Misrepresenting North American Intelligent Design

I've skimmed over the following article on the North American Intelligent Design (NAID) web site, Science and Culture....

On Scopes and Dover, Robert Pennock Twists History and Science | Science and Culture Today

Basically it's a long complaint about professor of philosophy Robert Pennock who in an article in American Scientists is accused of misrepresenting NAID. According to the article Pennock does no justice to the considerable differences between Young Earth fundamentalism and NAID. The article tells us that...

When it comes to intelligent design (ID), Pennock misleadingly charges that the “fundamental beliefs” of “ID creationists” are “continuous with those of creation-science”

Well, if the Science and Culture article is anything to go by I would agree: Pennock should have acknowledged the gulf between NAID  as an umbrella broad church, quasi-evolutionary community and the narrowness of YEC fundamentalism: NAID is a very different culture to YEC; it is much more tolerant than YEC fundamentalism toward a blend of opinions which subsume under the heading of ID.  By and large the NAID community are old earthers and therefore by implication they accept that natural history is evolutionary in the weaker sense that life has emerged bit by bit over a considerable period of time. Where the contention with NAID lies is in its identification of the precise mechanism of that emergence. 

So yes, going by the S&C article I'd agree that Pennock has created a distorted picture of the NAID community and I would blame the Pennocks of this world, in part, for the right-ward drift of the NAID community as they have found powerful allies in the Christian nationalist far-right. (e.g. the late Charlie Kirk; see also here). Pennock is attempting to simplify social reality by lumping together his antagonists into a single block. 

The kind of position propounded by Pennock is pretty much embedded in mainstream texts. Evidence of this can be seen in the replies I got from Google using two slightly different prompts on two different days. Viz: 

Prompt: North American Intelligent Design (My emphases)....

GOOGLE: "Intelligent design" (ID) in the North American context is a pseudoscientific, neo-creationist movement that asserts certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, rather than undirected natural processes like natural selection. The movement is primarily centered in the United States and driven by the Discovery Institute.

Prompt: North American Intelligent Design community (My emphases).... 

GOOGLE: The North American intelligent design (ID) community primarily consists of advocates and organizations, largely centered around the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC) in Seattle, Washington. This movement promotes the viewpoint that certain features of the universe and living beings are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than undirected natural processes like natural selection.

Let me make a special note of the phrasing used by Google.: Viz....

This movement promotes the viewpoint that certain features of the universe and living beings are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than undirected natural processes like natural selection.

Those quotes are very telling; it's the old intelligent agency vs blind natural forces dichotomy surfacing yet again! In fact it's the very dichotomy that NAID pundits use again and again (See here for example). The irony is that evolution, if it is the mechanism behind natural history, can hardly be called blind or undirected - in fact it would classify as a very remarkable process that in itself would have to be carefully designed - see here for more on that subject. 

The NAID community have actually known for a long while that evolution requires some extraordinary choreographing if it is to be an effective process. I first became aware that the NAID community had in their midst someone who understood this as far back 2009 when I discussed William Dembski's concept of Active Information: See here, here and here. Dembski brought up the subject of the Avida program which attempts to simulate an elementary model of evolutionary creation, a process whose inner engine drives the emergence of highly complex self-perpetuating, self-sustaining configurations. The Science & Culture article also mentions the Avida program as follows (My emphases):

But the Avida genetic algorithm he references precisely shows the need for intelligence to build complexity. Avida uses “mutations” that are pre-programmed and intelligently engineered to yield great leaps in complexity, not blind “slight modifications” that Darwin’s theory requires. As pro-ID computer scientist Winston Ewert put it, Avida was “designed to evolve.”

Well, yes, yes and yes to that, but also a great big whopping No! Sorry chaps, but you've just help promote the atheist version of Darwin's theory; that's because you've swallowed the atheist interpretation of this theory which axiomatizes the blind natural forces vs intelligent agency dichotomy which I've complained about so many times; my latest rant on this subject was against NAID pundit Casey Luskins (again, see here).  For evolution to work certain minimum conditions must hold and these minimum conditions must be embodied in the following caricatured equation which controls diffusion through multidimensional configuration space...

Equation 1

...where Y represents the medium 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 is incorporated into the VY term which must superimpose a network of channels on configuration space constraining the diffusion (I call that network the "spongeam"). This equation also tells us that the random motions of entropy are actually the motive force which drives the system toward the complex organization encoded in V, just as gas pressure drives gas through a network of conduits; it also explains why the  trend toward increasing entropy is consistent with the appearance of organised complex configurations - something which many NAIDs simply refuse to come to terms with. (e.g. Granville Sewell.  See footnotes *1 & *2)

If bog standard evolution is to be a viable process the crucial information must be incorporated in V. May be this has been achieved via the standard laws of physics which include an array of constants with who knows how many digits after the decimal point, thus storing large amounts of information. Or perhaps the Divine mind patches in the channels without the use of clever & subtle mathematics. Or it may be that NAID pundit William Dembski is right and that the physics of the cosmos implies that functionality only occurs in isolated islands; if Dembski is right then this would be a show-stopper as far as standard evolution is concerned; in which case the incremental trial and error computations needed to arrive at self-sustaining designs are taking place in the divine mind and are then patched ad-hoc into nature. As far as I'm concerned Demsbki could well be right, but I have my doubts; I have a feeling that God being the sort of person he is has reified his calculations by impressing them upon natural history; in which case Dembski is wrong. Personally I'm not dogmatic about my position on this question.

However, NAID William Dembski is wrong when he asserts that "natural forces", so called, cannot increase information. But as we saw here this equation,,,,, 

             I <= S + Log(T)

Equation 2

....tells us how information I increases with the Log of the number of steps in time T given the algorithmic information S. That divinely maintained linear time generates information very slowly has confused many that it can't generate information at all. However, that algorithmically controlled processing can generate information becomes much clearer when parallel processing is replaced with expanding parallelism and the equation above looks more like this

                                                                                I <= S + T

                                                                                    ****

Why do the NAID's not like evolution even though one can plausibly maintain that in the light of it's overwhelming surprisal value it is another manifestation of creative design and maintenance? Well to my mind the above equation might throw some light on this question. Conventional evolution demands that the contingent algorithmic information represented by S has an a priori high level of sophistication; but - and this is where NAID (and also many fundies) have their issues - evolution, as we conceive it, also demands very large numbers of temporal steps, T. To suggest such is a dangerous precedent to both NAIDs and fundamentalists; for too big a value of T suggests that the "blind natural forces" (sic) of time are the mechanism of evolution! Like a mindless enlightenment automata that mechanism is thought (wrongly) to allow the Divine mind to stand back and watch; that for many a naïve theist is a very worrying trending thought indeed....Time itself seems to be doing the work of creation and not some intervening deity; so let's do away with deity; it apparently serves no purpose! It's as if miracles are only perceived to reside in S and not in T. Crypto deism still rules the western mind. 

Diffusional Evolution cannot be ruled out on the basis that it is a "blind natural force": If indeed it is the mechanism driving the dynamic of natural history, then it is a highly sophisticated process which invites speculation about divine design. OK, it may not pass the islands of functionality test (Well, actually we don't know with high certainty if it does or doesn't) but NAID has not ruled it out on that basis: As my repeated analysis of their writings show, they rule it out on the spurious basis of being a wholly "blind natural force" which is certainly not true. In this respect the NAID community has dug itself into a hole as an anti-evilution movement. Although I have great sympathy with the misrepresentation of NAID, it seems that the trench digging on both sides of an intellectual no-man's land means the battle lines have ossified. 

****

Natural vs Supernatural?

One final comment I would like to make on the Science & Culture article concerns this passage : 

The Edwards ruling found that creationism was unconstitutional because it referred to a “supernatural creator,” and Pennock claims that ID requires “supernatural creation.” Yet he again ignores that pre-publication drafts of Pandas said the opposite. As John West notes, “Pandas carefully distinguishes between ‘supernatural’ causes and ‘intelligent’ causes, for intelligent causes are amenable to scientific investigation, whereas it is impossible to detect whether a cause is ‘supernatural.’”7 One pre-publication draft of Pandas provides a typically clear statement to this effect: “observable instances of information cannot tell us if the intellect behind them is natural or supernatural. This is not a question that science can answer.” Such reasoning differs crucially from creationism, which (as the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Edwards) always appeals to the supernatural. ID does not do this. Thus, even when using language referring to “creationism” or derivative terms, the Pandas textbook differed from classical creationism in fundamental philosophical, scientific, and legally important ways.

How can we tell what is supernatural and what isn't? The almost unrelenting high organization of our experiences does, however, give us a strong sense of normalcy: It is this sense of stable normalcy which allows us to mathematically define an apparently solid world of matter and this also facilitates experimental replication and testing, almost at will. At the other end of the spectrum are those far less accessible objects which generate once-in-a-while experiential output. 

But suppose we impose an a priori a world view whereby we only accept testable experiential output as valid if it is considered to be a consequence of what we believe to be immutable patterns of output conforming to mathematical algorithms? The assumption behind this world view can be then used to not only distinguish between the natural and the supernatural but also used as a basis to rule out observations which cut across the theoretical status quo; in this social context "supernatural" experiences are regarded as bogus. Thus experiential anomalies and erratics are dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders as mistaken; a psychological foible of human beings. 

Once again we see that the NAID community have swallowed a popular dichotomy - in this case the "supernatural vs natural" dichotomy. In my view it is better to commit to a far less stark concept of an observational spectrum which ranges from the normal to the supernormal. 

Footnotes

*1 Sewell is still trying to put the same case even today. See here;

For Darwin Skeptics, What Does Second Law Argument Accomplish? | Science and Culture Today

He appears not to have seen the possible implications of accepting that the whole cosmos has been created by a super intelligence (and the implications of equation 1 above). As the NAIDs themselves have admitted this opens the possibility that the universe has "been designed to evolve" (See Winston Ewart's quote above). This is not to say that evolution as currently understood has actually taken place, but if it has we cannot follow those atheists (and Sewell?) who then assume that evolution automatically entails no design. 

*2 The diffusion term obeys the H theorem but the V term does not. That's because V is an external perturbation. That is, in order to restore the H theorem one must embrace the system that is causing the perturbation V. The point is that the although overall order decreases (as proved by the H theorem), subsystems within the total system can increase in order.

Bill Dembski's Information Conservation Thesis Falls Over

NAID's Stephen Meyer interviewed by Unwoke Right Wing Republican Dan Crenshaw. 
Evidence that NAID has become part of the  politicized culture war

I see that William "Bill" Dembski has done a post on Evolution News on the subject of the "Conservation of Information". The article is for the most part an interesting history of that phrase and goes to show that "information" has a number of meanings dependent on the discipline where it is being used, with Bill Dembski having his own proprietary concerns tied up with his support of the North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community.  See here for the article:

Conservation of Information: History of an Idea | Evolution News

Bill's particular information interest seems to lie with the so called "No Free Lunch Theorems". These theorems were about the mathematical limits on computer algorithms purposed to search for (and/or generate) configurations with properties of particular interest. Bill's focus on the "No Free Lunch Theorems" is bound up with the NAID community's challenge to standard evolution, a process which they see as a threat to their self-inflicted XOR creation dichotomy; viz: either "God Intelligence did it" XOR "Blind unguided natural forces did it" . 

But Bill gets full marks for spotting the relevance of these theorems to evolutionary theory: Evolution does have at least some features isomorphic with computer searches; in particular these theorems do throw some light on evolution's "search", reject and select mechanism which locks in organic configurations. So, the least I can say is that Bill's interest in the "No free lunch theorems" is based on what looks to be a potentially fruitful avenue of study. However, although it is true that the "No free lunch theorems" reveal interesting mathematical limits on computer searches, as we will see Bill has gone too far in trying co-opt these theorems for his concept of information conservation; in fact, to the contrary I would say that these theorems prove that Bill is wrong about the conservation of information.

                                                                                             ***

We can get a gut feeling for the No free lunch theorems with the impressionistic & informal mathematical analysis in this post. 

(Note: I arrived at similar conclusions in these two essays...

GeneratingComplexity2c.pdf - Google Drive

CreatingInformation.pdf - Google Drive 

These essays are more formal and cover the subject in more detail)

***

We imagine that we have a set of computer programs executing in parallel with the intention of finding out if at some point in their computations they generate examples of a particular class of configuration. These configurations are to be found somewhere in an absolutely huge domain of possible configurations that I shall call D and which numbers D members, where D is extremely large.  It is a well known fact that most of the members of D will likely be highly disordered. 

A computer "search" starts with its initial algorithmic information  usually coded in the form of a character string or configuration S of length S. This configurational string contains the information informing the computing machinery how to generate a sequence of configurations C1, C2,.....,C_n,.... etc. The software creates this sequence by modifying the current configuration C_n in order to create the next configuration C_n+1. A crucial operational characteristic of algorithms is that they are capable of making if-then-else type decisions which means that the modifications leading to C_n+1 will be dependent on configurational features found in C_n. It is this decisional feature of executed algorithms which gives them their search, reject and select character, not unlike evolution. This means that their trajectory through configuration space is often very difficult to predict without actually executing the algorithm. This is because the conditional decision-making of algorithms means that we can't predict what direction an algorithm will take at any one point in the computation until the conditions it is responding to have actually been generated by the algorithm. The concept of computational irreducibility is relevant here. 

In his article Bill is careful to describe the components of search algorithms, components which give them their search, reject & select character. But for my purposes we can simplify things by ignoring these components and only give cognizance to the fact that an algorithm takes its computer along what is possibly a non-linear trajectory in configuration space. We can also drop Bill's talk of the algorithm aiming for a specified target and then stopping since in general an algorithm can go on indefinitely moving through configuration space endlessly generating configurations as does conventional evolution. All we need to be concerned about here is the potentiality for algorithms to generate a class of configs of interest in a  "time" T where T is measured in algorithmic steps. 

                                                ***

If we have an algorithm with a string length of S then the maximum number of possible algorithms that can be constructed given this string length is A^s where A is the number of characters in the character set used to write the algorithm.

We now imagine that we have these possible A^s algorithms all executing in parallel for T steps. It then follows that the maximum number of configurations C which potentially can be generated by these possible algorithms of length S will be no greater than the limits set by the following relationship....

C <= A^s x  T

 Relation 1.0

...where C is the number of configurations that can be created in time T if the set of algorithms are run in parallel and assuming that a) T is measured in algorithmic steps and that b) the computing machinery is only capable of one step at a time and generates one configuration per step per algorithm.  

If the class of configurations we are interested in exist somewhere in a huge domain D consisting of D configurations and where for practically realistic execution times T:

                                     D >>> C

Relation 2.0

...then the relatively meager number of configurations our algorithm set can generate in realistic times like T are a drop in the ocean when compared to the size of the set of configurational possibilities that comprise D.  If relationship 2.0 holds then it is clear that given realistic times T, our "searches" will be unable to access the vast majority of configurations in D. 

With the above relationships in mind no free lunch starts to make some sense: If we are looking for algorithms which generate members of a particular class of configuration of interest (e.g. organic-like configurations) then for the algorithmic search to have a chance of succeeding in a reasonable time we require one of the following two conditions to be true...

1. Assuming that such exists then an algorithm of reasonable length S has to be found which is able to generate the targeted class of configurations within a reasonable time T.  However, if relationship 2.0 holds then it is clear that this option will not work for the vast majority of configurations in D.

2.  The alternative is that we invalidate relationship 2.0 by either a) allowing the algorithms of length S to be large enough so that A^s ~ D, or b) allowing the execution time T of these algorithms to be sufficiently large so that T ~ D,  or c) allowing that T and A^s when combined invalidate relationship  2.0. 

***

So, with the foregoing in mind we can see that if an algorithm is to generate a stipulated class of solution in domain D in a reasonable time T it either a) has to be logically possible to code the algorithmic solution in a starting string S of reasonable length S or b) we have to code the required information into a long string S of length S such that A^s ~ D. 

In case a) both S and T are of a practically reasonable magnitude from which it follows that given relationship 1.0 then little of the domain D  can be generated by such algorithms and therefore the majority of configurations that could possibly be designated as of interest in D (especially if they are complex disordered configurations) can not be found by these case-a algorithms. In case b) the starting string S, in terms of the number of possible algorithms that can be constructed, is commensurate with the size of D and therefore could possibly generate configurations of stipulated interest in a reasonable time. 

Therefore it follows that if we are restricted to relatively short algorithm strings of length S then these algorithms will only have a chance of reaching the overwhelming majority of configurations in D after very long execution times. If our configurations of designated interest are in this long execution time region in D these configurations will demand large values of T to generate. Long execution time algorithms, absent of any helpful starting strings which provide "short cut" information are I think what Bill calls "blind search algorithms". That emphasis on the word "blind" is a loaded misnomer which appeals to the NAID community for reasons which I hope will become clear. 

***

For Bill this what no free lunch means to him...

Because no-free-lunch theorems assert that average performance of certain classes of search algorithms remain constant at the level of blind search, these theorems have very much a conservation of information feel in the sense that conservation is strictly maintained and not merely that conservation is the best that can be achieved, with loss of conservation also a possibility

It's true that unless primed with the right initial information by far and away the majority of algorithms will reach most targets of an arbitrarily designated interest only after very long execution times involving laborious searching.....ergo, upfront information that lengthens S is needed to shorten the search; in fact this is always true by definition if we are wanting to generate configurations of interest that are also random configurations. 

So, the following is my interpretation of what Bill means by the conservation of information; namely, that to get the stipulated class of garbage out in reasonable time you have to put the right garbage in from the outset. The "garbage in" is a starting string S of sufficient length to tip the algorithm off as to where to look. The alternative is to go for searches with very long execution times T. So, paraphrasing Bill, we might say that his conservation of information can be expressed by this caricatured equation:

G_in = G_out

Relation 3.0

....where G_in represents some kind of informational measure of the "garbage" going in and G_out is the informational measure of the garbage coming out of the computation. But the following is the crucial point which as we will see invalidates Bill's conservation of information: Although relationship 3.0 gives Bill his conservation of information feel, it is an approximation which only applies to reasonable execution times.....it neglects the fact that the execution of an algorithm does create information if only slowly. That Bill has overlooked the fact that what he calls "blind searches" nevertheless slowly generate information becomes apparent from the following analysis.

***

If we take the log of relation 1.0 we get:

                                                         Log (C) <= S Log (A) + Log(T)

relation 4.0

The value C is the number of configurations that A^s algorithms will generate in time T and this will be less than or equal to the righthand side of the above relation. The probability of one these C configurations being chosen at random will be 1/C. Converting this probability to a Shannon information value, I, gives:

I = - Log (1/C) = Log (C)

relation 5.0

Therefore substituting I into 4.0 gives:

I <= S Log (A) + Log(T)

relation 6.0

Incorporating Log (A) into a generalized measure of string length, S gives....

I <= S + Log(T)

relation 7.0

From this relationship we can see that parallel algorithms do have the potential to generate Shannon Information with time T, and the information is not just incorporated from the outset in a string of length S. However, we do notice that because the information generated by execution time is the log function of T, that information is generated very slowly. This is what Bill has overlooked: What he derisively refers to as a "blind search" (sic) actually has the potential to generate information, if slowly. Bill's view is expressed further in the following quote from his article (With my emphases and with my insertions in red).....

With the no-free-lunch theorems, something is clearly being conserved [No, wrong] in that performance of different search algorithms, when averaged across the range of feedback information, is constant and equivalent to performance of blind search.[Log(T) is the "blind search" component] The question then arises how no free lunch relates to the consistent claim in the earlier conservation-of-information literature about output information not exceeding input information. In fact, the connection is straightforward. The only reason to average performance of algorithms across feedback information is if we don’t have any domain-specific information to help us find the target in question.[The "domain-specific" information is implicit in the string S of length S in relation 7.0] 

Consequently, no free lunch tells us that without such domain-specific information, we have no special input information to improve the search, and thus no way to achieve output information that exceeds the capacities of blind search. When it comes to search, blind search is always the lowest common denominator — any search under consideration must always be able to do at least as good as blind search because we can always execute a blind search.[Oh no we can't Bill, at least not practically quickly enough under the current technology; we still await the technological sophistication to implement the expanding parallelism needed for "blind search" to be effective, the holy grail of computing. "Blind search" is a much more sophisticated idea than our Bill and his NAID mates are making out!] With no free lunch, it is blind search as input and blind search as output. The averaging of feedback information treated as input acts as a leveler, ensuring parity between information input and output. No free lunch preserves strict conservation [Tough, not true!] precisely because it sets the bar so low at blind search.

By distilling its findings into a single fundamental relation of probability theory, this work provides a definitive, fully developed, general formulation of the Law of Conservation of Information, showing that information that facilitates search cannot magically materialize out of nothing but instead must be derived from pre-existing sources.[False; information derives not just from S, but can also creep in from an algorithm's  execution time T ]

Blind search, blind search, blind search, blind, blind, blind,...... the repeated mantra of NAID culture which with its subliminal gnosto-dualism repeatedly refers to the resources of God's creation as a place of "blind natural forces". Sometimes you will also hear them talk about "unguided natural forces". But in one sense I would maintain the cosmos is far from "natural", and this is evidenced by the  sense of wonder its highly contingent form engenders among theists and atheists alike, all of whom can advance no logically obliging reason as to its highly organised configuration (accept perhaps Richard Carrier whose arrogance on this score would do Zaphod Beeblebrox  proud)

Bill's last sentence above is clearly false, as false can be; he's overlooked the slowly growing information term in relation 7.0. Information is not conserved during a search because the so-called "blind search" (sic) term is slowly, almost undetectably creating information. There is therefore no "strict conservation of information" (sic). That the so-called "blind search" (sic) is being understated by Bill and the NAID culture he represents becomes very apparent as soon as we realize that equation 7.0 has been derived on the assumption that we are using parallel processing; that is, a processing paradigm where the number of processors doing the computation is constant. But if we start thinking about the exponentials of a process which utilizes expanding parallelism the second term on the righthand side of 7.0 has the potential to become linear in T and therefore highly significant. This is why so much effort and cash is being put into quantum computing; Quantum computers clearly create information at a much more rapid rate and it is the monumental resources being invested in this line of cutting edge research which gives the lie to Bill's contention that information is conserved during computation and that somehow "blind search" rates as a primitive last resort. 

                                                                       ***

As far as the big evolution question is concerned I regard this matter with studied detachment. God as the sovereign author of the cosmic story could introduce information into the cosmic configuration generator using either or both terms in relation 7.0; in particular if unlike primitive humanity at our current technological juncture God has at his finger tips the power of expanding parallelism to crack the so called blind search problem the second term on the righthand side of 7.0 has the potential to become significant. Accordingly, I reject NAID's wrongly identified "blind natural forces" category when those forces are in fact highly sophisticated because they are in the hands of Omniscient Omnipotence. The trouble is that the NAID community have heavily invested in an anti-evolution culture and it looks like they've past the point of no return, such is their huge social and tribal identification with anti-evolutionism. Ironically, even if bog-standard evolution is true (along with features like junk DNA) we are still faced with the Intelligent Design question. As for myself I have no indispensable intellectual investment in either the evolutionist or anti-evolutionist positions.

                                                    ***

As I have remarked so many times before, what motivates NAID (& YEC) culture's aversion to the idea that information can be created by so-called "blind natural forces" is this culture's a priori anti-evolution stance. Underlying this stance, I propose, is a subliminal gnosto-dualist mindset, and this mindset in this subliminal form afflicts Western societies across the board, from atheism to authoritarian & touchy feely expressions of Christianity; in fact Western religious expression in general. But that's another story. (See for example my series on atheist Don Cupitt - a series yet to be completed)

What's compounded my problem with NAID & YEC nowadays is their embrace of unwoke political culture, a culture which automatically puts them at odds with the academic establishment. I'll grant that that establishment and its supporters have often (or at least sometimes) subjected outsiders (like Bill for example) to verbal abuse and cancellation (e.g. consider Richard Dawkins & the Four Horseman, RationalWiki etc.). This has help urge them to find friends among the North American far-right academia hating tribes and embrace some of their political attitudes (See here). As I personally by and large support academia (but see here) it is therefore likely that I too would be lumped together by the NAID & YEC communities as a "woke" sympathizer, even though I reject any idea that the problems of society can be finally fixed by social engineering initiated centrally, least of all by Marxist social engineering. But then I'm also a strong objector to far-right libertarian social engineering which seeks a society regulated purely by a community's use of their purses (and then be pray to the chaotic non-linearities of market economics and power grabbing by plutocratic crony capitalists). In today's panicked and polarized milieu the far-right would see even a constitutional Royalist like myself who is also in favour of a regulated market economy, as at best a diluted "socialist" and at worst a far-left extremist, ripe for the woke-sin-bin!

NOTE: An article on "Conservation of Information" has recently popped up on Panda's Thumb. See here: Conservation of arguments

NAID pundits Hedin and Sewell rightly criticized

Acknowledgement: I think this picture comes from the Faraday Institute, 

a Christain organization of scientists. It sums up well the NAID 

 community's dogmatic and entrenched (and politicized) version of 

Intelligent Design

In a post on Panda's Thumb Evomathematician Joe Felsenstein justifiably criticizes North American Intelligent Design (NAID) pundits Eric Hedin and Granville Sewell for the weakness of their anti-evolution arguments. See Felsenstein's article here: Eric Hedin, meet Granville Sewell

I have critiqued the work of both Sewell and Hedin myself. Below are links to some of the articles I've written.

ON HEDIN

Quantum Non-Linearity: NAID pundit William Dembski on AI

Quantum Non-Linearity: North American Intelligent Design's response to my 27 June & 2 July posts. Part 2

Quantum Non-Linearity: North American Intelligent Design's response to my last two posts. Part 1

ON SEWELL

Quantum Non-Linearity: Make it IDist proof and along comes a better IDist

Quantum Non-Linearity: Caution! You are about to enter Intelligent Design's false dichotomy zone!

Quantum Non-Linearity: Western Dualism in the North American Intelligent Design Community. Part 2

Quantum Non-Linearity: IDISTS

Quantum Non-Linearity: Once More into the False Dichotomy Zone: "Naturalism vs. Design".

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution and Computation

Quantum Non-Linearity: Granville Sewell; Still Getting it Wrong.

Quantum Non-Linearity: Thermodynamics and Evolution – Again.

And while I'm here: I have also critiqued IDists Nametti and Holloway for their halfcocked notion of "Algorithmic Specified Complexty".  See here:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Breaking Through the Information Barrier in Natural History Part 5

And again, while I'm here it's unfair to miss out Casey Luskin:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Naive Intelligent Design: Part III

***

Felsenstein presents two examples of the kind of hand waving arguments we get from these two NAID pundits. About Hedin's hand waving Felsenstein writes: 

Eric Hedin’s argument [against evolution] boils down to simple incredulity, without any logical proof of a barrier to evolution by ordinary evolutionary processes.

In my opinion that sums up much of the anti-evolution polemic one gets from the NAID tribe as a whole. But although one can criticize NAID thinking at a technical level (as does Felsenstein) it is also possible to criticize them from the very theistic basis which we know motivates most NAID endeavors; that is, NAID logic has internal incoherence. As a Christian myself this approach interests me (But of course one can't expect an atheist like Joe Felsenstein to respect a theistic approach).

As I've repeated so many times in this blog the NAID community as a whole are intoxicated by a blind natural forces versus intelligent design dichotomy. The irony is that the concept of Intelligent Design itself actually undermines the NAID community's dualistic dichotomy: For if one posits a creator God (as I do) then the very concept of blind natural forces becomes problematic; if an Omniscient, Omnipotent God has created those highly contingent and very special "natural forces" with the foresight of omniscience they can hardly be usefully labeled as blind and natural. See the following link where I suggest it is at least arguable that even standard evolution (if, repeat if, it has occurred) is not only highly unnatural but in fact constitutes creation with a vengeance....

Quantum Non-Linearity: NAID Part IV: Evolution: Creation on Steriods

See also the link below for Christian biologist Denis Alexander's comments which are in effect critical of NAID....

Quantum Non-Linearity: Denis Alexander: "I would suggest dropping the term 'methodological naturalism'"

Just as the NAID folk have irreversibly committed themselves (unnecessarily) to an outright anti-evolutionism they have similarly committed themselves (unnecessarily) to an outright and dogmatic anti-Junk DNA position. Again, ID itself undermines NAID's absolute certainty of this position: For even if we allow that life entailed an Omniscient, Omnipotent God directly tinkering with DNA during its long natural history we know so little about the methods and motives of that inscrutable intelligence that it is quite possible that like a human programmer this entity, for whatever mysterious reason, decided to leave or even insert dormant and redundant code in the DNA. None of this is to say that junk DNA exists (or doesn't exist), but the absence of junk DNA isn't a necessary implication of ID. 

I've come to the opinion that NAID thinking has less to do with a dispassionate intellectual position than it does the taking up of a variety of polemical postures which have more to do with tribal political badging (and badgering) than the studied detachment of heroic investigative thinking: See my article here: Quantum Non-Linearity: NAID Part V: Politics and North American Intelligent Design. Linked to their political branding are politically contrarian and anti-academic-establishment notions connected with climate change, vaccines, masks, gun law, sex & gender and paranoia about a large deep state and regulation of capitalist excesses (*1). One also has to throw into the mix young earthism, flat earthism and even conspiracy theorism and Trumpism, all of which are tribal subdivisions within the broad church of what is essentially an anti-establishment popularist movement. 

The arrogant atheism of someone like Richard Carrier is fueling the politically polarizing fires with his own very flawed version of "natural forces". Carrier simply doesn't understand probability and randomness which to his mind can be (ab)used as the ultimate logical truisms, the ultimate insentient creative "natural force". For him probability is at the heart of an atheist mythology about the aseity of a creative source which stands in as a kind of god-dynamic. Interestingly Sea of Faith theologian (and atheist!) Don Cupitt also gets carried away with the subliminal but spurious & curious assumption that the "mechanical universe" entails a self-sustaining efficacy; see here: Quantum Non-Linearity: The Sea of Faith and Don Cupitt. Part I.

For more on the popularist vs establishment polarization see here: Views, News and Pews: Religious Popularism vs Academia).

Finally let me make this clear: Along with Christian physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne I can claim to be an intelligent design creationist, but I reject the NAID community's entrenched, dogmatic and highly politicized popularist version of ID. In the early days of this blog I was sympathetic, but no longer. 

ADDENDUM 19/12

I was interested to read this quick report by David Klinghoffer on a NAID conference at the prestigious wood-paneled Cambridge University (UK)...

“Doesn’t the Fossil Record Prove Darwin Right?” | Evolution News

He raises well known challenges to standard evolutionary theory (e.g. The fossil record doesn't appear to provide strong evidence of that necessary implication of standard evolution, namely evolutionary gradualism). It's no skin off my nose if the current proposed mechanisms of evolution are false since I haven't put down big stakes (either way) in bog-standard evolutionary mechanisms.

But of course, NAID has huge stakes in anti-evolutionism (They have also put down big political stakes). With its intoxicating "natural forces vs evolution" dichotomy it has inextricably tied their version of ID to an anti-evolutionary position (*2). This of course means that should a successful development mechanism of natural history gain sufficient evidence their dichotomy would imply that ID is false and atheist Richard Dawkins who is enamored of the same dichotomy wins!

Klinghoffer betrays his intoxication with the NAID dichotomy when at the end of an otherwise agreeable post writes of the discontinuities in the fossil record.....

Such explosions of creativity are just what you’d predict from the activity of a designing mind, a source of biological information outside nature that has shaped the long history of life.

Sorry David that's not a necessary prediction of ID. As I've said so often, even bog-standard evolution requires careful design. But like Richard Dawkins NAID is having none of it: According to NAID, if evolution has occurred then we must all become atheists like our Richard!

Footnotes:

*1. Anger at private health insurers: Fuel for Marxist agitators!

The dark fandom behind CEO murder suspect Luigi Mangione - BBC News

*2 I'm of the opinion that NAID has driven its stakes so deeply because they are now part of an anti-establishment popularist political trend with Trump-world as the chief bellwether.

INTERESTING LINKS

1. May be not!

 A scientist may have just proven that we all live inside a computer simulation

2. Put science into the hands of market entrepreneurs?

Scientists as scoundrels

Far right Libertarianism.....

Milei has not minced words about his feelings towards scientists. Rather than having their research subsidized by the government, he said during a forum in September, “I invite them to go out into the market. Investigate, publish and see if people are interested or not, instead of hiding like scoundrels behind the coercive force of the state”.

The Compulsion of Conspiracy Theorism

 (This post also appeared on my Views, News and Pews blog, but to complete the collection on Quantum Non-Linearity I add it here as well)

                                        

I have recently compiled this analysis of an article by end-times pundit Wilfred Hahn. Below I've copied in the introduction to my analysis. 

1.     Introduction

      This document is best read in conjunction with my document here where I explore some of the pratfalls of conspiracy theorism. 

Conspiracy theorism is a pernicious evil that wracks democratic society; it undermines confidence and plays into the hands of tricksters and would-be-dictators who are looking for the disillusioned, the angry, the disaffected, the traumatised and the paranoid as an easy-sell for their concocted rumours of conspiracy & blame in order to justify a power grab. The cut & thrust and the open contensions natural to an accountable democracy exacerbates the insecurity of those targeted by would-be-despots who perceive democratic debate and its rancour as a sign of weakness and failure.

Of course, in societies where dictatorship has been successfully installed (e.g. Putin’s Russia) there is sufficient autocratic media control to block all conspiracies theories but the one put out by the protection racketeers in charge. In totalitarian and authoritarian states government may be headed by a demagogue figure who is portrayed as the only truth teller.

In this document I look at a web article by Christian end-times pundit Wilfred Hahn.  He consciously avoids fanciful conspiracy theories peddled by web enabled theorists. These theorists join the dots of social history into ramifying plots hatched by hidden nefarious operators who are said to be the evil geniuses behind current affairs. Hahn’s overall thesis is that an integrated economic system facilitated by enhanced technology, social integration and a world market makes the idea of international centralized social control by an anti-Christ an all too plausible scenario. I would not disagree with this conclusion.

But as we shall see, although Hahn identifies no specific baroque conspiracy behind current affairs he nevertheless informs us that the history of progress is a product of a conspiracy intended to bring about an anti-Christ power grab. He therefore inadvertently plays into the hand of conspiracy theorists by leaving the edges of the map blank and making statements to the effect that “Here be Monsters”. Therefore the active imaginations of the disillusioned, the angry, the disaffected, the traumatised and the paranoid are encouraged to fill in those spaces with fanciful entities which explain and make sense of their fears and anger: Such will take their eyes off up & coming world-dictators and instead they will focus on the fanciful intrigue imagined to be going on behind the scenes. All this will play into the hands of an antichrist.

It’s with reluctance that I relate my anticipation that many Christians are well set up to be duped by up-and-coming dictators who use conspiracy theories to exploit Christian diffidence about the democratic West where freedom of expression & choice is a prime moral value.  It is ironic that reformation Christianity opened the way to a sequence of events that ultimately gave Western populations the choice to accept or reject the core message of Christianity. This very freedom of choice was built into Christianity along with many other aspects of the democratic West where the concept that community serves the individual (and vice versa) along with the freedom to dissent still has a very strong hold on Western minds. The irony was that Christ’s take-it-or-leave-it presentation of Himself turned out to contain the seeds of the possible demise of core Christianity in the West.

As a reaction against the marginalisation and decay of core Christianity in the West it seems that some Christians consequently find common ground with potential dictators and will support a dictators cause as the price for the restoration of their traditional authoritarian view of society. (e.g Hitler, Trump and Putin). In any case many of those Christians come from sects with a culture that has a high view of demagogic leadership and may even seek to bring about a Christian social authoritarianism bordering on dominionism.  My guess is that Christianity will become debatable ground during the end times; by that I mean demagogues will claim to be working for Christianity.