I have committed the unpardonable sin of promoting ID as theology and arguing ID is not science. ID is the lineal descendant of Paley’s natural theology (as in contrast to “revealed theology”). I’ve publicly disputed the use of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as a general argument in favor of ID/Creation, and I’ve been mildly critical of the concept of specified complexity and its successors. I’ve suggested ID is most appropriately taught in college/seminary theology and philosophy departments. When I published a 2005 exchange between myself and Eugenie Scott of the NCSE regarding the appropriateness of ID being taught in college religion and philosophy departments, Eugenie was much kinder to me than some in the ID community who insist “ID is science.” See: Correspondence between Salvador Cordova and Dr. Eugenie Scott
To that end, in conjunction with university professors, deans of Christian and secular colleges (who are favorable to both Intelligent Design and belief in Special Creation), I’m helping build out the electronic component of courses that teach ID and concepts of Creationism for such venues.
The first order of business in such a course is studying Paley’s watch argument and modern incarnations of Paley’s watch. But I’ve found compartmentalizing the pure science and math from the theological issues is helpful. Thus, at least for my own understanding and peace of mind, I’ve considered writing a paper to help define terms that will avoid the use of theologically loaded phrases like “materialism”, “naturalism”, “theism”, and even “Intelligent Design”, etc. I want to use terms that are as theologically neutral as possible to form the mathematical and physical foundation of the ID argument. The purpose of this is to circumvent circular arguments as best as possible. If found what I believe are some unfortunate equivocations and circularity in Bill Dembki’s definition of Design using the explanatory filter, and I’m trying to avoid that.
VJ Torley was very kind to help me phrase the opening of my paper, and I have such high respect for him that I’ve invited him to be a co-author of the paper he so chooses. He of course is free to write his own take on the matters I specify in the opening of my paper. In any case, I’m deeply indebted to him for being a fellow traveler on the net as well as the example he has set as a meticulous scholar.
Here is a draft opening of the papers which I present here at TSZ to solicit comments in the process of revising and expanding my paper.
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Multiverse or Miracles of God?
Circumventing metaphysical baggage when describing massive statistical or physical violations of normative expectations
Intro/Abstract
When attempting to set up a framework for expressing the improbability of phenomena that may turn out to have metaphysical implications, it may be helpful to isolate the metaphysical aspects of these phenomena from the actual math used to describe them. Additionally, the probabilities (which are really statements of uncertainty) can be either observer- or perspective-dependent. For example, in a raffle or a professional sporting league, there is a guaranteed winner. Using more formal terminology, we can say that it is normative that there is a winner, from the perspective of the entire system or ensemble of possibilities; however, from the perspective of any given participant (e.g. an individual raffle ticket holder), it is by no means normative for that individual to be a winner.
With respect to the question of the origin of life and the fine-tuning of the universe, one can postulate a scenario where it is normative for life to emerge in at least one universe, when we are considering the ensemble of all universes (i.e. the multiverse). However, from the perspective of the universe in which an observer happens to be situated, the fine-tuning of that particular universe and the origin of life in that universe are not at all normative: one can reasonably ask, “Why did this universe turn out to be so friendly to life, when it could have been otherwise?” Thus, when someone asserts that it is extremely improbable that a cell should arise from inanimate matter, this statement can be regarded as normative from the perspective of human experience and experimental observations, even though it is not necessarily normative in the ultimate sense of the word. Putting it more informally, one might say that abiogenesis and fine-tuning are miraculous from the human point of view, but whether they are miraculous in the theological or ultimate sense is a question that may well be practically (if not formally) undecidable.
The objective of this article is to circumvent, or at least minimize, the metaphysical baggage of phrases like “natural”, “material”, “supernatural”, “intelligent,” when formulating probabilistic descriptions of phenomena such as the fine-tuning of the universe and the origin of life. One can maintain that these remarkable phenomena are not explicable in terms of any accepted normative mechanisms which are known to us from everyday experience and scientific observation, and remain well within the realm of empirical science. However, whether fine-tuning and the origin of life are normative in the ultimate sense, and whether they are best explained by God or the multiverse, are entirely separate issues, which fall outside the domain of empirical science.
No he didn’t Bill. He was specifically referring to Creationists like you who have shown zero desire to learn and only come by to shit-stir
The definition needs your picture next to it.
That sure sounds to me like an admission you really are only interested in trolling, not learning.
Yes, yes I do.
Well there’s your problem </auto mechanic>
I claimed “solutions to most (if not all) ‘problems’ can readily be found in sequence space”.
Your re-wording is utterly incoherent. “Smoke and mirrors”, indeed.
ROFL
Here’s the origin of the term “sealioning”. Sound like anyone here you know?
I have looked at the book about evolution that he posted in 2011, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. I could not give much credence to his “natural genetic engineering” as he was not very specific about how it worked. In particular, maintaining such a capability would be very difficult if it only was needed once every 10,000 years or so. Mutations inactivating that machinery would be unopposed in the meantime. Furthermore you don’t just want any old changes, you want ones that are adaptive. How the engineering machinery could be made to do only those changes is unclear. The capability would have to be put in place, and maintained, by natural selection. And it would be hard to have that work if it weren’t needed for long periods of time.
God did it.
Or you complaining that we can’t tell you EVERYTHING about how God did it?
Are you a Walrus?
DNA_Jock,
What do you mean by this?
Joe Felsenstein,
I agree with this. He speaks also about endosymbiosis and HGT also but both don’t add much to the overall picture.
colewd,
What do I mean by “solutions to most (if not all) ‘problems’ can readily be found in sequence space”?
I mean that:
If you repeated the experiment in Keefe and Szostak, using a variety of different ligands, you would (in most if not all cases) achieve similar results: you would be able to find weak binders at an “accessible” frequency (above 10^-16) and you would be able to improve on those weak binders via a process of random mutation and selection. Read the patent 6,261,804.
Additionally (but in this case much of the data has not been published, so your ignorance is understandable), the Keefe and Szostak library contains peptides that will weakly catalyze the biochemical reaction of your choice; you would be able to improve on these catalysts via a process of random mutation and selection, if you were able to avoid the minor technical issue associated with screening for catalysis.
I’m guessing that your weird re-wording: “sequence space is easily accessible in almost all proteins.” is a purported claim about the mutational sensitivity of extant proteins. That’s the only way I can parse it that makes any sense at all. In which case, it is utterly irrelevant, for reasons that have been explained to you many times.
You claim that God did it but not only are you unable to tell us EVERYTHING you are unable to tell us ANYTHING AT ALL.
It’s nice that you admit your position is a science stopper however, and that a non-scientific answer to a scientific question for you is a legitimate answer.
It’s telling you pretend you are being asked EVERYTHING as it’s much more face saving to say you don’t know EVERYTHING (who does) but you elide over the fact you can actually say NOTHING.
How’s that working out for you in general?
Is that a model? Predict something.
The difference you may not understand between you and most of the other people here is that most of the other people here have contributed to our understanding of reality in one way or another.
Whereas people like you have been standing on street corners since time immemorial saying exactly the same things and nothing new ever comes of it.
What new understanding of reality comes from saying god did it?
Which god?
The difference is there’s NO detail here, no expanation at all, no predictions. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero.
You have NOTHING and you’re fine with it. Hypocrite.
We might not be able to explain EVERYTHING, but you can explain NOTHING.
DNA_Jock,
I still don’t understand your claim but we can table it for now.
Ahem. Look here, and here please.
You keep repeating “deterministic” as if that was incompatible with evolution. So, maybe you should read some answers. Oh, please read the whole thing. The “deterministic” parts are by the end of both comments.
I know I know. I complicate things. Well, what can I do? You are mistaken about things that have complicated answers. As I keep saying, it’s easy to produce bullshit the way creationist apologists, like those at UCD, it’s harder to actually understand, but that’s just the way it is.
Entropy,
I think just the opposite. Thats why I was interested in your recombination claim a while back. Hayashi proposed it when he saw that the wild type of a microbe protein he was assessing required a library of around 10^70 sequences to find.
If we regard “nobody knows exactly how it works with all details, but extensive research has suggested a well documented consistent model” as one level, the next level down is “I don’t know how it works, and I doubt you know either, but knock yourself out” and the phoodoo level is “I don’t know how it works, and I don’t want anyone else to learn.”
In brief, there’s curiosity, there’s lack of curiosity, and there’s prohibition of curiosity. Goddidit falls in the latter category, by providing a definitive “nothing to see here” nonanswer — one that erects conceptual hurdles to be fought past before even reaching the starting line.
Its incompatible with Darwinian evolution.
Its not incompatible with ID though. Welcome aboard.
Can you name a single thing that is?
And that’s the problem with ID.
Darwinian evolution.
God’s caution tape.
Nope, not given an unknown designer with unknown abilities and unknown goals.
How do you know?
For example, when did the designer act? If it’s in “real time” then I can only agree with you.
If it was at the start of the universe and never since, well, “Darwinian evolution” works as is and “Intelligent Design” is meaningless.
So, which is it?
We know for a fact that phoodoo’s designer is really “god”.
Which god he has been mute on so far.
Stay focused Newton. ID says that the life we see was intelligently designed. Darwinian evolution says that there is no design.
The designer is irrelevant. You got it backwards.
And that is literally all it says. And it says it on the basis of no science, no mathematics and no modelling.
I mean, you can’t even say when or where this design happened, if it’s still ongoing or stopped a long time ago.
And that’s because none is needed as “Darwinian evolution” is a sufficient explanation for the appearance of design.
How convenient. Just another question you won’t be looking into answering.
It’s funny how people like you are happy with definitional answers to things. I guess you don’t have much curiosity.
Everything has a beginning.
What about god?
Oh, he’s special, he does not have a beginning.
What is the explanation for emergent behaviours?
It’s the supernatural and can’t be investigated.
Can I have that grant money back then?
I’m interested to know how you know when you have reached the “supernatural” level in your investigations? How do you know that you are not in error and that non-supernatural explanation is actually available?
How do you know “Darwinian” evolution is not the chosen mechanism for your Intelligent Designer (aka god) to implement biology?
Is your designer so inept it cannot create a self sustaining universe?
This sounds all right. Good to hear.
Oh, but it’s not a claim, it’s something we’ve seen in both, experiments and simulations: recombination accelerates evolutionary outcomes quite a bit.
No it isn’t. Darwinian evolution depends on both deterministic and stochastic processes.
Intelligence also depends on both deterministic and stochastic processes. ID puts the cart before the horse.
Sorry, but I’m far from buying into your fantasies.
Intelligence is a feature of a few of the life forms we see. ID is aberrant circular reasoning.
Nope. darwinian evolution says that new life forms derive from divergence of previous life forms. Whether there’s life forms that can produce designs or not is independent of how new life forms arise.
Since designers are life forms, you’re the one who got it backwards.
OMagain,
Dawkins used ID to demonstrate cumulative selection with his toy model. I agree that the argument is limited as most arguments are.
Entropy,
In what way?
Entropy,
Anything you could share here is appreciated.
You already know the answer to this Bill. I keep telling you almost every other comment. ID puts the cart before the horse.
Entropy,
This is key to your assertions. We have evidence of design where we cannot identify the “who did it”. This is a problem for your assertion.
That’s simply not true.
Firstly, what is this “evidence”? For you, atoms are evidence of design. Is this “evidence” scientific evidence, as implied by the usage of the word “evidence”? If so, let’s see it.
And secondly, you are making many assumptions when you say “who”. By using “who” you imply “whoever” did it is much like us. When you ask the question “who baked the cake” you are implying the answer is not “an entity that lives eternal but who is also ineffable”
It’s a “who” just like you or me. So, for you it seems either you believe an alien who is much like us did it or your imagination is so limited that your deity is a “who” just like you and the next door neighbour.
You don’t have evidence of design. You have decide to stop looking for explanations at an arbitrary point, just like phoodoo and his pathetic “have you considered the supernatural” plea.
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=recombination+accelerates+evolutionary+outcomes+
So lazy.
Examples please. You seem to be talking out of your ass again.
Probably. ID only requires that at some point that there must be an intelligence that was not intelligently designed. An eternal deity would qualify.
There are a multitude to choose from.
You need to be more specific. More importantly as to how having evidence of some artifacts being designed by unnamed designers constitutes evidence that intelligent life forms are not life forms, or how exactly you think such artifacts might be a problem for my logic (it’s not a mere assertion).
Funny, usually you would claim that no one actually knows what Darwinian Evolution means.
ID says that what we see is best explained by an intelligent designer, it does not speak to the how what we see came to be . Darwinian Evolution requires basically reproduction with variation and environment, both seem well within the capabilities of an unknown designer.
He might have just not cared or been capable of seeing what the design would become.
For ID as a political movement, yes.
As science, no. is in the name, the designer must be intelligent, without intelligence no intelligent design. The designer must have the knowledge to create the designs. Somehow it needs to create the actual designs , possibly over billions of years. All those things are required.
I think it is you who have it backwards, if the how, when ,and what exactly was designed is of little interest, the only thing is left is The Who and the design. Intelligent Design requires an Intelligent Designer capable of the design. The detection is that of the designer.
Where is that written?
Remember the niche, phoodoo! Remember the niche.
The environment provides the bias. The environment designs. Maybe God designs the environment. That is undecidable,
Entropy,
They’re artifacts that reasonable people can conclude a mind is behind the artifact based on certain criteria. So there is inductive evidence of a mind creating something that we cannot attribute to humans.
Based on this I do not think you can disqualify the design argument by mere assertion unless you invoke physicalist constraints. As you have to deny the inductive evidence as evidence however many reasonable people recognize this as evidence of design.
I grant you with physicalists constraints you can make a logical argument disqualifying the design argument but if we consider non physical possibilities the evidence becomes a problem for your claim.
I agree with one small change – they’re artifacts reasonable people can conclude a HUMAN mind is behind. We have a very good idea the sorts of artifacts humans make, because we are human and because we understand human thinking and human needs. (And even so, there are often debates among archaeologists as to whether something is an artifact.)
Now, imagine if some space alien visited your home last night and left something on your doorstep. Hell, it might be his trash, it might be a device of unguessable purpose, it might be the alien’s lunch, it might be a chunk of his home landscape, it might even be the alien itself! On what basis would you decide it was designed, since you have absolutely no basis of comparison? No matter what you speculate, your probability of a false positive or false negative is 50-50. You can’t tell.
This seems to be a creationist blind spot – if we see something we know people didn’t design, we can only conclude it’s designed at all by watching the design process – watching the bird build the nest, the spider build the web, etc. And if there is no way to observe the process, we have only two tools at our disposal – we can say we don’t know, or we can guess (and if we call our guess “faith” we can tell ourselves we are right. Saying goddidit is semantically the same as saying “I don’t know but I can’t admit it.”)
colewd,
Oh, come on Bill. You meant the ID bullshit all along? Then there’s no problem whatsoever with my position and my logic. All there is is compounded fallacious claims derived from more classic apologetics fallacies.
Do you mean like termite nests? Those are not designed by a “mind.” Besides, minds cannot design anything without the rest of the body and lots of tools. You keep talking about minds as if they were independent of everything that sustains them and makes them possible. As if you’re not understanding the problem. You’re putting too many carts-before-the-horse.
Given this, there’s nothing that can be attributable to “non-human minds.” There’s just things that you find hard to explain, and for which you allow yourself to jump to unwarranted conclusions, such as magical, absurd, beings.
It’s good that I don’t disqualify it by mere assertion. I disqualify it out of the absurdity of the proposal.
If the ID movement wants to pose as scientific, then they cannot ignore this cart-before-the-horse problem. Their only honest way out (and even that won;t work) is to admit that they’re thinking of magical beings in the sky (but they’re not honest so they fight the admission like the plague, just read gpuccio’s claim that he doesn’t need to talk about “God,” yet the religious underpinnings are obvious and implicit). But if they were that honest they’d be admitting that theirs is not a scientific proposal, but a religious one. Examining those underpinnings would still reveal that there’s no rational foundation for such a position, and ID would be left where the oxymoronic “creation science” was already left.
I’ll be happy to leave physical constrains out as soon as you demonstrate that such move is possible.
When I talk to reasonable people who have bought into the ID bullshit, it doesn’t take long before they understand the problems with ID and their claims. As I’ve said before, it’s easier to make shit up, the way the ID community does, than understanding the foundational philosophy and science. But if the reasonable people are willing to listen, then it’s game over for ID.
First you have to be able to philosophically and scientifically justify leaving out physical (not physicalist, but physical) constraints. Merely claiming that there could be some magical realm where this is possible won’t do. Merely pointing to things you cannot understand won’t do. Merely pointing to things I cannot understand or explain won’t do. Painting natural phenomena as if they were mere randomness won’t do (it’s false, and denying it leads to further cart-before-the-horse/shooting-yourself-in-the-foot problems with ID). We need foundations to forget about physical constraints, and I mean actual philosophical and scientific foundations, not religious/fantasy convictions.
Sorry, but to try and find problems with my position you get into much more trouble.
I actually disagree with this comment, I think in many cases we would be able to tell. The critical distinction to make is if the object would be an organism, i.e. the product of long generations of predecessors that would have been subject to evolutionary change and therefore increasing complexity, or if it is an artefact, a complicated entity assembled and produced de novo from its constituent parts. If the latter, the ‘tornado in a junkyard’ argument to dismiss non-design would be valid.
The problem with Paley is not that ‘watches are complex but some complex things evolve’, the problem with his argument is that watches don’t reproduce and are therefore immune to descent with modification, making his analogy entirely irrelevant to biology.
Flint,
The argument you make is one I have seen many times. You are arbitrarily trying to disqualify the argument by making knowledge of the designer a requirement.
This violates the practice of inductive reasoning as we conclude the cause from evidence. Observing the cause happen is not required.
faded_Glory,
How much they are able to evolve based on reproduction alone is an open question. When I see a transition that requires lots of new genetic information like a flight feather that’s when I would consider the design argument.
ID requires the designer to be both intelligent and capable of implementing its designs. ID is making the argument such designer exists and is actually is responsible. When someone makes that argument you are claiming knowledge of the designer’s qualities and existence. Flint is asking how you know this crucial information.
The answer is always it doesn’t matter.
We can conclude a cause is logically possible, evidence of the existence of such a cause is supporting evidence.