It just dawned on me that ID is dead.
Dembski is off all radar. He doesn’t even show up in the search box at South Carolina bible college or whatever. The last post on the Design Inference is a year old.
Meyer’s book went up like a firework and came down with the stick.
Most of the static websites are moribund. UD has banned virtually all dissenters. The few brave enough to wander over to TSZ bail out after a couple of rounds. The biologic institute inflates its “selected publications” with publications that have nothing to do with the biologic institute and seems to be doing no more than pretending to produce output.
Bio-Complexity is moribund.
Behe doesn’t seem to have much to say.
The big guys won’t come out to debate. The small ones mostly won’t leave heavily censored sites. Even the UD newsdesk peddles 6 year old stories as “news”.
And all the threads are about religion. Or tossing coins.
I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before.
It’s dead.
Posted at “After the Bar Closes on Jan. 05 2014,16:37 by Febble (Elizabeth Liddle)
Does anyone feel like extending or disputing Lizzie’s analysis? What other burning topics are others bothered by? Climate change? Unchecked exploitation of finite resources? Habitat destruction and extinction? I guess many commenters were drawn to this blog by a shared scepticism over “Intelligent Design”. Do we have any other shared interests? Now that ID has declined into insignificance, has TSZ lost it’s raison d’être?
OMagain said:
The only thing I can imagine you are referring to is the Middle Ages, and the common misconception that during that period the church hindered “scientific” research, such as it was at the time. From Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_%28historiography%29 :
I suggest you also read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science#Science_in_the_Middle_Ages
What is it that you think I need to explain in terms of what I have posited/argued here? Under certain pre-enlightenment (but after exposure to Greek philosophy) monotheisms, science progressed, under Islam as much as under Christianity. However, Islam turned it’s back on the concept of a God bound by logic or any innate characteristics such as “good”, and that’s when the golden age of Islamic scientific progress ended.
WJM
“If you begin with with the concept of a universe that just happened to form out of nothing by chance, you probably get no more technologically advanced than the ancient greeks.”
Pretty naive. If this universe just happened to form out of nothing by chance it’s still full of patterns, rules and lwas that can be understood and applied to solve problems. What you need is not a god (what is a god of logic?) but the awareness that you are ignorant about it and need to understand it by observing it, not by assuming what you like.
In fact, a god is the last thing you need to produce science and technology. If you have the Holy Truth, what you need science for?
Unfortunately the “Dark Ages” mean different things to different cultures. Originally it referred to the period between the fall of the Roman Empire (which varies depending on whether you consider the Eastern Empire to have continued into the Byzantine period) and the beginning of the Enlightenment, another “pick-your-own” date. I tend to think of it as the period between the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain till the arrival of Irish Christian monks and the reappearance of written history in Britain. But then I’m British!
William,
Congratulations, you can copy and paste from a Wiki.
Now explain what stopped computers being developed in the Middle Ages? As it seems to me all your stated conditions were met, namely:
Do tell why “enlightened monotheism” does not apply to the Middle Ages then? Why did science not advance then at the rate it currently is?
So the the golden age of Islamic scientific progress ended because they turned their back on the concept of a God bound by logic or any innate characteristics such as “good”, is that right?
Could you tell me what specific date that happened?
I was not aware you were also a scholar of Islam also. Got any references for that claim?
Guillermoe said:
“Understanding it by observing it” is not a maxim devoid of ideological assumption, but is rather a maxim full of ideological assumption – and one that doesn’t easily correlate to the perspective of materialism.
It’s easy to take the philosophical underpinnings of science and reason for granted without considering how they arrived on the scene, and why they are considered valid, and how they became integrated – and why such integration is necessary.
In the historical case, science (natural philosophy) was essentially the process of understanding how God sets nature in motion, by what rules and according to what principles, or as Kepler said, thinking god’s thoughts after him. It was essentially a philosophical/spiritual imperative to discern as much how the world worked as possible, with a ethical obligation to truth. This ethical obligation to truth often put scientists, or natural philosophers, at odds with dogma/orthodoxy.
The religious institution at the time considered this a sacred undertaking, and spent vast sums collecting and organizing scientific information, forming institutions of academia to store and train future “scientists” and to protect resources of knowledge. The church built the infrastructure of modern science, funded research, and paved the way forward.
For hundreds of years, in fact, science was considered something of a sacred duty that carried with it an obligation to the truth (even to the point of being at risk of heresy). Without such a motivation, as KN put it, I doubt modern science would be anything close to what it is today, much less without the conducive ideological framework.
So, actual history contradicts you.
Once you disconnect science from ID and hitch it up to atheistic materialism, that conceptualization acts as a sort of universal acid, as Dennet said, that cannot help but transform science itself (and then, of course, any culture that holds science in high regard) into something that corresponds to and is derivable from its essential tenets.
William Murray claims:
At what times precisely (or at least what century) are you talking about? Which religious institution? Sure, the Catholic Church played an important rôle in education, so I wonder whether your quotes around “scientist” acknowledge that it wasn’t science that was taught or studied in the Middle Ages.
William,
And yet, here we are.
People are living longer then ever.
Human rights are a thing for more people then ever.
Terrible diseases are becoming a thing of the past, slowly but surely.
Entire countries consider themselves secular nations and no spite from god appears.
So, actual reality contradicts you.
WJM
““Understanding it by observing it” is not a maxim devoid of ideological assumption, but is rather a maxim full of ideological assumption – and one that doesn’t easily correlate to the perspective of materialism”
Do you mean what you call materialism? And let me guess: you accomodate that definition of materialism so that it fits your arguments.
“It’s easy to take the philosophical underpinnings of science and reason for granted without considering how they arrived on the scene, and why they are considered valid, and how they became integrated – and why such integration is necessary”
It’s clearly easy for you.
” was essentially the process of understanding how God sets nature in motion”
Since the Holy Bible existed, understanding nature was more important than understanding god. Since being set in motion by god was assumed a characteristic of nature, basically it’s: ” was essentially the process of understanding nature”.
” or as Kepler said, thinking god’s thoughts after him”
Poetry. Even more: heresy.
“The church built the infrastructure of modern science, funded research, and paved the way forward”
So? Saying that because of that theism encourages scientific development is like saying that scientific development is encouraged by being european.
“For hundreds of years, in fact, science was considered something of a sacred duty that carried with it an obligation to the truth (even to the point of being at risk of heresy)”
Galileo. Ok? Was telling Galileo that although heliocentric model was far more precise than geocentric model he could not present it as a valid model an “obligation to the truth”?
Scientific development came from defying “obligation to the truth”.
The “motivation” you is just curiosity and the desire of not fooling onself with false explanations.
“Once you disconnect science from ID”
What is ID-rooted science, exactly?
Now that William has told us why ID is the way and the light he can go back to UD where all the best in science is currently happening and bask in the reflected glory of being on the right side.
William reminds me of the Iraqi information minister. We can see the tanks in the background, but no, there *are* no tanks.
Guillermoe
I suspect I will be able to derive that once William let’s us know the specific date/event that caused Islam to turn it’s back on the concept of a God bound by logic or any innate characteristics such as “good”.
Once that event is known we can divide time up into “ID-rooted science” and “other”, and it should be easy to see what he’s talking about.
So, William, all I need from you is the timeline of when Islam went “bad”.
I’m roughly familiar with William’s claim about the philosophical causes of the decline of Islamic science. In what I’ve read the blame has been laid at the feet of al-Ghazzali, who basically (from what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells me) used proto-Kantian arguments to show that one cannot prove any metaphysics by logic alone. (He was, of course, quite correct about that.)
However, apparently the role of al-Ghazzali in the decline of Islamic science is disputed by people who seem to know what they’re talking about. I’m in no position to judge their history; it’s not my field. Nor do I know enough to determine how biased or objective these articles are. Be that as it may: I offer for your consideration “Islam, Science and the “Decline” Narrative” and “Don’t Blame It on al-Ghazali”
The more interesting question, in terms of philosophy of science, is not whether modern science took shape within a theistic world-view, but whether contemporary science only makes sense in terms of a theistic worldview. William is pretty much right about the genealogy of early modern science, though I’d quibble with some details. (Stark’s The Victory of Reason is a pretty good presentation of this version of history, though he also tends to conflate the explanatory dimension and the prescriptive dimension.)
The real question is about whether scientific inquiry is intelligible independent of theistic metaphysics. William contends that it isn’t, but so far he hasn’t done anything to convince us of that. Simply pointing out the historical facts isn’t going to cut it, because doing so amounts to inferring an “ought” from an “is.”
KN,
I suspect William is just regurgitating ID talking points. They know they are losing the contemporary battle, so seek to gain ground historically.
Newton believed in God, don’t ya know.
William,
So, Islam was “pro-ID” before al-Ghazzali and not after? Is that about the size of it?
Muslims discovered evolution befor Christians, so Islam is the one true religion.
I miss being able to edit for typos.
So, all science derives from an ‘ID’-informed conception of a God of regular and logical habits? Accepting that arguendo (while pointing out the tenousness of linking that to the ‘science of ID’), the science of evolutionary investigation appears to have determined that God’s regular habit vis a vis the natural world is and always has been to allow it to reproduce competitively but with occasional errors, and for those errors to cause gradual and inexorable organic change. So … thanks for the insight, ID!
Or are we supposed to reach a different conclusion – that accepting William’s ‘ID-premise’, we must conclude that God suspends his regular habits in an undetectable and capricious manner in the case of the living world?
It’s all just a smokescreen to distract from the fact that ID is sterile and vacuous.
William is on record at UD as accepting *all* of evolution as fact bar “are random mutations really random?”.
Given that, one wonders what side he thinks he’s actually on and what argument he’s actually making and if he even understands what the IDers are claiming.
An important reason why modern science came to exist in Christian (and Jewish, to be sure) Europe is because Christianity had a very distant God, one who often did work subtly and without being “hands-on.” This came in part from the Greeks, but it does seem that Christianity desacralized the earth further than the Greeks, so that the “self-caused” motions that you see in Aristotle’s Physics are no longer preferred.
But Christianity at first was certainly not very friendly to science. Sometimes this is misportrayed as being caused by Christianity, yet it’s almost certain that it was more the other way around, that Christianity benefited from the decline in interest in ancient science, in artistic natural perspective, and the turn toward mysticism and spiritual concerns. Probably the confusion and danger experienced in the latter Roman Empire pushed this tendency further, however it didn’t really seem to begin with it, and I can’t say that I’ve ever been given a good reason why ancient science declined as much as it did during Rome’s zenith.
The “Dark Ages” were quite dark indeed in the West. It would have been so whether religion was friendly to science or not, though, as wars and plagues ravaged Europe, and surviving was the main concern of all but a few. Christian monks did keep a lot of texts alive by copying, but certainly didn’t try very hard to save the science, although time-keeping motivated them to keep astronomy alive to some extent.
Science as it existed then did the best in Islam, partly because Mohammed had recommended concern for science, but likely especially by creating an Islamic world that communicated across vast distances and cultures. Islam also knew Aristotle fairly well, while Christians were largely Platonists. Aristotle may not be a model for modern science, but he was rather more empiricist than Plato, and much more concerned about how things actually worked. Science declined in Islam, as we all know, and that involved Islam, but seems to have been caused especially by the Mongol invasions and their vast destruction of populations and civilization. It seems likely to me that Islam went mystical and spiritual in part because the old Islamic order had been so thoroughly destroyed by the Mongols, although possibly it would have done so eventually anyway. We’ll probably never know.
Science in Christianity was given a boost by the reappearance of many of Aristotle’s texts in Europe, with Aquinas as his champion. A lot of texts came into Europe with the Crusades and with the decline of Byzantium–which had really been great at keeping Greek texts existing, while doing little science. Byzantine texts were sent to Europe to save them from Islam, before the last conquest of Constantinople. I happen to think that gunpowder actually did much to promote science in Europe, because ballistics became hugely important, and one of the things Galileo figured out over time was how a cannonball arcs through the air (parabola).
So a number of things were occurring when modern science arose, around the time of Galileo. Europe had a large influx of ancient texts that had been lost in Europe (rot in damp Europe had a lot to do with paucity of texts there)–or never had gotten there at all–they’d benefited some from Islamic knowledge filtering in, the non-materialist concerns of the Pythagorean Plato that had dominated Europe so long had been replaced by Aristotle’s more thing-oriented approach, and gravity and kinetic energy had become pretty important to people shooting off cannons.
It’s perhaps not even a question of what religion was in Europe, but what philosophies dominated. There was Christian opposition to Aristotle at first, but that opposition didn’t prevail, and there’s no especial reason that it should have.
Probably, religion had to, and seems to have, receded in dominance for science to do well. Not because religion was particularly inimical to science, however its concerns are otherworldly. Science did benefit from Christian beliefs in a kind of remote God who had made laws to govern it. Of course that seems to have actually come from the Greeks more, originally from Pythagoras. The Semitic gods did cause order, cosmos, but that was a day-to-day matter, which could go completely awry. Pythagoras and other pre-Socratics believed in a world that came from Greek beliefs that the world itself a God that had always existed, while Pythagoras figured out that number was behind existence and form and everything. That can easily go too far, and the Greeks always seemed to want to figure things out without experiment. Christianity followed that principle itself to a good degree, but it was no empire.
Europe was divided. That’s an important consideration. Politically, and with the Reformation, religiously divided. The Chinese had done great things, like inventing printing, however they pretty much kept everything under imperial control. Empiricism in Europe that arose from competition and warfare. If it worked, good, and if one king stopped good thought, well, there were other kings that would allow, and possibly fund, your good ideas. The good thing about Christian Europe was that there always remained the Greek idea that numbers and forms and what-not were behind what happens in the world, ideas foreign to the Chinese.
It seems to me that science triumphed in Europe because the religion of Europe kept alive Greek ideas of “something behind” everything and because warring Europe would never settle into science-destroying imperial control. I think Christianity was good for science, primarily because empiricism can occur without any good theoretical understanding, and the Greek strains of thought within Christianity insisted that you have to “go deeper” to really understand things.
Glen Davidson
I’ll add, although it should be obvious, that my post has nothing to do with the ID that Lizzie was writing about. As far as I can tell, neither does William’s ID as it is being used in this thread.
The ID Lizzie was discussing is concerned about Who, not what and how, no matter its attempts to dissemble that fact. It is of the essence of anti-science.
Glen Davidson
KN said:
That would be because I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything.
“Intelligibility”, in and of itself, requires more than materialism has to offer, even in principle. Besides, science itself has disproved materialism several times over via various quantum physics experiments.
Bill Murray: “ID is the foundation that the entirety of modern science rests upon, not just historically, but fundamentally – “
Revisionist history at its best. Nobody is arguing that church did not invest in research to better understand the world. But their motivation was to find evidence to support their theistic views. Whenever the evidence called into question their odd world view, they did everything possible to stifle and censor that information. Newton was only acknowledged by the church because they had already lost the major celestial arguments. The fact that Newton was a theist was PR that they couldn’t pass up. But, at the end of the day, Newton did not propose anything that the church had not already conceded (ie, that the planets and stars really weren’t pushed through the heavens by angels.)
But I am a person who likes correlations. I realize that it can be dangerous to equate correlation and causation, but how do you explain the fact that the rate of scientific advancement has increased at the same time that the influence of the churches has decreased?
wjm:
That would be because I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything.
A strategic decision if one lacks evidence to support one’s assertion.
Billy: “Besides, science itself has disproved materialism several times over via various quantum physics experiments.”
Please read what you have written. Let me point out that quantum physics is still about physics, the most materialist of materialist studies.
You equate unexpected experimental results with proof of the supernatural. Do you seriously think that there are many (if any) physicists who believe this?
But, sincerely, I do commend you for bringing your debate here where, unlike UD, it will not be censored.
And I hope you have a merry Christmas.
William,
You should try it sometime. It can be educational.
No, it does not. There, checkmate!
Fer instance? Care to name and shame?
acartia_bogart,
William (paraphrasing now, feel free to correct me WM) believes that Uri Geller should be taken at face value and that James Randi’s disassembly of him as nothing more than a good sleight of hand magician with the morals of a wolf can be dismissed out of hand due to Randi’s agenda, and Randi would fraudulently cover up genuine ability (PSI or otherwise) in any case as it would not suit his purposes.
So I don’t think it actually matters to William if any physicists believe it or not.
Is Uri Geller really psychic William? Same answer.
Omagain: “Is Uri Geller really psychic William? Same answer.”
But even if psi exists, does anyone really think that it can’t be explained in a materialist fashion?
Science is about regular phenomena. Quantum theory has only one actual weirdness, and that is that it observes a limit to how much information we can know about very small systems (the ones commonly referred to as particles or waves.
If quantum theory were capricious and if quantum phenomena were not regular at the macro level. we would not have electronics and not have computers with which to spew creationist nonsense.
acartia_bogart,
Ask William about his thoughts on free will.
Nah, it’s like a hollywood ghost. Eyes can resolve it but a mere lens cannot. A camera shows you wrestling with yourself, not grappling with a spectre.
The faith healer only heals some, not all, If any at all. Why?
Uri cannot demonstrate his powers if he feels there is a skeptic in the room. Negative energy. Can’t you feel it?
Equally, Uri cannot demonstrate his powers if his confederate is unable to get to the power switch unobserved. Can’t you feel it?
Glen, I like your post above about the role of Aristotle in the rise of European science. (Unfortunately, with the plug-ins disabled, we can no longer quote directly from previous posts.)
The only point I’d raise as a bone of contention is that I think it’s a slight error to think of Aristotle as more an empiricist than Plato. Aristotle takes a lot for granted, and while he’s usually a pretty keen describer of experience, he doesn’t do experiments in the modern sense, i.e. intervening into the causal order.
The key difference between Plato and Aristotle, from what I can tell, is that Plato thinks that the intellect’s participation with the Forms involves overcoming or by-passing the senses, whereas Aristotle thinks that the intellect participates with the Forms by means of the senses. In some sense, sure, that makes Aristotle more of an “empiricist”. Certainly Aristotle thought that the movement of thought towards an intellectual comprehension of the whole and of being qua being began with sense-experience.
However, we should certainly not overlook the importance of the emergence of the concept of “law of nature” (which is, to my knowledge, basically a Stoic concept that re-emerges as Christianity struggles to contain Epicureanism, aka “materialism”, in the Scientific Revolution and following), the new mathematics made possible by Arabic numerals (including algebra), the idea of nature as homogenous rather than (as with Aristotelianism) heterogeneous, and so on.
William is quite right to point out that the rise of modern science took shape in a theistic climate, though even at the time it was dimly recognized that a radicalization of modern science was a threat to organized religion (such is how I read the fascinating challenge that Spinoza posed to Western philosophy and politics, anyway).
OMagain,
I have no idea if Uri Geller has psi abilities or not. It’s entirely irrelevant to me. As far as Randi is concerned, there’s plenty of information about him available to anyone who cares to find it. IMO, he’s simply a businessman, and his business depends on “debunking” all challengers. He doesn’t run scientific investigations, whereas others are committed to scientifically investigating such things.
acartia_bogart said:
Only to a materialist.
No, I don’t. The result of such experiments are not unexpected at all in light of a consciousness-centric view of the world. And the term “supernatural” is a loaded one. What do you mean by “supernatural”?
WJM,
And you are wrong. The paradigm is that QM is intrinsically probabilistic. Each individual outcome is random. That is the context and heuristic for research, inferences, and conclusions.
There may be disputes about what exactly is entailed, but Bohr won the debate, was influential, to many the final word indeed, and science was done nonetheless, even before Bell came along.
davehooke,
QM being intrinsically probabilistic is not the same as the scientific heuristic investigating and coming to conclusions about QM being intrinsically probabilistic. You are again confusing an explanatory model for that which is used to create the model.
William, science did not end with the Einstein-Bohr debates. I am pointing you to the fact that quantum physics has continued successfully from the resolution of the debate.
That which was used to create Quantum Electrodynamics includes probability amplitudes. It doesn’t include an assumption of a rational mind behind quantum phenomena.
davehooke,
You have fundamentally not understood the point I am making about the foundation of modern science.
William,
By “foundation” you might mean history, or you perhaps mean “justification”.
The discussion of either is interesting, but as long as it’s clear that a paradigm incorporating random events and probabilistic outcomes is a successful context and heuristic for modern scientific research, I will let others discuss historians or philosophers.
Petrushka,
You could say the same thing about chaotic systems. The weirdness on the quantum scale is more intrinsic. It isn’t that we just can’t measure accurately, it is that there is no classical explanation for quantum behaviour. Quantum tunneling and the gradual appearance of an interference pattern in the two slit experiment both demonstrate this.
davehooke said:
You are making the same mistake again. Scientific methodology and the principles of science existed long before QM, were used to generate QM theory, erect QM experiments and draw QM conclusions. The principles and methodology of science didn’t change due to QM.
William, Unless you want to disagree with the statement,
“A paradigm incorporating random events and probabilistic outcomes is a successful context and heuristic for modern scientific research”
I have nothing more to add.
William,
Great. Now care to predict something? You know, if the consciousness-centric view of the world really is so fruitful you’ll be able to make predictions of experiments that are yet to be done and show that one outcome is expected in your view of the world is true, and another if not.
So, please, enlighten us all.
Or will you just continue to point at other peoples work after the fact and say “I predicted that I did”?
William,
I missed you linking to the experiment(s) that disproved materialism.
You posted some quotes. Hardly the same thing.
What specific experiment. You said there were several, name them! And you said proof so I expect proof not a re-interpretation of someone elses work.
What William cannot and will not ever understand is that if science had disproven materialism then I’d listen.
Whereas when William tells me that science has disproved materialism and pulls up some quotes from the 60’s on peoples opinion after first telling me that he had specific evidence from specific experiments, well I’m not so inclined to listen.
If I said that I’ve proven ID to be false by experiment but then only provided a few quotes would he be convinced? No, of course not. Yet he expects that to work on others. Go figure.
William, I see that you still haven’t answered my questions. What are you afraid of? I would think that a know-it-all like you would be eager to clarify and support your assertions.
What happened to the reply button in each comment?
And my avatar picture went away too.
Check the moderation issues thread for state of play regarding functionality.
And if I remember correctly, wasn’t there an edit button that is also gone now?
davehooke said:
If you are saying that modern scientific research can investigate things that are random and probabilistic, I agree. But that has absolutely nothing to do with my point.
William, I am saying that science has proceeded from the *principles* of random events and probabilistic outcomes. If you now retreat to making a historical point or a philosophical point about the justification of science, that is fine by me.
From the paradigm, no less.