768 thoughts on “I lost my faith in ID”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Agreed; in fact, I would up the ante there and say that there is at least one conception of God that is logically incoherent: God as an infinite mind. An infinite mind is as logically incoherent as a square circle. We cannot conceive of a mind that is not finite, so the very idea of an infinite mind is incoherent to us.
Kantian Naturalist,
A couple of issues with this:
-The laws of physics explain a lot including why matter behaves as it does.
-General relativity is a model of how energy curves space-time.
The real question is can physics and chemistry alone explain abiogenesis. The reason to posit an “intelligent designer” is the existence of a purposeful arrangement of parts is being observed in addition to human designs when we look inside the details of biology. My conclusion is that there is design going on in nature outside of human design.
Entropy,
I would agree given the assumption that what we observe is all there is. Energy flows require subatomic particles. Where did they come from?
Great, there is no means by which any prophet might be discounted as false provided the claims timeframe remains open ended. Pretty robust system ya got there, Bill.
PeterP,
Many of the claims are not all open ended. Many claims can be tested against real events such as the fall of Israel and exile to Babylon. You really should not take the skeptics word for things. Be skeptical of the skeptics 🙂
There’s really only one claim that matters. Can that be tested?
I don’t see why we’d need such assumption.
Your claim seems awkwardly incoherent (though I’m no physicist). As far as I understand this, energy is made of particles (though there seems to be an alternative thing about fields instead of particles, but, again, I’m no physicist). So maybe you’re asking where did the particles that make up energy come from. My answer: I do not know, but if there was a Big Bang, then that’s where, from whatever form the universe was concentrated in.
I don’t see the relevance of the question either. It’s like you’re already putting the cart before the horse, and now you want to put many more carts before that cart. One cart isn’t enough?
Entropy,
I am simple pointing out assumptions you are making in order to form your worldview. That there is no intelligence without energy flows as you observe them is an assumption. Energy flow is not primary it assumes a medium called charge. The physics is like biology thinking about a gradient in a cell causing ATP synthase to turn by flowing charge from outside the cell membrane too inside. The cause of this energy flow is the potential difference of charge. In electronics we call this potentiaL difference voltage. The medium that flows is called electrons although positively charged particles can also be the medium. We can credit all these miracles to the laws of physics 🙂
So, Jesus is a like a battery then?
And I thought laminin was the most absurd thing they’d come up with. Turns out I was so very very wrong.
OMagain,
That’s a convincing proof that gullible people exist.
That there is no unicorns without energy flows as you observe them is an assumption.
It’s not an assumption, it’s an observation. If I’m not allowed to go by the observable, then why are you allowed? (You’ll see below).
1. I never said it was “primary.” It remains a fact that any activity, such as intelligence, cannot happen without energy flow.
2. Energy flow does not require charge. It requires, as i already said, an energy disequilibrium/differential.
The difference is what’s called potential Bill. It’s the disequilibrium I was talking about. I suspect you’re no physicist either.
So, based on a single kind of observation, flow of electrons, you are allowed to conclude that each and every energy flow consists on moving charges, but I cannot conclude that intelligence, an activity working by the laws of physics/chemistry, is but a tiny part of the universe, rather than being above and beyond it?
Entropy,
IMO it is a very difficult conclusion that consciousness and intelligent agents arrived without intelligence behind it all. If you look at and eliminate unobservables from your consideration I understand your conclusion.
What I read you as saying is, “YOUR position is based solely on what can be observed. Pay no attention to the fact that what can be observed is fully sufficient to support your position. Now, I believe in a very different position. MY position requires additional factors nobody can observe, or ever has. BUT for me to be correct and you to be wrong, these imaginary factors MUST exist. Therefore, YOUR position must be committing the error of simply eliminating the imaginary, which can’t be correct. If it were, I would be wrong. I’m not, therefore the imaginary MUST be taken into account.”
As someone once said somewhere, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Since every kind of mind that we know anything about is one that involves a living organism, we have no basis for positing the existence of minds that aren’t living organisms.
The very most that ID can possibly do is say, “certain kinds of complex systems strongly resemble human-made artifacts in some respects” — where the degree of resemblance is merely expression of one’s subjective biases and cannot be used to confirm them.
What ID has failed to do, despite every opportunity, is show how to subject this conjecture to any sort of empirical confirmation.
I actually have more respect for creationism than for ID. Creationists are at least trying to look for empirical confirmation of their claims — though they do so selectively and ignore the evidence when it conflicts with their conjectures. IDists aren’t even trying to test anything that they say — they want their unverifiable conjectures to be baptized as science without doing any of the hard work, and whenever this is pointed out, they resort to “but macroevolution can’t be confirmed either so your stuff is just as unverified as ours!”
Apart from being a sort of relativism that IDists decry as the rot of Western civilization when used in a moral domain, this response neglects all the myriad ways in which macroevolution has been indirectly verified by a consilience of evidence that one can only ignore by virtue of being miraculously stupid.
Flint,
On what basis do you label these factors imaginary? Are electrons imaginary? Your position does not explain the origin of complexity.
Again what is observed is complexity with no real explanation of its origin. The “fully sufficient” claim is false.
Kantian Naturalist,
Do you believe that macro evolution is a complete explanation of life’s diversity?
That’s all quite correct.
I would also urge a distinction between (1) unobserveds and unobservables and (2) testable unobservables and untestable unobservables.
We can posit unobserved phenomena, and perhaps those are unobservable — though whether something is unobservable is relative to some technology used to make observations. (Neptune is unobservable from Earth without a telescope, for example.) But for the most part, something is unobservable only if we do not know how to observe it — whereas if we know how to observe something, but have not yet done so (because the equipment is faulty, or the experiment is too expensive etc) then it would be only unobserved.
The nice thing about unobservable phenomena is that we can make predictions about what would be observable if the unobservable phenomenon existed or had existed, and then go looking for those observations. If we observe something that we had only gone looking for because it was predicted from the unobservables, then (by Bayes’s theorem) we have good reasons for believing that the hypothesis about the unobservables is true.
The fatal flaw in all ID reasoning is that they make the abductive leap and never come back to empirical ground — they give us the hypothesis but never deduce anything observable from it.
This smells like a “when did you stop beating your wife?” question. Since I am not under oath I decline to answer.
Kantian Naturalist,
No problem :-). The answer by Swamidass was it is not. He has not gone challenged at Peaceful Science with this answer. The main issue is explaining the mechanism behind complex adaptions. This is the niche ID fits into.
I’m guessing Prof. Swamidass holds that macroevolution is just one component of many in the theory of evolution, which, of course, is an incomplete explanation of life’s diversity, just like every other scientific theory is incomplete, AFAIK.
OTOH, and despite your kicking and moaning, “Look! Design!” is not a scientific explanation at all
It’s “mind”.
“Mind” is a complete and fully satisfactory explanation of all of life’s diversity, like men , and .. uh.. other things, because it explains complex molecular machines.
Can’t you see?
What is that explanation?
Yeah, you’re right, my bad.
In my defense, ID is such a sophisticated and comprehensive theory that it’s almost impossible to get it right. You really need to devote your life to exploring all the intricacies in it’s magnificently complex explanatory framework before you can even start to apprehend how incredibly insightful that shit about minds doing stuff is.
colwed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5540182/
Do you have something that approaches that level of detail for your ‘a mind did it’ theory?
Evolutionary theory doesn’t explain everything. ID doesn’t explain anything. That’s the difference.
I don’t know anything about Swamidass and don’t really care to. I’ve scaled back my Internet time to have more time for reading and writing.
Kantian Naturalist,
We have common ground here.
. ID attemps to find direct evidence of design. To the extent of finding it they may not have which would make your statement true. I am not sure they haven’t and if they have this is game changer.
Nobody claimed that it explained everything. Nobody claimed that it explained the origin of life. So your “common ground” is not what you think it is.
Does it? I thought ID had not made it to the lab yet?
They think they have.
When you expect Intelligent Design to overtake evolution as an explanation for life’s diversity?
This year?
Next year?
A decade.
And how absurd is it that you are pretending you don’t know if or if not ID has actually found evidence for Intelligent Design.
If they have. May not have. Not sure.
It’s funny then how unshakable your belief in the design of the cell is when you don’t even know if ID has found evidence for design at all, never mind at the origin of life.
Give a list of things and the direct evidence for design for those things.
Don’t worry, we’ll all wait. We’ve all be waiting for decades….
OMagain,
Flagellum motor. You have been ignoring the answers for 6 years :-). You probably can make a list on your own of observables that pass Behe’s filter.
It completely fails at that. But is it really trying?
To me, it seems that ID attempts to persuade gullible people that there is design, but without actually finding any direct evidence.
Actually I’ve been asking for probably a decade for a worked example of such. I know what’s claimed, but actual step by step calculations not so much. And I’ve asked many times under many guises.
Care to share what it is you know? I’m looking for a worked example of the Explanatory Filter (presumably the filter to which you refer) and as far as I know there is no such example.
Prove me wrong. I’d be delighted. Show me how the bacterial flagellum has been determined to be a product of design by the use of the EF.
Dare you.
Buy my book!
Visit my ad-covered website!
Send us a tax-free donation!
It’s all just about the $ at the end of the day, except people like colwed have not seen through the sham.
colwed,
I searched for Flagellum motor “explanatory filter” and all that seems to come up are explanations about why Behe is wrong.
Could you filter it down to that worked example you believe exists?
I believe it does not. You believe it does. I can’t find it. Can you? You must be able to, you believe it exists presumably because you’ve seen it. Right?
Here’s me asking in 2012: Peter Griffin
And again in 2011: WilliamRoache
In that second link I’m asking KF to publish as well, as it happens.
However despite my many pleas nobody could produce a worked example. But you appear to have convinced yourself that they exist colwed. But they don’t.
OMagain,
Behe’s filter is explained between 4 min in and 25 min.
Neil Rickert,
Direct evidence in plentiful in living cells. You may disagree with the interpretation but denying there is evidence to analyze is absurd.
I don’t know about Flint, but I’d label them imaginary on the basis that they’re based on the fairy tales of some ancient collection of books.
Being a model for some phenomena, where some particles have been verified to exist and coincide with the verified phenomena, I’d say they are not imaginary. But who knows what new developments in physics might reveal? Maybe they’re just a model, and a better model will arise?
Mine does, and quite satisfactorily: entropy and enthalpy.
It would seem that your main problem is that you haven’t been paying attention. I should insist, however, that your position, being based on fantasies, would not survive even if we didn’t have the slightest clue as to the origins of complexity. We’d just be left in ignorance. So what? Ignorance is not a reason to claim that some absurd fantasies are real.
You are seeing evidence of what you believe to be the result of design. But it is not direct evidence of design.
On the basis that they derive purely from the imagination. Not only have they never been observed by anyone, but those who claim they exist have been challenged to simply propose a test, any test, that might convince someone not already pre-convinced. Nobody has ever met this challenge. Can’t get much more imaginary than that.
Probably, since the description of an electron that best fits all observations is actually a charge field “probably” strongest in the center. Measurements (something of which you have none and cannot get any even in principle) show charge, spin, and mass. Come back when you have actual measurements of anything, or even simply a proposal of how to take them,
What sort of explanation would satisfy you? Can you describe it? For example, chaos theory explains the development of highly complex behavior from simple oscillation. The Santa Fe Institute has the whole mathematical model. Why does that not satisfy you? After all, chaos DOES develop from simple oscillation, and this is just one example of complexity developing from simplicity simply from a very few simple rules.
Earlier I pointed out that topology and gravity are sufficient to explain highly complex watersheds. I notice you ignored me.
Feel free to explain it in your own words. Then point to worked examples of it where it is objectively determined that some bit of biology is designed.
Feel free.
When will you or someone with your view be analyzing it and coming to some conclusion?
1 year?
10 years?
50 years?
How long until we are reading about ID on the front of the newspapers?
Dare to make a prediction?
Nobody is denying it. Goddam Dawkins even wrote a book about just that! It’s been analyzed.
And nobody who believes what you believe can write their analysis in a such a way that it passes muster when reviewed by peers.
Biology look like it was designed because it was designed. By evolution. No intelligent designer needed.
The evidence has been analysed since we invented microscopes. Not that long ago basically everyone in professional life was a theist. Biologists too. Geologists.
And yet scientists who have studied it who are themselves theists don’t see any Intelligent Design at work in biology. The vast majority.
This demonstrated by simply pointing to the lack of papers regarding Intelligent Design at work in biology from those theists. They are the people people like you need to convince, not the people here.
They are the same people that people like KF and Upright Biped need to convince. But telling yourself the story of a Darwinist cabal suppressing dissenting views in the scientific community is much easier then doing the actual hard work involved in science.
Suppose I’m walking with a friend and we see something moving in the woods ahead of us. I say, “look at that woodchuck!” My friend says, “what is your evidence that it’s a woodchuck?” If I say, “because I just see it as one!”, have I presented evidence for my hypothesis — or have I only restated the hypothesis?
Entropy,
You continue to repeat an unsupported claim and your whole argument rides on the claim which is only your own subjective assertion.
OMagain,
Nice try :-). The science does not support this any longer. There is no blind watchmaker model in biology and never has been.
Kantian Naturalist,
Who do you think is making an argument like this?
All of evolutionary theory is functionally a “blind watchmaker” model Bill. Your brutal willful ignorance about everything concerning evolutionary biology continues unabated.
Damn Bill, after we just spent two months repairing all those HypocrisyMeters you melted the last time. 😀
Nothing subjective about it. Again, you’re not paying attention. I can point anywhere around me and there it is: nature. You point to a book of fairy tales and you call my stance subjective!?