Scordova at UD asks a question that I find interesting.
By way of contrast, intelligent agencies, particularly those intelligent agencies which we presume have free will, cannot be counted upon to behave in predictable manners in certain domains. Even presuming some intelligent agencies (say machine “intelligence”) are deterministic, they can be an unpredictable black box to outside observers. This makes it difficult to make direct experimental confirmation of certain ID inferences.
It has long been my contention that the defining behavior of science is the search for regularity.
Some regularities can be refined into mathematical equations, which we generally call laws of nature.
Other processes are complex or chaotic, making long range predictions impossible. But chaotic systems can be seen, at small scale, to be following regular rules. Weather develops. It doesn’t simply appear. We can find regularities in its past.
Evolution is a bit like weather. we cannot predict where change is going, but we can find regularities in its past. And these regularities are what distinguishes evolution from intelligent design. They are what allows us to look in a certain place for Tiktaalik. Or hominid fossils. Or predict that genomes will form a nested hierarchy.
So I would answer Scordova that science never looks for capriciousness and always looks for regularity. That is the definition of science.
The reasons are partly historical and partly practical.
Historically, it has been a successful approach. And in practical terms, the search for capriciousness cannot fail. It is the default finding.
There are so many chaotic phenomena in our midst that the world seems to be governed by mysterious forces. The notion that one could find and potentially control these forces is a very new idea. It has little support in art and fiction, and is actively opposed by most religions. So when science started being successful and began to produce practical results, it also found itself in opposition to much of human culture. I do not find it surprising that animosity has developed.
Over to you guys…
Blas,
What are evolution 1 and evolution 2? What makes evolution 1 (whatever it may be) non-chaotic?
I too noticed that’s the logical consequence of WJM’s latest stinker of an argument. If gravity is “immaterial” then no one who accepts gravity is a materialist. WJM rarely thinks these things through before blithering.
Gregory,
What (other than your own prejudice) makes you think I am not open to dialogue? There is a factual issue on the table, WJM’s statement that quantum physics was largely constructed by creationists. However liberally one interprets that (unless we sever its connection with religion entirely), the statement appears to be at odds with the facts.
Only I’m not debating those people, Gregory. I’m debating people here in this forum.
From Merriam Webster:
It’s not my personal definition, and we are talking about scientists. Personally, I prefer to keep “creationism” as meaning something more specific, such as the literal interpretation of Genesis, but that’s not the way anti-ID advocates employ the term in debates about ID.
By the way anti-IDists employ the term “creationist”, I would suggest that, historically speaking, science is an enterprise that has been almost entirely constructed and run by creationists until very recently.
I agree that anti-ID advocates misapply the term “creationist” – mostly because they consider it a demeaning term that automatically discredits a scientist. They want to lump IDists into the creationist – so I have let them and adopted their use of “creationist” to make it a double-edged sword in terms of science and scientific achievement. Their entire enterprise was constructed by creationists (by their use of the term) and founded on creationist principles.
William J. Murray,
Not much. Who mentioned the bible? [scrolls up]. Oh, Einstein, quoted in passing. Not me, then.
I am not suggesting that there are no religious people in the entire field. But you appeared to claim QM as a victory for creationism (“largely discovered by creationists”). This is incorrect.
As far as creationism informed the thinking of earlier scientists, one might as well claim victory for gentlemen amateurs of independent means, or people with bushy beards.
LOL! The last part of WJM’s bluster is demonstrably false. No matter what the personal beliefs of the scientists were there is not a single discovery or advancement in science that used the Creationist paradigm. Not a single one.
In terms of being a materialist, it doesn’t matter what actually causes the behavior we call gravity, what matters is what one believes gravity to be as to whether or not their belief about what gravity is can be logically reconciled with materialism. Even if it cannot be, that logical failure doesn’t prevent people from believing that materialism is true, it only shows that people can have beliefs that are irreconcilable with the facts.
What things actually are in the physical world doesn’t restrict what one believes about them, or else we’d all have the same beliefs. By your logic, if materialism is true, and all real things are actually only made up of matter, then everyone would be a materialist. Since not everyone is a materialist, then materialism must be false – by your reasoning.
Whatever fairy tales you choose to personally believe doesn’t affect physical reality either. That’s why we’ve had scientists who were Creationists but never a scientist who used Creationism in his work.
Again, note this unsupportable statement of faith against creationism.
As it stands, it is demonstrably false – Occam’s Razor is a principle invented by a Franciscan friar is rooted in the religious belief that god would arrange an efficient universe. There is simply no reason to assume efficient explanations are more likely true under materialism.
There is no reason to assume that a unified field theory exists, or that universal patterns can be described elegantly – or even rationally – under materialism. Recognized or not, those are direct descendents of a particular theistic paradigm.
Now, let’s look at what materialism has to offer when it comes to explaining the fine-tuning of the universe: infinite universe generated out of nothing. That isn’t elegant; it isn’t rational; it’s not efficient. All it is is a way to salvage materialism in the face of evidence that the universe was intelligently, deliberately created.
This is why materialism makes for bad science; it puts ideological blinkers on the scientist. The same can be said to be true of some particular forms of creationism, but in the broad sense that anti-IDists employ the term, creationism in general has a less constricted explanatory set to draw from – like Newton and many of the greats of quantum mechanics did.
I never said any scientist used creationism in their work. I said that creationists have a larger explanatory set that includes the immaterial as potential causation. It seems you are immune to being disabused of what you falsely imagine my argument to be.
Every time anyone employs Occam’s Razor, they are employing a creationist principle in their scientific work. Every time anyone strives to achieve elegance in their theory, they are using a creationist principle in their work. The long struggle towards a unified theory of everything is the application of a creationist principle. There is no reason, under materialism, to even for a second believe that an elegant, efficient ToE exists.
So you have “materialist scientists” doing non-materialist science. If that is the case, then how can we distinguish between the science that “materialists” do and the science that Creationists do? Why the ID-shtick about materialists shutting ID-supporters out of science?
Even though the resulting science is not distinguishable as materialistic…
William J. Murray,
You still haven’t identified the ‘many greats of QM’ who drew upon their ‘creationist’ leanings, nor how it helped them see what their ‘materialist’ colleagues could not.
So far (off my own bat, because you can’t be bothered supporting your own statements), I’ve found Planck and Einstein who displayed some kind of religious sentiment, and Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Schrodinger who did not. They were all distinguished by ‘thinking outside the box’ – as anyone who wishes to make a scientific breakthrough must.
QM, in any event, is an extension of the behaviour of the ‘material world’, extending similar work initiated by the Newtons and Galileos. Progress was not made by saying ‘what would God do?’.
The multiverse is a prediction. It’s completely rational. You just don’t know what the reasons are.
“generated out of nothing” is an inaccurate characterization. There is no good reason to accept the philosopher’s “nothing” as an empirical fact. Such a concept likely comes from the fact that we are limited beings who can’t even see the molecules that make up air.
William J. Murray,
There is no particular reason to expect a Created universe to be regular, or a ‘material’ one to be irregular.
William,
Understood, that you are debating with people here, most of who are atheists or agnostics. If that’s your limited scope, then it makes at least some sense to keep using the term ‘creationist’ in the (distorted) way they want you to.
Did you actually look at BioLogos’ definitions? BioLogos is an anti-IDism organization founded by an Abrahamic theist and run by Abrhamic theists (in particular, N. American evangelical Christians) who reject creationism.
Likewise, the Faraday Institute is anti-IDist, while being run by Abrahamic theists. http://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/
Are you saying that nothing causes matter to behave in a regular, predictable manner?
For one thing, each assumption introduces further possibility of error.
(Note the multiverse concept does not introduce an infinite number of assumptions.)
For another, the fewer things you need to tweak in your hypothesis, the easier it is to make clear predictions.
Ultimately, that must be the case.
There are brute facts.
When darwinists stops to give two meanings to the same word discussion will be easiest. I used Evolution 1 in order to abreviate variation of the aleles in a population a regular and predictable process and evolution 2 the diversification of life forms a process of singularities with no regularities as far as we know.
That depends on the kind of creationism one believes in. There’s a reason why scientific progress exploded in the west under its particular kind of monotheistic culture.
I didn’t say anyone should expect a material one to be irregular. I said that such expectations only exist in ideological frameworks, and materialism offers no grounds for expecting to find a rational, elegant, efficient universe, and certainly no basis for uncovering apparently immaterial “laws” and “forces” that appear to govern how matter interacts.
Why is that?
Apparently you are using some private definition of rhetoric, something like “rhetoric: 1. Listing facts.”
Then according to you the petrushka OP is meaningles starting with :
“It has long been my contention that the defining behavior of science is the search for regularity.”
And concluding with his statement that :
“My answer — which may or may not be supportable — is that science always assumes that regular processes are sufficient to get from historical state M to historical state Q. “
That’s a moderately common claim among those whom anyone would count a creationist. But I think our Willy is making another even more common claim; because early scientists were creationists, they did science based on including miraculous and supernatural causes. Of course they can never come up with an example of such.
Alternatively, there is an infinite regress of causes, or our notions of causation are incorrect with respect to quantum mechanics, and/or causation is entirely the wrong way to look at something which has nothing outside of it, such as the universe.
No. I believe the first statement is correct. The second depends on what is meant by “regular processes”.
You have a lot of larnin’ to do, Willy. Note the creator-believers Gregory listed who explicitly reject that definition.
Most anti ID-ists that I have encountered uses “creationist” as shorthand for “one who believes that supernatural, miraculous, and un-testable causes should be an integral part of science”. Of course there’s a continuum ranging from flat-earthers to dogmatic new atheists.
I bet very few people active in the pro-evolution side think that anyone who believes in a creator is a creationist.
I read their write-up on the page you linked to. It seems to me that they are splitting some mighty fine hairs in order to distance themselves both from the term “creationist” and intelligent design.
What is this, a game of Find the Lady? You offer a definition of a particular flavor of creationist as a defense of your claim that:
and expect nobody will notice?
Let’s see a definition that is applicable.
Then why do they insist on calling IDists “creationists”?
Er, we are talking about scientific creationists. What could be more applicable than the definition of scientific creationism?
Why would one need an infinite regress of causes in order to provide causation for the regular behavior of matter?
How do you know the universe has nothing outside of it? Doesn’t Hawking propose that there are countless universes outside of our universe?
Except there were no facts listed.
Please note the materialist assumption that dictates the false dichotomy presented by davehooke; he claims that ultimately, either nothing causes the regular behavior of matter, or infinite regress is required.
There is, of course, a third option: an acausal cause, or as Aristotle put it, the unmoved mover or first cause. However, it is blinkered off from consideration due to ideological commitment otherwise.
Wrong. I guess you can’t be bothered to actually read what I write because it’s so much easier to respond to your convenient assumptions.
Possibly because the ID movement seems to spend most of its time and energy arguing that evolution isn’t true or can’t account for the history of life.
Other than a few Deists, such as Michael Denton.
Once you make the claim, as with Dembski and Behe, that evolution is limited to wobbling around a static center, you are requiring some sort of intervention.
Another claim, which is creationist, is that evolution works, but is rigged to produce the species that it did produce, including humans.
A third claim made by some ID advocates is that humans are the exception to evolution, and that something other than evolution produced humans.
All of these constitute creationist claims.
What causes the thing that causes the behaviour?
Outside? I don’t think so. Hawking and Hartle proposed that there is no boundary to space.
Anyhow, universe/multiverse, for that which is singular and has no “outside” of it, causation is not a useful concept
There’s no such thing as a scientific creationist or scientific creationism. There are scientists who hold creationism as their personal beliefs but that’s not the same thing, no matter how you try and weasel word it.
I gave three options not two.
As I said, there are brute facts.
Well that would matter if occam’s razor applied to number of assumptions and not the number of necessary entities an assumption inserts into the theory. “Assume an infinite pool of chance” can be used to explain everything, and so it explains nothing, and it is certainly not efficient or rational. It is anti-rational. It is the abandonment of reason and science in service of ideology.
LOL again! “Sure I said it but I didn’t really say it!!”
What’s the WJM record for use of that excuse in one day?
Tell that to Merriam Webster. They disagree.
Merriam Webster has definitions for unicorns and centaurs too but that doesn’t make them real.
An acausal cause wouldn’t require a cause.
“Entities” in this context is a lot closer in meaning to “assumptions” than “universes.”
A theory that a planet can have many moons is not judged less parsimonious
than a theory that a planet can have one moon by counting moons.
The multiverse does not mean anything can happen. The multiverse would have a specific history.
As I already told you, the multiverse is a prediction (of ‘inflation’).
Right. The behaviour of matter itself could be acausal.
Either infinite regress, or brute facts (i.e things not caused), and/or causation isn’t the right terminology for the context.
Blas,
Discussion would be easier still if I didn’t find myself constantly having to play some Creationist word game. Evolution is principally used to mean 2 things: change in allele frequency in a population and the generational change in lineages. The two are not mutually exclusive. Diversification involves change in allele frequency (and change in lineage) in separated gene pools.
Evolution 1 is not predictable. It is stochastic. The stronger an allele’s benefit, the more surely it will fix, but there are no guarantees, and something else may happen in the meantime. Including the fact that the rest of the population, and the rest of the biosphere, is evolving too.
Evolution 2 is simply Evolution 1 occurring on both sides of a reproductive barrier. Divergence is the increasing differential between two largely independent stochastic processes. It is chock full of regularities nevertheless. Just because we can’t predict the next woman to fall pregnant does not mean we can know nothing about the circumstances which lead to pregnancy.
Blas’ basic problem is conflating stochastic with non-regular.
the trrow of adice is stochastic, but the behavior of dice from the p[oint of view of a casino is regular.
So it goes with most things in nature. Behavior at one scale id unpredictable, but at another scale, predictable.
That is very scientific.
Darwinists are the nest enemies of darwinism:
“Just because we can’t predict the next woman to fall pregnant does not mean we can know nothing about the circumstances which lead to pregnancy.”
That I would apply to evolution 1. We cannot predict which mutation will happen and
which be the result, but if this mutation led to a better reproductive succes it will get fixed. So evolution 1 is a regular process.
You say “[evolution 2]It is chock full of regularities nevertheless”. One example? How can be regularities if you say that the process couldn´t happened in the same way given the same conditions? How can be regularities if to explain many important steps you change from evolution 1 to unique simbiotitic events like the pass from prokariotic to eukariotic?
The problem is that there is no positive evidence that evolution 1 can led to evolution 2. Ramdom tinkering without a goal do not led any where just make you walk in circles. An reproductive succes is a weak goal to make evolution 2 work. The champions of reproductive succes are prokariotes or nematodes. Reproductive succes do not led to build an elephant.