Cloistered Academics vs. Christian Punks

The Irony of a Cloistered Academia

I have recently been hammering it out with a couple Young Earth Creationists on Network Norwich (See the discussion thread found here). One of the issues I touched on was the YEC claim that because “we were not there” we are unable to disprove the YEC view that the cosmos was created a mere 6000 odd years ago. Here is an edited version of what I wrote in response to this view:

Science and repeatability: We need to get this straight as a matter of principle: No experiment is ever exactly repeatable as in principle it may be subtly modified by the effects of time, place and circumstance. Interestingly, Jason Lisle of AiG exploits this fact with his Anisotropic Synchrony Convention “solution” for the start light problem and yet here is a YEC telling us that experiments are for all practical purposes repeatable! All experiments are ultimately plagued by the “You weren’t there” syndrome and the “water under the bridge” effect of time passing. If YECs can grasp this they might have a little more humility about so called “operational science” which only differs from evolutionary science in degree and not in fundamental quality.

The canard about us not being a witness to something actually applies to every theoretical construction we conceive; not just ancient history, but to the whole of science. Viz: I wasn’t present for the testing of the laws of physics so how then do I know they are valid? We weren’t present at the writing of the Bible so perhaps its makeup had nothing to do with God’s choreography of events. The “You weren’t there” argument, if pressed, ultimately erodes our confidence in the whole of God’s revelation. Fundamentalist attempts to distinguish between “operational science” and history is an arbitrary construction that tries to stop the nihilist rot, but ultimately fundamentalism subverts science by undermining the information which the grace of providence has pleased to send us from the cosmos. (See: "Beyond Our Ken")

The motive behind the “You weren’t there” argument is to undermine the historical sciences. But the YECs want to have their cake and eat it; they won’t challenge physics (Unless you’re AiG's Jason Lisle, or a geocentrist) because that would really make them look silly and so they attempt to make an artificial and sharp demarcation between testable science and untestable science.

Interestingly enough PZ Myers tackles this same issue in response to Ken Ham congratulating a child for using the “You weren’t there” quip that Ken’s ministry teaches its following to use. PZ Myers’ excellent response, for which I’ll give him full marks, can be read here. Also of interest is PZ’s post here which makes the likely point that the Bible’s perspective (at least in the early OT) is in fact one of a flat earth and a geocentric cosmology. This perspective is valid for arcadian man but industrial age ultra-literalists have used it to delude themselves and marshal a gathering of gullible “punk” followers by exploiting the latter’s disaffection with the agnosticism of an ironically cloistered academic establishment.

It is very appropriate that Ken Ham relates the story of a child challenging the scientific establishment with the quip that his Ministry had taught the child, for really it is a child’s argument; one that’s easy to remember and understand and yet one that can leave even scientifically literate adults baffled for a moment as they grope for a simple one-liner riposte. As is so often the case children’s questions probe things that adults have long taken for granted and forgotten why they know them, but as soon as a little thought is applied the question crumbles at the touch. That this “you weren’t there” argument is so easily and uncritically swallowed by AiG’s gullible clientele is far from a recommendation for the mentality of that organization’s following. It reveals that shrewd fundamentalist ministries like AiG are based on a financial platform largely supported by scientifically illiterate punks who are disaffected with the profane academic establishment. AiG’s high profile has little to do with academic expertise, but instead exploits what the academic establishment refuses to give, and that is faith.

STOP PRESS 26/06/11
In this post PZ Myers tells us about to Ken Ham’s response to the above matter. Without engaging PZ’s very reasonable criticism of the “you weren’t there” quip, Ken and his correspondents put a very dark spin on the matter. They achieve this by piling on the emotive anti-superlatives: “Atheist attack”, “vile blogs” “shake their fist at God”, “an attack of the enemy”, “viciously attacking a little girl”, “instrument of Satan”. “How low they can go?”

And yet there is no attempt to engage PZ’s points and instead we get a tirade of deep, deep (self) righteous indignation. However, this response is not unexpected for it is inextricably bound up with their world view which tells them “If you are not with us you are against us; if you are against us you are against God, and if you are against God you must be evil”. The consequence is that these people have a very dark view of those not with them. Even Christians are treated with a deep suspicion if they don’t follow the YEC line and they will genuinely believe that such Christians are engaged in some kind of deep seated sin and compromise with Satan. I know because I have met many Christian sect members in my time; they look at you sullenly unable to establish normal cordial human relations with outsiders because they see them as at best apostate and at worst Satan’s scheming minions. I myself have been accused by the members of these sorts of sect as a “lover of lies”. No surprise really because they just cannot conceive that somebody can reject their position and still have a good conscience. They see the behavior of outsiders in a jaundiced light and therefore readily read the slightest criticisms as an ad hominem attack. They have no compunction about implicating outsiders  in heinous sin and yet they will put on a great show of (self) righteous indignation at trivial name-calling. Their consequent outlook on the world is a kind of pathological group think; for any reasonable and sane person could hardly construe PZ’s response as “viciously attacking a little girl”.

Polarisation passion feeds. Passion polarisation breeds. Polarisation is passion's cause, for crusade and holy wars.

“Church in England Spiritually Dead” According to Ham.

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Ken Ham: Flying in the Teeth of the Evidence

Ken Ham has obviously read James Knight’s latest Network Norwich & Norfolk’s article. Ken quotes a large chunk of it on his blog here. Ken is a little upset about James calling AiG a “cult”. Ken is also not very complimentary about state of the church in England, or even in America for that matter:

Oh, by the way, look at the state of the church in England: it is all but spiritually dead. I’ve ministered in England about 15 times now and have met with countless church leaders there. I’ve seen for myself that this once-Christianized nation is pagan. Most of the next generation doesn’t even believe in God. Yes, that is the outcome of this heretical teaching, which sadly not only pervades the church in England but is also infecting the church now in the USA. Sadly, academics like Peter Enns and those from Calvin College (and others as quoted in the Christianity Today article) are leading generations of church leaders to undermine the authority of the Word instead of standing uncompromisingly upon it as we must do!

As far as I’m aware the church in England is far from spiritually dead; what Ken means, of course, is that a church rates as all but spiritually dead, or at least compromised by heresy, if it doesn’t accept YEC teaching and ministry. Thus, as far as Ken is concerned that puts the great majority  of the English church well beyond the pale of God's pleasure! No wonder he sees the English church as dead; so very little of it swallows AiG's flintstone travesty of palaeontology, hook line and sinker. And am I glad: The last thing we want in this country is an expensive outsized wooden toy boat dominating the shore of an undersized ornamental lake; it would be an affront to both atheist and Christian scientists in this country. It is this sort of doctrinaire sectarian perspective by Ken and AiG  that ticks one of my cult check boxes.

As I’ve said before I have a reserved view toward evolution and I have a lot of respect for many of the anti-evolutionist correspondents on Uncommon Descent. I can even understand how your average Joe and Josephine Pugh, puzzled and confused by the times they are in, are looking for something that narrows the domain of cognizance thereby taking the strain off their creaking epistemic resources. For them a literal interpretation of early Genesis provides a myth that makes sense of reality and suits them just fine; at the very least it cuts down the vertiginous time dimension to anthropic proportions, if not the agoraphobic spatial dimensions of the cosmos.

I have to say that in spite of being potentially sympathetic I have a great deal of trouble trying to summon up respect for AiG and what it stands for with its “Our Word is God’s Word” ethos. But the rampart “dead cert” fundamentalism of AiG is not the only problem I have: Frankly, when it comes to technical subjects commentators like Beyond Our Ken Ham lack competence and aptitude. Give me William Dembski, or Hugh Ross any day – but not Ken Ham. Ken’s expensive Theme Park projects are just a little too kitschy and sentimental for me. Ken really needs to sort out his PR even in America before he brings his anti-science circus and far right Christian extremism over the pond.

2001 SPACED OUT ODYSSEY

The following post is an essay I wrote on Postmodernism in 2001

Singularly Askew: "It was an incomprehensible interlacing of bars and tubes, oddly awry, heeling over into the black shadows as if to elude our scrutiny" (From an early version of H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine")

The following contains some of my thoughts and reflections on the subject of postmodernism. The contents are not a summarised compilation of the enormous amount of data on this subject, but really represent some back of the envelope theorizing as I search for the kind of underlying, unifying, simplifying and universal principles that are anathema to extreme postmodernism itself. Theorising is a risky business, especially with something like postmodernism which, with its tolerance of contradiction, fragmentary discourses, irrationality, schizophrenic analyses, and extreme pragmatism, affects to defy all categories by its very definition. Postmodern philosophers dislike any attempt to categorise their philosophy and may be highly evasive about just what they believe, and, in fact, may prefer to be thought of as believing nothing at all.

The Rational Cosmos

                I am a great believer in the inherent grand rationality of our world, a rationality that makes that world comprehensible and controllable, thus providing the foundation for all forms of rational philosophy, mathematics, high science, and technology. It is with a certain amount of affection that I look back to the time when these things started to take a firm root in Western Civilisation. Although there are precursors, it is the period called the "enlightenment", (roughly the 18th Century) which is usually regarded as the time when Western Civilisation started to exploit the deeply rooted cosmic order for all it was worth, giving extra impetus to commercial and industrial growth. Since then mathematics, science, and technology have burgeoned to become the hallmarks of modernism and the fuel of industrialisation and there seems to have been no looking back. Or has there? Nerds and techno freaks might feel at home and in control with science and technology but not everyone does. For many, especially the postmodernists, the apparently grandiose and obliging truths of mathematics and rigorous science are intimidating and may even be regarded as an oppressive form of chauvinistic intellectual imperialism. As a professor of humanities has remarked: "Humbled by the mathematical language of science, I become speechless and relapse into my tribal dialect ...." (*1)

A Long history of disaffection

                It seems to be a historical fact that Western culture goes through periodic times of crisis in confidence, times when doubts about the trappings of modernism and where it is going start to advance like the glaciers of the ice ages. Although separated by relatively warmer "interglacials", periods of disenchantment, like the glaciers themselves, may never disappear completely. These fluctuations in our cultural weather system can be traced throughout modern times; in fact crises of confidence seem to surface even during the enlightenment itself. Moreover, since the 18th century one could draw attention to various historical waypoints in support of a theory of waxing and waning confidence. I won't describe them in any detail here but merely name them: Nietzsch's nihilism, the collapse in confidence at the end of the nineteenth century, the "Dada" art coming out of World War 1, the extreme anthropocentrism of existentialism, relativism, gnosticism, and so-called postmodernism. In many of these cases one can hear the same echoes: A self undermining scepticism, a disaffection with high rationality and the powers that be, a turning to mysticism, irrationalism, and anthropocentrism, an emphasis on the "inner voice", a glorification of juvenility and sometimes insanity. One could characterise these things as a complex cluster of symptoms caused by a kind of recurring social nervous break down of varying severity.

When did it start?

                In one sense it may true to say that "postmodernism" is better called "paramodernism" as it seems to be a manifestation of a concomitant of modernism; a disaffection with the latter that waxes and wanes and perhaps never disappears completely. Postmodernism may, in fact, really be an emerging into consciousness, (through popularisation and commodification) of things that have been there on and off for a long time; a new manifestation of an old problem. However, I suppose that postmodernism slowly emerged as a philosophy with a name and conscious identity from about the sixties and seventies onward as various academics and intellectual commentators, like Focault, Lyotard, Derrida, Buadrillard (these are the names that hit you first - definitely a French connection there) articulated and crystallised its key ideas. The central paradox presented by postmodern intellectuals is that they are theorists who have generated a grand and general theory asserting that one cannot annunciate grand and general theories!  In so doing they have done what they do best, namely, contradict themselves. But contradiction is precisely what extreme postmodernism affects to live with. One commentator remarks on two postmodern analysts (Deleuze and Guattari) for whom the schizophrenic in their "scheme of things becomes some kind of ideal model of human behaviour"(*2). Insanity is a recurring theme in extreme postmodernist expressions. I find it difficult to answer the question as to whether philosophical postmodernism grew out of more general “postmodern” social trends or whether it helped fuel those trends; most likely some sort of feedback relation couples them and the two probably go hand in hand.  One thing to note however; postmodernism is not pandemic; many people, especially those who have large stakes in the technocratic complex, are quite happy with the enlightenment paradigm, thank you very much.

What is Postmodernism?

                Academics may have given it name and an identity but it is impossible to catalogue all the cultural vernacular that goes under the heading of postmodernism in folk philosophy, much of which is a mere hint and flavour of the postmodern ethos, and often amount to benign stylistic renditions of a more extreme philosophy. The core ideas of philosophical postmodernism seem to revolve around the belief that one can no longer believe in all-embracing theoretical generalisations (or "grand narratives" as some postmodern intellectuals call it), so typical of modernism, whether it is in connection with morality, politics, theology, sociology or science etc.  For the postmodernist the cosmos is too complex, irrational and hostile a place to allow itself to be encapsulated into a few succinct universal principles amenable to human understanding. In contrast the postmodern concept of truth is thoroughly pragmatic and the breath taking theoretical vistas sought for by the "enlightenment project" are replaced with fragmentary disposable ideas that one can hold as long as they are useful or desirable. Thus, hard postmodernism is deeply suspicious of anything thing that has pretensions of being an over arching timeless truth and the universality of the majestic Christian message would certainly fall into this category. Side by side with the loss of belief in a deeply rational cosmos is the demise of any optimistic utopian vision or a belief in incremental historical progress - surely no surprise as both require control and control requires a benign and deeply rational world; the hard postmodernist believes in neither, and probably has a deep seated guilt complex about the whole notion of control; may be because in our world it is here that things have so often gone wrong; a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing and the steward so easily becomes the control freak in search of hegemony. The postmodernist, therefore, has little faith in the authorities.

                How these core philosophical ideas of postmodernism relate to the wider social nexus is debatable and it is at this point one could spend years studying the subject. There is a postmodern take on everything, whether it is science, literature, theatre or art etc., and there is claim and counter claim as to what ranks as "postmodern". Tracing all the connections, associations and allusions requires an expert. Typical of the postmodern mindset is the attitude to "simulation". Postmodernism blurs the distinction between reality and the "simulations" of the media (e.g. films, stories, computer games etc.). In fact the postmodernist Buadrillard claimed that the Gulf war, (a war we saw through the lens of target cameras, thus making it resemble a computer game), was a simulation. This was really a provocative way of saying that the media is so pervasive and real that its products now constitute a reality in their own right. There is grain of truth here: We see so much of our world through the media that distinguishing between simulation and reality can be difficult. For example, some people claim the moon landings were simulations. The televised O. J. Simpson case became its media representation.  For many who saw the televised attack on the World Trade Centre the immediate impact was of something as unreal as a science fiction film. In postmodernism appearances count for a lot and any effort to get round the superficial interfaces of our world to a deeper, universal and obliging logic is not taken seriously. Appearances don't deceive the hard postmodernist because he believes there is no deeper meaning to be deceived about. For the postmodernist meaning is subjective and everyone lives in their own private world of meaning unable to fully communicate; least of all with language because its ambiguities allow each to interpret it differently. And the postmodernist is unlikely to have much regard for "high tech" theoretical tools like probability, randomness, information theory, association networks etc. which help address the paradoxes of communication and language.

                Postmodern cultural products tend to focus on the irrational, the chaotic, the inconsistent, the bizarre, the nihilistic, the retrograde, the bleak or the hostile. If you see buildings mixing and matching a variety of clashing architectural styles (sometimes called pastiches) then you are probably looking at a postmodern design. Media productions and writings that jumble styles, time and space, allow fact to intrude upon fiction and vice versa, are also postmodern as are productions where performance and reality are mixed (e.g. the Jerry Springer show). Films that otherwise accept the logical rationality of our world but which have a bleak moral and social outlook (e.g. Terminator, and Alien) are also postmodern; gone is the idea that evolution, social and biological, is a progressive process in favour of humanity. Postmodernism also has a fascination with "self referencing" scenarios; e.g. a person plays himself in media productions; to what extent does his "real" persona become the role he plays and should he feed that back into the role? i.e. should he play himself playing himself ? The postmodernist is fascinated with such logical conundrums because they seem (superficially) to transcend all logical analysis, reinforcing his faith in an unknowable confused world resistant to human understanding, a world of shear appearance where simulation and reality blend together into a depthless world that Baudrillard calls the "hyper reality".

                Like other philosophies the general ethos of postmodernism is imbibed and exhaled by the populace and makes itself felt in a drift toward a variety of preferences, attitudes and styles. In particular, postmodern minds are receptive to consumerism, mixing and matching, transience, hyper reality, and a disconnected hotchpotch of ideas and perceptions. But the hard postmodernism of the philosophers must be distinguished from "soft" postmodernism; the term "postmodern" has been mobilised as a kind of catch-all category describing the general trends of the social milieu including anything which seems to capture the mood of postmodernism. e.g. brainstorming, fuzzy logic, eclecticism, chaos theory, proliferation of choice, quantum mechanics, theories of historical retrogression etc, etc, all of which really amount to a sophistication of concept or method but which do not strictly fall outside the rational paradigm. The term is also used rather loosely to label any movement in society that expunges some of the crass optimism of modernism, and modernist assumptions of an incremental progressive historical drift. In fact, the prefix "post" is often used when the preliminary "hype" that may greet new and modern ideas gives way to sobriety and reality: For example, with the demise of the "dot coms" one might say that we are now in a "post.com" period. In fact I have heard claims we are now passing into a "post-postmodern" period. That's no surprise to me; postmodernism has not only been "bandwagoned" and hyped, but it also suffers from the very ills it diagnoses and has logical limits on how far it can be developed.

                Whilst one must always be aware of the operation of social feedback loops much of the immediate responsibility for the philosophical state of our society is down to its intellectual leaders who through sins of omission fail to give a lead or through sins of commission lead in the wrong direction. Those who control the media are usually influenced by the philosophies of the day, and they in turn may be found supplying the fragments of postmodern texts and narratives by which the average person can dress and justify a life style of extreme pragmatism, individualism and a world of private meaning. But hard postmodernism has one last devastating message: With its thorough going scepticism of any deep rationality or benevolence in order to things, postmodernism leaves humanity wide open to the ultimate dissolution of the personality; for it must even question whether we are mistaken about the very concept of individuality and personal identity. Hard postmodern is so deeply logically flawed and cognitively unstable that its whole structure slips and slides toward a chaotic metamorphosis as it undermines even its own implication of individualism and the distinction between the sane and the insane is then ultimately lost.

The Causes

                On the causes of Western postmodernism the following are probably relevant:

1) Big anonymous machine like societies committed to investment and growth leading to communal fragmentation, and heartless change. Inequalities and exploitation. Many high and unfilled expectations. Demystification of authority.

2) The own goals of hi-tech society: Ecological stress. Control freak approach to the environment (probably a sign of insecurity). Warfare on an industrial scale. Nuclear energy gave us fear in the form of the bomb but never generated the promised "too cheap to meter" energy etc, etc.

3) A deep alienation from the highly analytical approach of science and technology. Science has revealed things difficult to make anthropic sense of: Cosmic history. The spectre of machine intelligence and alien life forms. Cosmic sizes. Atomism. A paradoxical blend of randomness and determinism. An exclusively "emergent paradigm" that disregards context, contingency and providence.

4) Physics, the science of fundamentals, is passing into a very abstruse and difficult stage, barely understood even by its intelligentsia, thus helping to consolidate the notion of an incomprehensible cosmos.

5) Science and technology has a relatively high proportion of nerds and techno freaks. That these social inadequates have one over on the rest of the population is often more than the socially competent can bear.

6) There are profound and unanswered questions over goals, purpose and meaning that the "emergent paradigm" of contemporary folk philosophy cannot address, and indeed may regard as meaningless.

7) Counter Reactions: A strong affirmation of the exclusively human: e.g. emotion, irrationality, sensuality. Affirmations of otherness: gnosticism, new age, “cargo” cults. Clutching at any hints of the supernatural. Alternative versions of history (e.g. Atlantis), medicine, and science.

8) Scepticism is a healthy enlightenment attitude in as far as it is an urge to test, demonstrate and prove, but if pressed too far it is like a digestive system that in its lust for food starts to digest itself.

                No doubt much could be made of these lines of inquiry and more. However, once alienation and disaffection sets in, for whatever reason, there seems to be no philosophical backstop to halt it. By way of illustration there is one theme above (8) that I would like to pick up briefly.

The 2001 Syndrome

                Ever since enlightenment times questions have been raised about how, without God, we have any right at all to expect a secure authoritative foundation to epistemology and ontology ( = know-how) whether it be in connection with science, social order or morality: Without God as underwriter, why should we be favoured with know-how beyond what is immediate, pragmatic and needed for short term survival? Attempts to place human know-how on a firm footing without the assumption of a Divine underwriter often resemble that famous self referencing problem we see when a dog chases its own tail. One might chase up the foundations of human know-how in order to secure its place in the museum of human achievement, but the cognitive and epistemic mechanisms doing the chasing are the very things being chased. If man seeks to secure a logically self-sufficient agnostic foundation to epistemology and ontology such a target may be unreachable because the very foundation sought for must be secured with that self same foundation. To the thoroughgoing scepticism of extreme postmodernism this is further evidence that there is no absolute foundation at all; a conclusion that is itself contradictory. The fact is that there will always be inherent instabilities and deep contradictions in human cognition whilst it affects to adopt a thoroughgoing scepticism either about its own make-up or of the world of which it is part. Those contradictions may remain hidden for a while but from time to time will resurface in recurring crises of confidence.

                To me, extreme postmodernism smacks of machines gone wrong; human machines stuck in a vicious self-referencing feedback loop: 2001 with its pathological HAL9000 has arrived. One might construe this as the just deserts for the abuse of providence by a self-congratulatory modernism that credits its socio-technological successes to anything but providence. As the proud "control freakery" of modernism seeks to put the foundations of human affairs on a Godless base it soon finds there is no such base and runs into self-referencing problems. Loss of faith in the deeply coherent structure of cosmic rationality may be a consequence. To the extreme postmodernist life is a simulation, an interface that can change as quickly and irrationally as the TV screen of the channel surfer. The perception is that the players and entities in this skin deep world have bit parts with no extensive background history or story that can be exhaustively tested and probed. But to me exactly the opposite is true; our world has the touch and feel of reality precisely because its coherent, consistent and replete rationality cannot be faulted by any test known to man. As such it can be likened to the kind of machine intelligence proposed by Alan Turing; that is, as a player that performs flawlessly and rationally under all conceivable probes, interrogations and tests (*3). Likewise, the players in our world whether they be sentient or material are not fakes, facades and bit parts; they do not have a mere "appearance of history" but have full blown life stories; they are not mere interfaces but have real mechanisms behind the facade.  Thus, in every sense they go beyond appearance. Any self-conscious being knows what I mean.

                If postmodernism serves any useful purpose at all it may do so as a vehicle for raising questions where there should be questions and sometimes one gets the feeling that the term “postmodernism” is used simply to refer to “modernism with humility”. But we must not forget that the kernel of philosophical postmodernism is its contradictory "antifoundational" philosophy and this antifoundationalism becomes apparent in the evasive shifting answers postmodernists give as to what they believe because to do so is to admit some kind of absolute foundation. Scepticism in measure is healthy; after all it was good old-fashioned enlightenment scepticism that brought me to faith. But the absolute scepticism of extreme postmodernism ultimately destroys itself in an unstable feedback loop.

It is fundamental to human nature to attempt to understand the world of which it is part. Even postmodernism comes to its own perverse, nihilistic and anarchistic conclusions. However, one cannot take for granted that the complexities of the Cosmos can be encapsulated in relatively few simple principles. Encapsulation of human know-how is a kind of data compression and this can happen only if, firstly, there is something about cosmic data allowing it to be so compressed, and, secondly, there are the cognitive resources available to compress it. But in a graceless world neither contingency need be granted. The giveness of these contingencies is dependent on the grace of providence and we can only exploit them if we are willing to accept that grace.

                                                                                                                                                                T.V. Reeves November 2001

*1 See reference 2, page xi

*2 See reference 1, page 7

*3 Alan Turing, Bletchley Park computer pioneer, suggested that the condition for true machine intelligence would be fulfilled if a machine can converse at an indistinguishably human level. Without commenting on the sufficiency on Turing`s condition, it serves as a useful illustration of what is meant by "in depth rationality"; that is, as something which can never be revealed as a facade by all the conceivable the tests and probes available to finite beings.

References

1. The Icon critical dictionary of Postmodern Thought: Editor Stuart Sim. Icon 1998

                A compilation of essays on the cultural effects of postmodernism. Includes a useful index of terms.

2. The Enlightenment. Norman Hampson: Penguin 1976

                Records and analyses some less well known aspects of the enlightenment.            

3. Introduction to H.G Wells' Time machine: Jonathan Benison, Cideb 1994.

                Benison cites the "irrationalism of  the Decadent era of the 1890s"

4. At the Edge of History/Passages about Earth: William Irwin Thompson. Lindisfarne press 1990

                An eloquent critical appraisal of technocratic society.

5. How to know you know you know it.  Knotes by T.V.Reeves 1993. Unpublished

                A short study on "self reference" in human knowledge.
(See here for the latter reference http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-know-you-know-you-know-it.html)

Does Intelligent Design Make Testable Predictions? Part 2

Could ID predict this scenario? If it happened would the explanatory filter fail to detect ID?

In the first part of this series I expressed doubt about Intelligent Design’s ability to make hard predictions; after all, ID covers a large range of opinions from Sir John Polkinghorne’s fruitful evolutionism to Beyond our Ken Ham’s mature creation, a creation created “just like that” 6000 years ago. It seems that ID can be used to underwrite so many creation scenarios that its predictive content is seriously compromised. I say this as an ID creationist myself, so I am not saying it from an anti-ID stance. In fact I say it because I am anxious to make all due allowance for the problems of prediction that arise naturally from an ontology that starts with the assumption of some complex presumably self-explaining entity whose nature is very alien to human kind; hardly a sound basis for successful prediction - and we thought predicting human behaviour was difficult enough. So perhaps the lack of predictability in ID is less a bug than it is an expected feature of the ontology it posits. Let’s face it, ID is going to struggle to be hard science.

So where does this leave the predictions in Uncommon Descent’s post here? Well, ID does become a harder science if, as seems to be the case in the community UD represents, ID is de-facto anti-evolutionism. A de-facto anti-evolutionism is liable to contradict certain evolutionary scenarios and will presumably impact expected biological and paleontological observations. But even if we assume an anti-evolutionary position that still leaves us with an open ended range of ID candidates running from Old Earth Creationism to fundamentalist views like that of Beyond our Ken Ham. Anti-evolutionists, then, will claim that they know what hasn’t happened, but they have no consensus on what has happened and consequently they are going to be vague about just what they expect the fossil record to reveal; all they know is that it’s not going to reveal evolution, at least as currently understood. Nevertheless, when ID slips over into anti-evolutionism it at least appears to be saying something with a little more content than “God did it – somehow”.

Anyway, without further ado here are the first four predictions in UD’s list, each followed by my own comment. I was hoping to get through all predictions in one post, but as there are a total of 14 predictions it looks as though it’s going to be a long hot summer.

ID Prediction 01: ID predicts that the Universe had a beginning.

My Comment: I can’t see why this follows. In his book “The Intelligent Universe” Sir Fred Hoyle moots the idea that life is intelligently designed and yet as a lifelong supporter of Steady State Theory he obviously didn’t think his version of ID implied a universe with a beginning. Neither do I see this as a prediction of ID in its most abstracted form. However, I agree that it is a prediction of mainstream Christian Theism; but Christian theism isn’t ID in its most abstracted form.

ID Prediction 02: ID predicts an increase (and not a decrease), as science progresses, in the number of finely-tuned parameters pertinent to the laws and constants of physics.

My Comment: I have a feeling that this prediction arises out of a misconception I have occasionally seen on UD that physical laws can’t carry information: The naive argument runs as follows: Laws equate to “necessity” and therefore the patterns they generate have a probability of 1. A probability of 1 entails zero information. The upshot is that many anti-evolutionists cannot see how the patterns implied by physical laws can be a receptacle of information. The only kind of information they recognize, then, are configurations that appear to have been patched in “by hand” rather than generated by physical laws. Moreover, Dembski’s explanatory filter, although valid in circumstances within the cosmic context, has the unfortunate side effect of making it look as though Law and Disorder causes obviate the need for Intelligent Design; the filter doesn’t readily raise the question of the Intelligent origin of Law and Disorder but instead invokes a regress whereby Law and Disorder generates Law and Disorder.

All in all this amounts to a double whammy against the efficacy of physical laws, for not only do they appear to be information-less, but the all important explanatory filter fails to explicitly acknowledge that laws themselves may be intelligently contrived. Thus, on UD there is tendency for only “hand patched” information to register on their radar as having ID origins. Hence in UD’s view the greater the level of overt hand patching the firmer the case for ID. Anti-evolutionists, then, expect more hand patched configuring rather than less. In my view high levels of “hand patching” does not necessarily follow from ID. If it really is possible to generate life using law and disorder, then given the level of Intelligence envisaged by ID creationists it follows that that intelligence is well able choose an elegant set of laws with a minimum of adjustable variables. Whether elegant laws can actually generate information I have considered on the following web pages:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/11/self-organisation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/12/darwin-bicentenary-part-29-dembski-and.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/03/darwin-bicentenary-15-critique-of.html

However, I must add a disclaimer: None of this necessarily means that Physical Law is the means by which  a creative intelligence has introduced information into our world. The UDers may be right and life isn’t a product of law and disorder, but has, in fact, been directly patched in by Divine Intelligence in the form of a second creative dispensation – this is why I like to keep tabs on UD in case they come up with something; they just might. Unlike some people who call them “IDiots” I do have respect for their abilities.

ID prediction 03: ID predicts the presence of specified complexity in living systems.

My Comment: For something to have “specified complexity” two conditions must be met. Firstly, the object must be complex in configuration – this rules out highly ordered configurations like crystalline periodicities. Secondly, the object must be highly improbable - this rules out highly disordered configurations because high disorder, by virtue of its overwhelming representation in the space of possibilities, is, assuming equal a-priori probabilities, very probable. Hence objects with specified complexity are objects that are both complex and at the same time members of a very improbable class. In absolute terms it is clear that organic structures fulfill both these conditions – they are complex and yet ordered enough to be very far removed from absolute disorder. So in one sense the above “prediction” is less a prediction than it is a manifestly obvious feature of life. I must emphasise, however, that I have just said “in absolute terms” – that is, a la Fred Hoyle’s Junkyard Jumbo “explosion” where it is assumed that each and every possible configuration of elements is equally possible thus entailing an absolutely minute probability of a Jumbo Jet forming during an explosion.

But if as evolutionists are implying life is a product of the “self organization” implicit in the laws of physics, then in terms of conditional probabilities the probability of life is much greater than it would be in absolute terms. The probability of life conditioned on the Laws of Physics can be represented as Prob(Life|Laws of Physics). Evolutionists are effectively telling us that the value of Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) is great enough for there to be a realistic chance of the formation of life in the history of the universe. Thus, the “specified complexity” of life, given the Laws of Physics, is correspondingly reduced. Now, as far as the UD community is concerned, specified complexity is used to detect Intelligent Design; it is used in the explanatory filter to decide whether a configuration is a product of intelligence or law and disorder. The trouble is, as I have pointed out above, the explanatory filter does not explicitly acknowledge the present of intelligence if a configuration can be explained, with a reasonable probability, as the outcome of law and disorder. Hence, if Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) is sufficiently high UDers are liable to lose sight of a cosmic intelligence behind the universe. Consequently, they favour the view that Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) is extremely low, which is the mathematical way of expressing their strong anti-evolutionist line; that is, they maintain that the laws of physics are not a sufficient condition for life thus entailing the high specified complexity of organic structures even given the laws of physics.

In order to convert the conditional probability Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) into the absolute probability Prob(Life), we need to know Prob(Laws of Physics). Trouble is, we haven’t got a clue what this value is and in fact we have little idea how to calculate it, if indeed it is an intelligible concept. In spite of some speculations about how physical laws might change across a multiverse no quantification is currently possible because there is no known Law and Disorder regime that generates law and disorder regimes. However, we can perhaps get an inkling of an answer to this question if we remind ourselves of an important mathematical abstraction: Namely, of all possible platonic patterns of behavior the ordered behavior described by the laws of physics is clearly an extreme rarity. Hence on this basis, and assuming equal a-priori probabilities, Prob(Laws of Physics) looks to be very low. This implies that even if Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) is relatively high, then the absolute probability of life, Prob(Life), is very low. So as far as specified complexity is concerned life has a very low absolute probability whether or not it is implicit in the laws of physics. That means that the above UD “prediction” has more the character of a logical truism in as much as it is true whether we are evolutionists or not. Therefore this “prediction” does not necessarily express an anti-evolutionist view.

ID prediction 04: ID predicts that, as scientific research progresses, biological complexity will be seen to increase over time, and information will have a more and more central role in the governing of life’s operations.

My comment: By “increase over time” I think the author actually means human research time. If so then this seems a rather trivial prediction given that as far the extent of our knowledge about organisms is concerned the only way is up!

But I’m going to use this opportunity as an excuse to talk about an increase in organic complexity over paleontological time; a prediction that is not peculiar to anti-evolutionist ID but also follows if Prob(Life|Laws of Physics) has realistic values - that is, evolution itself predicts an increase in biological complexity over time. Let me explain.

It is clear that not all biological organisms are of equal complexity. Here I am not so much talking about configurational complexity but the more abstract computational complexity measured by computation time. For example, it is fairly self evident that metazoans must be preceded by precursor structures; very likely single cell organisms. Single cell organisms in turn will be preceded by basic chemical constituents. In short any organic structure is preceded by a minimum number of precursor conditions that follow in a strict stratified sequence. This stratified sequence forms a kind “critical path” in the manufacture of the structure. The longer this path, the more computationally complex the structure is because the minimum time needed to arrive at the structure  is an increasing function of this sequence length.

If evolution is a kind of diffusion motion through configuration space then the precursor structures will necessarily be reached first. This diffusion motion causes a slow population growth in organic configuration space where the stratification sequence ensures that the “lower levels” will be populated before the “higher levels”. Thus it follows that biological complexity will be seen to increase over time. One way to think about this result is thermodynamically: The Earth is in a kind of morphological disequilibrium; as time increases the shuffling of happenstance entail a kind of diffusion motion which ensures the progressive population of morphological slots over time. Those morphological slots that require a sequence of morphological stages to be followed before they are arrived at will be populated later rather than sooner. The result is that biological complexity, computationally speaking, increases over time.

Religious Control Freaks

Inquisitors Attempt to Gag Freedom of Speech at NN&N

Who is Trying to Censor My Post on NN&N? "Answers in Genesis" or The Mysterious XXX Brotherhood? It's looking like the latter at the moment.

A rabidly fundamentalist article has appeared on the Christian Web site Network Norwich and Norfolk (NN&N) . The article is by an Answers in Genesis rep and consists of  the usual off the peg quip theology, backed up with spiritual threats implying Divine disleasure if the YEC view isn't believed. I posted a rebuttle, but unfortunately my main comment kept getting deleted by an anonymous "gremlin" user of the site who is presumbly  not at all pleased with my contribution. I in turn keep reposting it. To help things a long a little I'm posting my NN&N comments here so that I can use them as reference material if needs be: The gremlin will attempt to influence the site wallahs at NN&N in order to get my stuff deleted permanently. It is a classic fundamentalist ploy to attempt to gag the opposition rather than engage it in reason.

My apologies but the following won't be very meaningful unless you have followed NN&N; I'm just using my blog to as web space.

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The “hermeneutic” that this YEC author refers to does not lead to easy or infallible interpretations as he should himself be well aware of. Moreover meta-statements made by an author clarifying meaning must themselves be interpreted by the interpreter. Thus we ourselves are always, repeat always, the weak link that stops us short of claiming to have an infallible grasp of God’s Word. This then ought to prevent us making audacious claims about a particular interpretation of scripture. 

Re: The Historical Hermeneutic: This is particularly difficult to apply given that the contemporary mindset is certainly not identical to that of the Biblical writers. For example, it is unlikely that the early Biblical writers had any concept of the Earth as a globe and certainly not a spinning globe; their world view would be very geocentric. It is no surprise then that Answers in Genesis have clashed with Christian Geocentrists over the meaning of scripture. A sharp clash between AiG’s Danny Falkner and the Geocentrist scientist Gerardus Bouw can be seen here:

http://www.geocentricity.com/ba1/fresp/index.html

It is quite likely that the Greek concept of a spherical Earth didn’t figure much in the consciousness or interests of the Biblical writers and so perhaps it is not surprising that the Flat Earth society has, in times past, claimed their views to be based on “God’s Word”. See here:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm

Let us also recall in this connection the Witness Lee Brotherhood, who have made frequent recent visits to NN&N’s web pages. They follow the teaching of G.H. Pember’s Gap theory interpretation of Genesis 1 – an idea which I think you will find is strongly opposed by AiG. The Witness Lee Brotherhood believe that a Gap interpretation is all part of God’s “recovery” modus operandi. For them the concept of recovery is very much bound up with the end time restoration of the church as a brotherhood that blends into a spiritual elite. The Witness Lee brotherhood isn’t some uber-unorthodox cult: Their scriptural interpretations are largely mainstream evangelical although some idiosyncrasies such as the “recovery” doctrine do set them apart and guess what, they would likely view AiG as part of the unblended Christian “Babylon”.

One thing is clear; whether we are talking about AiG, Christian Geocentrists, Christian Flat-Earthers, the Recovery Brotherhood, or numerous other exclusive and devout religious sects, all are very pious, very vehement and utterly convinced that they are “taking God at his Word”. In fact I have even heard of some fundamentalist ultras who are dissatisfied with AiG’s compromise of mixing scripture with science. For them Sola Scriptura really means Sola Scriptura and they would rather drop all scientific dabblings (Something which is actually impossible to do) and they regard scientific creationists like AiG to “have fallen into the trap of being Greeks looking for Wisdom. and trying to compete wisdom v wisdom.”  The overall effect of this plethora of conflicting claims by those who “take God at his Word” is to evacuate its apparent meaningfulness.

When I was first converted to Christianity I was given the YEC hard sell, a hard sell that carefully juxtaposed YEC philosophy with the phrases we can see in the above article such as: “Putting words into Gods mouth”, “Applying your opinion to scripture”, “Compromising God’s word”, “God means what he says”, “ignoring God’s word”, “believing atheistic systems” and threats of what might happen on Judgment day if you don’t take God at his word etc etc. All this was scary and intimidating and naturally enough focused the mind of the religious novice on his judgment before God if he didn’t consent to YEC. The truism that the reader inevitably supplies a fallible interpretation is paid lip service to; in practice man’s interpretations become identified to God’s truth; in practice man’s interpretations sneak past critical analysis and somehow appear to directly emerge from scripture without an act of interpretation; they thereby attempt to place themselves beyond critical scrutiny by claiming to have God’s direct authority.

To cut a long story short: As my faith, confidence and knowledge grew not only did I find YEC science wanting and their use of scripture suspect, I also became very disturbed by their implicitly threatening language which looked like an attempt to apply spiritual duress. Around the same time I had started researching the cults and the similarities were alarming. On a sectarian/cult scale of 1 to 10 I would put AiG at around 6+.

I see that same strident and intimidating tones from the author of the above article that I saw many years ago; the same threatening spiritual pretensions that implicitly masquerade as “God’s Word”. It’s sectarian and it’s cult like. Above all it’s all too conceitedly human; even fanatical. To think I was nearly rushed into speaking like that myself. Frankly I find the whole thing revolting. 

NOTE: We must also be very mindful of RichardL’s excellent point about the genus of Biblical literature.

…...following on from these comments I would like to add that the "historical hermeneutic" has several related problematical issues/questions: 

a) Historical context may be humanly unrecoverable. “Plain readings” are not necessarily the rule.

b) Translation/copying issues raise questions over the whereabouts of the “original word”.

c) Given that we are dealing with a Divine Omni-Agency, there is a measure of inscrutability as to how God might use his word: Conceivably he is well able to use the resources of a contemporary context (rather than the original context) to invest his word with new meanings in order to achieve his purposes.

d) Does the historical hermeneutic have the relevant Biblical meta-statements justifying its usage?

e) It is very likely that the general reader looks at the Bible unaware of the gulf in meanings that could exist by virtue of the separation of his context from the context of the writer. It is quite likely that general reader uses an informal “on the hoof” hermeneutic that often leads to meanings very differently from the original writer: Can such informal interpretations be detected and should they be rejected or accepted? 

f) Use of the Holy Spirit’s name to underwrite a proprietary interpretation of the text begs the question.

There are other issues, but that will do for now.

The Choice is Yours

Now here''s a guy who believes in freedom of choice: "My way or the damned way" 

13/05/2011: After posting the above cartoon I was reminded of this post by Arni Zachariassen; the quote below taken from the post shows why. Caution! You're about to enter  "Beyond our Ken Ham's"  false dichotomy zone.

But if you repeatedly tell people that there’s only one way of doing Christianity and any deviation from that norm is compromise and a start down the slippery slope to abortion-loving, homosexual-marrying monkey atheism – well, you’re setting people up for the fall. Because any responsible higher education will relativise any theological position (that’s what higher education does), especially one the is founded upon science-denial, philosophical naivety and theological exclusivism. And if someone’s been told enough times that they have to choose between either that or the complete renunciation of the Christian faith? Let’s just say that the likelihood for apostasy is a lot higher.

Middlebrow Atheism. Part 5 (Final Part)

If you don't seek you may not find

This is the final part of my “Middlebrow Atheism” series. The other parts can be found as follows:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/04/middlebrow-atheism-part-4.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/03/middlebrow-atheism-part-3.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/03/middlebrow-atheism-part-2.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/03/middlebrow-atheism-part-1.html

Video Item 08: That some theists require an extra miracle for the creation of life is an admission that the cosmos isn’t fine tuned enough.

My Comments: This criticism really applies to anti-evolutionists who believe that a second “creative dispensation” is required on top of physics. Although I have reservations about conventional evolutionary theory I personally prefer the “one creative dispensation” view. One issue I have with the two dispensations view is that it is liable to disconnect living things from their cosmic stage: The dimensions and parameters of the cosmos become details incidental to the organic dispensation. At least in standard evolutionary theory the existence of life is logically bound up with the wider cosmos. But even if standard evolution is wrong my guess is that whatever the history of life’s development may be, that history is intimately connected to the cosmos; life is some function of cosmic dimensions and cosmic parameters; for then the cosmos no longer seems a "waste of space" but a necessary accessory to life. (Robert Sheldon is an example of a anti-evolutionist who has some intriguingly radical theories on panspermia that do at least connect life’s history to cosmic conditions)

Video Item 09: Life is a happy by product of an environment rather than the environment being designed for life. For example, is the atmosphere designed for sky diving? Was the wind designed for wind surfing?

My Comments: This one comes under the heading of what Sir John Polkinghorne aptly describes as the “fruitfulness” of God’s creation. Given the particular physical regime that governs our cosmos, this then implies a configuration space consisting of all that is possible within the constraints of that regime. This configuration space is a static platonic object and the layout of the configurations in this space determines whether the “shufflings of happenstance” (Another phrase I have picked up from Polkinghorne) is conducive to the Polkinghorne’s “fruitfulness”. For example, clearly “technological configuration space” is so arranged as to allow the quantum of human intelligence, (which I represent by “i”), to traverse it successfully; for human intelligence is not great enough to jump the huge gap between the stone age and the jet age in one generation, but it can jump the smaller gaps between the islands of functionality in “technological configuration space” as evidenced by the succession of artifacts in technological history that have lead up to the development of jet aircraft. A jet aircraft is the result of a long historical development of many technological innovations that have occurred in a piecemeal fashion; a product of the shuffling of human happenstance. It is the arrangement of artifacts in technological configuration space that allows human intelligence to traverse it in small technological leaps. Those artifacts are arranged in configuration space in a way that allows the quantum of human intelligence, i, to migrate from one innovation to the next. If this wasn’t so then the making a jet aircraft would be as improbable as Fred Hoyle’s Junkyard Jumbo. So, in answer to video I regard the wind surfing and sky diving as part of the built-in technological fruitfulness of our physical regime, a fruitfulness that also includes wind turbines, and flying. My conjecture is that a randomly selected physical regime would be unlikely to possess this fruitfulness, and thus we are likely to be talking here of something with a high “specified complexity”.

However, whether or not the configuration space of living structures can also be fruitfully traversed by the random shufflings of happenstance is a moot point.

Video Item 10: Science investigates researches, explains and tests hypotheses. There is no comparable testing and investigation available for the God hypothesis. With contemporary Cosmological theory there is the possibility for real data and some chance of testing these theories unlike for God. Where is the derivation for God? Where’s the chance to test this hypothesis? Religion gives up and says “a magic man did it”

My Comments. As I have made clear already in this series, the hard sciences (physics in particular) use a pair of explanatory object types that I refer to as “Law and Disorder”. “Laws” are functions subject to the Church-Turing Thesis in that they are pattern generating functions that can be rendered computationally. “Disorder” are patterns that yield to statistical description. In the video Alan Guth says he has no idea why the laws of physics are what they are. That’s no surprise to me: There is, I believe, a fundamental reason why Guth must say this: For without getting into a “Turtles all the way down” regress where Law and Disorder explanation gets stuck in a kind of self referential loop, physics naturally comes to an end once full description has been achieved (i.e. a “Theory of Everything” as it is called). If we are going to ask why the laws of physics work, then that question, as far as physics is concerned, is meaningless. A science of the mathematically elemental can provide no deeper answer “why” than in the giving of an exhaustive descriptive account of the status quo. (If indeed such is actually possible)

Given the huge number of possible patterns that can exist it is clear that there is a very large class of pattern that are too ordered to be amenable to statistical treatment, and yet too complex to be rendered with mathematical functions in a realistic time using serial computation. There is, therefore, a large class of patterns that are in principle intractable to “Law and Disorder” science. Potentially, then, there are objects out there that are not tractable to science as we currently understand it. If such exist in our reality they would not be amenable to derivation and testing. Thus, contrary to the suggestion of the video scientific intractability is no reason to rule them out: Because something doesn’t yield to research, derivation and testing is not sufficient condition for its nonexistence. All we can do is thank our lucky bunny (I don’t know what atheists thank; “bunny” is all I could come up with) that so much of our world is apparently amenable to our finite science.

But an “in principle” scientific intractability is compounded by practical intractability. Given that our world is mathematically chaotic and subject to random quantum perturbations means that even if we assume Law and Disorder offers a full description of the world it yet remains beyond our practical powers to describe much of that world with anything other than ex post facto narrative. Further compounding the tractability problems of science is the fact that data is, humanly speaking, irretrievably lost in the mists of time. Thus the inaccessibility and complex contingency of history is open to the same criticisms the video levels against theism: In history there is little in the way of derivation and testing that parallels the theories of the hard physical sciences. In many cases there is no possibility of real data and a chance of a theory being testable. In between stumbling on the occasional fortuitously surviving text or archeological artifact, history remains dependent on the experienced historian’s imagination to fill in the gaps for us.

The video’s beguiling arguments are nearly as devastating to history as they are to God. It is naive to think that one can approach God, (or history for that matter) in the manner that one might approach the elemental Law and Disorder objects of the hard sciences. If anything God’s complexity and inaccessibility makes for a far more scientifically intractable object than even history. If God was subject to Law and Disorder research it wouldn’t be God; the object would be far too elemental for that. This, of course, doesn’t mean there is such an object as God; but if there is a God, the unimaginative mindset of the video producers, whose theology only seems to extend as far as "a magic man", obstructs any chance of seeking him let alone of finding him.

From one mankind he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27

Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Is 55:6

Alien, Very Alien, Intelligent Design

Interesting is this post on Uncommon Descent which manifests a phenomenon I have become very familiar with; namely, anti-evolutionists attempting to form a cartel with atheist evolutionists on the basis of their mutual belief that “Darwinism” gives God his redundancy notice . “I don’t need that hypothesis” as the saying goes; as if God is a "Law & Disorder" hypothesis. 

In fact, the anti-evolutionists may go as far as to express admiration and respect for atheists who candidly spell out the “materialistic” conclusions of “Darwinism”. I suspect the respect is one way, although I have sneaky suspicion that the new wave atheists don’t mind at all when theists also caricature evolution as a mindless process based on chance. In this article on  the Christian web site Network Norwich and Norfolk James Knight notes that many new wave atheists started their life as Christians, thus hinting at some link between gnu atheism and Christianity. I added a comment to his article noting the apparent cartel forming behavior I have already mentioned and proposed that this may have something to do with the link. The cartel is used by fundamentalists to apply spiritual duress on Christian evolutionists: As James Knight says:

Yes we see a peculiar defense of fundamentalism take place, where, in order to dismiss theistic evolution they (the fundamentalists) put on a new-wave atheist's mask and quote their usual sound-bytes in the hope that theistic evolutionists will begin to stink of ‘Darwinism’, and qualify to the point of ex-communication.

***

It is an irony that one reason I can’t get evolutionary theory off my desk is precisely because of intelligent design. The engineering behind life is, within a little, not far from our intellectual reach. In contrast, evolution demands computational problems to be resolved that are way beyond both our intellects and our current computational technology. Above all, the problems of implementing an evolutionary system are all but impossible to resolve in realistic time via a purely stochastic system.

However, I'll grant that evolution cuts across many standard theological expectations: In the UD post I've linked to we find Denyse O’Leary saying:

Christian Darwinists struggle to convince Christians to jettison deeply held beliefs in order to embrace Darwin.

If evolution, or something similar to it, is the fruitful process that has generated the configurations of life then the “specified complexity” of its necessary preconditions are beyond human computation. The prerequisites of evolution, then, are evidence that we are dealing with a very alien form of intelligence. As the Good Book says (Is 55: 8-9)

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,”

declares the LORD.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Just how alien is clear from the context of the above verses  (Is 55: 6-7)

Seek the LORD while he may be found;

call on him while he is near.

Let the wicked forsake his way

and the evil man his thoughts.

Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him,

and to our God, for he will freely pardon.

“Free pardons for all who turn….” violates the mindset of the “God will pay them back” mentality that pervades so much of man’s theology.

As I have said before: I have a reserved view of evolution, but we should not reject evolution for the wrong reasons: ID alone is not good enough reason for rejecting it, especially as we are dealing with such an alien intelligence.

Does Intelligent Design Creationism Make Testable Scientific Predictions? Part 1

ID has the potential for too many googlies to be a hard science.

This post on Uncommon Descent (UD) is entitled “Does ID Make Testable Scientific Predictions?”. The post provides a list of ID predictions.

Before I look at this list in detail in part 2 here are some general comments:

Strictly speaking the phrase “Intelligent Design Creationism” covers a multitude of sins (the gnu atheists would certainly think of them as sins!). For example, Sir John Polkinghorne calls himself an Intelligent Design creationist, but Sir John is an evolutionist and in his view Divine intelligence is needed to set up and run a physical regime whose evolutionary fruitfulness is a sign of God’s providence.

I would also classify myself as an “Intelligent Design Creationist”, at least in the sense that Sir John understands it; for if evolution is to work, (i.e. it is fruitful) it must be resourced by the selection of some remarkable preconditions, effectively giving it the “specified complexity” that some ID theorists talk about. In other words evolution would require a considerable level of intelligence to contrive. However, I must admit to having some reservations about evolutionary theory and I respect the criticisms of evolution by some of the correspondents one finds on UD. But having said that I must say that I have not yet been able to get the concept of evolution off my “examination bench” and eliminate it from the enquiry.

On UD itself we find a very wide range of opinion on how life arose; views expressed run from Old Earth theistic evolution through evolution with an “intelligent assist”, to the occasional YEC contributor. The balance of opinion on UD may be skewed toward Old Earth, but most commentators are rabidly anti-evolution. This vehement anti-evolutionism is probably down to the polarizing effects of what has turned out to be a very acrimonious debate, even between fellow theists. An outcome of that polarization is that the phrase “Intelligent Design” now has the de-facto meaning of “anti-evolution”, the unspoken innuendo being that theistic evolutionists don’t accept intelligent design!

It is for this reason that people like John Polkinghorne and Biologos are unwilling to identify themselves with the so-called “ID” community that UD stands for. They may even be unwilling to use the phrase “Intelligent Design” to describe themselves. Meanings matter and today “ID” means “anti-evolution” and in the minds of Biologos it probably also means “anti-science”. Just as polarization has made it look as though theistic evolutionists are anti-ID, UD has been made to look like part of an “anti-science” community. Thus, as theistic evolutionists stand accused of promoting religious heresy, UD stands accused of promoting scientific heresy. In truth, neither charge stands, in my opinion.

Occasionally one reads a post on UD that bemoans the poor relations between the Biologos and UD, especially as it is clear that in the final analysis they must both support ID creationism in the truest sense of the words. The fault is on both sides: UD has some vociferous anti-evolutionist correspondents who caricature evolution as a blind, mindless process derisively referring to Biologos as compromising “Darwinists”. Biologos, who probably have some measure of kudos in the scientific establishment, don’t want to risk their scientific credibility by parleying with UD, who they probably look down on with haughty superiority as guilty of hobnobbing with superstitious anti-science rubes. The division between the communities respectively represented by Biologos and UD is down to passion and polarization and not a fundamental disagreement in the essential core belief in ID

The following preamble indicates that polarization has resulted in a distortion of the meaning of the phrase “Intelligent Design Creationism” and shifted its meaning toward anti-evolutionism and the fundamentalist end of the religious spectrum. This in turn has obscured the fact that “ID creationism”, in its truest sense, covers the full spectrum from Christian evolutionists to YECs.

Now, why do I say all this? What’s it got to do with ID predictions? This: What it shows is that as far as making predictions is concerned ID has got its work cut out: For if ID belief covers the full range from establishment evolutionists to Young Earth Creationism one can legitimately query if belief in ID materially effects one’s expectation about how the cosmos should look. In short, it seems that it is extremely difficult to make any predictions at all from an ID position. Naturally, if the world is designed by intelligence then it is clear that we are dealing with a very abstracted non-embodied intelligence and therefore in one sense a very alien intelligence whose purposes and works are likely to have a large measure of inscrutability. I say this as a supporter of ID.

For myself I much prefer the a softer, fuzzier, less hard science view of ID: ID is a philosophical, theological and perhaps even mythological/metaphorical backdrop structure with which one attempts to understand and make sense of the most general features of the world. Its main utility is less prediction than it is "joining the dots" of what we already know, with particular regard to origins (For reasons I have given in my “Middlebrow Atheism” series it is clear that standard science has no chance of making any ultimate human sense of origins) At the core of ID is the concept of a complex entity whose alien intelligence is unlikely to lend itself to the making of hard predictions. However, the question of whether UD have actually succeeded in making some predictions will have wait for part 2 of this post. I rather think you will find what UD call “ID predictions” are in actual fact “anti-evolutionist” expectations rather than ID predictions per se.