Reality: The Wall You Smack Into When You’re Wrong

_{Barry Arrington

May 7, 2010

Intelligent Design}

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I’ve been in trial the last couple of weeks, and I am just now coming up for air. I see the debate has continued in my absence. Alas, yet another confirmation (as if another were needed) that I am not indispensible. Thank you to all of our posters, commenters and lurkers, who continue to make this site one of the most robust stops on the internet vis-à-vis the intelligent design debate.

We live in a post-modern world, and the defense position at trial last week brought that dreary fact forcefully to mind.

Without going into detail, the trial was about a contract my clients (the plaintiffs) signed in 1996. The defendant received the benefits of his bargain and was content for 11 years. Then, when the contract turned to my clients’ benefit in 2007, the defendant refused to pay. Instead, he hired one of the largest law firms in the world (over 600 lawyers) to get him out of the contract, and these last several months his team of lawyers and paralegals (six strong at last count) have submitted literally hundreds of documents to the court in a feverish effort to convince the judge that – though the defendant said nothing for 11 years – the contract was unenforceable from the beginning.

Well, that is not entirely accurate. I should say this is the position on which the defendant finally settled after various other theories failed. At first he claimed the contract was valid, but my clients’ calculations were wrong, and they owed him money. When that didn’t work he claimed the entire transaction was a sham, and he knew it from the beginning. When it came to light he had certified the transaction to the IRS in 1997, his position changed yet again. Now, his position was that he thought the transaction was valid in the beginning, but after he reviewed the documents in connection with this case he learned he had been hoodwinked. The transaction was always a sham, but he just hadn’t known it all these years.

In golf a “mulligan” is the friendly practice of letting a player get a “do over” if his tee shot goes awry. I suppose the defendant’s lawyers thought I was going to give them a mulligan and not mention at trial the varied and inconsistent positions they had taken. But over a million dollars was at stake, so I decided I would pass on the mulligan, and when I had the defendant on the stand the cross went something like this:

Q. So if I understand what you’re saying, you didn’t know there was any irregularity with the transaction when you certified it to the IRS in 1996.

A. That’s right.

Q. In fact, you’re telling me that you never knew there was the slightest problem with this transaction until you reviewed the documents produced in connection with this case.

A. That’s right. I never knew.

Q. I have just placed in front of you the sworn affidavit you signed last September. Do you see paragraph three there? It says, “I believe [here I raised my voice for effect], AND HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED, the transaction was a sham.” My question for you is this: Just now you testified under oath that you NEVER believed there was anything wrong with the transaction. But last September you swore out an affidavit in which you said you ALWAYS believed the transaction was a sham. Help me out here. How can both of those sworn statements be true at the same time?

This, of course, is the trial lawyer’s dream scene. He has caught the other party making statements that simply cannot be reconciled. Both may be false (which is the case here), but there is no way both can be true. Needless to say, my clients are happy today.

What does this have to do with post-modernism? Just this. Over the last few months I have often wondered if the other side really believed they would be able to get away with just “making it up.” That question was answered by an incident that occurred on the second day of trial. My paralegal was in the back of a crowded courthouse elevator. One of the defendant’s lawyers and his paralegal were in the front, and apparently they did not know my paralegal was there, because she overheard them talking about the case. The lawyer said, “They are presenting their version of reality and we are presenting a competing version of reality. The case will come down to which version the judge finds compelling.”

I never thought of myself as “presenting a version of reality.” My goal was to just get the facts out about what happened, because I have always believed that if the judge knew what actually happened we would win. It turns out that I am hopelessly old-fashioned about these things. In our post-modern world there are no immutable “facts” for the judge to know. There are only competing “narratives,” and she will make her decision based upon which narrative she finds most “compelling.” And in developing his “narrative,” a lawyer need feel no obligation to quaint outdated notions such as “what actually happened.” There is no “what actually happened,” because reality is not fixed, objective and immutable. No, reality is malleable, subjective and constructed.

I like to say that reality is the practical wall you smack into when you’re theory is wrong. And thankfully trials are nothing if not practical endeavors. No matter what a post-modernist might say about “all reality is subjectively constructed,” the truth of the matter is they all look both ways before crossing the street. And it turns out that judges really do try to determine “what actually happened,” and another name for “presenting a competing version of reality” is “lying under oath,” which judges tend to frown on (as the defendant found out to his dismay).

I hope our opponents who post comments on this site will keep this story in mind. I hope they think about it the next time they are tempted to write in response to one of the arguments an ID proponent makes, “Well, that’s your reality. My reality is different.” It is such a hackneyed, trite and dreary expression. Worse, it is based on a self-evidently false premise, and, as the defendant found out, it will get you in trouble if you take it seriously.

Comments

7] Sev, 216: the theory of evolution fits that [fossil] record better than any other model. And “degenerative paradigms” – whatever that might mean – do not make successful predictions such as the location of the Tiktaalik fossils. Really! Post-hoc reasoning, with a bit of appeal to weasel words tracing to Darwin. The tree of life prediction expected that we would see overwhelmingly, a smooth process of branching transition from original forms of life tot he body plan level diversity in the world today and he fossil record. A tree, of course, is not a ladder, i.e when we see systematic body plan and molecular gaps, and islands of function, the basic pattern of the theory has failed, That is why punctuated equilibria models were advanced to explain away the want of the evidence of gradual transitions. Degenerative research programmes [cf Imre Lakatos et al on this] find themselves repeatedly having to play catch-up to the evidence, and overstraining such points as they can find to support their theory. So, to your Tiktalik, I can cite Pakicetus, where on evidence of a partial skull, a whale was built, only to find something more or less as aquatic as a tapir, when post cranial bones were found; and a long list of abandoned missing links over the course of 150 years. Worse, mosaic animals such as the platypus, which is a mosaic in gross anatomy and at molecular level, far better fit the model of suing ands adapting a library of components, than common derivation. So, commonality of design is at least as good an explanation for such branching as we can see form taxonomy, and has the further strong support of the underlying complex information system and digital information used to implement life forms. 8] It [natural selection] was never claimed to be anything else. The source of your new ‘information’ lies in the errors from which you infer knowable truth, namely, mutations, duplications, transpositions and so on. That is what natural selection filters. First, as a matter of patent fact, natural selection is routinely stressed as the source of biological innovation of information and function. So, the above is little more than the acknowledgemnt of a correction without accepting that it is a correction. Further, as just outlined, chance errors are not credibly able to generate functional complex organization, as the islands of function are deeply isolated in the configuration spaced of overwhelming non-function. But, that will be taken up more under: 9] That claim is based on estimates of probability and methods of calculating same which have been heavily criticized. FCSI is an invented metric which has yet to be shown to measure anything useful, let alone calculated and validated. Wrong. Apart from the fact that all metrics are "invented," metrics of functionally specific complex info0rmation, eg the Durston, Chiu et al metric [cf 27 in the weak argument correctives and onward links]is in fact a useful calculation and a validated one [peer review published, 35 families of proteins measured], based on well established information theory. (And simpler heuristics are in fact useful in highlighting the underlying issue of the known source of functionally specific complex information.) Returning to the simple FSCI metric, functional bits are of course a useful commonplace as near to hand as the hard drive of your PC. And, it is an undeniable mathematical fact that 1,000 functional bits cover a phase space of 1.07 * 10^ 301 states, on simple expansion of 2^1,000. It is a further commonplace that our cosmos has ~ 10^80 atoms, and that its expected thermodynamic lifespan is ~ 10^25 s, about 50 mn times the usual estimate for the current age of the observed cosmos. Similarly, the Planck time measures how long a photon takes to cross a tiny fraction of the diameter of a proton, and specifies the shortest reasonable amount of time for an interaction which is conservatively rounded down to 10^-45 s [it is more like 5 * 10^-44 s]. Simple multiplication shows that the atoms of ou4r observed universe would go through about 10^150 Planck time states in 10^25 s. [This is a genrous upper estimate for he number of bit operations that are possible in our observed universe across its lifespan.] That is so small a fraction of 10^301 states that it is evident that the whole observed universe, developing across its lifespan, could not scan more than a negligible fraction of the possible states for just 1,000 bits. So, chance is not a plausible explanation for any case of complexity of at least 1,000 bits, or 125 bytes. Especially when we know that routinely intelligence produces that sort of bit depth worth of organization. So, we are infinitely better warranted to infer to intelligence to explain such FSCI than chance. (And, onlookers, we saw above how natural selection is not a credible source of information; but instead a filter that eliminates the genetic information in organisms that have sufficiently inferior ecological performance.) A careful examination will at once reveal that the just above is not a probability calculation [not that the objections to such calculations -- premised on the principles of statistical thermodynamics -- amount to more than selective hypeskepticism]. Instead it is a search resource calculation. Chance does not have enough search resources on the gamut of our observed cosmos to credibly toss together the sort of complex function we are discussing. To find a needle in a haystack, you ave to search, and the point is that chance cannot do a search of adequate scope. But, as we have noted, this post and others in this thread provide abundant proof by instantiation of how intelligence can routinely provide cases of FSCI beyond that threshold. (And the convoluted rhetoric of the materialist objectors boils down to ways to try to work around the embarrassing fact that none of them can show a case where,credibly, undirected chance and necessity produced say a contextually responsive web message in English of more than 150 characters length. The overall size of the internet is now measured in Zettabytes.) 10] Mutations can cause loss of function which can be catastrophic for the organism but, occasionally, as in the case of the nylon-eating Flavobacterium it can add a new function, even if that it is at the expense of some other function. In fact, "Mutations can</strike [overwhelmingly] cause loss of function which can be catastrophic for the organism." Further, no cases have been identified where such mutations produced say 500 bases worth of novel, functional bio-information. In fact, the studies on malaria show that two-to-three co-ordinated mutations is an effective practical upper limit for mutational innovations. (And the implication of this for mutations as the claimed source of bio-information and novel body plans is that we see how despite more reproductive events than all of the vertebrate line can have had, malaria has been unable to surmount so "simple" a barrier as the sickle cell trait causing mutation.) As for nylonase, this is a gross exaggeration. A first clue is this remark from the Wiki article: "There is scientific consensus that the capacity to synthesize nylonase most probably developed as a single-step mutation that survived because it improved the fitness of the bacteria possessing the mutation." Thus, immediately, nylonase is irrelevant to the proposed issue of step by step producing a novel body plan embracing 10's of millions of new bases and specifying a whole new body architecture; by cumulative small variations and natural selection. That is why, as long ago as 2005, Dembski here at UD remarked:
Miller fails to show that the construction/evolution of nylonase from its precursor actually requires CSI at all. As I develop the concept, CSI requires a certain threshold of complexity to be achieved (500 bits, as I argue in my book No Free Lunch). It’s not at all clear that this threshold is achieved here . . . . Nylonase appears to have arisen from a frame-shift in another protein. Even so, it seems to be special in certain ways. For example, the DNA sequence that got frame-shifted is a very repetitive sequence. Yet the number of bases repeated is not a multiple of 3 (in this case, 10 bases are probably the repeating unit). What this means is that the original protein consisted of repeats of these 10 bases . . .
10 bases in a repeating frame is a whole order of magnitude below the threshold for FSCI, and it has nothing to do with innovation of a body plan that has to be embryologically viable. This also shows up the strawman tactic resorted to by the sort of materialism advocates who argue . . .
that this research would seem to refute claims made by creationists and intelligent design proponents, specifically, the claim that random mutation and natural selection can never add new information to a genome [LIE: CSI implies a threshold, and 500 - 1,000 bits is a useful measure of where it kicks in], and the claim that the odds against a useful new protein such as an enzyme arising through a process of random mutation [LIE, 2: the issue raised by Hoyle was the ab initio origin of the cluster of enzymess required for life, not the odds against a frame shift mutation in already existing and functional bacteria] would be prohibitively high . . .
See the problem of materialist rhetoric of distraction, distortion and denigration that I and others have had to keep pointing out? __________________ GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{May 17, 2010
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Seversky: There are several matters from your post at 216 that I now wish to address on points. In particular, your opening paragraph in reply to my earlier remarks is utterly an inadvertently revealing: 1] Sev, 216: All WE have observed thus far is a “world of matter-energy, space-time and the four forces” . . . And, who are the grand "we" doing the observing, an act on intensional mind, just what evolutionary materialism forbids by its reductionism to matter, energy, space, time and blind forces of necessity and chance? In short, you have again failed to address the implications of the self-referential incoherence of evolutionary materialism as it affects the grounding of the credibility of mind. It seems I need to again point out the basic chain of implications [which by the way do not trace to Plantinga, though his own thought is similar]. For, derisory labelling and dismissing do not constitute a cogent reply, but instead a fallacious negative form appeal to authority -- tag and dismiss:
. . . [evolutionary] materialism [a worldview that often likes to wear the mantle of "science"] . . . argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature. Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of chance. But human thought, clearly a phenomenon in the universe, must now fit into this picture. Thus, what we subjectively experience as "thoughts" and "conclusions" can only be understood materialistically as unintended by-products of the natural forces which cause and control the electro-chemical events going on in neural networks in our brains. (These forces are viewed as ultimately physical, but are taken to be partly mediated through a complex pattern of genetic inheritance ["nature"] and psycho-social conditioning ["nurture"], within the framework of human culture [i.e. socio-cultural conditioning and resulting/associated relativism].) Therefore, if materialism is true, the "thoughts" we have and the "conclusions" we reach, without residue, are produced and controlled by forces that are irrelevant to purpose, truth, or validity. Of course, the conclusions of such arguments may still happen to be true, by lucky coincidence — but we have no rational grounds for relying on the “reasoning” that has led us to feel that we have “proved” them. And, if our materialist friends then say: “But, we can always apply scientific tests, through observation, experiment and measurement,” then we must note that to demonstrate that such tests provide empirical support to their theories requires the use of the very process of reasoning which they have discredited! Thus, evolutionary materialism reduces reason itself to the status of illusion. But, immediately, that includes “Materialism.” For instance, Marxists commonly deride opponents for their “bourgeois class conditioning” — but what of the effect of their own class origins? Freudians frequently dismiss qualms about their loosening of moral restraints by alluding to the impact of strict potty training on their “up-tight” critics — but doesn’t this cut both ways? And, should we not simply ask a Behaviourist whether s/he is simply another operantly conditioned rat trapped in the cosmic maze? In the end, materialism is based on self-defeating logic . . . .
The issue, Seversky, is the chain of cause and underlying forces and factors that you would assume and assert, and its logical consequences. That is what you need to address, and it is what you patently spectacularly ducked behind a cloud of dismissive ad hominems. 2] the science and technology we have developed founded on the materialistic or naturalistic assumption has proven to be far more successful than any alternative. Modern science's main streams, of course, were founded by men setting out to think God's thoughts after him, Newton being the chief case in point. You are projecting a latterday coup of ideological materialists unto the founders of science. And, the technologies that you would trade on, were based on the intelligent and purposeful application of the forces and materials of nature as a going concern to the needs of humanity. That is, their very complex functional organisation shows how such organisation and associated information are empirically observable, reliable signs of design. So, when we turn to questions of origins, thus of attempted historical reconstruction of the roots of our being, we observe similar information rich complex organisation in carbon chemistry, cell based life, and we obse4rve that the cosmos that facilitates such life shows carefully organised fine tuning to do so. These empirically support the inference that life and the cosmos are the products of design. 3] The amorality of science is irrelevant since it is investigating what is not what should be. This is precisely the opposite of the hard lessons delivered by the past century, in which elite scientists, due to the amorality of their a priori materialist worldview commitments, lent the name of science to the agenda of might makes right, and supported horrific behaviour; costing over a hundred millions their lives. You may not wish to look too closely at this issue, but I am sure onlookers take due note that evolutionary materialism is amoral, and that amorality is utterly destructive, lending its support tot he agenda that might makes right and that the only practical limit on behaviour is what one can get away with, with the suitably dumbed down and/or intimidated sheeple. 4] what you have not acknowledged is that nowhere in their scientific theories, equations or calculations is there any reference to the immaterial or God or angels. Actually, a read of say Newton's general Scholium to his Principia -- in which he presented his three laws of motion and his law of gravitation, i.e. the is is the most pivotal and indeed revolutionary technical work of modern science -- will show that the opposite is the case, as he held that:
. . . This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being . . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final cause [i.e from his designs]: we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. [i.e necessity does not produce contingency] All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing. [That is, implicitly rejects chance, Plato's third alternative and explicitly infers to the Designer of the Cosmos.] But, by way of allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to desire, to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to frame, to work, to build; for all our notions of God are taken from. the ways of mankind by a certain similitude, which, though not perfect, has some likeness, however. And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy. [In Newton's day, wisely, they understood the process of science to be applied philosophy with a particular eye to epistemological issues of warranting knowledge claims; the resulting well-warranted conclusions were described as knowledge, i.e. scientia in Latin.]
Had we the wisdom to keep scientists in training in formal touch with the issues of the philosophical, ethical and historical underpinnings of scientific investigation, much of the attempted materialist ideologisation of science would have at once been dismissed as patently absurd and historically ignorant. And, of course, Sev, on the content of empirically based scientific investigations, you are diverting attention and appealing to ignorant prejudice. For,the proper scientific contrast in our investigations is not natural vs supernatural, but the difference between natural [chance and necessity] and artificial [intelligent] causes. Each of which leaves well known, identifiable and routinely studied empirical signs. 5] The existence of error does not necessarily entail the existence of knowable truth. Oops! Do you really mean to suggest that the fact that we can warrant the truth-claim that "error exists" to the level of undeniability on pain of immediate and patent absurdity, does not provide an instance of known truth? I would consider that instantiation is proof of existence. 6] There is function and process in the genome but information, in the commonly-accepted sense, exists only in the mind of the observer. That we can model what happens in the genome using information theory does not, in itself, warrant an inference that there is a message which implies an intelligent sender intended for an intelligent recipient expressed in a common language, for example. Onlookers, take time to look at the discrete-state (thus, digital) genetic code, and reflect on this often linked (and just as often studiously ignored) video showing the algorithmic, step by step process that transcribes genetic information, then translates it into sequenced amino acid bases and uses it to manufacture the proteins that carry out so much of the work of cell based life. (A medically oriented description of the process is here.) In short, we see here rhe instantiation of precisely the same general type of codes, instructions, string data structures and algorithms to use such data expressed using implementing machinery that we are familiar with from the world of computer technology, and in that context we see the source, encoding, transmission, decoding and application of digital messages, in exact accord with the principles and prime communication system model of information theory. In that context, we would do well to observe again the excerpted Wiki definition of information used [per credibility of a damaging acknowledgement of a fact that cannot credibly be denied] in the UD glossary:
“ . . that which would be communicated by a message if it were sent from a sender to a receiver capable of understanding the message . . . . In terms of data, it can be defined as a collection of facts [i.e. as represented or sensed in some format] from which conclusions may be drawn [and on which decisions and actions may be taken]."
Messenger RNA of course is a transcribed message, transferred to the ribosome and with the aid of transfer RNA, step by step translated into a protein, towards the purpose of fulfilling the requisites of functional cell based life. The only known observed source and causally capable source of systems that do that sort of thing, is intelligence. We know that forces of necessity do not create organisation but instead order like the atoms in a crystal. We know that chance can create complexity but once we need organisation that is functional, the islands of function rapidly become deeply isolated in the vast configuration spaces implied by the number of variable elements that are in an organised system. So, we find it unsurprising that complex organised entities are routinely the product of intelligence. So much so that it is well warranted -- though hotly denied by those whose worldview this plainly threatens -- to infer that such functionally specific, complex organisation is a reliable, empirically well warranted sign of design. [ . . . ]kairosfocus_{May 17, 2010
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Seversky: First and foremost, I must again correct you. You spent several posts above using typical New Atheist rhetoric [which is a recycling of long since past sell-by date traditional outrageous village atheist rhetoric] to try to indict the God of Judaeo-Christian Theism as a genocidal moral monster, and those who follow such a God as "accomplices." As such, it was therefore entirely in order for me to repeatedly correct you by pointing out from the acknowledged main texts the solemnly declared core of Biblical Morality [which at no point have you cogently addressed or assessed in a balanced way], and to call your attention to one of the major texts that shows the attitude of that God to acting in judgement of the nations, namely Jonah 4, where he rebukes his own prophet for want of concern for those who are subject to judgement; even if they are -- for horrific reason -- the dreaded enemies of his own people who very predictably would within a matter of decades set out on conquest of Israel. All this, in defence of the notion that there is no objectively binding morality, that there is no IS that can ground OUGHT,and the pious hope that "we" can find common ground to negotiate a reasonable agreement on what we should do or not do. As the descendant of slaves and the spiritual heir of the Gospel-driven reformers who spent fifty years fighting the interests, rhetoric and agendas that propped up that institution, I can only shake my head at your naivete about the games played by morally benumbed, willfully blind power elites who live by the premise that might makes right. (And by the way, one of the first objections to Wilberforce was that things had come to a sad pass in England when considerations of Gospel driven morality were being used to try to shape British policy. Wilberforce's journal of course summarised his sense of mission, that God had put before him the objectives of breaking the slave trade and reforming the "manners" [i.e. morals] of the British nation. The former was the strategic key to breaking slavery as a system, and in pursuit of the latter, he was involved in something like sixty-nine reformation initiatives as leader or eminent sponsor, from child labour, to the treatment of the mentally ill to the Bible Society, to the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. His famous book, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity., will make for interesting reading, even today. Seversky, I hope you will now reconsider your intemperate rhetoric. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{May 17, 2010
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Aleta: First, recall -- as I pointed out -- that Agassiz prof Richard Lewontin of Harvard was speaking as a card-carrying member of the scientific elites, and stating his analysis of the dynamics that drive the perceived "self-evident" consensus of "all but a few" of the scientific elites of our age. This, in review of Cornell professor and evolutionary materialism publicist Carl Sagan's last book, The Demon-haunted World. Note especially these remarks:
To Sagan, as to all but a few other scientists, it is self-evident that the practices of science provide the surest method of putting us in contact with physical reality [which to such materialists is ALL of reality, as Seversky underscored yesterday] . . . . It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
In short, a priori, ideological materialism and anti- supernaturalist prejudice dominate the scientific elites of our day [by utter contrast with say Newton's remarks in his General Scholium to Principia, and Query 31 to Opticks: Newton and other founders of modern science by and large were confident of and saw the intelligible organisation of nature as reflecting the intelligence of its Architect]. Nor is this a surprising or idiosyncratic view; it is supported by surveys of the worldviews and by the actual actions of those elites over the past 25 or so years. That is how Lewontin came to hold up the bogeyman of "a Divine Foot" in the door, and it is why the US NAS resorted to such loaded language when they derided "purported forces that are outside of nature." It also blinded the NAS to the patently plain actual contrast in causal factors that has been immemorial ever since Plato: nature [chance + necessity] vs art [purposeful, skillful intelligence]. As Stephen pointed out, that which the NAS states subtly, by means of the ideologically censoring implications of the imposed rule of so-called methodological naturalism (one "must" do science as though matter and energy and forces of chance plus mechanical necessity are all that there are) in the context that science is often seen as the premier window on the truth about our world, Lewontin states openly, even baldly. (Awareness of power elite dynamics and resulting exploitations of the marginalised is perhaps the one useful thing that Marxism gives its adherents.) In that context, look as how the NAS intervened in Kansas in response to the re-introduction of the more or less traditional, popular level definition of science that:
“Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation, that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building, to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena”
. . . which sought to correct the blatantly loaded definition of 2001 championed by the materialists, that "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations of the world around us." It is a matter of vicious and calculated spin tactics that the corrective to what was truly agenda-loaded was turned in the public's mind into exactly what Lewontin highlighted as the materialist bogeyman: a Divine Foot in the door. And, THAT materialist bigotry is why those who studied science in Kansas under what is in fact pretty much the traditional popular level understanding, were threatened with being black listed as ill educated. For, for ideological materialists, science, rationality, rationalism and materialism -- ironically -- are seen as one and the same thing. So, it is time for a corrective. And, not all revolutions, Aleta are radical. Some are corrective of out of control, destructive radicalism. Just ask the Poles and other Eastern Europeans since about 1980. G'day GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{May 17, 2010
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KF writes, "Aleta: I am glad that when Lewonting put the a priori materialism baldly, you see that such an a priori imposition is ultra vires. … However, the NAS is simply being subtler; …" Nope, and it's not your right to impose your prejudices into the NAS statement. The NAS statement makes reasonable and consensually supported statements about what science is. It does not say that the material world is all there is (which would be philosophical materialism), it just says relationships between different components of the material world is what science can study. The rest of your lengthy post is about two points: First you summarize why you think that there is something immaterial about intelligence and information, and that some non-material something called intelligence somehow has functioned and does interact with the material world as a cause. This, however, is not established consensual science. I know it is what you guys fervently believe is the case, but the general opinion in the scientific world is that you haven't come close to make a convincing case: ID is either philosophy and religion, and thus speculation outside the domain of science, or, to the extent it makes empirical claims about the world, it is wrong. Maybe someday you will convince more people, but as of now, given the pervasive entanglement of ID with religious belief, it will be hard to do that even if there is some way of testing hypotheses about the existence of a non-material cause that can create a material effect. And then you bring up Lewontin's quote again, but since I'm not defending Lewontin I'll not respond to that. And last, kf ends with "Time for a revolution! (Science is far too important to be left to ideologised elites with agendas.)" This strains my irony meter a bit: my experience is that generally those who call for a revolution are ideologues with agenda.Aleta_{May 16, 2010
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---Aleta to kairosfocus: "I basically agree with this, and disagree with Lewontin if his quote means that science as a whole (as opposed to Lewontin’s personal belief) proceeds from an a priori commitment to philosophical materialism. However the NAS statement does not say that – it just says that science as a working enterprise explains the natural world in terms of other naturally occurring phenomena, because that is the only way to have testable explanations that are not based on philosophical speculations." Yes, the NAS statement does say that. It is another way of saying exactly the same thing as Lewontin. "We may not allow a Divine foot in the door" is the exact equivalent to "methodological naturalism," which rules that scientists "MUST study nature as if nature is all there is." ---"For me, limiting science to searching for natural explanations is not because of an a priori commitment to materialism, but rather to an a posteriori conclusion that such a limitation works in a way that investigating additional metaphysical speculations doesn’t." It may be that way "for you," but it is not that way in fact. The religious commitment to metaphysical naturalism drives the tyrannical set of rules euphemistically labeled, "Methodological Naturalismm," the purpose of which is to PROTECT the Darwinist paradigm from any semblance of counter evidence. Without that commitment there would be no rule. ---"Continually quoting Lewontin as if his personal views are a statement binding on all scientists, or all of science, is wrong." I hope kairosfocus continues to use that quote until all interested parties come to understand and acknowledge the facts in evidence. Lewontin is speaking honestly for the Darwinist community. I know of no Darwinists who would change or modify the arbitrary and tyrannical rule of methodological naturalism. Do you support the right of an ID researcher to investigate the hypothesis that life was "designed" AS A SCIENTIST. I seriously doubt it. ---However, science has been seeking natural explanations for a lot longer than Lewontin has been around, and science doesn’t do so because of an a priori commitment to philosophical materialism, but rather to an a posteriori reasoned consensual conclusion over the centuries that such an approach works very well within the scope of its domain. It is useful to understand this distinction." What scientist have been doing for centuries has nothing to do with a 25 year old rule that never existed prior to 1980. Before that time, no one group of scientists EVER presumed to declare which methods were and were not off limits for other scientists.StephenB_{May 16, 2010
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Seversky: I have just a moment. You need to reckon with the inescapable self-referential incoherence of evolutionary materialism, and its resulting inability to ground either a credible mind or morality. I doubt that will faze you as you are evidently a committed materialist. However, it will be clear to onlookers that you are staring at a reductio ad absurdum and riding it off the cliff into self-referential incoherence and amorality. G'day GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{May 16, 2010
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kairosfocus @ 207
I should add that Seversky’s persistent inability to hold a balanced view of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its contribution to our civilisation is sadly telling.
We haven't been discussing "the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its contribution to our civilisation". We have been discussing evolution and materialistic or naturalistic science. We have not been discussing morality in science but we can if you want. For example, we all agree that rape is an immoral act but does that mean the the psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and forensic scientists who study it are immoral just because they study it? Do their studies imply that they approve of it? Of course, it doesn't! Any more than Darwin necessarily approved of what he foresaw happening to the more 'primitive' races at the hands of the more "advanced' ones. Describing something does not imply approval.Seversky_{May 16, 2010
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kairosfocus @b 205
That there is a material reality is plain and indeed self-evident; that the world of matter-energy, space-time and the four forces is ALL there is is a self-referentially incoherent and amoral philosophical assertion.
All we have observed thus far is a "world of matter-energy, space-time and the four forces". For all Plantinga's metaphysical contortions, the science and technology we have developed founded on the materialistic or naturalistic assumption has proven to be far more successful than any alternative. The amorality of science is irrelevant since it is investigating what is not what should be.
And, in fact most of the major domains of modern science were founded by those who were practising science in theistic frames of thought, the list being headed by men like Copernicus and Newton.
Yes, we know, that has already been acknowledged. They believed the were exploring and revealing God's creation but what you have not acknowledged is that nowhere in their scientific theories, equations or calculations is there any reference to the immaterial or God or angels.
1 –> You will observe that the very first warranted, credibly true fact of reality that I typically cite is that error exists. This is undeniably true on pain of immediate reductio ad absurdum, and entails that knowable truth exists.
The existence of error does not necessarily entail the existence of knowable truth. If I am playing a game of darts and I miss the board on one throw, that is an error - an error of execution or function - but it doesn't necessarily mean there is a knowable truth. What we have already agreed, however, is that there is beyond each of us an objective reality whose existence is not dependent on our awareness of it. We believe we can learn about it but what is not clear is the extent of the knowledge we can acquire.
2 –> DNA, as a coded, informational macromolecule stores functional linguistic algorithmic information [which goes beyond what strictly we should call information storing capacity, which is what Shannon's paper focussed on].
I disagree. There is function and process in the genome but information, in the commonly-accepted sense, exists only in the mind of the observer. That we can model what happens in the genome using information theory does not, in itself, warrant an inference that there is a message which implies an intelligent sender intended for an intelligent recipient expressed in a common language, for example.
3 –> The fossil record shows appearance, stasis, disappearance and/or continuity intot he mod3ern world, as its overwhelming pattern.
Darwin himself, as has already been noted, allowed for great variations in the rate of gradual change. The fossil record bears that out and the theory of evolution fits that record better than any other model. And "degenerative paradigms" - whatever that might mean - do not make successful predictions such as the location of the Tiktaalik fossils.
4 –> Natural selection, as was pointed out step by step above, is a probabilistic culler of existing bio-information, not an information generator.
It was never claimed to be anything else. The source of your new 'information' lies in the errors from which you infer knowable truth, namely, mutations, duplications, transpositions and so on. That is what natural selection filters.
Chance has no credible capacity to searchthe config spac es specified by first life and/or novel body plans, on the gamut of our observed universe. So, design is the best explanation of such FSCI in life forms.
That claim is based on estimates of probability and methods of calculating same which have been heavily criticized. FCSI is an invented metric which has yet to be shown to measure anything useful, let alone calculated and validated.
5 –> Overwhelmingly, observed mutations that have effects cause loss of bio-information and breakdown of function. Sickle cell trait is a capital example, as the health authorities all across the Caribbean know full well.
I hope it will not be necessary to keep repeating this à la Lewontin. Whether a mutation is beneficial, detrimental or neutral depends entirely on the environmental context. Sickle ell disease is unquestionably harmful to its victims in an environment where they are not challenged by malaria. Where malaria is endemic, however, it confers sufficient resistance to the disease that it has persisted in the populations affected. Mutations can cause loss of function which can be catastrophic for the organism but, occasionally, as in the case of the nylon-eating Flavobacterium it can add a new function, even if that it is at the expense of some other function. The nature of that mutation is interesting to us because of what we can learn from it but you should be very wary about inferring that it was the handiwork of an Intelligent Designer or God because of the implications for free will.Seversky_{May 16, 2010
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Aleta: I am glad that when Lewonting put the a priori materialism baldly, you see that such an a priori imposition is ultra vires. However, the NAS is simply being subtler; knowing full well that as Aristotle said ever so long ago, enthymemes [which leave certain terms in an argument implicit] are ever more convincing rhetorically than a baldly stated argument. To see that, let's draw out some implications of your rephrasing of their assertion:
the NAS statement . . . just says that science as a working enterprise explains the natural world in terms of other naturally occurring phenomena, because that is the only way to have testable explanations that are not based on philosophical speculations. As you yourself recently wrote (I can’t find the quote), that which cannot be investigated by empirical observation is nothing but metaphysical speculation, which is all the NAS statement is saying . . .
1 --> Notice the emphasis? The two highlighted phrases are not at all equivalent. 2 --> For instance, posts in this thread are capable of being subjected to "empirical observation." When we do so, we will see that a characteristic sign of such posts is functionally specific, complex information, tracing to the action of ART, i.e, intelligence. 3 --> Now, there is a certain science known as Information Theory, that investigates such functional, information bearing symbol strings, which in a very important sense are not "natural phenomena," nor are they properly explicable only in terms of "other naturally occurring phenomena." As, they can be explained in terns of art and its empirically reliable signs. 4 --> Indeed, in information theory, signal to noise ratio -- a key concept -- is based on precisely our ability to routinely distinguish noise caused by random chance and mechanical necessity, from signals caused by intelligent action. 5 --> And, we routinely do so on "empirically observable" signs that we often build in to the signals when we code them, using controlled redundancy techniques. (BTW, the doubling up of DNA is useful for error correction, on similar principles.) 6 --> More broadly, in a lot of scientific experimental work, we routinely distinguish the lawlike natural regularity we may be investigating, from the random statistical scatter caused by any number of disturbance, from bias caused by experiment design. And, if we did not, we would have serious problems with accuracy and precision in scientific work. 7 --> In short, it is routine in science to distinguish causes that are natural [tracing to chance and mechanical necessity] from causes that are artificial, i.e intelligent. 8 --> So, pardon a few direct words: the NAS is not being straight with us. They know, or should know that it is simply not the case that in science we are locked up to explaining natural effects by natural causes only; nor are natural phenomena or causes the only empirically observable or repeatable ones. 9 --> What is happening, is that when we look at the world as a going operational concern, we are often interested in discovering the natural and statistical regularities and dynamics that occur, which do trace from natural effects to natural causes. 10 --> But, when we are studying origins, we are looking at causal histories, and such histories are matters of inference to best explanation on known causal patterns and their empirically reliable traces. (An accidental fire quite often has different signs from arson, for instance, and arson convictions on circumstantial evidence are based on the contrast in patterns.) 11 --> What the NAS has unfortunately done is to inject a censoring constraint, often termed "methodological naturalism" -- but boiling down to metaphysical a priori naturalism by the back door, that prevents scientific investigations of origins from freely seeking the truth about the past based on empirical signs of different causal factors at work. 12 --> For instance, we see an implicit a priori ban on examining DNA and explaining it in light of the only directly and routinely observed cause of coded, digital, algorithmic functional complex information: art. Design thinkers look at the empirically well warranted point that such complex, functionally specific information is a reliable sign of design, and make the obvious inference, However, that just might allow Lewontin's dreaded "Divine Foot" in the door, so it is controversial beyond what would otherwise be a no brainer inference. 13 --> So, NAS is subtler, but what hey are doing is in effect what Lewontin said in pretty plain words:
Sagan's argument is straightforward. We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of physical relations among material entities. The vast majority of us do not have control of the intellectual apparatus needed to explain manifest reality in material terms, so in place of scientific (i.e., correct material) explanations, we substitute demons . . . . Most of the chapters of The Demon-Haunted World are taken up with exhortations to the reader to cease whoring after false gods and to accept the scientific method as the unique pathway to a correct understanding of the natural world. To Sagan, as to all but a few other scientists, it is self-evident that the practices of science provide the surest method of putting us in contact with physical reality . . . . It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. [NYRB, 1997]
14 --> Of course, first, the claim that science puts us in touch with reality and the linked claim that science is the "only begetter of truth," are metaphysical claims, not scientific claims, i.e. we see yet again the self-referentially incoherent nature of evolutionary materialism. And,that which is self-contradictory like that cannot ever be "self-evident." (But if you believe and think in a circle of thought, it may lead you to think that it is self-evident when it is actually just question-begging.) 15 --> Likewise, it is to be established on evidence -- not assumed at he outset of investigation or imposed by subtle rules that censor out inconvenient causal explanations -- that "[w]e exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of physical relations among material entities." (In fact, this is the credo of materialism!) 16 --> Philosophers and historians of science, on long investigation, will tell us that there is no one universal unique "scientific method," and insofar as we may construct a crude generic description of scientific methods as a collective, it is by no means clear and indisputable that "the scientific method as the unique pathway to a correct understanding of the natural world." (Compare the all too revealing assertions and threats made by the NAS and NSTA to the Kansas Board of Education in 2005, here. This letter makes the a priori materialism being imposed by the NAS acting as magisterium in lab coats, starkly plain.) 17 --> Nor is it at all a given that "it is self-evident that the practices of science provide the surest method of putting us in contact with physical reality"; where we note that the argument was premised on the question-begging assertion that "[w]e exist as material beings in a material world." That is patent question-begging, and sadly it is question begging that is backed by the US NAS and "all but a few scientists." 18 --> Remember: here, Lewontin speaks as the Agassiz professor at Harvard, on the predominant views of the members of his profession. A claim that is in fact backed by statistical studies on the worldviews of eminent American Scientists, including surveys of the membership of the NAS. (In short, Lewontin, a Marxist [similar to his colleague Gould], is describing the partyline ideology of a power elite class.) 19 --> And so, we see the naked agenda: we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. _________________ I contrast to this a modest proposal. Namely, science, at its best is an unfettered (but intellectually and ethically responsible) progressive pursuit of the truth about our world, in light of observation, experiment, theorising explanations, logico-mathematical analysis and free but mutually respectful discussion among the informed. Time for a revolution! (Science is far too important to be left to ideologised elites with agendas.) GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{May 16, 2010
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From the "weak objections:" "In general, personal beliefs and personal views about the general nature of reality (be they religious, atheistic, or of any kind) should not be considered directly relevant to what scientists say and do in their specific scientific work: that’s a very simple rule of intellectual respect and democracy, and it simply means that nobody can impose a specific model of reality on others, and on science itself." I basically agree with this, and disagree with Lewontin if his quote means that science as a whole (as opposed to Lewontin's personal belief) proceeds from an a priori commitment to philosophical materialism. However the NAS statement does not say that - it just says that science as a working enterprise explains the natural world in terms of other naturally occurring phenomena, because that is the only way to have testable explanations that are not based on philosophical speculations. As you yourself recently wrote (I can't find the quote), that which cannot be investigated by empirical observation is nothing but metaphysical speculation, which is all the NAS statement is saying. For me, limiting science to searching for natural explanations is not because of an a priori commitment to materialism, but rather to an a posteriori conclusion that such a limitation works in a way that investigating additional metaphysical speculations doesn't. Lewontin is a philosophical materialist. Most scientists are not. Continually quoting Lewontin as if his personal views are a statement binding on all scientists, or all of science, is wrong. As the correction quote says, "nobody can impose a specific model of reality on others, and on science itself," and that goes for Lewontin. However, science has been seeking natural explanations for a lot longer than Lewontin has been around, and science doesn't do so because of an a priori commitment to philosophical materialism, but rather to an a posteriori reasoned consensual conclusion over the centuries that such an approach works very well within the scope of its domain. It is useful to understand this distinction.Aleta_{May 16, 2010
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PPS: WAC 7: [WEAK OBJECTION:] 7] Because William Dembski once commented that the design patterns in nature are consistent with the “logos theology” of the Bible, he unwittingly exposed his intentions to do religion in the name of science [CORRECTION:] In general, personal beliefs and personal views about the general nature of reality (be they religious, atheistic, or of any kind) should not be considered directly relevant to what scientists say and do in their specific scientific work: that’s a very simple rule of intellectual respect and democracy, and it simply means that nobody can impose a specific model of reality on others, and on science itself. Moreover, Dembski is qualified as a theologian and a philosopher-scientist-mathematician (one of a long and distinguished tradition), so he has a perfect right to comment seriously on intelligent design from both perspectives. Further to this, the quote in question comes from a theologically oriented book in which Dembski explores the “theological implications” of the science of intelligent design. Such theological reframing of a scientific theory and/or its implications is not the same thing as the theory itself, even though each may be logically consistent with the other. Dembski’s point, of course, was that truth is unified, so we shouldn’t be surprised that theological truths confirm scientific truths and vice versa. Also, Dembski’s reference to John 1:1 ff. underscores how a worldview level or theological claim may have empirical implications, and is thus subject to empirical test. For, in that text, the aged Apostle John put into the heart of foundational era Christian thought, the idea that Creation is premised on Rational Mind and Intelligent Communication/Information. Now, after nineteen centuries, we see that — per empirical observation — we evidently do live in a cosmos that exhibits fine-tumed, function-specifying complex information as a premise of facilitating life, and cell-based life is also based on such functional, complex, and specific information, e.g in DNA. Thus, theological truth claims here line up with subsequent empirical investigation:a risky empirical prediction has been confirmed by the evidence. (Of course, had it been otherwise – and per track record — many of the same critics would have pounced on the “scientific facts” as a disconfirmation. So, why then is it suddenly illegitimate for Christians to point out from scientific evidence, that on this point their faith has passed a significant empirical test?)kairosfocus_{May 16, 2010
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PS: Aleta you need to read the weak argument correctives on the quotes you want to cite as though they are substantially parallel to the above, e.g. the well known logos theology cite. I think that by now materialists should be embarrassed by the abusive quote mining that such rhetorical tactics represent. Your turnabout, immoral equivalency rhetorical attempt fails.kairosfocus_{May 16, 2010
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DS and Aleta: Can you show that the quote is substantially incorrect, or that it is not the case that the evolutionary materialism it highlights does not in fact shape a lot of what goes on in the name of origins science, including by say the US National Academy of Sciences? The same NS who in their 2008 version of their booklet on Creastionism said . . .
In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring phenomena. Natural causes are, in principle, reproducible and therefore can be checked independently by others. If explanations are based on purported forces that are outside of nature, scientists have no way of either confirming or disproving those explanations. Any scientific explanation has to be testable — there must be possible observational consequences that could support the idea but also ones that could refute it. Unless a proposed explanation is framed in a way that some observational evidence could potentially count against it, that explanation cannot be subjected to scientific testing. [US NAS, Science, Evolution and Creationism, 2008, p. 10 Emphases added.]
. . . adroitly side-stepping, strawmannising and using loaded language to demonise the real alternative to chance and mechanical necessity that is scientifically studied: ART-ificial causes, i.e. intelligent ones and the reliable empirical traces they often leave behind. In short, even so august a body as the NAS is here seen setting up and knocking over a convenient creationist strawman; in attempted defence of what is plainly exactly the a priori evolutionary materialism Lewontin described. In short, if something says the revealing truth very well, it is entirely in order to use it to make the point. Especially when the point is an inconvenient truth that all too many are so plainly wanting to duck. And, BTW, here is Johnson's reply to Lewontin, Nov 1997:
For scientific materialists the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. We might more accurately term them "materialists employing science." And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence. That theory will necessarily be at least roughly like neo-Darwinism, in that it will have to involve some combination of random changes and law-like processes capable of producing complicated organisms that (in Dawkins’ words) "give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." . . . . The debate about creation and evolution is not deadlocked . . . Biblical literalism is not the issue. The issue is whether materialism and rationality are the same thing. Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence. Separate the philosophy from the science, and the proud tower collapses. [The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism, First Things, 77 (Nov. 1997), pp. 22 – 25.]
________________ So, we can chalk the last couple of remarks down to trying to dismiss the significance of what plainly cannot be addressed and truly justified on the merits: Lewontin let the a priori materialism cat out of the bag labelled "science." G'day GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{May 16, 2010
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As if Lewontin somehow was the spokesperson for all of science, and that one sentence by one person somehow was the definitive and binding position for everyone. However, I notice that when people offer quotes by Johnson or Dembski or Wells or others about how ID is about proving that "'In the beginning was the Word' is as true scientifically as it is Biblically", we get all sorts of replies about context, and about the difference between science and personal opinions about metaphysics. So there's a double standard here, I think.Aleta_{May 16, 2010
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Wow, you really, really love that Lewontin quote, don't you?Doomsday Smith_{May 16, 2010
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PS; Pardon some unexplained cross threading. Cf exchanges from 34 on here.kairosfocus_{May 16, 2010
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Overnight: I should add that Seversky's persistent inability to hold a balanced view of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its contribution to our civilisation is sadly telling. Observe, again, how -- even after warnings and corrections --he apparently simply cannot bring himself to acknowledge the force or many positive contributions over the long centuries of the actual core moral teachings as cited above. I suggest that onlookers may find it profitable to look at Vox Day's The Irrational Atheist, to begin to understand what is driving that patent hostility of the so-called new Atheism; and where, on long sad history, it will end if it prevails in our civilisation. Plato spotted it 2,300 years ago, in The Laws, bk X, and every time we forget the warning on what destroyed Athens and where it ends: might makes right, we get our fingers burned yet again. And in trying to get onlookers to dismiss the inadvertent warning of Lewontin on he implications of imposing a priori evolutionary materialism under false colours of science [by today's magisterium in lab coats], this is the threat of atheocracy that Seversky would distract us from:
Sagan's argument is straightforward. We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of physical relations among material entities. The vast majority of us do not have control of the intellectual apparatus needed to explain manifest reality in material terms, so in place of scientific (i.e., correct material) explanations, we substitute demons . . . . It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. [NYRB, Jan 1997.]
G'day GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{May 16, 2010
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The real killer for Darwinian evolution or any naturalistic process as a valid theory for life changes over times is as kairosfocus points out the lack of confirmatory information. The fossil record is not the only data base that is empty. The genome record is also bare. Where do we see all the arguments for Darwinian processes in the accumulation of new patterns in genomes over time. Where did all these tens of thousands of unique proteins come from? How did they assemble over time? Where are all the pathways and dead ends that must exist if the process was indeed random? How did all the complex control networks arise that control the higher level activities of complex organisms? So while the fossil record is fallow so is the genomic records showing all the pathways leading from simple to more complex capabilities. You would expect some, but none. I say none because if there were at least one does anyone think we would not be overwhelmed by the Darwinists touting just this one single examplejerry_{May 15, 2010
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Seversky: Perhaps the most telling point in your remark just above is:
The slightly odd thing is why so many believers have such a problem with materialism when it is clear to all but solipsists that there is a material reality out there, even if it is not all there is . . .
That there is a material reality is plain and indeed self-evident; that the world of matter-energy, space-time and the four forces is ALL there is is a self-referentially incoherent and amoral philosophical assertion. The two ought not to be confused. And, in fact most of the major domains of modern science were founded by those who were practising science in theistic frames of thought, the list being headed by men like Copernicus and Newton. Now, on other points of note: 1 --> You will observe that the very first warranted, credibly true fact of reality that I typically cite is that error exists. This is undeniably true on pain of immediate reductio ad absurdum, and entails that knowable truth exists. It also implies that we need to have an open-mindedness about our overall systems of thought. 2 --> DNA, as a coded, informational macromolecule stores functional linguistic algorithmic information [which goes beyond what strictly we should call information storing capacity, which is what Shannon's paper focussed on]. As such it is well beyond the credible reach of chance on the gamut of our observed cosmos, and strongly points to intelligence as the source of life and major body plans. 3 --> The fossil record shows appearance, stasis, disappearance and/or continuity intot he mod3ern world, as its overwhelming pattern. This is inconsistent with any reasonable gradualist view of origins, and even with punctuated equlibria models as the vast number of transitionals that would have had to have happened if life and biodiversity came about largely by chance variation plus natural selection should be such as to dominate the fossil record. Obviously, such do not, and so punctuarted equilibria is in effect an ad hoc patch to explain why the predicted evidence was not found. More and more epicycles to patch holes point to a degenrative paradigm. 4 --> Natural selection, as was pointed out step by step above, is a probabilistic culler of existing bio-information, not an information generator. It eliminates the genetic info held by the "less fit," it does not innovate. The source of novel functional bio-information -- as a highly contingent outcome -- chance mutations (etc) and/or intelligence. Chance has no credible capacity to searchthe config spac es specified by first life and/or novel body plans, on the gamut of our observed universe. So, design is the best explanation of such FSCI in life forms. 5 --> Overwhelmingly, observed mutations that have effects cause loss of bio-information and breakdown of function. Sickle cell trait is a capital example, as the health authorities all across the Caribbean know full well. And when it gets to the full anaemia, it is an outright killer. Under the pressure of endemic malaria parasites, it may have selection advantages in a population, but it certainly is not adding novel and improved function. Much the same holds across the many mutations that are known to have a significant impact. 6 --> Finally, unless you can show credible empirical cases of body plan level innovations caused by chance variation mechanisms, the best explanation for body plan level biodiversity remains the only observationally known source of functionally specific complex information: intelligence. And, the presence of FSCI in the heart of the living cell therefore strongly points to life as the product of such intelligence. G'day GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{May 15, 2010
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kairosfocus @ 202
With Seversky at 191, we have plainly now reached reductio ad absurdum for the evolutionary materialists.
For many onlookers, preferable to the argumentum Lewontin ad nauseam I think.
1] Sev, 191: First, tell us what you mean by “truth”, preferably in your own words, not through references to other articles or videos. Of course, Aristotle long ago aptly summed up what the truth is, in Metaphysics 1011b:
TRUTH: THAT WHICH SAYS OF WHAT IS, THAT IT IS, AND OF WHAT IS NOT, THAT IT IS NOT.
[...] But, as Mr Arrington pointed out in the original post, the radical relativism rooted in the impacts of evolutionary materialist worldviews denigrates truth in favour of competing, rhetorically manipulative narratives. So, when you hate and dismiss the truth, that tells us all that we need to know. For, reality is the wall that you smack into when you are stubbornly wrong.
We appear to agree that there is an objective reality beyond each of us whose existence is not dependent on our being aware of it. We appear to agree that truth, per Aristotle, lies in our words. It subsists in the extent to which our claims or narratives about that reality correspond to what we can observe. The data we have gathered about the world thus far is incomplete. We try to make sense of the fragments we have by constructing explanatory frameworks - stories, narratives, hyptheses, theories, what you will - into which they are fitted. If the data is sparse, yes, it will admit of a number of competing explanations but it is one of the tasks of science to try to decide between them. That there can be a number of narratives is not a failure but is both a measure of our ignorance and a means of reducing it. Truth is not so easy to come by if you have to find it out for yourself. That is why atheists, far from hating it, value it so highly. What they hate, to put it bluntly, is when some religious group tries to assert a claim that their truth is the only truth based on a compilation of incongruous narratives culled from ancient texts of dubious historicity whose authority depends entirely on a God whose existence cannot be substantiated.
In short, information is the substance found in messages, and has a use in making decisions, including automatically programmed ones. It is typicfally expressed as symbols used according to rules, such as those for text in English and for the underlying ASCII code used to put up text in comments appearing in this blog thread; including those of Seversky.
Information has a number of different meanings. The most common refers to that which is exchanged between intelligent agents through the medium of a shared language such as we are doing now. The question is, however, what exactly do we mean by information? In a previous post I drew on an example from an article by Richard Dawkins in which he was discussing the Shannon meaning of information. The example was of a telegram sent from the UK to a recipient in the US advising that the author would be arriving at JFK in New York on a Concorde flight at a certain time and on a certain date. I used the example to make a slightly different point about information:
I understand from the illustration about the Concorde flight how a message can be stripped down to its bare essentials in terms of information and that Shannon expressed this in a mathematical form in which the meaning was irrelevant but what, exactly, is information? The question I asked myself is this, the message about the Concorde flight would have told the recipient something they didn’t know before, namely, when and where the traveller’s flight was due to arrive. But suppose the sender was uncertain whether the message had been received so sent it again just to be safe, would it still contain information? Suppose the recipient had read the first message, they would no longer be surprised or informed by the second message, yet it was exactly the same as the first, so what is the information it contained? It seems to me that information is not so much a property of the message as it is a description of the relationship between the message and the recipient or, more precisely, the change the message causes in the state of the recipient. In a sense, it’s a process rather than an attribute. In the case of the Concorde flight message, the first one changed the state of the recipient by adding new knowledge, the second did nothing because the knowledge was already there.
This meaning of information, that it subsists in the effect or change produced in the mind of an intelligent observer by incoming sensory data, has the advantage that it can encompass the information observers are able to abstract from natural systems such as weather or tree-rings or rock strata. What we are describing is not an attribute of the observed system but a consequence of the observation of the system. Inasmuch as it resides anywhere, it is in the mind of the observer rather than the observed. This is why I believe it is misleading to treat information, certainly in the sense I have described above, as a property of the genome. What we observe in our genes are process and function, unquestionably highly complex and ordered, but nothing that contains meaning sent by an intelligent sender to inform an intelligent recipient because, as far as we know, there is neither. Yes, we can abstract a great deal of information by observing the genome and, yes, we can see analogies between processes in the genes and properties of human technology but they are not sufficient for us to infer that our genes contain information that must have been placed there by an intelligent designer.
Sev of course leaves out some significant context and discussion. We are discussing here the OBSERVED mutations that confer some benefits, and which are often highlighted as a proof of how random mutations can create benefits that are then selected for by environmental pressures. As the classic example of the mutation that triggers sickle cell anaemia shows, these are overwhelmingly a matter of breakdowns of function, and loss of functional genetic information, but which under certain circumstances are relatively advantageous.
Describing mutations as "breakdowns of function" reveals a classic misunderstanding of random mutation and natural selection. The mutation in the hemoglobin gene which causes sickle cell disease is an iconic illustration of how the same mutation can be beneficial or detrimental according to the environmental context. In the absence of malaria it is detrimental but where malaria is endemic it confers a degree of resistance to the disease which is beneficial. Mutations certainly can be harmful by crippling or disabling an important function and, given that there are many ways for some thing to go wrong but only one or perhaps a few ways for things to go right, they are the more common. But it is also possible, although far less frequent, for a mutation to add a new function whose advantages outweigh the partial or complete loss of a previous function which was no longer so useful. If you add in the possibility of copying errors and duplications then we have potential sources of new functions
No wonder, then, that after 150 years of diligent search, over 1/4 million fossil species and millions of specimens, the fossil record still does not support Darwin’s picture of a smoothly varying pattern of body plans in the tree of life as he imagined it from 1837 on. Instead — despite 150 years of often repeated headlines on missing links — the record consistently shows sudden appearances, stasis of basic form, and disappearance and/or continuation into the modern world. (The coelecanth shows that disappearance for an inferred dozens of millions of years is consistent with being present in the modern world.)
Darwin emphasized the gradual, incremental nature of evolution through natural selection in part because he needed to persuade his 19th century audience that great changes could be wrought by many small steps given sufficient time. Nonetheless, he also acknowledged that it need not proceed always at the same rate, that there could be short periods of rapid change interspersed with long periods of stasis or very little change, a concept that was later taken up and expanded on by Gould and Eldredge to account for unevenness in the fossil record.
In short, we clearly see the patterns of a priori evolutionary materialism, with rings of rhetorical fences designed to fend off unwelcome realities.
Reality is only unwelcome where it contradicts a cherished but ultimately false belief about the world. The fossil record may be more unwelcome to ID proponents and creationists because it provides better evidence for evolution than it does for their beliefs. The slightly odd thing is why so many believers have such a problem with materialism when it is clear to all but solipsists that there is a material reality out there, even if it is not all there is, and, if their God exists, then He created that material reality which makes it a proper subject of investigation by Christian scientists and not to be denied.Seversky_{May 15, 2010
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kairosfocus @202. Very Nice!StephenB_{May 14, 2010
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Onlookers (And Seversky, with BA) With Seversky at 191, we have plainly now reached reductio ad absurdum for the evolutionary materialists. Let us take up his five questions: 1] Sev, 191: First, tell us what you mean by “truth”, preferably in your own words, not through references to other articles or videos. Of course, Aristotle long ago aptly summed up what the truth is, in Metaphysics 1011b:
TRUTH: THAT WHICH SAYS OF WHAT IS, THAT IT IS, AND OF WHAT IS NOT, THAT IT IS NOT.
Most of us learned that lesson for life the first time we were smacked by our parents for fibbing to get out of trouble. But, as Mr Arrington pointed out in the original post, the radical relativism rooted in the impacts of evolutionary materialist worldviews denigrates truth in favour of competing, rhetorically manipulative narratives. So, when you hate and dismiss the truth, that tells us all that we need to know. For, reality is the wall that you smack into when you are stubbornly wrong. 2] Second, Tell us what you mean by “information”, again preferably in your own words. Notice the ever so telling scare-quotes. This is a case of stubborn refusal to acknowledge the relevance of what has been sitting in our handy dandy UD short glossary of key terms all along, courtesy Wikipedia in the guise of an admission against interest, and that has been cited as apt already:
[information:] “ . . that which would be communicated by a message if it were sent from a sender to a receiver capable of understanding the message . . . . In terms of data, it can be defined as a collection of facts [i.e. as represented or sensed in some format] from which conclusions may be drawn [and on which decisions and actions may be taken].”
In short, information is the substance found in messages, and has a use in making decisions, including automatically programmed ones. It is typicfally expressed as symbols used according to rules, such as those for text in English and for the underlying ASCII code used to put up text in comments appearing in this blog thread; including those of Seversky. Very similar strings of symbols are also of course found in DNA, mRNA and tRNA, most familiarly in the form of patterns of three-letter genetic codons, used in the manufacture of proteins. As this video that Sev et al tellingly repeatedly refuse to respond to, shows. 3] Third, what reasons are there for thinking that information is a property of the genome? H'mm, what about the just linked video summary? The codon table -- again so often linked and so often willfully ignored as inconvenient truth -- that sets out the rules for starting protein manufacture, for translating DNA or RNA symbol sequences into successive amino acids of a protein, then stopping when it is complete? The resulting informational, functional set of protein molecules that carry out so much of the cell level functions of life? 4] Fourth, ASSUMING that information of some sort is present in the genome, what reasons are there for thinking that in the parental genome is optimal? See that key word, "assuming"? In short, after 60 years of DNA studies, Sev cannot bring himself to face the reality of the digital code based information in the DNA. That is utterly telling, and sad. And, on the issue of optimality of the observed code of life, he might want to look here in my always linked notes for a quick 101. 5] Fifth, what reasons are there for thinking that all beneficial adaptations are at the cost of parental information? Sev of course leaves out some significant context and discussion. We are discussing here the OBSERVED mutations that confer some benefits, and which are often highlighted as a proof of how random mutations can create benefits that are then selected for by environmental pressures. As the classic example of the mutation that triggers sickle cell anaemia shows, these are overwhelmingly a matter of breakdowns of function, and loss of functional genetic information, but which under certain circumstances are relatively advantageous. What has NOT been shown, is that chance genetic variations are realistically capable of introducing new body plans, the foundation of macroevolutionary claims. (As I had to point out yesterday, the tendency to speak of "natural selection" begs the question of where the genetic information and phenotypes came from to select from. Chance -- undirected -- variation is the only answer permitted by evolutionary materialists. But they have yet to show us a case that supports the idea that 10's to 100's of millions of bits worth of info [2 bits per base pair] could credibly be added to a primitive unicellular ancestral life form dozens of ties over, to from the major body plans in the fossil record of the Cambrian and onward up to today's world. Without the chance variation credibly creating novel function, there is no basis for environmental pressures preserving "favoured races" in Darwin's "struggle for life." Worse, given that body plans are expressed early in embryological development and require co-ordinated changes across many characteristics, we have no good reason to infer that chance variation is capable of creating enough functional infor4maiton to land us at the shores of islands of function in the configuration space of the DNA sequences, which are vastly beyond the reach of random walks on the scope of the observed universe. Until you have at least primitive function for a new organ, limb or body plan, there is nothing for environmental pressures to select from. No wonder, then, that after 150 years of diligent search, over 1/4 million fossil species and millions of specimens, the fossil record still does not support Darwin's picture of a smoothly varying pattern of body plans in the tree of life as he imagined it from 1837 on. Instead -- despite 150 years of often repeated headlines on missing links -- the record consistently shows sudden appearances, stasis of basic form, and disappearance and/or continuation into the modern world. (The coelecanth shows that disappearance for an inferred dozens of millions of years is consistent with being present in the modern world.) ____________ In short, we clearly see the patterns of a priori evolutionary materialism, with rings of rhetorical fences designed to fend off unwelcome realities. G'day GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{May 13, 2010
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@bornagain #195 -"toronto you asked for reproducible results, frankly toronto every experiment ever conducted is proof of intelligent design since to conduct an experiment you must have faith that there is an underlying order to be discovered, This faith in a “hidden order to be discovered”, whether admitted to or not by a practitioner of science, arises from the Theistic worldview and not from the materialistic worldview since the materialistic world, by necessity, has chaos built into its premise" And the Truth shall set you free. :)above_{May 13, 2010
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Phaedros - that does have explanatory power... :-) Because how can one NOT KNOW???tgpeeler_{May 13, 2010
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toronto you asked for reproducible results, frankly toronto every experiment ever conducted is proof of intelligent design since to conduct an experiment you must have faith that there is an underlying order to be discovered, This faith in a "hidden order to be discovered", whether admitted to or not by a practitioner of science, arises from the Theistic worldview and not from the materialistic worldview since the materialistic world, by necessity, has chaos built into its premise.bornagain77_{May 13, 2010
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tgpeeler- It seems to me that atheism/materialism is largely an emotional position. Perhaps reason is the wrong tactic here.Phaedros_{May 13, 2010
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I have a theory about why some people just won't get it. For myself, I have too much respect for reality, being the true blue coward (and selfish bstrd) that I am, to want to know anything other than what is actually true. But some people, you know who you are, persist in rejecting reason to a, well, unreasonable degree. I think there must be a mental cancer that is analogous to physical cancer. If one detects the physical cancer early enough it can be killed and the body can live. But let it go for too long and it's game over. There is simply nothing that can be done. The damage is too extensive. In the same way, I think there is a mental version of this. At some point the rejection of reason, the mental cancer, becomes untreatable. There are no sound arguments that will cure this. There isn't enough data in the world, apparently, to cure this. It's painful to watch, though. I can tell you that.tgpeeler_{May 13, 2010
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I have a better idea seversky, why don't you falsify Abel's null hypothesis so as to give evolution a empirical basis to be considered scientifically valid at all.bornagain77_{May 13, 2010
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bornagain77 @ 190
Hey toronto I have a novel idea, let’s replace it with the truth. starting with: i.e. all beneficial adaptations of a sub-species away from a parent species will always come at a cost of the optimal functional information that was originally encoded in the parent species genome.
That sounds like a plan. So why don't you start us off. First, tell us what you mean by "truth", preferably in your own words, not through references to other articles or videos. Second, Tell us what you mean by "information", again preferably in your own words. Third, what reasons are there for thinking that information is a property of the genome? Fourth, assuming that information of some sort is present in the genome, what reasons are there for thinking that in the parental genome is optimal? Fifth, what reasons are there for thinking that all beneficial adaptations are at the cost of parental information?Seversky_{May 13, 2010
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