Dr. Joshua Swamidass, a theistic evolutionist, joined us recently at TSZ. I think the following comment of his will lead to some interesting and contentious discussion and is worthy of its own thread:
Third, if we drop “Darwinian” to just refer to the current modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, you are right that the scientific account does not find any evidence of direction or planning. I agree with you here and do not dispute this.
So the question becomes, really, is it possible that God could have created a process (like evolution) with a purposeful intent that science could not detect? I think the answer here is obvious. Of course He could. In fact, I would say, unless He wanted us to discern His purpose, we could not.
In my view, then, evolution has a purpose in creating us. Science itself cannot uncover its purpose. I find that out by other means.
You are starting to sound like a presuppositionalist.
I am open to discuss other possible ways if you have any. Fire away.
But be warned, I may not be all that convinced by chemical reactions that occur only in the brains of people who WANT to believe in something.
I said that in the ARN forum in 2006. Art Hunt agreed with me!
I happen to have a possible hypothesis that involves comparing moving line graphs. Perhaps we can discuss it some time.
For now it makes me happy just to know that you are not ruling out all possible ID research a priori.
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
Hypotheses cannot grow in the dark. Let it out.
Fair Witness, to fifth:
He did. That one didn’t do too well in the light.
Oh, cool ! Thanks ! Now I know what I will be doing with my spare time for the next couple of days
“before” and “after” may not apply to him, but they apply to the process. Once he’s set up the process and there’s a timeline, if the outcome is determined, then it’s not random. And if it’s random, then the outcome can’t be determined, timelessly or not, by definition. Could God do this a trillion times in a row and produce the same exact result? Would you call that a random process?
He is a presuppositionalist
But, as good theistic evolutionists, we can believe that Nature speaks to us, like God speaks to us. In one case it’s science, in the other case it isn’t.
Presumably, this is because Nature always says the same thing to everyone, while God does not always say the same thing to everyone.
Sorry. Does it sound like I am mocking theistic evolution and it’s view of Nature as an objective source of truth and God as a subjective source of truth?
revealed, target, bad words
dazz,
Again, the outcome isn’t determined.
The fact that God timelessly knows the outcome does not mean that the outcome is determined. If God knew the outcome before it occurred, then it would be determined, and all other possibilities would be ruled out. Since he’s outside of time, there’s no such problem.
That’s right. God observes the outcome timelessly. He doesn’t determine it. If he did, it wouldn’t be random, as you point out.
There is no such thing as “creating a trillion universes in a row” outside of time. “In a row”, in the sense of “one after another”, is inherently temporal.
What are natural processes doing when God is not using them to do His work?
When God chooses to use a natural process to do His work, why isn’t he interfering, intervening, tinkering?
What, exactly, is it that distinguishes theistic evolution from intelligent design?
Is it that ID refuses to say Goddidit while TE’s think that IDers should come right out and join them in claiming that Goddidit, even though both agree that science cannot tell us that Goddidit?
Yeah, I just read your OP from last year on detecting design that keiths linked, plus the first and last pages of comments. Your approach seems to suffer from the same wrong assumption that I mentioned in my first response to you in this thread – the assumption that design somehow is an inherent property of a thing, or leaves “traces”. It just isn’t, and doesn’t. You are making a category error. Sorry.
Why must it be determined just because somebody knows before hand what will happen? How does knowledge determine anything? Suppose somebody is remarkably good at predicting the future–or suppose somebody can just “premember” it, the same way we remember the past. How is that determining anything. Determination requires prior causes. Knowledge isn’t that.
Run along keiths, I’m off playing with phoodoo.
How would you teach teleonomy in science classes?
How does “outcome” apply to a timeless being anymore than “before” or “after”?
But this time I’m not arguing that god’s knowledge determines anything. My contention is that if there must be a purpose of creating humans by evolution, then the process must be created SO THAT it produces humans.
Heh, make it a trillion timelessly created universes then. What difference does it make?
As a Christian, I have to disagree with you.
Adam. Abraham. Moses. David. All the millions of the people who lived before Jesus and who have never heard of Jesus. The Bible clearly teaches the revelation of God to people who never had the opportunity to hear about Jesus.
fifthmonarchyman,
Ah yes. I’d forgotten about that bit of plagiarism. It must rather undermine his integrity, for those otherwise persuaded by his revelations..
walto,
The knowledge per se doesn’t determine anything, but remember that knowledge is dependent on truth.
If somebody knows ahead of time that X will happen, that means that it’s true ahead of time that X will happen. If it’s true ahead of time that X will happen, then X will happen, and nothing else is possible. X is determined.
Gawd. Think, keiths!
You sound just like an IDist.
I think this is just pathetically false, and yet also revealing.
They are a priori convinced this is detectable by scientific means. Obviously not.
And even Dr. Swamidass admits that this might in fact be detectable by scientific means if we only drop methodological naturalism.
It is the a priori conviction that science sans methodological naturalism is not in fact science that people ought to question.
keiths:
dazz:
It doesn’t apply to God. It applies to the event.
If God wants evolution to produce humans, he will create a process that happens to produce humans. That doesn’t mean that it was determined, within time, that the process would produce humans.
keiths:
dazz:
Well, considering that the difference between timelessness and temporality is at the heart of the issue here, I think it’s best to be precise about them.
If God timelessly created a gazillion universes, identical to ours except for the outcome of random events, and if he didn’t take advantage of his timeless knowledge, then presumably some of those universes would produce humans and others wouldn’t, depending on your definition of “human”.
My point is that an omnisicient and timeless God could take advantage of his timeless knowledge to create a universe that would happen to lead to humans.
I argue against the so-called “Free Will Defense” on similar grounds.
Don’t sugar coat it walto. THE WORST!.
😉
What does “ahead of time” mean, exactly, when applied to God, who is timeless?
Go back and review your previous comments, in which you explicitly addressed that question, but then simply forgot about what you had said previously.
Think, keiths!
Just to be clear
You are saying that it is impossible to detect intent even in principle?
Or is there perhaps some possible but as of yet unknown way to detect intent?
Correct?
I just want to understand how open mined you are
peace
you are on a roll !!!!!! Amen
peace
Like shooting fish in a barrel.
Should I conclude it to be impossible because your attempt seems to have failed? Of course not. But the more people like you and Dembski try and fail, the more I lean toward thinking it may not happen.
fifthmonarchyman,
Actually, I am starting to think that the very concept of detecting intent is incoherent. Suppose you have a shovel. It was originally intended to dig dirt. But someone buys the shovel and uses it exclusively to whack moles in their yard. Which intent would you be detecting? The digging intent, or the mole whacking intent? Would the detected intent be stronger for an item that works better for a particular use over another? Do you see how this seems nonsensical?
Argon,
Noted. Your opinion is wrong. . Niche environments can NOT speed the fixation of multiple traits.
(Wow, this argument style is really useful, thanks for the tip!)
Yes, but according to him, he is not even interested in what ways God’s influence is used to steer the universe (I guess it is a boring topic to him.) So how could he possibly know if it is detectable by science. He certainly is not studying that question very hard.
Yeah, that’s a confusion. Things don’t happen because it’s true they’ll happen. Quite the contrary. The only thing that can make it true that I will sing tomorrow is me singing tomorrow. Now, I may be determined to sing tomorrow, but if so, those determinants will be prior causes not abstractions.
I can’t seem to help it. I was born too nice or something. 😉
I want to mock theistic-evolution thought, but I am not sure it is even a real thing.
If evolution means an unguided process of genetic mishaps that so happen to generate reproductions efficiently, then shouldn’t this belief be called “Poly-deistic Evolutionism”? Or maybe “Mono-deistic Evolutionism” if you only believe in one God, but still believe he has nothing whatsoever to do with the universe?
The whole “I believe in a system that has no direction, and is guided by a God that has direction and purpose for this purposeless process” idea just sort of strikes me as gobbledygook hooey. As a word or part of a sentence I don’t think “theistic evolutionist” has any meaning whatsoever, other than the person is saying they hate the term ID.
If a God can know the outcome of any random event before it occurs , it is unnecessary for a God to be the direct cause that event.
That’s like saying, since God is all powerful, he can solve the riddle of what happens when an unstoppable force meets and unmovable object. Or God can know what is unknowable. Or, an infinite world can be finite.
Its just nonsense contradictions. If one’s position relies on logical impossibilities, why take it seriously. The hotel of infinite rooms has no vacancies!
Moved a couple of posts to guano
Please try to avoid insulting fellow commenters. It is fine to attack their ideas, of course!
Christ, Alan.
Readers, Alan is “protecting” you from this.
keiths,
Moderating decisions may be challenged in the “moderation issues” thread. Substantive elements of guano’d comments can be reposted.
I’m content to expose it and link to the “offending” comment.
keiths:
swamidass:
Throughout the Bible, God is happy to use non-natural processes to achieve his aims. Why the squeamishness when it comes to evolution?
Also, why assume that in a universe designed from scratch, there could be no “natural” way for evolution to unfold other than via mutations that are random with respect to fitness?
It suggests not only that he isn’t trying to disprove evolution, but that he’s actively trying to hide behind it!
The amount of suffering engendered by evolution over the eons is enormous. If God’s justification for that barbarity is that it’s an artistic flourish, then God help him (so to speak).
That seems to clash with Romans 1:20:
Do you disagree with Paul on this point?
Methodological naturalism isn’t binding on science. I’ve argued that it’s unnecessary and counterproductive…
The unhealthy synergy between methodological naturalism and accommodationism
…and I’m not alone.
keiths,
If you were God, How much suffering would you allow in a world where there are thinking people and they are mortal? None?
If it’s OK for a maximally great being to let people die in extreme pain, of horrible diseases at young ages when they couldn’t have done anything to deserve it, and you think that’s the minimum acceptable amount of suffering, you should probably reconsider having that god as the source of your morals. If you could stop that from happening just once, you would already be a greater being than that god in my book
Right.
Actually. It’s nothing at all like that. Foreknowledge is not inconsistent with non-determination. The libertarian Dutch Calvinists are right about that. So was Leibniz.
That seems right to me too. And, of course, so much of the suffering has nothing at all to do with free will. There are, as you point out, diseases. Also natural disasters, accidents, birth defects, etc.
At this point, Christians generally have to trot out God working in mysterious ways, His wonders etc. I get that we mortals don’t know much. But really.
I think that would be an interesting topic.
If I understand you correctly you are saying that you can’t do one of the most basic human activities.
The inability to detect intent is a symptom of a serious mental handicap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
I tend to agree that it’s impossible to detect intent when you are constrained by methodological naturalism. It’s a good thing we are not so constrained in our everyday experience
peace
Actually the Christians who hold that position are called Arminianis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arminianism
peace
I think a better analysis would be to say that tools have uses on the basis of which we assign functions to their parts. If we know how a tool is normally used, we know what function is normally assigned to its parts. But they doesn’t preclude its parts from having other functions if the tool is used in other ways.
The situation is far more complicated when we have to conjecture the use of a tool because we’re not familiar with it. (Long-standing debates about the purpose of Stonehenge and the Antikythera mechanism might be familiar to many of you.) Those conjectures have to be informed by background beliefs about which causal patterns in the world would have been salient to people from that culture, which salient patterns they would have had an interest in tracking and/or manipulating, and so.
On the other hand, I think that when it comes to seeing a person’s facial expression, or understanding what they say, we do not infer the intention but directly perceive it — or, more precisely, perceive it as directly as we perceive anything at all.
So whether intent is perceived or inferred really falls on a continuum, from seeing the anger or sadness in another’s eyes to determining the purpose of a Hellenistic computer.
For that matter, I think we can often directly perceive the intentions of animals whose characteristic ways of expressing themselves are sufficiently similar to those of primates. No mental gymnastics are typically involved when determining when my cats want to be fed or petted — they express their wants and needs to me quite vocally (just not verbally).