Faith and Reason in the OOL Context
| July 20, 2008 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
Paul Giem’s comment to my Faith and Reason post below is so good, I thought it deserved its own post. Read on to see how Paul demonstrates decisively that in the origin of life context (OOL) the materialists’ faith commitment is the sort of blind-leap-in-the-dark-in-the-teeth-of-the-evidence stretch of which they delight in accusing theists of making.
Paul is responding to a comment from Tom MH:
Tom MH,
It does seem like we share the axiom that the universe is rational, although we need to explore precisely what that means.
Does that mean that the universe is self-explanatory? If Big-Bang cosmology is correct, then there was a time when the universe was not self-explanatory. One can postulate a God, or multiple universes, or a super-universe. But the universe we know cannot explain itself, when pushed back beyond some 13.7 billion years. So, unless one is prepared to challenge Big-Bang cosmology, one must admit that rationality (for the universe) does not entail complete obedience to natural law (the laws of physics as we understand laws) and nothing else. For the laws of physics fail at the moment of the Big Bang. That’s why it is called a singularity.
Are there any other times at which there is evidence for a singularity? Are there any other times when the laws of physics fail to explain the observed phenomena? Probably the best candidate for such a time is at the origin of life. Consider three postulates:
1. Life exists at present.
2. Life could not have existed for a substantial period of time after the Big Bang.
3. Life comes only from life.
I believe we can agree on the first postulate. I believe that, given the Big Bang, we can agree on the second postulate. The real question is whether the third postulate is secure.
As you know, there was a time when the third postulate was believed to be demonstrably false. That time is gone. In fact, the whole point of evolution would be moot if the third postulate were routinely violated. Need some new phyla in the Cambrian? No problem. Trilobites, starfish, clams, hallucinogenia, and hagfish can just spontaneously pop into being. No need to postulate, let alone find, intermediates between ediacaran life and trilobites, for instance. For that matter, no need to find intermediates between reptiles and birds, or between chimpanzees and humans. They just spontaneously generated. The point is that it is generally recognized that the spontaneous generation of life is at least difficult and rare.
Is it even possible without the intervention of some kind of intelligence? We certainly don’t know the answer is yes by any kind of scientific experimentation. In fact, all our experiments to date argue that the answer is no. So if there is to be any evidence for the belief in abiogenesis, it must (at present) come from theory.
But as you also probably know, there is no coherent theory that explains the origin of life from non-life without intelligence either. Otherwise, Harverd scientists would not have gotten their grant to produce such a theory.
And the obstacles in the way of such a theory are formidable. They include (not an exhaustive list):
1. Miller-Urey apparati do not produce all the amino acids used in life.
2. Miller-Urey apparati produce numerous other compounds not used in life, and some that are toxic (the most prominent one being hydrogen cyanide).
3. Miller-Urey apparati do not produce sugars in the presence of ammonia, which is required for producing amino acids.
4. Miller-Urey apparati do not produce all the bases needed for DNA and RNA (Adenine, (HCN)5, being the only one made in appreciable amounts).
5. No known reaction will add bases to the 1-position of ribose (even living organisms do not synthesize the nucleosides that way, using either a complicated synthesis for adenine and guanine, or orotic acid for uridine and cytidine).
6. There is no known process for consistently forming one chirality (left-handed versus right-handed) of biochemical compounds from racemic (non-chiral or mixed chiral) reagents, outside of life itself.
7. There is no known way to get nucleoside triphosphates from nucleosides other than biochemically.
8. When nucleosides polymerize naturally into RNA, they form 2?-5? linkages rather than the 3?-5? linkages normally found in RNA.
9. When RNA is formed by RNA polymerase, shorter RNA molecules outcompete longer ones.
10. Reasonable requirements for the specificity of RNA required for the origin of life are vastly beyond the probabilistic resources of the universe.
11. Even given all the ingredients for life, life will still not spontaneously reorganize. That is why canned fool can sit on the shelf indefinitely without spoiling.
Thus all the evidence we have points to postulate 3 above being correct; life only comes from life. This appears to point to another singularity, this time after the universe began.
Postulating a material intelligence (as Dawkins allowed) doesn’t solve the problem. For then that intelligence must have arisen via some mechanism also. If it is life, then we still must allow for its spontaneous generation, or else a singularity for it. Non-living intelligence is even more of a reach. To postulate that computers, for example, can evolve without intelligent (e. g., from people) input completely strains credulity. And computers cannot have made it through the Big Bang.
So we are left with three alternatives.
1. There are laws of which we are totally ignorant that can produce life from non-living material, without the intervention of intelligence.
2. Life arose through a singularity with no cause, sometime after the universe was formed (implying a break in rationality).
3. Life arose through the action of an intelligent agent, whose intelligence is not dependent upon the organization of matter (which would make that agent supernatural).
Option 2, it seems to me, is irrational, and concedes a universe that is at least partly irrational. Option 3 is not irrational, but is not materialistic, postulating an entity or entities that is/are not restricted to the material. That is, it is rational, but not materialistic.
Option 1 is rational in one sense; we know that our information is incomplete, and this could be one more area where our information is incomplete. And belief in abiogenesis allows us to view the universe as completely (well, except for quantum mechanics and the Big Bang itself), explained by cause-effect relations.
But it is heavily faith-based. We have no experimental evidence for this belief, and the theoretical problems appear insoluble. We have here belief against all the evidence, analogous to the most daring leaps of religious faith imaginable, that is to say, faith not only without evidence but in the teeth of evidence. And it is even worse; there is no appeal to a God Who could reasonably do the feat that needs explaining. It is a miracle without God.
The rationale that I have seen for this leap of faith is usually that “science” has solved all previous problems and will solve this one too. But this argument is wrong, on two counts. First, even if successful, it would only establish that there was relative parity between the argument for the supernatural origin of life and those for abiogenesis. We would still be completely dependent on faith to believe in abiogenesis.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, “science” has in fact not solved all previous problems. Science has come up to a stone wall regarding the origin of the universe. In fact, “science” has come up to several difficult obstacles, issued promissory notes, and moved on without actually solving the problems. The origin of the Cambrian fauna is something that non-interventionalist evolutionary theory has simply postulated without fossil evidence. The origin of the flagellum in a step-by-step manner has never actually been demonstrated (the best try, that of Matzke, was actually a leap-by-leap explanation, and even then without any experimental evidence to back up his scenario). This insistence that nature must be self-contained is in fact faith against the weight of evidence.
Now if you want to believe in abiogenesis by faith, I won’t begrudge you. But some of us prefer to be a little more evidence-based.
72 Responses to Faith and Reason in the OOL Context
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Paul Giem,
Sorry for being “snarky.” You seem sincere, and perhaps I’ll enter into a kinder conversation with you later.
Hi Atticus:
RE, 56: In Dembski’s ID theory, intelligence is posited as a cause — and an empirically unobservable one, at that.
Nope.
1 –> Intelligence is a routinely observed and experienced FACT, as I took time to outline yesterday.
2 –> We, per capital example, are intelligent creatures. [We may have debates on whether the intelligence is an expression of merely physical-chemical etc effects, perhaps through coded information, but that is debating explaining the nature of intelligence, not recognising that it is.]
3 –> So, intelligence is possible, as it plainly is. And, it leaves identifiable characteristic traces that are [per experience backed up by probabilistic resource exhaustion issues] not left by chance and/or mechanical necessity — cf 400 dice dropped on a table at random and arranged in a functional, coded pattern.
4 –> So, when we see such traces as functionally specified complex information, we have good empirical reason to be confident that intelligence is at work.
5 –> Indeed, this is routinely written into scientific work and statistical studies.
6 –> Now, on certain matters, we see such signs of intelligence in contexts that are distinctly uncomfortable for evolutionary materialists. Their response, sadly, has not been to show that chance + necessity do generate FSCI, but to try to beg the question by definition. That is all too telling on the merits.
GEM of TKI
Atticus, again:
Re, 56: Dembski says that the only way more than a small amount of complex specified information is manifest in a material event is if non-material intelligence creates it.
First, last I checked, this was a reasonably credible definition of ID as a scientific endeavour:
Second, I think you will find in this discussion, nowhere any claim that intelligence is material or non-material in nature.
Third, the issue is that as one instance, as a matter of fact, once we see an entity that shows functionally specific, complex information, it has only been observed to be caused by intelligence. As a matter of empirical observation, so supporting a strong induction to the cause of FSCI. And, the practical threshold of such required complexity is of order 500 – 1,000 bits of information storing capacity.
It is the CONTEXT of certain cases in point that raises the onward question as to whether the intelligence responsible for say the origin of the observed cosmos as usually estimated at 13.7 BYA, with its multidimensional fine-tuning relative to supporting cell-based life, was embodied or not.
Please, note the direction of the chain of inference . . .
GEM of TKI
Atticus, yet again:
Re, 56: Pointing to outcomes of human behavior and saying “everyone knows that intelligence is what causes that” does not wash as scientific definition.
1 –> Here, we start from a basic fact: we are intelligent, living creatures.
2 –> I highlight the “living” as there is just as much no accepted general definition of life as there is no globally accepted definition of intelligence. Would you therefore wish to argue that the science that studies life — biology — is thus not a [proper] science? (Hold back the physicists out there who think anything less than physics is not a true science, please . . .)
3 –> In fact, we recognise plain cases of life, and look at he characteristics, then examine other cases that bear more of less of a family resemblance.
4 –> On pain of selective hyperskepticism, if we can study life and its traces and characteristics with profit as an empirically based scientific endeavour, we can similarly study intelligence, its characteristics and its traces as a scientific endeavour.
5 –> So, if we can find cases of known intelligent action, and find certain distinguishing characteristics that reliably empirically mark it apart from what chance and mechanical necessity can do, we have credible criteria for identifying the presence of intelligence as an active cause.
6 –> From the debates that surround so simple a matter, this is already revolutionary, even though it is a matter of extending techniques that are routine in many experimental and observational studies and associated statistics.
7 –> Beyond this, perhaps we can seek to identify whether physical embodiment is a necessary condition of intelligence, or what are the ways in which intelligence enters into the process of cause.
But, these are onward questions.
Already, simply to recongise that intelligence, chance and mechanical necessity are possible causal factors in a situation, and to seek tracers that mark out which is responsible for what, has proved revolutionary for science.
This revolution has obviously bled over into the culture wars over worldviews and agendas — which seems to be driving much of the opposition from evolutionary materialists who hitherto have thought they owned the copyright on the term “Science.”
But, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
GEM of TKI
Paul wrote:
“I don’t think Matzke is bluffing. I think he is a true believer that is putting his best case forward, and that sometimes he accepts inadequate explanations because he is credulous, and that there are some major holes in his case. But bluffing implies that he is saying things that he doesn’t believe in order to persuade others, and I think he really believes his case.”
You make a fair point, Paul. I am generally quite unimpressed with Matzke’s posturing, primarily because he has been exposed to this entire debate for so long and can’t seem to get over a couple of conceptual humps. For example, he still fosters the ID = creationism nonsense every chance he gets, despite numerous explanations and corrections to the contrary made to him personally by many of the leading ID proponents. On that specific point, I have a hard time judging whether he is incompetent or purposely deceptive. I also have a hard time telling whether he really believes what he writes some of the time, such as his “explanation” for the bacterial flagellum, or if it is mere posturing for the worldview.
As the second definition of “bluff” my dictionary has the following: “to impress, deter, or intimidate by showing more confidence than the facts support.” In that sense, I think Matzke is most definitely bluffing, now as usual, and that is the sense in which I made my comment.
However, there is another definition of “bluff,” namely to “mislead or deceive,” which implies (at least in the latter case) some intentional malfeasance. You are right that I can’t read Matzke’s thoughts and I don’t know his true motivation. Thus, in the spirit of civil discourse and reasoned debate I should — and am happy to — take him at face value and assume that he believes what he says. In that sense then, it is not clear that he is bluffing and I should have been more charitable in my choice of words.
It’s modern science that “reifies” the problem of intelligence in nature, not ID. And it’s the Darwinists, not the IDers, who now find themselves in the awkward position of having to ascribe intelligence to nature for its own sake.
Everyone now knows that Darwin’s spontaneous generation explanation for the origin of life was little more than wishful thinking. Things don’t just happen when it comes to life. The cell is astonishingly complex and probably irreducibly complex.
This complexity points north to intelligence. Nature is now described in engineering terms in science journals. Which raises the question—how do we account for signs of engineering in nature?
Now for IDers, it’s so easy a child could do it. Those signs are attributed to an intelligent designer, not to nature itself. If there was an intelligent designer, then it makes perfect sense that his handiwork would show signs of engineering.
Things are not so easy for the poor Darwinists, however. They cannot deny that the complexity of nature indicates intelligence, but they continue to cling to Darwin and refuse to allow any inference of a designer. Thus they have no choice but to attempt to ascribe intelligence to nature itself—to physical causes
At that point they find themselves falling on a two-edged sword. They were eager to embrace Hume when he conked Newton’s God on the head with his billiard balls, but the same deconstruction of causes also applies to any attempt to make nature a cause of intelligence. All we see is the effect; our notions of cause are pure speculation.
Hume argued that theists cannot reason back with certainty to first causes or discover their nature through the effects observed in nature—but then it is also certainly true that Darwinists cannot obtain any degree of certainty with regard to the causes of the signs of intelligence seen in nature.
In fact the Darwinists are in a worse position than Newton, in Hume’s analogy, since they cannot even see one ball strike the other. Not only are they incapable of making any final judgment about causes, but they cannot offer any tangible proof that the proximate causes they invoke really do exist.
So it seems Hume’s dream is coming true in a way he never considered. Modern science is in the process of undoing itself and its devotion to Darwin, which leaves philosophers free to reimagine a happiness that goes far beyond the limitations of Modernism.
Darwinism leads to the annihilation of all value except the will to power—but it seems the door is still open to articulate something fresh and new. Life itself has overturned the smallness of human thinking and the vanity of those who are wise in their own thinking.
Allanius:
RE: Hume argued that theists cannot reason back with certainty to first causes or discover their nature through the effects observed in nature
In light of the issue of inevitability of “first plausibles” with associated “basic beliefs”, and in light of our finitude and fallibility, can we be “certain” — beyond moral certainty — of ANY major worldview commitment?
In that context, does it not make better sense to dismiss teh quest for “certainty” in reasoning as the pursuit of a mirage, then accept that we live by worldview level faith commmitments?
Thence, is it not immensely well warranted — note the shift from terms like “proof” — to accept that the existence of agents who act intelligently and volitionally to cause events in the world of our collective experience is a matter of general practical consensus and self-evident reality?
Thus, we come back to the points that
1 –> agency is actual in our cosmos, so
2 –> it is possible for it to have been “there” at the point of the origin of life on our planet.
3 –> Therefore, when we see well-tested, reliable signs of intelligence at work in cell-based life,
4 –> it is reasonable to conclude that such life, per best — and provisional — explanation, is a product of intelligent action.
5 –> Further to this, since there is a competing explanation based on chance + necessity, if its advocates can show empirically that FSCI can plausibly be generated through non-intelligent mechanisms, the inference at 4 is provisional and subject o empirical test. [Big if, of course . . .]
6 –> Thus, the design inference is properly scientific.
GEM of TKI
kairosfocus, (67)
You are exactly right that science is provisional, and the word “proof” is not appropriate for science without qualification. That is why I argued that believers in (unguided) abiogenesis were faith-based against the evidence, rather than that they were wrong. Their faith is not irrational; it is just against the vast weight of the evidence.
If I understand Hume correctly, he argued that we cannot perceive cause and effect, just paired actions. He then went on to ague that a miracle must be less likely in all cases than a naturalistic explanation. But if we cannot be sure that there is such a thing as cause and effect, how can we be sure that a “cause” will always produce the same “effect”, in other words, without a cause-effect chain, how can one exclude miracles confidently? This appears like verbal gamesmanship, and it appears like Hume lost the game.
It is fascinating to note that, although there have been multiple vigorous philosophical challenges to the propositions that began this thread, there have been very few, and very anemic, attempts to challenge the scientific claims themselves (the 11 obstacles and relatives). It appears to me that in this area, once one clears the field of philosophical objections, there is no contest regarding the weight of the scientific data. It could be fairly said that believers in naturalism must resort to trying to win before the argument is started, because once it is joined, naturalism loses hands down.
——Paul Giem: You make an excellent point. All the objections to your 11 points depend either on unduly strong faith in materialism or unduly weak faith in reason. To challenge the principle of causality is to challenge reason itself.
Thanks to BarryA, Paul Giem and all of the posters on this thread. This one I’m going to have to print up as a hardcopy, to read and reread.
Most often, I lurk here at UD. As an educational exercise. In that, the subjects discussed are so often too far out of my depth for me to have much worth contributing.
I rehearse this disclaimer so that, should anyone detect any penchant in the following for sticking my foot in my mouth, it can be seen in its proper context.
1. On a humorous note, regarding Paul Giem @57:
Could it have been all that studying they had to do and all those tests they had to take in college?
Sorry.
2. On a theological note, regarding one of the points in Paul Giem’s most-excellent canvas of the epistemology of miracles @33:
I wholeheartedly agree, with added acknowledgment that, within most Biblical theologies considered sound by most Christians, there are two (dare I say) nonmaterial intelligent causes for miracles. One performing them for genuine reasons and the other for counterfeit reasons. Namely God and the Devil. Compare Acts 2:22 and II Thessalonians 2:8-9.
3. It seems to me that Paul Giem’s point 11, in the original post, also destroys the multiverse angle that materialists resort to when cornered into acknowledging the finely-tuned universe in which we live. Viz:
Here’s my logic, and please, someone shoot it down if it’s wrong.
It seems to me that, anybody resorting to multiple universes to overcome these odds, makes the same mistake as the coin-flipper. The one who, after the improbable event of 1000-straight heads, assumes that there has to be a better than a 50-50 chance that the next flip will be tails. When the odds, each flip, are always 50-50.
So when it comes to flipping multiple universes, if instead of the probability being 50-50, the probability of our particular finely-tuned universe turning up is “beyond the resources” of each particular universe being flipped (each having to be a coin “just like ours” in all its basic physical laws, in order for “ours” to have turned up as-is), then, no matter how many of universes are flipped, the “reasonable requirements for specificity” always remain impossible to meet.
That would make the odds of an infinite number of universes no better than the odds for one. And in fact, multiplying the universes, just like multiplying the coin flips, makes the results revert more and more toward the mean.
4. Regarding Rude @53 regarding: “…it’s ‘turtles all the way down’.”
What? Never heard that one before. Gladly on Wikipedia, Hawkings is cited where he relates the story in A Brief History:
ROFLMAO!!!
Hi JS:
Some interesting — and at points funny — comments.
A few remarks:
1] we do know quite a bit about the universe.
Two senses of know are at work there. First, book- and lab- learning. But the more deep sense is, whether our claims to know are well warranted and credibly true.
This last is what PG was driving at.
Never mind how funny it seems!
2] the same mistake as the coin-flipper.
This one is interesting.
The key issue is that it is assumed that if there are enough sub-cosmi out there, one is bound to come up trumps on facilitating life and then also having something like us. (Odds on a per universe basis are very low, but if the distribution of possible universes is wide enough and there are enough chances across a random distribution, then somewhere, someone will win the lottery.)
But, therein lurks the next issue: where did the universe-generating machine come from?
Robin Collins:
In short, we are looking at a regress. [The article is well worth reading.]
Which brings us to:
3] Turtles:
The issue is really a quesiton of chains of cause-effect or ground-consequent.
We basically have the choices:
So, which is it, why?
GEM of TKI
KF,
You know I was thinking about all of this yesterday. I have recently picked up guitar and was trying to recreate the sound of a particular artist. I have discovered that no matter how simple a riff is it is imperative to use the same set up as that artist. That is sound is a very precise thing even as simple as it may seem. This lead me to think about the specificity of form through the apparently designed universe. These tight fine tuned characteristics cant be the result of pure change because chance is not only incapable of producing matter motion and event- but chance cant even purchase itself= that is chance is not a mechanism that is self contained- it is not a set of all sets- it is a description that has form but cannot describe form as such.
Chance describes but cannot design.
When I was trying to find that perfect sound- in retrospect- it seems quite insufficient to say that all that was happening was chance methodologically trying to mimic itself. A chance realty is an absurd grouping of sets.