Stephen Meyer & God of the Gaps

This post is still undergoing enhancement and correction

Stephen Meyer: Haunted by the ghosts of the
enlightenment and  in a vicious double-bind

In the last part of my critique of North American Intelligent Design (NAID) Pundit Granville Sewell I criticized the God-of-the-Gaps theology that subliminally underlies much of the thinking of the NAID community. I also said that they will vehemently deny that theirs is a God-of-the-Gaps stance. Given this denial I thought I would have a look at some of their attempts to refute this accusation starting with NAID pundit Stephen Meyer (pictured above).

Firstly, let me get one thing clear: "Intelligence-of-the-Gaps",  rightly interpreted is a rational scientific position: We use it when we attempt to detect the works of non-transcendent intelligent agents like, humans, hominins,  animals and even aliens (*1). The problems arise, however, when God-of-the-gaps tries to masquerade as intelligence of the gaps and therein lies my case against the NAID community.  The Christian Omnigod not only transcends creation but His claim to being creator of everything, everywhere & everywhen makes God-of-the-gaps impossible to conceive. 

Anyway let's have a look at what Stephen Meyer has to say about God-of-the-Gaps. The following quote from Meyer was taken from this post on Science & Culture.....

Stephen Meyer Debunks the “God of the Gaps” Objection | Science and Culture Today

Here's the quote (My emphases): 

STEPHEN MEYER: God-of-the-gaps arguments use gaps in scientific explanation as indicators, or even proof, of God’s action and therefore of God’s existence. Such arguments propose divine acts in place of natural, scientific causes for phenomena that science cannot yet explain. The assumption is that if science cannot explain how something happened, then God must be the explanation. But the danger of using a God-of-the-gaps argument for the action or existence of God is that it lacks the foresight of future scientific discoveries. With the continuing advancement of science, God-of-the-gaps explanations often get replaced by natural mechanisms. Therefore, when such arguments are used as apologetic tools, scientific research can unnecessarily be placed at odds with belief in God.1 The recent Intelligent Design (ID) movement highlights this problem.

MY REMARKS

1. Philosophical background

Well, I wouldn't say I disagree with the sentiments behind Stephen's argument but his mode of expression betrays a subliminal philosophy I would take issue with; the problems in the above are with the subtext and the NAID thought forms behind that statement. For a start, look at the way Stephen has casually mentioned "scientific explanation", "natural scientific causes" and "natural mechanisms". as if he and everybody else knows what he means by these terms. But these terms hide a multitude of conceptual sins. 

Scientific "explanation", so called is, all said and done, about successful  description. This descriptive role really takes off when the providential organization of our experiences and observations is such that they become the data dots that can be joined together using succinct and apparently transcendent mathematical algorithms. The rational repleteness of this highly rational and logical world of experience and observation is so consistent and logical that it allows us to not only define the gritty world of so-called matter but also of cause & effect; it's the kind of world for which the term "mechanism" is so apposite. In this connection we note that above Stephen has used the term "natural mechanisms".

But it is clear that cause & effect and the notion of matter  are derivative concepts that can only be conceptually synthesized as a result of the particular structure of the mathematical algorithms which control the organization of our experiences and observations; matter and cause & effect are contingent upon mathematical relations which as far as we know could be otherwise; they are not, apparently, logical truisms. The synthetic nature of cause & effect becomes apparent when we encounter the apparent randomness we find in quantum mechanics (QM): In order to come to terms with QM and restore old fashioned cause & effect, decoherence and hidden variable theories have been developed. The desperation in the quest to bring back a thoroughgoing cause & effect is evidenced in those last resort multiverse theories. Notions of cause & effect are so entrenched in our thinking that when we encounter randomness such as we find in QM we still believe there to be underlying deterministic patterns and that the cosmos is after all an autonomous enlightenment automata; this is an a priori philosophical  commitment to the algorithmic simplicities of high order, but because this is clearly a synthetic position we can at least imagine cases where it fails to work (*2).  

Scientific description then is clearly a method of mathematical encapsulation facilitated by cosmic order. The bad news is that this description has a mathematical limit and ultimately leaves us with a kernel of  irreducible mathematical brute fact.  One response to this situation is, I suppose, that of atheists Bertrand Russell and  Galen Strawson  who have told us that the universe "just is" or that the cosmos itself has edged out of the picture the notion of divine eternity to be replaced by an eternal insentient machine. 

There, however, is an instinct in us which rebels against the idea that science "explanation" only amounts to succinct mathematical descriptions. Metaphysical instincts whisper to us that this observable cosmic order merely runs on top of a deeper (logically true?) ontology and that science actually points to something real about the ontology of the "thing-in-itself". In this connection, let's look at how Google AI responds to the prompt "Principle of Sufficient Reason".

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) states that everything must have a reason, cause, ground, or explanation for why it exists and is the way it is. [1, 2, 3]

Under this view, there are no true "brute facts"—meaning nothing happens or exists completely without an explanation. [1]

Core Concepts

·  No Uncaused Events: Every contingent fact (something that could have been otherwise) requires a sufficient explanation for why it is true. [1, 2, 3]

·   Intelligibility: The universe is assumed to be fully understandable in principle; if we lack an answer, it is a limitation of our knowledge, not a lack of a reason in reality. [1]

Key Figures: The concept dates back to early thinkers like Anaximander, but German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz gave the principle its classic general formulation. Later, Arthur Schopenhauer expanded it into four distinct roots in his work On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5

This response, as far as it goes, does not make it clear that the universe may be fully understandable in terms of mathematical description but in spite that completely allude us when it comes to the question of mysterious sufficient reason. Perhaps the universe does have an underlying causative ontology/reason; we have strong instincts that it does. But we can't be dogmatic about that as we don't have access to the thing-in-itself - our only access is to our experiences and observations and at best science is a descriptive method which exploits cosmic organization but which struggles to arrive at a logical truism explaining the whole caboodle. For a Christian such as myself this is where God's self-revelation is needed. But I suspect that the enlightenment idea of a machine working relentlessly and independent of any management by sentient intelligence will be held onto dearly and will be difficult to dispel; it starts as deism and then potentially morphs into atheism. 

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2. Stephen Meyer

It is at this point that the NAID response epitomized by Stephen Meyer becomes explicable. He articulates a malaise which has hung around in our culture since the enlightenment. But he's put himself in a double bind as has the whole NAID community.....

The NAID community is repulsed by the deist-atheist axis and they seek its antidote. The best antidote they've come up with is to make a distinction between mindless blind mechanical normalcy (or as Stephen has put it those natural mechanisms) and intelligent agency. But in my view Stephen appears to have in his mind the old deistical enlightenment thought forms i.e. those dreaded natural mechanisms which hint at the possibility of an autonomous automaton of a universe; the very notion he seeks to refute. And yet Stephen knows that God-of-the-Gaps is a blind alley as he makes clear in the quote above. What he doesn't make clear is that successful scientific "explanation" is description that exploits cosmic high order with the invention of mathematical models. 

As I have so often said, at the heart of so-called scientific "explanation" is the mother or all "gaps"; the gob-smacking kernel of contingent information which inevitably science leaves us with, begs the question: From whence comes this seemingly arbitrary cosmic organization which allows science to compress cosmic data into very effective mathematical algorithms and then leave us at a breath-taking logical hiatus? Science so far has left us with a meta-design question about the origins of cosmic contingency; in this connection the best atheism can do is simply say that the cosmos "just is", and is probably eternal as we have seen. 

This super-meta-gap is of a different genus to the in-house design questions which arise when we see flint tools or monoliths on the moon, apparently artifacts which likely point to non-transcendent intelligence. It is the failure of NAID philosophy to make this distinction between in-house intelligence and transcendent intelligence which has forced the NAID community toward a God-of-the-gaps anti-evolutionary position; for the NAID community evolution smacks of blind natural forces and therefore it must be opposed; consequently North American ID has become so closely identified with anti-evolutionism that it is now a metonym for anti-evolutionism.

But if evolution has occurred it is clear that it would require very careful choreography and design. Therefore if we believe in an Omnigod the question of whether such an evolutionary system has been designed and contrived is theologically a significant question. Evolutionism can't be automatically written off on the basis that we support an intelligently designed cosmos; that's the trap NAID has fallen into. 

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The NAID community are in a double-bind: They must reject God-of-the-gaps thinking and yet at the same time they perceive standard evolution as governed only by "blind natural forces". For NAIDs those blind natural forces demands periodic divine input to drive natural history toward advanced life. They have saddled themselves with a blind natural  forces vs. intelligent design dichotomy. But this dichotomy falls over on the theological stage. When we introduce an Omnigod who transcends space and time all logically possible possibilities become possible. As I've tried to make clear evolution (if it has occurred) requires considerable intelligence to implement. If evolution has occurred it can not be classified as a blind natural force; in fact for the Christian there really is no such thing as natural forces if they have been created by an Omnigod. 

I personally have no big commitment to conventional evolution (*3). In contrast the NAID community are vehemently anti-evolution as they have increasingly backed themselves into a corner whereby they must declare it as an impossible outcome of blind natural forces. This, I submit is because a background deistical thought forms have invading their thinking. This commits them to the view that natural history is full of ID gaps and since I doubt they will put this intelligence of gaps down to the tinkering of in-house non-transcendent aliens they will be forced to default to God-of-the-gaps. It is ironic that after all that Stephen Meyer says above it is easy to conceive that advancing evolutionary science could start filling in those many gaps in it's account of natural history.

I repeat: None of this is to say standard evolution has happened but the NAIDs have painted themselves into an anti-evolutionary corner and can not get out without loss of face. They are highly impassioned on this subliminal God-of-the-gaps position. The NAID community is self-validating as they engage in mutual back slapping. Further, they have allied themselves with right-wing power brokers. Thus, in North America so-called ID now takes us into a culture that is a combination of anti evolutionism and right-wing politics. This power of this politics helps them get even with that troublesome academic community.

One person in the NAID community, however, who has come close to the kinds of ideas I talk about above is William Dembski.... Just have a look at this link:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Dembski: “I’m not denying evolutionary gradualism, challenging common descent or Natural Selection” (!!!!)

How about that! But although he's not necessarily denying evolution he does point out that evolution must start with a burden of information. That is true because this equation...

Created Information <= Starting Information + Log (Time)

 

...means that unless we are dealing with a universe that uses expanding parallelism in some way, information is only generated very slowly with the logarithm of time. 

Next time I might have a look at this post on Science & Culture...

Atheist: Why ID Is Not “God of the Gaps” | Science and Culture Today

Footnotes: 

*1 Examples: Crime detection, Archeological artifacts, Flint tools, Beaver dams, birds nests, ant's nests, the lunar monolith in 2001 Space Odyssey

*2 But the non-locality of QM is a big departure from Newtonian mechanical cause & effect.... "Spooky action at a distance!"

*3 But the evidence for Common Descent is strong although the exact mechanism's driving this engine of descent may be more debatable. 

Yet Again: Intelligence of the Gaps. Part III

NAID Granville Sewell has been caught up in
 the dualistic bandwagon which contrasts physical
laws against divine agency 

In the third part of this series I continue to examine the thinking of  Granville Sewell who argues that the second law of thermodynamics theoretically undermines evolution. Granville is part of the North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community who not only specialise in promoting a God an Intelligence-of-the-Gaps paradigm (which they will strongly deny) but they also veer toward a right-wing political stance. Strong evidence of this politics is seen in that the unwoke political animal Chris Rufo was a one time director of the Intelligent Design think-tank, The Discovery Institute. 

See the following links for the two previous two parts...

Quantum Non-Linearity: Yet Again: Intelligence of the Gaps. Part 1

Quantum Non-Linearity: Yet Again: Intelligence of the Gaps. Part II

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GRANVILLE: You can argue that a few billion years ago a simple self-replicator formed by natural chemical processes, and that over the millions of years natural selection was able to organize the duplication errors made by these self-replicators into intelligent, conscious, humans, who were able to build rockets that could reach the moon and return safely. 

MY COMMENT: Ah, at last Granville is asking the right question: It's not about the evolution of junkyard computers, rather it's a question of bio-molecular evolution. If one assumes OOL has occurred (by no means a trivial assumption) those duplication errors that Granville refers to, as we will see below, play a crucial role. 

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GRANVILLE:  I would counter that we with all our advanced technology are still not close to designing any self-replicating machine; that is still pure science fiction. When you add technology to such a machine, to bring it closer to the goal of reproduction, you only move the goal posts, as now you have a more complicated machine to reproduce. So how could we believe that such a machine could have arisen by pure chance? 

MY COMMENT: Yet again, I repeat: We are not dealing with pure chance; instead we are dealing with conditional probability. and at that conditions created by an Omnigod. Therefore, we can not yet eliminate from the inquiry the possibility that the requisite physical pre-conditions needed for OOL-development have been contrived by a God for whom all (logically contingent) things are possible. So, given this relationship:

 I <= S + Log T

1.0

....it may be that without sufficient starting information, S, about how to construct a general molecular self-replicator, the computation time, T, required to arrive at this information, I, is humanly speaking prohibitive; but really we don't know the answer to that question. The best humanity has done, however, is create replicators in the virtual world of computer memory. Evolution itself, however, poses a far more abstruse meta-question: Is it possible to invent a regime of laws, constants and diffusive momenta which, given enough time, will result in an OOL natural history....that is, to arrive at simple self-replicating structures...and then on to highly complex replicators? I'm not aware that this has been achieved even within a computer memory (*2). In fact this problem could be computationally irreducible. If Granville is looking for gaps, then this is the mother of all gaps. Trouble is, given the intellectual resources of an Omnigod we don't know whether He has filled that gap with a physical regime where OOL is possible.

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GRANVILLE: And suppose we did somehow manage to design, say, a fleet of cars with fully automated car-building factories inside, able to produce new cars, and not just normal new cars, but new cars with fully automated car-building factories inside them. Who could seriously believe [!Gut-reaction!] that if we left these cars alone for a long time, the accumulation of duplication errors made as they reproduced themselves would result in anything other than devolution, and eventually could even be organized by selective forces into more advanced automobile models? So I would claim that we don’t really understand [!Yes we do!] how living things are able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants without significant degradation, generation after generation, much less how they evolve even more complex structures.  [Concession: may be!]

MY COMMENT: OK, so leaving aside the somewhat misleading subject of self-replicating cars, the core question Granville is really asking here is this: Assuming the existence of molecular self-replicators how is it that the information needed to breed biological replicators from generation to generation isn't slowly but surely being corrupted by random noise? There is a plausible answer to this particular problem and that answer also shows us why Granville's insistence that the second law is a mathematical block to evolution is fallacious.  I will be dealing with this question in the finale. 

Granville goes onto criticise infinite multiverse attempts at explaining away the high improbabilities of our highly ordered world. I am at one with Granville in rejecting multiverse theory and won't publish his comments here, but here are links to some of my comments on the subject:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Many Worlds Theory: A theory devoid of meaning, goals and purpose

Quantum Non-Linearity: Science and the Multiverse

Quantum Non-Linearity: Middlebrow Atheism. Part 5 (Final Part)

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GRANVILLE:  Conclusions: There are various ways to argue that what has happened on Earth does not violate the more general statements of the second law as found in physics texts. The “compensation” argument, which says that “entropy” can decrease in an open system as long as the decrease is compensated by equal or greater increases outside, so that the total entropy of any isolated system containing this system still increases, is perhaps the most widely used. Since in this context “entropy” is just used as a synonym for “disorder,” [i.e. high statistical weight and not high improbability] the compensation argument, as I paraphrased it in Physics Essays, essentially says that extremely improbable things can happen in an open system as long as things are happening outside which, if reversed, would be even more improbable! This compensation argument is not valid even when applied just to thermal entropy, as the decrease in an open system is limited not by increases outside, but by the amount exported through the boundary, as I’ve shown. Since tornados derive their energy from the sun, the compensation argument could equally well be used to argue that a tornado running backward, turning rubble into houses and cars, would not violate the second law either.

MY COMMENT: Once again Granville is trying to stretch credibility in evolution by ludicrous examples whose probability is all but nil. Once again, as we saw in Part II, in lieu of giving proper cognizance to conditional probabilities and a rigorous definition of entropy Granville is using our gut-feelings about known improbabilities such as tornadoes reconstructing houses and junk yards evolving computers and then exploiting those feeling to throw doubt on bio-evolution.... not a very satisfactory way to argue.

For my purposes there is no need to get involved with this compensation argument: We know from the process of crystallisation that highly improbable things (in the unconditional sense) do happen in isolated systems given the right conditions.  Also, Granville fails to make clear that entropy is not the same as randomness and therefore a system of maximum entropy is not necessarily highly random; a system of maximum entropy is a system whose macrostate has the highest statistical weight given the physical constraints on the system. Since maximum statistical weight can't be equated with randomness, then high order in a system constrained by physics is not necessarily to be equated with high improbability, although it can be equated with high unconditional improbability. 

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GRANVILLE:  Conclusions: But there is really only one logically valid way to argue that what has happened on Earth does not violate the fundamental principle underlying the second law — the one principle from which every application and every statement of this law draws its authority. And that is to say that it only seems impossibly improbable, but it really is not, that under the right conditions, [Ahh! What about conditions created by an Omnigod?] the influx of stellar energy into a planet could cause atoms there to rearrange themselves into nuclear power plants and digital computers and encyclopedias and science texts, and spaceships that could travel to tother planets and back safely. [Granville is appealing to his gut reactions again!]

And although the second law is all about probability, very few Darwinists are willing to make such an argument; they prefer to avoid the issue of probability altogether.

MY COMMENT: Although Granville gives no cognizance to conditional probabilities and the high unconditional improbability of crystallisation, this failure certainly doesn't mean that evolutionary mechanisms, as currently understood, are the engine driving natural history; all we can say at this juncture is that Granville's line of reasoning is fallacious and as an attempt to logically falsify evolution it has failed. Instead he has fallen-back on hand waving and gut-reaction-responses to ludicrous ideas about computers, encyclopaedias, science texts and spaceships popping out of an unconditional vacuum. No, Granville, the second law isn't all about probability, rather it is all about probability and the physical constraints on that probability. Think probability envelopes! But the form of those envelopes is a vexed question (see below) and that question is as much of a poser to so-called "Darwinists" (sic) as it is to the NAIDs.

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FINALE: Concerning Duplication Errors: In his post Granville raises the question about replicator duplication errors. Why doesn't random noise corrupt the information which needs to be passed from generation to generation to preserve the integrity of the replicator configuration? An answer is to be found in an equation I've often cited on Quantum Non-Linearity: Viz: the multiplying diffusion equation.....

2.0

....where: Y represents the count of replicators diffusing through configuration space, D is the diffusion constant and the "house" operator is a multidimensional version of the 3-dimensional "Del" operator. The intelligent information which has the potential to preserve the configurational status quo of replicators is incorporated into the VY term; The value of V is assumed to be coordinate dependent and will be dependent on the creation's physical regime. This term, depending on whether V is positive or negative, respectively describes either an exponential growth or an exponential decay of the replicator population at the coordinate concerned. The result, depending on how V varies over configuration space, is that at some points in configuration space the replicator population grows and at other points it decays. 

At the same time random perturbations (Granville's "duplication errors") ensure that replicator configurations are diffusing through multidimensional configuration space; if replicator configurations diffuse into configurational areas where V is negative the population decays and dies; if they move into areas where V is positive the population grows. Thus, for example, if a replicator's configuration has become corrupt due to duplication errors and this corruption adversely impacts the replicator's ability to self-perpetuate and replicate, then in that area of configuration space V will be negative and the population will die. Alternatively, if V is positive the population will increase. The value of V is the selecting mechanism which ensures that regions of successful replication will prosper and regions with negative V entail decaying population. Thus V has the potential to not only preserve configurational integrity but to enhance configurational survival. This is standard evolutionary theory expressed in an abstracted mathematical form. There is here a similarity with language changes. Languages are subject to incremental drifting all the time, but only those increments that ensure the language remains comprehensible and useful are selected. 

But and this is the big But it all depends on the given form of V and its layout in configuration space. As I've made clear in previous posts, if standard evolution is to work V must superimpose on configuration space a network of channels constraining the diffusion and forming a connected set I call that the "spongeam". For OOL and subsequent evolution to work the spongeam network must have connections all the way back from complex replicators to lifeless soups of chemicals.

Quantum Non-Linearity: Necessary Conditions for Evolution: The Spongeam

However, given the physics of our world it is by no means clear whether or not V traces out a spongeam facilitating evolution from scratch. For example if the functionality that organic life requires to survive occurs in isolated islands then there is an unsurmountable problem for conventional evolution; trouble is, proving this one way or the other is very problematic and the cognitive gaps here tend to get filled with the tribal gut-reactions of the woke and the unwoke. 

Equation 2.0 is, however, clear on one thing; namely, that Granville's NAID tribal belief that increasing entropy necessarily contradicts evolution is wrong. The spongeam, if it exists given our physical regime, is a networked domain of possibility in configuration space defined by the form of V. This networked space is also a domain of diffusion with the diffusion being a consequence of random walk. In elementary random walk the transition rate between any pair of points in space is the same both ways because it is only dependent on the distance separating pairs of points. This sets up the condition needed for the H-theorem to hold, and if the H-theorem holds it means that in configuration space the total entropy is always increasing. This constantly increasing entropy is true even though the presumed tight constraints imposed by the spongeam on configuration space may mean that as evolution progresses highly organised configurations appear for the simple reason they are on one of diffusion routes. The irony is that the random motions of entropy are actually the motive force which drives the system toward the complex organization encoded in V, just as the random motions of the molecules of a gas create a pressure which drives the gas through a network of conduits.

Equation 2.0 is notional and no doubt a simplistic town-toy model of a possible evolutionary scenario. But although it may not bear a strong resemblance to the complexities of an actual evolutionary scenario (if such exists) what it does show, by a mathematical example, is that Granville's assertion that the second law necessarily contradicts evolution is false.

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Repeating what I said in the last part: The NAID community have sold out to anti-evolutionism, and a God an intelligence-of-the-gaps model, although that will be denied by them. I propose that they subliminally hold on to this model because the deism of the enlightenment still plagues the thoughts of many. For should the completeness of science as a descriptive system be adequately demonstrated then the subliminal intuitions of both NAID and atheist alike quietly prompts them to view the cosmos as a kind enlightenment automata capable of working unattended; no deity needed. It is then a short step to eliminating deity altogether. Anxious to avoid this conclusion the NAID community have put all their eggs into the anti-evolution basket in their determination to find evidence that God does after all demonstrate His presence in overt interventions in natural history. This has prompted them to invent the bogus category they call "blind natural forces"; not something I would use to refer to God's creation and what He has encoded into it.

Of course conversely their atheist antagonists have put all their eggs in the evolutionary basket and concluded therefore that no God is needed to drive the machinery & mechanisms of natural history. 

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As I've said before the right-wing political stance of NAID is really no surprise: The negative and even hostile reaction of the academic establishment who regard NAID as a purveyor of pseudo-science goes down like a dog-dirt sandwich with the NAID community; they know that they are being classified as the rejected other. But the NAID community have fallen in with politically powerful friends such as Trump, Kennedy and Steven Miller et al. Perhaps these powerful friends can teach the "woke" academic establishment a lesson or two! Such is the degeneration of a community who propose otherwise interesting questions about the ultimate origins of the cosmos.

Footnotes and notes

1. See this link for more on my reaction to the woke and the unwoke

Views, News and Pews: Review of Sharon James Book , "The LIES...."

*2. But see this: Did Google Researchers Just Create a Self-Replicating Computer Life Form?

3. Evolution and Human Technology:  

Quantum Non-Linearity: From Spears to Aircraft