Are Evolutionists Delusional (or just in denial)?
| July 27, 2009 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Intelligent Design |
My friend Paul Nelson has the patience of Job. He writes that evolutionists, such as PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, “need to think about [their theological arguments] more deeply.” In one moment evolutionists make religious arguments and in the next they claim their theory is “just science.” Their religious arguments, they explain, really aren’t religious arguments after all. Gee, that was easy. In light of such absurdity, I don’t have much confidence that evolutionists are going to think more deeply about this. But it would be nice if they would stop misrepresenting science. And it would be nice if they would stop using their credentials to mislead the public. In short, it would be nice if they would stop lying.
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181 Responses to Are Evolutionists Delusional (or just in denial)?
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kairosfocus:
I’m sorry that you took offense, kairosfocus, but you seem to read through martyr-colored glasses. We presented several counterexamples, and you rejected all of them for various reasons. Where are the falsehoods, strawmen, and demonizing?
Personally, if I witnessed such an avalanche, I would attribute it either to God or to a very clever human illusionist. Perhaps someone dug trenches on the hillside in the form of English text to trap some of the falling rocks. Perhaps somebody performed the trick in a way that I can’t think of.
So a case that you would accept as a FSCI from unintelligent causes, I would reject as such. To each his own.
It’s interesting that you refer to “chance and necessity”, but then give examples of avalanches, noise, and Zener noise. You realize, I assume, that not all chance+necessity processes are statistically random.
We all know that English text, and biological structures for that matter, aren’t produced by statistically random processes. Yet CSI and FSCI examples are virtually always based on a hypothesis of pure noise. (By calculating C*S*B in terms of the size of the config space or required storage space, you’re implicitly assuming a pure noise or random walk hypothesis.)
Sure, Dembski gives lip service to non-uniform hypotheses in his CSI approach, but he doesn’t take any into account in his examples. And in his active info work he explicitly rejects any ultimate natural causes other than uniform noise.
So if FSCI succeeds in ruling out only what has already been ruled out, namely lucky noise, then how is it helpful?
Yes, it is obvious. It’s because avalanches don’t result in English text, Zener noise doesn’t produce Shakespeare, and the question of which phenomena fall under the “chance and necessity” category depends on one’s definitions and philosophical and religious assumptions.
It would be nice if we didn’t have to try to fill in the definitional details ourselves based on context and examples. Some of us are non-willfully obtuse and might get it wrong. Let’s look just at the terms functional and contingent.
Is the meaning of functional environment-dependent? Should only one environment be considered? If A causes B, and B is functional, is A also functional? (Note that Dembski claims this to be the case for specificity, or else CSI would not be conserved.)
How about contingent? Is a blotch from a spilled ink bottle contingent? How about the locations of fragments from an exploded bomb? How about the output of a pseudo-random number generator? Does contingency reflect a given observer’s lack of prior knowledge, or ultimate non-determinacy? If everything is ultimately deterministic, as it could be under Bohmian mechanics, then is there no such thing as contingency?
How so? You attribute the FSCI in novel solutions generated by GAs to the human programmers of the GAs. You attribute the FSCI in ocean tides to those who record and analyze tidal data. You have offered no general method for determining the source of FSCI, but you always give the credit to humans.
Certainly, but does designing the program equate to designing its output? If a programmer expresses the domain, structure, and objective function of a problem in code, is he designing a solution? If a natural language program utters a sentence that has never entered the head of the programmer, is it the programmer speaking? If so, then why doesn’t the FSCI in human-designed solutions and prose not get attributed to the cause(s) of humans? Is it because of a philosophical assumption that humans’ decisions, unlike computers’, are contra-causal?