As an ID proponent and creationist, the irony is that at the time in my life where I have the greatest level of faith in ID and creation, it is also the time in my life at some level I wish it were not true. I have concluded if the Christian God is the Intelligent Designer then he also makes the world a miserable place by design, that He has cursed this world because of Adam’s sin. See Malicious Intelligent Design.
Jesus prophesied of the intelligently designed outcome of humanity: “wars and rumors of wars..famines…pestilence…earthquakes.” If there is nuclear and biological weapons proliferation, overpopulation, destruction of natural resources in the next 500 years or less, things could get ugly. If such awful things are Intelligently Designed for the trajectory of planet Earth, on some level, I think it would almost be merciful if the atheists are right….
The reason I feel so much kinship with the atheists and agnostics at TSZ and elsewhere is that I share and value the skeptical mindset. Gullibility is not a virtue, skepticism is. A personal friend of Richard Dawkins was my professor and mentor who lifted me out of despair when I was about to flunk out of school. Another professor, James Trefil, who has spent some time fighting ID has been a mentor and friend. All to say, atheists and people of little religious affiliation (like Trefil) have been kind and highly positive influences on my life, and I thank God for them! Thus, though I disagree with atheists and agnostics, I find the wholesale demonization of their character highly repugnant — it’s like trash talking of my mentors, friends and family.
I have often found more wonder and solace in my science classes than I have on many Sunday mornings being screamed at by not-so-nice preachers. So despite my many disagreements with the regulars here, because I’ve enjoyed the academic climate in the sciences, I feel somewhat at home at TSZ….
Now, on to the main point of this essay! Like IDist Mike Gene, I find the atheist/agnostic viewpoint reasonable for the simple reason that most people don’t see miracles or God appearing in their every day lives if not their entire lives. It is as simple as that.
Naturalism would seem to me, given most everyone’s personal sample of events in the universe, to be a most reasonable position. The line of reasoning would be, “I don’t see miracles, I don’t see God, by way of extrapolation, I don’t think miracles and God exists. People who claim God exists must be mistaken or deluded or something else.”
The logic of such a viewpoint seems almost unassailable, and I nearly left the Christian faith 15 years ago when such simple logic was not really dealt with by my pastors and fellow parishioners. I had to re-examine such issues on my own, and the one way I found to frame the ID/Creation/Evolution issue is by arguing for the reasonableness of Black Swan events.
I will use the notion of Black Swans very loosely. The notion is stated here, and is identified with a financeer and academic by the name of Nasim Taleb. I have Taleb’s books on investing entitled Dynamic Hedging which is considered a classic monograph in mathematical finance. His math is almost impenetrable! He is something of a Super Quant. Any way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
1.The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2.The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3.The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.Unlike the earlier and broader “black swan problem” in philosophy (i.e. the problem of induction), Taleb’s “black swan theory” refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.[1] More technically, in the scientific monograph Silent Risk , Taleb mathematically defines the black swan problem as “stemming from the use of degenerate metaprobability”.[2]
….
The phrase “black swan” derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal’s characterization of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” (“a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan”; 6.165).[3] When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.Juvenal’s phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[4] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,[5] the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.[6]
The very first question I looked at when I was having bouts of agnosticism was the question of origin of life. Now looking back, the real question being asked is “was OOL a long sequence of typical events or a black swan sequence of events.” Beyond OOL, one could go on to the question of biological evolution. If we assume Common Descent or Universal Common Ancestry (UCA), would evolution, as a matter of principle, proceed by typical or black swan events or a mix of such events (the stock market follows patterns of typical events punctuated by black swan events).
If natural selection is the mechanism of much of evolution, does the evolution of the major forms (like prokaryote vs. eukaryote, unicellular vs. multicellular, etc.) proceed by typical or black swan events?
[As a side note, when there is a Black Swan stock market crash, it isn’t a POOF, but a sequence of small steps adding up to an atypical set of events. Black Swan doesn’t necessarily imply POOF, but it can still be viewed as a highly exceptional phenomenon.]
Without getting into the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, one could at least make statements whether OOL, eukaryotic evolution (eukaryogenesis), multicellular evolution, evolution of Taxonomically Restricted Features (TRFs), Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRGs), proceeded via many many typical events happening in sequence or a few (if not one) Black Swan event.
I personally believe, outside of the naturalism supernaturalism debate, that as a matter of principle, OOL, eukaryogenesis, emergence of multicellularity (especially animal multicellularity), must have transpired via Black Swan events. Why? The proverbial Chicken and Egg paradox which has been reframed in various incarnations and supplemented with notions such as Irreducible Complexity or Integrated Complexity or whatever. Behe is not alone in his notions of this sort of complexity, Andreas Wagner and Joe Thornton use similar language even though they thing such complexity is bridgeable by typical rather than Black Swan events.
When I do a sequence lookup at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), it is very easy to see the hierarchical patterns that would, at first glance, confirm UCA! For example look at this diagram of Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMP) to see the hierarchical patterns:
From such studies, one could even construct Molecular Clock Hypotheses and state hypothesized rates of molecular evolution.
The problem however is that even if some organisms share so many genes, and even if these genes can be hierarchically laid out, there are genes that are restricted only to certain groups. We might refer to them as Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRG). I much prefer the term TRG over “orphan gene” especially since some orphan genes seem to emerge without the necessity of Black Swan events and orphan genes are not well defined and orphan genes are only a subset of TRGs. I also coin the notion of Taxonomically Restricted Feature (TRF) since I believe many heritable features of biology are not solely genetic but have heritable cytoplasmic bases (like Post Translation modifications of proteins).
TRGs and TRFs sort of just poof onto the biological scene. How would we calibrate the molecular clock for such features? It goes “from zero to sixty” in a poof.
Finally, on the question of directly observed evolution, it seems to me, that evolution in the present is mostly of the reductive and exterminating variety. Rather than Dawkins Blind Watchmaker, I see a Blind Watch Destroyer. Rather than natural selection acting in cumulative modes, I natural selection acting in reductive and exterminating modes in the present day, in the lab and field.
For those reasons, even outside the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, I would think a reasonable inference is that many of the most important features of biology did not emerge via large collections of small typical events but rather via some Black Swan process in the past, not by any mechanisms we see in the present. It is not an argument from incredulity so much as a proof by contradiction.
If one accepts the reasonableness of Black Swan events as the cause of the major features of biology, it becomes possible to accept that these were miracles, and if Miracles there must be a Miracle Maker (aka God). But questions of God are outside science. However, I think the inference to Black Swan events for biology may well be science.
In sum, I think atheism is a reasonable position. I also think the viewpoint that biological emergence via Black Swan events is also a highly reasonable hypothesis even though we don’t see such Black Swans in every day life. The absence of such Black Swans is not necessarily evidence against Black Swans, especially if the Black Swan will bring coherence to the trajectory of biological evolution in the present day. That is to say, it seems to me things are evolving toward simplicity and death in the present day, ergo some other mechanism than what we see with our very own eyes was the cause of OOL and bridging of major gaps in the taxonomic groupings.
Of course such a Black Swan interpretation of biology may have theological implications, but formally speaking, I think inferring Black Swan hypotheses for biology is fair game in the realm of science to the extent it brings coherence to real-time observations in the present day.
And, after a great deal of discussion, I think we have all agreed that this is ONLY quote mining if the creationist fails to present the context in which the quote appeared. I gave you an example of a creationist using a Gould quote in support of a creationist argument, that was NOT a quote mine. Do you wish to see it again?
See the bolded part WJM? The part you keep ignoring? Every last example we’ve seen to date, tens of thousands, supports that conclusion. Your failure to find a single counter-example speaks volumes.
My expectation, derived from my naturalism, is that life has arisen in many locations at many times throughout the universe by natural means. Therefore I wouldn’t regard life in any particular location as a black swan.
Should my expectation prove to be wrong, and life is unique to earth, then you’d have something.
From the OP:
The prophecy concerned the destruction of Jerusalem which took place almost 2000 years ago. I think your failure to understand Scripture that is easily understood calls into question your use of Scripture to support your YEC views [among other things].
Of course they do. They have all sorts of reasons to, one of which I’ve repeated several times here – to establish that certain things are agreed to in both camps.
I’ve already addressed this several times. You have a fundamentally flawed concept about what “quote-minnig” means. It has absolutely nothing to do per se with the overall views or conclusions of the author.
That would be my view, too, from the outside. But why create such an unnecessary conundrum. Why do Creationists need to trump facts with outlandish claims about the age of the Earth etc. It seems utterly irrelevant to Jesus’ teachings. Sal, for example, seems to tie himself in knots over fitting reality to old Testament “truth” for no good reason at all.
Anyway, I’m not going to derail this thread with stuff that should be in the other thread any further.
But why bother? If the facts support you, WHO CARES that Joe Evolutionist accepts the same facts. How does that advance your argument? Do you think an evolutionary biologist making a biological argument would list thousands and thousands of other biologists who agree with each of his baseline facts?
We are going to have to disagree. You cannot honestly quote someone about their views, without making clear what their views are. Again, do you wish me to produce an example of how to do this honestly?
There’s nothing at all reasonable about atheism.
Reciprocating Bill,
I tend to agree, Bill. Have you thought much about the Drake equation / Fermi Paradox and “the great filter”?
And the fact is that creationists never actually do cite scientists to “establish that certain things are agreed to in both camps”. It’s hypothetically possible that they might, but they never do in reality because even that bare minimum of honestly is too hard for them.
We know this because we’ve seen the evidence, that is, the endless page after page of creationist bullshit. It would be irresponsible for us to give them the benefit of the doubt that what they are doing is merely incompetent (as if they “honestly” think the way to establish basic facts is to quote some big-name evolutionist’s opinion).
WJM’s claim is that I can’t call the guy with his pants down and his willy in hand peering into my window a “peeping Tom” because, honestly, he might just be trying to establish that we’re neighbors.
Hi Sal
Thank you for the very interesting post. So it appears your hypothesis is that there were thousands of black swan events required for evolution to occur. What do you think is the cause(s) of so many rare events being required?
Why don’t you post that OP here so that its merits can be discussed without Barry editing and deleting comments, or banning the commenter for simply pointing out factual errors?
I already did.
I’m less sure of the existence of intelligent civilizations capable of radio communication, etc., as there is many a contingency between cup and lip – surely they are vastly more rare and brief than living organisms generally.
To sum up my argument: There’s plenty of evidence/argument for a god of some sort and plenty of practical reasons to believe in god; there’s zero evidence supporting strong atheism (no gods exist, which is a universal negative) and the weight of available evidence should tilt reasonable agnostic (weak) atheists towards some form of basic theism. Also, there are many practical reasons to not be an atheist and, even if atheism is true, no per se reason not to believe in god.
There’s really no good argument or evidence for atheism, nor any compelling rational reason to be one.
Actually there’s not but we all know the low standards Creationists use for evidence.
There are practical reasons for believing in astrology too but that doesn’t make astrology true.
I’m convinced astrology is nonsense but intrigued as to what practical reason there would be for thinking it to be true.
Premises are bald assertions of truth if not backed up. And apparently the point flew right above your head:
If “Good” is an innate, unchangeable, fundamental aspect of God, then you can’t have God without good, but the moral argument states that one can’t have good without God.
By identifying God with morality, you destroy the argument, it’s nothing more than the bald assertion that you can’t have good without god because they’re one and the same thing. I call BS and I win, simple as that.
Listen, if objective morals exist, those morals are the standard of good and bad. Period. God is superfluous, unnecessary, adds nothing to the argument about morality. Might as well postulate that your dog is the necessary source of morals.
And you have the nerve to call that evidence for god’s existence? Hilarious
The practical reasons are psychological benefits for those inclined to believe. Since astrological predictions are virtually always neutral or positive (i.e “you will come into money”), those who get the good news are more inclined to have positive attitudes and feel better about themselves and their chances.
Of course there is zero scientific evidence astrology is true.
I like how evidence is a mere / away from argument to you. That line also reads very much like a quote from an Douglas Adams book.
Out of interest, what evidence is there for god? And what sort of god is that evidence evidence for?
You say there is lots of evidence/argument and then sum up your argument. Can you now sum up your evidence too?
Read and have a good laugh
Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about all that
I love how they use this one. If they really believed in that principle they’d worship the black hole, void creating deity to whom matter was a distraction from the far vaster spaces between it all.
And yet they use as “evidence” a planet whose composition is somewhat unlikely. If the universe was fine tuned for planets like earth, the designer must have lost his tuning fork that day because there is only one we know about so far! And yet that is evidence and by the same token the evidence for the “void creator” is so much more massive and just ignored.
They’re torn between that and the bacterial flajesus
BTW, if the laws of physics and the fundamental constants were so precisely “fine tuned” that the universe couldn’t be any other way… god didn’t get to pick those laws. Who imposed those laws to the flying spaghetti monster?
OMagain,
I summed it up here and at UD in those threads I linked to.
Sorry. That was before my time here. Based on the conviction of your assertions, can I assume that your arguments in your previous thread convinced a significant number of those skeptical of your views?
dazz said
No, they’re not. They’re just premises. I’m not asserting anything other than if one adopts that premise, then the dilemma is resolved.
I don’t know if god is innately good. I don’t even know if there is a god. I make no assertions about it.
If we assume there is a god for the sake of argument, then the Euthypro dilemma can be resolved if one further accepts the premise that good is a fundamental, unchangeable aspect of god.
The Euthypro dilemma is a logical argument that comes from logically examining the consequences that come from two different theological premises. It represents a false dichotomy simply because those two premises are not exhaustive of all possible theological premises – like the one I gave, which resolves the dilemma.
Acartia,
ROFLMAO!!
Oh, how cute. And if you accept the premise that God is a cheeseburger what about that?
You creationists can’t handle more than one concept at a time. The Euthyphro dilemma is a challenge to the moral argument for god’s existence. If your counter to the dilemma obliterates your original argument, THEN YOU’VE LOST. PERIOD. How is it that hard to grasp? You can’t come back saying that “oh, if you buy this extra premise that defines god into existence then the argument is safe”
Whhhahahahahahahahah!? You don’t even know what that means dude. A false dichotomy means that SOME OTHER OPTIONS ARE IGNORED, not that the two options presented are actually the same one.
And there’s no false dichotomy in the dilemma: It boils down to this:
Can god pick what is moral? It’s a yes or no thing.
Please stop embarrassing yourself like this. It’s not funny anymore.
Did you address the specific point I made? No, I don’t think you did. If mistaken, please link.
William J. Murray,
BTW, That doesn’t even solve the dilemma. So what if goodness is an inherent property of something? That something is still contingent to goodness, not the other way around
dazz said:
I’m not sure what inferences could be made from that.
Yes, but as I said, it relies on a false dichotomy of premises – that (1) good is whatever god commands it to be (Command Morality), or good is exterior to and binding on god’s behavior, which would mean something is “more powerful” than god (whatever the source of that good is).
There is, as I said, another premise which solves the dilemma – that good is an innate, unchangeable aspect of god. So, god cannot make X good on monday and then evil on thursday, and god is not bound by any exterior good greater than god.
Dilemma solved.
Well, okay, I apparently wasn’t clear. The source of what good is, is that innate, unchangeable aspect of god. IOW, good doesn’t come from anywhere else – it comes from god, and god cannot change what it is any more than god can change other fundamental aspects of what it is to be “god”.
Once again. Use your mind for once. Where does that leave your argument for god existence, if one needs to buy that premise first?
Probably tasty.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
Communion through the Big Mac.
Bah, Murray explicitly conceded defeat right there and he won’t even realize it. That amounts to claiming that gawd is necessary and sufficient for morality, effectively identifying the object of his purported proof with his premises.
His evidence amounts to “buy my premises and you’ll get your proof… It’s all in the premises!”
Can we reasonably suppose that cultures worshiping multiple gods, have more innate goodness? Or do they simply have more different kinds of goodness?
Good to know what god can and cannot do. Have you let god know? Oh, wait, god may or may not exist according to you and it makes no difference either way as we still all act as if god does. So you might want to prefix all that when telling us all what god can and cannot do, noting it’s all regardless of if god exists or not. Or people might get the wrong idea…
No, they have less, or even negative, innate goodness — because getting many/wrong gods surely causes interference and static in the reception of god’s goodness signals. That’s just science, doncha know!
You know people like Billy boyo are just making up the rules as they go along. In spite of his (sometimes) comments that he’s thought this all through and (supposedly) picked a philosophically consistent belief set… it’s no more meaningful than picking two entrees from Panda Express. It’s just a mishmash, just their personal preferences mixed together — but the difference is, no one really thinks their choice between sesame or orange chicken is a real truth about the nature of our universe, our morals, or anything other than “taste”.
If only they’d be honest that their preferences about god are nothing other than a question of taste, I’d have no reason to argue.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
At least, until it gets legislated into law and enforced by the religious police. As we have seen around the world as well as in the US. One subtext of these entire discussions is that if people are not Good, we must MAKE them good, it’s for their own good. Gods give authoritarians the excuse that it’s not their preference at all, it’s Absolute Morality. Somehow, they believe it.
Then good is whatever God commands , per your premise God’s actions are limited to His nature( good) , you know good by what He commands.
“Innate, unchangeable aspect of god.” So god was born? To whom? That raises another whole range of issues.
This is where I earn my much-deserved reputation as an anti-theist. I don’t think a civil society can flourish where we give in to the religious-authoritarians even in the small apparently-insignificant things. Letting them take for granted that they can put “god” on the money or “10-commandments” in the courtrooms just emboldens them. It’s not a coincidence that Utah and Saudi Arabia both have excessive respect for religiously-derived laws and both are hellholes for anyone who isn’t an elder of their faiths.
But like I said, if they would treat their preference for god(s) just like a preference for flavors, I’m sure I would have no problem with them. Because when was the last time anyone tried to make either chocolate or vanilla illegal?
If some people really have tried to make chocolate illegal, please don’t let me know. I’ll cry. 🙁
Murray is right that the Euthyphro Dilemma is avoided if God is necessarily good. The question that persists is how we know that God is necessarily good, or how we know that goodness is necessarily a divine predicate. Murray thinks he’s entitled to make that a bare assumption, without any argument.
That’s fine, I guess, but then one hasn’t actually argued for anything. One has simply taken on board one big assumption — one that anyone else is rationally entitled to dismiss out of hand, without giving any argument against it, precisely because no argument has been given for it.
But alas, one of the key reasons people have invented so many thousands of gods is to “objectivize” their personal preferences. Gods imply a prescription for how to live and how to behave. Generally speaking, gods don’t need to tell THEM how to behave, they already know. Gods are there to tell YOU how to behave, because their god(s) said so.
And really, just TRY to convince one of these god-botherers that they have built their lives around something as trivial as a preference for canned peas.
I think it’s pretty obvious that some gods are better than others. Maybe SOME gods are necessarily good. After all, we DO get to assign them whatever attributes we find congenial, right?
True. Sad.
Gullible skepticism would seem to strike the perfect balance.