ID and the Science of God: Part I
| January 5, 2009 | Posted by Steve Fuller under Biology, Comp. Sci. / Eng., Creationism, Culture, Education, Global Warming, Informatics, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, Philosophy, Religion, Science, The Design of Life, theistic evolution |
In response to an earlier post of mine, DaveScot kindly pointed out this website’s definition of ID. The breadth of the definition invites scepticism: ID is defined as the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. But is there really some single concept of ‘intelligence’ that informs designs that are generated by biological, human, and possibly even mechanical means? Why would anyone think such a thing in the first place? Yet, it is precisely this prospect that makes ID intellectually challenging – for both supporters and opponents.
It’s interesting that not everything is claimed to be intelligently designed. This keeps the phrase ‘intelligent design’ from simply collapsing into ‘design’ by implying a distinction between the intelligence and that on which it acts to produce design. So, then, what exactly is this ‘intelligence’ that stands apart from matter? Well, the most obvious answer historically is a deity who exists in at least a semi-transcendent state. But how can you get any scientific mileage from that?
Enter theodicy, which literally means (in Greek) ‘divine justice’. It is now a field much reduced from its late 17th century heyday. Theodicy exists today as a boutique topic in philosophy and theology, where it’s limited to asking how God could allow so much evil and suffering in the world. But originally the question was expressed much more broadly to encompass issues that are nowadays more naturally taken up by economics, engineering and systems science – and the areas of biology influenced by them: How does the deity optimise, given what it’s trying to achieve (i.e. ideas) and what it’s got to work with (i.e. matter)? This broader version moves into ID territory, a point that has not escaped the notice of theologians who nowadays talk about theodicy.
A good case in point is Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation, a comprehensive work written from a theistic evolutionary standpoint. Southgate is uneasy about concepts like ‘irreducible complexity’ for being a little too clear about how God operates in nature. The problem with such clarity, of course, is that the more we think we know the divine modus operandi, the more God’s allowance of suffering and evil looks deliberate, which seems to put divine action at odds with our moral scruples. One way out – which was the way taken by the original theodicists – is to say that to think like God is to see evil and suffering as serving a higher good, as the deity’s primary concern is with the large scale and the long term.
Now, a devout person might complain that this whole way of thinking about God is blasphemous, since it presumes that we can get into the mind of God – and once we do, we find a deity who is not especially loveable, since God seems quite willing to sacrifice his creatures for some higher design principle. Not surprisingly, religious thinkers complained about theodicy from day one. In the book I flagged in my last post, The Best of All Possible Worlds, Steven Nadler portrays the priest Antoine Arnauld as the critical foil of the two duelling theodicists, Nicole Malebranche and Gottfried von Leibiniz. Against them, Arnauld repeatedly pointed out that it’s blasphemous to suppose that God operates in what humans recognise as a ‘rational’ fashion. So how, then, could theodicy have acquired such significance among self-avowed Christians in the first place (Malebranche was also a priest) and, more interestingly, how could its mode of argumentation have such long-lasting secular effects, basically in any field concerned with optimisation?
The answer goes back to the question on everyone’s mind here: What constitutes evidence of design? We tend to presume that any evidence of design is, at best, indirect evidence for a designer. But this is not how the original theodicists thought about the matter. They thought we could have direct (albeit perhaps inconclusive) evidence of the designer, too. Why? Well, because the Bible says so. In particular, it says that we humans are created in the image and likeness of God. At the very least, this means that our own and God’s beings overlap in some sense. (For Christians, this is most vividly illustrated in the person of Jesus.) The interesting question, then, is to figure out how much of our own being is divine overlap and how much is simply the regrettable consequence of God’s having to work through material reality to embody the divine ideas ‘in’ – or, put more controversially, ‘as’ — us. Theodicy in its original full-blooded sense took this question as its starting point.
There was some enthusiasm for this way of thinking in the late 17th century. Here are four reasons:
(1) The sheer spread of literacy, connected both to the rise of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation (and those two events connected to each other, in terms of who operated the presses), meant that the Bible came to treated increasingly as instructions for living, as often happens today. So, the claim that we are created in the image and likeness of God was read as a mode of personal address: I am so created. This, of course, broke down the Catholic mode of Christian domination, whereby clerical authorities had modulated the biblical message for the situation at hand – e.g. by telling the faithful to treat certain aspects of the Bible as merely ‘symbolic’ or ‘metaphorical’. Theistic evolutionists routinely resort to this strategy today.
(2) On theological grounds, to deny that we are literally created in the image and likeness of God is itself to court heresy. It comes close to admitting an even worse offence, namely, anthropomorphism. In other words, if we presume that, even in sacred scripture, references to our relationship to God are mere projections, then why take the Bible seriously at all? 19th century secularisation was propelled by just this line of thought, but anti-theodicists like Arnauld who refused to venture into God’s mind could be read that way as well – scepticism masquerading as piety. (Kant also ran into this problem.) In contrast, theodicists appeared to read the Bible as the literal yet fallible word of God. There is scope within Christianity for this middle position because of known problems in crafting the Bible, whose human authorship is never denied (unlike, say, the Qur’an). One extreme result of this mentality was Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to edit the Gospels of all ‘superstitious’ elements, just as a Neo-Darwinist (say, UK geneticist Steve Jones) might re-write Origin of Species to reinstate Darwin’s fundamental principles in a firmer evidence base. To be sure, there is still plenty of room for blasphemy, but at least not for atheism!
(3) Within philosophy, theodicists, despite their disagreements, claimed legitimacy from Descartes, whose ‘cogito ergo sum’ proposed an example of human-divine overlap, namely, humanity’s repetition of how the deity establishes its own existence. After all, creation is necessary only because God originally exists apart from matter, and so needs to make its presence felt in the world through matter. (Isn’t that what the creation stories in Genesis are about?) So too with humans, so Descartes seemed to think. The products of our own re-enactment of divine thought patterns are still discussed in philosophy today as ‘a priori knowledge’. The open question is how much of our knowledge falls under this category, since whatever knowledge we acquire from the senses is clearly tied to our animal natures, which God does not share. But of course, the senses do not operate unadorned. Thus, by distinguishing the sensory and non-sensory aspects of our knowledge, we might infer the reliability of our access to the intelligent designer.
(4) There was also what we now call the ‘Scientific Revolution’, whose calling card was the fruitfulness of mechanical models for fathoming the natural world. A striking case in point was Galileo’s re-fashioning of a toy, the telescope, into an instrument of astronomical discovery. This contributed to the sense that our spontaneous displays of invention and ingenuity also reproduced the divine creative process: We make things that open up the world to understanding and control. This mode of thinking would start to kick in the scientific societies formed around the 18th century’s Industrial Revolution. One such influential society in the British Midlands, the ‘Lunar Society’, has been the subject of a recent popular book by Jenny Uglow.
Theodicy gets off the ground against these four background conditions once a specific mental faculty is proposed as triggering the spark of the divine in the human. This faculty was generally known as intellectual intuition – that is, the capacity to anticipate experience in a systematic and rational fashion. (Here’s a definition of intelligence worth defending.) We would now say the capacity to generate virtual realities that happen to correspond to physical reality, the sort of thing computer simulations do all the time, courtesy of their programmers. In the 17th century, people were especially impressed by the prospect of analytic (aka Cartesian) geometry capturing a rational world-order governed by universal laws of mechanical motion. So far, so good. But clearly something went wrong – what?
Tune in for the next instalment…
165 Responses to ID and the Science of God: Part I
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Hi Sal Gal
Nor can you with an autistic savant.
A generalization about humans does not necessarily hold true for every individual human. If I write that men are taller than women it is fallacious for you to argue that George is only 4’6” so men are not taller than women.
Care to dehumanize those people?
I have not said that persons lacking apparent rational capacities are not human, only that humans, all other things being equal, are the only creatures that appear to exibit the qualities of rational thought (intelligence).
And you can’t train a human to do the criminal investigative work dogs do. Humans are not as “intelligent” as dogs in olfactory processing.
As someone once said, you train animals and you teach humans. I can’t do mathematical calculations as fast as the computer I am using, does that make the computer intelligent? What about my adding machine?
If you are not familiar with the elaborate structure of the mounds that blind, individually “dumb” termites produce through “collective intelligence,” you might want to look into it before responding.
And I am certain the blueprints they work from are equally astounding.
Do humans stand outside nature, or do they not?
Isn’t that the 64,000 dollar question?
The “definition” also makes me think of Yul Brenner in “The King and I”: “Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…” Do you actually believe that this clears things up?
What, specifically, do you find objectionable to the definition, other than the irrelevant and apparently emotive memory of “sitting on a hard pew on a Sunday morning, listening to a preacher invoke Saint Webster to pronounce the “real meaning” of a pivotal word in the sermon.”
Is there some particular objection to the definition?
It tells you nothing about what I actually do.
I have no doubt that you are extremely intelligent and well educated. No matter how solid your reasoning, false premises will lead to false conclusions, and one of the false premises is that intelligence is quantitative rather than qualitative. “The least error in the beginning is magnified a thousandfold in the end.” Aristotle
Have you ever read J. Budziwzewski “Escape From Nililism”. It can be found on the web. Here he writes of himself;
“Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit.”
dgosse (151):
I believe that the philosophy of mind is very important. (In fact, consciousness is at the center of my personal philosophy.) But not every subject of interest can be investigated empirically. To devalue mind or consciousness because it is not a scientific entity is to grossly overvalue science.
Mind, like consciousness, in intrinsically private. There is no empirical observation of the mind. The fact that you and I can give similar verbal reports (which make for empirical data) on our private (subjective) experiences does not make the experiences themselves empirically (publicly, “objectively”) accessible.
1. Reduction of mind to chemistry is nothing but pursuit of a philosophical agenda. And it is quite a muddled pursuit, at that, for if mind reduces to chemistry, then there really is no need for the term mind at all. This is just an underhanded way of asserting philosophical naturalism. In contrast, a methodological naturalist says that mind can be addressed in science only with operational definition in terms of empirically observable phenomena. There is no claim as to what mind “really is,” but as to what science really does.
2. I contend that all Truth is subjective (intrinsically private), and that the “objective reality” we arrive at by social processes (e.g., science) is merely a body of shared belief. I have the capacity to recognize truth in another person’s account of private experience, and so do you. But the process by which we do so is nothing like empirical science. This perhaps gives a better idea of why I value religion, philosophy, art, music, and literature more highly in my personal life than science. Again, science is a workhorse in blinders.
Hi Sal Gal
I believe that the philosophy of mind is very important
As do I. I am pleased to see that we are approaching common ground. At the risk of sounding silly, philosophies of mind affect how we think about ourselves and our place in the world. Some philosophies have unpleasant consequences.
(In fact, consciousness is at the center of my personal philosophy.)
In what sense? Do you have a public philosophy? If so, how does one affect the other?
Mind, like consciousness, in intrinsically private. There is no empirical observation of the mind.
If by empirical you mean we cannot pick it up and weigh it and measure, then yes, “there is no empirical observation of mind” in that sense, however…
The fact that you and I can give similar verbal reports (which make for empirical data) on our private (subjective) experiences does not make the experiences themselves empirically (publicly, “objectively”) accessible.
I suggest that making a verbal (or written) report does make the experience or observation public. There are indeed certain phenomona associated with the experience that are subjective, such as the personal thrill we feel at a successful experiment, but the logical chain of thought and physical result the experiment are both open to public scrutiny.
1. Reduction of mind to chemistry is nothing but pursuit of a philosophical agenda. And it is quite a muddled pursuit, at that, for if mind reduces to chemistry, then there really is no need for the term mind at all.
I couldn’t have said it better myself, in fact, I have often said it far less succinctly. 8^> The sad fact is that such reductionist ideas are common currency in what passes for “intellectual” thought today. It leads to some rather bizarre conversations… (You have a mind. Do not. Yes, really, you do. Do not! Do too! Do not!)
2. I contend that all Truth is subjective (intrinsically private), and that the “objective reality” we arrive at by social processes (e.g., science) is merely a body of shared belief.
Ar you absolutely sure about that? Is that a True statement? Does the observation that all Truth is subjective assert that the Truth I believe is also purely subjective? If so, then there is at least one truth that is objective and universal. If we can uncover one universal truth then the potential exists that we might uncover more universal truths.
…and that the “objective reality” we arrive at by social processes (e.g., science) is merely a body of shared belief.
Please, reconsider this statement. There are implications embedded in this that you cannot (or at least, should not) embrace. Particularly if you are a scientist seeking to uncover truths about the world in which we live or a teacher imparting knowledge to the next generation.
I kind of wonder what kind of a tool was used by intelligence to tell it self it is indeed intelligent.Is it contagious?
I think they make you join MENSA 8^>
It’s right next door to the restaurant at the end of the universe. The home of endless endings.
Want to know something that has to be one of the most kept”INTELLIGENT”secrets of our governments?Space travel.I don`t have an inside visual imagination,but for those who do,imagine what kind of electronics they say they have to measure “ACCURATELY” enough the measurement there in miles,in in calendar time,in fuel capacity,in visual and audio contact,in robotic perfect control and in radar directional homed in on what headed to the “OUTER LIMITS” successfully televised believed and Cellphone use in places in adip won`t work because satelites aren`t developed yet to help the stupids back here on EARTH?!Would that be considered an “INTELLIGENT DESIGN to fool the STUPID NATURAL?” I am glad that that I am a STUPID CRAZY and not considering myself as an INTELLIGENT DESIGN.It`s kind of like sending tax dollars to HELL to put toward distinguishing an eternal fire that evaporates liquid half way there.Wonder if we could trade some metal GARBAGE and GOLDEN TACKS for some of Hell`s fire sit under some donkeys behinds to change their empty brains that an economy needs transportation systems,friendly,safely useable as a “TOP” priority,atleast here in Canada where they should also be GOLDEN.They can travel to the outer limits with their golden jets for very little fuel(ALSO need to generate heatvery cold>and electricity for headlights to see in the dark for their generators).”INTELLIGENT DESIGN”helped the wasteful while the stupid natural could only look on. “INTELLIGENT DESIGN just keeps getting more desireable to defend and be proud of,doesn`t it? ^$$^
Joseph: As I have said many times- nature, operating freely, ie WITHOUT agency involvement.
Does anyone else here consider this a scientific definition? If so, could someone please tell me what branch of science I can research to find the definition of “agency”?
I think that this kind of vague and equivocal terminology is partly to blame for the poor communication between Joseph, CJYman, and myself. Some statements also confuse me as to whether they refer to the behavior of a system or the origin of the system. CJYman’s response to Dembski’s point about the redundancy of “law+chance” showed that we’re talking right past each other.
I don’t know how to interpret the terms “law”, “chance”, “intelligence”, “foresight”, and “design” in a way that renders this discussion coherent. Maybe answers to a few questions will help me to concretize the terms:
(In the following questions, I use the word “computer” to mean the whole package of hardware+software.)
1. If a computer can make predictions, does it have foresight?
2. If a computer can decide from different courses of action based on its predictions, does it have intelligence?
3. If the above computer can also improve its track record over time by forming generalizations from its own experience, does it have intelligence?
4. Can a computer design software?
5. If not, why not?
6. If so, should the resulting software be attributed to law+chance, or design?
7. Is the next state of a human brain determined by its current state plus any inputs from sensory receptors, Penfield’s electrode, etc.?
8. If not, is there also an indeterministic factor in the state transition?
9. Are there any factors that are neither deterministic nor indeterministic?
10. How do we determine that humans are designers and not merely conduits of CSI?
Thanks in advance.
Joseph: Is there ANY data which demonstrates chance and law can account for living organisms? No.
I don’t know whether you’re saying that chance and law can’t account for the behavior of living organisms or the origin of living organisms. Regardless, data has nothing to do with my question, which was a hypothetical IF. I explicitly said that I wasn’t claiming that this was the case.
So this all boils down to what you “don’t see”?
That is not a scientific stance.
Of course it’s not a scientific stance. I saying that I can’t see how your position is not metaphysical. If you could state your position in scientific terms, then I would see.
“Evolution names Adam`s wife as a deer John.??
CJYman: Moreover, as I have already explained, operating on best explanations, CSI rules out chance and law because it is both highly improbable and specified and not merely described by regularities (algorithmic compressibility).
I don’t know where you got the idea that algorithmic compressibility does not by itself entail specificity (along with CINDE, TRACT, and DELIM of course). Do you think that something extremely simple but non-functional, like a rectangular monolith, is not specified? You’re incorrect in thinking that specificity’s role is to rule out law/regularity/necessity. Check out the EF.
The mathematics behind Dembski’s formulation of a COnservation of Information Theorem, and the subsequent work on active information seems to back up the hypothesis that neither CSI much less intelligence can be “purchased” without previous intelligence.
Needless to say, it doesn’t seem that way to me at all, but I don’t have any issues to bring up that haven’t already been pointed out by Dembski’s critics.
Simply put, something with the amount of high improbability and functional specificity as intelligence requires at least that same amount of high improbability and specificity to produce said intelligence. You and I can discuss this if you wish, however, please refrain from implying that it is a mere assumption.
Where did I imply that? If I were to talk about conservation of CSI I would say that it’s simply wrong, not that it’s an assumption. For one thing, specificity is relative to a specifying agent and can easily increase via a deterministic function, eg a decrypter. (And yes, I know how Dembski says that the encrypted string is specified in terms of the encrypter and the decrypted string, but that requires that the specifying agent know about the encrypter, so the LCI is not universal. It also requires that the encrypter have zero descriptional complexity in order to conserve specificity.)
kanttoockthahhwokspeedingpelphnope?P
Dear Joan(J0hn).It is the Eve(evolution) tomorrow of Adam`s and your celebration of of your first child.You must be so happy.When we last talked you said that if you had twins,you would name them Able for the first and Cain for the second.Running out of ink,write us.Love you all.
Dear Eye:Thank you for your letter.Adam and I(Eye)did give birth to twins but unfortunately Cain`s biblelic cord choked Able apparently just before they were born.Our mid wife said that this happens quite often.Able is just the spitting image of his father and we are all healthy.Sending you some extra ink.Love ya all.
Would illerate visual thieves understand how to read between the lines or look at the callendar that doesn`t exist for a date or their watch that didn`t exist for atime that didn`t exist?It must atleast have been daylight,YES?