ID proponents often portray ID critics as “materialists”, and recently someone asked whether a force was “material”. Well, if a force isn’t “material” then there are no “materialists”. So yes, is the answer to that question. A force that can move matter is a material force. A force that can’t move matter isn’t a force at all.
And this matters for the Intelligent Design argument, because when we infer that an object has been intelligently designed, we are also inferring that it was fabricated according to that design. And to fabricate an object, or modify it, the fabricator has to accelerate matter, i.e. give its parts some kinetic energy it did not otherwise possess, by applying a force.
While ID proponents are often reluctant to speculate much about the nature of the designer, they rarely even mention the fabrication process. But the ID proposal implicitly postulates that a force was applied to matter by the designer, or her workforce, in order to make it do something other than what it would have done had that force not been applied.
I’d like to ask ID proponents here: what is your preferred hypothesis as to how the putative designer of living things actually made them? What material force accelerated the required molecules into position in the first living cells, converting potential energy into kinetic energy, and since then, guides the nucleotides into the required positions to produce novel proteins and enzymes as required?
What is, in other words, the energy source for the “poof”?
OMagain,
Because it has a beginning and that makes it by definition something that exists due to an act and because randomness doesn’t exist.
creation
: the ACT of making or producing something that did not exist before : the act of creating something
Did the Universe had a beginning?
The Borde-Vilenkin-Guth Theorem states that any universe, which has, on average, a rate of expansion greater 1 that system had to have a finite beginning. This would apply in any multiverse scenario as well.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0110012v2.pdf
Since nothing physical existed prior to the Universe you can only have an act and if you have an act you have intention and if you have intention you have consciousness.
Because it has a beginning and that makes it by definition something that exists due to an act and because randomness doesn’t exist.
creation
: the ACT of making or producing something that did not exist before : the act of creating something
Did the Universe had a beginning?
The Borde-Vilenkin-Guth Theorem states that any universe, which has, on average, a rate of expansion greater 1 that system had to have a finite beginning. This would apply in any multiverse scenario as well.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0110012v2.pdf
Since nothing physical existed prior to the Universe you can only have an act and if you have an act you have intention and if you have intention you have consciousness.
Yes, it does.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence also.
OMagain,
A random event is an event that isn’t determined by anything nor determines something, such an event can exist only in a state of Nothingness since the abscence of everything is the abscence of causes. For that reason when you have something you don’t have randomness.
Someone should put this on “fundies say the darndest things”
Neil Rickert,
Why am i wrong?
EL:
ID proponents, theists in general, grossly underestimate the role that knowledge plays in the biosphere.
Knowledge is information that plays a causal role in being preserved. And, whether embedded in brains, books or genes, knowledge is material. Intention doesn’t guarantee results. Belief doesn’t guarantee results. Actually rearranging atoms into a primitive cell, or to add some important mutation to an existing cell, would occur when the requisite knowledge is present.
So your chosen deity is too weak to create a universe that includes randomness?
Noted.
Actually you are not even wrong.
OMagain,
How is that even relevant to our discussion? What does even mean? Why should Randomness exist?
OMagain,
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence also.
Odd how you don’t see the irony in your use of this.
You brought it up. You tell me.
OMagain,
Okay so you agree with me that our creation was intentional right? I mean, if something is not random it is by definition a deterministic event and you can’t have something physical prior to the Universe to detemine it.
Goddamn WIntery Knight. A murderous, woman-enslaving, gay-hating dominionist who has a veneer of respectability solely because he’s a christian apologist.
This is a genuine ad hom: anyone who really believes something Wintery Knight has said is not worth listening to.
No one ever needs to waste a second “answering” Wintery Knight.
I require that you give a satisfactory, answer, William! “It’s embedded in the physical system the designer internally occupies and operates through” isn’t an answer to my question.
At least, it isn’t if we aren’t talking about a physical designer with a physical fabricator.
I cannot make a robotic car-plant make cars without first providing it with a source of energy.
So if we want to invoke a designer to design and make, for instance, the first life-forms, that designer needs a source of energy to actually move the parts around to get them into the designed configuration.
You can’t get that from “the physical system the designer internally occupies and operates through” unless the designer actually occupies and operates a physical system. And that’s fine if s/he does – if you want to support your hypothesis that the first living cells were designed and fabricated by an intelligent designer, then we should be able to look for physical traces of designer, fabricator, and of the fabrication process.
But no-one associated with ID seems to want to do that. We are constantly told that it is unnecessary to look for the designer – all we need to look for is “design”. And they cite SETI, forensics and archaeologists as precedent. But none of those ignore the physical actuality of the designer – the followup to any SETI signal would be an investigation into who, how, what and where. Without answers to those question, “intelligent source” would remain a very provisional hypothesis, just as “LGM” was for quasars.
OMG. I agree with Gregory! Will wonders never cease. 🙂
Designers typically have to eat something in order to move matter through Intention. God doesn’t. He just kind of moves stuff, and there is no requirement for a balancing of the energy budget because – well, he’s God, why would he? And of course he’s not going to violate his own plan by interfering with it. And wind farms. Matter is mathematics. Or something. Things we learnt today.
If you can’t have anything prior to the universe, you’ve just written your deity out of the picture. Unless of course, conveniently and totally co-incidentally, your deity is excluded from such and can exist before the universe.
Sure. Not without communicating her design to a fabricator, and feeding the fabricator. Or fabricating it herself. That’s my point. Design, or intention, alone, does nothing. It needs to be translated into action if the world is to change, and that involves energy transfer.
Which, means, if god is produce anything radically different from what things would otherwise do, s/he will have to violate the Laws of Nature as we understand them.
Including the Law of Conservation of Energy. And that ought to leave a mark.
OMagain on June 2, 2015 at 4:24 pm said:
Am i talking to a wall or something? I just said that Consciousness is fundamental for the physical reality to exist. Where did i stated that God is a material being? There was nothing physical prior to the Universe but nothing physical doesn’t mean absolute nothingness, it means transcendence.
No, we don’t. Which is why “God is the answer to why there is anything rather than nothing” remains to me the most cogent argument for God.
It’s not the argument I take issue with, and it’s not the ID argument.
Frankly we run out of language when we consider the cause of causation. But again, this is not the argument I am taking issue with.
So you are still missing my point. I don’t think human or animal, or possibly intelligent alien, intention, lie outside the laws of nature at all. And I am NOT, repeat NOT asking you to explain the cause of you postulated “intentional force” any more than I am asking you to explain, nor think you are asking me to explain, gravitational force.
What I am asking you is where the energy comes from when the application of that force does work.
In that case, if “intention” is a normal force, where does the energy come from when it is applied in a manner that results in work being done?
Fine. So where does the energy come from when it does work?
Good. So what was the energy source when the putative designer of living things actually made them?
EL said:
I’ve directly answered this several times now. It’s embedded in the system intention is working through.
To recognize the absurdity of this inference, ask yourself: what would the universe look like without gravity? Without the strong nuclear force? We would have a radically different universe. Since intention has been present and operating since the beginning, the effects of intention are part of our expected, every-day world. To remove it would result in a world that looks radically different, just like removing any of the other physical forces.
It’s a trivial point because nobody has argued otherwise. Without matter or energy to affect, whatever causes gravity does nothing. So? What do the laws of thermodynamics “do” on their own, without any energy or matter present in some system it applies to?
Yes, intention does nothing on its own because like all physical laws and forces it is a description of how matter and energy behaves in a system. Without a system to describe, physical laws and forces of any sort are meaningless.
Allan Miller said:
Who said? If god is directing energy in the physical world, that energy comes from some source in the physical world. If sunlight supposedly powers the work necessary to generate life and variant versions of living organisms by chance processes, god can certainly use sunlight to power intentionally directe chemical reactions. Whatever power source is available for other natural laws and forces and stochastic processes to utilize is available to any designer to utilize in directing the traffic.
Where did I suggest that you are wrong?
What you wrote is absurd. Or, as some might put it, what you wrote is not even wrong.
That seems to be like demanding that the empty set have an actual member.
Of any IDist.
I mean of course there’s some point in showing that they never have any meaningful answers, but it’s just asking for another “pathetic level of detail” response.
Basically, God can do anything by definition, so…
Just word games.
Glen Davidson
No, it’s not. Go on, disprove it!
When you’ve done that wake me up and we can have another go around.
If my auntie had bollocks she’d be my uncle.
That is not an answer, William. Please be specific.
In that case ID is wrong: we can’t infer Design from the absence of sufficiency of Law and Chance.
Under your scenario, it’s all Law.
To quote McCabe again:
I do not take issue with McCabe. And if that is what you are saying, William, then I do not take issue with you either.
I take issue with ID, which proposes that there CAN “be a feature of the universe which indicates that it is god [aka designer]-made.”
I sincerely doubt any answer I give you about anything is going to “satisfy” you, EL.
It is a direct answer to your question. All physical laws and forces act on matter and energy embedded in the systems they describe.
Actually, my hypothesis here is that intention is like a physical law or force – it’s how I answered your original question.
Let me ask you: what physical traces do we find to show that gravity is responsible for a presumed artifact of gravitation? Does it make sense to ask “how” gravity orchestrated the clumping of matter in the universe? Does it make sense to ask “what energy” gravity used to make such patterns of clumping?
Physical laws and forces are descriptions of how matter and energy in the system behaves. Intention is a description of how matter and energy in our system behaves. Asking “how” intention accomplishes this is like asking “how” gravity or the strong nuclear force accomplishes this; all you end up with is the description being reified as the cause.
So, intention as physical force is a description of how matter and energy behave. When matter and energy behave in a manner consistent with a teleological purpose and implausibly according to other natural laws and forces, then the model applies and we can reify that model and say that intention is causing matter and energy to act in a teleological manner.
I don’t think you know what that word means. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. You can’t. Please find another word.
Mung at Uncommon Descent:
I’m getting an image of a many-armed celestial juggler. But all those juggling fingers have to make contact to make those balls fly. I guess I’m being too literal.
Seems a reasonable question to anyone who isn’t a dualist of some sort.
Well, it’s not my problem. You invent “God”, you have to explain Her.
What specific behaviour is it you claim that the designer was required to be the cause of?
Origin of life is it? Or what?
Elizabeth,
You’re the one that keeps inserting god in the argument, not me. Whether we are talking about god or human designers, what organizes the matter and energy towards teleological ends is intention. My point in postulating it as a natural force, like gravity or the strong or weak nuclear forces, is to demonstrate the problem with asking questions like “what energy did a designer use ….”.
Intention describes patterns of matter an energy in the system. Your question is a non-sequitur. Intention doesn’t “use” energy, it describes patterns of energy applications in certain sequences that is not reducible to/predictable by other laws/forces, even if other laws and forces do not prohibit such patterns. If god is intentionally generating matter/energy outcomes, they will be recognizable as teleological arrangements and uses of matter and energy implausible without intention.
Which is precisely what ID argues the first living cell is: an artifact that requires intention to explain the teleological arrangements of matter and uses of energy to construct it. Regardless of trying to characterize their mission in politically correct terminology, this is exactly what SETI is doing – looking for an intentionally generated signal.
That’s rather vague. Which is it; as a force is not a law and I’m sure there is some axiom about A and not A?
Did I say “scientific hypothesis”?
You can infer intentionality the same way you can infer gravity as a necessary contributor to the existence of some phenomena. (1) lack of sufficient description without gravity; (2) gravity adds the necessary descriptive sufficiency.
Without intention, other physical laws and forces are insufficient to describe the coming-into-existence of a functional battleship. Intention is required, because the battleship demonstrates certain characteristics that explicitly imply teleology and functional purpose. So, (1) other physical laws & forces insufficient & (2) ID, or intention, provides what is required for a sufficient description.
I’d say force is the better fit, considering “laws” are considered more deterministic.
Depends on how you define random.
Ever hear of stochastic processes and false dichotomies?
We can measure gravity. How do you propose that we measure intentionality?
William J. Murray,
Me:
So god eats plants? Or God is a plant? Or he just kind of … ‘directs’ solar energy in the manner required?
One would imagine that a being capable of creating matter and energy from nothing would not really need to then be bound by its properties.
Let’s be realistic. ‘Oh My Self!’ is actually what is meant (I.e. “me thinks I am a god”). So, at least change it to OMS (or something similar).
Not even close. When your designer pushes an atom, where in the system does the embedded energy come from and how is it transmitted?
Right, if it’s all Lawful, if it’s all god/designer-made/caused, then what on Earth is the point of spouting a big ID case about the flagellum? The flagellum would be all of a piece with designing/making bacteria to begin with, with designing/making the conditions which allow bacteria to exist to begin with. But there would not be anything specific, anything exceptional, which we could point to about the flagellum where IDists could say “See, now, that’s too-obviously designed to be possible as a result of either Law or Chance.” Because Law already is everything, everywhere, no exceptions.
According to what WJM just said, everything in our world involves the “effects of intention” in exactly the same way that everything involves the effects of the (other, known) physical forces. So just las everything looks like it’s shaped by gravity (and we can’t really imagine any other reality –that is, not shaped by gravity), so also does everything look like it’s shaped by Intention (and it would be “absurd” to try to picture a reality not shaped by Intention).
When “Intention” operates as a force as universal as gravity, then every single thing we can witness exists in accordance with the force of “intention” as it exists in accordance with the force of gravity. This may be true. But if so, then there is not any single thing in biology which could possibly demonstrate “intention” more exceptionally or more clearly than every other thing. Why on Earth would Meyer be lauded by believers in “Intention” for raising the supposed problems with the Cambrian? He’s just another ordinary fool for picking that specific era when it, and every other moment of time with every other mutation and diversification, has been completely Lawful and in accordance with Intention all along. NO exceptions!
Ooh, ooh, pick me, I know this one.
We measure intentionality the same way we measure it-looks-designed-ness.
That’s the right answer, isn’t it? Can I have my gold star now?
How does intention just disappear, as it sometimes does?
Is distraction the opposite of intention?
Indeed, how does intention appear? What’s the energy causing it to begin to exist, when it recently did not?
Of course Murray isn’t dealing with intention in its complexity and its many questions. It’s just a convenient placeholder term to appear as if it stops the questions.
Maybe you need to learn a bit about forces.
Glen Davidson
Gregory,
Learn to enjoy a back-handed compliment, Gregory. 🙂