The following
passage by Intelligent Design guru V J Torely appeared on the ID apologetics
site Uncommon Descent on 15th May. It is a passage about the nature
of the intelligent agent who from time to time is thought by these de facto
IDists to “intervene” in the “natural world”. It provides ideal evidence of
just how soft the soft science of ID is:
When I speak of the agent’s “goals,” I don’t mean the
agent’s personal motives for doing something, which we have no way of inferring
from the products they design; rather, I simply mean the task that the agent
was attempting to perform, or the problem that they were trying to solve.
Beyond that, there is nothing more that we could possibly infer about the
agent, unless we were acquainted with them or with other members of their
species. For instance, we cannot infer that the designer of an artifact was a
sentient being (since the ability to design doesn't imply the ability to feel),
or a material being (whatever that vague term means), or a physical entity
(since there’s no reason why a designer needs to exhibit law-governed
behavior), or even a complex or composite entity. To be sure, all the agents
that we are familiar with possess these characteristics, but we cannot infer
them from the products designed by an agent. Finally, the fact that an agent is
capable of performing a variety of functions does not necessarily imply that
the agent is composed of multiple detachable parts. We simply don’t know that.
In short: the scientific inferences we can make about non-human designers are
extremely modest.
This tells us
how unknown and unknowable is de-facto ID’s version of the intelligent agent.
It is this all but unknowable unknown that is purported to make good the design
gaps that these ID people believe to be at the heart of the natural world. Of course everyone knows the subtext; the designer the ID community have in mind is none other God himself who, it is envisaged, is acting behind the Turing screen as if he was an alien engineer tinkering with otherwise "natural processes". No
doubt some gaps are here to stay, but my view is that divine proactiveness is
not seen in these gaps only. Moreover, God’s presence in "natural forces" is more
than just a sustaining power. In fact the idea that I continue to probe is that these so called “natural forces” are God’s intelligence in action, action which
therefore becomes the subject of empirical investigation.
Torely (and his
ID community) see nature and God intelligence as two very distinct categories; one with cognitive powers and the other without. Torely’s model of divine intervention is almost “archeological” in the sense that the artifacts are living things, a product of Divine intelligent agency some time in the distant past. Using the epistemic of the explanatory
filter he sees a stark choice between natural forces and God intelligence
– for Torely those natural forces are utterly insentient with ability to
achieve little more than high order, chaos, and randomness. What Torely
is telling us above is that his postulated intervening intelligence is all but
inscrutable. Consequently, once he has concluded that a material configuration
is the result of an intervening intelligence there is little more he can say,
because, Torley concedes, so little is known about that intelligence: “…the
scientific inferences we can make about non-human designers are extremely
modest”. It follows, that the predictive efficacy of Torely’s version of ID is concomitantly reduced; since we know so little about the
intelligence concerned it is going to be difficult to come to any expectations
in advance about what form the work of that intelligence will take. And yet the
ID community claims to be able to make predictions such as economy of
design and absence of Junk DNA. I suggest that they cannot make these
predictions unless they are actually making implicit assumptions about the nature of the
intelligence they are dealing with; there is therefore an inconsistency in
Torley’s thought: He can’t make claim to knowing so little about the nature of
the intelligent agent and yet at the same time try and pass on predictions that contain implicit assumptions about that intelligence. After
all, motive, that is emotions, are a huge part of any
practical intelligence and we need some inkling of those motives to make predictions.
But when we do hazard postulating something about the nature of the
intelligence involved the resultant science is far from exact, in fact it is a
science that is a lot softer than archaeology (see link below).
Two other points
about Torely’s post:
1)
I have a feeling that Torely’s
remark about the agent not necessarily being “composed of multiple detachable parts” is a nod by Torely to Thomas
Aquinas’ philosophy. Aquinas believed that God
is simple, without composition of parts, i.e. indivisible. By modern standards Aquinas knew little about any analytical
breakdown of intelligence. To me it seems inconceivable that something as
complex as God doesn't have multiple parts in the analytic sense, although, of course, those parts would not be literally detachable.
I suspect that here Torely has been seduced by Aquinas philosophy of “substance”.
2) Stupidly, to my mind, Torely
even claims that an intelligent agent might be insentient: To date this
seems highly implausible. A designing intelligence would have to be highly
motivated; our current understanding is that all highly motivated goal seeking complex systems are the seat of a motivating sentience: For example, it is a form of
irrational solipsism to suggest that the higher mammals are anything other
than conscious/sentient. Notably, Roger Penrose book "Shadows of the Mind" is based on the premise that real intelligence and consciousness go together.
To finish let me
just say I have no illusions that evangelical atheists will be anything other than vociferously
opposed to theism in any form and may
argue against it from a basis which caricatures science. But there is little to be
gained from the unnecessarily dichotomising models of the de-facto ID community, models which
place much about the evolution of life well beyond conventional science and
into the realm of unknown powers that in Torely’s own oxymoronic terms may not
even be sentient!
Relevant Link:
Relevant Link:
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