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”?
Well, agreement didn’t last long, did it. Too bad.
Allan Miller asks:
Does gravity just sort of direct solar energy to bend around intense gravity wells? Does it just sort of “direct” how matter behaves in a gravitational field? Do entropy and the laws of thermodynamics just sort of “direct” how energy behaves?
I think you’re having a hard time conceptualizing intention as a force or a law and what that means. Those things are descriptions of how matter and energy behave in a system; they are not explanations of that behavior. You seem to keep thinking of intention as a cause instead of a description of behavior reified as a cause, the latter of which is what forces and laws are.
A better word than “conceptualizing” would be “imagining” here. It’s certainly true that, as far as I am concerned, you may just as well be talking Arapaho.
On the other hand, if you are on to something, you may be on the way to solving the World energy crisis. Imagine if we could tap in to intentionality! Cold fusion, Phhhht!
Perfect for TSZ: Self applause
hotshoe said:
Right. Because you can’t recognize a difference between the effects of the laws of motion from the effects of the laws of thermodynamics, right? You wouldn’t be able to discern matter moving according an intentional force from matter moving according to gravitational force because you also can’t mediate between matter moving strictly according to inertia, and matter necessarily also being acted on by gravity, right?
You guys will say the most bizarre things to throw up roadblocks for no apparent reason other than it is an IDist saying a thing.
Yeah. If only we could intentionally do things! Imagine what we could invent and accomplish if only we could teleologically arrange matter and use energy towards a future goal!
Again, you guys will say the most bizarre things.
Oh William!
Just curious, William. Can I ask if you are aware there is a precise (well, precise in a philosophical sense) concept known as Intentionality. You seem to be muddling the concept up with the everyday idea of “intent”.
William J. Murray,
The flux of energy through living systems is very well characterised. You seemed to be arguing that something similar goes on when God does his business. But no, when challenged you immediately fall back on the irreducible explanation of the most basic physics. “You know how you can’t say exactly how gravity bends light? Well …. it’s like that!”. Well we can measure the gravitational effect on light, We can measure the electronegativity of molecules and atoms, and the energy flux between them. We can measure the available energy content of foodstuffs. We cannot measure your ‘intentional force’ – that is, there’s no apparent energy unaccounted for when a person chooses to move a brick as opposed to sneezing. It all comes from complex carbohydrates, which ultimately gain energy either from the sun or from chemotrophy.
No, I think more that you’re having an easy time handwaving and pretending your ‘intentional force’ has any merit simply because there is a limit to any causal explanation of force.
On observation, there is minimal ‘reification of models’ going on when one observes that designers must eat. Not eating has a causal effect on their ability to design. If one argues that Designers move matter around the same way we do, one is talking about systems of interchange involving complex carbohydrate. Otherwise it’s not the same. It’s something much more vague and handwavy and conveniently not shackled by the conventions applicable to ‘material’, as opposed to New-Age, matter and energy.
Nope. The “one” who inserted god in the argument were the cdesignproponentsists.
If you, on the other hand, are merely drawing the conclusion that a pre-human alien made life on earth, I think your inference is unfounded, but I don’t ask you to provide an energy source. I assume the energy source is what the alien had for breakfast.
Wrong. Or, at the very least, a category error. I can organise matter intentionally (and sometimes disorganise it unintentionally). But when I do so, I do not apply a force called “intention”. I apply muscle power, which converts sugar into kinetic energy.
If I merely sit there, intending stuff, nothing gets done.
Of course, we could get into a discussion about what happens in my brain when I form an intention, and perhaps you want to argue that some kind of intentional forcefield acts on my neurons to send signals to my muscles. If so I would ask you the question: where is the energy coming from that diverts the ions within and without my neuronal membranes from the path they would have continued to travel along had I not formed that intention?
If work is done, there’s an energy bill. And if work is done that would not have been done in the absence of intention, then you need to send that bill to the intender. And if the intender is me, she’ll spend it on weetabix.
It certainly demonstrates the problem – the problem it poses for you. I am perfectly happy to regard it as a natural force, per arguendum, but if its application to bits of stuff so that that stuff moves in a direction it wouldn’t move without its application, it is going to require energy.
I can’t parse this – is there a typo? In any case, I thought you said intention was a force?
This makes no sense. You said intention was a force. Now you say it “describes patterns of energy application”. But special patterns, that are not predictable by other laws.
OK, let’s try a ferinstance:
Let’s take one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions. Could that be what you have in mind? They are intended – check. They represent a pattern of application of energy application in certain sequences – check. That pattern is at least unlikely in the absence of an intentional agent. Check. But they are not a force. So, uncheck.
So is intention, not, in fact, a force?
Or is intention the pattern of forces that assembled the contraption? But the contraption was assembled using regular energy (weetabix et al again) and regular forces.
So I think you are muddled.
OK, so you seem to have retracted the claim that intention is a force. Rather, it is the inferred cause of a pattern of outcomes “implausible” in its absence. Right?
Or do you still want intention to be a force?
It seems you are back to Rube Goldberg and deism again.
William, I think you are trying to present to conflicting models as one.
Here is one model, that sort of works:
Some intentional creator agent (divine or otherwise) set up earth in such a manner, that, unlikely as it might seem, the precise sequence of natural events took place that was required to create the first living cell, and, again, contrary to any expectation, also to the Cambrian explosion, and bacterial flagella, etc.
But that is a deist conception – the energy that fuels the precise pattern of process is the potential energy of the starting configuration. No intervention can take place under this scenario without the input of additional energy, just as to alter the outcome of one of those Rube Goldberg setups, you’d have to dislodge something. And note that in this scenario “intention” is a “description of a pattern of energy application”, in this case, a lot of potential energy. Intention is not a force – the actual forces involved are all the common or garden ones.
So let’s take scenario two, in which intention is a force. And let’s call it an “intentional field”. When a configuration of matter enters the field – let’s say a patch of primordial soup – it is diverted along intentional field lines to form a protocell.
Now what happens? Does the intentional field “switch off” and allow normal forces to do what they would do “unintended”? And does it stay switched off until the Cambrian Explosion is due, and form a different field pattern, again diverting matter from the trajectories it would otherwise take, until it has adopted the intended configuration?
If so – cool – but – what is fueling the fluctuations of this intentional force field? what is causing it to switch on and off? Do you know of any other force fields that can be switched on and off? And is this how you think that human intention works? Note that in this scenario, intention is not a “pattern of energy application” – it’s a force field.
So you have a choice, I think William.
Pick one. You can’t have both.
Sure they are. Nothing wrong with looking for intentionally generated signals. But you have to keep your categories straight: an “intentionallly generated signal” is a signal generated by an intentional agent. It isn’t (normally regarded as) a signal generated by an intentional force field. A laser wouldn’t get very far if the alien just sat there and intended it to switch on.
[Incidentally, Philip Pullman has fun with the concept of an intention field with his Intention Craft. But that is of course fiction.
With respect, William, I think you are having a hard time thinking through the implications of your proposal that intention is a force field, like gravity.
Why do you think that MRI machines makeso much noise?
That’s an interesting question. Transformer hum indicates a design flaw or manufacturing shortcut. Energy wasted moving parts that shouldn’t move.
You haven’t distinguished between conception of the design and execution of the design. Can you tell me what law of nature George De Mestral was following when he conceived of the notion of velcro? He obviously had the idea of velcro before any actual material came into production.
Well I don’t subscribe to the view that there is some external being tinkering with matter. I take a more holistic view of reality. I don’t see the earth as a globe of dead matter but as a living being. And just as creatures such as oysters produce dead matter as part of their being so the living earth as a whole can be said to extrude dead matter. Think of the chalk formations in the earth’s crust.
The universe is alive and energetic and what you would regard as dead matter has been crystalized so to speak out of this living system. In other words I see energy as primal to matter.
There is no external designer producing cleaver seeds; the idea of the form of the seed is contained in the being of the plant itself. The essence of the plant is much more than we can grasp with our limited senses and our experiments derived from them.
There is far more wisdom in the animal and plant kingdom than in the technical achievements of humanity. So what you see as the energy problem may be a problem for some ID proponents but its not a problem for me.
And that explains…what?
Glen Davidson
And that sounds like a very satisfying philosophy.
Nothing. I suspect that’s the point.
I most certainly have. It’s my entire point: that if ID proponents are going to infer designer as the cause of, say, biological organisms, they must also infer a fabricator who assembled the organism according to the design. Those two roles might or might not be filled by the same agent. But the fabricator must have access to the design, and must have an energy source to divert various masses from the trajectories that they would have had absent the designer to ones that will result in the intended configuration.
In that case, my argument is not with you. That sounds perfectly sensible to me, indeed it conforms quite closely to my own view.
But it is not the view proposed by ID.
Velcro was invented by evolution. The product was copied from burdock seeds.
Elizabeth,
It is perfectly compatable with ID
Invented several times by evolution. If common descent doesn’t cover it convergent evolution will. We are asked to believe that several species of plants stumbled on this solution independently.
So what do you think ID is proposing?
That’s nice. ID-pushers have been known to assert that all the findings of evolutionary science are “perfectly compatable with ID”. A squadron of flying unicorns touching down in Trafalgar Square and dancing a quadrille would be “perfectly compatable with ID”. Bluntly, absolutely anything whatsoever is “perfectly compatable with ID”—and if you disagree with that assertion, I heartily invite you to come up with something that would, in fact, not qualify as being “perfectly compatable with ID”.
What’s your point (if any)?
By jove, you are right. It’s actually more reasonable to believe that some being outside of the universe is inventing it instead (somehow, yet to be determined as per this thread!) of some process we are already aware of that can create novelty.
Elizabeth,
That certain features of the natural world have been designed by an intelligent agent.
cubist,
Blind, unguided evolution is incompatable with ID
My point is that you don’t have to be a fundamentalist, creationist to support ID. In fact many creationists are critical of ID.
OMagain,
Why should one have to believe that the inventor is outside the universe?
Can you give an example of the process you speak of creating novelty?
OMagain
Me? Scientists have disproven it.
The delayed choice quantum eraser experiment was confirmed with helium atoms this year. One more nail in the coffin of materialism. As the article says, “The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150527103110.htm
Neil Rickert
emm no its not.
Complex Specified Intentionality. CSI. Oops, that one’s taken.
How about ISC: Intentionally Specified Complexity
Another morsel for the IDiot alphabet soup bowl.
Elizabeth, do you think force and energy are the same thing? There’s plenty of available energy out there. We’re constantly reminded that the earth is not a closed system.
Alan Fox’s posts can still be found at UD, so what on earth are you talking about?
sigh
“It must be stressed at the outset that Newtonian mechanics is a formalism. It is thus characterized entirely by an inferential structure, and as such, needs, of course, to have no external referents at all.
…Thus if we believe, as we have for centuries past, that the Newtonian formalism actually models the external world, the characteristic inferential structure in Newtonian systems says something about causality, indeed, indeed about causal entailment in general.
As I shall now show, Newtonian mechanics as a formalism manifests a surprisingly weak inferential structure, in the sense that almost everything of importance in it is unentailed. When we translate this back to the language of causal entailment, we find the province of causality correspondingly restricted this poverty in entailment, which is intrinsic to the formalism itself, seems at first sight to make that formalism very general, in that many diverse things can be encoded into it, but the paucity of entailment makes the formalism very special as a formalism. And if a formalism is special, what makes it special is automatically impressed on anything encoded into it; it will thereby com to look special too. And that is the crux of it.”
– Robert Rosen, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into the Nature, Origin and Fabrication of Life
On Gravity:
“…any particle exerts a force on any other particle, directly proportional to the produce of their masses (parameters, state-independent) and inversely proportional to the square of he interparticle distance (state-dependent).”
Mung,
Was there an actual purpose in making those quotes?
Really? Hmm. Since ID steadfastly refuses to posit any restrictions whatsoever on the Designer, it seems to me that ID is “perfectly compatible with” a Designer Who elects to make use of “blind, unguided” forces. And given that there have been a number of human designers who have explicitly made direct use of “blind, unguided” forces in their work, I would really like to see how you justify your assertion that “Blind, unguided evolution is incompatable with ID”.
Perhaps not, but can you name any ID-pushers who are not also Christians who subscribe to a fairly specific strain of Xtian belief? The vast majority of scientists who accept evolution include members of pretty much every religious creed on Earth; why, then, is it that damn near all ID-pushers are members of one specific religion?
Yes, they are—because they feel that ID is one of the wrong flavors of Creationism. Just as some YECs (to specify one particular flavor of Creationism) are critical of ID, so, too, are YECs in general critical of OEC. Did you have some sort of a point to make by referring to the fact of sectarian divisions between differing branches of the religious dogma of Creationism?
As I have clearly said, several times, Mung, no, I do not.
And nor do I think there is a shortage of energy.
I am asking were the energy comes from that is imparted to mass when the designer inferred to intervene to create living cells, bacterial flagella, Cambrian organisms or whatever, applied a force to change the trajectory of matter from the course it would have taken without such intervention.
Kinetic energy was imparted to the mass. Where did it last reside?
I’ve moved some posts to Guano. Please read the rules.
You seem not to understand that they are quite different categories.
OK, go with “intention is a force”. So where does the energy come from to change the force field?
But not others?
Most of Alan Fox’s comments may be found there – but not all. That whole threads have been deleted in the past is a matter of record. It’s a question of trust and integrity. Anyone who comments here can rely on the fact their comment will not be deleted or edited (subject to compliance with the stated rules on posting porn, spam or “outing” other posters).
I commented on my adventures as “Aurelio Smith” in the Sandbox and I hope Mung has time for a response.
It’s because while you are scanning, you need to keep changing the field gradient.
Which is my point to William: if he wants intention to be a field, he still has to provide energy to change the field – release the assembled parts to behave according to their properties in an intention-free field. Otherwise they won’t work as designed.
The question in my OP is really very simple: if a non-human designer designed the first living cell, where did the energy come from that did the work of moving the parts into position? Obviously forces were involved, but if those forces resulted in stuff moving that would not otherwise have moved, additional work was done, and additional energy required.
What fueled the fabrication of the design?
I have no issue with anyone who posits a creator god. It’s an unfalsifiable philosophical view that doesn’t work for me but if it suits others, that’s perfectly fine.
But if God is omniscient, why does she need to tinker? And what is the basis for anyone deciding that God needed to tinker here but not there?
If I were an ID-ist I would say something like this:
Imagine a person with an unmade jigsaw puzzle. They have a choice in what to do with the pieces: they can spend an hour moving them about willy-nilly, and the result will be a random pattern of pieces that doesn’t show a picture. Or, they can spend an hour actually making the puzzle, and they end up with a pattern that does show a picture. Is the energy spent during this hour any different in the first outcome than in the second one? If not, how is the energy question relevant to ID?
It’s actually heretical in some flavours of theism – to posit that God only created parts of the world, and not others.
No, it isn’t any different. But in that case we’d be positing that all moving is done by a designer-fabricator, and that sometimes the designer-fabricator moves things in a way that makes a picture and sometimes the designer-fabricator moves things in a way that doesn’t.
We’d be unable to devise any laws governing the way that the pieces moved in the non-picture case.
But it turns out we can. We have very good laws that govern the way the pieces move in the undesigned case. And not only that, but ID proposes that we infer a designer-fabricator when those laws CANNOT explain the observed pattern.
So the analogy to the ID proposal is that the pieces jiggle about according to some set of laws, but that sometimes a jigsaw-puzzle solver comes along, and moves them into the picture configuration, a configuration very unlikely were we to simply wait for them to jiggle into that configuration.
In the case of human designer (trying to do the puzzle on a bumpy ferry ride, say), we can easily explain the energy source – the ferry cafeteria.
I’m asking for the energy source for the designer on pre-biotic earth.
Again, just wearing my ID hat, you have to remember that the Design Inference merely posits that the best explanation for the completed puzzle is intelligence somewhere in the causal chain. It accepts that the design detection method can result in false negatives (the jumbled up puzzle will be flagged as non-designed although there still is an intelligent agent in the causal chain).
Design detection starts and ends with concluding design, or not, from the properties of the object under study. The properties of the designer are outside the scope of ID, so it is silent on the question if a particular design requires additional energy over and above non-design. As the puzzle example shows, additional energy is not necessarily a requirement to produce a design rather than a random pattern, so your question is irrelevant for the Design Inference 🙂
fG
But is there? In the jigsaw example, we have the person moving the pieces, fuelled by food. In the ID “examples” where is the causal chain? Who or what is pushing the atoms and molecules into non-random assemblies and how or when? As a non-falsifiable philosophical position, God holding everything together everywhere at every moment is an alternative explanation to God having set the properties of the Universe to the specifics necessary to produce us and what we see. Or atheists can leave out the God part and substitute “I don’t know” for “God”.
The IDist claims to be able to discern
God’sthe Designer’s fingerprints in some but not all of the observable universe. How do they do that scientifically?Well, precisely. And I’m saying that in the case of a positive (whether a true positive or not) as with SETI, forensics and archaeology, the next step is to figure out how the putative artefact was made.. If an object was designed, it was also fabricated. And if it was fabricated according to a design, then the designer caused its parts to assemble by applying forces counter to the forces that would have acted on those parts had the fabricator not applied them according to the design.
Unless the whole thing was frontloaded, as in the Rube Goldberg contraptions – but that is a deist approach, and in any case, would destroy any analog with human design, at least outside a deterministic framework.
I know it is silent. My point is that all designs, whether exquisite or indistiguishable from random mess require energy input to be fabricated. A designed mess is still designed, and still required interference by the designer to make THAT mess not some other mess.
Sure it takes no extra energy to produce a design that doesn’t look like a design than it does to produce a design that does.
But if ID proponents are saying that everything in the world, even those things that look as though they are simply obeying regular laws, are in fact, deliberate moves by a designer trying to fool us into the conclusion that some times the universe obeys regular laws and sometimes it doesn’t, even though in fact, it is all whim, then they should make that explicit.
And they should certainly drop the EF, and its descendents, because they’d be saying that there are no natural laws – even things that look like law and chance are actually deliberate moves by the designer.
Absolutely. This is why, in my view, it’s bad theology, quite apart from the ropey science. It’s assuming there are God-made things and non-God made things. Or possibly, stuff that God just let happen according to some initial laws, and stuff that she took a little more care over.
But if we want to find out whether the latter is true, then we should follow the energy trail, to see where normal laws were suspended. But so far, no ID proponent seems to see this as the sensible next move.
It’s not as though the answer “no” would negate the idea of God. It would simply tell us that if the universe was created by God, she didn’t obviously violate her own laws to manufacture certain parts of it.
Which would seem more consistent, to me, with the idea of an omnipotent omniscient God than one who had to keep tinkering to make the thing come out right
Alan Fox said:
You – and many non-theists here – are thinking of creation in terms of a single event in time. For most theists I’ve been around, this is an incorrect conceptualization. Creation didn’t happen at some point in the distant past, but is always occurring. God is always creating the universe because if you took god away, there would be no universe. The underlying sustaining power and form of the universe is god generating its ongoing throughout time. While we may experience time in a linear fashion, god does not.
So, it’s not a case of god “tinkering” with stuff in the universe here and there; everything we see and experience is made manifest by god.
Some aspects of the universe, as manifested by god, can be described in terms of what we call “natural” laws and forces – patterns in the manifestation that are extremely consistent and predictable. Other patterns are less precisely predictable. Other patterns are the result of what we call teleology, intention or ID.