| February 26, 2017 | Posted by Joshua G under Creationism, Darwinist rhetorical tactics, ID, Lessons of History, Naturalism, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
Here’s my new article at Design Disquisitions. Enjoy:
In the next two (potentially three) articles I’ll be taking an in-depth look at an excellent paper written by Jeffrey Koperski, a philosopher of science at Saginaw Valley State University. Koperski has written about ID in several publications (1), which I highly recommend, and he takes a balanced and sensible approach to this topic. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t accept ID, but takes a constructively critical stance, so his work is well worth engaging with.
As one can tell from the title of the paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Goods Ones(2), Koperski critically analyses two common criticisms of ID, suggesting that they are highly dubious lines of argument. He then goes on to suggest two better ways of trying to refute design. In this first part, I’ll be taking a look at what he sees as two bad arguments. In the next article I’ll then turn to what he sees as two better arguments, and find out whether or not they withstand scrutiny.
Jeffrey Koperski on Two Bad Ways and Two Good Ways to Attack ID (Part 1): Two Bad Ways
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Good science can not be done from a motivation of religion, because the religious are constantly looking for the Designer’s handy work.
Your silly example of Newton does not mean he went to the Bible and read something to motivate his investigation.
The overt Christianity shown by posters here suggests science can take a back seat to theology. The fact that a text book ‘Of Pandas’, had all the word forms for ‘creation’, replaced with various renditions of ‘Design Proponents’, also suggests deception about motivation is almost as destructive to science as the religiosity of the ‘proponent’.
It is perfectly acceptable to question a scientists religious motivation in their experimentation, as religious motivation speaks to supernatural reasons; this is not acceptable in science.
Ken Miller has mentioned that his Catholocism is left at the laboratory door.
Using enlightenment scientists to argue they used their religion as motivation is impossible to prove, but, let’s face it, highly, highly unlikely. Do they use God as motivation? Who cares? As long as HE doesn’t raise His hoary head in the field, or lab. What we do know for a certainty is that the enlightenment scientist’s discoveries were all material in origin.
This line of criticism, whereby evidence of pure religious motivation in science is used to smear some religiously motivated scientists will not dissapear. The fact that the religious in places like the egregious ICR or worse Answersingenesis, constantly howl that they too are doing science, merely interpreting the data differently, is a disgraceful abuse of science. Do you seriously wish to be associated with these fine institutions?
rv, it’s perfectly fitting for you to be so petrified of science and physical reality. In you we have a true and unvarnished representative of the modern anti-intellectual movement. You are emblematic of everything it has going for itself.
UB,
‘petrified of science and reality.’
If you read my post you will see that I explain that everything connected to God and religion be removed from the science realm.
I am in fact petrified that with the way fear is prancing around the world, that people will fall back on the usual trio, God, anti-foreigner, anti-science.
rv, you are petrified of science, and have demonstrated this clearly on these pages. You are blinded by your hatred and bigotry.
EDIT: If you’d like to have your aversion to material facts demonstrated again, we can certainly do so.
F/N, FYI: From my always linked note on Newton’s views in his General Scholium to Principia:
http://www.angelfire.com/pro/k.....newtgensch
>>. . . This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light of the fixed stars is of the same nature with the light of the sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems: and lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those systems at immense distances one from another.
This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God pantokrator , or Universal Ruler; for God is a relative word, and has a respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants. The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God; for we say, my God, your God, the God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords; but we do not say, my Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of Gods; we do not say, my Infinite, or my Perfect: these are titles which have no respect to servants. The word God usually signifies Lord; but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes duration and space. Since every particle of space is always, and every indivisible moment of duration is every where, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and no where. Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person. There are given successive parts in duration, co-existent puts in space, but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man, or his thinking principle; and much less can they be found in the thinking substance of God. Every man, so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the same man during his whole life, in all and each of his organs of sense. God is the same God, always and every where. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without substance. In him are all things contained and moved [i.e. cites Ac 17, where Paul evidently cites Cleanthes]; yet neither affects the other: God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God. It is allowed by all that the Supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always, and every where. [i.e accepts the cosmological argument to God.] Whence also he is all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colours, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, or touched; nor ought he to be worshipped under the representation of any corporeal thing. [Cites Exod 20.] We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of any thing is we know not. In bodies, we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savours; but their inward substances are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds: much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God. 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. >>
KF
PS: As for so called methodological naturalism, first the grotesque strawman caricatures, stereotyping, scapegoating and stalking of ID supporters needs to stop. Those objectors who refuse to acknowledge that these are real issues are enablers. With that set aside the atmosphere can then be cleared enough for us to readily see that the assertion is little more than a question-begging ideological imposition that artificially blocks us from following the course of inductive reasoning. We ourselves demonstrate that intelligent design is not just possible but actual, and only a fool would argue as if we exhaust the sphere of possible designers. Then, on trillions of observed cases, designed objects often have characteristic, observable, reliable features that indicate origin by intelligently directed configuration as opposed to blind chance and/or mechanical necessity. Functionally specific, complex organisation and/or information as we see in comments in this thread is a case in point. The problem with the design inference on such FSCO/I is not that it is a weak induction, but that it clearly cuts across where dominant ideologies want to take science and society. So, all sorts of devices have been brought to bear to lock it out. Why? The world of cell based life is chock full of such FSCO/I, starting with the algorithmic TEXT in the DNA of the living cell. As in, smoking gun.
In this thread prof. Swamidass applied his own version of the same tired tactic:
intelligent design invokes God, which is forbidden by methodological naturalism. Swamidass ignored my appeals that intelligent design does not invoke God and is neutral on the identity of the designer.
Joshua, thanks for this post.
Bad arguments against intelligent design are a dime a dozen.
I’m looking forward to your next post regarding his two “good arguments”. They should allow us to make a quick assessment of how well he understands intelligent design.
Rvb8:
”Good science can not be done from a motivation of religion, because the religious are constantly looking for the Designer’s handy work.”
Well you clearly know nothing about science then. It is an empirical and historical fact that you can do good science with religious motivation. Pretty much all the founding father’s of science had such motivation. Such are the facts.
“Your silly example of Newton does not mean he went to the Bible and read something to motivate his investigation.”
Sorry, Newton himself said the contrary. Who are you to tell Newton what his real motivations were. Funnily enough newton wrote more on theology than he did on science. Look where that got him.
Considering the evidence, it’s a lie to suggest the scientists mentioned didn’t have these motivations, they said it themselves. If a statement from them about such motivations isn’t evidence, then neither can statements by ID proponents be evidence they have theological motivations. Try think a little harder about that one. Which is it? Or you can continue to commit the fallacies mentioned in my article, but that’s up to you.
Thanks Eric, the next one should be up on Sunday. It’s ending up to be quite detailed, but hopefully helpful.
Just the idea that there could exist a good way to attack ID is beyond laughable. A first glance at the intelligent design all around us registers its intelligent source as simulataneously as physical light is registered. A victim of cretinism would register it instantly.
The atheist has created a truly surreal, Alice in Wonderland, intellectual landscape. But there days are numbered. In fact, all our days are numbered if God doesn’t exist and will not ave us from the car-wreck we have made of this planet.
What people say, what people witness, what people saw, is a very, and recognisable poor way to get facts. (Don’t rely on Tony Blair’s Biography to let you know what Tony Blair did, or thought.)
‘Witnessing’, is inherrantly flawed as people have poorly evolved flawed senses. Get thirteen people in a room to witness a crime and the police will tell you, they get thirteen different accounts.
Human inaccuracy being the norm scientists go to other sources of evidence. Newton didn’t use the Bible to get his laws on motion, or his optics.
You say his faith was his inspiration, perhaps, but he sure as hell didn’t use it in his calculations.
And once again, please stop this historical relatavism. It matters not a jot that in an incredibly religious age, religion was used by religious scientists as a religious motivation.
The simple fact is that it was ignored in their discoveries. And when the Church lost its strangle hold on life, science, art, music, politics, and the individual, these areas continued to flourish, without the Jesus inspiration; did they not!?
RVB8,
As has been repeatedly pointed out to you, blanket dismissal of testimony removes any warrant based on observation [and memory], witness, record etc.
This would lead to collapse of education, management, accounting, courts, commissions of inquiry, history, science and more. Even Mathematics rests on the consensus that competent witnesses have gone through the many chains and sub chains of warrant. Society would collapse in an avalanche of global hyperskepticism.
Global dismissiveness regarding testimony and linked record is absurd and self-referentially irretrievably incoherent.
What you are really doing above is implicitly reserving trust for cases you like and targetting those you don’t for the force of hyperskepticism, with the rhetoric just seen as self-referentially abbsurd. That is, you have now exerted an implicit, self-/agenda- serving double standard of warrant. AKA, the fallacy of selective hyperskepticism.
This multiplies the folly of global hyperskepticism, by that of smuggling in might and manipulation make “right” and “truth” etc, tricks often resorted to by dishonest lawyers and politicians.
The nihilism involved is blatant.
Yet again — and as Heine long since warned against.
You go on to talk dismissively about Newton while refusing to engage his General Scholium, in effect his introduction to Principia 2nd edn. In that introduction — as is also seen in his Opticks Query 31 — he plainly engages in philosophy of our idea of God informed by his particular understanding of the Judaeo-Christian scriptues. He even more directly ties this to his scientific work, indeed this is the in effect introduction. Principia is, of course the single most significant professional level work of modern science, the point of triumph of science as a discipline and socio-cultural movement.
Your failure to cogently address is diagnostic of your underlying failure to ground, instead you are issuing rhetorically manipulative assertions.
I suggest, that you stop such, pause and think.
A good point to begin is with why Newton thought in terms of natural philosophy. He understood himself to be engaging in a philosophically driven investigation of nature, informed by epistemology, logic and metaphysics — three of the roughly half dozen main facets of philosophy. Well founded results then emerge as provisional knowledge, Scientia in Latin; Science per shift to English. As, the Scholium makes plain.
Going beyond, let us see how he articulated this further in Opticks, Query 31:
We have somewhat refined our view of induction beyond mere generalisation from particulars, but this is a major step. In fact, it looks very much like the root of school-level summaries of “the” scientific method.
It is therefore highly significant to note onward, that this query also states:
Connexions to the General Scholium are quite obvious, as has already been cited. We see here a direct chain from philosophy of inductive, empirical investigation to grounding of provisional knowledge on empirical basis. This is structured in terms of wholes and parts and inferred dynamics acting. That structure of the cosmos is then traced to intelligent Agency, specifically identified as Creator [in a Judaeo-Christian context]. Blind forces of chance and mechanical necessity are dismissed as impotent. The onward link is made that there are also ordering rules impressed by the same Lord on morally governed creatures. To wit, us.
All of this, in two pivotal scientific works by the principal father of modern science. One of these is the greatest professional work of modern science, Principia. And, Opticks is itself an impressive work in Newton’s scientific corpus.
It is quite evident that we have been fed a bill of dubious goods through the revisionism that has been imposed by radical secularists on the history and definition of science and its methods. As well as the even more pernicious myth of secularist progress to enlightened utopia once stranglehold of God, scripture, church and bitter clingers to same, are removed.
You really, desperately, need to read Plato’s parable of the cave and that of the mutinous ship of state. When you have done such, ponder here on the rise of modern liberty and democracy — yet another field utterly distorted through secularist utopian progress mythology.
I would suggest that you revise your views.
KF
PS: Greenleaf, a founder of Harvard Law School in the modern form, and foundational to modern anglophone theory of evidence, says the following in his opening chapter of his justly famous, multi-volume Treatise on Evidence:
F/N: Eleven years past, Peterson raised some material points on the rise of modern science in what is now an oldie but goodie. Well worth the clipping, to help us move the matter beyond secularist, progressivist myth-making:
Points to ponder, with significant balancing and corrective force.
KF
PS: As was already highlighted, evo mat is inherently and inescapably self-referentially incoherent, utterly refuting itself. It is necessarily false and cannot stand scrutiny so it dons the holy lab coat and demands to set the rules for science and society alike. Plato, in The Laws Bk X, long since warned on where that heads.
Joshua G: Let us know when Part 2 is ready! 🙂