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Post by zameel on Feb 2, 2010 19:28:07 GMT
In comparison, ID essentially posits that certain features of the natural world are too complex to be accounted for by anything other than intelligent agency. This is fine as a philosophical concept, but the trouble in applying it to science is that any single instance of applying ID (to a given protein, say) becomes a GOTG because you're basically saying that this particular protein is designed but, say, 256,000 other proteins are not. I see you're point that ID would be a GOTG argument if the features it argued were designed were chosen arbitrarily based on the ignorance of the scientific community. But this is not what ID does. ID attempts to devise a rigorous and empircally sound test to detect features that are known to originate only by intelligent agency. If intelligent design is detectable in this way, whether it be for Mt Rushmore or the bacterial flagellum, there can be a strong positive argument for design, one that is not based on ignorance and is not an arbitrary GOTG. Do you see the difference between your characterisation of ID and what it actually sets out to do? [the way you construed ID as "essentially positing that certain features of the natural world are too complex to be accounted for by anything other than intelligent agency" is wrong; rather it argues there is "feautre X" (X being "specified complexity" or "irreducible complexity"), and wherever "feature X" is found that is (positive) evidence of intelligent agency; of course there is a negative argument also, showing that the other mechanisms postulated are inadequate, but that is only a part of the ID argument but unfortunately misconstrued as the entire argument]
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Post by perplexedseeker on Feb 2, 2010 21:56:27 GMT
I do see your point. If the ID movement could produce such a rigorous test I would of course be intrigued to see it, but I have not yet encountered anything that I believe qualifies for this. If you can show me such an argument, I might be prepared to reconsider. But perhaps it would be better to do that in the "science" subforum rather than clutter eastshore's thread here?
What I was trying to show was how people use GOTG to attack a very heterogenous selection of arguments, and how its effectiveness against these is very uneven. I've often seen people try to cheat by equivocating between crude "god did it" creationism and formal theistic arguments, and it irritates me even when it's done in ignorance. When it's done in a deliberate attempt to muddy the water by people who should know better, it becomes something altogether more sinister.
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Post by zameel on Feb 2, 2010 23:11:42 GMT
I do see your point. If the ID movement could produce such a rigorous test I would of course be intrigued to see it, but I have not yet encountered anything that I believe qualifies for this. If you can show me such an argument, I might be prepared to reconsider. But perhaps it would be better to do that in the "science" subforum rather than clutter eastshore's thread here? I'm sure eastshore wouldn't mind, the last couple of pages have been on this subject. Almost every book on ID (e.g. The Design Inference, Darwin's Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, Signature in the Cell) is about finding a marker for intelligent design. So it's not that the ID movement have not produced such a rigorous test it's just that most people tend to ignore it and most mainstream scientists choose to dismiss it. The marker for intelligent design is basically a system or code that is complex (i.e. highly improbably arranged, heterogenous, multipart) which corresponds (or integrates or is "well-matched" in Behe's words) to an independent function/pattern/meaning. Language, computer code, radio signals and machines exhibit this feature known as "specified complexity"/"complex specified information"/"irreducible complexity". An example would be walking into a park and seeing flowers arranged apparently randomly in various colours but when one steps back it actually spells "welcome"; one would conclude design rather than chance because of the complex arrangement AND the specific pattern/meaning; if it were merely "complex" one would not conclude design (this is typically a straw man argument against ID that they argue design from mere "complexity" or mere "order"). Similar would be the bacterial flagellum which is exquisitely arranged (as shown in the electron micrograph e.g. here: www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-08-20images/figure03.jpg ) and has a specific function corresponding/well-matched to its many parts i.e. rotary motion. This is the crux of the argument, and the books attempt to spell it out in greater detail: Dembski uses mathematical arguments about the "probabalistic resources" of the universe (i.e. how many chances it has) to show if an arrangement's probability is lower than 10^139 (the full "probabalistic resources" of the universe based on the quickest an event can happen, planck time, and the age of the universe, and the number of atoms) AND it exhibits "specified complexity", then it is almost certain it is intelligently designed; Behe looks at complex biochemical structures both to show the limitations of the Darwinian mechanism (in his "two-binding-site rule") and the evidence of intelligent design (in his "irreducible complexity); Stephen Meyer looks at the digital code in DNA, the origin of biological information and the origin of life (all related), which show a remarkable similarity to computer code (as expressly said by Bill Gates and Richard Dawkins), and he shows intelligent design is the "best explanation" (the only adequate explanation). I've often seen people try to cheat by equivocating between crude "god did it" creationism and formal theistic arguments, and it irritates me even when it's done in ignorance There is a lot of equivocating in evolution too e.g. when people equivocate between crude laboratory mutations (e.g. fruitfly "evolution") and large scale macroevolution by a neo-Darwinian mechanism. When people ask "has evolution happened", you don't know what they're really asking; according to ID it has happened according to many of the meanings for which it is used, but not others. www.arn.org/docs/meyer/sm_meaningsofevolution.pdf
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Post by eastshore4 on Feb 8, 2010 21:25:12 GMT
Hey perplexed, thank you again for another great response! I won't try and butt-in on the ID issue, but I just wanted to make a quick statement:
I just wanted to thank you all for the advice you have offered. At this point I have rejected my atheism and embraced agnosticism, for what it's worth. I wish I could say that I'm ready to turn to Christianity or some other theistic belief, but I just don't quite feel like I'm completely convinced yet... I am glad to know that there are really great arguments for theism and atheism isn't nearly as "obvious" as I once thought, but I am still struggling with some objections (evolution, the mind, biblical criticism and philosophy in general)
I still have trouble understanding just how much science can be compatible with religion, and I need to come to understand just how much sway philosophy is supposed to have, but I suppose these are matters for reflection now that I have a decent grasp on many of the arguments. I have gained a great understanding thanks to you guys and I really do appreciate it!
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Post by Deleted on Feb 8, 2010 22:06:00 GMT
Eastshore, I'm glad you changed your position, though I'm displeased at myself for contributing only two meager post to this topic. Existence of God should be my expertise, but I feel I don't contribute as much as I should.
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Post by unkleE on Feb 9, 2010 7:18:50 GMT
I just wanted to thank you all for the advice you have offered. At this point I have rejected my atheism and embraced agnosticism, for what it's worth. I wish I could say that I'm ready to turn to Christianity or some other theistic belief, but I just don't quite feel like I'm completely convinced yet... I am glad to know that there are really great arguments for theism and atheism isn't nearly as "obvious" as I once thought, but I am still struggling with some objections (evolution, the mind, biblical criticism and philosophy in general) I still have trouble understanding just how much science can be compatible with religion, and I need to come to understand just how much sway philosophy is supposed to have, but I suppose these are matters for reflection now that I have a decent grasp on many of the arguments. I have gained a great understanding thanks to you guys and I really do appreciate it! And thank you for saying so! I for one am really glad that this forum can be helpful to someone like you. I hope you stick around and continue to discuss.
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Post by eastshore4 on Feb 10, 2010 1:34:26 GMT
Thanks guys. Matko, maybe you can help shed some light on something actually. I'm kinda in this scientism state of mind when it comes to philosophy... whenever I try and follow a philosophical argument I'm finding it hard to see why I should embrace any particular argument. I understand philosophy isn't about facts, and not necessarily about opinions, but I just don't see where we're supposed to draw a conclusion as to when an argument can become convincing. Let's use the AFR for example... at it's core it's a fairly simple convincing premise, but then you have all of these philosophical objections, causations, defeaters, defeater-defeaters, etc. that the argument becomes less and less convincing and seems like it can be argued for eternity. I'm finding my philosophical journey very frustertating... Victor Reppert says something smart, but then a commenter objects with a flurry of philosophy jargon I don't understand, what do I make of all this!? I'm having a problem with philosophy of the mind too, there almost seems to be a conflict where philosophers think scientists are overextending their claims, and scientists think philosophers are being weasly... it's like "the scientific steamroller vs. the armchair philosopher"
Just curious, but are you familiar at all with thomism? I've been reading Ed Feser's "The Last Superstition" and it's really compelling, but I feel like there's possibly some sneaky logic or something going on, his case seems almost too convincing.
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Post by perplexedseeker on Feb 10, 2010 16:48:56 GMT
I'll let matko field this one, but to give my 2 cents:
The best description I ever heard of philosophy was in a book by Mary Midgely, where she describes it as being analogous to plumbing. Everyone uses philosophy all the time, even if they don't realise it. Often they do it badly because they don't realise they're doing it. Having some ideas about what (if anything) reality, existence, personhood, mind, free will, morality, time, energy and value are is essential just for living from day to day. And, like plumbing, people only notice philosophy when it breaks and stuff starts to stink.
That's exactly what happened to me. I had lived for years in a state of unquestioning scientism, and dismissed philosophy as useless word games. Until one day I realised, to my horror, that my beliefs rested on a reductive materialism that, if taken consistently, would deny the existence of many things I experienced day to day, such as my own conscious experience. I was fine with God possibly not existing, but I then realised that my scientism also precluded the existence of many human things as well, things which I valued very highly. From that day on I started actually looking at philosophical arguments, instead of just dismissing them.
Science is philosophy, at its core, once all the rhetoric about "steamrollers" and other mythical imagery has been cleared away as the hot air that it is. Anyone who denies that philosophy matters isn't being especially scientific or objective, they're just doing bad philosophy.
@ zameel: The real problem I have with ID is that there's no convincing way I've ever heard of that could allow it to make predictions. I'm aware that predictions aren't essential for something to count as science, but it sure helps in the case of a tie-breaker. Natural selection predicts the existence of transitional forms in the fossil record, which have been found in many (though not, I will admit, in all) cases. In contrast, ID explanations are entirely post hoc. They are ascriptions of design to things in the past, and since ID interventions depend on the (presumably free and hence unpredictable) will of God, there is no way I know of in which they could predict any further cases of ID which would occur in the future.
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Post by perplexedseeker on Feb 10, 2010 16:58:21 GMT
To put it another way, even if the interventions postulated in ID were to be real (something which as a non-aligned theist I do not deny the possibility of), then presumably natural processes would still operate the rest of the time. Each intervention would be a single, non-repeatable event, so we would still be best served studying what happens most of the time, and is therefore more likely to be applicable an any given situation (for example, in the case of antibiotic resistance, it would do us little good waiting for divine intervention to reduce the pathogenicity of the bacteria - whilst it's certainly possible that this could occur, such an event would be entirely up to God, (who might have better reasons for not intervening), so we would do better to use evolutionary logic to devise a way out of the problem).
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Post by zameel on Feb 10, 2010 18:37:02 GMT
The real problem I have with ID is that there's no convincing way I've ever heard of that could allow it to make predictions I've already provided evidence of a prediction made by IDers back in the 90s, that "junk" DNA will have function, that has now been confirmed. According to geneticist Richard Sternberg and James Shapiro, most of the genome is functional. This has been demonstrated by the recent ENCODE project: www.genome.gov/10005107 www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7146/abs/nature05874.htmlID proponents Forrest Mims in 1994 and William Dembski in 1998 both predicted, that according to an ID model, function will be found for junk DNA. Traditional Darwinian models of course predicted the opposite. Richard von Sternberg wrote "neo-Darwinian narratives have been the primary obstacle to elucidating the effects of these enigmatic components of chromosomes" and concludes "the selfish DNA narrative and allied frameworks must join the other icons of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory that, despite their variance with empirical evidence, nevertheless persist in the literature" (Richard Sternberg, “On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context of a Unified Genomic–Epigenetic System,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 981: 154–188 (2002)). Another specific prediction that was confirmed was the nature of the T3SS in relation to the bacterial flagellum. Kenneth Miller basing his view on a gradualistic Darwinian view believed T3SS was co-opted for the flagellum during the bacterium's evolution. On the other hand, IDers at the time, based on their view of top-down design, predicted T3SS degenerated from the bacterial flagellum, and it turned out that they were right (as for e.g. the bacterial flagellum is found in both Gram -ve and +ve bacteria whereas the T3SS only in -ve). Other broad predictions are provided in Meyer's book, Appendix A. Behe also predicted in his two-binding-site rule, that no protein complex made of more than two binding sites (which are abundant in nature, which therefore "natural selection" should easily produce) would come about by Darwinian means. Natural selection predicts the existence of transitional forms in the fossil record, which have been found in many (though not, I will admit, in all) cases "Natural selection" does not predict transitional forms, common descent does. Unfortunately, various themes are conflated to give the impression of the confirmation of ideas that are associated with but are not what certain findings show. Not all IDers deny common descent (Behe doesn't), and common descent is not the subject-matter of ID. It is also untrue that "transitional forms" have been found in most cases - this is only the case if universal common descent is assumed from the outset. What the fossil record in fact shows is abrupt changes, with species coming in and out of the fossil record without much change. The Cambrian explosion (in which all major animal phyla emerged in about 5 my, which geologically speaking, is very "sudden") is a remarkable example of this. Although soft-bodied fauna are found in the pre-Cambrian, none of them have ancestry to the Cambrian fauna. There are also many problems with Darwinian interpretations of the sequences; for instance, the recent "tiktalik" which was thought to be a transitional between fish and tetrapod (and inspired Neil Shubin's eager book Your Inner Fish) has been shown to be nonsense, as tetrapods existed long before tiktalik: www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7277/full/463040a.htmlfor example, in the case of antibiotic resistance, it would do us little good waiting for divine intervention to reduce the pathogenicity of the bacteria - whilst it's certainly possible that this could occur, such an event would be entirely up to God, (who might have better reasons for not intervening), so we would do better to use evolutionary logic to devise a way out of the problem But ID theory does not deny the fact small-scale evolution by such processes do occur. If it is claimed since these examples of small-scale (micro) evolution are all we have seen, then the same criterion of not postulating ID should be used for not postulating an all pervasive Darwinian mechanism. And we have in fact seen ID at work in microevolution: human beings have, for instance, inserted the insulin gene and some genes for anti-thrombotic proteins in bacteria in order to "manufacture" these proteins; "artificial selection" is also ID at work as it attempts to push change to the extremes whereas "natural selection" does the complete opposite, that is, it is a conservative force that keeps things the same.
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Post by himself on Feb 10, 2010 19:14:45 GMT
Attempting to find God in the mere facts of the universe is like expecting to find Shakespeare by reading the script to Hamlet, or to identify Whittle by measuring the components of a jet engine. The notion of demoting God from First Cause to just another efficient caused operating materially within the universe -- because, evidently, when he created the world it wasn't really very good and needs tweaking and intervention -- seems theologically unsound. What happens when the probabilities turn out to be not so small? Or when a material mechanism is identified that accounts for what was previously mysterious?
There really is a difference between the natural, which operates from immanent properties endowed upon its very nature, and the artificial, which operates only by the art of another.
It is a blindness of the modern world that confuses "design" in the sense of "plans or intentions" with "design" in the sense of an engineer sitting at a drafting table specifying this or that detail of a particular product. We live in a technological age, and so see everything in terms of technology and "hypotheses" that must be "confirmed" by empirical "evidence."
The medievals at least recognized the distinction between an argument in the physics and an argument in the metaphysics. Of all the arguments they deployed for the proofs of God, complexity of any sort was not among them. "Mere order" was.
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Post by Al Moritz on Feb 10, 2010 19:19:33 GMT
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Post by Al Moritz on Feb 10, 2010 20:18:36 GMT
Himself wrote:
1. The notion of demoting God from First Cause to just another efficient caused operating materially within the universe -- because, evidently, when he created the world it wasn't really very good and needs tweaking and intervention -- seems theologically unsound.
2. It is a blindness of the modern world that confuses "design" in the sense of "plans or intentions" with "design" in the sense of an engineer sitting at a drafting table specifying this or that detail of a particular product.
3. Of all the arguments they deployed for the proofs of God, complexity of any sort was not among them. "Mere order" was.
All this is, in my view, perfectly consistent with the argument from fine-tuning of the laws of nature (which also has the advantage to be far stronger than any ID argument). It concerns the design of nature, whereas the ID argument concerns design within nature -- indeed prone to the ill fate of the "God-of-the-Gaps".
The fine-tuning argument for the design of nature is another way of ascribing First Cause to God, it describes "design" in the sense of "plans or intentions", and it concerns the "order" of things.
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Post by zameel on Feb 10, 2010 21:06:58 GMT
The article states: If almost all of these sequences are not conserved by evolution, and we haven't found a function for any of them yet, it's hard to see how the "none of it's junk" view can be maintainedIn other words: "because the non-coding regions show little similarity to chimp sequences and because I don't know the precise function of the RNA transcripts, they must do absolutely nothing". It is precisely this Darwinian mentality that Sternberg said inhibited research in this topic. For under a Darwinian premise, human beings just can't be that different from chimps. And, as would (or should) be expected, the claim is untrue: we have found functions for many of them. See, e.g., these articles: Non-coding-RNA regulators of RNA polymerase II transcription, 2006 www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v7/n8/abs/nrm1946.html and Small dsRNAs induce transcriptional activation in human cells, 2006 www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17337.abstract . These non-coding RNA (i.e. those that are not translated into protein) have important regulatory functions. In fact Shapiro and Sternberg write in their research employing, according to them, a non-Darwinian "information science model" and "functionalist perspective": "one day, we will think of what used to be called 'junk DNA' as a critical component of truly 'expert' cellular control regimes" ("How Repeated Retroelements format genome function," Cytogenetic and Genome Research 110:108–116 [2005] - www.zi.ku.dk/evolbiology/courses/me05_projekter/transposable elements/von sternberg copy.pdf )
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Post by zameel on Feb 10, 2010 21:13:04 GMT
Himself wrote: 1. The notion of demoting God from First Cause to just another efficient caused operating materially within the universe -- because, evidently, when he created the world it wasn't really very good and needs tweaking and intervention -- seems theologically unsound.As I've said repeatedly, quoting Behe, ID does not necessitate tweaking: it can happen by the one single act of creation. But the question is exactly what was "specified" in that act of creation? According to the fine-tuning view, the laws were specified. But as IDers have shown, the laws themselves are not adequate as explanations for the origin and diversification of life. It is possible that besides the "laws", many details and events, which we would think to be incredible accidents that the laws themselves cannot explain, were "specified" from the start e.g. the intelligence selecting the universe from the many universes that has those particular accidents in its history. The question of laws being sufficient or not as an explanation for life is a different one to the question of direct interventionism if the answer to that question is no. Why is it that only physical and chemical laws can be specified from the start? Why can't actual events and details be specified, assuming the intelligence can "see" its entire history?
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