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This intelligence-of-the-gaps model is still being used by the North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community although they will strenuously deny it. As a consequence all their eggs are in the anti-evolution basket |
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| NAID thinker, Granville Sewell, is still using the like other NAIDs he will probably deny it. |
I have remarked before on the extreme unconditional improbability of evolution; so much so in fact that if evolution has actually occurred it would be Creation on Steroids. See here...
Quantum Non-Linearity: NAID Part IV: Evolution: Creation on Steriods
If evolution is at least a theoretical possibility then presumably for Christian theists the creation of such a mechanism of development would not be beyond the cognitive resources of an Omnigod (*1). However, given that our cosmos appears to be a parallel processor rather than one with the capability of exponentially expanding parallelism it would seem that it must have required a heavy dollop of "starting" or "implicit" information S, as demanded by this equation...
I <= S + Log T
equation 1
...where S is the starting/implicit information, T is the generation time and I the information generated. More about this equation can be found at the end of this paper here. For conventional evolution to work (assuming it has occurred) S would have to be very large even given the space-time dimensions of our own observable cosmos. There is also the question of just where this implicit information resides: Is it just in the laws of physics and the possibly endless decimal places of its fine tuned constants? I don't claim to know.
It is not absolutely clear, however, that evolution is even a theoretical possibility: For example it may be that NAID William Dembski is right: He suspects that organic forms employ "isolated" islands of functionality. If this is true then it would be a block to the necessarily gradualist diffusing process across configuration space that is the fundamental underlying mechanism of bog-standard evolution. Theological objections apart, in order to completely eliminate evolution from the inquiry one needs to...
a) Demonstrate mathematically its theoretical impossibility.
And/Or...
b) Demonstrate that it's not in line with empirical evidence.
Even if it becomes clear that our cosmos supplies neither sufficient implicit information S nor sufficient time T to provision standard evolution it is just possible that some kind of expanding parallelism is being used to circumvent the very sluggish Log term in equation 1. Quantum Mechanics might obliquely hint at the existence of some sort of expanding parallelism but it's a long shot and I'm not going argue that here.
What I would avoid, however, is the approach of NAID Granville Sewell who is still arguing that the second law of thermodynamics is a theoretical way of eliminating evolution from the inquiry. I'd be contented if he had really shown that evolution is off the agenda if it were not for the fact that he's part of a mutually back-slapping NAID tribe who are governed by a subliminal motivating quest to discover small-time gaps in evolutionary reasoning, gaps which they then fill with Divine intelligent interventions. That the laws of physics will ever remain a single huge impenetrable logical gap everywhere and everywhen is not something the NAID tribe is given to emphasize (see here Quantum Non-Linearity: Physics' irreducible logical barrier); instead NAID culture continues to tinker with what they believe to be the gaps in the natural history record, gaps for all we know, which might have been filled by little grey or green men....whereas the irreducible logical barrier of physics is of an entirely different genus to the gaps in "intelligence-of-the-gaps" and therefore demands an entirely different genus of entity to fill it.
Behind the scenes NAID culture by and large identifies the creative entity as an Omnigod but plays this down in favour of positing intelligence as a general creative agent (*3). This has lead them to promote the so-called explanatory filter which they use to detect the work of such agents. This explanatory filter has imposed on them an intelligence vs blind natural forces dichotomy and basically has led them up the garden path; this is because the filter works for beings like humans, animals and aliens(?) which are clearly entities who work within the created context, but the filter fails for a transcendent Omnigod; such an entity has the potential to scupper any intelligence-of-the-gaps arguments: For if it is theoretically possible, an Omnigod may well fill in a logical gap with logic we have yet to understand. For example if we can't see how evolution could work, then as long evolution is theoretically possible, an Omnigod will presumably have the intellectual resources needed to make it work. In fact NAID culture has effectively admitted as much: In this link...
Quantum Non-Linearity: Misrepresenting North American Intelligent Design
....I quote a Science and Culture article as follows....
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.” (*4)
Perhaps the cosmos has been designed to evolve.
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This brings me back to Granville Sewell a NAID who has always maintained that the 2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts evolution. True, it may well be that (as I have already observed)...
a) The evolutionary mechanism as we conceive it is theoretically impossible.
And/Or....
a) Even if conventional evolution is theoretically possible it may or may not be the actual driving mechanism behind natural history; it then becomes an empirical question.
But I can tell you this: Granville has not refuted evolution in either of these ways although he probably thinks he has. In fact he has just raised some interesting questions that I'm looking at in this series.
Entropy, contrary to Granville's opinion, is not necessarily connected with disorder. It is in fact a superset of disorder; it includes genuine disorder but because it is defined as the statistical weight of a macrostate. Such a state could be highly ordered in comparison with the absolute disorder of randomness and yet at the same time of maximum entropy. For example, if we have a heavily loaded die with 90% chance of landing a six then a long sequence of throws with this die would, compared to absolute randomness, be highly organized; the statistical weight of a long sequence of throws with approximately 90% sixes is very low compared to the the statistical weight of the maximally random sequence of the unbiased die. But the sequence generated by the biased die is maximally disordered given the physical constraint of its bias. Putting it another way: The biased die generates a sequence of maximum entropy within the trammels of the physical constraint of the bias. But maximum entropy does not necessarily entail high disorder. Entropy comes in degrees and maximum disorder doesn't necessarily entail high randomness. A configuration could have maximum entropy but that doesn't necessarily mean it is highly disordered. Yes, I'm deliberately labouring the point, because it is clear that Granville doesn't understand it.
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I will now go through Granville's post below which recently appeared on Science & Culture....
Life and the Principle Behind the Second Law | Science and Culture Today
GRANVILLE: Nevertheless, the
second law is all about probability and there is something about the origin and
evolution of life, and the development of human intelligence and civilization,
that appears to many to defy the spirit, if not the letter, of the second law even
if the Earth is an open system. There seems to be something extraordinarily
improbable about life.
MY COMMENT: I would not say that the second law is all about probability. The second law is also about the probabilistic maximization of entropy within given physical constraints. It is certainly true that life is extraordinarily improbable if we are talking about the unconditional probability of life. But then it is also true that crystalline structures are extraordinarily improbable if we are talking about their unconditional probability. But with crystalline structures we do have more than an inkling of the conditions (i.e. the laws of physics) which The Creator has provisioned and which considerably enhances the conditional probability of crystals as a maximum entropy configuration. (Of course that's not to say that The Creator has actually contrived pre-conditions, if indeed such conditions are logically possible, which considerably enhance the conditional probability of the evolution of life as a maximum entropy configuration).
In conclusion: I would contradict what Granville states about the evolution of life defying the spirit of the second law..... if The Creator has provisioned suitable pre-conditions (if indeed such conditions are a mathematical possibility) then there is no defiance of the spirit of the second law; life would constitute a maximum entropy condition under the constraints supplied by The Creator. But of course whether The Creator has actually supplied such preconditions is the 64 trillion dollar question!
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GRANVILLE: The second law of thermodynamics — at least the underlying principle behind this law — simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen, [Rubbish!] and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred. (my emphases)
MY COMMENT: NAID thinking is shot through with the assumption that somehow the physics of our world falls into this mystical category called "natural forces" and therefore can be discounted as utterly "blind" and with no creative efficacy. The obvious snag with this proto-pagan view is that those "natural forces" are The Creators creation and therefore it does no justice to them to describe them as blind natural forces; if I was feeling ill tempered I might say that it is bordering on faithless blasphemy to refer to those laws as such.
As a general rule it is blatantly false to claim that that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen, There is of course the simple case of crystallization which as we've seen is an entropy maximization process whose unconditional probability is all but zero - the unconditional probability of a crystal is like throwing a million heads in a row. I would hasten to grant, however, that highly organised crystal configurations are one thing but the configurations of life are quite another; but at this stage given the presence of huge Divine intellectual resources those providential so-called "natural forces" (sic) created by The Creator are a wild card and this means that as far as we are concerned, we are not yet at the stage where evolution can be categorically eliminated from the inquiry.
To see what can be done with the right kind of information lets consider embryo growth. Restating equation 1.....
I <= S + Log T
equation 1
Embryo growth starts with a large burden of implicit information S in the form of DNA strings and other cellular manufacturing paraphernalia (not to mention the laws of physics). Nevertheless a certain amount of time T is still needed to complete the development work as governed by the DNA recipes. The point, however, is this: The process of embryo development entails imposing high organization on large quantities of matter and yet at no stage is the 2nd law violated. In principle it is possible to construct a boundary of isolation round the embryo development system and include within that boundary all that embryo development is going to need in terms of the output/input of energy & matter and then make sure that nothing passes that boundary. We can then think in terms of an isolated boundaried system and forget about negentropy imports from the outside. What we do know is that in this isolated system overall entropy will increase, even though the miracle of embryo development entails imposing highly organized configurations on macroscopic quantities of matter; this is the miracle of cellular machinery, DNA and the laws of physics which together constitute the information in S. The miracle here is that this system generates huge pockets of high organization and yet as a whole entropy increases; in short embryo growth is a entropy maximisation process. The other thing to note is that random diffusion plays a big part in assembling the necessary molecular configurations......The initial molecular machinery represented by S has the effect of locking-in diffused matter and energy into the growing molecular configurations. It achieves this with what is in effect a trial-&-error search facilitated by the thermal agitations of random walk. Thus S entails a mathematical constraint which biases the random agitations of random walk and it does this by selecting only those molecular unions which fit the templates implicit in S.
Of course this observation is no proof that bog-standard evolution is actually the real-life mechanism of natural history but it does set up a challenging precedent for intelligence-of-gaps thought and the NAID community who have put all their eggs into the anti-evolution basket. For if (repeat, if) evolution has occurred as we understand it, it shares with embryo growth a similar balance of S and T.... If standard evolution is to work without the help of expanding parallelism the cosmic value of S must be large enough to develop what are in fact highly complex living configurations given that the cosmos is in effect only a parallel processor operating for time T; the huge unconditional improbability of living configurations means that the visible dimensions of cosmic time and space, though they seem enormous to us, are no match for life's immense unconditional improbability.
Well OK that's no proof of standard evolution, but let me stress again that the weakness of NAID is that it has put all its eggs into the anti-evolution basket, which means the NAID community is tribally committed to a single cause; namely, agitating against a hostile academia's evolutionary consensus. NAID's riposte to academia is that evolution just can't happen because it relies on "blind natural forces" (sic) ...but what a pagan way to describe the providences of God's creation!
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GRANVILLE: In a 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article2 I claimed that The second law of thermodynamics — at least the underlying principle behind this law — simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen, and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred.
One reader noted in a published reply to my article that any particular long string of coin tosses is extremely improbable, so my statement that “natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen” is not correct. This critic was right, and I have since been careful to state (for example in a 2013 BIO-Complexity article4) that the underlying principle behind the second law is that Natural (unintelligent) forces do not do macroscopically describable things that are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view. (My emphases)
MY COMMENT: Granville goes on to define macroscopically describable things in terms of algorithmic information theory... content I certainly wouldn't dispute! In short macroscopically describable things are highly organized configurations of billions of atoms, where this particulate organization is such that it allows algorithmic data compression to take place (See this link and my work on Disorder and Randomness). So, I was pleased to find Granville talking some sense at last. But that pleasure was offset by the statements I've emphasized in the quote above where he "blasphemously" (!?) refers to God's providences as blind and unintelligent natural forces (*Gasp!*). And yet we know that given the right kind of S and T those "blind forces" (sic) can create highly organised macroscopic configurations in the form of embryos & crystals and yet at the same time without violation of the 2nd law. Of course I'd accept that it's too much of a stretch to automatically extrapolate this to evolution; but if evolution as we understand it has occurred it displays a similar balance of S and T as I've already remarked.
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GRANVILLE: This principle is very similar to William Dembski’s observation that you can identify intelligent agents because they are the only ones that can do things that are “specified” (simply or macroscopically describable) and “complex” (extremely improbable) [That's the first time I've seen a clear cut definition of so-called "specified complexity" a term bandied about by the NAID rank and file is if they know what they are talking about]. Any box full of wires and metal scraps could be said to be complex, but we only suspect intelligence has organized them if the box performs a complex and specifiable function, such as “playing DVDs.”
MY COMMENT: A nice slap on the back there for William Dembski from fellow NAID Granville! Yes, I too would acknowledge that the incredible feats of macroscopic organization, in particular the mathematically elegant laws of physics, are very intuitively compelling re. intelligent design. My theological intuitions that this points to Divine providence are as strong as any. The alternative of a fluky random universe are, as Sherlock Holmes observed in the story of The Cardboard Box, unthinkable (See the introduction to Disorder and Randomness). The work of Divine providence is even more compelling when one sees the botched job that arrogant atheist Richard Carrier has done in trying to explain it all in terms of randomness. Further intuitive compulsion is added when we see how nice-boy atheist Brian Cox offers his thoughts on his Godless empty vision of cosmic destiny: Viz:
In 10 trillion years the last
star will fade. The universe becomes a void without light, life or meaning. The
darkness will last forever. As the stars fade so does all possibility of life
and meaning.
But what I bulk at with NAIDs like Granville is that they will have a real headache on their hands if it it ever turns out that physics is logically complete: That is, that it's algorithmic descriptions not only cover basic physical phenomena but also the evolution of life and moreover the workings of the human brain. They would then have no small-time gaps for their intelligence-of-the-gaps plug-ins to get a purchase on.
Nevertheless I must add the caveat that I'm not committed to the notion of the logical completeness of the laws of physics, but neither am I committed to a denial of that completeness. Unlike Brian Cox and the NAIDs I'm not going to put all my theoretical eggs into one basket. But for me there remains some very basic intuitions... theological intuitions expressed in the likes of Psalm 8, Psalm 19 and Psalm 139.......
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are
mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8)
The heavens declare the glory of
God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth
speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no
words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into
all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19)
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am
fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your
thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand –
when I awake, I am still with you. (Psalm 119)
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The perennial fault of the NAID community is that they don't acknowledge that the theology of a totalizing & transcendent Omnigod creator leads one to a very different form of theological logic to that of the explanatory filter which only caters for in-house created intelligences like humans, animals and little green men. But I would acknowledge that the NAID community do have mitigating circumstances: In the highly polarized political environment of the US some of the academic community have treated NAID theorists like an unclean plague. As I've remarked before this has pushed the NAID community into the embracing arms of some very vicious right-wing idealogues and demagogues; like Donald Trump for instance.
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In the next episode I will have a look at Granville's open system reasoning where he considers the transport of negentropy across an open boundary and doubts that this explains increasing configurational order - not the way I would do it personally as I prefer the closed system approach that I've used above; but lets see what he has to say....
...to be continued.
Footnotes
*1 It needs to be pointed out here that whatever the logical and empirical status of standard evolutionary mechanisms some people may have overriding theological issues with evolution which makes it impossible for them to accept.
*2 But it is likely I would not be a good fit for the so-called "libertarian" political ideology and conspiracy theorism which pervades the NAID community: Recall types like Charlie Kirk. This is ironic as I've always thought of myself as a free-market-loving liberal minded constitutional monarchist. But polarization has so set-in that I probably look like a raving communist to the Trumpite/Kirkist/Randist/Faragist/Hamite far-right and a capitalist running dog to the Marxist far-left!
*3 The NAID community continue in the affectation that their thesis about intelligent design is not a theological one but a scientific one and therefore their concept of "intelligent agency" masquerades as a purely scientific concept that can be tested for in scientific ways. This is certainly true if we are dealing with the agency of humans, animals or aliens who work within the implicit information (S) of the physical world. But if we move over to the agency of an Omnigod the question of intelligent agency becomes much more tricky, theological and intuitive. This is a consequence of the transcendent Christian Omnigod being both eminent and immanent to creation (Acts 17:28). So in principle one might think that the NAID community is a broad church that opens it's doors to anyone who accepts their thesis of non-transcendent intelligent agency, but somehow I doubt that's the case. I suspect that even someone like myself would be persona non grata to the NAID tribe.
*4 See these links:
Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicentenary Part 11: William Demski’s Active Information
Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicentenary 14: Active Information and Evolution
Quantum Non-Linearity: Darwin Bicentenary Part 19: Dembski's Active Information Continued...
ADDENDUM 30/06/2026
A rather politically sinister post has appeared on Science & Culture by Granville Sewell. Viz:
On the Road: The Science of Design in an American Context | Science and Culture Today
In this article Granville gives credit to the virtues of the American Declaration of Independence but without mention of important contexts: Viz:
1. The role of the English Civil war in giving historical rhetoric to the American cause. One could go even further back to the ground work of the Provisions of Oxford and the Magna Carta. Also the input of the European Enlightenment and the English industrial revolution need consideration.
2. The current US context of the democratic backsliding of the MAGArite movement and the banana republic style rule of the pathological narcissist D J Trump. The "stolen election" of 2020 were Trump lies supported by the likes of Mike Pompeo.
Let's also beware of the hazard of both "Christian" internationalism and nationalism: Christendom under the Popes was oppressive; ask Wycliffe and Tyndale. English Christian nationalism under the Stuart destiny was highly oppressive for Non-conformists until William of Orange (1688) and the eventual repeal of the Test Act in 1828. Catholics were also oppressed by over fervent English Christian nationalism. And while we are here let me mention a certain Mr. V Putin whose version of Christian nationalism might have some appeal for MAGArites such as Steve Bannon & Stephen Miller. Let's also beware of too idealistic interpretations of Adam Smith, interpretations which for the Western Irish subsistence farmers of the 19th century only exacerbated their terrible suffering.
The Boston Tea Party and the American revolution were not some super-duper Christian revolution emerging from no-where; it had background - a lot of background in Europe.
Granville is not only silent about the above contexts but also about the corrupt Christian nationalism of MAGArism and Trump. He is therefore in my view complicit. It may well be that as with someone like Ken Ham the interests of NAID are being quietly served by MAGArism and vice versa.
