Scordova at UD asks a question that I find interesting.
By way of contrast, intelligent agencies, particularly those intelligent agencies which we presume have free will, cannot be counted upon to behave in predictable manners in certain domains. Even presuming some intelligent agencies (say machine “intelligence”) are deterministic, they can be an unpredictable black box to outside observers. This makes it difficult to make direct experimental confirmation of certain ID inferences.
It has long been my contention that the defining behavior of science is the search for regularity.
Some regularities can be refined into mathematical equations, which we generally call laws of nature.
Other processes are complex or chaotic, making long range predictions impossible. But chaotic systems can be seen, at small scale, to be following regular rules. Weather develops. It doesn’t simply appear. We can find regularities in its past.
Evolution is a bit like weather. we cannot predict where change is going, but we can find regularities in its past. And these regularities are what distinguishes evolution from intelligent design. They are what allows us to look in a certain place for Tiktaalik. Or hominid fossils. Or predict that genomes will form a nested hierarchy.
So I would answer Scordova that science never looks for capriciousness and always looks for regularity. That is the definition of science.
The reasons are partly historical and partly practical.
Historically, it has been a successful approach. And in practical terms, the search for capriciousness cannot fail. It is the default finding.
There are so many chaotic phenomena in our midst that the world seems to be governed by mysterious forces. The notion that one could find and potentially control these forces is a very new idea. It has little support in art and fiction, and is actively opposed by most religions. So when science started being successful and began to produce practical results, it also found itself in opposition to much of human culture. I do not find it surprising that animosity has developed.
Over to you guys…
I could as easily say the same thing about atheists and materialists and how they interpret the data. So?
Nothing but rhetoric.
Whale meat is legal to sell and eat in the USA. It just can’t be imported.
sin·gu·lar·i·ty [sing-gyuh-lar-i-tee] Show IPA
noun, plural sin·gu·lar·i·ties for 2–4.
1.
the state, fact, or quality of being singular.
2.
a singular, unusual, or unique quality; peculiarity
reg·u·lar [reg-yuh-ler] Show IPA
adjective
1.
usual; normal; customary: to put something in its regular place.
2.
evenly or uniformly arranged; symmetrical: regular teeth.
3.
characterized by fixed principle, uniform procedure, etc.: regular income.
4.
recurring at fixed times; periodic: regular bus departures; regular meals.
5.
rhythmical: regular breathing.
How often we see an animal lengthen his neck to call that observation a regularity?
I think that darwinist states that ramdom mutation let a pig become a whale without forseen that it would happen and that would be reproductivly succesfull. Darwinist also state that evolution still happen. Then should predict that ramdom mutation are leading terrestrial animals to be marine animals, short neck animals to long neck animals, fishes become tetrapods. And test that change for reproductive succes.
Creationists invented modern science, both the principles and the methodologies. Atheists and materialists are like spoiled brats trying to send their parents off to the nursing home by calling them senile so they can gain ownership of the house their parents built.
Creationists are better at science than materialists and atheists (for the simple reason they do not exclude a potentially true set of causes). Materialists and atheists, however, are much better at rhetoric, narrative-building and politics.
Why this is non sense? In order to have predictability, you need regularity. You cannot predict unique events. And if you have regularity you will have predictability for determined process the exact outcome, for stochastic process you have the distribution of the possibles outcomes.
The problem with evolution is that it is all about unique events in the past. And for darwinistic evolution is wordt because darwinits thinks that that uniques events in the past could not have happened.
I wonder how tinkering a cam and camshaft you get a combustion engine?
Says William to Jeff Shallit’s:
Were’s the rhetoric? That you gave no example of ID critics’ dishonesty is a plain fact. That Jeff Shallit has published copiously is a plain fact. That Bill Dembski withdrew from Dover preventing Professor Shallit from “going there” is a plain fact.
Oh, come off it! Creation “science” is a futile search for something that might support their religious stance on issues such as a 6,000 year old Earth, a global flood (where did that water come from? And where did it go?),and everyone descending from the survivors on the ark. Talk about ruling stuff out!
ETA
This has to be Poe’ Law.
Are you sure about that, William?
ETA Here
Please list for us some of the scientific advancements made by Creationists using something other than a 100% materialistic approach.
Even one will do.
I’m not surprised by your wonderment. ID advocates nener talk about the process of invention. Or whether the pieces are borrowed from previous inventions, or whether invention is incremental.
True enough. This was 42 years ago and I was outside of the United States at the time. And I ate it without at first knowing what it was.
Blas,
Blas,
Thanks for your patronising response. I am aware of the distinction between singular and regular, hence my exasperation. It is not that I think singular phenomena are individually regular – gimme a break – but that you apparently think that the existence of singular phenomena means there are NO regularities to ANY evolutionary systems.
The following are (arguably) singular, in that they describe a category that probably goes through a coalescent origin:
– particular events of endosymbiosis
– the initiation of a syngamy/reduction cycle (ie sex).
– A particular species of antelope with a long neck.
– ‘Whales’.
Does the fact that those things – those over there, the ones that we have agreed are strongly contingent and unique – mean that NOTHING, in the whole of evolution, displays regularity?
I think even you might agree that is nonsense. If I have misrepresented your position, feel free to state more explicitly what it is.
If you followed the discussions on randomness, you will know that a process of birth and death will inevitably lead to a single ancestor standing from an initial pool. That is an ‘unpredictable regularity’. Any given trial could be deemed ‘singular’. The last ancestor standing will be different each time, and unpredictable. The behaviour of this system is ‘regular’, and applicable to neutral loci in any gene pool. There are also regularities evident when non-neutral alleles are passed down the generations from such a pool.
‘Predictability’ is a complete red herring. Physics can’t predict the next asteroid to hit the earth, nor its impact co-ordinates. Does that mean physics is not a science?
Blas,
This, I can’t make much sense of, sorry. How can specific random mutations be predicted? How does the inability to predict them stop them being causal?
You could say it but you couldn’t support it.
Shallit can.
If you mean by evolution the variation of alleles in a population, yes that is a regularity. If evolution means the change oflife forms as consequences of the variation of alleles in a population, in that sense of evolution there is no singularity.
And Physics can predict quiet well when an asteroid will hit the earth given his initial condition.
No, it’s not a regularity. The allele ratios depends on the feedback provide by a variable and unpredictable environment.
All this time and you still don’t understand the basics.
May be it is my english. I do not mind that ramdom mutation can be predicted, what I mean is:
If the process that produce evolution is RM+NS and it is still going on then we should be able to see not the appearance of new life forms because that dpends on NS but the change that could led to new life forms.
You probably do not understand what are the relations between cams and camshafts with combustion exchanges and are overestimating the tinkering as source of inventions. Combustion engine it is not the tinkering of vapour engine, is a new concept of tarnsformation of chemical energy in motion.
Invention usually starts with ideas to solve problems, the application of that ideas usually starts using what they have but ordered according the new concept.
Tinkering is a process of trial and error, usefull but time and resources consuming. Is vey usefull to improve what you already has,but if you want to solve a new problem or you need to close a gap in performance tinkering it is not the way to go.
That is the problem with evolution, change the finches beak is something that you can do by tinkering, go from a procariote to an eucariote tinkering it is not enough. You invoke a unique simbiosis event.
More rhetoric.
Nothing in that article contradicted anything I said, Alan. Try reading more carefully next time.
How would either of us know if they used a “100%” materialist approach?
It is your slavish devotion to materialism that generates such absurd challenges.
Virtually all of the scientific facts and interpretations thereof that challenged particular creationist narratives were gathered and interpreted by other creationists (like Galileo). Materialist atheism masquerading as “the” scientific paradigm is a rather recent phenomena.
I see. You made the claim but were just talking out of your nether regions. Same as always.
Thorton:
You might want to double-check what claim I actually made. It has nothing to do with your straw man about “100% materialist approach” disaster of a response. That’s really the problem with most anti-ID advocates; they argue against their own imagination, not against anything an IDist actually says.
You claimed Creationists are better at science than materialists. Those are your words right above, remember?
WJM: ‘Creationists are better at science than materialists and atheists (for the simple reason they do not exclude a potentially true set of causes)”
Just tell me how to do science “better” without relying 100% on materialism. Tell me how to test a vaccine when a supernatural Loki God could make it 100% effective one day and a deadly poison the next day.
Back up your own words for a change.
I make the rather trivially-true claim that most scientific achievements have been made by creationists (in fact, science as a modern endeavor was invented, funded and promoted almost entirely by creationists). Creationists collected endless scientific facts, categorized them, recorded them. They made countless discoveries. The church funded this process and set up libraries and schools for training in these scientific pursuits. The bulk of the institution of science, until relatively recently, was filled with creationists of one stripe or another.
Thornton then inserts the straw man challenge of demanding that I offer an example of a creationist using an “approach” that wasn’t “100% materialistic” to arrive at their contribution to science. I never made a claim about their “approaches” one way or another – as if either of us could find a way to vet such a claim in the first place.
It’s not just silly; it’s preposterously bad thinking. And then he says, in effect, nyah, you can’t do what you said. Only, I never said any such thing. Typical materialist rhetoric and postmodern anti-rationalism. Note how the questions directly implies that Thornton believes that all scientific progress – every step – was accumulated by a strictly materialist “approach”. Such an unprovable, unsupportable belief can only be held in a kind of religious, zealous faith.
Such as when people like Liz says “there is no evidence for god”. It’s materialist fanaticism on display for anyone who cares to see.
I backed up my own words in the very quote you repeated. My clam is that Creationists are better at science for the simple fact that they do not preclude a potentially true set of causes – immaterial causes.
When one rules out potentially true sets of causes, it cannot help but make them – at least in general – worse scientists.
WJM says this:
the linked article says this:
then WJM has the temerity to say this:
the irony is rich!
Hey, William, do you know which port(s) the USA commercial whaling fleet calls home and/or perhaps a US distributor of whale meat?
thanks!
BK,
Wow, I did miss that. My bad and my apologies. That **was** ironic.
After looking into it, I don’t think it would be fair to say that any whale meat, including minke or the limited whale hunting allowed in Alaska could be reasonably characterized it being legal in the USA.
I was wrong.
LOL! Wouldn’t be a day without the “sure I said it but I really didn’t say it!” backpedal by WJM.
You haven’t demonstrated that introducing supernatural causes makes Creationists better scientists. In the view of most it makes them not scientists at all by introducing an unscientific untestable and unrepeatable element.
Another big FAIL for WJM and his silly Creationist cheerleading.
I didn’t say anything about “supernatural”. Just another straw man by thornton.
LOL! Here we go again. “I said it but I really didn’t say it!”
Then tell us how to do “better” science without relying on materialism. I suppose you’ll deny ever having used that word either, right?
This is a pretty good demonstration of how badly anti-ID advocates misread and misinterpret statements made by ID advocates. I make a rather trivial claim about the number of contributions to science by creationists, and point out that because they do not rule out a potentially true set of causes – immaterial causes – they are – in general – better scientists.
Thornton takes the above and then insists I have made a claim about the methods that creationists used to contribute to science, and then insists I have said something about “supernatural” causes, neither of which is remotely true.
The willingness to consider what appeared to be inexplicable, non-observable, immaterial causes is what allowed Newton to employ the term “force” as a label for whatever it was that was causing certain regular, predictable behaviors of matter and material interactions. Materialists have apparently reified a description of behavior (gravity) as a material commodity that causes the behavior.
Whatever methods Newton used, and without necessarily invoking the supernatural, Newton’s willingness to consider apparently non-material causation led to arguably the greatest scientific advancements in history (at least until quantum mechanics arrived, which is another milestone of science largely discovered by creationists and those willing to posit non-material causation).
But that’s not a valid claim. “Immaterial” causes are untestable, unrepeatable, and therefore unscientific by definition. Anyone including them is therefore a worse scientist, not a better one.
You made a really dumb statement and like always are weaseling like crazy to justify the idiocy. Too late for that now WJM no matter how much you squirm.
BTW gravity isn’t an “immaterial” force. It’s an integral part of the space time continuum.
The apparently immaterial cause for the regular behaviors of matter and material interactions are quite “testable” and so repeatable they are often called the Laws of Nature. They are really the necessary root of most scientific investigation, at least in the physical sciences.
Nobody knows what causes matter to behave in the manner we describe as “gravity”. Nobody can point it out or observe it; we can only observe the effects and characterize the behavior with models.
Here’s a question you might want to consider: what would qualify as a class of causation that would be viable as “that which causes matter to behave the way it does”? It can’t be matter that causes matter to behave the way it does, can it? That would be a thing causing itself to behave a certain way.
If, logically, matter cannot be the cause of it’s own fundamental behavioral properties, what is left except the immaterial? Considering “laws” or “forces” that explain the behaviors of matter is necessarily considering the immaterial, unless one holds that matter can cause itself to behave the way it does.
Without something immaterial, the behavior of matter can only be a self-referential loop. Without considering the immaterial, no “physical law” or “force” that causes matter to behave the way it does can ever be considered.
And that is why the exclusion of the immaterial as possible scientific explanations makes materialists worse scientists and incapable of of coming up with what creationists are able to come up with – including Newton.
LOL! Wow, look at WJM tapdance and backpedal!
Immaterial – adj
Philosophy
spiritual, rather than physical.
“we have immaterial souls”
synonyms: intangible, incorporeal, bodiless, disembodied, impalpable, ethereal, insubstantial, metaphysical; spiritual, unearthly, supernatural
Sorry WGM but nothing in science relies on metaphysical, unearthly, supernatural actions. Not gravity, not electromagnetic radiation, not the strong and weak nuclear forces, NOTHING. No matter how many silly rhetorical games you try and play.
Williams’s position is no-one knows anything , then he goes on the net to argue about it.
Thanks for the apology over whale meat, William. Perhaps you’d now like to look into your misquote of Hawking and Mlodinow.
Blas,
So do we have a disagreement or not? ‘That is a regularity’ and ‘there is no singularity’ seem to be saying the same thing – that evolution is indeed a process with many regularities. And those regularities render evolution inevitable, incidentally. You can find that out by analysis. What you can’t do is feed in the entirety of modern data and predict which way this stochastic system will go. Precisely because it is a stochastic system, as you found out from analysis.
Biology is full of probabilistic scanarios. If I have a packet of seeds with 95% germination, which ones will germinate? Ummm… If I release a new organism onto an island, will it become extinct, become a pest, or integrate with the existing ecology? Ummm … If a man-made disease escapes from the lab, will it wipe out all of humanity or just fizzle out? Ummm … If DNA polymerase makes a mistake every 10^8 bases, which will be the next? Ummm ….
Not really. How close to the end are you thinking of starting?
In biology, you are talking of prediction of systems with gazillions of potential sources of perturbation, over millions of generations. You can still analyse the behaviour of such systems, even if you can’t ‘predict’ in this horse-race manner that you seem to think prediction should entail.
Blas,
Blas:
The process that produces evolution is RM+NS+Drift+Recombination+Migration. Four of those are random (and NS is too, really, because it cannot be separated from Drift). The latter 3 are chaotic – ie, small changes in initial conditions lead to large differences in final result. This renders the whole shebang inherently unpredictable.
Suppose I discover what I predict to be the next evolutionary innovation: the flying rabbit. Fly, my precious, fly … oh, shit. Tree. Mind that Peregrine. Not enough food to sustain flight? How was I supposed to know? You feel ill? What, all of you? You were supposed to form a dynasty, dammit!
Since all scientists consider “laws” and “forces” then no scientists are “materialists” in your sense. Your version of the “materialist scientist” doesn’t exist.
Don’t confuse regularities with causes and you will be fine.
William wrote:
Are you suggesting that *all* Abrahamic theists, by your (rather anachronistic) definition, should be called ‘creationists’? In other words, anyone who believes in ‘Divine Creation’ automatically qualifies as a ‘creationist’ in your definition, is that right?
Why then does BioLogos, an evangelical Christian organization set-up by Francis Collins in response to questions about his book “The Language of God,” speak out directly against ‘creationism’ and ‘creationists’?
Go here if you need help: http://biologos.org/questions/biologos-id-creationism
William J. Murray,
(my bold)
This raised my left eyebrow by precisely one and one-fifth millimetres, so I googled “Bohr religious beliefs”, then “Schrodinger religious beliefs”, then “Dirac religious beliefs”, then “Pauli”, then … well, I gave up. Who comprises ‘largely’?
Even Einstein, who wrote of God’s aversion to games of chance, did not appear to fit the label “creationist”.
“The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”
eta: perhaps you mean Planck. Like Einstein, ‘deist’ seems closest to his proclivities.
Off course, that is because you think that the regular process, evolution as variation of alleles in a population, is enough to exlain the singular process, make a rabbit a flying rabbit. You say the process is cahotic. Which one? evolution 1 is not cahotic at all. There are laws that predict how the alleles will change in a population, the observed mutation rate is measurable and constant unless there are mechanism that change it. We see the regular changes in populations like finchs beak, Nothing cahotic there. The problem is that darwinist want that evolution one is enough to explain evolutio two, then you need to introduce the cahotic factor, because it is not enough evolution one to explain evolution two. We do not know what make a pig be a pig, we do not know how a fertilized egg of the species pig is able to build a pig. Until the singularity that a pig become a whale it is only speculation.
Allan,
If you too were open to cooperative science, philosophy, theology/worldview conversation, rather than pitting science & religion as in eternal conflict, perhaps you would be more charitable to the characters (not just the nature) involved.
http://nobelists.weebly.com/uploads/4/0/2/0/4020654/50-nobelists-english.pdf
Belief in a Creator does not make them ‘creationists.’ That may be William’s personal definition, but it’s not what world-active scholars in science, philosophy, theology/worldview discourse think.
Allan Miller,
What does the bible have to do with creationism, other than representing one particular form of it?
I’m using the term “creationist” the same way, as far as I know, that anti-IDists use the term, meaning anyone who believes that the universe (and thus everything in it) was thus created by intelligence. Why limit it to Abrahamic theists? Virtually all native cultures and many non-Abrahamic religious believe the universe to be created by an intelligent agency.
Anti-ID advocates call IDists “creationists” even though IDists don’t even necessarily believe in god. What, are they going to complain that I’m using the term in a broad scope the same way they use it?
You’d have to ask them.