On Uncommon Descent William Dembski claims that Richard Dawkins has admitted that life could be designed and thus wonders: “Is ID therefore scientific?”. As I will show this is a logically flawed conclusion.
First of all lets point out Intelligent Design does not claim merely that life is designed but that such design can be detected via scientific methods. In this aspect if differs from science which admits that design always remains a logical possibility, however science also accepts that if such design is ‘supernatural’ no scientific method can detect such design.
William Dembski Wrote:I expect that Dover was not the end of litigation involving ID. In the next court case, it will be interesting put depose the people on the other side who appear in EXPELLED as they try to argue that ID is religion given their huge concessions in this film.
It’s ironic that once again Dembski is bragging about how ‘next time… you just wait… next time…’. This promissory note is a typical response from ID creationists whenever reality conflicts with their beliefs. Remember how Dembski was bragging how the next time evolutionists would be under oath, he would certainly be able to expose them using the ‘vise’? In Dembski’s fantasy world of “The Vise Strategy: Squeezing the Truth out of Darwinists”, he explains that next time… we will get the ‘truth out of Darwinists’. When the opportunity arose in the form of the Dover Kitzmiller trial, Dembski was curiously absent and the remaining witnesses for the defense, outlined nicely why ID was religiously motivated and lacked as a science. While the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses were hardly needed to expose this, contributions of Barbara Forrest, which the defense tried to have ‘expelled’ for obvious reasons, as well as the testimony of Ken Miller all but sealed the fate of ID creationism.
So what will it be next time? ID will have erased its history of religious foundations? Unlikely? ID will have shown that it can have a scientific ‘theory’ of ID, a contradiction in terms if I have ever heard one? Unlikely as even staunch ID proponents have come to admit the scientific vacuity of ID. For instance in Berkeley Science review, Philip ‘Father of Intelligent Design’ Johnson expressed his frustrations:
Philip Johnson Wrote:I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to prove…No product is ready for competition in the educational world.
Source: Michelangelo D’Agostino In the matter of Berkeley v. Berkeley
Could ID be therefore scientific? Sure, nothing is beyond the impossible and science will surely consider this possibility, although so far, ID has done nothing to engage science and to show that ID can indeed be a scientific position.
So wake me up when ID creationists provide a scientific explanation of how the bacterial flagellum was ‘designed’.
In fact, to argue that Dawkins admits that life could be designed is hardly news. After all, as a scientist, Dawkins would hardly reject the possibility of a designer, although he does explain why such a possibility is highly unlikely by using ID’s own arguments. Now that’s just too ironic for words.
In his Time Discussion with Collins, Dawkins for instance stated
DAWKINS: To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God–it’s that that seems to me to close off the discussion.
TIME: Could the answer be God?
DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.
COLLINS: That’s God.
DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small–at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that’s the case.
No need for Ben Stein and still while miracles like ID becoming scientifically relevant are never beyond a logical possibility, it seems also evident that ID is not making much progress in actually following such a path. Perhaps Dembski can help us understand how ID will be able to testify differently next time… Well, there will always be a next time I guess.
PS: I will attempt to leave a trackback. Of course history tells me that such an attempt is futile. ID is not ready for science.
A poster on UcD left the following ironic message
Why would Dembski’s Vise strategy be more successful next time, since it failed to produce anything during the Dover Kitzmiller trial? What has changed? Science admitting to the logical possibility of a designer? After all Ken Miller’s testimony placed the following exchange on the record
In other words, an expert witness for the plaintiffs admitted that ID is a logical possibility, and explained how it still fails to be a scientific explanation because it explains anything and thus nothing.
Design implies a conscious designer and thus contrary to Kenneth Miller is not useful in evolutionary theory and just adds fuel to the creationists for no reason. We see patterns; to see design is merely an example of pareidolia.Causalism implies dysteology and thus conflicts with design, which implies teleology. Natural selection, being its own boss and showing no design,dysteological, needs no superboss to contradict it with design. Amiel Rossow @ Talk Reason rightly takes Miller to task for casting out ID out the front door, only to bring it in through the back door , just on faith, no reasons given. Theistic evolution is thus an oxymoron.From the side of religion it can be true; from the side of science , no. See God: the failed Hypothesis” and “Has Science found God.” Thanks William Provine ,Paul Hick and Richard Dawkins for speaking up for us non-accomodationists!
Correction: Paul Kurtz.
I suddenly got this wonderful idea. The rubes really believe that Dembski got the goods and he is gonna destroy “evilution”. Most such rubes believe in other nonsense like, “a penniless engineer invented a car that runs on water and the Big Oil suppressed the invention”.
So we should advance the theory that, “Dembski could take down evilution any time he wants, but he is not doing so because he is milking the situation by making money. He billed TMLC 200$ a hour in the Dover trial even though he refused to testify on stand”. Let him explain whether he could not or why he did not destroy evilution at Dover, PA.
Dembski waking up and actually beginning to understand some science and mathematics is also a logical possibility.
Er,… never mind.
So Dawkins says life could be designed, therefore Mr. Dembski thinks that means ID isn’t religion. If Dawkins ever says that there could be a god, that would mean that religion isn’t religion! I hope Mr. Dawkins never says there could be a god! Oh boy!!
Heeheehee!
Perhaps understanding Kenneth Miller, and Ruse for that matter or Ayala or others who have argued why design in nature is inevitable is helpful rather than adding fuel to creationists. Laws of nature, combined with constraints, and fueled by selection inevitably leads to something we call ‘design’. Rather than ignore this, it seems far more sense to embrace this.
I’ve noticed that a lot more average citizens are echoing what Dembski is saying here. I’m coming across quite a few letters to the editor and blog posts that argue ID is merely the concept that life was created. It seems to me they’re basically confusing ID with deism. Is this part of some sort of strategy on the Discovery Institute’s part to gain wider acceptance?
I think you mean that if such a design is supernatural then it is possible that no scientific method could detect it. There is no fundamental reason that a supernatural designer must be cryptic, inscrutable and/or undetectable, nothing prevents them from signing their work plainly and obviously. It’s just that inscrutability and undetectability are the only excuses left to justify continuing to suggest such an entity, therefore any God Designer still being proposed at this point would have to be of the stealth variety.
The first two words of the title have a sort of “Pope is Catholic” feel to them.
I wish people wouldn’t say “that’s possible” about a claim when what they mean is “that can’t be absolutely disproven at this point”. Inability to disprove something doesn’t imply that the thing is possible, only that we can’t state with utter certainty that the claim isn’t the case.
Henry
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Then how would you define “possible”?
So, is Dembski an idiot, a liar, or a crook?
No, I’m being too narrow-minded. He could easily be all three. :P
The problem with this is that we have no way of attributing anything we find in Nature to the design or “signature” of a supernatural being. All we can detect are natural phenomena. The supernatural, by definition, is outside the realm of science.
Several thousand years of attempted deity detection has produced nothing but a divergence of sectarian beliefs and sectarian warfare. On the other hand, only a few hundred years of natural science has produced a convergence of deep understanding agreement about the natural world.
To postulate a deity or designer who acts in only one direction by placing a “signature” on their work doesn’t help either. How is a “signature” to be interpreted as anything different from physical law? Even as strange as, say, something like quantum mechanics is, it is not necessary or even logical to construe it as the signature of a designer.
All the patterns and regularities we find in the natural world are not made any more comprehensible by interpreting them as a signature of a deity/designer. Our existence can be explained as a result of the regularities of the laws of nature, but it is not necessary to throw in an extra entity called a deity or designer. Adding a deity or designer simply adds the same old complications people have been warring over for thousands of years.
Truly amazing. Unless you have read The God Delusion (2006) or possibly earlier texts where Dawkins use this scenario to show that gods are improbable.
So if Dawkins gives away the godie store to Dembski, it is because he thinks it isn’t worth putting money into the business. As opposed to, say, science.
That is not to say that the actions or effects of all supernatural entities or agents must also be supernatural and undetectable. Should God exist and decide to stop the rotation of the Earth (as we hear he has done in the past) that would certainly be detectable to science. It is in this fashion that religious claims such as those concerning the power of intercessory prayer are open to scientific investigation despite their claimed supernatural origin and/or mechanism. In just this way the fingerprints of design, if such design existed, could very well be clearly detectable regardless of the nature of the designer. Whether science could then detect or determine the specifics of the designer is a separate question.
It sure is. Everything about ID, from the name on down, is “designed” to obfuscate. Among other things, there is a constant effort to imply to the general public that they refer only to the “origin of the universe”, or the “origin of life”
Fortunately, there is a solution. The solution is ID itself. This was nicely demonstrated in Dover, and I have had the same experience personally.
A particularly powerful tool for clarifying is anything ID has ever said about microbes or pathogens. As soon as people realize that “ID” is not some vague, spiritual statement about the origin of life or the universe, but a specific claim that things like the bacterial flagellum or malarial parasites “could not have evolved” and had to be directly “designed”, they begin to see through it.
Of course, those who actually support an authoritarian political agenda that wraps itself in the guise of sectarian religious opinion will continue to parrot anything that the “leaders” tell them to. But simply revealing what ID is actually all about rapidly eliminates most of the superficial “support”. And that’s been true in most rural, religious, and conservative communities.
Nobody really “believes” ID as it actually is. It’s always a combination of cognitive dissonance/denial, and overt fakery in the service of a hidden agenda, in varying proportions, depending on the individual, with some more delusional and others more transparently weasely.
All we can detect are natural phenomena.
Okay, then anytime anybody says anything about anything supernatural, we know they are full of baloney. Thanks!!
I have to agree with Alexandra here. “Science” doesn’t refuse possible observations of miracles or gods, such as 3 days dead men walking, or what not. It is religion that does.
Not as long as religion claims the supernatural is observable, in creations, miracles, or designs.
Funny, I thought evolution lead to functional traits.
If you want to call such functional systems “designs” without having a designer, that is you prerogative I guess. But Dawkins have called the same systems ““the illusion of design, or apparent design“. I think that is apt, considering the context. (No designer, no final functional goal.)
Good question. If there are no other questions, then…
Actually, I don’t offhand know of a non-circular way of defining “possible”. I could list synonyms (“might be”) or antonyms (“can’t be”), but then those would need defining too.
Henry
I think you misunderstood. Any deity’s stamp or signature in the natural world cannot be linked to a supernatural realm (by definition); otherwise we would have a god detector in the natural world, and the “god” could be construed as an extension of the natural world that was hitherto inaccessible (much like opening up our understandings of the universe by the discovery and technological exploitation of x-rays and other electromagnetic radiation outside the visible spectrum). Thus there is no reason to refer to the newly discovered phenomena as “god”. This has nothing to do with trying to decide whose god it is.
There is no evidence that the Earth’s rotation was stopped by a deity in the past. That is religious myth.
Intercessory prayer has been tested (this has been reported in a number of places, including Dawkin’s book, The God Delusion). But even there, the effect was to cause people who knew they were being prayed for to do worse because of the psychological effects of worry and fear that they were worse off than they were being told. Strong beliefs and superstitions are known to have dramatic physical effects; these effects don’t have to be assigned to supernatural causes. People who don’t know they have a voodoo curse on them are not affected any more than people who know voodoo to be a superstition. So it was an experiment in the natural world, with natural explanations.
Always enjoyed Carl Sagan’s rather mordant commentary on “religious integrity”. He noted that over millennia, with literally trillions of ineffective intercessory prayers on the books, the Official Religious Position was “insufficient data, answer unknown.” Then one day a decade or more back, some folks did a poorly-designed study and found what might (or might not, due to the experimental design) be interpreted as systematic effect of prayer.
And overnight, this became “sufficient data” and a thousand websites trumpeted “scientific proof” of God’s intercession.
Subsequently, the errors in the methodology were correct, the study was replicated many times (including by the original experimenters), and again no hint of any effect at all. Did the religious folks change their tune, back to “insufficient data”? Are you kidding? In true “religious integrity” fashion, they have simply ignored all subsequent studies, and claimed “scientific proof” to this very day.
A wonderful cautionary tale of the mindset we’re always fighting.
So, are you saying that if the intercessory prayer experiment had shown a small but measurable effect in just the way believers had predicted/hoped, this would constitute the “naturalization” of the phenomenon hitherto known as God?
I’m not sure how you would define “supernatural”, but there is nothing that would prohibit a supernatural agent from causing detectable events. There is simply no reason we cannot have, as you say, a “god detector”. Most religions make all sorts of claims which, if true, would be readily detectable. That they are not detected suggests that they are not true, not that gods and their effects are somehow immune to science or even rational perception.
If, as I said, the world suddenly stop rotating we would notice that. If all the Christian amputees in the world started spontaneously regrowing their lost limbs in response to prayer, we could observe that. This would not somehow, as you claim, make such miraculous events nor those agents responsible for them “natural” by any normal definition of that word.
Alexandra, I have to come down on your side. I love these extreme hypothetical things to clarify matters.
Suppose the Earth stopped rotating for a couple of hours. Throw in the effect of no other effects (earthquakes etc.), so our civilization doesn’t collapse. Scientists exhaust every possible explanation for this potentially miraculous event, and after decades of hypotheses, and maybe even new areas of physics explored to investigate it, no one can come up with even a whiff of a natural explanation. The event violates so many laws of physics that it is just plain impossible in our space-time continuum. Yet it happened and was witnessed by the whole population of Earth.
I think it would be perversely nitpicky to refuse to call such an event a miracle, and to allow, at least tentatively, attributing it to a power outside our space-time continuum. Could one object to calling that supernatural?
Please don’t assume from the above that I believe that anything of that nature has ever happened, or is ever likely to.
Down here if Florida, burnt toast passes muster as a miracle.
we had a crying statue once; it got on the regular news, people came to pray over it, the reports said that “there appeared to be no natural explanation” for the tears of blood. what they meant was; “we can’t be bothered to think of a logical explanation when we can just use magical thinking”
I’m personally tired of it. I get more PZ every day down here.
Here it is, my neighborhood:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrfGDRFjBC8
possible — Capable of happening
http://www.answers.com/topic/possible
provides more alternatives.
Is it not more likely that the film will actually cement the idea that ID is religion.
Ben Stein seems to have forgotten to read from the DI script and openly equates the “Designer” with “God”.
They want to have their woo and eat it too.
God is observable through miracles and and even personal communications when it suits them.
God (whoops the Designer) is unknowable, untestable and unfalsiable when it suits them.
There are similar ambiguities in other pseudosciences such as “psi”.
Maybe poachy’s encouragement to Dembski to “Go get ‘em!” should be taken in the same sense that Dr. Peter Venkman said “Go get her, Ray!” in Ghostbusters ; )
Civilisation collapse? There would be nothing left to collapse. Some time with a physics textbook and a calculator would convince you that, if its rotation were halted by “natural” means over the course of, say, five seconds, Earth would briefly become the brightest object of its size in this region of the galaxy.
Were this effect to be observed, it would be a clear indication of super- (or at least un-) natural agencies at work.
Then, were its rotation suddenly to be restored with no apparent physical cause (or possible source for the enormous amount of energy required), there would be another miracle.
Goddamn it! I’m gutted! There goes my dream of intercessory prayers from the entire forum putting an end to this ID bulldust. :)
Dawkins answers “Yes” to Collins’ statement “That’s God”, is surely an admission that “There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.” Good, terrific! Isn’t that the point of the scientific method, to admit that we don’t have all the asweres and investigate beyond out current knowledge constraints; otherwise we would succumb to dogma.
Why is there nothing that would prevent a supernatural agent from causing detectable events? How do you know that? By definition? What kind of supernatural agent do you have in mind? And why should any such events be aimed at or detectable by humans? Why not bats, or whales, or slime molds, or bacteria, or future species (after humans are gone)?
Supernatural refers to an existence beyond the natural universe and/or relating to deities. Some people might like to suggest (as seems implicit in your use of the word; correct me if I am mistaken) that the natural world is a proper subset of, or is imbedded in, a supernatural world.
Now if you allow entities from the supernatural world (or the compliment of the natural world, if the natural world is a proper subset) to make their imprints on the natural world, what phenomena can one use to link such imprints to the supernatural world? If you can find such phenomena, then how is the “supernatural” really any different from the natural?
If one claims that humans are god detectors in some sense, then history would suggest that they are notoriously unreliable. A better interpretation, one that is much better supported by thousands of years of evidence, is that the so-called gods that are being detected are simply projections of human mental states.
“If” is a mighty big word here. While the human imagination seems virtually unlimited (something that even science depends on), not everything one can imagine has or can be investigated by means of natural phenomena that can be touched by science. In fact, science has learned over a few hundred years how to go about sorting reality from fantasy. So, even though you can imagine scenarios that could prove your point, there is no evidence that such scenarios can be or ever have been played out. We can also imagine that everyone has a guardian, invisible pink elephant spirit that follows them around and can only be seen by drunks. But until science can verify such a thing, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to put much stock in it (unless, perhaps, thinking about it makes you a kinder, gentler drunk).
Flint already gave a good answer to this. “Small but measurable” is a colloquial way of saying statistically significant. Given the nature of religious claims over the centuries, any good scientist would be suspicious of a single “experiment” that produced a statistically significant result against a background of hundreds of failures. In fact, one of the characteristics of pseudo-scientific claims, such as paranormal effects, is that they forever lie in the statistical noise no matter how many times they are carried out. Different experiments can give statistically significant results, but others confirm nothing. One isn’t free to pick and choose the ones that confirm what your imagination would like.
And while the efficacy of prayer “experiment” was posed as a test of the supernatural (or paranormal), in reality it turns out to be a test carried out in the natural world. It does not require an interpretation as a pronouncement on the supernatural. It can be interpreted as showing that human minds don’t radiate enough electromagnetic energy to influence the outcome of an operation on strangers. It doesn’t show the existence or non-existence of a supreme being. It doesn’t show that well-wishes are mediated through some supernatural realm. How could it?
Religious claims, paranormal claims, anything-that-humans-can-imagine claims are either amenable to scientific study or they are not. If one chooses to make claims about things that are, by definition outside the possibility of confirmation in the natural world, then what reality can one attribute to such claims other than they lie in the human imagination? Simply being able to imagine a scenario in which the claims are shown to be true doesn’t mean that such a scenario will occur or that a scientific experiment can be performed that will give an unambiguous answer, especially under repetitive conditions.
And what good are one-off events alleged to have happened in the past if there is no other supporting evidence whatsoever that they ever did happen? Simply claiming it happened because it was written in a holy book that “everyone in the whole world” saw it happen, doesn’t make it so. And what good does it do to arrange that nothing was disturbed in the process, so it is undetectable? Doesn’t that put it outside any possibility of verification by scientific means and hence only in the imagination?
When science tries to deal with one-off events, such as the “big bang”, there are many pieces of evidence lying around that converge to support a belief that such an event did in fact occur. And none of these require a preconception of a supernatural being having characteristics conforming to the dogma of a particular religious sect and suspending physical laws in order to avoid leaving evidence.
Simply trying to justify sectarian belief by imagining scenarios in which it “might be scientifically verifiable” does not elevate the sectarian belief to any higher level of respectability. Any sectarian of any religion can do the same. As long as they never have to provide hard evidence, they are “safe”.
Some time with a physics textbook and a calculator would convince you that, if its rotation were halted by “natural” means over the course of, say, five seconds, Earth would briefly become the brightest object of its size in this region of the galaxy.
Ah, that’s when the inertial dampers kick in : )
Perhaps understanding Kenneth Miller, and Ruse for that matter or Ayala or others who have argued why design in nature is inevitable
or Collins?
phht.
Regarding the natural vs. supernatural issue, how about this:
Forget about “natural” or “supernatural”.
Describe the entity, object, or phenomena that one wishes to investigate. If it can’t be described, then there’s nothing that can be done with it or about it.
Then ask: Would the described phenomena, as a logical consequence of its described attributes, cause repeatable consistent detectable patterns in what we can observe?
If so, it can be studied. If not, it can’t. (That might change in the future, if relevant discoveries or advances in technology occur.)
Henry
Mike Elzinga,
First of all, I think we’re in agreement on everything but tactics and terminology. Granted, no one seems likely to win Randi’s million dollars any time soon. Granted, the prayer efficacy experiment showed, not unexpectedly, that there was no measurable effect. Granted, religious definitions are often quite self-serving. What I’m trying to point out is that I think your definitions are also self-serving, and somewhat contradictory. On one hand, you seem to be saying that no experiment has ever measured the supernatural, so belief in the supernatural is not scientifically justifiable. So far so good, but on the other hand, you’re saying that, by definition, anything that can be measured is natural, not supernatural, so that one can never prove the existence or non-existence of the supernatural. You’re simply defining away the possibility by fiat, and then refusing to deal in speculation, even for purposes of ‘reducto ad absurdum.’ I largely agree with your conclusions, I just think the way you’re going about it is open to criticism, which you don’t seem to be too good at taking, either. Let me ask the question another way: if Randi actually lost his million, and you conducted the world’s best possible investigation into how he could have been tricked and you found nothing, would you just declare Randi a fool, or change your definition of supernatural?
Bill,
My apologies if my reply seemed critical. I thought you were seeking clarification (justifiably). I was trying to be brief with a complicated idea, and I didn’t want to get onto a soapbox. I didn’t mean to offend.
I do indeed wonder how one can claim that the supernatural is outside of the natural world (and every definition and usage I have ever heard seems to suggest this), but then suggest that there can be some kind of link between the two without blending them; i.e., simply making the supernatural a hitherto inaccessible aspect of the natural world.
Thus I am essentially saying that, if supernatural really means outside the natural by definition, then it is inaccessible to any natural phenomena used to investigate and characterize the natural world. What would then constitute a link between the two?
More precisely, what is the meaning of a link or bridge between the natural and supernatural? Can it be a natural phenomenon? If it is, how does it access the supernatural? If it is supernatural, how do we have access to it? What would be the meaning of some kind of intermediate phenomenon?
Indeed, one can imagine that a closer look at elementary particles would find an inscription on every one of them, “Made in Heaven by God” (in English, no less); but so far such an observation seems to be quite out of the running because that isn’t how we “see” elementary particles. More generally, there simply isn’t any working concept in science that points to the possibility of a link of any sort to a supernatural realm.
Are humans some kind of link between the natural and supernatural? Historical evidence suggests not, given the violent disagreements about the supernatural realm. Do supernatural beings leave their marks on the natural world? How can we know? Where are the links that connect such evidence in the natural world to the supernatural and then to beings in that realm? If we can know, are such beings still supernatural?
It seems to me that too many liberties are being taken with the supernatural by suggesting or speculating that beings or agents in this realm leave imprints on the natural world that can be linked to a supernatural realm. People do it, I have done it, and I can understand and empathize with anyone doing so. But does it really make sense?
If Randi lost his million, I would still place my bets on the natural world explanations even if I didn’t find them using the best science I had (besides, a magician would be a better person to do the investigation than would a scientist). The natural world has offered more than enough surprises and remains just as interesting and mysterious as it ever was. We still have much to learn. The supernatural may simply be the human mind’s extrapolation of the mysteries of the unknown natural world.
Yet I can accept the fact that people, simply because of practical limitations of time, knowledge, and the simple need to get on with life, can use the idea of the supernatural as something to reach for. It is what the human mind seems to be able to do. Is it limitless in its ability to imagine? Well, we humans may like to think so.
But we don’t really know how other animals really conceive the world through other senses that are more developed than ours. We can try to make inferences from our knowledge of technology, but we really don’t know how a bat or whale “sees” with sound or how a dog processes chemical odors of various kinds. We don’t know how that information is processed within the nervous systems of these animals. There are simply a huge number of things about the natural world that we still don’t know and probably are unable to appreciate given our nervous system and biology.
But if people want to speculate about the supernatural, I certainly have no objections; it might even trigger some better insights into the natural world. I would simply point out that as soon as one begins to seek scientific justification for a sectarian dogma, one then steps into a minefield of problems.
PvM, I agree. It can (quite convincingly) be argued that natural selection is itself a design process. This is why human engineers have been copying nature and using evolutionary algorithms. In so doing, they sometimes arrive at design solutions that are surprising to the human designers and unlikely to have been conceived of by a human designer.
Mike,
I think we are in agreement. Thank you.
One of my favorite toys over the years has been a 2-D Newtonian motion simulator (you can get a copy of your own from www.tesp.com/ballistic.htm). It comes bundled with a number of “pre-created” (and intelligently designed) low-budget universes.
Once any of them is loaded and running, “natural” causes (e.g. f = G * m1 * m2 / d2) take their course.
If I should happen to be displeased with any of the objects’ location or velocity or mass, I can halt the simulation, make arbitrary changes to the object in question, and resume the run.
Behold: a supernatural event has occurred. If the simulation platform and starting conditions were sufficiently complex that sentient life were to evolve, they’d be able to observe, but not explain, the event.
Mike, Bill, Alexandra, excellent discussion! Thanks to your arguments I think I can sum up the Natural/Supernatural conundrum as: If we can imagine a scenario whereby a singular event is observed which violates all known scientific theories (such as a temporary halt to the Earth’s rotation), many would be tempted to attribute the event to the actions of a supernatural agent. However, the event is occurring in the natural world and is observable and testable in the natural world. If a supernatural agent has to act on natural phenomena in the natural world in order to disclose its existence, then how do we know that any or every natural event isn’t caused by a supernatural agent(s)? It seems to me this renders the whole idea of the supernatural moot. BTW, Randi’s challenge is set to expire in two years. I love his podcasts - wish they were longer… Chris
Henry J, I found your comment interesting.
I think your approach has some merits.
First, the definitions for natural or supernatural seem to be rather difficult to achieve.
Secondly, it captures many of the essential starting points for doing science.
Thirdly, it does not exclude the possibility of supernatural entities, however they might be defined. (Supernatural can not be excluded by science, or by any algorithmic process).
Regards
Eric
:-)
These are also fun thought experiments.
If you stopped the “universe”, then backed it up and re-ran it with changes, would the creatures in that “universe” have the same “memories” of what had occurred before the run was stopped, backed up, changes made, and then restarted? If they did not, there would be nothing to compare. If they did, then some part of them would be, in effect, “outside” the universe because they would be aware of the two different paths the universe took.
If, on the other hand, the creatures were observing the motion of, say, a falling rock, and suddenly its motion was inconsistent with the behavior of falling rocks that are in the “memories” of these creatures, then they have a means to compare. You would have stopped the program and, for example, reversed the velocity vectors of only the atoms that made up the rock, and then restarted the program.
What really gets interesting in a program like this is how to deal with the “memories” of creatures that evolve in this “universe”. A lot of science fiction stories get this really screwed up, but it is fun anyway.
You mean the “I’m my own grandpa” syndrome?
With a particular automaton like this one, using digital math in its platform, they’d have a bumpy ride.
The first (MS-DOS) edition of this simulator did in fact have a “run backwards” function. However, as I note in the help file for the Windows edition, there is so much information discarded between any two simulation steps that you can never get back to a previous state by reversing the process.
The simulated universe has an inherent “arrow of time” for that reason. (And Mercury’s orbit also precesses, but presumably for different reasons from those in an analog Einsteinian universe.)
I responded to this over on UD a short while ago. The response actually concerns a different entry from UD, linking to another review of Expelled, but the discussion is from Dembski’s. The two reviews are so similar in content that it doesn’t really matter, though on purely stylistic grounds, Cashill’s the better writer. The other UD entry is here, for any who care:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/expe[…]ws-expelled/
It’s just the excerpted first part of the full review, found here:
http://www.cashill.com/intellig_des[…]d_review.htm
I don’t know if I’ll be artificially selected out of the game by moderation, but I found the whole thing so annoying I figure it was worth a shot. Anyway, I reproduce my response on Dembski’s entry here:
——————-
OK, nevermind. Found it myself. Umm, that’s rather misleading to attribute that quote directly to Dawkins. Rather the review actually says:
“To Stein’s astonishment, Dawkins concedes that life might indeed have a designer but that designer almost assuredly was a more highly evolved being from another planet, not “God.””
I’d like to see the footage of Dawkin’s response in his own words, preferably unedited. It may very well be an unedited response in the film, but there’s no way to know that from a secondhand account written by an unapologetic advocate of ID on whose site one can find prominent promotion of the movie.
I tend to doubt that Cahill’s interpretation of Dawkins’ response is accurate, because Dawkins has discussed this notion of “Extraterrestrial Design” before in “The Ancestor’s Tale”. It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the concept, and was in fact a critique of ID in general and IC in particular:
“It is perfectly legitimate to propose the argument from irreducible complexity as a possible explanation for the lack of something that doesn’t exist…[t]hat is very different from evading the scientist’s responsibility to explain something that does exist, such as wheeled bacteria. Nevertheless, to be fair, it is possible to imagine validly using some version of the argument from design, or the argument from irreducible complexity. Future visitors from outer space…will surely find ways to distinguish designed machines such as planes and microphones, from evolved machines such as bats wings and ears. …They may face some tricky judgments in the messy overlap between natural evolution and human design. If the alien scientists can study living specimens…what will they make of fragile, highly-strung racehorses and greyhounds, of snuffling bulldogs who can scarcely breathe and can’t be born without Caesarian assistance.…[m]olecular machines – nanotechnology – crafted on the same scale as the bacterial flagellar motor, may pose the alien scientists even harder problems.
Francis Crick, no less, has speculated semi-seriously in ‘Life Itself’ that bacteria may not have originated on this planet but been seeded from elsewhere. In Crick’s fantasy, they were sent in the nose-cone of a rocket by alien beings, who wanted to propogate their form of life… Crick and…Orgel, who originally suggested the idea with him, supposed that the bacteria had originally evolved by natural processes…but they could equally, while in the mood for science fiction, have added a touch of nanotechnological artifice…perhaps a molecular gearwheel like the flagellar motor…
Crick himself – whether with regret or relief it is hard to say – finds little good evidence of his own theory… But the hinterland between science and science fiction constitutes a useful mental gymnasium in which to wrestle with a genuinely important question…how do we, in practice, distinguish [evolution’s] products from deliberately designed artefacts? … Could there be genuinely persuasive examples of irreducible complexity in nature…? If so, might this suggest design by a superior intelligence, say from an older and more highly evolved civilisation on another planet?” [549-50, Trade Paperback]
So, clearly, this is not some shocking, new admission on Dawkins’ part, considering that he put it in print almost four years ago. Neither is it so outlandish as Cahill’s review suggests because just as clearly, Dawkins views the whole notion as intellectual play — a thought experiment like Schrodinger’s proverbial Cat, as evidenced by language such as “while in the mood for science fiction”, “fantasy”, and “mental gymnasium”. He is certainly not putting any of it forward as a serious, fully-formulated hypothesis. So, yes, the possibility of design is conceded, but it always has been. Absence of evidence is not, well, you know the rest. As to the assertion that Dawkins considers ID-via-ET more likely than ID-via-Deity, I buy it. What else would you expect from a man who identifies himself as an atheist? Of course he considers intelligent alien life more likely to be responsible for some hypothetical example of ID. That doesn’t mean he considers either scenario all that likely in absolute terms. And, in fact, it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t take the whole alien idea very seriously at all.
It did make for one of the better stories from Star Trek: TNG though, but maybe that’s just nostalgia – I haven’t watched it in years. I think it may even have been a two-parter.
———————–
I have to admit to a bit of rhetorical trickery of my own: it was a two-parter, and I’ve known it all along. Sorry about that. Anyway, for the convenience of the interested, here’s Cashill’s home URL:
http://www.cashill.com/index.htm
The review itself is problematic in other ways, not just because it served as the source for an unusual form of quote-mining: attributing someone else’s summary of Dawkins’ interview to Dawkins’ himself, that someone else being an ID advocate with a giant ad for Expelled plastered on their homepage. Well turnabout is emphatically not fair-play, but I can’t resist quote-mining Cashill myself:
“This isn’t film making. This is fraud.”
While my quote-mine is just as illegitmate, dishonest and unfair, it has the considerable advantage of being amusing.
Oh, yeah. And the actual Dembski thread containing the link the the other review:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/expe[…]-scientific/
Actually, it just occurred to me that there really was fraud involved – at least insofar as securing PZ Meyer’s cooperation with the film is concerned. Does this mean I’ve discovered a new form of quote-mining? Sure, it’s still out of context and completely ignores the author’s intended meaning, but it also happens to be pretty accurate. It really needs some ridiculously jargon-y pseudo-technical name, but nothing comes to mind at the moment.
Ftw, on an old thread, old topic, no time then:
Exactly. But omnipotent gods are supposed to work outside physical laws, make occasional creations, et cetera. Instantaneously stopping a planets rotation seems like an obvious non-natural event. Coding primes in the CMBR spectra is another.
Um, science is supposed to be empirical. We can’t outdefine observational events, we can classify them by theory, and sometimes make (terribly shaky) no-go claims.
If you are trying to say that supernatural phenomena by any definition are improbable and/or imagination, welcome to the club. But still people claim that supernatural phenomena exist “by definition”. Which definition?
Now you are playing the definitional goalpost moving game again. People insist on supernatural, people get supernatural (as improbable by theory; it will wreak havoc with physics as we know it, locally or globally, and be easily observable; and observation).
In order to debunk a proposition, it must frequently be accepted as stated. Here it would otherwise mean declaring supernatural phenomena impossible by fiat, which amounts to a dogmatic position.
I don’t think you mean that, looking at your analysis. Solipsism or its equivalence (simulation, last Thursdays) has AFAIK no answer besides parsimony.
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