As well as
theological problems I have a couple of smaller niggles with Dembski’s procedure:
Firstly, his separation of law and chance; in my experience physics tends to
form one seamless law and disorder (L&D)
package. Secondly, I’m growing more and
more uncomfortable with the IDist dichotomy of intelligence vs. L&D
processes. After all, it appears that the functioning of the human mind has a
considerable point by point conformity with neural operations, operations which
in large measure at least follow known L&D principles. This polarization of
L&D and intelligence into two separate categories may be fundamentally
flawed.
The dichotomies championed by the ID movement influences the whole way they think about the subject. Their parceling
“intelligence” into a separate black box category seems to be the reason why
some of them, of late, have been digging themselves into another hole: Viz they are declaring
that it is sufficient for their purposes to simply identify an object to be the
product of intelligence with little or nothing being claimed about the character
of the intelligence involved. To my mind this is clearly an error which potentially
undermines the whole ID project: Since it is necessary to have at least some
inkling about the nature of intelligence in the first instance in order to
identify and anticipate its works, this strategy entails a contradiction. But in actual fact one finds that attempts
by the ID community to use their ideas to make predictions do depend at least on a modicum of
implicit understanding about the nature of the intelligence involved!. In
particular, the prediction by IDists about there being no junk DNA is posited on the basis of an assumption about how an intelligence may prefer to work.
However, although
I believe that Dembski’s broad brush epistemic procedure falls over when it is
invoked in disciplines like theology, philosophy, and the nature of intelligence,
it is nevertheless true that something like it does apply in many everyday situations where we try to determine
whether or not an event or object has an “artificial” or “natural” origins.
Moreover, the epistemic is also relevant to archeologists and imaginary scenarios
like 2001 Space Odyssey. But in an attempt to fix some of the filter's problems and improve
its robustness and durability in more nuanced disciplines I have designed this procedure:
In the above procedure we get hold of some “object” to be
investigated (top box) and then pass it on to a process called “Get Object Origins”. This latter process
may well contain something that looks like Dembski’s explanatory filter, a
procedure which attempts to explain an object either in terms of L&D or intelligent
agency – but you will notice that I make no explicit reference to this
dichotomy because it is not as sharply defined as the ID community make out.
Also, in the flow diagram above things don’t end there. We go onto to create an
“origins object” and then after outputting the results we ask the question is
this object complete? By that I mean
that some decision has to be made as to whether the explanatory activity has
found an object which is deemed to be a complete explanation of the cosmos. I’m
in no way suggesting here that explanatory
completeness is something that is either easily attributed or can be done
so without controversy – this decision box clearly hides plenty of
philosophical cut and thrust. However, if ever the explanatory project is deemed complete
the process halts. If on the other hand the epistemic procedure doesn’t halt
the “origins object” is submitted
back to the “Get object origins”
process which is in affect now attempting to get the origins of the
origins. This means that if OOL and
evolution should, within acceptable scientific standards, be demonstrated to be
a product of known physics that physics may
then itself be submitted to origins research. I emphasize "may" here: Who knows; if biology is shown to be a product of physics
some people may experience no philosophical unease making them feel there are further questions to be answered. For
theists on the other hand this would be unacceptable: They will likely feel
that even the most complete L&D physical regime calls for more origins
research. Moreover, some atheists may also be inclined to resubmit their
physics to origins research, perhaps hypothesizing some kind of L&D
multiverse. So, in short my procedure
caters for both philosophically minded atheists as well as theists.
The belief that the
detection of the presence of intelligent agency can be sharply distinguished
from questions about the nature of the intelligence concerned appears to be another
of the ID community’s false dichotomies. But this dichotomy does not sit well with
the comments of one of their own gurus, Granville Sewell. I applauded Sewell’s
comments and made reference to them in this blog post. In that post I suggested that Sewell was
starting to open up what these other IDists treat as a black box in which sits
some kind of localised alien homunculus. In contrast Sewell is starting to discover the
consequence of the fact that intelligence is not an intensively located homunculus, but
an extensive property spread over more than one subsystem, and which probably involves,
I submit, non-locality. The problems introduced by thinking there is a sharp (and
artificial) demarcation between intelligence and L&D is once again foisting
upon theists a Pandora’s box of problems.
Theists like me were once sitting comfortably, but then along came.....
Appendix
Below is
my enhanced explanatory filter expressed in C-like pseudo code. I have made it recursive in order to give it
an elegant look.
Fundamental =
FALSE;
FindObjectOrigins(Object) /*Submit
object being researched to function */
{
OriginsFlag; /*
Flag for origins type */
OriginObject; /*
Data about origins */
If (Fundamental) then Halt; /*
Halt if object is fundamental */
OriginsFlag = GetOriginsOfObject(Object, OriginsObject&
); /*Is object generated by ID or
L&D?*/
Output(OriginsObject, OriginsFlag); /*
Output results */
If (CompleteObject(OriginsObject)) /*
Is object a complete explanation? */
Fundamental = TRUE; /*
If so flag as fundamental */
FindObjectOrigins(OriginsObject); /*
Find origins of origins object */
}
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