Since Charles over at LGF was kind enough to link to my blog in this article, and identified me as an “anti-intelligent design” blogger, I figured it would be best to write something about the issue (other than commending Charles for his similar stance, as I did below). Since I discuss this issue in my Introduction to Philosophy class, I fortunately have some comments readily at hand…
While the intelligent design movement that concerns Charles focuses on the theory of evolution, arguments from (apparent) design to the conclusion that God exists date back at least to Aquinas, and the earliest ones had little (if anything) to do with biological evolution per se. Aquinas, for instance, argued from an Aristotelian conception of all things natural having a purpose. His argument, very roughly, went like this:
1) Natural things (even inanimate objects) nearly always act regularly, in such a way as to produce the best results.
2) So, natural things act purposefully, to achieve some goal.
3) If something acts purposefully, it either has a mind, or is designed by something that does.
4) Natural things (such as inanimate objects) do not have minds.
Conclusion: So such natural things must be designed by something that does have a mind (God)
The problem with this argument is that (2) doesn’t follow from (1), and there is no independent reason to think it’s true – at least short of accepting a Darwinian notion of “purpose” (biological function, where ‘function’ is defined in part by procreative usefulness), which would in any case apply only to biological organisms, rather than to all natural things.
A more recent argument for intelligent design of the universe which is not limited to the purported design of living creatures has to do with the extremely narrow range of physical constants that allow our sort of life to exist:
1) Life would never have evolved if certain physical constants had been slightly different.
2) There are only three possible explanations of the observed values of those constants: physical laws, sheer luck, or intelligent design.
3) Known physical laws do not explain the observed values.
4) Given all of the possibilities, it is highly unlikely that the observed values are the result of luck.
Conclusion: So the observed values are the result of intelligent design.
The problems with this argument are not as obvious as those with Aquinas’s, since this argument does not presuppose Aristotelian physics. However, there are several objections, one of which is, to my mind, fairly conclusive-
Objection to premise 2: this list might not be exhaustive; there might be more explanations (admittedly, this is not a particularly strong objection…). Objection to premise 3: maybe unknown physical laws can explain the observed values (this is a stronger objection, but still based on an assumption of ignorance). Objection to premise 4′s supporting the conclusion: even if the values are unlikely, this is no reason to believe in intelligent design. This is the strongest objection, but it calls for some explanation…
Suppose that, using a net, you catch 100 fish in a pond, all of which are larger than 6 inches. Does this data support the view that most fish in the pond are larger than 6 inches? Not if your net can’t catch smaller fish… This is known as a “selection effect”: limitations of a data collection process limits the reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from the data.
A similar limitation has to do with any single observation, in isolation from other observations. For instance, we observe life on Earth. Does this imply that life is probably found on Earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe? Well, not by itself. The problem is that our single datum entitles us to conclude neither that our situation is typical, nor that it is atypical. The point is that we may be be prejudiced by the fact that no matter how unlikely life on Earth-like planets might be, we happen to live on one that has life. Unlikely events do happen.
A similar sort of “observation selection effect” applies to the observed values of the physical constants, but here the problem is even more serious. For while we may someday have the data to be able to judge whether life on Earth is likely or unlikely (after we have observed a large number of such planets), there is only one universe to ever observe. So even if the values of the physical constants are highly unlikely, they give us no good reason to believe in intelligent design. After all, the constants having those values (or at least falling within a narrow range of values) are preconditions of there being any observations (by creatures like us) at all! We would have to observe them, whether they were likely or unlikely. Now, if they are likely (that is, if unknown physical laws make it the case that any physical universe must have similar values), this is obviously no reason to believe in intelligent design. But, less obviously, even if they are unlikely, this is also no reason to believe in intelligent design. Here’s a simple lottery analogy: it is always unlikely that the winner of a fair lottery is the winner. But this certainly doesn’t give us any reason to believe that an intelligent designer picked the winner.
Right. Anyone with half a brain knows you can’t prove the existence of God. Either the universe was created by a conscious being or it wasn’t. Which it was will never be known by any living person. If you believe that it was created by a conscious entity, as I do, that’s fine, but it takes a leap of faith. If you believe that it wasn’t, well you’ll never know if that’s true either. If you never consider the question, or never make up your mind, then that’s fine too. Welcome to the world of unanswerable questions!
I am not impressed with Aquinas. His Apologia pro vita sua is nothing but a collection of straw men that he proceeds to knock down.
Regarding the anthropic argument, another objection to statement 4 is that it doesn’t follow from probability theory. What has happened has a probability of exactly 1.0.
As to the “observation selection effect”, note that if the initial conditions were not such as to permit the development of intelligent life, then there would be no one to ask questions like this.
One more point: as to the more recent argument, even if the argument is valid, the only God it proves exists is the God of Deism.
If the government runs a lottery with a probability of 1 over 10 to the 32nd power of a winner, and the ticket is won by some guy in Peoria, I would consider that signficant evidence of a god, though the god’s name might be Blagojevich.
Declaration of interest: I am a protestant evolutionary biologist. Larry tries gallantly and in civil fashion to overthrow the anthropic principle. But it is surely at least surprising that the laws of physics must be not only tuned, but extremely finely tuned, to allow complex life-forms (not necessarily just humans) to exist and evolve in our universe. One could invoke the multiverse alternative; but since this is virtually beyond any hard observational test, a strong preference for it – in the present state of knowledge at any rate – is as metaphysical as creationism in my book. Larry’s approach also simply takes for granted the existence of a cosmos and the existence of remarkable laws for it. Finally: if, as Larry apparently believes, we are just molecular mechanisms, we have no free will, and therefore no basis for ethics or reason, both of which require free will to make good choices over bad ones. I do not mean that sceptics never behave morally or reasonably – that would be quite unfair. I mean that there is no theoretical basis in their materialistic and deterministic belief system for ‘the better angels of (their) nature’.
The objection to (4) is not logical. Yes, it is necessary that the unlikely event occurred in order for us to be here to ask questions about it. But that fact does not make the event any more likely to have happened when its occurrence was still uncertain.
Take this example: You are standing blindfolded in front of a firing squad of 20 expert riflemen. They all aim at you and fire at the same time. After the sound of the gunshots you are still standing there. Now you can come to two conclusions:
1) You were exceptionally lucky that all of them missed.
2) Somebody tampered with the event, by giving them blanks, or something equivalent.
Obviously (2) is most likely explanation by a good measure. The fact that you are “around to ask the question” does not make (1) any more likely than it was before they pulled their triggers.
Hi!
I’m another blogger to whom Charles has kindly linked.
The argument from the narrow range of constants or other parameters within which life is possible is one I’ve taken to calling the Savage Curtain argument, or the Squire of Gothos argument. In both of these Star Trek episodes, the Enterprise detects a habitable area on a planet that is otherwise deadly to human life. The immediate conclusion is that some intelligent agent is working to make that area habitable, and that’s where the team should beam down to find intelligent life.
Of course, this only applies where we can see the rest of the planet and determine that it’s grossly unsuited to life. And furthermore, the normal range of the environment on the rest of the planet doesn’t overlap the parameters in the habitable zone one bit.
In the case of our universe, we have no idea at all what the range of values for any physical constants may be. If we increased the gravitational constant some amount, the universe would burn out before life could arise; decrease it by some other amount, and stars would never form. But does that range represent one billionth of the possible range, or 99.9999% of it? We just don’t know.
I’ve also suggested in blog posts and other essays that maybe a Designer set the parameters of the universe at the moment of the Big Bang. Or maybe those parameters were determined by pre-existing laws of nature, which could themselves be eternal.
One one hand, an eternal Designer setting the laws of nature to allow for life to exist; on the other hand, eternal laws of nature which allow for life, with no designer needed.
I know of no scientific way to decide between those two.
I guess I’ll just have to rely on faith.
I share your view that the apparent unlikeliness of the parameters of life does not prove intelligent design, mainly because we do not have sufficient data to judge such unlikeliness.
However it should be equally apparent that we also do not have sufficient data to infer that life or the development of species is purely spontaneous i.e. not designed.
The problem in the debate regarding evolution/design is the failure to recognize that underlying the concept of data is a belief by which we determine what is data and what is not. As recognized by Kuhn in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, a belief underlying the scientific method, is the principle of regularity. Science is merely a method by which we identify regularities in our experience. Science does not establish that the only reality is that which manifests in regularities. Other realities which do not manifest as regularities may also exist, but are not counted as real by science.
The problem with evolutionists is that that they don’t distinguish between belief and scientific data. They claim that only natural regularities explain the phenomena of the development of life. In fact they can only claim that certain observed natural regularities exist. They can’t claim (from observed data) that nonregular realities don’t exist. That is a belief, and the basic definition of religion is a system of beliefs. Evolutionists are intertwining their beliefs with the teaching of science, when it comes to evolution.
I am sceptical of the effort to prove intelligent design from observed data. However, science cannot avoid being intertwined with belief systems. Accordingly when teaching science, it is fair to recognize the different results that may obtain from differing belief systems. More specifically, it should be made clear that science does not rule out intelligent design, certain belief systems do.
Dear Larry A. Herzberg
Humberto R. Maturana, in his essay, ‘Biology of Language: the Epistemology of Reality” that appears in the book “Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought: essays in honor of Eric Lenneberg,” editor George Miller, Academic Press, New York 1978, makes a persuasive argument that the universe is a mechanistic, deterministic universe and there is no chance. Maturana shows that a phenomenon that a normal observer believes to be creative or novel is in fact the effect of the observer’s ignorance. I am not sure how this idea will fit into your Philosophy 101 lecture, but I thought I’d mention this thought in connection with your discussion of the values of the constants that seem to determine the existence of life in the universe.
There is one physical truth that seems to deify accountability but it is absolutely necessary for the existence of life on earth. A physics student in high school could assure you that most material objects become more dense as their temperature decreases. This is true, even of water, except at the freezing point where liquid water becomes solid. At that point the solid ice is less dense than the water from which it was formed. If that fact were not true, the ice would sink to the bottom of the vessel or lake in which it was formed. As a practical matter, if water, as it becomes a solid, was more dense than the water from which it was formed, eventually, all of the bodies of water on the planet would become solid ice from the bottom of the body of water eventually to the top, and life as we know it could not exist.
I mention this in passing as you might wish to incorporate the enigma into your lecture. Thank you for the interesting commentary.
Sincerely yours,
Carl Raymond Crites
This last portion is a zero sum. We know.. we don’t know… we don’t have nearly enough information to make predictions, but we do know that we’re unlikely to gain enough information to make predictions.
“4: even if the values are unlikely, this is no reason to believe in intelligent design. ”
Umm, the way you worded it, yes it is. It’s a reason to believe that that choice is better than the other choices — again, based on your own words. Now, you worded the conclusion, “So such natural things must be designed by something that does have a mind (God) .” But that’s not the way it’s usually stated. It’s usually stated more like “Conclusion: So such natural things are most likely designed by something that does have a mind (God).”
In conclusion, you have effectively shot down a poorly worded conclusion.
Thanks to all of the commentators for your points so far.
I have some sympathy for Ben’s fideism… as long as we define “faith in a proposition” somewhat differently than “belief in a proposition”, involving different normative standards (etc.).
I also agree with David’s points up to the point of “Finally:…”. First, I don’t believe that we are just “molecular mechanisms”, and I doubt that any contemporary physicist does either. In any case, identifying something as physical does not in any way de-mystify it (in my view), since we are far from having a satisfactory theory of observable phenomena, and may well be cognitively incapable of ever developing one. I certainly don’t believe that materialism and free will are incompatible with each other, since materialism – after quantum theory – is no longer deterministic. However, any satisfactory definition of ‘free will’ goes well beyond physical indeterminism. Finally, as a rationalist about ethics, I strenuously disagree that materialists and/or atheists have less of a basis for for moral or ethical behavior than do theists. If you do believe in God, you still must choose which religious text to follow. That amounts to a choice of an ethical theory that could be adopted without God. And if, as I believe, there is no theoretical reason to believe that God exists (as ‘God’ is usually defined), it seems to me that outsourcing moral theory to God amounts to (perhaps inadvertently) trying to escape from the responsibility of having to think hard about the moral judgments we all make (at least in regard to the behavior of others). Only rationality provides a reliable test of consistency, and upholds the ideal of an objective point of view that entails impartiality – a hallmark of justice.
But, as they say, the issues are complex, and can’t be adequately dealt with in a blog post.
If everythihng started at the big bang, and a massice explosion is necessarily a chaotic event, can anyone identify a single other chaotic event that ever resulted in fine-tuned ORDER?
And if random mutations resulted in incremental or significant changes to DNA that then expressed themselves as, say color-detecting eyes, would not that random mutation actually have had to happen simultaneously in thousands of ‘beings’ for that change to survive an otherwise ‘violent’ and predatory environment (survival of the fittest). If only one ‘being’ exhibited the random change, that being had to, throughout its life, survive all manner of threats in order to mature to adulthood, and then the random change had to be dominant over the countervailing gene of its mate so as to survive into the next generation. That, on a probabalistic basis, seems to be nonsense.
I find it much more likely that an intelligent being, for me that is God, designed and created a world that is linked and shares a commonality in genes and structure and function, so that man, as he develops more rigorous and refined techniques of data gathering and research, is able to understand how all life is linked together
Well, you all seem to be well-behaved and intelligent types, so I’ve turned off first-comment-approval for now; I have to go to bed.
I’ll be interested in reading all of your comments as soon as I get a chance. Thanks for the discussion.
Larry:
Since you say, “since materialism – after quantum theory – is no longer deterministic…” it appears that you may not be familiar with the work of Nobel Laureate Gerardus ‘t Hooft, who theorizes that under our workable quantum theory is a genuinely deterministic physics at the planck length. Following Maturana’s reasoning, our quantum theory is just a procedure out of ignorance that works reasonably well.
Frank Barron at Chapter 24, in his book, “Creativity and Personal Freedom,” D. Van Nostrand Company, New York, 1968, states that “acceptance of determinism as a working hypothesis is basic to psychology as a science.” He then argues that science and physics are in a different universe than the human acceptance of creativity and free will as a psychological “truth.”
We can both buy that, can’t we?
Carl-
Sure, I’m happy to buy that with you… at least provisionally, since I’m not clear about what Barron means by “psychological truth” as opposed to simply “truth”…
I am aware that there are deterministic interpretations of quantum theory, but I’m not up on the current state of the debate (nor could I probably understand it, given my lack of training in the requisite math). What I do believe, with William James (for instance), is that the issue of determinism versus indeterminism – in its simplest form, at least – is not a scientific issue, since there is no experiment that could bear on it. Rather, it seems to me to be a metaphysical issue… Namely, whether what does happen MUST happen, or whether something other than what does happen COULD happen. And when it comes to metaphysical issues, it seems to me that intuitions of various sorts (linguistic and, in this case, phenomenological and/or normative) ought to guide us, if anything should…
Free will does not require indeterminism. I’m inclined to think (with Taylor, for instance) that it requires a certain sort of determinism: an agent’s ability to determine her own action… That would mean that to have free will, an agent (rather than an event) would have to have the ability to initiate a causal chain…
Now I really do have to hit the sack… Goodnight!
It seems pretty clear that evolution happens, but why must it be the ONLY thing that happens? The alternative to some sort of weak anthropic principle/intelligent design explanation is that there is an infinitude of possible universes and we just got lucky. This seems rather lame.
There is stuff, and it does some interesting things. The notion that clouds of hydrogen can spontaneously compose symphonies (Darwinism) strikes me as even more question-begging than fundamentalism. At least fundamentalists acknowledge the improbability of the universe we observe.
People in every age believe they have a pretty good model of reality. These models amuse their descendants. We seem to be smart enough to recognize the problem but not smart enough to realize that we don’t know enough yet to solve it. Some humility is in order on both sides of this argument. Bad answers tend to postpone good ones.
To me it seems that there is a problem of limited perception in terms of “unlikely”.
If you look outside on a clear night you see a great many stars. Even in the best conditions (without urban light pollution) the number of stars you see is a fraction of those that exist. This is something we know from astronomy. We also now know that a great many of them (and perhaps the majority) have planets orbiting them.
From a standpoint of probabilities, one could look at these many billions of star systems and not find it entirely unlikely that a few would have “the constants” in place that would allow for life to exist.
But if you are an observer confined to one such planet with limited observation of others, one could suppose that the advent of life on that particular planet was “unlikely”.
>>Here’s a simple lottery analogy: it is always unlikely that the winner of a fair lottery is the winner. But this certainly doesn’t give us any reason to believe that an intelligent designer picked the winner<<
Maybe not, but you must admit that someone created the game and established the rules!
I agree you can’t prove God exists. However, the analogy of a lottery isn’t a good one. The odds of winning the lottery are small, whereas the odds of life starting by chance are infinitely small. It would be better to compare the “likeliness of life” to rolling double sixes 50000 times in succession.
Just out of curiosity; how would you answer Fred Reed’s objections to evolution? He’s a curmudgeon, not a creationist. You can find the relevant post here:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/EvolutionMonster.shtml
This last portion is a zero sum. We know.. we don’t know… we don’t have nearly enough information to make predictions, but we do know that we’re unlikely to gain enough information to make predictions.
Jim Brock:
Not Aquinas, but Newman.
A further objection to premise #3:
“3) Known physical laws do not explain the observed values.”
The known physical laws (ie. relativity, quantum physics, quantum electro-dynamics, the Standard Model) do indeed explain very well nearly all the observable values of the universe. While there remain some unanswered questions, over the past 100 years or so modern physics has been extraordinarily successful in discovering the way in which the universe works and in defining these laws in a consistent formal language, mathematics.
sam hall:
thanks for the link. I read it and felt like I could breathe air for the first time.
Unto Tom Connors:
I think you’re getting things a bit backward there. (I don’t know if Kuhn does or not — I’m relying on what you say he says.)
Data is from the Latin word for “given”. It’s what we can observe. Period. If we can’t observe it (see, hear, feel, smell, taste), it’s not data. If we can observe it, then it is, even if what we observe is someone walking on water or rising from the dead.
Where regularity comes in is when science tries to account for data — to fit it into a pattern or a model. Newton’s laws of motion, for example, were Newton’s attempt to fit his data into a pattern. It was spectacularly successful, but ultimately, incomplete.
Now, in order to find a pattern, it helps if we have more than one instance of some observation. The process of fitting things to a pattern doesn’t work very well for one-off events. However, science doesn’t claim one-off events aren’t real, merely that they’re unexplained.
Unto Carl Raymond Crites:
Quite true. However, there is an underlying mechanism which is well understood.
First, a nitpick: Water is at its densest at a temperature of 4°C (39°F). Above and below this temperature, it becomes less dense, and this fact is responsible for the annual “turn-over” in higher latitude lakes.
Above 4°C, water becomes denser because its molecules are moving more slowly, and knocking each other apart less energetically. However, at 4°C, we start getting ice crystals forming. These form briefly, but while they exist, they take up room in the water, making it less dense. The structure of the ice crystal, due to hydrogen bonding, is more open than the closest packing of water molecules. Finally, at the freezing point, the energy level is low enough to allow the formation of large expanses of ice crystal, and water begins to freeze.
Why hydrogen and oxygen bond in this particular way is a whole ‘nother story, whose proper understanding depends on quantum mechanics. However, the fact that it drops out of an application of general properties for all matter tells us no one needed to design in an exception to any laws of nature.
Unto Steve:
Actually, the big bang was a highly ordered state. Everything was packed into a very small volume, and thus forced to a very high energy level. Throughout time, as the universe has expanded, we’ve had a process of energy running downhill. Any time we have energy running downhill, we have the opportunity for spontaneous order to arise.
In a way, Charles Darwin and Adam Smith made the same observation: Order arises spontaneously in a large enough system, without any one entity intending to create it. Religious fundamentalists hate Darwin because he showed where design in life can arise without the need for a designer; Leftists hate Adam Smith because he showed where design in an economy can arise without the need for a central planner.
That’s actually a question of statistics. Show your calculations.
Living things make copies of themselves. That’s their job.
A beneficial mutation will, if its carrier lives to reproduce, show up in multiple individuals of the next generation. On average, if a mutation confers an advantage, then on average, it will increase in a population.
Now granted, this may be a tiny advantage compared with the other trevails in an organism’s life, but casinos derive a very large, very predictable income from only a tiny advantage for the “house”.
Unto Carl Raymond Crites and Larry:
Yes, there are attempts being made at making quantum mechanics ultimately deterministic. The world (and the Nobel Prize committee) are waiting for someone to make exact predictions in any process governed by quantum indeterminacy. The first person to predict, for example, where on a plate of film the wave function of a photon will collapse, will get the rapt attention of the scientific community.
Unto Don Dixon:
Right now, though, the statistics seem to show no difference between what we observe and what we would expect from unguided physical and chemical processes. Mutation, for example, happens with a certain probability, in certain directions allowed by the makeup of the system. There have been some hints of other processes at work, such as a sort-of-Lamarckian transfer of acquired traits to the genome, but if they exist, they’re not very influential, to say the least.
Unto Emphasis:
OK, take a lottery game where six numbers are pulled out of fifty numbers. Who established the rule that any particular six numbers had only one chance in some sixteen million of being drawn?
Forget intelligent design or evolution, it’s the ET aliens who came to the world and manipulated ancient hominids into humans over the course of several thousands years.
Sam Hall-
Thanks for the link. While I haven’t had time to read it carefully, here are a few thoughts-
First, I agree that no one knows how life came about. We may never know (although there are some good theories being tested, I believe). But this gives us no reason whatsoever to believe that life came about as a result of supernatural causes. “It came about accidentally or supernaturally” is a false dilemma. If it the origin of life has a natural scientific explanation that cites causal regularities of some sort (and we have no reason to think that it doesn’t), then it did not happen accidentally.
Secondly, putting aside the origin of life, I agree that the theory of evolution continues to be refined, and will never be complete in every respect. Very few natural explanations are ever complete (welcome to science). But if you’re looking for certainty, you should not look to science. What makes science different from religion is that science is always revisable. A theory can always be disconfirmed (setting aside issues related to epistemic holism for the moment) – that’s what makes science a rational, rather than a purely dogmatic, exercise.
Finally, I myself am skeptical of evolutionary explanations of human consciousness and other aspects of human cognition. In this I tend to agree with philosophers such as Jerry Fodor (of Rutgers). See, for instance, his book “The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way”. But if human consciousness is not best explained by evolutionary theory, that does not mean it doesn’t have a scientific (or at least rational) explanation. In my view, adverting to a supernatural agency – one which itself cannot be explained in principle – explains nothing, although it may satisfy certain emotional longings…
July, 1995 marked an event which has since awarded several scientists millions of dollars. The Bose-Einstein Condensation Theory became a PROOF. It’s real, matter breaks down to little wave functions or something that can laser itself, build itself, design itself. It just takes a zero temperature or other condition (some are saying a high frequency condition… see blog.
The point is …. science knows very little … to say that we were designed vs. an accident … as in spontaneous, etc. really may not have all that much standing in that we can’t even figure out why quantum mechanics events can act at an infinite distance. And what is G-d anyway. Who does he answer to? or she? What does it mean to be Designed? Isn’t my design in my DNA? Let that go …. and see where it lands. Free Will, or free Willy? Lots of questions … we can’t know what death is, or when someone begins to exist as a person.
I love the argument for a definition or appreciation of death. Imagine telling a fetus what it is like to breathe air, to use lungs and expand our chest. The infant’s response is to cry. The prior world seemed so perfect. There is terror until a big warm breast is presented and a stroking mother becomes known.
So when we expire, with a Brine Shrimp Experimental electromagnetic pulse as our final passing is captured by a plant leaf and then relayed on another receptor or not. Read Chandra Bose’s Intelligence of Plants, referenced in the Secret Life of Plants by some squirry hippie, with some insignt.
We ignore so much knowledge … because it might hurt our feelings, or pump us up or knock us down. Frankly, acting as if there were at least a Designer who wishes you to act morally is cheap insurance, so that all else being equal, the simplest is the best, there being some coordinated forces that can bring time and space together is possible … that it must be the ultimate, the single the most, the best and only is not for me to determine without any signal.
I’m not good enough at physics to argue the constants … but the fact that they all work together as they exist, is part of the magic that they exist at all.
Some say in the early universe, constants were different or something like that from Paul Dirac. That they have changed is a coming together that all things do to live or don’t do to not live. Those that do not live, do not exist and don’t extend the trait. It’s like the earth can only have about 23 percent oxygen, more and you couldn’t put out a fire, and less you couldn’t breath. There is a concert of animals, plants, and others who maintain this. Even as we poison ourselves. One meteor, however, the size of a small town could stop most everything from living…. but then in time, things spring back …. but different. Does G-d sent the meteor to destroy the dinosaurs… too big, eat too much … not good conversations? Can’t say.
[...] Angle on Intelligent Design Filed under: Posts — buttle @ 11:03 A good take down here by Larry [...]
can anyone identify a single other chaotic event that ever resulted in fine-tuned ORDER?
Water freezing into ice. Waves sorting pebbles on a beach (the heaviest pebbles are closest to the water). Any small physical system that has a lot of energy dumped through it by a larger one will show an increase in order, at the expense of an increase in disorder of the larger system.
Here’s the thing–most people don’t know anything about physics, and don’t have any idea how “likely” a physical proposition is.
For example, there are very good physical reasons why large organisms are multicellular and not one huge cell. It is because cellular “machinery” depends on diffusion to get molecules from where they are to where they need to be. In a cell, the molecules are confined to a small space and so they diffuse around the entire volume of the cell thousands of times in a second. In a one-celled organism the size of an adult human, a molecule would take years or centuries to work its way around the volume by diffusion. If we ever find an amoeba the size of an elephant, than we would know that something is seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe.
Statistical mechanics tells you a great deal about the constraints on possible forms of life. Most people know nothing whatever about statistical mechanics, or any other physics.
Now let’s talk about arguments from “unlikeliness”. First, how can you determine the probability of anything that has only been known to happen once? Secondly, given a great deal of time and a great deal of universe, even extremely unlikely events happen over and over.
There is a big difference between spontaneous origin of life being a billion-to-one proposition, in which case life ought to be extremely common in the universe, and being a 10^23 to 1 proposition. The probability alone means nothing. You need a denominator. How likely is something to happen in a given time and a given volume of space? Multiply that probablity by the age and volume of the universe, and you may find that life has about 1 in 1 chance of appearing spontaneously somewhere, sometime, or 50/50, or 1/1000.
None of this disproves God, of course; it may be His purpose that He can only be known by faith and has set up the universe in this way. It’s a big cosmos and there is room for lots of things, including God.
But God’s purposes are not ours. We may not like His answers. If God wants it to appear as though we are nothing special, evolved from slime and muck, cousins of apes, if you choose to look at it this way, and you don’t feel good about that, why should He care? Remember the voice from the whirlwind that spoke to Job. Did it give comforting reassurances?
“So even if the values of the physical constants are highly unlikely, they give us no good reason to believe in intelligent design.”
“But, less obviously, even if they are unlikely, this is also no reason to believe in intelligent design.”
“But this gives us no reason whatsoever to believe that life came about as a result of supernatural causes.”
Every time Dr. Herzberg made conclusions with this type of wording, I’m reminded of my son during a chess game in which I was way ahead: “Dad, just because you have all your big pieces left and I have only my king and two pawns, this gives us no good reason whatsoever to believe that you’re going to win.”
Physical laws do not define the values of dimesionless constants. The fine structure constant could have been larger, and matter and electromagnetic energy would be much less distinguishable. Complex structures could not form. Or smaller, in which there would be insufficient attraction to form stable particles.
Only in a three dimensional universe are stable orbits possible: planets but more imortantly electrons. Only in a three dimensional universe does light, sound, propogate without distortion.
Complex structures are possible, only because mass and other properties are quantized. All Hydrogen atoms are the same, all carbon atoms the same. If there were a continuous distribution, discrete reproducable molecules, necessary for biology and evolution couldn;t exist.
There really are layers and layers of these coincidences. The probability is unimaginably small.
On the other hand, there may be an infinity of other causally disjoint universes with random pproperties, we are in the lucky little sub-infinity of them with the right properties.
It’s weird.
What a fascinating thread with so many thoughtful contributions and it all started out so innocently! Thanks, Larry! The thinking is so wide range I am having a bit of trouble keeping everything in focus.
First, Karl at 2/26/09 at 9:33 am, thanks for the quick tutorial on water density. My ad hoc allusion was related to the discussion of the improbability of life if certain constants did not have their values in fact realized. It has always seemed to me to be a chicken vs. egg question. If the observed values of the certain constants are indispensable for the existence of the universe and if the universe exists the indispensable values exist, If not, no universe and no discussion of the unrealized values. And Karl, your observation at 2/26/09 at 9:34 is well taken. The experiments that would be required under ‘t Hooft’s theory with manipulation and observation of objects with Planck lenght dimensions seems unimaginable to me.
Larry, getting back to the determinism versus free will question, I would like to note Frank Barron;s assertions and the issue of Philosophical (physical) Truth and Psychological Truth. Beginning at page 292 of his book I cited above, Frank said:
“It appears, of course, that if one admits that all events are absolutely predictable, then one must admit that what one is about to do a moment from now can be stated with certainty; but if this is so, then one cannot do otherwise. And if there is some possible action that one cannot do, then one is not free. One is, in fact, compelled. To deny such compulsion, it appears, one must assert that in principle not all events are predictable. Thus one seems to regain freedom to act differently a moment from now, in spite of all the psychological response-catalogues that can ever be invented. The reply of the philosopher of science to such a position is “Freedom, my eye!” or words to that effect. In the absence of predictability, what obtains is not freedom, but chance. Free will versus determinism is a mistaken opposition. There is chance versus predictability, and there is freedom versus constraint, but freedom and predictability belong to two different universes of discourse. (emphasis crc) In the nature of the case they cannot be brought into any relationship with one another, save the mistaken opposition with which classical philosophy has so long concerned itself. There is no solution to the “problem” of free will versus determinism; there is possible, and proper, only a resolution.
Such, in brief, is the position on the question taken by the modern school of scientific philosophy. Properly stated, the arguments are as long and as complex as they ought to be to resolve so ancient an unsolved problem. However, our purpose here is not to concern ourselves with the free will problem as a vexing philosophical question, but to inquire into its psychological origins in an attempt to explain its lasting popularity ( crc), and the freshness of its appeal to each new generation upon the earth.”
Larry, this is what I was suggesting in the reference to the two kinds of “truth.” (Personally, I do not hold to this idea as I am a very determined determinist, but his idea bears consideration,) Further on, at page 302, Professor Barron expands his ldeas, beginning with the quote that I gave at 2/25/-9 at 10:38 am as follows:
“The acceptance of determinism as a working hypothesis is basic to psychology as a science. When it becomes more than that, as it so often does, and is elevated from modus vivendi to sentiment and then , to principle for one’s whole life, it is surely itself a form of selfimposed restriction upon imagination and the capacity to create.” For myself, I believe there is a recalcitrant oddness at the heart of things — I had almost written at the heart of hearts-and I am pleased when my mind wanders off to think no more of this or that.
A final bow to Dostoevski’s gentleman (a reference to a passage from “Notes from the Underground,” to which Barron alludes at p 291): Yes, indeed, it is time to scatter rationalism to the winds, if by rationalism is understood the mistaking of a part of mind, the intellectualizing part, for the whole. Let us conclude with four unreasonable paragraphs he might endorse:
1. Pristine common sense imprisons the human spirit; science is fortified common sense, and science as concealed metaphysic or as cosmic attitude is maximum-security confinement.
2. Reason accepts the given world, and arises in the service of adaptation to it. Its premise is determinism, and it can argue for freedom only because it considers the feeling of freedom a functionally useful deception.
3. What is reasonable in human nature is mechanical, and life is not needed for its perpetuation. If human nature is reasonable in its essence, then life is simply a means for matter to become intelligent, and the function of man is to build machines that can think and be virtually incorruptible.
4. But human nature is an emergent (crc) differing in kind from the material and from the rest of the organic universe; it is not only the newest thing in the universe, it alone can generate novelty and resist adaptation by an act of will. Before it, all novelty arose by chance; with it, novelty can arise by intention.”
Larry, I have the highest respect for Frank Barron and his notable work, but over the years and in a number of different discussions I have taken exception to the proposition he presents in his point 4, above. He, along with a number of philosophers I have studied,
falls back on his imaginary artifact, an “emergent” to explain the inexplicable. This “emergent” is a relatively recent arisen feature used to explain the difference between humans and the other animals from which we have evolved. I have unsuccessfuloy pressed upon Frank when he was living, Humberto Maturana’s thesis that observations of novelty and creativity in the universe are products of the observer’s ignorance.
With this thought, I will close this post with an assertion that may bring disagreement. If the world (universe) is not materialistic and deterministic, then there is no reasonable justification for ruling out the occurrence of miracles.
Every time Dr. Herzberg made conclusions with this type of wording, I’m reminded of my son during a chess game in which I was way ahead: “Dad, just because you have all your big pieces left and I have only my king and two pawns, this gives us no good reason whatsoever to believe that you’re going to win.”
bryce: Is winning the lottery a miraculous intervention by God in the winner’s favor?
Is being struck by lightning a judgement from God?
At what level of improbability does God automatically become responsible for an event? 1 in 1000? 1 in 10 million?
This is what Dr Herzberg gets, and you don’t.
“Finding Darwin’s God” by Kenneth R. Miller is the most fascinating exploration of the evolution versus intelligent design issue I’ve read.
There’s a good excerpt online here:
http://www.findingdarwinsgod.com/excerpt/index.html
This is what I saw as the crux of the author’s argument:
“It is often said that a Darwinian universe is one whose randomness cannot be reconciled with meaning. I disagree. A world truly without meaning would be one in which a deity pulled the string of every human puppet, indeed of every material particle. In such a world, physical and biological events would be carefully controlled, evil and suffering could be minimized, and the outcome of historical processes strictly regulated. All things would move toward the Creator’s clear, distinct, established goals. Such control and predictability, however, comes at the price of independence. Always in control, such a Creator would deny his creatures any real opportunity to know and worship him – authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation. Such freedom is best supplied by the open contingency of evolution.”
This comment was left by Francis last night, but for some reason WordPress would not accept it.
“St Thomas is not arguing for “intelligent design” in the sense of irreducible complexity, and it is rather disingenuous to read the argument from ordering/teleology (extremely crudely presented above) as an instance of ID-type argumentation. Aquinas should really be read as OPPOSED to ID – see Michael Tkacz’s accessible presentation of his work on this subject here.
As for the chap who says he was not impressed with Aquinas’ Apologia pro vita sua… I just hope for his sake that was intended as a joke. (For those unaware, the Apologia was written by John Henry Newman, separated from Aquinas by some mere six hundred years or so.)”
Francis-
I never meant to imply that St Thomas was arguing for anything like the thesis of modern ID. In fact, I go out of my way in my post to say that this sort of argument from design has little (if anything) to do with evolution. However, I do see historical arguments from design as precursors to the anti-evolution arguments; in both cases an intelligent designer is being inferred from natural phenomena… But in one sense the precursors are better, since at least these arguments are based on positive observations (even if dubiously interpreted), while modern anti-evolution arguments focus mainly on the LACK of data that would further confirm evolution. If we put aside the dubious notion of “irreducible complexity”, as most molecular biologists do, the modern ID arguments boil down to little more than various instances of the fallacy of “appeal to ignorance”.
Gabriel Hanna writes of me, “This is what Dr Herzberg gets, and you don’t.” Ahh, but it took a understanding of my words to have to say that. I’ll try again. When LH writes ““So even if the values of the physical constants are highly unlikely, they give us no good reason to believe in intelligent design.” — what he *means* is that this is no *proof* of intelligent design. To which I agree. But I think he is unwilling to say: “So even if the values of the physical constants are highly unlikely, they give us no good reason to believe in intelligent design, *but they do open the door wider to believing in it.*” — which is, I believe, a fair conclusion from his own argument.
bryce: No, they do not “open the door wider to believing it”.
You have nothing to compare your probability to. If winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning is not considered a miracle, it is because we can judge these probabilities relative to others, and we know they are not so rare as to require miraculous explanations.
You have no idea what the odds are that the physical constants of the universe have the values they do. You have no idea what the odds of a God existing and creating the universe are. So how can you compare them to each other?
Well, you like one better than the other, is all. I find the possibility of a creator God far more unlikely than a random meaningless universe that luckily produced us, and you have no basis from which to argue against me. It’s my prejudice against yours.
Fair enough.
This discussion has certainly proceeded at a much higher level of civility than I am accustomed to in the Creation vs. Evolution debate.
One tendency I have noted is how a conflation of evolution and the neo-Darwinian synthesis leads to a category error. Am I wrong in concluding that evolution qua Evolution is essentially an ontological standpoint, and Darwinism qua Evolution is its epistemological counterpoint? We have a similar thing going on here: we have the Universe, which is, and nothing more (the World is everything that is the case, if you like). It has a certain set of physical constants whose values are astoundingly close to those that are necessary for us to exist. But they have these values. That is an ontological standpoint. Then we have various epistemological avenues such as the idea that universes with a given set of physical constants bud off from black holes in universes with a similar set of constants and thus universes such as ours, which are favourable to black hole production, tend to have more ‘descendants’. But we are mistaken if we fail to see that they are two different stances.
The points about the impossibility of the a priori measurement of the probability of the existence of life are well made. Rather than a lottery, I like to think of it as a raffle. Say you’re handed a raffle ticket with the number 600 written on it. What is the best estimate of the total number of tickets in the raffle, i.e. the inverse of the probability of your winning? This is indeterminable (with two tickets, however, you can make an estimate, albeit a pretty shaky one). So if we ever do discover life elsewhere in the cosmos, that instantly confers on us the ability to make statements about its likelihood, whereas before we could say nothing at all (and therefore should remain silent :) ).
David-
Perhaps you could clarify: I understand why you say that the point about the universe and its constants is ontological , in the sense that it is about “what is” and “how it is”… but I fail to see why the point about black holes is not similarly ontological (but rather epistemological). After all, as you express it, it is not about the state of our knowledge per se, nor about the justification of our beliefs, etc.
I think what I’m driving at is that the ontological is the ‘what’ and the epistemological is the ‘how’. The weak anthropic principle to me feels tautological, and the strong version just a leap in the dark (for now). Currently we are at the stage before Darwin. Darwin wasn’t the first to realise the ‘what’ of evolution, but he was the first to come up with a robust and plausible ‘how’. That rescues the explanation from tautology. We don’t need to justify that evolution has occurred, but the epistemological task of choosing between differing explanations remains. I guess from the evolution vs. ID perspective, we yield too much ground in even granting that evolution itself is arguable. There could, conceivably, be a better ‘how’ than Darwinism, but the ‘what’ is invariant. ID/creationism isn’t operating at the explanatory level but at the foundational ‘what’ level. Likewise, in cosmology, even without a ‘how’, we don’t need to concede the stage to ultimately barren philosophies like ‘God did it’.
David-
Okay, I see what you’re suggesting now. I certainly agree with the last sentence, but I’m not sure that we should rule out the possibility of varying the ‘what’, as well as being open to alternative (testable, or at least rationally evaluable) ‘hows’. Ontologies change, just as explanations do. Indeed, ontologies sometimes change precisely because better explanations demand that they do. I think that some degree of open-mindedness and humility is in order, both in terms of ontological assumptions (just what is it that we are observing?) and in terms of explanatory norms (in addition to alternative explanations within a given a set of norms). It’s just that at this point, ID doesn’t even qualify as a good alternative explanation within our current set of rational explanatory standards, and it gives us no reason to change either those standards or our ontological assumptions.
I’m not a philosopher, so I’m not really prepared to discuss the issue of evolution in terms of ontology and epistemology. However, I notice a tendency to conflate a number of things that are properly kept separated.
Firstly, strictly speaking, “evolution” refers to the history of living things once the first living thing(s) existed. The topic of how the first living thing(s) arose is “abiogenesis”. One can make a case for lumping both under a broader topic of “origins”, but I see too many people claiming that because one is unclear, the other must be, too.
Secondly, “evolution” is very different from the topic of how the universe came to be. That topic is known as “cosmology”, and the mechanisms that apply in one field can’t be expected to apply in the other. For example, as far as we know, universes don’t pass information to descendants, so any rules of inheritance from biology won’t apply to cosmology.
Thirdly, yes, as David notes, the concept of evolution (change over time) predates Darwin by quite some time. Naturalists had reached the uncomfortable realization that many kinds of living thing have gone extinct, and so God’s Creation was not immutable. As the geologic column was formalized, it became apparent that fossils that were non-existent in earlier rocks would become quite common in later ones. Thus, it certainly looked like creatures were appearing that had never existed before. The question was, how?
Fourthly, or maybe three-and-a-half-ly, the term “evolution” has been taken to mean any number of things, some of them more tendentious than others.
I’ve noticed it’s very common for the discussion of evolution to slip from one of these meanings to another, and for people to wind up arguing completely different subjects without even realizing it.
Some of the above notions are widely accepted in science, others completely rejected, still others continue to be argued over, and others serving as little more than straw men to help win an argument.
The arguments over evolution in the science journals focus on the “how” of evolution. Only in the political sphere does the “what” really come in to play, and before we argue the “what”, maybe we need to decide which “what” we’re talking about.
Larry:
My problem with evolution isn’t “did it happen?” It does seem the most likely explanation. The grit in my eyes is the poor choice of words on the part of evolutionists (call that shorthand for any one defending or explaining it) who too often imply some sort of conscious effort on the part of an organism; a will to change.
The above, but also the following: the oft-cited example of evolution in action where the filmstrip/text/lecturer will show the student the decline of light colored moths in Great Britain during industrialization. They were more visible because of the contrast between their color and the soot on the trees. Most folks will sit there and keep silent, not wanting to be thought foolish for voicing the obvious; “Well. That’s interesting. As a proof for natural selection, anyway. Being more visible makes you easy prey. Mind you; they’re still moths. They haven’t changed in anything except relative numbers. Prove that the dark colored moths arose out of the light colored population without being extant before the enviromental change and then you’d have something.”
And lastly; more curiosity than criticism: has anyone carried the primordial soup experiment a step further? Yes, yes, yes; amino acids form when the postulated early atmosphere is exposed to an electric arc simulating lightning; what happens next? Do you simulate the amino acids washing ashore onto a hot lava flow? Or left stranded in a puddle at low tide? When I first heard that I thought “Hmm, interesting. So then what happens?” What’d'ya mean what happens? Isn’t that proof enough? “Um, it’s nice. Amino acids, building blocks of life, neat. So, how did they first hook up? I’d like to make an inference that it means they’ll build something, but should I reason that way?”
Over 700 PHDs signed a public list, ( http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/), indicating their view that Evolution is flawed and should be scrutinized further. Their objections are scientific and deserve to be addressed. Why can’t the Pro-Evolution side simple dispense with the strawdogs and address the REAL arguments.
-many complex features of life require impossibly numerous lucky steps before being an advantage for the organism. I’ve read all serious attempts to explain a feature like the bacterial flagellum and all appeal to impossible odds. They talk of homologous genes without explaining how large the difference is between what’s there and what’s needed for the new feature. It wouldn’t be so funny, if it wasn’t so sad. The people on the Pro-Evolution side must be the most optimistic group in the world, and must be responsible for most of the lottery ticket purchases.
Joe-
No one on the “pro-evolution” side is arguing (or at least should argue) that the theory of evolution is flawless or complete. Even if a scientific theory seems completely satisfying at some point in time, it remains revisable in the face of new evidence. The argument against intelligent design is not that evolutionary theory is perfect, but rather that there is NO positive and testable evidence for intelligent design.
Sam Hall:
Oh, yes, absolutely! Scientists are constantly examining each other’s work, seeing if it can be replicated, and seeing what happens when they vary conditions. The more interesting a finding is, the more people will examine it.
From the Talk.Origins archive, Index of Creationist Claims CB035:
As for washing on to a lava flow, the chemicals would break down into simpler molecules. Although, in the absence of free oxygen to properly burn them, you might get any number of interesting chemicals evaporating from the sludge.
Chemicals that get stranded in a puddle at low tide will be re-suspended at high tide, or not. Chemicals are more likely to find each other and react in interesting ways when they’re confined to a surface than when they’re free to drift around in a volume of water. Indeed, membranes serve a vital role in modern life, by facilitating chemical reactions. Molecules stick to a membrane, find other molecules more quickly, and react.
And of course, just because some prebiotic chemicals may wind up being fried on lava, this by no means implies all of them will. A planet is a big place, with lots of micro-environments to deal with, and only one of them needs to be suited for the origin of the first life form. After the first life arises, the rules change.
Karl:
Thanks. Whenever that experiment is mentioned I always feel so much more could be done.
Oh, my. That site you mentioned could be quite a time sink.
A passing thought / experiment: has anyone ever tried reverse engineering a single cell organism? And did it yield any insights into how it may have all come together? I’m a layman, so I don’t know if it’s been done. But wouldn’t it be fascinating?
I know researchers have put together strands of DNA, protein fragments, and even an entire virus from parts. This is an amazing ability, considering that half a century ago, we were just barely working out the basic structures of a lot of these molecules.
One drawback to this approach, though, is this is probably the only way we know life did not originate. Any life form we can examine now, even the simplest, is going to have 3½ billion years of evolution under its belt, and we have no guarantee that any of its systems haven’t been completely replaced over time.
One small example, which was one of Behe’s poster children in Darwin’s Black Box, is the blood clotting cascade. Behe gives an excellent description of the complex dance of different pieces working together to cause blood clots to form when needed. He then declares the odds against all these pieces coming together at once to be impossibly remote, and so therefore, Something Else put them together. At the time of Behe’s writing, Dr. Kenneth Miller had already done considerable work piecing together the details of how this system might well have arisen. The thing is, it starts with a digestive enzyme, and the many parts we see today are the result of gene duplication and subsequent modification, not someone fashioning parts and adding them to make a seamless whole.
Similarly, research is ongoing into possibilities for the origin of life. The first step, of course, is determining the sorts of building blocks that would reasonably have been available. Thus, ringing the changes on gases in the Miller-Urey experiment, and subjecting the products to other, reasonably available processes. They also look with interest on the chemicals found in interstellar dust clouds, as these chemicals could easily have fallen to earth and contributed to the mix.
And there are people working on how these chemicals may have formed the parts of a first life form. For further reading, I’m afraid I have to send you back to that time sink.
It is, indeed, fascinating – fascinating enough to keep lots of people quite busy doing research. (Unlike the ID folk, whose only research seem to be finding questions that science hasn’t answered yet, and writing papers about how they can’t be answered without an Intelligent Designer.)
Karl-
Interesting point about the difficulties of studying in the laboratory how life began. The right combination of ingredients might have to stew together for millennia (or more) before the first organized components of a cell could be detected. I suppose the second-best approach would be to form various theoretical demonstrations of the chemical possibilities, with some mathematics thrown in to argue for various probabilities. That’s generally how the hypothesis that there is life on other planets is argued for.
Ultimately, I suspect that’s the best we’ll have. Eventually, researchers will cobble together a workable pathway that leads from prebiotic soup to life. They may even cobble together more than one, and then the question will be, what sort of evidence would we expect to see if one, the other, or a third unknown pathway were the one actually used?
Even in the case of the blood clotting cascade, Miller’s description of how it may have arisen is not Gospel. The mere fact that traces of what look like an evolutionary history show up where you’d expect to find them if his theory is true, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Indeed, all these pieces could have been created de novo by an intelligent creator. Indeed, they could have been created last Thursday, with all appearances of prior history, including our memories, installed at the moment of creation. (This “theory” is known as “Last Thursday-ism”.)
If we find life on other planets, I expect people to go crazy analyzing the basic chemicals it uses, to see how much it does differently. If it turns out that there is one pathway leading to life, we might expect a very similar chemical makeup. If not, then who knows?