It goes downhill from there. If I were a Darwinian, I would be embarrassed by this stuff.
From Jeremy E Sherman at Psychology Today:
I’m an atheist with a PhD. in evolutionary theory. I spend much of my time encouraging a new relationship with religion and spirituality modeled on our relationship with fiction.
For example, I wish that Christians believed in Christ the way they believe in Santa Claus, as a fictional character based loosely on a historical one, reconfigured to embody a first-cut simplification of Christian values for kids that remains vivid and valued by nostalgic and conscientious adults.
Most of the world, for whatever reason, continues to distinguish between apparent truth and admitted fiction. Now, as to Sherman’s main point: He thinks that there isn’t yet a valid scientific explanation for agency
What do I mean by agency? Agency is the behavior of agents like you and me though not just of humans. Agency is evident in any living being, any organism making an effort for its own benefit, effort fitted to circumstances. You are an agent but so is a bug, begonia or bacterium. All organisms try to stay alive. Trying is the heart of agency.
Most organisms don’t know they’re trying, don’t feel like trying and aren’t trying to try better. Still, they try to stay alive. That’s agency.
And so?
So how does ID explain agency? Beautifully from a poetic fictional perspective. From a scientific perspective, they offer no explanation at all.
According to ID (and theology and spirituality in general) agency doesn’t need explaining because it’s the fundamental property of the universe, present in God before the origin of the physical universe. More.
Sherman does not source his claims about ID theory to anyone in particular and gives no sense of having read books by ID theorists (who don’t talk this way). By all means, read his column if you wish, but it says something about psychology today in general that – in Psychology Today – unsourced, poetically inspired opinion is welcomed in place of factual analysis and interviews with representative actual subjects.
See also: Psychologist offers a drive-by psychiatric diagnosis of ID guys. Those who cannot deal with a fact base often build an elaborate drama around why it doesn’t really exist or else doesn’t mean what it means, conscripting key players into unfamiliar roles and generalizing about the rest.
and
Facts are shaking the foundations of psychology
Maybe ID doesn’t say this specifically, but they certainly practice it. ID attempts to infer design but refuses to address anything about the designer or how the design is made real.
Allan:
So what? ID doesn’t prevent anyone from looking into those questions. ID just makes them separate from determining whether or not real design exists.
That said, evolutionism is supposed to be all about the how and yet evolutionary biologists don’t have a clue the vast majority of the time.
ET,
It’s no skin off my nose. But reputable scientific disciplines keep digging. Archaeologists aren’t satisfied with saying, “yup, that there thingy sure looks like it was designed, our job here is done”. They try to find evidence of who designed it. What tools and mechanisms of construction were used. Where the materials came from. How the tools themselves were manufactured. Who manufactured them. What happened to the beings that designed and made the structure.
But if ID is satisfied with not doing any of this, I have no problem. But then don’t complain when nobody else takes ID seriously.
Stop quote-mining me, loser.
Again- ID does not stop anyone from looking into those questions.
ID doesn’t say that either. Clearly you are just ignorant of what ID says.
ID is about the detection and STUDY of intelligent design in nature. We STUDY it so we can come to understand it. We do that so we can maintain or repair it as required. And maybe be able to duplicate it some time in the future.
And they aren’t always successful. heck we still don’t know who designed and built Stonehenge. We don’t have anything with respect to the Antikythera mechanism
Yes, you have a major problem- ignorance of science
The losers who don’t take ID seriously do not have a testable and viable alternative to explain the evidence. That is why the vast majority of people don’t take what tey say seriously.
That is completely false. ID is not about the agency. ID is about what the agency did and left behind, ie ID is about the DESIGN.
ET,
You have a strange idea of what a quote mine is.
But nobody does. Why?
Is this the actual stated purpose of ID? Reference please.
The actual names of the people? No we don’t. But we know a lot about when and the people who built it. Some of them are even buried there.
http://www.bradshawfoundation......ehenge.php
Allan:
No. You only quoted part of what I said and left out the relevant part. That is a quote-mine
Ask yourself- why don’t you look into those questions?
Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence. Wm. Dembski
Umm we don’t know if they designed and built it. The people buried there could have been people not even related to the structure.
Allan ID attempts to infer design but refuses to address anything about the designer or how the design is made real.
If the thermometer reads 120 degrees does that tell you what caused that thermodynamic state? Should the reading be discounted because it doesn’t?
If a tape measure reads 203 mm does that tell you why the length of the object is that?
A methodology does not have to provide complete knowledge to be useful.
ET,
For the same reason that I do not look into astrology claims, bigfoot sightings and claims of alien abduction.
Allan:
And yet all of those have more evidentiary support than evolutionism has.
Evolutionary biologists don’t even know what makes an organism what it is. They have no idea how nature produced living organisms. They have no idea how nature produced this planet or solar system.
Your position doesn’t even have a methodology to test its claims.
AK @ 1:
Theoretical physicists are often simply messy mathematicians working on models that will never be useful, and pure mathematicians are often disgusted with them for applying their beautiful mathematical forms towards any ugly application at all.
Science is specialized, guy. If archaeologists (or paleontologists!) find an alien “genesis chamber”, we can crack it open. If SETI or anyone else receives a message from the sky, we can then so hypothesize. Not being able to find the chisel marks and flint dust on DNA makes no case against its design.
Seeing as a lot of biology amounts to software, it would be more like considering a working executable file of unknown origin on my hard drive. Would the lack of a signature string, or knowledge of an author, or the compiler they used, or their favorite IDE, or the amount of ram on their computer at compile time put its being designed in doubt? Should I then expect it was an artifact of a drive defrag?
As it is, we can safely expect that any designer capable of producing such systems is also potentially capable of not leaving behind physical evidence beyond the product at issue (biology). And, even if they did, how do you go looking for it on the basis of what you have, separate from the digging we already do?
So we should stop believing in Christ when the stockings no longer get stuffed with treats?
LM,
I agree. But making no attempt to look for them does.
No. We know that computer code is designed.
But why would we assume this. If we are using human design to infer design in biology, shouldn’t we expect to see physical evidence of how it was manufactured. We see physical evidence with human made artifacts.
The same way that science progresses in all other fields. You develop hypotheses and then you test them. Even failed hypotheses are important. Every failed hypothesis points to another way that it wasn’t made. If it was truly designed, the process of elimination will eventually identify the most likely process.
It is laughable that an atheist would want God to be considered imaginary. If God is not real, then nothing else can be real. PERIOD!
Here is a recent post on Agent causality and the catastrophic epistemological failure that is inherent to the Atheist’s worldview in his denial of his own agency:
Of related note:
of related note to evidence for the Mind of God as the cause for the universe.
bornagain77 @ 14
Says who?
Have you considered what that claim entails? If nothing is real unless God is real then God is necessary for the existence of anything – which includes evil and human suffering. If all the wonders of this world only exist because God wills and sustains them then so too does slavery, disease, famine, the Holocaust and all the suffering and death from all the diseases to which humanity is prone. By your own claim anything you have suffered in your life was willed and sustained by your God. Is such a being really worthy of your worship?
Well Seversky, you may rely on the self-refuting, theologically based, ‘argument from evil’ to try to make your point,,,
,,, but I will rely on scientific evidence.,,,
Materialists hold that material particles are the ultimate reality and, more specifically, materialists hold that atomic particles can exist independently of any conscious observers (after all conscious observers are nothing but material particles according to Darwinian materialists). This view of reality is called ‘realism’. Yet Quantum Mechanics has falsified ‘realism’:
And to put it more clearly, in the following experiment that was done with atoms instead of photons, the researcher remarked, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
So thus Seversky, as an atheistic materialist your whole foundational materialistic premise is experimentally taken completely out from under you.
If you really cared about science (and truth), these experiments from quantum mechanics should make you completely reject your entire materialistic worldview.
But even if you were to disregard the experimental evidence that falsifies your materialistic worldview, just from a practical standpoint, you should completely abandon atheistic materialism since it is a completely insane worldview,,,
,,, it is a completely insane worldview that is impossible to live consistently by as if it were actually true,,,
Dawkins himself admitted that it would be ‘intolerable’ for him to live his life as if atheistic materialism were actually true
In what should be needless to say, if it is impossible for you to live as if your worldview were actually true then your worldview cannot possibly reflect reality as it really is but your worldview must instead be based on a delusion.
And not so surprisingly, this delusional thinking that is inherent to atheistic materialism is found to have significant detrimental mental and physical effects on atheists
So thus Seversky, just from a practical and pragmatic standpoint, you should reject atheism since it is robbing you of life, health and happiness.
Verse:
If I don’t have to find them, I don’t have to look for them. The only case I have to continue examining against is falsification via replication of the artifact by naturalistic processes.
Should we expect it to be so? Why can’t a weird intersection between deleted data after a hard drive defragging yield a properly working and useful program? It’s no different than neutral theory popping out useful functions out of sight of selective pressure.
We need not assume this. We need not prove it, either. If the designer had remote means of manufacture and transport, we need not assume that we’ll see evidence of how it was manufactured, either.
Also, once humans can manufacture systems on par with biology, our current expectations of human manufacturing could very well be meaningless.
Ok, we identify all means of manufacture, via the separate fields of biology/bioengineering. Then what? We already assume it can be manufactured, so design was always deemed possible. If it can’t be, ever, then we’ve effectively ruled out any naturalistic origin as well.
ID already defers to demonstrable naturalistic processes; so if they remain insufficient, they remain insufficient. The inference towards an intelligent origin doesn’t change. What are we going to say? “Aw, jeez guys, these things are REALLY hard to make. I wouldn’t have bothered at all if I were some other designer. Must’ve started as a weird rock.”
This is all just a red herring.
Sev, for you to be killed, you have to first exist. So God makes your existence possible. Then you are killed. It doesn’t mean God killed you. Nor does it even mean God wanted you dead. Maybe you did. Or someone else. But between you and God, frankly, you’re the likely candidate.
Reason doesn’t seem to be your strong point. But then, materialism invariably damages reason. Just look at your comrade AK, the failed hypothesis.
Why do organisms value life? Why do they try to stay alive? Science has no answer, according to Sherman.
There is a serious problem.
But, hooray, now there is finally a scientific explanation developed by Berkeley scientist Terrence Deacon.
So, why do organisms value life? Why is there such a thing as value at all? What is the scientific explanation for this fact? … wait for it …
Organisms focus on valuable activity.
This is brilliant stuff by a brilliant mind. These are great times to be alive.
[/snarc]
// follow up #20 //
The fact that organisms try to stay alive (and, thus, value being alive) is “explained” by the fact that organisms focus on staying alive …
This is a brazen example of circular reasoning.
Seversky @ 15:
Good, evil, life, death, love, hate. If we were to just nakedly ascribe everything to God, the stark beauty, detail, and grandeur of it all should demand worship.
Plenty of atheists are worshipful of nature on this basis. They’ll wax poetic about dumb nature and “her” often terrible, often magnificent beauty; but put a mind behind it (other than theirs) and suddenly it’s hideous and worthless.
Now, if that God acts to tip the balance for the better, that only makes Them even more worthy of worship.
I am late to the party, but I want to reply to this quote from the OP.
I understand that this doesn’t apply to everyone’s thoughts on ID, but it is a very accurate statement about the metaphysics of most of the UD participants about the nature of mind, consciousness, and the nature of the universe in general.
‘Staying alive’ is an abstract idea, since, depending on circumstances, it can mean countless of different things. For an organism, attacking may be required for staying alive in scenario A, but can mean instant death in scenario W.
My simple point is that ‘staying alive’ is an abstract catch-all-term for a wide range of distinct behaviors on many different levels of the organism.
Sherman presents ‘staying alive’ as something that organisms can be focused on. But how can a bacterium focus on such an abstraction? Such a focus can only be achieved when an organism has the ability to understand the generic concept of ‘staying alive’, which, under Sherman’s preferred world view materialism, is absurd.
Surely I am not alone in despairing when I see over and over the same banal objections to design mixed with illogical mantras and truly awful attempts at philosophy.
Could the editor hold or somehow compartmentalise the likes of AK and Seversky and their jejune notions – they have been answered in length and depth and breadth for YEARS now.
That way we can read comments relevant to the article.
I fear I miss intelligent commentary trying to skip past blether.
bornagain77 @ 20
I’m pretty sure I’ve answered the key points in those posts on at least two previous occasions at length.
Very briefly:
The origin of good and evil have to be God if you are a Christian, since nothing exists except by His will. If you are agnostic or atheist then good and evil are judgments we make of purposeful acts.
In spite of Cornelius Hunter’s Paleyist propaganda, the theory of evolution does not depend in any way on a theological position for its acceptance although it can account for its rejection.
Quantum mechanics is a materialist theory in that it describes what happens at the very smallest scales of matter and energy. It has revealed many counter-intuitive phenomena at that level but it does not change the fact that of you kick a rock you can still hurt your toe.
Furthermore the Copenhagen Interpretation and the measurement problem do not necessarily imply that the existence of reality at all scales depends on an observer. If nothing exists before an observation, what was being observed in the first place? Are you arguing that you do not exist unless you are being observed by someone else? If nothing exists unless it is being observed then you are opening the prospect of an infinite chain of observer and observed. How can there have been a first observer if such could not have existed without being observed? If you admit there was an unobserved first observer then you are denying that nothing can exist without being observed.
Quantum mechanics does not undermine my materialist view it simply expands it.
blip @ 19
If God, being omniscient, knew I was about to be killed and, being omnipotent, had the absolute power to prevent it but did nothing, then my death would certainly have been by His will even if He did not actually pull the trigger. Who is the more guilty, the hit-man or the man who hired him?
as to:
“The origin of good and evil have to be God if you are a Christian, since nothing exists except by His will. If you are agnostic or atheist then good and evil are judgments we make of purposeful acts.”
There are no purposeful acts in atheistic materialism. There is no good and evil in atheistic materialism. There is no “I”, i.e. agent causality, in atheistic materialism. i.e. There can be no ‘judgment’ in atheistic materialism.
“In spite of Cornelius Hunter’s Paleyist propaganda, the theory of evolution does not depend in any way on a theological position for its acceptance although it can account for its rejection.”
Then tell present day Darwinists to stop making theologically based arguments for Darwinian evolution and finally, once and for all, present, some, ANY, real time empirical evidence for their sweeping claims.
“Quantum mechanics is a materialist theory in that it describes what happens at the very smallest scales of matter and energy. It has revealed many counter-intuitive phenomena at that level but it does not change the fact that of you kick a rock you can still hurt your toe.”
Quantum Mechanics is about as far away from materialistic presuppositions as can be had. Denying it does not make Quantum Mechanics friendly to materialistic concerns.
The Death of Materialism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0IKLv7KrE
Your simplistic dodge of the measurement problem has also been answered by InspiringPhilosophy.
The Measurement Problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB7d5V71vUE&list=PL1mr9ZTZb3TViAqtowpvZy5PZpn-MoSK_&index=4
Seversky really ‘lowered the boom, on you, ‘bornagain77’, pointing out to you that lots of nasty things happen in the world, so God must be cruel and horrible. And… and.. if He’s such a cruel rotter, we won’t let him be God. Really, Seversky, are you interested in the truth or only finding a God you approve of ?
Strangely enough – I’m not saying they are necessarily wrong – I believe Christian apologists consider that God must be good, though I can’t remember the reason adduced. I tend to favour Aldous Huxley’s view, i.e. that a creator god does not have to be good. It just happens that He is.
The repeated lack of logic shown, the irrelevancies thrown out, by you and Keith Allan should make an academically-educated person feel ashamed.
I messed up that last sentence, BA77, meaning to address Seversky and Keith Allan, not you, not you and Keith.
On the problem of evil, i/l/o Plantinga’s response — and, long before that, Boethius: http://nicenesystheol.blogspot.....u2_gdvsevl