ID Foundations, 21: MF — “as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation” . . . a root worldview assumption based cause for rejecting the design inference emerges into plain view
In the OK thread, in comment 50, ID objector Mark Frank has finally laid out the root of ever so many of the objections to the design inference filter. Unsurprisingly, it is a worldview based controlling a priori of materialism:
[re EA] #38
[MF, in 50:] I see “chance” as usually meaning to “unpredictable” or “no known explanation”. The unknown explanations may be deterministic elements or genuinely random uncaused events which we just don’t know about.
It can also includes things that happen as the result of intelligence – but as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation.
But, just what what is the explanatory filter that is being objected to so strenuously?
Let me present it first, in the per aspect flowchart form that I have often used here at UD, that shows it to be a more specific and detailed understanding of a lot of empirically grounded scientific methods of investigation.
Galileo’s leaning tower exercise, showing mechanical necessity: F = m*g, of course less air resistance. NB: He did a thought expt of imagining the light and heavy ball tied together, so on the “heavier must fall faster” concept, the objects now should fall even faster. But, shouldn’t the lighter one instead have retarded the heavier? As in, oopsie. The expt may have been done and the heavier may have hit just ahead, as air resistance is as cross section but weight is as volume. (HT: Lannyland & Wiki.)
One that explicitly invokes mechanical necessity as first default, then on high contingency rejects it — if a lawlike necessity is at work, it will produce reliably similar outcomes on similar initial circumstances, just as a dropped heavy object near earth’s surface has initial acceleration 9.8 N/kg due to the gravity field of the earth.
However, this does not cover all phenomena, e.g. if the dropped object is a fair common die that then falls to a table, it will tumble and settle to read a value from the set {1, 2, . . . 6} in a way that is close to the mathematical behaviour of an ideal flat random variable.
But also, chance and necessity cannot cover all outcomes. Not only do we routinely experience being intelligent designers — e.g. by my composing this post — but we often see a class of phenomena which is highly contingent but not plausibly accounted for on chance. For, if we see 500 – 1,000 bits or more of functionally specific complex organisation and/or information [FSCO/I], the needle in haystack challenge faced by the atomic resources of our solar system or cosmos will be overwhelmed by the space of possible configurations and the challenge of finding cases E from narrow and isolated target or hot zones T in such spaces, W.
Citing Dembski’s definition of CSI in No Free Lunch:
p. 148: “The great myth of contemporary evolutionary biology is that the information needed to explain complex biological structures can be purchased without intelligence. My aim throughout this book is to dispel that myth . . . . Eigen and his colleagues must have something else in mind besides information simpliciter when they describe the origin of information as the central problem of biology.
I submit that what they have in mind is specified complexity [[cf. here below], or what equivalently we have been calling in this Chapter Complex Specified information or CSI . . . .
Biological specification always refers to function . . . In virtue of their function [[a living organism’s subsystems] embody patterns that are objectively given and can be identified independently of the systems that embody them. Hence these systems are specified in the sense required by the complexity-specificity criterion . . . the specification can be cashed out in any number of ways [[through observing the requisites of functional organisation within the cell, or in organs and tissues or at the level of the organism as a whole] . . .”
p. 144: [[Specified complexity can be defined:] “. . . since a universal probability bound of 1 [[chance] in 10^150 corresponds to a universal complexity bound of 500 bits of information, [[the cluster] (T, E) constitutes CSI because T [[ effectively the target hot zone in the field of possibilities] subsumes E [[ effectively the observed event from that field], T is detachable from E, and and T measures at least 500 bits of information . . . ”
So, design thinkers reject the default explanation for high contingency– chance — if we see FSCO/I or the like. That is, we infer on FSCO/I and related patterns best explained on (and as known reliable signs of) design, to just that, intelligent design:
Accordingly, I replied to MF at 59 in the OK thread, as follows:
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>>> the pivot of the issue is now plain from MF at 50 above:
[re EA] #38
[MF:] I see “chance” as usually meaning to “unpredictable” or “no known explanation”. The unknown explanations may be deterministic elements or genuinely random uncaused events which we just don’t know about.
It can also includes things that happen as the result of intelligence – but as a materialist I believe intelligence to be a blend of the determined and random so for me that is not a third type of explanation.
Here we have the root problem, that for MF, design reduces to chance and necessity.
Also, I would not go along fully with MF’s definition of chance {“uncaused events” is a very troublesome concept for instance but my focus here is,} having identified that chance processes come about by two major known physical processes:
Chance:
Tumbling dice — a chaotic phenomenon thanks to eight corners and twelve edges interacting with uncontrollable surface roughness etc. (HT:Rosendahl, Flicker)
TYPE I:the clash of uncorrelated trains of events such as is seen when a dropped fair die hits a table etc and tumbles, settling to readings in the set {1, 2, . . . 6} in a pattern that is effectively flat random. In this sort of event, we often see manifestations of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, aka chaos, intersecting with uncontrolled or uncontrollable small variations yielding a result predictable in most cases only up to a statistical distribution which needs not be flat random.
TYPE II:processes — especially quantum ones — that are evidently random, such as quantum tunnelling as is the explanation for phenomena of alpha decay. This is used in for instance zener noise sources that drive special counter circuits to give a random number source. Such are sometimes used in lotteries or the like, or presumably in making one time message pads used in decoding.
In reply to MF’s attempt to reduce design by intelligence to the other two sources of cause, I suggest that this approach radically undermines the credibility of mind as a thinking and knowing function of being intelligent humans, in a reductio ad absurdum. (Cf my remarks here yesterday in reply to Dan Barker’s FFRF and my longstanding observations — in the end they go back to the mid 1980′s in answer to Marxist materialism as well as evolutionary materialism — here on.)
Haldane sums up one of the major problems aptly, in a turn of the 1930′s remark that has often been cited here at UD:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [[“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]
Let me clip my more extended discussion:
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>> 15 –> In short, it is at least arguable that self-referential absurdity is the dagger pointing to the heart of evolutionary materialistic models of mind and its origin . . . . [It can be presented at a much more sophisticated way, cf. Hasker p. 64 on here as an example, also Reppert, Plantinga and others] but without losing its general force, it can also be drawn out a bit in a fairly simple way:
a: Evolutionary materialism argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature; from hydrogen to humans by undirected chance and necessity.
b: Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws of chance and/or mechanical necessity acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of happenstance initial circumstances.
(This is physicalism. This view covers both the forms where (a) the mind and the brain are seen as one and the same thing, and those where (b) somehow mind emerges from and/or “supervenes” on brain, perhaps as a result of sophisticated and complex software looping. The key point, though is as already noted: physical causal closure — the phenomena that play out across time, without residue, are in principle deducible or at least explainable up to various random statistical distributions and/or mechanical laws, from prior physical states. Such physical causal closure, clearly, implicitly discounts or even dismisses the causal effect of concept formation and reasoning then responsibly deciding, in favour of specifically physical interactions in the brain-body control loop; indeed, some mock the idea of — in their view — an “obviously” imaginary “ghost” in the meat-machine. [[There is also some evidence from simulation exercises, that accuracy of even sensory perceptions may lose out to utilitarian but inaccurate ones in an evolutionary competition. “It works” does not warrant the inference to “it is true.”] )
c: But human thought, clearly a phenomenon in the universe, must now fit into this meat-machine picture. So, we rapidly arrive at Crick’s claim in his The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994): what we subjectively experience as “thoughts,” “reasoning” and “conclusions” can only be understood materialistically as the unintended by-products of the blind natural forces which cause and control the electro-chemical events going on in neural networks in our brains that (as the Smith Model illustrates) serve as cybernetic controllers for our bodies.
d: These underlying driving forces are viewed as being ultimately physical, but are taken to be partly mediated through a complex pattern of genetic inheritance shaped by forces of selection [[“nature”] and psycho-social conditioning [[“nurture”], within the framework of human culture [[i.e. socio-cultural conditioning and resulting/associated relativism]. And, remember, the focal issue to such minds — notice, this is a conceptual analysis made and believed by the materialists! — is the physical causal chains in a control loop, not the internalised “mouth-noises” that may somehow sit on them and come along for the ride.
(Save, insofar as such “mouth noises” somehow associate with or become embedded as physically instantiated signals or maybe codes in such a loop. [[How signals, languages and codes originate and function in systems in our observation of such origin — i.e by design — tends to be pushed to the back-burner and conveniently forgotten. So does the point that a signal or code takes its significance precisely from being an intelligently focused on, observed or chosen and significant alternative from a range of possibilities that then can guide decisive action.])
e: For instance, Marxists commonly derided opponents for their “bourgeois class conditioning” — but what of the effect of their own class origins? Freudians frequently dismissed 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? Should we not ask a Behaviourist whether s/he is little more than yet another operantly conditioned rat trapped in the cosmic maze? And — as we saw above — would the writings of a Crick be any more than the firing of neurons in networks in his own brain?
f: For further instance, we may take the favourite whipping-boy of materialists: religion. Notoriously, they often hold that belief in God is not merely cognitive, conceptual error, but delusion. Borderline lunacy, in short. But, if such a patent “delusion” is so utterly widespread, even among the highly educated, then it “must” — by the principles of evolution — somehow be adaptive to survival, whether in nature or in society. And so, this would be a major illustration of the unreliability of our conceptual reasoning ability, on the assumption of evolutionary materialism.
g: Turning the materialist dismissal of theism around, evolutionary materialism itself would be in the same leaky boat. For, the sauce for the goose is notoriously just as good a sauce for the gander, too.
h: That is, on its own premises [[and following Dawkins in A Devil’s Chaplain, 2004, p. 46], the cause of the belief system of evolutionary materialism, “must” also be reducible to forces of blind chance and mechanical necessity that are sufficiently adaptive to spread this “meme” in populations of jumped- up apes from the savannahs of East Africa scrambling for survival in a Malthusian world of struggle for existence. Reppert brings the underlying point sharply home, in commenting on the “internalised mouth-noise signals riding on the physical cause-effect chain in a cybernetic loop” view:
. . . let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, together cause the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts . . . [[But] if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and [[so] we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be, the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions. [[Emphases added . . . ]
i: The famous geneticist and evolutionary biologist (as well as Socialist) J. B. S. Haldane made much the same point in a famous 1932 remark:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [[“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]
j: Therefore, though materialists will often try to pointedly ignore or angrily brush aside the issue, we may freely argue: if such evolutionary materialism is true, then (i) our consciousness, (ii) the “thoughts” we have, (iii) the conceptualised beliefs we hold, (iv) the reasonings we attempt based on such and (v) the “conclusions” and “choices” (a.k.a. “decisions”) we reach — without residue — must be produced and controlled by blind forces of chance happenstance and mechanical necessity that are irrelevant to “mere” ill-defined abstractions such as: purpose or truth, or even logical validity.
(NB: The conclusions of such “arguments” may still happen to be true, by astonishingly lucky coincidence — but we have no rational grounds for relying on the “reasoning” that has led us to feel that we have “proved” or “warranted” them. It seems that rationality itself has thus been undermined fatally on evolutionary materialistic premises. Including that of Crick et al. Through, self-reference leading to incoherence and utter inability to provide a cogent explanation of our commonplace, first-person experience of reasoning and rational warrant for beliefs, conclusions and chosen paths of action. Reduction to absurdity and explanatory failure in short.)
k: And, if materialists then object: “But, we can always apply scientific tests, through observation, experiment and measurement,” then we must immediately note that — as the fate of Newtonian Dynamics between 1880 and 1930 shows — empirical support is not equivalent to establishing the truth of a scientific theory. For, at any time, one newly discovered countering fact can in principle overturn the hitherto most reliable of theories. (And as well, we must not lose sight of this: in science, one is relying on the legitimacy of the reasoning process to make the case that scientific evidence provides reasonable albeit provisional warrant for one’s beliefs etc. Scientific reasoning is not independent of reasoning.) >>
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In short, there is a major issue that materialism is inherently and inescapably self referentially incoherent, undermining its whole scheme of reasoning.
That is a big topic itself.
But, when it comes to the issue of debates over the meaning of chance and inferences to design which implicate intelligence, it is an underlying assumption that plainly leads to endless debates.
In this context, however, the case of 500 coins in a row on a table reading all H or alternating H and T or the first 72 characters of this post in ASCII code, strongly shows the difference in capacity of chance and design as sources of configurations that come from independently and simply describable clusters that are deeply isolated in a space of configs that are such that the atomic resources of our solar system cannot credibly search a big enough fraction to make it reasonable to believe one will stumble upon such configs blindly.
In short, there is a major and directly experienced phenomenon to be accounted for, self aware conscious intellect and related capacities we subsume under the term mind. And this phenomenon is manifest in capacity to design, which is as familiar as composing posts in this thread.
Such designs are well beyond the capacity of blind chance and mechanical necessity, so we have good reason to see that intelligence capable of design is as fundamental in understanding our empirical world as chance and as necessity.
Whatever the worldview consequences — and I think they are huge.>>>
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In short, it seems that one key root of objections to the design inference is the notion that intelligence needed for design in the end reduces to cumulative effects of blind chance and mechanical necessity.
Only, that runs into significant self referential incoherence challenges.
A safer approach would be to recognise that intelligence indisputably exists and indisputably exerts capacities not credibly observed to emerge from blind chance and mechanical necessity. Indeed, on inductive and analytic — needle in haystack — grounds, it is arguable and compelling that certain phenomena such as FSCO/I are reliable signs of design as cause.
Then, we run into the challenge that from its very roots, cell based life is chock full of such signs of design, starting with the genetic code and the size of genomes, from 100 – 1,000 kbits on up.
Then, the observed cosmos itself shows strong and multiple signs of being fine tuned in ways that enable the existence of cell based life on terrestrial planets such as our own — where fine tuning is another empirically grounded sign of being designed.
So, there are good reasons to extend the force of the design inference to the origin of cell based life and of major body plans for such life, and to the origins of the observed cosmos that hosts such life. END
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F/N: I must update by posting this all too aptly accurate debate summary by no less than UD’s inimitable WJM, done here on Christmas day as a gift to the blog and world. WJM, I CANNOT let this one just wash away in the stream of comments! (You ought to separately headline it under your monicker.) Here goes:
Typical debate with an anti-ID advocate:
ID advocate: There are certain things that exist that are best explained by intelligent designed.
Anti-ID advocate: Whoa! Hold up there, fella. “Explained”, in science, means “caused by”. Intelligent design doesn’t by itself “cause” anything.
ID advocate: What I meant is that teleology is required to generate certain things, like a functioning battleship. It can’t come about by chance.
Anti-ID advocate: What do you mean “by chance”? “By” means to cause. Are you claiming that chance causes things to happen?
ID advocate: Of course not. Chance, design and necessity are the three fundamental categories of causation used to characterize the outcomes of various processes and mechanisms. You’re taking objection with colloquialisms that are commonly used in mainstream science and debate. Here are some examples of peer-reviewed, published papers that use these same colloquialisms.
Anti-ID advocate: Those aren’t real scientists!
ID advocate: Those are scientists you yourself have quoted in the past – they are mainstream Darwinists.
ID advocate: I’m using the quotes the same way the authors used them.
Anti-ID advocate: Can you prove it?
ID Advocate: It’s not my job to prove my own innocence, but whatever. Look, it has been accepted for thousands of years that there are only three categories of causation – necessity, or law, chance and artifice, or design. Each category is distinct.
Anti ID advocate: I have no reason to accept that design is a distinct category.
ID advocate: So, you’re saying that battleship or a computer can be generated by a combination of necessity (physical laws) and chance?
Anti-ID advocate: Can you prove otherwise? Are you saying it’s impossible?
ID advocate: No, I’m saying that chance and necessity are not plausible explanations.
Anti-ID advocate: “Explanation” means to “cause” a thing. Chance and necessity don’t “cause” anything.
ID advocate: We’ve already been over this. Those are shorthand ways of talking about processes and mechanisms that produce effects categorized as lawful or chance.
Anti-ID advocate: Shorthand isn’t good enough – we must have specific uses of terms using explicitly laid-out definitions or else debate cannot go forward.
ID advocate: (insert several pages lay out specifics and definitions with citations and historical references).
ID advocate: In summary, this demonstrates that mainstream scientists have long accepted that there are qualitative difference between CSI, or organized, complimentary complexity/functionality, and what can in principle be generated via the causal categories of chance and necessity. Only intelligent or intentional agency is known to be in principle capable of generating such phenomena.
Anti-ID advocate: OMG, you can’t really expect me to read and understand all of that! I don’t understand the way you word things. Is English your first language? It makes my head hurt.
Comments
@UB:
He did not write that sentence, you did.
Yes.
ID is a scientific project, as such its appropriately limited to material evidence. If you were expecting something else, then you should rethink your expectations.
Don't get me wrong, I'm talking about the current situation of ID. ID is in its infancy; and that's why it's useless (naturally it's not useless for the scientists invested in ID).
Furthermore watching how the UD discussions onfold with all the culture wars and materialism vs. non-materialism is really frustrating, since it sometimes poisons the atmosphere and doesn't further the ID-ideas (yes I do understand that UD is just a blog).
That will be a welcomed outcome.
I wholeheartedly believe that nearly all humans who ever lived, regardless of their current religion or their criminal records, will eventually live in paradise.
Christianity is not a science, its the following of Jesus Christ.
Christianity makes some remarkable claims about the design of our universe. If you want to know the "when", "what", and "who" of the ID-issues, at the moment you NEED Christianity.JWTruthInLove
January 6, 2014
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RDFish:
Wow! I have just been away a couple of days, and there has really been some movement here! :)
Well, I believe I still owe you an answer to your last post to me, #120 I suppose, and then, if I find the time, I will try to read what has happened after that.
Here it is.
First of all, just to be consistent, I will repeat that I don't like to repeat things. Therefore, I will try to answer only those points which have not been already debated fully. For the rest, let' say that I understand well your arguments, and I am not convinced by them, and that you understand my arguments, and are not convinced by them. That's perfectly fine. There is no reason just to go on repeating those arguments. Intelligent people have certainly already understood all of them.
On the contrary, my position is that you refuse to admit that we do not understand some things about our world. You are adamant that we should never admit our ignorance, but instead take whatever idea we prefer and claim scientific support for it.
Here, a simple re-writing will suffice:
"I admit, indeed insist, that we do not understand a lot of things about our world. And I am adamant that we must not simply say "we don't know", but rather look for the best explanation available, and test it against all new facts that will be discovered, because that's what science does."
I don't like to repeat things, but I will not allow gross misrepresentations.
In this way, you display the same fideism to ID that you deplore in Darwinists. Neither you nor Richard Dawkins is sufficiently objective to admit that your theory lacks the evidence that theories require in order to be considered well-supported scientific results.
Dawkins and I differ in many things, but we have one thing in common (if I understand well what he thinks): we both believe that both neo darwinism and ID are legitimate scientific theories. Obviously, we have very different ideas about how much each of them is supported by facts.
You, on the other hand, deny the scientific status to both theories. we differ from you, and you differ from us. And I am happy to side with Dawkins on that point.
You insist that because human beings are conscious and can design complex machinery, then something with a human-like mind must be responsible for inventing biological systems, but of course you have no evidence that such is the case. Moreover, since an undefined “conscious agency” is not a well-understood entity, it is not possible to event evaluate the evidence to see if it matches ID’s claims or not.
Re-writing:
"I insist that because conscious human beings are the only kind of known agent that can design objects exhibiting dFSCI, then something with similar conscious faculties is a good explanation for the only other example of objects exhibiting dFSCI, biological systems. My evidence for that is the presence of dFSCI in them. My hypothesis can certainly be tested both against already known facts and against new facts, because the design process implies specific observable consequences in what we observe, consequences that cannot be explained by any other theory."
That's better, isn't it?
That is why I reject both Darwinism and ID. The Darwinists will cry that I’ve rejected their well-supported theory, and you cry that I’ve rejected yours, and you’ll continue to battle in vain because neither of you are willing to take the evidence for what it is and be humble enough to know when we simply don’t understand something. Your idea that we simply must choose one of these two very bad theories is nonsense.
I can't speak for darwinists, but I certainly don't cry for that. You are perfectly allowed to reject my theory. I can live very well with that. Rejecting or accepting a theory is a personal privilege. I am happy that you are using that privilege.
I don't know why you say that I am "battling in vain". I am certainly batlling, but why in vain? Because I cannot convince you? But that has never been my priority, indeed not even my purpose. As I have said many times, my purpose in not to convince anybody, just to share my views and, if possible, to make them well understood. So, I will go on battling, and I hope it is not in vain.
You don’t seem to understand the fundamentals of AI either. Many computer systems do not have “specific algorithms” that the programmer designs; instead, the system uses learning techniques and sub-symbolic processing of various forms that shape the behavior of the system in unpredictable ways as it interacts with its environment. For you to say that the sentence generated by such a system is not CSI, but the same sentence uttered by a human being does have CSI, is very confused indeed. And you failed to respond to my point: If everything a computer does is attributable to its designer, why isn’t everything that a human being does attribute to its designer?
I really think that strong AI theory is nonsense. You seem to believe in part of that nonsense. I don't.
Computer systems only perform the algorithms that have been designed in them. They do nothing else. Please, explain what they should be able to do, that is not a necessary result of their algorithms, given the inputs.
The fact that we cannot predict the results does not mean that they are not algorithmic.
Instead, there is no evidence that human consciousness and its activities are merely algorithmic. Indeed, there are very good reasons to believe the opposite (see, also, Penrose).
You ask: "If everything a computer does is attributable to its designer, why isn’t everything that a human being does attribute to its designer?".
Well, because human beings are non merely algorithmic agents, conscious free agents.
And when computer scientists design and implement their information representations, and when the computer system assembles representations of the sentences it is going to display, those representations… do not exist, because the computer is not conscious?
Exactly.
This is terribly confused, really it is. Computer representations exist, as any computer scientist will gladly explain to you.
As you should have understood by now, with "representation" I mean a subjective state where the form is perceived by an I. If any computer scientist gladly explains to me that a computer has subjective states where it represents forms, I will gladly refute his explanation.
Computer systems routinely generate meaningful, contextually appropriate, grammatical sentences in natural language (like English) that have never before been seen or conceived of by any human. This is a fact. You simply deny it, and pretend that computers are incapable of such things, because it conflicts with your particular (and rather odd) philosophy of mind.
I do deny that computer systems can generate new, original dFSCI. Please, bring the evidence that they can, and we can discuss it.
I am not talking about the consequences of the theory! Rather, I am talking about the assumptions that the theory makes! The problem isn’t that the theory indicates some particular metaphysics! Rather, the problem is that you must believe in particular metaphysics or else the theory doesn’t make sense!
Your use of language, here, is almost as bad as your epistemology. It is not necessary to "believe" in an assumption, to assume it in a theory. Again, it's like saying that one must "believe" a priori in the Big Bang to assume it in a Big Bang theory. Luckily, that is not the case.
Big Bang Theory rests on physical principles that we can observe to be true. It doesn’t assume any unknown forces, properties of matter or energy, or any unknown immaterial causes in order to coherently express what BB Theory claims happened at the beginning of the universe. BB Theory proceeds to make highly specific predictions that have subsequently been confirmed. That is why BB Theory is a valid scientific result.
So, then origin of space and time from an undefined singularity is a well known process?
ID Theory rests on metaphysical commitments that cannot be evaluated scientifically. In order to believe in ID, you must accept that conscious agency is capable of doing things that no combination of chance and fixed law is capable of doing. In other words, you must believe that mind transcends physical causation. That is the starting point of ID – if you don’t believe that at the outset, you will not believe ID theory, period. But of course nobody can show that this assumption is in fact the case! It is a faith-based assumption that you have made, because once you believe that, you can go on to build a theory that you like. Beyond that, ID Theory makes no specific predictions that can subsequently be confirmed or falsified, because the idea of “conscious agency” is inherently capable of explaining any observation that could ever take place. That is why ID is not a valid scientific theory.
Re-writing:
"In order to believe in ID, you must assume that conscious agency is capable of doing things that no combination of chance and fixed law is capable of doing, which is very much supported by the empirical fact that dFSCI is observed only in designed systems, and never in non designed systems (leaving undecided biological systems, which are exactly what we are trying to understand). In other words, you must accept as possible that mind can transcend physical causation. That is the starting point of ID – if you don’t accept that as a possibility, because of your specific worldview, you will not believe ID theory, period. But of course nobody can show that such a denial of that possibility is in fact the case! It is a faith-based assumption that you have made, because once you deny that, you can go on denying a theory that you dislike.
ID Theory makes specific predictions that can subsequently be confirmed or falsified, because the idea of conscious design is inherently capable of explaining dFSCI, and the specific observation of dFSCI in ever new forms, that cannot be explained by known laws and by reasonable random systems, is constant support for the theory. That is why ID is a valid scientific theory."
Hahaha! Exactly! You think this discounts my point, but you’ve actually undercut your own position. Of course we do not know if anything in our minds transcend physical causality – that is what I have been trying to explain to you! The problem is that you blithely ignore this inconvenient fact and pretend that this is a known fact, or that it doesn’t matter if we take these things on faith. It does matter: You can’t build a scientific theory on the quicksand of unsubstantiated assumptions!
You really don't understand. Because we don't know, it is equally legitimate to assume both that out minds do not transcend physical causality, and that they do, in a scientific theory. And the, test the theory for its explanatory power.
It is dogma to reject a reasonable assumption only because we "don't know" that it is true. Therefore, Dawkins and I are right, and you are wrong. And dogmatic.
Finally! I was waiting for this one.
The fact is, ID blatantly equivocates: On one hand, ID could be the hypothesis that life on Earth was designed by life elsewhere. This hypothesis is consistent with our understanding of intelligent agency, and living things, and does not require metaphysical speculation regarding the existence of disembodied minds in order to accept it. However, this is a terrible theory for several reasons, among which is the simple fact that once we posit extra-terrestrial life forms, it is much simpler to assume that we are the descendents of these beings, rather than the products of their bio-engineering efforts.
ID is the hypothesis that life on earth was designed. Aliens are a legitimate possibility, compatible with ID theory. I am not specially interested in discussing it, because it is not my theory.
The theory that we are the descendants of those beings is legitimate, but it is not an ID theory (it does not imply design, but simply generation). I believe, however, that you should detail it better. What do you mean by "the descendants of those beings"? What are you referring to? Bacteria? All living beings?
You see, the problem for ID is to explain dFSCI. New dFSCI appears throughout the whole natural history. So, I am not sure I understand what your theory of "descendance" really means.
On the other hand, ID could be the hypothesis that life on Earth was designed by something that did not have a complex physical body at all. This hypothesis flies in the face of everything we know about intelligent agency, however, and would require actual evidence that such a thing – which has never been observed – could actually exist.
Another theory compatible with ID is the hypothesis that life on Earth was designed by something that did not have a complex physical body at all. That's correct.And it flies in the face of nothing.
And how is it that now, suddenly, we know so many things about intelligent agency? I thought your position was that we "don't know". It seems that we only know things when it is convenient for your argument.
However, I would really like your response to this (most ID folks choose to ignore this one, for obvious reasons): Why would you accept the theory that alien life forms designed life on Earth, but not that life on Earth was simply descendent from those life forms?
I can certainly accept both theories, although I would appreciate if you detailed better the second one. Why not? I accept them. I only prefer mine, as the best explanation.
As I have stated immediately after:
"The reason why I prefer non physical designers to that scenario are in part scientific, in part philosophical. But the design inference remains valid, whatever kind of designer we choose to hypothesize."
To be more clear, if each living species on earth is the descendant of some alien species, that is an explanation, and dFSCI is explained (on earth), because the dFSCI of each species was already present in the alien species. That is an explanation. Everybody can decide how good it is.
You’ve dodged the question yet again. Once more: Name one single thing that a “conscious agent” is incapable of doing.
I have dodged nothing. I have explained that I only assume that he is able to output dFSCI to objects. Why do you ask me what he is incapable of doing, when my theory will never ask anything else of him?
I can name inummerable things that evolutionary processes are incapable of doing. I can name things that gravity cannot do, that electrons cannot do, that germs cannot do; for any valid scientific explanation (this excludes Darwinism) you can name, you will see that the explanatory constructs are defined in a way such that they can cause some things and not others. In contrast, you cannot say one single thing that a “conscious agent” is incapable of doing! This is yet another reason why ID is a non-starter as a scientific theory.
This is another example of terrible reasoning. The problem with "evolutionary processes" is simply that they cannot generate new dFSCI. It is not that they cannot, say, shape planets or redeem souls. Why? Because it's dFSCI that they are supposed to explain.
That conscious intelligent agents can generate dFSCI is empirically observed. Whatever else they can, or cannot do is not pertinent.
In other words, you are simply declaring a faith-based opinion that no other explanation will ever be found for the existence of functional protein sequences. You simply insist that there can be nothing we do not already understand that could constrain the processes that result in these sequences such that they function in living metabolisms. You are exactly like the people who insisted that no possible explanation could ever be found for the highly improbable sequence of lightning strikes – except God!
Re-writing:
"I am declaring very reasonably that no explanation has been found for the existence of functional protein sequences, according to known laws of biochemistry and biology and statistics. I insist that there is nothing that we understand that can constrain the processes that result in these sequences such that they function in living metabolisms, except conscious design. And that there are no reasonable arguments to believe that any law of necessity, even if presently unknown, or random system, can ever explain that kind of functional complexity. However, I remain ready to evaluate any reasonable theory, if and when it is proposed."
It is this objection of yours that is bad, I’m afraid: OF COURSE lightning is not protein! The point – which you seem very determined to miss – is that we do not know what we do not know! The Boston scientists thought they knew everything, and so they felt justified in saying there could never be any explanation of the churches being struck except for intelligent agency. They were wrong. ID scientists think they know everything, and so they feel justified in saying there could never be any explanation for protein sequences except for intelligent agency. They are wrong: Same mistake both times.
I will simply repeat my objection (for the last time). It is not bad at all.
"No. Functional configurations of digital “switches” are completely different from lightening. Again, you banalize, and refuse to deal with the true arguments of ID. Your arguments are generally good, but this one is very bad. IMO."
This would be helpful save for the inconvenient fact that ID provides no empirical method by which to observe when conscious designers intervene!!! How are we supposed to falsify ID by finding a complex body plan that arose without conscious design when we have no idea how to look at some complex body plan and then decide no conscious design was involved??? Don’t you see? EVERY complex body plan you see you simply DECIDE that conscious design was involved – you don’t observe the intervention!
The meaning of my point is very simple. If you can just produce a system in a lab, which generates new dFSCI without any intervention of a designer, that will falsify ID. I will not assume that a non physical designer has intervened in your lab just to frustrate us all.
In the same way, if you can show that biochemical and biological laws can explain biological dFSCI, you have falsified biological ID. That is very simple to do for proteins. You only need to show that neo darwinism can really explain the proteins, detailing a pathway to them where NS can really act, lowering the statistical improbability enough to bring it in the range of empirically possible events. That would falsify biological ID (at least for proteins).
Really – just take a look at what you’re saying. Give us some hypothetical, counter-factual scenario where some biological complex body plan is observed, and we SOMEHOW can determine that no conscious designer was involved, thus falisifying your theory. That’s right – you can’t do it.
It's perfectly possible to do that, as I have clearly show. Remember, we need not determine that no conscious designer was involved. It's more than enough to show that the physical system considered could do it.
And so while intelligent agents operate on a time scale of days, months, or years, biological systems are found to take hundreds of millions of years. Why isn’t this a problem for ID? Because no matter what we observe, ID proponents will always say that it is consistent with conscious agency, that’s why.
Different living beings operate at different time scales. That is not a problem for ID. I really don't understand why it's a problem for you.
Wrong, because there is no test to reveal whether or not a complex biological system was the result of conscious design or some other unknown process.
Why? If you correctly set a system in your lab, and new dFSCI emerges, that's it. Even a computer experiment could falsify ID by correctly generating new original dFSCI.
Wrong, because showing that theory A does is not a falsification of theory B. Now that we know Darwinism is false, we need to be able to figure out what theory is true. In order to test to see if ID is true or not, we need something that would be inconsistent with ID to see if that ever happens. But because nothing is ever inconsistent with ID, that can’t be done.
Nonsense. If neo darwinism is shown to be able to explain biological complexity, ID is falsified, because it rests on the observation that no known algorithm can explain that. Neo darwinism is a known algorithm. And it cannot explain biological complexity. But if it could, ID would be falsified.
So, that possibility is something that is inconsistent with ID theory, and would falsify it.
It absolutely would not be a problem for ID at all of course, because there is no reason a conscious designer could not design selectable intermediates!
That clearly shows that you simply don't understand ID theory. ID theory is about detectable design, not about design in general.
It can be true that, even if neo darwinism were shown to explain proteins, somebody could still argue that they are designed by a designer who chose to use neo darwinism, or just to simulate it. That would not be an objection compatible with ID reasoning. Because, in any case, even if those proteins were designed, design would not be objectively detectable, and ID theory would be falsified just the same.
IOWs, if dFSCI can be explained without a conscious designer, ID theory is falsified.
And you don't understand what ID theory is.
Give it up, GP – just admit that the “conscious agents” hypothesis is compatible with every possible observation, and so you are just pretending that ID can be falsified by saying that proving some other theory true would falsify it. Don’t you see that you have falsified Darwinism without any reference at all to ID or any other theory? The reason you could falsify Darwinism is because Darwinism happens to be a scientific theory! But you can’t falsify ID because it explains every possible observation that could ever be make by invoking the same unseen, untestable cause.
Well, I really don't think I will give it up.
And I certainly don't ask you to give it up. Please, go on. Do what you believe to be right, defend what you believe to be right.
I would simply politely ask that you don't involve me in a simple repetition of well understood arguments. Thank you.gpuccio
January 6, 2014
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Joe: Please tone down intensity and language. I am about to remove a vulgarity. You were doing well, kindly return to that. KFkairosfocus
January 5, 2014
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F/N: We routinely observe or experience design in action, producing FSCO/I including dFSCI beyond 500 - 1,000 bits. We know on needle in haystack grounds that blind chance and/or mechanical necessity cannot plausibly produce at the threshold much less beyond it. So, design is a fact and that it transcends the capacity of C & N on a routine basis is also a fact not an assumption. The only question-begging assumption here is the materialist one that intelligence capable of design MUST have come from such. Why? Because it is assumed that is the root of reality, by materialists and those unduly influenced by them. KFkairosfocus
January 5, 2014
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RD sez:
“Can you provide a description of what ID means by “designer” that will allow us to look at the observable evidence (biological systems) and decide if everything we see is within the capabilities of the sort of “designer” you are talking about, and will allow us to judge how likely it is that something like you describe is likely to have ever existed in the first place. Once we do that, we will be in a position to say if ID is a good explanation of living systems or not.
And yet we know the designers capabilities by what they left behind- how do we know humans could construct Stonehenge or the pyramids? Because we have those structures to study. No one would believe it if it was just a story.
As for your other [SNIP! -- language & tone, KF] about ID not saying what is meant by "designer"- read - Intelligent Design is not Optimal DesignJoe
January 5, 2014
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RDFish @ 151
No, the question is serious and important and reveals a fatal problem for ID; it was your answer that was obviously asinine.
Not at all. In fact I rather thought it was quite amusing. As has been patiently explained ad nauseam, there is no way to determine the limits of a designing agent from examining the products of said designer. The only thing that can be reliably, consistently ascertained from examining a designed object is the minimum capability of the designer. For instance, both a child with a runny nose and a renowned artist would be capable of drawing a crude stick figure. If all we had to work with was the stick figure, we would have no way to distinguish whether the designer was some little kid or Norman Rockwell.
All of these fields study the activity of human beings, not “conscious agents” in the abstract. We know a great deal about human beings, including things that they cannot do. If we found evidence of something in an archaeological dig, or a crime scene, that we know human beings cannot do, we would then know that our assumption of human activity has been falsified, and we would need to posit some new hypothesis. This has nothing to do with ID, which refuses to say what is actually supposed to explain all of that which ID purports to explain.
So let's apply your reasoning, then. We'll hypothesize that the tremendous amounts of functional information present in biology are due to the willful activity of some number of human beings acting in the remote past. But as that would require the existence and activity of human beings before human beings existed (discounting time travel paradoxes), we must therefore discard the specific hypothesis that human agency was at play in producing the functional information present in biology. But we still have to account for the origin and subsequent existence of biological information. What if we modify the hypothesis of human activity by positing some nonhuman form of consciousness? Such a nonhuman consciousness would at minimum be capable of producing the same sort of functional information that humans produce. The proposal of a nonhuman consciousness readily follows from the available data and simple logic. It explains the presence of functional information nicely without overreaching into baseless assertions about the specific attributes of the designer(s).
I’ve never said “direct” empirical evidence. Rather, I point out that a scientific hypothesis requires empirical evidence in order to be accepted as a successful explanation; this is not a controversial position.
I agree that empirical evidence is needed to justify a scientific hypothesis. I've never said otherwise. I merely pointed out the absurdity of requiring independent confirmation of the existence of a designer when there is no other credible explanation for the origin of functional information. If something else was known to be capable of producing functional information, then your demand would of course be perfectly reasonable. However, to the best of our knowledge, conscious agency is the only causally adequate explanation of functional information. In other words:
If 'A' and only 'A' is capable of causing 'B', the presence of 'B' necessarily indicates 'A'.
In that case, you’ll need to inform a lot of people that ID is not, in fact, a scientific endeavor! I happen to disagree that emprical inquiry cannot, even in principle, yield knowledge about OOL and the development of biological complexity. But I do agree that with you that we have not, thus far, successfully explained these things.
Amusing, I'm sure. The point I made was simply that hard core empiricism is going to come up empty when trying to understand events that occurred billions of years ago. It's not that empirical data aren't important. They absolutely are. But unless we're willing to make some reasonable inferences drawing on our knowledge of cause and effect, employing uniformitarian reasoning, then absent being present to watch OOL, we're not going to get very far.
Well yes, obviously so. But that isn’t the issue here. The Big Bang happened billions of years ago, but because we understand so much about physics, scientists were able to construct very specific predictions that we could observationally confirm if Big Bang theory were true, and that were extremely unlikely to be true if the Big Bang theory was not true. So, we believe the Big Bang happened as the physicists say it did, even though nobody was there at the time.
And we understand a great deal about information and what is required to produce it. Hence we can with some measure of confidence infer the involvement of conscious activity in the origin of life. However, the action of a designer may not necessarily leave behind such abundant traces that we could comfortably predict 'C', 'D', and 'E' from 'A'.
In contrast, we have no way to determine if the intervention of some sort of “conscious agent” was involved in the origin of life. Every bit of “evidence” that ID people talk about has nothing to do with ID; it always refers to the inadequacies of other theories instead.
Nice use of scare quotes! "Evidence" - sounds spooky. Of course that's rubbish. We infer the activity of a "conscious agent" from the presence of function information / complexity in biology. Until you present some convincing reason that conscious agency actually has some explanatory rival to account for said phenomenon, the ID inference stands as provisionally the best explanation of the origin and diversification of life.Optimus
January 5, 2014
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RDF:
Saying how the parts could NOT have come together does not explain how they DID come together.
Of course, but you are evading the point: There are no metaphysical assumptions involved in the IR process, meaning that your claim to the contrary has been refuted.
SB: You can’t find any assumption of dualism in that analysis because it isn’t there.
As I’ve explained 100 times to you, the assumption of dualism is found in ID’s claim that intelligence transcends chance and necessity.
This is doubly weird since the usual rap on ID is that it assumes a mechanistic view of nature. Just read the literature. Of course, that charge is false as is your charge at the other extreme. There may be some who hypothesize a transcendent mind, but there is no instance of such a hypothesis being transformed into a metaphysical assumption that gets smuggled into the process of making a design inference. It doesn't happen. It can't happen.
ID says simply that intelligence is a different kind of cause than chance and necessity and that the former can be prescinded from the latter. Any implication of dualism is a conclusion that follows from the evidence, (or from the obvious fact that an effect is not identical with its cause) not a presupposition that leads or informs the process of inferring design. I believe that I have explained this to you perhaps fifty times.
The ID process has a beginning (observation) and an end (inference). Each phase has been marked. There is no assumption of dualism in that process. In keeping with that point, I have a question for you: Do you think the design and the designer are one and the same thing? Please answer and explain.
This [irreducible complexity] is metaphysical speculation masquerading as a scientifically sound principle.
So, unmask it. Take the elements apart (without adding anything) and show me the metaphysical assumption. Don't try to read my mind or guess my motives. Just go ahead and try to extract a metaphysical assumption from irreducible complexity.
SB: ID makes many predictions about such things information processing in cells, RNA world analysis, the fossil record, the flagellar motor, the functional sequence of amino acids etc. The point is not to get into a technical discussion about them, but to make you aware of them and point out that any of them, if proven wrong, have the potential to falsify ID.
This is a bluff.
You have tried this gambit many times with me and it has never paid off. There is no need for me to bluff. I am not the one who is trying to alter reality.
Instead of spending all this time telling me that you can list these predictions if you wanted to, you could have actually described one single prediction.
It is time consuming enough to give you new information in abbreviated form without going into detail at every turn. I will be happy to provide two examples (I could provide many more, but we both know that you will dismiss them immediately upon learning about them just as you dismissed the proven methods of historical science immediately upon learning about them).
*If life was designed, we would progressively discover a top-down rather than a bottom up pattern of new fossil forms.
*If life was designed, we would progressively find evidence that allegedly bad designs contained an internal functional logic.
The fact of the matter is that ID makes ZERO predictions for the obvious reason that ID presents nothing to predict from – unless you say what is responsible, you can’t predict what it would do.
Obviously, you are incorrect. Again, your lack of familiarity with the methods of historical science gets in the way since you labor under the misconception that predictions in that context are similar to predictions made in a laboratory setting.
Prove me wrong by describing these predictions. Here is my prediction: Not one single prediction will have anything to do with intelligent design; rather, they will all be about OTHER theories and how OTHER theories fail to account for what we observe.
I get it. First, you say I am bluffing and cannot provide any predictions, and then you say that the predictions that I present (and wasn't bluffing about after all) will prove to be unsatisfactory in the end.
It is one thing to avoid a reasonable interpretation of facts, but it is entirely another matter to avoid the facts themselves. All phases of the ID process and all aspects of the ID argument are empirically based. No rational objection that can be made against the point. Let’s take a few of them one at a time:
[a] To base an argument for design on the digital information in the cell is to make an empirical case.
[b] To base an argument for design on the irreducible complexity of molecular machines is to make an empirical case.
[c] To base an argument for design on the patterns found in the fossil record is to make an empirical case.
[d] To base an argument for design on the fine tuning of physical constants is to make an empirical case.
[e] To base an argument for design on the information processing system in the cell is to make an empirical case.
[f] To base an argument for design on the fine tuning of the environment is to make an empirical case.
[g] To base an argument for design on the specified complexity found in designed artifacts is to make an empirical case.
There is simply no way to extract a metaphysical assumption from any of these arguments. They all begin with an observation, advance through aposteriori reasoning, and end with a conclusion. No matter how much creativity you apply to your objections, or how long you wallow in your self-made complexities and fabricated subtleties, or how intently you assign hidden motives to ID proponents, you cannot change the facts.
Your only option, and apparently the one you have chosen, is to abandon reason itself. You may insist on getting the last word, and I may give it to you, but it is a debate that you cannot possibly win. The futility of such an effort is not due to any lack of creativity on your part, but due to the fact that every process has a specified beginning and a specified end. Your desire to discredit ID, as powerful as it may be, cannot change the logical order of ID methodology.StephenB
January 5, 2014
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RD, you refuse to evaluate the evidence for design, and your entire schtick is designed to insulate you from having to address that evidence. Your post at #157 is the latest transparent example.
I stopped taking you seriously when I demonstrated that not conceding to your schtick drives you into an emotional meltdown.
RDF Nov2013: No, you are of course the one who is confused … none of you ID folks are able to follow any sort of subtle or conditional argumentation … you apparently require a great deal of repitition before you can actually comprehend these things … If you were able to read and understand language a little better … your bizarre notion … is simply nonsensical … What you fail to understand (among other things) … we need to work through that step-by-step, so you don’t get confused … You have put your fingers in your ears, and you are screaming for me to stop telling you what the truth is, because you don’t want to hear it. “END!” you cry. “Stop, please, don’t say any more about the designer because I can’t stand to hear it! My precious beliefs in transcendent mind are too fragile to discuss, and so I forbid any discussion that might make me evaluate my beliefs against the evidence!” … That is simply pathetic. You are pretending to base your religious beliefs on scientific evidence, but when it doesn’t go your way, all you do is shout out “END! YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT THAT!” … If you aren’t willing to take the evidence where it leads, then stop pretending to care about evidence, and just admit your beliefs are faith-based like all of those good old-fashioned religious people used to do … Oh good grief – can’t you read? … I know you won’t respond to that – you’ll just ignore it again, your fear and loathing preventing you from understanding these simple points … The real targets of my arguments are people like you who attempt to co-opt the imprimatur of science in order to push their own particular religious beliefs upon others, but then are afraid to actually subject their views to the sort of critique that all scientific results must be subjected to. You want to claim that science shows your religious views are correct, but then refuse to discuss all of the empirical evidence that may be inconsistent your beliefs. “End!” you cry! “No more evidence, please!”
Upright BiPed
January 5, 2014
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Hi Upright BiPed,
RDF’s objection boils down to not being able to identify a designer at the point of OoL.
No, it isn't. If you try really hard and actually read what I say, perhaps you will understand my objections. But you haven't, and so you don't.
The problem is NOT that I think you need to be able to "identify a designer", of course. What would that even mean? I would find out His Name? His Address? His Facebook Page?
No, the problem is not that ID does not reveal the identity of the Designer, but rather it is that ID refuses to say what it actually means by the word "designer" in the first place, and provide a description of what a "designer" is that will allow people to determine if such a "designer" likely existed and was actually responsible for OOL.
That is the problem. Unfortunately for you, my actual objection is fatal to ID, while the straw man you set up is just silly. I'm not asking "Who is the designer", because that would be a stupid question (it assumes the designer is a "Who" - a person - for starters).
I am asking this: "Can you provide a description of what ID means by "designer" that will allow us to look at the observable evidence (biological systems) and decide if everything we see is within the capabilities of the sort of "designer" you are talking about, and will allow us to judge how likely it is that something like you describe is likely to have ever existed in the first place. Once we do that, we will be in a position to say if ID is a good explanation of living systems or not.
Cheers,
RDFish/AIGuyRDFish
January 5, 2014
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- There’s only one known source of information: God.
This is not an argument, its a conclusion.
- We’re intricate machinery, designed by someone. That someone is maybe God.
Much better.
- There’s no evidence that anyone (except for God) has ever produced a single bit of information.
He did not write that sentence, you did.
- I will see you in heaven.
That will be a welcomed outcome.
- ID is such an illdefined concept it’s useless.
ID is a scientific project, as such its appropriately limited to material evidence. If you were expecting something else, then you should rethink your expectations.
- Arguments about consciousness cloud the ID-debate unnecessarily.
I generally agree, but the topic is debatable. If it becomes necessary at some level, then there is nothing wrong with having the conversation.
- Chrstianity is the only true ID-concept!
Christianity is not a science, its the following of Jesus Christ.Upright BiPed
January 5, 2014
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Hi JWTruthInLove,
I think you are the clearest thinking theist I have met here! Congratulations on your honest and consistent position.
Cheers,
RDFish/AIGuyRDFish
January 5, 2014
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JW:
- Chrstianity is the only true ID-concept!
That sucks because I don't think Christianity is true...Joe
January 5, 2014
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Every bit of “evidence” that ID people talk about has nothing to do with ID; it always refers to the inadequacies of other theories instead.
Ignorance at its finest...Joe
January 5, 2014
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@Joe:
BTW JW’s position has never been clearly stated nor does he speak for ID.
- There's only one known source of information: God.
- We're intricate machinery, designed by someone. That someone is maybe God.
- There's no evidence that anyone (except for God) has ever produced a single bit of information.
- I will see you in heaven.
- ID is such an illdefined concept it's useless.
- Arguments about consciousness cloud the ID-debate unnecessarily.
- Chrstianity is the only true ID-concept!JWTruthInLove
January 5, 2014
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Hi Optimus,
RDFish:What is one single thing that a “conscious agent” is incapable of doing”?
Optimus: Create a square circle, violate noncontradiction, etc. In all seriousness, this question is laughably asinine.
No, the question is serious and important and reveals a fatal problem for ID; it was your answer that was obviously asinine.
Can you think of a single example from archaeology, forensics, or any other mode of historical inquiry where the inference to a designing agent was held in abeyance until the said agents capabilities were precisely spelled out?
All of these fields study the activity of human beings, not "conscious agents" in the abstract. We know a great deal about human beings, including things that they cannot do. If we found evidence of something in an archaeological dig, or a crime scene, that we know human beings cannot do, we would then know that our assumption of human activity has been falsified, and we would need to posit some new hypothesis. This has nothing to do with ID, which refuses to say what is actually supposed to explain all of that which ID purports to explain.
Your demand that ID should provide direct empirical evidence of the designer(s) is difficult to understand.
I've never said "direct" empirical evidence. Rather, I point out that a scientific hypothesis requires empirical evidence in order to be accepted as a successful explanation; this is not a controversial position.
By its very nature, the question of the origin and subsequent development of life resists a purely empirical approach.
In that case, you'll need to inform a lot of people that ID is not, in fact, a scientific endeavor! I happen to disagree that emprical inquiry cannot, even in principle, yield knowledge about OOL and the development of biological complexity. But I do agree that with you that we have not, thus far, successfully explained these things.
Unless someone figures out how to build a time machine so we can go back to the dawn of life, we will never know empirically what happened. These events took place millions and billions of years ago.
Well yes, obviously so. But that isn't the issue here. The Big Bang happened billions of years ago, but because we understand so much about physics, scientists were able to construct very specific predictions that we could observationally confirm if Big Bang theory were true, and that were extremely unlikely to be true if the Big Bang theory was not true. So, we believe the Big Bang happened as the physicists say it did, even though nobody was there at the time.
In contrast, we have no way to determine if the intervention of some sort of "conscious agent" was involved in the origin of life. Every bit of "evidence" that ID people talk about has nothing to do with ID; it always refers to the inadequacies of other theories instead.
Cheers,
RDFish/AIGuyRDFish
January 5, 2014
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RDFish:
The fact of the matter is that ID makes ZERO predictions for the obvious reason that ID presents nothing to predict from – unless you say what is responsible, you can’t predict what it would do.
For ONE, as with archaeology, SETI and forensic science, ID predicts that when intelligent agencies act they tend to leave traces of their actions behind. These traces are detectable, and as forensic science has it, very valuable to the investigation.
BTW JW's position has never been clearly stated nor does he speak for ID.
And one more thing RDFish- your childish and false analogies just further expose your agendaJoe
January 5, 2014
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Here is a whimsical comment I made about Mark Frank and another anti-ID person nearly 5 years ago
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/complex-specified-information-you-be-the-judge/#comment-305339
We were discussing CSI and who is the designer came up. Here is my comment which might help FDFish
Mark Frank and Adel, you people are just too good to be true. Next they will be accusing us of having planted you people here.
Yes, I make sarcastic remarks because absurdity deserves it. If I hear one more person wanting to know what FSCI is, I will scream. I explained it to my niece in 4th grade and she understood it and thought it was neat. But she is really a bright kid.
Someone actually wants the laboratory techniques used 3.8 billion years ago. You talk about bizarre. I say a thousand as hyperbole and Mark in all seriousness says there is probably only a dozen. Mark wants the actual technique used a few billion years ago.
Mark, I got word from the designer a few weeks ago and he said the original lab and blue prints were subducted under what was to become the African plate 3.4 billion years ago but by then they were mostly rubble anyway. The original cells were relatively simple but still very complex. Subsequent plants/labs went the same way and unfortunately all holograph videos of it are now in hyper space and haven’t been looked at for at least 3 million years. So to answer one of your questions, no further work has been done for quite awhile and the designer expects future work to be done by the latest design itself. The designer travels via hyper space between his home and our area of the universe when it is necessary.
The designer said the techniques used were much more sophisticated than anything dreamed of by current synthetic biologist crowd but in a couple million years they may get up to speed and understand how it was actually done. The designer said it is actually a lot more difficult than people think especially since this was a new technique and he had to invent the DNA/RNA/protein process from scratch but amazingly they had the right chemical properties. His comment was “Thank God for that” or else he doesn’t think he wouldn’t have been able to do it. It took him about 200,000 of our years just experimenting with amino acid combinations to get usable proteins. He said it will be easier for current scientists since they will have a template to work off.
Adel, if you make a negative comment or exhibit a negative attitude then expect the essence of your negative comment to be dealt with in some way. I would not let any of my children make a comment such as yours without being sent to their room. I could think of hundreds of ways for you to have made a cordial comment inquiring what I think on the matter. But why did you choose the way you did which revealed a lot of things. (By the way I am quite clear on what I think and it is all over this blog.)
But thank you any way for your comments. Your comments and Mark Frank’s comment and those by others here help us immensely. We really appreciate how easy you guys make our job
jerry
January 5, 2014
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Both have a completely closed mind, infinitely protected by their ability to say “Who’s the Designer” in as many ways as possible.
I find it remarkable that anyone responds. I know it is always for the on-lookers but I doubt any sentient on-looker would read more than one or two comments before moving on.
It is also remarkable at how similar they all are and why they waste their time defending such inane points of view. Maybe there is a sub-species of humans that are programmed to behave this way and they are drawn to UD like a honey bee to a flower.jerry
January 5, 2014
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@ RDFish
What is one single thing that a “conscious agent” is incapable of doing”?
Create a square circle, violate noncontradiction, etc. In all seriousness, this question is laughably asinine. Can you think of a single example from archaeology, forensics, or any other mode of historical inquiry where the inference to a designing agent was held in abeyance until the said agents capabilities were precisely spelled out? To criticize ID for not speculating wildly about something that cannot possibly be known is unfair
and nonsensical.
Your demand that ID should provide direct empirical evidence of the designer(s) is difficult to understand. By its very nature, the question of the origin and subsequent development of life resists a purely empirical approach. Unless someone figures out how to build a time machine so we can go back to the dawn of life, we will never know empirically what happened. These events took place millions and billions of years ago. This is a very different sort of inquiry from, say, determining the shape of the earth. The only way to get some idea about the remote past (absent a time machine) is to use extant available data and draw careful inferences based on our knowledge of the cause and effect structure of the world. What else conceivably could we do? Inference is an indispensable tool for understanding the ancient past. StephenB's criticism of your argumentation is spot on.Optimus
January 5, 2014
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Hi StephenB,
RDF: Ok, that’s fine. You believe metaphysical dualism is an empirically obvious fact, and I believe it is something that has been debated for millenia without empirical resolution.
SB: I am simply saying that the design is distinct from the designer.
Sorry but that's perfectly ambiguous. Here is what ID proponent JWTruthInLove thinks about this:
JWT: I do agree that there’s no evidence that any human, not even Jesus, has ever done anything beyond “chance” and “necessaty”...There’s no evidence that our empirically observed design-activities ever produced anything that trancends physical cause.
Do you, or do you not, agree with JWTruthInLove on this point?
There are good reasons for familiarizing yourself with abductive reasoning.
It is amusing that you think you know something about abduction that I don't, but irrelevant nonetheless. If you want to make a point about why ID is supported by abductive inference then please do so, but your ad hominmen allusions, as usual, just make you sound desperate.
Which conscious agent did you have in mind?
This is very funny! ID is your preferred theory, not mine. I am asking you to tell me what it is that ID offers as an explanation for CSI in biology, and you turn the question around and ask me what it is! If ID can't say what it is that is supposed to have been responsible for the origin of life, then it really isn't any sort of explanation at all.
The answers would all be meaningless since none of this has anything at all to do with the process of a design inference.
Unless you say what it is that was responsible, saying "design inference" is perfectly meaningless.
Let's say we have no working theory of gravity, but Ted has a theory to explain our observations of how the planets move in the night sky. His theory rests on the "movement inference". He points out that all movement must have a mover, and so a mover must be responsible for our observations of the changing positions of these planets.
Scientist: What is it that you think accounts for the planets' movements?
Ted: My theory is not about the mover; it's about the movement inference.
Scientist: Sorry, but that doesn't tell me anything about why the planets observed motion.
Ted: You don't understand motion or planets.
Scientist: Huh? Anyway, you need to describe the "mover" in a way that I can determine if it exists or not
Ted: It's only about the movement inference, not the mover.
Scientist: How does this word "mover" explain the eliptical paths of the planets around the sun, the orbits of moons around the planets, the perihelion of Mercury, and so on?
Ted: My theory isn't about that. It is about detecting effects of a mover.
Scientist: Then your theory doesn't explain anything at all!
Ted: Yes it does - it is the best explanation of our observations of the planets' locations over time.
This is just what ID is doing. You claim you "detect design" - that is simply acknowledging the complex form and function we observe. You say that there must be a "designer" but this is just as ambiguous as saying there is a "mover" of the planets. You refuse to say what the designer is, and this makes ID as vacuous as a theory that explains the planet's locations using the "movement inference" without saying what it is that accounts for the planets' actual movements.
Scientist: What if we observed planets moving differently? What if their speed remained constant throughout their orbit of the Sun instead of observing Kepler's Laws? Would that falsify your theory?
Ted: No, it would still be due to a mover.
Scientist: Is there anything that a mover can't do?
Ted: It depends on what sort of mover you are talking about!
Scientist: Then how do you know that this "mover" is really responsible?
Ted: It is the best explanation we have.
This is just the runaround that you're giving me. If ID does not actually describe what it thinks is responsible for CSI in biology, then it explains nothing, pure and simple.
The same test cannot be applied to a hypothesis that proposes a mechanism (Neo-Darwinism) with a theory that does not propose a mechanism (ID).
It's not about "mechanism" - it's about "explanation". It doesn't matter if the explanation is a "mechanism" or not - it matters that a theory actually says what it claims explains the phenomenon in question. ID does not.
We reject Darwinism because it cannot support its extravagant claims with even a shred of evidence. ID, on the other hand, does not make extravagant claims.
HUH????? Do you, or do you not, say that ID explains the origin of the universe, the values of the universal constants, and the existence of biological complexity? If the answer is "yes", then ID makes even more - MUCH more - extravagant claims than Darwinism. If the answer is "no", then you agree with me that these things remain unexplained!
I don’t assume dualism when I do a design inference. Example: The bacterial flagellum was likely designed. Its parts could not have come together through a gradualistic process because the organism cannot function unless all parts are present.
Saying how the parts could NOT have come together does not explain how they DID come together. Like every single other piece of evidence you think supports ID, this has nothing to do with ID - it has to do with something else ("gradualistic processes" in this case).
You can’t find any assumption of dualism in that analysis because it isn’t there.
As I've explained 100 times to you, the assumption of dualism is found in ID's claim that intelligence transcends chance and necessity. This is metaphysical speculation masquerading as a scientifically sound principle.
ID makes many predictions about such things information processing in cells, RNA world analysis, the fossil record, the flagellar motor, the functional sequence of amino acids etc. The point is not to get into a technical discussion about them, but to make you aware of them and point out that any of them, if proven wrong, have the potential to falsify ID.
This is a bluff.
Instead of spending all this time telling me that you can list these predictions if you wanted to, you could have actually described one single prediction. The fact of the matter is that ID makes ZERO predictions for the obvious reason that ID presents nothing to predict from - unless you say what is responsible, you can't predict what it would do.
Prove me wrong by describing these predictions. Here is my prediction: Not one single prediction will have anything to do with intelligent design; rather, they will all be about OTHER theories and how OTHER theories fail to account for what we observe.
Cheers,
RDFish/AIGuyRDFish
January 5, 2014
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Jerry you are correct. RDF's objection boils down to not being able to identify a designer at the point of OoL. It's the same reworked and reworded objection he comes back with time after time. The actual evidence of design is of no consequence whatsoever. MF is the same as well. Both have a completely closed mind, infinitely protected by their ability to say "Who's the Designer" in as many ways as possible.Upright BiPed
January 5, 2014
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Jeryy:
Is RDFish really objecting to ID based on the fact that no one can point to a designer that existed prior to humans?
Sad but true, even though we usually tell that humans were around by the traces they left and not by actually observing them...Joe
January 5, 2014
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In order for this hypothesis to be true, some intelligent being had to exist prior to the CSI.
ID fails to provide any empirical evidence that any such being existed – none whatsoever.
Is RDFish really objecting to ID based on the fact that no one can point to a designer that existed prior to humans?
This is the same objection that Mark Frank has.
There seems to be thousands of comments by RDFish and those responding to him. Does it all boil down to no obvious designer, thus, no design?
I apologize for asking this question but have refused to read anything RDFish writes since I learned early on that it all seemed pointless and didn't want to waste time reading nonsense.jerry
January 5, 2014
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RDFish is a moron on an agenda:
ID begins with the observation of biological CSI.
OK
ID then hypothesizes that the CSI was produced by an intelligent agent.
Nope. To date every time we have observed CSI and knew the cause it has been via some intelligent agency- 100% of the time. And we have NEVER observed nature producing CSI.
In order for this hypothesis to be true, some intelligent being had to exist prior to the CSI.
Yup
ID fails to provide any empirical evidence that any such being existed – none whatsoever.
Again your ignorance means nothing here. Perhaps you should do some actual research to see what IDists and ID really says.
1) ID refuses to characterize its conscious agent.
ID is NOT about the designer- again your ignorance is showuing.
2) Therefore, since there is nothing to say what this agent can’t do, it cannot possibly be inconsistent with any observation
THat is false and exposes your ignorance wrt science.
3) Therefore no matter what we observe, “ID Theory” will always match the observation – guarenteed!
Again that is only YOUR ignorasnce saying that.
4) This means we can never tell if ID is true or not, and so it is not a scientific explanation.
YOU can't because you are a scientifically ignorant punk.
Joe
January 5, 2014
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RDF:
Let's see on just one point:
KF, 126: >> You come upon a table, with 500 fair coins in it, with the ASCII code for the first 72 characters of your last post spelled out in the HT pattern.
What would you infer from that observation as to its likely cause, why? >>
KF, 127: >> . . . ID would be overthrown in the world of life if something as simple as 500 bits/ 72 ASCII characters of text in English as just described were to indubitably . . . per reliable observation . . . arise by blind chance and mechanical necessity.
Nor is this news, that has been the focus of ever so many overturn ID attempts for years. Many of those were shot down in and around UD >>
RDF, 128 : >> [on, inference:] Some human being who is familiar with computer science set them up . . . .
[on, why:] Seriously? Because I know that human beings exist and some of them understand ASCII and they have the ability to turn coins over like this . . .
[on the source of FSCO/I in cells:] This “empirically confirmed class” consists of only one single type of agent, a human being. ID hypothesizes that this class might contain other sorts of agents too, but provides no evidence that this is the case. Worse yet, ID is actually two distinct hypotheses:
1) Life on Earth was designed by living things elsewhere
2) Life on Earth was designed by a non-living agent (i.e. something without a complex physical body)
The second hypothesis is not consistent with the “empirically confirmed class” of agents you mention>>
RDF, 131, to SB: >> of course ID folks are not going to come out and say that what they are talking about is an omnipotent God. But as I just showed, because ID refuses to characterize this “conscious agency” in any way, there is no way of deciding what it cannot do. That is why ID’s “conscious agency” functions in ID exactly the way an omnipotent being would. >>
The pattern of -- with all due respect -- evasive reasoning is quite clear, sadly so:
1 --> Presented with a case of FSCO/I, and particularly dFSCI, you did draw a design inference. In so doing you tried to set up a lockdown to the notion that only separately confirmed agency is a legitimate possibility.
2 --> This immediately undermines a major goal of science and reasoned thought, to understand that which due to circumstances we did not directly observe or cannot. At simple level, no-one has seen an electron, but in a computer age it is by such we see ever so many other things. We do so, because of the cumulative explanatory power of the hypothesised particles, and the convergence of such explanations on a common factor.
3 --> Likewise, the scientific reconstruction of the unobserved past of origins depends on identifying in the present forces that are capable of producing like effects to the observed traces.
4 --> Where, there is but one observed source of FSCO/I (across billions of cases all around) . . . intelligent design. There is analytical and empirical evidence that, on needle in haystack vs available search resources grounds, indicates that blind chance and mechanical necessity on gamut of the sol system, cannot credibly be the source of 500+ bits of FSCO/I. Where also, FSCO/I per the use of coded descriptive strings, WLOG, reduces informationally to strings.
5 --> There is an error of basic fact, this particular ID thinker happens to have noted as arguably a good example of a non-human source of FSCO/I the limited but interesting agents, beavers. Cf here.
6 --> Also, if any of the various possibilites of artifacts were found on Mars, the Moon, Pluto, etc, from the FSCO/I seen as comparable to cases such as humans or beavers, there would be absolutely no hesitation in inferring to design. Indeed, the case of a large, mirror finish smooth precisely cuboidal monolith made up of Granite or the like polycrystalline stone on the Moon (even one without inscriptions) it could easily be concluded that this was a case of FSCO/I and would be a case in point. Indeed VJT argued on this some years ago here at UD. The difficulty of maintaining precise and unnatural polycrystalline shapes like that would point to design. Notice, it would not be crystallographic order such as a large quartz crystal or columnar basalt. Likewise, SETI is dedicated to the possibility of similar FSCO/I being found in electromagnetic signals -- even a clean long sustained sine wave would be a significant sign, as a sustained sinusoid is not a naturally plausible event.
7 --> So long as agents other than humans are POSSIBLE, the evidence that FSCO/I is a reliable sign that is observed to be caused by agents, and is not plausible on the other empirically established patterns of cause -- chance and necessity -- should be allowed to let evidence point to the cause.
8 --> And it patently would, save for selective hyperskepticism fearing undesired potential agents -- from 131, there is an obvious inference to the undesirability of Lewontin's "Divine Foot" in the door of the secular temple of lab coat clad materialism. (Lewontin's argument, as the OP shows, collapses.)
9 --> It should also be plainly noted that we have here a strawman, one that is known to be laced with polarisations. For, from the beginning of technical ID thought in the early 1980's, on concerns on the limitations of empirical inference, it was understood by Thaxton et al, that inference to design in the world of cell based life by itself does not allow us to infer whether such a designer is or is not within the observed cosmos.
10 --> The reason for this, especially nowadays, is obvious: given the work of Venter et al, a molecular nanotech lab some generations beyond where we now are, could be a reasonable sufficient cause for the phenomena of the living cell. Indeed efforts are ongoing to artificially construct a living cell, implying some degree of confidence in the possibility.
11 --> So, all of that stuff on omnipotence of agents is a red herring led away to a strawman soaked in polarisations, to be set alight though hints and suggestions of the previous dirty agitprop war conducted against Creationists.
12 --> There IS a side of design thought that does infer to an agent cause beyond our observed cosmos, cosmological inference to design on fine tuning. This, you have yet to do serious justice to despite it having been repeatedly drawn to your attention. In short, the evidence highlights setting up a strawman.
13 --> Similarly, you redefine living things to equal body-based entities. But surely, you know that biological life and life, especially life as understood as the action of purposeful intelligence, cannot be so reduced . . . especially as, without announcement, RDF, you have crossed the border into philosophy.
14 --> At that level, unless you show a class of beings is IMPOSSIBLE, on having attributes that stand in mutual contradiction similar to those of a square circle, you cannot rule out possibilities by imposing ideologically convenient definitions. And of course this particularly holds for ruling out the possibility of God as a transcendent, immaterial being by definitional fiat on what is or is not life.
15 --> Where also, the design inference on empirical evidence of cosmological fine tuning, points to the live possibility of a being of great power, intelligence, knowledge, skill and purpose, acting as causal root of the observed cosmos. With the further factor in play that an evidently contingent world of matter and energy in space and time, calls out for a necessary being as its causal root. Such a necessary being being, by simple logic of not being dependent on external enabling factors, eternal. (As a very simple example of that the truth in 2 + 3 = 5 does not have any such external dependence, and has no beginning, and cannot come to an end. It is of course a proposition -- an inherently mental object, and a classic point is that it is eternally contemplated by an eternal mind.)
16 --> Thus, arguably the external world and our minded life within both point to the inference to God as root of being. Such a context does not depend on any body of religious tradition or scripture, it is a philosophical inference to best explanation informed by first principles of right reason. (Onlookers, cf here on for a 101.)
17 --> As to the notion that agency has no limits, the answer is obvious from the contrast:
(a)it is possible for an intelligent agency of relevant capabilities to develop a unicorn, a horse with a horn in the middle of its forehead,
VS:
(b) it is not possible for an intelligent agent to create a square circle or the like.
18 --> However, the point is on a red herring.
19 --> The real issue is that FSCO/I exists, is frequently encountered and on our experience invariably comes from design when we directly can see the cause in action. This is unsurprising on needle in haystack grounds as repeatedly explained -- blind chance and/or mechanical necessity is empirically incapable of creating FSCO/I beyond 500 - 1,000 bits due to inability to scan the space of possibilities sufficiently beyond a negligible level, to make such creation anything but all but absolutely impossible. Indeed, this sort of reasoning is the basis for the second law of thermodynamics, statistical form.
20 --> And, just as the second law of thermodynamics is subject to empirical test, e.g. see if you can build a perpetuum mobile of the second type, the FSCO/I is a reliable sign of design as cause inference is subject to empirical test . . . see if blind chance and necessity can reliably give rise to it.
21 --> Much tried, e.g the ongoing random document generation tests. As of last count, per Wiki . . . cited as speaking against known ideological interest . . . on the infinite monkey theorem:
The theorem concerns a thought experiment which cannot be fully carried out in practice, since it is predicted to require prohibitive amounts of time and resources. Nonetheless, it has inspired efforts in finite random text generation.
One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according to an article in The New Yorker, came up with a result on August 4, 2004: After the group had worked for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey-years, one of the "monkeys" typed, "VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t" The first 19 letters of this sequence can be found in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". Other teams have reproduced 18 characters from "Timon of Athens", 17 from "Troilus and Cressida", and 16 from "Richard II".[24]
A website entitled The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, launched on July 1, 2003, contained a Java applet that simulates a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end. For example, it produced this partial line from Henry IV, Part 2, reporting that it took "2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years" to reach 24 matching characters:
RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r"5j5&?OWTY Z0d...
22 --> No prizes for guessing why that is so, at 7 bits per ascii character.
23 --> Consequently, the balance on merits is plain:
a: FSCO/I, expressed as a definite nodes and arcs pattern that fulfills observed functionally specific configurations, is routinely observed as produced by intelligent agents.
b: On needle in haystack grounds, it is not credible that the empirically warranted alternatives, blind chance and/or mechanical necessity, will be capable of practically generating FSCO/I of at least 500 - 1,000 bits on the gamut of solar system of observed cosmos atomic and temporal resources.
c: This is backed up by ever so many empirical tests.
d: Thus, on the uniformity principle of scientifically reasoning about what we cannot observe directly, in light of the traces it leaves and what we have established as empirically reliable signs, FSCO/I is a reliable sign of design as cause.
e: Where also, design, on massive empirical grounds, and the logic of evident purpose and contrivance to fulfill purpose, entails designer.
f: Furthermore, we have no good reason to a priori confine the world of possible designers to humans, or even to the embodied.
g: So, we have excellent scientific grounds to infer that where we see FSCO/I, there has been design as key causal factor.
h: Where known cases include: origin of life, origin of major body plans and key features such as human linguistic abilities, and the fine tuned organisation of the physics of the observed cosmos.
24 --> Cumulatively, this suffices to show that intelligent design is a reasonable and scientifically warranted view, the many attempts to deride, demonise or dismiss it notwithstanding.
KFkairosfocus
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RDF:
Ok, that’s fine. Let’s agree to disagree: You believe metaphysical dualism is an empirically obvious fact, and I believe it is something that has been debated for millenia without empirical resolution.
I am simply saying that the design is distinct from the designer.
I am happy to let the fair reader decide who is right.
Sounds good.
ID is empirical and begins with an observation.
ID begins with the observation of biological CSI.
ID then hypothesizes that the CSI was produced by an intelligent agent.
So far, so good.
In order for this hypothesis to be true, some intelligent being had to exist prior to the CSI.
You are on a roll.
ID fails to provide any empirical evidence that any such being existed – none whatsoever.
The evidence for the designer is inherent in the design patterns. The cause (the designer) is indicated by the effect (the design). We know from experience that design patterns have never been known to exist in the absence of a designer (intelligent agent). Based on that experience, it would be unreasonable to believe in a design without a designer.
SB: You are silent about [a] The science of past causes, [b] Abductive reasoning, [c] Inferences to the best explanation, [d] uniformitarianism, [e] multiple competing hypotheses, [f] causal adequacy, [g] causes now in operation, …
I’m silent about these things??
Yes.
Why should I give a dissertation on these things? If you have some point to make regarding any of these things, then simply do!
A dissertation? I have already made the point. On the one hand, [a] all those methods that you care nothing about, and which define the ID paradigms, are empirically grounded. On the other hand, [b] you say that ID is not empirically grounded. You need to explain how you reconcile [a] with [b]. I have said that it is because you are not familiar with [a]. I have no reason at this point to change my opinion.
But there is really no need for me to lecture about abductive reasoning in general; I’m providing a set of reasons why ID can not at all be considered to be an empirically justified result, even given the limits of historical sciences.
There are good reasons for familiarizing yourself with abductive reasoning. If you are unaware of the elements of ID’s empirically-based process, then you are hardly in position to claim that it isn’t an empirically-based process. Your reasons for saying that ID cannot be empirically justified are not legitimate since they are unrelated to and uninformed by the ways that ID does, in fact, uses empirical methods.
As for the main question on the table, I believe I have been rather clear about that. In case you, for some odd reason, don’t recall my position on this question, I shall remind you: The answer is nobody knows.
No one claims to know for sure in this context. ID simply claims that its arguments for a real design are better than Neo-Darwinism’s arguments for illusory design. And so they are.
SB: Each of these approaches is consistent with the other and all are empirically-grounded. It is the greatest folly, then, to claim that ID’s arguments are not empirical without even knowing the rationale on which they are based.
If you think there is a single bit of empirical evidence that I am not aware of, please do let me know.
You know, this is one of the big problems that we have. Each time I make a point you transform it into something you wish I had said. For the record, I didn’t say that you were unaware of the evidence. I said that you are unaware of ID’s historical methods for evaluating it. And so you are.
You just dodged my question once again. The reason you don’t answer the question is because there is no answer to this question. Why don’t you just admit it? Why pretend you don’t see it? Here, I’ll ask you one more time:
What is one single thing that a “conscious agent” is incapable of doing”?
I will be happy to answer any reasonable question. So, make your question reasonable. Which conscious agent did you have in mind? Are you discussing human agents or superhuman agents? Human agents are incapable of doing many things. They certainly cannot design universes. They cannot high jump ten feet. They cannot type four hundred words a minute. Obviously, this is going nowhere.
If you are discussing superhuman agents, do you mean God? That would be one answer. Do you mean, the flying spaghetti monster? That would be another answer. Do you mean an alien being? That would be yet another answer. Make no mistake about it. The answers would all be meaningless since none of this has anything at all to do with the process of a design inference. Still, I will be happy to indulge you for a while (but not for long).
Don’t dodge the question, SB – come on, just admit that a “conscious agent” is something that ID folks say, but what they mean is “something that can do anything that we can ever imagine happening”.
That is not what ID folks mean—even if that is what you wished they did mean. What they mean is exactly what they say, no more, no less. From a scientific perspective, the DNA molecule has features that indicate design.
Again, because in order to determine if ID’s hypothesis of “conscious agency” is true or not, we have to be able to compare what we observe with the predicted results of “conscious agency”.
No, we do not have to use a process like that and we are not trying to determine the “truth” about anything. The abductive method, which compares competing hypotheses, simply doesn’t work that way, which is another reason that you should learn something about it. Otherwise, you will keep expecting ID to use your methods, which are unproven, arbitrary, and peculiar to you, rather than its own methods, which are proven, appropriate for design detection, and universally accepted as relevant for historical science.
If we observe things that “conscious agency” is incapable of doing, then we have reason to reject ID’s hypothesis.
This is how we reject Darwinism. Darwinism hypothesizes that random mutation and natural selection account for speciation and the complex form and function we observe. We can then compare what we observe (the CSI we find in biological systems) and compare it to what RM&NS is capable and incapable of doing, and decide that the structures we observe cannot possibly be produced by RM&NS, at least within the timeframes involved.
The same test cannot be applied to a hypothesis that proposes a mechanism (Neo-Darwinism) with a theory that does not propose a mechanism (ID). We reject Darwinism because it cannot support its extravagant claims with even a shred of evidence. ID, on the other hand, does not make extravagant claims. It is not extravagant to say that something that appears designed really was designed. It is a very modest claim and it is, indeed, supported by the evidence.
But you can’t do this with ID, because no matter what you observe, a “conscious agent” can always be imagined who could accomplish it – even if it’s creating a universe.
We could reject ID on the grounds that its predictions do not pan out or because the evidence doesn’t support its claims.
You simply can’t recognize your own metaphysics. You assume dualism and libertarianism, and pretend that those are empirical facts.
I don’t assume dualism when I do a design inference. Example: The bacterial flagellum was likely designed. Its parts could not have come together through a gradualistic process because the organism cannot function unless all parts are present. You can’t find any assumption of dualism in that analysis because it isn’t there. Again, you are making claims that you cannot defend.
SB: Also, you seem unaware of ID’s falsifiable predictions, which is why I continue to remind you that your analysis is premature. Are you going to accuse me of another ad-hominem argument for pointing this out?
For goodness sake, SB, if you’d like to discuss some prediction (and by this we mean a specific observation that can be empirically tested and that would not be expected to occur unless ID was true) that you believe can be derived from ID Theory, now would be a very good time to bring it up, don’t you think?
ID makes many predictions about such things information processing in cells, RNA world analysis, the fossil record, the flagellar motor, the functional sequence of amino acids etc. The point is not to get into a technical discussion about them, but to make you aware of them and point out that any of them, if proven wrong, have the potential to falsify ID.StephenB
January 5, 2014
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@RDFish:
Ok, that’s fine. Let’s agree to disagree: You believe metaphysical dualism is an empirically obvious fact, and I believe it is something that has been debated for millenia without empirical resolution. I am happy to let the fair reader decide who is right.
God transcends physical cause by definition. I do agree that there's no evidence that any human, not even Jesus, has ever done anything beyond "chance" and "necessaty", since humans are designed machinery (Have you ever seen a computer do something supernatural????)! There's no evidence that our empirically observed design-activities ever produced anything that trancends physical cause. That's a fact.JWTruthInLove
January 5, 2014
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Hi StephenB,
RDF: The metaphysical assumption is that intelligent cause transcends (stands apart from) physical cause. This is an ontological claim that has no empirical support.
SB: Not true. It is an empirically obvious fact.
Ok, that's fine. Let's agree to disagree: You believe metaphysical dualism is an empirically obvious fact, and I believe it is something that has been debated for millenia without empirical resolution. I am happy to let the fair reader decide who is right.
ID is empirical and begins with an observation.
ID begins with the observation of biological CSI.
ID then hypothesizes that the CSI was produced by an intelligent agent.
In order for this hypothesis to be true, some intelligent being had to exist prior to the CSI.
ID fails to provide any empirical evidence that any such being existed - none whatsoever.
You are silent about [a] The science of past causes, [b] Abductive reasoning, [c] Inferences to the best explanation, [d] uniformitarianism, [e] multiple competing hypotheses, [f] causal adequacy, [g] causes now in operation, ...
I'm silent about these things?? Why should I give a dissertation on these things? If you have some point to make regarding any of these things, then simply do! At that point I'll respond. But there is really no need for me to lecture about abductive reasoning in general; I'm providing a set of reasons why ID can not at all be considered to be an empirically justified result, even given the limits of historical sciences.
...and even [h] The main question on the table (How did the appearance of design in living systems arise)?
As for the main question on the table, I believe I have been rather clear about that. In case you, for some odd reason, don't recall my position on this question, I shall remind you: The answer is nobody knows.
Each of these approaches is consistent with the other and all are empirically-grounded. It is the greatest folly, then, to claim that ID’s arguments are not empirical without even knowing the rationale on which they are based.
If you think there is a single bit of empirical evidence that I am not aware of, please do let me know. That's your part in this - you are supposed to be arguing for ID Theory here. My part is to say why I think ID theory is a non-starter as a scientific theory:
ID Version 1: ET Alien Designers (i.e. designers with complex physical bodies)
1) No evidence that ETs ever existed
2) Doesn't explain how first life arose
3) If there were ETs, we might have simply been their descendents
4) Additional hypothesis required: these life forms were so advanced that they could create millions of different terrestrial species
ID Version 2: Unembodied Designers (i.e. designers without complex physical bodies)
1) No evidence that unembodied designers ever existed
2) Information processing, required for design, requires complex physical mechanism
3) Doesn't explain where the unemobided designer came from
4) No matter what we observe in the fossil record, we can never find anything to contradict ID, since as far as ID Theory is concerned, "conscious agency" can do theoretically do anything at all
RDF: There is nothing – not one single thing – that the “conscious agency” of ID is unable to do, according to ID theory. (If you disagree with what I just said, remember to tell me what it is a conscious agency is incapable of doing!)
SB: Again, you are making a claim that you cannot support. There is no reason to believe that the conscious agency of ID requires an omnipotent being. ID doesn’t presume to know that the designer is omnipotent nor does it need to even address the question in order to infer design.
You just dodged my question once again. The reason you don't answer the question is because there is no answer to this question. Why don't you just admit it? Why pretend you don't see it? Here, I'll ask you one more time:
What is one single thing that a "conscious agent" is incapable of doing"?
What about it? Again, can it create a universe? Pick the values of the physical constants? Carve the Grand Canyon? Configure the solar system so we on Earth have nice eclipses? Decide to give Zebras stripes? Decide to make more than 350,000 different species of beetles? Design something optimally efficient? Design something inefficient? Write a book? And so on and so on and so on...
Don't dodge the question, SB - come on, just admit that a "conscious agent" is something that ID folks say, but what they mean is "something that can do anything that we can ever imagine happening".
You have not explained why ID should be able to do that.
Again, because in order to determine if ID's hypothesis of "conscious agency" is true or not, we have to be able to compare what we observe with the predicted results of "conscious agency". If we observe things that "conscious agency" is incapable of doing, then we have reason to reject ID's hypothesis.
This is how we reject Darwinism. Darwinism hypothesizes that random mutation and natural selection account for speciation and the complex form and function we observe. We can then compare what we observe (the CSI we find in biological systems) and compare it to what RM&NS is capable and incapable of doing, and decide that the structures we observe cannot possibly be produced by RM&NS, at least within the timeframes involved.
But you can't do this with ID, because no matter what you observe, a "conscious agent" can always be imagined who could accomplish it - even if it's creating a universe.
If only ID critics like yourself would stop misrepresenting their arguments or trying to find stealth motives and metaphysical assumptions that aren’t there.
You simply can't recognize your own metaphysics. You assume dualism and libertarianism, and pretend that those are empirical facts.
So, first you argue that ID refuses to characterize its conscious agent and then you argue that ID’s conscious agent functions exactly as an omnipotent being. That’s a neat trick.
Do you really not understand this? Seriously?
1) ID refuses to characterize its conscious agent.
2) Therefore, since there is nothing to say what this agent can't do, it cannot possibly be inconsistent with any observation
3) Therefore no matter what we observe, "ID Theory" will always match the observation - guarenteed!
4) This means we can never tell if ID is true or not, and so it is not a scientific explanation.
Come on - this is a very simply point!
Also, you seem unaware of ID’s falsifiable predictions, which is why I continue to remind you that your analysis is premature. Are you going to accuse me of another ad-hominem argument for pointing this out?
For goodness sake, SB, if you'd like to discuss some prediction (and by this we mean a specific observation that can be empirically tested and that would not be expected to occur unless ID was true) that you believe can be derived from ID Theory, now would be a very good time to bring it up, don't you think?
Cheers,
RDFish/AIGuyRDFish
January 4, 2014
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RDF:
The metaphysical assumption is that intelligent cause transcends (stands apart from) physical cause. This is an ontological claim that has no empirical support.
Not true. It is an empirically obvious fact. There is no question that I stand apart from the paragraph I just wrote, just as there is no question that any intelligent agent stands apart from the design pattern that it fashions.
SB: None of this supports your claim that ID makes unscientific metaphysical assumptions.
Again, only the latter of these two ID hypotheses requires a particular metaphysical assumption, specifically that a mind can exist independently of a brain (or even some other complex physical information processing mechanism) and that such a mind can act on matter in the physical world.
Please be more specific with example (2). Define what you mean by a non-living agent that doesn’t possess a body and show why allowing for the logical existence of such a (being?) (designer?) requires a metaphysical assumption.
The first hypothesis requires no such metaphysical commitment. Thus, if ID wishes to renounce its metaphysical commitments, it ought to be restricted to the hypothesis that life on Earth was designed by some living thing(s) elsewhere.
You have yet to show that your second scenario requires a metaphysical commitment.
No, the story about Flew was about what one man personally thought, and to the extent he believed that, he was confused.
No. Flew is on record for accepting ID arguments and he is on record for explaining how he arrived from point [a] the empirical evidence to point [b] the existence of an eternal mind. None of his critics tried to argue that he began with a metaphysical assumption nor did they present any evidence that his reasoning was confused. All design arguments (including cosmological arguments) begin with observation and proceed with aposteriori reasoning. None of them begin with apriori assumptions. No one argues for the existence of an intelligent agent by assuming an intelligent agent. That would be a tautology. ID is not tautological. You are simply misguided.
SB: As I have explained to you many times, ID is [in large part, though not exclusively] based on the methods of historical science, which are a unique subsection of the broader scientific picture. Thus, your loosely phrased comment about generic science is irrelevant. Unless you come to terms with the methods of historical science, and unless you grasp their relationship to the design inference, you will always be making false assumptions about ID and misrepresenting its arguments.
Don’t just tell me I don’t understand some broad scientific picture, tell me what specifically I have argued that is wrong, and why you think it is wrong.
It is wrong because it claims that ID science begins with a metaphysical assumption. ID is empirical and begins with an observation. It seems that every few weeks, you put your creative instincts to work for the purpose of reframing ID’s empirical arguments into something other than what they are.
SB: This is where historical science, abductive reasoning, and uniformatarian principles come into play. If you are not familiar with those methods, and clearly you are not, you cannot possibly evaluate the legitimacy of the conclusions that they produce. That should be evident.
Again, this is nothing but an ad hominem dodge of my arguments.
It is not an ad hominem attack to point out that you don’t even engage ID arguments. You simply transform them into strawmen and address them on that basis alone. You are silent about [a] The science of past causes, [b] Abductive reasoning, [c] Inferences to the best explanation, [d] uniformitarianism, [e] multiple competing hypotheses, [f] causal adequacy, [g] causes now in operation, and even [h] The main question on the table (How did the appearance of design in living systems arise)? Each of these approaches is consistent with the other and all are empirically-grounded. It is the greatest folly, then, to claim that ID’s arguments are not empirical without even knowing the rationale on which they are based.
There is nothing – not one single thing – that the “conscious agency” of ID is unable to do, according to ID theory. (If you disagree with what I just said, remember to tell me what it is a conscious agency is incapable of doing!)
Again, you are making a claim that you cannot support. There is no reason to believe that the conscious agency of ID requires an omnipotent being. ID doesn’t presume to know that the designer is omnipotent nor does it need to even address the question in order to infer design.
Thus, we can’t compare our observations with the limits of what “conscious agency” is capable of in order to assess whether or not “conscious agency” was responsible.
Irrelevant. You don’t need to know the capabilities of the intelligent agent to draw an inference to design, just as you don’t need to know the wide range of an author’s capabilities to know that he designed each page of a manuscript.
I’ve told you this over and over: Because ID (and you) is not able to specify one single thing that “conscious agency” is NOT able to do!
You have not explained why ID should be able to do that.
SB: Where in the ID literature have you found claims that a scientific inference to biological design is synonymous with claims of omnipotence? Only in the realm of philosophy could such arguments be made.
Again, of course ID folks are not going to come out and say that what they are talking about is an omnipotent God.
So, you think ID folks are hiding something, do you? Is that why you continually inject claims into their arguments that they didn’t make? Try to face the simple facts. Life appears to be designed and, according to the empirical evidence, life likely was designed. You cannot get to an omnipotent God by calculating CSI or IC. It simply cannot be done. ID already knows that. There are philosophical arguments that can demonstrate a pretty thick slice of God, but ID’s paradigms simply don’t have the juice, nor do they claim to—which is to their credit. If only ID critics like yourself would stop misrepresenting their arguments or trying to find stealth motives and metaphysical assumptions that aren’t there.
But as I just showed, because ID refuses to characterize this “conscious agency” in any way, there is no way of deciding what it cannot do.
As I indicated, it isn’t a question of refusing to characterize the conscious agency. It is a question of the limitations of the paradigms being used.
That is why ID’s “conscious agency” functions in ID exactly the way an omnipotent being would.
So, first you argue that ID refuses to characterize its conscious agent and then you argue that ID’s conscious agent functions exactly as an omnipotent being. That’s a neat trick.
You’ve just proven my point again, SB. I said that ID folks think that by proving evolutionary theory true that would falisfy ID, so that means ID is falsifiable. WRONG.
I said that there are many ways (many means more than one) to falsify ID. Among them, we can either prove Darwinism true or prove ID’s predictions false. Question: Do you know anything about ID’s predictions? If not, then your analysis is premature.
Darwinism makes all sorts of specific predictions, and guess what… we can falsify them! Random mutations could not in fact add up to complex form and function even if the Earth was a thousand times older than it is – bingo, we’ve falsified Darwinism without talking about any other theory. But there is no way to falisfy ID, because ID is tantamount to saying “Some unknown thing that can account for everything we observe is what accounts for what we observe”.
Again, you are addressing a strawman and ignoring ID’s main argument, by which “some features in nature” give evidence of design. Also, you seem unaware of ID’s falsifiable predictions, which is why I continue to remind you that your analysis is premature. Are you going to accuse me of another ad-hominem argument for pointing this out?
I’ve already told you how to show that I’m wrong about this: Simply tell me one single thing that a “conscious agent” is unable to do. Can It create a new universe with any sort of physical constants It wants to? Sure, why not! Can it arrange the solar system so we on Earth can observe nice eclipses? Sure, no problem! Something that can explain everything explains nothing.
I have already explained why you are wrong. The process of detecting the existence of a designer using empirical methods does not, in any way, depend on the prospect of establishing the designer’s other capabilities.StephenB
January 4, 2014
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Hi Eric Anderson,
“We” meaning humans? Or “we” meaning simple single-celled organisms that existed on the early Earth? If the former, then what about all the other organisms on Earth? And if the latter, then that is just another form of the panspermia idea.
Well, we could certainly begin to debate the merits and problems of the idea that we've descended from extra-terrestrial life forms; I think it's a perfectly terrible theory, since (1) we have no evidence that ET life forms have ever existed, and (2) even if it were true, that would only push the problem of the origin of life back a step - it wouldn't answer it.
It is, however, not quite as bad a theory as the idea that we were designed by alien life forms. That theory also suffers from (1) we have no evidence that ET life forms have ever existed, and (2) even if it were true, that would only push the problem of the origin of life back a step - it wouldn't answer it. And on top of that, we'd have to speculate even farther to assume that these aliens somehow had the amazing bio-engineering skills required to populate the Earth with millions of different species!
So, no, it is not in fact the case that we “might as well” conclude that we are their descendants. At least not without a huge caveat to that statement. We could indeed be their descendants in some fashion or another, sure. But there is also pervasive additional design in life that is not explained simply by virtue of organism z descended from organism a.
Again, the same problem is present in ID-ET (the idea alien life forms designed life on Earth). Perhaps these aliens sent two of every type of life on their planet off to Earth, like Noah's Ark!
It should go without saying that these sorts of questions are like counting angels on the head of a pin. None of these conjectures has any evidence for it at all.
If I may, the answer is that (for the most part) we don’t know the limits of what conscious agents can do.
Yes of course - and why do you think that is? Because we have no idea if there is such a thing as a "conscious agent" that isn't the very sort of organism that ID is attempting to explain: A complex life form. The existence of a whole class of different sorts of things that are conscious - spirits, gods, demons, and so on - is purely hypothetical, empirically speaking. Since these other sorts of "conscious agents" have never been observed, of course we can't imagine what their abilities and limits are.
All we can do in a particular case is ascertain whether something is most likely the product of design or not.
You can only ascertain if something is produced by something we know about or not. If we find something (like a chromosome) and we can't figure out how it came to exist, then that's that. It doesn't mean that we've demonstrated the likelihood that some sort of conscious agent was involved. In order to establish that, we'd actually need evidence that it was true.
In other words, for those situations in which the actual historical event was not witnessed (say, OOL and the development of life on Earth), the inference runs the other direction — not from the conscious agent to the design, but from the design to the conscious agent.
Here is what you don't seem to understand, and I think this misunderstanding happens a lot.
Take this sentence: "We have ascertained that the flagellum is the product of design".
Now, let's very carefully look at the meaning of that phrase. I would say that a "product of design" means "something for which a conscious agent created a construction plan", or something similar. You see? The moment you say that you believe something "has been designed", or that it is "the product of design", or that it "is a design", you have already implicitly started with the postulation of a conscious agent. So if you say some object was designed, you are in fact making the claim that a conscious agent existed prior to that object's existence, and caused the design of the object to exist.
Meaning, we identify things that are designed and then from that we know the agent was at least capable of that particular design. This is precisely how it works every time we discover an amazing archaeological find, a piece of technology from an ancient civilization that was previously unknown, etc.
No, none of this has anything to do with what we're talking about, because in all these cases we know a tremendous amount about the cause of each object (a human being). We are very well aware of the abilities and limitations of human beings. None of these disciplines ever refers to a whole hypothetical class of "conscious agents" that might have been responsible for the pottery shard or gear that they find - every single time it is taken as a given, for very obvious reasons, that a human being was responsible.
ID doesn’t attempt to explain everything. It is a very limited theory. It cedes a huge amount of territory to chance and necessity and only claims those limited cases in which we have a confluence of specified complexity.
This is merely at the discretion of its practioners, not some limit that is built into the theory! There is no theoretical limit to the abilities of "conscious agents" in ID, and so anyone can explain anything at all by invoking the action of a "conscious agent". No scientific explanation functions this way; there are no other hypotheses that can be applied the same way to every imaginable phenomenon. (Although in biology, Darwinism comes in a reasonably close second sometimes, since anyone can explain any biological feature by invoking the all-powerful "Random variation + selection"!)
Cheers,
RDFishRDFish
