Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.
They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.
After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."
That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Which is fine, so long as people realize that such an assumption is not proof when things wander into the unknown. It's one thing to always look for a natural explanation for everything and quite another to assume that there is always a natural explanation for everything.
Even when scientist were all searching for evidence of God, they were looking for regularities and consistencies, not miraculous interventions.
Because they were trying to understand how God's universe worked, which is where I think religion needs to get back to, rather than literalism.
It is only when the regularities and consistencies began to impinge on Biblical literalism that religion started crying foul. Real trouble started when geology began to resemble a clockwork, and the ticking traced back more than a few thousand years. The last straw came when life itself was compared to the clockwork.
Ultimately, I think the problem lies in whether science leaves room for God or claims that it proves a godless universe. The former can coexist with religion while the latter cannot.
Of course, true ID advoctes will not be worried about Biblical literalism. they are satisfied by the clockwork metaphor. What they find offensive is the assertion that varition is stochastic and that populations are shaped by the rather brutal process of natural selection. The notion that nature itself has free will is just too much.
I think you are missing the more important argument and that's a bit of a straw man, mixed with some psychobabble. A lot of the ID advocates seem to simply believe that it's improbable that random mutations and natural selection could produce some of the patterns they see in the world around them and in the biological features of organisms.
In many ways, I think this is like coming upon a pile of 1,000 nickles that are all heads up. A person that starts out with the assumption that those nickles fell into that pile naturally (perhaps there is a larger open bag of nickles laying on its side on a shelf above the pile in such a way that it looks like the nickles poured out) is going to think that the all-heads pattern just happened to be that 1 in whatever chance that they'd all randomly fall heads up. If another person questions how they could possibly believe they all fell that way naturally would rely on the fact that it's possible that they did, that they don't believe any other agent was responsible, and therefore it just must have happened by lucky chance.
Another person, however, might want to look around the room for evidence that a person was responsible for the pile of head's up nickels, especially if they already believe that someone else is lurking about that might have done it. They might not know why another person would make a pile of nickles that are all heads up, why they would put the open bag over the pile to make it look natural, or even be able to produce the person who did it but the fact that they believe another person is lurking about that might have done it is enough to break their ability to casually assume that this must have been a 1 in whatever event because they think there is another credible explanation - a person was responsible.
Which one is correct? Either one could be, and that's why I think ID deserves a seat at the table. Maybe it was a 1 in whatever lucky random pile of nickles or maybe an unseen agent built the pile so that every nickle would be heads up and that there were exactly 1,000 nickles in the pile. Either explanation is plausible and which one seems more plausible will, unsurprisingly, depend in part on whether the person thinks that a natural process was the only possible cause or not. But it doesn't mean that either is necessarily correct.
So what it boils down to is that ID asserts strict determinism. Everything was wound up at the beginning, all the rules in place, everything that would happen in time was anticipated and known by the designer.
That's one possiblity that could make ID indestinguishable from natural evolution. Another possibility is that a divine agent makes the periodic tweak to things or even more significant changes.
Frankly, I don't see how anyone can understand physics or how brains work and believe in "free will" as it's commonly thought of, anyway, but maybe that's just me. After all, our brain is simply a chemical machine and we can't consciously control how it works. How it works controls what we think. Of course our will will be perceived the same way whether it is free or determined so it really doesn't matter either way.
To detect design we need some template to test design against: some criteria of a 'designed object'. This has to be objective - it has to include all the possible ways something could be designed, since we know nothing about the designer. But of course, the set that incluiudes every possible designer has the ability to create every possible design, since we can simply define designer x as the designer that would create design y. We therefore need some criteria to narrow the set of designers. Thus, the task of detecting design objectively is impossible.
People can waste their time any way they like. However, if they come up with some sort of shoddy fake, as Dembski has, and try to sell it to the rest of us as an objective way of detecting design, they can expect to be scathingly rebutted, as Dembski has been.
I don't think that's true. Looking at the fire pit, for example, it is just as useful to know what a natural fire leaves behind as it is to know what a man made fire leaves behind. If you only knew what a natural fire looked like, it would be possible to determine that a fire didn't look natural.
So tell me what a natural fire lools like.
As a semi-made up example, suppose natural fires are started by lightning and lightning very rarely strikes twice in the same place
That's an immediately bogus proposition. The probability of a second lightning strike at a given location is higher, not lower, than the probability of a first, because places that get struck by lightning generally have characteristics that make them more likely to be struck by lightning. But anyway...
If I come upon the remains of a fire that contains many layers of strata suggesting there were many different fires in the same place, I could simply assume that this spot was a random fluke of probability or I might start looking for another reason why there were repeated fires in the same spot and look to make sure that I'm interpreting my evidence correctly.
It's a space alien landing zone. They have a secret beacon under the earth, and when they land there, they char the earth.
You attribute it to humans, because you know humans make fires. You're not starting with a tabula rasa. You don't go looking for all the possible coincidental characteristics of the earth.
Let me give you a counterexample. About 10,000 years ago, most of the large land mammals in North America became extinct. Was this a mere coincidence that this coincided with the arrival of humans, or was it cause-and-effect? Tell me, knowing only those two facts, how you could tell.
A specified deity is irrelevant to ID. That the deity is intelligent and played a role in designing life to work in some particular way is all that really matters. May religious people have a very real experience of God, and of course they think the God that they experience is the real one. You can argue that all those experiences are simply psychological effects that aren't really deities. That may be true. But it's not all that difficult to use the same arguments that can be used to question a religious experience down the slippery slope toward "cognito ergo sum" being all that can be known for certain.
I take it you have never really looked at the Arteriodactyl to Cetacean sequence, or the Hominid sequence.
"Evolution is a theory and until such time as fossilized proof can be shown to the world, it will remain only a theory.
I'm so glad you agree with that. A theory is the highest level possible in science. By the way, a 'Law' is used in a different context.
The problem with your coin analogy is that any series of coin tosses is equally likely. The case of all heads is no more unlikely than any other string of results.
In what ways do you think evolution is not proven beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt?
I've already looked there. All I can say is ...Ewwww.
If Dembski's filter really works and said that biological objects are designed but most of the rest of the universe isn't then that looks like proof that the God of the Bible doesn't exist. Hmmm, not where Dembski is trying to lead us, I suspect.
Have you been talking with my wife?
Is there a consensus on how much of an effect that human activity is having on global climate change? As I noted in my last post, it's almost impossible to get any reliable information on this topic as it is so politicized. I really appreciate being able to talk to a reasonable person about this.
Does current research show the effects of human activity to be significant? I have seen arguments on both sides but it is impossible to tell who is credible.
You are correct that all heads is no more unlikely than any other string of results. It's also true that the arrangement of letters in the works of Shakespeare are just as likely as any other combination of the same number of letters and it's it's possible that an infinite number of monkeys given an infinite amount of time could write the works of Shakespeare by randomly banging on typewriters. But the first thing that crosses your mind if you find a typed sonnet in the street is probably not, "I wonder what natural or random process produced this sonnet."
If you came upon a pile of exactly 1,000 nickels and all were heads up, underneath a large open bag of nickels tilted over on the shelf above the pile, would you assume that exactly 1,000 nickels fell out of that bag at random and all happened to fall heads up or would you assume that some person set up the pile by counting out exactly 1,000 nickels and placing them all face up in a pile with the tilted bag purposely placed there to mess with your mind?
That's the difference between possibility and probability. Yes, it's possible for exactly 1,000 nickels to fall out of a large bag of nickels into a pile and for every nickle in that pile to fall face up. But it's also very improbable. When faced with something that's possible but improbable, you can attribute it to chance or design, and which one you err toward will be based on secondary evidence and other assumptions. For example, if you came upon that scene in a locked bank vault, knew that the bag of nickels was there the night before and the pile was there the first thing in the morning, and had video camera evidence that nobody entered the vault, it would make sense to assume it was a random event. If, however, the bag and pile are found in a room in a house inhabited by practical jokers, you'd probably assume a person set it up. And in between, there is a lot of uncertainty.
ID people look at the probability of random mutations and natural selection producing a certain outcome to be unlikely enough to warrant looking for another cause. If you already assume that no other agent could possibly be in play, then it's easy to accept that any possibility as proof that it did happen, just as finding a pile of coins in a locked vault with no other explanation would make a random explanation seem quite plausible. If, however, you don't presume that the universe is godless or that random mutation and natural selection are the only means that exist to explain a certain outcome, then it's not unreasonable to explore other explanations, much as a person who found 1,000 face up nickels might look for a human explanation. It's possible that it happened randomly. But without additional evidence, does mere possibility warrant any certainty that it did happen or does the implausibility of the result warrant some investigation for some other cause?
I don;t know Michael Denton. 20 years ago when I was designing processors and weapon systems we made it a goal to improve the design by adding features of self-diagnostics, self-healing, redundancy, etc etc and of course adaptation to the environment.
In our expert systems we added functions for learning from the environment in order to adapt the pattern recognition algoruthms for optimum performance etc etc....
Adaptivity and learning are sophisticated design features, but life systems dwarf in "sophistication" anything we have ever done with machines.
Of course, the soul is neither measurable nor observable by an external observer.
I take exception to the atheists who use science to refute spirituality, or the Bible.
But this is were ID parts company with reality. Selection is the very things that shapes the outcome. You can't formulate any mathematical rule that distinguishes a produc of selection from a product of some other cause. the biggest problem for ID is that we can see selection at work in real time. ID does not bring any ongoing process to the table.
Why? Because you do not understand it? by "knowing life scientifically" I am referring to a reasonably comprehensive model of life forces in scientifically useful terms(i.e. mathematically describable system of forces, interfaces and processes, etc etc).
"Science will never know everything. "
Really? Do patronize me. It works at a level where it can make progress. It does not need to know the first three billion years of history to study how populations change, any more than astronomers need to know the positions of the planets three billion years ago in order to say where they were ten thousand years ago or tomorrow."
it is not unreasonable to assume that the forces that created life still exist today, not just 3 billion years ago. if we do not understand the force that created life, and most likely still exists today, then we really know very little about life other than the humdrum mechanics of everyday chemical reactions and molecular constituency.
Focus on the "force" that compels life to come into existence and stay in existence. What is it?
Life is not like a fire, a mere chemical reaction burning out of control and consuming. It evolves. it reproduces. It creates! Fire and every other chemical reaction that are not driven by life forces destroy and decompose. They do not create!
Think about it. Life creates! It constructs! It grows! It replicates itself from raw elements! It stores energy, not just consumes. There must be a creative force behind it, almost by definition!
I have to get back to the evacuation. We have a Mag 5 hurricane coming down the gullet. We are in the way.
Mandatory evacuation now. Texans will show the New Orleans Democrats how to handle an emergency.
Off to Dallas.
BAck next week I hope. It could be real bad.
I think you vastly underestimate the current state of knowledge. A real time model of a bacterial cell is a work in in progress. What will you have to say when it is up and running?
I don't see how science can refute spirituality any more than spirituality can refute science.
If you have faith that God is the author of all natural laws, whether or not evolution was a "natural" or a "guided" process is inconsequential - either way we're here because of God's will. Science, due to its inherent limitations, is only capable of revealing "natural" laws, because the consequences of "guided" (i.e. supernatural) laws/processes yield no empirically predictable consequences.
I'm aware that science has its limitations. As you pointed out earlier, there's a lot of puzzles remaining to be solved about the Genesis of the universe (i.e. where's the "dark matter/energy" that makes up 96% of the universe?) or "how did a bacterial flagellum evolve?". The best answer science can give to these questions is "We don't know yet". Whether or not you want to infer the presence of an intelligent designer in these gaps is a matter of faith, not science.
Good luck - some things are more important than debating on FR. Hope everything turns out for the best.
900. Truly prime.
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