If ID Theorists Are Right, How Should We Study Nature?

Evolution News and Views ^ | January 23, 2014 | Denyse O'Leary

[Heartlander]

If ID Theorists Are Right, How Should We Study Nature?

One can at least point a direction by now. I began this series by asking, what has materialism (naturalism) done for science? It made a virtue of preferring theory to evidence, if the theory supports naturalism and the evidence doesn't. Well-supported evidence that undermines naturalism (the Big Bang and fine tuning of the universe, for example) attracted increasingly speculative attempts at disconfirmation. Discouraging results from the search for life on Mars cause us to put our faith in life on exoplanets -- lest Earth be seen as unusual (the Copernican Principle).

All this might be just the beginning of a great adventure. World-changing discoveries, after all, have originated in the oddest circumstances. Who would have expected the Americas to be discovered by people who mainly wanted peppercorns, cinnamon, sugar, and such? But disturbingly, unlike the early modern adventurers who encountered advanced civilizations, we merely imagine them. We tell ourselves they must exist; in the absence of evidence, we make faith in them a virtue. So while Bigfoot was never science, the space alien must always be so, even if he is forever a discipline without a subject.

Then, having acquired the habit, we began to conjure like sorcerer's apprentices, and with a like result: We conjured countless universes where everything and its opposite turned out to be true except, of course, philosophy and religion. Bizarre is the new normal and science no longer necessarily means reality-based thinking.

But the evidence is still there, all along the road to reality. It is still saying what the new cosmologies do not want to hear. And the cost of ignoring it is the decline of real-world programs like NASA in favor of endlessly creative speculation. It turns out that, far from being the anchor of science, materialism has become its millstone.

But now, what if the ID theorists are right, that information rather than matter is the basic stuff of the universe? It is then reasonable to think that meaning underlies the universe. Meaning cannot then be explained away. It is the irreducible core. That is why reductive efforts to explain away evidence that supports meaning (Big Bang, fine-tuning, physical laws) have led to contradictory, unresearchable, and unintelligible outcomes.

The irreducible core of meaning is controversial principally because it provides support for theism. But the alternative has provided support for unintelligibility. Finally, one must choose. If we choose what intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski calls "information realism," the way we think about cosmology changes.

First, we live with what the evidence suggests. Not simply because it suits our beliefs but because research in a meaningful universe should gradually reveal a comprehensible reality, as scientists have traditionally assumed. If information, not matter, is the substrate of the universe, key stumbling blocks of current materialist science such as origin of life, of human beings, and of human consciousness can be approached in a different way. An information approach does not attempt to reduce these phenomena to a level of complexity below which they don't actually exist.

Materialist origin of life research, for example, has been an unmitigated failure principally because it seeks a high and replicable level of order that just somehow randomly happened at one point. The search for the origin of the human race has been similarly vitiated by the search for a not-quite-human subject, the small, shuffling fellow behind the man carrying the spear. In this case, it would have been well if researchers had simply never found their subject. Unfortunately, they have attempted at times to cast various human groups in the shuffler's role. Then gotten mired in controversy, and largely got the story wrong and missed its point.

One would have thought that materialists would know better than to even try addressing human consciousness. But materialism is a totalistic creed or else it is nothing. Current theories range from physicist Max Tegmark's claim that human consciousness is a material substance through to philosopher Daniel Dennett's notion that it is best treated somewhat like "figments of imagination" (don't ask whose) through philosopher Alex Rosenberg's idea that consciousness is a problem that will have to be dissolved by neuroscience. All these theories share two characteristics: They reduce consciousness to something that it isn't. And they get nowhere with understanding what it is. The only achievement that materialist thought can claim in the area of consciousness studies is to make them sound as fundamentally unserious as many current cosmologies. And that is no mean feat.

Suppose we look at the origin of life from an information perspective. Life forms show a much higher level of information, however that state of affairs came about, than non-living matter does. From our perspective, we break no rule if we assume, for the sake of investigation, that the reason we cannot find evidence for an accidental origin of life is that life did not originate in that way. For us, nothing depends one way or the other on demonstrating that life was an accident. We do not earn the right to study life's origin by declaring that "science" means assuming that such a proposition is true and proceeding from there irrespective of consequences. So, with this in mind, what are we to make of the current state of origin-of-life research?

Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips .

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for all of your insights, dearest sister in Christ!

It occurs to me that Ayn Rand, notorious atheist that she was, was probably also an empiricist and thus hung onto Aristotle's wisdom while distrusting Plato's and smearing him falsely with labels of the political demons she opposed.

[Alamo-Girl]

Praise God for this illuminating insight for you! And thank God for both of you!

On the rest of it, please remember that God's timing is perfect.

[Alamo-Girl]

So very true and so very true!

[betty boop]

"There is why I 'do science' — and how I go about it: I search through the evidence He embedded for us in His Created Universe, to discover the wonders of it — and to reveal and understand His designed-in principles and the awesome grandeur of The One Who did it all..."

Oh such a beautiful credo, dear brother in Christ!

Plus Romans 1:20 would be the perfect frontispiece for your "presentation a-building!" (I'm so looking forward to seeing it, but am being patient, for I know you've got archeological/geological irons in the fire right now....)

May our Lord ever bless you and all your dear ones!

Thank you so much for writing!

[betty boop]

It occurs to me that Ayn Rand, notorious atheist that she was, was probably also an empiricist and thus hung onto Aristotle's wisdom while distrusting Plato's and smearing him falsely with labels of the political demons she opposed.

Indeed. I don't know what other conclusion to draw.

[hosepipe]

There is one difference. The effects of those things can be quantified.
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The "Flat Earth" was also quantified..
as well as those following Phrenology..... quantified things..

not to speak of those that quantify Babies to be Fetus's..
a sever reduction in quality and quantity..

Is the quality and quantity of things measured "spiritually".. -OR- "Carnally".... or even "Materialistically"..

A Worm looks at things one way.. a Butterfly another way..
The Chrysalis of life... makes quantity an open question..
Is it possible to be a Worm and a Scientist as well?..

[betty boop]

As a student of the Bible, I can say with personal certainty that Jesus is making those who believe on Him (that is faithe in Him as their Soter) joint heirs in this greater dimensionality, for when we see Him, we shall be like Him. To see Him in His fullness requires that we have the greater dimensionality very nearly to His limits, but not quite, for He is The Great I Am.

Thank you, dear brother in Christ, for your beautiful meditation!

That you thought it through in terms of "relative dimensionality" is particularly intriguing to me.

You point out that the best man can achieve is to come "very nearly to His limits, but not quite." This coheres very well with my own understanding of man as imago Dei, the creature made in the image or "reflection" of God. God is Source: we are reflections. Ineluctably, there is a categorical difference here of cosmic proportion.

And that categorical difference suggests that man can never be god himself — there is an insurmountable chasm between the divine and its human image.

I do believe that Jesus Christ incarnated as a man and suffered most grievously to die for us on the Holy Cross, so to pay the blood price for the sins of men, imputed to them since Adam's Fall, that they may be redeemed. And on the third day, He rose again from the dead, and was resurrected unto His Father in heaven. Thus our Lord Jesus Christ shows us, in the entire Crucifixion drama, the future of every living soul who loves Him in faith, hope, and love of neighbor.

God alone knows how many dimensions there are. But it seems to me for the above reasons that man vis-a-vis God will always come up at least one dimension short. For the image is not the Source.

Your wrote:

"...when we see Him, we shall be like Him."

Yes!!! But the operative word here is "like Him"; which does not mean "same as He."

I just mention this to dissuade people who might think there's any kind of beneficent pay-off in actual reality for exercises in "self-divinization." Examples: Hegel's Phaenomonologie; Nietzsche's Ubermensch; Obama's presidency....

If you were to ask me, these all signify Second Realities. All sound and fury, signifying nothing.... Going nowhere, and causing as much misery as possible along the way to Nowhere. Thomas More coined a term for this "Nowhere": he called it Utopia.

I'd better put a sock in it for now, dear brother!

Thank you so very much for writing, dear MHGinTN!

[betty boop]

No different then, than gravity, or magnetism, or electrons, or a whole host of other things that scientists accept as fact based not on direct observation but the effects these things have on other things.

Great observation, dear sister in Christ! Thank you!

[Alamo-Girl]

Indeed and Amen!

[Alamo-Girl]

Truly there are many things which can be quantified, e.g. the flatearth of 2 spatial dimensions plus 1 dimension of time. That does not make it real.

Another example is coordinate transformations. That coordinates may transform between systems does not mean that all such systems are real.

[Alamo-Girl]

God alone knows how many dimensions there are. But it seems to me for the above reasons that man vis-a-vis God will always come up at least one dimension short. For the image is not the Source.

So very true, dearest sister in Christ, thank you for sharing your insights!

[metmom]

There is one difference. The effects of those things can be quantified.

Quantify love.

Quantify will.

Quantify beauty.

Quantify a changed heart and life, like Chuck Colson's.

Quantify a miracle.

Jesus does that stuff and the effects of it can be observed and quantified.

This was quantified....

Aaron Shust shares Michael's miracle story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVRy-t3S0ts

[Alamo-Girl]

Indeed, qualia can only be experienced, not conveyed.

[metmom]

Yet.

And it is no less real in spite of the fact that there is no substance to them.

There is more to reality than the physical, material world in which we find ourselves.

One thing that I think many of the atheist/evo/scientist types forget is that we know and understand today because of the increase of knowledge and technology, would be considered the supernatural of years gone by. Being supernatural doesn’t mean that there’s no explanation for it, nor even a good one. It simply means that we don’t know yet.

To God, there is no supernatural. But he is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, so He has full knowledge.

So those materialists who write off stuff as superstition are no better than those the denigrate because THEY are the ones impeding the advance of knowledge. By labeling something as *supernatural* and then claiming that science does not deal with the *supernatural* they are excluding it from study in which we might actually learn something.

Not everything that appears random necessarily is. It only appears that way to those who have not figured it out yet. But to exclude something from study because we don’t understand it yet is the height of folly. They then end up doing the very thing they condemn.

They’re cutting off their nose to spite their face.

[betty boop]

The Great Chain of Being corresponds to an interconnected hierarchy of different unseen dimensions or astral-planes within the impersonal mind of the World Soul....

Jeepers dear sister in Christ, RE: this "great chain of being" business, I hope you didn't draw the conclusion from my earlier post regarding the Great Hierarchy of Being that the latter is a synonym for the Hermetic "great chain...."

The supposed "great chain of being" has been thoroughly co-opted by Darwinism. It is godless.

Not so the Great Hierarchy — which is the divine creation of the triune Creator God.

JMHO FWIW

Thank you so very much for your highly informative essay/post!

[CodeToad]

God made the world and it is our job to figure it out. This idea by some people that think our only job is to believe in God and he will fill our bellies and prevent us from being sick is naïve and arrogant. He never said h would fill our bellies; he said he would provide the means for us to do it ourselves. This is a great world we live in and it has everything we need.

[Alamo-Girl]

Exactly, dear sister in Christ, thank you for sharing your insights!

[cookcounty]

Study science just like anyone else, but with an open mind. That is to say, maintaining the possibility that some things may be beyond the explanatory capacities of science.

[hosepipe]

There is more to reality than the physical, material world in which we find ourselves.

---

Well said... i.e. art.. music.. prose.. dance.. fashion..

* A look at an instrument cannot possible measure the quality or even type of music that can come out of it....

* A painting speaks un-uttered words heard by eyes..

* A lyric sounded in different cadences can be ugly or beautiful..

* A body language gesture can be clumsy or svelte..

* A Love loved can be hidden or obvious or both..

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*** Many things get by the UN-observant.. and crass..
or are Non- existent to the willfully blind... or unimportant to the politically naive...

[metmom]

A rainbow or sunset over the Gulf can be explained *scientifically*, but the beauty can only be appreciated by the human observer.

Science cannot quantify beauty and yet it is real and people recognize it when they see it.

Willfully blind says it all.