Kairosfocus discusses this comment of mine at UD:
Elizabeth: That’s not what “undermines the case for design” William.What undermines the “case for design” chiefly, is that there isn’t a case for a designer.
If current models are inadequate (and actually all models are), and indeed we do not yet have good OoL models, that does not in itself make a case for design.It merely makes a case for “our current models are inadequate”.
Even if it could be shown that some oberved feature has no possible evolutionary pathway, that wouldn’t make the case for design.What might would be some evidence of a design process, or fabrication process, or some observable force that moved, say, strands of DNA into novel positions contrary to known laws of physics and chemistry.
And it would be interesting.
I’m not going to discuss things at UD until Barry makes it clear that he will not retrospectively delete, wholesale, posts by posters he subsequently decides to ban. It makes discussion pointless. In any case, comments are closed on that thread.
But I will respond to one thing in Kairosfocus’ post here:
KF, knowing I am indeed prone to missing out words when I type, posits an amendment to my post:
If current models are inadequate (and actually all [the?] models are), and indeed we do not yet have good OoL models, that does not in itself make a case for design.
No, KF, in this case I meant exactly what I said, and it’s a crucial point, and one that many people who are skeptical of modern science miss:
All MODELS ARE INADEQUATE.
Not just our current models of OoL, not just our current evolutionary models, not just our cosmological models. All of them. And they always will be.
THAT is one of the assymmetries in the ID debate. ID proponents often think that they are trying to puncture the claim that science shows that there was no designer.
Science shows no such thing. And any attempt to show that science is adequate to explain the world, and therefore leave no room for divine intervention is fundamentally flawed.
As Isaac Asimov so eloquently wrote in his essay, The Relativity of Wrong .
The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that “right” and “wrong” are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.
All science can do is produce models that are incrementally less wrong than previous models. Or, as Asimov puts it:
Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
Science is, in fact, not about truth versus falsehood at all. All our models are false in the sense that they are all approximations. They are our maps, not the territory we are mapping. What matters is their usefulness. Moreoever, some simpler, but cruder, approximations turn out to be more useful than more complex, but more accurate, approximations. The most useful theories often only hold more or less true over a limited range of data. My favorite example is Hooke’s Law, which allows us to consider a whole range of fascinating “non-Hookeian” materials that don’t obey it.
And the reason we exclude the Divine Foot from science is not that do we not like the possiblity; it’s that Divine Feet cannot possibly form part of any predictive model. It’s their raison d’etre. If we were to discover a Divine Foot law, we’d have to drop the word “Divine”, because Feet would then become a generalisable causal factor, constrained by a Law. And isn’t the whole point of Divine Intervention that a deity (it’s the very nature of deities) need not be bound by Her own laws?
And that is the flaw I see at the heart of the whole ID argument, and the point of what I was trying to express in my post to William. We cannot infer the Divine from the inadequacy of our models to explain the world. There are no scientific tests for the supernatural, by definition. That does NOT mean that we can infer that supernatural events do not occur, NOR does it mean that that we can infer that they can. Absent a good predictive model, for a phenomenon the only claim we can make, empirically, is that we do yet understand it.
The existence of God cannot be inferred by use of empirical scientific methods.
Like. Like very much indeed.
And I agree with your moratorium on commented at Uncommon Descent.
It seems to me that when IDists do this its a subtle form of the God-of-the-gaps argument.
Many IDers going back to Philip Johnson have suggested that this reflects an inadequacy in science- an inability to deal with designers, but of course this is not the case. When there is reasonable evidence for design science is perfectly capable of dealing with design. Just ask the Egyptologists who’ve been studying the Pyramids for the last 200 years. Most of science involves modelling natural laws and processes but when design is involved a whole new set of questions come into play: who are the designers?, why did they design? how did they design? what constraints and limitations where they operating under? what solutions did they come up with for individual problems? All of these questions can be asked and sometimes answered leading to new questions.
Although my reading in ID isn’t exhaustive, it seems to me no one in ID has made any effort to apply legitimate design questions to living things. Fence sitters should take this as a sign that ID is vacuous
Joe must be feeling inadequate with nobody to abuse. The list of recent comments down the right side of UD has become rather sparse on ID critics.
The fact that ID refuses to address the designer or the mechanisms involved is the heart of the issue. But if they openly attempt this, the religious nature of ID would become more self-evident than it is now. And if you ask the question at UD, the rath of Barry is never far behind.
Ah, I’m glad you linked to Asimov’s Relativity of Wrong.
He shows that the flat earth idea was not “all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely” — because the curvature of the Earth, which would be exactly 0 per mile if flat Earth were true, is so close to that value (about 0.000126)
It looks like a revolution in worldview to suddenly go from flat Earth model to spherical Earth model (and no denying it has some major implications for actual maps). But we’re still capable of living our ordinary human lives as if the Earth is flat because we don’t need such a tiny percentage adjustment (from truly flat) to plan a trip across town, to build a house, to walk to school, to plant the crops. Our flat model still works just fine for all the things which it worked for, before.
That’s the same basic problem IDists /UDists face. Even if they’re correct that an alien/godly designer stuck its fingers in to twiddle molecules of DNA at some point(s) in life history, the ToE still won’t be totally overturned because it “happens to be nearly right”. They think they’re proposing a revolutionary overturn in materialist-science, but actually they’re just proposing a “0.000126-type” correction (or less) — the tiny tiny adjustment to accommodate whatever twiddling. Bacterial flagellum needed a special design-and-insert twiddle? Fine, that’s easily within the 0.000126. Cambrian needed a special new-body-plans twiddle? Fine, that’s also easily within the 0.000126.
Of course, first they have to demonstrate that any such twiddles actually did occur. But even if they did, the Theory of Evolution isn’t going to be overturned, it will just be adjusted, because the parts of ToE which already work as good models will still work as good-enough models. We can and will, if necessary, accommodate the 0.000126 correction.
So, their problem, as I see it, is that they won’t be satisfied emotionally unless the ToE is completely overturned. They reject any primacy of materialist-science; they want a worldview to be all-god-all-the-time. They want everyone to make the same error which Asimov was talking about, the error of thinking that flat earth was “all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely”; equivalently that Theory of Evolution was “all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely”. And we’re not going to fall for that.
Too bad for them. “Wrong” turns out to be relative.
Like the force of gravity! 🙂
EL says,
I say,
I just noticed this thread and I won’t comment more than just this once here because I’m busy elsewhere
but
Christians at least believe that God’s actions in the universe are indeed predictable. The natural laws were simply generalizations of the define foot. At least that is what the early scientists thought.
What I think the critics miss is that the laws of nature are not separate from divine action but are in fact the description of that action in the universe.
peace
I don’t especially like the term “inadequate” for most established models. “Incomplete” is fine, and “inadequate” could be argued, but what matters is, “inadequate” to what?
Inadequate to explain everything, of course. But Maxwell’s equations are quite adequate to explain a host of electromagnetic phenomena, and evolutionary theory is adequate to explain most of the patterns we see in life, along with physics and ecology, anyway. ID, by contrast, is inadequate to really explain anything at all (the problem being that it can “explain anything”), and thus fails even to be a real (scientific) model..
It seems to me that scientific models are adopted on the basis of being adequate to explain a set of phenomena. That’s why OoL models are problematic, for they’re not utterly useless, but really not adequate to explain life’s origin, either. But I don’t think I prefer to extend the inadequacy of OoL models to the rest of science, where models are generally adequate (as generally conceived), yet incomplete.
Glen Davidson
Exactly. The standard response to any request that ID proponents investigate the designer is to point to scenarios like finding watches on Jupiter, or to the fact that we can conclude someone was murdered without knowing who the murderer is.
Which is to totally miss the point.
If we find something that appears to be produced by some design-like process, the next question is to figure out candidates for that process.
And an external designer is a potential candidate in cases where the thing does not fabricate itself (and may also be a candidate where it does). So the next step is to test some hypotheses about that potential designer. For instance SETI is now on the lookout for laser signals. And the reason is that they figure that if a civilisation is at least as advanced as us, they might have actually found us, and be training their lasers on us to let us know. So if we detected a laser signal that might or might not indicate a search beam from an alien civilisation, but the next step would be find out where the signal was coming from – is it coming from a star system with exo planets, for instance?
The point being that these are all hypothesis-driven questions. If an alien found a watch on Jupiter, sure, they’d think: well, this thing obviously hasn’t grown from a seed, and won’t produce one, so it looks as though somebody fabricated it. Hmm. Are there any planets nearby that might be inhabited by watch-makers? Oh, look, yes, earth looks biological, let’s check it out.
But as it is, what we’ve found is living things. And we’ve got as far as discovering Darwinian processes – but where did the first self-replicator come from? Well, chemistry is one candidate, but also possibly some external source, including an external designer. So let’s check out meteors to see whether they contain potential “seeds” of terrestrial life. Or for evidence of some lab somewhere in early earth.
Or perhaps there is a Universal Mind that can make these things. Let’s see if mind alone (after all we have minds) can move nucleotides around.
etc.
But you can only test a designer hypothesis (or, to please Gregory, a Designer hypothesis) if you are willing to postulate constraints on the designer. If you don’t, it’s completely untestable.
Until ID is willing to actually postulate on what constraints the putative designer might have, their argument remains designer-of-the-gaps, no matter how much they say it isn’t.
And as an argument for God it really sucks, because an omnipotent omniscient god is by definition unconstrained.
I’m happy to substitute “incomplete” or “insufficient”. My point is unchanged. All models have gaps. We will always have residuals.
It looks as if UD regulars, Timaeus and Mung are still stuck in that loop, for all Zachriel’s help in trying to enlighten them.
I think that science does show that, so long as we understand “designer” in a limited manner. Paley wasn’t so much making a limited scientific hypothesis, but his argument was something that could be turned into a scientific hypothesis that is falsifiable–and it was falsified. A “Designer,” on the other hand, of course has not been and could not be falsified.
Science has to stick to limits, and so long as it does so it can test for whether or not life has been designed. It’s relatively easy to do, just check to see if the sort of match-up of design to function that designers regularly employ is utilized in life, rather than the vertical transmission of possibilities that is available to heredity in organisms lacking in much horizontal transfer of DNA. Well, which is it? It’s not the relative lack of transfer constraint found in design, it’s the constraints of heredity that we see throughout. Organisms that incorporate horizontally-transferred DNA not infrequently are “designed” according to their particular constraints, and those not readily incorporating horizontally-transferred DNA were “designed” for the last few hundred million years without much horizontally-transferred DNA. The “natural limits” dictate the possibilities, not the intelligences of designers.
That is the falsification of any reality-based limited design hypothesis, such as Paley’s could be. It is not the falsification of The Designer, but then neither is evolution the falsification of The Designer (although clearly they fear that it is the falsification of their particular religious beliefs).
Paley really did get it a lot better than IDists do, because he realized that he had to make a case for design, not one against an accepted theory of evolution that didn’t then exist. Nothing has changed in the sense that ID would need to make a case for design to be science, but IDists seem not to get it, presumably because they’re so bothered by evolutionary theory. If evolution destroyed The Designer, why wouldn’t destroying evolution restore The Designer? But evolution didn’t destroy The Designer, the evidence falsified the designer.
The evidence is against scientifically-meaningful design (not Design) regardless of how evolutionary theory fares, and I really think that very few creationists/IDists actually understand this fact at all.
Glen Davidson
Exactly. I mean “it must have been a miracle” is simply a dead end.
A science-stopper. But when you say that to ID proponents they get very cross. I don’t think they can have it both ways: ID can’t be both not-of-the-gaps AND not-a-science-stopper.
Here’s a classic examplefrom Axel, of the ID misapprehension of the nature of scientific claims:
Not sure what his question mark is for, but yet again is this bizarre idea that to believe that Darwinism is a good model is to be “convinced” that it is “true”, and that therefore the idea of a designer is false.
No scientific model is true, firstly, and second, how good the Darwinian model is has no bearing at all on whether an omnipotent omniscient designer was also involved. Science can only falsify specific claims about God (YEC for instance). It cannot possibly falsify the existence or role in reality of a God with unconstrained powers.
As I see it, scientific laws are all human constructs (so not “laws of nature”). They are adopted on pragmatic grounds. Science is a search for what works, rather than a search for truth.
Even supposing there is an infinite God, finite human minds and methods cannot infer it formally, only circumstantially. We would need to be omniscient to answer the question, but in such case we would be God! To have the correct answer to the question of God, one would providentially need to have faith in the correct Deity. God would have to provide the answer, and the questioners would have to accept the evidence to some extent on faith. We find similar complications in mathematics where a question posed is greater than the capacity of questioner to comprehend formal answers.
You can’t. This would only give KF another reason to KF you.
You think KF needs reasons? Excuses, maybe.
As a rule, not a good idea to change your words when you’ve already been quoted.
Sure. But to add a clarification when you’ve been misunderstood should be helpful.
stcordova,
Sal,
Don’t feel you have to answer, as your beliefs are your own, but how do you reconcile the idea of a young Earth with the vast body of consilient data that establishes it as over 4.5 billion years?
And when you now say things like this, how can you accept the particular religious dogma you subscribe to when there is nothing to distinguish it from a thousand others?
“Inadequate” serves my intended meaning fine, but English being full of nuance, it’s possible that “insufficient” might have been a better choice, as “inadequate” can have connotations of “useless”; “not fit for purpose” which I did not mean.
Merriam-Webster does, though give “insufficient” as a synonym for “inadequate”.
I hope my post is enough to clarify my meaning.
And that is absolutely fine, fifthmonarchyman – and makes good sense. It was the position I held when I was a theist, and still would, if I were still a theist!
But that is NOT the ID argument. The ID argument is that some things evince a designer because they can NOT be predicted from the natural laws that normally generalise well, but which, they say, cannot account for living things.
EL says,
But is it not you whole point that models working from generalized natural laws will be forever inadequate to predict and account for the things we see?
it seems like you agree with the IDist it just that you think that the things we see don’t call out for “accounting”.
I find this position strange.
“Accounting” for what we see is the fuel that drives science IMHO
Peace
IDers don’t get that the existence of this designer needs to be established.
Science got started in the West when people stopped taking for granted the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans. They didn’t outright reject this wisdom but everything was subject to verification. IDers think that essentially the worlds theologians are giving a body of knowledge to the world scientific community – a tome called “Everything We’ve Learned About God in the Last 2000 Years” – and that scientists should just accept this without question and start incorporating God in their models of the natural world….so there is a God who can do absolutely anything instantaneously and very often for mysterious reasons. This designer has no material form and is outside space time but is still able to do all these things….etc etc. This is not how science works of course.
IDers could correctly point out that sometimes the designed object is the evidence of the designer. There are many examples of this: if we found stone tools on an island in the Pacific in a layer of sediment that predated by 10,000 years our assumption of when humans got there we’d have to infer a designer. But we already know who the designers are -humans, and we already know they build stone tools and boats. This would just push back the date that humans landed there. Even evidence from SETI would be relatively uncontroversial- we already know that living things on the surfaces of planets are capable of developing technology. The problem with the designer invoked by ID is that not only is there no evidence for it but what we do know of the world is evidence against it. A designer can’t exist outside of space and time. A designer has to have a body or at least physical instrumentation to implement any plan. The history of life on earth has unfolded in such a way that seems to defy any reasonable notion of a plan but is fully explainable by natural mechanisms
OK, well, do you think that some natural laws are divine and some are not?
They keep drawing me back in 😉
EL says,
I say,
The laws are simply the physical representation of God’s nature. The Logos to use a term from Greek philosophy and Christianity.
So they are in this sense all divine.
Now as you acknowledge our understanding of natural laws is necessarily imperfect and forever incomplete so our understanding is not divine in any sense.
peace
Well, if all laws are divine, why infer the divine from the apparent lack of an explanatory law?
RodW,
I also conclude that intelligent design creationism is vacuous, but Dembski claimed to have calculated CSI for the bacterial flagellum in “No Free Lunch”. I don’t have the book handy, but if I remember correctly he actually did no such thing. Still, he made something of an effort.
EL says,
I say,
That is not what ID is doing at all.
I’m not sure what you mean by “explanatory” but the presence of natural law is one of the things that lead us infer design.
I am really amazed that folks can spend years around this stuff and apparently not have a clue of what we are talking about.
I have come to attribute this perennial misunderstanding to irreconcilable world views.
When folks from my side say something it often seems folks from your side hear something completely different. It really is like we are speaking two different languages
That communication gap one of the reasons these conversations never seem to get anywhere.
Peace
According to Ken Miller:
Multiplying up
for a few proteins is not a huge amount of effort. I would have given Dembski more credit had he taken a little trouble to inform himself on evolutionary processes before attacking his strawman version. I guess I’m less generous than you. 🙂
ETA take that
Alan Fox,
Thanks for digging up that summary.
Doubtful. 😉
I think that is a real problem – both ways. One problem is that not everyone on either side has the same take. So when you say I have “no clue” about what “we” are saying – well it depends who “we” is. I have read Behe, Dembski and Meyer and they are all saying rather different things, and I could certainly cite you passages from Dembski that say something very similar to my precis: that we if something is improbable under known natural laws, then we should accept design.
Perhaps you disagree with Dembski – that is fine. I disagree with Dawkins, Provine and Lewontin (although I think they are misunderstood, actually, but I still disagree with things they have said).
So yes, there is a real communication gap. It might be due to “irreconcilable worldviews” but I don’t think so. I think it is, as you say, to do with language.
fifth, could you summarise what YOU think the ID movement is saying?
This is what I was referring to:
EL says
I have no idea what an ID movement is supposed to be. Ive never seen one.
My idea of the basic thought behind ID is
quote:
The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.
end quote:
I’m reasonably sure that authors who are sympathetic to ID would have no problem with that characterization.
Peace
It’s so broad and meaningless that almost anyone not sympathetic to ID would have no problem with that characterization, as such. As interpreted, different matter, but no one here is denying that there are designed things in the universe (features of the universe? Depends, doesn’t it?) or that even some aspects of living things have been designed (genetic engineering, artificial selection).
As usual, the lack of specifics and the tendency to overlap with unquestioned facts make the ID statement worthless. Not surprising, since it exists to be affirmed, not used for science.
Glen Davidson
Well, I have a problem with it. Saying
implies such an explanation exists. But there isn’t one.
Alan,
Worth another discussion, in due time. Thanks for asking, I will try to reply this month.
Sal
stcordova,
I’ll look forward to it.
Not at all, but the hard part is: WHY does ID hold that? Dembski’s old Explanatory Filter accepted “design” as explanation if Law and Chance could be safely rejected, which is essentially what I said. CSI is similar (and superceded the EF).
EL says,
I say,
No it is not what you said
You said we infer design by the lack of “explanatory” Law. (whatever that means)
That is not at all why we infer design. We might withhold a design inference if an object is explained by law.
But lack of law (again whatever that means) is not a reason to infer anything, Except possibly that there is no law present.
Peace
OK, let me rephrase. I am not saying that ID infers God from a lack of natural laws. I’m saying that ID infers God from the inability of natural laws to explain a specific observation (biological organisms).
Hey EL,
Here is the deal, We humans are hard wired to infer design in certain situations.
ID is simply trying to quantify when we can justifiably hold on to those hardwired notions.
If I understand the critics correctly they are saying we must abandon our hardwired impressions in each and every case if we are to do science. I find this to be illogical.
It’s as if you are demanding we prove the infallible reliability of our eyesight before we can attempt to read the paper
peace
Salvador, we can create models of God. They are not right or wrong, merely incomplete.
…perhaps we can decode something about the future of some natural system without explicitly encoding its present at all.
If we can do this, then Natural Law provides us to that extent with a nonspecific crystal ball whereby we seem to derive its benefits with only half the work. This is the essence of metaphor: decoding without encoding, in a sense, only the top half of our modeling relation.
All science, and biology in particular, is replete with such metaphors … they constitute what there is of theory in these areas.
Perhaps the most important for our purposes is the machine metaphor of Descartes … It asserts that things about machines can be decoded into predictions about organisms, without the benefit of any specific encodings going the other way. Machines thus become our crystal ball,. our one-way mirror for looking into the organic world, without needing to look out again. We do nto need to dwell further on the crucial role this metaphor continues to play in shaping the outlook of biology.
At root, such metaphors are pursued in the belief, or expectation, that they can in fact be turned into models.
Robert Rosen, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into the Nature, Origin and Fabrication of Life
By coincidence [no doubt] I just happened to be reading this today.
Mung,
Is the whole text above the citation a quote? Is the rest of the book written in this style? Have you any idea what Rosen is trying to say in the quote?
You JUST contradicted yourself. On the one hand you claimed that science cannot possibly falsify the role in reality of a God with unconstrained powers, and right before that you said the exact opposite.
Science cannot falsify YEC because an unconstrained God could have created the earth last Thursday and made it look billions of years old.
Science cannot falsify YEC because an unconstrained God could have created YOU two minutes ago along with all these thoughts you’re having.
Seriously Elizabeth.
Not at all, fifth. I’m not entirely with your “hard-wired” thing, although I would agree that we seem to be fairly “hard-wired” to infer intention from action, though not, as far as I know, from static objects. But that doesn’t make us infallible – as children grow, they both under- and over-generalise. I might have told you that my son once asked: “how do tornadoes see where to suck?”
But of course we an infer design. I’m not at all saying we can’t. We do it regularly, and it is a science – as ID proponents like to point out, it’s done by forensic scientists, archaeologists and, potentially, SETI.
But they don’t do it the way ID does it, and they do all make hypotheses about both the designer and the fabricator – testable hypotheses, without which, they cannot infer anything definitive. When Jocelyn Bell discovered the signal from quasars, “intelligent signal” was one of the hypotheses (a serious one, despite the “Little Green Men” or LGM that it was dubbed). It turned out not to be of courses, in that case, but had it not become clear when it did that the signal was from a rapidly rotating radio-emitting star, then I guess there would have been a great deal of interest in testing the LGM hypothesis further.
Seems you agree with Keiths that nothing is certain.
But that is NOT the ID argument.