Starboy

Athanasius,

I suggest that instead of trying to get others to make ID workable you get your fellow IDers to think more about it. When they get something that could be approached scientifically then come back. Perhaps then you will get a better reception.

Or, could it be you are here because the IDers have no workable ideas? If you can’t get the folks that have a passion for it to produce results, what makes you think, results are possible at all or that those without a passion for it would be interested at all?

Or, could it be that what you are really calling for is a scientific crusade, the search for the holy designer? The more I look at your posts, the more I come to see that is exactly what you’re asking for.

Why don’t you respond to my posts? Is it because it would require you to more carefully examine your motivations? Why do you need science to buttress your faith? The real Athanasius would never have had a need for such silliness.

Starboy

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

DMB

You keep on using terms suggestive of probability when you have no mechanism for assigning probabilities to anything to do with ID of universes -- no-one has. What you are proposing hasn't moved on much from William Paley's hollow argument about watches.

We recognise human artifacts because we know a lot about human beings and their activities. We don't know anything at all about hypothetical designers of universes.

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: DMB ]</p>

Xyzzy

..should we constrain our definition of scientific explanations to the bounds of methodological naturalism? Does this not limit the questions that science can ask?

You argue from a false premise.

Contrary to the posts on this forum.. science is by no means limited to methodological naturalism. It is naturalistic and materialistic only as a 'result' of its methodology, because the scientific method of determining useful models of the world based on empirical experiencial observation, inference, logic, quantification, experimentaiton, only support these theories.

Only these types of phenomena have proven reliably universally accessible to every human, offer any sort of reliable evidene, and can be reasonably falsified. So far, naturalistic explanations are the only ones that have met the criteria of science.

Note that this does NOT preclude a designer. If a designer were to have designed all life, we would expect at least a small number of testable hypotheses that would allow us to verify that this was the case. A short list of these might be:

1. No order to designed beings. Unrelated designs each with novel features and patterns.

2. Purely aesthetic features in designed creatures. No attention paid to the survivability of the feature of the creature beyond rudimentary existence.

3. No strong positive evidence for a more pedestrian natural explanation. No fossil evidence of evolutionary branching and speciation, no evidence of DNA similar in proportion to evolutionary relationships, no evidence of mutation, selection, and the other strong positive evidence for evolution.

4. Historical or paleontological evidence for design. Abrupt appearance of all life with no precursor species. To justify the christian belief, this would include mammals, fish, humans, and all other modern animals.

5. Mathematical disproof of the more pedestrian explanation would help the case for a designer, though no such proof has ever been offered. Quite the contrary.. in fact the strength of the mathematical evidence for mutation plus selection is stronger than ever.

6. Physical evidence of a designer, his blueprints, his prototypes or failed designs, his workshops, tools, techniques, technology, methods. We must have these to infer human design, likewise we would need them to conclusively prove Godlike design.

Perhaps this is a "heretical" point to bring up on a site devoted to promoting metaphysical naturalism, but if life WAS actually designed by an intelligence independent of this natural realm, would this not close our minds to ever scientifically admitting the possibility of it? We might scientifically and methodologically observe and measure the work of that Intelligence, but could not ever "scientifically" theorize that life owed it's genesis to it. This would be akin to a forensic scientist investigating a death and never opening himself to the possibility that it might have occurred by design - a murder. He might come up with a brilliant and very plausible sounding explanation of how the death might have happened accidentally. But how could he ever be certain that he had discovered the truth unless he opened his mind to both possibilities?

Starboy

Xyzzy,

Nice post. There are some things you said that were not clear to me. Perhaps you could elaborate.

Starboy: Isn’t this a circular argument? Wouldn’t phenomena that satisfy these criteria be called natural?

I think Athanasius was very clear about this:

Starboy: He is asking for something that is not science. Perhaps it is poetry or art or maybe even religion, I make no claims of knowledge in these areas, but it was most definitely not a scientific question.

Starboy: No but yes. Science does preclude a non-natural designer, but certainly a natural designer could be considered. And if a natural designer were considered then all those points you suggest and more would certainly be food for research. And the existing scientific knowledge could be used, as you have done, to decide if the idea has merit.

Starboy: It was at this point in Anthanasius’s original post that his motives became clear. Both his name and his use of the word “heretical” indicate that his is not a scientific but a religious agenda. That truth, objectivity and open mindedness are only a smoke screen to try to recruit people to a point of view that has already made its conclusions and is just trying to find facts to support it. But that is old news, what really baffles me is why would a person of faith give a rats a** about facts or science or anything else other than their own creed. I have not been able to get Anthanasius to answer that for me.

Are you reading this Anthanasius? What say you?

Starboy

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

Albion

This looks rather a lot like trying to have it both ways. Humans may well produce sub-optimally designed things, but we aren't talking about humans here, are we? If we aren't even talking about extraterrestrials (which wouldn't be a problem for methodological naturalism), then we must be talking about God or some other sort of deity that exists outside the bounds of the universe and laws of nature. There's no excuse for God to start coming up with suboptimal designs unless God has some sort of reason for it. And if you're then going to say, well, God made it perfect but then bad things happened, you have to be specific about why and what you're talking about. Why would the suboptimal design of the human knee, which is so similar to the primate knee, be anything other than an adaptation of a quadruped structure to a bipedal mode of locomotion?

On the one hand you have the explanation based on evolution. On the other you have the explanation of a Designer who could have designed it perfectly but chose not to for some reason we'll probably never be able to figure, or a Designer who designed it perfectly and then some other force (what force? why?) took over and corrupted it so that it ended up looking like a joint from a quadruped that hadn't been all that well adapted to a bipedal mode of locomotion.

Now, why would Designer explanation be so much more compelling than the natural-process one?

Xyzzy

No.

If magic, psychic viewings, telekenesis, God, angels, etc. were testable and reliably observable by science, they still would be supernatural phenomena. You're assuming that science would discover natural "explanations" for them.

Science does not require that these phenomena are "natural", only that they are universally and consistently observable and empirically testable.

If any scientist A wants to test the existence of God, he can say prayer B, at which time a beam of light C appears with a powerful disembodied voice D saying "This is God. May I help you?" As long as this test reliably works, can be repeated by any scientist, and no other more pedestrian explanation can be posited for it, it is pretty good empirical evidence for "something" that seems to be outside of natural law.. and God would be a good working hypothesis.

Unfortunately, there are no such proofs of God, and the proofs proposed by Theists tend to be highly subjective.. not at all empirical, universally testable, or falsifiable.

If the subject were not about the state of the physical world, it would be a metaphysical question. However what he's talking about is what we can infer from physical evidence.

His problem is that supernatural origins for natural phenomena ARE a possible avenue of exploration. These supernatural origins could leave physical evidence just as convincing as any natural process.

But real science doesn't care, because science is not wedded to methodological naturalism, it is based on an epistemological process of reliably extracting valid inferences and testable models from empirical evidence. If there is falsifiable empirical evidence for supernatural processes, then science will posit a supernatural explanation.

I gave a short list of evidence that would point to a supernatural explanation in my previous post. These types of empirical evidence are certainly not outside the realm of impossibility, they are just what we would expect from intelligent design. That we do not find these types of things is considered good evidence that intelligent design is NOT responsible for life.

Starboy: No but yes. Science does preclude a non-natural designer, but certainly a natural designer could be considered.

Science does not preclude EITHER a non-natural designer or a natural designer. Science precludes any process for which there is no "evidence". Non-natural processes universally leave behind no evidence, and also require the positing of supernatural processes and phenomena which we do not observe in the present and have never been reliably observed. Add to this the fact that we see quite a bit of positive evidence for natural explanations, and this explains why science prefers one over the other.

However, were supernatural phenomena ever to yield to empirical investigation (I'm not holding my breath), or strong empirical physical evidence ever to appear for any historical supernatural occurance (again.. not remotely likely), science would treat that just as it does any other sort of evidence.

But until supernatural phenomena produces any such evidence, it will be outside of the realm of sicence, and more in the realm of anecdotal subjective touchy feely nonsense where it has always been.

Because humans are by nature rational beings. They have to be to survive and prosper day to day (after all, how many people do you know who use prayer "exclusively" to decide how to solve a math problem, where to invest their money, or what business to go into). Most poeple, even the most religious, use rational thought daily in their lives.

People recognize that their beliefs are irrational and frankly it bothers them. They want to find some way to make them "seem" rational, and want other people to agree with them that they are being rational and not silly.

Xyzzy

The extremely short list of "not" why intelligent design theory fails.

1. It does "not" fail simply because it posits a supernatural entity as the origin for the design. Science doesn't care.


The short list of why intelligent design theory fails:

1. It fails to provide any explicable process for the design.

2. It ignores a huge body of evidence which indicates design by natural processes.

3. It relies on fallacious arguments such as irreducible complexity (ignoring scaffolding, changing purpose, and other methods of it evolving as well as experiments where IC is provably produced), arguments such as faulty probability estimates, etc.

4. It relies heavily on appeals to ignorance and incredulity.

5. It assumes that if (and emphasis on "if") all natural explanations are eliminated, a single unprovable supernatural explanation with absoultely no evidence for it must be true. This selection of a single arbitrary theory with no evidence is fundamentally in error, as if all empirically evidenced explanations are eliminated, the only reasonable explanation is: "We don't know".

Starboy

Xyzzy,

I concur with your short list of arguments regarding ID.

I would like to better understand your point of view. What is natural?

Starboy

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

Starboy

Xyzzy

I should have made myself clear. When I say natural I mean anything that affects and is affected by the physical world. Supernatural or unnatural would be anything that is not natural. I think from this definition it is easy to see that any explanation requiring the supernatural could not be tested and thus would not be scientific. We appear to have different definitions of the word natural. What is your definition?

Perhaps incorrectly I did assume that Athanasius shared my definition of natural. If he doesn’t agree he can let me know, however he appears to be afraid to discuss ID with me.

Starboy

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

Athanasius

Please forgive me - I have not been ignoring anyone, I’ve just been away. It looks as though while I have been gone a lot of excellent posts have been placed which deserve more attention than I am able to give at this time. I will respond to some of them, but please forgive me for not responding to them all.

WinAce, sorry to disappoint you. My last post was of necessity hastily written, and could have been more carefully thought through, I will admit.

Ps418, you wrote, “It seems to me that all three options [increase, decrease, constancy] are fully consistent with ID.” Good point, all three could be, depending on the capabilities and purposes of the Intelligent Designer. Hypothetically, an Intelligent Designer of sufficient or unlimited intelligence could design any of these three. His choice would depend upon His objectives.

But we are examining ID and macroevolution as competing hypotheses. Reproductive systems capable not only of constancy of desirable traits, but of a complementary increase in complexity permitting the cumulative assimilation of new desirable traits to such an extent that new kinds of life emerge, are by definition evolutionary systems. Macroevolution requires that such a mechanism or process exist. ID does not. ID-istic macroevolution is certainly conceivable, but it is still macroevolution, so for purposes of comparison, we must lay that aside. We know that in addition to mechanisms for producing limited variety, there are mechanisms for preserving constancy in biological systems. However, mutations and genetic accidents, most of which are harmful, do occur. Even with mechanisms for preserving constancy, over time, a copy of a copy of a copy is likely to lose information. That is what ID uncombined with macroevolution would predict, and that is exactly what we observe in nature.

Related to this, you also mentioned the nylon bug and some other examples as well. My challenge was not “Can you show me just one provable observed example of new order wrought by evolution?” Instead, it was “Can you show me just one provable observed example of an increase in order and complexity wrought by evolution?” There’s a big difference! Regarding the examples you mentioned, however, the article regarding the nylon bug did acknowledge that most mutations are harmful to an organism. Many of them, although they may hinder reproduction, do not prevent it. Because of this, organisms with harmful mutations can contaminate a genetic population. There is a species of ferret, for instance, that has a lethal genetic defect, but the defect does not kill the organism before it can reproduce. Given the fact that beneficial mutations are rare and outnumbered by harmful ones, what is to prevent the gradual downward degradation of a genetic population? Natural selection, to be sure, could have a preserving influence in times of environmental stress, but how could the selection of a few beneficial mutations overcome the accumulation of countless harmful ones that would occur when there was less environmental stress?

You also asked, “Can you cite a few examples of an "provable observed" increase in order and complexity wrought by a supernatural agent?”
After the initial creation event, ID does not require this. Macroevolution does, and therefore has more to prove.


Scientae, you wrote, Perhaps the Intelligent Designer did have the foresight to know that devolution and degeneration would occur, and chose to allow it. The aspect of intervention is really irrelevant to our discussion, and not necessary to ID, although I would hope that an Intelligent Designer would care enough to intervene.

Xyzzy, your list of differences between intelligently designed and evolved objects, although clever, works entirely from the presupposition that biological systems are the products of evolution. I’m asking you to assume less than that. Even Richard Dawkins acknowledged that life gives the appearance of design. In the Blind Watchmaker, he wrote:
Starboy, what bearing at all do my own views or motives have on the objective truth of my statements? What do yours? If a statement is true, it is still true, even if the motives of the person who made the statement are suspect.

DMB, you wrote, Do we have to know the nature of an Intelligent Designer of Universes to observe and measure his handiwork? Of course not! But we could assume that a Designer of universes would at least have those qualities which we believe make us intelligent. All scientific investigation works on the basis of an underlying philosophy. We reason on the basis of certain things which we accept as true, or probably true. There is nothing to prevent us from doing the same with an Intelligent Designer.

Starboy and Xyzzy, I think you missed the definitions of natural, supernatural, and exo-universal that I was making use of.

Xyzzy, regarding your short list, I have a similar one regarding the materialistic explanation for life:

1. It fails to provide any explicable process for the genesis of life.
2. It has yet to demonstrate that design by natural processes is capable of producing an increase in information.
3. It relies on unproven ideas such as an unbroken succession of organisms filling in the gaps between dissimilar species (something we do not find in the fossil record. Darwin, if I recall correctly, acknowledged this problem, and it drove Eldredge and Gould to come up with the idea of Punctuated Equilibrium), and mechanisms to account for increasing complexity in the genetic code.
4. It relies heavily on faith in itself and appeals to ignorance: “Just because we don’t know the exact mechanism yet, does not mean that we will not in the future. I have faith that science will one day do this.”
5. It arbitrarily assumes that no explanation for complex information but blind chance is a legitimate one.
6. It attributes to simple matter the “intelligence” to design itself into complex, intelligent life, a proposition so incredulous that it seems absurd.

I wish I had more time, but family and work call, so I must come up out of the lion’s den. I’ll let ya’ll (I have given away the fact that I am a Southerner by the my use of this wonderfully expedient word) have the last words, and return (perhaps a few weeks from now) when I have more time.

“Hey Nebuchadnezzar! How ‘bout a rope?”

Edited for punctuation.

[ August 04, 2002: Message edited by: Athanasius ]

[ August 04, 2002: Message edited by: Athanasius ]</p>