ID and the Science of God: Part III
| January 13, 2009 | Posted by Steve Fuller under Atheism, Biology, Creationism, Culture, Darwinism, Education, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Origin Of Life, Philosophy, Religion, Science, The Design of Life |
I have been reflecting on the critical responses to my posts, which I appreciate. They mostly centre on the very need for ID to include theodicy as part of its intellectual orientation.
The intuitive basis for theodicy is pretty harmless: The presence of design implies a designing intelligence. Moreover, in order to make sense of the exact nature of the design, you need to make hypotheses about the designing intelligence. These hypotheses need to be tested and may or may not be confirmed in the course of further inquiry. Historians and archaeologists reason this way all the time. However, the theodicist applies the argument to nature itself.
At that point, theodicy binds science and theology together inextricably — with potentially explosive consequences. After all, if you take theodicy seriously, you may find yourself saying, once you learn more about the character of nature’s design, that science disconfirms certain accounts of God – but not others. Scientific and religious beliefs rise and fall together because, in the end, they are all about the same reality.
This is explosive because we live in a world where (allegedly) false scientific beliefs and false religious beliefs are treated radically differently. The former are a matter of public concern: Stamp them out now before our kids’ minds are contaminated! However, the latter are seen as being of purely private concern: Only the belief’s holder bears the consequences. I suppose this double-standard is what makes us ‘modern’, or at least ‘secular’. We end up tolerating all sorts of religious beliefs – including militant atheism – while even minor deviations from the scientific orthodoxy can lead to ostracism, as when Michael Reiss opened the door to creationist questioning of evolution.
Now some people on this blog believe that the safest way out of this minefield is to say that ID makes no hypotheses about the designing intelligence – some even go further to say that in principle the designing intelligence cannot be inferred from design. If you take these policies seriously, you won’t have any science at all. You’ll just have a toolkit of concepts and techniques for reliable design detection. That’s nice, but it doesn’t explain why all these designs should be treated as part of a common object of inquiry. Here you need some underlying laws and principles. This brings you back to proposing hypotheses about how the intelligent designer’s mind works. And then you’ll have science.
Even a simple concept like ‘irreducible complexity’ doesn’t really make sense except as a step towards a theory of the intelligence behind the design. Imagine a Darwinist’s knee-jerk dismissal of Behe’s concept: ‘Just because, say, a cell looks like it’s been purpose-built doesn’t mean that you can compare its parts to those of a mousetrap. That’s to take a superficial similarity and read into it way too much meaning. The cell’s apparent design could have been just as easily brought about by a combination of contingencies spread over a long stretch of time. Keep off the mechanistic metaphors, if you really want to understand how life works’.
My point here is that the Darwinist’s knee-jerk dismissal, however unjustified, is nevertheless right about one thing – namely, that Behe’s concept is not only about nature’s design but also the designing intelligence. For the Darwinist, to theorize both together begs the question against his position, which holds that the appearance of design need not implicate a designing intelligence. So it’s no surprise that Behe has been led to argue theodicy with Ken Miller. Yes, Behe is religious but his science already builds in the idea of a designing intelligence that we are trying to fathom at the same time we are trying to understand the design features of life.
One final thought: When militant Darwinists like Dawkins and Dennett call the teaching of religion ‘brainwashing’ that demands some sort of cerebral hygiene, they are mainly exercised about the claims of religion that explicitly tread on scientific ground. They get most of their rhetorical mileage from targeting Young Earth Creationists but it’s pretty clear that they also have ID in their sights. Perhaps the only virtue of these attacks is that they take the cognitive content of ID sufficiently seriously to realize that it’s incompatible with a strong naturalistic atheism. It would be too bad if avowed defenders of ID did not take the theory as seriously as its staunchest – and perhaps smartest – opponents do.
79 Responses to ID and the Science of God: Part III
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—–allanius: “Kant won the argument and changed Western culture by not attacking his ideological foes head-on; by employing an offensive-defensive strategy that plundered the rhetorical resources of his antagonists and put them on their heels. It is a strategy based on a thorough understanding of intellectual history and a knowledge of the weakness of one?s own position in the face of the prevailing paradigm.”
As Reid evidently understood, agnostics had been waiting for a pretext–any pretext for rejecting reason’s testimony. I get it routinely from the agnostics on this blog who try to use some variation of Kantian skepticism as a means of evading reasoned arguments. Each time I point them to Adler’s explanation about where Kant went wrong, they stop posting on the thread, pop up on new one, and recyle the same error.
Phillip Johnson,
Just look at your enduring influence on the ID movement (32):
A common ploy is to put naturalism on trial as a conclusion of science, when it is in fact a working assumption, and then object rhetorically to arguments that scientists do not offer. Mainstream evolutionary theory is a body of naturalistic explanations. It supports naturalism no more than the top of a table supports the legs.
The syntactic parallelism in “unknown processes” and “unknown designer” is rhetorically very clever. It encourages the reader to jump to the conclusion that the referents of the two phrases are as similar as the phrases themselves, when they are anything but.
In mainstream science, the “laws of nature” are inferred relations on empirical observations. They are essentially “unknown processes” that “connect” antecedent and consequent events, and methodological naturalists never arrive at final acceptance of them. Methodological naturalists assume that the “gaps” between antecedent and consequent events can be “reduced” through further empirical observation. The heuristic value of this is that it keeps scientists looking, as opposed to claiming that there’s nothing more to be seen.
In intelligent design theory, the “designer” in “unknown designer” is non-material intelligence, an empirically unobservable entity granted physical reality, and not the material entity, if any, with which the intelligence is associated. The working assumptions of ID theory are so radically different from those of mainstream science that to refer to ID theory as “science” is to equivocate. If ID theory is scientific, then it is a theory within an alternative science, not an alternative theory within the science that includes Darwinian theory.
In contrast to the methodological naturalist, the IDist explains some empirical observations by saying that unobservable intelligence accounts for them. This puts an end to empirical observation. The IDists says that some “gaps” cannot be “reduced” with further empirical investigation.
What I find refreshing in Steve Fuller’s remarks is that he confronts, without invoking the term, the “God of the Gaps” in ID. A design inference is intrinsically a claim that something we cannot observe empirically exists, has certain anthropomorphic properties, and manifests itself in what we do observe. Eschewing semantic contortions, an unobservable, goal-directed intelligence is supernatural, be it the intelligence of God or a God-like intelligence created by God.
Sal Gal:67
Prayers do get answered sometimes,don`t they?
Double checking that could prove intelligence>< without a doubt.
Nice.
Let’s reduce both arguments to their simplest essence.
On the one hand, Upright Biped illuminates the following fact: ID’s greatest strength is its capacity to refute the adversary on its own terms, materialistic science unaided by religion’s testimony. If we introduce religion into the paradigm, the “unaided” component is thus invalidated and the adversary wins by default. So, they say, “Aha, we knew all along that you were bootlegging your religion into your science and now we have proof.”
On the other hand, Steve Fuller challenges this argument by saying that ID must not obsess over this scientific gambit. Otherwise, one gathers, it will never become a comprehensive theory with explanatory power similar to what the Darwinists claim to have. So, he pleads with us, “You can’t avoid the God question forever, so you might as well immerse yourself in it now.”
I submit that Upright Biped has the better of the argument for two reasons.
[a] If we stay the course and continue to insist on the limited ID paradigm, we lose nothing. If ID was meant to become more expansive in its outlook, a possible development that Upright Biped and Dave Scot seem to discount, it will happen not because our adversaries or our misguided friends prompt us from the outside but because some ID genius makes it possible from the inside. That kind of growth cannot be summoned at will, especially in the current hostile environment that the Darwinists have created.
[b] If we change direction and try to determine the identity and character of the designer without first perfecting the art of analyzing his handiwork, we lose our sense of order and perspective. Look at it this way: We can’t even convince Darwinists of the elementary-school level observation that a DNA molecule was designed. Shouldn’t we get some kind of agreement from them on the basics before take them (and ourselves) to graduate school and speculate about what the designer had in mind when he did it? Wouldn’t that be the equivalent of trying to identify the perpetrator of a crime without first proving that a crime was committed?
Translation—first things first.
Sal Gal…I appreciate the sentiments in 66.
But ID brings the philosophy down to earth. You’re a biochemist, you sequence DNA, and you find Hamlet embedded within. Where do you go from there?
You’d be a fool to rule out design. Rigidly abiding by the dogma of methodological naturalism might well lead you astray. Let’s cut through the dogma and, as Feynman said, “find things out”.
Davem(49):
Of course. However, if anything that has been proposed about the nature of God has been disproved by science, then stuff proposed about the nature of God is “falsifiable”. If it is falsifiable, it is valid as scientific hypothesis.
Please check out the * at the bottom of my post. I had already explicitly acknowledged the possibility of a group of minds acting in consert.
However, the Greeks and Romans hypothesized a bunch of feuding gods. The big bang, and first life, were not the product of a bunch of feuding gods. Agains, conjectures about the nature of “gods” has been falsified — by science.
In post 8, I said: :The designer that we learn something about is vastly more intelligent than we are.” Pretty much the same thing, yes?
Isn’t this what you have just said?
I am convinced that mathematics was not derived from the mind of man. If we were to find alien intelligences at the same general level that we are at, we would discover that most of our mathematics would be the same. They may have not considered esoteric concepts like “imaginary number”, they may well not be bent towards base 10. They would likely show our mathemeticians a thing or two. But math is discovered, not invented.
Did God invent mathematics? I don’t know. It could be that mathematics is just an inherent necessity.
A physicist I know shares the following thought:
A biologist fancies himself to be a chemist.
A chemist fancies himself to be a physicist.
A physicist fancies himself to be God.
And God fancies himself to be a mathemetician.
Just a thought.
StephenB @68:
Before I note a couple of disagreements with you, let me say that you summarized this very nicely.
You are absolutely correct that testifying cannot have a role in the science. If there are ID proponents who recommend identifying the designer as God, I share your resistance to that idea.
My view is slightly different. I don’t see how we can avoid learning about the designer when identifying design. We are going to learn a great deal, in fact, and we shouldn’t ignore that knowledge. While many of us believe the designer to be God, that is not an a priori assumption of ID theory. Therefore, the concerns about injecting religion are unfounded.
Only those who assert that the designer must be God have to worry about knowledge of the designer being religious. It may turn out that God designed the designer. I don’t think it will, but we have to follow the evidence to know.
Cutting a bit in the interests of brevity brings me to:
We lose a great deal! We lose all the knowledge of the designer that we perforce ignore by focusing only on identifying design (more on this below). We also cripple ourselves intellectually because we cannot avoid learning about the nature of the designer when identifying design.
Again I get the distinct impression that avoiding criticism from the methodological naturalists is too big a concern among ID proponents. They are never going to stop criticizing us, so there is no reason not to follow the evidence where it leads. We get no benefit from being less than forthright.
After another little skip:
This brings us to the flip side of the coin. Not only can we not identify design without learning about the designer, without knowing something (or making assumptions) about the designer, we cannot detect design.
As I noted earlier in this thread, ID theory uses CSI to identify design. That implicitly assumes that the designer imparts CSI to designed objects. Without that assumption, there is no reason to consider a flagella designed but a rock not designed.
When crimes are committed, the perpetrator is assumed to be human (outside of X-Files reruns) and that provides a huge amount of information. The same holds for archaeology and paleontology. It is simply impossible to infer design without some knowledge of the nature of the designer.
JJ
JayM, well said.
That said, I would cautiously disagree with you when you said,
We needed no assumption about a designer to determine that a big bang happend, or that life originated from a single ancestor. In fact these were determined within the context of a committment to an “no designer” hypothesis.
Further, without ever hypothesizing a designer, we can bump into the reality that life contains a quality (IRC) that cannot be reasonably explained by natural causes.
From that point, we need only hypothesize designer(s), placing no qualities on the nature of the designer, and a bunch of qualities pop out in the evidence. (See post #8).
ID certainly needs to avoid extracting properties for a designer from religious texts and perspectives — especially so in light of the critical eye we ar getting by the materialists. Yet the evidence still calls to have some meat placed upon the nature of the designer. We need to allow that meat to be built up. Which, of course is the root of what you are saying.
Jay,
bfast
Steve
Sal Gal
After reading your comments, (with due care I hope) my main point still seems to hold. The question is not, it seems to me, whether ID will morph into something else. It may or it may not. The question is this: When and by whom does this transformation take place? It’s not something that a “movement” can do; it requires an individual trailblazer. There is no reason for ID to change what it is at this time, because no one has provided the necessary light. If some new genius fashions a more expansive paradigm, then that’s great. Let the transformation begin.
Meanwhile, that is, until that noble trailblazer comes along, It does no good for anyone else to say, “Hey, ID community, how about doing some trailblazing and extend the work of Dembski and Behe. The obvious answer to that challenge is, “If you want it done, do it yourself. We’re not there yet, and may never be.”
This clarian call for innovation reminds of the creative-minded mouse who once reassured his colleagues that they would never again have to fear the house cat. All that was needed was a little forward thinking. If someone would simply place a bell on the cat’s neck, all the mice would we warned that he is coming and they would be safe from that point on. All was well until someone asked the question, “Who bells the cat.” That was the end of that dialogue. So, I say to all those who would transform ID into something that is not, go for it. Bell the cat.
Oops, I meant, “clarion call.”
StephenB @73:
We seem to be approaching violent agreement. I don’t think that ID researchers have identified the answer yet, but I do think that the question of the nature of the designer is a valid one, and properly part of ID theory. “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer. “We’re not considering that question” is not.
JJ
WeaselSpotting,
No free premise.
Not that it’s appropriate in this thread, but you should try to describe precisely how someone not looking for Hamlet specifically might find Hamlet “embedded” within a long sequence of letters from a four-letter alphabet. A related thought experiment is to consider how someone who is bent on extracting Hamlet from the sequence would go about selecting a decoding algorithm.
I am not being contentious here. I have pointed you to some fundamental problems in design detection. And I have not done so with “down to earth” philosophy, but with a theoretical understanding of coding, language, and computation.
—-JayM: “We seem to be approaching violent agreement. I don’t think that ID researchers have identified the answer yet, but I do think that the question of the nature of the designer is a valid one, and properly part of ID theory. “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer. “We’re not considering that question” is not.”
Well, no, my friend, not exactly. You seem to misunderstand my position. The question about a designer is off limits until the researcher says differently. “Not yet” means, “No, I’ll let you know if and when I ever change my mind.” The scientist makes the call— not the Darwinists, not the scientists friends, and certainly not impatient critics kibbitzing from the sidelines. My position is basically the same as that of Upright Biped, with the possible exception of allowing for future contingencies.
JayM,
I wasn’t really attempting a military metaphor. What Sun Tzu and others described is no more about military maneuver than gravity is about Newton’s falling fruit. A mother trying to get her son out of the neighbor’s tree faces the same issues of opposing force as a damselfish surviving on a coral reef. Anytime forces meet in opposition the rules apply. Beyond the words used, there is no metaphor; the actual issues remain. Either the defended position matters or it doesn’t. Either attacking the weakness inherent in strength is wise, or it is not. Either broadening your forces against a superior opponent weakens your attack, or it doesn’t. Which is it?
I think there are those who should answer the question.
- – - – - –
allanius, thank you.
- – - – - –
Sal,
I enjoy reading your posts, even when I don’t agree with you. I especially appreciate your comments about a “utilitarian” approach to naturalism. I say this despite you finding it appropriate to accuse me of “unChristian subterfuge” if I don’t proceed as you on other matters. You also seam to think I have been influenced by Mr. Johnson, a man whose conquests I have never followed and whose writings I have never read. I am more likely influenced by Denton and Behe in ID and perhaps Berlinski in opinion.
As for your post at #65, you are certainly correct that I was being rhetorical, but I am less sure of the remainder of your comments.
I have no particular desire to put naturalism on trial. What I would like is for science and its outbound conclusions to demonstrate some level of integrity in what it does and does not know, the method of discovery is trivial by comparison.
A fine textbook description. Unfortunately, materialist ideologues have very much arrived at their conclusions and have made every attempt to have their conclusions codified into all public thought on the matter. To think otherwise is simply blind.
You apparently don’t need my help in jumping to conclusions; it seams you’ve done that yourself. The evidence presented by nucleic sequencing is that it requires agency to accomplish it. Chance and necessity have virtually nothing to recommend them in the bringing of the original nucleic sequence into order. This observation is purely agnostic. Despite your own assumptions otherwise, it provides nothing that says this agency is either outside of the laws of nature, or not.
This is the issue at hand. Science is to serve mankind. If the scientific establishment, as well as its public relations vehicles and the broader media in general, were saying that science has proceeded to a point where chance and necessity were no more of an explanation for Life than agency, then at least some semblance of honesty would have returned to the issue. But that is not the case. The opposite is demonstrably true in more ways than can be counted.
Of course, people will continue to promote that it is not science but ID being dishonest. What else could be expected – humility from those held up as the wisest among us?
StephenB @76:
Well, no, my friend, not exactly.
Darn it, I thought this might be the first time two people ever reached agreement in public on the web. We could have been famous!
I find this position untenable, for the reasons posted by myself and others previously in this thread. To summarize:
1) Detection of design provides information about the designer. At a minimum we determine that a designer exists, but the knowledge gain inherent in the process of researching design provides far more information than this. Each new discovery adds to this knowledge.
2) Design cannot be detected without making some working assumptions about the nature of the designer. By using CSI as an indicator of design, ID theorists are making some very strong claims about the designer, not least that it has an intelligence similar to that of, or recognizable by, humans.
3) Given 1 and 2, there is no logical, scientific reason to exclude consideration of the nature of the designer. In fact, doing so is unscientific in that it arbitrarily restricts where researchers may follow the evidence.
All objections to investigating the nature of the designer seem to be based on political and rhetorical considerations. This is actually far more damning to the ID cause than openly and honestly discussing what ID researchers have learned about the designer. I ask you this: Why is investigating the designer considered non-scientific if ID theory doesn’t assume, explicitly or implicitly, that the designer is God?
This charade is ethically questionable, scientifically indefensible, and politically useless. We should take the moral high ground and follow the evidence where it leads.
JJ
Upright BiPed,
I did not direct the “un-Christian subterfuge” remark at your virtual identity. Behe strikes me as entirely honest. I do not consider Denton a leader of the ID movement. Johnson and Dembski have published honest and admirable discussion of ID in out-of-the-way places. I have wondered for years how those two Christians could in good conscience propagandize as their adversaries do in the “cultural war.” Kierkegaard’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” has come to mind many times. Clearly I have not demonized Johnson and Dembski, though their methods sometimes disgust me.