… I wonder if I could interest you in a little thought experiment, in the form of four simple questions:
1. Is it possible that we could discover an artifact on Mars that would prove the existence of extraterrestrials, without the presence or remains of the extraterrestrials themselves?
2. If yes, exactly what kind of artifact would suffice? Car? House? Writing? Complex device? Take your pick.
3. Explain rationally why the existence of this artifact would convince you of the existence of extraterrestrials.
4. Would that explanation be scientifically sound?
I would assert the following:
a. If you answer “Yes” to Question 4, then to deny ID is valid scientific methodology is nothing short of doublethink. You are saying that a rule that holds on Mars does not hold on Earth. How can that be right?
b. If you can answer Question 3 while answering “No” to Question 4, then you are admitting that methodological naturalism/materialism is not always a reliable source of truth.
c. If you support the idea that methodological naturalism/materialism is equivalent to rational thought, then you are obligated to answer “No” to Question 1.
Well, I can never resist a thought experiment, and this one seems quite enlightening….
1. Is it possible that we could discover an artifact on Mars that would prove the existence of extraterrestrials, without the presence or remains of the extraterrestrials themselves?
Yes. Well, strongly suggest, rather than prove. We don’t prove things in science.
2. If yes, exactly what kind of artifact would suffice? Car? House? Writing? Complex device? Take your pick.
Anything that looked like it was supposed to be for something. I take it that the thing doesn’t reproduce, because if it did, we’d be in the presence of an extraterrestrial.
3. Explain rationally why the existence of this artifact would convince you of the existence of extraterrestrials.
Well, if a thing looks like it was made for some purpose – maybe stones with a sharp edge, with no apparent non-intelligent mechanism for shaping them, or something with a regular shape (a rectangular polished monolith, for instance), again with no apparent non-intelligent mechanism for producing such a thing (crystalisation, for instance), or an intricate systematic pattern and movable parts (like the Antikythara Mechanism), then it would be reasonable to assume that some intelligent purposive agent made it to serve some purpose.
4. Would that explanation be scientifically sound?
Yes, I think so. It would involve generating hypotheses and testing them, including hypotheses about the possible function of the object, and what purpose it might serve its putative designer.
I would assert the following:
a. If you answer “Yes” to Question 4, then to deny ID is valid scientific methodology is nothing short of doublethink. You are saying that a rule that holds on Mars does not hold on Earth. How can that be right?
Well there are perfectly valid methodologies for inferring design from the presence of a non-reproducing object that appears to have been made to serve some extraneous purpose even if that purpose is obscure. And some aspects of ID methodology are relevant – if the thing seems to have some specialness about its form, yet does not itself reproduce, nor does it appear to be the result of some iterative process, such as crystallisation, or deposition, or indeed chemistry, than that might be a design indicator. Where ID methodology is invalid is in dismissing evolution as such an iterative process. It’s perfectly possible that self-reproducing things could be designed by external designers (though it’s not obvious that those designers could themselves be non-self-reproducing), but it’s not obvious that they have to be, which was Darwin’s point. And in any case, here we are not talking about a self-reproducing thing.
b. If you can answer Question 3 while answering “No” to Question 4, then you are admitting that methodological naturalism/materialism is not always a reliable source of truth.
Not at all. Scientific methodology (which is, by definition, naturalist) is perfectly capable of detecting design, with reasonable reliability, even in the absence of the designer.
c. If you support the idea that methodological naturalism/materialism is equivalent to rational thought, then you are obligated to answer “No” to Question 1.
Well, no, because there’s nothing in naturalism/materialism that prevents us from making a perfectly valid design inference. The issue, and I do wish ID proponents would get this, is not that inferring design is in principle non-scientific (forensic scientists and archaeologists do it all the time), but that the method that ID proponents use to infer design from biology is invalid – becauses they fail to take into account (or, if they do, do not specify how, or underestimate) the power of iterative mechanisms to produce entities with features that serve their own perpetuation.
Liz said:
Not true at all. They do not fail to take the iterative mechanism aspect of the phenomena in question into account; they rightly take it into account and ask if such an iterative process is sufficient in itself to produce what appears to be designed.
They also rightly ask if it is reasonable to think that the iterative mechanism itself is likely the result of design.
Specify how ….. what?
As far as “underestimating”, at least design theorists attempt to estimate the capacity and have assigned a value of the proposed limitation of such iterative processes to accomplish design (in terms of FSCO/I, or irreducible complexity). Darwinists flat assume such iterative processes are capable of virtually anything, without even the attempt to “estimate the capacity”.
One might disagree with the estimate, or how they reach their estimate, or how they define the parameters of the estimate, but they’re the only ones in the game attempting such an estimate.
No, on a technicality. We could find something that strongly suggests extraterrestrials, but I would not count that as proof. I might reach a tentative conclusion that it was from extraterrestrials, but that tentativity would be there. We should always be willing to consider other possibilities.
It’s hard to say a priori. Show me the artifact, and I will explain why I reached that tentative conclusion.
We see plants arising naturally, so they don’t look like artifacts. We see seeds being produced naturally, so those don’t look like artifacts.
I remember, as a child, being shown an artificial flower. It was made to look very like a natural flower. But it was always easy to tell natural from artificial.
I say “follow the money”. That is to say, try to work out who benefits from having this artifact.
If the “artifact” is a biological organism, then the main beneficiary is the organism itself. So that suggests self-design, which is roughly what evolution amounts to.
I don’t have a good definition of “scientifically sound”. The essence of science is questioning, being skeptical. It is presenting your ideas to others for thoughtful criticism, and re-evaluation in the light of new evidence. Those are the methods I would use, and they never lead to more than a tentative conclusion for that kind of question.
Not true. No meaningful figures emerge from the pseudo-scientific babble produced at length by Kairosfocus.
That really is the problem with ID.
They go to great lengths to argue that complex functional structures cannot arise by chance, but faile to demonstrate that they can’t arise by evolution.
The whole CSI thing is rubbish because it ignores evolution.
Behe is a shade smarter. He has actually tried to argue that evolution is insufficient. But every time he puts a number to the Edge of Evolution, nature demonstrates that his numbers are simply wrong.
Oh, they ask, But they say “no” without having actually taken it into account.
Which is a perfectly reasonable question. But not one to which they provided a supported answer.
Specify how ….. what?
Specify how to calculate the power of iterative mechanisms to produce entities with features that serve their own perpetuation. Dembski’s equation, which he says takes account of it, provides no way of calculating it. He just gives it an algebraic representation.
Wrong on two counts. No, Design theorist do not attempt to estimate the capacity. All they estimate is how likely it would be to happen given that capacity, which they do not estimate. As I said in my earlier post about Belling the Cat, they do not set up any way of calculating their null. Dembski at least acknowledges that the null has to include iterative mechanisms. KF doesn’t even seem to realise that.
And no, Darwinists do not “flat assume such iterative processes are capable of virtually anything”. You forget that it is ID proponents that are making the strong claim here – that the data indicate a Designer. “Darwinists” aren’t claiming that they don’t, although thet do claim that if there is a Designer, there are features that would indicate that the Designer used an iterative approach and for some reason did not re-use ideas from one lineage in another.
No, that is not what their calculations estimate. I can explain the math if you like.
Actually, I forgot about Behe. Yes, he does attempt to calculate it (unlike Dembski, and certainly unlike the rest of the alphabet-soup makers). But, as Petrushka says, his numbers are testable, and so far, wrong. Which is not surprising, because his math is also dodgy.
Two reasons why “design theory” really is pseudo-science:
(1) design theory conflates ‘inference to the best explanation’ with mere hypothesis generation, thereby neglecting the role of testing hypothesis. (Peirce, who is wonderfully insightful on this point, thinks of ‘the scientific method’ as involving abduction (his term for ‘inference to the best explanation’), and deduction, and induction. It’s a three-legged stool. Design theory wants to have only one leg and still call it science.)
(2) when design theory does attempt to test its inferences, it does so mathematically, but without noticing that the calculations are only as good as the assumptions they are built on. So if one assumes that the only alternative to “design” is “chance and necessity,” then one does indeed have a framework in which anything other than design is almost incoherent — as they often claim. The error lies in their assumptions, not in the conclusions drawn from those assumptions.
[Note: Paul Thagard has a really nice article, “Why Astrology is a Pseudo-science”, in which he argues that we can use the category “pseudo-science” without worrying about its necessary and sufficient conditions or about the demarcation problem.]
And those assumptions (isolated islands) contradict actual research.
Yes, the whole shell-game only works if one begins by assuming — as they do, sometimes explicitly — that “evolution” just means “chance” (or “chance and necessity”).
So here’s a way of perhaps showing what’s deeply wrong with design theory: showing that evolution, properly understood, does not amount to “chance and necessity”. This has, of course, been done, most notably (in my limited reading) by Orr’s critique of Behe. But it could stand to be done again, and maybe better. Because if evolution does not amount to chance and necessity (mere randomness plus physical laws), then Dembski is flatly wrong to assert that design is the only alternative to chance and necessity. (Interestingly, it would also show that Plato was wrong to make the same assertion, which he does in Timeaus.)
Have they ever read “Chance and Necessity”? Do they have a clue what the phrase means?
I don’t know why people apologize for the phrase.
Doubtful.
I have my own reasons for being highly suspicious of it, but I haven’t read Monod completely and carefully. It’s worth talking about, for sure!
I’m curious why an “evolutionist” would object.
We speak of mutations (regardless of type) as being blind with respect to need.
As there are different kinds of mutation, there are also different kinds of selection: positive, neutral, purifying.
The phrase chance and necessity is deliberately provocative. It invites discussion. It quickly separates those who are curious about nature from those who (in WJM’s terms) lack free will.
To borrow a phrase from Dembski, I think we are smuggling into this problem a great deal that we take for granted. If we substitute the phrase “human design” every time we see the word “design”, this clarifies our thinking. I would seriously doubt that we could identify anything truly alien as an artifact at all. I think it’s fatuous to project a human purpose (the only kind we know) onto some object and convince ourselves it HAS a purpose.
We could probably go so far as to say that we are unaware of any Martian processes from which some object might result. But question #2 gives it away: he lists human artifacts, and asks for identifiable alien analogies. To steal from Gordon Dickson, let’s say we stumble upon the artifact the alien uses to zorrgle his grob. How would our (extensive) HUMAN background knowledge help us even know this is an artifact at all?
So my answer to question #1 is, probably not. Even if we met the alien, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t know it (and neither would the alien!). The aliens themselves may reproduce in ways unguessable to us, and may not even be subject to evolution as we understand it. Identifying an actual alien artifact requires background knowledge we simply do not possess. The best we could do would be to presume enough similarity between the aliens and humans (or some other earthly critter) to make an educated guess. We might spend years trying to figure out how to communicate with unexpected Martian geology.
Hi Flint,
I disagree with a couple of the things you wrote.
You said:
We wouldn’t be relying solely on our knowledge of humans to identify something as an alien artifact. We’d also be relying on our knowledge of what nature can and cannot do when intelligence is not involved.
To invoke the IDers’ favorite example, I think we could identify Mt. Rushmore as an artifact even without any background knowledge of humans and their characteristics. Natural geological processes don’t produce surfaces with those shapes.
It takes geological knowledge to figure out that Mt. Rushmore is an artifact, not knowledge about humans.
Well, if they a) reproduce, b) vary, and c) pass the variations on to their offspring, then they are subject to Darwinian evolution. Nothing more is needed.
Unless the aliens themselves are designed, I think that Darwinian evolution is the only explanation for how they can get from OOL to the point where they are producing artifacts.
When they begin modifying their own genomes, their evolution starts looking a lot less Darwinian. At that point it’s still evolution, but with a turbo boost from intelligence.
No problem. I disagree with myself often enough.
Well, let’s disagree. If you drive around the Black Hills, you will find a lot of rock outcroppings, all with different and complex shapes. Some of them are very close to the (late) Old Man of the Mountain. But maybe you’re saying that you can apply some reliable metric, like fractals, and to the extent that your metrics are matched, we can determine it’s natural?
So we can reliably presume that geology works the same on other planets, or close enough? So that if we were to find a funny-looking rock formation different enough from some Standard Metric of Geological Variation (for that planet), we can reliably conclude that we’re looking at a deliberate carving? I suspect we’d get a LOT of false positives and false negatives.
But what if they no longer do so? What if, for example, they are a machine society that reproduces through unknown manufacturing techniques not involving inheritance, but rather redesign or whatever? What if the alien sculptors are nano-life shaping rock through geological-type processes to produce works of art? I’m always worried about aliens being like Star Trek aliens – humans painted green and given funny names.
So we would have to eliminate the possibility that we are looking at designed aliens, without any clue as to the background and history of the designs. LOTS of false positives and negatives.
Indeed. But the original question was, could we positively identify a designed alien artifact, knowing absolutely nothing about the nature of the aliens? I’m reminded by a story (Clifford Simak, I think) about some explorers who landed on a planet, and soon their equipment started to break down. Within a week, nothing worked. Nothing LOOKED wrong, but nothing worked. Now, was this the result of aliens themselves, or of the action of some unguessable alien device, or just something in the alien chemistry or whatever? You tell me!
I’d like to point out that we have an actual case history: the Martian face.
It would appear this thread has been seen on UD, and they want us to account for OOL. If we did that, we would no doubt have to account for the universe. It feels like old school gapsism. And that’s where the designer lives.
Fair enough. But in that case, they need to stop accusing kvetching on about poor old Darwin.
Also about CSI. They need to ditch Dembski, and apply Behe to OOL.
And either way, stop claiming that scientists infer that there was no Designer. Scientists assume that there was no designer, because, as no designer is in evidence, it seems a poor avenue for OOL research while chemistry seems a lot more promising. But if ID proponents want to hunt for evidence of a life-designer active around four million years ago, fine.
I have no problem, in principle, with the idea that the world was Designed. The problem I have with ID arguments is the fallacious inference that it was.
The appearance of design in biology, which is just about universally agreed to, is evidence of a designer, even if one shouldn’t accept such prima facie evidence as proof.
You need to read that phrase you abstracted in context, William.
I wrote:
Let me spell it out:
Right now we can explain the diversity and complexity of life as we observe it very well by Darwinian mechanisms, without need (although we cannot rule it out) for an intervening Designer, but those mechanisms depend on there being in place, in the first place, a population of Darwinian-capable self-replicators for which the modern DNA-tRNA-protein system was within reach.
So two unsolved questions are on the table:
To these questions, scientists say: “we don’t know”.
To these questions, ID proponents say: “a Designer must have done it”.
In response to which, I say: well, that’s one possibility, but there are also others, including properties of the chemistry, physics, and topology of early earth, and the possibility that RNA, which can both reproduce itself and act as catalyst, may have been an important intermediate stage. Moreoever, we have no evidence of a physical designer on early earth, but we do have promising evidence for a potentially life-generating environment. So where do we look first? Answer – the environment.
But you say: oh, but the appearance of design is evidence of a designer, which begs the entire question. Yes, it’s possible that it is. But it is also possible that it is not. And in the absence of independentevidence for an actual designer, the obvious strategy must be to pursue the possiblity of a non-design mechanism.
To rule out a non-design mechanism simply because you have decided, a priori, that the appearance of design is evidence of design, is to assume your consequent (something you often accuse me, erroneously, in my view, of doing :))
What you are, in effect, saying is: The appearance of design indicates a designer, because we don’t know of any non-design mechanism that can produce the appearance of design.
What we are saying is: The appearance of design may indicate a designer, but we know of many non-design mechanisms that can produce the appearance of design, including Darwinian mechanisms, and other iterative mechanisms such as crystalisation, even though we don’t know, specifically, how our putative ancestral self-replicators might have got started, and, if they did, how they got from what must have been a very simple initial form to the biological DNA-based forms we observe today. But we have some good ideas, so there is no good reason to stop looking, nor to infer Designer as the most probable answer.
I have to say, though, William, that I really do appreciate the fact that you come here and engage. That is so refreshing. And if it’s any comfort, it’s made me rethink my view of morality somewhat (not radically, I have to say, but I hadn’t properly taken in the implications of Randian “morality”).
In contrast, it is hard not to find it very annoying when Eric Anderson, for example, who doesn’t even seem to read this blog, responds to JoeG’s highly edited reports of what is said here with posts like this
I have to ask: why is it so hard for some people to step outside their own paper bag?
I was just thinking about this earlier, about how you (not just you, but certainly people on both sides of the argument) assume their premise true by arguing as if it is true, utilizing terminology that the other side holds as meaning something different.
For example, when you say you can “explain” biological diversity via Darwinian mechanisms – to an ID proponent, there is simply no way this can be true, given that when they look at it by assuming the Darwinist’s perspective, then because the Darwinist him/herself agrees that there is no metric available that can determine the limits of Darwinian (non-intelligent) evolution, one cannot say that Darwinian mechanisms and processes can “explain” the product.
It’s true that Darwinists have described processes that generate outcomes, but they haven’t vetted those processes as “Darwinistic”, by the ID use of the term, and it is only assumed that those processes are sufficient for the development of macroevolutionary features. IOW, there is no math that Darwinists have provided that can be used to falsify whether or not their Darwinistic processes are plausibly capable of generating any particular feature in any particular stretch of time.
There’s no way to vet the processes and mechanisms AS Darwinian (as IDists use the phrase) in the first place, according to Darwinists – they are just assumed to be Darwinian (as IDists use the phrase, as a placeholder for non-intelligent, which is often categorically denoted as chance & necessity).
The Darwinists often say, “there is no evidence of a designer” – but there is at least prima facie evidence of a designer, and the so-called “Darwinistic” mechanisms have not been vetted as capable of producing what they are claimed to have produced (in the contested cases).
Can you tell us, then, what metric we can use to vet whether or not a particular biological feature can be plausibly explained by Darwinism? IOW, if you’re going to argue that we have no metric by which we can vet a feature as not plausible without intelligence, where is your metric that shows that a feature is plausible without intelligence, given the prima facie evidence that the feature appears to have been designed?
If one is going to assert that something is explicable without intelligence, they cannot simply ride a de facto assumption and then shift the burden to others when challenged to support their positive assertion..
That’s simply untrue, Liz, and you should know this.
First, you have generated a false division that gives the impression that ID proponents are not scientists, betraying your (perhaps subconscious) biases. You put “scientists” in one category, and “ID proponents” in another. Are there no scientists that are ID proponents?
Come on, now.
And, as if there are no materialist scientists who say “unintelligent forces and materials must have done this”.
All the major ID proponents say “the most plausible current explanation is that these things were designed, conditional upon further information.”
That’s a fair criticism, William. Yes, there are a few. Not very good ones in my view, though.
OK, there are some of those too. But be careful you don’t mistake a working assumption with a philosophical conviction.
Yes, and that is faulty reasoning IMO.
And my point remains valid: that ID proponents make the strong claim that an ID is indicated by the data. ID opponents merely make the weak claim that ID is not indicated by the data. There is a huge difference.
You seem to be operating from a different definition of “evidence” and “appearance” than I am. I use the term “appearance” not “when it appears”, but rather what something looks like, as in prima facie evidence, or at first sight. Virtually no one disagrees that biological organisms appear (look) as if they are designed. This prima facie (at first glance) evidence; it is the evidence that can lead one to look into it more closely.
Because biological systems appear to be designed to virtually anyone is by itself prima facie evidence of a designer (I don’t know why you inserted “physical”; is there evidence of a non-physical designer you’re keeping from us?) – whether there is any other evidence or not that one existed when life came into existence.
All the information that I’ve been able to gather about “the environment” at any supposed time in the past is that it is generally considered, for the most part, inhospitable to the generation of life and inhospitable to its maintenance (after all, haven’t virtually all species that ever lived been killed off by natural selection?).
Perhaps a self-replicating difference machine could have been generated via lawful, unintelligent chemical processes; as far as I know of, there is no evidence that supports this as anything more than a bare hypothesis with “just so” stories – and, let’s remember, the prima facie evidence favors ID, not blind chemical interaction, just as the prima facie evidence favors ID when it comes to biological diversity – not unintelligent physical processes.
A lot of the early Darwinian arguments against ID were actually arguments for design – bad design, and evil design. IOW, it still looked like design, but not designed by an all-powerful and loving god. Those were/are arguments Darwinists made/make, and they are still couched in terms of the apparent design.
Now, I want to show you how an IDist interprets what you have said in this thread:
You said:
That’s a strong claim, which means to an IDist that you have demonstrated unintelligent forces to be a sufficient explanation; if it is not a sufficient explanation, it cannot be claimed to be an explanation “without need for an intervening Designer”.
I said:
You said:
You said:
You’ve made the strong claim above that your “Darwinian” explanation doesn’t require a designer – meaning, your explanation is sufficient. Yet you also claim that there is no (current) means by which to vet ID as a necessary part of the explanation, because you agree there is no metric that can make this determination.
IOW, you make the very same (if inversed) “strong claim” you attribute to IDists, yet are also without the very same (if inversed) metric you claim the IDist must have to support his/her claim – the metric you claim doesn’t exist.
IF there exists no metric by which the IDist can assert ID as necessary, then there exists no metric by which the Darwinist can assert ID as unnecessary. It’s the same (even if hypothetical) metric. Thus, you can have no grounds by which to claim Darwinian forces are “explanatory”.
Well there’s Michael Behe, the only tenured scientist who shows up in courtrooms to defend ID.
It seems significant to me that Behe doesn’t give much time to Axe’s argument and none at all to KF’s. Behe argues that there are just a few gaps requiring miracles. I’m sure if he thought the other ID arguments were convincing he has the credentials to raise them.
Behe and Axe are really the only people out there making the case for ID, and they rely entirely on the god of the gaps argument.
Actually, IMO the other academic making a half-way decent case for ID, although he’s not a scientist, is Nagel.
I don’t find it persuasive, but it makes some kind of sense.
What’s the difference between Nagel and Chardin? Or Michael Denton for that matter?
I see that Nagel has joined the chorus of evolution is doomed prognosticators. The death of Darwinism is just around the next corner.
Indeed.
Flint, Petrushka,
The Old Man of the Mountain and the Mars Face aren’t comparable to Mt. Rushmore. The OMM’s resemblance to a face depends entirely on viewing angle, and the Mars Face’s depends on the lighting angle. Neither appears designed when you look at it up close, from different angles, and under different lighting conditions, but Mt. Rushmore does.
Another favorite example of the IDers is Stonehenge. I agree with them that we would regard it as an artifact if we found it on another planet. Why? Because we know of no physical processes (apart from intelligent ones) that can hew stones of roughly equal size, arrange them upright in the pattern seen at Stonehenge, and line the whole thing up with the sun’s position on the solstice.
I think the IDers are right to claim that we could identify design in some cases, even if humans were not involved. Their mistake, as Lizzie points out in the OP, is in underestimating the power of Darwinian processes to produce things that might otherwise appear to be designed.
I agree with Keiths and Lizzie that we would classify such items as designed, but only because we would every reason to do so and no reason not to do so. That’s not quite the same thing as correctly identifying those items as designed — rather, we’d have no basis other than our own experience and knowledge to rely upon.
And while a serious misunderstanding of (and underestimation of) Darwinian processes is involved in the ID position, I also think that their view depends on a serious misunderstanding: that living things even so much as appear to be designed. If one is already in the grip of design theory, then one will be deeply impressed by the similarities between organisms and artifacts; if one is not, then one will be more sensitive to the differences.
The key difference, as far as I can tell, is that we KNOW Mt. Rushmore was designed, and we KNOW the Old Man of the Mountain and the Face On Mars were not. Close-up examination from multiple vantage points doesn’t change this.
I’m with KN here that deliberate design rather than natural processes would be the default, and we MIGHT be right more often than wrong. We would of course be presuming that there’s really no such thing as a truly alien geological process, based on our familarity with what we assume would be the physics and chemistry.
Except for those obviously artificial circular frost heaves, of course. The point being, we might be hard pressed to construct a natural cause for really alien natural causes.
KN,
We never have anything other than our own knowledge, experience, and reason to rely upon, and there is always the possibility that we are mistaken.
To someone who doesn’t know about evolutionary theory, design is not a bad explanation for the complexity of living things. That is why I say that I probably would have been a theist (or a deist) had I lived before Darwin.
The problem is that IDers generally don’t recognize (or don’t want to recognize) how much better evolutionary theory is at explaining the data.
Perhaps one could identify design by non-humans, but I don’t think it is possible to do so without making some assumptions about the nature and capabilities of the designers. That is another mistake often made by intelligent design creationists.
Actually, we don’t know that the Old Man in the Mountain and the Mars Face weren’t designed. We think they weren’t designed because nothing about them seems to be out of the reach of normal geological processes.
I maintain that Mt. Rushmore would look designed even to someone who had no prior knowledge of its origin, as would the Easter Island moai.
Well, we already have strong evidence that the laws of physics and chemistry are the same throughout the observable universe.
Also, in inferring the design of a Mt. Rushmore or Stonehenge-like site on an alien planet, we would not be assuming that “alien” geologic processes don’t exist. We’d merely be comparing the likelihood of the following two explanations:
a) this Mt. Rushmore- or Stonehenge-like thing was designed; vs.
b) there happens to be an unknown but highly specific alien geological process that hews stones, props them upright in a circular pattern, and aligns the whole arrangement to local seasonal indicators; or one that carves symmetrical faces into rock, leaving tailings that look like they were produced by targeted explosions and jackhammer impacts.
Hypothesis a) seems far, far likelier to me.
Patrick,
Well, to claim that something is designed is obviously to claim that the designer(s) had the ability to design it, but beyond that, I don’t think you need to assume anything.
As I explained to Flint above, you are really judging the relative likelihood of two hypotheses:
a) X was designed; or
b) X was produced by physical processes (apart from intelligent ones — brains operate according to physical law, of course).
If X seems to be within reach of intelligent causes, as in the case of an alien Mt. Rushmore or an alien Stonehenge, but out of reach of unintelligent physical processes, then I think design is a reasonable inference.
Where the nature and capabilities of the designer(s) come into play is when you are trying to decide whether a specific designer (or category of designers) is responsible for something, as when IDers implicitly or explicitly invoke God as the Designer.
In that context, the immediate question that arises is “If God is the designer, why did he make it look exactly as if unguided evolution were operating?”
IDers seem very reluctant to tackle that question.
It seems to me that the design inference cannot be tested without making some assumptions about the nature and identity of the designer, because one needs to introduce some assumptions about what the designer intended, what limitations it faced, what resources it had, and so on. So the very move that the design theorists make in order to ensure that they fall on the ‘science’ side of the science/religion dichotomy by abstaining from identifying the designer as God (“whatever you do, don’t mention the war!”) also, at the same time, prevents them from testing their inference, and so the design inference fails to count as science, either.
What this shows, among other things, is that science/religion is a false dichotomy — just because ID isn’t explicitly religious, doesn’t mean it gets to be scientific by default. It is, instead, a piece of metaphysics — and indeed, a metaphysical speculation with a long and honorable heritage that goes back to ancient Greece — but whatever its merits, it cannot be tested and so can’t count as an empirical theory.
I agree with your model of two competing hypotheses, but I think that your term “intelligent causes” would be better phrased if it reflected intelligence that we, as humans, can recognize. One significant flaw with some IDCist arguments is that they try to generalize from human design and human intelligence to abstract design and abstract intelligence. Unfortunately for those arguments, human design and human intelligence reflect the nature and capabilities of humans.
If aliens are not sufficiently like us that we can relate to their designs and intelligence, it’s quite possible that we would be incapable of recognizing their artifacts as being artificial.
Then again, maybe I read too much science fiction.
keiths,
I have no problem agreeing with you about Mt. Rushmore, because it shows every indication of a human process applied for human purposes. It is not alien.
But as Lizzie and others have argued, the boundaries of what constitutes an “intelligent” process are fuzzy. Is a watershed intelligently designed? After all, it follows rules. Now, let’s suppose some unknown aliens designed a watershed in accordance with their unguessable purposes. Would we be able to identify that watershed as an arficially designed artifact? Or more to the point, how likely would we be to guess correctly whether it was not intelligently designed? Could we do better than 50-50?
The “strange maybe-an-artifact that may or may not have been built by some superadvanced civilization in the very distant past” is a standard science fiction trope, which works because our interpid human explorers do not know even if such aliens ever existed, much less their tools or psychology or history or purposes.
One FTL mechanism commonly used is “jump points” between locations A and B. And the question always arises, are these points a side-effect of gravity wells on space-time, or are they leftover alien constructs. Again, the neat point is that there is no way to know.
Maybe we can paraphrase Clarke and say that anything sufficiently alien is indistinguishable from natural.
We do know something of what is being claimed regarding the designer’s capabilities. We know from KF’s computations that the designer knows where the islands of function are, and we know that any database capable of storing this quantity of information would exceed the particle count of the universe. So the candidate list is short.
I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or not.
Flint, Patrick, Kantian Naturalist,
Flint writes:
I’m certainly not claiming that we could successfully identify every instance of alien design. We’re not even always able to do that with human design, particularly if the artifact in question is designed to look natural.
But remember, Englishman in Istanbul’s original question was whether there was any kind of an artifact that, if we found it on Mars, would cause us to infer design. My answer to that question is yes.
You’re asking a different question, which is “Would we recognize every alien artifact we came across as designed?” My answer to that is no.
Patrick writes:
That would be true if the design inference worked like this:
But I don’t think it works like that. This is more like it:
The only question you’re asking in that case is about the capabilities of undirected natural causes. You don’t need to know anything about designers, human or otherwise, to answer it.
Kantian Naturalist writes:
I would say no, for the same reasons I just gave to Patrick.
The problem isn’t their reluctance in identifying the designer. If we found something on Mars that looked like Stonehenge, I would accept that it was designed despite knowing absolutely nothing about the designer(s). Wouldn’t you?
This is a great idea for creationism. As good as the watch in the woods thing. It hits home about design equaling designer equal desire to find space beings.
the clear complex thing as opposed to the possibility of nature without intent creating same is the great evidence for a creator. The bible says this.
To say the complex thing is created by nature without intent must go a long way to persuade anyone.
its not good evough for unlikely hypothesis like evolution to create the glory of the immune system or the liver idea.
i think we win.
I’d suggest not. There is very little “official” information available from the IDers about the capabilities of the designer. So it has to be inferred indirectly from their claims. And this is one of them.
If there is only one needle in a universe sized haystack….
We also know, for example, that the UD “designer” can simply “know” somehow which protein out of all the available proteins will do the job, first time. Yet that same designer cannot see that it’s creations, almost without exception, go extinct. Seems odd.
You really should know your own resources, Byers.
Paley’s putative watch was “on the heath”
And no, you don’t win.
You don’t win because I can tell you exactly how to make a watch – how to smelt and alloy the metals, shape and assemble the parts, what tools to use, and so on. And I’ll show you the workshop where I did it
You can’t tell me how to assemble the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other atoms that go to make up a living cell, nor what tools and methods were used, nor where it was done.
“Poof!” wins nothing, Byers
If you are going to assert design by means other than evolution you need to demonstrate that it is possible.
That’s a good summary of Dembski’s Explanatory Filter, but it highlights its fatal flaw, namely that design is the default. As others have pointed out, a conclusion of intelligent design requires positive evidence for the involvement of an intentional agent. That is:
As nicely articulated by Kantian Naturalist, addressing step 2 requires “. . . making some assumptions about the nature and identity of the designer, because one needs to introduce some assumptions about what the designer intended, what limitations it faced, what resources it had, and so on.”