Tension Over Intelligent Design

International Herald Tribune ^ | 10/31/2005 | Joseph Rosenbloom

[Diamond]

BOSTON Michael Behe is a respected professor of biochemistry noted for his research into the structure of nucleic acid. He is also the author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," a book, published in 1996, that put him squarely on the map in favor of an anti-evolution concept known as intelligent design, causing deep tensions between Behe and his fellow faculty members at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Two months ago Lehigh's Department of Biological Sciences, where the 53-year-old Behe has taught for 20 years, publicly repudiated his views in a notice on its Web site, saying that they had "no basis in science."

Read more at International Herald Tribune

[js1138]

... particularly when he cites the results of his search for papers on various evolutionary mehanisms.

In lieu of actual research. As he admitted under oath in court.

[USConstitutionBuff]

Which Deist? Why those Founding Fathers which were Deists of course. A Deist does not believe in any creed or Revelation, therefore the Bible is not looked upon as anything more than a source of morality, and a linchpin of our shared culture.

Are you saying that Ben Franklin was not too smart? He was a far better man than you or I and I would say a damn site smarter as well.

At least I got you admitting that there were freethinking Christians who were not Biblical literalists (such as Jefferson) and Deists (such as Franklin and Paine) among the Founding Fathers. Even if you wish to lump them into your big tent "Creationism" that is expanded so much that to you it simply means "not an Atheist"; and therefore looses almost all of its meaning.

[hosepipe]

[ At least I got you admitting that there were freethinking Christians who were not Biblical literalists (such as Jefferson) and Deists (such as Franklin and Paine) among the Founding Fathers. Even if you wish to lump them into your big tent "Creationism" that is expanded so much that to you it simply means "not an Atheist"; and therefore looses almost all of its meaning. ]

You've been posting to or reading posts by free thinking christians all over this thread.. Christ makes you free or free'er than you were pre-christ.. Some are too free and others not free enough but all are free'er than they could be..

Not every Christian/believer is smart i.e. Deists.. etc. but you don't have to be smart to be a Christian.. Evidence; "be you as a little child".. its all about faith not you're particular dogma.. Actually being smart can inhibit you from "seeing" the deep things, especially the deepest things of God in the bible.. Rational thinking adults are not qualified to be Christians/believers.. i.e. "be ye as a little child."..

Your demeanor appears to be that of a rational thinking adult.. I know; I'm too smart too.. When I was twenty I thought I was a veritable genius.. but I've grown progressively dumber since then.. THANK GOD...

[USConstitutionBuff]

free·think·er ( P ) Pronunciation Key (frthngkr)
n.
One who has rejected authority and dogma, especially in religious thinking, in favor of rational inquiry and speculation

This is T. Jefferson, to a T. He questioned everything and accepted nothing on faith; but he was a Christian in that he was "sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other." However he rejected authority and dogma and any account of the miraculous.

[betty boop]

Good grief, js1138, the Webster's Online recapitulation from Wikipedia takes a real slam at the "teleological argument," or "argument from design." But Darwinist evolution is itself premised on a teleological argument: survival of the fittest. How can Darwinism gore the ox of teleology without goring its own ox?

Teleology, as you know, deals with "ends," purposes, and goals. Evidently nature is purposive, evolution is purposive. How do we get from accident to purpose?

It seems evident (to me anyway) that biology cannot be reduced simply to physics ("matter in its motions" as described by the physicochemical laws, given initial and boundary conditions), leading to "random" mutations whose fitness value will be "rewarded" or punished by the environment -- since the genetic, algorithmic, and symbolic information content of living organisms is much greater than the information content of the physical laws.

Chaitin (1985) pointed out that the laws of physics have very low information content, since their algorithmic complexity can be characterized by a computer program fewer than a thousand characters in length. In 2004, in a private communication to a colleague, Chaitin wrote: “My paper on physics was never published, only as an IBM report. In it I took: Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s laws, the Schrödinger equation, and Einstein’s field equations for curved spacetime near a black hole, and solved them numerically, giving ‘motion-picture’ solutions. The programs, which were written in an obsolete computer programming language APL2 at roughly the level of Mathematica, were all about half a page long, which is amazingly simple.”

How does the complexity of living organisms increase if its main driver is the physicochemical laws, estimated to have an algorithmic complexity of only 10³ bits? Certainly, the observed flow of environmental information is enormous, and tellingly, it is morphological information. But what is the source of the enormous environmental information flow?

Did the Big Bang's initial conditions have an algorithmic complexity greater than the algorithmic complexity of physical laws themselves? If not, then how did environmental and biological information increase in the evolution of the Universe?

Now Ashby’s Law (Ashby, 1962) states that “The variety of outputs of any deterministic physical system cannot be greater than the variety of inputs; the information of output cannot exceed the information already present in the input.” In accordance, Kahre’s “Law of Diminishing Information” reads: Compared to direct reception, an intermediary can only decrease the amount of information (Kahre, 2002, 14). Moreover, it is a widely held view nowadays that the chain of physical causes forms a closed circle. The hypothesis of the causal closure of the physical (Cameron, 2000, 244) maintains (roughly) “that for any event E that has a cause we can cite a physical cause, P, for its happening, and that citing P explains why E happened”. Therefore, not only Ashby’s and Kahre’s laws but the causal closure thesis is in conflict with the complexity measures found in physics and in biology. Now if the algorithmic complexity of one human brain is already around I₁~10¹⁵-10¹⁷ bits, the information paradox consists in the fact that the information content of physics is I(physics)~10³ bits while that of the whole living kingdom is ... I(biology)~10¹⁵-10¹⁷ bits. Taking into account also that physics is hopelessly far from being able to cope with the task to govern even one human person’s biological activity ~2*10²¹ bits per second, it becomes clear that at present, modern cosmological models’ algorithmic complexity is much less than the above obtained complexity measures characterizing life.
-- A. Grandpierre, "Complexity Measures and Life’s Algorithmic Complexity," 2005.

Just tell me, js1138, how did nature become, not only purposive, but informed such that it can be purposive? What is the information source, if (as Ashby, Kahre, and Cameron seem to suggest) it cannot be explained on the basis of an evolution strictly according to the physicochemical laws?

To me, this is the great question....

[hosepipe]

[ This is T. Jefferson, to a T. He questioned everything and accepted nothing on faith; but he was a Christian in that he was "sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other." However he rejected authority and dogma and any account of the miraculous. ]

Man, you're smart.. I used to be able to read minds too..
Pity, I'm a mere shell of what I used to be.. again praise Jesus.. d;-)~',',..

[js1138]

This is typical of your posts -- quote an authority without question or without doing any thinking of your own.

Has it ever occurred to you that the "laws of physics" cannot be reduced to X number of bits for the simple reason that there is no complete and final set of such laws.

The laws of physics are a human construct. They work well for engineering purposes, but they do not definitively describe nature.

But more importantly, any such set of laws, even if complete, do not limit what is possible, any more than a dictionary limits what can be written.

[frgoff]

Read the book. It's not cursed, you know.

[frgoff]

Um, looking for relevant papers IS research.

Good grief.

[js1138]

Maybe in History or Literature it is, but not in science. In science there are reviews of literature, but they are not research.

Sometimes raw datasets are reanalyzed, and this is research.

[Diamond]

I was looking for something on Jefferson's materialism but I found this:

The Exaltation of a Reasonable Deity:
Thomas Jefferson’s Critique of Christianity

...Jefferson molded and absorbed these various ideologies (among others) and elevated God to the stature of Rational Creator. As many enlightened reformers of his age rejected God and Christianity alike, Jefferson found a way to justify belief. By simplifying religion and remaining aloof to exclusivistic tendencies, Jefferson produced a rational theology that, although was at times considered outlandish, was not unique or radical. It may not have exactly fit the bill of orthodox traditionalism, but Jefferson stood amongst powerful company in his perception of a reasonable Deity. For instance, several of the Founding Fathers held an accepted belief in general principles of religion. As Ben Franklin noted in a letter to Ezra Stiles in 1790:

Here is my creed. I believe in One God, the Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we can render Him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion.¹²

[snip]
Jefferson wrote to John Adams concerning his natural perspective of God:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a new view of the Universe, in its [sic] parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its [sic] composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with it’s distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles … it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion … We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in it’s course and order.

The irony of Jefferson being used to imprecate design is palpable.

Cordially,

[USConstitutionBuff]

Nor was that my purpose, only to expose as a naked lie the very idea that someone who REWROTE the Bible was a Biblical literalist in regards to Genesis; i.e. a Creationist.

Franklin was a Deist, he believed that the universe was created; as do I. Neither of us could accurately be called a Creationist.

That is all.

[USConstitutionBuff]

I have read it, and I continue to read it whenever someone cites something I do not accurately remember. You can stop beating up a straw-man. I am not anti-Christian, I am anti-Historic Revisionism.

[USConstitutionBuff]

I believe in everything Jefferson said in the following, also without appeal to Revelation (which neither I nor Jefferson believed in)...

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a new view of the Universe, in its [sic] parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its [sic] composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with it’s distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles … it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion … We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in it’s course and order.


But you see as a Scientist, I do NOT mistake my 'FEELINGS' (said in a Dr. Savage'ian sneer)for empirical data. I share with Franklin and Jefferson the belief that the universe was created; but I don't think that this philosophical point can be sufficiently propped up with shoddy mathematics in order to somehow make it a science.

[RogueIsland]

Evidently nature is purposive, evolution is purposive

There is no evidence to that effect, no.

[betty boop]

This is typical of your posts -- quote an authority without question or without doing any thinking of your own.

Oh goodie....let's start with an ad hominum whack at me for openers. And you think I haven't done any of my own thinking about this because????

Your reply reminds me of something Richard Lewontin once wrote:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute….

Lewontin has the mindset of a Marxist -- which is hardly surprising, because he is a Marxist. And like Marx, he is a materialist; and like Marx, apparently he "forbids" all questioning of his materialist "system." To permit questioning risks disturbing the "internal logic" of his system, which refuses any engagement with external reality.

I accept entirely the view that we may not yet know all the physical laws. But I strongly disagree with you that the physical laws are "human constructs." I think they are human discoveries. There is no way to reconcile this difference of perception between us.

However many physical laws there might ultimately be, so far we know of only 10³ bits-worth of 'em. [cf Chaitin] So, what we do know about cannot explain the complexity measures that already have been quantified for various living systems. Maybe physics will catch up with biology someday? Your argument that the explanation is forthcoming at some unknown and possibly quite remote future time sounds like a cop-out to me.

Another thing I've been thinking over lately is that the physical laws themselves are examples of nonphenomenal -- that is, non-material -- reality. So is information. Even if they were purely human constructs -- which I strongly doubt they are -- this would only be to say that humans help construct the nonphenomenal world, which in turn affects the phenomenal world. As a materialist, I expect you absolutely deny any concept of nonphenomenal reality on principle.

You wrote that the physical laws "work well for engineering purposes, but they do not definitively describe nature." Are you at all interested in "describing nature," js1138? Or is such an inquiry forbidden by some rule I'm not aware of, which rule would also be an example of nonphenomenal reality?

What is matter, by the way?

[betty boop]

The irony of Jefferson being used to imprecate design is palpable.

Simply marvelous, Diamond. Thank you ever so much for tracking down the definitive views of TJ and Ben regarding Creator and creation....

[betty boop]

There is no evidence to that effect, no.

Jeepers, you must be blind, guy! Either that or you're just not looking....

[USConstitutionBuff]

Yes, neither Jefferson or Franklin believed in the literal account of Genesis. That really didn't need any "tracking down" however, it should be common knowledge, but Thanks anyway! ;)

[betty boop]

Yes, neither Jefferson or Franklin believed in the literal account of Genesis.

Jeepers, USCB, would you please lighten up? I grant you the above statement is true. My objection is that it seems you go after all Christians, rather than just some Christians whose peculiar traditions and practices seem disturbing to you for whatever reason. There are also Christians who presume the Holy Bible is not primarily a literal account, but a truthful account. As Francis Schaeffer put it: In the Holy Scriptures, God tells us about Himself and ourselves and the social and natural worlds and our relations with them "truly, but not exhaustively."

I take this to mean God sets great store by human freedom.

Thank you for writing USCB.