Misrepresenting NAID

I've skimmed over the following article on the North American ID web site, Science and Culture....

On Scopes and Dover, Robert Pennock Twists History and Science | Science and Culture Today

Basically it's a long complaint about professor of philosophy Robert Pennock who in an article in American Scientists is accused of misrepresenting North American Intelligent Design (NAID). According to the article Pennock does no justice to the considerable differences between Young Earth fundamentalism and NAID. The article tells us that...

When it comes to intelligent design (ID), Pennock misleadingly charges that the “fundamental beliefs” of “ID creationists” are “continuous with those of creation-science”

Well, if the Science and Culture article is anything to go by I would agree: Pennock should have acknowledged the gulf between NAID  as an umbrella broad church quasi-evolutionary community and the narrowness of YEC fundamentalism: NAID is a very different culture to YEC; it is much more tolerant than YEC fundamentalism toward a blend of opinions which subsume under the heading of ID.  By and large the NAID community are old earthers and therefore by implication they accept that natural history is evolutionary in the weaker sense that life has emerged bit by bit over a considerable period of time. Where the contention with NAID lies is in its identifying the precise mechanism of that emergence. 

So yes, going by the S&C article I'd agree that Pennock has created a distorted picture of the NAID community and I would blame the Pennocks of this world, in part, for the right-ward drift of the NAID community as they have found powerful allies in the Christian nationalist far-right. (e.g. the late Charlie Kirk, see also here). Pennock is attempting to simplify social reality by lumping together his antagonists into a single block. 

The kind of position propounded by Pennock is pretty much embedded in mainstream texts. Evidence of this can be seen in the replies I got from Google using two slightly different prompts on two different days. Viz: 

Prompt: North American Intelligent Design (My emphases)....

GOOGLE: "Intelligent design" (ID) in the North American context is a pseudoscientific, neo-creationist movement that asserts certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, rather than undirected natural processes like natural selection. The movement is primarily centered in the United States and driven by the Discovery Institute.

Prompt: North American Intelligent Design community (My emphases).... 

GOOGLE: The North American intelligent design (ID) community primarily consists of advocates and organizations, largely centered around the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC) in Seattle, Washington. This movement promotes the viewpoint that certain features of the universe and living beings are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than undirected natural processes like natural selection.

Let me make a special note of the phrasing used by Google.: Viz....

This movement promotes the viewpoint that certain features of the universe and living beings are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than undirected natural processes like natural selection.

Those quotes are very telling; it's the old intelligent agency vs blind natural forces dichotomy surfacing yet again! In fact it's the very dichotomy that NAID pundits use again and again (See here for example). The irony is that evolution, if it is the mechanism behind natural history, can hardly be called blind or undirected - in fact it would classify as a very remarkable process that in itself would have to be carefully designed - see here for more on that subject. 

The NAID community have actually known for a long while that evolution requires some extraordinary choreographing if it is to be an effective process. I first became aware that the NAID community had in their midst someone who understood this as far back 2009 when I discussed William Dembski's concept of Active Information: See here, here and here. Dembski brought up the subject of the Avida program which attempts to simulate an elementary model of evolutionary creation, a process  whose inner engine drives the emergence of highly complex self perpetuating, self sustaining configurations. The Science & Culture article also mentions the Avida program as follows:

But the Avida genetic algorithm he references precisely shows the need for intelligence to build complexity. Avida uses “mutations” that are pre-programmed and intelligently engineered to yield great leaps in complexity, not blind “slight modifications” that Darwin’s theory requires. As pro-ID computer scientist Winston Ewert put it, Avida was “designed to evolve.”

Well, yes, yes and yes to that, but also a great big whopping No! Sorry chaps, but you've just help promote the atheist version of Darwin's theory; that's because you've swallowed the atheist interpretation of Darwin's theory which axiomatises the blind natural forces vs intelligent agency dichotomy which I've complained about so many times; my latest rant on this subject was against NAID pundit Casey Luskins (again, see here).  For evolution to work certain minimum conditions must hold and these minimum conditions must be embodied in the following equation which controls diffusion through configuration space...

The intelligent information is incorporated into the VY term which must superimpose a network of channels on configuration space constraining the diffusion(I call it the "spongeam"). This equation also tells us that the random motions of entropy are actually the motive force which drives toward the system toward the complex organization encoded in V, just as gas pressure drives gas through a network of conduits; it also explains why the  trend toward increasing entropy is consistent with the appearance of organised complex configurations - something which many NAIDs (e.g. Granville Sewell) simply refuse to come to terms with.

If bog standard evolution is to be a viable process the crucial information must be incorporated in V. May be this has been achieved via the standard laws of physics which include an array of constants with who knows how many digits after the decimal point. Or perhaps the Divine mind patches in  the channels without the use of clever & subtle mathematics. Or it may be  NAID pundit William Dembski is right and that the physics of the cosmos means that functionality only occurs in isolated islands; if Dembski is right then this would be a show-stopper as far as standard evolution is concerned; in which case the incremental trial and error computations needed to arrive at self-sustaining designs are taking place in the divine mind and are then patched ad-hoc into nature. As far as I'm concerned Demsbki could well be right, but I have my doubts; I have a feeling that God being the sort of person he is has reified his calculations by impressing them upon natural history; in which case Dembski is wrong. Personally I'm not dogmatic about my position on this question.

However, NAID William Dembski is wrong when he asserts that "natural forces", so called, cannot increase information. But as we saw here this equation,,,,, 

             I <= S + Log(T)

....tells us how information I increases with the Log of the number of steps in time T given the algorithmic information S. That divinely maintained linear time generates information very slowly has confused many that it can't generate information at all. However, that algorithmically controlled processing can generate information becomes much clearer when linear time is replaced with expanding parallelism and the equation above looks more like this

                                                                                I <= S + T

                                                                                    ****

Why do the NAID's not like evolution even though one can plausibly maintain that in the light of it's overwhelming surprisal value it is another manifestation of creative design and maintenance? Well to my mind the above equation might throw some light on this question. Conventional evolution demands that the contingent algorithmic information represented by S has an a priori high level of sophistication; but - and this where NAID (and also many fundies) has have their issues - evolution, as we conceive it, also demands very large numbers of temporal steps, T. To suggest such is a dangerous precedent to both NAIDs and fundamentalists; for too big a value of T suggests that the "blind natural forces" (sic) of time are the mechanism of evolution! Like a mindless enlightenment automata that mechanism is thought (wrongly) to allow the Divine mind to stand back and watch. That for many a naïve theist is a very worrying trending thought indeed....Time itself seems to be doing the work of creation and not some intervening deity. It's as if miracles are only perceived to reside in S and not in T. Crypto deism still rules the western mind. 

Diffusional Evolution can not be ruled out on the basis that it is a blind natural force: If indeed it is the mechanism driving the dynamic of natural history, then it is a highly sophisticated process which invites speculation about divine design. OK, it may not pass the islands of functionality test (Well actually we don't know with high certainty if it does or doesn't) but NAID has not ruled it out on that basis: As my repeated analysis of their writings show, they rule it out on the basis of being a wholly blind natural forces. But NAID has dug itself into a hole as an anti-evilution community. I have great sympathy with their misrepresentation but the trench digging on both sides of no-mans land means the battle lines have ossified. 

****

Natural vs Supernatural?

One final comment I would like to make on the Science & Culture article concerns this passage : 

The Edwards ruling found that creationism was unconstitutional because it referred to a “supernatural creator,” and Pennock claims that ID requires “supernatural creation.” Yet he again ignores that pre-publication drafts of Pandas said the opposite. As John West notes, “Pandas carefully distinguishes between ‘supernatural’ causes and ‘intelligent’ causes, for intelligent causes are amenable to scientific investigation, whereas it is impossible to detect whether a cause is ‘supernatural.’”7 One pre-publication draft of Pandas provides a typically clear statement to this effect: “observable instances of information cannot tell us if the intellect behind them is natural or supernatural. This is not a question that science can answer.” Such reasoning differs crucially from creationism, which (as the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Edwards) always appeals to the supernatural. ID does not do this. Thus, even when using language referring to “creationism” or derivative terms, the Pandas textbook differed from classical creationism in fundamental philosophical, scientific, and legally important ways.

How can we tell what is supernatural and what isn't? The almost unrelenting high organization of our experiences does, however, give us a strong sense of normalcy: It is this sense of stable normalcy which allows to mathematically define an apparently solid world of matter and this also facilitates experimental replication and testing almost at will. At the other end of the spectrum are those far less accessible objects which generate once in a while experiential output. 

But suppose we impose an a priori a world view whereby we only accept testable experiential output as valid if it is considered to be a consequence of what we believe to be immutable patterns of output conforming to mathematical algorithms? The assumption behind this world view can be used to not only distinguish between the natural and the supernatural but also used as a basis to rule out observations which cut across the theoretical status quo; in this social context "supernatural" experiences are regarded as bogus. Thus experiential anomalies and erratics are dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders as mistaken. 

Once again we see that the NAID community have swallowed a popular dichotomy - in this case the "supernatural vs natural" dichotomy. In my view it is better to commit to a far less stark spectrum concept that ranges  from the normal to the supernormal.