Executive Summary:
Barry Arrington doesn’t understand ID. KF talks about math and design detection but never does it. ID exists as an amorphous miasmic anti-evolutionary argument. It is the North Korea of the internet
Barry Arrington doesn’t understand ID.
in now epic thread Barry told us what would convince him ID was wrong:
The science bomb that will destroy my belief in ID: A single example of natural forces observed to have create Orgel’s CSI.
Now as IDists can’t actually measure CSI (they don’t appear to understand it at UD) this was troublesome, but a close examination of Dembski’s CSI contains the term P(T|H), which is described by him as
Moreover, H, here, is the relevant chance hypothesis that takes into account Darwinian and other material mechanisms.
So Barry wanted a demonstration of CSI being made by natural forces, whilst Dembski defines CSI as only to be ‘counted’ in the absence of them. Barry doesn’t understand CSI. I asked him if he thought that “CSI=FSC=FSCO/I”. He never responded.
KF talks about math and design detection but never does it
KF’s behavior is perhaps the most odious of the moderators there. Rather than have an actual discussion, he creates multiple one-off posts with closed comments, which means that associated critique is never attached to the post itself. This effectively allows him to perpetually reboot once destroyed arguments as if they are new and unassailable. This just shows us the strong connection between creationism and ID – creationists are still rolling out “2LoT” and “If we came from Monkeys” today.
All of KF’s posts are basically reformations of Hoyle’s tornado in a junkyard arguments: Complex things cannot spontaneously generate. Of course this has *nothing* to do with life and does not consider P(T|H). KF has yet to do any credible math pertaining to an evolutionary narrative. Sadly telling.
ID exists as an amorphous miasmic anti-evolutionary argument
The general trend at UD is for the IDists to tell us what they think evolution can’t do rather than what ID can do. It is gapism in its purest form. The target moves from PCD to abiogenesis to the first cell and they want a complete history of the evolution of life with pictures and an index of all the mutations as they happened. Given the ‘Jesus this’ and ‘God that’ that happens at UD, I wonder if they have the same high bar for other ‘historical’ events.
It is the North Korea of the internet
They silently ban, delete accounts, place in moderation, mark up others posts and post themselves with comments disabled. This degree of message control is a symptom of their arguments being completely noncompetitive when there is a free and fair exchange of ideas.
And I can’t edit the typos, and the hyperlinks didn’t come through. HALP!
Working on it.
I’ve done my best. I might have missed some typos.
You seem to be confused by the “title” part of links, so I just deleted those. The “title” is the text you see when moving your mouse over the link. It is not the text that becomes linkified.
By the way, you links were there, but invisible because you had no text to be linkified.
(And no, “linkified” is not in my dictionary either, but I think it will convey the point).
But they did ban Joe. So they can’t be all bad.
Thanks, Neil.
And how would that destroy an honest design hypothesis? Would it actually show that natural forces actually did create CSI, rather than design?
Of course it wouldn’t. The fact is that with or without such a demonstration there would be no evidence for the types of cross-lineage thinking that you’d expect from intelligence, and there would still be voluminous evidence that life conforms to the limits of inheritance, whether these include horizontal transfers to any considerable extent, or not.
Only the evidence from life could possibly decide what happened, and it has always weighed firmly on the side of unintelligent evolution.
Glen Davidson
I was doing a little perusing of UD OPs and I noticed that Joe posted the first comment on Barry’s amnesty announcement. It appears that he ran afoul of one of the rules that he suggested:
“JoeOctober 21, 2014 at 11:46 am
What you need are some rules:
1- Stay on-topic
2- It is OK to bash ID if and only if you can demonstrate how your position is the better explanation
3- Also if you say that ID is not scientific you have to demonstrate how your position is
4– No cussing“
Someone needs to point out to Barry the difference between arguments and bombs. If a bomb is falling on me, and I say “I absolutely refuse to give credence to this bomb!” I will still get blown up.
Not so with arguments.
So going ten years and not having any of your arguments blown up by another argument is not the same as going ten years and not getting blown up by a bomb.
Joe Felsenstein,
If a bomb goes off and no one ever sees it, no one ever hears it, and no one can describe it, is it still a bomb?
I can’t get over how blind they are to the circularity of their argument no matter how many times it’s pointed out.
The ID argument goes
1. The only things known to contain CSI are human intelligently designed objects and life.
2. Therefore life must be intelligently designed”
If you offered them the same logic in a different case:
1. The only things known to produce large electrical discharges are human intelligently designed generators and thunderclouds.
2. Therefore thunderclouds must be intelligently designed”
They’d blow a gasket.
They also have not figured out which of these is true:
1. CSI is something you can observe. As there is a proof that CSI cannot result from evolutionary processes, the observation of CSI proves that Something Else (namely Design) must have been involved.
2. We figure out whether an adaptation can result from evolutionary processes. If not, then Design must have been involved. And then, having concluded that, we can say that the adaptation has CSI.
The latter makes CSI an afterthought that is not important in concluding, well, anything. It is William Dembski’s position. It is said to have been his position all along, but many people, including me, and including a lot of UD regulars, were under the distinct impression that #1 was his position earlier.
Barry and Denyse O’Leary have often said that “Darwinism” cannot explain CSI. Under position #2 CSI is defined as not present if it can be explained by natural evolutionary processes. Oops.
UD is the rebel here. All creationists are. Its not fair and square how we are allowed access to the public and how we are censored in spirit and deed.
I have fought the good fight on the internet for 5-10 years now.
I have been on loads of origin forums/blogs.
Everybody, and a few more, punishes, censors, the posters on their forums/blogs.
Even the best must make careful rules and carefully judge.
This forum seems very free but has not yet a great volume of posters and, I think, come from people hurt by bannings on other forums.
The reason for the forums/blogs is to fight for ones cause and so frustration comes from the resistance met.
I have been banned on evolutionist ones and a few creationist ones over the years.
Yet never deserving. i am loyal to all i ever said and am always not malicious or unkind or disruptive to threads. Although picking a specific point will bring accusations of disruption.
i have been treated with malice, and censorship for dumb reasons.
I can’t say its just the bad guys(evolutionists if I may say so)
everybody is so damn sensitive. its like they are not the demographics that ever worked in a warehouse or had a hockey fight or drive on the roads or got married. (The last would get you banned so don’t repeat it)
In a free nation(s) men should easily allow free speech and expressions in subjectsv where they engage in contention with others.
So only and easily should malice, or too much, or disruption of threads(changing the subject too much) be punished after fair warnings.
Malice is not contrary opinions however unwelcome. YES I think all babies are ugly but its not hate from me but a sincere opinion without hate.! One can’t cry OFFENSIVE.
a finale, NEW, idea I have is that everyone should be extra sensitive to the host of the forumn/blog.
It is more of a reflection on them and they will get more trouble from friends, their side, when things are said that are not welcome.
The host can be more unreasonable I think. Its fair .
They do the work b build the audience, and have the original agenda.
If they offer free speech then hold them to it but remember they get blamed for allowed speech.
Censorship has become the norm in north america, as usual in britain/Europe, and especially from the dominant left.
Once again truth and freedom must be fought for in the medians used for truth and freedom.
Be more articulate and less nasty. Especially the stronger, smarter, righter side.
The wrong side is going to lose in the end.
Enkidu,
I would say there is a pretty good chance large thunderclouds were intelligently designed.
Materialists on the other hand want to believe the incredibly precise and consistent laws of electromagnetism (as well as all laws in the universe) were organized by…..hm, nothing.
By Thor? Or is the Catskill Gnomes from Rip Van Winkle’s tales bowling a game of nine-pins again?
Robert, for the record I’m against censorship no matter who does it.
Why do you think precise and consistent laws need “organizing”(whatever you mean by this), more than imprecise and inconsistent laws?
Have you ever seen natural laws come about, if not how do you know they can even be any different?
This falls back to Behe’s claim that evolution can’t happen.
Or, specifically, that evolution of certain configurations can’t happen.
Which brings to mind the fact that Behe’s argument is both circular and vacuous. What Behe says is that a sequence of mutations can’t happen if one step in the chain is fatal. Pretty much a tautology.
But his argument illustrates the difference between a tautology and an experimentally derived statement. The way you test whether a sequence can evolve is to do the experiment, as Lenski has done.
Phoodoo, if one of the electromagnetic constants were slightly different, would it be any less precise? Or any less consistent?
This is now what WJM is doing at UD. He’s admitted that he’s no support for anything re: design but now claims that nothing would exist nor could evolve unless a “framework” for it’s existence or that evolution was designed.
They’ve created a gap so small their deity is reduced to nothing at all by crawling in.
So yes, have that victory. Congratulations. You have created a new religion! You worship a deity that has no importance whatsoever apart from in the most abstract sense possible. It exists merely to prove “materialists” wrong, where “prove” is “because I say so”.
Thanks for doing such good work phoodoo, WJM. You may keep what you have earned.
That was the deism (of guys like Newton and Jefferson) pic all along, wasn’t it? Some kind of God was needed to wind the clock and then get the hell out of the way?
You say Deism, I say Multiverse
You say Designed, I say Anthropic,
Potayto, patattah, tomayto, tomahto,
Let’s call the whole thing off….
Assuming the acceptance path is atheism > Deism > Theism, I find Deism > Theism much harder to accept (the argument that the universe is designed for you by always around loving guy) than Atheism > Theism.
BruceS,
Multiverse? Oh, so you have no problem in believing in something you have absolutely no evidence for then.
I guess all evolutionists share this proclivity with you.
KF just said this: “Indeed, once one recognises the existence of FSCO/I, s/he may infer to design without explicit calculation. ”
So after all that bellyaching and banning about people being evil and wicked for pointing out he does no relevant math..
Assuming you are correct in stating BruceS “believes” in a multiverse and assuming you include me as an”evolutionist” then you are wrong. I have a problem believing that something exists for which there is no physical (however indirect or inferential) evidence.
So if it looks designed to me, the calculation is unnecessary, and indeed, superfluous. And it looks designed to me because I know it has too much FIASC/O to have arisen through incremental evolution.
I might just add, that when an IDiot puts forward an argument that has been abandoned by Behe and Dembski, He has crossed line separating wrong from stupid.
Dembski has been forced to admit that a sufficiently permissive functional space will allow evolution.
Behe has never denied the kind of evolution that involves developmental timing — regulatory evolution. Behe can only cite a handful of cases that seem difficult for evolution, and they are not the kinds of cases that most trouble creationists.
You did not read the last sentence of my post, did you?
Nice series on mutliverses in quanta magazine.
It’s too soon to say one should (or should not) believe in multiverses. There is some indirect evidence for them (eg standard interpretations of inflation).
I’m keeping an open mind. Other versions of me in different universes likely hold a different opinion. For calculating the odds of how likely, see the linked article.
There are things that are possible and consistent with all those carefully designed physical constants, such as inflation, multiverses, and such.
And there are things that are not consistent with known physics, such as non physical entities interacting with the physical.
Mere consistency with known laws of physics is setting a very low bar for ontology. Consistency is cheap, since it’s fixed only by human ingenuity!
For my part, I put the multiverse hypothesis on an epistemic par with the theistic hypothesis — both are equally consistent with all known science, and neither has any superior rational superiority over the other. It’s a leap of faith in either direction!
(I used to call myself an atheist because I was comfortable making this leap of faith. Now the leap of faith strikes me as intellectually irresponsible, though it might satisfy a deeply-rooted emotional need.)
Since (as far as anyone’s told me) the universe is informationally closed, there’s no possible measurement of any universe besides this one. And that means that the multiverse hypothesis cannot be experimentally confirmed. Hence the question, “but where did the universe come from?” is scientifically meaningless.
Once we’ve left the bounds of science and embarked upon unconstrained, purely speculative metaphysics, any speculation is as good as another — theism, multiverses, the dream of Vishu, whatever you like. Conversely, if one insists on confining one’s metaphysical speculation to what is licensed by our best empirical science (which is my approach), then there’s no alternative to agnosticism.
Put otherwise, the real divide at the level of metaphysics and epistemology isn’t between theists on the one hand, and agnostics/atheists on the other. The real divide is between those who take empirical science to constrain ontological commitment (agnostics) and those who don’t (theists and atheists). The agreement of agnostics and atheists at the level of ethics and politics shouldn’t be conflated with their profound disagreement at the theoretical level.
Not necessarily.
Let me put it this way: if (1) empirical confirmation of the multiverse hypothesis requires measuring some other universe, and if (2) our universe is informationally closed, and if (3) information closure of our universe precludes measuring anything outside of the universe (whether other universes or anything else), then (4) the multiverse hypothesis cannot be empirically confirmed (or disconfirmed). That’s what puts it in the same epistemic box as theism.
Of these premises, (2) is an empirical truth grounded in our best physics, and it could well be overturned. Or perhaps it has been overturned and I’m misinformed. (3) seems like a conceptual truth grounded in the concepts of “information” and “measurement”. I don’t know what to say about (1), save that I don’t see what would count as empirical confirmation of the multiverse hypothesis besides some actual measurement. Just giving us more mathematics to play with isn’t going to cut it!
That is the part referred to by “not necessarily”.
But if multiverses are an unavoidable prediction of eternal inflation, and eternal inflation is the consensus explanation of why our universe is observed to be the way it is, then that reason for believing in multiverses would involve more than just consistency.
But I agree there is a long way to go before saying that multiverses are a justified belief, however, let alone knowledge (move along, Neil, nothing to see here….)
Well, information could be disappearing into black holes, and showing up in cute new baby universes. Although I don’t think that is a widely held view.
And Penrose thinks that certain patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background might be evidence of the pre-Big Bang state of the, er, pre-universe, although he does not have much support on that theory. He should maybe stick to quantum consciousness.
The moral of the story: physicists are crazier than philosophers. As is reality, it seems.
Fair enough — except that I wasn’t asserting any necessary truths to begin with there. I was drawing an inference from an empirical truth, and if it turns out that our universe isn’t informationally closed, then that will (of course) alter the epistemic status of claims about what is outside of our universe.
My point would be that there is ongoing research to determine if any evidence exists for other universes. There are serious hypotheses that can be researched.This is what separates the multiverse hypothesis from theism or ID or other non-sciences or pseudo-sciences.
I take your lack of an answer to my questions as tacit admission that you have none. I’m glad we got that settled.
Even more interestlingly, what does it mean to “organize” natural laws? Are they listed somewhere in descending order of influence, or perhaps alphabetically, in the great immaterial “law realm” ?
Ok, fair enough. I remain to be convinced but that’s just me. In part it’s no doubt that the origins of the universe just isn’t a very interesting question to me. But if we should arrive at an answer, or narrow down the range of possible answers, that would be cool. With regard to origins-questions, I’m much more interested in the origin of life and the origin of sentience and of sapience.
I think most people who study the origin of life would say it is inevitable given the physical constants. One of the questions physists find interesting is whether they could be different.
KeithS, I believe Jerry is looking for this: http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=14;t=5735;st=7020#entry139410
ThinkPol informs us:
”
kairosfocusNovember
10, 2014 at 1:47 am
PS: Closed comments FYIs are based on a need to provide reference, supplementary info, to headline things easy to overlook, to give graphics and/or vids, and the situation of a problem with what has to be called internet vandalism or trollish behaviour. They normally are linked to live threads of discussion.”
Thank you big brother.
That makes two of us.
Speech is deadly for good or evil.
However truth to prevail,must have freedom of speech.
Untruth also can use this freedom for its ends and has done so.
Its finally a belief freedom has a margain of gain for truth and right.
I think a good margin but still a margin.
Regarding a blog/propaganda site, although technically accurate, “censorship” of comments seems hyperbolic to me. They are just controlling content. In their usual ineffectual way. Some of the creationists who comment there are just as harmful to their cause as anyone else could be.
I’m surprised someone (Zach!) hasn’t introduced
to
http://www.zachriel.com/mutagenation/Beware.htm
The regulars here will appreciate this:
Well I guess it must have worked for William to characterize his relativism as a search for truth.
And so it goes on…
Glen Davidson
I think that qualifies as a minor superpower.
Having specified the bomb that would shake his beliefs:
“The science bomb that will destroy my belief in ID: A single example of natural forces observed to have create Orgel’s CSI”
Barry Now quoted from Dembski:
“…Neither Orgel nor Davies, however, provided a precise
analytic account of specified complexity.’
Learning as you go must be a painful exercise for Barry.
“
Thoughts requested: