Is there an homunculus behind the scenes driving evolution?
Astronomer Otto Struve (1897 – 1963) is quoted as saying this:
An intrinsically improbable
event may become highly probable if the number of events is very great….It is
probable that a good many of the billions of planets in the Milky Way support
intelligent life. To me this conclusion is of great philosophical interest. I
believe that science has reached the point where it is necessary to take into
account the action of intelligent beings, in addition to the classical laws of
physics.
This statement is of IDlogical
interest on several counts.
ONE: As Struve tells us sufficient trial resources (in terms of
planet numbers in this case) can turn the improbable into the probable. But Struve
is thinking in mere billions; this in itself is far from sufficient. For life to be
generated with a realistic probability we must select one or both of two mathematical
conditions: 1) An a priori physical
regime which constrains the physical possibilities to such an extent that trial
resources quantified with a mere 3 digit logarithm are capable of reaching life,
and/or 2) A physical regime which is capable of returning trials whose number
can only be quantified with a very large logarithm. *1
TWO: Interesting to note that Struve sets up an intelligence vs. physical
law dichotomy – at first sight this
looks very much like the kind of thinking behind the explanatory filter epistemic of the
de-facto Intelligent Design movement. But unlike the North American ID
community I doubt very much that Struve was arguing from a subliminally
theological position. More likely he was arguing from the point of view that “Law&Disorder” physics is a primary causal agent, whereas
intelligent life is a secondary
causal agent derived from physics;
i.e. life is a product of the cosmic physical regime. I suspect that Struve is
following the mainstream academic view that separating out physical action and
intelligent action in to different categories is not a fundamental category
division but one of utility: Deriving life from physical first principals is
analytically difficult (if not impossible) making necessary an artificial
discipline division where a higher level phenomenon like life is dealt with
more descriptively by biologists. In a
similar way geologists who deal with complex geological processes don’t always
work back to the first principles of physics, but cut the knot by talking about
a separate category of “geological forces”; that’s not to say, of course, that
geologists believe “geological forces” have any vitalistic basis. Likewise,
most biologists are likely to believe that the kind of intelligence Struve is
talking of would trace back to the generating power of basic physical processes.
Needless to say atheists would favour this philosophy, a philosophy which
doesn’t take intelligent agents as a
given with all the potential there of smuggling in the divine. Of course,
the de-facto IDists believe exactly the opposite; for them intelligence (subliminally,
divine intelligence) must be taken as a
given when reckoning up creative processes.
THREE: In the foregoing we’ve seen how intelligent action is put
into a different category to “natural forces”, although for atheists this is
done for utilitarian rather than fundamental reasons. It is surely ironic that
this manoeuvre readily leads on to the Intelligent Design community’s
explanatory filter epistemic. In this epistemic intelligent action is effectively
placed on the same logical level as Law&Disorder
explanations. In fact in most everyday contexts the explanatory filter of the IDists
is robust; after all, something like this epistemic is used by
archaeologists when they are trying to decide whether an object is an artifact
or of natural origins. In short the explanatory filter is exactly the method
one uses when one is faced with the possibility of action by either humans or
aliens; but what about for God?
FOUR: That the de-facto ID community use the explanatory filter, a
filter comfortably used by archaeologists and implicit in Struve’s statement above, says a lot about de facto ID theology.
This theology is a dualist theology where God has become an homunculus-of-the-gaps default agent of
causation who acts almost within the
cosmos and is invoked as an explanation when “in principle” physical explanations
are difficult if not impossible to find. As I’ve complained many times before on this blog, this
theology has the effect of setting up two mutually exclusive categories of
causation, namely the physical and the divine. We know of course that what the
de-facto ID community obliquely refers to as an “Intelligent Designer” is,
behind closed doors, identified with God rather than aliens. God thereby
becomes a distinct “cause” to be lined
up in an identity parade of all the other possible agents of “causation” that
work within the cosmos. This has the pernicious effect of placing God very much
inside creation like some super-alien,
violating at a stroke both His eminence and immanence.
Moreover to talk of God being a “cause”
also does an injustice to God. The notion of “causation” is itself very much a
concept derived within the context of
the contingent patterns of behaviour displayed by the physical universe; causation, in fact, can become difficult to define or even undefinable in connections where we are dealing with timeless patterns and/or disorderly patterns. Admittedly when talking about God it is almost
impossible to do so without using metaphors based on our experience of this world,
but some metaphors are not as good as others and to rank God as an agent of
causation in a very literal sense is particularly insidious; the fallacy of the Kalam argument is a sign of
this.
FIVE: For myself I prefer
the metaphor of the cosmos as a giant thought pattern or story created in the
mind of God; it’s as if an author like Tolkien created and maintained his world
of Middle Earth in his mind rather than reifying it in physical print. This
metaphor satisfies to some extent the theological demand that God is both
eminent and immanent in relation to the very contingent patterns of our world. We
are effectively immersed in God rather than God being a homunculus who is immersed
in creation as an ancillary agent of causation, occasionally turning up to do
something special. The immersed human perspective on the physical workings of
our world is a bit like the perspective of someone zooming in with a powerful
microscope and looking at the behaviour of
individual neurons of the human mind and then wondering where the intelligence
is; one only finds that intelligence at the high system level, in the big
picture.
Above all, this metaphor satisfies
the theological requirement for the otherness
of God: The patterns of our world are contingent
with no logical necessity and therefore very much other than the presumed aseity of a God who hosts them. These contingent patterns have been dragged out of platonic space and reified in an act of creative divine thought. In the sense that these patterns have a kind of immaterial platonic existence prior to reification, gives them a platonic existential status that is independent of God's existence; i.e. they are other than God. So, just as Tolkien's Middle Earth is other than Tolkien, the cosmos is other than God. God and Tolkien create in as much as they reify pre-existing platonic patterns.
It is tempting to think of the distinction between God and creation as bound up with a distinction of “substance”. But identity of “substance” is a derived concept based on our experience of the macroscopic physical world where material object integrity is only maintained by clear spatial separations and demarcations. This concept of substance breaks down, however, in the microscopic world of identical particles where it becomes clear that distinction of substance can only be maintained by clear distinction in patterns of behaviour, patterns determined by such properties as charge and mass.*2 That is, “substance” is bound up with the extrinsic properties bestowed by patterning and is not an intrinsic property.
It is tempting to think of the distinction between God and creation as bound up with a distinction of “substance”. But identity of “substance” is a derived concept based on our experience of the macroscopic physical world where material object integrity is only maintained by clear spatial separations and demarcations. This concept of substance breaks down, however, in the microscopic world of identical particles where it becomes clear that distinction of substance can only be maintained by clear distinction in patterns of behaviour, patterns determined by such properties as charge and mass.*2 That is, “substance” is bound up with the extrinsic properties bestowed by patterning and is not an intrinsic property.
Footnotes.
*1. What do you do if the universe only has a very
limited number of particles, say 10^80 and therefore has very limited “trial
resource” capability? Simple; you use quantum mechanics, a method whereby the
possibilities open to a collection of particles are all explored at once. Individual particles are
then effectively “smeared” over large volumes.
*2. Identity of “substance” is a
problematical concept in the context of sheer patterning. Consider for example a
binary pattern where we have two separate digits both set to “1”. Our use
of common language, a language used to dealing with distinct concrete objects,
tempts us to talk of these binary digits as distinct entitles, as if they had
their own separate "substance"; but if this were true it would be possible to
swap the digits and then claim that each separate digit has been moved. But as
per quantum statistics no change has actually taken place and the "swap" doesn't count as
a distinct combinatorial item. Ergo, talking about “swapping digit positions”
is only a figure of speech and is otherwise meaningless.
Relevant Links:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/western-dualism-in-north-america.html
