The Human Question

Ignorance or near ignorance should never stop a blogger's blathering (what I am about to say is clearly consistent with the above principle): The emergent property of a whole is not merely the sum of the interactions of its parts according to their individual, pre-emergent properties. Something more is going on: something new. If sentience is regarded as an emergent property, then no machine could be sentient, for the product of a machine's operations is nothing other than the result of the interactions its parts. Someone might object, however, that under certain circumstances new properties might emerge from from the interactions of the machine's parts. One can respond to this objection in either of two ways. First: definitionaly (sp?). If a machine IS a machine then it has no emergent operations. Period. Or (call this 1b) one might recast the same point in the form of a modem tollens argument: if machines can have emergent properties, then there is no reason ...

Now I've seen everything: Franciso Ayala: a devout Christian who criticizes ID not onl as false, but as having very harmful theological implications: http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2134 Bradley Monton: an atheist who defends ID as worthy of serious consideration (even if it is false): https://www.broadviewpress.com/product.php?productid=952&cat=0&page=1 The former debated William Lane Craig with the latter served as the moderator.

What if Behe (IDer who accepts common descent and doesn't posit anything like progressive creation) and Miller (a very theo-friendly natural selectionist) travelled in a time-machine, giving them an incredibly precise perspective of past biology, so that they could observe all phenotypes, even at the cellular level w/o being able to observe the genotypes (they couldn't see DNA, etc.) ? What if they both saw what they expected to see? In such a case, the only thing they would disagree about would be the precise mechanisms and probabilities of what had actually happened.

http://www.discovery.org/a/2848 http://www.discovery.org/a/3003 Yeah. I wouldn't want to take credit for something that stupid either... Another thing: Eugenia Scott points out how Dembski was going to testify in Dover but declined once the plaintiffs threatened to subpoena the draft of a book that he was working on with a creationist think tank called The Foundation for Thought and Ethics. Uh this is inconsistent with what Discovery says in one of the above links. So either I understood Scott incorrectly or Discovery is leaving out important details.

Apparently Ken Miller applies a principle first articulated by Herman Miller (are they related?): http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/DI/clot/Clotting.html

Scientists, inasmuch as they are focused on the observable/measurable, are concerned with actions, with dispositions to action, and with characteristics that distinguish things with one kind of disposition from those with other characteristics. This range of concerns is narrower than a philosopher might have: it tends to exclude concern with that in virtue of which a thing having many characteristic parts is one being rather than a composite of those parts. This narrow focus likewise bears upon our knowledge of a thing's substantial form, i.e. that in virtue of which it is one whole being rather than a composite of many beings. In the case of living things it bears upon the soul, for it is the form that gives unity to the parts, duration through time and a kind of impetus to life acts. The substantial form can be defined as the first act of a body, in virtue of which it acts as it does, while the soul gets a more specific definition the first act of a body disposed toward life...

She makes some good points about the underlying motives of some of those who call themselves IDers, as well as some systematic points about the inappropriateness of trying to infer beyond the limits of a natural science. These points I accept, but the following arguments made by her don't prove as much as she would hope: 1. While she makes an excellent point about how the bogus faux-science textbook used in Dover was really a slightly modified creationist book, she never addresses whether Discovery was involved in this deception. One gets the impression that the other entity was. Needs clarification. 2. She makes a very good point that all hard core creationists naturally love the arguments they find in ID manuals, as they offer support for creationist conclusions, and they are all found in Creationism. My reply: she is committing a kind of invalid conversion. Just because everything in ID is acceptable to Creationism doesn't mean the converse is true. Consider how all c...

What if someone belonged to a religion whose scriptures taught evolution from a common ancestor: Would the attempt to use science to defend this belief be anti-scientific?

Creationism's Trojan Horse, by Forrest and Gross Why ID Fails, by Young and Eddis ID, Creationism, and its Critics, by Robert Pennock God, the Devil and Darwin, by Niel Shanks The Counter Creationism Handbook, by Mark Isaac Finding Darwin's God, by Ken Miller Defending Evolution...? Evolution and Creationism, by Eugenia Scott Theologians against ID See John Haught Perspectives on an Evolving Creation by Keith Miller

A genuine God of the gaps argument would itself have a big gap... it would fail to recognize that the greatest evidence of God is in the non-gaps. But still, a God of the gaps argument is not in principle utterly without value.... as long as the gaps are infinite or are getting wider.

In one of these lectures I learned that Gould referred to Dawkins as a fundamentalist.... what type? I need to look up that quote!

During Q & A in his talk "Biology, the Anthropic Principle and Natuarl Theology," given at the Faraday Institute on Science and Religion, a couple of questioners asked questions that AM did not meet head-on. They were (paraphrased): 1. Isn't saying that the universe is fine tuned so that humans can exist like saying that my nose is fine tuned so that glasses can be placed on them? 2. If we can reasonably say that the universe is fine-tuned so that we might exist, then wouldn't it be even more reasonable to say that it is fine tuned so that The Wheel of Fortune might play on television? Alister's answer was very non-confrontational (and I misquote): "I just think that the possible fine-tuning of the universe is something that we should think about." A better response to the first question would have been to point out how inapt the comparison was: the nose/glasses comparison relates one item in nature to something else that in no way arose as a re...

Augustine's seminal reasons as an example of an evolution-compatible understanding of the origin of life forms evolution. My response: what is marvelous about this example is that it shows that the Christian understanding of Genesis is by no means married to the fixity of the species, etc. JH Newman, paraphrased: I believe in design because I believe in God, rather than vice versa. This quote captures a central point in the essay, is that the calibration of the universe to the conditions necessary for life is a fact that a Christian is able to make sense of...not about proving but about how fruitful, coherent the Christian worldview is. He criticizes Carter for coining the term "anthropic principle" when his arguments show how the universe is fine tuned so that life generaliter may arise. Hence he proposes that "biocentric principle" would have been a more suitable term than "anthropic."

In its fledgling phase Marxism may not have been a science, but its proposals were at least genuinely scientific, for they offered both an account and predictions that allowed the account to be tested. Once these predictions had not been fulfilled, however, Marxists had to offer decide whether to tweak their model or abandon it. These failures happened repeatedly. And as they continued to occur, it became more and more apparent that the model should be abandoned rather than tweaked, and Marxism became an ideology rather than a science. Somehow this is relevant to the ID debate, but I forget why (perhaps it's b/c my son is singing "The Sound of Music").

Newtonian physics being characterized as supporting deism Freud's speculative remarks about the origin of religion being paraded as scientific insight; also the dogmatic use of the ego/superego/id division Steady-state theory Lamarkian version of evolution used to justify eugenics, racism Marxism inasmuch as it aspired to be a scientific explanation. Not exactly belonging to the same category as the above but closely related examples of scientists who saw themselves as disproving folk theism/morality/etc but later shown to be flawed: Margaret Mead B F Skinner Kinsley Haeckel

The mere point that something like only one scholarly journal has published one article in any way positive about ID is not sufficient to show that it is utterly without merit. Once he became a leader in the study of the origin of life, Miller of Miller-Yuri fame worked hard to suppress all views of the origin of life at variance with his own. This sort of thing sometimes happens...in the short term.

Johannes Kepler's belief in cosmic intelligent design made him want to study the mathematical beauty of the movement of heavenly bodies, for he took this beauty as a sign of an even greater beauty. This interpretation didn't at all get in the way of his research, in part because he wasn't out to prove that his faith was true. He was only looking for ways in which the truths of science might resonate with his faith in a rational, free and good cause of the being of the world. Of course, it is dangerous to use the same term--ID--for this as theses that are ambiguous in their acceptance of the conclusions of modern science regarding evolution. Call it what you want, Ken Miller believes in it... so it ain't bad ID (you know: good chlorestrol/bad chlorestrol...).

I just can't stop myself from posting these thoughts about freedom... Before one can find what it is in human will that is free one must first find what it is in human understanding that is necessary. That is, what is it that constraints us to judge that 2 plus 2 equals 4, etc.? The only satisfactory answer must be "what we know," but what is it that we know? What kind of objective reality. How is it that it constrains our thought? And by "thought" I mean to include not only anything that transcends material limitations but also the biological processes associated with thought: these two are in a sense constrained. But how if the object is not itself a physical individual or process?

During a talk sponsored by the Veritas Forum, where he is the principle speaker in opposition to Hugh Ross and another creationist, Tom McKnight points out that intelligent design has its origin in a theory called" interlocking complexity," developed by Herman Miller (a Noble prize winner at Rice University). According to this theory, things evolve together independently until they form a complexus, which then performs a function that no part could do alone. McKnight also gives a funny comparison of ID: a four-legged horse, says McKnight, is irreducibly complex because, should you remove one of its legs, it won't be able to go anywhere, or at least it won't be able to go fast. The same fellow also quoted Augustine's criticism of the misuse of Genesis AND cited the source of the idea of ID... must find that talk and get his name! p.s.: I contacted McKnight and he sent me some interesting links. One is to a website that also contains information about Herman M...

In the Winter of 2006 she gave an extremely interesting presentation on "Intelligent Design and the Creationism/Evolution Controversy"( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE3Qvfm8jU0&feature=player_embedded ). The main value of this presentation is that it narrates how some folks who were personally committed to creationism (not sure whether it was young earth or progressive creationism) basically dressed up their theory in a new suit, called intelligent design. My concern here is to report what she said, not to affirm or deny every detail of the history that she provides. Let me say that the overall impression is that the Dover case (i.e., the case that condemned ID as a version of creationism) was well-decided against the teaching of (at least one version of) intelligent design. She gives the following case as important background: Edwards v. Aguilar, in which the USSC decided that creationism violates the religious clause(s) in the US Constitution... ...or was it anot...

... does not discredit everything thing they have to say about science. When Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation (did I blogpost this before?), his motivation might have been to undermine Lamarkian evolution, which he (as a believing Catholic) saw as opposed to revelation. But Pasteur went about this by producing a repeatable experiment, so that even those who did not share his faith could verify his claim.

... is not sufficient to discredit all future possible attempts to argue for an intelligent source of natural life forms. Behe/Dembski/Meyer/etc. may be like the author of the Vestiges of Creation... offering the wrong evidence for a conclusion that is both correct and capable of at least partial empirical verification.

Ken Miller, one of the most important critics of ID, mentioned in passing that he believes in the fine tuning of the universe for life forms and considers this a kind of evidence of the Creator. He even described this as a kind of ID. The talk is " Chance, Necessity and Evolution," given July 31st 2007. S ee http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/Multimedia.php

Having listened to some very worthwhile arguments against ID in its present incarnation, I am anxious to write down a record of these objections here, lest I forget. But before I do so let me see if I can find my way through a controversial One opponent said that teaching ID will harm our schoolchildren's ability to do science. If ID is insidiously creationist then that criticism of the teaching of ID would certainly be correct, for creationism is false and teaching falsity harms one's ability to know truth. But if by the label ID one means something that presupposes the evidence of evolution found in the fossil record, etc., that we are all descended from a common ancestor, then ID is not creationism (neither instant nor progressive). Some day, something like ID may or may not become a serious scientific proposal. But to teach it in grade schools before it has been validated by a significant part of the scientific community would be to put the cart before the horse----un...

Alasdair Coles, at the end of the Q&A of his talk on brains and religious experience, points out that temporal lobe is the source of numinous awareness, closely associated with erotic experience, which in some is reported as the calm, peaceful awareness that God is with them (he specifies that PET studies show that this is mediated through the 5HT system). He adds that drugs affecting the same area can make an event that seems boring to one person seem to another to be full of deep significance for their life, for the world, for the universe. So religious experience and the sense of how everything fits together are related, even physiologically.

Two important examples are relevant to the question of whether faith can adversely/positively affect attempts at scientific reasoning. Pasteur came up with a valid way of disproving spontaneous generation. His motivation for coming up with argument might well have been the desire to disprove Lemarkian evolution, and he have objected to that because of Pasteur's convictions as a Catholic. Yet he came up with a repeatable experiment (placed a piece of meat under a glass with a twisted opening so that air could circulate in and out of the area around the meat but flies could not figure out how to enter that area and hence could not deposit larvae or whatever on the meat) Kepler saw the universe as a divinely instituted mathematical harmony. Looking at it this way was sufficient (but not necessary) to cause him to look for mathematical symmetries where others saw complex patterns. As a result he replaced the complex explanations of the oribts offered by Copernicans (a combination o...

Many or all so-called absolute laws of nature involve the word "unless": take inertia for example. Something to look into: whether laws describing particles use "unless"; whether one can infer from the scientific description of the behavior of these particles in a non-atomic state (e.g., before atoms and molecues were formed)... whether one can infer from that description the way these particles will interact as parts of the wholes that we call atoms, etc. In other words, the question of whether atoms have emergent properties, the necessary conditions of which are the pre-atomic properties of their respective particles, but with properties that exceed the sum of the properties of their parts. If my hunch about the latter is correct, then "unless" might be used to describe particles at a level of generality that includes both the non-atomic and atomic state (i.e., they behave the way they do in the non-atomic state unless...in the atomic state). My furth...

It seems that one or both of these is not a picture, but is rather a statistical composite.... which one?That's something I need to look into. Meanwhile, here's a quote from Wikipedia, the Wild West of learning, about pet scans: The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide (tracer), which is introduced into the body on a biologically active molecule. Images of tracer concentration in 3-dimensional space within the body are then reconstructed by computer analysis. In modern scanners, this reconstruction is often accomplished with the aid of a CT X-ray scanperformed on the patient during the same session, in the same machine.If the biologically active molecule chosen for PET is FDG, an analogue of glucose, the concentrations of tracer imaged then give tissue metabolic activity, in terms of regional glucose uptake. Although use of this tracer results in the most common type of PET scan, other tracer molecules are used in PET to imag...

I've been listening to a talk by Eugenie _?_?_?__ of the Research Council and was convinced by her that it is kinda stupid of those ID folks to complain about "Darwinism." Well, not exactly for the reasons that she gave (even though hers weren't bad). Then I read something in Touchstone about Alfred Russell Wallace, who discovered natural selection at the same time as Darwin (their papers were presented at the same meeting). The author mentions approvingly that Alfred Russell Wallace believed in something called "intelligent evolution." I approve too. In fact, I think that this name shows more "intelligent design" than the name intelligent design. For if the heretofore ID folks have anything worthwhile to say (which I think is possible), then they can only be heard by distinguishing themselves from the creationists: they need to put the word "evolution" in their name (this may dry up funding for the Discovery Institute). Back to E...

...the more the explanans looks unlike our lifeworld. Yet it can be understood only in terms of our life world. Hence the need for paradox: e.g., photon as wave/particle. And we will never dissolve these paradoxes with something more familiar. We will be left with a degree of mystery. Similarly with God-talk.

One can (fecetiously?) take the law of action/reaction as indicating that there is "nothing new under the sun": when I push a bike (with a kid on it) the sum of force that I and the bike exert on each other are equal. And so it is with the mechanical forces within my body as I move while floating in space. There is no such thing as an individual efficient cause, no starting point of motion. Merely the transfer of movements already there. But to interpret movement in this way would be to take a mathematical abstraction as the complete story. Something was left out at the beginning, something given in the common sense regard for the situation. And in this case, common sense is no mere "folk physics" to be overturned. On the other hand, if common sense is correct, then the way in which there is more to this situation than is recognized by Newtonian consideration of the forces, and this "more" does not contradict the abstraction.... just as the "mor...

Sometimes the debater focuses on the political dimension to the question of ID and argues that it will hurt science education in the US if ID is taught. This argument is sound only if ID is faux-science. And I certainly would grant both that creationism is faux-science and that teaching it if it were better than that would be harmful to education. But ID, at least in its most evolution-friendly incarnation, may not deserve such a harsh judgment. And to argue against ID w/o having already offered a sound argument against ID's being a genuinely scientific proposal is an example of begging the question... kind of like a prosecutor arguing before the jury that they should convict the defendant of rape because murder is such an evil crime and murderers must not be allowed to go to kill new victims.... arguing in this manner without ever offering support of the claim that the person on the stand is in fact a murderer. To argue in such a way would both be a distraction and a circular...

It just occurred to me that the inertia objection to the first way is especially intuitive if one has a mathematized view of nature. For in such a case "efficient cause" means (if anything) the antecedent event. And the antecedent event most certainly predicts the consequent (unless something interferes). So yes, if that's all you mean by cause and explanation, then if you look on a time/distance x/y Cartesian coordinates that maps out constant motion, then by looking at time x you already have what you are looking for to explain the continued movement at time x+1. The question really is, however, whether a mathematized view of nature is an adequate explanation of nature.