Part two of my series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Good Ones’ is now up on my blog. This one is quite in depth, but a couple of interesting issues come up along the way. I examine the concept of soft and hard anomalies in scientific theories and how they might affect theory change. I then look at the claim that ID’s scientific core is too meagre to be considered serious science. The final objection I analyse is the claim that ID violates a metatheoretic shaping principle known as scientific conservatism.
In part one of this series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Good Ones, I focussed on the two arguments he thinks fail as good critiques of design. The first argument, if one could call it that, is the claim that ID is merely repackaged creationism. The second was the claim that ID fails to meet the criteria of science because it doesn’t adhere to methodological naturalism. I considered Koperski’s criticisms of those arguments and found them to be persuasive. In the second part of the paper, he takes a look at two more arguments. He sees these as being good reasons to reject ID. In this article I’ll be considering the two arguments put forward, suggesting that they fail as affective counter arguments, concluding that ultimately, the four arguments looked at in his paper all fall in to the category of bad arguments against design.
As I have pointed out here for the past 2-3 years, without IC, nothing in the cell can be specified by a medium of information. There would be no physical means for the cell to become (or remain) organized. No specification by a transcribable medium = no translation apparatus, no cell cycle, no life. Behe’s observations stand firm.
..by the way, congratulations on a fine article.
JG,
Okay, I see you are now back up. Let me clip from your OP elsewhere:
ARGUMENT 3: “soft, not hard anomaly”
ARGUMENT 4: “overly radical departure”
These look like pretty thin gruel to me, given the ferocity of the rejection of design thought that we have been seeing, and perhaps the thinness of the “good” arguments is why the bad ones seem to make up the lion’s share of objections we deal with.
For the first, my comment begins: has anyone actually observed functionally specific complex organisation [including irreducible complexity] and/or associated information arising by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity beyond 500 – 1,000 bits?
The answer is, no, where by contrast there are trillions of cases where we know that design is the routine source of FSCO/I. Indeed, the very objecting articles are cases in point.
Multiply this by a blind search space needle in haystack challenge and we see that the mechanisms that have become established and entrenched in the core paradigms of origins science lack a sufficiently strong means to get to the critical phenomenon of life: highly informational specific and functional organisation starting at molecular level and going on to body plans etc.
This is a context of persistent paradigm failure, not oh ho hum we can easily reconcile what we see with what we already have.
In that context, “conservativism” becomes a euphemistic code word for preserving the imposed ideological status quo, a priori evolutionary materialism.
The prevailing paradigm is broken, and needs to be faced as such.
then, we can move on to the real purpose of science, as an empirical observation driven search for the truth about our world.
KF
PS: Lewontin on the imposition:
Joshua Gidney points out the hyper-skeptical attitude of evolutionists towards counter-arguments: a counter-argument must be totally undeniably convincing or it doesn’t matter at all. If someone can come up with some head trip scenario where the counter-argument does not hold, then all is well.
Darwin himself set the tone:
Only that would be a problem! Only if it “could not possibly” … Showing that the theory renders things astronomically unlikely is not a problem for the evolutionist.
I wonder where this attitude comes from and if it even makes sense.
I agree fully with Gidney’s assessment:
Origines, that’s right too. The relevant logic of inference to the best explanation is an inductive logic in this context and does not deliver certainty beyond doubt or dispute as a result. Darwin here smuggled in an improper criterion. KF
Joshua G, good work on your detailed response.
In summary, it sounds like Koperski didn’t have any substantive criticism of intelligent design.
Rather, he prefers to stick with the status quo and rely on the plea evolutionists have been making for more than 150 years: “Just give us more time and we’ll find the evidence.”
I’m glad that he is willing to at least discuss ID in a mature and thoughtful manner.
But ultimately, it comes down to the evidence.
The evolutionary paradigm hasn’t provided any convincing evidence for its grander claims. This despite more than a century and a half of concerted effort, thousands of scientists devoted to the effort, and billions of dollars spent on the search.
Thus, anyone familiar with the actual state of the science would feel very little obligation to bow at the crumbling and aged altar of Darwinism and would instead be eagerly looking for another explanation that is more consonant with the evidence.
Darwin provided very little of actual substantive scientific content in The Origin. But he was a skilled writer and rhetorician. It is unfortunate that so many have fallen for his self-serving rhetorical ploy of arguing that his theory should be accepted as true unless proven impossible.
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I was hoping Koperski would have something substantive to offer that we could sink our teeth into. I guess I’ll have to keep waiting for some good arguments against intelligent design . . .
kf @3:
I went back and read your comment #3 just now.
Excellent and well said.
UB @1:
Not only do Behe’s observations stand firm, but — quite ironically — some of the attempts to specifically refute Behe, like the much-cited Avida paper, actually confirmed his observations.
It was remarkable to see how that particular study was twisted and distorted by true believers into some kind of “refutation,” when the results actually confirmed Behe’s argument.
Then we have attempts like Matzke’s paper that was supposed to refute Behe, when it actually was nothing more than a series of thought experiments and imagine-this scenarios that had no basis in the real world.
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Behe has been one of the few scientists willing to actually ask what evolution is capable of doing. What can we actually demonstrate about its capabilities?
Why, we must ask, are other scientists not interested in this most critical and foundational question? Very few outside of the intelligent design community seem willing to even entertain the question, just naively assuming that mindless matter in motion must have all this wondrous creative power . . .
EA, 7:
Very well summed up.
KF
Consistent in what sense?
Is it theoretically possible that something like the bacterial flagellum could have come about through purely materialistic processes?
Sure.
Just as it is theoretically possible that the sun will cease shining today at noon or that gravity will fail tonight at midnight.
But if someone comes along proclaiming that we should take such theoretical possibilities seriously, they should expect to get laughed out of court.
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Koperski would do well to read, and take to heart, Bill Dembski’s long-ago, and still relevant, response to Allen Orr, whose defense of Neo-Darwinian evolution in the Boston Review similarly relied on theoretical possibility to prop up the theory:
https://billdembski.com/documents/2002.12.Unfettered_Resp_to_Orr.htm
In science we don’t rely on sheer theoretical possibility. There has to be a practical likelihood. Neo-Darwinism utterly fails in that regard.
At the risk of too long a quote, here is one key section from Bill’s essay, regarding Behe’s arguments on the direct and indirect Darwinian pathways.
If you don’t read Bill’s whole essay, at least read this:
Eric Anderson
I hate(?) to get nit-picky, but I think the problem is the use of the phrase ‘theoretically possible.’ Using that phrase implies something more substantial than ‘it can be imagined’. I think there is a difference between the two phrases, with the latter being the more accurate of the two, in this case.
Andrew
I have done my utmost to find something to disagree with in Joshua Gidney’s article and I think I have managed to find something minor.
Since selection does not explain anything ….
… I would say that mutation is the primary mechanism. But I’m aware of the fact that evolutionists often use the term ‘natural selection’ as to include mutation. If Gidney uses the term ‘natural selection’ in that sense, then I have no point. However this is not so clear:
Okay, what does “natural selection” mean here? Is it something distinct from “incidental change” (mutation)?
Also here it is unclear if by natural selection is meant mutation.
Just noticed this gem from Koperski:
What rich irony!
After 150+ years, thousands of researchers, and billions of dollars spent, all we have is a growing pile of evidently worthless promissory notes from evolutionists, who in recent decades have been frantically handing out more promissory notes at an accelerated pace at every turn, all the while pleading for more time (and more grant money) to come with some evidence for the Neo-Darwinian story.
asauber, would “hypothetically possible” suit your tastes better? I could go with that.
In either case, the point is that we must at the very least move beyond sheer logical possibility to practical possibility.
Indeed, something approaching reasonable likelihood or reasonable probability should be required before we accept something as a workable scientific explanation, rather than just speculative imaginations.
Eric,
I totally agree with you @16.
Andrew
EA,so do I. KF