There are numerous definitions of naturalism. Here is one definition with some additional observations from infidels.org:
As defined by philosopher Paul Draper, naturalism is “the hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system” in the sense that “nothing that is not a part of the natural world affects it.” More simply, it is the denial of the existence of supernatural causes. In rejecting the reality of supernatural events, forces, or entities, naturalism is the antithesis of supernaturalism.
As a substantial view about the nature of reality, it is often called metaphysical naturalism, philosophical naturalism, or ontological naturalism to distinguish it from a related methodological principle. Methodological naturalism, by contrast, is the principle that science and history should presume that all causes are natural causes solely for the purpose of promoting successful investigation. The idea behind this principle is that natural causes can be investigated directly through scientific method, whereas supernatural causes cannot, and hence presuming that an event has a supernatural cause for methodological purposes halts further investigation.
http://infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/naturalism/
For the purposes of this discussion, I’m not going to be too insistent on particular definitions, but it seems to me this captures the essence of naturalism: “More simply, it [naturalism] is the denial of the existence of supernatural causes.”
Personally, I’d be on the side of naturalists or at least agnostic if I felt the origin of life question were satisfactorily resolved. So although I have sympathy for the naturalistic viewpoint, I find insistence on it too closed-minded. I don’t think reality operates in a completely law-like, predictable fashion, it only does so mostly, but not always.
The word “natural” can be equivocated to death and is often equated with “ordinary” or “typical” when it should not be. So if someone insists that naturalism is true but wishes to also be fair with the facts and avoid such equivocations, when they comment on the origin of life, they might say:
The origin of life was an atypical and unique event far from ordinary expectation, but many of us presume it happened naturally since supernatural events are not observed in the lab.
That would be the an accurate way to characterize the state of affairs, but this not what is usually said by advocates of naturalistic origins of life. Most origin-of-life proponents insinuate that the origin of life event was not terribly extraordinary, that OOL fits well within “natural” expectation, even though by accepted laws of physics and chemistry and current knowledge, such an event violates the ordinary (dare I say “natural”) expectation that non-living things stay non-living.
Turning to evolution, if someone insists on naturalism, but is at least fair with our present day knowledge, they might say:
It is NOT typical for something as complex as an animal to emerge from a single-celled organism, but we presume it happened naturally since animals share some DNA with single celled creatures.
Again, that would be the an accurate way to characterize the state of affairs, but this is not what is usually said by advocates of naturalistic evolution of life from the first cell. Evolutionists insinuate that the necessary events to evolve an animal from a single cell must not have been terribly extraordinary because animals and single-celled creatures share some similar DNA — the idea is insinuated even though it is a non-sequitur because something can share DNA via extraordinary or atypical events, at least in principle.
Darwin and his supporters argue that most evolution of complex function proceeded via a mechanism which Darwin labeled “natural selection”. However, if Darwin’s claims actually entail highly atypical events rather than ordinary ones, then his label of “natural selection” for how things evolved would be a false advertising label. If major evolutionary changes require highly atypical events, then “highly atypical events almost indistinguishable from miracles” would be a far more appropriate label for Darwin’s proposed mechanism of evolution. Instead, Darwin’s label of “natural” is presumptuous and unproven at best and completely false at worst. For all we know, natural selection prevents major evolutionary change. Michael Lynch points out:
many genomic features could not have emerged without a near-complete disengagement of the power of natural selection
Michael Lynch
opening, The Origins of Genome Architecture
Many? How about most? No one knows for sure, and thus Darwin’s label of “natural” for “natural selection” is presumptuous. For all we know the correct theory of evolution could be “evolution of significant novel forms by highly exceptional events”.
Animals and single-celled creatures share some DNA, but from all that we know, the transition from single-celled creatures to something as complex as a multi-cellular animal is highly atypical and so far from natural expectation that something of that order of change might likely not happen again in the history of the universe.
If naturalism can accommodate any atypical or extraordinary event as a matter of principle, no matter how improbable, then naturalism can accommodate events that would otherwise be indistinguishable from miracles.
Whether there is a theological dimension with atypical events is a separate question. Can there be an event atypical enough that it warrants supernatural explanations? That’s a philosophical question with probably no formal resolution.
Proponents of naturalistic emergence of biological complexity desperately pretend the sequence of necessary events are not atypical, but rather within the realm of ordinary expectation. Hence they try to render the question of supernatural origins as moot as the question of whether supernatural causes are needed to make ice melt on a hot day.
But imho, efforts to characterize emergence of biological complexity as “not that out of the ordinary” are failing. The more we learn of life’s complexity the more it seems highly atypical events were involved to create them. Perhaps these events were so atypical that they are virtually indistinguishable from miracles of supernatural creation.
I’m certainly not alone in those sentiments:
If we do not accept the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, then at this one point in the history of evolution we must have recourse to the miracle of a supernatural creation
Ernst Haeckel, 1876
Pasteur’s experiments and those followed from 1862 disproved spontaneous generation. Ernst Haeckel’s 1876 quote shows how false ideas like spontaneous generation die a slow death. Haeckel’s quote symbolizes how naturalism seems inherently uncomfortable with anything that suggests a highly atypical event actually happened somewhere in the past.
Things that happen 1 in 2 times, happen half the time.
Things that happen 1 in 10.000 times, happen 1 in 10.000 times.
Things that happen 1 in 10^10^10^150 times, happen 1 in 10^10^10^150 times.
… so what? None of those would be evidence against naturalism.
Thank you for the comment. I’m obviously quicker to accept a miracle as an explanation than you are. I respect your viewpoint, although it is not one I hold.
The collision that (probably) created earth’s moon was highly atypical, and it fits with, well, science. I don’t find “naturalism” to be meaningful or helpful for much except as it’s better understood as empiricism, where observed causes (not idealization of known causes, like ID tries to invoke) are used to explain effects.
Is Theia’s collision with earth “virtually indistinguishable from a miracle”? How? Is the start-up of plate tectonics (may have happened only once on earth, and no other planet has it now) on earth “virtually indistinguishable from a miracle”? Maybe for a rather degraded version of “miracle.” What about the Late Heavy Bombardment? It only happened once, apparently. How about the origin of Witwatersrand’s gold deposits? The like has never been found elsewhere, so is it miraculous, “virtually indistinguishable from a miracle”?
According to one idea of how the Witwatersrand deposits formed, it could only happen in a world without significant atmospheric oxygen, hence it couldn’t occur today–much as it is with origin of life. No one knows if abiogenesis would be exceedingly rare in the distant past, and the fact that it can’t occur in today’s oxygenated environment has nothing to do with the odds.
Multicellularity may not be commonly arise, but it’s hardly a one-off event. Even some cyanobacteria colonize, and slime-molds can be unicellular or combine to form multicellular forms having some specialization. But what if it were a one-time event anyway? Such things happen.
Cordova never really gives up this tack, never mind that rare events are simply rare events, and one needs to use causes that have evidence for them whether or not they are rare. He doesn’t consider rare events other than those that purportedly are in life, which shows up the fact that it’s not a principle across all events, but merely another weary, dreary attack on evolution by someone who lacks the first bit of legitimate evidence that life was designed.
Glen Davidson
Rumraket,
Will this event ever happen in a finite universe?
“But imho, efforts to characterize emergence of biological complexity as “not that out of the ordinary” are failing. The more we learn of life’s complexity the more it seems highly atypical events were involved to create them.”
The “h” part of IMHO would seem to be contradicted by the implicit assertion that you have even the faintest idea what is and is not typical in the universe. There are trees down the road from my house that predate all of modern science. The idea that postulating the supernatural is necessary or reasonable simply because of our collective ignorance on a particular question is simply laughable.
Events like that happen all the time
A highly atypical event with religious significance is pretty much what I mean when I say miracle. Really what separates “the naturalists” from the rest of us is simply the attribution of significance.
It works the same in every day life.
Some folks will assume significance in the slightest glance and others are oblivious to the most obvious social cues.
In the end it’s all about our theory of mind
Peace
Given that miracles are not evidence against naturalism, what would be evidence against naturalism?
dazz,
Can you support this claim?
Do not.
I don’t see how we could have the requisite background knowledge to determine if the origin of life on this planet was highly probable, highly improbable, or somewhere in between. The fact that we haven’t yet figured out how abiogenesis happened doesn’t mean that it was a highly improbable event.
An atypical event would be Sal thinking clearly about anything.
Kantian Naturalist,
The fact the we have not figured it out, and some of its elements look to be beyond the scope of nature as we know it, the hypothesis that it is highly improbable is certainly reasonable.
Give me a random number between 1 and 10^10^10^150
It doesn’t actually help. After reading that “definition”, I still don’t know what “naturalism” is supposed to mean, nor what “naturalism is true” is supposed to mean.
The meaning of “supernatural cause” (if it even has a meaning) is even less clear than the meaning of “naturalism.”
Life exists. What else is there to resolve?
This doesn’t make sense.
If you find something atypical that you can exploit for your own benefit, wouldn’t you do that? And isn’t that what life does? And isn’t Darwinism basically saying that this is done cumulatively?
Not at all. Haeckel was merely saying that life either arose naturally or supernaturally. As a naturalist, he considered the latter to be implausible.
Note that Pasteur’s demonstration applies only to current conditions, not to conditions obtaining in the Eoarchean era, when our planet’s geological crust was forming.
🙂
A supernatural cause is a cause that is not a natural cause. A natural cause is a cause that is not a supernatural cause. I don’t see the difficulty.
How do you know this?
Shuffle a standard deck of 52 cards and deal them out. The probability of getting the order you do is 52! or 8.1×10^67. Ho hum.
Shuffle together four standard decks of 52 cards and deal them out. The probability of getting the order you do is 208! or 2.3×10^393. MIRACLE!!
How could such a low probability “atypical” event happen Sal??
My reading indicates that the atmosphere was anoxic in the Eoarchean, about 3.5 billion years ago, when evidence of life on our planet is first detectable.
Are you saying that spontaneous generation is more probable in anoxic conditions?
If so how do you know this?
peace
If Pasteur’s demonstration applies only to current conditions, then it follows that it did not apply to the conditions present when he performed his demonstration. Or any other past or future conditions.
That’s a pretty broad claim to be making.
So to you, a miracle is something that happens rarely? If so, how rare must it be? And why would you call that a miracle? What does that tell us that you put the “miracle” label on it?
Are miracles not evidence against naturalism? I think we need some definitions now.
What do you mean by miracle? And naturalism?
When you ask this question I distinctly get the impression you think such an event can’t happen unless 10^10^10^150 events have taken place first. Sort of like thinking that events that happen 1 in 100 times, must only happen when 99 times have passed and then suddenly they’re allowed to happen, and then when it has happened it’s again forbidden from happening for another 99 times. That’s not how it works.
Probabilities are expressions of an AVERAGE number of times they happen, out of (ideally) infinitely many. There’s no requirement that they happen at the end of all those events. The very first event might be the “1 in 10^10^10^150” event. It just has a probability of 1 in 10^10^10^150.
When we say something only happens once in 10^10^10^150 events, what we mean is that ON AVERAGE that is so. Technically it could even happen twice in a row(or even three, or ten times, it’s just going to be more and more unlikely), it’s just that averaged over infinitely many events, it would come out as 1 in 10^10^10^150.
So to answer your question directly, yes, such an event could happen in a finite universe, and it wouldn’t constitute a violation of the laws of probability.
At the most fundamental level, your error is the improbable therefore impossible-fallacy. There isn’t any probability except 0 that logically equals impossible. If the likelihood is anything above zero, it’s possible no matter how finite the number of tries you have. And it could technically be the very first thing that happens.
Not at all. The fact that abiogenesis is highly improbable under current conditions on this planet doesn’t entail that it was highly improbable 3.6 billion years ago on this planet.
I do think that defining “naturalism” and “supernaturalism” in terms of each other is a non-starter.
I take metaphysical naturalism as the position that (1) all conceptual framework-dependent assertions about contingent actualities should be tied to measurements of intensive and extensive magnitudes and (2) conceptual frameworks about contingent actualities yield better predictions to the degree that they approximate the causal and modal structure of reality.
The importance of (1) is that it captures what is most important in what Kant calls “empirical realism”; the importance of (2) is that it rejects what Kant calls “transcendental idealism”.
This has explained nothing at all. You’ve used two labels without defining either.
Except that we haven’t figured it out yet, those aren’t facts. It’s just something you sit there and make up.
Adapa,
The probability of getting the order in your hand is 100% not the probabilities you described.
The probability of the cards in the deck after shuffling are in the same order as when you opened the deck are more like the probabilities you described.
I have no words for this. Clearly you should be gambling. Just remember, the probability that you are dealt the deck you are, is 100%. See how far that takes you.
Yeah, just Bill Cole’s usual struggles with probabilities. Amazing that such a simple concept always escapes creationists
Kantian Naturalist,
You are replacing the word hypothesis with entail. Why? This makes your argument a straw man.
dazz,
Is there an argument you want to make Dizzy 🙂
Rumraket,
You really don’t see the flaw in Adapta’s argument?
Already did that, Billy. Many times, starting at Sandwalk long ago. You’re a lost cause
Not at all. You were suggesting that it’s reasonable to believe that abiogenesis was highly unlikely 3.6 billion years ago because it’s highly unlikely under currently existing conditions. I’m pointing out that your inference is mistaken.
dazz,
I surprised you don’t see the fallacy in the argument.
Kantian Naturalist,
So you are making a claim that an inference made about past events is always mistaken?
No, there’s no fallacy there. It’s YOUR problem if you can’t see that knowing the probability of some event a posteriori doesn’t tell you how exceptional it was without some previous knowledge.
Very funny. I’m making a claim that estimates about the probabilities of past events need to take into account what is known about the conditions that obtained at the time of those events.
Since we know that the conditions that obtained on Earth 3.6 billion years ago are very different from those that obtain presently, the improbability of abiogenesis under present conditions is not a reliable guide to assessing the probability of abiogenesis 3.6 billion years ago.
Thanks; that’s a better way of putting the point I’m trying to make here.
It’s all about the priors. If you have the wrong priors, your estimate of the likelihood is coming to come out wrong, too.
LOL, not true, but thanks to you
Yes, and subsequent experiments under different supposedly more plausible conditions show that life emerging from non-life is still is not the ordinary expectation.
If there is water present, proto-proteins will break apart spontaneously. Time is the enemy in that case, not the friend of building up a protein polymer from individual amino acids because the breaking apart of the proto-protein is the more natural direction of the reaction, hence even at that very basic biochemical level, the natural direction is toward simplicity, not complexity. Complexity is atypical.
Further, there is a problem with the supposed RNA world, not the least of which RNAs have half-lives as pointed out by the pioneer of the Urey-Miller experiment himself, Stanley Miller:
http://www.pnas.org/content/95/14/7933
Note, this is almost laughable to invoke origin of life in frozen water at 0°C since such temperature slow chemical reactions significantly. But that is only the beginning of problems.
The TalkOrigin website tries to come to the rescue by invoking Saladino’s paper that supposedly circumvents these problems as stated by Mark Isaak here:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB030.html
but Isaak leaves out some important details, like the absence of water! Not exactly a balanced rebuttal of the problem is it? Saladino himself in a later paper points out the problem:
Like, no duh Sherlock….
But back to the other problems. RNA’s hydrolize spontaneously.
And worse, this was carried out under supposed pre-biotic scenarios of hydrothermal vents. The RNAs had a half life of as little as 4 seconds! OUCH!
http://nass.oxfordjournals.org/content/42/1/289.full.pdf+html
The point remains, evidence suggest OOL was an atypical event.
And it’s not just about having pre-cursors, but where did enzymes ( a class of proteins) to catalyze reactions come from?
Here is just one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topoisomerase
Below is a topoisomerase video. Let the reader decide if emergence of something this complex counts as a typical event. The problem is that without topisomerase, a life form that uses DNA the way living things do won’t be around to evolve it since it will be dead! So I say evidence points to a not so typical event to make a DNA replication system with a topoisomerase machine to get it to work.
The hypothesis that this would be an exceptional event is consistent with the observation that non-living things stay non-living.
dazz,
This is not the argument I was making and not relevant to the discussion at hand. What we can predict based on the outcome is likelihood of cause A being the real cause.
We’ve tried to simulate those conditions and make them even more favorable to creating life, but it still doesn’t work. The probabilities don’t work for the simple reason the chemicals decay as pointed out in the prior comment.
For example hydrothermal vents were proposed, but then get shot down when the chemical half lives were on the order of only 4 seconds. The proto life only had a few seconds to come together before getting blasted apart.
But even under generous conditions how do specific chemicals necessary for the current architecture arise? There may be an infinite number of ways to implement life like there are an infinite number of ways to create a lock-and-key combination, but it doesn’t make either highly likely.
But in any case, it looks like the abiogenesis event is not typical for simple reasons like the specificity and rarity of requisite enzymes in the space of possible amino acid combinations.
If life doesn’t emerge from the soup or mix of chemicals in relatively short order, the mix won’t stay around for very long, it will degrade and become unusable. That is the natural evolution of such chemicals. So its not like time is really much of a friend to help the process along.
Kantian Naturalist,
So any experiment that tries to simulate abiogenesis is by definition flawed and worthless? What conditions do you think could increase the probability of a genome becoming ordered sufficiently to sustain a living organism? If the answer is you don’t have a clue then is the low probability inference still invalid a priori.
Do you have references regarding these simulations?
The rate at which complex molecules dissociate is very much temperature-dependent. Water issuing from hydrothermal vents can have a temperature exceeding 460°C while surrounding water can be a degree or two above 0°C
See above to note this is not correct. Extremely hot and very cold water mix rapidly. There is an opportunity for complex molecules that form at high temperature to be preserved at low temperature.
It only had to happen once.
That’s another unsupported claim. You don’t know how rare functional proteins are in sequence space. All work done so far indicates that functional proteins are not as rare as some would have us believe.
Except that rates of chemical reactions are temperature-dependent.
As I said, you are ignoring the crucial factor of temperature.
Yes, but I don’t want to get banned for posting them.
stcordova,
I recommend “The secret of how life on Earth began“. Once you get past the over-hyped title, it’s a nice overview of the history of abiogenesis research. In particular, pay close attention to the research carried out by John Sutherland, Jack Szostak, and Armen Mulkidjanian.
I’m certainly not saying that we have figured out abiogenesis, and it’s certainly possible that some key missing step will always elude us. But I think that if you look carefully at what is known, the prospects are not good for positing miraculous (‘supernatural’) intervention.
Mung,
LoL I’ll leave it unedited!
ETA On looking back, I see what you did there.