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?
The random byproduct of imperfect replicators filtered by non-uniform probability distribution selection and fed back into subsequent generations.
Since you’re posting in good faith it must be our fault for not communicating such simple ideas to you. If we used less scientific terminology and fewer big words would it help?
I’m not sure about “arbitrary based on convenience”, but as best I can tell, “value”—be it “value” of monetary units, or “value” of human life, or “value” of whatever else—is, exactly and precisely, a human invention.
What is the “value” of human life? Whatever we humans say it is. Some humans say that human life has value on the grounds that they believe their own life has value, and they generalize from themselves to everyone else; some humans say that human life has value on the grounds of their belief that [insert favorite deity-of-choice] told them so; some humans say that human life has value on still other grounds entirely.
Again: Human life has “value” when humans say it has value. Godbots like yourself, phoodoo, tend to reject this proposition on the grounds that if human life was only valuable because humans say so, then [insert evil consequence here]… but in my experience, it is utterly, completely, I-could-have-a-heart-attack-and-die-from-unsurprise commonplace that the [evil consequence] which a godbot has cited as grounds to reject the proposition that human life has value because humans say so, is an [evil consequence] which has actually occurred in human history, and usually more than once. Myself, I don’t quite see how you get from if [proposition X] was true, [consequence which has been frequently observed] would occur! to therefore, [proposition X] is false, but my experience has shown me that many of you godbots do somehow manage precisely that feat of intellectual gymnastics.
People are valuable
in the same way that calling money a representation of value are similar conceptsbecause God says so? So once the psychopaths are in power, andwe use a credit card system of paymentthe dogma of The One True Religion becomes the law of the land, human life which does not belong to sincere adherents of The One True Sect Of The One True Religion can also beusedvery justifiablyas fuel for incineratorstortured until they recant their heresy, or even just plain killed outright—according to all the great“evolutionist-emergians.”believers in the One True Religion.Neil Rickert said:
Excellent choice. Anyone who believes that stochastic processes can’t produce determinate results should perform the Monte Carlo exercise of deriving pi using no more than a straight edge ruler and a packet of rice grains.
This is why “random” is such a treacherous word to use. Here is a classic example of a mathematician using it one sense, to mean “blind draw”, and a second person using it to mean “non-intentional draw”. The two definitions sound as though they are interchangeable but they aren’t.
I can intentionally make a blind draw, and designers do this the whole time.
Not only that, but non-intentional processes can be “non-blind” in the sense that if an independent person knows the precursor, she can predict the result with a high degree of certainty. It’s how IDists distinguish between “chance” and “necessity”.
This is why I prefer the term “stochastic” – because it has no baggage of non-inintentionality, and does not imply anything other than “noisy” – not fully predictable by a generalisable rule.
And anyone who looks up stochastic in the dictionary will see it described as “random”, since we aren’t talking about mathematical theory in this discussion, that is all stochastic means-so your point is kind of mute, and once again really just a distraction. Evolutionary theory is predicated on randomness, sorry.
Lizzie,
Furthermore, I could choose at least ten words out of your last post, give you alternate meanings for those words, which mean something different than what you meant, and that in no way follows that you used the incorrect words.
What did you mean when you said blind draw, did you means a person with no eyes painting….?
How can it be a stochastic process if you are choosing a ruler and a packet of rice. Didn’t you just design the process?
It’s trivial and I have already given the example. If everyone in the world dies, bar a person who thinks they are perfectly entitled to rape children then raping children shall be moral.
Simples!
Morality is invented by us, for us. When there are no more humans, there will be no more human morality. Whoever the last human is will *be* human morality.
You don’t have much imagination do you William?
Then why don’t you?
Indeed. And I’m not saying saying that one meaning is “correct” and others not. I’m saying that it is difficult to communicate using words with several meanings, and that you and Neil had failed to communicate, as a result.
Stochastic doesn’t mean “not designed”. As I just said. That’s why I prefer the term. Mutation (and natural selection) are both stochastic processes. That statement says nothing about whether they are the result of a designer’s intention or not.
Actually, we are. We are talking about mathematical models that can be fitted to empirical data. And in the case of evolutionary theory, the mathematical model is a stochastic one.
That tells you nothing about whether the process was designed or not. I, and others, design stochastic models all the time – they can be really useful, and, indeed, can tell you the value of pi.
In my case, they tell me things like what brain patterns are minimally correlated with other brain patterns (a technique called Independent Components Analysis).
If it weren’t for my computer’s random number generator, I’d be seriously handicapped in what I do.
Is the environment random?
William J. Murray,
If no, the moral-baby-torturer is a moral irrelevance. If yes, it is not a universal truth.
And either way it ain’t analytically true, which distinguishes your other examples. Is this an odd-one-out game? Spot the synthetic statement that has been smuggled into a list of analytic ones? There’s a word for this kind of argumentation. Sopp … sophie … that’s it – sophistry!
If there is a model, where is it ? and does it truly predict nature and evolution? If you are talking about simulations and programs like Avida , then there are program that disprove Avida- – I think it is ‘Mendel’s accountant’
Wouldn’t it be easy to prove evolution if a really working model existed ? The problem is no one has a proper model of evolution and that is reason for dispute.
More correctly stated, this is what you believe. You in fact have no way of knowing if these are stochastic (random!) processes, you are just guessing.
Furthermore, you calling natural selection a process is also incorrect. Natural selection is not a process at all. It is not a cause of anything. I am surprised you would even say this when you made such a fuss over saying that chance is not a cause. Natural selection is no more a cause or a process than chance is. Natural selection is simply a description of an observation that some things die more quickly than others.
No it is stochastic 🙂 Wouldn’t it be easy to prove evolution if a really working model existed ? The problem is no one has a proper model of evolution and that is reason for dispute.
That would be the ‘Mendel’s Accountant’ program written by YEC John Sanford to ‘prove’ the human species couldn’t be more than 6000 years old. Supposedly this was due to his made up problem of ‘genetic entropy’. The program was rigged to crash a population to zero no matter what starting parameters you entered in. Sadly for Sanford and the YECs ‘Mendel’s Accountant’ was easily discredited merely by empirical observations. By Stanford’s program animals with fast reproduction times like mice should have gone extinct many times over but they’re still doing just fine.
The funniest thing I saw was someone entering in the values for Sanford’s claimed population of eight that got off Noah’s Ark. According to Mendel’s Accountant humans should have gone extinct 4000 years ago yet he we sit with a population of 7 billion. Oops!
Ok. I don’t believe in YEC. Does Avida do a good job of predicting evolution? Did anyone compare those two programs – I mean scientifically ? So we can model evolutionary process ?
Did I ask if you could imagine such a culture? To anticipate your next question, did I ask about some “imagined” you, conditioned by an imaginary culture?
You seem to have a bit of a misunderstanding. Evolutionary theory can’t predict what specific species will evolve in the future because of the huge amount of random variables involved in environmental pressures and the non-linear effects of feedback. What evolutionary theory can predict is general trends, things like insular dwarfism of isolated populations. ToE also can predict fossil discoveries that fill in the gaps of our historical knowledge like the prediction and discovery of the early tetrapod Tiktaalik.
Downloaded Mendel’s accountant . I got this warning when I tried to run the simulation with 8 population.
WARNING: population size is too small for polymorphism analysis. So apparently it is not YEC anymore
Yes. I understand that ,so we may get some trend but can’t be sure if that is right or wrong. A bit like universe – we don’t even know whether we are in multiverse or not.
From Biology Online:
Natural Selection: A process in nature in which organisms possessing certain genotypic characteristics that make them better adjusted to an environment tend to survive, reproduce, increase in number or frequency, and therefore, are able to transmit and perpetuate their essential genotypic qualities to succeeding generations.
It’s pretty hard to have a meaningful conversation with a person who doesn’t understand the basic terminology.
I didn’t even realize it was still around. Sanford withdrew it from online access a few years back when so many of its flaws were made public. I can’t imagine it’s any better now.
You are assuming the conclusion that morality is subjective by categorizing the moral statement as synthetic. If morality is considered objective, then all the statements in my example are analytic, because just as 1+1=2, torturing children for fun = immoral.
Furthermore, you are using a conceptual arrangement of concepts and how they should be, in your mind, regarded (analytic vs synthetic) as if that arrangement of concepts and what they individually include is universally binding about the nature of various propositions, even though not everyone in philosophy agrees with the validity of that system of categorization.
Is the proposition that propositions can be categorized as synthetic or analytic a synthetic or analytic proposition? Well .. it must be synthetic, right? Therefore, not tautologically true. So, why are you presenting that argument as if I must agree that the moral statement “is not” analytic? Are you attempting to bind me to a synthetic proposition as if it was a tautology?
Isn’t that the very thing you’re accusing me of doing by including the moral statement in with analytical statements?
Hmmm.
Look, there’s no way I can prove to anyone that morality is an objective commodity – nor have I ever, to my knowledge, tried to do so. It may not be an objective commodity.
The point I originally made was that the assumption that morality is a subjective commodity is not satisfying to me personally. I personally love the objective-commodity view and need that view because it delivers me from a life I don’t want to live, and it keeps me from being something I don’t want to be.
I choose to believe that morality refers to objective good not because I can prove it, and not because I know it to be true, but because that belief allows me to be a good person and enjoy life.
I’m incapable of being a good person and enjoying life if I believe in a subjective morality. I’m not claiming that to be true of anyone else. I’m sure that a lot of people that believe in subjective morality are far better people than me – but I personally can’t go that route. I’ve tried it. It results in me being a bad person and being miserable, and because I know my mind, I know what will happen if I ditch the belief in objective morality.
The only thing that keeps me civilized is my belief that morality is not only objective, but that there are necessary (inescapable) consequences.
And I’m afraid this is what happens every single time anyone actually probes at an ID claim – it falls apart under any kind of rigorous scrutiny.
Which is not to say the core claim is wrong – for fifty years I had no problem in believing that the world was willed into existence, in the form it took, by a Divine Creator. I still think it’s a perfectly reasonable belief.
The problem with the ID movement isn’t that their conclusion is wrong – I don’t know whether it is or not – but that their reasoning and evidence are faulty, and, to be frank, often dishonest. My hunch is that the reason Dembski’s gone so quiet recently is that he’s smart enough (and he is) to know that he goofed. He still probably believes in God – which is fair enough. But he knows the reasoning he once thought led to God, doesn’t.
I could be wrong. But I think ID is dead at its heart now, and all that’s are people who were, unfortunately, fooled by it.
I think that’s pretty much most IDist’s view of Darwinism.
Well, no, those two equations are completely different kinds of claim. The first is an axiom. The second is a subjective view. Shared by most modern people, but not by everyone in the past.
I think it’s neither a commodity nor objective. I think it’s a social construct.
Well, that’s cool. But my social construct thing does the same, and I don’t think it’s any less pragmatic, nor less “logical” – what’s more, it doesn’t depend on something that may or may not be true, but which you can’t demonstrate.
Well, that’s excellent. But in that case, why do you argue that my morality is irrational?
OK. I can certainly see that believing, and persuading others to believe, that if they do something immoral, that they will suffer unpleasant consequences, would be an incentive not to. It’s why we have social justice systems, after all.
But how does that help you figure out what is immoral?
Apart from the babies, thing, what else do you avoid doing that you otherwise wouldn’t? And why didn’t you torture babies for fun before you started to believe in objective morality with necessary consequences?
William J. Murray,
And yet, in the one, publications continue to appear on a daily basis; in the other nothing but perennial rehash of the same tired arguments. How does an incorrect science prove to be so fruitful?
Thanks for the correction, yes.
Yes, I think it is. But I’d say that our view is supported by the evidence (look at Bio-complexity’s publication record; look at the dead websites; look at the silence from most of the big guns; look at the fact that ID sites are mostly heavily censored; look at the “selected publication” list at the Biologic Institute, heavily inflated by non-ID papers and papers by non-ID authors with no connection to the Biologic Institute.
And in contrast, look at the vast output from non-ID science, including evolutionary science, in genetics, palaeontology, biology; look at the role it plays in translational research, from agriculture to medicine; dammit look at its’ explanatory power, if you can. And then look at physics (the same physics as drives cosmology and multiverse theory) – and the extraordinarily accurate predictions it makes.
Then look at the extreme dominance of theological issues in ID, and the total lack of theological issues in any scientific output – it is simply an irrelevance. Scientists can believe what they like about god or gods – it makes no difference to the science.
And yet IDists keep predicting the fall of “materialism”, and reporting its imminent demise It’s just not happening, in science or anywhere.
And as religion declines, the world actually becomes more peaceful. I don’t think the link is straightforward, but I do think that evidence-based reasoning is a powerful antidote to violence and war.
And that reasoning simply doesn’t lead to faith in most traditional religions, although it may well lead to faith in a less traditional god, as your reasoning has done.
William J. Murray,
A statement’s analytic/synthetic status does not depend upon objectivity/subjectivity. It is objectively true that there are black swans, but ‘there are no black swans’ could be an analytic statement if ‘swan’ is defined to exclude black ones. There is a world of difference between your oft-cited example of the 4-sided triangle and the ‘self-evident moral truth’. The first relates to an ideal that requires no examination of an external reality. The second is based upon examination of the ‘world’ – your heart, the hearts of others or, for that matter, the ideals of Objective Morality itself. All of these are external to the statement, and cannot be asserted simply from examination of the statement itself.
Also, read jesse’s post on four sided triangles.
And welcome jesse! Good to see you!
William J. Murray,
In which case, I would encourage you to maintain your belief! I think you err in (apparently) believing that we are all in need of such restraint, or are irrational in rejecting the actuality of that particular restraint.
I think not, since Mendel’s Accountant is obviously not written to model evolution. There’s a good discussion of it at http://talkrational.org/showthread.php?t=24627&highlight=accountant
It doesn’t “predict” evolution, exactly. It’s a “toy” model of evolution, in which virtual organisms evolve in a virtual environment, in which some functions result in accessing additional resources from that environment, which then increases their chance of breeding (rather as being able to digest a novel foodstuff would help you survive, and thus breed).
You can set various parameters for the amount of extra “fuel” each new “function” enables the organisms to access, and all “organisms” at the start have the ability to survive and breed at a baseline level.
When they breed, their offspring will be a little different to the parent – with a mutated genome.
And the analogue to acquiring a new hunting skill, or digestive enzyme, in the model, is the ability to perform logic functions – take an input, do a logic operation on it, and produce the correct output.
Most mutations are neutral or negative (make things worse for the offspring, not better). But a few result in a new logic function, and this lets the organism get more food. Some new functions involve the loss of old functions, and in any case, any mutation can destroy an old function – and many do.
So it’s a simplified, but accurate version of the basic neo-Darwinian model.
And all the functions are “IC” – in other words, all fail to work if one thing goes wrong, and can only be “reached” via a series of non-advantageous mutations.
You can vary how much extra “food” each function allows the organism to get, again, just as postulated in neo-Darwinian theory (neo-Darwinian, because it the organisms have genomes).
What it shows is that provided all functions increase the organisms ability to get food (“are rewarded”) a little, then even the most complex logic function to acquire, which is “EQU” will evolve, even though EQU is highly IC, and, it turns out, can only be reached via not just a long series of neutral mutations, but some deleterious ones also seem necessary. In other words, it requires a “loss of function” mutation to evolve (again, just as we see in nature). However, once evolved, the lost functions can be rapidly re-evolved, as long as they remain something that benefits the organism.
So it essentially falsifies Behe’s claim – in fact three claims:
That ID structures can’t evolve by neo-Darwinian processes (they can, and do, with great reliability)
That structures can’t evolve via IC pathways of “high degree” (they can, and do).
That you can only evolve a fancy function by disabling another (that can be true, but it does not prevent the lost function re-evolving without destroying the fancy one).
Also worth pointing out that many genomes can produce a particular function – there isn’t just One True Solution, as, in, for example, the notorious WEASEL. It is not possible, in AVIDA, to predict when or how the population will acquire each function. But they reliably do.
You can stop it happening by not rewarding simpler functions and only rewarding EQU – but all this does is show that adaptive evolution does require advantageous steps, and will not happen by drift alone. Which was Darwin’s original insight.
All criticisms of AVIDA have gaping holes in them. If you find one (Joe G is a great source) bring them along and we’ll show you where the flaw is.
Also, as I recall, unlike AVIDA, Mendel’s accountant is based on using parameters from population genetics, rather than modeling from the bottom up, using actual evolving virtual organisms in an environment full of resources and threats.
And as population genetics, for all its powers, is an abstraction, it’s not actually model of evolution. Which is odd, because evolutionary models are dead easy to write.
Hello William,
The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism
Given the track record of these claims, I’d be a bit more parsimonious in making the claim again.
As ever, Jesse
Why do birds, “suddenly” appear?*
Every time, you are near?
Could it be, they also see
breadcrumbs in your mustache?
*NOW with ID “SCARE QUOTES”.
Fortunately, I never claimed to believe any such thing.
Hello Lizzie,
Once again, faulty mathematics has drawn me into your discussion. 😉 Checking just now, I see my email still has a “friend request” from 2/23/2012 but for an account I can no longer recall creating. Surfing your site, it seems you had a hackdown recently, too. (FYI, TWeb is gone following a disk failure, though the owner tells me she’s still interested in resurrecting it.)
After the fiasco at Dover, I’m almost surprised to find ID is still being discussed. Is there anything left of the movement outside of UD now? The last I heard of Dembski, he was groveling to keep his sinecure at some bible college down south. (It seems he suggested that the earth might be 6.1 thousand years old or that the flood didn’t happen and was called on the carpet.) Even Behe has stopped milking the cow, with nothing new since ’07.
What’s the gamut of discussion around here now?
As ever, Jesse
The most obvious flaw in Mendel’s accountant is it doesn’t comport with reality. Fast breeding populations do not go extinct.
There was some talk of using it to support a young earth, but if the Bible is literally true, then the major animal groups faced a bottleneck of two or 14 members as recently as 3000 years ago. Even mainstream biology would expect most to go extinct.
Lenski’s experiment started with a population of one. After thirty thousand generations, there is no meltdown. I assume Sanford can do arithmetic, but his model is fatally flawed.
No examination of anyone’s “heart” or the “world” or “the ideals of objective morality” is necessary to know that the act described by the statement is immoral – not any more “examination” of the world than is necessary to understand what “black” or “swan” means, or what “triangle” and “sides” mean. Once a person knows what a child is, and what torture is, they know torturing children for their personal pleasure is wrong – well, all sane people, anyway.
Once you know what a triangle is, and what a side is, you know that there are no 4-sided triangles.
Once you know what a swan is, and what black is, (if a swan is defined to not include black swans), you know there are no black swans.
Once you know what a child is, and what torture is, you know it is wrong to torture children.
Mendel’s Accountant also starts with the Biblical premise that the human genome was created “perfect” and that any change regardless of the environment is a degradation. It’s GIGO from the start.
I could “prove” space flight is impossible in a simulation by assuming gravity doubled every additional 100′ off the ground. Every single one of my simulated rockets would crash but that would say nothing about real world spacecraft launches.
Erm, as it’s 3 dimensional, its top is also its bottom, giving it 4 sides? 😉
Once you decide ahead of time your opinion is the only correct one and that it will never change regardless of what evidence is presented you know you’ve already lost.
There’s also ENV. And UD is a pretty sad shadow of what it once was.
“Once you know what a swan is, and what black is, (if a swan is defined to not include black swans), you know there are no black swans.”
So all you have basically, is the law of identity. X = X, X being arbitrary.
Right. In other words, if you set up a test of the process actually postulated lo and behold, it delivers the predicted outcome.
They weren’t testing evolution, they were testing their own theory – and the prediction flowing from their theory was supported.
But it doesn’t match what we observe – human beings, far from going extinct, are at record numbers. And there are still mice.
I’m reminded of the line from the movie “Tootsie”
“When were you ever famous?”