Here is one of the more essays I wrote based on discussions I’ve had hereon and on other sites like Pandas Thumb. I think this is one of the more appropriate essays for discussions here and it also happens to be one I feel is fully finished at this point. Well…I’m happy with it, but clearly I may edit it a bit given constructive criticism… 🙂
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I haven’t seen much press on this lately, but back in the late 1980s, Creationists – a slice of Christians who hold that the creation of the universe, Earth, and all living things on Earth were created by God exactly as described in the Christian Bible and that the Earth is roughly 10,000 years old…tops – tried an end around to the 1987 Supreme Court decision (Edwards v. Aguillard) barring the teaching of Creation Science in public schools. The attempted end-around was called Intelligent Design (ID).
ID, boiled down, is essentially a dressed up version of William Paley’s The Watch and The Watchmaker argument for the existence of God, or rather, a slightly gussied up Teleological Argument for the Existence of God. Paley’s argument goes like this: if you stumble upon a rock in the woods, you could reasonably surmise that it had been there, in that state, forever (keep in mind that Paley wrote his analogy in 1802 and was not familiar with what we now know about geology and in particular plate tectonics and erosion and similar forces. So, he can be forgiven for thinking that some items of the universe (like planets and stars) and the Earth (like soil, rocks, mountains, rivers, land masses, and so forth) exist unchanged forever) as a simple object of nature. By contrast, if you stumble upon a watch, you would not think that this item had been there forever, but rather you’d likely think that this item reflected the intent of a creator and, in particular given its complex parts working in intricate harmony, functions specifically for a purpose the creator designed it for. Given this, by analogy one can reasonably look at the universe and, seeing its complex interactions working in intricate harmony, infer it too must be designed and conclude, therefore, there is an ultimate Designer.
All Teleological Arguments rely on the same basic argument: certain features and functions of the world exhibit complexity that appears far too harmonious and intricate to have occurred by accident and thus must have been intelligently designed. Ergo…God.
It’s helpful to understand a bit about the history and use of the concept to better understand the application of teleology in theology, but it’s not absolutely necessary. That said, here are a definition and a brief summary:
Teleology comes from the Greek telos, meaning end (as in goal or purpose), and logos, meaning reason. So, teleology is about understanding the purpose of things. In its most basic form, teleology is the study of the purpose that phenomena serve rather than the cause by which they arise in order to provide an explanation for the phenomena. In other words, teleologists hold that the purpose for the sky being blue is more useful in understanding aspects of the world than studying and understanding optics and the Rayleigh Diffusion Effect. I admit, I’ve had no luck digging up a teleological explanation for the sky being blue, but apparently there used to be some popular ones back before modern science’s explanations. The point is, teleology attempts to address ‘why’ things occur, as opposed to scientific approaches that attempt to answer ‘how’ things occur. It’s also worth understanding that teleology, particularly as popularized by Aristotle and Plato in their day, was a reflection by analogy of the fact that nearly all human endeavors are goal-oriented and purpose driven. Thus by analogy, Aristotle saw the universe as rational and purposeful – analogous to human rational and purposeful behavior – and thus felt that all phenomena can only fully be understood when one considers and appreciates the purpose of the various phenomena.
There are a number of issues I have with teleological arguments and perspectives, but I’m going to focus on four main issues here.
First and foremost, technically there is no actual argument in the teleological approach to the existence of God as it’s simply a tautology and thus question begging. If your philosophy’s premise assumes that all things have purpose and goals, using that philosophy to argue for a goal-oriented and purpose-creating designer is simply restating your premise’s assumptions. It’s just arguing in a circle. Intelligent Design tries to dress the argument up a bit by focusing on complexity vs purpose and goals, but the issue remains the same. In ID, the argument is changed slightly to certain biological and informational features of living things are too complex to be the result of natural selection (or natural processes) and therefore must be the result of intentional and rational (intelligent) design requiring an intelligent designer. This, of course, suffers from the same tautological issue noted above: the first premise of ID is that living things are too complex to be the product of natural processes, but if the premise is that living things can’t come about from natural processes, what’s left? By premising that living things can’t be the product of natural processes, the premise implies something other than natural processes – i.e. design processes. To then conclude a designer is simply restating the premise. Yet again, a tautology.
Next, there’s the fallacy of the General Rule. The fallacy of the General Rule is a logical fallacy wherein someone assumes that something in general is true in all possible cases. A standard example is the claim that “all chairs have four legs”. But clearly rocking chairs have either no legs or two legs, depending on the design, and there are plenty of modern chair designs with three legs, and not a few bar stools that are essentially held up on a single pole. In the case of ID, the assumption is that complexity implies design and since biological objects are complex they must be designed. The thing is though, not all designed things – well, human designed things – are complex. Consider toothpicks, paper clips, floss, and Popsicle sticks as but a few examples. These objects are never used in teleological arguments for obvious reasons. And while it’s certainly possible that a toothpick could come about through natural processes, we know a human-designed toothpick when we see it and not because of the harmonious workings of its complex parts. No, it’s because of two things: man-made toothpicks have tell-tale evidence of being manufactured and they exist in greater collected numbers than nature could reasonably produce.
Another issue with ID that is related to the fallacy of the General Rule noted above is that it relies upon a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy wherein someone argues that some condition has only two alternatives when in fact there are more. An example would be someone who insists that the only alternative to driving a car is walking when clearly bicycles, skateboards, pogo sticks, and air travel all exist. In the case of ID, even if one were to agree that most, if not all, living organisms are too complex to have come about through evolutionary processes, it’s questionable at best whether a designer (and specifically God) is the only alternative. There are abundant natural processes that lead to complex organized structures (think snowflakes, tree rings, and the Giant’s Causeway). And even if we grant a necessitated designer, since there’s no way to assess or know anything about the supposed designer inferred by ID, the designer could very well be invisible pink unicorns or aliens. The bottom line is that it’s a rather large (and unrealistic) stretch to assume the only way to get biological complexity is either evolution or God.
Lastly, as noted above, we don’t infer design from complexity so much as we infer design from indications of manufacturing. This, for me, the primary failure of all forms of teleological arguments for the existence of God and ID in particular. Designs are a very specific form of plan and planning. We make designs (usually written and drawn) to help us visualize how various components and processes will interact and work in a given environment in order to (hopefully) highlight problems and issues before we actually manufacture the object of design. So the truth is that looking at an object tells one very little about the actual activity that went into designing that object. And while looking at an object can indicate something about whether the object was designed, it’s really the indications that the object was manufactured through some tool use process that provides that inference. Manufacturing leaves evidence; design does not.
I’ve never found the ID arguments for the design of biological organisms all that compelling for a number of reasons. The dubious math, the fallacious arguments, the disingenuous bait and switch to Christian apologetics, and so forth. But even beyond that, there was something about the objects in nature – organisms themselves – that just don’t seem designed to me. There is something different about them compared to man-made objects, but I was not able to put my finger on what I felt the difference was. And then it hit me one night: replaceable parts.
All man-made objects – every single one – are either designed specifically to be replaced or have components that are designed specifically to be replaced. Why? Because tool users and manufacturers learn really quick that tools and/or certain parts of tools wear out. So as designers, we anticipate the need for maintenance.
No such anticipation or planning for maintenance can be found in nature. None. If something breaks in an organism, either that organism learns to live without it or it dies. Or, in the case of humans, that part gets replaced by human designed or human configured replacements (as in my case). But even in the later case, humans have to create a work-around, because biological parts actual resist being replaced. You can’t just replace human parts with other human parts willy-nilly. In most cases, the new parts just won’t work, or worse, they’ll be rejected by the body’s immune system. But of particular note, there’s no surplus of replacement parts anywhere; no storage unit somewhere with a bunch of eyes or hearts or toes or hair or kidneys or…anything. Not even bark or leaves or antennae or scales. Nothing.
Of course, this makes perfect sense given evolution and other similar natural processes. It makes no sense if there were an actual designer, particularly an omni-god Designer, behind it all.
From my reading, I can’t escape the idea that the error rate (and copying integrity generally) has itself evolved over time. Too high an error rate, and subsequent copies cannot survive at all. Too low, and organisms have no possible way to track changing environments no matter how slowly those environments change. So there must be an ideal error rate. I wonder if that rate is close to the same across the entire biosphere.
To be sure, the probability of a new mutation being beneficial goes down as the organism is increasingly well adapted to its environment. But I suspect the error rate is independent of the “beneficial mutation” rate.
That makes sense. It’s the age-old balance between chance and necessity.
Fair Witness,
Ironically, of course, the design people insist that it’s biologists who are living in the fantasy realm due to their delusion that random chemical interactions can give rise to life and subsequent major evolutionary transitions.
And yet it also seems very intriguing to me that so many ID people are attracted to it because of a background in engineering.
Yep.. ID’ers often seems to depend on a false dichotomy where things are either designed or they are chaos. They are ignorant of the rich spectrum of natural creative processes in-between.
I have personally experienced the heady power trip that you get from an engineering education. You find yourself with the ability to manipulate some part of your world and build useful things. I can see where a person can get carried away thinking they understand more of the universe than they really do.
Engineering does not teach you ANYTHING about the scientific method.
My own experience as an engineer leads me to believe you have it backwards. It’s not that engineers are attracted to Design so much, I believe, as that those married to Design find engineering a congenial field for their interests. If you have a talent for STEM generally, and you are a creationist, you find science to be disturbing and somehow wrongheaded. But math and engineering are good fits, because they do not threaten your religious preconceptions.
I’m of the opinion that creationists are bent in that direction by about the age of 6 or 7, perhaps earlier. It’s creationists who choose engineering, not the other way around.
And equating consciousness with neural activity is where we disagree.
That would be like saying T.S.Eliot reading The Waste Land is no different to the words appearing on your screen here.
We are aware of our brains not the other way round. Your concept “brain” is meaningless without the complete organism of which it is a part.
And could this awareness exist without the “I” that you have linked it to? Does your “I” suddenly cease to exist if you are anesthetized?
What a silly caricature. IDists object to the idea of it being a random unguided process. Just throw a bunch of chemicals into a pool and eventually out comes intelligence. That’s not engineering. That’s blind faith.
I’m sure that you and Steve can argue about what it is that is front loaded. I don’t believe he thinks that the entire set of genes that have ever existed are present in the first cell.
In my opinion form is primal to matter, but not form as in physical shape. More in keeping with the idea of universals re Aristotle.
Chemistry informs us that the elements are wonderfully suited to combine in such ways that living tissues in their spectacular diversity can be constructed from them. 🙂
To be clear, this is precisely how Dembski set things up: his argument for “the design inference” (which has been abandoned by everyone, I think — I don’t see anyone at UD talking about it anymore) depends on ruling out, a priori, the very possibility of a “rich spectrum of natural creative processes”. For them, the trichotomy of design, law, or chance is an article of faith.
Which is why it’s so fascinating to me that the design movement tends to look to engineers rather than scientists to bolster its credibility.
Yes.
Why, isn’t what you are suggesting is a kind of “hidden” engineering in nature?
This is clearly the materialists being disingeneous when they posit something beyond chaos, but refuse to call it engineering. The “something beyond chaos” is a complete whitewashing of any explanation. Its the verbal equivalent of emergent somehow. That’s science?
You haven’t quite grasped what I believe.
There is no physical matter that is not associated with an etheric aspect and related higher aspects. But there is nothing static about this association, the strength of the attachment varies.
For instance, take a deciduous tree in which the etheric aspect is closely bound in spring and summer but it gradually loosens over autumn and winter which results in the loss of its leaves. It could be said that this relationship is like a respiration process at a higher level. The whole reflected in the parts. The death of the tree is an indication that then individualized etheric principle is severed and the material substance of the living part of the tree returns to a condition of association with the etheric aspect of the earth in general.
What you describe as the rolling out of the the archetypal forms, is the effects of the ties of the matter to the etheric which “informs” it. Physical organisms particularize the archetype which is their etheric aspect. The difference between a newly sprouted, fresh moist leaf and a dried up dead leaf lies in its relationship to the etheric principle.
When I compare my dried up stiff old bones to the supple, soft growing bones of a toddler I am looking at the effects our respective etheric aspects are having on our physical constituents.
We live in a world of representations.
A map is a limited representation of that which it is representing. What limits does the ideal triangle have compared to any perceived triangle? How accurate a triangle can you engineer?
All physical triangles are limited in time and space, not so the ideal triangle.
No.
It”s called complexity theory. It’s been around since the 1990s. There are books about it.
I was quite happy that “I” could disappear for a bit while they extracted my infected tooth.
It occurs to me that the edges of a triangular Doritos chip might possibly follow some fractal formula. That is OBVIOUSLY the ideal triangle.
The neat thing about complexity theory is, it makes testable predictions. Even better, these predictions are a close match for observation, so there must be something to it.
The problem is, complexity theory requires the modeling of multiple interdependent feedback processes, so the math is pretty ferocious. Most people look at some of these equations filled with strange symbols and give up.
If the evolution of life is considered to be a process of blind, fortuitous forces, how can anything that happens along the way be regarded as an error? Surely this is just nature doing what nature does?
Let’s not equivocate.
For the purposes of the front-loading discussion, I define “error” as any unintended change to genetic information as compared to its original state, regardless of the consequences of that change. If an A is present in the original sequence but it gets copied as a T, that is an error.
That’s not how I would describe evolution.
I agree on that point. I don’t think we should be using “error”.
To say that something is an error is to suggest that it was not as intended. People who believe it is a mistake to ascribe intention to nature should not be using “error” in their descriptions.
Kantian Naturalist,
What a great talk! Thanks for the link KN.
I agree that it is an invitation to equivocation, which is pretty much all we seem to get around here. Sigh.
I use ‘error’ as a term of art, and there is no implication regarding intent: it is merely a shorthand for “nucleotide added to polymer chain differs from the standard A:T G:C pairing”, that is, a departure from 100% copying fidelity.
Thus error rates for polynucleotide replication all sit in the Goldilocks band between 10-8 and 10-2.
Yeah, six orders of magnitude.
Creationist fans of fine tuning like to make hay over the idea that 100% fidelity would be less than ideal, while studiously ignoring the fact that it is also unobtainable. To address Flint’s comment, the higher fidelity end of the range [10-6 to 10-8] comes at an (energetic) cost, so there’s a trade-off.
Oh, so that’s the name you prefer. I use “chaos not chaos”, but anyway same thing. Sort of like how you use “emergent” and I use “poof magic of the gaps”. And like how you use teleology to mean maybe candles, maybe not.
But even though we differ on terms, it seems we both agree on one thing-You are saying that life can arise not through chaos, but through the way nature designs it. But you are offended that IDists talk about engineering.
I guess I have to leave it to others to decide where the absurdity lies.
Such as? That chaos won’t look like chaos?
And it has a transcript. So much better to read a transcript than watch a video.
Yes thanks, KN and thanks, Jock for getting me to read it. Confirms my view that “consciousness” is a redundancy.
How can it be a redundancy if you don’t think it is even a coherent or real concept?
Close.
In fact, it is I who is in possession of the ideal Doritos chip, of which all Doritos chip-shaped objects (try-angles they are called you say?!?) are mere imperfect representations. I am keeping it in a realm beyond my desk drawer, quite inaccessible to sensory perception, I am sorry to say. Too bad really, since it also embodies the ideal salty snack.
In answer to my question, “Does your “I” suddenly cease to exist if you are anesthetized?”
Interesting video but some of what he says is very misleading.
He begins by telling us that while under general anaesthesia he ceased to exist. Obviously his body was still present so he is not talking about that. What he had lost was his ego, his sense of self. But if at that point it ceased to exist, what about when he came round? Was it, like Lazarus, raised from the dead. Humpty Dumpty was put back together again; it’s a miracle. 🙂
And then he goes on to use the infamous machine metaphor in claiming that the brain generates consciousness. I would agree that consciousness is mediated through the nervous system, but what he is doing is observing correlation and assuming causation.
He then goes on to imply that consciousness is fundamental (“consciousness is all there is”). And he doesn’t see much of a future for conscious machines. Now he is getting somewhere.
But then he starts talking about the brain as if it had some sort of limited awareness. Locked in its dark silent chamber, somehow it can make guesses. This from an organ that can be stabbed, prodded and poked without any sensation of pain even without anaesthetic.
He then shows us the “grey square illusion”. Goethe had already studied this phenomenon a couple of centuries ago and understood it as a perfectly natural feature of our vision. He said
Goethe studied intensely the behaviour of colours and shades in juxtaposition and how they affect each other for our vision. Reality consists of relationships and wholeness. Nothing exists in isolation.
Seth’s “controlled hallucinations” are nothing more than Barfield’s “collective representations”.
The point is we can transcend our “controlled hallucinations” through the act of thinking. I might see the two grey squares as being a different shade from each other but I knew they were the same shade because I am aware of the concepts of colour contrast and the like, Thinking overcomes the illusion created by the senses.
He quite rightly says, “we can misperceive the world, we can misperceive ourselves”. That is why the maxim, “know thyself” is so important.
If he was being consistent every time he says, “I think”, should he not be saying “my brain thinks”? 🙂
In my opinion he is a person who specializes in the physical aspect of the nervous system and that has caused his views to be so narrow. But his talk is enlightening nonetheless.
I’m sure you were! But your disappearing “I” is not the same thing as it ceasing to exist. The room in front of me disappears from my view when I close my eyes, but that does not mean it ceases to exist.
I knew you wouldn’t like the video, CharlieM, but I did not expect your ‘critique’ to be quite so incoherent.
You seem to have completely missed the point about controlled hallucinations; for instance, you claim “Goethe had already studied this” while quoting from a passage that discusses a simple contrast effect. [It is sandwiched in between passages discussing afterimages ffs!].
Dr Seth’s point was that what you consciously perceive is a confection, a hallucination created by your brain, based on a butt-load of assumptions your brain is making. There’s a lot going on. [ETA: see bullet 1 vs bullet 3 of the summary]
Goethe finishes the paragraph you quoted from thus
NOT what Dr Seth was talking about. At all. You missed the point.
Don ‘t you see? His “I” emerged from the “I” that ceased to be in the same way that a new potato plant originates from the death of the seed potato.
This triangle of your imagination is your own idiosyncratic view. You have added fractals which are not an essential feature the triangle as we conceive it.
It’s a good job school kids don’t have to work out dimensions of any triangle according to your understanding of triangles.
If you want to use words such as “error” then you must also agree that words such as “purpose” and “intent” are legitimate in this context also. In fact you have already used “unintended” which implies that there is something that has the intention of maintaining fidelity. Do species have an integral intention of resisting change while there are outer entities which intend to disrupt the process?
What is the opinion of your brain on this? 🙂
Good. I didn’t think for a minute that you would do that.
And do you think it’s fair to say that the brain makes guesses? That it tries to make sense of its inputs? Do you think your brain is sentient?
I took him to be expressing his own opinion. I happen to disagree with some of what he said.
In particular, I disagree that we are hallucinating the world. I prefer to say that we perceive the world, which is very different from hallucinating it. Yes, perception is a constructive process, but he overplays that idea.
I would not describe it in that way.
We can always count on you to flush out every possible misinterpretation of what someone has said. In this case, perhaps you are just not familiar with the whole idea of front-loading.
Remember that the front-loading hypothesis includes a designer. That designer would be the source of the intention, intending for many species to arise at future points in time from an original front-loaded genome. The designer is the one who would have to arrange for mechanisms to prevent any copying errors from disrupting his plans.
Some ID creationists favor front-loading as a way to explain all the existing evidence that we evolved, while keeping their designer in the narrative.
By using the word error, you are assuming its not part of the plan. There is no reason to assume so. Changes to the genome is a more accurate description, and as such there exists variety.
There is no reason to assume its all chaos. Or chaos that doesn’t look like chaos as some are now proposing.
Nope, not even close.
Again, not even close to being right.
I carefully explained why candles aren’t teleological, but then again, I never credited you with basic reading competence to begin with.
We definitely don’t agree on that.
Not offended — more like amused by such clumsy, amateurish reasoning.
There is no such thing as “the ideal triangle”. This is sheer confusion.
If planned, purposeful changes are being made along the way, why bother with front-loading to being with?
This!
Ad hoc reasoning always leads to plot snarls. Or…rather…explanation snarls. I recall a discussion some years back that I think was on Panda’s Thumb, though it may have been at After the Bar Closes. In any event, a faithful YEC was trying to defend the story of Noah as being literally true and, IIRC, Mike Elzinga was pointing out all the physics issues with the story – how much energy would be released by the storm as described, the height and violence of the seas and why no boat of any kind (let alone a wooden one) could survive in them, all the mess the animals would make over 40 days and nights in awful seas, the amount of food that would be required to keep just two of the animals (elephants) alive for that length of time, and so forth. The YEC finally said something to the effect of, “well…with God all things are possible” to which several of us about simultaneously posted, “yeah…then what’s He need the boat for or the flood for that matter?”
Sometimes, I can only shake my head…
A good reductio ad absurdum will sink the ark every time. It’s a skill that apparently not everyone has.
” He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.” – Spock, “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan”
“What does God need with a starship?” — James Kirk, “Star Trek: The Final Frontier”
Not even close to being right? Do you even know what you are saying. If you can use the word “emergent” to mean how far from equillbrium bags of chemicals create intelligence, how can you say its “its not even close to right’ for ME to say I call that poof magic of the gaps? Its my term, not yours so how can you say its wrong?
Except that the paper you referenced claims perhaps it is sensible to say candles ARE teleological, so again, you don’t get to be the arbiter of all that is correct. If you think their ideas have value, you don’t get to then say, “Oh, but in this regard, No,no, they are all wrong….” It destroys your whole premise.
What makes you think I didn’t like the video? Just because I didn’t agree with him on several points doesn’t mean I did not like it and found it enlightening.
You are focusing too much on the particular and failing to notice the general principle which connects both Seth’s account of the grey square illusion and Goethe’s elucidation of the context in which individual sections of a complete visual image are apprehended by visual perception.
Goethe recognized the wholeness of reality and he understood that our visual system is organized in such a way that our impressions will be experienced in a way that tries to conform to reality. Our intellect which relies on sensual experience is telling us that the two squares in the demonstration are of different hues and so we compensate for this when the lighter one is in shadow, thus maintaining the logic of our experience. But then reason intervenes and reminds us that the intellect cannot be relied on to give us reality. Through reason we gain the concept of colour constancy are come to understand that it it is a natural effect of our visual system and not the actuality of the situation which causes us to see the squares in the way we do. Reason gives us the whole understanding that does not come with perception alone, but must add the correct concepts which complete the reality of the situation.
Reason overcomes the dichotomy between sense experience and a limited understanding which relies on this sense experience.
Because I explained why emergence is not magic, but is a logical implication of the correct account of causation. You ignored that explanation because you found it convenient to do so.
It certainly doesn’t destroy my whole premise for me to think that Mossio and Bich were mistaken to concede that dissipative systems have minimal teleology. But let’s notice that we were talking about biological teleology, and here Mossio and Bich are explicit:
So, even if dissipative structures are teleological — a possibility that they allow for, but which I do not — it would have no bearing on their explanation of how teleology is realized in living things. And I do think that explanation has merit, even though it has some problems that need to be addressed.
You what? You explained how emergence works? That’s delusional.
So when a philosopher writes :
You think the problem is that they just haven’t come here and read how you explain how its not magic? You could save the whole academic world of philosophy from having to tackle this subject ever again, if only they would just come here…
EXCEPT they are BOTH teleogical! Oh, are they then? I am so glad you quoted them.
I would respect your position more KN, if you didn’t spend so much time harking about how irrational IDists are for seeing design in nature, and calling them so delusional and having no scientific arguments whatsoever, and its just dead in the water theories that are meaningless, but you champion this.
The fact that Seth said, “I was having a small operation” also, “and then I was back”, demonstrates that he did not question the continuity of his individual “I” before and after the operation. With respect to the potato there was no continuity of the individual tuber but there was continuity of the plant as a whole.
I know that the material constituents of my body are being replaced constantly. My bodily form is less transitory in that it retains a basic form as it changes over time. But my “I” has more consistency, the evidence for which comes from the fact that I have memories going back to my early childhood years.
I get your point.
If as he says, we are hallucinating the world, doesn’t the fact that he recognizes it as a hallucination mean that he has actually overcome its hallucinatory character?
Neither would I.
For those who believe that the brain is just matter in motion they contradict themselves when they say that this lump of matter can think and make guesses.
But it is not just in arguing against “front loading” advocates that followers of the orthodox view use terms such as “error correction”. The language of modern biology is rife with language which implies entelechy and agency.
My problem with front loading is that implies some external agent directing operations, but at least its advocates are being more consistent in using these terms.