Quantum Non-Linearity: NAID: The Thumbs Down and the Thumbs Up

Monday, October 13, 2025

NAID: The Thumbs Down and the Thumbs Up

I think this is what they mean by a "trigger"

I've complained about North American Intelligent Design (NAID) culture on many an occasion; in particular their unnecessarily a priori anti-evolutionism and anti-Junk DNA posturing founded on their dualist God of the Gaps philosophy: Viz: "either God did it or evilution did it". NAID pundits like Casey Luskin will of course try and deny this, but Luskin is not the kind of guy I find very competent. But worse than Luskin's philosophical faux pas' is that NAID culture, following its sometimes off-hand treatment by academia, has fallen into the embrace of far right nationalists: We can find, for example, an article on their website which supports the Trumpist commandeering of museums to preach the far right gospel of unwokeness. (See also here). In the US Christian culture is being politically corrupted from within. The late Charlie Kirk is to my mind a typical case of a politically corrupted Christian. So, it's thumbs down to all that Philosophical dualism, Casey Luskin and most of all to those far right political bedmates determined to cancel anything which to them smacks of "woke".

Trump Commandeering policy at work

But having said all that I can get behind Intelligent Design in the abstract and would call myself an intelligent design creationist along with the late Sir John Polkinghorne. In this post I'm going to mention some articles on the Evolution News/Science & Culture website where I can give them a thumbs up for a change.

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The Thumbs Up

1. Death by Intelligent Design? A Biological Enigma | Science and Culture Today

This article is by Eric Hedin. I have criticized Hedin before as a NAIDer who has succumbed to dualism, but in this post he makes some very worthy remarks (in my view). He points out that given the biological world's potential ability to breed exponentially such a superpower makes death in a world of limited space and resources a necessity; he even applies this to human populations - an idea that would certainly not go down well with Biblical literalists of a fundamentalist frame of mind. What he doesn't say however is that the breeding/death contention is very much part of the evolutionary dynamic. For a discussion of this contention see my generalized evolutionary equation and the question of islands of functionality.

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution by (Naked) Chance?

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution and Islands of functionality

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution: Naked Chance?

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Mathematics of the Spongeam.

Quantum Non-Linearity: On Structuralism and the Spongeam

Quantum Non-Linearity: Necessary Conditions for Evolution: The Spongeam

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2, Farewell to John Searle, Philosopher of Mind and Language | Science and Culture Today

This is a tribute to the late philosopher John Searle who made it clear to the world that there is a difference between conscious cognition and the formal computational simulation of the amazing molecular processes which give organic minds their consciousness and therefore their first person perspective. Those irrational "rationalists" who are spooked by the subject of consciousness and the irreducible first person perspective will likely continue to maintain their consciousness-doesn't-exist stance; they do this by conflating the difference between third and first person linguistic usage and also conflating the structure of formal models and the actual subject of a formal simulation. This tribute by Science and Culture was well deserved.

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3. French Authors Say Science Points to God; Scientists Listen | Science and Culture Today

This interesting article by Denise O'Leary starts with a mention of a book by two French authors titled "God, the Science, the Evidence". This book apparently takes a favorable view toward theism. Denise goes on to consider what may be a more sympathetic shift among some scholars toward theism. The article does, however, betray hints of NAID's anti evolution God-of-Gaps philosophy rather than show any cognizance of the One Big Gap everywhere and everywhen necessarily left by descriptive science's elegant compressed mathematical formalisms

What particularly interested me was this quote from Denise's article:

For one thing, materialism is, as philosopher Edward Feser points out, a snake that eats its own tail. If our minds are merely illusions or brain noise, why should we believe anything?

That reminded me of the following post of mine on unstable self-reference:

Quantum Non-Linearity: HOW TO KNOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW IT

Denise finishes by suggesting that materialism may be reborn as panpsychism - she might be right.

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4. Materialism Is Bad for Science | Science and Culture Today

This is another interesting post by Denise O'Leary. She right takes geneticist Richard Lewontin to task for his closed mind toward epigenetics. Well, I'm not going to get into that fracas - it could go either as far as I'm concerned, but where I would agree with Denise is that in her quote from Lewontin it seems that Lewontin was or is an unscientific bigot who is of the opinion that when a theory is well established he is right to ignore data and experience which might just point to the need to refine and/or update the theory. Lewontin's attitude is on a par with geocentric establishment who persecuted Galileo in favour of the established Ptolemaic theory. True, the established epicycle theory fitted quite well, but the vested interests of the establishment meant that they were captive to the theoretical status quo and unable to pay attention to its limitation and at least entertain other possibilities and least of all a paradigm shift.

The foregoing doesn't necessarily relate to hardened materialism: It's really about how established science can become set-in-concrete by conservative bigotry, status jealousy and vested interest. Nevertheless I can see how Lewontin's bigoty will readily port to God denying materialism.

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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. tvreeves@yahoo.co.uk

Quantum Non-Linearity

Monday, October 13, 2025

NAID: The Thumbs Down and the Thumbs Up

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION