Who or what is the designer?
| December 22, 2005 | Posted by William Dembski under Intelligent Design |
A creationist on one of the listserves to which I subscribe wrote:
Ken Miller and Rick Wood (skeptic and host of the radio program audiomartini) claim to have more respect for young earth creationists than ID proponents because “at least they are upfront about what they believe.” According to them, everyone knows what the real purpose of ID is: it is to advance belief in God. What, then, is the problem with acknowledging it? So why not just be up front and put to rest the accusation of dishonesty?
Here is why in fictional monologue:
- ID scientist, (insert Behe, Minnich, Dembski, anyone) is it true that you are a Christian and believe in God?
- Is it true that one of the tenets of Christianity is to make disciples of all nations?
- Although I acknowledge your claim that ID does not say who the designer is, you do in fact have a personal belief that it is God, correct?
- Although I can agree that you are attempting to make observations and religiously neutral hypotheses, the conclusions ultimately will point to a supernatural intelligent designer correct?
- Then even though you claim to be using science alone, I don’t believe that your motivation is only to advance science but instead are only hiding your real motivation to convert people.
Points 4 and 5 are problematic. Let’s cut to the chase: Is the designer responsible for biological complexity God? Even as a very traditional Christian and an ardent proponent of ID, I would say NOT NECESSARILY. To ask who or what is the designer of a particular object is to ask for the immediate intelligent agent responsible for its design. The point is that God is able to work through derived or surrogate intelligences, which can be anything from angels to organizing principles embedded in nature.
For instance, just because I hold to both Christian theism and ID doesn’t mean that God directly designed and implemented the bacterial flagellum by specifically toggling its components. It could well have happened by a process of natural genetic engineering of the sort envisioned by James Shapiro. The design would be no less real, but God’s role in the design would be distant, not proximal.
Philosophers have long distinguished between primary and secondary causes. The problem is that under the pall of methodological naturalism, secondary causes have been identified with purely materialistic processes. But it’s perfectly legitimate for secondary causes to include teleological processes. I develop all this at length in THE DESIGN REVOLUTION.
Great thread (I searched long and hard for a discussion like this…)
I am interested in the intersection of physics with the philosophy of design vs. entirely natural processes. ISTM that whether you adhere to a determinstic or random basis for fundamental physics, either way there is no opportunity for the insertion of so-called CSI beyond the initial conditions of this Universe. Not having read Dembski yet, it seems from the comments here that he proposes specific acts of ‘CSI insertion’ in the relatively recent history of Mankind. So my question for the author (if he is following ths thread), or for anyone else, is this: what kind of process do you propose by which the purported designer can inject CSI into the stream of random &/or deterministic processes that follow the laws of physics, including the (possibly fundamentally) statistical laws of quantum mechanics?
Somewhere in this chain of events, something has to give: an atom has to move a bit differently; an electron pops into an orbit that it shouldn’t have. Some sort of interaction has to occur along the boundary between the material world, as we understand it to behave physically, and the world of ‘rationality’, which is apparently a source of ‘CSI’.
This all reminds me very much of some philosophical exchanges that occured from the 1970′s onward, regarding the claims of AI researchers, cognitive scientists, and those who took a strong stand to defend the dualist (by my reckoning) concept of irreducible consciousness and free will. Basically, it all comes down to whether you believe in free will as a fundamental feature of reality.
ps it may interest you all to know (though I doubt it’s a surprise) that in many intellectual circles, ID is characterized as a mindless rehash of bible-thumping creation myth advocacy. The idea that there is any actual attempt by intelligent persons to think about these issues, and perhaps seek some common ground between their faith and their reason, is anathema to that crowd. I tried in vain to make the point on one list that an overly dogmatic, “they are all idiots who need to be burned at the stake of science” approach to this issue, was a bad idea. I tried to make the argument that allowing a bit of discussion in schools might help encourage critical thinking in the minds of young people looking to resolve the conflicts between competing dogmas they are exposed to. A couple folks emailed me off-list to simply say, “don’t go there, you will be branded a religious nut and ostracized”. It’s sort of sad how predictable human beings are, even the supposedly smart ones.
-dbm
pps I just re-read this post, and actually had an urge to cancel it and re-register under a nickname I have never used, out of fear that someone I have interacted with in other circles might actually read it. But I just realized that I am willing to defend my right to engage in this discussion, and anyone who brands me as a potential zealot because I even post a comment on a blog started by someone who wrote an ID book, can go to hell
But it’s not a worry, because they generally will not descend to even reading this stuff, and if they do, they can’t admit it to anyone.
Dan
“what kind of process do you propose by which the purported designer can inject CSI into the stream”
Anything you can imagine that is within the realm of the physically possible.
I refer you to a statement by the Arthur C. Clarke “Any sufficiently advanced technology will appear as magic.”
I don’t know all the technologies available to sufficiently advanced designers but I presume they operate within the known laws of physics. It’s possible there are undiscovered laws of physics but for the nonce I prefer to think about what’s possible within known laws.
As I see it, mankind is on the cusp of being able to engineer living forms and transport them to another planet. At least in principle it’s possible and anything that’s possible in principle is an engineering problem which can be solved by throwing enough time and money at it. The most likely scenario IMO is that life on earth arrived here in a pre-programmed form billions of years ago with all necessary CSI already contained within the blueprints and it was just a matter of unfolding. Think of how a single egg cell unfolds into a complex human being with trillions of cells in hundreds of different specialized cell types organized into dozens of tissue types and organ systems in a matter of months (ontogenesis). Imagine now that phylogenesis was a similar process that took place over a span of billions of years. Just as the egg cell for a human contained all the CSI needed to construct a human a hypothetical egg cell for the earth’s biosphere could’ve contained all the CSI needed to diversify into what we observe today. This answers all the problems (gaps) in standard evolution and poses one new question – where did the first cell come from. Just like many other questions the answer to that may simply prove to be lost in time and never answered.
Now that we’ve outlined a planetary seed scenario keep in mind that mankind is on the verge of being able to seed another planet with life. For instance, much has been written about the terraforming of Mars. We would in fact be reproducing our planet’s biosphere on another planet. I posit it would not be the first time a planet has been terraformed by a technological intelligence. It happened on earth and we in turn will reproduce again. This is the story of life – reproducing itself. I say it’s a story that’s older than our solar system and we’re just one chapter in it.
danbmil99 writes:
“Somewhere in this chain of events, something has to give: an atom has to move a bit differently; an electron pops into an orbit that it shouldn’t have. Some sort of interaction has to occur along the boundary between the material world, as we understand it to behave physically, and the world of ‘rationality’, which is apparently a source of ‘CSI’.”
Dan,
Well put. That is exactly what I had in mind in writing the following:
“The only sense in which ‘directed’ stands in opposition to ‘undirected’ is if the laws of nature are being violated in the ‘directed’ case, which by definition would seem to require supernatural intervention.”
I’m not sure what to make of DaveScot’s response. He doesn’t seem to have understood the question you were asking.
Welcome to the blog.
Regards,
Keith S.
jay writes:
“What this says to me is that you do not believe that a non-supernatural being can have free will, but that a supernatural one can.”
Actually I lean toward compatibilism (a la Dennett), so I believe that non-supernatural beings can have free will even while consisting only of matter and energy operating according to natural law (whether deterministic or not). See comment #6 at
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....chives/568
“…perhaps by means of intelligence, quantum indeterminacy is somehow both harnessed, organized, and amplified [to produce CSI].”
If you’re allowing for a purely material intelligence, and you believe that quantum indeterminacy is part of nature, then Dembski would seem to rule out the production of CSI by this means when he says “Natural causes are incapable of generating CSI.”
If you believe that either intelligence or quantum indeterminacy or both have a non-material component, then you’re requiring something outside of nature (i.e. something supernatural). So again, you’re forced to invoke the supernatural.
“Second, you are assuming that anything that can choose to cause (i.e., direct) outcomes that would not otherwise occur (i.e., is a conscious intelligence) must be supernatural.”
Dembski seems to demand that intelligence have a supernatural component when he says that intelligence can generate CSI but that natural causes alone cannot. My personal view is obviously quite different, but again, my purpose here is to see where Dembski’s ideas lead.
I wrote:
“Lastly, Dembski himself is quite specific about this. He writes in ‘Intelligent Design’ that ‘Natural causes are incapable of generating CSI’ and ‘The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases’.â€Â
jay writes:
“You’re quote mining here.”
Careful, boy, them’s fightin’ words ’round here!
“On the same page (170), in the the same paragraph, of *Intelligent Design*, Dembski provides the following definition: “natural causes are precisely those characterized by chance, law or a combination of the two†Thus, in the quote, when he says “natural causes†he clearly means “undirected natural causes.†You are being (perhaps unwittingly) dishonest in your reading.”
On the contrary, my interpretation agrees with yours. He is referring to undirected natural causes, which is why he specifies a “closed” system. An open system would be required in order to allow natural causes to be directed from outside.
“Further, in *The Design Revolution*, in the preface he states that the ‘fundamental claim’ of intelligent design is that ‘there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of UNDIRECTED natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence.’”
Again, we agree. He is saying that the CSI of these systems could not have come into being through undirected natural processes. As he says, “The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases.â€Â
You probably agree with this, but just to be clear, he is speaking of the origin of the CSI in the system via directed natural processes. The operation of the system proceeds according to undirected natural processes.
DaveScot writes:
“Still flogging the “who designed the designer†argument.”
Dave,
Still not admitting the designer chain argument is different? I answered your “infinite regress” charge and your “identify the first designer” charge. How can the arguments be the same if they differ on those crucial points?
“This is directly from mouth of the Pandamonium game’s first and weakest Panda – The Philosopher Panda.”
Well, if a video game says so, I guess it must be true. Perhaps we should ask PacMan about the bacterial flagellum and consult the Super Mario Brothers on the Cambrian explosion.
By the way, have you noticed that the Pandas always kill the “think tank” in the end?
“The only sense in which ‘directed’ stands in opposition to ‘undirected’ is if the laws of nature are being violated in the ‘directed’ case, which by definition would seem to require supernatural intervention.â€Â
I disagree. Direction does not require a violation of the laws of physics. It simply requires stacking the probablistic deck. This can be done in total or piecemeal.
PjB writes:
“I disagree. Direction does not require a violation of the laws of physics. It simply requires stacking the probablistic deck.”
Hi PjB,
Perhaps, if you could “stack the deck” in a scientifically undetectable way. But it still seems you’d need a supernatural agent to do so, which is my point. See my reply to Jay above regarding quantum indeterminacy.