I can think of few greater contemporary British journalists than Christopher Booker. He is the AGW alarmists’ waking nightmare. In fact, he inflicts sleep deprivation on all manner of promoters of scares, seeing, as HL Mencken once realised, that scares are a means by which power-hungry folk can persuade benighted citizens to sign up to the latest safety measures.
And yet even great men have their off days. In last week’s edition of the Spectator (which is behind a subscriber firewall), he writes, on page 20, that there is a dastardly campaign by the Darwinian establishment to crush any signs of dissent from those who subscribe to some form of Intelligent Design (or what might be more accurately known as Creationism). He then goes on to liken the plight of these poor, oppressed ID advocates with AGW skeptics. And yet the parallel strikes me as absurd. AGW skeptics fall into various camps: those who simply want to trash any suggestion that AGW is a problem; those who say that AGW is a problem but who are unsure about its effects, and those who realise that AGW is probably happening but who debate whether it can be mitigated, reversed or adapted to, and who want to know about the pros and cons (think of the likes of Nigel Lawson, or Bjorn Lomborg, etc). A lot of AGW skeptics pore over immense amounts of data to highlight their doubts; and some of them, such as Lawson, employ powerful economic and related arguments that draw on known facts.
But ID advocates do not have the same kind of facts, as far as I can see, to conclusively press their case. What they have instead is a sort of “We cannot explain X so in the absence of a better idea, we’ll assume a Creator got involved”. Not terribly convincing, is my reaction. I accept that some scientists might be sympathetic to ID without losing any integrity, but what Booker’s article signally fails to address is whether any ID advocate has given a plausible explanation, with proof and evidence, of how a particularly complex phemomenon of nature came to be “created”. All they do, it seems from Booker’s article, is to state that because there are “gaps” in fossil records, etc, that therefore the gap must imply that some outside agent (like a God), caused X or Y. But his article does not go beyond that to explain what sort of processes these ID folk imagine happened. And the reason for that is simple: they don’t know. By contrast, AGW skeptics seem to a far more persuasive lot and are able to throw out all manner of facts and data to back their case up. I am just not convinced that Creationists come remotely close.
In fact, a recent comment on this kind of issue by someone called bgates on Samizdata nicely captures a key issue here, because it might explain why a lot of people treat evolution theory and creationism as being on an equal footing:
“It’s interesting that so many people who think they’re proponents of evolution discuss the matter in terms of “belief”. I’ve never heard anyone voice a belief that red light has a longer wavelength than blue, or a belief that B-lactam antibiotics work by interfering with bacterial cell wall synthesis. Those statements are instead presented as facts that have been deduced from an examination of physical evidence. The difference seems to be that so many of the most fervent defenders of the theory of evolution are unaware of the (astonishing, voluminous, and altogether convincing) physical evidence supporting the idea. They don’t have knowledge of the evidence, they have faith in their belief, and they’ll fight for their beliefs as passionately as any mujahedeen.”
And in conclusion, for all I support Booker’s general stance on free speech and resistence to any thought control, I think – as a AGW skeptic myself – that is not really smart for Booker to lump AGW skeptics into the same supposedly “oppressed” category as creationists. If creationists come in for abuse, they need to raise their game and employ the same rigour, if they can, as those who have looked at the AGW issue, and cried foul.
Sidepoint: Timothy Sandefur had some interesting thoughts about science and freedom of expression, and the role of the state, here.
[Apologies for the off-topic, but I’ve sometimes considered submitting an article to Samizdata. I wonder 1) if these are welcome and 2) if anyone reads the reply@samizdata.net email address?
Feel free to delete this if it’s inappropriate.]
I’m sorry, the term “global warming” is no longer in use, please update your PC dictionary with the term “global climate disruption.”
It’s certainly true that many people treat contentious (or contended) scientific ideas as matters of faith. I’ve written about it myself a few times. As in so many areas of life, people want to belong, and they seek the prevailing orthodoxy among the group they want to feel part of. Then they profess belief, even when it is not a question of belief, but of knowing and understanding.
Science and religion usually belong in two separate universes. That said, I heard an astrophysicist once make the case that Intelligent Design (Capital I Capital D) is unmitigated crap, but that intelligent design (small i small d) based on what we don’t know about the Big Bang and the complex ways that energy turned into matter and then some of it turned into life, is worth considering.
I guess the most annoying thing is the way the debate always comes down to a replay of the Scopes Monkey Trial as seen in the movie “Inherit the Wind”, as if all our knowledge was frozen in the 1920s.
Okay.
At the risk of being boring I return to my first question which was:
How can order occur spontaneously in randomness?
There is actually no truly logical answer to anything. Every statement, including this one, relies on some accepted assumption.
Personally I believe in the Lord Jesus because of the tangible deliverance He has caused in my life.
But that is my subjective experience and relies on assuming the validity of my experience.
I don’t know anything about the ID movement, but I can tell you why I am skeptical about a wholesale acceptance of creatorless Darwinism.
I’m a researcher studying the functioning of the human visual and attentional systems. I look at these kinds of systems, and the arguments that are made by pure evolutionists, and frankly I don’t buy it. I consider the notion of an intelligence being behind these systems much more parsimonious. It strikes me as far too elegant to be explained otherwise.
Dawkins et al try to have their cake an eat it. In one breath they will say “Oh if there is a God he must be a blind watchmaker – look how crap human biology is at coping with X”, and in the next breath they will say “Look at the marvelous and wonderful variety evolution has furnished us with. All the beauty of nature can be explained by this single process…”
That’s not to say the data produced by evolutionists is flawed, I just debate their conclusions. I’m sure much of what falls under “evolution” is a real and ongoing process, but I suspect our understanding of what is actually going on is poor to say the least. I take issue with the idea that “random” mutation is behind species change in particular. What I study every day seems anything but random.
The human brain is complex on a scale that beggers belief. Taking the elements we possess, the brain could exist in nearly infinite different configurations, and yet it doesn’t. It exists in the surprisingly efficient configuration that we see.
The earth just isn’t old enough to account for this via uncontrolled mutations.
So no, I don’t think it is reasonable to ringfence AGW skepticism and evolution skepticism. You don’t need to show that evolution cannot account for something, but rather that its explanations become so improbable and bloated that there is a simpler explanation. Parsimony is one of the key principles of science.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that much of the ID debate hinges on this point.
I agree with you that lumping creationists and AGW skeptics into the same group is a lousy strategy. It’s completely apples and oranges. However, you asked the question in a strange way: “but what Booker’s article signally fails to address is whether any ID advocate has given a plausible explanation, with proof and evidence, of how a particularly complex phemomenon of nature came to be ‘created’.” I’m certainly no expert on ID “theory” (“I have no need of this hypothesis,” as LaPlace famously said), but it seems to me that asking what “process” an omnipotent creator employed is fundamentally unanswerable, even meaningless. “Let there be light” doesn’t require a “process”.
Laird, the reason why I ask about process is because it is incumbent on any ID advocate, in my view, if they want to be known as scientists, to give a testable notion of how they thought the creator did the creating. But they never do.
On the other hand, for all the gaps and remaining queries, Darwinists have at least tried to do this, and often with remarkable results. Dawkins, for all that he can be an obnoxious character perhaps, has even looked at computer models and used all kinds of techniques to highlight his ideas. There is simply nothing comparable with the ID people.
Laird is right Johnathan. You can’t give a plausible scientific explanation for an act of supernatural fiat. If we were designed by a god (and who designed him, we must ask?) then that’s it.
ID attempts not to explain, but to show that what is natural cannot have arisen naturally. If they can do that, they have won the argument. They don’t need to explain why the divine being chose to have us reproduce by rubbing groinal organs together rather than by, say spitting genetic material into each others mouths. He just did. All they have to show is that rubbing bits together couldn’t possibly have arisen by selective processes.
They believe in a big fairy in the sky that does magic. They therefore stand outside science.
How can order occur spontaneously in randomness?
Easy, through the input of energy from an external source.
Universally entropy increases, but locally it decreases. We see this principle in practice all day, every day.
Energy from the sun powers an increase in complexity all around you – no conflict with thermodynamics at all.
Johnathan, You made by put one and one together. I think I came up with two(Link).
The link between ‘faith’ and acceptance of certain ‘scientific’ ideas is a perspicuous point, Jonathan. But, I think it may only be half of the story.
As you can see from some of the above posts, people are driven by a combination of ‘faith’ and wish-fulfilment.
This occurs on both sides of both debates, but the best examples are, as you can see, ID supporters.
That should read:
You made me put one and one together
‘Computer models’? Talk about damning with praise…
The theory of ID tends to focus mostly on criticising the evidence and ideas of evolution – it has rarely tried to come up with a strong idea of how the designer actually created life.
And ID and creationism are far more different that commonly supposed – read a book on ID and the Bible will probably never be mentioned, the focus is solely on science (however good or bad). ID always argues from evidence to a designer. Creatonism on the other hand argues the other way – Genesis says God made the world in 6 days, hence evolution must be wrong.
While they appear to come up with the same conclusions, even then they can be different. Most creationists will believe in a young earth, ID proponents most likely not.
My personal view (as a Christian) is that evolution is scientifically very weak, and God had a massive role to play in creating the universe and life in it. How he did it, doesn’t actually matter very much – whether it was exactly as in Genesis or some other way.
Of course, if we want to find out the scientific truth on such matters, then we have to allow all ideas to be fully explored – there’s little doubt in my mind that modern science has ruled out God as ever being a possibility as an a priori assumption, and so ID proponents won’t get a fair hearing. “God of the gaps” is lousy science, but a lot of ID is much smarter than that.
There are two separate issues here.
No, two and a half
No, three…
Among the separate issues here are
– where does legitimately harsh scientific criticism of a theory end and oppression begin? Should someone lose his science job due to believing in ID? Should someone fail to get a science job due to believing in ID? In general I’d answer no to the first and yes to the second, but only in general.
– intelligent design is unfortunately used to mean everything from “allows any possibility of theism whatsoever” to full-on Young Earth creationism. There is a lot of sailing under false flags by creationists posing as “merely” ID-ers. There is also a regrettable tendency for theist scientists to be described as ID-ers and edged out of positions. It’s not an ideal example, but Michael Reiss (like me, a Christian with a perfectly mainstream understanding* of Darwinism) was treated shabbily by the Royal Society after being misrepresented by the media, partly because the Royal Society were paranoid about the whole ID issue.
The point I am stumbling towards is that the questions of whether ID is true, whether its proponents behave with scientific integrity, and whether its opponents behave with scientific integrity towards its proponents are all separate questions but not fully separable.
Oh dear. That’s not one of my snappier quotes, is it?
*OK, his understanding of Darwinism is probably somewhat better.
Hey, smite robot, get off your idle silicon butt and onto passing my comment of a minute ago. That was some of my best dithering there.
The point I was sort-of making is that ID advocates can indeed be oppressed, and still be wrong, and still be capable of some sharp practice themselves, sometimes.
Abet, the “how” of ID does matter If creationists want to be called scientists. It matters rather a lot.
One thing that mystifies me is the question of what possible purpose this designer could have. After all, he’s a busy man, or they’re a busy super-civilisation, or whoever the unnamned one(s) is/are.
Why did It fill the world with dinosaurs, then get rid of them? What was good at one time about the trilobites, then what made them surplus to requirements? What got the mammoths slated for extinction, and what was the purpose of Neanderthal Man that became superfluous 30,000 years ago?
After all, this isn’t a designer who dropped by once to create homo sapiens; It’s been designing for 4.5 billion years now, and still no apparent purpose is revealed. What’s it all for? Is It just very bored? Are we some kind of art project? What external purpose do we serve, pottering around on this lonely little planet? What does It want from us?
Counting Cats, the energy from an external source is also a form of order.
You are simply drawing the borders at a convenient distance and outsourcing the assumption!
Just to be clearer and a bit less sarky, the point I was trying to make in my previous post is that JadedLibertarian and other “scientific” IDers have to recognise that in order to get the “perfect synchrony of parts” which stands as proof of the ID, It has had to have designed every single hominid; all the failed ones, all the preceding apes, and so on. Each one “perfectly designed”. And all the other species too. Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings. He made their glowing colours, he made their tiny wings. For four and a half billion years.
“Art project.” I like that. It contains a lot of explanatory power.
How can order occur spontaneously in randomness?
A simple example. Take the standard logistic map f(x) = ax(1-x). Plotting many tens of thousands of iterations shows it to be the classical chaotic system. At intervals it displays organised behaviour and bifurcations, becomes chaotic, becomes organised, etc etc.
No external influence required.
What about us poor believers in Unintelligent Design as the only rational explanation for the existence of the human race?
View from the Solent,
Those appearances of organised behaviour are random, though.
Perhaps.
If the monkeys type long enough they might come up with Complete Works of Shakespeare.
But that will be a random event.
(And how did the order of the typewriters and the monkeys originate?)
The view of Death being the sculptor of man’s evolution indicates that randomness can manifest periods that tend to order, of which Death takes advantage.
Taylor’s astrophysicist who dismissed ID, but not the possibility of an intelligent design, strikes the right note for me. There’s a subtle difference between “We cannot explain X so in the absence of a better idea, we’ll assume a Creator got involved” and “We cannot explain X, therefore we cannot entirely dismiss the possibility, albeit unlikely, of an intelligent agent”.
Since Booker’s article is behind that paywall it’s hard to say what and who he’s defending, but while it would be dangerous to lump AGW sceptics in with the former argument, there’s clearly a danger that those who advocate the latter will be dismissed and villified by those who fail to see the distinction.
bgates is a frequent troll at WUWT, btw, and we have to regularly snip his trollery.
To use one of the warmists buzzwords, the agw skeptic arguments would be described as “robust” scientifically because they do pore over the data, they do prove their points scientifically in a way that anybody can understand and replicate, even if they disagree with the skeptic point of view. This is what has won skeptics like those at WUWT, Climate Audit, and elsewhere a lot of support not only from the general public (WUWT’s web traffic is consistently several times greater than ClimateProgress.org, the most popular warmist site) but respect and praise from many in the scientific mainstream, especially a number of ‘lukewarmers’ (as well as sending AGW fanatics into apoplexies on a regular basis).
ID, I agree, at least regarding biological evolution, is much much less supportable, and the more we learn from research, the fewer their arguments become, as the “gaps” become increasingly closed. I personally consider ID proponents to be religious Von Danikenites.
That said, the credibility of their arguments is immaterial to the issue of suppression of unconventional points of view. It is a common characteristic of leftist regiemes throughout history that they engage in puritanical inquisitions and purges of individuals who do not follow the entirety of the leftist dogma in all matters. Whether or not an ID proponent is a moonbat or not, it doesn’t matter, they have an inherent right to their opinion on matters that science cannot answer without repercussions to their careers, professional reputations, or livelihoods.
The campaign to purge ID proponents from the sciences is merely a first step on a slippery slope to purge anybody who holds any religious faith of a judeo-christian origin (muslims, hindus, and buddhists are apparently ok, and will remain so, until the muslims impose sharia on the atheists).
Warmists and anti-Godists will tend to come in for a far higher degree of “public” funding I would imagine. And would therefore tend to be able make far better researched cases for their point of view.
“Money answereth all things”
Actually, Ian B, as to what a Creator might have been playing at, with all that has happened and then ceased, is a valid question.
I feel certain that a loving Creator would never require that valid questions should be disallowed.
Unfortunately the scientific establishment has now blown its credibility to the point that it can no longer tell people what to believe. Warmism is just the biggest example, but I now find I routinely dismiss the majority of reported science I read, pretty much out of hand. (Of course, the scientific establishment can by no means take all the credit for that, the journalists deserve their share).
I comfortably accept evolution, based on my own understanding of the evidence and the logic, but I wouldn’t attempt to ask anyone else to take my word for it. Yes IDers, the scientists would lie to you, they would select and even occasionally fake evidence, they would silence opponents by methods they publicly disavow; I believe you now. On this issue it happens they’re right anyway, but I don’t expect to convince you of that over a coffee or in a blog comment.
Mike Lorrey,
I agree that there is a disquieting first tilt of the slippery slope in the current climate of opinion regarding both theists in general and ID-ers in science. I mentioned as an example (in a comment awaiting moderation) the ousting of Michael Reiss, a Christian but not an ID-er, from his post at the Royal Society. I also certainly agree that proponents of ID have an inherent right to their opinion, but I cannot agree that they have an inherent right to their opinion “without repercussions to their careers, professional reputations, or livelihoods.”
No one has a right to a good reputation; it can only be granted by the freely given good opinion of other people. (Although one can have a right not to be actually slandered or libelled.)
As for repercussions to a person’s career or livelihood, it is very hard to give a general answer. Some very good scientists have been wrong but a scientist who is consistently wrong just isn’t a good scientist. When promoting or not promoting scientists surely those making the decision have a right to assess them as a whole?
It is the proponents of AGW who are like the ID people.
AGW’ers claim that they cannot explain the 20th century warming without including the radiative effects of the extra CO2. As we know so little about the whole Earth system this is an incredible stretch.
You are simply drawing the borders at a convenient distance and outsourcing the assumption!
Nonsense, I’m doing no such thing.
I said:
Universally entropy increases, but locally it decreases.
That address this point precisely. Chemical processes spontaneously make use of an energy gradient to increase complexity just about everywhere such a gradient can be found.
Imagine that there is nothing but absolute Chaos, because this is the standard excuse that atheist scientists use when asked where the universe came from.
By definition, Chaos can’t make choices, can it? Chaos is unintelligent, unliving. Therefore, this primordial Chaos could not stop order from arising, once order randomly occurred.
When would this happen? Chaos is eternally timeless, outside of our reality of space and time.
Therefore Chaos would be the ground from which Universes grow, when they randomly occur. All variants of universes exist simultaneously, since Chaos doesn’t have time, or preferences.
How, then, could GOD Not arise from Chaos? In the same way that randomness has allowed us to evolve, over time, it would mandate that a Chaos-controlling entity MUST spontaneously arise, given infinite time and space.
Thus, either God creates Chaos, or God arises automatically from Chaos, and controls it.
As for ‘The problem of evil’, there are a few solutions as to why God allows evil to exist, but as an esoteric Christian, I think we are souls that have descended into animal bodies for our own amusement, and thus have only ourselves to blame. Some people do claim to remember previous lives, and Jesus once dobbed in John the Baptist as Elijah reborn, so I have few problems with this approach.
Hail Eris, etc.
As for facts and beliefs, Evolution is not a fact- nor is creationism. Fossils are facts, and theories are interpretations as to the meaning of these facts. The theory of Evolution involves fewest assumptions, and this is why most scientists prefer it. A lot of IDers would accept evolution if it seemed to have an endpoint, or goal, but this could be simply our own love of planning.
An agnostic’s defense of an Intelligent Design; It is idiotic to assume that any scientific discovery or theory, let alone the theory of evolution contradicts the idea of ID.
Quite the opposite. In the mind of an intelligent supporter of ID all those elements of human knowledge will support the God’s existence and his role in the act of creation.
Even the original and obviously primitive description of the process of creation is nothing else but the description of an evolution.
This is a description of the God’s experimentations and His’ struggle to create ever better “creation”.
It is an imaginable proof that God didn’t have any concrete plan along which the process of creation would procede, neither had He any vision of its final outcome.
So His creative MIND and along His vision were EVOLVING.
Isn’t it itself a recognition that the EVOLUTION is the very fundamental element of God’s existence in its dynamic aspect?
The idea that the world has been created within seven days is purely symbolic; What for a human is, let’s say two billion years, for God it is just one day.
It is not a science and it’s discoveries or theories that contradict the God’s existence. It is the abysmal moral state of God’s finest creation – the HUMAN and it’s world where the EVIL has such a powerful and enduring presence, the EVIL that seems to be winning again.
It is an almost total lack of empathy for the Human’s unimaginable suffering that undermines the very idea of God as a thoroughly good, creative an omnipotent spirit.
Dawkins puts it best in one of his books; can’t remember which one. That is, that if you exclude the supernatural, evolution is the only possible theory.
Either species have precursors, or they don’t. If they don’t, you must support spontaneous generation. Since the spontaneous generation of the biosphere as it is now would be impossible by natural means, only a supernatural agent can be responsible.
The only possible alternative is to presume precursors from which it developed. The theory of evolution is simply the statement of that inescapable logical fact.
For a hilarious and original twist on the ID concept I recommend Strata, one of Terry Pratchett’s pre-DiscWorld sci-fi novels.
Having just seen the new smitebot, it seems the Samizdata editorial team have increasing pretensions to Godhead…
[editor: no we have always been like that]
RW, no, the idea is to block trolls, “race realists” and sundry other bores, lunatics and lowlifes.
I had mixed thoughts the other day about a guy we blocked by the name of Gabriel, since he was occasionally quite insightful; but then I remember his rudeness, deliberate misinterpretation of what anyone said, and general obnoxiousness. And then I discovered he is a 20-something student at Oxford. What the fuck are they teaching at uni these days?
@Nuke Gray
as an esoteric Christian, I think we are souls that have descended into animal bodies for our own amusement, and thus have only ourselves to blame
I hadn’t come across that idea before, but it would explain a lot.
@AMcguinn
There is no scientific establishment. The great majority of scientists work in their own specific fields, intellectually isolated from all but their close colleagues, in search of answers that they know can only be shown to be valid by certain tried and tested methods. The idea of scientists as a scheming, homogenous mass is a perception created by politicians and the press, and sometimes business, all of whom may need such a perception at certain times. Some scientists are not very good at what they do, and sometimes, when the lure of money or publicity affects their work, they remind us that they are human.
It would be interesting if one of the cautious or otherwise ID supporters above to perhaps point out any single attempt at “ID” “science” that isn’t basically an argument from ignorance. That’s been the problem with ID and pretending it’s science, no one yet that I’ve seen, and I’ve tried to read quite widely on this, has come up with a half coherent argument, at least as science.
If you want to go off and pretend the sky fairy argument that “God did It” and that’s all there is, fine, but that’s utterly vacuous as a scientific statement. It is unchallengeable as a belief though, but no more valid than a belief in the spaghetti monster (bless his noodly appendages), and that everything was created in the short gap between the hot water and the parmesan.
Johnathan-
Really? My mental image of Gabriel was a middle aged devout Jewish conservative with a family. You never know on the internet, do you?
Can somebody at samizdata central take a look at the bot? It seems to be smiting about 70% of my comments the past couple of days; has it got its virtual knickers in a twist? From what I can tell from others’ comments it’s not just me.
The argument shouldn’t be between Evolution and Creationism/ID so much as between the scientific method and received wisdom.
Therefore Evolution isn’t truth but merely the best available model for explaining the origin of species. It is conceivable, but unlikely, that tomorrow someone will come up with a better theory. That being the case, the theory of evolution will be superseded [notwithstanding Ian B’s point]. It is the scientific method that is important, not the latest theory and all theories can and should be open to challenge.
Creationism/ID fails this test because evidence is selected or ignored depending upon how it complies with the received wisdom. The core doctrine cannot ever be abandoned regardless of how it complies with observations, and so they have to invent supplementary corollaries to explain the oddities. eg. Dinosaur were Dragons. This bears some comparison with explaining retrograde motion in Geocentric astronomy.
Having said that, I have some sympathy for Booker. When Darwin published Origin of Species, most people were Creationists [notwithstanding thought around evolution via acquired characteristics]. Yet from that virtually zero base the number of people who accept evolution has grown to be a majority in the West. We didn’t need to force people to accept Darwinism when it was a minority viewpoint, yet now we do. We have the situation where there is panic by the educated elite over the idea that some people might teach their kids Creationism. There’s this idea that massive harm is done to the kids or society. I accept there are concerns about the proportion of Muslims training to be doctors who believe in Creation but the vast majority of Creationist are never in a position where the belief might affect what they do. It’s all of a piece with the idea that people cannot be trusted to bring up their kids as they see fit and the the state has to determine what is good. The cure seems worse than the problem.
Second, whilst I think IDer’s may not have a credible theory of their own it doesn’t prevent them from bringing a valid criticism to the Darwinist table. Not that I’m not claiming they have brought anything orininal to that discussion (perhaps Behe’s idea of ireducable complexity?); but regardless of source, criticism needs to be answered. I get the sense that more and more the media identify the “experts” and excluded lay people as unqualified to talk about a subject. This is certainly a issue that AGW and Evolution have in common. The growing disbelief in AGW has more to do with the arrogance of Michael Mann et al than any understanding of the issues and I’m sure the way Dawkins talks about child abuse doesn’t win him any converts either.
Nailed it, TDK: sometimes a messenger is plain suicidal, and the message blows up with him.
“Those appearances of organised behaviour are random, though”
BINGO!
I mean, repeat a gazillion times, find some kinds of organised behaviour that are self-perpetuating… What am I missing?
Sure, it might seem like the Earth isn’t old enough, as JadedLibertarian suggests, but has anyone done any calculations on that? How many generations from amoeba to Rob Fisher?
Also, the universe is big.
TDK makes an excellent point. Nothing should be above criticism, and Dawkins’ arguments in particular are not without their flaws. Take the statement Ian quoted there a few comments back: he starts off from the position that any intelligent agent that might have been involved in the creation of life on Earth must be “supernatural”. Oh? Why’s that, then? Couldn’t it just be vastly smarter and more capable than us? And isn’t that exactly the sort of baseless assertion he accuses religion of?
I always turn off when I see that word. Nature is simply what exists. If that intelligence exists, whether it’s the omnipresent, omniscient God(s) of the main theistic religions or Slartibartfast and his colleagues on Magrathea, it’s part of nature. I know this is the position of Protestant Christianity. I get the impression Islam goes the other way. But have the Dawkinsites even bothered to investigate the ideas they criticize? I often get the impression they never read past the headlines.
Don’t get me wrong: as I say, I agree: slow, grinding, evolution over millions of years is by far the best, most coherent, and likely explanation for the way we see the Earth today. But there are much better arguments for it than, “Well, stands to reason, dunnit?”
I’ve never read Behe or Dembski, so can’t really claim to know much about ID, but my understanding is that ID is not really science – rather it is philosophy based on scientific observations. After all, it is addressing a philosophical question (the existence of God) rather than a scientific question. The problem arises because, as a movement, it is extremely sceptical about current scientific orthodoxy.
Hence, while it may not be correct to lump the proponents of ID together with AGW sceptics – their opponents do tend to see them in much the same way, and tend to treat them in much the same way. In that respect at least, Booker is quite correct.
Except I didn’t say. Note to self: re-read comments after editing. 🙂
RW, no, the idea is to block trolls, “race realists” and sundry other bores, lunatics and lowlifes.
Don’t quite get this JP, particularly given my original posts. We all appreciate the good work you guys put in to preserve us from malwords – I was just pointing out that someone is enjoying their omnipotence. And why shouldn’t they – the bot message was quite amusing. And the editor seems to agree with me.
I am curious though as to why “race realism” is singled out, what you mean by it and how your bot queries it? Cultural realism has figured quite a bit on this blog and, given we live in a multicultural society, it would be odd to thought police this out. Race is not synonymous with culture but behavioural DNA would IMHO be an interesting thread. Although Larry Summers thought so to and was thrown out by the PC brigade.
CC.
In reply to my question, which you quoted:
“How can order occur spontaneously in randomness?”
You replied:
“Easy, through the input of energy from an external source.
Universally entropy increases, but locally it decreases. We see this principle in practice all day, every day.
Energy from the sun powers an increase in complexity all around you – no conflict with thermodynamics at all.”
Thereby apparently dismissing my question, but which I have never seen answered.
I simply pointed out that your answer above does not answer the question because randomness is not, surely, going to become ordered without some external input.
It can certainly appear to exhibit ordered qualities from time to time. Such is randomness.
But it can never become an ordered state by itself.
I am sorry if my response:
“You are simply drawing the borders at a convenient distance and outsourcing the assumption!”
seemed to lack respect.
You were referring to a closed system.
My question would be, how does/did that system of order come into being?
Rob Fisher, that is my point. Those appearances of order are in fact random events.
A conclusion to that is that what we think of as being order is in fact randomness – there is no order.
John B, if you want to know where there are stars, the answer is gravity. Because mass attracts mass, a uniform distribution of matter is not stable; it will inevitably form clumps, which get heated by gravitational collapse. From there, more well understood physics leads to the formation of stars, around which conditions are far from thermodynamical equilibrium.
Ultimately, gravity breaks our intuitions about entropy and order because when gravity is significant, the energy is unbounded below. There is no minimum energy state, unlike the situations for which our intuition developed, so things act contrary to our expectations. Put two stars together, and the hot star will get hotter while the cold one gets colder, completely unlike normal systems, all because of gravity.
Life on earth is possible because of the energy flow from the sun, driving things away from pure randomness, and the creation of stars out of an initially smooth distribution of matter is an inevitable consequence of the way gravity works.
The notion that some non-supernatural being intervened in the development of life on Earth falls under panspermia, but all it does is push the question back a step. How did the alien responsible for the intelligent design come into being?
More practically, the universe simply isn’t old enough for that kind of thing to be plausible. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. If the aliens weren’t themselves the product of intelligent design, there evolution must have taken significantly longer than our planet’s history, starting at least 10 billion years ago, but then the universe was only about 3 billion years old. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, they were all much rarer back then, because there had not been time enough to bake them in stars, and without those elements, or any of the others save hydrogen and helium, there’s little chance of life.
It could be argued that the intelligent designers were themselves intelligently designed, but if we’re not invoking the supernatural, that regress must terminate within the physical universe, and the deeper it goes, the less time there is for natural processes to produce the undesigned designer.
Robert.
How does the attraction inherent in mass come about? From where comes gravity? Are you not assuming it to be a given. Something that we accept exists without questioning how it, itself, comes about?
Even in our day to day experience:
The natural realm moves from life to death. Things are born then they die. They do not go from death to life. Everything physical falls apart. In the physical, things do not spontaneously come together in an ordered form. Life, or any form of order, is a totally contrary force to natural events, which tend to cessation, dissipation, to death. Life is a concentration of resources. In the natural world things tend to dissipate, not concentrate. Life is not natural. Life is un-natural. It is against nature. It is against logic and reason. The natural world, or should I say the physical world? – is diametrically opposed to life. The physical world is about death.
Life is supernatural ?
John, you are confusing a general principle with specifics. That is, you are confusing what generally happens with what always happens.
The 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics is simply an observation of the general. It is the observation that there are more disordered states available to a system than ordered states. It thus follows that usually, a system in a state we considered ordered will evolve to a less ordered state because there are more disordered states- magnitudes more- than ordered ones. But there is no obligation for it to do so; it may randomly wander into a more ordered state.
You must agree that some ordered states can perpetuate themselves (by generating disorder elsewhere). A human sperm and egg can make a whole baby by purely natural means. That is because the sperm and egg are examples of those special ordered states. So the only question is how the first sperm and egg arise; after that, everything can be explained by natural laws.
But as explained above, there is no mystery. Systems which are disordered will occasionally wander into an ordered state; if that corresponds to a self-perpetuating order, you have life. It only has to happen once, and then life persists. No magic required.
From where comes gravity?
There’s a few theories on this but nothing sure at the moment, but I’ll have to say that we’ll probably come up with a completely naturalistic answer to this one too.
The best you’re going to get, for an argument for a “god” figure is that the universe appears the way it is because that’s how it’s set up. Of course, that cuts both ways because that also could be entirely random – if it didn’t look like it does then we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place.
I simply pointed out that your answer above does not answer the question because randomness is not, surely, going to become ordered without some external input.
Snowflakes. Is somebody designing them individually, or does the order of a snowflake arise through purely boring reactions across a change in thermal gradient in the right conditions?
The other problem is that humans are REALLY bad at dealing with what is random and what is not. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy)
Anyway, fascinating discussion, which does nothing to change my position that the Climate is Changing and that, in balance of probability humans are the cause of the current changes, and, even if we aren’t, burning hydrocarbons is a dumb as bricks way of running an advanced industrial society…
On that note… http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/09/solar-roadways-fix-the-power-grid-and-crumbling-pavement/
I love the future.
Then, Ian, you are saying what we perceive as order is, in fact, randomness that appears ordered to us because it meets certain criteria.
A self perpetuating order initially caused by an accidental set of circumstances? The very fact of an accident being able to occur indicates order/criteria.
The natural state of everything is total stillness (nirvana?). A complete absence of movement as everything resolves back to stasis. Or doesn’t leave that state in the first place.
Any movement or energy is the manifestation of order. Of something happening. An interaction of systems.
Where did that something arise, and why?
I am not saying any of this indicates the existence of God. I am saying that materialist realists take the most amazing leap of faith when they presume that anything can be considered anything but random.
But here we are.
John, you are using rather strange definitions of words like “Order”. Movement or energy isn’t order; more energetic states are more disordered by common definition. A box of gas is, the overwhelming majority of the time, entirely disordered. If you compress it, you will induce more order (and it will get hot, which is the entropy increasing elsewhere). The natural state is not “total stillness”; in fact at the particle level you can never get that. There is movement even at absolute zero.
I hope you won’t find this patronising; but to discuss these issues you really need to read some physics books in order to understand the terminology and the basic physical concepts. Your questions can’t really be answered because you’re unwittingly wandering in and out of metaphor. It is like somebody trying to discussion Christian doctrine without having any understanding of concepts like the Trinity, sin, predestination and so on. As a result, your musings read to an extent as word salad.
It’s fine to be patronised as long as I am not required to conform. 🙂
To keep it simple and avoid risky explorations:
Any action, energy, mass, any manifestation of anything is the result of the interaction of difference.
In randomness everything tends to sameness.
How can order (definition; difference) arise spontaneously in randomness?
Or, to keep it simpler, what came before the Big Bang?
There is no “before the Big Bang”. Time began at the Big Bang. It’s like asking what is below the centre of the Earth.
None of which has anything to do with the origin or development of life on Earth, long after the Big Bang.
It is the singularity? Planck’s Wall?
I don’t think we can assume anything about the beginning of time.
I know I’m late here, but what a crock of sh*t this post is. You obviously have no idea what Intelligent Design is all about. ID most assuredly cannot be, let me repeat that, cannot be equated with Creationism. To oversimplify, ID is a scientific examination, using recent scientific research, particularly through an examination of genomes, of the validity of the three pillars of Darwinism: common descent, natural selection, and random mutation.
Unfortunately, those scientists who have the guts to fight the Darwinist absolutists have shown that random mutations, even over billions years, can only explain a tiny portion of evolutionary change. These scientists do not purport to replace Darwin’s theory. They only state that as more and more information becomes available from scientific research, the 19th Century Darwinian position, supported particularly by Richard Dawkins and his ilk, is sinking fast. I suggest you read – what a shock, actually read – some of the literature from what I would call Darwinian critics, such as Michael J. Behe Gerald L. Schroeder, (since you are obviously an elitist, both with PhDs) It will open your eyes to new ways of seeing the truth.
BTW the visible disdain, bordering on hatred, that Orthodox Libertarians have for those who are examining the basic tenets of Darwinism is astonishing. Apparently any words of negativity against the sainted Darwin is mistakenly perceived by those like you as a vote for Creationism. And heaven forbid, a libertarian can’t believe in God (wrong!). You couldn’t be any more mistaken and really need to get educated on the results of modern genome research. The outcome, in spite of the resistance of Orthodox Libertarians and their atheist/leftist allies, will be the “evolution” of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution in response to these findings. Get over it.
Boqueronman, I know of no one here who is arguing that the Darwinian theory is beyond criticism, improvement, or even abandonment if the evidence so warrants. Indeed, most commenters here seem to expressly acknowledge that the theory isn’t perfect. But your description of ID would have us believe that it is only a refutation of Darwinism. However, as I understand it, ID is also a claim that since Darwinism is (purportedly) “refuted”, the only other possible explanation for our existence is the action of a Creator of some kind. That is not a scientific doctrine; at the best it is a “god of the gaps” (with all those “gaps” rapidly closing), and at worst it’s simple religious faith dressed up in ill-fitting clothes and a bit too much rouge. Refuting Darwin is fine, indeed useful, but until you come up with either a credible non-supernatural alternative or demonstrable (non-inductive) evidence of a creator it won’t fit the definition of a “scientific” theory.
And there are lots of religious libertarians; I know many. True, many libertarians are atheists or agnostics, but far from all. Religious belief has absolutely nothing to do with libertarianism (“orthodox” or otherwise).
Natalie,
My point is that religious beliefs of any kind are immaterial so long as the scientist does good science (or engineer does good engineering). If a bridge builder builds the best bridges ever but worships a cabbage on saturdays, his cabbage cult is really immaterial to his vocation and shouldn’t be used to judge him professionally.
Now, if he preaches the holy cabbage verses at work, thats something else altogether. One thing that does annoy me in researching aerospace topics is I frequently come across papers authored by US Air Force officers who invariably have a dedication page that in addition to the USAF, their wife and kids, professors, etc, they dedicate the paper to God.
Ethically, these things are boundary issues and reflect a person who can’t or won’t respect the boundaries between the different spheres of their lives or those of others. It is as bad as your family doctor asking your kids how many guns you own or their teachers investigating your family recycling habits.
By the same token, those who seek to drag their subordinates personal lives into judging them professionally should be sued and sued hard. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” isn’t just a good idea for one’s sexual preference, but for your politics, religion, etc.
CIngram, for further proof of reincarnation, look up the case of Ma Tin Aung Myo. She is a Burmese woman who is a lesbian, but she knows why she is a lesbian- she was born in 1953, but recalled memories of having been a Japanese soldier who was killed in WW2. This does not seem like the usual fantasy that children have, because things japanese were distrusted after the war. She could have fantasised about being a Burmese hero, or resistance fighter, instead.
This case shows why it is good to suppress our memories of our past lives, lest they dominate our current bodies.
As for bible texts supporting reincarnation, read Deuteronomy chapter five, verses one to five. What does Moses mean here? Or what does the author want us to read into Moses sentences? Moses seems to be saying that these people had been with him on Mount Sinai, forty years ago. but the trek in the wilderness had been to replace that generation with a new generation! Are these the same souls, in new bodies? Jewish mystics think so, at any rate.
If you google for ‘Ma Tin Aung Myo’, you might want to add ‘rebirth’, or ‘japanese soldier’, to narrow your choices.
Not sure of your point, Nuke. We all get “reborn” when our constituent elements are redistributed throughout the food chain, some possibly becoming part of another human. (Or, wait long enough, and our atomic and subatomic particles will someday form part of a new sun or planet.) But so what? If there is “something else” (a soul, or whatever) which is reincarnated but it has no memory of its prior lives, what does that matter? It’s not me, at least not a me I would recognize. No more “me” than are those recycled constituent elements. If this is “reincarnation” it’s a total dead end, a waste of intellectual time. Without continuity of memory it’s meaningless.
I believe that Intelligent Design is theologically suspect. I believe in a God who wishes to preserve free choice and thus acts to keep it possible for rational people to choose wrongly. The question of whether ID can possibly be good science is different. I think that it can be.
The experiments are long, tedious, and most likely very expensive. They involve mapping out all possible intermediate states between an organism without, let’s say a flagella, and one with. If there is no intermediate path between the two where all the intermediates are evolutionarily functional enough to survive long enough to “get past” that particular stage then you could scientifically say that you’ve discovered irreducible complexity and ID has thus been proven.
It is very unfortunate that ID proponents do not flesh out this and other experimental pathways so that ID is more than an interesting thought experiment. I understand the reasons though. It is quite likely that the same barriers the AGW people have put in front of scientific skeptics would be placed in front of truly scientific ID.
Laird, I am speaking of souls, which I believe to be composed of a finer grade of matter- perhaps the same type of matter that is slowing down the Voyager spacecraft.
As for memory, it is not totally lost, but it is usually more in the background, providing deja-vu moments. If it were too much in the foreground, you might not be able to change in this life- think how many bad habits you might have forgotten about! In this life, I do not smoke, but I might have been a heavy smoker in my last life. When you have enough willpower to overcome bad habits, then total recall might be a good option. And some impersonal memories can, and do, come through as freak talents- the author of Rosemary’s Baby was inspired to write it because his untaught son had great natural talent on the piano, sounding exactly like ‘Fats Waller’.
Have foot, will put in mouth. I don’t mean ‘Rosemary’s Baby, the horror story! I mean the book that was made into a movie, with anthony Hopkins as the ‘mad’ neighbour who believes that his dead child has returned as his neighbour’s own daughter- and it turns out he is right. The name of the Author and the book escape me- does anyone else know?
Bridey Murphy? 🙂
Could be, Laird! I’m glad one of us has infallible memory!
That brings me to another point. Most cases were people claim to recall past lives are of lives very close in time to their current life. There was only about a decade between the Japanese soldier getting shot, and Ma Tin Aung Myo being born.
You said that memory is important, but how specific does it have to be? Can you recall, right now, what you were doing exactly ten years ago today? I can’t and i doubt if you could, but we still believe that we are the same person. If souls spend more than one decade before returning, perhaps the memories just naturally become part of the background- the same as your memories within this physical life.
Well, Nuke, I’m not convinced. I don’t believe in souls or reincarnation, and certainly don’t see the point of reincarnation if the prior lives are nothing but “background noise”. Still, if you do I’m happy for you. I’ll just leave it there.
I was not trying to convert you, but i was trying to explain my own position. I just hope you keep an open mind. Next time you see someone born with a talent, or born exceptionally goodlooking, at least consider that the Universe could be fair, and Karma could be how justice is meted out. And that memories could show as rogue talents- or disrupted sexual identities. the soul in Ma Tin Aung Myo’s body should have spent more time out of a body before rebirthing, and would then have had less trouble adjusting to that body. (Though we would then have had one less case to consider!)