Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I agree that I don’t know that evolution has a purpose. I choose to believe it for reasons I’ve already listed.
Well, that was really interesting. What obsession(s) are you talking about?
Obsession with meaning and purpose, to the extent that they are more important than preponderance of evidence.
Except, that’s not what I said or meant. I didn’t claim that knowledge is impossible, or that everything is uncorrectably subjective.
I’ve never denied that technology works. I’ve never denied that science works. All I’ve done is admitted that I have an interpretive bias, and that IMO all humans – including scientists – have interpretive biases. Your post admits as much, as do scientists; if they didn’t have interpretive biases, they wouldn’t need all of the safeguards you listed to attempt to protect against error caused by it.
I’m not sure what you think you’re arguing against; your post completely validates exactly what I said.
I’ve never claimed anything of the sort.
William J Murray,
Your use of logic is meaningless if those conclusions you reach, that run counter to your beliefs, are not accepted by you.
Do you accept conclusions that are logically valid, even if they contradict your current beliefs?
I wonder how one would ponder evidence without meaning, and for no purpose?
Toronto,
I don’t hold internally inconsistent beliefs, if that is what you mean. Also, I don’t hold beliefs that directly contradict experiential facts.
I think your obsession with meaning and purpose is evident not so much in what you have chosen to believe, but in what you have chosen to understand and in what you have chosen to educate yourself about.
You started an entire discussion by admitting you are unqualified to debate the technical merits of evolution, and yet the concepts are not beyond your reach. You have simply chosen not to apply your intelligence to understanding them.
What’s the problem? A person can have a reason and purpose without requiring biology to have a purpose.
Wiiliam J Murray,
You claimed your beliefs are not based on evidence, therefore, new evidence, (i.e. new knowledge), will not alter your beliefs.
This means that learning is not possible since new knowledge that is contrary to your beliefs is not acceptable.
If you accepted new knowledge, your beliefs would change in step.
This is really important.
So, you’re not a biological entity?
Not to mention an obsession with “finding” all these hidden goals, purposes, and teleological assumptions hidden in all forms of modeling, theorizing, pattern-matching, data analysis, and every other technique used to build explanatory power. WMJ has selected a Final Cause, an Ultimate Purpose that meets his theological needs, he presumes everyone else thinks the same way, he rejects explanations as based on “wrong” projection of nonexistent purposes, because to him explanatory power has nothing to do with predictive capability and everything to do with his desire to have a Designer assign purpose where it can’t otherwise be found.
Your question doesn’t make sense. I can have purpose even if the process that brought me into existence does not.
If you take the trouble to study the mathematics of evolution you will discover — as is confirmed by the Lenski experiment — that evolution explores all possible variations from any given starting point. It doesn’t matter a bit whether mutations are guided or unguided, because all nearby variations will be tested.
Now you may “choose” to believe –as Michael Denton does — that physics and chemistry are designed to ensure certain outcomes, but the fact is that the process itself proceeds like water flowing downhill.
Dr. Hunter’s constantly repeated point is his view that religion drives science, and that it matters.
On purpose: Science can study purpose and intent. Ask Elizabeth about her own area of expertise. It can be studied where it’s found which, so far, is solely in the actions of ourselves and other animals. There’s nothing wrong at all with looking for it in biology outside animal behaviour, but until you find it, there’s no reason to believe that it’s there. By all means study mutations and try to identify some that appear to have happened on purpose. That would seem to be a worthy I.D. project. But it has to be done. The current view of them being random in respect to fitness is based on observation, not ideology.
Do you agree that humans have a history of seeing volition where it isn’t? (Think of things like volcano gods, lightning gods, and explanations of unusual looking geological formations in local mythologies that involve stories about supernatural beings). Or do you think that the purposes of such beings should be included in the relevant scientific fields, like volcanology, meteorology and geology?
this is yet another of your fundamental misunderstandings of the science: yes, the scientists claiming that certain changes are random in relation to X indeed have very good reason for these claims: they either have measured it themselves or reviewed the accumulated evidence available! For example, there is very good accumulated evidence that point mutations are random in relation to extinction risk of a population.
The difference here is, science is fighting as hard as it can to neutralize biases, to work around them and approach accurate understandings despite them. You, to the contrary, are embracing biases, wallowing in them, finding comfort in not having to make the effort to understand anything. I consider that an emotional need, not a conscious choice.
But as Dawkins wrote, there is no sensible limit to what the human mind is capable of believing, against any amount of contrary evidence. Emotional needs trump intellectual understandings without even breathing hard — to the point where there is no sensible limit to how deeply we can kid ourselves.
Intellectual honesty starts at home.
It seems that William Murray is the Stanley Fish of Intelligent Design.
Nothing means anything except what each of them chooses it to mean.
But I’ll bet that they both look carefully before crossing the street.
…and you think that public education should espouse the stuff you choose to believe.
The assumption of mutations as random and purposeless is a simplifying one, not an ideological one. Why introduce the notion of agency unless you had some evidence of it. Of course there might be agency involved but you wouldn’t needlessly introduce that concept unless you had a compelling reason to do so. That would just be pointless question-begging.
Actually, as your commenting history on this blog amply demonstrates, you hold plenty of beliefs that are internally inconsistent and/or directly contradict experiential facts. You just choose to believe that you don’t, and keep insisting that evidence to the contrary must be ideology instead.
This is such a beautiful example of how one can so easily mistake ideology for reality.
Because you’re wrong; Science doesn’t attempt to neutralize biases; it attempts to apply/enforce a single one. In Newton’s time, that bias was called “methodological naturalism”. Today, it can more appropriately be called “metaphysical materialism”. The two are different.
Now, we can debate what bias is better, and in what terms “better”, but the fact is that science cannot operate at all without some sort of interpretive bias as a foundational and methodological heuristic. You are mistaking the application/enforcement of a single bias for no bias at all.
You don’t have to do either. You don’t have to characterize the mutations in such a way at all, only report that they occur, where, and in what observed frequency.
WJM said: “I have no problem accepting evidence that doesn’t support my views as evidence. My beliefs aren’t based on evidence.”
This can only be true if you DO NOT change your beliefs when you come across evidence showing that they are wrong.
WJM said: “I don’t hold beliefs that directly contradict experiential facts.”
This can only be true if you DO change your beliefs when you come across evidence showing that they are wrong.
It can’t be both. Which one is it?
I disagree with both Norm and WJM: Mutations are not simply *assumed* to be random, their randomness (in relation to phenomenon of interest x) is an experiential fact.
And WJM: you were clearly not advocating for *not doing either* just a few posts earlier – you were advocating for characterizing evolution in a framework of purpose. Not because we have any experiential evidence for it, but because of your personal preferences.
You are mistaking a method for a bias.
My eyes are not biased against sounds – they just aren’t equipped to detect them.
Science is not equipped to detect supernatural effects. It isn’t a bias. It’s just intrinsic to the method.
BTW “intelligence” is not a supernatural effect. Science is perfectly capable of detecting intelligence, and is not biased against it.
William J Murray,
Again, I cite you when you say that your beliefs, are NOT based on evidence.
There is NO evidence, of any type, that suggests all humans have a common purpose.
Do you have any facts that show I am wrong about this?
WJM: If you really want to know if your beliefs are consistent with evidence and reality, join us on the technical threads.
If you don’t feel qualified, educate yourself until you are.
Ah, and this is why competing investigators can come to eventual agreement, and this is why people from ALL cultures, religious backgrounds, languages, etc. can come to agree, etc. It’s not because reality is consistent and knowable, it’s because ALL scientists from ALL nations, backgrounds, and walks of life share the same bias. Who knew? Consiliance doesn’t mean cross-disciplinary consistency, it means enforcement of a single bias! Gravity only “exists” because a gravity-accepting bias is being enforced. And it can be precisely measured, I suppose, because the measuring devices and approaches themselves are outgrowths of an enforced bias.
Amazing.
What’s the problem? A person can have a reason and purpose without requiring biology to have a purpose.
Do geological and/or meteorological entities (or events/materials/processes) have a purpose? A purpose that is designed, created, and directed by an intelligent designer (God)?
No, you do. Toronto isn’t promoting a designer. You are.
How do you define materialism?
My “position” is that I will accept whatever is real.
You’re a self declared Muslim creationist, who also relies on Christian scripture at times.
Exactly what explanation do you mean?
Can your “position” explain them?
One thing I know for sure is that there is a difference between evolution and the theory of evolution.
Of course evolution is okay with fish evolving into fish. The theory of evolution is also okay with fish evolving into fish. Who said it isn’t?
You’re funny. Really.
If “the designer” exists, it had to come from somewhere and something, didn’t it? Either that or it came from nothing, but that would go against your “position”, wouldn’t it? Don’t you IDists claim that something can’t come from nothing, and aren’t you the ones who are so concerned with origins? So, from where and what did “the designer” originate?
To actually support you claim, all you have to do is step up and show the evidence that “the designer” can produce living organisms out of non-living matter. Can you? Will you?
To actually support your claim, all you have to do is step up and show evidence of the origin of life that is directly attributable to “the designer”. Can you? Will you?
And please provide a citation that says I need to provide a citation for you to step up and support your claims. You’re promoting a designer. You say that ID is all about origins. The origin of “the designer” is your problem.
I thought you said that ID is about the origin of CSI? Are you saying that the origin of CSI is equal to the origin of life? And how about IC? Don’t you say that ID is about the origin of IC? Is the origin of IC equal to the origin of life? And how about the sun, the Earth, the rest of this solar system, the Milky Way, and “this” universe? Don’t you say that ID is about the origins of all of that too? Is all of that equal to the origin of life? If there are other universes, is ID concerned with them too?
I’m wondering, did dinosaurs have CSI and IC? How about trilobites? Were dinosaurs and trilobites designed and created by “the designer”? If so, how and why?
Thank goodness.
Baraminology, and ID, are so vague and unscientific that virtually anything will fit in with them.
Ah, so you’re admitting that you’re against the theory of evolution because it challenges (whether directly or indirectly) your religious beliefs?
Then where did the “CSI” come from? Remember, ID/CSI/IC are all about origins.
Could still be present? Are you saying that there may not be any CSI in the universe right now?
Maybe a post on this subject would be interesting, because opinions would divide in a way which isn’t I.D. folk versus the rest. If a being appears in London claiming to be a goddess, and she changes the river Thames into wine while walking on it, surely science is equipped to test the effects of her actions by, for example, collecting the wine in bottles, taking it to the lab to verify that it’s wine, and subsequently making repeatable observations about it.
More realistically, if we ask a group of Christians to pray for the recovery of groups of patients without their knowledge, and the recovery rate of the groups prayed for is consistently better than that of control groups, couldn’t we reasonably falsify the hypothesis: “There are no gods who answer prayers”?
I’d say that there’s no a priori exclusion of the supernatural (or anything else) from science, it merely isn’t included at this point because it has yet to be discovered to exist. IOW, it’s not included for the same reason as flat planets or neutrinos that travel faster than light aren’t. It’s subject to the same rules and standards of evidence as everything else, and currently, IMO, all the evidence suggests that it’s the product of human heads.
I agree entirely, but I think that a significant gulf between the folk at U.D. and their critics is that the I.D.ists do consider human intelligent design as being supernatural at source. To William, we are not animals. Therefore, presumably, we are the evidence for the existence of non-biological intelligence, something necessary for an I.D. explanation of the OOL.
A question for anyone who believes that the human race has a purpose (besides survival, reproduction, and getting the latest video game or Ipad):
What exactly is that purpose?
WJM:
YAAAAARGH! How can Drift occur anything BUT haphazardly? That’s what it is! Unless you are suggesting that (say) Brownian motion is not ‘haphazard’ – that every buffeting of every molecule is Ordained. In which case, whence your precious Free Will? I HAD to meet my wife because we HAD to make our small contribution to Genetic Drift! Or you just mean some buffetings are guided, and we can’t tell which … Drift is compounded sample error, and is a necessarily haphazard property of the whole sample, not a bit of it. Why is that ideological?
Yeesh. This is one of the most aggravating things about the ID-er. Because they are enmeshed in an ideology that needs interference, the contrary position is ideological also – we somehow need there to be none. The concept of having objective intent (even if perception is admittedly filtered by nature and experience) is utterly alien. And hence, an understanding of what we should be teaching kids in science class – to think for themselves – simply does not compute. How can they think for themselves if we teach them what previous generations of scientists have long accepted – they were atheist ideologues; we need to teach about non-evidenced supernatural agency!
WJM:
To which I must give in to the temptation to vocalise my gut reaction: horseshit! As regards the “Darwinist”’s morality – shove off; I would wager it is no worse than yours! But in any case you have absolutely no basis (other than the usual “I-just-choose-my-beliefs”) for your thesis that Darwinism has contributed, or will contribute, in any way to the decline of society, nor that those societies (or portions thereof) that reject it are any better or worse as a consequence. The society you would like to see – where people pretend truths are untruths for the Greater Good – fills me with horror, as someone who rather likes the label “freethinker”. If evolution is UNTRUE, let’s get rid of it. If it is not … tough. You seem to be advocating some kind of Orwellian doublethink, and how this might be achieved in wider society – you imposing your ‘non-mightful right’ through ‘objective morality’, perhaps, or teachers teaching what they do not themselves accept – calls to mind the excesses of some of the more citizen-bashing Islamist states. As a libertarian, you would give teachers the freedom to teach everyone to think as you do!
Your belief that we can pick and choose from science is hopelessly naive – we’ll take it, but without a side-order of Darwinism. Science is an interlocked whole. The society we have today, post-industrialisation is, for good or ill, built upon science. Regardless whether one would ‘wish to live’ in bucolic pre-industrial societies, or a more ‘libertarian’ version of modern industrial ones, the fact is that we got where we are by increasing our understanding of chemistry and physics and biology, which has fuelled our ‘advance’ (at a cost – the planet is being strangled by our over-production of offspring and slavish dedication to Growth). And evolutionary understanding has played its part. Darwinian theory is used to devise policy on diseases and pests, to advance medicine, to design, to manage conservation issues … of course, we could still have these things, and just pretend we made the ideas up … there is nooooo relevance of these mechanisms to anything in our ‘privileged’ evolutionary history as the rightful guardians of this planet. Goodness me, no. That’s just the preserve of trilobites and dinosaurs and maples and flatworms and E. Coli … fortunately, the supply of people who CAN make the connection without being sidetracked by hopeless, impractical Quixotic ideology will never dry up. Your desire to see some kind of union of religion and libertarian politics has already been realised in certain states, but what are you going to do with the freethinkers, or the barbarous societies in Europe who live by largely secular principles?
That we are masters of our own destiny is, I think, an important message for society to grasp. How many populations do we need to examine before we can appreciate the significance of limits? And in that sense – “a wizard will save us” – ID is part of a dangerous philosophy, though I oppose it on more mundane grounds.
I think that we can more accurately say that regardless of the various other biases scientists bring to the table, science as a process is designed to deliberately attempt to filter all of that down to a single bias. The fact that so many published, peer-reviewed papers offer findings that cannot be reproduced shows how deep of a problem this is. Another indicator is the long, rich history of the institution of science’s aversion to non-consensus view. Consensus is a powerful bias that may be overcome only, as Max Planck said, “one funeral at a time”.
BTW, I am of course not saying that this bias is a bad thing; I’m saying that it is necessary to provide an organizing heuristic. Conscious entities all have an interpretive bias; science, as an institution, chooses its bias and enforces it. I, also, have chosen my interpretive bias.
How do you know that I have “absolutely no basis” for my view about Darwinism, when I haven’t even presented a case for that view? Your strong emotional reaction absent even a request for debate or support reveals, IMO, your strong ideological attachment to Darwinism. Otherwise, you might simply ask: “Do you have any evidence to support that view?”
After all, as I’ve said repeatedly, just because I don’t choose my beliefs based on evidence doesn’t necessarily mean I cannot back any particular one up with evidence and logic.
I have no idea what your rant at the end of your post was supposed to address. You have apparently made some incorrect inferences.
WJM said: “I have no problem accepting evidence that doesn’t support my views as evidence. My beliefs aren’t based on evidence.”
Madbat089 said: “This can only be true if you DO NOT change your beliefs when you come across evidence showing that they are wrong.”
WJM said: “I don’t hold beliefs that directly contradict experiential facts.”
Madbat089 said: “This can only be true if you DO change your beliefs when you come across evidence showing that they are wrong. It can’t be both. Which one is it?”
You’re assuming evidence = experiential facts. In my view, they are entirely different things. Experiential facts are honest, descriptive statement about my personal experience, but do not indicate any explanatory models or claims about the true nature of experienced phenomena; evidence is an interpretation of those facts in light of theoretical or hypothetical explanatory models.
So, while I do not allow myself to believe that I’m not looking at a monitor as I type this, I allow myself to believe that every time I type a letter to advance the cause of good, the world becomes a better place.
WJM:
OK – DO you have evidence that Darwinism is an enabler of moral decline?
You’re right, I indulged the temptation to express my objection vigorously. Why the heck should I not? Would you consider me less of an ideologue if I was more polite?
Equally, you could have responded by simply presenting your evidence. Instead you took the opportunity – as I have seen countless times before in debate with the ID fraternity – to read ideological committment into vigorous expression. I am not ideologically committed TO Darwinism, but AGAINST the addled suggestion that it is responsible for moral decline – and, an implicit slur I take more personally, that as a “Darwinist” I must be the moral inferior of those who oppose it. It is not my committment to the supposed ideology that draws my ire, but holier-than-though sanctimony.
As I said, quite clearly, if Darwinism is incorrect I would happily see the back of it.
It was intended to address the dangers of belief that we have a Purpose, and the the Originator of that Purpose will show up in time to perform his regular trick of guiding us down an appropriate path. I did not infer that you personally hold that view, but it is a common one. I did not join the dots, and it would make a lengthy post in itself, but I think understanding the Darwinian-Malthusian paradigm is going to be vital for the next generation, not sugar-coating. Unfortunately, this has implications for those of a libertarian turn of mind. I wonder whether that is the real problem?
LoL! You have no idea what is real. And materialism is the belief that matter, energy, necessity and chance are all that is required.
Nope, not me. But do keep fishing.