I don’t think this is an appropriate subject for this blog (although Barry Arrington and KF found it quite suitable for UD). However, it interests me and I have written a small piece on my own blog. So I thought I would take the opportunity to advertise it here.
[Comments closed for this topic. Please comment at Mark’s blog (link above). – Neil Rickert]
Best wishes for the season.
Consider this a thread for general discussion, particularly season based. I will probably close comments early in the new year.
Michael Todd has joined our discussion, and makes the assumption in the title of this thread. Michael introduced himself with “Greetings all. I’m new here. I’m also a Christian.”
Here’s the rest of what Michael said in that comment:
I assume most here are atheistic materialists. Fine. However, the dilemma is yours. Why? Glad you asked. Materialistic determinism. Everything that happens, according to the necessary tenets of your creed, is a result of the properties inherent in matter. This would include all of your mental life – personality, memory, and perceptions. This would mean that all of your assertions are nothing more than expressions of an unrelenting matter/energy cascade.
The discussion started by Michael will be moved to this new thread.
I can’t help wondering whether ID is pointless. Even if there were an intelligent designer, I don’t see that as being of much use to biologists.
Archeologists find pottery in their digs. And they infer that the pottery was designed. This kind of example is sometimes mentioned by ID proponents.
Paul Nelson has argued against macro-evolution, and I sense that some folk here want to discuss it. So here’s a thread where we can do that without taking other threads off-topic.
First, some references. There are three UD threads on this:
In the tradition of offering threads to our visitors from Uncommon Descent (Gil Dodgen, Upright BiPed, gpuccio and others), I’m creating a thread in which Mung can explain why he is an ID supporter.
Mung continually complains that we misrepresent ID at TSZ. Here’s his chance to set the record straight, to tell us what ID really is, and to explain why he thinks the case for ID is strong.
Take it away, Mung.
(Thanks to OMTWO for the suggestion.)
Intelligent design proponents make a negative argument for design. According to them, the complexity and diversity of life cannot be accounted for by unguided evolution (henceforth referred to simply as ‘evolution’) or any other mindless natural process. If it can’t be accounted for by evolution, they say, then we must invoke design. (Design, after all, can explain anything. That makes it easy to invoke, but hard to invoke persuasively.)
Because the ID argument is a negative one, it succeeds only if ID proponents can demonstrate that certain instances of biological complexity are beyond the reach of natural processes, including evolution. The problem, as even IDers concede, is that the evidence for evolution is too strong to dismiss out of hand. Their strategy has therefore been to concede that evolution can effect small changes (‘microevolution’), but to deny that those small changes can accumulate to produce complex adaptations (‘macroevolution’).
What mysterious barrier do IDers think prevents microevolutionary change from accumulating until it becomes macroevolution? It’s the deep blue sea, metaphorically speaking. IDers contend that life occupies ‘islands of function’ separated by seas too broad to be bridged by evolution.
In this post (part 2a) I’ll explain the ‘islands of function’ metaphor and invite commenters to point out its strengths and weaknesses. In part 2b I’ll explain why the ID interpretation of the metaphor is wrong, and why evolution is not stuck on ‘islands of function’.
Read on for an explanation of the metaphor.
Granville Sewell is at it again. Today (Thanksgiving Day in the USA), he posted at UD, a video about his disagreement with the scientific establishment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFMXR6PqGtg
My reaction is shown in the title of this post.
During the recent debate with Gpuccio at one point he claimed was that it was my prior adoption of particular ideology or worldview that led me to exclude design as an explanation. Thus reducing our disagreement to a choice of worldviews. I am not sure I know what a worldview is – but scepticism falls far short of being an ideology. All it amounts to is the demand for strong evidence before believing anything. This is just an approach to evidence and is compatible with all sorts of beliefs about the nature of reality.
To take the particular issue of whether life is designed. Scepticism does not exclude design. It just asks that a design explanation is evaluated by the same standards as any other explanation. It is not sufficient that other explanations are considered to be inadequate. If you happen to believe in a designer with the appropriate powers and motivation then you may well accept that as the best explanation for life. If you happen to believe in a designer with evil motivations and sufficient power then that is a perfect explanation for natural disasters. But these are beliefs which need to be separately evaluated with their own evidence. You cannot use the fact that a designer is a good explanation for life as evidence for that designer.
(Sorry this is so long – I am in a hurry)
Gpuccio challenged myself and others to come up with examples of dFSCI which were not designed. Not surprisingly the result was that I thought I had produced examples and he thought I hadn’t. At the risk of seeming obsessed with dFSCI I want assess what I (and hopefully others) learned from this exercise.
Lesson 1) dFSCI is not precisely defined.
This is for several reasons. Gpuccio defines dFSCI as:
I have been having an exchange with Upright Biped here about his perception of how his “semiotic theory of Intelligent Design” has fared among sceptics. In the hope that he will be prepared to re-engage with us in addressing a few outstanding points, I post his argument, originally published at lawyer Barry Arrington’s Uncommon Descent blog
1. A representation is an arrangement of matter which evokes an effect within a system (e.g. written text, spoken words, pheromones, animal gestures, codes, sensory input, intracellular messengers, nucleotide sequences, etc, etc).
Will try to sort out mess. Would any one like to volunteer for admin privileges?
As a temporary fix, until Lizzie returns, anyone who is being moderated and can’t comment is invited to leave a comment here and I will approve it, hoping that it will work as a fix for all commenters in all threads. Perhaps other thread authors could also check to see if they can do the same. I note that Lamont has approved my comment in his thread but this has not stopped my comments in other threads (including my own) ending up in moderation, so maybe it won’t, but you never know!
Added in edit:
Seems that author approval releases moderated comments in that thread only. As Lizzie is, I suspect, the only one with administrator permissions, we are stuck with the status quo.
Added in edit:
Seems it is worse than I thought. Author approval is apparently needed for each comment which is really impractical. Mark Frank has already suggested continuing on his blog but perhaps we could open an ad hoc wordpress blog with shared admin among volunteers and open authorship as this seems to operate well here. The level of abusive posting (apart from one notable exception) has been minimal and I think we should err on the side of open-ness. I will try and be alert to checking moderation.
Added in edit:
Just a thought. It could be democratic with shared admin (volunteers, please) and all members having author status by default as that seems to work well here. Keeping a wordpress format should make it easy to transfer active threads if need be.
Added in edit:
The moderation glitch appears to be fixed!
Since this is the Skeptical Zone, I think it is appropriate to apply a little skepticism to atheism itself. How could anyone know if they were deceived by an evil demon into believing that God does not exist? Furthermore, if a person was trapped inside a matrix of evil lies and deception, is there anyway to escape and come to know the truth about God?
Certainly it is more likely that an atheist could be deceived by an evil spirit into not believing in God, than it is that all of us could be completely deceived about everything as Descartes proposed in his Meditations. Hence, this is an argument that the atheist should take seriously.
It should also be noted that the empirical sciences are of no help here because for the deception to be successful demons could not leave behind any testable evidence. If there was proof that demons existed, that would constitute strong evidence for the existence of God. So demons must remain hidden and work through nonphysical means.
So what would the deception look like? It would begin by asserting that all knowledge is acquired through the senses with the aid of the scientific method. Scientism, materialism, and naturalism provide the foundation for the deception. Knowledge of God is ruled out a priori.
Secondly, it would promote immorality as normal. Nothing keeps the mind from thinking about God any better than the vices of greed, lust, and pride.. A culture that promotes mindless consumerism, sexual promiscuity. and narcissism is perfect for this.
Finally it would mock religion in general and seek to place restrictions on religious speech and expression. Militant secularism and freedom from religion would be promoted as necessary for a healthy society. If a person never hears about God, then it is much less likely that they will think about God or believe in God.
Since all the elements of the deception are already in place, only a fool or a willing participant in the deception would refuse to investigate the unthinkable alternative. Maybe God actually exists.
Escape from the deception can come about in many ways. The first step is for the atheist to acknowledge the fact that he might be wrong and may have been deceived.
A second step is to consider the fact that everything that actually exists either came from something that actually exists or, is self-existent and exists eternally and immutably. The material things that science studies are all made of parts that can be put together to make something and broken apart and reformed to make something new. There is nothing in the material world that is eternal or unchangeable. The universe that we know is not eternal, it came from something else. That eternal something else that produced our universe cannot itself be composed of material parts for then it would not be self-existent or eternal. It must be immaterial. The immaterial, eternal, and immutable something else is what philosophers call God.
But what sort of being is immaterial and eternal? The one thing that we know of that is like that is our own minds or souls. Our minds are not bound by time. We can think of the past, the future, and the timeless. Our minds are not bound by space. Our bodies and our brains are in one place and our experience is limited to that place at that time. Our minds however, can be anywhere and we can think about anything that we choose to think about including abstract immaterial things that are not in any particular place or time. Most importantly we can choose to think about God.
Religion is the result of our thinking about God, and even though most of our thoughts about God may be wrong, it is possible that God is also thinking about us and wants us to know him. That is a possibility that is worth investigating. I believe that everyone who seriously seeks to undertake this investigation will eventually know the truth about God and be freed from all deception, but first you have to want the truth and nothing but the truth,
I don’t know if anyone will be able to see this. I posted a similar message on the Sandbox, but it didn’t appear.
If you are a logged in, registered user and click on the little speech bubble on the dashboard bar, you’ll get a list of comments awaiting moderation. You’ll also see this warning message:
Akismet has detected a problem. Some comments have not yet been checked for spam by Akismet. They have been temporarily held for moderation. Please check your Akismet configuration and contact your web host if problems persist.
This suggests that either Akismet is unreachable, possibly due to the recent storm, or that bit rot has set in and we need to summon Lizzie back somehow.
This is The Skeptical Zone, so it’s only fitting that we turn our attention to topics other than ID from time to time.
The Richard Mourdock brouhaha provides a good opportunity for this. Mourdock, the Republican Senate candidate from the state of Indiana, is currently in the spotlight on my side of the Atlantic for a statement he made on Wednesday during a debate with his Democratic opponent:
You know, this is that issue that every candidate for federal or even state office faces. And I, too, certainly stand for life. I know there are some who disagree and I respect their point of view but I believe that life believes at conception. The only exception I have for – to have an abortion is in that case for the life of the mother. I just – I struggle with it myself for a long time but I came to realize that life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape that it is something that God intended to happen. [emphasis mine]
29th Oct: I have offered a response to Gpuccio’s challenge below.
I think this is worth a new post.
Gpuccio has issued a challenge here and here. I have repeated the essential text below. Others may wish to try it and/or seek their own clarifications. Could be interesting. Something tells me that it is not going to end up in a clear cut result. But it may clarify the deeply confusing world of dFSCI.
Challenge:
Give me any number of strings of which you know for certain the origin. I will assess dFSCI in my way. If I give you a false positive, I lose. I will accept strings of a predetermined length (we can decide), so that at least the search space is fixed.
Conditions:
a) I would say binary strings of 500bits. Or language strings of 150 characters. Or decimal strings of 150 digits. Something like that. Even a mix of them would be fine.
No problem with that.
b) I will literally apply my procedure. If I cannot easily see any function for the string, I will not go on in the evaluation, and I will not infer design. If you, or any other, wants to submit strings whose function you know, you are free to tell me what the function is, and I will evaluate it thoroughly.
That’s OK. I will supply the function in each case. I note that when I tried to define function precisely you said that the function can be anything the observer wishes provided it is objectively defined, so, for example, “adds up to 1000” would be a function. So I don’t think that’s going to be an issue!
c) I will be cautious, and I will not infer design if I have doubts about any of the points in the procedure.
I am not happy with this. If the string meets the criteria for dFSCI you should be able to able to infer design. You can’t pick and choose when to apply it. At the very least you must prove that the string does not have dFSCI if you are going to avoid inferring design.
d) Ah, and please don’t submit strings outputted by an algorithm, unless you are ready to consider them as designed if the algorithm is more than 150 bits long. We should anyway agree, before we start, on which type of system and what time span we are testing.
I don’t understand this – a necessity system for generating digital strings can always be expressed as an algorithm e.g Fibonacci series. Otherwise it is just a copy of the string. Also it is not clear how to define how many bits long an algorithm is. Maybe it will suffice if I confine myself to algorithms that can be expressed mathematically in less than 20 symbols?
And anyway, I am afraid we have to wait next week for the test. My time is almost finished.
That’s OK. I need time to think anyway. But also I need to get your clarification on b,c and d.
There is a lot of debate in the comments to recent posts about whether the argument from ID is circular. I thought it would be worth calling this out as a separate item.
I plead that participants in this discussion (whether they comment here or on UD):
What follows has been covered a thousand times. I simple repeat it in as rigorous a manner as I can to provide a basis for the ensuing discussion (if any!)
First, a couple of definitions.
A) For the purposes this discussion I will use “natural” to mean “has no element of design”. I do not mean to imply anything about materialism versus supernatural or such like. It is just an abbreviation for “not-designed”.
B) X is a “good explanation” for Y if and only if:
i) We have good reason to suppose X exists
ii) The probability of Y given X is reasonably high (say 0.1 or higher). There may of course be better explanations for Y where the probability is even higher.
Note that X may include design or be natural.
As I understand it, a common form of the ID argument is:
1) Identify some characteristic of outcomes such as CSI, FSCI or dFSCI. I will use dFSCI as an example in what follows but the point applies equally to the others.
2) Note that in all cases where an outcome has dFSCI, and a good explanation of the outcome is known, then the good explanation includes design and there is no good natural explanation.
3) Conclude there is a strong empirical relationship between dFSCI and design.
4) Note that living things include many examples of dFSCI.
5) Infer that there is a very strong case that living things are also designed.
This argument can be attacked from many angles but I want to concentrate on the circularity issue. The key point being that it is part of the definition of dFSCI (and the other measures) that there is no good natural explanation.
It follows that if a good natural explanation is identified then that outcome no longer has dFSCI. So it is true by definition that all outcomes with dFSCI fall into two categories:
Note that it was not necessary to do any empirical observation to prove this. It must always be the case from the definition of dFSCI that whenever a good explanation is identified it includes design.
I appreciate that as it stands this argument does not do justice to the ID position. If dFSCI was simply a synonym for “no good natural explanation” then the case for circularity would be obviously true. But is incorporates other features (as do its cousins CSI and FSCI). So for example dFSCI incorporates attributes such as digital, functional and not compressible – while CSI (in its most recent definition) includes the attribute compressible. So if we describe any of the measures as a set of features {F} plus the condition that if a good natural explanation is discovered then measure no longer applies – then it is possible to recast the ID argument this way:
“For all outcomes where {F} is observed then when a good explanation is identified it turns out to be designed and there is no good natural explanation. Many aspects of life have {F}. Therefore, there is good reason to suppose that design will be a good explanation and there will be no good natural explanation.”
The problem here is that while CSI, FSCI and dFSCI all agree on the “no good natural explanation” clause they differ widely on {F}. For Dembski’s CSI {F} is essentially equivalent to compressible (he refers to it as “simple” but defines “simple” mathematically in terms of easily compressible). While for FSCI {F} includes “has a function” and in some descriptions “not compressible”. dFSCI adds the additional property of being digital to FSCI.
By themselves both compressible and non-compressible phenomena clearly can have both natural and designed explanations. The structure of a crystal is highly compressible. CSI has no other relevant property and the case for circularity seems to be made at this point. But FSCI and dFSCI add the condition of being functional which perhaps makes all the difference. However, the word “functional” also introduces a risk of circularity. “Functional” usually means “has a purpose” which implies a purpose which implies a mind. In archaeology an artefact is functional if it can be seen to fulfil some past person’s purpose – even if that purpose is artistic. So if something has the attribute of being functional it follows by definition that a mind was involved. This means that by definition it is extremely likely, if not certain, that it was designed (of course, it is possible that it may have a good natural explanation and by coincidence also happen to fulfil someone’s purpose). To declare something to be functional is to declare it is engaged with a purpose and a mind – no empirical research is required to establish that a mind is involved with a functional thing in this sense.
But there remains a way of trying to steer FSCI and dFSCI away from circularity. When the term FSCI is applied to living things it appears a rather different meaning of “functional” is being used. There is no mind whose purpose is being fulfilled. It simply means the object (protein, gene or whatever) has a role in keeping the organism alive. Much as greenhouse gasses have a role in keeping the earth’s surface temperature at around 30 degrees. In this case of course “functional” does not imply the involvement of a mind. But then there are plenty of examples of functional phenomena in this sense which have good natural explanations.
The argument to circularity is more complicated than it may appear and deserves careful analysis rather than vitriol – but if studied in detail it is compelling.
A few weeks ago, commenter ‘kairosfocus’ (aka ‘KF’) posted a Pro-Darwinism Essay Challenge at Uncommon Descent. The challenge was for an ID critic to submit a 6000-word essay in defense of ‘Darwinism’, written to KF’s specifications. The essay would be posted at UD and a discussion would ensue.
The challenge generated no interest among the pro-evolution commenters here at TSZ, mainly because no one wanted to write an essay of KF’s specified length, on KF’s specified topic, in KF’s ridiculously specific format (and presumably double-spaced with a title page addressed to ‘Professor Kairosfocus’). We also had no interest in posting an essay at UD, a website that is notorious in the blogosphere for banning and censoring dissenters. Kairosfocus himself, in a ridiculous display of tinpot despotism, censored no less than 20 comments in the “Essay Challenge” thread itself!
(Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link, Link)
The commenter in question, ‘critical rationalist’, was banned from UD and has taken refuge here at TSZ, where open discussion is encouraged, dissent is welcome, comments are not censored, and only one commenter has ever been banned (for posting a photo of female genitalia).
Given the inhospitable environment at Uncommon Descent (from which I, like most of the ID critics at TSZ, have also been banned), I had (and have) no desire to submit an essay for publication at UD. However, I did respond to the spirit of KF’s challenge by writing a blog post here at TSZ that explains why unguided evolution, as a theory, is literally trillions of times better than Intelligent Design at explaining the evidence for common descent.
In his challenge, kairosfocus wrote:
It would be helpful if in that essay you would outline why alternatives such as design, are inferior on the evidence we face.
I have done exactly that, and so my challenge to kairosfocus is this: I have presented an argument showing that ID is vastly inferior to unguided evolution as an explanation of the evidence for common descent. Can you defend ID, or will you continue to claim your bogus daily victories despite being unable to rise to the challenge presented in my post?
I see that in the unending TSZ and Jerad Thread Joe has written in response to R0bb
Try to compress the works of Shakespear- CSI. Try to compress any encyclopedia- CSI. Even Stephen C. Meyer says CSI is not amendable to compression.
A protein sequence is not compressable- CSI.
So please reference Dembski and I will find Meyer’s quote
To save Robb the effort. Using Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence by William Dembski which is his most recent publication on specification; turn to page 15 where he discusses the difference between two bit strings (ψR) and (R). (ψR) is the bit stream corresponding to the integers in binary (clearly easily compressible). (R) to quote Dembksi “cannot, so far as we can tell, be described any more simply than by repeating the sequence”. He then goes onto explain that (ψR) is an example of a specified string whereas (R) is not.
This conflict between Dembski’s definition of “specified” which he quite explicitly links to low Kolmogorov complexity (see pp 9-12) and others which have the reverse view appears to be a problem which most of the ID community don’t know about and the rest choose to ignore. I discussed this with Gpuccio a couple of years ago. He at least recognised the conflict and his response was that he didn’t care much what Dembski’s view is – which at least is honest.