I expect that most here have heard about the situation at Ball State University (in Muncie, Indiana), where a physics professor was apparently including some Intelligent Design in a science class. There was a public fuss. And, more recently, the president of Ball State wrote a letter to the faculty about the situation. It seems to have been a classy letter. She described the issue as one of academic integrity, rather than one of academic freedom as a few commentators had suggested. She apparently agreed that there were first amendment issues, as others suggested. But she saw academic integrity as the main issue. Incidentally, I also thought academic integrity was the issue.
The ID people don’t like what she wrote, because she was blunt about ID not being science. Over at UD, vjtorley has a post “An open letter to BSU President Jo-Ann Gora” where he raises some questions that he would like the Gora to answer. I’m giving my answers here, rather than in a comment at UD, because I think the issues warrant more discussion, and I’m sure others here will want to join in.
Defining ID
Vincent’s first question starts with “how do you define ID”. It specifically asks about fine tuning.
My answer: It is not up to Ball State to define ID. They are reacting to a movement which has been very noisy about what it advocates.
On fine tuning: It does not matter to me whether “fine tuning” is specifically designated as ID. The relevant issues are that:
- “fine tuning” is a religious apologetics argument, and
- it has no scientific content. If the apologetics were removed, it would be philosophy, not science and not philosophy of science.
He also brings up the question of whether the cosmos could be a giant computer simulation. But that, too, I see as philosophy and not science.
Bad science
Vjtorley’s second section opens with:
Would you agree that the discussion of a bad scientific theory – even one whose claims has been soundly refuted by scientific testing, such as aether theories in physics, the phlogiston theory in chemistry, and vitalism in biology – can be productive and genuinely illuminating, in a university science classroom?
To me, this seems a misdirection. ID has never shown any scientific value. By contrast, phlogiston led to a research program of measuring the mass of combustion products. It was the beginnings of modern chemistry, though that very research led to the downfall of phlogiston.
I would class the aether as an hypothesis, rather than a theory. It was a background assumption but played no direct role in research with the exception of the Michelson-Morley experiment. But it did provide a useful background for discussing apparent wave-like phenomena in light transmission. Perhaps it’s role is similar to that of origin-of-life questions in biology. The physics itself did not depend on anything about aether, just as biology does not depend on how life originated. As far as I can tell, ID does not offer anything comparable.
I don’t know much about the history of vitalism, so I won’t comment about that.
Fred Hoyle
The next section begins with:
If you answered “Yes” to question 2, as I expect you did, then I shall assume that for you, the decisive reason for keeping intelligent design out of the science classroom is that it is essentially religious in nature. As you wrote in your email: “Teaching religious ideas in a science course is clearly not appropriate.”
It then goes on to discuss Fred Hoyle’s ideas.
Honestly, Vincent, this is absurd. Nobody would have heard of Hoyle’s view of evolution, if he were not already famous for his astrophysics. An famous astronomer says something laughably dumb about biology, and you really think that’s worthy of time in a biology class?
Now I hope you can see where I’m heading with this line of inquiry. If the discussion of the flaws in intelligent design theory belongs in a university science classroom, it logically follows that discussion of the theory itself belongs in a university science classroom.
Sigh! Creationists and ID proponents are still confusing “theory” and “hypothesis”. ID was never a theory. At best, it is an hypothesis, and a rather bad one at that. Compare it to phlogiston, which was a genuine theory and did lead to useful empirical research. The research we see coming out of the ID community seems to be little more than a search for gaps in which to put your “god of the gaps.” You don’t even need an ID hypothesis for that kind of research.
Richard Smalley
The next section is about Richard Smalley. The whole section reads like apologetics. I am wondering why vjtorley thinks that an apologetics argument would persuade people that ID is not religion.
So my question to you is: if a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry thought that intelligent design belongs in the category of “science”, what makes you so sure that it belongs in the category of religion?
Another non-biologist says something stupid about biology. It should be obvious that this is not useful to discuss in a science class.
Viewpoint endorsement
The Ball State statement said that particular viewpoints should not be endorsed, even in humanities classes. Vjtorley begins his question with:
I’d now like you to consider the hypothetical case of a humanities or social science lecturer at your university who is asked a very direct, personal question by a student: “Do you believe in intelligent design?”
If a student asked me that in class, I would decline to answer and rule it off-topic. If he asked me informally out of class, perhaps I would answer. But, in my opinion, this sort of viewpoint endorsement does not belong in the classroom. I agree with president Gora that this is an issue of academic integrity.
Lizzie,
From what I’ve seen, people like WJM have no interest in understanding what emergent properties are supposed to be — that would involve abandoning their straw-man version of naturalism, and that’s not going to happen.
They have too much emotionally invested in regarding their own views as the only rational ones, and so everyone who disagrees with them must be incoherent and irrational. The thought that sincere, thoughtful, and rational people can have profound disagreements even up to and including their respective “world-views” makes no sense to them.
William
Recently I’ve been thinking that the fundamental objection some IDers have is they object to causality. Not some of it, but all of it fundamentally.
Let me give you an example. Many IDers believe the physical brain is a receiver for a, well, soul signal I suppose. Damaging the mind causes damage to the interpretation of the signal, not the underlying source of the signal. You know it well I’m sure.
And this is the “decider”, lifted out of mere physics, and will is thereby imposed on the world.
But what is it you suppose happens in the decider? Some process that does not follow some sort of rule set? If it’s all true then just as we have our version of causality, it’ll have it’s own however opaque to us “down here”.
So then don’t you just have the same problem all over again or did I miss something? It goes behind the veil, the magic does not work otherwise I guess.
So what powers the processes going on when you are doing other then whatever physics commands William? How do you get from A to B in that space? At what point is physics suspended and at what point does it resume? All these questions, and more, will be answered notime soon.
That doesn’t really mean much, given your penchant for using idiosyncratic and self-serving definitions so that you can have your cake and eat it, too. You’ve already agreed that the “I”, and whatever it “does”, is a computation of physics, so all you can possibly mean here is compatibalist nonsense that creates semantic distance between “physics commands” and “I do”, when the latter is entirely subsumed by the former.
If what emerges is free from the command of physics, this might be something other than self-deceptive sophistry.
If you plan on dressing someone down about their views, you might want to prepare yourself by at least knowing what they are. Otherwise, it is only too plain that you are tilting at stereotypical windmills generated by your own fears.
Hang on Pumpkin.
You think you create your own reality. So all of *this* is your fault. Just wish it away, or better, or however it works for you. It’d be a shame to have all that power but not the wherewithal to use it efficiently. If he’s dressing you down, it’s your fault, because you make this reality, remember. You’re mad about his ‘stereotypical fears’ you created for him. And if your creations are laughing at you, it might be because they are thinking “what sort of plum would create his own adventure and fare so poorly at it”?
Perhaps you had better quit before you step in it deeper. Everybody here is now laughing at you.
If you want to remain the “mysterious and elusive ‘religion’ ninja,” hiding behind smoke and mirrors and playing games, then be my guest.
You claim to make up your own “reality” and believe whatever you wish; but when you start name-calling and making accusations that conflict with the objective realities everyone else knows about, you are going to get some blowback. There is a real world out there despite what you choose to believe.
If you can’t handle a “dressing down” in the form of a civics lesson and a recital of the tactics and behaviors you choose to engage in, then start behaving like an adult.
Nobody is interested in your imaginary world. You aren’t the center of the universe.
Ball State’s president is acutely aware of the history of ID/creationism – as are many who post here; and it appears that they are going to deal with it before it gets out of hand. It’s not your call.
It’s rather amazing that you’ve made exactly the same mistake covered in the quote you served up prior. If you’re going to dress someone down for their beliefs, you best know what they are first.
I’m afraid that statement says far more about you than “them” or me.
William J. Murray,
Feel free to clarify. I seem to recall you claiming you “make your own reality” but can’t be bothered to go searching. Perhaps one benefit of “making your own reality” is “rewriting your own history”?
You’re right, Richard. That is what William claims, even if he is embarrassed to admit it.
Here’s the preface of William’s book Instant Enlightenment, which he recommended to us just last year as a current account of his beliefs [bolding is mine]:
From later in the book:
And:
Stay tuned to find out whether William will take his own advice and
…or whether he will continue to complain about the “scientific aristocracy” and “intellectual fascists” who are holding ID back.
Manifest your chosen reality, William, or explain to the people who bought your book — the ones you presume to advise — why you are so incompetent at practicing what you preach.
Take a look around, literally and figuratively. This is the reality you’re ‘manifesting’, William.
Another quote from William’s book:
William is fighting against reality — and losing badly.
For the third time in less than 24 hrs, if you’re going to dress someone down for their beliefs, you might want to know their beliefs. I wrote that book almost 20 years ago. I’ve changed my mind about most things since then.
So now you are just flat-out lying. From YOUR OWN link where I supposedly “recommended to us just last year as a current account of his beliefs.”:
Anarchic Harmony was, as I said, an existential, anti-authoritarian rant. I wouldn’t advise anyone to read that for the purpose of understanding anything I currently believe.
Unconditional Freedom was an better expression of my beliefs as they stood 20 years ago, and I even added the caveat in that post that they do not reflect my beliefs today. You deceitfully and maliciously claimed otherwise in your post.
Furthermore, in the context of the thread that you linked to, I was making the point that Dr. Liddle was simple assuming that consensual empiricism was by default the arbiter of “reality”, and that there were other ways of looking a what “reality” was besides “consensual empiricism” that did not necessarily evoke solipsism. That was when I referred her to my books, which outline a hypothesis of reality that contains both mutually consensual and entirely subjective components that are both real in the existential sense.
While I do carry some version of some of what I wrote in those books (mostly the second) with me today, those views have been redesigned to fit and serve a different theistic perspective.
I did not offer the books as a window into my current beliefs, and explicitly said so in the very post you linked to.
I believe that we do generate a lot of what we experience. However, I believe that what is available to be manifested in any life is constrained by several factors (such as what is logically possible, and what is logically necessary, and given the situation we are in), and what an individual can manifest out of “what is available” is further constrained by certain factors inherent in the individual, and by the often complex, conflicted desires of the individual.
I can make the whole “atheo-materialist” perspective go away from my experiential reality very easily simply by ignoring those that promote such views. It doesn’t require “manifesting” them out of existence.
I’m not compelled by any sense of “saving the world” or even saving atheists to debate in these venues. I’m here to do as much of what is right as I can stomach. You could say I’m doing some volunteer work here in the online asylum of post-modern atheistic materialism. If it required my actually being around those of your ilk, I’d just have to accept whatever necessary consequences came my way for not doing what I should.
Thank God for the internet.
You take the biscuit sometimes. Your ridiculous notions of what materialism entails – news to any actual materialist – are precisely the kind of windmill-tilting you here decry.
I fail to see how your missionary work among the heathens has had any positive effect.
You have accused “us” of bullying or censorship without pointing to any ID research that is worthy of publication but which was rejected by the peer review bullies.
Same for grant proposals. No list of grants declined.
Nor have you or anyone else in the ID movement responded to numerous requests to outline an ID research program — what you would like to do if you had the funds.
Surely 200 years is enough time to come up with some ideas.
No, much more interesting to switch back to free will/determinism for the 1000th time, and pour scorn on the entirety of people’s character based upon their particular metaphysical ‘choices’, and some words they type into the World Wide Web.
Allan Miller,
Nope. I rarely argue about what any individual might believe unless I’ve had a pretty involved discussion with them about their beliefs. What I argue against is what materialism/atheism necessarily entails when examined logically. That it doesn’t comport with what particular atheists/materialists here believe is actually the point of much of what I write; what most atheists/materialists actually believe, and how the actually behave, cannot be derived from atheism/materialism at all, but rather relies on stolen concepts and obligations.
I respect all metaphysical worldview choices (and have said so, such as my respect for certain atheistic/materialist philosophers); what I don’t respect are those who use sophistry, stolen concepts, equivocation and self-deception to hide from the necessary ramifications of those metaphysical choices.
The problem isn’t just that naturalists don’t believe what you think they ought to believe; the problem is that you’re so sure that your understanding of naturalism is the correct one, that you just don’t take the time to find out what other people actually believe, and why they believe it.
is, as you have made perfectly clear, ‘us’. We’ll live. Your respect for certain atheistic philosophers (whom you have not directly engaged) is, I am sure, a great comfort to them.
Meanwhile we, according to you, have not thought through our position, or if we have we are deceiving ourselves, or if not we are trying to kid you we think something other than what we really think, or some other such nonsense … merely because we do not accept your lofty pronouncements on what atheism entails.
In fact, you are simply wrong (yes! I dare to use that concept!). You’ve stolen and misused the ‘stolen concept’ thing; having a non-physical essence does not change any argument on free will vs determinism (and you confuse determinism with ‘predeterminism’); having no spiritual arbiter of Moral/True/Good etc does not mean we therefore have no ‘right’ to those concepts. etc, etc, etc.
Anyhoo … what ID proposals have been suppressed by the fascists? This is your golden opportunity to get past the censor.
I find “free from the command of physics” to be an awkward phrase, but I suppose you mean something like this:
And to that question, I say “no,” because I interpret “physical determinism” as an epistemological claim, not as a metaphysical one.
For one thing, I divide my metaphysical commitments into two categories: those that are necessary by transcendental argument for securing the grounds of thought, judgment, and action; and those that are posited by our most successful science of the day.
(We can all these ‘transcendental metaphysics’ and ’empirical metaphysics,’ respectively — though I’m not delighted by those particular labels. Also, this way of distinguishing between different kinds of metaphysical commitments, though clearly inspired by Kant, Carnap, Sellars, and Putnam, is a new view I’m just trying out now.)
Now, it seems fairly clear to me that causal or physical determinism, of the “no room for free will!” variety, is neither transcendentally necessary nor posited by our best physics. For we can understand it as an epistemological claim, i.e. as a claim about the predictability of the kinds of simple systems that physicists study.
But then we have no reason to expect that complex systems will be as predictable as simple systems are. The facts about the sub-atomic constituents of my brain are the facts at that level of spatial and temporal resolution, as disclosed by the appropriate technologies and mathematical models. That is, based on those technologies, we have constructed models about that level of spatial and temporal resolution, and to the extent that those models are confirmed, we call them “the facts about the microphysical”.
There’s no reason to expect that what holds true at the level of atomic or molecular description will also hold true at the level of organismal biology or cognitive neuroscience, and the facts about organismal biology and cognitive neuroscience are not helpfully explained by insisting on reducibility to microphysical description. And that’s why emergentism is not threatened by determinism.
I said nothing about reductionism, nor about predictability, nor about determinism. Those are all your straw men.
William,
Now I know what you are arguing against.
Now I have just one question.
Why are you arguing against it?
It would seem to me that from your perspective it would be like arguing with a wild animal. The animal is never going to “get it” – how can it when the very idea of “getting it” only makes sense in a theistic universe built for human understanding?
So why do you bother? What’s the best that you can hope to achieve?
Getting some people you already know are wrong to admit they are wrong?
And that’s how people who “get it” behave is it?
Rather then lead you to enlightenment you want to force people there by removing all possible alternatives?
Tell me William, before there was language was there religion? Was there co-operation? So who stole what from who?
Allan Miller,
If the shoe fits.
No, but if you want to talk about the suspension of physics while your soul makes it’s mind up then it’s going to come up at some point, no?
The type of shoe you wear would be illustrated by a few examples of research that has been suppressed by the worldwide cabal of fascist scientist overlords who guard against all ID supporting papers.
I know that you don’t need evidence for your beliefs, but when you make a claim like that it’s more convincing to me personally if you provide some evidence to go along with it. So, any actual specifics there?
Incorrect – you talk about an ability to make “special” decisions outside of what people in general understand to be reality. All those things are involved. If they are not, then how are your claims of “out of band” signalling special in any way?
True, you didn’t use the term “reductionism,” but I don’t understand what the phrase “the command of physics” could mean, if not an appeal to reductionism.
So if “the command of physics” isn’t about the supposed threat of reducing psychological and biological properties and relations to microphysical properties and relations, then what is it about?
Reduced to gnomic utterances now? Which shoe? A blockquote would help; there were several passages in the linked post. I take it you mean you have no respect for me on account of my sophistry, self-deception, equivocation and (scrolling back up to refresh my memory) stolen concepts. Ah well. My kids think I’m great.
Anyway, let’s not get personal (I have, after all, impugned your character not one whit). Now, about those fascists and their suppression of ID science …
Nope. Whether or not material cause and effects can be reduced down to the states and properties of smaller bits is entirely irrelevant to the point of whether or not whatever one is talking about is assumed to be the effect of something else where that cause and effect relationship can be described via physics.
It doesn’t matter if what one does can be described in terms of the properties of subatomic quanta or if such outcomes are predictable when one’s claim is that what one is, and what they do or think, is a computation (even if unpredictable, chaotic, etc.) of physical properties as the interact under the laws of physics.
Under physicalism or materialism, emergent properties do not escape physical law; they do not produce new physical laws. They may produce new commodities, but those new commodities are governed by the physical laws that already exist, and interact with other commodities accordingly. Nothing emergentism produces escapes being entirely caused by, and entirely governed by, physics.
IOW, to avoid the fundamental problems that are obvious under reductionism, you’ve only displaced those problems to a different column with a different name, as if moving the issue from the subatomic to the “emergent” somehow solves the issue.
So, “emergentism” is just a self-serving deception that addresses absolutely nothing of importance. If consciousness and qualia are emergent properties, so what? It doesn’t answer any significant problem, it just transposes it from atoms and subatomic quanta to whatever has “emerged”.
I’ve never talked about any such thing.
Attention troll is trolling.
William J. Murray,
Exactly as you have done. As I noted in a previous comment all you are doing is pushing back the very same problems in the same way.
When you make a decision in the “special place” what is it that happens there? By definition there must be some ordering of available data, a process that is followed to determine the “correct” answer and so forth. So, presumably, for the same situation your “special place” would give the same answer twice. It has internal logic and rules.
So it seems to me that because you don’t like the implications of having your decisions made solely by what goes on ‘inside your head’ you pass that responsibility off to the “special place” where the mere laws of physics don’t hold sway and your “soul answer” can replace a mundane answer derived via “mere physics”. All without thinking about what must be going on in that “other place” for the answers it produces to be used.
You’ve just replaced a clear(ish) box with an opaque one and claimed that you’ve solved a problem that has been around since people have been able to think about such things. Yet your solution is what? More of the same except as you can’t see in it it has the possibility that it’s not more of the same after all.
Believe what you will, but don’t also attempt to fool yourself at the same time eh William?
So, when I say what a person I is, and what they do, is commanded by physics, pointing at “emergentism” is a non-sequitur, unless you are claiming that some emergent property is not entirely caused and ruled by physics – the cause and effect interaction of physical properties under physical law, whether or not such interactions can be predicted or can be reduced to behaviors of constituent parts.
I’ve never said anything about a “special place”. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I can hardly bring myself to ask, but what significant problem do you consider to have been solved by your proposals? You just seem to be putting things in a box and because you can no longer see them you consider them to be resolved.
Oh, and I would consider the behaviour where the larger is unpredictable from the smaller to be significant indeed. I think you’ve mistaken this reality for the one that has all the easy answers, packaged up in a digestible format.
By putting “emerged” in scare quotes you seem to be saying that the fearful wonder of this universe is undermined unless you can get a simple answer to a complex question. That “emerged” is just another way of saying “I don’t know”. The strange thing is, that’s how I view you. You solutions to the ideas of consciousness etc seem to be just long winded ways of saying “I don’t know”.
So, yes, pressure “emerges” from the interaction of many things at a much smaller scale then we can readily appreciate.
You lack of wonder that such behaviours can “emerge” from what seem like substrates too simple to support such complex behaviours tells me that if a god does exist she’s going to be rather pissed at you dismissing the fine work that would have had to go into that.
“He put emerged in scare quotes? I’ll have him know none of the others in my class ever got biology to just emerge without leaving obvious tool marks all over the place – plays havoc with a race’s cultural development I can tell you!”
You can be satisfied with the easy answers if you like, personally I think that’d just be far too easy…
Wherever it is that the decision making process not bound solely by the physical information in this universe occurs. Call it what you like.
Your “palace of free will” then. You remember?
I don’t have free will according to you, but you do. So that place that you have access to that I don’t.
Please direct me to where I claimed you didn’t have free will.
It’s on this board. I asked you. You said no. If you really want a quote I can dig it up. Quote some time ago.
The problem of free will (and the cascading issues from there), which atheo-materialists keep attempting to solve via compatibalism, re-definition of terms, concept-stealing and “emergentism”, which originated in this thread where Dr. Liddle said:
And I responded:
Obviously, when Liz or KN refer to emergent properties, they think it solves what they are being challenged about in terms of reductionism. If the challenge was itself invalid, there’d be no reason to refer to something “greater than the sum of the parts” or “emergent properties”. The only thing they are escaping is the challenge of explaining the concept of not being commanded by physics to be what physics decrees, and doing what physics decrees, in terms of subatomic properties and interactions; they have not answered the challenge of how they are not “what physics commands” and do not do “what physics commands”.
“I” is a product of physics, and is entirely caused by physics, under physicalism or atheistic materialism, whether or not it is explicable in reductionist terms.
What theism offers is an uncaused resource that is not bound to “be” what physics commands, nor is bound to “do” what physics commands, in terms of prescription, not description. Under physicalism, physics prescribes what the I will be and is, and what the I will do; under theism, the essential I is not “prescribed” by physics, and what the I wills is not prescribed by physics.0
C’mon William, that thug-suppressed ID research isn’t going to find itself, is it?
Meantime, my spirit-homunculus is about to pull my levers and send me off down the pub. Did it decide freely? It likes beer, that’s for sure! 🙂
But this is what I keep asking about!
That “uncaused resource” has to have it’s own rules about how it works right? And those rules will give similar output for similar input, right?
So in what way have you sovled anything and not just pushed it back another level?
All you’ve got now is a physics-2 that theism operates under instead of the physics-1 that operates otherwise.
In what way does that solve any problem? It just pushes it back one level, exactly as you attack with your “emergent” scare quotes.
William,
but what significant problem do you consider to have been solved by your proposals?
If you believe that you’ve solved the problem of free will then why are you here instead of honing your paper? A Nobel is in the offing for sure!
Omagain,
And in your world “doesn’t sound like it to me” is the same as a claim that you do not have free will?