An Evolution Question

[Shadowfury333]

(4) supernatural without design. Something like a great supernatural sneeze could splatter across our cosmos and create things that somebody might mistakenly interpret as design (perhaps by mistakenly reasoning that natural processes cannot create them, so they must have been designed, or even because the sneeze created things with features also reminiscent of human design, even though no design took place).

Well, if you are right, then I suppose that we should all be living in perpetual fear of The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief. Otherwise, I suggest that you cancel your frequent trips to Viltvodle VI.

The fourth one was the one I particularly had in mind, but this is because as Shadowfury notes, I'm more skeptical of a God's role (either that or by "ambiguous" he's trying to point out a feature of my writing style ).

Well, I meant ambiguous in that you weren't about to believe in either of the extremes already listed, but you hadn't specified your own belief. I suppose agnostic would've been more accurate.

[snoopy]

Precisely. It's like asking whether Mt. Rushmore was formed by intelligent designers or by tools that can shape stone.

And I think there's even a fourth possibility.

The first two were (1) natural without design and (2) supernatural with design. Then there's a third one, the one you mentioned, (3) natural with design, but I think there's also another important fourth: (4) supernatural without design. Something like a great supernatural sneeze could splatter across our cosmos and create things that somebody might mistakenly interpret as design (perhaps by mistakenly reasoning that natural processes cannot create them, so they must have been designed, or even because the sneeze created things with features also reminiscent of human design, even though no design took place). The fourth one was the one I particularly had in mind, but this is because as Shadowfury notes, I'm more skeptical of a God's role (either that or by "ambiguous" he's trying to point out a feature of my writing style ).

ID intentionally isn't making statements about the means by which something came about, it's making statements about the design behind the result. You're confusing what scientific ID is intended to be about with what creationists want to use it to say.

Your example has 2 elements to each case: design or no design, and natural or supernatural execution of the design. So, you're really doing nothing to refute ID, you're tacking extra meaning onto what ID claims to seek. So, when looking at Mt. Rushmore, ID really doesn't care at all about how it was formed- it cares about the fact an intelligent being had a hand in designing the current state that it is in. Obviously, the intelligent being has to somehow enact the design so that it may be detected, bit ID doesn't try to make any statements about that.

Again, it's a matter of scope. ID is only about detecting the presence of intelligent design in something, it isn't about determining how that design was transferred to the object.

ID relegates objects into two categories: designed or random. By pitting design against natural processes you are comparing different things- one is the evidence of an intelligent being's influence, the other is one of many possible means by which that influence could have been (or could not have been) enacted. So, let me put it to you this way: If something could not have arisen randomly, how could it have arisen other than by intelligent design?

[Mercury]

If something could not have arisen randomly, how could it have arisen other than by intelligent design?

By natural processes, since they can produce nonrandom results.

Edit: I know you want to leave natural processes out of this in order to get things down to a dichotomy, but there's no reason for me to accept that. The dichotomy is artificial: Natural processes can be random or nonrandom, and intelligent design can be random or nonrandom (as Jeff described above).

[Jeff250]

ID intentionally isn't making statements about the means by which something came about, it's making statements about the design behind the result. You're confusing what scientific ID is intended to be about with what creationists want to use it to say.

Yes, I was mistaken to use the word "supernatural," but to describe the more realistic case, design in general, only makes it even harder for the ID-ist, because now not only does he have the burden of coming up with a test to distinguish divine design from a divine sneeze, the test now needs to distinguish alien designs from alien sneezes, human design from human sneezes, etc. Human designs vs. human sneezes are usually easy to figure out. Alien designs vs. alien sneezes might be apt for speculation, but distinguishing divine design from divine sneezes seems all but possible. It's the strongest example case, so I went with it.

This isn't just a matter of confusing the what (is something designed) from the how (how is something designed). I hope we all agree that if a God sneezed, and intelligent design concluded that whatever universe it spawned was designed, then that would be a false positive.

So, let me put it to you this way: If something could not have arisen randomly, how could it have arisen other than by intelligent design?

Like I already said, I believe an apt example would be a divine "achoo!" (God bless yourself!) The aftereffects of that would be supernatural but not the result of intelligent design. But in any case, it doesn't really matter, because any speculation about what God's schnauze is or is not capable of, regardless of what we conclude, is going to be bringing non-scientific assumptions back into play, which seems to re-undermine the ID project all over again.

[Lothar]

does science's success rate in describing phenomena, contributing to technology, etc., help bolster naturalism?

Science's success rate helps to bolster the core of science: Observe, Theorize, Test (repeat until satisfied.) The scientific method works whether you're working in a \"natural\" setting or not.

Saying science's success within natural settings bolsters naturalism is akin to using the Bible to validate its own prophesies. It's self-fulfilling, but not enlightening.

[Jeff250]

The scientific method works whether you're working in a "natural" setting or not.

I've noticed the opposite. Surely we can agree that things like supernatural events tend to break science, since they can cause us to come to false conclusions. Take "what goes up must fall down"--if I throw up ten apples, and by divine intervention, they keep shooting upward toward the sky, I'd have good reason to incorrectly falsify an otherwise correct hypothesis, that anything I could humanly throw upward will eventually fall back down. In a world with a lot of supernatural events, science would be an ineffective tool for prediction of future events, and technology would be extremely difficult if not impossible to pull off (if you thought Windows crashed a lot now...). For instance, I don't see how a person in such a universe could even begin to scientifically justify trying to categorize what sorts of events are solely subject to natural law and which others are subject to unpredictable divine intervention. Even if it initially seemed as though some events were categorizable like that, surely even that hypothesis would be just another thing subject to divine intervention. Essentially, science's predictability power would become, if not ineffective, at least unjustified.

[Lothar]

Take "what goes up must fall down"--if I throw up ten apples, and by divine intervention, they keep shooting upward toward the sky, I'd have good reason to incorrectly falsify an otherwise correct hypothesis...

In that case, you're looking at a natural setting that's being manipulated externally, which is not in any way what I was talking about (though, as I describe below, what I said still generally applies.) I was referring to actual supernatural settings, or other settings that don't generally conform to what people typically think of as "scientific".

Consider communication with other people on the internet. That's not generally regarded as a "scientific" setting -- there's no such thing as a controlled experiment when dealing with other minds. But, you can still apply the methodology -- observe, theorize, test -- to great effect. You don't come out with the same sort of laws as you do in the purest of sciences, but you do get some predictive power. An assumption of naturalism is entirely unnecessary; you don't need to know if the other person's thoughts come from chemical processes in the brain or a supernatural "soul" in order to apply the methodology.

In a world with a lot of supernatural events, science would be an ineffective tool for prediction of future events...

This is no different from a world with a lot of intelligent agents (like, for example, people.) In either case, you're dealing with something making a decision you don't have the power to predict precisely 100% of the time. BUT, given adequate interaction with that intelligence, you may gain the ability to predict it with moderate certainty, much like you can predict certain Descent pilots' actions if you play against them enough.

Of course, if the supernatural agent you're dealing with is sufficiently weird (or has an unpredictability fetish) you'll have serious difficulty doing any sort of science at all. But that's not a "necessary" flaw with all supernatural agents or supernatural settings, only with those that behave in certain ways.

[snoopy]

If something could not have arisen randomly, how could it have arisen other than by intelligent design?

By natural processes, since they can produce nonrandom results.

You are right- let me re-word that. ID finds evidence of Intelligence by eliminating the other known mechanisms that could have produced it, and I understand that you have qualms with that. The question is, what is left that it hasn't taken care of? ID takes natural processes into account by requiring that the object/pattern being tested not be produced by any known non-random natural processes. (I'll touch on the random ones in a minute.) Due diligence is required to show that there isn't evidence for it being produced by an unknown natural process. ID takes care of single-event random natural processes by requiring that the pattern displayed be statistically impossible to have arisen by blind chance. ID claims to take care of incremental random natural processes by requiring the displayed pattern to be irreducibly complex. (This is the weak link in the chain- it's difficult to demonstrate irreducible complexity.) ID also requires the pattern to be specified- something that was previously known- to show not just any pattern came about, but a specific(ly useful) one came about.

So, something that passes the ID test is statistically impossible to be a product of chance, and demonstratably not a product of a known predictable natural process, and specific. Yes, it could be a product of a natural process, but until that process has been discovered, the best hypothesis remaining is that it was intelligently designed. ID doesn't claim to prove that something was intelligently designed, it looks for situations where the best hypothesis available is that the specimen is a product of ID.

I'll also comment on the definition of science that we are working with. There's a difference between that Judge's definition of science and mine. I don't think that science precludes the supernatural, it just assumes that things are a product of natural processes. It means if something is scientifically unanswered, there isn't necessarily a natural process that can answer it. (Especially for one-time events) I'm not saying that we simply credit God for anything that doesn't have a scientific theory, but it does mean that some things will remain eternally perplexing to science (Like I said, mostly with unexplained single events.)

[Jeff250]

This is no different from a world with a lot of intelligent agents (like, for example, people.) In either case, you're dealing with something making a decision you don't have the power to predict precisely 100% of the time. BUT, given adequate interaction with that intelligence, you may gain the ability to predict it with moderate certainty, much like you can predict certain Descent pilots' actions if you play against them enough.

I take it that for this example we're assuming that intelligent people's actions can be explained solely in natural terms. I think that the important disanalogy between hard-to-predict natural people and hard-to-predict supernatural events is that at least with natural people, we have something like the "Principle of Uniformity of Nature" to guarantee us that our inability to predict people's actions is due to our ignorance of their brain's workings. Since, in science, we can assume that people's brains are always guided by the same laws of nature, it's imaginable that some day we might have the technology to predict human behavior with extreme accuracy just with something analogous to a brain scan. (See respective Star Trek episodes.)

On the other hand, I don't think it makes much sense to apply the Principle of Uniformity of Nature to something supernatural like a God. Even if we scratched off the "of Nature" part, can we say that God is bound by the same natural, or, er, supernatural, or whatever laws at all times? Is this a justifiable assumption? Is this even an intelligible idea--does it make sense to say that God is bound by the same laws at all times? If we understand enough about the laws that govern God, could we predict God's will and his actions?

All fun to speculate, but even if we were all sure that the answers to the aforementioned questions were "YES," these assumptions are not implicit in science. We have a terrible enough time justifying the Principle of Uniformity of Nature in nature. (Why must the future resemble the past anyways?) Fortunately, for science, it doesn't attempt to justify it. It just assumes it. But there's still no implicit assumption like the Principle of Uniformity of "Supernature" in science, so even if we were convinced of such a principle being true, it would seem to still be outside science's purview.

[Lothar]

we have something like the "Principle of Uniformity of Nature" to guarantee...

We have a terrible enough time justifying the Principle of Uniformity of Nature in nature.... it doesn't attempt to justify it. It just assumes it.

So you see, as the key difference between "supernatural" and "natural" realms, a principle which we assume but don't justify? A principle that you just don't think "makes sense" applying to the supernatural, for no particular reason? That's pretty weak.

Science is the repeated process: observe, theorize, test. In general, we desire for our theories to be more "compact" than our observations. We can always take a set of data points and make a theory that just lists them off, but that's not a very interesting theory. Instead, we want a theory that explains a large amount of data (and predicts yet-ungathered data) while itself being relatively simple. That's what the "Principle of Uniformity of Nature" really comes down to -- we want theories that explain things consistantly throughout time and space, because that's simpler than theories that require us to predict things differently at different times and spaces.

If we're working in a realm that doesn't have a principle of uniformity, the process we call "science" may or may not still yield useful results, depending on exactly how non-uniform it is -- that is, depending on how "wacky" the governing dynamics are wrt time and space. If the wackiness itself conforms to some underlying rule (ex: space-time isn't uniform, but its curvature depends on mass, energy, and momentum in a predictable way) then we can still do science within that realm.

Now, wrt the natural world, we simply assume such a principle of uniformity, and then we work from there. When the principle seems to function appropriately, we hold on to it, and when it doesn't, we discard it and create a new version (see space-time curvature.) You spend a lot of time talking about how you don't "think" the principle should apply to the supernatural. Well, why not use it the same way as we do in the natural realm -- start by assuming it, and see what happens?

[Jeff250]

Now, wrt the natural world, we simply assume such a principle of uniformity, and then we work from there. When the principle seems to function appropriately, we hold on to it, and when it doesn't, we discard it and create a new version (see space-time curvature.)

Well, why not use it the same way as we do in the natural realm -- start by assuming it, and see what happens?

The scientific method doesn't really work with testing Uniformity itself. The scientific method assumes Uniformity. That's how we can say anything in science. Granted, if you're within a Galilean paradigm with a Galilean navigational system and are quickly accelerating to near-light speeds in a space ship, you might become quickly distressed when so-called scientific theories begin failing to have predictive value all around you. But you would either continue being a scientist and keep with Uniformity and seek out a new theory that makes sense of it all, even if you never do, or, if you're particularly distressed with the unpredictable results, you might step outside the domain of science and evaluate whether or not Uniformity is really an apt assumption to be making in the first place. This latter approach has to occur outside of science.

A principle that you just don't think "makes sense" applying to the supernatural, for no particular reason? That's pretty weak.

Not at all. I asked those questions about God and Uniformity to demonstrate that the answer isn't straightforward, not to show that the answer to them is "no." (Otherwise, I would have said that their answer is no.) But, frankly, the burden of proof lies with whatever Christian group is trying to inject supernaturalism into science to justify that injection. Uniformity isn't a priori. It isn't a freebie. We shouldn't apply it to supernatural causes recklessly or willy-nilly. Science happens to have the implicit assumption of Uniformity of Nature. If you think this is wrong, if you think that science's definitions or implicit assumptions should be changed, then you can argue about this in a philosophy class, and maybe even some day succeed in changing them. But until then, there's no reason to justify uniformity being applied to supernatural causes within the domain of science.

[Lothar]

The scientific method doesn't really work with testing Uniformity itself.

Sure it does. Observe, theorize, test -- that's science in a nutshell. Observe that things seem to behave the same today as they did yesterday, or that they behave the same in France as in China, or that they behave the same 3 million light-years away as here. Theorize that the universe is governed by uniform laws. Gather further information. Repeat.

The scientific method doesn't assume uniformity. Individual theories are assumed to be universal, but the method does not require all of them to be. Universal/uniform theories are the most elegant, but they're not the only ones that can be generated through the process. (Most uniform theories are generated through a series of partial theories anyway.)

frankly, the burden of proof lies with whatever Christian group is trying to inject supernaturalism into science to justify that injection.

"Burden of proof" arguments are crap. The "burden of proof" lies with nobody. You simply make the assumption and see where it leads. (You certainly don't have a problem with people not "proving" uniformity of nature, so why claim Christians or whoever else needs to "prove" uniformity of whatever other realm they're looking at? Why the double standard?)

Now, I'm not saying ID-in-the-form-most-of-you-see-it is a science, or that I can prove God through science; don't mistake my argument for that. What I'm saying is that there's no a priori reason to dismiss the possibility of applying scientific methodology to non-natural realms. Science is "observe, theorize, test" repeated over and over, and there's no reason why that process should be limited to the realms certain people seem to think it should be. The process should be applied to every observation you make in your life, whether physical, emotional, supernatural, or other.

[Jeff250]

The scientific method doesn't assume uniformity. Individual theories are assumed to be universal, but the method does not require all of them to be. Universal/uniform theories are the most elegant, but they're not the only ones that can be generated through the process. (Most uniform theories are generated through a series of partial theories anyway.)

A theory doesn't have to be universal a la Newton's laws of motion for it to presuppose uniformity. All uniformity says is something like "the future resembles the past." Like my example a few posts ago about throwing apples up in the air: If I was throwing apples in the air and I noticed that they all fell down, I might hypothesize that any thrown apple will do this. After enough tests, I might theorize--"Any apple thrown in the air will fall down." That's presupposing uniformity, that the future will resemble the past. It doesn't need to be true that for every place in the universe if I throw an apple it will fall back down. It doesn't have to be about a universal law in itself, although it might presuppose some.

Theorize that the universe is governed by uniform laws. Gather further information. Repeat.

Which would presuppose uniformity.

[Lothar]

All uniformity says is something like "the future resembles the past."

This is not different from what I said in any meaningful way.

Whether it's "things will behave the same across space" or "things will behave the same across time", you're assuming -- and then observing -- some sort of uniformity or universality. The middle of that sentence is the key -- after you've assumed it, your continued observations either confirm it or show it not to be true. (They never "prove" it in a mathematical sense, but as they continue to confirm it, it becomes the best "going theory".)

Theorize that the universe is governed by uniform laws. Gather further information. Repeat.

Which would presuppose uniformity.

Right -- you presuppose uniformity to demonstrate uniformity. It's not a proof by contradiction

You're creating an artificial problem where there isn't any real one. There's no particular reason to say, a priori, that we DO have uniformity in nature but we DON'T have uniformity in supernatural or other settings. Both can be assumed without prior justification, and the only justification for either comes from the observations we make.

[Jeff250]

This is not different from what I said in any meaningful way.

I'm going to try laying out what I mean to say a different way.

Yes, we do come up with and use partial theories all the time. And yes, they certainly are scientific theories in the fullest sense. But their partial scope doesn't mean that they presuppose uniformity any less than theories with more universal scope. After all, partial theories do presuppose something like universal laws working behind them, which do have universal scope. We just can't always put a name to those universal laws yet (like my partial theory about throwing apples as opposed to a more universal theory of gravity).

Now, I think the problem when introducing supernatural causes is that now you're introducing something that has incommensurate laws, that is, if it even has laws. (Now, if the laws were commensurate with our own, then on what basis would we have to justify the cause as supernatural?) And that does break uniformity. And that breaks what universal laws and even partial theories presuppose to justify an expectation of predictable results. And this seems like something we can say a priori, by virtue of the definition of supernatural.

[Lothar]

partial theories do presuppose something like universal laws working behind them

Any "theory", by definition, is a supposition that data will follow a pattern. You don't need to invoke universality for this.

I think the problem when introducing supernatural causes is that now you're introducing something that has incommensurate laws... that does break uniformity.

How do you know the supernatural has incommensurate laws? And why must it break uniformity?