Quantum Non-Linearity: Polkinghorne: A Creationist and ID Theorist.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Polkinghorne: A Creationist and ID Theorist.

Last night I was at Norwich Cathedral where John Polkinghorne was giving a talk. I have published some pics to convey the atmosphere. Their quality is not good as my “point and snap” photographic technique struggles under poor conditions.

One of Polkinghorne’s theme (as usual) was of a universe “endowed with the potentiality” to generate life via evolution. During the Q&A session he described himself as a creationist who believes in Intelligent Design. This claim is entirely intelligible given that Polkinghorne believes the universe to have been deliberately “fine tuned” in order to be fruitful in its production of life.

However, what worries Polkinghorne about the term “intelligent design” also worries me: It has become (especially in North America) synonymous with anti-evolutionism. Thus, the insinuation is that theorists like Polkinghorne who are standard evolutionists must be advocating a life creating processes that is unconditional upon Divine Design. As Polkinghorne himself said, somehow the anti-evolutionists have posited “natural” processes in which God has no hand; that is, their objection to physics as the source of life is based on a subliminal feeling that physics is a “mechanical” or “natural” process that minds itself without the hand of God.

The contention here is not whether evolution is supported by common physics or not, but just who can consider themselves to be flying the flag of “intelligent design”. The anti-evolutionists think that they alone are flying that flag and that everyone else should come on side for God. The insinuation is that those who don’t are somehow in bed with “naturalism” and atheism.

The anti-evolution/evolution

debate is an emotionally charged war zone where combatants need to know who to shoot at and who not to shoot at. As far as the anti-evolutionists are concerned Polkinghorne is on the wrong side and cannot be regarded as an ID supporter. It is therefore no surprise that in this polarized environment people like Polkinghorne tell us that they have little sympathy with the anti-evolutionist ID community.

But the category division between "goodies and baddies" is based on quite subtle criteria. In this post on Uncommon Descent a correspondent moots the idea that common descent with genetic front loading can be identified as an ID candidate even though the correspondent doesn’t hold this view himself. Why then can’t Polkinghorne’s evolutionary views, which if they are valid would inevitably entail a biased front loading, also be identified as an ID candidate? I suspect this has something to do with the side of the battle field he identifies with.

Christian flock: some think ID sorts out the sheep from the goats
and that Polkinghorne is a ~~nave~~ knave

JOHN POLKINGHORNE LECTURE NOTES

These are the notes I made on the evening of 27/4/2010

Qualia vs Formalism. Meta questions beyond science

Why is science possible? Why can we render it using equations? Why do we have a rationally transparent world? The Creator: A concept that makes intelligible the intelligibility of the world.
Why is the universe so special? For example the Carbon resonance. Dark energy has been fine tuned to a very small value.

Polkinghorne believes in one universe – the multi universe is speculative and unintelligible.

The universe is endowed with potentiality. The universe is designed to be fruitful. It is not a puppet theatre. Life can make itself. Mutation needed for evolution tradesoff against cancer. Can not easily separate the benevolent from the malign – inextricably bound up. Hence a universe with ragged edges and blind alleys.

Question & Answer Session

Polkinghorne says he believe in creation and ID.

The IC concept – postulates isolated structures.

American “ID” drives a wedge between the “natural” and God: posits processes where God didn’t have hand.

The Fall: Down to the self limitng act of God – he gives gifts of free will. Creature make themselves vs puppets. The good has to be balanced against the evil.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Polkinghorne: A Creationist and ID Theorist.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION