Posted on 06/13/2005 7:50:19 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
"And is actually stated as such on their web pages and by some Kansas school board members."
Only when they are possessed by a rare moment of intellectual honesty, (or they think that nobody is paying attention lol).
"Thank you for sharing your views!"
You're welcome! I felt somebody aught to :)
But the Seven Spanish Angels who push the Planets around the Earth do. Of course, these Angels are somewhat intoxicated most of the time, leading to epicyclic wandering.
"But the Seven Spanish Angels who push the Planets around the Earth do. Of course, these Angels are somewhat intoxicated most of the time, leading to epicyclic wandering."
They must have been smoking pot with Willie :)
The debate began with Aristotle and Plato, Godel and Einstein argued it, Penrose and Hawking argued it. You and I will not settle it.
It is however a classic example of the very point I was making earlier about the difference between evidence and the interpretation of the evidence.
In philosophy, the difference in the two worldviews is generally known as nominalism v realism – with the Aristotlean view falling on the nominalist side. The point is whether universals exist. The realist says yes, sound exists, green exists. In Plato lingo, threeness exists, redness exists, chairness exists, pi exists, circles exist, etc.
How any mathematician could possibly do his work without being at least somewhat Platonist is beyond me. After all, every variable in a formula is a universal in its application.
Nevertheless, in the above article, under "autonomy" the difference between Aristotle and Plato is summarized in an excerpt from Max Tegmark’s article and an excerpt from a review of Barrow’s book. Tegmark calls the Aristotle view the “frog” view and the Plato view the “bird” view. The frog sees the movie one frame at a time, the bird sees it all at once. The frog sees a particle moving at constant velocity, the bird sees a strand of spaghetti. The frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two strands of spaghetti in a double helix.
In sum, to a Platonist or realist, when a tree falls in the forest it makes a sound even if noone hears it, geometry exists and the mathematician comes along and discovers it, forms exist (and thus the importance to the autonomy investigation). And in the Tegmark Level IV universe, every existent in 4D space/time is actually a mathematical structure “beyond” space/time. His is the only closed cosmology known to me.
The Aristotle v Plato debate is irreconciliable because the frog and the bird cannot agree on what reality “is” – they see different things.
Thus when the evidence wrt autonomy is in, there will be at least two different, equally respectable but irreconcilable, interpretations.
That doesn't logically follow since gravity is not identical with philosophical naturalism.
Do such views make ID unscientific? If not, what does make ID unscientific in your view?
one reservation I would have would be over the following comment:
If the intelligent design hypothesis made the presupposition that the “intelligent cause” of “certain features” of “living things” was an agent – and could not be a phenomenon as well, such as emergent or fractal properties – then it would indeed be ideological or theological in an unspecified sense - and therefore the intelligent design objections and hypothesis have no place in publicly funded schools, by legal precedent wrt to the establishment clause of the Constitution.
It seems perfectly reasonable that based on "the impossibility of the contrary" (Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen) , such a presupposition would be justified and would have a place in the public school system. Maybe more on this later :o)
Great point, Alamo-Girl. Sometimes I think that people take so much for granted, that they never bother to question the substance of what they take for granted. It never occurs to them that this might be a useful exercise. I gather the whole idea is "if something works, I don't need to understand why it works. That it works is all I need to know."
Thank you for your excellent post/essay, A-G!
You might be interested in also checking out this article in American Enterprise: God is in the Details
The author of that article "gets it". Science and the courts will become amenable to the intelligent design hypothesis once it is realized that "intelligent cause" does not stipulate either agent or phenomenon much less any particular agent or phenomenon. He correctly notes Kauffman (et al) who are traveling down the self-organizing road of autonomy and emergence. Kauffman among others are listed in the base article of this thread to illustrate that the intelligent design objections are shared in the mainstream of science.
In sum, and without prejudice to any theology or philosophy, science and the courts can easily accept phenomenal intelligence as a factor in evolution. Unstipulated agency can also be accepted as an alternative interpretation. But agency alone, even an unstipulated agency, may be broaching theology in a "new agey" sense thus dooming the intelligent design movement.
IOW, the courts have already firmly decided that publicly funded endeavors cannot take any theological position as it would violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
Moreover, front-loading the hypothesis, making any such presupposition would be self-destructive to the intelligent design movement’s objective of removing the methodological naturalism paradigm. IOW, if it insisted on "agency only" then it would be doing exactly the same thing, replacing the presupposition that “Nature did it!” with “Agent did it!”. Neutrality would be lost.
As it is, the intelligent design hypothesis does not substitute for evolution and merely states that “certain features” are best explained by “intelligent cause” rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. IMHO, burdening the hypothesis with any presupposition will kill the whole movement though the results will be the same in the long run, i.e. the mathematicians and physicists will continue to pursue the phenomenon of intelligence as a causation for "certain features" in living things. Should that happen, the theologians will no doubt interpret the evidence as God's hand in the process.
For Lurkers, Cornelis van Til was a theologian/philosopher - his is an interpretation of evidence (particularly Scripture), i.e. presuppositional apologetics.
Bahnsen studied under van Til and is known for Christian reconstructionism.
I gather that the late, great Richard Feynmann, "father" of quantum elecrtodynamics, was also on the "'nuff said" side of the divide. But mathematician/physicist Robert A. Herrmann is not. He writes ("Simplifying the Technical Aspects of the G, D-world, MA-models and U-cosmology," at http://www.serve.com/herrmann/pp4.htm):
"...Richard Feynman ...writes, '... while I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that. I can't explain why Nature behaves in this peculiar way.' ...
"Scientists don't know how Nature works, in this case. Feynman has only modeled Nature by little probability arrows on a piece of paper, stop watches, rules for combining arrows, rules for calculating probabilities, and the so-called paths taken by photons. I respectfully submit that Nature probably doesn't do geometric diagramming with probability arrows, Nature probably doesn't do the mathematics and other such human paper and pencil activities. His geometric approach is, I submit, but a model for how Nature works and nothing more AND as with models like the balloon model [Herrmann uses the balloon model to illustrate the inflationary universe model earlier in this monograph], except for the behavior between entities, many aspects of the Feynman approach need not correspond directly to anything in objective reality. Indeed, certain predicted aspects of the MA-model can replace various aspects of these Feynman diagrams. The science of the invisible microscopic world is the science of models as I have defined them. Scientists don't really know how or why Nature does something in many, many cases. Because of all of these uses of models, it shouldn't be difficult to comprehend the MA-model. But what about the paths of motion for photons? Considering the mathematics used, you can't use a finite collection of freeze frames as a complete refined description for such behavior. Thus, in such cases, there wouldn't exist an actual standard word w such that S applied to w would yield the same refined alterations in photon behavior that produces its path of motion.
"When they exist, words such as w might be described as the images, or building plans for how a Natural-system will evolve since it's the force-like process S that would put them together to form the actual development. After the concepts of the word and the force-like S were discovered, there was also discovered the following quotation attributed to the exceptionally brilliant scientist Hermann Weyl.
"'Is it conceivable that immaterial factors having the nature of images, ideas, "building plans" also intervene in the evolution of the world as a whole?'
"As will be seen in the remainder of this monograph, such immaterial factors are indeed conceivable....
"In what follows, recall the Richard Feynman statement. Often science is interested in patterns that illustrate how Nature behaves and such patterns will not tell us why Nature behaves as illustrated by such patterns. Indeed, there may be no possible standard way to know why Nature behaves in such a way. Also recall the Hermann Weyl description for a possible physical-like object that gives 'images, ideas or building plans' for an evolving Natural-system. The MA-model predicts that for any Natural-system that is described by a developmental paradigm there exists a physical-like ultraword w that can be described in the same general manner as described by Weyl. [Indeed, it contains a "super" amount of information, something like an informational "superball."] Then when another physical-like process *S is applied to w, the entire developmental paradigm is produced in the exact moment-by-moment sequence that corresponds to the exact moment-by-moment sequence of the actual events. Now the physical-like process *S has all of the basic behavioral patterns associated with an ultralogic. As mentioned, we often drop such an intermediate linguistic-like phrase as "developmental paradigm." When this is done, the mathematically generated interpretation becomes "The physical-like process *S when applied to the physical-like object w produces each physical event associated with an evolving Natural-system.' But, there's a great deal more than just this or similar statements."
A very interesting article here, Alamo-Girl! Thank you so much for your excellent post/essay!
I am pretty certain, actually, that we have NOT discovered all the natural laws extant in the universe, at least if you begin with an assumption that the universe is amenable to rational thought. I say this because the two basic theoretical paradigms in physics, general relativity and quantum mechanics, are not logically compatible with each other. I guess this could be the ultimate reality in an irrational universe, but I don't really think the universe is irrational. If it were, why is it that logic and rational thought work so well? How would rational thought even be possible? Therefore, I believe that some more general law that encompasses both GR and QM is yet to be found (maybe string theory? Maybe not?) I tend to agree that there are natural laws which have a logical form and that they are not products of chance, but rather that they were made a part of the universe by God at its inception, which probably occurred much as described by big bang theory. Of course, such speculations are speculations about science, but are not themselves scientific. As a practical matter, I would love to see a course in which high school students are taught some of these ideas, but I wouldn't want this done in an actual science course. I would reserve science courses for ideas that actually can be tested, not ones that are the subject of philosophical speculation.
I don't disagree with anything you write here, Stremba.
If you have the time, you might find this of interest:
http://www.serve.com/herrmann/pp4.htm
The author, mathematician/physicist Robert A. Herrmann, is of the persuasion that the Universe as a whole is ordered similarly to the way the human mind is ordered, and that's why the Universe is (a) intelligible in itself and thus (2) man being intelligent, man can grasp it, can unlock its "secrets."
I think you are exactly right: If the Universe is irrational, then logic and reason would not only not work, but they would be totally inexplicable.
Thank you for your thoughtful, perceptive post stremba!
Truly, the unreasonable effectiveness of math keeps many a physicist and mathematician standing in awe. The mathematical Platonist has an awareness of this symmetry, this elegance, underlying "all that there is". That is the bird view according to Tegmark.
Barrow sees it as mystical or spiritual, Tegmark sees the mathematical structures existing "beyond" space/time, Penrose looks for the missing physics between the quantum and classical to comprehend it, and Herrmann turns to information theory and geometry seeing the language of design.
From my point of view, at the root, it is geometry. The expansion of space/time – the creation of time, of geometry - is what manifests fields and therefore energy/matter. Geometry suggests order, laws, symmetries - the unreasonable effectiveness of math.
Something came out of nothing and order came out of chaos. This is a concept often missed in the first few verses of Scripture. For Lurkers who might be interested:
In the beginning the Mighty One filled the skies and the land because the world existed devoid and void. A chaotic void was over the face of the deep then the creative breath of the Mighty One hovered over the face of the water. The Mighty One said "let order exist" and order came into existence. The Mighty One saw that the order was beautiful. The Mighty One made a separation between the order and the chaos. The Mighty One called the order day and the chaos night. There was an evening and there was a morning, a unified day.
Schroeder: The Age of the Universe
Nachmanides says the text uses the words "Vayehi Erev" - but it doesn't mean "there was evening." He explains that the Hebrew letters Ayin, Resh, Bet - the root of "erev" - is chaos. Mixture, disorder. That's why evening is called "erev", because when the sun goes down, vision becomes blurry. The literal meaning is "there was disorder." The Torah's word for "morning" - "boker" - is the absolute opposite. When the sun rises, the world becomes "bikoret", orderly, able to be discerned. That's why the sun needn't be mentioned until Day Four. Because from erev to boker is a flow from disorder to order, from chaos to cosmos. That's something any scientist will testify never happens in an unguided system. Order never arises from disorder spontaneously. There must be a guide to the system. That's an unequivocal statement.
Harmonics in the Early Universe
The peaks indicate harmonics in the sound waves that filled the early, dense universe. Until some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot that matter and radiation were entangled in a kind of soup in which sound waves (pressure waves) could vibrate. The CMB is a relic of the moment when the universe had cooled enough so that photons could "decouple" from electrons, protons, and neutrons; then atoms formed and light went on its way.
Thus, as the Scriptures say, as the CMB evidences and as Herrmann suggests: language and geometry.
AG, I'm not sure I follow your "needn't be"... I have always accepted that the sun wasn't mentioned until the fourth day, because that was when God (said He) created it...
Of course, the sun's absence until the fourth day precludes measurement of the (earthly reference-frame) days prior to that point as rotations of the earth on its axis - relative to the sun.
Nevertheless, the equivalent of earth days works out perfectly in reconciling the age of the universe.
Schroeder says (and I agree) that creation week must be measured from the inception space/time coordinates (inflationary theory/relativity). After all, God was the observer and author of Scripture.
It works out that 6 days at the inception space/time coordinates are equal to approximately 15 billion years at earth's space/time coordinates.
I agree completely. I am just refining my thoughts for discussions with those who (but not so succinctly) insist that earth's space-time coordinates are all that exist. IOW, that those six "yom" equated to six rotations of earth on its axis WRT the sun. (AKA "Young Earthers")
Showing that the means to measure time in that manner (planetary orbital/rotational mechanics) did not (according to Genesis) even exist until the fourth day -- might get them to condescend to listen to a discussion of the relatavistic reality that you and I, et al, see so clearly.
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Totally irrelevant aside: Do you use something like keystroke macros to generate your ubiquitous "Thank you..." lines?
Getting into the Hebrew root words might help as they point to a parallel between chaos to cosmos and an equivalent day at earth's space/time coordinates. It's like a key built into the language.
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