In a recent UD post, Gil has been more specific than he often is, so I thought I would respond here:
The resolution of the debate about the creative powers of natural selection is dead simple and utterly trivial to figure out.
- Natural selection throws stuff out. Throwing stuff out has no creative power.
- Existing biological information, mixed and matched, can be filtered by natural selection, as in sexual reproduction, but nothing inherently new is created.
- Random errors can produce survivability quotients, but only in circumstances in which overall functional degradation supports survival in a pathological environment (e.g., bacterial antibiotic resistance), and only given massive probabilistic resources and a few trivial mutational events capable of producing the survival advantage.
- Random errors are inherently entropic, and the more complex a functionally-integrated system becomes, the more destructive random errors become. Anyone with any experience in even the most elementary engineering enterprise knows this.
To his first, I cite this:
To the second, I say: why not? Every mutation is something new, and that can be “mixed and matched” as well as “existing information”.
To the third, I say: this is simply not the case.
To the fourth, I say: this assertion assumes that the biological landscape is as rugged as the engineering landscape. It clearly is not. Engineered artefacts are usually highly vulnerable to slightly alterations – A stuck screw can render an entire motorcycle worthless, as Robert Pirsig noted. This is not the case with biological organisms, which countless slight variants are perfectly viable, as is evidenced by the fact that although all children (including even monozygotic twins) are unique, most are viable.
Therefore this:
Yet, we are expected by Darwinists to believe that throwing a sufficient number of monkey wrenches into the complex machinery of living systems, over a long enough period of time, can turn a microbe into Mozart.
Is not unreasonable at all 🙂
How was it determined that evolution is stochastic?
1- UB is not making that error
2- You can say Michelangelo created David by throwing stuff out, all you want. It does NOT make it so
What makes is so is that it is a statue carved from a block of marble. Nothing was added to that block of marble to make the statue, only removed.
I did not say “merely”.
Really, a fascinating case study in how a creationist denies the self-evident. First, he changes the subject. When that doesn’t work, he modifies statements to say something they didn’t say originally. When that doesn’t work. he just simply denies even the most obvious facts. When that doesn’t work, he repeats the denial. Over and over. When asked questions, he either ignores them, answers something that wasn’t asked, or rearranges the question into something stupid and answers that.
This is a lot like “reasoning” with a tired 2-year-old.
So if I just remove pieces of marble from a block of marble I will get a statue of David?
Merely throwing stuff out is what Gil is talking about.
“What makes is so is that it is a statue carved from a block of marble.”
CARVED- NOT thrown out …
And not even your own two year old, or even a cute one.
So what’s the point of trying to reason with him? For all the talk of creationists being irrational, trying to have a discussion with someone who has demonstrated countless times that they won’t/don’t get it is the most irrational thing I see here.
Sholom
And not even your own two year old, or even a cute one.
So what’s the point of trying to reason with him? For all the talk of creationists being irrational, trying to have a discussion with someone who has demonstrated countless times that they won’t/don’t get it is the most irrational thing I see here.
On other C/E forums Joe G posts this garbage on he’s been told to go take a flying f**k at a rolling donut, or outright banned, or both.
Why Dr.Liddle allows him to keep disrupting conversations with his childish rants and brainless repetitive one-liners is beyond me.
I’m aware of cases where creationists show up to heckle, harrass, hijack, and otherwise trash every thread they can get into, with the goal of getting banned so that they can return to their creationist sites and claim censorship (which is roundly applauded by the only people permitted to post on those sites). But I don’t think Joe G has the brains to be that devious, and in any case Elizabeth has set aside a couple of special threads just for such folks.
But a while back Gil Dodgen himself tried to convert everyone here, and basically got his logical and evidential hat handed to him. Unlike Joe, Gil has enough intelligence to realize that on a level playing field, he had no hope of winning any debates on the merits, so he ran back to UD where he posts the kind of nonsense extracted to create this thread, without fear of intelligence on the part of anyone there.
There’s a very good reason why Joe should be allowed to display his ignorance. here, and that’s because it’s one of the few places he posts where intelligent people can engage him. So it’s all on record.
You can’t do this on UD, because intelligent people get banned. You could do it on UD, but the rules of engagement there allow name calling, so the arguments tend to lose focus. As much as I like ATbC, I find it a difficult place to learn stuff, because The posters tend not to explain things.
I understand why. They’ve been through it a thousand times and are bored.
There have been other forums where Joe and his tribe have had their heads handed to them, but this one is currently hot, because of it’s history with UD, and by extension, Dembski.
No, they don’t. They have been quite clear that they don’t. And they have been quite clear on what the sculpting was intended to illustrate.
That leaves you as being thoroughly dishonest.
WJM: But then, for Darwinists, there is no difference between the production of David, or the production of a pile of rocks after an avalanche; they are equal outcomes of chance – everything is reducible to chance.
What spectacular misunderstanding of the statements of any *Darwinists* on this blog! The only thing more spectacular is the level of misunderstanding of the concepts of proximate and ultimate causes. A proximate cause for phenomenon X is not *reducible to* an ultimate cause for phenomenon X. I suggest that you read up on the concept of proximate and ultimate causes (in the biological, sociological, ordinary-every-day, or your favorite: philosophical sense – makes no difference; neither concept is compatible with your interpretation). Both ultimate and proximate causes are links in a chain of factors. A cause is called proximate when it is immediately close to the event of interest. In the same chain, a cause is called ultimate when it both precedes the proximate cause and lies at the specific level of interest for causation. Proximate causes are ultimate causes from a different perspective of investigation (when the chain is investigated forward from the cause in question), and vice versa (when the chain is investigated backward from the cause in question. Events in such a chain are caused by prior events in the same chain, not *reducible to* them. I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean. I can ask “Why did the ship sink?” The answer may be:”Because it had a hole beneath the waterline (proximate cause)”. I can further ask: “Why is there a hole?” The answer may be: “Because the ship hit a rock (ultimate cause)”. It makes no sense to say that the hole beneath the waterline is reducible to the ship hitting a rock. It does make sense to say that the hole beneath the waterline is caused by the ship hitting a rock.
As far as I can tell, that’s all anyone has been saying: Action X was caused by the intent of a human. The intent of this human was / may have been caused by non-intentional events. Nothing is being reduced to anything here.
For someone regularly trying to hang your hat on logic as a presumed substitute for scientific understanding, you demonstrate over and over a remarkable lack of sound logical reasoning.
To what extent is this misunderstanding purposeful I wonder? In other words, WJM, have you realised you’ve lost the “proximal” argument and are now retrenching in your last epistemological bastion?
To be fair, WJMs unique sophist philosophy allows him to pick and choose in the most arbitrary and capricious ways what he chooses to believe without the need for justification.
What intelligent people are engaging me here? Please be specific.
BTW the reason evos do not explain things is because they can’t.
Yes Neil,
It is quite clear that Elizabeth’s use of David to try to refute Gil is a tad dishonest.
Gil responds to Lizzie:
Gil’s response
When someone repeats the same false accusations after repeated correction by multiple people, it becomes pretty difficult to believe that they are posting in good faith. After enough such corrections, willful dishonesty is really the only viable explanation. The possibility of simple stupidity to that degree would preclude being able to post at all – or even feed oneself!
Once again I’m reminded of Molly Ivins’ “military denier”, someone who can look you in the eye, tell you you’re not there, and sincerely believe it! I suppose it’s possible that we’re looking at the selective suspension of sanity. Maybe Elizabeth can tell us more about forebrain and hindbrain influences.
skin Flint-
For once you are correct- so why do evos continually post false accusations after repeated corrections?
Joe: “How was it determined that evolution is stochastic?”
Random Mutation and ….
Man…it took awhile to parse William’s posts, but I’ve finally figured out what he’s actually trying to argue – it’s the “hydrogen to humans” argument from incredulity.
Basically, William can’t accept that natural processes such as gravity and motion along with the basic material components such as hydrogen, helium, and lithium could ever lead to self-structured purposeful systems such as the human (or other organism) mind. That’s really what his ranting boils down to.
William, it’s pretty simple – emergent properties allow for the creation of all sorts of higher lever, complex system interactions. There’s nothing magical about that and no “ultimate” purpose is required. My typing here is indeed purposeful, but there’s nothing about that that requires a succession of purposeful conditions and events; my purposes are merely the emergent product of memory, analytical neurological processing, and sensory input. Those systems are emergent properties of chemo-electrical processing, which in turn is emergent from basic chemistry and physics and so on down the line.
Evidence, Robin. You can spew all you want but until you have some supporting evidence all it is is a rant.
And did nature produce gravity?
Joe is perfectly right. Materialists have NO EVIDENCE that Michelangelo threw anything out. For all we know the marble chips are still in the universe somewhere.
And, it just kinda struck me: the David statue wouldn’t be quite the same if Michelangelo hadn’t kept a few bits (or at least one big one).
Therefore God.
P.S.: Joe, here is a bunny for you.
@Robin:
…my purposes are merely the emergent product of memory, analytical neurological processing, and sensory input.
You’re composing your post. Consciously and intentionally (as far as you are aware), you choose to type the letter “m”, then “y”, then the space character, then p-u-r-p-o-s-e-s, etc.
Are your actions (pressing certain keys in a specific order) products merely of law (“the laws of nature”, “the laws of science”), without any non-physical realities in play? Does physical law completely determine your self-perceived “choices”? If so, isn’t “choice” or “purpose” a poor word to describe why you, consciously and intentionally (as far as you know), pressed the letters you did in the sequence you did? Was your post in fact an emergent property of a mindless universe?
Are your actions products of chance (stochastic processes)? If so, in what sense might you justifiably ascribe purpose to them?
If your actions are products neither of law nor chance, what produced your actions?
Kent_D:
You may have missed the discussions earlier about the difference between proximate purpose (choosing the right letters in the right order) and ultimate “chance” (that is, you are the product of a muilti-billion-year feedback process subject to the constriaints of physics and chemistry).
The post emerges from proximate purpose. You do not.
Ahhh…but as I noted, my actions are not merely the products of “law”, but also of emergent properties. Emergent properties are not products of law – that is to say that the texture and form and characteristics of water is not simply a some component of either hydrogen or oxygen or even a law of their coming together. The fact that table salt has the taste it does is not simply some physical component of chloride or sodium (and I dare say you don’t want to test that claim by licking some sodium and then some chloride). No, the taste of table salt and the texture of water ’emerge’ as unique characteristics of the constructs themselves. Similarly, my “purposes” – my intentions and willful actions are emergent properties from the series of complex systems that make up my biological structure. My actions are not simply products of stochastic processes – although certain stochastic processes underlie the basic foundations of most of my biology – but rather are products of the emergence of “intent” that comes from the incredibly fast interaction of memory, sensory stimulus, and analytical processing.
I think purpose is a perfectly fine word to use to describe intentional actions, but I’m open to some other word if someone has one.
How do you know they haven’t?
I think what Kent would like is an explanation of what free will and conciousness are, nature unveiled so to speak.
Me too. And so?
In what sense do you ascribe purpose to your actions Kent?
What is the purpose of your actions, ultimately?
Hindbrain? Is that a euphemism for butt-head?
What do you mean, exactly, by “non-physical realities”?
Does anyone still care about the OP?
What’s interesting about Gil’s post is that his misrepresentation of natural selection in point 1 follows from his assertion of genetic entropy à la Sanford in points 2-4.
A number of people have asked why the old-earth IDCists would associate with a YEC like Sanford. Dembski and Marks argue that Darwinian evolution does not create biological information, and they are more than open to Sanford’s claim that mutations generally destroy it. Sanford says that life could not have been created long ago, given the rate of genetic entropy. Dembski and Marks would counter that Divine Intelligence has been adding information — “No-one knows the [means] for this, but it’s probably quantum” — to sustain life.
Marks says in the interview I link to here [40:00],
So I what I’ve said is not too big a stretch.
Darwin described natural selection in terms of beneficial, deleterious, and neutral variations in the Origin:
Well, of course “genetic entropy” has no useful operational definition. So as usual, it’s determined by working backwards. Evolution can’t work, god said so. Therefore, mutations can’t provide any useful improvements, because if they could, evolution would work and it can’t. But if mutations make things worse and keep happening, why are there still monkeys? Aha, it’s because the creationist god keeps injecting “mute-away” into all organisms to counteract the deleterious effects of mutation and generate the Crown of Creation, namely creationists themselves.
Assuming your conclusions as your postulates always comfortably leads straight to your conclusions, in a nice airtight logically inevitable sort of way.
Flint,
You should trademark “Mute-Away” and lease it back to the creationists as a talking point!
You’ll be rich Flint, rich!! 🙂
@Robin:
I’m not sure what the word “emerge” means, as you use it. Do you perhaps mean “become evident” or “come to the surface”, or do you imply something stronger, like “come into being”? Or something else?
How would you compare and contrast the term “property”, as you’re using it, with “event” or “occurrence”? (To me, the act of pressing a key on a keyboard is an event. Granted, it may be an aggregate of many events, but taken as a single act, it is an event. An event is active; it is something that happens, not merely something that is.)
No, the taste of table salt and the texture of water ‘emerge’ as unique characteristics of the constructs themselves.
But do the properties emerge deterministically? Are their respective properties invariably the same whenever salt and water are produced?
Is the post that you typed an emergent property?
I’m fairly certain I’m not tracking your line of thought — maybe I’m being dense. Any help would be appreciated.
Actually, it would be “mute-toward,” given the Dembski-Marks preoccupation with “hitting the target.”
Sanford is unusual. He was an old-earther for a long time before turning YEC. As best I can recall, the problem is not that he’s making stuff up about mutation rates, but that he’s leaving crucial stuff out (e.g., the effects of recombination). People have told him that, and it seems to me that he simply keeps saying what he’s been saying — no rhetorical evasion that I know of.
Here’s a ™ to add in edit, Flint. Hurry!
Gil who?
@OMTWO:
If you expect an unveiling of the essence of nature from me, you’re going to be disappointed.
In what sense do you ascribe purpose to your actions Kent?
In the literal sense. I believe that my choices are meaningful and significant. My decisions do not originate in the material world, nor is my volition a function of physical processes. I may depend upon physical processes to express my choices, but my choices are not physical.
The possibility of meaningful communication relies upon free will — the capacity to consciously do this, but not some mutually exclusive that. Any world view that denies free will, either on axiomatic or inferential grounds, must also deny rationality, and the possibility of meaningful communication. If free will is denied on axiomatic grounds, such a world view is stillborn; if on inferential grounds, it is suicidal.
(BTW, “free will” as I use it here has virtually nothing to do with the Calvism vs. Arminianism debate within the Christian church.)
What is the purpose of your actions, ultimately?
My own purpose for my actions? To borrow from the Westminster Shorter Catechism: My “chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.“
@Patrick:
What do you mean, exactly, by “non-physical realities”?
I mean things that might really exist (even if only for the sake of argument), like a deity, or some entity beyond what would normally be considered the purview of science, but an entity which might nevertheless impinge upon the physical universe. I.e., any entity denied my materialists on axiomatic grounds. (I was not, at that point, claiming that non-physical realities exist. I was just trying to clarify, for my own benefit, what Robin was saying.)
Kent_D,
Then where do your decisions originate?
If your brain dies, does your mind continue to exist?
@Flint:
I understand what the words “proximate” and “ultimate” mean. However, I do make a distinction between “cause” and “purpose”. A cause may or may not be intelligent. A purpose is always intelligent, in the sense that only an intelligence can exercise will; only a sentient, rational, volitional being has the capacity to choose to bring about a desired end or goal.
There is no room for ultimate purpose in a materialistic universe; the universe is what it is because it…just is. There is no intelligence, either anterior to the universe, or behind it, or immanent within and over it. There is, of course, an ultimate cause for the universe. Maybe that cause is within science’s reach, or maybe it is forever beyond science’s reach. But we can rest assured that, whatever the cause, it is not intelligent choice. The universe is purposeless, in the most literal sense of that word. So argues the materialist. I confess — it is a noble sentiment:
Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.
(Bertrand Russell, from “A Free Man’s Worship”)
That is what I mean by a suicidal world-view.
The post [Robin’s TSZ post] emerges from proximate purpose. You do not.
On the contrary. We human beings all emerge as a consquence of ultimate purpose. And I mean really ultimate purpose, beyond which causally nothing at all exists.
“In the beginning was the Word…” But I stray outside the domain of science…
@Toronto:
…where do your decisions originate?
In my spirit; in the immaterial part of my being. The expression of my decisions in this physical world may rely on mechanisms like the nervous system. But that doesn’t make the origin of my decisions material. Will (volition) is immaterial, just as information is.
If I die, or my brain dies, my spirit (which includes the mind) does continue to exist. This, of course, is not a scientific conclusion. But then, science is impotent to address your question.
Kent, WJM, and others here who believe that humans can’t have a purpose unless the universe does,
Say you were conceived by accident. Your parents didn’t have you on purpose. Therefore you can never do anything on purpose, right? (since your proximate cause was chance).
If you disagree with that statement, how is that different than postulating that we can only be purposeful we were all purposefully created by god?
Kent,
You responded to the question “Where do your decisions originate?” with “In my spirit; in the immaterial part of my being.” (Sorry, I can’t get block quotes to work here.)
Do you have any empirical evidence for the existence of such a thing?
You went on to say “The expression of my decisions in this physical world may rely on mechanisms like the nervous system.”
This suggests that there is some mechanism by which your “immaterial spirit” can interact with physical reality. What evidence do you have that such an interaction is taking place? What is the nature of this mechanism?
@Sholom:
I’m more interested in ultimate purposes than proximate purposes. An unplanned pregnancy may have been unintended from the parents’ point of view, but might well fall within the plan of somebody farther up the purposive chain, so to speak.
It is one thing to have a purpose, but quite another thing to be intended or “wanted”, and to owe my existence to that intent.
———-I’m more interested in ultimate purposes than proximate purposes———
There is not necessarily a problem with this, but in practice people assuming an ultimate purpose find it congenial to adopt a truly perverse posture toward observational evidence. In severe cases, they look at objects and they SEE purpose, as though it were an attribute of the object like color or mass. And if no purpose is required and no evidence of a purpose can be found, they PROJECT one, which overrides what’s actually there.
So the default for most people here is, assume no purpose unless some immediate, proxmate purpose can be established. And do not extend that purpose beyond the immediate without solid evidential reason.
And for the ID folks, it’s just the opposite. ASSUME purpose without evidence, and since evidence is not involved, this assumption can never be “wrong”. Purpose becomes its own justification, the purpose of purpose is purpose! And tight circular reasoning is impossible to penetrate.
@Patrick:
Do you have any empirical evidence for the existence of such a thing?
If my making decisions counts as empiricial evidence, then I do. But there are many things which I believe without empirical proof, and I have no problem with that. (Many of the axioms of science, for example, including the validity of logical reasoning.)
What evidence do you have that such an interaction is taking place?
The facts that I think rationally, that I have self-awareness, and that I communicate meaningfully as an exercise of free will are all evidence (on the assumption that I have a spirit) that there is a mechanism by which my spirit can interact with the physical component of myself. That such an interface exists seems a reasonable inference.
I do not find the inference that mind can arise from purely material processes to be credible.