Stephen Meyer & God of the Gaps

Stephen Meyer: Haunted by the ghosts of the
enlightenment and mired in a vicious double-bind

In the last part of my critique of North American Intelligent Design (NAID) pundit Granville Sewell I criticized the God-of-the-Gaps theology which subliminally underlies much of the thinking of the NAID community. I also said that they will vehemently deny that theirs is a God-of-the-Gaps stance. Given this denial I thought I would have a look at some of their attempts to refute this accusation starting with NAID pundit Stephen Meyer (pictured above).

Firstly, let me get one thing clear: "Intelligence-of-the-Gaps",  rightly interpreted is a rational scientific position: We use it when we attempt to detect the works of non-transcendent intelligent agents like, humans, hominins, animals and even aliens (*1). The problems arise, however, when God-of-the-gaps tries to masquerade as intelligence of the gaps and therein lies my case against the NAID community. The Christian Omnigod not only transcends creation but His claim to being creator of everything, everywhere & everywhen makes God-of-the-gaps impossible to conceive. 

Anyway let's have a look at what Stephen Meyer has to say about God-of-the-Gaps. The following quote from Meyer was taken from this post on Science & Culture.....

Stephen Meyer Debunks the “God of the Gaps” Objection | Science and Culture Today

....and here's the quote (My emphases): 

STEPHEN MEYER: God-of-the-gaps arguments use gaps in scientific explanation as indicators, or even proof, of God’s action and therefore of God’s existence. Such arguments propose divine acts in place of natural, scientific causes for phenomena that science cannot yet explain. The assumption is that if science cannot explain how something happened, then God must be the explanation. But the danger of using a God-of-the-gaps argument for the action or existence of God is that it lacks the foresight of future scientific discoveries. With the continuing advancement of science, God-of-the-gaps explanations often get replaced by natural mechanisms. Therefore, when such arguments are used as apologetic tools, scientific research can unnecessarily be placed at odds with belief in God.1 The recent Intelligent Design (ID) movement highlights this problem.

MY REMARKS

1. Philosophical background

Well, like Stephen I disagree with God-of-the-gaps thinking but his mode of expression betrays a subliminal philosophy I would take issue with; the problems in the above are with the subtext and the NAID thought forms behind that statement. For a start, look at the way Stephen has casually mentioned "scientific explanation", "natural scientific causes" and "natural mechanisms" as if he and everybody else knows what he means by these terms. But these terms may hide a multitude of conceptual sins. 

Scientific "explanation", so called is, all said and done, about successful description. This descriptive role really takes off when the providential organization of our experiences and observations is such that they become the data dots that can be joined together using succinct mathematical algorithms. The rational repleteness of this highly logical world of experience and observation is so consistently ordered that it allows us to not only define the gritty world of so-called matter but also of cause & effect; it's the kind of world for which the connotations of the term "mechanism" is so apposite. In this connection we note that above Stephen has used the term "natural mechanisms".

But it is clear that cause & effect and the notion of matter are derivative concepts that can only be conceptually synthesized as a result of the particular structure of the mathematical algorithms which control the organization of our experiences and observations. Matter and cause & effect are contingent upon the particular form of mathematical relations which as far as we know could be otherwise; they are not, apparently, logical truisms. The synthetic nature of cause & effect becomes clearer when we encounter the apparent randomness we find in quantum mechanics (QM): In order to come to terms with QM and restore old fashioned cause & effect determinism hidden variable and decoherence theories have been developed. The desperation in the quest to bring back a thoroughgoing cause & effect determinism is evidenced in those multiverse theories; the last resort of the mechanical paradigm. Notions of cause & effect are so entrenched in our thinking that when we encounter randomness such as we find in QM we still believe there to be underlying deterministic cause & effect patterns and that the cosmos is after all an autonomous enlightenment automata; this is an a priori philosophical commitment to the algorithmic simplicities of high order, but because this is apparently a synthetic position we can at least imagine cases where it fails to work (*2).  

Scientific description then is a method of mathematical encapsulation facilitated by cosmic order. The bad news for a thoroughgoing scientism is that this description has a mathematical limit and ultimately leaves us with a kernel of irreducible mathematical brute fact. One response to this situation is, I suppose, that of atheists Bertrand Russell and Galen Strawson who have told us that the universe "just is". In this atheistic context the cosmos itself has nudged out the notion of divine eternity to be replaced by an eternal insentient machine (*4).

There is, however, an instinct in us which rebels against the idea that scientific "explanation" only amounts to contingent but succinct mathematical descriptions. Metaphysical instincts whisper to us that this observable cosmic order merely runs on top of a deeper (logically true?) ontology and that science actually points to something real about the ontology of the "thing-in-itself". In this connection, let's look at how Google AI responds to the prompt "Principle of Sufficient Reason".

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) states that everything must have a reason, cause, ground, or explanation for why it exists and is the way it is. [1, 2, 3]

Under this view, there are no true "brute facts"—meaning nothing happens or exists completely without an explanation. [1]

Core Concepts

·  No Uncaused Events: Every contingent fact (something that could have been otherwise) requires a sufficient explanation for why it is true. [1, 2, 3]

·   Intelligibility: The universe is assumed to be fully understandable in principle; if we lack an answer, it is a limitation of our knowledge, not a lack of a reason in reality. [1]

Key Figures: The concept dates back to early thinkers like Anaximander, but German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz gave the principle its classic general formulation. Later, Arthur Schopenhauer expanded it into four distinct roots in his work On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5

This response, as far as it goes, does not make it clear that the universe may be fully understandable in terms of mathematical description but in spite of that completely allude us when it comes to the question of that mysterious sufficient reason. Perhaps the universe does have an underlying causative ontology; we have strong instincts that it does(*6). But we can't be dogmatic about that as we don't have access to the thing-in-itself - our only access is to our experiences and observations and at best science is a descriptive method which exploits cosmic organization but which struggles to arrive at a logical truism(s) explaining the whole caboodle. For a Christian such as myself this is where God's self-revelation is needed. But I suspect that the enlightenment idea of a machine working relentlessly and independent of any management by sentient intelligence will be held onto dearly and will be difficult to dispel; it starts as deism and then potentially eventually morphs into atheism. 

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2. Stephen Meyer

It is at this point that the response by Stephen Meyer becomes explicable. He uses terms expressing a malaise which has hung around in our culture since the enlightenment and at the same time he's put himself in a double bind as has the whole NAID community.....

The NAID community is repulsed by the deist-atheist axis and they seek its antidote. The best antidote they've come up with is to make a distinction between mindless blind mechanical normalcy (or as Stephen has put it those natural mechanisms) and intelligent agency. But reading between the lines Stephen appears to have in his mind the old deistical enlightenment thought forms; that is, those dreaded natural mechanisms which hint at the possibility of an autonomous automaton of a universe; the very notion he seeks to refute. And yet Stephen knows that God-of-the-Gaps is a blind alley as he makes clear in the quote above. What he doesn't make clear is that successful scientific "explanation" is a form of description which exploits cosmic high order by inventing mathematical models which successfully join the dots of observation.

As I have so often said, at the heart of so-called scientific "explanation" is the mother or all "gaps"; the gob-smacking kernel of contingent information which inevitably science will leave us with, begs the question: From whence comes this seemingly arbitrary cosmic organization which allows science to compress cosmic data into very effective mathematical algorithms and then leave us at a breath-taking logical hiatus? That hiatus leaves us with a meta-design question about the origins of cosmic contingency. But is this question even meaningful? Should we expect a better answer than the best that atheism can do, which as we have seen, simply tells us that the cosmos "just is", and is probably eternal: Their "god", if you can call it that, is the cosmos itself; but it is not a god which addresses our deepest existential aspirations. 

The  super-meta-gap of science is of a different genus to the in-house design questions which arise when we see flint tools, the  monoliths of Gobekli Tepe or monoliths on the moon, apparently material configurations which likely point to non-transcendent intelligence. It is the failure of NAID philosophy to make this distinction between in-house intelligence and transcendent intelligence which has forced the NAID community toward a God-of-the-gaps anti-evolutionary position; for the NAID community evolution smacks of blind natural forces and therefore it must be opposed. Consequently North American ID has become so closely identified with anti-evolutionism that "NAID" has become a metonym for anti-evolutionism.

But if evolution has occurred it is clear that it would require very careful choreography and design, as I've already remarked. Therefore if we believe in an Omnigod the question of whether such an evolutionary system has been designed and contrived is a significant question that forces itself onto the theological agenda. Evolutionism can't be automatically written off on the basis that we  believe in an intelligently designed cosmos; that's the trap NAID has fallen into. 

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The NAID community are in a double-bind: They must reject God-of-the-gaps thinking and yet at the same time they perceive standard evolution to be governed only by "blind natural forces". For NAIDs those blind natural forces demand periodic divine input to drive natural history toward advanced life. They have saddled themselves with a blind natural forces vs. intelligent design dichotomy. But this dichotomy falls over on the theological stage. When we introduce an Omnigod who transcends space and time all logically possible possibilities become possible. As I've tried to make clear evolution (if it has occurred) requires considerable intelligence to implement. If evolution has occurred it cannot be classified as a blind natural force; in fact for the Christian there really is no such thing as natural forces if they have been created by an Omnigod. 

I personally have no big stake in conventional evolution (*3) either way, as I'm not a biologist. In contrast the NAID community are vehemently anti-evolution as they have increasingly backed themselves into a corner whereby they must declare it as an impossible outcome of blind natural forces. This, I submit, is because a background of deistical thought forms have invaded their thinking: For the NAID community the blind natural forces (sic) of natural history are an incompetent creator. This commits them to the view that natural history is full of ID gaps and since I doubt they will put this intelligence-of-the-gaps down to the tinkering of in-house non-transcendent aliens they will be forced to default to God-of-the-gaps. It is ironic that after all that Stephen Meyer has said above it is conceivable that advancing evolutionary science could start filling in those many gaps in the account of natural history. Let me repeat the second half of the quote from Stephen....

But the danger of using a God-of-the-gaps argument for the action or existence of God is that it lacks the foresight of future scientific discoveries. With the continuing advancement of science, God-of-the-gaps explanations often get replaced by natural mechanisms. Therefore, when such arguments are used as apologetic tools, scientific research can unnecessarily be placed at odds with belief in God.1 The recent Intelligent Design (ID) movement highlights this problem.

......Yes, the NAID movement does highlight this problem; who knows whether or not advancing evolutionary science will fill the gaps that ID seeks to fill with God-intelligence-of-the-gaps! They are themselves vulnerable to the very criticism with which they criticize!

I repeat: None of this is to say that standard evolution has actually happened but the NAIDs have painted themselves into an anti-evolutionary corner and cannot get out without loss of face. They are highly impassioned on this subliminal God-of-the-gaps position. The NAID community is self-validating as they engage in mutual back slapping. Further, they have allied themselves with authoritarian right-wing power brokers. Thus, in North America so-called ID now takes us into a culture that is a combination of anti-evolutionism and right-wing politics; the NAID community also champion the right's anti-establishment views on vaccinations, climate change, sexuality/gender, "libertarianism" (sic) and other issues. The strong-arm leadership behind this right-wing politics helps the NAID community get even with those uncompliant bad boys & girls in the liberal academic establishment! (*5)

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One person in the NAID community, however, who has come close to the kinds of ideas I talk about above is William Dembski.... Just have a look at this link:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Dembski: “I’m not denying evolutionary gradualism, challenging common descent or Natural Selection” (!!!!)

How about that! But although he's not necessarily denying evolution he does point out that evolution must start with a burden of information. That is true because this equation...

Created Information <= Starting Information + Log (Time)

...means that unless we are dealing with a universe which uses expanding parallelism in some way, information is only generated very slowly with the logarithm of time. 

Next time I might have a look at the following post on Science & Culture...

Atheist: Why ID Is Not “God of the Gaps” | Science and Culture Today

Footnotes: 

*1 Examples: Crime detection, Archeological artifacts, flint tools, beaver dams, bird's nests, ant's nests, and the lunar monolith in 2001 Space Odyssey. One might also add embryo development, which works because of the intelligence built into the bio-mechanisms. These mechanisms constitute the Starting Information in the equation:

Created Information <= Starting Information + Log (Time)

*2 But the non-locality of QM is a big departure from Newtonian localized mechanical cause & effect.... "Spooky action at a distance!"

*3 But the evidence for Common Descent is strong although the exact mechanism's driving this engine of descent may be more debatable. 

*4 See also this series: 

Quantum Non-Linearity: Creation, Probability and Something for Nothing? Part V

*5 The academic community are far from faultless. Christian academics John Lennox and Amy Ewing-Orr both tell stories of attempts to silence their witness within academia. Dr. Ewing says in a recent article in Premier Christianity magazine: "There was an intentionality about identifying Christians who might have a public voice and taking them out".  But then what do we expect: Academia is as full of epistemically and morally challenged sinners as is the NAID community. However, Christian biologists Dennis Alexander and Simon Conway-Morris suggest different stories can be told. This subject could do with a bit more research.  

*6 I have a hunch that animals are far less curious & more inclined than human beings to accept that the natural status quo "just is" (As atheist Galen Strawson puts it). They therefore have little urge to ask more questions. Perhaps it is this curious questioning instinct which is distinctly human and is responsible for much human striving for the numinous, the ultimate causative.

Yet Again: Intelligence of the Gaps. Part III

NAID Granville Sewell has been caught up in
 the dualistic bandwagon which contrasts physical
laws against divine agency 

In the third part of this series I continue to examine the thinking of  Granville Sewell who argues that the second law of thermodynamics theoretically undermines evolution. Granville is part of the North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community who not only specialise in promoting a God an Intelligence-of-the-Gaps paradigm (which they will strongly deny) but they also veer toward a right-wing political stance. Strong evidence of this politics is seen in that the unwoke political animal Chris Rufo was a one time director of the Intelligent Design think-tank, The Discovery Institute. 

See the following links for the two previous two parts...

Quantum Non-Linearity: Yet Again: Intelligence of the Gaps. Part 1

Quantum Non-Linearity: Yet Again: Intelligence of the Gaps. Part II

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GRANVILLE: You can argue that a few billion years ago a simple self-replicator formed by natural chemical processes, and that over the millions of years natural selection was able to organize the duplication errors made by these self-replicators into intelligent, conscious, humans, who were able to build rockets that could reach the moon and return safely. 

MY COMMENT: Ah, at last Granville is asking the right question: It's not about the evolution of junkyard computers, rather it's a question of bio-molecular evolution. If one assumes OOL has occurred (by no means a trivial assumption) those duplication errors that Granville refers to, as we will see below, play a crucial role. 

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GRANVILLE:  I would counter that we with all our advanced technology are still not close to designing any self-replicating machine; that is still pure science fiction. When you add technology to such a machine, to bring it closer to the goal of reproduction, you only move the goal posts, as now you have a more complicated machine to reproduce. So how could we believe that such a machine could have arisen by pure chance? 

MY COMMENT: Yet again, I repeat: We are not dealing with pure chance; instead we are dealing with conditional probability. and at that conditions created by an Omnigod. Therefore, we can not yet eliminate from the inquiry the possibility that the requisite physical pre-conditions needed for OOL-development have been contrived by a God for whom all (logically contingent) things are possible. So, given this relationship:

 I <= S + Log T

1.0

....it may be that without sufficient starting information, S, about how to construct a general molecular self-replicator, the computation time, T, required to arrive at this information, I, is humanly speaking prohibitive; but really we don't know the answer to that question. The best humanity has done, however, is create replicators in the virtual world of computer memory. Evolution itself, however, poses a far more abstruse meta-question: Is it possible to invent a regime of laws, constants and diffusive momenta which, given enough time, will result in an OOL natural history....that is, to arrive at simple self-replicating structures...and then on to highly complex replicators? I'm not aware that this has been achieved even within a computer memory (*2). In fact this problem could be computationally irreducible. If Granville is looking for gaps, then this is the mother of all gaps. Trouble is, given the intellectual resources of an Omnigod we don't know whether He has filled that gap with a physical regime where OOL is possible.

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GRANVILLE: And suppose we did somehow manage to design, say, a fleet of cars with fully automated car-building factories inside, able to produce new cars, and not just normal new cars, but new cars with fully automated car-building factories inside them. Who could seriously believe [!Gut-reaction!] that if we left these cars alone for a long time, the accumulation of duplication errors made as they reproduced themselves would result in anything other than devolution, and eventually could even be organized by selective forces into more advanced automobile models? So I would claim that we don’t really understand [!Yes we do!] how living things are able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants without significant degradation, generation after generation, much less how they evolve even more complex structures.  [Concession: may be!]

MY COMMENT: OK, so leaving aside the somewhat misleading subject of self-replicating cars, the core question Granville is really asking here is this: Assuming the existence of molecular self-replicators how is it that the information needed to breed biological replicators from generation to generation isn't slowly but surely being corrupted by random noise? There is a plausible answer to this particular problem and that answer also shows us why Granville's insistence that the second law is a mathematical block to evolution is fallacious.  I will be dealing with this question in the finale. 

Granville goes onto criticise infinite multiverse attempts at explaining away the high improbabilities of our highly ordered world. I am at one with Granville in rejecting multiverse theory and won't publish his comments here, but here are links to some of my comments on the subject:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Many Worlds Theory: A theory devoid of meaning, goals and purpose

Quantum Non-Linearity: Science and the Multiverse

Quantum Non-Linearity: Middlebrow Atheism. Part 5 (Final Part)

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GRANVILLE:  Conclusions: There are various ways to argue that what has happened on Earth does not violate the more general statements of the second law as found in physics texts. The “compensation” argument, which says that “entropy” can decrease in an open system as long as the decrease is compensated by equal or greater increases outside, so that the total entropy of any isolated system containing this system still increases, is perhaps the most widely used. Since in this context “entropy” is just used as a synonym for “disorder,” [i.e. high statistical weight and not high improbability] the compensation argument, as I paraphrased it in Physics Essays, essentially says that extremely improbable things can happen in an open system as long as things are happening outside which, if reversed, would be even more improbable! This compensation argument is not valid even when applied just to thermal entropy, as the decrease in an open system is limited not by increases outside, but by the amount exported through the boundary, as I’ve shown. Since tornados derive their energy from the sun, the compensation argument could equally well be used to argue that a tornado running backward, turning rubble into houses and cars, would not violate the second law either.

MY COMMENT: Once again Granville is trying to stretch credibility in evolution by ludicrous examples whose probability is all but nil. Once again, as we saw in Part II, in lieu of giving proper cognizance to conditional probabilities and a rigorous definition of entropy Granville is using our gut-feelings about known improbabilities such as tornadoes reconstructing houses and junk yards evolving computers and then exploiting those feeling to throw doubt on bio-evolution.... not a very satisfactory way to argue.

For my purposes there is no need to get involved with this compensation argument: We know from the process of crystallisation that highly improbable things (in the unconditional sense) do happen in isolated systems given the right conditions.  Also, Granville fails to make clear that entropy is not the same as randomness and therefore a system of maximum entropy is not necessarily highly random; a system of maximum entropy is a system whose macrostate has the highest statistical weight given the physical constraints on the system. Since maximum statistical weight can't be equated with randomness, then high order in a system constrained by physics is not necessarily to be equated with high improbability, although it can be equated with high unconditional improbability. 

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GRANVILLE:  Conclusions: But there is really only one logically valid way to argue that what has happened on Earth does not violate the fundamental principle underlying the second law — the one principle from which every application and every statement of this law draws its authority. And that is to say that it only seems impossibly improbable, but it really is not, that under the right conditions, [Ahh! What about conditions created by an Omnigod?] the influx of stellar energy into a planet could cause atoms there to rearrange themselves into nuclear power plants and digital computers and encyclopedias and science texts, and spaceships that could travel to tother planets and back safely. [Granville is appealing to his gut reactions again!]

And although the second law is all about probability, very few Darwinists are willing to make such an argument; they prefer to avoid the issue of probability altogether.

MY COMMENT: Although Granville gives no cognizance to conditional probabilities and the high unconditional improbability of crystallisation, this failure certainly doesn't mean that evolutionary mechanisms, as currently understood, are the engine driving natural history; all we can say at this juncture is that Granville's line of reasoning is fallacious and as an attempt to logically falsify evolution it has failed. Instead he has fallen-back on hand waving and gut-reaction-responses to ludicrous ideas about computers, encyclopaedias, science texts and spaceships popping out of an unconditional vacuum. No, Granville, the second law isn't all about probability, rather it is all about probability and the physical constraints on that probability. Think probability envelopes! But the form of those envelopes is a vexed question (see below) and that question is as much of a poser to so-called "Darwinists" (sic) as it is to the NAIDs.

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FINALE: Concerning Duplication Errors: In his post Granville raises the question about replicator duplication errors. Why doesn't random noise corrupt the information which needs to be passed from generation to generation to preserve the integrity of the replicator configuration? An answer is to be found in an equation I've often cited on Quantum Non-Linearity: Viz: the multiplying diffusion equation.....

2.0

....where: Y represents the count of replicators diffusing through configuration space, D is the diffusion constant and the "house" operator is a multidimensional version of the 3-dimensional "Del" operator. The intelligent information which has the potential to preserve the configurational status quo of replicators is incorporated into the VY term; The value of V is assumed to be coordinate dependent and will be dependent on the creation's physical regime. This term, depending on whether V is positive or negative, respectively describes either an exponential growth or an exponential decay of the replicator population at the coordinate concerned. The result, depending on how V varies over configuration space, is that at some points in configuration space the replicator population grows and at other points it decays. 

At the same time random perturbations (Granville's "duplication errors") ensure that replicator configurations are diffusing through multidimensional configuration space; if replicator configurations diffuse into configurational areas where V is negative the population decays and dies; if they move into areas where V is positive the population grows. Thus, for example, if a replicator's configuration has become corrupt due to duplication errors and this corruption adversely impacts the replicator's ability to self-perpetuate and replicate, then in that area of configuration space V will be negative and the population will die. Alternatively, if V is positive the population will increase. The value of V is the selecting mechanism which ensures that regions of successful replication will prosper and regions with negative V entail decaying population. Thus V has the potential to not only preserve configurational integrity but to enhance configurational survival. This is standard evolutionary theory expressed in an abstracted mathematical form. There is here a similarity with language changes. Languages are subject to incremental drifting all the time, but only those increments that ensure the language remains comprehensible and useful are selected. 

But and this is the big But it all depends on the given form of V and its layout in configuration space. As I've made clear in previous posts, if standard evolution is to work V must superimpose on configuration space a network of channels constraining the diffusion and forming a connected set I call that the "spongeam". For OOL and subsequent evolution to work the spongeam network must have connections all the way back from complex replicators to lifeless soups of chemicals.

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

However, given the physics of our world it is by no means clear whether or not V traces out a spongeam facilitating evolution from scratch. For example if the functionality that organic life requires to survive occurs in isolated islands then there is an unsurmountable problem for conventional evolution; trouble is, proving this one way or the other is very problematic and the cognitive gaps here tend to get filled with the tribal gut-reactions of the woke and the unwoke. 

Equation 2.0 is, however, clear on one thing; namely, that Granville's NAID tribal belief that increasing entropy necessarily contradicts evolution is wrong. The spongeam, if it exists given our physical regime, is a networked domain of possibility in configuration space defined by the form of V. This networked space is also a domain of diffusion with the diffusion being a consequence of random walk. In elementary random walk the transition rate between any pair of points in space is the same both ways because it is only dependent on the distance separating pairs of points. This sets up the condition needed for the H-theorem to hold, and if the H-theorem holds it means that in configuration space the total entropy is always increasing. This constantly increasing entropy is true even though the presumed tight constraints imposed by the spongeam on configuration space may mean that as evolution progresses highly organised configurations appear for the simple reason they are on one of diffusion routes. The irony is that the random motions of entropy are actually the motive force which drives the system toward the complex organization encoded in V, just as the random motions of the molecules of a gas create a pressure which drives the gas through a network of conduits.

Equation 2.0 is notional and no doubt a simplistic town-toy model of a possible evolutionary scenario. But although it may not bear a strong resemblance to the complexities of an actual evolutionary scenario (if such exists) what it does show, by a mathematical example, is that Granville's assertion that the second law necessarily contradicts evolution is false.

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Repeating what I said in the last part: The NAID community have sold out to anti-evolutionism, and a God an intelligence-of-the-gaps model, although that will be denied by them. I propose that they subliminally hold on to this model because the deism of the enlightenment still plagues the thoughts of many. For should the completeness of science as a descriptive system be adequately demonstrated then the subliminal intuitions of both NAID and atheist alike quietly prompts them to view the cosmos as a kind enlightenment automata capable of working unattended; no deity needed. It is then a short step to eliminating deity altogether. Anxious to avoid this conclusion the NAID community have put all their eggs into the anti-evolution basket in their determination to find evidence that God does after all demonstrate His presence in overt interventions in natural history. This has prompted them to invent the bogus category they call "blind natural forces"; not something I would use to refer to God's creation and what He has encoded into it.

Of course conversely their atheist antagonists have put all their eggs in the evolutionary basket and concluded therefore that no God is needed to drive the machinery & mechanisms of natural history. 

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As I've said before the right-wing political stance of NAID is really no surprise: The negative and even hostile reaction of the academic establishment who regard NAID as a purveyor of pseudo-science goes down like a dog-dirt sandwich with the NAID community; they know that they are being classified as the rejected other. But the NAID community have fallen in with politically powerful friends such as Trump, Kennedy and Steven Miller et al. Perhaps these powerful friends can teach the "woke" academic establishment a lesson or two! Such is the degeneration of a community who propose otherwise interesting questions about the ultimate origins of the cosmos.

Footnotes and notes

1. See this link for more on my reaction to the woke and the unwoke

Views, News and Pews: Review of Sharon James Book , "The LIES...."

*2. But see this: Did Google Researchers Just Create a Self-Replicating Computer Life Form?

3. Evolution and Human Technology:  

Quantum Non-Linearity: From Spears to Aircraft

Yet Again: Intelligence of the Gaps. Part 1

This intelligence-of-the-gaps model is still being used by
  the North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community
 although they will strenuously deny it. As a consequence all
 their eggs are in the anti-evolution basket

NAID thinker, Granville Sewell, is still using
 the God Intelligence-of-the-gaps model although
 like other NAIDs he will probably deny it.  

I have remarked before on the extreme unconditional improbability of evolution; so much so in fact that if evolution has actually occurred it would be Creation on Steroids. See here...

Quantum Non-Linearity: NAID Part IV: Evolution: Creation on Steriods

If evolution is at least a theoretical possibility then presumably for Christian theists the creation of such a mechanism of development would not be beyond the cognitive resources of an Omnigod (*1).  However, given that our cosmos appears to be a parallel processor rather than one with the capability of exponentially expanding parallelism it would seem that it must have required a heavy dollop of  "starting" or "implicit" information S, as demanded by this equation...

I >= S + Log T

equation 1

...where S is the starting/implicit information, T is the generation time and I the information generated. More about this equation  can be found at the end of this paper here. For conventional evolution to work (assuming it has occurred) S would have to be very large even given the space-time dimensions of our own observable cosmos. There is also the question of just where this implicit information resides: Is it just in the laws of physics and the possibly endless decimal places of its fine tuned constants? I don't claim to know. 

It is not absolutely clear, however, that evolution is even a theoretical possibility: For example it may be that NAID William Dembski is right: He suspects that organic forms employ "isolated" islands of functionality. If this is true then it would be a block to the necessarily gradualist diffusing process across configuration space that is the fundamental underlying mechanism of bog-standard evolution. Theological objections apart, in order to completely eliminate evolution from the inquiry one needs to...

a) Demonstrate mathematically its theoretical impossibility. 

And/Or...

b) Demonstrate that it's not in line with empirical evidence.

Even if it becomes clear that our cosmos supplies neither sufficient implicit information S nor sufficient time T to provision standard evolution it is just possible that some kind of expanding parallelism is being used to circumvent the very sluggish Log term in equation 1. Quantum Mechanics might obliquely hint at the existence of some sort of expanding parallelism but it's a long shot and I'm not going argue that here. 

What I would avoid, however, is the approach of NAID Granville Sewell who is still arguing that the second law of thermodynamics is a theoretical way of eliminating evolution from the inquiry. I'd be contented if he had really shown that evolution is off the agenda if it were not for the fact that he's part of a mutually back-slapping NAID tribe who are governed by a subliminal motivating quest to discover small-time gaps in evolutionary reasoning, gaps which they then fill with Divine intelligent interventions. That the laws of physics will ever remain a single huge impenetrable logical gap everywhere and everywhen is not something the NAID tribe is given to emphasize (see here Quantum Non-Linearity: Physics' irreducible logical barrier); instead NAID culture continues to tinker with what they believe to be the gaps in the natural history record, gaps for all we know, which might have been filled by little grey or green men....whereas the irreducible logical barrier of physics is of an entirely different genus to the gaps in "intelligence-of-the-gaps" and therefore demands an entirely different genus of entity to fill it. 

Behind the scenes NAID culture by and large identifies the creative entity as an Omnigod but plays this down in favour  of positing intelligence as a general creative agent (*3). This has lead them to promote the so-called explanatory filter which they use to detect the work of such agents. This explanatory filter has imposed on them an intelligence vs blind natural forces dichotomy and basically has led them up the garden path; this is because the filter works for beings like humans, animals and aliens(?) which are clearly entities who work within the created context, but the filter fails for a transcendent Omnigod;  such an entity has the potential to scupper any intelligence-of-the-gaps arguments: For if it is theoretically possible, an Omnigod may well fill in a logical gap with logic we have yet to understand. For example if we can't see how evolution could work, then as long evolution is theoretically possible, an Omnigod will presumably have the intellectual resources needed to make it work. In fact NAID culture has effectively  admitted as much: In this link... 

Quantum Non-Linearity: Misrepresenting North American Intelligent Design

....I quote a Science and Culture article 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.” (*4)

Perhaps the cosmos has been designed to evolve.

***

This brings me back to Granville Sewell a NAID who has always maintained that the 2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts evolution. True, it may well be that (as I have already observed)...

a) The evolutionary mechanism as we conceive it is theoretically impossible. 

And/Or....

a) Even if conventional evolution is theoretically possible it may or may not be the actual driving mechanism behind natural history; it then becomes an empirical question. 

But I can tell you this: Granville has not refuted evolution in either of these ways although he probably thinks he has. In fact he has just raised some interesting questions that I'm looking at in this series.

I would hazard that the subliminal/unspoken rationale behind Granville's endeavour is that of the NAID movement as a whole: Viz: an God intelligence-of-the-gaps philosophy - although they will likely deny it. All said and done I am myself an Intelligent Design Creationist (*2), so why aren't I looking for those small-time logical gaps in the mechanisms that drive natural history and which for many a NAID is the cause unifying their mutually back-slapping tribe? Well, it may be that such gaps exist but really these gaps pale when one realizes that physics is ever destined to be one big logical gap, everywhere and everywhen (Once again see here: Quantum Non-Linearity: Physics' irreducible logical barrier).

Entropy, contrary to Granville's opinion, is not necessarily connected with disorder. It is in fact a superset of disorder; it includes genuine disorder but because it is defined as the statistical weight of a macrostate. Such a state could be highly ordered in comparison with the absolute disorder of randomness and yet at the same time of maximum entropy. For example, if we have a heavily loaded die with 90% chance of landing a six then a long  sequence of throws with this die would, compared to absolute randomness, be highly organized; the statistical weight of a long sequence of throws with approximately 90% sixes is very low compared to the the statistical weight of the maximally random sequence of the unbiased die. But the sequence generated by the biased die is maximally disordered given the physical constraint of its bias. Putting it another way: The biased die generates a sequence of maximum entropy within the trammels of the physical constraint of the bias. But maximum entropy does not necessarily entail high disorder. Entropy comes in degrees and maximum disorder doesn't necessarily entail high randomness. A configuration could have maximum entropy but that doesn't necessarily mean it is highly disordered. Yes, I'm deliberately labouring the point, because it is clear that Granville doesn't understand it. 

 

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I will now go through Granville's post below which recently appeared on Science & Culture....

Life and the Principle Behind the Second Law | Science and Culture Today

GRANVILLE: Nevertheless, the second law is all about probability and there is something about the origin and evolution of life, and the development of human intelligence and civilization, that appears to many to defy the spirit, if not the letter, of the second law even if the Earth is an open system. There seems to be something extraordinarily improbable about life.

MY COMMENT: I would not say that the second law is all about probability. The second law is also about the probabilistic maximization of entropy within given physical constraints. It is certainly true that life is extraordinarily improbable if we are talking about the unconditional probability of life. But then it is also true that crystalline structures are extraordinarily improbable if we are talking about their unconditional probability. But with crystalline structures we do have more than an inkling of the conditions (i.e. the laws of physics) which The Creator has provisioned and which considerably enhances the conditional probability of crystals as a maximum entropy configuration. (Of course that's not to say that The Creator has actually contrived pre-conditions, if indeed such conditions are logically possible, which considerably enhance the conditional probability of the evolution of life as a maximum entropy configuration).

In conclusion: I would contradict what Granville states about the evolution of life defying the spirit of the second law..... if The Creator has provisioned suitable pre-conditions (if indeed such conditions are a mathematical possibility) then there is no defiance of the spirit of the second law; life would constitute a maximum entropy condition under the constraints supplied by The Creator. But of course whether The Creator has actually supplied such preconditions is the 64 trillion dollar question!

****

GRANVILLE: The second law of thermodynamics — at least the underlying principle behind this law — simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen, [Rubbish!] and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred. (my emphases)

MY COMMENT: NAID thinking is shot through with the assumption that somehow the physics of our world falls into this mystical category called "natural forces" and therefore can be discounted as utterly "blind" and with no creative efficacy. The obvious snag with this proto-pagan view is that those "natural forces" are The Creators creation and therefore it does no justice to them to describe them as blind natural forces; if I was feeling ill tempered I might say that it is bordering on faithless blasphemy to refer to those laws as such. 

As a general rule it is blatantly false to claim that that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen, There is of course the simple case of crystallization which as we've seen is an entropy maximization process whose unconditional probability is all but zero - the unconditional probability of a crystal is like throwing a million heads in a row. I would hasten to grant, however, that highly organised crystal configurations are one thing but the configurations of life are quite another; but at this stage given the presence of huge Divine intellectual resources those providential so-called "natural forces" (sic) created by The Creator are a wild card and this means that as far as we are concerned, we are not yet at the stage where evolution can be categorically eliminated from the inquiry.    

To see what can be done with the right kind of information lets consider embryo growth. Restating equation 1.....

 I >= S + Log T

equation 1

Embryo growth starts with a large burden of implicit information S in the form of DNA strings and other cellular manufacturing paraphernalia (not to mention the laws of physics). Nevertheless a certain amount of time T is still needed to complete the development work as governed by the DNA recipes. The point, however, is this: The process of embryo development entails imposing high organization on large quantities of matter and yet at no stage is the 2nd law violated. In principle it is possible to construct a boundary of isolation round the embryo development system and include within that boundary all that embryo development is going to need in terms of the output/input of energy & matter and then make sure that nothing passes that boundary. We can then think in terms of an isolated boundaried system and forget about negentropy imports from the outside. What we do know is that in this isolated system overall entropy will increase, even though the miracle of embryo development entails imposing highly organized configurations on macroscopic quantities of matter; this is the miracle of cellular machinery, DNA and the laws of physics which together constitute the information in S.  The miracle here is that this system generates huge pockets of high organization and yet as a whole entropy increases; in short embryo growth is a entropy maximisation process. The other thing to note is that random diffusion plays a big part in assembling the necessary molecular configurations......The initial molecular machinery represented by S has the effect of locking-in diffused matter and energy into the growing molecular configurations. It achieves this with what is in effect a trial-&-error search facilitated by the thermal agitations of random walk. Thus S entails a mathematical constraint which biases the random agitations of random walk and it does this by selecting only those molecular unions which fit the templates implicit in S.

Of course this observation is no proof that bog-standard evolution is actually the real-life mechanism of natural history but it does set up a challenging precedent for intelligence-of-gaps thought and the NAID community who have put all their eggs into the anti-evolution basket. For if (repeat, if) evolution has occurred as we understand it, it shares with embryo growth a similar balance of S and T.... If standard evolution is to work without the help of expanding parallelism the cosmic value of S must be large enough to develop what are in fact highly complex living configurations given that the cosmos is in effect only a parallel processor operating for time T; the huge unconditional improbability of living configurations means that the visible dimensions of cosmic time and space, though they seem enormous to us, are no match for life's immense unconditional improbability. 

Well OK that's no proof of standard evolution, but let me stress again that the weakness of NAID is that it has put all its eggs into the anti-evolution basket, which means the NAID community is tribally committed to a single cause; namely, agitating against a hostile academia's evolutionary consensus. NAID's riposte to academia is that evolution just can't happen because it relies on "blind natural forces" (sic) ...but what a pagan way to describe the providences of God's creation!

****

GRANVILLE: In a 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article2 I claimed that The second law of thermodynamics — at least the underlying principle behind this law — simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen, and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred.

One reader noted in a published reply to my article that any particular long string of coin tosses is extremely improbable, so my statement that “natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen” is not correct. This critic was right, and I have since been careful to state (for example in a 2013 BIO-Complexity article4) that the underlying principle behind the second law is that Natural (unintelligent) forces do not do macroscopically describable things that are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view. (My emphases)

MY COMMENT: Granville goes on to define macroscopically describable things in terms of algorithmic information theory... content I certainly wouldn't dispute! In short macroscopically describable things are highly organized configurations of billions of atoms, where this particulate organization is such that it allows algorithmic data compression to take place (See this link and my work on Disorder and Randomness). So, I was pleased to find Granville talking some sense at last. But that pleasure was offset by the statements I've emphasized in the quote above where he "blasphemously" (!?) refers to God's providences as blind and unintelligent natural forces (*Gasp!*).  And yet we know that given the right kind of S and T those "blind forces" (sic) can create highly organised macroscopic configurations in the form of embryos & crystals and yet at the same time without violation of the 2nd law.  Of course I'd accept that it's too much of a stretch to automatically extrapolate this to evolution; but if evolution as we understand it has occurred it displays a similar balance of S and T as I've already remarked. 

****

GRANVILLE: This principle is very similar to William Dembski’s observation that you can identify intelligent agents because they are the only ones that can do things that are “specified” (simply or macroscopically describable) and “complex” (extremely improbable) [That's the first time I've seen a clear cut definition of  so-called "specified complexity" a term bandied about by the NAID rank and file is if they know what they are talking about]. Any box full of wires and metal scraps could be said to be complex, but we only suspect intelligence has organized them if the box performs a complex and specifiable function, such as “playing DVDs.”

MY COMMENT: A nice slap on the back there for William Dembski from fellow NAID Granville! Yes, I too would  acknowledge that the incredible feats of macroscopic organization, in particular the mathematically elegant laws of physics, are very intuitively compelling re. intelligent design. My theological intuitions that this points to Divine providence are as strong as any. The alternative of a fluky random universe are, as Sherlock Holmes observed in the story of The Cardboard Box, unthinkable (See the introduction to Disorder and Randomness). The work of Divine providence is even more compelling when one sees the botched job that arrogant atheist Richard Carrier has done in trying to explain it all in terms of randomness. Further intuitive compulsion is added when we see how nice-boy atheist Brian Cox offers his thoughts on his Godless empty vision of cosmic destiny: Viz:

In 10 trillion years the last star will fade. The universe becomes a void without light, life or meaning. The darkness will last forever. As the stars fade so does all possibility of life and meaning.

But what I bulk at with NAIDs like Granville is that they will have a real headache on their hands if it it ever turns out that physics is logically complete: That is, that it's algorithmic descriptions not only cover basic physical phenomena but also the evolution of life and moreover the workings of the human brain. They would then have no small-time gaps for their intelligence-of-the-gaps plug-ins to get a purchase on.

Nevertheless I must add the caveat that I'm not committed to the notion of the logical completeness of the laws of physics, but neither am I committed to a denial of that completeness. Unlike Brian Cox and the NAIDs I'm not going to put all my theoretical eggs into one basket. But for me there remains some very basic intuitions... theological intuitions expressed in the likes of Psalm 8, Psalm 19 and Psalm 139....... 

When I consider your heavens,

    the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

    which you have set in place,

what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

    human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8)

 

The heavens declare the glory of God;

    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

    night after night they reveal knowledge.

They have no speech, they use no words;

    no sound is heard from them.

Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,

    their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19)

For you created my inmost being;

    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

    your works are wonderful,

    I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you

    when I was made in the secret place,

    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed body;

    all the days ordained for me were written in your book

    before one of them came to be.

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!

    How vast is the sum of them!

Were I to count them,

    they would outnumber the grains of sand –

    when I awake, I am still with you. (Psalm 119)

****

The perennial fault of the NAID community is that they don't acknowledge that the theology of a totalizing & transcendent Omnigod creator leads one to a very different form of theological logic to that of the explanatory filter which only caters for in-house created intelligences like humans, animals and little green men.  But I would acknowledge that the NAID community do have mitigating circumstances: In the highly polarized political environment of the US some of the academic community have treated NAID theorists like an unclean plague. As I've remarked before this has pushed the NAID community into the embracing arms of some very vicious right-wing idealogues and demagogues; like Donald Trump for instance.

****

In the next episode I will have a look at Granville's open system reasoning where he considers the transport of negentropy across an open boundary and doubts that this explains increasing configurational order - not the way I would do it personally as I prefer the closed system approach that I've used above; but lets see what he has to say....

...to be continued.

Footnotes

*1 It needs to be pointed out here that whatever the logical and empirical status of standard evolutionary mechanisms some people may have overriding theological issues with evolution which makes it impossible for them to accept. 

*2 But it is likely I would not be a good fit for the so-called "libertarian" political ideology and conspiracy theorism which pervades the NAID community: Recall types like Charlie Kirk.  This is ironic as I've always thought of myself as a free-market-loving liberal minded constitutional monarchist. But polarization has so set-in that I probably look like a raving communist to the Trumpite/Kirkist/Randist/Faragist/Hamite far-right and a capitalist running dog to the Marxist far-left!

*3 The NAID community continue in the affectation that their thesis about intelligent design is not a theological one but a scientific one and therefore their concept of "intelligent agency" masquerades as a purely scientific concept that can be tested for in scientific ways. This is certainly true if we are dealing with the agency of humans, animals or aliens who work within the implicit information (S) of the physical world. But if we move over to the agency of an Omnigod the question of intelligent agency becomes much more tricky, theological and intuitive. This is a consequence of the transcendent Christian Omnigod being both eminent and immanent to creation (Acts 17:28).  So in principle one might think that the NAID community is a broad church that opens it's doors to anyone who accepts their thesis of non-transcendent intelligent agency, but somehow I doubt that's the case. I suspect that even someone like myself would be persona non grata to the NAID tribe. 

*4 See these links:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicentenary Part 11: William Demski’s Active Information

Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicentenary 14: Active Information and Evolution

Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicentenary Part 19: Dembski's Active Information Continued...

ADDENDUM 30/06/2026

A rather politically sinister post has appeared on Science & Culture by Granville Sewell. Viz:

On the Road: The Science of Design in an American Context | Science and Culture Today

In this article Granville gives credit to the virtues of the American Declaration of Independence but without mention of important contexts: Viz:

1. The role of the English Civil war in giving historical rhetoric to the American cause. One could go even further back to the ground work of the Provisions of Oxford and the Magna Carta. Also the input of the European Enlightenment and the English industrial revolution need consideration.

2. The current US context of the democratic backsliding of the MAGArite movement and the banana republic style rule of the pathological narcissist D J Trump. The "stolen election" of 2020 were Trump lies supported by the likes of Mike Pompeo.

Let's also beware of the hazard of both "Christian" internationalism and nationalism: Christendom under the Popes was oppressive; ask Wycliffe and Tyndale. English Christian nationalism under the Stuart destiny was highly oppressive for Non-conformists until William of Orange (1688) and the eventual repeal of the Test Act in 1828. Catholics were also oppressed by over fervent English Christian nationalism. And while we are here let me mention a certain Mr. V Putin whose version of Christian nationalism might have some appeal for MAGArites such as Steve Bannon & Stephen Miller. Let's also beware of too idealistic interpretations of Adam Smith, interpretations which for the Western Irish subsistence farmers of the 19th century only exacerbated their terrible suffering. 

The Boston Tea Party and the American revolution were not some super-duper Christian revolution emerging from no-where; it had background - a lot of background in Europe. 

Granville is not only silent about the above contexts but also about the corrupt Christian nationalism of MAGArism and Trump. He is therefore in my view complicit. It may well be that as with someone like Ken Ham the interests of NAID are being quietly served by MAGArism and vice versa.