For what it’s worth…
Dr Liddle has described her conception of chance as all outcomes being equiprobable, and has most assuredly used “chance” as an explanation of that outcome. [citation needed]
Sal:
The proper debate maneuver for the ID side, now that we’ve identified the vulnerability is to say:
Question for Lizzie?
Given you think anyone resorting to chance explanations is wrong to do so, do you think the evolutionary biologist Koonin is wrong to assert in
The overwhelming importance of chance in the emergence of life on Earth
or how about Richard Dawkins
If evolution worked by chance, it obviously couldn’t work at all.
Richard Dawkins
etc.
I hold Lizzie too high regard for her hospitality toward me I won’t go to TSZ and post such a discussion. But if I were less friendly, that’s how I would play the game.
Yes, I think “chance explanations” are not explanations. However, I do think that many, if not most, processes are stochastic – in other words they have variable effects, depending on complex interactions between many factors. This is true for the processes that govern mutations, and also for the processes that govern natural selection. Hypotheses about such processes therefore propose probability distributions for outcomes, rather than certainties. For example, instead of saying “If A is true, we will observe B”, we say “if A is true, B will follow probability distribution X”. Both mutation and natural selection are highly stochastic processes. But then so is intelligent decision-making.
What is certainly true is that stochastic processes that are orthogonal to each other are often at work. For instance, it is probably true that the stochastic processes that govern mutation are uncorrelated with the stochastic processes that govern natural selection. But even that may not be completely true – it may be that some of the processes are shared, and that certain mutations are more likely in certain environments.
All these questions are interesting, and the word “chance” is far to ill-defined to play a terribly useful role in them. Nonetheless, I would not say that a man like Koonin is wrong for using it without reading carefully what he is saying, and how he is using the word. My point is much simpler: that we need to be precise when defining our null hypotheses, otherwise our rejection or retention of that null will be meaningless.
And “due to chance” is not a serviceable null hypothesis, even though we may, if we retain our null, informally say that our retention of the null means that we can attribute our actual observations to “chance”, though I wouldn’t recommend it.
It is also worth noting that a two-tailed null is always literally false. Which is one of the many problems with null-hypothesis testing. But maybe we should leave that for another thread.
Apologies for spamming TSZ with responses to people at UD, but as I can’t post there, yet I am regularly cited…
(Extracted from a post at ID website Evolution News and Views “Excerpted from Discovering Intelligent Design, by Gary Kemper, Hallie Kemper, and Casey Luskin; Chapter 5, “The Empire Strikes Back”:” )
Link (H/T REC at AtBC)
Well, fancy that!
I agree with Casey Luskin and Barry doesn’t!
Alan – nice quote. At the root of all this I wonder if there is any substantial disagreement at all! I may all be down to definitions but the ID crowd don’t seem to want to explore that.
“Apologies for spamming TSZ with responses to people at UD, but as I can’t post there, yet I am regularly cited…”
Well, this site did start as a reaction or response to your being banned from UD, so your concentration on UD is understandable.
I’d be more interested in you explicating your worldview here more coherently, e.g. in case skepticism is what you call it, or if being a skeptic or skeptical is what you advocate. The scientist and/or scholar is required to be skeptical, curious, explorative, etc. as part of their academic calling. But the human being qua ‘person’ (cf. intelligent agent) usually, if not always, has ‘faith’ in something, even if it is in meaninglessness, nihilism, fatalism, rationalism or pragmatism as a ‘sense of life.’
Faith in flipping coins? = ))
UD, in the end, is a waste of most peoples’ time. The IDM is a dead-end, which has been and will continue to be exposed for its SOCIOLOGICAL biases until it fades away in the coming decade(s). I’ve already identified the conditions in which IDism gives itself away, as have others, but for now it is a predictable transition ideology and a pain in the neck for Darwinists, evolutionists, naturalists, materialists and others who simply are unwilling to elevate themselves (just as IDT leaders are unready) to invite a mature and reconciliatory dialogue between science, philosophy and theology/worldview. Only such an elevated, respectful discussion (which some people are having already, though very little at TSZ) will lead to fruitful pathways forward.
Will the USA ever recover from the sectarian religious fundamentalism of its past and present, will it learn how to be ‘secular’ (as C. Taylor means) without becoming atheist-owned (like the USSR was)? I don’t think it will be merely ‘chance’ that decides this. Shall we then welcome the concept/percept of ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ or disqualify those terms too?
So if you agree with this:
“Because many of these factors are difficult to predict or control beforehand, we attribute the outcome to “chance.” But “chance” is not really the cause at all. That term is an expression of probability and is used simply to predict and describe events. It is not a causal agent.”
You are accepting the deteminism. Each event on the universe is produced by previous events folloeing the “laws of physics”: Then everything is determinated, evolution too. If we could rewind the movie the outcome will be almost the same. It is inevitable that I´m here writing this comment and you reading it.
Barry,
Barry, perhaps you and Luskin need to talk on the phone before you put up too many more comments?
Mark Frank,
Frankly*, Mark, I think Barry is honing his version of the Gish Gallop.He wasn’t interested in justifying how he agreed with Eldredge on evolution and I don’t think he’s interested in the semantics of chance either. He could always prove me wrong!
*Sorry, couldn’t resist.
One rather important counter-example is radioactive decay. What event triggers the decay of a carbon14 atom at any particular moment?
Where did Mr. Arrington claim that chance was a causal agency?
Interesting point, as what’s of more interest to me in the whole “Intelligent Design” thing is the, well, Intelligent Design.
Just out of interest, when you are done with all this stuff about chance and who said what when will you be moving onto the Intelligent Designer as a causal agency?
Seems to me you are all avoiding that elephant in the room.
Jesus does.
Would the title of the recent UD post, presumably written by Barry:
Count?
Chance?
Blas,
What does that tell us? I could say an individual atom decays spontaneously, randomly and unpredictably (although we can predict the overall rate of decay in a measured amount of material). But it’s an observation rather than an explanation.
No Alan, do not reverse the problem. You asked what make an atom decay in a determined moment. I answered chance. You have to accept tha hypothesis or reject it giving another.
That problem has nothing to do whit the amount of atoms that decay per unit of time that is the result of the big number atoms suject of “stochastic” process called decay.
So in your mind, “explanation” is the same as “causal agency”?
Do you think design is a mechanism, out of interest?
Faith in flipping coins? = ))
Oh, I forgot. Salvador T. Cordova the IDist gambler considers himself a ‘holy roller.’ LOL!
Just for Lizzie´s record you have a citation here:
About the coin questions at UD:
UD is not a statistics forum. To expect that coin problems should be described with a probability distribution, null hypothesis and confidence interval is ridiculous. The statement about coins in layman terms is pretty clear to a layman, and that is how you should be approaching the question.
I suggest that you start a new post about this, since I would imagine that no one here really understands what you mean by this.
I understand somewhat, insofar as I have my own reasons for thinking that empirical theories should be informed by epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics (and vice-verse, of course!) — but my reasons are somewhat different from yours (I think?) and I don’t understand what makes “theology/worldview” different from “metaphysics”.
If you really want to have a conversation with us at TSZ about this, a new post about it is the way to go.
Hi coldcoffee,
How long have you been reading UD? Stats/math based posts are made there *all* the time, although their quality is somewhat uneven, to say the least. Many of those posts assume the reader is familiar with basic concepts such as hypothesis testing and probability distributions.
I doubt I’ve ever used the phrase “causal agency”? I would be happy deciding if A were the cause of B, in the sense that Alan pushed Barry off the cliff. In such a scenario, Alan might be described as the “causal agent”. I doubt “well, yeah, I pushed him” would be sufficient as an explanation for Alan’s action, though.
No Mark it is not all down to definitions. Is all about the all darwinian trick of changing the meaning of the words depending of what they are arguing about..
When Gould said that humans were not a determined result of evolution, chance was a proposed mechanism. When Sagan, Dawkins, Coyne, Hopkins said that science can explain life and the universe without God, chance was a mechanism.
If chance it is not a mechanism Humans are the determined result of physical laws and darwinist do not like this conslusion.
If chance is not a mechanism we cannot rule out God as explanation and really cannot explain nothing. And darwinist do not like this.
And when confronted with the poor scientific answer of chance as mechanism they deny that they used the word chance as mechanism as they deny that Gould, Sagan, Dawkins and other darwinist afirmation implies chance as mechanism but do not accept the consequences of that rejection.
Maybe at UD are stubbornly committed to make you accept that darwinism has chance as mechanism, I´m only pretend people of TSZ realize that you cannot eat the cake and have it.
Chance is not a hypothesis. It is an admission we don’t have an explanation. Well, I don’t and I’m guessing you don’t, either. We do know that atoms of certain elements or certain isotopes are unstable and there is correlation with atomic number and proton/neutron ratio. We just do not know what (if anything) makes an individual nucleus decay at any one moment.
Agreed it’s a different problem, statistical predictability arising from individual random events.
He is strenuously disagreeing with me that it isn’t!
If he agrees that it isn’t, then why is he telling me I’m wrong to say that it isn’t?
Do you think that chance is a causal agent, William?
“I don’t understand what makes “theology/worldview” different from “metaphysics”.”
Perhaps that’s part of the reason you’re such a poor defender of philosophy here, KN? You claim to teach philosophy at a USAmerican university, yet “don’t understand” the difference?! What kind of philosophy education do they have in your country!? Your university must have generously overlooked this shortcoming in your ‘philosophy’ or surprisingly forgot to ask about it at all.
“the human being qua ‘person’ (cf. intelligent agent) usually, if not always, has ‘faith’ in something.” KN has ‘faith’ in Nature, in Empiricism? Is that what ‘Reform Judaism’ (link to other thread) teaches, KN? That would be a shock.
Ok Alan, I can agree with the fact that chance it is not a mechanism, but accepting that has consequences. We do not have all tha answer science do not ruled out God, as many here at TSZ believe.
I would be sympathetic to that point of view, if posters at UD were merely making minor mistakes.
The problem is that when we attempt to clear up confusion, without attacking the UD posters, they turn around and demonize us for being correct.
I’m sorry Blas, but you are simply wrong here. The equivocation with words is happening on the ID side right now, not the “Darwinian” side.
That is why I am insisting that we are precise, and it is far from precise – indeed it is actively misleading – to say that when we reject a “null hypothesis” we are rejecting “the hypothesis that our observed results are due to chance”. Quite apart from the second being essentially meaningless (because chance isn’t a causal agent) it cannot be substituted for the words “null hypothesis” and have the sentence still make sense. The two things are simply not the same. Claiming they are is precisely the sort of “redefinition” that you are accusing “darwinians” of.
If they said that, they were being sloppy. Dawkins is frequently sloppy with the word chance. But I’d like a specific quotation, with context, please.
Could be, and I don’t especially dislike the conclusion. But it probably isn’t true, because some processes seem to be inherently uncertain. That doesn’t mean that “chance” is a “mechanism”, it means that some mechanisms are inherently unpredictable – they have probability distribution that cannot be reduced in variance by including additional factors in the model.
This Darwinist has absolutely no interest in ruling out God, nor have most Darwinists, including a pope or two.
The probably is that IDists keep insisting on shoving the cake down our throats. Darwinian evolution is not the theory that God Didn’t Do It. Just as God could make things fall by creating Gravity, she could make things intelligent by creating evolution.
But I think you have got to the root of this whole silly argument, Blas. This isn’t about statistics, it’s about the fear that IDists have that if “evolutionists” are right, they are saying that mere “chance” created life, and thus life has no meaning.
No, it doesn’t mean that. If evolutionists are right (and I think they are) it means we know something quite important about the mechanisms by which life became intelligent. It tells absolutely nothing about whether any Divine Creator intended this outcome or not.
Blas, I acknowledge that you are earnest. But please try being reasonable. “Let us reason together.”
“science do not ruled out God”
Note this carefully and reconsider your ideological IDism: God is not ruled in by science either. Yet that is what the implicationist ideology of IDism requires; a transcendent, supernatural Intelligent Agent (not just created lowercase intelligent agents).
IDT is biased against atheists, Blas. Pure and simple. One cannot be an atheist and accept IDT.
Do you realise that or not?
If you are a USAmerican citizen, IDT will *never* be able to be taught in USAmerican schools because of that obvious unconstitutional bias. That is the USA’s national legal position.
That is a fair point, coldcoffee, and I have every sympathy with people who write about statistics using non-rigorous language. The problem here is twofold: firstly, Barry is accusing me of talking nonsense, which I am not. Secondly, the mistake (or sloppiness) in Barry’s language also lies at the heart of ID, which is, in most manifestations, a probability argument. The reason Barry’s example has 500 coins, and not 600 or 400, is that for certain (spurious) reasons, Dembski decided that if a thing had a less than one in 2^500 probability of occurring “uner the relevant Chance hypothesis” we must infer that it was “designed.
This is the point at issue – not the 2^500 part, but the “relevant Chance hypothesis” part.
If Chance makes no sense as a null hypothesis (and it doesn’t) then Dembski’s argument fails.
And the reason it makes no sense is firstly that Chance isn’t causal, and secondly, if you have a stochastic hypothesis, you have to specify your probability distribution. Dembski is smart enough to realise this, and so specifies “the relevant Chance hypothesis” but does not tell us how to define it.
Most IDists seem to ignore that key word “relevant” and regard “Chance” as something like “random draw” from some distribution or other.
Which one can readily reject (at a lot less severe a criterion that p<1/2^500), but that simply does not leave "Design" as default. It leaves lots of other potential non-design nulls.
I would prefe let aside your usual denial mode and focus on this
When you say “inherently unpredictable” you mean
-given the same initial conditions you can reach state A or B.
– given the same initial conditions I will always reach A or B but I cannot predict wich because I do not know wich are the initial conditions that led to A or to B.?
“Dawkins is frequently sloppy with the word chance. But…” – Lizzie
Are you not able to back up your own statement without help from IDists, Lizzie? Why don’t YOU quote Dawkins and reprimand his sloppiness as you see it?
“This Darwinist has absolutely no interest in ruling out God, nor have most Darwinists, including a pope or two.”
Now, you do the work please. Find me a Pope who calls them-self a ‘Darwinist.’
I dare you, Elizabeth Liddle! I think you’re just talking smack on this one. And since you denied being a ‘Darwinist’ in the thread I wrote on Darwinism, you just sound like a philosophically naive flip-flopper now. How about some consistency in your worldview, Lizzie?
“Darwinian evolution is not the theory that God Didn’t Do It.”
Note please: Darwinian evolution and Darwinism = NOT THE SAME THING!!
Darwin lost his faith in God, left the Church of England, could not see purpose in life. His daughter’s death was part of that, but just a part. “Darwin forgot the spirit,” as Nietzsche wrote.
Do you not understand at all, Lizzie, why IDists throw mud at their fellow religious believers who accept evolutionary theories, by calling them Christian Darwinists? I’m sure you wouldn’t feel comfortable addressing this on your blog.
Look, in my view you’ve made a strong argument against Barry and his mistaken null hypothesis claims. O.k. bravo and well done. So why not stop and rest your case before going ideologically overboard as you did in the above post to Blas?
What has been ruled out is the usefulness of any hypothesis that invokes invisible intentional agency.
Not ruled out logically, but ruled out for the same reason we rule out the possibility that ghosts commit murders and that detectives need to take the possibility of ghosts into account.
We have no reason to think this useful.
Sorry Gregory I do not understand nothing of you are trying to tell me, starting by IDT. Side note I do not think ID is scientific.
I could do, but I’m thinking of several interviews I’ve seen, where he’s said things like “mutation is random but natural selection isn’t”. He uses the word “random” to mean different things at different times. I could try to find a selection of quotes, but I’m not inclined to do so unless someone is seriously challenging the truth of my claim here. There were several threads about this at RDF IIRC.
I’m not going down this rabbit-hole, Gregory. The catholic church has been happy with Darwinism for quite a while. tbh I don’t know anyone who calls themselves “a Darwinist” except in the sense of accepting that Darwin’s principle was essentially correct.
It depends entirely what you mean by the word, Gregory. If you mean someone who thinks that Darwin was essentially correct, I am “a Darwinist”. If you mean an atheist, I’m not. If you mean someone who thinks that Darwin was entirely correct, I’m not.
Suit yourself.
Addressing what? Sounds a perfectly good topic to me.
Because I didn’t. Where I see a scientific hypothesis, you see an ideology.
And where that scientific hypothesis is sloppily worded, to the extent that it leads to invalid conclusions, I point it out.
Sounds great. He seemed to do OK anyway, better then most even. Your point?
I mean that given all possible available information, we cannot predict whether A or B will happen, except to say that A is more, or as, or less, likely than B.
And when A (or B) does happen, A (or B) may cause something else to happen. But it makes no sense to say that “Chance caused” A or B. What we can say is that all we can know about A or B are the probabilities with which they will occur.
So given the same conditions you can have A or B as result.
What makes more probably A if the initial condition are the same?
Lizzie just for your information Catholic Church never was Ok with darwinism, only accepted evolution partially. You can read the Catholic Cathecism.
Lizzie,
Sal Cordova led me (bad link, Sal) to this thread at Larry Moran’s blog, Dawkins on Chance, where C R Dawkins makes an appearance in the comments!
Moran:
I’d like to have seen a response from Dawkins to this.
At quantum level, we don’t know, Blas (at least that’s as I understand it – I’m no physicist). All we can say is that instead of knowing that, say, we will find an electron at position X, that the electron has a certain probability of being found at position X, and that when we plot those probabilities against X we get a wave function.
It never accepted “Darwinism” as the explanation for the soul, but then it was never proffered as such.
Whenever we see a statistic (note carefully the meaning of that word) that differs from what our model of a population or series of events predicts, the first thing we do, if we are being careful, is to do the experiment again while accounting for different possible systematic effects.
Upon confirmation of the difference, we do NOT go looking for “chance” as a mechanism that “pushes stuff around”. How would “chance” do that? How close does “chance” have to be to the members of our population or to the atoms and molecules in a series of events in order to influence their behaviors?
Does the influence of “chance” drop off with distance? Does it fade with time? What kind of matter does “chance” interact with?
If we really want to understand the difference between our statistic and the predictions of our model, we don’t look for a mechanism called “chance”. That would be like looking for a supernatural effect with a new label, “chance,” tacked onto it.
“The catholic church has been happy with Darwinism for quite a while.”
Sorry, Lizzie. You may be somewhat competent about brains, penguins and music. But you’re a rank amateur when it comes to ideology, including recognition and defense of your own. Time to take your medicine.
Just stop using the term ‘Darwinism’ and you’ll be fine. Suggesting that “Darwin was essentially correct” means ‘Darwinism’ is just lazy, low-educated talk. Like Mazzie in the “Horton Hatches an Egg” story. Such claims do you no credit, Lizzie.
No, the Catholic Church is *NOT* “happy with Darwinism.” 🙂 Have a reality check with your mistaken views and perhaps actually start reading what Catholic scientists and officials write before you misrepresent them.
One among many, Edward Oakes wrote: “The problem comes from the conflation of Darwinism with evolution strictly defined.”
The reality is, Lizzie, that you haven’t spent hours and hours, months and months or years and years specifically focussing on and researching what ‘evolution’ and ‘evolutionism,’ what ‘Darwinian’ and ‘Darwinism’ means, across a range of academic disciplines. Would you be willing to defer to those who have?
The Catholic Church is not anti-evolution, in the sense of opposing responsible biological theory, as long as it does not turn into biologism (which some people here still deny is a meaninful term). But the Catholic Church *is* anti-evolutionISM, when evolution turns into an ideology and it is certainly opposed to the universal Darwinism of Campbell, Dawkins, Heylighen, Cziko, et al. all of whom were/are atheists and/or anti-theists.
Do you acknowledge this or not, Lizzie? Can you see the difference or not?
For a non-atheist, Lizzie, you sure don’t seem to be well-tuned into the position of the way theists view this topic. (I just met one of the most well-known Brits on the topic of science, philosophy, theology/worldview the other week; he is an anti-IDist too!) That’s why I wrote what I did at the top: “I’d be more interested in you explicating your worldview here more coherently, e.g. in case skepticism is what you call it, or if being a skeptic or skeptical is what you advocate.”
“Addressing what?”
Addressing “why IDists throw mud at their fellow religious believers who accept evolutionary theories, by calling them Christian Darwinists?”
We do not know what? If the initial conditions are the same what could change? Unless you accept that the initial state is ramdom based on QM, then chance is again a cause.
No Lizzie, there are many more differences.