Posted on 01/23/2014 9:19:28 AM PST by Heartlander
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 .
So the ruins on Mars got there how?
They are right. They should stop looking for validation from people who don't understand the concept and just proceed with their own research. Even evolution requires an underlying formula, and information feedback loops.
A program that is self-adjusting is evidence of a master programmer. But I wouldn't waste time trying to convince someone who doesn't see it. Let them gather their data points and we'll make sense of them. You don't need their approval to proceed on the basis of what is rather self-evident after all. They are the ones looking at a 3D system in 2D. (Or would it be a 5D system in 4D?)
That assumption of orderliness, elegance and predictability is the foundation of Western scientific advancement.
In the Islamic world, assumptions of these things is considered blasphemy.
Ignoring the possibility that God created it does not preclude from figuring out how it works or got there, or whatever else the physical world can answer.
Frustrated, a researcher throws his hands up and decides God won’t give up that secret.
I don't believe that has happened very frequently, and I don't believe the good ones do that.
For all the previous 2000 years of science, most were devout believers in God. Yet they made fantastic progress.
Whachutalkinbout Willis?
I am disappointed: when I read the title, I thought he was going to propose an actual ID-based research program. I’ve been waiting for someone to hypothesize what a moment of design would look like—where, when, and how the Designer inserted himself into the process—and how we might go about looking for it. Unfortunately, the proposal here is the same old approach of using “design” to fill whatever holes in our knowledge may still exist.
For more ID papers see HERE or HERE
Excerpt from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1844, p. 464:
As this chapter is written in the early twenty-first century, the hypothesis that the universe reflect intelligent design has provoked a bitter debate in the United States. How very different was the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century! Then, virtually everyone believed in intelligent design. Faith in the rational design of the universe underlay the world-view of the Enlightenment, shared by Isaac Newton, John Locke, and the American Founding Fathers. Even the outspoke critics of Christianity embraced not atheism but deism, that is, belief in an impersonal, remote deity who had created the universe and designed it so perfectly that it ran along of its own accord, following natural laws without need for further divine intervention. The common used expression “the book of nature” referred to the universal practice of viewing nature as a revelation of God’s power and wisdom. Christians were fond of saying that they accepted two divine revelations: the Bible and the book of nature. For desists like Thomas Paine, the book of nature alone sufficed, rendering what he called the “fables” of the Bible superfluous. The desire to demonstrate the glory of God, whether deist or – more commonly – Christian, constituted one of the principal motivations for scientific activity in the early republic, along with national pride, the hope for useful applications, and, of course, the joy of science itself.
What ruins?
I have recently thought that evolution as a method of creation might bear some analogy to God’s giving of free will to his intelligent creations, humans and spirits both.
God apparently chose to make beings with free will who would choose to be his friends, instead of robots or dolls that would simply act out His will.
Couldn’t evolution be something similar? God sets up the parameters, initiates the process and then stands back to see what happens.
None of which takes away the possibility of his jumping back into the process to adjust it whenever He sees fit.
You can't really find anything resembling science all that much prior to 1500, and not much before 1600.
Science, if it means anything at all, refers to a method and a way of looking at the world. These were invented in Western Europe probably over the course of the 1600s.
While thinkers in the classical period and in India and China accomplished amazing things, they did it without the benefit of science, as such.
So what’s this about design? We are just bags of molecules in motion, constrained in our thoughts and actions by the laws of chemistry and physics. Free will is an illusion.
300 genes in the simplest of lifeforms, all coded to give the correct sequence of amino acids, all remarkably left-handed, to form proteins that fold just the right way, to perform needed functions. Turned on and off at the right moments. Disassembled and ejected when functions are complete.
Design? This incredible quality of assembled matter that we call life coded itself into existence, randomly generating the needed information. It was inevitable since everything is deterministic from the moment of the big bang. Time - anything can happen given enough time.
If mathematically impossible in “A” universe, it’s entirely possible, even probable, in infinite universes. We happen to be in the one out of essentially infinity where it all came together.
It’s all very scientific. Design to explain all of this? Only for the simpletons and the unscientific.
It is funny to imagine that in one of those 'infinite universes' - Richard Dawkins is a rabid creationist ; )
My Deist Grandfather thought much the same thing. From God’s perspective (from the bang event to our epoch) how many times has the Universe doubled in size? ... IIRC six going on seven times.
It was aliens.
Thanks for the ping!
Who put the miles high monolith on the Martian potato shaped moon, Phobos? Since Mankind is likely to have done so, it would be aliens, right? And after you do a search on that anomaly, you can start doing searches on ‘faces on Mars’ ... there’s more than one, and some sort of gigantic ‘lettering’, also. And yes, the data are straight from NASA photographic images.
That should have been a ‘is NOT likely to have done so’ ...
See #36 above
Would like to explain why you posted that link? Trying to ridicule and failing?
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