather than just settling for “God/Intelligent Designer did it”. Is that so wrong?
Hazel, so you are suggesting Johnny can’t make a design inference unless he proves the letters were written with chalk on a sidewalk as opposed to crayons on paper? God help us.
Sev at 8. The math is straightforward. Counting spaces there is a 1 in 27 probability at each place. The probability of the entire sequence is exponential with the exponent being the number of positions. And we know that even for a short sequence like this, the probability of a random process is so low there is not enough time in the history of the universe for it to have happened even once. Romper room design theory here. One wonders what motivated Sev to pretend he did not know this.
What if the text was encrypted?.
re 10: I didn’t say that, Barry, or even address that question. I was replying to PeterA’s point that things are designed in a mind. I think the relevant issue then becomes what goes on in the physical world when that designed is implemented.
BB, if the design is encrypted design detection becomes more difficult but not impossible. We actually spend billions each year doing that very thing at the NSA. Thanks for pointing it out.
Hazel, so you’re saying your point was irrelevant to the larger discussion. Thanks for clarifying.
And I suppose PeterA’s comment was irrelevant also – true? And the following comment by Somerschool at 7, also.
seversky:
If I ask “How did X evolve?” and you say “X evolved”, that is a reply but it does not answer my question.
Not knowing how something was designed does not take away from the fact that it was.
LoL! Your side is supposed to be all about the how and yet you have nothing.
ID is based on our knowledge of cause and effect relationships. If you don’t like that then get to work and find support for your position.
Or shut up already
What if? Nature cannot produce random letters
hazel- there are plenty of artifacts that science is still trying to determine the how. And guess what? They are all still artifacts.
There are murders and crimes we still don’t know the who. And guess what? They are still murders and crimes.
Science and reality say that in the absence of direct observation or designer input, the ONLY possible way to make any scientific determination about the who and how, is by studying the design and all relevant evidence.
It’s obvious that the anti-ID people here have never conducted an investigation in their lives.
Intelligent Design employs a top-down approach. As do all design-centric venues.
A top-down approach means FIRST (intelligent) design is determined to exist. And again, we do that by using our knowledge of cause and effect relationships.
And yes the existence of design means the design was implemented by some mechanism that could manipulate matter and energy for its own purposes. It remains a hanging question. Someone will eventually take it on. And that means ID is far from being a scientific dead end. It opens up new and exciting questions to try to answer.
But there are more important questions to answer. So all questions depend on resources and the need to answer them.
That ID isn’t a mechanistic theory just means we don’t have to know the “how” before we can determine if design exists and then study it. We study it (and all relevant evidence) in the hope of answering those new questions. Science 101
ET writes,
Good.
Is anyone working on these questions?
So science is the valid vehicle for studying how design is implemented – true?
And again, is this study being pursued?
Seversky @9:
If you ask me how it was designed I’ll honestly tell you that I don’t know, you should talk to the designer(s) directly. However, the designer(s) might be inaccesible to us. Also, we might not be capable of understanding it. Perhaps we have a similar situation with the implementation.
Now, if you ask an engineer how he designed certain system, his explanation might be very difficult for us to understand. We would have to either learn at least some basic terminology or have the designer explain it in easy terms.
Interesting discussion. Obviously the fact of some intelligent agent being involved is not the same as identifying the agent. Nor is it the same as explaining how the agent was involved. Forensics is the obvious science to point to: first determine to a high probability that a fire was arson, then discover how the fire was set, and finally determine who the agent was.
ID is still in its infancy and has found massive evidence pointing to the involvement of an intelligent agent. The “how” of the agency is an open question, but perhaps ID will look into that once the rest of science agrees that ID is a valid theory. Until then we are just accumulating evidence for ID and other evidence against the non-Id theory (or theories), hoping that the rest of science will “see the light” (or intelligence) as it were.
Once ID is allowed to exist and flourish, there is evidence that may cast light on the “how?” aspects:
– fossil record shows various “explosions” of new life forms; e.g. the “punctuations” in punky-e.
– Behe’s devolution evidence shows the usual direction of unguided evolution, from some higher-information starting point
– molecular studies of evolution may point to times when added genetic information was injected into the tree of life.
– living fossils can help calibrate and authenticate the “when” and “what” questions of such research.
However, until ID is accepted as a legitimate research topic by the mainstream science establishments, ID will have to proceed on a shoestring budget, with few researchers openly involved, and will continue to focus on the yes/no question about intelligent involvement.
That does not prevent people from speculating in Science Fiction or elsewhere. For one example of a speculative “how” of ID, see:
https://thopid.blogspot.com/2019/02/intelligent-design-speculations.html
hazel- I don’t know who is working on what. I don’t know what resources are available. I would expect the new questions require new specialists. Specialists that have to be taught an trained.
I don’t see how we can study how the design was implemented. The best we can hope for is trying to produce a narrative based on the evidence and our current level of knowledge. Some things may be as simple as to be answered by our own genetic engineering. But if life requires more than what physics and chemistry can provide, then we may never figure that out. And according to ID, life requires more than any materialistic process can provide.
Again, there are artifacts that we have yet to determine a cause for- the how they did it eludes us. And these are things that allegedly our ancestors built. And everything we do know came after years, decades, and even centuries of study.
Nan Madol is child’s play when compare to a living organism. And the only thing we know for sure is that some people’s did it some time in the past for some reason and by some mechanisms.
Fasteddious writes,
But wouldn’t it be better for people who accept ID to be asking the further questions about implementation, on the grounds that good answers to those questions would most likely do more to help convince the rest of science that ID is worth pursuing? Saying that “perhaps ID will look into” those further questions doesn’t come across as very motivating for those who who might see some merit in considering ID, but don’t accept the premise of the OP that it is sufficient to detect design without asking further questions of implementation.
I don’t think some preliminary work involve possible hypotheses and research projects should be stopped by lack of acceptance or mainstream funds. Again, as had happened frequently in the past, someone(s) have to pioneer the ideas and work to get a new paradigm off the ground.
Just arguing for design hasn’t had any great impact, I don’t think: maybe what is missing is a movement to address the implementation questions.
BA
And we are only successful in decrypting encrypted messages because we know about the mechanisms that are used for encryption. Thanks for pointing it out.
hazel:
If that is what it takes then that is BS. The science of ID is in the detection and study of the design. Blind watchmaker evolution is supposed to be all about the “how” and it has nothing. Why aren’t THEY doing the research to find out the how?
LoL! Blind watchmaker evolution has only had a negative impact. It hasn’t helped us understand anything.
The people who reject ID will NEVER come up with a viable scientific alternative. That alone should tell you something about them.
Brother Brian:
Not true. You not only need that knowledge but also then key. The Brits knew how enigma worked but it wasn’t until they found a key did they start decrypting messages
Hi Fasteddious. I read the speculative post you linked to at 22 with some interest. I remember a discussion at Dembski’s ISCID forum many years ago where a similar idea was discussed at some length, I think.
That is, an omniscient, omnipresent designer could implement organized changes in the genomes of multiple organisms (a population) over multiple generations (possibly centuries or longer) so no one genomic change would ever be distinguishable from one happening by natural causes, but the overall change would produce the desired directed, designed, result.
In this speculative view, there would never be any “hopeful monsters: as you write
(However, I’ll note, an omniscient, omnipotent designer would not need a “lab”, as it would be able to conceive all the information needed in its mind: no experimentation needed. Also, you mention agents – “angels in lab coats”, but that would be unnecessary also: the designer, again omniscient and omnipotent, could do all this itself.)
Also, as you point out, such a speculative scenario would preserve common descent.
The ‘how’ of how design is implemented is already answered. Yet it is an answer that Darwinists simply refuse to, and indeed can’t, accept.. The design was implemented via Intelligent agency and/or Intelligent volition. Atheistic Materialism simply has no place for Intelligent agency
I suppose that Darwinists and/or Atheistic Materialists, in the current discussion, imagine that intelligent agency and/or intelligent volition is more mysterious than mechanical causality, but, as Professor J. Budziszewski points out in the following article and lecture, the reality of the situation is completely opposite from what Darwinists imagine. As he states, “I supposed that I understood cause and effect; I supposed causation to be less mysterious than volition. If anything, it is the other way around. I can perceive a logical connection between premises and valid conclusions. I can perceive at least a rational connection between my willing to do something and my doing it. But between the apple and the earth, I can perceive no connection at all. Why does the apple fall? We don’t know. “But there is gravity,” you say. No, “gravity” is merely the name of the phenomenon, not its explanation. “But there are laws of gravity,” you say. No, the “laws” are not its explanation either; they are merely a more precise description of the thing to be explained, which remains as mysterious as before. For just this reason, philosophers of science are shy of the term “laws”; they prefer “lawlike regularities.” To call the equations of gravity “laws” and speak of the apple as “obeying” them is to speak as though, like the traffic laws, the “laws” of gravity are addressed to rational agents capable of conforming their wills to the command. This is cheating, because it makes mechanical causality (the more opaque of the two phenomena) seem like volition (the less). In my own way of thinking the cheating was even graver, because I attacked the less opaque in the name of the more.”
Moreover, for atheists to presuppose that the law of gravity is ‘natural’, and that it can be explained without reference to the Agent Causality of God, is also cheating. It was Sir Isaac Newton’s belief in God, i.e. in a universal law giver, that enabled Newton to make the intellectual leap that was necessary in order for him understand that “the same force that caused an apple to fall at the Earth’s surface—gravity—was also responsible for holding the Moon in orbit about the Earth.”
In regards to this first unification, Sir Isaac Newton stated: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One;,,,”
Atheistic Materialists and/or Darwinists simply have no clue why the constants should be constant. As Albert Einstein himself stated, “a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way .. the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.”
And whereas Atheistic Materialists are a complete loss as to explaining why the universal constants should be constant in the first place, the Christian Theist presupposes the laws of nature to be constant and that presupposition was essential to the founding of modern science,
Moreover, advances in quantum mechanics, especially with the recent falsification of ‘realism’, have only highlighted the necessity of the Agent Causality of God in sustaining the universe,, even more so than the universal constants necessitated an appeal by us to the Agent Causality of God. As Scott Aaronson stated, “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationist,,, But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”
Indeed, advances in Quantum Mechanics have simply been devastating to Atheistic Materialists or anyone else, such a Deists and Theistic Evolutionists, who prefer a universe where God created the universe and then walked away. i.e. Deists believe that God is not always presently active in sustaining the universe:
Verse:
BA,
Y’all must be doing it not bad to compare so well against your objectors. Congratulations!
Check this out:
Alexa Global Internet Traffic Ranking
UD………..602,154…….UP…….199 K
PT………1,637,776…….DN…….155 K
TSZ…….3,319,498……DN………807 K
PS……….7,051,271……DN……. 3.65 M
It’s impressive that there are so many websites out there.
The problem with (universal) common descent is that there aren’t any known mechanisms capable of pulling it off. The jump to eukaryotes (given starting populations of bacteria) is much more than just adding an organelle via endosymbiosis. No one knows how such a thing could have just happened without planning.
Universal common descent doesn’t seem be able to get started.
The scenario Fasteddious talks about in his linked essay posits an omniscient, omnipotent designer who makes small genetic changes generation after generation in multiple organisms: reproductive continuity and common descent are certainly consistent with such a hypothesis.
Apparently there are over 1.5 billion websites but less than 200 million active.
Let’s say there are 100 million active websites
Then UD is in the top 1% of active websites
PT is in the top 2%
TSZ in the top 4%
PS in the top 8%
Why have PT, TSZ and PS dropped so drastically in the ranking while UD has raised the last 90 days?
hazel- there isn’t any evidence that genetic changes are sufficient. There isn’t any way to test the claim. There isn’t any evidence that genomes and genotypes determine what type of organism will develop. So that would be a problem for any scenario relying on genetics.
Hazel @ 6,
>I believe the issue is not how was it designed, but how was it implemented: what went on the physical world as the design was brought into physical existence.
I think that fails to be a roadblock for the same reasons as Barry’s OP points out: One could still infer design reliably without having to know how it was implemented. We do that all the time also. I don’t know what order the parts in my car were assembled, but it still shows design. (And sometimes it even runs!)
Hazel @ 20,
>So science is the valid vehicle for studying how design is implemented – true?
Not if science presumes a materialistic approach, no, because we’ve inferred our way towards the metaphysical. That does place some things out of our immediate reach. That takes some of the fun out of it, but if we’re truly and correctly following the evidence and eliminating possibilities, then those are the breaks. (And it will have to get out-of-reach at some point, such as with the origin of the universe, in any case.)
BB @ 12,
>What if the text was encrypted?
BB @ 25,
>And we are only successful in decrypting encrypted messages because we know about the mechanisms that are used for encryption. Thanks for pointing it out.
But even a text message that we could never decrypt would still show evidence of design because the letters on the paper (or bits travelling over a wire) did not happen by chance.
And it is possible to hide evidence of design, but that also takes a mind. Steganography is just that, the intentional hiding of (typically encrypted) information in something else.
Hi EDTA; First, I don’t think I implied a “roadblock”. I understand that detecting design is a task in itself. My point is that once one has accepted design, the question of what happens in the world when it is implemented becomes the immediate next question. Even if one accepts a possible metaphysical designer, there still is the question of the interface between it and the physical world: if one is empirically observing the physical world, what events actually happen as that implementation is instantiated?
Darwin Devolves ?
https://gsejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12711-019-0458-6
BA, as I pointed out, the history of science shows that the objection is not valid. Blackbody/cavity radiation had a spectral pattern that resisted being accounted for on classical analysis. Thus the “ultraviolet catastrophe” and so something seemed wrong even without an alternative. Planck used the lumps of energy model and once radiation came in lumps proportional to frequency, he could fit the observed curve. A few years later Einstein expanded to explaining the photoeffect. Quanta were on the table and were not going away. And yet it took a generation of the top flight practitioners for some sort of theory to be hammered out, the notorious Copenhagen interpretation; many others have been put up since, but all turn on the quantum principle and several other closely linked, empirically grounded ideas such as wave-particle duality, uncertainty etc. Comparing, OoL and Oo body plans face an information (and language!) origin catastrophe. There is a trillion member observation base that establishes the reliable cause of such FSCO/I; intelligently directed configuration. It is backed up by analysis of blind search challenge in configuration spaces of at least 500 – 1,000 bits. Moreover, agent causation by intelligent direction of configuration is a routinely carried out process as OP shows; this gives a how though it is not blindly mechanical, agent action is the basis of logic and mathematics as well as the world of technology around us. Further, as I noted recently, we see molecular nanotech labs synthesising or engineering genomes and we see how molecules are designed and built by chemists, e.g. the molecular car. The problem is not the observations, the history, the reasoning, having a known effective means. No, it is ideological imposition on and straight-jacketing of science and society by a worldview long past bury by date: evolutionary materialistic scientism, aka naturalism. KF
No it isn’t. What CSI calculates is the probability that a sequence would fall in the specification if the sequence were drawn randomly. Thus, he can reject total randomness, but not other mechanisms (e.g. the CSI calculation assumes independence, so depending on the specification, a Markov process could look like design). It’s a large leap from “it’s not mechanism A” to “it is mechanism B” when you can’t even specify how mechanism B works, and you ignore any other possible mechanisms.
Bob O’H:
Not so. It eliminates both chance and necessity.
Like what, Bob? What other mechanism could possibly put a coherent message on paper or an internet forum?
What other mechanisms, Bob? Why are you too afraid to say?
hazel:
There are other immediate questions too, hazel. More important questions.
We may never know because clearly it is over and above our capabilities and understanding. So that will take some time to figure out. But in the meantime there are more important questions to answer.
ET
It’s nice to see that ET agrees that you can’t confirm design unless you have some knowledge and evidence of how the design was implemented
Brother Brian:
That doesn’t follow from what I said. Clearly you are just a desperate troll.
I said that you cannot decrypt an encrypted message without the knowledge of how it was encrypted along with the key. That has nothing with determining design. If we intercepted a seemingly random sequence of letters we would know that an intelligent agency sent it because nature is incapable.
ET, what are some of the “more important questions” you refer to in 41?
hazel- a list off the top of my head and no where near finished:
1- Purpose- under ID there is a purpose, besides happiness and leading a good life, to our existence. I would think that would be the most important question to answer. It should get the world on the same page. And if not at least then we would know who the hopeless resource wasters are.
2- How to properly maintain the design. Using our own design insights to solve biological issues. For example I would think it would be helpful to know that certain pathogens were the product of a design gone awry. Compare to the “good” microbes and see if we can engineer a solution. Cancer- same idea. See if we can infuse the cancerous cells with synthesized functional information to correct the genetic defects.
3- Our understanding of what makes an organism what it is would no longer be focused on the genomes, genotypes and epigenetic effects. So we should be able to better solve that mystery. That would go a long way into understanding our existence.
4- The junk DNA argument would be switched to “what is the function of that DNA? Is it similar RAM and EEPROMs as carriers and holders of (immaterial) information?”
5- And in an ID scenario the odds of other civilizations out there increases to 1. So where are they and have they been here, would be important questions. Can they help? Will they help? Have they helped?
By getting through those we may gain a better understanding of the how and who.
EDTA
I agree. But we know this because we recognize the way we write our languages. But if it is encrypted we don’t know whether it contains any meaningful information unless we have a good knowledge of encryption techniques. In short, to confirm design of the message we need knowledge about the language being used, or encryption techniques if it is encrypted.
Let’s us the flagellum as an example. We know that it is composed of 20+ proteins, almost all of which are found elsewhere, serving other functions. Looking at it from evolution perspective we don’t know the specific evolutionary steps that led to it, but we do have examples that serve another function but only differ by a couple proteins. We have mechanism for increasing genetic and phenotypic variation in a population. We have mechanisms for differential reproduction that result in some combinations of genes/proteins becoming ubiquitous in the population. We have evidence of proteins that did not exist before arising in a population. You could argue that this was due to design but until you come up with a mechanism for this occurring, we fall back on mechanisms that we know exist.
Brother Brian:
But we would still know an intelligent agency id it, ie it was designed.
An we know that bacteria do not go on shopping sprees. We also know that the protein subunits are expressed in different quantities.
Looking at it from an Intelligent Design perspective we don’t know the specific design steps that led to it, but we do have examples that serve another function but only differ by a couple proteins.
As does Intelligent Design.
As does Intelligent Design.
And Intelligent Design offers the only viable explanation.
Pure equivocation. For all we know those mechanisms are design mechanisms.
The problem is people like Brian have absolutely no idea what ID is an no idea what mainstream evolutionary thought entails.
@ET
I think Bob O’H makes an important point. The problem is what do we mean by ‘chance and necessity’? Is that all possible stochastic processes, or a particular subset? If the former, how can we eliminate all of them? If the latter, how do we know another subset is not responsible? Further, is intelligence itself a stochastic process, or something else? If something else, what is a non-stochastic process? I’ve studied probability, comp. sci., information theory and the like quite a bit, and I’ve not seen a non-stochastic process defined.
I think the ID movement does need to do a better job defining exactly what is meant by ‘intelligence’. Because merely calculating the CSI does show that some other process might be a better explanation of the event under question, but I’m not sure it is clearly a design inference.
If we take the standard example and have a run of 100 heads in a series of coinflips, we can easily eliminate the uniform random hypothesis. But, what allows us to make the design inference? And, let’s say we do make the design inference, but it turns out the run of heads was due to the coin having heads on both sides. The design inference is supposed to guarantee true positives, so why did it fail in this instance? Is it only because we didn’t adequately account for all the possible chance hypotheses, i.e. that the coin had heads on both sides? But if that is the problem, then in the scenario of a natural event that exhibits positive CSI, such as a bacterial flagellum, why can we be confident that we’ve not made a false positive error when inferring design, if we are not sure we have accounted for all possible chance hypotheses?
So, in summary, after my years of personal research, I am confident that the theory of ID and CSI calculations is sound, but the rub is in actually filling in the details of application. If we can never be sure we account for all chance hypotheses, then how can we be sure we do not err when making the design inference? And even if absolute certainty is not our goal, but only probability, how can we be confident in the probability we derive?
Thus, while the critics are wrong in claiming ID research cannot proceed without a positive account of intelligent design, such an account seems very important to making a coherent design inference, and being able to justify confidence in doing so. Consequently, on the ID side, we cannot wave our hands and claim design has been inferred in the biological sciences just because we’ve eliminated a particular chance hypothesis (i.e. Darwinism). We need to better articulate and justify the inference to design. I think that “it looks like a humanly intelligently designed artifact, therefore it is intelligently designed” is actually a pretty decent step, but it needs to be spelled out a bit more why that step makes sense, as JohnnyB has done in quite a few publications at this point.
The Mind Matters blog is also a good move in this direction, but it too needs more of a positive account of what intelligence is, vs the (useful) negative analysis of why artificial intelligence is not like human intelligence.
EricMH at #48:
Good questions.
Regarding the coin example, I would say that the possible explanation “coin with two heads”, or even simply a severely unfair coin, is simply a necessity component which changes the probability distribution of the system, favoring one outcome (head), in the case of an unfair coin, or even transforming the system in a necessity system without any random component (a coin with two heads).
However, that would be already included in the classical idea that we have to check for known necessity explanations (see Dembski’s explanatory filter) before inferring design.
It is interesting that the problem of excluding necessity influences is important for specifications linked to order (the series of all heads), but is loses much of its relevance (maybe all of it) whne we are discussing funcional information. It is really irrational to believe that, among the necessity laws of biochemistry that govern mytations at the level of nucleotides in the DNA, there may be any law that favors the sequences that code for a functional proteins when translated according to the genetic code. Such a necessity theory would be only an accumulation of impossibilities.
So, functional information makes the design inference so much safer. The only necessity component which has been invoked to “explain” FI in biological objects is NS, which is not a law, but rather a complex process. But, for various reasons, that I have discussed elsewhere, it completely fails.
There is also a rationale in considering design as explanation for high FI. We can observe in human design that what seems to allow us to overcome the huge probabilistic barriers to high levels of FI is the simple fact that we are conscious, and as conscious beings we have the following two categories of subjective experiences:
1) The understanding of meanings
2) The feeling of purposes
Some reflection will easily show that those two experiences cannot be described in purely objective terms: they are rooted in consciousness, in subjective representation.
Some reflection will aslo easily show that it’s exactly the possibility if understanding meanings and having purposes that allows us to build machines, language and software. Against the probabilistic barriers that preclude the generation of that kind of results by probability alone.
So, design is not only the only origin of high FI in the known world, it is also the only reasonable cause of that.
That said, I essentially agree that ID theory should try to face the aspects of the “how”, of the mechanism. I have many times expressed some general ideas about that. However, it remains perfectly true that the design inference itself does not need that. But it is a duty of any scientific approach to deal with all aspects of reality that can be in some measure investigated according to available facts.
We don’t have to eliminate them all. Just the ones we know of. Science is not about proving something. It is about coming to a reasoned inference based on our current knowledge.
And a double-headed coin would be a sign of intelligent design.
We don’t just eliminate nature, operating freely. Dr. Behe gave us the positive criteria:
THAT is how we justify the design inference.
Hazel, I’m glad you enjoyed the post. In principle, the designer does not have to be omniscient and omnipotent in order to play with genetics and invent new life forms. After all, our bio-scientists are almost able to do that already, and they are far from omni-anything.
Of course God (as the possible designer) could have done it any way he chose, and our study of potential ID mechanisms and procedures are perhaps one way of “looking up God’s pant leg” as Einstein famously put it. As an engineer myself, however, I like to think of God as the divine Engineer, tinkering around in his creation to see what he can come up with. Most engineers like getting some “hands on” time in the lab or shop from time to time, or to play around with prototypes and design changes themselves. And although a divine lab and angelic assistants may not be needed by God, who are we to say how he should or should not do whatever he wants to do?
As for creative purposes, perhaps one of God’s purposes is simply to create many and varied lifeforms, within the constraints of his own creation, just for the fun of it. Engineers, and presumably God, can play with stuff just for fun. E.g. an engineer can constrain himself to using LEGO pieces to make some really cool things, even though he could make similar things by other means. Just speculating here…
As mentioned in the post, “common descent” is indeed possible, but not necessary in this scenario. It does put a new spin on “descent with modification”, however. A Darwinist might look at the description you quoted in 28 and say that it looks just like Darwinism in action: many small steps, each with small changes. However, each of the small steps would still require major genomic changes, such as new genes, new expression controls, and/or carefully modified development plans – aspects beyond the capability of unguided Darwinian processes. Hence ID may look like what Darwinists want natural selection to look like.
EricMH:
That is the nature of science. It is tentative.
We do the best we can with the knowledge we have.
The science of today does not, will not and cannot wait for what the science of tomorrow may or may not discover.
We should be able to test the claim with respect to nature’s ability to invent/ produce biologically relevant replicators. And when that doesn’t work scientists have designed them. And guess what they discovered? Spiegelman’s Monster. Your starting population isn’t going to get any more complex with respect to functions and length/ number of nucleotides. The fastest replicators always win out. And the fastest replicators are always the simplest. They do that one thing, they do it efficiently and they do it faster.
That is how it works with nature. The line of least resistance. That is because it doesn’t want nor try to do otherwise. Nature allows things to just happen. It definitely isn’t going to build a coded system from the ground up, having the code emerge from the system and its components.
So if people aren’t convinced by the semiotic argument for Intelligent Design with respect to biology, it isn’t for scientific and evidentiary reasons. We need them to step forward with the methodology they use so we can compare. How did they determine NS, drift, CNE or some other materialistic process did it?
Another example is with any bacterial flagella. It isn’t just about getting the right proteins. You need the proper number of subunits. Missing ONE protein means you are missing more than one part. You are missing a chunk of machinery. People want to use the type three secretory system as some sort of evolutionary link? Where did they get that structure from? Never mind the fact that is would take an engineering wonder to pull of the structural and functional changes required.
If someone can demonstrate it somehow all just happened to come together, a Nobel Prize definitely awaits them. They will have more fame then any other human ever. And that is why people are trying to do just that. Their successes only expose the huge problems they face.
.
If variation and selection are (among) the mechanisms of evolution, then semiosis (the specification of something among alternatives) is the mechanism of design. Indeed, evolution by selection requires symbolic memory tokens, a coordinated set of interpretive constraints, and a multi-referent code – just as it was predicted. After all, it is the specification of something that is selected.
Materialists are free to rock back and forth in their chairs and kick their feet all they wish; it won’t change the documented physical reality (or recorded intellectual history of the issue). Demanding to know whether the designer was right or left-handed is merely a ploy to dismiss the positive inference, and can be seen for what it is.
For Upright Biped, et al- from Art Hunt: The Origin of Prebiotic Information System in the Peptide/RNA World: A Simulation Model of the Evolution of Translation and the Genetic Code.
They have an admittedly “sketchy and speculative” narrative but with it the scientific testing can begin. I remember when the paper Self-Sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme was published. Neither lead author thought that nature could produce one of their RNA’s let alone the required two. And those two could only bond two other engineered RNAs.
The point is the two working RNAs were made up of only 35 nucleotides. Even if nature could get to those it cannot get you beyond that.
So we will see…
EricMH @ 48,
> Further, is intelligence itself a stochastic process, or something else? If something else, what is a non-stochastic process? I’ve studied probability, comp. sci., information theory and the like quite a bit, and I’ve not seen a non-stochastic process defined.
Intelligence, like consciousness might be something beyond the stochastic/deterministic dichotomy. I don’t think we can eliminate all the “chance” possibilities, but until we discover new types, our best inferences will have to operate by eliminating the chance possibilities we do know about.
GP @49:
That’s a fundamental concept that must be clear to all.
.
#54
I am familiar with the objection (and the paper).
I understand very well that Art Hunt, and others like him, are forced by their prior convictions to believe there was once an arrangement of matter on earth that not only began to replicate itself based solely on its dynamic properties (such as in the promise of an unknown self-replicating RNA), but it then somehow kept replicating dynamically as it also came to described itself symbolically in a semantically-closed self-referential organization. If your paradigm depends upon a continuum of function from the dynamic domain to the symbolic domain, then at some point in the continuum the system has to function in both domains. You can try to move the pieces around to give the appearance of a solution, but you can’t avoid it in earnest.
In any case, the physical, chemical, and organizational problems with this position are legion. Among the scores of problems is the fact that (good grief, even granting a dynamic self-replicator) there still remains a sheer vertical face in the necessary organization of semantic closure (which not only requires the presence, but also the simultaneous coordination of multiple unrelated objects in the system). There are more insurmountable problems in the construction of a set of constraints from memory, as well as numerous other points along the way. I believe this is why materialists typically avoid the fundamental details already recorded in the literature, as well as the history of those discoveries.
Thus, devoted materialist like Art Hunt (and his anti-design religious supporters like Joshua Swamidass) are stuck with any form of proposition (which is all the cited paper is) that might be used socially (argumentatively) to save their prior commitments from the empirical evidence as it is fully documented to be.
There is a derogatory term used in science circles to describe the promotion of unsupported conclusions in lieu of actual documented physical evidence. That term temporarily escapes my mind, but others might recognize the situation.
There is also the very real issue of that which has been denied. A multi-referent symbol system was famously predicted to be the core physical and organizational requirement of an open-ended self-replicator, like the living cell. That prediction was later confirmed by experiment. Since its confirmation, the physical requirements of that particular system have been exceedingly well-documented in the literature. It has also been well-documented that the only other such system known to science happens to be found only in human language and mathematics — two unambiguous correlates of intelligence. The recorded history of these discoveries is already on the books, and is not going to change. In fact, there is a completely coherent chain of scientific understanding from persons like Peirce to Turing to von Neumann to Crick to Pattee that fundamentally supports this conclusion. This chain of understanding is not only clearly recognizable, but has been fondly acknowledged by distinguished members of the biological community. The simple fact of the matter is that design is positively on the table at the origin of the symbol system and constraints that enabled the specification of the first living cell, as well as the subsequent diversity of all life on this planet.
Otherwise well-meaning researchers like Art Hunt are perfectly free to hold their (unsupported) paradigms if they wish; it does not change the recorded physical evidence in any way whatsoever. Likewise, religious propaganda sites like BioLogos and Peaceful Science are free to lead and mislead whomever wishes to be led. All anyone can do is point out the recorded facts for those who are genuinely seeking to know the record.
In Art Hunt’s cited paper we find this claim,
And yet,
In short, “Tawfik soberly recognizes the problem. The appearance of early protein families, he has remarked, is “something like close to a miracle.”45,,,
“In fact, to our knowledge,” Tawfik and Tóth-Petróczy write, “no macromutations … that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.”69”,, “The emerging picture, once luminous, has settled to gray. It is not clear how natural selection can operate in the origin of folds or active site architecture (of proteins). It is equally unclear how either micromutations or macromutations could repeatedly and reliably lead to large evolutionary transitions. What remains is a deep, tantalizing, perhaps immovable mystery.”
GP @49:
As clearly reasonable and convincing as this may sound, it’s not understood by many highly educated folks, like JS and AH at PS. Why?
What keeps those intelligent folks from understanding such a rational explanation?
Any clues?
In further critique of naturalistic origin of life (OOL) scenarios:
In response to the preceding video, a Darwinist quipped,
To which I responded as such,
In the video, Dr James Tour, (who is very well respected for his breakthroughs in synthetic chemistry, and who is regarded as one of the top ten synthetic chemists in the world), states the insurmountable problem for atheistic materialists as such:
What Dr. Tour touched upon in that preceding comment is the fact that having the correct sequential information in DNA is not nearly enough. Besides the sequential information in DNA there is also a vast amount of ‘positional information’ in the cell that must be accounted for as well.
The positional information that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be on the order 10 to the 12 bits,,, which is several orders of magnitude more information than the amount of sequential information that is encoded on the DNA of a ‘simple’ bacterium.
,,, Which is the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
And in regards to this vast amount of positional information that must be accounted for in order to account for the Origin of Life, in the following 2010 experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, it was demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position converts information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
Again to repeat that last sentence, “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.””
Think about that statement for a second. That statement should send a chill down the spine of every ID proponent.
These experiments completely blow the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolution, (presuppositions about information being merely ’emergent’ from some material basis), entirely out of the water and also directly show that information is a property of an ‘observer’ who describes the system and is not a property of the (material) system itself as Darwinists presuppose.
On top of that, ‘classical’ sequential information is found to be a subset of quantum positional information by the following method:
Specifically, in the following 2011 paper, researchers ,,, show that when the bits (in a computer) to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that (in quantum information theory) an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.
To say that “entropy is always dependent on the observer” is antithetical to the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolution is to make a severe understatement.
An ocean of ink has been spilled by Darwinists arguing against Intelligence. Much less will Darwinists concede that an Intelligent “Observer” is needed for the Origin of Life (nor the subsequent diversification of life). In fact Intelligent “Observers” don’t even come into play in the Darwinian scenario until long after the origin of life. And even then Darwinists have argued, via population genetics, that our observations are illusory and therefore unreliable. (Donald Hoffman)
Of course, Darwinists could, like Dawkins and Crick did, appeal to Intelligent Extra-Terrestrials in order to try to ‘explain away’ the Origin of Life and avoid the obvious Theistic implications that follow from these recent developments in quantum information theory, but that evidence-free act of desperation on their part, number 1, concedes the necessity of Intelligence in explaining the Origin of Life, and number 2, only pushes the problem back into imaginative and basically untestable speculations.
So to further establish that the Designer of Life must be God, it is necessary to point out that “quantum information” is, number one, found to be ubiquitous within life:
And number two, quantum information in particular requires a non-local, beyond space and time, cause in order to explain its existence: As the following article stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
Darwinian materialists simple have no beyond space and time cause to appeal to in order to explain this quantum information, whereas Christian Theists do:
Bottom line, these developments in quantum information theory go to the very heart of the ID vs. Evolution debate and directly falsify, number one, Darwinian claims that immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from some material basis. And number two, these experimental realizations of the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment go even further and also directly validate a primary claim from ID proponents. Specifically, the primary claim that an Intelligent Designer who imparts information directly into a biological system is required in order to circumvent the second law and to therefore give an adequate explanation of life. And number three, due to quantum non-locality, a beyond space and time cause must be appealed in order to explain the quantum information that is ubiquitous within life. In short, in any coherent explanation for life, and far as the empirical science of Quantum Information theory itself is concerned, God, Who is, by definition, beyond space and time, must ultimately be appealed to in order to give an adequate causal explanation of life.
Of course, since this is empirical science instead of unrestrained imagination, don’r expect Darwinists to be forthcoming to these developments in science any time soon.
Upright BiPed @57:
You did not present any convincing argument against the paper ET cited @54 as referenced by professor Art Hunt. The given paper presents very solid scientific proofs. Do you have anything to say that won’t make me yawn? You said that you’re familiar with that paper. Did you read it well? Did you understand it? Do you see anything that may disqualify or at least weaken the authors’ conclusions?
PU states “The given paper presents very solid scientific proofs.”
Really??? Perhaps you would like to lay out some of those supposedly “very solid scientific proofs” that you imagine exist in the paper??? Like say for instance, perhaps you could lay out the “very solid scientific proof” for the origin of a single functional protein? (see post 58).
PavelU- That paper didn’t present anything but speculation. There wasn’t any proofs. No one has ever shown that nature can produce replicating RNAs. No one has ever shown that nature can produce tRNAs. No one has shown that nature can produce proteins.
All that paper represents is a narrative- it may sound like science but it lacks science.
Bornagain77 @62 & ET @63:
It’s all well described in the given paper. Just read it and try to understand it well. It may take some time to get through all the details, which are so thoroughly and extensively described.
This paper is such a game changer that no further debate is necessary.
Perhaps that’s why Dr Swamidass decided to stop the discussion with Gpuccio at the Peaceful Science website.
Game over. Their argument is more reasonably scientific than your philosophical guessing. They won. You all lost.
Read the paper suggested by Professor Art Hunt and be sufficiently humble to accept that fact.
You may want to call your experts Dr Behe et al. to give you a hand understanding that paper.
PavelU- I have read the paper and I know you are lying about what it contains. What I posted in 63 are facts.
That paper doesn’t contain any science to support its claims. the authors say what they wrote is “sketchy and speculative”- the AUTHORS said that. So please stop spewing lies.
ET to PU:
To wit:
On top of that the paper also honestly admitted that, “life is more sophisticated than any man-made computer system,,,”
Yet, even though they conceded that their attempts to explain how something “more sophisticated than any man-made computer system” came about were quote unquote “sketchy and speculative”, none-the-less, PU, without a hint that he actually understood what they wrote in the paper, claimed that,
To which ET responded
Ditto! To which I can only add that PU’s comment is pure poppycock!
Guys, I could be wrong, but I think Pavel is one of Dio’s socks, so …
As I posted- They have an admittedly “sketchy and speculative” narrative but with it the scientific testing can begin. Although I am in awe of anyone who can read that paper and hold out any hope for nature getting it done. It takes a special type of person to be able to do that and be serious about it.
@ET, the problem is that it seems materialistic science gets all the results, because you can at least in theory exactly understand and manipulate the how. If an intelligent mind did it, that’s about all you can conclude. You cannot dissemble the mechanism and reuse it for your own purpose. And previously, people used to believe intelligent minds guided everything, i.e. spirits, and we made no scientific progress. So, that is why the inclination is to avoid mind based explanations as much as possible, and instead seek stochastic mechanisms. If you asked an ancient person ‘what if you just haven’t discovered the mechanism yet?’ they would scoff and point out how much more easily they can explain things by appealing to spirits. It’s easier to explain diseases as demons rather than bacteria, and the latter explanation would never have occurred to an ancient person.
This, I believe, is the main impediment to getting ID accepted. It looks a whole lot like the ancient way of thinking that was a science stopper. That’s why ID needs to present something that’s useful and gets results beyond “Darwinism is false”, or find some other way to clearly show it’s a scientifically useful hypothesis. Otherwise, the unknown possible chance hypotheses out there could be just as fruitful as the theory of gravity, microbiology, molecular chemistry, and so on. Yet, if we just reject the possibility of such alternate hypotheses because something has a high CSI score and say “an intelligent agent did it”, then it looks like ID is a science stopper, not a science starter.
That is why a theory as bad as Darwinism gets so much traction. It is a completely materialistic ‘how’ and while the original theory might completely not match the data, at least there is a material theory that can be refined with further material theories, and retain the possibility of a ‘how’ that we can deconstruct and use.
EricMH- What results has materialistic science provided? And I disagree. We can conclude quite a bit from any given design inference. We know nature didn’t do it. And we would conclude there was a purpose behind it. By studying it we may be able to reverse engineer it.
How is ID useful- see comment 45
@ET doesn’t it seem like all of modern science is materialistic, and that it has progressed precisely because scientists have sought materialistic mechanisms that underly observed phenomena, instead of assuming spirits, vital forces, etc.?
I think you mean that the presupposition of a mind means people sought structure in reality. But, a mind has been presupposed since at least Plato’s time, and modern science is a pretty recent phenomena. Seems a commitment to materialistic explanations is what moved things forward, so methodological naturalism guided by philosophical theism is what gets results.
However, ID’s big claim is that it is a science, not a philosophy. So, what does ID offer beyond methodological naturalism guided by theism?
For your list of ID benefits:
#1 seems to be covered under philosophy, seems too general to be the topic of science
#2 why does this need ID? can’t we compare genomes without assuming ID?
#3 not sure how ID contributes, and not sure what it means. Are you proposing vitalism?
#4 ID is not necessary, all that is required is to observe the large amount of non-random structure in the genome
#5 is interesting, though sounds speculative and not exactly normal science
And yet #1 is a very important question. A question that, amazingly enough, may have been partially answered in “The Privileged Planet”. For that matter most of science was once centered around the idea that science was a methodology to understand God’s Creation. Understanding there is a purpose to our existence should unite the world in trying to figure that out. That would be job 1. And hopefully the answer isn’t “42”, because that means we asked the wrong question.
The second one is not about comparing genomes. It’s about repairing them. That is once we figure out the design well enough to repair it.
The third point- see “Nature’s Destiny” and “Why is a Fly Not a Horse?”. We have no idea what determines form. Yes, we know that genotypes control and genes influence development. But neither of those determine the final form. It’s that immaterial information that sets ID apart. You want to call it vitalism, I don’t care. ID is all about the claim that materialistic processes cannot produce life because life is not reducible to matter, energy and what emerges from their interactions. So yes, there is something else. And clearly we are missing it because no one is even looking
Point 4- not sure what non-random structure means with regards to the point. And only ID would predict/ expect there to be immaterial information that requires storage and access.
Point 5- See SETI. It would be HUGE. And if science followed the lead of “The Privileged Planet”, we would have a real good chance at finding them.
All that said, in 1997 Dr. Lee Spetner wrote “Not By Chance”. In it he proposed his “non-random evolutionary hypothesis” with the mechanism of “built-in responses to environmental cues”. That is opposed to changes just happening, just happening to get through the proof reading and error correction and just happening not to muck things up. That book was a direct response to “The Blind Watchmaker”.
Then consider our planet. I never understood the abundance of nitrogen in the atmosphere until I read that lightning produces nitrates because of it. And those then rain down and fertilize the soil. Then we have:
There isn’t any materialistic explanation for any of that.
@ET, these points do sound interesting, but they also sound largely speculative, or ideas that can be investigated within methodological naturalism + theism. For instance, if “the genome stores immaterial information” means the same thing as a computer hard drive, then while we might call the information “immaterial” the operation of everything in the hard drive is completely physical. If we identify structure in the genome, just like we identified the genetic code in the first place, it is still an entirely physical structure that can be analyzed like physically instantiated software code, which is compatible with methodological naturalism. Besides a single immaterial mind to start it all, it is hard to see what ID contributes to the specific methodology of science, besides maybe big picture question and direction, which still sounds largely philosophical and outside of the day-to-day scientific experimentation that normally characterizes something as science.
The only specific, positive IDish result I’ve seen is Dr. Ewert’s dependency graph of life, but even there it isn’t ID per se that provided a positive contribution. It is primarily eliminating the negative restriction of presupposing Darwinian evolution allows one to infer a more general graph structure instead of a phylogenetic tree. The inspiration of looking for the graph comes from drawing an analogy with human generated computer code, so there is a positive contribution from ID theory, but not specific like in the way the theory of gravity can allow us to make specific predictions about the trajectory of a cannonball. So, it is still ID operating more as inspiration than a specific, quantifiable theory.
But, already that’s a huge step beyond what we currently have, so perhaps this is just quibbling.
BB @ 46,
> In short, to confirm design of the message we need knowledge about the language being used, or encryption techniques if it is encrypted.
I think the improbability of finding characters on paper (or bits over a wire) is quite sufficient to rule out chance or necessity. No further confirmation of that is necessary. So your point is more relevant to ID than I originally thought: We recognize design in nature, and now we know what the further work is that needs to be tackled.
EricMH- What I am saying is that there is information that cannot be seen with a microscope. It directs the hardware that the microscope can uncover. The information is not in the sequence. The sequence specificity is what carries out the instructions. It directs the editing and splicing. It directs the transcription and translation. Those processes don’t just happen. There isn’t any materialistic explanation for how it all works. How the ribosome is a genetic compiler is not reducible to its proteins and RNAs.
Under MN biologists do NOT know what determines form. Under ID we should be able to flesh that out.
See, to me, I know it matters to any investigation, as in how it proceeds, if what it is being investigated arose by nature, operating freely or via some intelligent agency. That determination alone is key to the investigation. You look for different things. You can even place yourself in the driver’s seat and figure out how YOU would have done it. Then test that idea.
Archeology and forensic science tell us the value of the design inference. So I guess it’s OK as long as it’s intelligent design and not Intelligent Design.
EricMH,
I think I see your point, which seems to make sense. However, apparently it has been noted -though I don’t recall any specific source now- that the Darwinian ideas have negatively affected the progress of biology research at some points in science history. I think in one case wrong assumptions have been used for too long as the basis for keeping researchers from having open minds when investigating complex biological systems. Apparently for quite too long scientists didn’t look into the so-called “junk DNA” for answers to their numerous questions on controls and functional information. The ID paradigm has opened scientists’ minds to look for answers to the increasing number of questions piling up after each research discovery.
I think the ID paradigm has reinforced the idea that before we talk about how the biological systems appeared on the scene, we should try to understand them well.
So interesting.
Well said Upright on Specifications.
Specifications can also include plans for alternative splicing 🙂
Amazing the level of code and specifications in each cell.
How can Error Correction arise in blind, unguided mutations to inspect and repair systems w/o specific foreknowledge of the broken sequence and correct sequence?
In Design, “How” is not a problem.
The problem exist for Darwinist because blind steps have no clue how to Error Check anything, let alone repair it to original state.
Why do Darwinist have the right to steal the Logic of Design principles? And still claim a series of blind steps Did it?
Pretending a series of blind steps can integrate complex systems and signal processing between these systems?
How does a series of blind mutations understand anything?
Design principles are well known.
Blind, random mutations are not well known and can lead to fatality as we discover more each day in formerly misnamed JUNK DNA.
Stop stealing the logic of Design principles and pretending blind, unguided mutations can be logical.
Error Correction systems must be pre-programmed for error correction based upon strict specifications that limit change except in areas that allow variation.
EricMH claims
That certainly sounds like a NSCE talking point, or even something that Judge Jones might have said during the Dover trial, than it sounds like something an ID proponent would say.
Many scientists, including many scientists who personally believe in God, erroneously believe that methodological naturalism is the required assumption for doing science:
In fact, the judge in the Dover case, who ruled against Intelligent Design being taught in schools, concluded that “Methodological naturalism is a ‘ground rule’ of science today”
Yet, contrary to what many people believe, and what many leading universities teach, “Methodological naturalism is certainly NOT a ‘ground rule’ of science today”.
As Karl Popper clearly illustrated, if there is to be one ‘ground rule for science’, then that one ground rule for science, (a ground rule that clearly demarcates whether a theory is even scientific or not), is whether or not that theory is falsifiable. As Karl Popper stated “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
In fact Popper explicitly rejected the naturalistic worldview, i.e. “I reject the naturalistic view: It is uncritical.,,, is liable to turn into a dogma”
And on the ground rule of Popper’s falsification criteria for science, (instead of the falsely imposed ground rule of methodological Naturalism), Darwinism is found to fail to even qualify as a science in the first place.
In fact, it is not that Darwinism is not falsifiable, it has been falsified many times over, it is that Darwinists simply refuse to ever accept any empirical falsification against their theory.
Here are a few falsification of Darwin’s theory that Darwinists simply refuse to ever accept as falsifications for their theory
Verse:
Besides Darwinists refusing to adhere to the criteria of falsification for their supposed scientific theory, by any other reasonable measure that one may wish to judge whether a theory is scientific or not, Darwinism fails to meet those criteria as well:
Simply put, Darwinian evolution is more properly classified as a pseudoscience, even as a religion for atheists, rather than being classified as a real science in any meaningful sense.
In fact, all of science, every nook and cranny of it, is based on intelligent design and is certainly not based on methodological naturalism as is falsely presupposed by atheistic Darwinists (and as is, apparently, also falsely presupposed by some misguided Christians).
From the essential Christian presuppositions that undergird the founding of modern science, (i.e. that the universe is rational and that the minds of men, being made in the ‘image of God’, can dare understand that rationality), to the intelligent design of the scientific instruments and experiments themselves, to the logical and mathematical analysis of experimental results, from top to bottom science itself is certainly not ‘natural’.
Not one scientific instrument would ever exist if men did not first intelligently design that scientific instrument. Not one test tube, microscope, telescope, spectroscope, or etc.. etc.., was ever found just laying around on a beach somewhere which was ‘naturally’ constructed by nature. Not one experimental result would ever be rationally analysed since there would be no immaterial minds to rationally analyze the immaterial mathematics that lay behind the intelligently designed experiments in the first place.
In fact, (as I have pointed out several times now), assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.
Thus, although the Darwinian atheist may firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
As to this claim from EricMH in particular,
Actually, contrary to what is falsely taught in many universities today, and what EricMH apparently believes, of naturalism and/or methodological naturalism being the supposed ground rule for science, the fact of the matter is that it is when the Christian worldview came to dominate medieval Europe that the fairly ‘recent phenomena’ of modern science was born and that is what allowed things to move forward.
Little known by most people today is the fact that almost every, if not every, major branch of modern science has been founded by a scientist who deeply believed in Christ:
The assumption of materialism and/or methodological naturalism simply had NOTHING to do with the founding of modern science. In fact, several of the founders of modern science argued vehemently against the assumption of materialism,,,, to repeat the last sentence of my last citation
Moreover, Stephen Meyer himself has a book coming out on this subject in April 2020 that will (hopefully) clear up much of the confusion that is generated by people naively invoking the false doctrine of methodological naturalism. A false doctrine, as EricMH himself gives witness to, that seems to be prevalent within our universities and our education system in general.
Much more could be said on this subject, (such as the fact that advances in quantum mechanics have now falsified materialism itself), that show that methodological naturalism, far from being the supposed ground rule of science, is actually a hindrance to science that drives it into catastrophic epistemological failure. But hopefully, with what has been laid out thus far in this post, EricMH can now see that his assumption of methodological naturalism, as the supposed ground rule for science, is far from what he, apparently, has been falsely taught to believe that it is. Far from it.
Verse:
Put me down for membership in the tribe that doesn’t think that science is only about a “commitment to materialistic explanations.”
This is a commitment to hide from reality. No thanks.
Andrew
@BA77 I believe we are talking past each other. I am aware much of science came from theists, and seems to have occurred in a uniquely Christian setting. However, the point I’m making is that the concrete scientific theories themselves that make the specific testable predictions do not refer to anything other than physical processes and mathematical formula. In this sense, methodological naturalism seems to be how science currently proceeds and is what has made it successful. On the other hand, as you point out, philosophical theism is the motivating force for much of science.
Yet, this is not the official ID claim. ID is not stating it is a philosophical conclusion that provides a high level guidance and motivation. ID’s claim to fame is that it is a unique form of science, able to make specific predictions and hypotheses like physics and chemistry, and thus should be taught alongside other sciences. If ID were merely a philosophical conclusion or apologetic argument, it is nothing new, and does not merit all the attention that has been paid to it, since there are already many similar such arguments for God within philosophy and theology, such as Aquinas five ways.
So, if ID really is a science, what specific and testable predictions does it make that makes it more than methodological naturalism? If ID just says “it’s designed, so look for structure” ID has nothing more to offer than the traditional methodological naturalism + philosophical theism.
If, on the other hand, the point of ID is just to eliminate the presupposition of philosophical naturalism from the sciences, that’s fine, but that’s the job of a philosopher, not of a science practitioner, and again ID is not a scientific theory.
Or, if the point is to eliminate Darwinism, that’s fine too, but then ID is irrelevant, because ID is consistent with both Darwinism (frontloading) and its negation (continuous info addition), as well as atheism and its negation (theism). In this case, the real debate is between some form of creationism and Darwinian evolutionists, and ID should be taken out of the picture.
So, again, what is the specific, testable contribution that makes ID a science? What are the specific methodologies and explanations that ID introduces that science has lacked up until now, that are not just high level philosophical claims?
@ET, your claim does sound somewhat specific, but how can you concretely show there is information that is not somehow embedded in the physical matter involved in fetal development? It sounds like a philosophically interesting position, but not empirically testable. The way you present it, the claims sounds like an appeal to ignorance.
EricMH, you claim.
And what is blue blazes is ‘natural’ about applying mathematical formula to the universe? Both Einstein and Wigner are on record as regarding the applicability of mathematics to the universe as a inexplicable miracle. Miracles are about as far away from methodological naturalism as you can get! You, like Darwinists in general, are simply trying to impose the false doctrine of methodological naturalism where is it has no place being. That you are basically in lock step with Darwinian talking points ought to be a huge red flag for you that you are on the wrong track.
To repeat, there is nothing natural about man doing science.
In fact, (as I have pointed out several times now), assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.
Thus, although the Darwinian atheist (and the misguided Christian) may firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
@Asauber, what non materialistic scientific theories are there? Can you name one that is not a high level philosophical claim, but makes specific quantifiable predictions that we can test?
I’m not saying science has to be that way, nor does methodological naturalism preclude philosophical theism. Scientists are free to come up with any sort of theory they want and believe what they want. I am saying that all the successful scientific theories seem to be of the materialistic variety.
“what non materialistic scientific theories are there”
How about math? Logic?
Andrew
@BA77 you seem to be confusing methodological naturalism with philosophical naturalism. I am saying successful scientific theories seems to be of the former variety, to propose specific materialistic mechanisms that guide physical phenomena, even though the scientists themselves may be guided by non naturalistic philosophy.
@Asauber, math and logic don’t do things. Science consists of theories about things that happen. I don’t know of any scientific theories that are not materialistic. It just seems like the nature of science that it must be materialistic, because the topic of science is things we can predict and control. We cannot predict and control a person with free will in the same way, so we cannot have a scientific theory of free will.
“I don’t know of any scientific theories that are not materialistic”
EricMH,
Then I would caution you about immersing yourself in the science=materialism culture. It doesn’t explain a lot of what you experience on a second by second basis. There are a lot of weird self-defeating beliefs that culture holds for some reason. It’s a non-starter, IMO.
Andrew
EricMH:
That sounds like MN.
My claim should be empirically testable. All one needs to do is synthesize every part of a minimal cell, put it together and see if it works. If I am right it won’t.
@Asauber, I agree materialism does not explain the majority of what we experience, and cannot explain itself without self contradiction. But, that doesn’t mean the majority of what we experience can be scientifically analyzed. Again, we are mixing methodological naturalism with philosophical naturalism and scientism.
It might be the case that only materialistic phenomenon can be scientifically analyzed. People can go in two directions from this observation. Either, like the materialists, they assume everything can be scientifically analyzed, and therefore everything is reduced to matter (scientism). Or, the common sense position is to not assume more than we know, and thus not assume everything can be scientifically analyzed. And again, this does not depend on claiming ID is a scientific discipline. It just depends on avoiding scientism.
@ET, I see two problems with what you propose:
A) it doesn’t seem to be scientifically tractable, at least not within our lifetimes
B) even if we put it all together and it doesn’t do anything, it’s not clear what this demonstrates
For instance, I can assemble all the parts of a computer and put them together, but they will not do anything until I turn on the power. This doesn’t demonstrate there is some ethereal source of information that makes the computer work.
“this does not depend on claiming ID is a scientific discipline”
EricMH,
Well for me, science has to include what we observe. ID is in there.
Andrew
@Asauber, sure, you can call everything science if you want. But, that’s a different usage of the term than what people normally mean. When I hear ID claiming it is science, I think it means it is on par with physics and chemistry in terms of quantifiable predictions and experiments. I don’t think ID claims are like saying “roses are red and chocolate ice cream tastes good”, i.e. qualitative and subjective claims, which can still be true and significant, but such claims are not the topic of scientific research and do not drive technological advancement. “Science” means the latter in most people’s minds, I believe. If ID cannot produce the latter, then it probably should not call itself “science”. Instead, it should call itself “philosophy”, but then ID loses its significance because there are already plenty of philosophical arguments about the source of our universe.
ID’s one and only claim of significance is that it is a hard science like physics and chemistry. If it is not, then all the hoopla of the past couple decades is for nothing, and the critics are ultimately right (even if their specific arguments are fairly lame).
EricMH- There is plenty with MN that remains untestable. How we came to be is untestable. How vision systems came to be is untestable. How our planet came to be is untestable. How the laws that govern the universe came to be is untestable. That the genetic code just runs is untestable. The list is dang- near endless. Another example is that we cannot test the claim that a living organism is reducible to physics and chemistry.
And by the way, organisms do not have a plug. If you assembled a computer and didn’t realize it had to be plugged in and programmed, well, that is on you and you alone.
You want to talk mechanisms, fine. If Venter or anyone else genetically engineered a bacterial flagellum into existence, would that be evidence for an ID mechanism?
Science requires the claims being made to be testable. ID has that. We can use our knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships to determine if intelligent design exists. We have the criteria that Dr. Behe has provided as a guide.
And the design inference remains potentially falsifiable just by demonstrating physics and chemistry can produce it.
Sounds like science to me.
“you can call everything science if you want”
EricMH,
I don’t want to call everything science, and I don’t think I am. I think observing/perceiving something and then calling that observation “not science” is an error, and requires a non-scientific philosophical commitment. Again, no thanks. I would just be resisting reality.
Andrew
@ET you are mixing methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism. Methodological naturalism does not need to explain the origin of anything. The origin may well transcend the realm of science. The point of methodological naturalism is that it is a reliable way to understand and control the physical phenomena we face on a daily basis.
Philosophical naturalism, on the other hand, is the proposition that the origin of everything is the same as the materialistic operation, and that proposition is unfounded.
If Venter created life in the lab from scratch, I don’t see how that is any different than a programmer writing a complex program. It maybe demonstrates that philosophical naturalism is false, but it does not give us a scientific theory of intelligent design.
And the design inference is impossible to falsify. It is essentially a truism. Physics and chemistry operate according to chance and necessity, and so will always provide non positive CSI. On the other hand, if you perform a CSI calculation that gives a positive result, what does this demonstrate? E.g. with the run of heads example I gave before, this might just mean we have not accounted for all possible chance hypotheses. And once we have accounted for all chance hypotheses, can anything provide a positive CSI reading? E.g. maybe we have just left the intelligent agent out of our calculation, and that is what makes it positive. But, then we are engaged in special pleading. We can only avoid this if we include the intelligent agent in our chance hypothesis. But then, what is the nature of intelligence that if we include intelligent agency in our calculation then it must give us a positive CSI reading? For example, in your vitalist scenario, information from another realm is not going to give us a positive CSI reading, if we include this other realm in our calculation. We only get positive CSI if we leave some causal source out of our calculation, and again that is special pleading. So, CSI itself cannot tell us whether anything is an intelligent agent or not, because whatever cause for the effect that you leave out can be the source of the positive CSI, and the cause may or may not be intelligent. All CSI tells us is that our causal explanation for some effect is incomplete. In which case, it is no different than a Bayesian likelihood test. Nor does CSI eliminate chance and necessity, because we have to leave a chance and necessity cause out of our explanation in order to get positive CSI. So, again, ID does not contribute anything new here.
@Asauber, my point is there are a vast multitude of things we observe in our everyday lives that are true, reliable, and understandable. But, most do not meet the level of rigor and prediction that characterize the sciences. ID claims to meet this level of rigor. But it is unclear how ID substantiates this claim as a positive science.
Geeze you are one confused little pup EricMH. You state,
No I am not, you are the one is confused and who falsely believes that methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism can be kept in separate boxes. Yet, as William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, and Paul Nelson have pointed out, (and as should be glaringly obvious to you), to say that only materialistic answers are ever allowed to be given, i.e. methodological naturalism, is in effect to assume that philosophical naturalism is true and is to effectively cast by the wayside all the essential Theistic presuppositions, even the essential Christian, presuppositions, that enabled and continue to enable us to practice science in a coherent fashion in the first place.
In further confusion, EricMH also claims that
If anything can be said to ‘guide physical phenomena’ it is certainly not ‘materialistic mechanisms’.
‘Materialistic mechanisms’ do not ‘guide’ anything, physical or otherwise. There is not one example from science that you can give for your claim that a ‘materialistic mechanisms guide physical phenomena’. For prime example, and contrary to popular belief, Newton certainly did not think that gravity was some kind of ‘materialistic mechanism’.
In fact, only immaterial minds have the capacity, within themselves, to guide physical objects towards a goal, i.e. teleology, which is something that methological naturalism explicitly denies,
As humans, we witness this teleology of our immaterial minds constantly when we intelligently design objects from material substrates in order to accomplish goals that we have in mind. Moreover, as Dr. Egnor makes clear in the following article, we see this teleological design, i.e. goal directed guidance imposed on physical objects, reflected in nature.
Bottom line EricMH you are stuck in the mud because of the false doctrine of methodological naturalism that you falsely imagine must somehow be essential to science.
One final note, in your response to ET, you seem to have a very limited view of how we can scientifically detect the physical reality of immaterial information.
Although there are many examples I can give, my favorite method for demonstrating the physical reality of immaterial information is with quantum teleportation:
The coup de grace for demonstrating that immaterial information is its own distinct physical entity, separate from matter and energy, is Quantum Teleportation:
The preceding experimental result should make the head spin of anyone who toes the methodological naturalism party line. 🙂
of supplemental note:
EreicMH:
Of course it does. One of the basic questions science asks is “how did it come to be this way (the way it is)?”
All evidence to the contrary. IDists have said exactly what will falsify ID.
Is there a scientific theory of archaeology or forensic science? Is there a scientific theory of evolution? If there is no one can link to it.
If it can be demonstrated that nature can produce a living organisms, ID would be falsified.
That said, proof-reading, error- correction, editing and splicing all require knowledge that doesn’t exist in the basic molecules used to carry out those processes. That alone tells us there is something we cannot see ruling over life at the cellular level.
Has a troll taken over Eric’s account?
@BA77, no, I think ID is failing to deliver on its promise to be a science.
Further, I do not claim that science must follow methodological naturalism. I am stating that all successful science seems to do so. If ID claims to diverge from this pattern, then it needs to provide an alternative.
And you are, once again, wrong. Unlike Darwinism, ID is falsifiable and ID is a driver of science.
I could reference those facts, but alas, I’m tired of you wasting my morning and referencing stuff that you do not even pay attention to. I’m out of here.
@BA77 I’ve read through everything you posted. I do not believe you are carefully reading and understanding the distinctions I am making.
Additionally, I do not think ID cannot be science.
Rather, from my perspective, ID made a good start, with bold claims, and actually established a scientific direction at the beginning. But since then, ID has lost its way and become enamored of creationism vs evolution, apologetics and the culture wars, and lost the actual scientific aspect it originally had. So, ID has failed to follow through, and is riding on the cultural momentum of the original claims without making progress.
Science asks 3 basic Questions and ID attempts to answer them.
Methodological naturalism? I think not…
Irreducible complexity is a testable claim. Discrete combinatorial objects is a testable claim. Sequence specificity is a testable claim.
That transcription and translation just happen is not a testable claim. That the earth exists due to innumerable cosmic collisions and gravity, is an untestable claim.
Kudos to EricMH at 104 for a candid assessment from an ID supporter.
This resonates with points I made earlier. One accepts ID as a scientific claim. Then what? What further scientific investigations does one then propose? Battling atheists and other culture war issues is not science, and doesn’t further the ID cause: in fact, it reinforces the perception among some (many) that ID is in fact not a scientific enterprise, burt rather a philosophical/theological/cultural/political movement.
At 81, EricMH made another good point:
LoL! @ hazel- EricMH is wrong. ID has all the hallmarks of science. And there still isn’t a scientific alternative to ID.
What predictions are borne from blind watchmaker evolution? If you cannot say then clearly you are part of the problem
Already covered.
@ET, like I said, I do not think ID cannot be a science. Just that currently it is not doing so well as such. Nor does the failure of Darwinism mean that ID is a science.
Well Eric, ID makes testable claims and can be potentially falsified. You want predictions? ID predicts there is more to life than what meets the eye. That life is not reducible to physics and chemistry. And that we will find signs of intelligent agency activity. IC is such a sign, Eric.
And the failure of materialistic explanations does help ID as science mandates design inferences first eliminate materialistic explanations as part of parsimony.
@ET, like I said, such predictions are high level philosophical sorts of claims. Nor is it clear ID is necessary to make such claims. All we need to do is deny philosophical naturalism and scientism, which are philosophical positions. Finally, I would not call such claims science, at least not the sort of science that physics and chemistry are.
Claiming ID is a philosophy and not a science is not at all controversial. Just about all the critics are fine with calling ID a philosophy. It is when ID claims to be a science on the level of physics and chemistry that the controversy arises.
OT:
https://www.popsci.com/evolution-linear-branch/
Popular Science: current title: Evolution doesn’t work the way you think it does
Proposed Fix: Evolution doesn’t work (well, it’s shorter, anyway)
EricMH:
Just because you say it doesn’t make it so.
It is to me and many, many others.
ID is based on three premises and the inference that follows (DeWolf et al., Darwinism, Design and Public Education, pg. 92):
Those are the core concepts of ID and to falsify Intelligent Design all one has to do is demonstrate that natural selection can produce irreducibly complex biological systems.
@ET, yes I get the argument, but how does that result in a positive scientific research program, besides high level guidance like ‘look for structure’, or ‘an intelligent agent did it’? This is no different than what has guided most scientists before the modern era, and they seem to have mostly followed methodological naturalism in formulating their precise scientific theories. At the very least, ID is not scientific like the theory of gravity which provides very specific predictions that are precise enough that we can send people to the moon and launch missiles that can hit other countries.
Of course, Darwinism doesn’t meet this criterion either. I would also say Darwinism and evolution in general are more philosophical than they are scientific. However, the difference is that if Darwinism were true, then we could use Darwinian theory to make specific physical predictions, at least in principle. It’s harder to see how this could happen with ID.
I would most like to be wrong, and believe that I am, but the ID movement, with one or two notable exceptions, has not generated much positive science. It seems to have turned into an anti-Darwin and culture war/apologetics movement. If that’s what the Discovery Institute wants to be, that is fine, but they should not promote themselves as providing a new scientific paradigm.
Eric, although I think that ID with respect to biology is dead in the water, I think that you have made some very good points. In particular, and correct me if I am getting your point wrong, ID is doing itself a disservice by refusing to address the nature (limitations) of the designer and the possible ways in which these designs are/were implemented. By making these leaps, ID can become more respected as a field of science because these hypotheses can be investigated and tested. Much like we have been doing for over a century with evolution.
Brother Brian:
What a joke. ID offers the only scientific explanation with respect to biology.
Those don’t have anything to do with ID. Also we know a designer’s limitations by what said designer left behind. Duh. And we can only make a scientific determination about the how by studying the design and all relevant evidence.
Evolution does more of a disservice by refusing to address the origin of life. How life originated dictates how it evolved.
You are confused as Intelligent Design is NOT anti-evolution, and peer-review is devoid of support for evolution via blind and mindless processes. You have nothing to account for the major innovations observed in the different Phyla. You have nothing to account for eukaryotes. Endosymbiosis is not your savior.
Blind watchmaker evolution hasn’t advanced our knowledge of biology one bit.
A few notes:
Contrary to what has been falsely alleged in this thread, ID is a driver of science, (instead of being a parasite on science like Darwinism is):
As well, and again contrary to what has been falsely alleged in this thread, ID makes testable predictions:
Intelligent Design, contrary to what many evolutionists (and Theistic Evolutionists) will say publicly, does in fact make solid predictions for science that we can test.
In fact, Testable Predictions for ID and how they match up to what the scientific evidence is now telling us starts at the 15:23 minute mark of the following video:
Moreover, ID, unlike how Darwinists treat their theory, is a potentially falsifiable science: In fact, there is up to a 10 million dollar prize for anyone who can falsify ID
@BB, yes, in a certain respect. As ET and JohnnyB correctly point out, you don’t need such a theory about the designer to detect the design itself. The CSI calculation is designer agnostic. And ET is correct that ID is not dead in the water when it comes to biology. I’d say it is floundering, but not due to the theoretical weakness of ID, but because the movement has become distracted away from pursuing the positive scientific research.
However, without addressing the designer, there is a big question mark, as I’ve pointed out with my questions about eliminating chance and necessity. If we are not going to engage in special pleading, we need to include the designer in our chance hypothesis. This means the designer is a very mysterious sort of entity, because it must be non-stochastic in order to generate a positive CSI score. It must transcend stochastic mechanisms, as one commentator stated. And this is uncharted territory. In all my readings in probability and information theory, I have not seen such a thing described. And ID does itself a disservice if it just says this non-stochastic entity is a ‘designer’ or an ‘intelligent agent’, which are just placeholders like Behe disparages in his book ‘Darwin Devolves’. This is where ID breaks from traditional methodological naturalism, because the entire theoretical content of methodological naturalism is stochastic processes. If ID truly has identified a new thing, a non-stochastic process, then this seems to be a major breakthrough, if it can be characterized scientifically and mathematically. On the other hand, if stochastic processes exhaust the range of scientific explanations, then ID’s appeal to a non-stochastic process is non-scientific, and at that point passes into some other discipline like philosophy or theology.
Yes, they can.
Most, if not all, anti-IDists always try to force any theory of intelligent design to say something about the designer and the process involved BEFORE it can be considered as scientific. This is strange because in every use-able form of design detection in which there isn’t any direct observation or designer input, it works the other way, i.e. first we determine design (or not) and then we determine the process and/ or designer. IOW any and all of our knowledge about the process and/ or designer comes from first detecting and then understanding the design.
IOW reality dictates the only possible way to make any determination about the designer(s) or the specific process(es) used, in the absence of direct observation or designer input, is by studying the design in question.
If anyone doubts that fact then all you have to do is show me a scenario in which the designer(s) or the process(es) were determined without designer input, direct observation or by studying the design in question.
If you can’t than shut up and leave the design detection to those who know what they are doing.
This is a virtue of design-centric venues. It allows us to neatly separate whether something is designed from how it was produced and/ or who produced it (when, where, why):
Stonehenge- design determined; further research to establish how, by whom, why and when.
Nasca Plain, Peru- design determined; further research to establish how, by whom, why and when.
Puma Punku- design determined; further research to establish how, by whom, why and when.
Any artifact (archeology/ anthropology)- design determined; further research to establish how, by whom, why and when- that is unless we have direct observation and/ or designer input.
Fire investigation- if arson is determined (ie design); further research to establish how, by whom, why and when- that is unless we have direct observation and/ or designer input.
An artifact does not stop being an artifact just because we do not know who, what, when, where, why and how. But it would be stupid to dismiss the object as being an artifact just because no one was up to the task of demonstrating a method of production and/ or the designing agent.
And even if we did determine a process by which the object in question may have been produced it does not follow that it will be the process used.
As a comparison no need to look any further than abiogenesis and evolutionism. Evolutionists make those separate questions even though life’s origin bears directly on its subsequent diversity. And just because it is a separate question does not hinder anyone from trying to answer either or both. Forget about a process except for the vague “random mutations, random genetic drift, random recombination culled by natural selection”. And as for a way to test that premise “forgetaboutit”. Also evolutionism is all about the how and when yet it cannot answer those questions scientifically. That must be what pisses them off and causes them to flail away at ID with their ignorance-> if they could support their position’s claims ID would be refuted.
Intellegent Design is about the DESIGN not the designer(s). The design exists in the physical world and as such is open to scientific investigation.
All that said we have made some progress. By going over the evidence we infer that our place in the cosmos was designed for (scientific) discovery. We have also figured out that targeted searches are very powerful design mechanisms when given a resource-rich configuration space.
@BA77, very interesting list, but I would say those fall into the philosophical motivation and analogy category, just like belief in God motivated Newton to look for orderly laws that govern the universe. But, not like how the theory of gravity lets us predict where a rock will land when we throw it.
As an example of what I’m looking for, if ID functioned like, say, chemistry, then we can identify gaps in the data we’ve collected, and make specific predictions about the sort of things that will fill those gaps. Just like with the table of elements, we identified gaps and were able to make predictions about what will fill those gaps. In bioinformatics, when DNA sequences are reconstructed, we know when certain proteins are missing, and can predict what sort of genes we need to still discover. Or, when reverse engineering source code, based on what the designer intended, we can make predictions about what sort of functionality we need to discover, and search it out.
If ID were a positive science, it could make these sorts of specific positive predictions about what sort of pieces fill in gaps in the puzzle.
I think ID is up to the challenge, but have yet to see such a positive approach.
@ET, yes, good points, but in any of those disciplines, if the researcher saw the artifact and said “it’s designed, case closed” it would not be much of a discipline. Because the researcher knows stonehenge is designed, they are able to make certain specific predictions and insights from that fact. What are the specific predictions and insights we get from inferring ID in biology, something on the level of chemistry where we have a very concrete idea of what should be there if the thing is designed?
EricMH:
Archaeology, forensic science and SETI all must deal with beings that transcend stochastic mechanisms. So we do have plenty of experience with it.
@ EricMH- No one in ID says that we have detected design and that’s it. Dembski says quite the opposite.
And I gave you the prediction for design in biology:
“Our ability to be confident of the design of the cilium or intracellular transport rests on the same principles to be confident of the design of anything: the ordering of separate components to achieve an identifiable function that depends sharply on the components.”
He goes on to say: ” Might there be some as-yet-undiscovered natural process that would explain biochemical complexity? No one would be foolish enough to categorically deny the possibility. Nonetheless, we can say that if there is such a process, no one has a clue how it would work. Further, it would go against all human experience, like postulating that a natural process might explain computers.”
To answer the new questions ID opens up requires new training and schooling. Scientists tend to be specialists and right now I don’t know of any specialty that deals with these new questions.
This proves ID isn’t a dead end as it obviously opens up new questions that we, as humans, will clearly try to answer. But this will take time because what the Designer did is far beyond our capabilities. It’s like asking an Amazon tribe to figure out how a smart phone was designed and manufactured. They will definitely be able to tell you it is an artifact, though.
With respect to Intelligent Design and mechanisms, that would pertain to the methodology used to determine whether or not (intelligent) design exists. That is the science of ID-> the detection and study of design in nature. We study it so we can better understand it and hopefully answer those new questions.
Well EricMH, you are all over the map in your criticisms of ID.
First you were claiming that ID needs to toe the methodological naturalism party line. Yet. as Paul Nelson pointed out in his article that I cited, “Methodological Naturalism: A Rule That No One Needs or Obeys”, methodological naturalists do not even toe the methodological naturalism party line unless they are trying to exclude ID from consideration. It is a rhetorical ploy on the part of atheists. Yet, you apparently fell for that rhetorical ploy from atheists hook, line and sinker.
Moreover the fact that all of science is dependent on basic Theistic presuppositions is revealed by the fact that Darwinian arguments are replete with bad theological presuppositions. In fact, their arguments fall apart without those bad Theological presuppositions:
Darwinists, with their vital dependence on bad liberal theology, instead of scientific evidence, in order to try to make their case for Darwinian evolution are, as Cornelius Van Til put it, like the child who must climb up onto his father’s lap into order to slap his face.
I also pointed out that assuming methodological naturalism, i.e. insisting on materialistic answers prior to investigation, is equivalent to assuming that philosophical naturalism is true. For crying out loud, it is a glaringly obvious point that insisting on materialistic answers prior to investigation is functionally equivalent to assuming philosophical naturalism is true from the outset. It is almost embarrassing to even have to point this out to you.
Moreover, I also previously pointed out that assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.
Thus, although the Darwinian atheist (and the misguided Christian) may firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
Apparently none of this mattered to you Eric since you did not even acknowledge your profound mistake in claiming that methodological naturalism as a supposed ground rule for science.
Eric, In the latter part of the thread you wanted ID to be a science like chemistry.
And I would argue that ID, and even the progress of science in general, (since science itself is based on principles that can only be grounded within Theism), is doing exactly as such, although perhaps not specifically to your personally liking. For example,
Now Eric, if you want to get into the business of making successful predictions for ID, might I suggest that you will never go wrong in assuming God to be behind the Design of life and making predictions for ID based on that presupposition?
For instance, as the following recent 2019 article stated (which was written by people who are not even necessarily pro ID), It’s now known that some form of positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location.,,, when researchers have been able to appropriately determine what cells are doing, many have been surprised to see clear indications of optimization.,,,”
“Optimal” is not just some word that they are carelessly tossing around. When they describe a biological system as being in a ‘optimal’ state, they mean exactly what they are saying. As the following article states, “In each instance, biophysicists have calculated, the system couldn’t get faster, more sensitive or more efficient without first relocating to an alternate universe with alternate physical constants.”
Moreover, as the following article states, “There are a surprisingly limited number of ways a network could be constructed to perform perfect adaptation.”,,, Moreover, the “amazing and surprising” outcome of the study is applicable to any living organism or biochemical network of any size.,,,”
Thus, contrary to what you believe Eric, ID is doing quite well as science advances one slow step at a time.
@BA77, I think you are missing my point about the distinction between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism. The latter would imply there is no structure to be discovered in the world, but the former means we focus on stochastic explanations for the phenomena we see within science, since that has been the most successful path science has followed. That doesn’t mean we can only draw materialistic conclusions from what we observe, but such conclusions are not science of the physics and chemistry variety that allow us to make specific predictions about the world. So, we are free to draw the ID conclusion, but it is not a hard science, at least not yet, so we shouldn’t say it is.
@ET, you and I seem to agree. The inference to design is warranted, but the state of ID is not such that we can use it to make specific predictions about the world, so it is not a science in the same way physics and chemistry are sciences. And I see almost no progress in that direction. The Discovery Institute and Bio-Complexity seem content to mostly identify the shortcomings of Darwinism, and Mind Matters is mostly focused on the shortcomings of stochastic theories of mind, i.e. artificial intelligence. But nowhere do I see much of a positive project to show what the science of ID itself is, to make an ID science that can make rigorous predictions about the world like physics and chemistry, so we can actually say ID is truly a science. The singular exception to this negative trend is Dr. Ewert’s dependency graph of life paper.
So, as a movement, I cannot say that ID is much of a scientific movement. It seems more to be focused on the culture wars, which may be terribly important, but are also terribly boring. In my opinion, presenting a positive case for ID would be much more successful, both on its own merits, and in the culture wars. Just as with atheism it is hard to rally around a negative cause. If ID truly offered a positive science that was providing decisive insights that elude current methodological naturalism, I think that would be much more attractive to those currently wedded to Darwinian evolution.
EricMH, you repeated this false claim,
I am missing nothing. To reiterate,
Eric, this is the second time that you have claimed that,,,
To clearly define your terms so to dispel any ambiguity,,
My first reaction is that you have got to be a atheistic troll who has taken over Eric’s handle. That claim is pure balderdash. Presupposing things are ‘randomly determined’, i.e. without ‘method or conscious decision’, is a Atheistic presupposition that had nothing to do with the founding of modern science itself and is also a presupposition that has been shown to wrong time and time again by recent advances in modern science.
For prime example, one of the main presuppositions of Darwinists is that mutations are ‘randomly determined’, i.e. without rhyme or reason, and that ‘randomly determined’ mutations are the foundational source for all the diversity of life we see around us.
Yet we now know that mutations are not ‘randomly determined’,
And in quantum mechanics we find that the atheistic belief that everything is ‘randomly determined’, i.e. without ‘method or conscious decision’, is directly falsified by the fact that “In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,”
In fact Weinberg, again an atheist, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave.
Specifically, in 2018 the ‘freedom of choice’ loophole was closed in Quantum Mechanics,
Moreover, we know that the probability distributions we obtain in quantum mechanics, after our choice of what to measure, cannot be ‘randomly determined’, i.e. without ‘method or conscious decision’, since the failure of Atheistic Materialists to account for the ‘Born rule’ in their Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is one of the main falsifications of their Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI).
The irresolvable problem of deriving the “Born rule” within the MWI is discussed at the 4:30 minute mark of the following video,
To go further, in Thermodynamics we find that Ludwig Boltzmann, an atheist who first linked entropy and probability, and because he believed, as an atheist, that everything was ‘randomly determined’, i.e. without ‘method or conscious decision’, did not think to look for a constant for entropy. Whereas Max Planck, a Christian, automatically assumed that there would be a constant for entropy to be found and quickly found it.
To further demonstrate that entropy itself is not ‘randomly determined’, i.e. without ‘method or conscious decision’, (as is presupposed within Atheistic materialism), we find that in the Quantum Zeno effect “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.”
Atheistic materialists have tried to get around the Quantum Zeno effect by postulating that interactions with the environment are sufficient to explain the Quantum Zeno effect.
Yet, the following interaction-free measurement of the Quantum Zeno effect demonstrated that the presence of the Quantum Zeno effect can be detected without interacting with a single atom.
In short, the quantum zeno effect, regardless of how atheistic materialists may feel about it, is experimentally shown to be a real effect that is not reducible to any materialistic explanation, i.e. it is NOT “randomly determined’i.e. without ‘method or conscious decision’.
Moreover, the atheistic belief that entropy itself is ‘randomly determined’, i.e. without ‘method or conscious decision’, is also falsified by recent advances in quantum information theory that have now shown that entropy is “a property of an observer who describes a system.”
As the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
Moreover, Penrose himself did not think that the initial entropy of the universe was ‘randomly determined’, i.e. without ‘method or conscious decision’, but Penrose himself said that “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.”
One final note to highlight Christianity’s central importance in science and to dispel your belief that science best operates by thinking everything is “randomly determined’ i.e. without ‘method or conscious decision’,,,
, the main conflict of reconciling General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics into a ‘theory of everything’ appears to arise from the inability of either theory to successfully deal with the Zero/Infinity conflict when we try to combine the two theories into one mathematical framework:
And yet, when we allow the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”.
Isabel Piczek and Chuck Missler note in the following video and articles, the Shroud of Turin reveals a strange ‘event horizon’:
To support Isabel Piczek’s claim that the Shroud of Turin does indeed reveal a true ‘event horizon’, the following study states that ‘The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image.’
Moreover, besides gravity being dealt with, the shroud also gives us evidence that Quantum Mechanics was dealt with. In the following paper, it was found that it was not possible to describe the image formation on the Shroud in classical terms but they found it necessary to describe the formation of the image on the Shroud in discrete quantum terms.
Kevin Moran, an optical engineer working on the mysterious ‘3D’ nature of the Shroud image, states the ‘supernatural’ explanation this way, “This suggests a quantum event where a finite amount of energy transferred abruptly. The fact that there are images front and back suggests the radiating particles were released along the gravity vector.”
Moreover, the following article found that it would take 34 Trillion Watts of what is termed VUV (directional) radiation to form the image on the shroud.
Another piece of evidence that adds considerable weight to my claim that Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides the correct solurion for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ is the fact that both Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, our most powerful theories in science, have now overturned the Copernican Principle,
Bottom line Eric, your belief that “we focus on stochastic explanations for the phenomena we see within science, since that has been the most successful path science has followed” is a patently false belief that has been falsified time and time again in modern science.
Eric, I don’t know how you have been so drastically misled in your beliefs about what you falsely believe has supposedly been the ‘most successful path’ in science, (atheistic propaganda would be my first bet), but I suggest that you return to your Christian roots and to the true ‘most successful path’ in science. The path that gave us modern science itself, i.e. Christianity, i.e. I suggest you return to the scientific worldview that is based on the Christianity that you have publicly confessed here on UD!
EricMH:
Please tell me why predictions are required for science. Then show how that applies to forensics and archaeology.
I have never seem a definition of science that says predictions are a requirement. And then explain why IC isn’t a prediction of ID, when it is clearly spelled out
@ET, sure, you can define some kind of science where predictions are not required. It sounds like a fairly uninteresting sort of science.
@BA77, a great many fascinating articles. I’m impressed by the breadth of your research, and what you say about the observer dependent nature of quantum physics is very interesting. That does seem to be the positive sort of ID science I’m talking about, where the intelligent agent is a key part of the equation. But, I don’t know any quantum physics to be able to evaluate what references to ‘free will’ and ‘observer dependence’ mean concretely.
There also may be an error since the Bell test is about disproving local realism, not related to free will in any way, as far as I know. The articles about the shroud of Turin are also very interesting, I didn’t realize people have been able to analyze it that carefully, I thought the shroud was off limits.
That being said, these sorts of scientific conclusions are not the sort of science I’m referring to. While I don’t argue with the conclusions you draw and their scientific basis, what I am getting at is that there is not a scientific ID methodology that is distinct from methodological naturalism.
To define my terms, because I think that is leading to the confusion.
methodological naturalism: find predictive models for what we observe
philosophical naturalism: claim that all of reality must be the same sort of thing as the predictive models
So, I can, for instance, practice methodological naturalism by understanding how a car operates, without be philosophically naturalistic about its origin. This approach to the natural world of using naturalism to understand the how has been very successful. Much of these discoveries have been made by theists who are motivated by theism to look for these mechanical and predictable models of how the world operates. And the mechanical and predictable models they derived we now call modern science. And it is these mechanical and predictable models that we do not have a replacement for with intelligent design. It is also hard to see how we can have an adequate replacement with intelligent agents, which are neither mechanical nor predictable.
The closest I’ve seen to a scientific methodology of ID is Dembski’s information tracking idea, that you can always track positive CSI back to an intelligent agent, since stochastic processes cannot generate CSI due to the conservation of information. Ewert and Marks put this theory to practice in their analysis of a variety of artificial life simulations and genetic algorithms. And the other closest thing to a scientific methodology is Ewert’s dependency graph of life. These steps have been great, but progress in creating the positive ID methodology seem to have ended with them.
There is also the problem that the information tracking is a mostly negative enterprise, and deals with scenarios where we already know an intelligent agent is involved. It’d be even better if it was used in a scenario where we don’t know if an intelligent agent is involved, so would actually be delivering surprising results in identifying intelligent agency where none was believed to be.
The dependency graph is a more positive enterprise, but in that case the connection to intelligent agency is based on analogy to human generated code. I think this can actually be said to be a positive ID result, because the analogy is made based on the inference that the genetic code is designed, so it gave Ewert a hypothesis to test due to what he saw in human generated code. Another great thing is that it is a very quantitative experiment. He took a great deal of data, and ran a hypothesis test to demonstrate the superiority of the dependency graph model. So, this is the one solid example of positive ID theory in action, and is the sort of thing the Discovery Institute should be putting full focus on. An even better step is if there is a more solid theory of intelligent agency, and how it differs from stochastic processes, so we can make the concrete, deductive predictions more akin to physics and chemistry. And, it is still in a sense methodological naturalism, because no where in Ewert’s analysis is there any rigorous appeal to a non stochastic cause, except by implicit assumption that either human engineers are non stochastic causes, or AIs created by an ultimate non stochastic cause (i.e. God). At any rate, it is the standard ID fallback that somewhere along the cause and effect chain that results in a design type outcome there must be non stochastic intelligent agency involved.
Eric- According to ID is based on three premises and the inference that follows (DeWolf et al., Darwinism, Design and Public Education, pg. 92):
Specified complexity and irreducible complexity are predictions borne from ID. And the exciting prediction is that life is not reducible to physics and chemistry, which means there is something more to life that we cannot see.
As far as I call tell archaeology merely predicts there will be signs of work. An that when intelligent agencies act within nature they tend to leave traces of their activity behind. Forensic science that there will be signs of intelligent agency activity (work).
“The Privileged Planet” predicts that extraterrestrials will be from a system with a host star similar to our Sun. And that it too will have a large stabilizing moon.
So it really all depends on what you are looking for with respect to predictions.
EricMH, geeze you are stuck in the mud with this false atheistic talking point of methodological naturalism that you keep trying to push. You state:
The source of your confusion is that you are (now) making up your own definitions to try to suit your own purposes. You do not get to make up your own definitions. I’ve never heard or seen of a definition of methodological naturalism that is defined as “find predictive models for what we observe”
Per the anti-ID website rational wiki:
And from the NCSE website, (another anti-ID organization), we find methodological naturalism defined as such:
And Eric, even you yourself earlier in this thread defined your assumption of materialism in science, i.e. methodological naturalism, as such,
There is nothing in any of those definitions that entail ‘find predictive models for what we observe’, and for good reason. Finding predictive models for what we will observe in the future is a thoroughly ‘non-naturalistic’ affair that does not entail the presumption of methodological naturalism in the least.
In fact, to ‘find predictive models for what we observe’ is a thoroughly ‘non-naturalistic’ affair that presupposes the reality of the immaterial mind. As Stanley Jaki pointed out, “There is no physical parallel to the (immaterial) mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future.”
Moreover, even the mathematical models that allow us to predict, for instance, lunar eclipses many years into the future, are the result of immaterial minds deducing those abstract and immaterial mathematical models for physical phenomena. Abstract models, i.e. ‘non-natural’ models, that allow us to predict lunar eclipses many years into the future.
In fact, one of the more interesting falsifications of the reductive materialistic framework, i.e. methodological naturalism, that undergirds Darwinian evolution comes from the Platonic, i.e. ‘non-naturalistic’, nature of mathematics itself.
It is almost universally acknowledged that mathematics exists in some kind of transcendent, beyond space and time, “Platonic” realm,
,,, and although every rigorous theory of science requires verification from mathematics, and experimentation, in order to be considered scientific in the first place, (In fact, this is precisely where I believe you are getting stuck in your thinking with regards to ID, EricMH)
,,, the reductive materialism, i.e. methodological naturalism, that Darwinian evolution is based upon denies the very existence of anything beyond the material realm. (This denial is practically built into the very definition of methodological naturalism itself)
There simply is no place for the immaterial, i.e. Platonic, realm of mathematics to find grounding for its reality in the reductive materialism, i.e. methodological naturalism, that undergirds Darwinian thought.
As David Berlinski states, “There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time….”
Therefore, besides Darwinian evolution already being shown to be mathematically impossible (by Sanford, Dembski, Marks, Axe, Behe, Durston etc.. etc..), Darwinian evolution is further falsified by mathematics as being a scientific theory since Darwinism denies the very reality of one the thing it most needs, i.e. mathematics, in order to be considered scientific in the first place.
Thus in conclusion EricMH, you do not get to presuppose that methodological naturalism entails ‘find predictive models for what we observe’ since the very act of finding predictive models for what we observe is a thoroughly ‘non-naturalistic’ affair that presupposes the very reality of the very things, i.e. immaterial minds and immaterial mathematics, that naturalism itself denies the very existence of.
What you have done Eric is that you have committed the logical fallacy of “begging the question” in your argument. i.e. You have presupposed that your conclusion of methodological naturalism is true in the premises of your argument so as to arrive at your desired conclusion of methodological naturalism. It is a logical fallacy that is also known as ‘circular reasoning’:
Yet Eric, you do not get to presuppose that finding “predictive models for what we observe” is a naturalistic affair,,
As Kurt Gödel himself stated, “Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine.”
And as mathematician James Franklin stated, “the intellect (is) immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board.,,,”
Moreover, to repeat what I said earlier in this thread, Albert Einstein, of relativity fame, and Eugene Wigner, who won a Nobel prize for quantum symmetries, are both on record as to considering it a miracle that the (immaterial) mind of man is able to accurately model the universe using mathematics: Specifically, Einstein stated “You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way,,, That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.”
And along that same line, Eugene Wigner stated “,,certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.,,,
It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here,,,, The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”
Of supplemental note and to repeat, Methodological Naturalism had NOTHING whatsoever to do with the founding of modern science. In fact the founders of modern science would have considered the dogma of methodological naturalism to be absurd.
And rightly so. Methodological naturalism is completely absurd. To repeat for the apparently deaf ears of EricMH: (as I have pointed out several times now), assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.
Thus, although the Darwinian atheist (and the misguided Christian) may firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
Eric@133, very good points. I think the bottom line is that evolutionary theory leads to predictive models that are or can be testable. Maybe it is possible for ID to make testable predictive models, but I have not seen anyone attempting to do so.
@BB I stated that Dr. Ewert has created a testable model of ID with his dependency graph of life, and Dembski’s information tracking methodology. So it is not impossible. My point is that the ID movement via the Discover Institute does not seem very committed to making ID a practical science, which is supposedly its big claim to fame. Again, I am not saying this is impossible. Just that the movement has become distracted from its fundamental claim that ID is science.
But, your other point that evolutionary theory leads to predictive models is correct, and the reason it has been preferred over ID. It is just that the predictive models of evolution have been falsified. And even more importantly, the implicit idea of Darwinian evolution is that stochastic processes can create CSI, and Dembski has proven this claim to be false. So, Darwinian evolution is the one theory in all of this that is truly dead in the water.
This leaves open the huge question: if stochastic processes cannot create CSI, then what can? Whatever it is, we call it ‘intelligence’ but that does not tell us very much.
BB, Darwinism is notorious for making predictions that are later falsified.
Per:
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/hard-to-believe-but-true-senior-canadian-journalist-knows-darwinism-is-bunk/#comment-683164
@BB, what BA77 says is correct. I am reading through a couple bioinformatics books, and they are full of falsified predictions of Darwinian evolution. A lot of bioinformatics is fudging around the failure of Darwinian theory.
If the Discovery Institute wanted to make good on its “ID is science” claim, there seems to be plenty of low hanging fruit in the very practical field of bioinformatics.
Brother Brain:
Nonsense. If that were true then we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. And you would have posted something to support your trope.
@ET, BB is correct, and Dr. Dembski et. al. have falsified the prediction that Darwinian evolution can create CSI, both mathematically and empirically.
EricMH- There was never a model for Darwinian-type evolution producing CSI. And I don’t know of any way to test the claim that Darwinian-type evolution can produce CSI. All Darwin and others have done is baldly assert that nature can do it. Then write a sciencey narrative to that effect.
The only reason why Dr. Dembski came up with the probability argument in the first place is because of what I said- there wasn’t anything else to go after. No substance to grab onto and examine. It’s one big house of cards that Vinnie Gambini would easily shred.
@ET the whole point of Darwinian evolution is to explain how design (i.e. CSI) can come about without a designer through stochastic processes. We can test whether Darwinian evolution can generate CSI with genetic algorithms.. Dembski proved CSI cannot be generated by stochastic processes through his law of conservation of information, and then empirically demonstrated that when we detect CSI from a genetic algorithm we can trace it back to a designer (programmer). That’s the sort of methodological scientific approach I am asking for. Very quantitative and measurable, with specific claims. This is more like physics and chemistry than philosophy.
Yes, Eric, I know the point of Darwinian evolution. That has nothing to do with what I said. Just because it was supposed to do something doesn’t mean it evolved any further than a narrative.
Genetic algorithms start with the very thing that needs to be explained in the first place- the ability to reproduce. Then come the fitness functions which guide the preliminary solutions towards a goal.
And if Dembski already proved it then what else do you want? Proof, proof?
An actual scientific methodology of ID, something that is like physics and chemistry that produces interesting results, makes predictions and drives technological advancement. Otherwise ID nothing more than another apologetic argument, just like a multitude of other such arguments that rely on scientific data, and is nothing special.
Actually being a science is different than using scientific data to make a point. ID claims to be the former, but mostly is just doing the latter.
Once ID can start doing something equivalent to creating modern medicine, agriculture and the IT revolution, then it deserves to be taken more seriously than methodological naturalism. Otherwise, methodological naturalism is what gets results and drives the modern world forward and ID is an interesting philosophical argument to consider in your free time.
OK, wait. Intelligent Design is about the detection and study of design in nature. That encompasses the science of ID. The scientific methodology is with the detection part. What we do with the knowledge of being part and parcel of an Intelligent Design is up to us. To me that knowledge is a game changer. It completely changes the way we look at things- that science and scientists look at things.
That said, genetic algorithms exemplify evolution by means of intelligent design. They show us the power of telic processes reigning over, random (not blind and mindless)/ constrained variations. They also show us the limitations but those are purely of our own making and limitations.
And I think it is exciting that IDists are the researchers who told us what to look for to find extraterrestrials. It isn’t their fault no one seems to be reading what they say.
ID being true and accepted will drive the research you are looking for. Just for the mere fact that scientists would finally be looking at living organisms correctly. Meaning they would at least know more about what determines form. It might help them understand why genetic engineering, after a huge success with the insulin gene inserted into bacteria, just hasn’t lived up to the hype.
So yes, exciting times indeed
EricMH, continues his fallacious defense of methodological naturalism as such,
There is so much that is ‘not even wrong’ in that statement it is hard to know where to begin. There is, and has been, much debate on what qualifies something as a real science. Whether or not a theory is based on methodological naturalism is not even on the list of different criteria that are usually used to determine whether or not something may be scientific. In fact, as has been pointed out several times to EricMH now, and yet he apparently refuses to listen, assuming methodological naturalism as true prior to investigation is completely absurd. To repeat for the apparently deaf ears of EricMH: , assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.
What part of ‘catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself’ do you not understand EricMH?
Clearly, despite what Eric may falsely imagine as being true, methodological naturalism is a non-starter as the supposed ‘ground rule’ for doing good science.
The generally accepted ‘ground rule’ for determining whether something is even a real science science or not, as was clearly pointed out to EricMH in post 78, is that something must be testable and potentially falsifiable to be science. i.e. Popper’s falsification criteria.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/once-more-from-the-top-on-mechanism/#comment-683425
And on that score of being falsifiable, Darwinian evolution and methodological naturalism, since Darwinism is based explicitly on the assumption of naturalism, Darwin’s theory fails to qualify as a science. In fact, as was also pointed out to EricMH in post 78, it is not that Darwinism is not falsifiable, it has been falsified many times over, it is that Darwinists simply refuse to ever accept any empirical falsification against their theory.
And as was also pointed out in post 78, ID is testable and potentially falsifiable, and, in spite of the fact that many millions of dollars have been spent, and thousands of scientists, have been trying to falsify ID, (by showing that unguided material processes, i.e. ‘natural’ processes, can generate functional information) none-the-less ID remains standing and is unfalsified to this day. If that does not qualify ID as a rigorously testable scientific theory, then nothing ever will.
Apparently none of this is good enough for EricMH for him to personally consider ID as ‘good science’.
Although EricMH completely ignores Popper’s falsification criteria in determining whether ID is good science or not, EricMH does seem to tentatively hold to the criteria of predictability and fruitfulness when he tries to condemn ID as being bad science and hold methodological naturalism as supposedly being good science. And indeed predictability and fruitfulness are good indications of whether something is science or not. And yet Darwinian evolution, which is based explicitly on the assumption of naturalism, i.e. methodological naturalism, fails to qualify as a science by the criteria of predictability and fruitfulness as well.
Darwinian Evolution, and by default methodological naturalism, simply fails to qualify as a science by any reasonable measure of science one might wish to invoke:
I addressed the failure of methodological naturalism to ‘find predictive models for what we observe’ in post 135, and further showed in post 136 that the very act of ‘finding predictive models for what we observe’ is a thoroughly ‘non-naturalistic’ affair that presupposes the very reality of the very things, i.e. immaterial minds and immaterial mathematics, that naturalism itself denies the very existence of.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/once-more-from-the-top-on-mechanism/#comment-683535
To further drive this point home, imposing materialistic answers onto the scientific method beforehand, methodological naturalism, is especially problematic in these questions of origins, since we are indeed questioning the materialistic philosophy itself. i.e. We are asking the scientific method to answer this very specific question, “Did God create the universe and us or did blind material processes create the universe and us?” When we realize that this is the actual question we are seeking an answer to within the scientific method, then of course it is readily apparent we cannot impose strict materialistic answers onto the scientific method prior to investigation.
When looking at the evidence from modern science in this light we find out many interesting things which scientists, who have been blinded by the philosophy of materialism, miss.
This is because the materialistic and Theistic philosophy make, and have made, several contradictory predictions about what type of science evidence we will find.
These contradictory predictions, and the evidence found by modern science, can be tested against one another to see if either materialism or Theism is true.
Here are a few comparisons:
As you can see when we remove the artificial imposition of the materialistic philosophy (methodological naturalism), from the scientific method, and look carefully at the predictions of both the materialistic philosophy and the Theistic philosophy, side by side, we find the scientific method is very good at pointing us in the direction of Theism as the true explanation. – In fact modern science is, as was pointed out in post 130 and 131, even very good at pointing us to Christianity as the solution to the much sought after ‘theory of everything’.
Moreover, even though Naturalism has been spectacularly wrong in its predictions, EricMH, completely oblivious to that spectacular failure of methodological naturalism, holds that quote unquote, “methodological naturalism is what gets results and drives the modern world forward’.
That statement is so far disconnected from the reality of the situation that it is obvious that EricMH has thought NONE of this through and is just parroting atheistic talking points against ID.
I just wonder when EricMH will try to bring up ‘the argument from evil’ to go alongside his current fallacious ‘god of the gaps’ argument since that is the other major atheistic argument, i.e. talking point, against ID?
Fruitfulness, Eric’s other criteria for teying to say ID is not good science,, is another area that EricMH is severely off the mark with his apparent bias against ID.
There are several examples I could give to show ID is indeed fruitful.
But alas, time forbids me from addressing his fallacious objection of ‘fruitfulness’ this morning. Perhaps later today I will further expose EricMH’s arguments against ID, as supposedly being bad science, as being severely misguided and misinformed.
BA77
There must be a reading comprehension problem here. Eric has not been defending methodological naturalism, although it’s success suggests that it needs no defence. Eric has just been criticizing the lack of action of the ID community for refusing to advance beyond the unconfirmed (and unconfirmable) detection of design in biology.
Brother Brian:
Design has been confirmed. And no one has a scientific alternative to ID. Go figure.
So Brian is just another willfully ignorant troll.
It is very telling that every time IDists point out the evidence that supports ID that it is just hand-waved away. And when we press back for their methodology for determining nature did it, we get either silence or misdirection.
Sad, really.
EricMH’s insistence on methodological naturalism or materialism as the only practically fruitful paradigm reminds me of a little thought experiment. Forensic science could be considered to include art analysis. Let’s say some scientists decide to attempt to scientifically establish the origin of a Rembrandt portrait. True to the scientific method, to do so they must exclusively use observation, hypothesis building, testing and experiment, refining or replacement of the hypothesis, and so on. True to their paradigm of methodological naturalism only “natural” causes outworking from the laws of nature are to be considered. True to their paradigm, all potential hypotheses involving a conscious intelligent agent human or otherwise producing an artifact must be excluded at the start. Only processes and mechanisms that can be understood as outworking from the laws of physics, chemistry, mechanics, and especially quantum mechanics can be considered. In this paradigm reality is neatly divided into either non-stochastic (deterministic) processes and stochastic (probablistic or random) processes. There is nothing else.
Unfortunately this enterprise will soon inevitably grind to an impotent halt, because this particular configuration of paint on canvas (the Rembrandt portrait) contains a very large amount of complex specified information that purely “natural” processes either deterministic or random simply can’t be demonstrated to be able to produce. Since the scientists are prohibited by their paradigm of methodological naturalism from ever even at the start considering conscious creative intelligence as a possible origin, they get nowhere.
Incidentally, this is just as they have failed to explain the origin of the extremely large amounts of complex functional information in biology.
The problem is, their basic method excludes consciousness in its view of reality, and consequently deliberately excludes consciousness and teleology of any kind as a source of complex functional information.
Of course the truth is that a conscious creative intelligent agent produced this artifact of art, and the true nature of this consciousness and the creative ingenuity it put into the intentional purposive effort of painting it is probably forever impenetrable to physical science, since physical science by its very nature excludes consciousness as part of reality except as some sort of epiphenomenal illusion where what it is that is experiencing this illusion is undefined.
So how fruitful is methodological naturalism in this scenario? It isn’t at all, even to the slightest extent. Sure, it is immensely fruiful within its own intended physical realm, but this purely physical realm deliberately excludes the most important part of reality – consciousness and intelligence, the essence of what we are as humans. This situation will prevail indefinitely, until (if ever) science can explain and has a mechanism for, consciousness. I won’t be holding my breath.
In the mean time, the properties of conscious awareness (the essence of what we are) remain in an entirely different existential realm than the properties of matter, energy and space, what can be investigated by physical science. This is the conscious awareness that was the true source of the Rembrandt portrait. Some examples with conscious awareness:
– intentionality – the quality of directing toward achieving an object
– aboutness: being about something
– this object of aboutness may be totally immaterial as in abstract thought, i.e. a thought about the number pi
– subjectivity
– qualities of subjective awareness – i.e. blueness, redness, loudness, softness
Of course the paradox of modern physical science is that all things that can be measured and investigated start with quantum mechanical reality, in which observation and consciousness are fundamental. After quantum state reduction or “collapse of the wave function”, measured classical parameters include forces, field strengths, masses, charges, velocities, etc. All of this that can be scientifically measured and experimented with amounts to “things” of some sort, not thoughts.
The properties of mental phenomena such as the examples given can’t be derived from the properties of the ultimately physical phenomena investigatable by physical science. They are in entirely different existential categories.
So this seems to leave consciousness out in the cold as some sort of epiphenomenal illusion, where what it is that is experiencing this illusion is undefined. But consciousness can’t be a powerless epiphenomenon because consciousness obviously has causative power in the world. To claim that this is just “emergence” is just to evoke another mysterious miracle. The core mystery of consciousness and creativity remains, impenetrable to physical science as limited by methodological naturalism. If this is not “science” as it is currently restrictively defined doesn’t change the fact that it is of supreme importance.
Very well put Doubter. Liked your Rembrandt illustration,
In post 146 EricMH made this fallacious claim
Methodological naturalism, i.e. the assumption of materialism, had nothing whatsoever to do with creating modern medicine, agriculture and the IT revolution. And therefore it is completely ludicrous for EricMH to claim that ‘methodological naturalism is what gets results and drives the modern world forward.’
In regards to ‘creating modern medicine’, Philip S. Skell – (the late) Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, stated, “Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin.,,, I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin’s theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.,,,
From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.,,,
Darwinian evolution – whatever its other virtues – does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology.”
Even Jerry Coyne himself admitted that Darwinian evolution has been useless for medicine, among other things:
And as Dr. Egnor stated, “Evolutionary explanations by themselves are worthless to medicine. All medical treatments are based on detailed proximate explanations.”
In fact, besides being worthless to medicine, in so far as Darwinian evolution has influenced medical diagnostics, it has led to much medical malpractice in the past,
For example, the false evolutionary assumption of vestigial organs has misled medical doctors into much needless medical malpractice in the past:
Whereas the presumption that the human body was designed would have avoided all that needless medical malpractice involving supposedly useless vestigial organs.
Moreover, billions of dollars have been wasted on animal testing because of the false evolutionary assumption of common descent.
And whereas evolutionary assumptions have led to much needless medical malpractice, on the other hand, Intelligent Design, particularly the presumption that there are strict limits to what unguided evolutionary processes can accomplish, is turning out to be very useful for medicine.
The multiple drug cocktail that has been so effective in controlling HIV uses the exact same strategy of being beyond the ‘edge of evolution’ that Dr. Behe has elucidated:
Design principles also offer promising avenues in treating cancer
If the successful treatment of pathogens and cancer using Design principles does not impress EricMH as to the usefulness of Intelligent Design as a guiding heuristic in medicine, then nothing ever will.
On a personal note. I would much rather have a Doctor who rightly believed that the human body was designed, (and even one who might even be willing to pray with me during my time of crisis), than having a Doctor who thought that the human body was basically an accident of time and chance:
This Professor of Medicine agrees
I will further address EricMH’s other fallacious claims against ID later tonight or tomorrow.
Eric- Back to the immaterial information. Think about a bacterial flagellum. Its assembly instructions are not in the DNA sequence. Yet it gets faithfully assembled each time. It’s beyond absurd to think that the different proteins just diffuse through the cell, just happen to all meet and self-assemble. The faithful assembly only makes sense under Intelligent Design and immaterial information guiding cellular processes.
We are missing that under methodological naturalism. It’s right in front of everyone but no one wants to admit the obvious so they look for naturalistic narratives. How is that helping advance anything?
The only thing methodological naturalism is good for is a sobriety check. As in repeat these words “methodological naturalism”. 😎
To continue on with EricMH’s fallacious claim that
As was shown in post 154, methodological naturalism, i.e. the assumption of materialism, had nothing whatsoever to do with creating modern medicine.
In regards to agriculture in particular we find that methodological naturalism, i.e. the assumption of materialism, was also useless.
As Jerry Coyne himself admitted, “But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.”
And as plant geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig asked, ” why — even after inducing literally billions of induced mutations and (further) chromosome rearrangements — all the important mutation breeding programs have come to an end in the Western World instead of eliciting a revolution in plant breeding, either by successive rounds of selective “micromutations” (cumulative selection in the sense of the modern synthesis), or by “larger mutations” … and why the law of recurrent variation is endlessly corroborated by the almost infinite repetition of the spectra of mutant phenotypes in each and any new extensive mutagenesis experiment (as predicted) instead of regularly producing a range of new systematic species…(?)”
Likewise, Dr. John Sanford, a leading expert in plant genetics, (whose most significant scientific contributions involved three inventions – the biolistic (“gene gun”) process, pathogen-derived resistance, and genetic immunization), also found the assumption of materialism, i.e. Darwinian evolution, to be useless in his research on plant genetics. In fact he wrote a book entitled “Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome’ which is simply devastating to the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolution. In that book he stated (among other things),
As to the claim from EricMH that methodological naturalism, i.e. the assumption of materialism, lay behind the IT (Information Technology) revolution, that claim is simply the most insane and ludicrous of all of EricMH’s claims for methodological naturalism, i.e. the assumption of materialism..
That humans should ‘master the planet’ due to his unique ability to manipulate immaterial information is completely contrary to the ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking that undergirds Darwinian thought. Although humans are fairly defenseless creatures in the wild compared to other creatures, such as lions, bears, sharks, etc.., nonetheless, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and also to, specifically, infuse immaterial information into material substrates in order to create, i.e. intelligently design, objects that are extremely useful for our defense, basic survival in procuring food, furtherance of our knowledge, and also for our pleasure.
And although the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information into material substrates, that allowed humans to become ‘masters of the planet’, was rather crude to begin with, (i.e. spears, arrows, and plows etc..), this top down infusion of immaterial information into material substrates has become much more impressive over the last half century or so.
Specifically, the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial mathematical and/or logical information into material substrates lies at the very basis of many, if not all, of man’s most stunning, almost miraculous, technological advances in recent decades.
To presuppose that methodological naturalism, i.e. the assumption of materialism, lay behind the IT revolution is simply completely disconnected from the reality of the situation. In fact, the fact that human beings ALONE process this ability to manipulate immaterial information, and the fact that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundation basis, is proof for the Theistic claim that human beings alone are ‘made in the image of God’.
In the following article, Anton Zeilinger, a leading expert in quantum mechanics, stated that ‘it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows.’
In the following video at the 48:24 mark Zeilinger states that “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” and he goes on to note at the 49:45 mark the Theological significance of “In the Beginning was the Word” John 1:1
Vlatko Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and is also a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics, states
Moreover, besides being foundational to physical reality, information is also found to be ‘infused’ into biological life.
It is hard to imagine a more convincing proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’, than finding that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our ability infuse information into material substrates.
I guess a more convincing proof that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was God.
And that is precisely the proof claimed within Christianity.
Verses:
@ET, I’m not sure what you are saying. You think there is the equivalent of a bacterium flagellum blueprint that exists in some non-physical realm? What is the evidence for this? And what is the difference between this idea and before we discovered DNA? What if a biologist back then claimed that the information encoded in the DNA was emerging from some non-physical realm and therefore we should not seek a physical medium and the problem was solved? We would never have discovered DNA and biological science would be set back centuries. This seems to be the danger of the current state of ID, that it can appeal to non physically testable entities as an explanation, thus not explaining anything and not seeking out a possible testable explanation, which is precisely the major criticism leveled against ID by methodological naturalists. Is this problem not clear to you? How can ID mitigate it?
Again, I’m not saying this problem is fatal to ID. I am saying it is at least a potential problem, and I’ve fallen prey to it myself. We need a rigorous methodology to guard against postulating untestable explanations.
Eric- The immaterial information exists in the cells. As I said there isn’t any evidence that the assembly instructions are the DNA. So how do you think any bacterial flagellum gets assembled, faithfully, time after time?
And of course we would have discovered DNA. All that took was a powerful microscope.
I didn’t say anything about a non-physical entity. “Information is information, neither matter nor energy” Norbert Weiner
Information is immaterial, Eric. And my suggestion is testable. Just find the physio-chemical component that details the assembly processes of biological structures (and developmental biology). No one has found such a thing so far. And yet those structures exist and get faithfully replicated.
@ET, it is hard for me to understand what you mean. When you say ‘information is immaterial’ I thought you meant there is some non physical source of the information that forms a biological organism, i.e. some kind of vitalism. But you claim there is no non-physical entity. So, I don’t know what you mean.
For example, even though the same software program can be implemented in multiple computers, and in that sense the program’s information is some sort of abstract Platonic reality, the actual program that makes the computer do something is embedded in a physical medium. Is this what you mean when you say ‘information is immaterial’? There is still some way the information that creates the flagellum is physically embedded in the generating organism? If so, this seems best studied with some sort of methodological naturalism, where we seek out the manner in which the information is physically embedded. Of course, it is best if we assume philosophical theism so that we seek out information in the first place, but once we get to the point where we are explaining the operation of the flagellum building process, we rely entirely on physical mechanism and material encodings of immaterial information. It is this restricted setting that methodological naturalism seems best suited for providing scientific guidance.
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@BA77, hopefully the above illustrates the sort of distinction I am making. I agree with much of what you write, I think you are misunderstanding my terminology. Theism certainly works much better than naturalism as a guide and motivation for science. But when it comes down to the actual silicon, wiring and programming that makes our computers work, we rely entirely on physical mechanisms and materially encoded information, all things that are entirely within the realm of methodological naturalism. That being said, the inference from what we discover scientifically seems to overwhelmingly point towards intelligent agency, as you point out with your catalogue of examples.
I believe our basic disagreement comes down to different definitions of methodological naturalism. I am only referring to the sort of science that ‘gets things done’. Currently, such science proceeds entirely by reference to physical mechanisms. The error comes in when people extrapolate from the methodological naturalism necessary to ‘get things done’ to philosophical naturalism about the ultimate origin of everything.
A charitable understanding of the motivation for exclusively focusing on methodological naturalism given by Francis Bacon is that before he proposed only looking at formal and efficient causality in natural philosophy, many theologians were supposing metaphysical entities that were practically worthless for solving what Bacon saw as the pressing physical problems of his day. By restricting focus to formal and efficient causality Bacon sought to solve the problems of disease and hunger that surrounded him in his era. And arguably, this restriction in focus has achieved exactly what Bacon sought to great effect.
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@Doubter, well thought out example. My question is, why do you remove the intelligent agent from the chance hypothesis? That seems like special pleading. For any event under examination, we can always remove whatever causal agent we want to designate as ‘intelligent’ and get positive CSI. For instance, say I flip a double headed coin, and for sake of analysis I use a fair coin as my chance hypothesis. Under this setting, I get about N bits of CSI for N coin flips. Yet, there is no intelligent agency involved. I get positive CSI because I have chosen to set ‘double headed coin’ as the ‘intelligent agency’ and this gives the desired result.
This shows that if we get to choose what to exclude from the chance hypothesis, then the explanatory filter is not a test for intelligent agency, per se, but a test for the alternate hypothesis, i.e. a Bayes log likelihood test. However, this then begs the question. The Darwinist claims that human beings have been created through the evolutionary process, so are themselves the product of chance and necessity, and thus should be included in the chance hypothesis, potentially resulting in no CSI. The ID argument, on the other hand, claims there is something special about humans and thus excludes them from the chance hypothesis, resulting in positive CSI. However, the whole reason there is something supposedly special about humans is because they are intelligently design and are themselves intelligent agents and outside the realm of stochastic processes. But, this is precisely the point under debate between the two sides, so cannot be used as the assumption in the IDist’s argument.
Thus, both sides beg the question when applying the explanatory filter by deciding whether to include or exclude humans from the chance hypothesis for the piece of art. Since setting up the explanatory filter must be a priori set with either side’s assumptions to achieve the desired conclusion, then the circularity of the argument means the explanatory filter does not provide any assistance in objectively resolving the question for either side.
It is safe to say that nobody really knows how an organism achieves its basic form. In the following article, Michael Denton remarks that,’to date the form of no individual cell has been shown to be specified in detail in a genomic blueprint.’
And in the following article entitled ‘how do rod-like bacteria control their geometry?’, in the concluding paragraph, the authors conceded that, ‘We are still far from unravelling the fundamental “engineering” challenges that biology has to overcome in shaping single cells as well as multi-cellular tissues.,,,’
,,,, the failure of reductive materialism to be able to explain the basic form of any particular organism occurs at a very low level. Much lower than DNA itself.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
further notes:
EricMH at 159, the misunderstanding, and misapplication, of methodological naturalism is entirely your own.
Methodological naturalism, i.e. assuming materialism, has achieved NOTHING.
You have made grand claims for materialism, (i.e. creating modern medicine, agriculture and the IT revolution), for which you, as has now been shown in this thread, simply have no evidence.
@ET to expand a bit more on my response.
Perhaps you can answer this question by using your argument in a more familiar setting.
If, following your line of argument, I say ‘Windows is generated by immaterial information’ because no one can point to the particular electrical/silicon component that generates Windows, what benefit does this explanation provide? It seems, rather, that I can understand Windows best by assuming it is produced by a particular digital encoding, which in turn is used by the various computer components to generate the OS we know and love. In particular, if I’m IT support, a programmer, or a hacker, then knowing the precise naturalistic details of how Windows is physically embedded and operates allows me to manipulate the system to greatest effect. On the other hand, as a standard end user, the naturalistic details are mostly irrelevant, and I can focus exclusively on the informational and teleological aspects of the OS.
In my view of things, modern science operates in the role of the IT support/developer/hacker, and thus is best conducted by knowing the physically instantiated details of reality, i.e. methodological naturalism. On the other hand, we normal end users get the most benefit from the teleological user interface with which God has endowed creation, and this realm seems to be investigated without reference to methodological naturalism.
The big question is whether these two realms ever intersect. The ID claim is that they do, and in a significant way. The modern science claim is that they do not. Philosophical naturalism goes further and claims the latter realm does not really exist.
However, I do not really see ID making good on the intersection claim. But, ID is doing very well justifying the existence of the latter realm, and thus is falsifying philosophical naturalism. Yet, methodological naturalism remains largely untouched.
@BA77, the problem with your line of argument is the question: ‘so what?’
Let’s say we accept your argument that there is no physical embedding of the information that gives an organism its form. And, let’s say we accept your argument before we discover DNA. And, let’s say that it is accepted by the entire scientific enterprise, so no one seeks to understand further how organisms get their form, and instead assume ‘God did it’. It is not clear to me what benefit we gain.
On the other hand, it is very clear that we would not have discovered DNA, since research into the information encoding will have stopped. No one is going to accidentally stumble across microscopically encoded information within intertwined nucleotide chains. They were looking for the encoding because they thought something was physically causing organisms to have the form that they do, i.e. following methodological naturalism to discover a physical cause for a physical phenomenon. And without discovering DNA, we would have missed out on significant chunks of modern progress in medicine and agriculture.
Just because we now know that, as you derogatorily put it “‘God did it”, that does not stop scientific inquiry. By the same token, although erroneously assuming ‘unguided material processes did it’ (as you still insist on doing) did not stop scientific inquiry. In fact science progressed regardless of the severe impediments that assuming methodological naturalism placed on science.
The benefit we gain in science, by casting the erroneous assumption of methodological naturalism. i.e. materialism, to the wayside, is that we now have a correct understanding of what is actually going on in place, and a correct foundational understanding always catalyzes more fruitful areas of research.
I could list many examples where the assumption of materialism has impeded scientific research (sometimes for decades). and where assuming Theism fostered scientific discovery. Shoot, modern science itself owes its very existence to Christianity.
You are simply misguided, and worse yet you are parroting atheistic talking points, in your insistence that science should dogmatically assume materialism, i.e. methodological naturalism, as a starting assumption.
Of supplemental note, your characterization of the discovery of DNA and your claim that “They were looking for the encoding because they thought something was physically causing organisms to have the form that they do,”, is misguided at best.
As Stephen Meyer has explained, Francis Crick was able to come up with the ‘sequence hypothesis’ for DNA primarily because of his prior work on breaking the German’s ENIGMA code during WWII, not because of any assumption of materialism that he may have held as an atheist.
i.e. Crick made the discovery IN SPITE of his atheistic materialism, not because of it!
Moreover, experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, and DNA was discovered precisely because of the availability of new instruments and methodologies:
The advancements in instrumentation that allowed the discovery of DNA owes nothing to the assumption of materialism. The scientific instruments that allowed the discovery of DNA were INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED for crying out loud.
To repeat for the deaf ears of EricMH, In fact, all of science, every nook and cranny of it, is based on intelligent design and is certainly not based on methodological naturalism as is falsely presupposed by atheistic Darwinists (and as is, apparently, also falsely presupposed by some misguided Christians).
From the essential Christian presuppositions that undergird the founding of modern science, (i.e. that the universe is rational and that the minds of men, being made in the ‘image of God’, can dare understand that rationality), to the intelligent design of the scientific instruments and experiments themselves, to the logical and mathematical analysis of experimental results, from top to bottom science itself is certainly not ‘natural’.
Not one scientific instrument would ever exist if men did not first intelligently design that scientific instrument. Not one test tube, microscope, telescope, spectroscope, or etc.. etc.., was ever found just laying around on a beach somewhere which was ‘naturally’ constructed by nature. Not one experimental result would ever be rationally analysed since there would be no immaterial minds to rationally analyze the immaterial mathematics that lay behind the intelligently designed experiments in the first place.
EricMH, you simply, (like many atheists here on UD have done before you came along), are dogmatically trying to give credit for materialism where credit is not due. Any discovery in science that you can give that you think supports your claim that methodological naturalism. i.e assuming materialism, should be the ground rule for science, I can show where that discovery was fostered by the Intelligent Design and advancement of the instruments and techniques of scientific experimentation. As should be needless to say, none of that has anything to do with methodological naturalism, i.e. assuming materialism, as you are falsely presupposing.
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Eric, may I ask you a question please. You need not answer (and it is quite alright if you don’t), but I am only asking in an effort to understand (only for myself) why you appear (to me) to be so utterly confused about the subject of biological information.
Do you believe there is information in a carbon atom? And if so, what is it?
Eric:
That is a strange absolute extreme, Eric. Scientists like Newton and Kepler saw science as a way of understanding God’s handiwork. If we saw there was something to explore inside of cells you bet we would develop the technology to do so. We would still need to know about the germs of germ theory.
Just because DNA does not determine form doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Genomes and genotypes control and influence every aspect of development. It’s just that neither of those are determining factors. Factory assembly lines control and influence the development of products. They do not determine what they are supposed to be producing.
And no one advocates for saying “DESIGN” and ending it there. It would be very exciting research to determine how the biological molecules are directed to where they need to be. To determine where the assembly instructions are. And finally determine how we can infuse our synthetic cells with that information.
I agree. But we just need basic science. We do NOT need to label it “methodological naturalism”. Naturalistic processes had nothing to do with installing the software. Unless you are defining “naturalistic” so broadly as to make it superfluous.
EricMH
“Why do you remove the intelligent agent from the chance hypothesis?”
The scientists in the thought experiment are strictly self-limited to the scientific method as presently defined, which presumes methodological naturalism (actually metaphysical naturalism). You forget that this scientific method (with its foundation of metaphysical naturalism) assumes as a paradigm that all that exists is matter, energy, space and time. It cannot account for consciousness, for conscious agents, having the properties that include the ones I gave as examples. Therefore the scientists must assume that there really are no conscious agents – there are only deterministic/stochastic biological machines with consciousness being an illusory epiphenomenon of the workings of their neurological structures. And by implication, that these biological machines originated over millions of years by another combination of stochastic and deterministic processes, Darwinian evolution. A process where selective reproductive fitness is the only “purposive” force, the rest being stochastic random with respect to fitness genetic variation.
That this paradigm is self-referentially absurd since it denies the real existence of the scientists themselves as real seekers after truth with the real free will to do so, is ignored for the moment, but it hangs in the background.
As such, as already mentioned, in this paradigm reality is neatly divided into either deterministic or probabilistic/random processes. There is nothing else, no room for something else, for real conscious creative intelligences that are more than these processes.
For these scientists to hypothetically propose an intelligent conscious human being as the origin of the Rembrandt portrait would actually amount within their paradigm to their proposing that at the historical time the work of art is dated to, a biological machine with no real consciousness and no real free will created the large amount of complex specified information in the portrait. I submit that this proposed hypothesis is absurd, first because we know that human conscious intelligence is fundamentally more than and different than physical processes. As evidenced by the properties of human conscious awareness such as the ones I used as examples, that fundamentally, existentially, can’t be derived from the measurable material phenomena of science:
– intentionality – the quality of directing toward achieving an object
– aboutness: being about something
– this object of aboutness may be totally immaterial as in abstract thought, i.e. a thought about the number pi
– having meaning
– subjectivity
– qualities of subjective awareness – i.e. blueness, redness, loudness, softness
These properties or qualities and more are strongly elicited by the Rembrandt portrait, indicating a conscious intelligent originator having these immaterial properties. This is the only known source of such an artifact. Not a “meat robot” as assumed by materialism.
This proposed hypothesis also is untenable because the researchers can’t actually demonstrate even theoretically that a mechanism consisting only of random/probabilistic and deterministic sub-mechanisms can create such an artwork consisting of a very large amount of complex specified meaningful information (of course with no intelligent outside input). They can’t do this any more than they can demonstrate even theoretically that the extremely large amount of complex specified information in biology has such an origin in Darwinian processes. This is shown by the bankruptcy of modern synthesis Neodarwinism. As absurd as hypothesizing that the faces on Mount Rushmore are the result of natural wind erosion and tectonic processes over millions of years.
So if they are going to be both true to their paradigm and not absurd these scientists must exclude the intelligent conscious agent hypothesis.
Very well put again Doubter, if I might add this old gem from Paul Nelson,