Darwin Bicentenary Part 23: Dembski’s Specified Complexity:

William Dembski quantitatively defines specified complexity as follows. If T is an observed pattern then the specified complexity of this pattern, C, is given by

C = - log[R S(T) P(T)] ,

Where:

R represents the replication resources, that is, the number of opportunities where the pattern T might arise. For example, the opportunity count might be proportional to the size of the universe in time and space because clearly the larger the universe (or the multiverse) then the greater the number of opportunities for T to arise. From the above equation it follows that C decreases with increasing R.

S(T) is the number of patterns with a Kolmogorov complexity no larger than pattern T. Kolmogorov complexity (=K) has the characteristic that the number of patterns consistent with a particular value of K increases as K increases. For example, the class of disordered patterns typically generated by, say, the tosses of a coin have a maximum K and correspondingly there are a very large number of such disordered patterns with the same value of K. Thus, it is clear that S(T) increases sharply as the frequency profiles of pattern T move toward a maximum disorder frequency profile. Looking at the definition of C it is clear that increasing S decreases the value of C. This means, all other factors being held constant, that complex patterns will have a lower specified complexity than simpler patterns with a lower Kolmogorov complexity. Admittedly this is a little bit confusing: Dembski’s specified complexity decreases with increasing Kolmogorov complexity.

P(T) is the probability of T should it have occured by ‘chance’. That is, if we advance the “null hypothesis” that T is the outcome of a stochastic process, then P(T) is the probability of T occurring as result of this process. Clearly C decreases with increasing P.



Rationale: Dembski’s definition of C is intended to act as a detector of intelligently contrived artifacts. Patterns with high values of C are supposed to alert observers to the presence of intelligent contrivance whereas low values of C are supposed to indicate that the pattern observed could (but not necessarily) be down to “natural causes”. Thus the rationale of specified complexity is predicated on the assumption that “natural causes” and “intelligent contrivance” are distinct categories. In this connection notice that C decreases with increasing R, S and P. R, S and P can be thought of as a measure of the “natural” resources available to create C; the greater these are, then the more plausible the hypothesis that pattern T is an outcome of “natural” resources, and consequently the lower the value of C. P is the probability of a “natural” physical system generating T, and R is the number of natural systems available to generate T. The higher the value of P and R then the greater are the natural resources available to create T. In the quantity S Dembski is, I guess, trying to capture the intuition that ordered patterns are much rarer than disordered patterns, and therefore disordered patterns are somehow easier for natural systems to “find” and generate than are ordered patterns, which as a class are few and far between.

What follows are some examples where I attempt to qualitatively apply Dembki’s definition of specified complexity.

Example 1: Coin Tossing: Let us apply Dembski’s definition of C to a pattern T that we hypothesize to be generated by 1000 tosses of a coin. Firstly, the pattern produced would have a very low probability because it is a unique pattern taken from 2 power 1000 possibilities; as all these possibilities have an equal probability the actual pattern probability P(T) would be very small at 2 ^ -1000. The value R would be number of times in the history of the world 1000 tosses had been carried out. Clearly since it is very likely that R is going to be much smaller than 2 ^ 1000, it follows that R x P is still going to be a very small value. Consequently, the product R x P by itself generates a pressure toward a very high specified complexity. However, we are still left with the value S(T) to take cognizance of. The number of patterns up to and including those with the high Kolmogorov complexity associated with typical patterns generated by randomness is going to be very high; in fact in the order of 2 ^ 1000. Thus, if the pattern we are looking at is typical of the highly disordered patterns generated by coin tossing then S(T) is going to have a value in the order of 2 ^ 1000. The result is that the high S(T) and low P(T) cancel out to produce a mediocre specified complexity for patterns typically generated by a coin tossing. Given that a high value of C is supposed to indicate the presence of an intelligent agent behind a pattern, then the mediocre values of C generated by a pattern that looks to be typical of the unintelligent process of coin tossing is to be expected.

Example 2: Jumbled Junkyard: Now consider the example of a junkyard. Assuming the junkyard workers are breaking and mixing up the stuff delivered to their care without much intelligence or sorting then the configuration of the junkyard contents will very likely be highly disordered; that is the junkyard contents will be Kolmogorov complex. Hence given the probabilities and replication resources available to the junkyard connection then we expect, using logic parallel to that of coin tossing, a jumbled junkyard to return a low specified complexity.

But now imagine that we discover the miscellany of items in a junkyard to have somehow become assembled into a functioning vehicle of some kind, like, say, an aircraft. Such a configuration has a very low probability under junkyard conditions. It also has a relatively low Kolmogorov complexity. Moreover, all the junkyards in the world are unlikely to provide sufficient replication opportunities to compensate for the very low P and S. Hence, given the “null hypothesis” that the aircraft has come together by chance we would calculate a very high value of C. This high value of C would alert us to suspect that some intelligent agent has been at work rather than the aircraft being a chance product of the normal workings of a junkyard and we would very probably be right.

Example 3: Sorted Junkyard: Let us now imagine that we found the items in a junkyard to be sorted into categories and neatly stacked into very regularly spaced piles. As for the discovery of an aircraft made from junkyard detritus such a configuration would return a high specified complexity rightly leading us to the conclusion that the junkyard employees are using their intelligence to organize the junkyard. However, there is one surprise for us in this expected result. Very regular configurations have a lot lower Kolmogorov complexity than something as complex as an artifact like an aircraft. Thus, according to Kolmogorov simple structures, like a very regular and neatly stacked junkyard, would rate as a lot less Kolmogorov complex than an aircraft constructed from junkyard parts. So, using Dembski’s definition a highly organized junkyard would return a very high specified complexity, a lot higher than a complex artifact like an aircraft. This character of Dembski’s definition is, I feel, a little unnatural; are we to conclude that the intelligence required to neatly sort a junkyard is greater than that needed to conceive and assemble an aircraft? My guess is that Dembski would reply that C is meant only to flag the presence of intelligence rather than measure intelligence.

Example 4: Crystal Lattice: What about something like a crystal lattice? This is analogous in configuration to the neatly and regularly stacked junkyard. So does this mean we return a high specified complexity? The answer is no. This is because using the null hypothesis that the crystal lattice is the product of a physical regime that is the right mix of atomic forces, mineral concentrations, temperatures and pressures, P(Crystal) is very high. This high probability will considerably depress the value of C. To cut a long story short, standard physics and chemistry implies that highly ordered and unrepresentative crystal patterns can be built up using cumulative ratchet probabilities which, of course, implies a probability of formation much higher than the straight spontaneous formation values. Hence, if we observe a crystal and hypothesize that it is a product of standard physics and chemistry, Dembski’s definition will assign crystals a low specified complexity, thus telling us that they could conceivably be a result of natural processes.


Example 5: Biological Structures: On the basis of the foregoing examples Dembki’s definition seems to do its job. It returns low specified complexities for coin tossing, a muddled junk yard, and for crystals; in each case indicating that intelligence is not necessarily to be inferred as the source of these patterns. In contrast C has a high value for an aircraft assembled from junkyard detritus, thus leading us to suspect intelligence at work. The equation for C also returns a rather (surprisingly) high specified complexity for a well sorted junk yard, which once again is likely to be a product of junkyard employees using their intelligence to sort the material in their care

OK so having successfully “dry run” Dembski’s definition for some test cases we know about, what about the big 64 billion dollar question of living structures? Firstly, it is seems fairly self evident that organic structures are highly organized. This means that relative to the huge space of possibility, the number of possible patterns with Kolmogorov complexity no larger than organic structures is tiny, thus pushing up the specified complexity of organic configurations. The replication resources are difficult to evaluate but it is likely that R will not be in excess of any of the cosmic pure numbers which are seldom, if ever, greater in value than 200 digits in length. It might therefore seem that R could be very large but a number of less than 200 digits is miniscule compared to the space of possibility whose dimensions are measured with numbers that run into billions of digits and beyond. Thus, it is clear that even cosmic sized replication resources are utterly inadequate produce the cover needed to find the members of a relatively tiny set of organic configurations lost in a truly immense space of possibility. Moreover, if probability is uniformly spread over the entire space of possibility it follows that P(T), where T = [organic configuration], will be tiny. Hence the product R.S(T).P(T) will be very small indeed, thus returning a very high specified complexity when plugged into Dembski’s equation. So, it looks as though organic structures return a high specified complexity, alerting us to the likely hood that intelligent “intervention” was required in the creation of life. So, do we conclude ID theory is vindicated? If only things were that simple.

In the above considerations I have assumed cosmic replication resources are relatively low (baring multiverse speculations) when compared to the immensity of “possibility space”. I have also assumed that life has a relatively low S(T). I don’t think these two assumptions are controversial. However P(T) is a different matter; it is the fudge factor that can hide so much. It is far from clear that probability is spread uniformly over the space of possibilities; in fact we know it isn’t. The high probability of the formation of crystals, structures that are above all the most unrepresentative of configurations, tells us that it isn’t. Crystals would have a high specified complexity were it not for the fact that the “law and disorder” of the physical regime facilitates the cumulative/ratchet formation of crystals molecule by molecule; crystals are, in fact, reducibly complex patterns. If the physical regime is such that it allows the "ratchet" formation of a configuration then the probability of its formation is, of course, far greater than the corresponding probability of spontaneous formation in one grand slam miracle. This takes as right back to the core ID issue of irreducible complexity: If organic structures , like crystalls, are reducibly complex then that means we have the organic equivalent of a ratchet which would increase P(Organic) to the point that C becomes low. The ID theorists will of course tell us that no biological equivalent of a “ratchet” exists and that organic structures are irreducibly complex. Well, that may be case but it is clear that Dembski’s definition doesn’t provide the answer to that question; his definition will only return a high specified complexity for organic structures if P(Organic) is low, and one way of ensuring that P(Organic) is low is to postulate that organic structures are irreducibly complex.

Comments

At first sight Dembski’s definition seems to successfully flag the presence of intelligent activity, although on the important question of biological structures the definition is hamstrung by the controversy over irreducible complexity. That apart, however, I do have three other comments I would like to make about Dembski’s definition.

Comment 1: The ID community as whole make a sharp distinction between intelligent causes and natural causes. At the extremes of the spectrum, say, when trying to distinguish between human and “natural” activity, this distinction may be clear cut. But measures of intelligence seem to run on a continuum scale. Moreover, it may be (although it is yet far from proved) that human intelligence is a highly complex structure that can be explicated in terms of a convoluted application of a law and disorder ontology; if so then there will be no vitalistic criteria providing us with a clear cut demarcation between "animal and mineral" (another way saying "intelligence and non-intelligence"). What happens, then, to Dembski’s definition in the intermediate region between intelligence and non-intelligence? The examples I have worked through seem to succeed only because I was looking at cases where the distinction between intelligent causes and natural causes is clear.

Comment 2: Specified complexity, C, is a monotonically decreasing function of increasing Kolmogorov complexity. Kolmogorov complexity is a measure of a pattern’s disorder, so as disorder increases then S(T) increases, which in turn means that specified complexity decreases with increasing disorder. All other factors being held constant it follows, then, that highly organized patterns like simple periodic arrangements return higher specified complexities than some complex artifacts. This is a little counter intuitive; simple periodic structures seem to require less and not more intelligence in their construction than an object of intermediate complexity like, for example, an aircraft.

Comment 3: Natural causes also generate simple ordered patterns like, say, crystals or regular planetary orbits. Although S(T) is low for these “natural” patterns, according to Dembski they actually have a low specified complexity on account of their high probability, as conditioned on natural law. It does seem ironic, however, that the simple patterns described by natural law, which in any other context have a high specified complexity flagging the likelihood of an intelligent source, have a low specified complexity. This is because Dembski’s definition of specified complexity is predicated on a sharp distinction between “natural causes” and “intelligent causes”, and the latter may be a cryptic way of referring to “supernatural causes”. In the world of ID theory “natural causes” and “intelligent causes” are competing tentative candidates for the explanation of a pattern. This competing candidacy is certainly valid within the confines of the cosmic context where in most cases clear cut categories of natural causes and intelligent agents operate, and where it is of interest to science to determine which category is the cause of a pattern. But when it comes to questions of the primary explanatory ontology underlying the cosmos a presumed paradigm that dichotomizes natural causes and intelligent causes create a tension that, I submit, is all too easily resolved in favour of natural causes. For the ID community have taken onboard a paradigm with implicit presumptions that commit them to deriding the efficacy of so called “natural causes”, even to the extent that such causes are considered to be of trivial import, utterly incapable of any real creative potency and if anything only the source of decay; their chief role is to serve as a paragon of elemental non-sentience to be contrasted unfavourably against the role of the “unknown” intelligence that has created life. The paradox is that it is these "natural causes" which give us highly ordered patterns that in any other circumstance return the extremely high specified complexities reckoned by Dembski to be a sign of intelligent activity!

The so called “natural causes” are to be identified with what ID theorists frequently call “chance and necessity” (what I refer to as “law and disorder”) or when referring specifically to evolution “natural selection and random mutation”. The ID category distinction of intelligence vs. natural causes, when applied to the outer frame of our cosmos, helps pave the way for a philosophical dualism, even a crypto “natural vs. supernatural” dualism of two competing potential creators, one inferior to the other. This dualism detracts from the enigma of natural causes and the question of their ultimate origins, reinforcing the “naturalness” of natural causes in as much as they are taken for granted to be an almost logically self sufficient category as would befit their assumed P(T) ~ 1 status. So, if natural causes are so …well, natural, almost to the extent they begin to assume an existential self-sufficiency and axiomatic status, then why do we need to venture beyond them and introduce such a complex and confounding explanatory object such as a-priori intelligence? Atheists would agree. For if, in the atheist view, all the patterns of the cosmos can be explicated in terms of law and disorder then according to Richard Dawkins we can all become “intellectually fulfilled atheists” and no longer need look for a primary ontology in the middle ground between law and disorder. For the atheist intuition is that natural causes are tantamount to a logically self sufficient and/or axiomatic ontology. The irony is that the ID community seems to unintentionally connive with those who believe that natural causes are a basic elemental category with no problematical existence.

Stop Press 19/6/09

Some indication of the upstart bogey that "natural causes" have become in the mind of ID theorists is suggested by these posts on Uncommon Descent:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-nature-of-nature-edited-by-bruce-gordon-and-william-dembski/
http://www.uncommondescent.com/education/evolution-was-the-key-in-joseph-campbells-loss-of-faith/

In particular this quote from William Dembski is telling:

....when I studied ancient near eastern cosmologies at Princeton Theological Seminary, I found an interesting thing: they divided into cosmologies in which creation occurs through a spoken word by a supreme deity (the biblical cosmology was not unique in this regard) and cosmologies in which natural forces evolve and do all the creating, producing better and more powerful deities as time flows along (e.g., the Babylonian creation, in which Marduk is born several generations down and finally becomes the chief god).

Darwin Bicentenary Part 22: Of Psychos and Anti-Theorists

I was interested to read this post on Uncommon Descent by Cornelius Hunter about epigenetics. Of particular interest are Hunter’s comments on his web page (here) where he remarks on the apparent rapidity of evolutionary change. (In fact his whole web page is worth keeping tabs on)

Some people have some very high stakes in the evolution/ID debate; the problem/puzzle/mystery solving approach is not for them because the choice of evolution or ID is bound up with life style choices, viz: world views, vested interests, social networks and above all social status. Thus, the evolution/ID question often takes on more the character of a war of badly managed anger than a fascinating riddle.

For example, if evolution is false and/or needs radical modification (to account for rapid evolutionary change, say) then I have grave doubts that some high stake evolutionists will be dispassionate enough to handle the evidence with integrity. Some would perhaps sooner kill (of the “character assassination” kind I must add!) rather than admit to weaknesses in a cherished theory.

However, turning to Hunter’s work I was interested to find out whether he was proposing a radical modification to evolutionary mechanisms or whether he accepted common descent or even whether he was a YEC. Scanning his web page I was unable to find answers to these questions, for, alas, his web page seems to be largely anti-theory.

Characters of the wild web number 13
Evolution: The Cool, The Enraged and the Desperate

Pending Position Statement

As a result of direct inquiries I intend to produce, at some stage, a position statement regarding my views on Christianity. However, I am currently absorbed with one two other matters that I am following up; hence this promissory note.

Intellectual Hegemony and The Thought Police

Characters of the Wild Web Number 12: This guy was caught subverting Law and Disorder

In this blog post scientific lawman Larry Moran introduces a “world view continuum” that runs all the way from Young Earth Creationists, through ID theorists and Theistic Evolutionists to Materialist Evolution. Larry objects that this spectrum is misleading because in his view there is a qualitative discontinuity somewhere between theistic evolution and materialist evolution. His motivation, I suspect, is that he wants to divide the world up into two opposing categories of people; fundamentalist materialists and the methodological law breakers he would consider guilty of “anti-science” subversion and superstition.

In order to try and get a handle on Larry’s views I traced a link back to an earlier essay of his entitled “Theistic Evolution: The Fallacy of the Middle Ground”. In this essay Larry starts with a quote from Eugenie Scott which tells us that “science restricts itself to explaining the natural world using natural causes”, a statement that is all but tautological; with this statement in mind we might be tempted to explain matter and energy using “natural causes” such as…er…matter and energy. However, Larry goes on to quote Michael Ruse who is worth quoting; but then Ruse is a philosopher with Quaker roots.

Michael Ruse: The methodological naturalist is the person who assumes that the world runs according to unbroken law; that humans can understand the world in terms of this law; and that science involves just such understanding without any reference to extra or supernatural forces like God. Whether there are such forces or beings is another matter entirely and simply not addressed by methodological naturalism. Hence, although indeed evolution as we understand it is a natural consequence of methodological naturalism, given the facts of the world as they can be discovered, in no sense is the methodological naturalist thereby committed to the denial of God's existence. It is simply that the methodological naturalist insists that, inasmuch as one is doing science, one avoid all theological or other religious references. In particular, one denies God a role in creation. [Michael Ruse (2002) "Methodological Naturalism Under Attack" p. 365]

Not bad; at least that’s intelligible and I think I can go along with most of it. Leaving aside Ruse’s references to God the crucial part of Ruse’ statement is this: “The methodological naturalist is the person who assumes that the world runs according to unbroken law; that humans can understand the world in terms of this law…” I identify Ruse’ “unbroken law” with my concept of “Law and Disorder”; that is, an assumed ontology whose behavior is described using a combination of only two mathematical objects: short algorithmic laws and statistics. These latter two objects, which respectively reside at the extreme ends of the order/disorder spectrum, describe many if not all the patterns in our world. Thus, I conclude that “methodological naturalism” is an epistemology based on the assumption of an ontology that is subject to a regime of Law and Disorder.


So, given the foregoing definitions I’m a “methodological naturalist” – almost, but not quite. I say “almost” because I keep a corner of reservation in my mind as I do about most things. Firstly, strict “methodological naturalism” is simply not a practical proposition. Many historical objects, for example, cannot be encapsulated using law and disorder only; the objects of history are in the main intrinsically complex and history is likely to remain an irreducibly narrative intense subject even if in principle history is ultimately the outcome of some kind of fundamental “law and disorder” physics like String Theory. But I would go even further than this “in practice” critique of methodological naturalism. In fact I would want to express a fundamental skepticism and reservation about it. Although I favour and even like the idea that the cosmos is in principle (if not in practice) descriptively reducible to some fundamentalist vision of law and disorder, I certainly have my doubts. My position then is that of a skeptical methodological naturalist. As far as I’m aware there may be objects out there that are not descriptively reducible to the two classes of mathematical objects that come under the rubric of “law and disorder”. In fact it just seems all to humanly convenient to posit a world that can be exclusively rendered in law and disorder terms which, surprise, surprise, make that world conceptually and epistemologically amenable to human probing. Isn’t somebody just trying to defend their intellectual comfort zone? I find the intellectual hubris behind this kind of unreserved assumption repugnant. Moreover, given that “Law and Disorder” objects are those that are most amenable to scientific epistemology, is it any surprise that the most vociferous proponent in favour of the view that the categories of “Law and Disorder” are exhaustive, turns out to be – yes, you’ve guessed it – a career scientist.

It is no surprise then that Larry’s essay proceeds by assuming the foregoing concept of naturalism. In fact he seems to simply take it for granted that methodological naturalism is exclusive and nowhere in his essay does he attempt to justify this exclusiveness. He just asserts it as rule of science; end of story, so shut up! Unlike Ruse who may well be agnostic about objects transcending the categories of Law and Disorder Larry Moran takes a dim view of anyone who might delve into the realms beyond his stated terms of reference. Consider the following passages, for instance, which are taken from his essay:

Scientists, on the other hand, argue that an interventionist God who guides evolution violates the rules of science.

If science really does have to be strictly naturalistic, then even the softest version of intelligent design—that promoted by Michael Denton—is ruled out because God creates the laws of physics and chemistry. This point is worth emphasizing. If one's explanation of the natural world posits a God who created the laws of physics and chemistry then one is not behaving like a scientist. Of course, there's even more of a conflict if one's God is supposed to have set up the universe in order to produce humans.

On the surface it seems that all forms of religion conflict with science in one way or another. It seems as though there's no room at all for religious explanations of the natural world as long as we agree that scientists have to stick to naturalism. Do scientists really insist on this restriction? Yes, they do.

As Popper grappled with the nature of science and attempted to characterize ,it he insisted that he was not presuming to draw a line round the whole of rational discourse, but instead was trying to draw a line within it*. Would Popper have used emotive language like “violates the rules of science” or “supernatural explanations” to describe discourse beyond the realm amenable to “Law and Disorder” science? Some atheists, on the other hand, seem determined to annex the whole of rational discourse into a catholic empire of “Law and Disorder”. What makes me suspicious of them is that they are not content to accept that the efficacy of scientific epistemology fades at the edges as ontology moves into the complex middle ground between law and disorder. Instead they are proactively campaigning against middle ground ontologies and define those active in such areas as anti-science and anti-rational. They seek universal conformity to their proprietary concept of “behaving like a scientist”, the only valid form of epistemic behavior in their view. They don’t recognise limits to science simply because everyone, without exception, is supposed confine their discourse within the limits of a science beyond whose scope nothing else is presumed to validly exist. This is simply unfashionable cultural imperialism.

Presumably God falls outside the law and disorder category and into the “supernatural” middle category because He/She/It is a-prior complex and narrative intense. Therefore someone like myself, who at the very least is conjecturing about deity and who is giving plenty of space to ID theorists, would be portrayed as in conflict with science, perhaps even hostile to it, simply because the middle ground between law and disorder is excluded a-priori as an illegitimate realm of study for any human being; or to put it in Larry’s terms “Do scientists really insist on this restriction? Yes, they do.” Well, we certainly know one scientist who insists on it.

It would be wrong and unfair to suggest that all atheists are enthralled by a kind of intellectual hegemony. People like Paul Davies realise that the deeper questions of primary ontology and aseity are still up for the grabs and therefore open to speculation. In his book “The Goldilocks Enigma” Davies submits his own (non-theistic) speculations for consideration. But when delving into such questions it is by no means obvious why the ontology that sustains and creates our universe should be a law and disorder ontology, or even an ontology that is easily accessible to science (String theory, although a law and disorder ontology, currently has an accessibility problem). In any case it is far from clear that the problem of absolute necessity will be solved with a law and disorder ontology and in fact may have a solution completely inaccessible to finite minds.


I have no problems with atheism per se; at least in the sense of it being a belief that the underlying primary ontology of aseity is not theistic. What I do have a problem with is intellectual hegemony. Intellectual hegemony may in part be an outcome of a lack of reflexiveness; that is, an inability to turn critical analysis on itself and become aware of its own presumed objects (whether those objects are, say, “science” or “intelligence”). If one can’t see those objects, but instead sees the world through them, then one is unable to submit them to scrutiny. If one perceives that others are not captivated by one’s own intellectual enthrallment then the thought of reviewing one’s enthrallment may be too much to bear. A feeling of unease and even anger may set in and this in turn lead to attempts to police the thoughts of others.

* See Popper’s “Logic of Scientific Discovery”,

Darwin Bicentenary Part 21: Stuff the Politics and Stuff the Crusaders.

This tank gun doesn't go "Bang", it goes "Bong".

This post on Uncommon Descent links to a story about the “endless culture wars over evolution and other volatile topics” that have lead to some vicious political infighting in the state of Texas. It’s an indication of how politicized the ID/evolution debate has become in America. Nearer at home we have this article on Network Norwich & Norfolk where we read about some Norfolk church ministers engaged in an anti-evolution campaign and who intend to send an anti-evolution pack to all British MPs. Bundled with this pack is a copy of the booklet “The Delusion of Evolution”. This campaign is disturbing on at least two counts: One: The ministers are quite sure God is on their side because “We feel that the Lord has placed this campaign on our hearts”. Two: I have grave doubts about the booklet’s editor to competently handle the material in his charge, scientifically, philosophically and theologically, without recourse to religious intimidation and authoritarianism. These people are pressuring us into accepting their self appointed role by claiming that they have a leading of God to free the world from what they emotively label a “delusion”.

But some of us want some space, some time, some quietness and tranquility in which to ponder the problem undisturbed, and not be rushed into premature conclusions by those who, on the one hand, may charge us of courting superstition and scientific heresy and on the other hand by those who apply religious duress in order that we may play second fiddle to a crusading bunch of campaigning incompetents.

Darwin Bicentenary Part 20: Does Evolution Violate the 2nd Law?

All anti-evolutionists that I have heard commenting on the Second Law of Thermodynamics claim that evolution violates this law. This assertion is a slogan that does the rounds in the anti-evolution community and is second only to the cry that information cannot be created. It is likely that both slogans are popular because they give the appearance that rigorous science is being employed to refute evolution. The ID community who host many anti-evolutionists cannot now backtrack on this slogan without considerable loss of face and consequently they put up a stiff fight in its defense. But is the second law really the killer argument against evolution?

My sixth attempt to get this graph right (Click to enlarge)

The above graph represents the increase in disorder of an isolated system of cosmically significant dimension. The disorder is shown as capital Z (Note: I don’t have an “omega” character available just at the moment). The value of Z at time t represents the huge number of possible microscopic combinations that are consistent with a system that has been developing for time t. (Entropy S, by the way, is given by S = k Log Z).

On the same graph I have superimposed another graph for the quantity I call w. This quantity represents the number of microscopic combinations taken from the huge set of combinations enumerated by Z which have the property of containing life. I have shown this graph as a hump because it is likely that at the extremes of order and disorder life is impossible. Hence I conclude that there is a limited time window during which life can exist, a window which I have marked as “Life’s window”.

Now, the evolutionist’s conjecture is that without resort to anything more than the “law and disorder” normalcy of the physical universe, there is a realistic chance of organic structures evolving in the life time of the universe. A necessary condition of this conjecture is that the ratio w/Z is significant enough to ensure that a cosmos containing a sufficient number of these quasi isolated systems will return a realistic chance that life will evolve somewhere. The ID theorists, on the other hand, are effectively telling us that this is nonsense and that w is far too small in relation to Z to return a realistic chance of evolution in spite of the size of the universe. In other words, ID theorists are telling us that the hump I have drawn is of negligible height.

Looking at the graph of Z one thing is clear; the system represented by the graph must be under a very tight physical constraint. This fact is evident from the smooth increase in Z; the system clearly cannot make sudden random leaps to anywhere in the space of possibilities. It follows that the behavior of the system in time is highly constrained, preventing such disordered jumps. In fact the behavior of Z is consistent with a system that makes incremental steps according to some variant of random walk. This ordered dynamic in no way contradicts the second law. It hardly needs be said that the meta-constraints of physical law, which are responsible for this continuity of change, are not subject to the second law, as the latter describes behavior within these constraints.

In the light of the foregoing it is clear that if evolution is to work its success must be encoded in the meta-constraints of physical law; this follows because only the constraints of physical law can sufficiently limit the value of Z in order to raise the ratio w/Z to a magnitude which returns a realistic probability of life evolving. Under these conditions evolution, far from being a violation of the second law, would in fact be an outcome of the second law. This is because the second law is the engine that forces the exploration of system possibilities, thus ensuring evolutionary outcomes receive their share of the probability on offer which, provided w/Z is sufficiently large, will have a significant value. In short, provided w/Z is great enough, the second law does not prevent evolution; in fact it does the very opposite: it facilitates evolution. Evolution is only a violation of the second law if w/Z is too small for the evolution of life to be realistically probable. But without specifying this variable it is wrong to claim that evolution is an in principle violation of the second law.

The general conclusion that under the right conditions the second law must be the engine of evolution rather than a block to evolution, does not mean to say that in practice evolution is possible given the particular set of laws and constants that govern our own cosmos. Those laws and constants may not set a sufficiently high value of w/Z to favour evolution. Moreover, ID theorists Abel and Trevors, in this paper, contest the idea that physical law of any kind can be the logical source of evolution. Abel and Trevors tender two challenges to the notion of some kind of physical law being the putative logical source of evolution:

a) Simple algorithmic laws generate monotonous simplicity like, for example, crystal lattices, and cannot source the complex structures of living things.

b) If simple algorithmic laws determined the structures of life then those laws would prohibit the degrees of freedom needed by life’s information bearing media like DNA, thus rendering those media useless. According to Abel and Trevors, life’s information bearing structures are “dynamically inert” in that their configuration is not determined by physics and chemistry and necessarily so according to them.

Abel and Trevors’ very interesting and probing paper really needs its own post to do it justice, something I hope to do at a future date. However, here are my first reactions to the above two points:

a) Simple to complex mappings are possible. Short algorithms can generate complex configurations, including, to a good approximation, random sequences; although admittedly with respect to the huge number of possible complex objects, the number of algorithmically reducible objects is very small.

b) If basic physics and chemistry implicitly encode the highly complex forms of life, then this encoding must be embodied in a morphospace containing reducibly complex organisms. Thus physics and chemistry is not required to directly generate the appropriately encoded information bearing structures of life, thus limiting their degrees of freedom. Morphospace is a static platonic object with no degrees of freedom and is given once and once only. As such it does not require the degrees of freedom needed for reuse in order to store new information. Therefore it does not need to be, as Abel and Trevors put it, “dynamically inert”.

If evolution has happened then its deeper cause traces back to the complex platonic object of an algorithmically reducible morphospace implicit in the laws of physics and Chemistry. It is this object that guides evolution via its available pathways of reducible complexity. This object, then, must be reducible on two counts: 1. It must be algorithmically reducible and 2. It must be reducibly complex in the sense that it must contain pathways along which the random walk of evolution can diffuse. Such an object is not entirely unprecedented: Human progress has been fed by a “Technological Morphospace” that is also implicit in the laws of physics and chemistry and contains artifacts that are reducibly complex with respect to the given human quantum of intelligence (see part 18 of this series).

Darwin Bicentenary Part 19: Dembski's Active Information Continued...

Characters of the Wild Web Number 11: "Satisfactory Mathematical Proofs required", but Billy the DembskID is still not wanted by the evolutionists.

Continuing my look at Dembski’s “active information”….

Resume

Dembski’s paper on active information describes the Avida experiment in evolutionary computation. This experiment evolves the complex XNOR logical function from the random shufflings of elementary NAND gate components. The XNOR function consists of a hierarchy components and sub-components that all ultimately break down to elemental XNOR gates. Avida evolution works because it assigns a high probability of persistence to the components in the component hierarchy of the XNOR function. This creates a system of stratified stability or a kind of ladder up which Avida evolution can climb. As Dembski rightly points out this assignment of persistence probabilities has to be conferred in advance and thus Dembski’s case for “active information” is clinched; if that’s what active information is.

Dembski’s active information works as follows. We imagine a system where a selected outcome or selected range of outcomes has a probability of p of making an appearance. In the sort of system Dembski has in mind p is usually tiny because the class of selected outcomes is very, very small compared to the total number of possible outcomes, and also because the system is assumed to have and even distribution of probability amongst the vast number of possible cases.

We now imagine that we apply some kind of physical constraint on the system that effectively redistributes the distribution of probabilities amongst the possible outcomes so that they are no longer even. I call this a “constraint” because the system no longer has a full range of possibilities open to it; probability is being lost on certain outcomes in favour of others. Given this new distribution of probability, the probability of the selected outcome(s) of interest becomes q and we assume that q is much greater than p. The information value associated with the outcomes before and after the introduction of the constraint is –log(p) and –log(q) respectively. The system has effectively lost information, because we now know more about its outcomes and therefore their ability to provide us with information is lessened. The information has passed from the system to our heads. Thus, the loss of information to the system is –log(p) – [ –log(q)] = log (q/p). This value is called the “active information” by Dembski, and although it entails a loss of information to the system, it represents a corresponding gain in information to us as observers of that system.

In the case of Avida the probability of the XNOR gate evolving is considerably elevated by the assignment of high persistence probabilities to the components and sub components of XNOR. Hence these persistence probabilities have the effect of introducing a constraint that lowers system information in favour of observer information, thus in turn introducing active information. As have I said in the previous posts on Avida these persistence probabilities have been put in by hand, and it is in this respect that the active information has been removed from the system in order to redistribute the probabilities over the possible cases in favour of the evolved outcome.

Some Comments

1. Fitness Functions.
The constraint applied to a system like Avida is crucial; without it Avida would fail to produce an evolutionary result in realistic time. This constraint is often called a “fitness function”. The fitness function is itself an item that is chosen from amongst many possibilities. In his recent paper (which I hope to look at in more detail later) Dembski attempts to quantify this choice by showing that evolution of the Avida type is only highly probably because it depends in turn on the selection of a highly improbable choice of fitness function taken from a huge class of spurious possibilities. I think that Dembski’s analysis is one way of telling us that whatever way we look at it, our universe, although to us humans having apparently enormous space-time resources, is negligible in size when compared to the vast combinatorial space from which the relatively tiny class of complex cybernetic structures are taken. On this matter Dembski is almost certainly right.

2. Mathematical Constraints vs. Fitness Functions
I am not very keen on the term “fitness function”; it smacks too much of a commitment to evolution by selection. It is more general to refer to constraints; a constraint is a mathematical stipulation that redistributes probability over set of possibilities unevenly, and so as I have suggested above probability is lost on certain outcomes in favour of others. Ironically in showing us Avida Dembski is showing us how, given the appropriate constraints, an evolution of sorts can happen. But his main point is that it can’t happen without a constraint, a constraint which sufficiently alters a level distribution of probabilities in order to make the chance of evolution realistic. This point is, I feel, unassailable. But the big question for me is whether such constraints can be embodied in a succinct system of short algorithmic laws rather than be applied by hand as in the case of Avida. In real biological connections this conjectured constraint would imply “reducible complexity”, the opposite of the ID community’s “irreducible complexity”. Reducible complexity is the necessary condition needed to raise the probability of evolution to realistic levels. Evolutionists assume that this constraint is embodied in the basic laws of physics, which of course can be expressed in short algorithmic form. I suspect that ID theorists would much prefer the view that such constraints are inherently mathematically complex and therefore cannot be expressed in short algorithmic form and thus have to be put in directly by an intelligently guided hand. But then why shouldn’t the appropriate short algorithm, if such exist, also be sourced in intelligence?



3. Conservation of Information?
“You can’t create information!” is the moral boosting rallying cry of the ID community. If nothing else this slogan is very evocative. It is a hook for people who have some training in the physical sciences and who will remember the conservation laws of mass and energy. Didn’t these people suspect all along that something was missing from the physical sciences, something to do, perhaps, with that intuitively sensed property of organization? So how appropriate then that this intuitive “something” should be captured in a conservation law, thus completing a triune of conservation laws encompassing mass, energy and information. It’s all very compelling. If you say something like “Evolution breaks the law of conservation of Information” it certainly sounds as though you have just said something rigorous, scientific and unassailable. It helps raise the kudos of ID with the suggestion that a strict scientific law is at its heart. And it’s all backed up with some mathematical theorems by the brilliant William Dembski; difficult to understand perhaps but it must all make sense because he is an academic and a professor. All in all it gives the impression that at last ID supporters have rigorous science on their side and therefore something they can shout from the roof tops and be proud of.

And yet it is all rather ill defined and slippery. As I have indicated in a previous post, Shannon’s notion of information is liable to betray the ID community; it can unexpectedly appear and disappear and things that seem to have a lot of information turn out to have no information, and vice versa. It also fails to be sufficiently expressive of the surprising fact that simple to complex mathematical transformations that can take place: Although the vast majority of complex forms are algorithmically irreducible we know that a limited class, albeit a very limited class, of complex forms can arise from simple conditions and algorithms.

In the light of the foregoing are we to conclude that the ID community’s favourite mantra means anything? Actually I think it does mean something; it expresses the intuition that our universe is wholly contingent; it is the “something” in the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and so the cosmos comes to us with Shannon’s “surprisal” value. This intuition can be placed on a (slightly) firmer footing with a little bit of hand waving as follows: If the universe could be shown to be a logical necessity then one might interpret this as the universe having P(Universe) = 1*. But nothing we know about the universe allows us to conclude P(Universe) = 1. In fact as Dembski’s analysis suggests our particular universe has been taken from an immense class of possibilities, and from a very small class within that great space of possibilities at that. Hence, if it is meaningful to apply probabilities in this extreme outer framing context (a maneuver that is not beyond criticism) we return a P(Universe) with a value a lot less than 1. Hence –log P(U), the information in the universe, is very large and thus the information value of any outcome conditioned on U will be large. The ID community may yet have the last laugh.

Stop Press 3/6/9
William Dembski has recently posted this reaction to some of the criticism he has received regarding his “Conservation of Information”.


Footnote
*Presumably because of God’s Aseity, only P(God) = 1. But if P(God) = 1 then from Shannon’s definition of information God contains no information! This is yet another surprising result that is a product of ambiguities in the application of probability and its meaning.

Darwin Bicentenary Part 18: Time to Cash in Evolution?

Characters of the Wild Web Number 10: Johnny Cash is currently performing in the UD Saloon

With evolutionary theory I have good days and bad days; in fact I’m having a bad time with evolution at the moment. Some parts of the ID theorist’s negative challenge to evolution are compelling, although I have to say that as a positive replacement to evolution I also get bad days with ID theory. The trouble is, I never seem to get any good days with it. As ID theory effectively employs complex a-priori explanatory objects intermediate between law and disorder (i.e. intelligence), ID theory seems theoretically and epistemologically so utterly intractable. In this sense ID theory reminds me of YEC theory. When I first became a Christian the intimidating suggestion was that YEC theory is a necessary part of the religious package; reject it and imperil one’s salvation and standing before God. But the stickler was that whenever I visited a site of geological interest I could make little sense of it with YEC theory. For example, what sense did YEC theory make of the huge chalk deposits of Alum bay (Isle of Wight), superimposed on which are hundreds of yards thickness of coloured sand sediments and then all these beds tilted to the near vertical? God knows! In fact that was the YEC answer: "God knows and we don’t, so shut it."

However, this post on UD has helped a little to assuage my doubts about evolution. Here William Dembski published a YouTube song performed by Johnny Cash entitled “One bit at a time”. The song tells the story of a Detroit Cadillac assembly line worker who smuggles out a miscellany of components bit by bit in his lunchbox and cobbles together his own botched up Cadillac at home. Artistic license allows Cash to get away with questions like just how does one get an engine block into a lunch box, but Dembski uses the song anyway to lampoon evolution’s bit by bit strategy. The underlying irony is that the car hides an evolutionary metaphor. Development of the automobile truly has been one piece at a time. In fact here is the comment I added to Dembski’s post.

I enjoyed the song but “One piece at a time” may not be so far from the mark.

The wheel, the wheeled chassis, the leaf spring, glass, various electromagnetic devices, pistoned heat engines, bulbs, not to mention agriculture, cities and writing which set the social base for industrialization etc, were all invented/discovered without the car being conceived or envisaged as a goal. This example sets the precedent for a form of reducible complexity at least to an extent which allows limited human intelligence to make advances with a piece meal divide and conquer strategy, and achieve results beyond that available to a single act of inventive foresight and goal formulation.

The artifacts generated by human culture must form islands of innovation in “configuration space” sufficiently close together to enable limited human intelligence and prescience (let’s represent that by “i”) to jump the gaps between these islands of functionality.

Now I would not be so brazen as to suggest that “i” could be reduced to zero and hey presto you have mindless, goalless evolution (I realize there are lots of robust challenges to that, thanks to you excellent folk), but the human technological model does indicate that limited foresight and goal perception can generate functionality beyond itself if some measure of reducible complexity holds in “technological morphospace”. If this were not so then human technological progress, with its ability to create unforeseen, unimaginable artifacts well beyond single quantum flashes of inventive genius will come to a standstill, limited by its ability to see ahead and formulate goals. Such is the Creator’s grace bestowed upon finitely endowed humanity.

Basically the message is this: Technological artifacts are reducibly complex with respect to the quantity “i”. Without that reducible complexity human culture could not develop highly sophisticated artifacts like cars, jet aircraft and computers. Human beings are simply not intelligent enough to invent in one flash of inspiration something as sophisticated as a modern car or a jet fighter. Moreover, there was a time in the past when artifacts, like say computers and the internet etc, couldn’t even be conceived as goals let alone invented, and yet human progress was working toward them in spite of there being no discernible purpose in that progress. Such artifacts were not purposefully being sought for, but the components and sub components of which they are composed were prompted by the next inventive step that could be made within the range of human inventive skills given the technological milieu of the day. What actually drove this “one piece at a time” inventiveness were not long term projects that envisaged these technical marvels as goals but short term goals such as immediate convenience and profit.


So, if humans are not intelligent enough to build the sophisticated machines around us, or even to conceive them as targets, where then is the intelligence and direction that has built these machines? Ultimately it is in the abstract platonic realm of technological morphospace that juxtaposes the objects of innovation in such a way that limited human intelligence can leap the gaps between them; this is basically analogous to the evolutionist’s assumption of reducible complexity.

With these thoughts in mind here is a thought I once posted somewhere else and then decided to delete:

We zoom in on the particulars of the process of evolution in our minds eye and all we see is the 'purposeless' shufflings of fragments of 'dead' stuff. Where’s the mind in that? Where’s intentionality? Where’s the purpose? But don’t expect to see intentionality, intelligence and purpose down at that level, any more than expect to see intentionality down at the neural level if someone zooms in on the human brain with an electron microscope – individual neurons work blindly and know no purpose – to suggest neurons know purpose would be a repeat of the homunculus fallacy. The mystique of intentionality and purpose (if they are to be found at all) are only likely to be found on the level of the whole system.


Clearly some things, such as computers, aircraft and cars, are describable as organizations of interacting of parts. One doesn’t find “computerishness”, “aircraftness” or “carness” in individual components, but in the organization of those components. Perhaps intelligence and purpose should also be thought of in these terms. Whether human intelligence and intelligence in general can ultimately be described as an organization of parts really remains to be seen, but if it is describable in system terms then intelligence and purpose will be found on a system level and not at the component level.

So far I have had no response on UD to my comment. In fact at the time of writing William Dembski’s Johnny Cash post has attracted less that 10 short comments. Perhaps this is no surprise; everyone on UD is taken up with the next post which publicizes PZ Meyers’ provocative challenge to the ID community to come up with evidence of a designed gene. This latter post has attracted in excess of 100 comments. And yet under the very noses of the ID community is an issue that is potentially subversive to their core thesis of irreducible complexity; for just how far can “i” be reduced? In fact if intelligence is descriptively reducible then at the elemental level “i” must be near zero because intelligence and purpose are clearly not going to be found in the elementary components of which intelligence is composed. The irony is that both PZ Meyers and his ID critics may both be unable to see the wood from the trees and perceive the intelligence that might be staring them in the face.

Gun Fighting Partnership

An evolution vs. anti-evolutionist gun battle has erupted over on Network Norwich. James Knight, Network Norwich columnist has been taking a fairly strong and competent pro-evolutionary line. This, unfortunately, has brought out the religious authoritarians witch hunting for heresy. I’ve might have been humming and ahhing about the mechanism of evolution and been a doubting evolutionist of late, but I’ve had to shelve all that and weigh in on James side in defense of freedom of conscience and make a stand against spiritual bullying. These spiritual bullies force you to reach for your gun – they give you no choice.

Who Shot TVR?

Characters of the Wild Web Number 9: Who is he (she?) and what direction did the shot come from? Where’s lawman Larry when you need him?




Somebody has taken a pot shot at my last post, presumably a Wild Web Winchester Wielding sniper (see above). Here’s the comment followed by my reply.

Well it could be worse, we could be dealing with Pandeism, which proposes a God that is a quite logical and scientific entity which engineered a Universe that is truly random, and lacking in any of that unacceptable tinkering....
2:12 PM, May 07, 2009

Thanks very much for an intelligent comment!

Hhmmm… whom have I got here? An atheist who doesn’t like any form of theism or a theist who is not keen on my brand of theism? Probably the latter as my commenter seems to regard Pandeism as even worse than my own theological ramblings; for Pandeism is likely to be slightly more acceptable to an atheist than my own views. Moreover, that sardonic use of “truly random” and “unacceptable tinkering”, could be a sign that I have here an ID supporter; perhaps even an evangelical ID supporter?

Why not declare yourself? I won’t bite. I have plenty of time for ID supporters, because who knows, those one-off “unacceptable tinkerings” may well pop up here and there in the history of the cosmos and supplement the more “acceptable” and epistemologically tractable “tinkerings” of “law and disorder”. Perhaps ID supporters can teach us a thing or two on this score? I know I’m playing a dangerous game here with people like lawman Larry around; he might accuse me of conspiring with those who subvert scientific law and disorder.

But I just don’t take a hard line on such matters. After all, as far as humanity is concerned all those “tinkerings”, whether law and disorder or other, in the final analysis present themselves as patterns, and that really also includes “randomness”; although I much prefer the term “disorder” to “randomness” because it emphasizes “pattern” rather than “process” or “dynamic”. "Process" and "dynamic" are terms that are more likely to get loaded with emotive and metaphysical associations to do with a preconceived primary ontology. Hence we hear expressions like “truly random” – what’s the difference between “random” and “truly random”? The difference is, of course, that the word "truly" signals a difference in an ulterior weltanschauung and beliefs about just what is the primary engine creating (and destroying) the patterns of our cosmos.

As for the nature of God and how he relates to the cosmos: Yes I’m sure like everyone else I’m pretty much groping on this matter and like the rest of humanity bound not to get it quite right. Although I do have some sympathy with the Pandeist efforts to grapple with God, with them the divine personal element largely seems to be missing as you may agree.*

I remember reading an article in an evangelical publication entitled “Heresies Ancient and Modern”. What interested me was that amongst some of the more gross heresies it listed many were actually quite subtle differences from the authors own views on the Trinitarian Godhead,derived from his particular interpretation of Scripture. I was left wondering why he could be so hard on quite subtle departures from his own opinion given the Grace of God and human epistemological difficulties.

As I have said what seems to be missing from much Pandeism is the personal element, and, I would add, that it is also missing even from some forms of evangelicalism. For if God exists and we succeed in making that “Abba Father” (Roms 8:15) connection with Him, then why all the fuss about our approximate and sometimes downright erroneous renditions of the nature of God and how He relates to the cosmos? Isn’t God Gracious? When I was young my connection with my mother was such that I might have thought of her as literally being made of sugar – clearly an erroneous idea, but it didn’t stop her from mothering me, or me using that metaphor to validly convey something about our relationship. No doubt other children would have poured scorn on the idea, especially those who were of the opinion their mothers were made of cotton wool.

We’ve just got to give people the security of allowing them to take risks and allowing them to be wrong and mistaken when working in such difficult and speculative areas. We must get away from some of these high passion and ill tempered debates that are doing a disservice to a perennially difficult subject, a subject that calls for some delicate and risky maneuvering.

I hope to shortly continue my Darwin Bicentenary series by continuing to look at William Dembski’s “active information”.

* Footnote 9/5/9
What I should have made clear is that I make a sharp distinction between Aseity (=God) and the contingent cosmos Aseity creates, sustains and destroys (effectively a distinction between necessity and possibility). I am inclined to eschew supernatural vs. natural dualisms that implicitly posit a three tier system consisting of God, the supernatural world and the natural world, with man a hybrid of the latter. This three tier system is often the de facto scheme found amongst evangelicals and it has some resemblances with preliterate religion (see http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-dualism.html) However, the last thing I would want to do is to try and bully people into my own point of view by suggesting that they must be evil and malign idiots simply because they don’t follow my own opinions in this very speculative area of study. It is quite possible that the pandiests are working their way toward God (see . http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html)

Atheist Atheology

Atheist anti-theology is getting into a tangle over on Sandwalk

Francis Collins' take on theistic evolution is creating a poser for scientific lawman Larry Moran. Is Collins breaking scientific law or not? To this end atheist Larry Moran does a spot of theology, (or perhaps I should call it anti-theology). That Larry Moran is an atheist is immaterial: what I am putting under the spotlight here is his notion of God, a notion he must in some measure have assembled in his mind in order to test it against experience and rule out as an extant ontology. As we shall see, basically his concept of God is that of an interventionist God, a concept closely linked to dualism. But in the apparent absence of a cosmos being nudged and knocked by an interventionist God the conclusion is that either God is making himself scarce, or perhaps simply doesn’t exist. Needless to say Larry believes the latter; who can blame him if God’s only mode of working is that of intervening, because just where are those so called interventions?

Characters of the Wild Web number 8: Is Francis Collins good, bad or ugly? He certainly looks shifty but can lawman Larry bring him to book as a scientific law breaking baddy?


Here are some of Prof Larry’s comments on Collins' views, followed by my own comments.


Larry Moran: Theistic Evolution is a form of creationism that limits God's involvement in the creation event. The chief limitation is that most of God's activities have to be consistent with the facts of evolution.


Comment: Given that there is a very wide spectrum of views running all the way from Big Bang creationism, through Intelligent Design’s second creative dispensation, to Young Earth Creationism, the main function of the term “creationist” is to define a category that lumps together a wide diversity of philosophies into one in order that Larry can identify who the law breakers are. It cleans up reality into clear cut opposing camps, and makes it easier to identify targets to shoot at. You know you are on wrong side of the law if you are labeled a “creationist”, and this readily paves the way for further emotive terms like “superstitious”.

The phrase “limits God’s involvement in the creation” makes sense in the light of Larry’s interventionist notion of God; for between limited “interventions” the cosmos is likely to be conceived as an entity that runs itself under a regime of quasi-autonomous “law and disorder”* normalcy. Law and disorder normalcy allows the interventionist to distinguish between two further contrasting categories, namely that of natural action and supernatural action, the latter transcending what is expected under natural law and disorder. In consequence interventionists have a tendency to gravitate toward a natural vs. supernatural dualism. However, I wouldn’t disagree with Larry’s observation that God’s activity, or whatever deeper ontology underwrites cosmic contingencies, must be consistent with the facts of evolution. (if indeed they are facts)

Larry: Many of us have difficulty understanding how a personal God can be involved in guiding evolution without violating the laws of physics and chemistry. In other words, how is Theistic Evolution/BioLogos compatible with science?

Comment: Why a personal God? Does the opposite of an impersonal God provide any less difficulty in understanding how deity might “guide” evolution? I put it to Larry that some theological complex is lurking under the surface here that explains this nuance, perhaps to do with the problem of pain and suffering, although, of course, this would be strenuously denied. As for “guiding evolution without violating the laws of physics and chemistry” that, I submit, betrays some rather crude theological anthropomorphisms also lurking under the surface. Viz: Humans create highly organized structures like clocks, engines and computers, by imposing an organization on preexisting matter which, given a preexisting regime of natural laws, then run themselves, apart from, perhaps, some “guiding” maintenance to keep them on track. I suggest that it is this kind of anthropomorphic picture that informs Larry’s concept of Divinity; that is, he sees the physical regime running itself according to the patterns of normalcy unless tampered with by deity; but since we don’t see many such tamperings the conclusion is, understandably, that “God probably doesn’t exist so stop worrying and enjoy life”.

It is this “engineering” anthropomorphism that also seems to be at the bottom of deism; the thought is that God is some kind of supernatural engineer who builds mechanisms which he then leaves to run themselves, although perhaps he might pop back from time to time for some guiding maintenance or, if we are lucky, to give us a miracle or two.

If there is a God it is not at all clear that this engineering anthropomorphism works. The ex-nihilo creation (and destruction) of mass-energy and its sustained existence have no known inherent logical necessity and presumably are supported by some deeper logical necessity. If God exists then it is likely that God should be identified with this logical necessity, rather than a part time anthropomorphic creator who merely reorganizes what’s already up and running, occasionally nudging and knocking it, but who is otherwise a divine slouch who loafs off and largely forgets all about it.

Larry: According to him (Francis Collins), Christians believe in creation and a strictly scientific explanation of evolution seems incompatible with this belief.

Comment: Seems incompatible with what belief? Let me submit that what Larry means here is that evolution is incompatible with his preconceived notion of an interventionist God. Standard evolutionary theory uses the known processes of law and disorder to explain the history of life. Using the engineering anthropomorphism the deist is inclined to believe that these processes have a self sufficient autonomy enabling them to continue unless tampered with by the Divine hand. In the absence of evidence of interventions the deist has little choice but to serve a redundancy notice on his part time God or perhaps even come to the conclusion that absence of evidence of interventions is evidence of God’s absence. Hence belief in evolution could be construed as a process, if not incompatible with an interventionist God, not exactly supportive of it.

However, if “creation” is understood not as an interventionist act but rather as the underlying logical necessity that creates and sustains the fundamental constituents of the cosmos and their patterns of behavior, then the interventionist argument against God’s existence collapses. If God is identified with the underlying supporting Aseity sustaining and creating a contingent cosmos, then sheer existence becomes the continuous present tense evidence of God’s reality. It is nonsense to say that this kind of God intervenes any more than it is right to say that Quantum Mechanics intervenes too create the observable world, or that an author intervenes in the book he is writing, or that a computer intervenes in the software it is running.


Larry: Collins makes it clear that theism is not deism and his view of Theistic Evolution/BioLogos is not deistic. So how does he solve the problem?

Comment: What problem? Larry once said that deism is the only view of God that is compatible with science, so let me suggest that what he means here is that if you are not a deist then theism is a problem for science, because it otherwise entails “unscientific” divine interventions. But a deist is essentially an interventionist who has served a redundancy notice on God’s interventional activity and an atheist like Larry is essentially a deist who has served a redundant God with a death certificate. Therefore it follows that Larry Moran is an interventionist who has concluded that the interventionist God doesn’t exist. Ironically I agree with that conclusion.


Larry: If science says that evolution obeys the laws of physics and chemistry then there's no room for an interventionist God without violating those rules. And if your God does that then there's a conflict between science and religion. They are not compatible.

Comment: That really sums up Larry’s view, but let me spell it out: Like I said, Larry’s notion of God is that of an interventionist Deity who is patently not intervening because the law and disorder normalcy of the universe suggests no interventions are taking place. Those interventions are not taking place because, in Larry’s view, God doesn’t exist; no make that “the interventionist God doesn’t exist”.

Larry: What to do? Miller and Collins, and many other theists, opt for a solution where God can intervene at the quantum level without ever being detected. Thus, nature only appears to obey the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry because God is clever enough to disguise his interventions.

Comment: Crafty that – God encoding his interventions by embedding them in randomized patterns thus making them all but undecipherable. With this and the butterfly effect boosting things up to macro level just about anything could be a “supernatural” intervention. This is no doubt what is really worrying atheist Larry. If the dog next door barks, who knows, it might be message from God tripped by some quantum intervention amplified by a chaotic neural state. This leaves us with an ontology that could be classified as “unscientific” because it presents an epistemologically intractable object – the “enciphered” intervention. I have no principled objections to people positing epistemologically intractable ontologies, but they can’t expect them to be classified as science given that methodological decisions about what constitutes science are usually based on epistemological tractability.

However there is a philosophical/definitional problem here: My understanding of the interventionist concept of an intervention is that, based on the anthropomorphic engineering analogy, an intervention entails a departure from the patterned normalcy of the cosmos – a departure from the so called fundamental laws of physics and chemistry (ibid). But since quantum reality appears to be obeying statistical laws its failure to depart from statistical norms could be construed as also a lack of evidence of divine intervention. Why should statistical patterning be any better evidence of interventions than the high order patterns of simple algorithmic laws?

Larry: On the surface it seems to work since, by definition, all of God's interventions and guidance are undetectable. Therefore, there can't be any obvious conflict between the purely modern scientific view of evolution and creationism.
Personally, I don't think you can have your cake and eat it too. Once you start attributing events to God's intervention you are conflicting with a strictly materialistic interpretation of those same events. It doesn't matter whether your God is extremely careful to fool scientists into thinking that evolution is natural. The very act of postulating divine intervention in the natural world is not compatible with the scientific way of knowing.


Comment: “…it seems to work”: Really? Without those so called interventions causing transcendence from normalcy (a normalcy which includes conformity to statistical patterns), can we deem the interventions to have happened? But if we do allow quantum events to be classified as possible interventions where do we stop? Since life is an aggregate of quantum events perhaps anything and everything is an intervention. Moreover, if we allow statistically conforming events to be interventions then why not also the events constrained by the patterns generated with deterministic algorithmic laws as well? And what if it turns out that quantum disorder is not absolute but caused by the chaotic effects of a deterministic decoherence? Would this disprove all possibility of Collin’s conjectured interventions?


Judge’s Summing Up Comments: It’s no wonder that lawman Larry is having trouble pinning the charge of heretical superstitious scientific law breaker on Collins; lawman Larry 's prosecution case is all but unintelligible. All Larry can come up with is that Collins can’t have his cake and eat it, because somehow Collin’s conjectured interventions are “conflicting with a strictly materialistic interpretation of those same events”. But just what is a “materialistic interpretation” of those same events? What property is Larry attributing to these same events that are different from that of Francis Collins? Just what are “materialistic interpretations”? Do they enlighten us to the conjectured fundamental logical necessities that underlie the cosmos? Charges of violating “strictly materialistic interpretations” are just too woolly to enable scientific lawman Larry to pin anything on Collins. After all, how does one submit the notion of “materialistic interpretations” to the vaunted "scientific way of knowing" in order to clinch the case against Collins? How does one go about testing “materialistic interpretations” scientifically? Such interpretations have the character of preconceptions which is fair enough as long as they are acknowledged as such. Otherwise Larry's case looks to leading us up the garden path.

Where I would agree with Larry is that there is little or no evidence of God that is amenable to a scientific methodology and its affiliated scientific institutions, but unfortunately that doesn’t help much because many questions in history and prehistory cannot be settled by scientific methodology; some objects are just too complex and remote, like for example a conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Flintstone circa 10,000 BC. So for me the question of God is not just an open one but also an active area of seeking. This is where Prof Moran and myself go our separate ways, just as we must go our separate ways on a "way of knowing" that presumptuously declares objects beyond its remit and capability as unreal, not to mention those woolly “strictly materialistic interpretations” that escape critical scrutiny, and above all on the mindset of interventionism. For it is clearly meaningless to say that substrate ontologies intervene in the phenomena they generate and support.
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Characters of the Wild Web: Sheriff Larry Moran; (over) enthusiastic guardian of scientific law and disorder


Footnote:
“Law and Disorder” is the phrase I use to refer to the physical sciences almost exclusive use of two sorts of explanatory object Viz. simple deterministic algorithmic laws and statistics.

The Green House Effect at Uncommon Descent

Comments on this thread on UD, where I was in discussion with Paul Giem, are now closed. What I regard as the most important thing to come out of this discussion was the complete absence of animosity. This is doing well considering that Paul Giem is a YEC and probably well displaced from my own position on several issues. In contrast; if people start out with the opinion that the “other side” is populated by malign boneheads and treat them as such, then I see no hope of progress in the evolution/ID debate.

However, the thread leaves a number of loose ends:

1. Paul’s suggestion that long dinosaur necks are likely to require the simultaneous operation of several functioning parts/genes is likely to be correct; this is, of course, another special case rendition of the irreducible complexity question. But the apparent irreducible complexity here doesn’t automatically entail Intelligent Design in the UD sense.

2. I’m not sure how far Paul has come to grips with the idea that ontological accessibility and/or complexity generates a sliding scale of scientific tractability that both sides of the debate use against one another.

3. UD supporters may have consensus when it comes to knocking evolution but little consensus on the positive aspects of their theory, namely just how life came to be. This department of their theory seems to suffer from greater problems of scientific tractability than even evolutionary theory. People who live in green houses shouldn’t throw stones and that applies to both evolutionists and ID theorists.

In The Uncommon Descent Saloon

Characters of the Wild Web 6: The UD Saloon; "Hi Guys, Before anyone reaches for their gun..."

I recently visited Uncommon Descent and raised one or two of the issues mentioned in my Darwin Bicentenary series; especially with respect to the alternatives ID offers in relation to evolutionary history. See here for the discussion. Actually, I was dying to use the phrase “Now, before anyone reaches for their gun…” so I could add another item to my “Characters of the Wild Web” series. (See above). However, in all but one case the commentators on UD have proved to be Gentleman and Scholars, and that’s far more important than anything else. It certainly could be a lot worse.... like this for example:

Characters of the Wild Web 7: On some "science" blogs one can hear the guns cocking!