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”?
William J. Murray,
Intent and consequence are very much temporally linear. As, for that matter, is the evidence of history wrapped in genomes, morphology and fossils. If you are not bound by time, why ‘create’ serially, in a manner that looks exactly like descent with modification?
EL said:
Probably as potential energy in the thing itself. In order to know what energy in a system was used to achieve an effect, wouldn’t one have to be there to see what was going on?
Intention could also act like a constraint force that doesn’t even use energy, it just constrains the direction of motion generated by other non-intentional forces.
For ID, there is or was a designer somewhere involved in the process, and that is as far as they will commit themselves. They claim they can infer this from the properties of the objects under study.
I don’t think their method is scientific, but not so much because they don’t want to speculate about the designer. I think the problem lies in the lack of testable predictions following from the design inference itself. Sure, speculation about the designer may lead to testable predictions, but if those fail the test, the only result would be that this particular designer is no longer a viable option. That wouldn’t by itself rule out a different kind of designer and so it wouldn’t actually refute the design inference itself!
Think about Wegener and plate tectonics. When he posited his theory of moving continents there was no known mechanism that could account for such a thing. His theory had a hard time being accepted because of that, but did it mean it wasn’t scientific? I would think not. Positing moving continents, regardless of mechanism, leads to testable predictions such as continuity of geological features across oceans that didn’t exist in the past.
I think that the challenge for ID is to come up with testable predictions based on what their actual theory says, not based on what other people would like to turn it into. If they say it is not about the designer – fine, then we shouldn’t worry about the designer either, or testing for that, because either way the DI itself would not be affected. I happen to think that this is not unreasonable: just like evolutionary theory can appeal to as yet unknown mechanisms without being unscientific, likewise ID can appeal to as yet unknown designers without necessarily being unscientific. Fair or not?
fG
Alan Fox said:
Not according to delayed choice quantum eraser experiments.
Just because one can observe & interpret the universe in a manner that supports a particular perspective, doesn’t mean that is what the universe is. There are interpretations of quantum physics that provide for a model of the universe as something other than a serially-produced sequence of events.
faded_Glory,
Fair. However, ID proponents do indeed make predictions.
A prediction of ID purported to have been recently verified:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/03/another_success094531.html
Whereas ID thinking and prediction – that we can expect deeper and more astounding layers of functionality, design, coding and engineering – appears to be right on target and validated more and more as time goes on.
As I have argued before, materialism/Darwinism institutes an investigatory heuristic based on expectations that are continually contradicted by science, both in biology and physics – which is why materialists constantly have to rearrange their philosophical framework and terminologies.
William J. Murray,
Quantum physics is pretty much irrelevant to fossils and nested hierarchies of genetic and morphological traits. When strata overlay each other, complete with isotopic confirmation of relative age, who but the desperate would start invoking quantum weirdness?
William J. Murray,
If synonymous codons vary at other than the neutral rate, that is hardly a “failure to detect natural selection”! Quite the opposite. It’s a failure to detect ‘true’ neutrality.
William J. Murray,
It is by no means established*** that quantum objects are ‘really’ particles or waves when in transit. A simple resolution of the apparent temporal paradox is that they are neither. Photon behaviour in interference experiments is in any case no help in determining that effect precedes cause in the general case up here in the ‘macro’ world. There is a possibility of ‘local’ movement against the temporal flow, as against probability, down in the range of the very small. The same occurs with moves against the direction of entropy ‘out here’. Nonetheless, there is a predominant arrow, and quantum effects soon become negligible with increasing scale – such as, when you start working with minds, and applying them to collections of quarks.
Failure to appreciate scale variance may be the #1 feature of Creationist physics, a feature regularly noted by Mike Elzinga.
*** eta: eg see here.
Allan Miller
I’m not sure what you mean here. Physicists that conduct quantum experiments and theorize about the nature of the universe, time, and how observation affects the outcomes of certain experiments aren’t generally (as far as I know) “desperate” to say anything about evolution or the apparent history of the planet.
Their experiments are what they are, and the data is what it is. They make various interpretive theories about what that data means in terms of what the universe is, how it works and about our perception of it.
In a philosophical discussion about “god creating and tinkering with the world”, those interpretations offer some insight about how linear, materialist interpretations of what the world is, and how it works, are not even supported entirely by science – and are, in fact, contradicted by many quantum experiments (non-locality, non-local realism, instantaneous information transfer, universal entanglement, backwards-time causation, etc.)
Of course, those limited, materialist perspectives are good for them because it frames the universe in a way that supports their views and arguments. Unfortunately, modern science is eroding support for those views and arguments every day. The trajectory of science is not one of increasingly supporting anything that can be reasonably, remotely considered “materialism”, but rather of undermining it towards a more consciousness and information-centric conceptualization of our existence.
Positing restrictions or allowing an unrestricted designer is something that would concern individuals and their beliefs but it is not the concern of ID. ID is about examining particular instances and trying to determine whether or not they could come about by these unguided processes. If all instances can be shown to have come about in this way then ID is falsified no matter what the source of the process.
I’m not interested in the beliefs of individual ID proponents, I am interested in what they have to say about ID.
Certain features can be accounted for by natural proccesses so it would be silly to attribute them to ID. Would you say that the pile of marble chippings scattered on the floor as Michaelangelo sculpted his “David” was intelligently designed?
I’m not anything remotely resembling a christian.
Even in the framework of a universe created by god, some features can still be said to be best described as natural, and others as produced by ID. This is not even controversial – most theologies agree that a god or gods created everything, but yet there there is still a distinction that can be drawn between what we call “natural” and what we refer to as “artificial”.
ID is simply the name of a particular kind of characteristic unique to particular phenomena, much like gravity, or inertia, or electromagnetism have particular characteristics and move matter in particular ways.
This goes back to the sheer stubbornness of anti-ID advocates to refuse to admit even the most obvious things – that there is a qualitative difference between some things that are intentionally designed, and things that are not. There is a qualitative difference between some simple, natural things, and some simple designs; and there is a qualitative difference between some complex simple things, and some complex designed things.
The resistance to admitting this obvious distinction exists, even if it is not a very well-defined or articulated difference, is simply – IMO – an ideological
resistance to the potential metaphysical implications. When one defends SETI’s mission statement as scientific, and ridicules ID’s theory as “creationist”, there is no other rational conclusion possible.
Citation please. I accept that there is a difference between things that are designed and things that are not. Who are these people that do not? Name them or retract.
And there we have it. ID claims that it can refine this obvious distinction to the point at which it can say “life is designed”. That is where the dispute lays. Not in “do designed things exist”.
And how can something be “obvious” and at the same time not well defined or articulated? You can’t have both!
The difference between SETI and ID is that SETI is more then just words in a blog or words in a book. They are out there, doing something, looking for support for their position (that there is life out there to be found). ID is doing nothing like that, except to try to poke holes in Darwinism which will never advance the ID case. SETI does more then simply argue that aliens exist – they look for them. ID does nothing analogous to that.
If ID is science, where is the science of ID?
Simply listing the things that have been designated by ID as “designed” and why they have been so designated would go much further then re-explaining for the 100th time what ID is and is not.
Nonetheless, your evangelism is the same.
Are you an ID supporter William? Or are you just talking about ID?
I’ll just park this here:
“24
MungJune 3, 2015 at 9:12 am
Meanwhile, the real wasteland can be found in a recent thread at TSZ where they don’t know energy from force from gravity.
But they do know a designer couldn’t have done it.
And they’re not “materialists.”
I don’t know that a designer could not have done it. But I do know that nobody has actually put any convincing evidence in front of me that it did.
I remembered how big you all are on entailments.
It’s a map/territory thing. Someone needs to show what’s entailed by the model and then relate that to real world causation. Else these are just nonsense questions.
I think WJM is on the right track. Perhaps he would find the book of interest.
What are your thoughts on causation, Mung? Are they like Mackies? Putman? Carver?
Not necessarily. When energy is translated from one form to another, it usually leaves evidence – a hole in the ground, for instance. What sort of evidence would you look for to support the hypothesis, that, say, an intelligent agent had fabricated the first cell, or changed round the nucleotides of bacterial DNA in order to produce flagella?
Right, as I’ve said: you could set the whole thing up at the beginning like a Rube Goldberg contraption and watch it unfold. But if you want to CHANGE the “intention field” you are going to need some energy.
So which option do you prefer, William?
But that prediction doesn’t distinguish it from evolutionary processes. It needs to make a differential prediction to go head to head with evolutionary processes.
Also, why should intelligent design predict this anyway?
So it would be “silly” to attribute the creation of the galaxies to ID, or indeed the earth and the heavens – you would only attribute an ID as the cause of biological organisms?
Can you explain what a “complex simple thing” is? An example perhaps?
Can you please keep this conversation to the sandbox?
I invite Mung to cite a post that shows that someone doesn’t know the difference between these things.
That’s stupid. IDists often say stupid things like that. First one idiot comes up with an example he thinks challenges “unguided processes”. He shouts “Show me how this can have come about by Chance or Law” and if not satisfied then he shouts ‘ID it must have been ID!”. Meanwhile when evolutionists show a plausible sequence of mutations, the first guy never has the decency to admit that their “challenge” has been refuted. Then some other idiot comes up with some other example he thinks challenges “unguided processes”. RInse and repeat. It’s just like playing Whack-a-mole.
Your idea of “falsification”, CharlieM, is ridiculous. It’s nothing more than a way to keep hope alive for a Designer-of-the-gaps. We do NOT have to refute “all instances” of possible design which some string of idiots can propose. No, it’s up to the IDists — if they want to be taken halfway seriously as science, instead of a political movement to suppress science education — to form a proper hypothesis which leads to testable predictions.
But they can’t do that, can they.
Right, well that is fairly clear.
So your model, William, appears to entail the law of conservation of energy being more a guideline, right? That can be violated by fluctuating intention fields?
Do you have any evidence for human-intention fields doing this? Or is it only the divine intention field that can fluctuate at will?
I think the topic of ID predictions is a big one and probably needs an OP all by itself. Looking at this link I see many problems with these ‘predictions’. Someone would need to spell out in more detail why most of these are even logical entailments from ID, and why unguided evolution could not also account for such expected findings.
How does this follow from the Intelligent Design hypothesis? Firstly, you are simply assuming that non-ID processes cannot give rise to such deeper layers of functionality etc; and secondly you are not showing why design would necessarily lead to deeper layers of functionality etc. All this seems like so much handwaving, instead of precise predictions logically entailed by the ID hypothesis.
fG
I think William’s model does give us a testable hypothesis, actually. If the world is suffused with an intention field reflecting the desired outcomes of a creator-designer, then we should observe deflections in the trajectories of matter that cannot be predicted by vectors of known forces, and we should specifically see these when the resulting configuration of matter has properties of functionality and/or complexity.
Exactly.
WJM is being way more blockheaded than usual.
I wonder …
I wonder if he didn’t reality-check the things he said before hitting “post-comment” simply out of haste/carelessness …
But that bit about “refusing to admit” difference between some designed things and some not — that’s a level of stupid statement far beyond what most IDists say. Dunno what got into him today.
How are you going to check that? If I make a jig-saw puzzle, can you establish that my movements are all predictable as vectors of known forces?
fG
Can you give me the details of the scenario you have in mind?
Elizabeth,
Moved a few more OT comments to Sandbox so those who wish can discuss Aurelio there. I’m especially interested in what Mung has to say.
Set me at a table with an unmade jigsaw puzzle. Observe my movements when I aimlessly move the pieces around, and then observe my movements when I actually make the puzzle.
In the first case the outcome is an undesigned pretty much random collection of pieces, in the second case it is a clearly designed picture.
Which of my movements, or those of the puzzle pieces, in these two cases can you determine to be the result of known forces? Which ones can you not?
Genuinely curious.
fG
Actually, a better example would be if I am sitting on the beach and moving colored pebbles around, either aimlessly, or with the intent to make a mosaic of a mermaid. This removes the complication that the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are designed to only fit one way. The resulting mosaic is either a random collection of pebbles, or the picture of a mermaid. Can you establish if the pebbles, and/or my hands, moved according to different laws in the one case or the other?
fG
ID predictions thread: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=3785
Elizabeth,
Mung, replying to KF who perhaps finds this place *Just too scary too read*:
“28
Mung
June 3, 2015 at 10:57 am
kf, eight pages of mostly insulting commentary interspersed with an occasional tidbit worth reading. A wasteland.
The essence seems to be the claim that the designer must have applied some force in order to move mass around, aligned with questions like “where did the energy come from”?”
No, because my hypothesis would be that they were moving according to the same laws, although I might be able to detect a difference nonetheless, if we set up the experiment in an MRI scanner, or, better still, MEG, because I think that you’d use your brain a bit differently in the first task than in the second.
What I’m claiming is that you could, with really good data collection, tell the difference between the forces acting on, say, a tray of pebbles being jiggled by a some rumbly thing, and those acting on a tray of pebbles in an “intentional field”.
For instance, let’s take Uri Geller’s spoon-bending, and assume, for the purposes of this discussion, he isn’t faking it. The forces acting on the spoon molecules while it lies within Geller’s “intentional field” are clearly unbalanced, so the head of the spoon moves, despite the handle being held still. When Geller switches off his field, the spoon stops bending.
So having established this intentional field, we now need to know what fuels its change. It could be that Geller carries around an intentional field that is static, and simply bends all spoons that come within range – in which case the energy source is simple – it’s whatever fuels Geller’s move towards the spoon (or the spoon’s move into Geller’s range). Or it could be that Geller can adjust the field, depending on whether he wants to bend spoons, or do something else. In which case we’d want to know how Geller turns the field on and off, and adjusts its gradients.
So a good place to start investigating intentional fields would be with people who seem to be able to use pure intention to move stuff without applying any other known force.
And then, if we found that, yes indeed, the local energy source is in the energy stores of the intender (Geller, say) then we know that if we are looking for the evidence designer/fabricator of the first living things, we need to look for evidence of a food source, or fuel source, for the designer.
While I would wish that we could have fewer insults here (they are mostly against the rules), really, by any standards, UD is no less insulting, Barry in particular.
The funny thing is, that pretty accurately states the essence of this thread. Except it’s not really Elizabeth’s claim that the designer must have applied some force … it’s their own claim, but they refuse to make it overt because then it really does beg the question “so where does the energy come from?”
In a universe where we know F=MA, and we also know we have M (eg mass of atoms in DNA molecules), where does the energy come from for the A in that equation, the movement of atoms from one sequence to another (intended/planned/designed)?
Too bad the IDists don’t have any answer to that question, and then choose to misrepresent the resulting discussion as a “wasteland”. What a great spin on their own failure.
EL said:
No, you’re thinking of the intentional field as static – once in place its configuration never changes, and thus it would need to be a rube goldberg contraption laid in from the beginning. I’m thinking of it as a variable constraining force which doesn’t necessarily require any energy at all. Remember, it’s intentional. That means it varies with the intent.
I agree that it can be tested. There have been tests in the past with REGs.
http://www.williamjames.com/Science/PK.htm
PEAR labs also conducted such tests:
And then there’s this:
And this:
So, it seems there has indeed been some data collected that indicates a force of intention exists and can affect trajectories of matter.
hotshoe said:
Does gravity convert the mass of an object in its grip to energy?
William J. Murray,
No, they aren’t, but an IDist is if they try to suggest that God’s causal approach to Life is somehow ‘outside time’, invoking the support of quantum physics, when we have a clearly written serial history (in the conventional manner) to explain. And you failed to address the counter-arguments against ‘backwards causation’ by other, equally respected physicists, you inveterate cherry-picker you.
And yet fossils continue to sit in apparent historical sequence, and nested hierarchies speak to that self-same historical sequence. I love how quantum weirdness is ‘borrowed’ by New-Agers such as yourself to justify any and every left-field notion.
It is making no inroads into evolutionary theory, so far. But dream on. The arena of ideas is yours for the taking, if you can only join the dots.
OMagain,
Yep, me too. Simply not sure about living things, is all. Aardvarks, maybe. Guppies – no way.
How long before we get the personal testimony of Uri Geller as WJM’s “scientific” evidence? 🙂
That is evident in your woolly views displayed defending IDism.
Seems to me, the force (*looks round to see if Olegt is watching*) of gravity is no different from a watch spring or a rechargeable battery. Lifting a weight requires energy (from food if you or I are doing the lifting) and stores energy that can be regained (with less than 100% efficiency) by allowing it to re-descend, doing work at the same time – such as driving the hands of a long-case clock.
A watch will run until the spring required rewinding or the battery replacing. It seems that the observation that energy is conserved and the total energy in the system is unchanged holds for this universe.