Philosophers: We can’t know that the design hypothesis for nature is false

Seems to me that the neo-Darwinians owe the scientific community a response to the following: What differentiates life that is the result of intelligent design from that which is the result of random undirected chemical processes, chance and mutations? If we were to discover life on a distant planet in a different galaxy, how would our scientists be able to differentiate whether the life they discovered was the result of intelligent design (engineered) or the product of evolution? If they could not differentiate one from the other, it is simply impossible for them to know with any certainty that life on earth is not the result of ID. If they CAN tell the difference, they should disclose the distinguishing characteristics of ID life so we can all examine whether it is absent in the life we find on earth. In all that I have read and studied on the topic, nothing has been offered from the scientific community as to what ID indicators are and how they are clearly absent from earth life. Rather, all that is available are claims that the overwhelming appearance of design should be ignored without any coherent reason to do so. Scotoma

The very feature that disinguishes empirical science from other spheres of knowledge, is that it focuses on the 'appearance(s)' of the natural world. Indeed, the very terms, 'observation', and 'measurement', are used synonymously. It's as crazy as the concept of a 'blind watchmaker' ! How did he ever get away with it ? Unbelievable chuzpah. Axel

The only design in the Universe that we can recognize reliably is what we do ourselves

Self-referential. Not scientific. Andrew asauber

Yes Sev - Design only from the Creator and those made in the image of Creator. Humans are darn special huh. Specks yes - but unique designing specks. Unique. Specks compared to Creator of course. ppolish

SA, 9: yup. KF kairosfocus

F/N: Let's get back to basics, as it is a patently false and misleading claim to imply or assert that the key design inference is not subject to empirical refutation. In simple terms, if ever

A: we are able to credibly use blind chance based random walks -- and nope Dawkins' warmer-colder targetted search Weasel is not this -- in B: a configuration space for a s-t-r-i-n-g of 500 - 1000+ bits to C: generate functionally specific complex organisation and associated information,

THEN

D: the core design claim that such FSCO/I (by whatever terms) is a reliable sign of design would collapse.

In short, directly and easily, the core design inference relevant to the world of life is readily testable, e.g. by random text generation experiments using computers. No one commenting seriously on ID should reasonably be ignorant of this. Now so humble a source as Wiki speaks to the million/infinite monkeys exercise, and this is what it has to say on this particular point:

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 simulated 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... Due to processing power limitations, the program used a probabilistic model (by using a random number generator or RNG) instead of actually generating random text and comparing it to Shakespeare. When the simulator "detected a match" (that is, the RNG generated a certain value or a value within a certain range), the simulator simulated the match by generating matched text.[25]

Of course, being Wiki it shortly goes on to cloud the issue by talking about algorithms designed to generate grammatical text from components. That does not detract from the point, text searches of up to 1 in 10^50 or so are feasible, but the 500-bit threshold is a factor of 10^100 beyond that in terms of scale of config space. We have excellent reason to infer that when we see FSCO/I, especially digitally coded functional text, we are seeing design. And, the key point is that D/RNA in the heart of life is just such text, functioning algorithmically in protein synthesis as machine level code. Where, it is notorious that such start out at 100 - 1,00 kbases, and we can show that novel body plans would require 10 - 100+ mn bases beyond that. The result of this is obvious, config space has in it deeply isolated islands of function, sitting in a vast sea of non-function. With cosmos scale resources being utterly inadequate to search such. Also, the search for a golden search runs into the issue that a search of a space is a subset, i.e. the space of searches is of order of the power set of the original space of scale n, i.e. of scale 2^n. Search for search is far harder than search. This is the analytical muscle in outline that grounds why we observe FSCO/I coming about by design -- e.g. posts in this thread; and., only see them by design. the search challenge for things to be otherwise is simply far too hard. KF

kairosfocus

@bornagain77 should have his own column. aarceng

Seversky stated: "The only design in the Universe that we can recognize reliably is what we do ourselves." Seversky, I have a question for 'you' (assuming that 'you' exist). Since Darwinian atheists claim that we do not really exist as real persons, which is the most sure thing we can know about reality, but insist that we are merely 'neuronal illusions', why in blue blazes should I trust what your illusory self tells me what is designed and what is not designed?

The Confidence of Jerry Coyne – Ross Douthat – January 6, 2014 Excerpt: But then halfway through this peroration, we have as an aside the confession (by Coyne) that yes, okay, it’s quite possible given materialist premises that “our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” At which point the entire edifice suddenly looks terribly wobbly — because who, exactly, is doing all of this forging and shaping and purpose-creating if Jerry Coyne, as I understand him (and I assume he understands himself) quite possibly does not actually exist at all? The theme of his argument is the crucial importance of human agency under eliminative materialism, but if under materialist premises the actual agent is quite possibly a fiction, then who exactly is this I who “reads” and “learns” and “teaches,” and why in the universe’s name should my illusory self believe Coyne’s bold proclamation that his illusory self’s purposes are somehow “real” and worthy of devotion and pursuit? (Let alone that they’re morally significant: But more on that below.) Prometheus cannot be at once unbound and unreal; the human will cannot be simultaneously triumphant and imaginary. Per NY Times “that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.” Francis Crick – “The Astonishing Hypothesis” 1994 “We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good.” Matthew D. Lieberman – neuroscientist – materialist – UCLA professor At the 23:33 minute mark of the following video, Richard Dawkins agrees with materialistic philosophers who say that: “consciousness is an illusion” A few minutes later Rowan Williams asks Dawkins ”If consciousness is an illusion… what isn’t?”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWN4cfh1Fac&t=22m57s Atheistic Materialism – Does Richard Dawkins Exist? – video 37:51 minute mark Quote: “You can spout a philosophy that says scientific materialism, but there aren’t any scientific materialists to pronounce it.,,, That’s why I think they find it kind of embarrassing to talk that way. Nobody wants to stand up there and say, “You know, I’m not really here”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCnzq2yTCg&t=37m51s

Sev, if you can't even be sure that you really exist as a real person, which is something that you directly experience first hand every waking moment of your life, then certainly your judgement is not to be trusted in anything else. bornagain77

Sev We observe things in nature purposefully designed by less-sophisticted non-human, intelligences (beaver dams, bee colony operations). So, when we observe aspects of nature that exhibit more sophisticated levels of purposeful design - the inference to a higher designing intelligence is easy and logical. Silver Asiatic

Seversky, you are begging the pivotal question of empirically grounded signs of design. KF kairosfocus

Even in our own poor human world, 'design' implies intelligence. Otherwise, we could rely on 'retro-happenstance'. It would be so much cheaper, too. Another crushing blow to poor Ned Ludd, who did know a thing or two. Axel

The only design in the Universe that we can recognize reliably is what we do ourselves. We can certainly rule that design out as the origin of the Universe and the life in it. Seversky

Van Woudenberg's Radical skepticism: I can’t deny that whatever I just said is completely useless. Silver Asiatic

A Matter of Considerable Gravity: On the Purported Detection of Gravitational Waves and Cosmic Inflation – Bruce Gordon – April 4, 2014 Excerpt: Thirdly, at least two paradoxes result from the inflationary multiverse proposal that suggest our place in such a multiverse must be very special: the “Boltzmann Brain Paradox” and the “Youngness Paradox.” In brief, if the inflationary mechanism is autonomously operative in a way that generates a multiverse, then with probability indistinguishable from one (i.e., virtual necessity) the typical observer in such a multiverse is an evanescent thermal fluctuation with memories of a past that never existed (a Boltzmann brain) rather than an observer of the sort we take ourselves to be. Alternatively, by a second measure, post-inflationary universes should overwhelmingly have just been formed, which means that our existence in an old universe like our own has a probability that is effectively zero (i.e., it’s nigh impossible). So if our universe existed as part of such a multiverse, it would not be at all typical, but rather infinitely improbable (fine-tuned) with respect to its age and compatibility with stable life-forms. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/04/a_matter_of_con084001.html WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? Infinity – Max Tegmark – January 2014 and Feb. 2015 Excerpt: Physics is all about predicting the future from the past, but inflation seems to sabotage this: when we try to predict the probability that something particular will happen, inflation always gives the same useless answer: infinity divided by infinity. The problem is that whatever experiment you make, inflation predicts that there will be infinitely many copies of you far away in our infinite space, obtaining each physically possible outcome, and despite years of tooth-grinding in the cosmology community, no consensus has emerged on how to extract sensible answers from these infinities. So strictly speaking, we physicists are no longer able to predict anything at all! http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/02/20/infinity-ruining-physics/#.VOsRyS7cBCA Too many worlds – Philip Ball – Feb. 17, 2015 Excerpt:,,, You measure the path of an electron, and in this world it seems to go this way, but in another world it went that way. That requires a parallel, identical apparatus for the electron to traverse. More – it requires a parallel you to measure it. Once begun, this process of fabrication has no end: you have to build an entire parallel universe around that one electron, identical in all respects except where the electron went. You avoid the complication of wavefunction collapse, but at the expense of making another universe (and another you).,,, http://aeon.co/magazine/science/is-the-many-worlds-hypothesis-just-a-fantasy/ A Critique of the Many Worlds Interpretation - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_42skzOHjtA&list=UU5qDet6sa6rODi7t6wfpg8g

Thus, basically, without God, everything within the atheistic/naturalistic worldview, (i.e. supposed evidence for Darwinian evolution, observations of reality, beliefs about reality, sense of self, free will, even reality itself), collapses into self refuting, unrestrained, flights of fantasy and imagination. It would be hard to fathom a more unscientific worldview than Darwinian evolution and Atheistic materialism/naturalism in general have turned out to be. To reiterate the first sentence of this post, "Either the design we see in life, and in the universe, is real or everything is an illusion." Scientists should definitely stick with the worldview that brought them to the dance! i.e Christianity! Verses, Videos and Music:

2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; 2 Peter 1:16 For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. Shroud of Turin: From discovery of Photographic Negative, to 3D Information, to Quantum Hologram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-TL4QOCiis The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from Death as the “Theory of Everything” – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uHST2uFPQY&list=PLtAP1KN7ahia8hmDlCYEKifQ8n65oNpQ5&index=4 Hillsong United – Taya Smith – Touch The Sky – Acoustic Cover – Live – HD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyl34fHQi3U

bornagain77

Thus, given materialistic premises, people become illusions whose observations of reality are illusory. And why in blue blazes should anyone trust what illusions having illusions have to say about reality? (of personal note: Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “A Dream within a Dream” is a fitting reference at this point)

A Dream Within A Dream - Poem by Edgar Allan Poe http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-dream-within-a-dream/

Moreover, as Nancy Pearcey alluded to in her article, free will itself also becomes illusory. Thus, under atheistic naturalism there is not really a real person with the free will to choose to believe in, or to not believe in anything, be it believing in God or be it believing in naturalism. There are only illusions of persons who are fed illusions of free will. Moreover these illusions of free will somehow miraculously coincide with the illusory intentions of the illusory self. How the supposed random jostling of atoms in our brain pulls off all this amazing synchronization throughout our entire life is something that fully ought to be considered a miracle in its own right!

Do You Like SETI? Fine, Then Let’s Dump Methodological Naturalism – Paul Nelson – September 24, 2014 Excerpt: “Epistemology — how we know — and ontology — what exists — are both affected by methodological naturalism (MN). If we say, “We cannot know that a mind caused x,” laying down an epistemological boundary defined by MN, then our ontology comprising real causes for x won’t include minds. MN entails an ontology in which minds are the consequence of physics, and thus, can only be placeholders for a more detailed causal account in which physics is the only (ultimate) actor. You didn’t write your email to me. Physics did, and informed (the illusion of) you of that event after the fact. “That’s crazy,” you reply, “I certainly did write my email.” Okay, then — to what does the pronoun “I” in that sentence refer? Your personal agency; your mind. Are you supernatural?,,, You are certainly an intelligent cause, however, and your intelligence does not collapse into physics. (If it does collapse — i.e., can be reduced without explanatory loss — we haven’t the faintest idea how, which amounts to the same thing.) To explain the effects you bring about in the world — such as your email, a real pattern — we must refer to you as a unique agent.,,, some feature of “intelligence” must be irreducible to physics, because otherwise we’re back to physics versus physics, and there’s nothing for SETI to look for.”,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/09/do_you_like_set090071.html

And although Dr. Nelson alluded to writing an e-mail, (i.e. creating information), to tie his ‘personal agent’ argument into intelligent design, Dr. Nelson’s ‘personal agent’ argument can easily be amended to any action that ‘you’, as a personal agent, choose to take:

“You didn’t write your email to me. Physics did, and informed the illusion of you of that event after the fact.” “You didn’t open the door. Physics did, and informed the illusion of you of that event after the fact.” “You didn’t raise your hand. Physics did, and informed the illusion of you of that event after the fact.” “You didn’t etc.. etc.. etc… Physics did, and informed the illusion of you of that event after the fact.”

A few more notes along this line:

Physicist George Ellis on the importance of philosophy and free will - July 27, 2014 Excerpt: And free will?: Horgan: Einstein,,, seemed to doubt free will:,,, George Ellis: ,,, if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options. I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/physicist-george-ellis-on-the-importance-of-philosophy-and-free-will/ Human consciousness is much more than mere brain activity, – Mark Vernon – 18 June 2011 However, “If you think the brain is a machine then you are committed to saying that composing a sublime poem is as involuntary an activity as having an epileptic fit. …the nature of consciousness being a tremendous mystery.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/17/human-consciousness-brain-activity Sam Harris’s Free Will: The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It – Martin Cothran – November 9, 2012 Excerpt: There is something ironic about the position of thinkers like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state — including their position on this issue — is the effect of a physical, not logical cause. By their own logic, it isn’t logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/11/sam_harriss_fre066221.html

Finally, this unconstrained ‘illusory’ nature inherent to naturalism/materialism becomes even more acute when atheists try to explain the origin and sustaining of the universe, i.e. try to explain the origin, fine-tuning, and quantum wave collapse of the universe. That is to say, every time an atheist postulates a random infinity to try to get around the glaringly obvious Theistic implications of the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and the quantum wave collapse, of the universe, then the math surrounding that random infinity tells us that everything that is remotely possible has a 100% chance of happening somewhere in that random infinity of possibilities that the atheist had postulated. Even an infinite number of Richard Dawkins riding on an infinite number of pink unicorns becomes assured in an unconstrained random infinity:

Why Most Atheists Believe in Pink Unicorns – May 2014 Excerpt: Given an infinite amount of time, anything that is logically possible(11) will eventually happen. So, given an infinite number of universes being created in (presumably) an infinite amount of time, you are not only guaranteed to get your universe but every other possible universe. This means that every conceivable universe exists, from ones that consist of nothing but a giant black hole, to ones that are just like ours and where someone just like you is reading a blog post just like this, except it’s titled: “Why most atheists believe in blue unicorns.” By now I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, but I’ll say it anyway. Since we know that horses are possible, and that pink animals are possible, and that horned animals are possible, then there is no logical reason why pink unicorns are not possible entities. Ergo, if infinite universes exist, then pink unicorns must necessarily exist. For an atheist to appeal to multiverse theory to deny the need of a designer infers that he believes in that theory more than a theistically suggestive single universe. And to believe in the multiverse means that one is saddled with everything that goes with it, like pink unicorns. In fact, they not only believe in pink unicorns, but that someone just like them is riding on one at this very moment, and who believes that elephants, giraffes, and zebra are merely childish fairytales. Postscript While it may be amusing to imagine atheists riding pink unicorns, it should be noted that the belief in them does not logically invalidate atheism. There theoretically could be multiple universes and there theoretically could be pink unicorns. However, there is a more substantial problem for the atheist if he wants to believe in them and he wants to remain an atheist. Since, as I said, anything can happen in the realm of infinities, one of those possibilities is the production of a being of vast intelligence and power. Such a being would be as a god to those like us, and could perhaps breach the boundaries of the multiverse to, in fact, be a “god” to this universe. This being might even have the means to create its own universe and embody the very description of the God of Christianity (or any other religion that the atheist otherwise rejects). It seems the atheist, in affirming the multiverse in order to avoid the problem of fine-tuning, finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. The further irony is that somewhere, in the great wide world of infinities, the atheist’s doppelganger is going to war against an army of theists riding on the horns of a great pink beast known to his tribesman as “The Saddlehorn Dilemma.” https://pspruett.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/why-most-atheists-believe-in-pink-unicorns/ Fine Tuning, Pink Unicorns, and The Triune God – video https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/vb.100000088262100/1145151962164402/?type=2&theater Multiverse and the Design Argument – William Lane Craig Excerpt: Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of our universe’s low entropy condition obtaining by chance alone are on the order of 1 in 10^10(123), an inconceivable number. If our universe were but one member of a multiverse of randomly ordered worlds, then it is vastly more probable that we should be observing a much smaller universe. For example, the odds of our solar system’s being formed instantly by the random collision of particles is about 1 in 10^10(60), a vast number, but inconceivably smaller than 1 in 10^10(123). (Penrose calls it “utter chicken feed” by comparison [The Road to Reality (Knopf, 2005), pp. 762-5]). Or again, if our universe is but one member of a multiverse, then we ought to be observing highly extraordinary events, like horses’ popping into and out of existence by random collisions, or perpetual motion machines, since these are vastly more probable than all of nature’s constants and quantities’ falling by chance into the virtually infinitesimal life-permitting range. Observable universes like those strange worlds are simply much more plenteous in the ensemble of universes than worlds like ours and, therefore, ought to be observed by us if the universe were but a random member of a multiverse of worlds. Since we do not have such observations, that fact strongly disconfirms the multiverse hypothesis. On naturalism, at least, it is therefore highly probable that there is no multiverse. — Penrose puts it bluntly “these world ensemble hypothesis are worse than useless in explaining the anthropic fine-tuning of the universe”. http://www.reasonablefaith.org/multiverse-and-the-design-argument Does a Multiverse Explain the Fine Tuning of the Universe? – Dr. Craig (observer selection effect vs. Boltzmann Brains) – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb9aXduPfuA

bornagain77

To put it more clearly, given materialistic/atheistic premises, not only are our personal beliefs about reality held to be somewhat flawed, and therefore in need of testing, even our perceptions/observations of reality itself are held to be untrustworthy and thus ‘illusory’ given the materialistic premises of atheism. Richard Dawkins puts the awkward situation between Darwinian evolution and reliable observation like this:

Why Atheism is Nonsense Pt.5 – “Naturalism is a Self-defeating Idea”video Excerpt: “Since we are creatures of natural selection, we cannot totally trust our senses. Evolution only passes on traits that help a species survive, and not concerned with preserving traits that tell a species what is actually true about life.” Richard Dawkins – quoted from “The God Delusion” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff-5rsrDRGM

In the following video and article, Donald Hoffman has, through numerous computer simulations of population genetics, proved that if Darwinian evolution were actually true then ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory.

Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? – Video – 9:59 minute mark Quote: “,,,evolution is a mathematically precise theory. We can use the equations of evolution to check this out. We can have various organisms in artificial worlds compete and see which survive and which thrive, which sensory systems or more fit. A key notion in those equations is fitness.,,, fitness does depend on reality as it is, yes.,,, Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is, and it is fitness, and not reality as it is, that figures centrally in the equations of evolution. So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality. Others see just part of the reality. And some see none of the reality. Only fitness. Who wins? Well I hate to break it to you but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality, but are just tuned to fitness, drive to extinction that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. Those (accurate) perceptions of reality go extinct. Now this is a bit stunning. How can it be that not seeing the world accurately gives us a survival advantage?” https://youtu.be/oYp5XuGYqqY?t=601 The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality - April 2016 The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions. Excerpt: “The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/

Although Hoffman tried to limit his results to just our visual perceptions, as Plantinga had pointed out years before Hoffman came along, there is no reason why the results do not also extend to undermining our cognitive faculties as well:

The Case Against Reality - May 13, 2016 Excerpt: Hoffman seems to come to a conclusion similar to the one Alvin Plantinga argues in ch. 10 of Where the Conflict Really Lies: we should not expect — in the absence of further argument — that creatures formed by a naturalistic evolutionary process would have veridical perceptions.,,, First, even if Hoffman’s argument were restricted to visual perception, and not to our cognitive faculties more generally (e.g., memory, introspection, a priori rational insight, testimonial belief, inferential reasoning, etc.), the conclusion that our visual perceptions would be wholly unreliable given natural selection would be sufficient for Plantinga’s conclusion of self-defeat. After all, reliance upon the veridicality of our visual perceptions was and always will be crucial for any scientific argument for the truth of evolution. So if these perceptions cannot be trusted, we have little reason to think evolutionary theory is true. Second, it’s not clear that Hoffman’s application of evolutionary game theory is only specially applicable to visual perception, rather than being relevant for our cognitive faculties generally. If “we find that veridical perceptions can be driven to extinction by non-veridical strategies that are tuned to utility rather than objective reality” (2010, p. 504, my emphasis), then why wouldn’t veridical cognitive faculties (more generally) be driven to extinction by non-veridical strategies that are tuned to utility rather than objective reality? After all, evolutionary theory purports to be the true account of the formation of all of our cognitive faculties, not just our faculty of visual perception. If evolutionary game theory proves that “true perception generally goes extinct” when “animals that perceive the truth compete with others that sacrifice truth for speed and energy-efficiency” (2008), why wouldn’t there be a similar sacrifice with respect to other cognitive faculties? In fact, Hoffman regards the following theorem as now proven: “According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness” (Atlantic interview). But then wouldn’t it also be the case that an organism that cognizes reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that cognizes none of reality but is just tuned to fitness? On the evolutionary story, every cognitive faculty we have was produced by a process that was tuned to fitness (rather than tuned to some other value, such as truth). http://www.gregwelty.com/2016/05/the-case-against-reality/

Thus, in what should be needless to say, a worldview that undermines the scientific method itself by holding all our observations of reality, and cognitive faculties, are illusory is NOT a worldview that can be firmly grounded within the scientific method!

Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself – Nancy Pearcey – March 8, 2015 Excerpt: Steven Pinker writes, “Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false. To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion — and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value. So how can we know whether the theory of evolution itself is one of those false ideas? The theory undercuts itself.,,, Of course, the atheist pursuing his research has no choice but to rely on rationality, just as everyone else does. The point is that he has no philosophical basis for doing so. Only those who affirm a rational Creator have a basis for trusting human rationality. The reason so few atheists and materialists seem to recognize the problem is that, like Darwin, they apply their skepticism selectively. They apply it to undercut only ideas they reject, especially ideas about God. They make a tacit exception for their own worldview commitments. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/03/why_evolutionar094171.html

Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the math of population genetics predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.

New Mind-blowing Experiment Confirms That Reality Doesn’t Exist If You Are Not Looking at It – June 3, 2015 Excerpt: The results of the Australian scientists’ experiment, which were published in the journal Nature Physics, show that this choice is determined by the way the object is measured, which is in accordance with what quantum theory predicts. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Truscott in a press release.,,, “The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” he said. Thus, this experiment adds to the validity of the quantum theory and provides new evidence to the idea that reality doesn’t exist without an observer. http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html

Apparently science itself could care less if atheists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory! Moreover, as Nancy Pearcey alluded to in her ‘Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself’ article, given the materialistic/atheistic premises of Darwinian evolution, not only are our observations of reality itself held to be illusory, but even our sense of self, i.e. the belief that we really exist as real persons, which is the most sure thing we can know about reality, becomes illusory too. Thus, in what I consider to be a shining example of poetic justice, in their claim that God does not really exist as a real person but is merely an illusion, the Atheistic naturalist also ends up claiming that he himself does not really exist as a real person but is merely an illusion. Here are a few quotes to that effect,,,

“that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.” Francis Crick – “The Astonishing Hypothesis” 1994 “We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good.” Matthew D. Lieberman – neuroscientist – materialist – UCLA professor The Confidence of Jerry Coyne – Ross Douthat – January 6, 2014 Excerpt: But then halfway through this peroration, we have as an aside the confession (by Coyne) that yes, okay, it’s quite possible given materialist premises that “our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” At which point the entire edifice suddenly looks terribly wobbly — because who, exactly, is doing all of this forging and shaping and purpose-creating if Jerry Coyne, as I understand him (and I assume he understands himself) quite possibly does not actually exist at all? The theme of his argument is the crucial importance of human agency under eliminative materialism, but if under materialist premises the actual agent is quite possibly a fiction, then who exactly is this I who “reads” and “learns” and “teaches,” and why in the universe’s name should my illusory self believe Coyne’s bold proclamation that his illusory self’s purposes are somehow “real” and worthy of devotion and pursuit? (Let alone that they’re morally significant: But more on that below.) Prometheus cannot be at once unbound and unreal; the human will cannot be simultaneously triumphant and imaginary. Per NY Times At the 23:33 minute mark of the following video, Richard Dawkins agrees with materialistic philosophers who say that: “consciousness is an illusion” A few minutes later Rowan Williams asks Dawkins ”If consciousness is an illusion… what isn’t?”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWN4cfh1Fac&t=22m57s Atheistic Materialism – Does Richard Dawkins Exist? – video 37:51 minute mark Quote: “You can spout a philosophy that says scientific materialism, but there aren’t any scientific materialists to pronounce it.,,, That’s why I think they find it kind of embarrassing to talk that way. Nobody wants to stand up there and say, “You know, I’m not really here”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCnzq2yTCg&t=37m51s

bornagain77

Either the design we see in life, and in the universe, is real or everything is an illusion. Even leading Darwinists readily admit that life gives an overwhelming ‘appearance of design’. Here are a few quotes to that effect:

“Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.” Richard Dawkins – “The Blind Watchmaker” – 1986 – page 21 quoted from this video – Michael Behe – Life Reeks Of Design – 2010 – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdh-YcNYThY "living organisms "appear to have been carefully and artfully designed" Richard C. Lewontin - Adaptation,” Scientific American, and Scientific American book 'Evolution' (September 1978) “This appearance of purposefulness is pervasive in nature.... Accounting for this apparent purposefulness is a basic problem for any system of philosophy or of science.” George Gaylord Simpson - “The Problem of Plan and Purpose in Nature” - 1947 "The real core of Darwinism,,,, the 'design' of the natural theologian, by natural means." Ernst Mayr "Darwin’s theory of natural selection accounts for the 'design' of organisms, and for their wondrous diversity, as the result of natural processes," Francisco J. Ayala - Darwin’s greatest discovery: Design without designer - May 2007 “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” Francis Crick – What Mad Pursuit - p. 138 (1990) “Organisms appear as if they had been designed to perform in an astonishingly efficient way, and the human mind therefore finds it hard to accept that there need be no Designer to achieve this” Francis Crick – What Mad Pursuit – p. 30

As well, many scientists, with no particular theological axe to grind, readily admit the universe also appears to be designed:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." Robert Jastrow - God and the Astronomers, p. 116. "Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it's remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren't just the way they are, we couldn't be here at all. The sun couldn't be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here. Some scientists argue that "well, there's an enormous number of universes and each one is a little different. This one just happened to turn out right." Well, that's a postulate, and it's a pretty fantastic postulate — it assumes there really are an enormous number of universes and that the laws could be different for each of them. The other possibility is that ours was planned, and that's why it has come out so specially." Charles Townes - Nobel Prize winning Physicist "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe that was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan." Arno Penzias - Physicist and Nobel laureate "If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in." John O'Keefe (astronomer at NASA) "I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing." Alan Sandage (preeminent Astronomer)

Yet, despite the fact that many leading Darwinists admit that life has the overwhelming 'appearance of design', all the purported scientific evidence, that is suppose to demonstrate for the rest of us how this overwhelming appearance of design in life came to be by unguided material processes, turns out itself to be ‘illusory’. Franklin M. Harold, whom I believe is also an atheist, calls Darwinian accounts ‘a variety of wishful speculations’. Specifically he states:

“,,,we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.” Franklin M. Harold,* 2001. The way of the cell: molecules, organisms and the order of life, Oxford University Press, New York, p. 205. *Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry, Colorado State University, USA

James Shapiro, main founder of the anti neo-Darwinian group "The Third Way", and who is not an intelligent design advocate, makes an almost verbatim statement prior to Harold's statement:

“The argument that random variation and Darwinian gradualism may not be adequate to explain complex biological systems is hardly new […} in fact, there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory explanation for such a vast subject — evolution — with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses works in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity.” Prof. James Shapiro – “In the Details…What?” National Review, 19 September 1996, pp. 64.

The same thing happens with the 'appearance of design' for the universe. Although many scientists with no theological axe to grind readily admit that the universe has the overwhelming 'appearance of design', all the evidence that is suppose to demonstrate for the rest of us how this overwhelming appearance design came to be turns out to be illusory.

Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law: Peter Woit, a PhD. in theoretical physics and a lecturer in mathematics at Columbia, points out—again and again—that string theory, despite its two decades of dominance, is just a hunch aspiring to be a theory. It hasn't predicted anything, as theories are required to do, and its practitioners have become so desperate, says Woit, that they're willing to redefine what doing science means in order to justify their labors. http://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/0465092756 Cosmic inflation is dead, long live cosmic inflation - 25 September 2014 Excerpt: (Inflation) theory, the most widely held of cosmological ideas about the growth of our universe after the big bang, explains a number of mysteries, including why the universe is surprisingly flat and so smoothly distributed, or homogeneous (i.e. why the universe is 'round').,,, Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, who helped develop inflationary theory but is now scathing of it, says this is potentially a blow for the theory, but that it pales in significance with inflation's other problems. Meet the multiverse Steinhardt says the idea that inflationary theory produces any observable predictions at all – even those potentially tested by BICEP2 – is based on a simplification of the theory that simply does not hold true. "The deeper problem is that once inflation starts, it doesn't end the way these simplistic calculations suggest," he says. "Instead, due to quantum physics it leads to a multiverse where the universe breaks up into an infinite number of patches. The patches explore all conceivable properties as you go from patch to patch. So that means it doesn't make any sense to say what inflation predicts, except to say it predicts everything. If it's physically possible, then it happens in the multiverse someplace Steinhardt says the point of inflation was to explain a remarkably simple universe. "So the last thing in the world you should be doing is introducing a multiverse of possibilities to explain such a simple thing," he says. "I think it's telling us in the clearest possible terms that we should be able to understand this and when we understand it it's going to come in a model that is extremely simple and compelling. And we thought inflation was it – but it isn't." http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26272-cosmic-inflation-is-dead-long-live-cosmic-inflation.html?page=1#.VCajrGl0y00 “I don’t think one should underestimate the fix we are in. That in the end we will not be able to explain the world. That we will have some set of laws of nature (that) we will not be able to derive them on the grounds simply of mathematical consistency. Because we can already think of mathematically consistent laws that don’t describe the world as we know it. And we will always be left with a question ‘why are the laws nature what they are rather than some other laws?’. And I don’t see any way out of that. The fact that the constants of nature are suitable for life, which is clearly true, we observe,,,” (Weinberg then comments on the multiverse conjecture of atheists) “No one has constructed a theory in which that is true. I mean,, the (multiverse) theory would be speculative, but we don’t even have a theory in which that speculation is mathematically realized. But it is a possibility.” Steven Weinberg – as stated to Richard Dawkins at the 8:15 minute mark of the following video Leonard Susskind - Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg - 1 in 10^120 - Cosmological Constant points to intelligent design - video https://youtu.be/z4E_bT4ecgk?t=495

Thus, the overwhelming ‘appearance of design’, that Atheists themselves admit to seeing pervasively throughout life, and the universe, was apparently produced by scientific evidence that itself turns out to be illusory. Simply put, illusory evidence produced illusory design! Perhaps atheists can excuse me if I find their illusory scientific argument for illusory design less than compelling? In fact, I hold that Darwinists, and scientists in general, are naturally detecting the 'appearance of design’ because of the inherent ‘image of God’ that they have within themselves, and that they are living in denial of that natural ‘design intuition’.

Children are born believers in God, academic claims - 24 Nov 2008 Excerpt: "Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/3512686/Children-are-born-believers-in-God-academic-claims.html Design Thinking Is Hardwired in the Human Brain. How Come? - October 17, 2012 Excerpt: "Even Professional Scientists Are Compelled to See Purpose in Nature, Psychologists Find." The article describes a test by Boston University's psychology department, in which researchers found that "despite years of scientific training, even professional chemists, geologists, and physicists from major universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale cannot escape a deep-seated belief that natural phenomena exist for a purpose" ,,, Most interesting, though, are the questions begged by this research. One is whether it is even possible to purge teleology from explanation. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/10/design_thinking065381.html January 2017 - Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language,,, Best Selling author Tom Wolfe was so taken aback by this honest confession by leading Darwinists that he wrote a book on the subject.,,, It is hard to imagine a more convincing scientific proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’ than finding both the universe, and life itself, are both ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and, moreover, have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our unique ability infuse information into material substrates. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/human-language-after-wolfe-on-chomsky-everett-finally-speaks-for-himself/#comment-623446

Moreover, this illusory nature inherent to the evidence for atheistic naturalism gets worse for the atheist than just him seeing the overwhelming 'appearance of design'. Much worse! For instance, although reliable ‘observation’ of reality is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself,,,

Steps of the Scientific Method Observation/Research Hypothesis Prediction Experimentation Conclusion http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/scientific_method.html

,,, Although reliable ‘observation’ of reality is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method, the reductive materialistic foundation that Darwinian evolution rests upon undermines this necessary cornerstone. bornagain77