I don’t think that science has disproven, nor even suggests, that it is unlikely that an Intelligent Designer was responsible for the world, and intended it to come into existence.
I don’t think that science has, nor even can, prove that divine and/or miraculous intervention is impossible.
I don’t think that the fact that we can make good predictive models of the world (and we can) in any way demonstrates that how the world has observedly panned out was not entirely foreseen and intended by some deity.
I think the world has properties that make it perfectly possible for an Intelligent Deity to “reach in” and tweak things to her liking – and that even if it didn’t, it would still be perfectly possible, given Omnipotence, just as a computer programmer can reach in and tweak the Matrix.
I don’t think that science falsifies the idea of an omnipotent,omniscient deity – at all.
I think that only rarely has this even been claimed by scientists, and, of those, most of them were claiming that science has falsified specific claims about a specific deity, not the idea in principle of a deity.
I do think that the world is such that IF there is an omnipotent, omniscient deity, EITHER that deity does not have human welfare as a high priority OR she has very different ideas about what constitutes human welfare from the ones that most people hold (and as are exemplified, for example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), OR she has deliberately chosen to let the laws of her created world play out according to her ordained rules, regardless of the effects of those laws on the welfare of human beings, perhaps trusting that we would value a comprehensible world more than one with major causal glitches. In my case, her trust was well-placed.
I do think that the evidence we have is far more consistent with the idea that life and its origins are the result of processes consistent with others we see acting in the world, and not a result of some extraordinary intervention or series of extraordinary interventions, regardless of any question as to whether a benign or otherwise deity designed those processes with the expectation that life would be a probable or inevitable result.
I don’t think that it follows that, were we to find incontrovertible evidence of a Intelligent Creator (for instance, an unambiguous message in English configured in a nebula in some remote region of space, or on the DNA of an ant encased in amber millions of years ago) that that would mandate us in any way to worship that designer. On the basis of her human rights record I’d be more inclined to summon her to The Hague.
I think that certain theological concepts regarding a benevolent deity useful, inspiring, entirely consistent with science, and may reflect reality.
I don’t myself, any more, believe in some external disembodied intelligent and volitional deity, simply because I am no longer persuaded that either intelligence or volition are possible in the absence of a material substrate. But I do understand why people think this is false, and that consciousness, intelligence and volition are impossible, even in principle, to account for in terms of material/energetic processes, and I also understand that, although I think, for reasons that satisfy myself, that they are mistaken, the case is not an easy one to articulate, not least because of the intrinsically reflexive nature of cogitating on cogitation.
I think that “free will” is an ultimately incoherent concept; I think that the question “do we have free will?” is ill-posed, and ultimately meaningless. I think the better question is: Do I have the ability to make informed choices for which I am morally responsible?” and I think the answer is clearly yes.
Anyone else want to unload?
William J. Murray,
William,
Why don’t you, too, read Anderson’s essay? Then we can discuss this question in some depth. I have already given the gist of it to phoodoo in this comment, so it should be of interest to you.
Even if that were true, phoodoo, we would be merely stupid (which I don’t think we are). That’s a lesser sin than deliberately misrepresenting your opponents’ views, as you do on a regular basis.
If I am right that those people don’t even know their own views, then there is no way they could know I am misrepresenting them.
phoodoo,
Value is in the eye of the beholder(s).
A stack of hundred-dollar bills is just ink on paper. Do you think people are irrational to value them more than a stack of last week’s newspapers?
Haven’t you ever thought about the concept of value before?
olgegt,
Even if there are “rule changes” that occur where the macro is not explicable in terms of the micro rules, but rather that a new set of behavioral and causal rules must be established for the way the macro system behaves, that doesn’t change the fact that when you get to the consciousness, under materialism/physicalism there would still be physical, causal rules that would describe the behavior in question.
IOW, the physics of the system (whether of micro or macro states) determine the outcome, even if that outcome is unpredictable. It still means that what phyisically precedes Liz’s concept of what she “should” do is what causes Liz to have the notion of what she “should” do. The exact same physical process, with variations, generates in a psychopath their sense that they “should” grab, torture and eat that girl scout at the door.
What any person should do, then, under physicalism/materialism, is the exact same physical thing as whatever they happen to think they should do, whether it is feed the poor or eat the poor. There is no presumed or hypothetical arbiter beyond what one’s personal programming/preference happens to produce.
William,
The thing is, its not a symmetrical relationship.
I am at the zoo.
You sure like spending time with zombies huh? Nothing better to do? Can’t find any other real people out there?
William,
This is rather naive. Forget human consciousness, you can’t even get from Newtonian mechanics to chemistry or thermodynamics!
Newtonian mechanics underlies the motion of molecules in gases, liquids, and solids. You can say that Newtonian mechanics is ultimately responsible for the formation of crystals, liquids, magnets and so on. That would be a hollow phrase that clarifies and explains exactly nothing. You can’t comprehend why magnetic dipoles in magnets line up or why crystals melt by referring to Newtonian mechanics. You need an entirely new framework and new principles to get there. Statistical mechanics does not just boil down to Newtonian mechanics.
From my perspective, we here at TSZ are continually returning to the same debates over and over because of a fundamental (and perhaps irresolvable?) conflict about the notion of “emergence”.
On the one hand, we have those (such as Lizzie and myself, perhaps a few others) who find the concept of “emergence” an intuitively plausible way of accommodating our common-sense notions of mind and life with a disenchanted concept of nature. (This is central to what I called “evolutionary pantheism” a few weeks ago.)
On the other hand, we have those who don’t see anything intuitively right about the concept of “emergence,” and so they conclude that we would have to begin with mindedness as such, as a fundamental ontological premise, in order to get the properties of “mind” and “life” instantiated in the history of the cosmos.
The two biggest problems for naturalism are intentionality (the “aboutnesss” of thought and language) and normativity (the “oughtness” of belief and action).
I do think, on the one hand, that the most promising account of intentionality and of normativity does not require positing the existence of entities that in any way transcend the causal order. So those accounts qualify as “naturalistic” in a platitudinous sense. On the other hand, however, I think that most attempts amongst philosophers to “naturalize” normativity and/or intentionality merely presuppose the disenchanted conception of nature. And that is a conception I firmly oppose.
I am, if anything, much more on the side of the Romantic tradition of nature-philosophy, with deep roots in Schelling, Coleridge, and Emerson, and flourishing in the19th and 20th centuries with Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and many others. Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature and Evan Thompson’s Mind In Life are both excellent, contemporary expositions of this tradition that reconcile Romantic philosophy of nature with contemporary empirical science.
(The Romantics themselves thought that they had to oppose science, because (a) the hegemony of mathematical physics in how the Enlightenment philosophers thought about science as such and (b) the limitations of 17th and 18th century mathematics for describing complex, dynamical systems.)
Actually, I have said nothing about whether they “should” or not. I even argued that it was rational to kill old people (although I’m not saying they should!) The question is why should humans value human life – when some other combination of the same molecules wouldn’t – I’m saying that it is one of the properties of the configuration that they do – because some configurations of matter have different properties to others, and to their parts, and a property of the configuration we call a human is that it enjoys living and doesn’t usually want it to stop.
Yeah. It’s often denigrated as some handwavy cop-out – but those who do so seem to think it’s something much more airy fairy than it is. At its simplest it’s blindingly obvious – a table salt crystal has properties not shared with elemental sodium or elemental chlorine,and indeed (luckily!) lacks the properties of those two substances.
There is simply no reason to assume that the configuration of something will have the same properties as its parts, nor that the configuration is some extra magic added something.
One needs to know what mechanisms cause crystals to melt or magnetic polarity in order to understand the dichotomy between materialism and spirituality?
William,
I suppose what I am trying to say, in my crude way, is that for many of the people here I can go and find their work, read their papers etc. Their thoughts on various matters that they stand by, that they will change when change is required.
Where can I go to read the same for you? I make no claims for the value of my own opinions, but when you dismiss complex things like GAs despite obviously not fully understanding them it makes me wonder where is your work that backs these opinions? Where have you made an effort to show your working with GAs? Ever programmed one? Ever tried?
What I do find puzzling about William’s apparent position is that on the one hand he takes a pragmatic view of what to believe – and then on the other ridicules the conclusions of others, despite readily conceding that he does not have the background to evaluate those conclusions.
He does seem to think that “logic” is enough – but it isn’t, because logic depends often on detail that has escaped William. It may be logical to assume that if a dead body is found in a room locked from the inside, it cannot have been murder, but that ignores possible mechanisms by which it could have been. More information changes the chain of reasoning.
I think that is a crass appeal to authority.
The detailed mechanisms of your purely physical world are irrelevant to elucidating the dichotomy of materialistic and spiritualistic mindsets.
You are pretending that you have a private view into an exclusive room of knowledge. Its like Mitt Romney claiming he is more rich because he has special talents most can’t understand.
Lizzie, I often think of the locked room mystery when reading the arguments of ID advocates. I think it’s the most powerful metaphor for illustrating what’s wrong with ID.
Dembsky gives the game away by admitting you have to eliminate all possible natural causes before calculating CSI.
Oddly enough, one of the masters of the locked room mystery is also the author of one of the dumbest and most widely quoted Dembsky-esque aphorisms: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Now about the small matter of eliminating the impossible.
Conan Doyle Wrote a number of stories in which supernatural causes were considered. So did Agatha Christie. They seem to have resolved otherwise.
William also hangs on to logically incoherent ideas (such as libertarian free will) even after their incoherence is repeatedly demonstrated to him.
If logic, like truth, is strictly optional for William, why is he so concerned with the purported illogic of others?
No, it’s the very opposite. It’s an appeal to people (you, William) to actually read the scientific papers, learn the language, understand the methodology, and articulate the argument accurately before you reject it.
At which point, you may find that you don’t. I’m not telling you what is what; I’m asking you not to reject an argument you don’t apparently yet understand.
Possibly, possibly not. I actually dispute that this is about “mindsets” at all. The reason I hold the positions I do is not because of a “mindset” but because it is where I have reached after considerable searching, learning and thought. I could be wrong – I’m certainly wrong about a great deal – but I don’t think my mind is “set”.
No. I’m absolutely sure you can understand. That’s why I find it frustrating when you don’t actually address what I did say, but instead keep repeating something I quite explicitly rejected.
Well, logic can still hold, even if the premises are false.
I haven’t seen William stipulate any set of premises, true or false, under which libertarian free will is coherent.
I think what’s often missed by P, W, is that this actually does happen. It just happens “expert to expert” in the formal arena of jousting, er, peer review and just arguing your case with other experts in the field.
And it’s tedious, and brilliant, and full of words that have specific meanings and all that. Did you look at the paper that went along with the video of cubes evolving William?
I’m just an onlooker. But I can that what P, W think is an argument is often just a repeated talking point (seriously, you are way off W with GAs) and does not rise to what would be considered an “argument” in the technical arena.
If it did, then that’s where they would be having it! And it does not rise to that level yet W talks as if that level of hard work has all been done and it supports him.
So the point I keep making is that there is an asymmetry here that is not recognised I think by P, W in that for “Darwinism” there is a deep body of work that supports the theory. And it’s not something that a self confessed non-expert can seriously dismiss with a wave of the hand.
I do wish William would respond to my posts about the GAs. I spent a lot of time responding to his 🙁
I know enough about the science, I contend you don’t know about the philosophy. What makes you think that understanding life is more about understanding the science?
When will you start demonstrating that you know enough?
What dichotomy?
I am neither a materialist nor a spiritualist. So where does your alleged dichotomy leave me?
I repeat:
In that case why do you keep ignoring the point I keep making about entities like human being having properties not possessed by their molecules?
Do you not understand it, or disagree with it? If don’t understand, I’ll try to explain. If you do, but disagree, on what grounds?
Then explain to me the philosophical point you are trying to make. I’m moderately bright.
There you go again! I said no such thing, and I fail to see how anything I have written could be construed as indicating that I meant any such thing! Can you quote where I said what you think meant that?
Nice example.
It’s interesting that ID advocates are fond of citing the difference between a collection of junk and a working 747, but unable to fathom the difference between unorganized molecules and a person.
Molecules – person, but junk 747.
Is it impossible to see the equivalence? Impossible to see that structures have properties not possessed by component parts?
To me, the interesting thing about this blindness is that it suggests ID advocates are the last people on earth capable of designing anything, because they do not understand that there are elements of any complex product that must evolve through trial and error. There are always unforeseeable interactions in any complex system.
We are as one mind on this, Petrushka 🙂
And no ID person ever touches it. At least not to my knowledge.
We (individually) give things value. This is trivially proven by things like bidding or price discrimination / revenue management.
And, quoting myself, by asking “don’t you have anything better to do William then write posts here” what I’m really saying I suppose is “given that there seems to be no body of work, by you or anyone else, providing support to your claims, why aren’t you working on that instead of arguing about topics you admit you know little of yet seem ready to dismiss out of hand?”
You response, while accurate and amusing as far as it goes
does not consider the fact that such a body of work already exists for my “side” and as such what happens here has to be seen in that light. We have it, you don’t. You might want to work on that. What we do to you is not the same as what you do to us. What you do to us is all that you have whereas what we do to you is encourage (and help) you to frame your case in such a way that it can be competently examined and dismissed (for reason) or furthered, as it may be.
The reason that blog posts from UD are copied here and re-posted to is that UD is practically the sole source of ID related material. It’s that asymmetry again. You have a dot, against the world. And given that you can’t talk freely on UD about ID….
And I might ask Liz about that, sure, and if she has a break from doing what she talks about some aspects of here in the real world she might answer. It’s that “real world to here” link that is missing on your side William, for me anyway. One one side I see a thriving scientific machine, on the other – UD where KF writes an undergraduates paper worth of words a day, but refuses to get it out to the wider world for some testing because of the darwinists cabal.
Yet, if my meta-belief system was working out, I’d expect that given two things where the two are supported by vastly different levels of evidence, I’d accept the one with the most evidence. Unless and until I could create cogent arguments against the one I chose (whole or part), and advance it by making it more accurate I’d default to that. Why not? What else to do? Why not stand on the shoulders of giants?
Yet you don’t. It just seems irrational. GAs “don’t work” because of something someone else said. Pah. ID is the conclusion, IDers are looking backwards from it for evidence to support it retrospectively.
It’s better supported that looking when you cross the road is better if staying alive is your goal. I bet you look, but why? What if Behe said that crossing the road is the better way? That looking presupposes the designer does not have a plan for you? What then?
That doesn’t matter. I didn’t claim that “shoulds” were **reducible** to chemistry or quantum mechanics or thermodynamics or any particular aspect of the environment, or any particular set of rules; only that under materialism, “whatever one thinks they should do” is caused by accumulative, preceding natural tendencies, laws, behaviors, physics of some sort, the sort of predecessors produce, in another person, an opposite set of “shoulds”.
And under your system, William, where does a “should” come from?
That terrifies you, right?
When I am satisfied with the state of a debate – that I’ve achieved my purpose in engaging in it – there really isn’t any reason for me to continue, is there?
I point out what I think could use pointing out and leave it from there for others with reasonable intelligence, a fairly open mind and a reasonable grasp of logic to figure out on their own. Most of the nonsense posted on this site certainly doesn’t need me pointing it out – it’s that obvious.
Well, from my PoV I pretty well shredded your understanding of GAs, and I was rather hoping that now you would have a better understanding of them!
Doesn’t wash: “It’s obvious, innit.” is just about the least persuasive argument there is 🙂
You posted a spoof conversation: I analysed it in detail, showing how you had confused various concepts and conflated others.
If you have a counter-argument, why not present it?
No, but “being a good person” wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying and fulfilling if I believed it was just a matter of however my atoms happened to be arranged by happenstance physical forces. Not so much “terrifying” as “disappointing” and “depressing”.
After you sit in the chemo clinic with your daughter, rush your son to the hospital after he blew his hands up with fireworks, and wipe your momma’s ass a few times, you get different perspective on what qualifies as “terrifying”.
Because I don’t consider it my job to rebut nonsense.
How Republican, a net producer, not consumer! Bravo sir, Bravo!
Here’s how I see the exchange:
You presented a faux-dialogue between a “Darwinist” and “Programmer”, apparently intended to demonstrate the absurdity of the “Darwinist’s” understanding of GAs.
I commented in detail on this dialogue, being someone who is both a “Darwinist” [Gregory, avert your gaze] and someone who has actually programmed quite a number of GAs and evolutionary simulations, with intention of demonstrating to you that you had a straw man, and that your faux-dialogue, far from demonstrating the absurdity of the “Darwinist”, simply revealed your misunderstanding of the relationship between GAs and evolutionary theory, and with the additional intention of replacing your straw man with a more accurate representation of that relationship.
Rather than attempt to point out the flaws in my (I have to say, pretty well-informed) rebuttal of your points with a set of counter-rebuttals, you simply say “I don’t consider it my job to rebut nonsense”.
How do you know it is nonsense? What makes you think you know more about GAs and Darwinism than I do?
Or are you prepared to take the risk because the conclusion is irrelevant to you?
In which case, would it not, at the least, be courteous to say: “well, Lizzie, you may be right about this, I wouldn’t know, but it’s irrelevant to my main point, which is…whatever”?
But none of us do believe this, William. That is what we keep trying to explain. That’s what all the stuff about “chance not being cause” was about. We don’t think that “it was just a matter of however my atoms happened to be arranged by happenstance physical forces”. We think (or I do) that it is a matter of how those atoms are configured by a complex cascade of interlocking processes involving the collection of information and the weighing up of alternative goals that I call “Lizzie’s decision”, because it as sure as heck isn’t anyone else’s.
Meanwhile you are left with the (to my mind incoherent) position that your decisions are the result of some extra-material blob of ectoplasm that is somehow able to receive information from material sources, and transmit it so that it impacts on matter and deflect its course, without being “caused” by matter, and also being undetectable in its effects.
Indeed. You also get a different perspective on what motivates people, I think.
Shrug. Ask the designer what that was all about.
EDIT: Believe it away. As you prefer.
Ever thought about trying to find one of those onlookers and getting an idea of how you are doing with that? Or is feedback not relevant in your “system”?
Most of the nonsense posted in a single thread on a single post on this site beats in interest and intellect the entire output of UD since day 1.
But you are so far removed from reality if you think what you’ve pointed out about GAs is anything other then your misunderstandings of them, and stolen ideas, that I’m surprised you can even type.
And apparently that’s a “better” explanation that any science can come up with. Why not add a few other layers on as well? After all that, “blob” has to follow some kind of eternal logic of it’s own, how could it not? It’s just “better” logic then the poor old materialists can use.
I guess it’s possible for people to have the appearance of a fully working person but still be badly broken.
Hey, William, if you are wrong about GAs (and you are) perhaps you are wrong about the whole blob thing? The whole belief system thing?
Will one thread unravel the whole thing in a single go I wonder? Is that why you refuse to even read a paper about how the flagellum could have arisen? That it might start the cascade? The final straw before you snap?
Fine. Here, then, is a response you should be able to understand:
No, but “being a good person” wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying and fulfilling if I believed it was just a matter of how those atoms are configured by a complex cascade of interlocking processes involving the collection of information and the weighing up of alternative goals that I call “William’s “shoulds”.
You see, Liz, in your world, what you said is somehow significantly different from what I said. In my world, it’s essentially the same thing.
Liz says:
Omagain says:
Everyone is, of course, free to reach their own conclusions based on the exchanges here. As I said, I’m satisfied with the current state of that particular debate. That the two of you cannot let it go and – in effect – keep reiterating “I win” or “You’re a coward” – is something I’m happy to leave to observers to assess.
Which effectively means that you are blind to differences that are apparent in our world. OK. But perhaps at least allow for the possibility that from our vantage point, what looks like uniformity from yours is rich with distinctions in ours. And therefore not assume that it is necessarily “nonsense”.
Well, I said neither of those two things. I don’t consider I “won” – I’m not even interesting in winning. I’m interested in having a discussion, in which one, or both, of us may learn something. What is frustrating is when the other person simply unilaterally declares the other person’s last submission “nonsense” and bails out.
I have no idea why you think what I tried to explain about GAs is “nonsense”. It seems odd, given that I almost certainly know more about them than you do, having written them, which I don’t think you have. But there may be a glaring error which you can see, but I don’t. I guess. But if so, apparently you are not prepared to say what it is.
So it seems weird to me to both fail to offer a counter-rebuttal AND declare my attempted rebuttal “nonsense”. It looks like Nelson holding the telescope to his blind eye.
A course that paid off for Nelson, but not a generally wise one.
What debate? A debate usually consists of several rounds, point – rebuttal, counterpoint. etc. You know. A back and forth, where each point raised is examined in turn by the other. In detail.
What debate? I must have missed it! You just repeated some talking points from UD and never engaged at all on anything anybody raised.
Presumably, you’re also satisfied with the state of the thread that touched on the evolutionary explanation for camouflage in polar bears. link