Subliminal deism and the de-facto IDists

Kalam thinking: God posited as a boundary condition in time

I've said it before and I say it again: In many ways I have a lot in common with the de facto Intelligent Design theorists: Viz: Without invoking sentience as a primary force it is, I believe, it is difficult to make intelligible sense of a highly organized universe where the observational experience of human consciousness is so central to the meaning of the reality of the cosmos. The irreducibility & hiddenness of the human first person perspective is the precedence for invoking thoughts of an a priori highly complex sentience underlying the cosmic order. Moreover, accounting for the universe just in terms of simple local interaction between fundamental particles necessarily eventually runs up against a logical hiatus of brute contingency. Therefore I seek aseity & ultimate origins in the complexity of deity and not the localised mindless simplicity of particulate interactions.

But in spite of all that when ever I look at the detail of the de facto IDist's apologetic efforts there is always something I have to take issue with and that issue, if its not to do with their now Trump slanting politics, is their subliminal dualism. This dualism comes out in their habitual use of a "natural forces vs "God" Intelligent Agency" dichotomy. But if it is God who has created and continues to create our world those so called "natural forces"  are far from "natural". In fact the cosmos is most unnaturally miraculous everywhere and everywhen.

This post is about my latest beef with de facto ID thinking.  

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In a post entitled Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Tries Banishing The Kalam Constant on the de facto Intelligent Design web site Uncommon Descent, Big Bang theorist Ethan Siegel is criticized for making an attempt to muddy the waters over the question of whether the Big Bang represents an absolute beginning. For as sure as eggs are eggs the de facto IDists are thoroughly committed to the idea that the Big Bang was an absolute beginning. They may well be right about that; in fact as Christian I think it likely they are right. But it is typical of dualist ID, whose "natural forces vs God" dichotomy all but puts created matter on a deistic footing, demands the patching-in of periodic and ad hoc Divine interventions in order to save Christianity. This subliminal deism also leads them to commit to the notion that Big-Bang was the first Big Patch-in.  As we shall see they are on precarious ground because the early nanoseconds of creation fade into epistemic obscurity the further we look back and the ground becomes debatable. Worst of all they commit themselves to the flaky Kalam argument.

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UNCOMMON DESCENT: Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Tries Banishing The Kalam Constant. To do that, he posits an “acausal, indeterminate, random Universe”:

 It remains possible that the Universe does, at all levels, obey the intuitive rule of cause-and-effect, although the possibility of a fundamentally acausal, indeterminate, random Universe remains in play (and, arguably, preferred) as well. It is possible that the Universe did have a beginning to its existence, although that has by no means been established beyond any sort of reasonable scientific doubt. And if both of those things are true, then the Universe’s existence would have a cause, and that cause may be (but isn’t necessarily) something we can identify with God. However, possible does not equate to proof. Unless we can firmly establish many things that have yet to be demonstrated, the Kalam cosmological argument will only convince those who already agree with its unproven conclusions.

 Ethan Siegel, “Does modern cosmology prove the existence of God?” at Big Think (November 3, 2021)

MY COMMENT: Given that Siegel is an atheist he's not being unreasonable here and he is giving some leeway to us theists: Yes, from the observational and theoretical data we have it is not yet possible to certainly decide whether the universe had an absolute start, although Siegel does concede above that a fundamental logical discontinuity at the beginning could conceivably be identified with God's action. But he's right, we don't yet have a water-tight proof one way or the other; rather we have, depending on one's worldview, arguments which may or may not compel. He does not posit an acausal, indeterminate, random Universe”. Rather he's being agnostic about the Kalam argument which in my opinion is an argument with cracks in it.  Although I would take issue with Siegel that the use of randomness really "explains" nothing in the deepest sense of the word "explain", I agree with him that randomness does erode the sharpness of the "cause & effect" concept, a concept that only really comes out clearly in classical mechanics. In fact not long after Newton annunciated his laws some enlightenment philosophers interpreted the unbroken chain of Newtonian cause & effect in a self sufficient deistical manner, a manner that has worked against Christianity. This leads very easily into de facto ID's "nature forces vs God" dichotomy with the upshot that IDists are very anxious to show that the otherwise deistical cosmos does from time to time experience divine interventions, thus making good for what they believe to be the cosmos' evolutionary inability to create life by those inferior "natural forces".

One can of course simply relabel randomness as a kind of cause in itself with its effects being seen in disordered patterns, but that is really just a change in semantics.  All in all I would suggest that given his convinced atheism Siegel naturally enough is going to favor the elimination of any awkward origins discontinuity or logical hiatus and would much prefer to establish a cosmic continuity from eternity unto eternity; that is, he sees the cosmos as a self supporting affair not needing the input of God as a sustaining and/or continuously creating agent. There's irony in his appeal to randomness: It's a process where there's a discontinuity every moment, but if you are going to claim that randomness is the forever-cosmic-status-quo then the constant discontinuity randomness becomes the new continuity!

But I'll give Siegel this: He's being fair to theists with his agnosticism about whether cosmic origins entail a logical discontinuity or not. 

UD quotes ID guru Brian Miller who is writing on Evolution, News and Science about Siegel's views:

MILLER: Siegel begins his piece by outlining the Kalam cosmological argument for God that Meyer detailed in The Return of the God Hypothesis:

 a) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

 b) The Universe began to exist.

 c) Therefore, the Universe has a cause to its existence.

 Siegel then attempts to challenge the first premise by arguing that quantum phenomena appear to occur without causes:

“…there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable. In fact, there are many other quantum phenomena that display this same type of randomness, including entangled spins, the rest masses of unstable particles, the position of a particle that’s passed through a double slit, and so on.”

MY COMMENT:  Leaving aside decoherence and multiverse notions (ideas which attempt to reinstate localised determinism) it's true that quantum mechanics is certainly not so compellingly causal as Newtonian mechanics.  So, apart from the change in semantics I've already mentioned I would accept that Seigel is right in so far as the concept of "causation" in the context of irreducible randomness is a somewhat strained idea. However, where I do differ with Siegel is that my intuitions cannot accept the absurdity of irreducible randomness, an absurdity which tries to convince us "that's the way things are and that is all there is to it. Get used to it!". If Siegel finds he is able to accept that this meaningless logical hiatus is the end of enquiry then I have say I personally find it senseless and God help Siegel! For me the inquiry must go further rather than being left as the absurd logical hiatus of random contingency. As I always say, atheism teeters on the edge of the nihilist abyss.  

In the sense I advance in my previous post on Kalam, the search for a profound "cause" of  the highly contingent cosmic state of affairs, affairs which otherwise seem absurd & meaningless, must go beyond a resigned acceptance of the brute-fact descriptions of an ultimately incompressible kernel of algorithmic information. But the Kalam argument is naïve: It is based on notions of temporal antecedents & sequences of events: Whatever begins to exist has a cause..... And need that "cause" be God? Perhaps it's simply preceding "natural causes"?

I suspect that the Kalam argument finds intuitive support from those gross Newtonian intuitions about an unbroken temporal sequence of cause & effect. I don't share those intuitions myself, therefore Kalam doesn't work for me; it is far from axiomatic as far as I'm concerned. If there is any worthy intuition behind Kalam it is that the cosmos must make anthropic sense.

MILLER: This claim is highly misleading since it confuses determinism with causality. Quantum mechanics is not deterministic since it describes only the probabilities that certain events could occur such as the paths a photon could take in the double slit experiment. But the laws of quantum mechanics act in our universe as the causal agent for all such events.

Brian Miller, “Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Again Desperately Attempts to Avoid a Cosmic Beginning” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 8, 2021)

Siegel may be confusing the Kalam Constant with the Shazzam! Constant. What’s really interesting is that he thinks he must answer Meyer’s arguments at all.

MY COMMENT: No, Mr. Miller quantum mechanics isn't a "natural causal agent" (as opposed to an "intelligent agent"?); Rather, it's a sovereign God's ordained constraint on the possible patterns of events that our cosmos can generate. The quantum equations are not best thought of as the cause of the individual random events of quantum collapse, but as a kind of "permissive envelope" of possibility within which the statistics  of randomness applies. 

The need for the use of statistics in QM is simply an admission that humanly speaking, beyond  frequency statistics, the individual events of randomness are epistemically unknowable and we really don't know how particular "random" events fit in with God's active and permissive wills.  In referring to quantum mechanics as a causal agent Miller is really engaged in the trivial activity I've already talked about; namely, recycling the word "causal" to cover the role of quantum mechanics as a statistical constraint. Miller is at liberty to engage in this semantic jiggery-pokery, but Miller really should note that the Kalam argument is set very much in the context of time as a sequence of events with one event being the cause of the next event, an event which is regarded as an effect - this concept of cause comes straight out of intuitions that have been formed in the macroscopic world of Newtonian mechanics. Viewing physics as a constraint with divine purposes behind it rather than an old fashioned Newtonian cause & effect scenario is to my mind a much more appropriate nuance.

Miller's subliminal dualism encourages him to hang onto the Kalam argument at all costs. Yes. I agree it is likely that Big Bang does trace back to an absolute logical hiatus. But Miller is part of the ID subculture which has staked so much on the inefficacy of those so called "natural forces" to generate life and therefore has the need to invoke a patched-in intelligent agency. Underlying this, I propose, is a blend of subliminal deism which commits de facto IDists to seek evidence for the existence of intermittent acts of special creation in order to make the epistemic of their explanatory filter to work. 

Miller goes on to pick up the debate as to whether on not current theory points to an absolute beginning, in particular debates around the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem, a theorem I mention in my previous post on Kalam.  This theorem suggests that an absolute beginning is entailed by Big Bang Theory.  But Siegel mentions a paper by Aquirre and Gratton which raises questions over the BGV theorem. Miller counters as follows:

MILLER: And in his extended research notes under Note 6c, Meyer explains why the Aguirre and Gratton model is completely unrealistic. It requires an unimaginable level of fine-tuning in the infinite past for the universe to have contracted to such a special low-entropy, compact state at the transition from contraction to expansion. If the model were even plausible, the level of required fine-tuning would represent even greater evidence of design than it was intended to avoid by removing the beginning. By appealing to it, Siegel is proverbially jumping from the philosophical frying pan into the fire.

MY COMMENT:  Miller does have a worthy point here when he tells us that as one goes backwards in time entropy must decrease: This decrease can't go on forever.  If as the Boltzmann equation asserts entropy is a monotonically increasing function of the number of microstates consistent with a macrostate then there comes a point where the number of possible microstates is so small that the large-number assumptions of statistical mechanics will break down. I see this as yet another example of the potentially pathological epistemic of hopefully extrapolating physical laws (otherwise only tested in normal circumstances) into the unknown to the point of breakdown. 

And another example of extrapolation pathology: As I remarked on my previous post on Big Bang: The other baffling [extrapolation] issue is this: As we follow the shrinking exponential of inflation back in time there comes a point where the scales of gravity and quantum theory collide: What happens then?  Gravitational and quantum theory have yet to be united, hence extrapolation beyond the hot big bang period is an extrapolation into the dark unknown. Therefore, apart from speculation on all sides, I guess that is how the situation will remain for some time to come.

In my previous post on the Kalam argument I commented what I believe to be the general import behind the likes of the BGV theorem:

The general mathematical principle being invoked here can be found in algorithmics. The computations inherent in some functions cannot be meaningfully wound back in time indefinitely. There comes a point when the computations prior to a certain time in the past are undefined. So yes, it may well be that the physical computations that run our cosmos have a definite start time. However, it is one thing to hypothesize physical functions that can’t be run back in time indefinitely and quite another to make one’s theology depend on it.

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Both Siegel and Miller show hints of desperation in desiring to see their respective creation agendas justified, although Siegel can be commended for showing a certain amount of epistemic humility in giving us theists some leeway. Miller however looks to be the more desperate or the two and that, I hazard, is because of de facto ID's philosophical dualism and subliminal deist thinking. For the IDist God must be seen to be overtly "intervening" in what they believe to be the creatively ineffectual "natural" order. Therefore a very contingent logical hiatus at the beginning of things will do nicely thankyou very much; it represents a God starting as he means to go on; namely, as an occasional intelligent "cause & effect" agent when "natural forces" are thought by IDists to be unable to do the job.  Well yes, I can accept that God may well occasionally miraculously dabble with one-off works, but that doesn't mean that the so-called natural order, which I stress once again is also God's work, isn't also capable of the miraculous. What I object to is that for IDists God becomes an ancillary cause to be invoked when "inferior natural forces" are thought not to be up to the job. What are the dualist IDists going say if evolution was proved beyond reasonable doubt? Do they then abandon "The God hypothesis"? 

For IDists "The  God Hypothesis" has become too dependent on an absolute beginning and those occasional one-off interventions; And here's the irony: Deism, which posits the existence of self sustaining "natural forces" is a short step from atheism; all one need do is argue that if the universe has a natural self-sustaining sequence of cause & effect then why is there any need for divine one-off interventions at all if it can be shown that "natural forces" can generate life?  In focusing so exclusively on a jumped up Newtonian time-based cause & effect paradigm IDists have failed to do justice to a cosmos that has a highly contingent logical hiatus everywhere and everywhen.

ADDENDUM  27/11/2021

Business as usual at de facto ID central

In the YouTube video below William Dembski implicitly assumes a natural forces vs intelligent agency dichotomy and perpetuates  the error that evolution, if it were true, doesn't entail the need for an intelligent agent and therefore people like Richard Dawkins can claim to be intellectually fulfilled atheists. As I've maintained before, in terms of the way they think  IDists are not far removed from the thinking of atheists.

William Dembski: Gauging the Success of Intelligent Design - YouTube

And by the way: Dembski concludes that de facto ID has not been successful at least in terms of its take-up.  As long as it continues to perpetuate old errors it doesn't deserve success.

Big Bang Notes I

Microwave background: Looking back in time to the Big Bang

Recently somebody asked me for my assessment of Big Bang Theory. I'm no ball of knowledge on Big Bang, but I do have a few notions on the subject that I relate here. That the cosmos has its origins in a hot dense continuum seems a very likely scenario given the state of astronomical observation, but this very general idea can be the front for a huge amount of detail: it seems that those details are far less settled.  Anyway, below are my comments on Big Bang that I returned to the inquirer:

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Inflation was an idea that was generated by the need to explain why opposite ends of the universe show the same temperature and density given that without inflation they wouldn't have been in thermal contact at the beginning. Inflation also explained the observation that the universe looks to be flat to a very good approximation. 

But Inflation theory is far from confirmed: The source of the energy needed to generate inflation is unknown, although there is some speculative talk about it being "dark energy". There is also the problem of unifying gravity and quantum mechanics which inflationary theory doesn't pretend to solve....as the inflation is wound back one reaches the so called "quantum gravity" limit where space-time curvature is so great that one must take into account the uncertainty principle - what happens here given that gravity hasn't yet been successfully quantized is anybody's guess.

What we are fairly sure about is that to all intents and purposes we can only wind the clock back 13 odd billion years to the very hot & dense big bang before we hit the "unknown physics barrier".

We can of course imagine the graticules of time measurement extending before that, but since time is actually measured using the physical ticks provided by material standards (such as vibrations) then given that as we go back in time gravity modifies these ticks by slowing them to near zero it follows that time just about stops at t=0 simply because there is no physical standard which remains ticking to measure it.

We are very far from understanding the big bang in terms of absolute origins. Hence the actual details on the other side of the big bang are up for the philosophical grabs. Atheists who don't like the idea that the big bang was an absolute beginning can speculate about previous universes or a multiverse of continuous inflationary bubbles or play philosophical word games with the meaning of nothing. Alternatively theists can speculate about it being an absolute beginning; that is the mathematical edge of a grand logical hiatus....this is the point at which our ability to carry out algorithmic compression via the annunciation of general physical equations stops. See the epilogue of my book on randomness where I discuss this:(see footnote)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeQXVKb2lHUmdtRzg/view?resourcekey=0-qGG_yo-LP-9gZ0lW9K__nw

My money is on this argument running and running because of epistemic distance: There seem to be insurmountable epistemic barriers in the two areas where we can attempt to make observations to test origins theories: Viz: 1) The microwave background yields limited data and only extends back so far. 2) Particle accelerators are unlikely to reach the colossal energies needed to recapitulate the very early universe. Of course there may always be observational & theoretical wild cards out there somewhere, but I'm not banging banking on it!

People still hanker and yearn after the idea that there was something

 before the big bang. But what was it? Was it God or just more  

algorithmically compressible bytes and bits?

Endnotes

Contingency and the Grand Logical Hiatus

Endnote 1: (Added 03/10/2021) It ought to be fairly self evident that an ultimate Logical Hiatus in our so-called  "explanations" is forever going to be an irreducible feature of our attempts to account for the cosmos. For those explanations find their expression in succinct mathematical laws as algorithmic ways of encoding descriptive information about the ordered dynamic that pervades our world. A hard core of contingency, then, can never be eliminated as the algorithmic nature of these laws means that as a matter of logical inevitability they must start from a set of given mathematically stated conditions. The laws of physics, then, amount to a form of algorithmic compression and as such lead back to an irreducible kernel of enigmatic simplicity. So, if we are looking for an ultimate "explanation" in some deeper sense than mere description, it's not going to be found in the simplicity of physics; more likely in complexity; perhaps the complexity of a Godhead. (See here where I first mooted this idea)

So leaving aside the silly word games with the meaning of "nothing", those who dislike the mystery of an irreducibly particular contingency find that their best shot is to postulate some version of multiverse theory, a theory which in its most extreme form posits the existence of just about every logically possible contingency. This tactic works by attempting to neutralize the mystery of a kernel of particular contingency by eliminating selective contingency (which is in fact what our cosmos, on the face of it, presents us with) by spreading the existential butter over a huge range of possibility. Needless to say, our instincts suggest that behind selective contingency is an intentionality. That there is such a concerted effort to eliminate selective contingency with multiverse notions is a sign that these instincts, even among disbelievers, are alive and well. 

Endnote 2: (added 19/10/2021) One of the bugbears with the common concept of "mechanism" is that it is conceived as entirely a matter of local interactions between the parts of the mechanism. Those parts, such as atoms or fundamental particles, have a few relatively simple rules governing their near-neighbor interactions and it is thought that these "mindless" rules are then the source from which all else incidentally and purely fortuitously emerges. It is assumed then that these rules are the fundamental & primary reality of the cosmos and all else is secondary and ephemeral.  No further questions are then asked about whether this system of rules, if it supports the development and maintenance of life, must therefore be algorithmically pre-biased.  Moreover, it is further assumed that these rules do not include global teleological constraints, constraints which (amounting to action at a distance) would really blow away any semblance of local interaction completeness & primacy.  The oft overriding and superficial response to this picture of local mechanical interactions is that it is entirely mindless in that clearly in and of themselves these interactions have no sentient apprehension of what they are doing and therefore any complex development built on them (such as life) is purely accidental and incidental. It is ironic that this superficial response is endemic among the de-facto Intelligent Design community of North America. But then there is this.

OK, the mechanical picture of cosmic development with its purely bottom-up as opposed to top-down vision is at first sight a challenge to an anthropocentric view of the cosmos.  But if one starts to push a little harder the wall of that challenge starts to crumble. 

Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal

The Grand Logical Hiatus.

A post on the de facto ID site Uncommon Descent (See here) alerted me to this blog post by atheist Sean Carroll. Just as atheist PZ Myers is a source of news about American Christian culture so UD is a source of news about the world of atheism. 

Carroll’s post concerns a matter which has been very much a theme of this blog: Viz that science, even if it should ever be in the position where its laws provide a complete description of the cosmos, will nevertheless always leave us with an irreducible kernel of “unexplained” information. “Explanation” in the physical science sense of the word takes the data complexes furnished by observation and merges them into sense making theoretical constructs. In physics these constructs invariably simplify the intricacies of these data complexes by showing how they could be the outcome of relatively succinct principles. In this context a theoretical narrative which “explains” a large data complex is effectively a way to “compress” that data into something smaller and simpler. Ultimately, however, all such constructs, although they may vary in their level of succinctness, obey the “law of compression”; that is they must contain a grand logical hiatus; a kernel of “brute fact” beyond which further “compression” is impossible; you can’t “explain” something from a starting point of nothing! Nothing generates nothing whereas something, though it be relatively little, can lead to a whole lot more.

A rider needs to be added at this point. The laws of physics, which can by and large be expressed as algorithms, are in contrast to statistics, a subject which deals with randomness. (I define randomness here). Random patterns are patterns which, by definition, don’t yield better than chance predictions when attempts are made to predict them using small space, short time algorithms. Such patterns can only be treated successfully with statistics. Unlike the data complexes which are the subject of the laws of physics random patterns do not simplify or “compress”.  The upshot is that the content of the physical sciences is usually an inextricable blend of two kinds of descriptive narrative: Laws and Statistics. This is what I refer to as “Law and Disorder” science.

These themes can be picked up in the following blog posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/end-of-line.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/darwin-bicentenary-summing-up-part-1.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/mind-gaps.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/intelligent-designs-2001-space-odyssey.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/contingency-and-grand-logical-hiatus.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/norwich-and-norfolk-faith-group-lecture.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-kalam-argument-sucks.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/grand-logical-hiatus.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/richard-johns-vs-larry-moran.html

Below I publish the text of Carroll’s article and as usual interleave my own comments.

SEAN CARROLL ASKS:

Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?

Posted on February 8, 2018 by Sean Carroll

A good question!

Or is it?

I’ve talked before about the issue of why the universe exists at all (1, 2), but now I’ve had the opportunity to do a relatively careful job with it, courtesy of Eleanor Knox and Alastair Wilson. They are editing an upcoming volume, the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics, and asked me to contribute a chapter on this topic. Final edits aren’t done yet, but I’ve decided to put the draft on the arxiv:

Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?

Sean M. Carroll

It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.

MY COMMENT:   As far as I’m concerned there is no disputing Carroll’s argument that “explanation” in the physical science sense of the word bottoms out with brute fact. And I’ve given the reason for that:  Viz: Once we get a handle on just what we mean by physical “explanation” in the Law and Disorder sense of the word then we can see that its “information compression” effect can’t carry on indefinitely; taking “explanation” as far as it will go finally results in an irreducible kernel of information from which all else is derived.

But I would query Carroll’s claim that Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. Any attempt to “prove”, after the manner of the physical sciences, that the universe can exist all by itself in a “self-contained, self-sustaining” way would, of course, require some Law and Disorder type explanation of this situation. This, as we have seen, always entails an ultimate kernel of irreducible “brute fact”, a kernel which can have no further “explanation”, least of all an explanation as to why this brute fact is somehow “self-contained and self-sustaining” whatever that means. The descriptive role that the explanations of physical science offer do not admit such metaphysical concepts as “self-containment and self-sustenance” – these ideas are simply Carroll asserting his belief that beyond the kernel of law and disorder science there is nothing to say other than that this kernel, in some strange way, has the god-like property of aseity. This is sheer metaphysical assertion on Carroll’s part. He is of course entitled to his (subjective) opinion about such matters, but he can’t claim that ideas like this have proofs in law and disorder science, a science which, as Carroll himself will agree, ultimately presents us with a brute fact kernel. Like Carroll we can if we are so inclined impute the metaphysical property of aseity to this law and disorder kernel…. or perhaps we should look elsewhere for aseity?

CARROLL WRITES: As you can see, my basic tack hasn’t changed: this kind of question might be the kind of thing that doesn’t have a sensible answer. In our everyday lives, it makes sense to ask “why” this or that event occurs, but such questions have answers only because they are embedded in a larger explanatory context. In particular, because the world of our everyday experience is an emergent approximation with an extremely strong arrow of time, such that we can safely associate “causes” with subsequent “effects.” The universe, considered as all of reality (i.e. let’s include the multiverse, if any), isn’t like that. The right question to ask isn’t “Why did this happen?”, but “Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The demand for something more — a reason why the universe exists at all — is a relic piece of metaphysical baggage we would be better off to discard.

MY COMMENT; Well, I think I can agree with most if not all of that; but only up until the last sentence – but I’ll speak of that in a little.

Once we understand just what “explanation” means in the physical science sense of the word then it becomes clear that we can hardly ask of it any more than what that explanation actually does; namely, to join the data dots of observation with a descriptive narrative which exploits the natural order in the cosmos so as to encapsulate nature’s patterns in succinct principles.

Like Carroll I understand “cause and effect” to be very much a construction or derived concept based on the arrow of time. It is not as fundamental as those timeless physical laws which Carroll speaks of; without an arrow of time "cause and effect" becomes a problematical concept. Hence, the question “why” often implicitly assumes this conception of time. But physics is less about the contingencies of time than it is about the timeless fundamental cosmic constraints expressed in law and disorder mathematics.

But having said all that I think I would want to re write Carroll’s last sentence as follows:

The demand for something more — a reason why the universe exists at all — I regard as a relic piece of metaphysical baggage I believe we are be better off to discard.

That is, Carroll is really speaking for himself here and not necessarily for the rest of us; hence my additions “I believe” and “I regard”.  As we have already seen Carroll has his own metaphysical baggage about the aseity of law and disorder science but seems to have fooled himself into thinking of it as rigorous physics: He believes that somehow physics’ kernel is self-contained and self-sustaining. It is clear, however, that the mathematics of physics has no self-affirming and self-referencing qualities which amount to aseity. Instead physics must end in a clear logical hiatus of brute fact as Carroll well knows.

Some people like Carroll might consider that our intellectual engagement with the cosmos is complete once law and disorder science has arrived at a comprehensive theory of explanation and thereafter people like Carroll will feel satisfied that this is all we can know. That’s fine by me, different strokes for different folks, but this in itself is a metaphysical response which presupposes the inquiry into meaning must stop there. I can’t stop Carroll stopping at that point or complain about his lack of a metaphysical urge to try to take matters further; that’s just the way he is. But by the same token there is nothing to stop people following up their metaphysical suspicions and trying to press on a bit further. After all, if Carroll continues to carry his own obviously metaphysical baggage about regarding physical self-containment and self-sustenance (although he might disguise it as physics) there’s no reason why we shouldn’t follow his good example, but in a different sort of way; although of course he and other atheists are under no obligation to follow us into those white spaces beyond the edge of the map; in fact they may even believe that it is not meaningful to even talk about those “white spaces”.

.

CARROLL WRITES: This perspective gets pushback from two different sides. On the one hand we have theists, who believe that they can answer why the universe exists, and the answer is God. As we all know, this raises the question of why God exists; but aha, say the theists, that’s different, because God necessarily exists, unlike the universe which could plausibly have not. The problem with that is that nothing exists necessarily, so the move is pretty obviously a cheat. I didn’t have a lot of room in the paper to discuss this in detail (in what after all was meant as a contribution to a volume on the philosophy of physics, not the philosophy of religion), but the basic idea is there. Whether or not you want to invoke God, you will be left with certain features of reality that have to be explained by “and that’s just the way it is.” (Theism could possibly offer a better account of the nature of reality than naturalism — that’s a different question — but it doesn’t let you wiggle out of positing some brute facts about what exists.)

MY COMMENT: I have a lot of sympathy here with Carroll. It certainly does feel, humanly speaking, that as he says “Whether or not you want to invoke God, you will be left with certain features of reality that have to be explained by “and that’s just the way it is.” And that seems to be true of theology as much as anything else; humanly one seems to be stuck with always having start by postulating contingent givens or brute facts. This, as we have seen, is very clear with Law and Disorder science and Carroll, if I am reading him right, would agree. At first it does seem as if theists have the same problem; they have to start with a given, albeit a very complex and difficult to understand given, namely God himself. But as Carroll points out: As we all know, this raises the question of why God exists; but aha, say the theists, that’s different, because God necessarily exists, unlike the universe which could plausibly have not. Well, as we have seen it is clear that the simple starting objects of law and disorder science don’t appear to have this property of aseity – that is, a necessary existence; they are just too simple to have such a convoluted property. But this is not quite so clear with theism because the postulated infinite complexity of God could hide something well outside human understanding and perhaps therefore infinite complexity could in some way have a necessary existence. This was an idea I first introduced in a blog post here and I quote the relevant parts of this post as follows*:

These are difficult issues, but for a theist their resolution is likely to be bound up with the concept of Divine Aseity.I favour the view that mathematics betrays the a-priori and primary place of mind; chiefly God’s mind. The alternative view is that gritty material elementals are the primary a-priori ontology and constitute the foundation of the cosmos and mathematics. But elementalism has no chance of satisfying the requirement of self-explanation as the following consideration suggests: what is the most elementary elemental we can imagine? It would be an entity that could be described with a single bit of information. But a single bit of information has no degree of freedom and no chance that it could contain computations complex enough to be construed as self-explanation. A single bit of information would simply have to be accepted as a brute fact. Aseity is therefore not to be found in an elemental ontology; elementals are just too simple.

In the search for Aseity elementalisation leads to an ontological dead end because elementals have a lower limit complexity of one bit, a limit beyond which there is no further room for logical maneuvering that could resemble anything close to self explanation. In contrast complexity has no upper limit and hence if Aseity is to be found at all, it must reside at the high end of logical complexity, perhaps at infinite measures of complexity with some kind of reflexive self affirming properties, such as we find in your “there is one true fact” example.

What I’m saying here is that an infinitely complex object could incorporate, in a way not accessible to the human mind, some kind of capital Aseity. In contrast we can see all round the gritty elementals of law and disorder science and nothing like aseity is apparent. Their very simplicity excludes aseity and these elementals can only ever be contingent brute facts with no logical necessity.  Recall also that God, if he is meaningfully a person, must embody the first person perspective of conscious cognition. As I have always had an attraction toward logical positivism, a philosophy which only sees reality in what the first person experiences and theorises about, it seems not unreasonable to me that some kind of divine and irreducible first person perspective should be at the root of all reality. However I admit that all this is rather abstruse and vague and therefore if atheists feel more comfortable with ending the inquiry into the nature of reality at the givens of law and disorder physics I have no basis for complaint.

CARROLL WRITES: The other side are those scientists who think that modern physics explains why the universe exists. It doesn’t! One purported answer — “because Nothing is unstable” — was never even supposed to explain why the universe exists; it was suggested by Frank Wilczek as a way of explaining why there is more matter than antimatter. But any such line of reasoning has to start by assuming a certain set of laws of physics in the first place. Why is there even a universe that obeys those laws? This, I argue, is not a question to which science is ever going to provide a snappy and convincing answer. The right response is “that’s just the way things are.” It’s up to us as a species to cultivate the intellectual maturity to accept that some questions don’t have the kinds of answers that are designed to make us feel satisfied.

MY COMMENT: Once again I largely agree with Carroll here. I’ve heard naïve interpretations of quantum mechanic’s potential to bring matter out of empty space (!= "nothing") as if it has solved the problem of why there is something rather than nothing. I have even heard talk along that lines that empty space defines what we ordinarily understand as “nothing” and therefore because quantum mechanics shows that something can come out of an empty space it effectively redefines nothing as something .... a condition which can generate something and hey presto you can get something from nothing!. But Carroll can see through this argument, which was originally simply about the quantum properties of space and not about the something vs nothing debate. As Carroll points out: But any such line of reasoning has to start by assuming a certain set of laws of physics in the first place. Why is there even a universe that obeys those laws? This, I argue, is not a question to which science is ever going to provide a snappy and convincing answer. The right response is “that’s just the way things are.”  In effect science hasn’t redefined the concept “nothing” in such a way that it shows how “something” can come from “nothing”….  rather science has redefined “something” as the laws of physics, laws which have a presupposed transcendent existence! So essentially we are back to the idea of necessarily getting something from something. Big deal.

I probably would depart from Carrol in his last two sentences. Here he clearly expresses a valued judgment on his part. He sees the calm acceptance of the brute facts of physics, with no further questions asked, as a sign of intellectual maturity. Well that’s up him. If he wants to leave the matter there that’s fine by me. In my opinion, however, real maturity is shown if one realises that not everyone is going consider the matter closed, done & dusted at that point! Opinions will vary and some people, to quote Carroll, will not necessarily come up with the kinds of answers that are designed to make us feel satisfied.

Footnote

* In the quoted post I was replying to James Knight in a response to a question about mathematics. He seems have picked this idea up in the following blog post of his:

http://philosophicalmuser.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/god-mathematics-munchhausens-trilemma.html

..where he says:

Unlike our interpretations of God and mathematics, physics just doesn't seem to amount to a complexity powerful enough to contain an ultimate explanation. When we think of complexity, we think of a lower level complexity and an upper level complexity. The lowest level complexity would be something containing just a single bit of information. But once we start to think of an upper level complexity, we find that there really is no limit to how complex complexity can get. To me, such a realisation necessitates either one of the following:

A} Mathematics is the reason that existence 'is'.

B} God is the reason that existence 'is'.

He then goes on to consider the relationship of God and Mathematics

Mind the Gaps

In a post on the ID Website Uncommon Descent entitled Casey Luskin on Theistic Evolutionist’s evidence-phobia contributor Denise O’Leary quotes de facto ID guru Casey Luskin as follows:

Picture originally found on "Sandwalk" The speech bubble is mine.

Of course, when BioLogos claims “it is all intelligently designed,” they mean that strictly as a faith-based theological doctrine for which they can provide no supporting scientific evidence. Indeed, it’s ironic that BioLogos accuses ID of “removing God from the process of creation” when Collins writes that “science’s domain is to explore nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science.” Under Collins’s view, God’s “domain” is seemingly fenced off from “nature,” which belongs to “science.”

My Comment: Here we go once more unto the breach dear friends: Western Dualism’s nature vs. theology dichotomy! What’s the point of theology if it isn’t responding to the empirical conditions of the human predicament by attempting to provide, however inadequately, a world-view level account of it? Under any circumstances theology is not fenced off from “nature”. If nature = creation and humanity is part of creation then any experience/observation/thought we have, based as it is in the created psyche of our humanity will by definition also be part of creation and therefore classify as “nature”. Ergo, theology, which presumably attempts to make sense of the broad sweep of human experience, is inextricably bound up with so called “nature”.  But admittedly, theology, like string theory has more the role of providing postdictive sense making narratives rather than that of predictive testability.

Since CIDs [Christian intelligent design supporters] treat design as a scientific hypothesis, not a theological doctrine, they would reply that a failure scientifically to detect design doesn’t mean God was somehow theologically absent, and would say that natural explanations don’t “remov[e] God.” BTEs [BioLogos theistic evolutionists] thus fail to recognize that CIDs have no objection to God using natural, secondary causes. They also fail to appreciate that in some cases, CIDs argue that natural explanations can even provide evidence for design (e.g., cosmic fine-tuning). But CIDs disagree with BTEs that God must always use natural causes, and argue we should allow the possibility that God might act in a scientifically detectable manner Thus, one important dividing line is:

• BTEs accept materialistic evolutionary explanations (such as neo-Darwinism) where the history of life appears unguided, and deny we scientifically detect design.

• CIDs hold we may scientifically detect design as the best scientific explanation for many aspects of biology

My Comment: I think you will find that in principle de facto IDists like Luskin understand “natural causes” to be those explanations which fall within the present canon of physics or, presumably, any future development of that canon (Although as we will see below in practice the IDist’s so called “natural causes” actually refer to the much dreaded evolution). The IDist’s explanatory filter defaults to intelligent agency when the physical canon fails as an explanation. But the explanations of physics inevitably face an ultimate logical hiatus or explanatory gap; this is because physics is in effect descriptive and therefore its final and complete word can only be a kernel of logically compressed brute fact; physical explanations can do no more and no less. Hence, the explanatory filter will eventually default to intelligent agency when the ultimate logical hiatus is arrived at. The pertinent question is at what point is the gap going to be found? Is that gap going to be found at the level of biological configurations; that is, are biological structures fundamental givens? Or is the gap going to be found at the fine tuning level where once the physical canon has been set up and correctly tuned the cosmos will then generate life? If, repeat if, Luskin is just talking about this general logical hiatus then I would question his claim that his kind of ID has a formal scientific status. After all, a grand logical gap is mathematically destined to be part the physical cannon under any circumstance and will exist where ever it is found. And if humans have anything to do with it the information inherent in this logical gap will inevitably prompt debate about its origin (This is why my version of the “explanatory filter” is recursive). The ensuing debate is likely to have a strong philosophical and theological slant. Thus arguing for God on the basis of an inevitable logical hiatus will probably veer towards theology and/or philosophy rather than formal science.

But we know that as a rule de facto IDists actually have a deep raison d’etre for insisting that a logical hiatus exists inside biology itself, not just generally in the canon of physics. For rather than trace the gap all the way back to the physics of fine tuning and the abstruse and contentious philosophico-theological posturing about the origins of physics, they much prefer to bring the gap closer to home; namely, at the level of biological configurations. And we know what that means: De facto IDists like Luskin hate evolution and will claim evolution didn’t happen (because intelligence did it!).  Whether conventional evolutionary theory works or not is something that is subject to testing. So, in this sense, biologically based intelligence–of-the-gaps sidesteps the highfalutin philosophical questions about ultimate origins and actually becomes scientific, although it is very negative science of (evolution) denial.

As I have remarked before in this blog this commitment to anti-evolutionism is potentially toxic to theology if some version of evolution is ultimately found to work. Luskin’s ID, although he may not bring himself to be very explicit about it, is very dependent on the failure of evolutionary theory. Luskin’s so called “scientific hypothesis” is not about the philosophico-theological issues which surround the question of the grand logical hiatus but rather the strong North American Christian right “No! No! No!” to evolution.  When Luskin accuses Biologos of requiring God to always use “natural causes” he can’t be accusing them of trying to do away with the grand logical hiatus because that is logically impossible. What he really means is that Biologos’ loathed publicly funded establishment academics are evolutionists!

Notice that Luskin wrongly refers to evolution as unguided. As I have repeatedly attempted to make clear on this blog even standard evolution is far from unguided – it very much depends on the up-front-information needed to “guide” it in the form of the channels of the spongeam, which if they exist (although they probably don’t at my guess) would have to be implicit in the canon of physics and/or future developments of that canon.

[A]ccording to textbooks and leading evolutionary biologists, neo-Darwinian evolution is defined as an unguided or undirected process of natural selection acting upon random mutation. Thus, when theistic evolutionists say that “God guided evolution,” what they mean is that somehow God guided an evolutionary process which for all scientific intents and purposes appears unguided. As Francis Collins put it in The Language of God, God created life such that “from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process.” Whether it is theologically or philosophically coherent to claim that “God guided an apparently unguided process” I will leave to the theologians and the philosophers. ID avoids these problems by maintaining that life’s history doesn’t appear unguided, and that we can scientifically detect that intelligent action was involved.

My Comment: The premise that pervades this paragraph falls over because as I’ve already said conventional evolution, on its own logic, is guided – that is, it effectively posits the implicit information of the spongeam, a requirement that is related to Dembski’s conservation of information. Because testing evolution amounts to testing for the existence of the spongeam then the question of its existence is subject to formal scientific investigation. On the other hand the question of the origin of the information in the spongeam, which would have to be implicit in the physical canon, concerns that final logical hiatus I’ve already referred to and is therefore potentially philosophical and/or theological.

Theistic evolutionists sometimes try to obscure these differences, such as when BioLogos says “it is all intelligently designed.” But when pressed, they’ll admit this is a strictly theological view, since they believe none of that design is scientifically detectable. CIDs wonder how one can speak of “intelligent design” if it’s always hidden and undetectable. “We’re promoting a scientific theory, not a theological doctrine,” replies ID, “and our theory detects design in nature through scientific observations and evidence.”

Some theistic evolutionists will then further reply by saying, “Since we both believe in some form of ‘intelligent design,’ the differences between our views are small.” ID proponents retort: “Whether small or not, these differences make all the difference in the world.”

And there’s the rub. By denying that we scientifically detect design in nature, BTEs cede to materialists some of the most important territory in the debate over atheism and religion. Biologically speaking, theistic evolution gives no reasons to believe in God.

My Comment: Since the logical hiatus in physics is mathematically inevitable and must ultimately be acknowledged by both Biologos and Luskin, at first site it might seem that if they both use the explanatory filter, both are justified in claiming to be IDists. Therefore Luskin’s claim that theistic evolution gives no reasons to believe in God is false. So what’s the real basis of Luskin’s beef? Well Luskin can’t bring himself to admit it but what he really means by his claim to having a scientific theory is that he is anti-evolution and Biologos isn’t.  But bland anti-evolutionism is not a great way to claim to having a “scientific theory”.  Hence de facto IDists will attempt to make claim to a positive science of “intelligence did it!”.  But this doesn’t hold much water because some de facto IDists will actually tell us that explicating  the nature of the intelligence that "did it " is not part of ID!.  This makes it very difficult to use this “science” in a positive way to make predictions. For example, de facto ID’s belief that there is no junk DNA is problematical given the inscrutability that some IDists build into their intelligent agent. This makes it all but impossible to anticipate the methods, motives and personality of that intelligence; may be that intelligence has some obscure reason for storing redundant and repetitive DNA in the genome.  (See here for a blog post of mine that tries to take a sympathetic view to ID “predictions”)

To be clear, I’m not saying that if one accepts Darwinian evolution then one cannot be a Christian. Accepting or rejecting the grand Darwinian story is a “disputable” or “secondary” matter, and Christians have freedom to hold different views on this issue. But while it may be possible to claim God used apparently unguided evolutionary processes to create life, that doesn’t mean Darwinian evolution is theologically neutral.

According to orthodox Darwinian thinking, undirected processes created not just our bodies, but also our brains, our behaviors, our deepest desires, and even our religious impulses. Under theistic Darwinism, God guided all these processes such that the whole show appears unguided. Thus, theistic evolution stands in direct contrast to Romans 1:20 where the Paul taught that God is “clearly seen” in nature. In contrast, theistic evolution implies God’s involvement in creating humans is completely unseeable,

Theistic evolution may not be absolutely incompatible with believing in God, but it offers no scientific reasons to do so. Perhaps this is why William Provine writes: “One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.”

My Comment: The first two paragraphs of this passage are incoherent given that conventional evolution is far from unguided; presumably this fact is not “clearly seen” by the likes of Luskin; he can only see biological gaps. But on account of de facto ID’s explanatory filter conventional evolution, with its ultimate inevitable logical hiatus, does offer at least a prima facia case to believe in God contrary to what Luskin says, as I have already stated. Thus, from the point of view of the explanatory filter conventional evolution is theologically neutral. However, that’s not say that it is theologically neutral on the deeper question of whether a Christian God would actually reify such a process.

***

Finally the post on Uncommon Descent had some snarky concluding comments from Denise of O’ Leary:

So many people marketing theistic evolution these days dislike evidence…… If the evolution scene were what they claim it is, you’d think we’d be the ones not to want evidence. But we totally rely on it and are comfortable with it.

As a science de facto ID is primarily negative. If de facto IDists are loathe to comment on the nature of the intelligence at work the power of ID to provide predictive evidence is compromised. O’Leary’s boast about ID being very evidence based rings hollow; ditto Luskin's claim to de facto ID being strongly scientific. The fact is de facto ID is not a hard science. 

My own attempts at explaining evolution in terms of an immanent intelligence at work require the nature of intelligence to be at least partly unpacked – see here and here. However, let me make it clear that this work is highly exploratory, speculative, tentative and very unfinished. So, I am in no position to bully either atheists or de facto IDists round to my point of view.

Intelligent Design's 2001 Space Odyssey Style Search for Intelligence of the Gaps

Bad Theology: ID's search for intelligence might have gone off into the wild black yonder; but perhaps it was right under their noses all along.

In a post on Panda’s Thumb Joe Felsenstein continues the same debate with IDists which I looked at in the following posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/dembski-and-felsenstein.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/dembski-and-felsenstein-part-ii.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/algorithms-searches-dualism-and.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/algorithms-searches-dualism-and_12.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/algorithms-searches-dualism-and.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/algorithms-searches-dualism-and_13.html

(Also relevant to the material I present below is this link:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/a-note-on-limitations-of-dembskis.html )

The above series of posts are an analysis of Joe Felsenstein and Tom English’s reaction to the work of IDists William Dembski, Winston Ewert and Robert Marks (DEM for short).  Below I publish quotes from Felsenstein’s latest post and as usual interleave them with my own comments. At the start of his post Felsenstein makes it clear that…

FELSENSTEIN: The issue is not the correctness of their [DEM’s] theorems, but given that they are correct, what flows from them. Dembski, Ewert, and Marks (DEM) may object that they did not say anything about that in their paper….

We don’t think that it is a stretch to say that DEM want their audience to conclude that Design is needed.

Let’s look at what conclusions Dembski, Ewert, and Marks draw from their theorems. There is little or no discussion of this in their paper. Are they trying to persuade us that a Designer has “frontloaded” the Universe with instructions to make our present forms of life?

My Comment: I think I largely concur with that: As I constantly say on this blog, de facto ID is essentially God-of-the-Gaps (although they will deny it), or perhaps in this instance “God-of-the-frontload”. If as Felsenstein says DEM don’t discuss in their paper the origin of the information required to generate life that may be because DEM believe the major part of their epistemic task complete. The epistemic procedure of de facto ID’s “explanatory filter” prompts a default to “intelligent design” if no “natural causes” can be found. To this end DEM’s paper has the role of locating an explanatory gap which they know all too well will be filled in by their followers; as Felsenstein says: “Are they trying to persuade us that a Designer has “frontloaded” the Universe with instructions to make our present forms of life?” But the explanatory filter epistemic as formulated by Dembski and used by his ID community has its limitations, especially in theology.

FELSENSTEIN 1. Their space of “searches” includes all sorts of crazy searches that do not prefer to go to genotypes of higher fitness – most of them may prefer genotypes of lower fitness or just ignore fitness when searching. Once you require that there be genotypes that have different fitnesses, so that fitness affects survival and reproduction, you have narrowed down their “searches” to ones that have a much higher probability of finding genotypes that have higher fitness.

2. In addition, the laws of physics will mandate that small changes in genotype will usually not cause huge changes in fitness. This is true because the weakness of action at a distance means that many genes will not interact strongly with each other. So the fitness surface is smoother than a random assignment of fitnesses to genotypes. That makes it much more possible to find genotypes that have higher fitness.

In short, with their theorems, Design is not needed to explain why a reproducing organism whose genotypes have fitnesses might be able to improve its fitnesses substantially. Just having reproducing organisms, and having the laws of physics, gets an evolving system much farther than a random one of DEM’s “search

My Comment: Firstly, there is a good reason why DEM must consider the whole domain of possible searches. The point of their whole exercise is to show that whatever be the “search” (or better “process”) behind the generation of life in our cosmos, then within the full set of possible Dembskian searches it must be a very special case; that is, it is highly a-typical. The conclusion, then, is that given the principle of equal-a-priori-probabilities the cosmic search must be a highly improbable case and therefore of high information. So, I myself can see the point of this enumeration of the entire domain of possible searches. And yet as I have discussed in the previous parts of this series Felsenstein is also right; Viz: if one posits a) a differential in the fitness of possible configurations and b) our particular laws of physics which smooth out the fitness surface, then it follows that the cosmic physical regime goes a long way to providing the front loaded information needed for the generation of life. 

However, I must register here my dissatisfaction with the fitness surface model. In this post I gave reasons why this model makes implicit assumptions about the survivability and reproducibility of the organic structures that respond to the fitness surface. In consequence far more fundamental than the fitness surface is the mathematical object I call the “spongeam”. This is a conjectured fully connected but extremely tenuous sponge-like-set in configuration space. This conjectured abstract structure is defined by the requirement that it is composed entirely of (organic) forms which are stable and complex enough to survive and  replicate.  The point is that these forms need not be very fit, but nevertheless must be fit and complex enough and sufficiently connected to allow some kind of evolutionary diffusion (by replication) across the conjectured channels of the spongeam. In fact some regions of the spongeam may not even have any fitness slopes at all; the fitness could be unchanging across the spongeam in those regions. In these "flat" regions evolutionary diffusion will be unbiased although in other regions where fitness changes the diffusion will be biased. In the latter regions the idea of “sloping fitness surfaces” will apply. It follows then that “fitness” is not as fundamental as the spongeam; different levels of fitness may or may not be superimposed on the spongeam. If Felsenstein is right then it is the spongeam which is implicitly frontloaded into the cosmos via our physics. The final twist here, however, is that I don’t think the spongeam exists; therefore neither do fitness surfaces. (See the post I have already linked to)

Felsenstein quotes Dembski:

DEMBSKI: The term “evolutionary informatics” was chosen deliberately and was meant to signify that evolution, conceived as a search, requires information to be successful, in other words, to locate a target. This need for information can be demonstrated mathematically in the modeling of evolutionary processes. So, the question then becomes: Where does the information that enables evolutionary searches to be successful come from in the first place? We show that Darwinian processes at best shuffle around existing information, but can’t create it from scratch. [As it turns out this latter statement by Dembski doesn't do justice to the subject as I intend to show in due course - TVR]

I see this work as providing the theoretically most powerful ID challenge against Darwinian evolution to date. As for the attention this work has garnered, there has been some, but Darwinists are largely ignoring it. I’m justified in thinking this is because our methods leave them no loopholes. We’re not saying that evolution doesn’t happen. We’re saying that even if it happens, it requires an information source beyond the reach of conventional evolutionary mechanisms.

My Comment: The first paragraph here basically concurs with what I have just said: For evolution to successfully generate life there must be some kind of informational “frontloading” (Unless we are to accept interventional tinkering). Felsenstein is saying that this information is probably implicit in the laws of physics, laws which imply a fitness surface smooth enough for conventional evolution. Felsenstien might be right (although as I have said I personally have reservations about this conclusion). Interestingly, Dembski says We’re not saying that evolution doesn’t happen and is in effect admiting that evolution could conceivably be tapping into information from somewhere, perhaps the spongeam. So even if evolution does occur DEM’s conclusion that a practical and successful search requires a priori information still applies. And Felsenstein would agree!

You might think, then, that Dembski has got the “materialists” into a “heads I win tails you lose” impasse. But generally IDists are unwilling to exploit this advantage because lurking in the background is Western dualism, a dualism embodied in Dembski’s explanatory filter and which implicitly sets natural forces against divine intelligent design. It is therefore dangerous for IDists to even admit that evolution might be sufficiently provisioned with the requisite information (presumably via the spongeam, perhaps) to do the job; for if they do, then cranking the handle of the explanatory filter leads to an embarrassing answer. This has the effect of making “evilution” taboo in the ID community.  This is why in the second paragraph Dembski says:

I see this work as providing the theoretically most powerful ID challenge against Darwinian evolution to date.

“Yes” and “no” to that Dembski! “Yes” if you are going to depict “Darwinian evolution” as the straw man caricature of an unguided process, as do some interlocutors on both sides of the debate. And “No” if one understands, and certainly Felsenstein understands it, that the “fitness surfaces” which may be implicit in physics, provisions evolution with the requisite directional information.

Before I proceed with the next quotation I need to make the following disclaimer. I don’t accept the habitual assumption of the de facto ID community that natural processes “can’t create information” and that information only emerges from the mysterious black box of the so-called “intelligent agent”. This de-facto ID error is bound up with what is likely to be a misconception about the nature of probability. In fact my latest work (which I hope to post in due course) suggests that the creation of information is exactly the intended role of those so-called “natural processes”.....watch this space.  In an earlier post here I explore some of the complexities of the information concept which impact this matter.

Felsenstein also quotes Robert Marks

MARKS: By looking to information theory, a well-established branch of the engineering and mathematical sciences, evolutionary informatics shows that patterns we ordinarily ascribe to intelligence, when arising from an evolutionary process, must be referred to sources of information external to that process. Such sources of information may then themselves be the result of other, deeper evolutionary processes. But what enables these evolutionary processes in turn to produce such sources of information? Evolutionary informatics demonstrates a regress of information sources. At no place along the way need there be a violation of ordinary physical causality. And yet, the regress implies a fundamental incompleteness in physical causality’s ability to produce the required information. Evolutionary informatics, while falling squarely within the information sciences, thus points to the need for an ultimate information source qua intelligent designer.

My Comment: Firstly let me say that the average reasonably intelligent, yet non-technical Christian will be completely amazed and fazed by the likes of gurus like Dembski, Ewart and Marks and unable to ferret out the weaknesses in their position. It all looks oh-so-technically-expert and this in itself is heart-warming and reassuring to the average guru follower who can connect with the dualist idea that only black-box-intelligence creates information. And yet there is a deep issue with what Marks says above. Given Marks’ habituated mode of thought it doesn’t enter his head that in any practical sense of the word so called “natural processes” can create information. Instead he sees conversation of information working much like energy conservation.  From the perspective of Marks’ dualistic habits of mind it is taken for granted that physical causality is wholly different from the “intelligent designer”. To him and others in the de facto ID community the designer is the mysterious and analytically indivisible entity sourcing information at the end of his information regress. It never occurs to him to make the connection that perhaps physical causality may be that intelligence at work.

At one point Felsenstein quotes a question by ID supporter Casey Luskin.

LUSKIN: What is Active Information, and why does it point to the need for Intelligent Design to solve a problem, rather than an unguided evolutionary process? ……..Well, we appreciate the work that you [Marks] are doing and the papers that you’re publishing analyzing many of these evolutionary algorithms and asking whether they support a Darwinian view of life or an Intelligent Design view of life. (My emphasis)

My Comment: If the spongeam and the fitness surfaces which ride on its back exist, as Felsenstein thinks they do, then "Darwinism" is certainly not unguided!  DEM’s work in fact shows that conventional evolution cannot be unguided. It is ironic that the B-teams on both sides of the debate err on this notion of unguided evolution  - see here for example.

Felsenstein quotes Ewart:

EWART: While some processes are biased towards birds, many others are biased towards other configurations of matter. In fact, a configuration biased towards producing birds is at least as improbable as birds themselves, possibly more so.

Having postulated Darwinian evolution, the improbability of birds hasn’t gone away; we’ve merely switched focus to the improbability of the process that produced birds. Instead of having to explain the configuration of a bird, we have to explain the configuration of a bird-making process.

My Comment: This is certainly true and this is what DEM have successfully shown. And yet there is a deep implicit issue embedded in Ewart’s statements as to the significance of his claims. It is on that significance which the de facto ID movement is going astray.  The ulterior motive behind the above, a motive which is clear to Felsenstein and myself, is that Ewart thinks he is paving the way for the explanatory filter to default us to the “intelligent agent”, whatever he means by that. The big problem, as I will be proposing in my latest work, is that intelligence too classifies as a highly improbable configuration and this fact points to a major loophole in the work of the ID gurus.

How does Felsenstein react to Ewart’s statements?....

FELSENSTEIN: This example leaves it unclear what the “process” is. The reader may be tempted to conclude that it is the process that models an evolving population. And then the reader may think that if this evolutionary process succeeds in improving fitness, that some outside force is needed to set up the process so that it succeeds. But for their theorem to apply, the processes considered must include processes that make no sense as models of evolution. Processes that wander around among genotypes randomly, without being more likely to come up with higher fitnesses. Even processes that prefer to find genotypes with lower fitnesses. All of those are among the processes that must be eliminated before we get to processes in which genotypes have fitnesses, and those fitnesses affect the outcome of evolution.

My Comment: As I have already said DEM have rightly included all the possible searches in their enumeration and that includes all the highly disordered searches which practically speaking are fruitless. Disorder, by definition, has an overwhelming statistical weight and therefore a successful evolutionary search is a very rare case when set against the class of disordered searches.  Using the principle of equal a priori probabilities it follows, then, that a practical evolutionary process is a highly improbable search and this by definition implies a high information object. But then Felsenstein is also right; he presents a good prima facia case that physics implies different levels of fitness and a smooth fitness surface, which is where the information required by DEM lies according to Felsenstein. (Although I must once again register my reservations about the existence of the spongeam on which the existence of the fitness surface depends,)

Felsenstein further comments on Ewart:

FELSENSTEIN: In his reply, Ewert invokes the smoothness of the fitness landscape, and considers the smoothness to result from “laws or self-organization”

(EWART): *Quote* It is not sufficient to invoke the three-fold incantation of selection, replication, and mutation. You must also assume a suitable fitness landscape. You have to appeal to something beyond Darwinism, such as laws or self-organization, to account for a useful fitness landscape. *Unquote*

He does not seem to realize that those “laws” might simply be the laws of physics, and that the “self-organization” can simply be self-reproduction, something that all organisms do.

My Comment: Although DEM are right in asserting that any working conventional evolutionary process must have, a priori, a high information content, it is notable that Ewert doesn’t acknowledge that conceivably this information could, as Joe Felsenstein plausibly maintains, reside in the rarity of our familiar physical regime. One might think that by admitting this as a possibility at least, the IDists could have their cake and eat it; they could even claim that Felsenstein is admitting the existence of “active information”!  But no, the de facto ID movement has painted itself into a corner here: For if something along the lines Felsenstein is suggesting could be satisfactorily demonstrated then not only would that bugbear of ID, the explanatory filter, stab IDists in the back, but the whole thrust of IDism, which has been unequivocally against any hint of “Darwinism”, would make it look as though they have been defeated. The IDists have fostered the fearsome dualist spectre that if those loathed “natural forces” are doing the creation job all along then ID is worsted. Notice Ewert’s reference to so-called “self-organization”, a vague concept which has yet to produce any substantive input into the evolution debate.  And yet if Felsenstein is right, the solution could be staring the IDists in the face; namely, that if the requisite fitness surfaces are implicit in physics then in effect common-or-garden physics is doing the job of “self-organisation”. (Assuming the existence of the spongeam I must add). Even though this outcome to the debate would still be consistent with the work of DEM, such an outcome would cloud the tribal-clarity of the IDists shrill anti-Darwinist rallying call, a call which appeals to the dualist thinking of every Christian sect between here and the Watchtower’s Brooklyn HQ.

FELSENSTEIN: It is clear from these examples that Dembski and Ewert mean their theorems to be read as evidence for an Intelligent Designer either frontloading the evolutionary process, or for an Intelligent Designer intervening in it. But Tom English and I have shown that their Active Information can come about without that. It can come about simply by having a reproducing organism which has different genotypes, which have different phenotypes, and these have different fitnesses. And further Active Information can also come about by the predisposition of the laws of physics to bring about fitness surfaces smoother than “white noise” fitness surfaces.

Could that Active Information be enough to explain the evolution of, say, a bird? Do they have some argument that further “configuration of a bird-making process” is needed beyond that? There is actually nothing in their argument that requires that there be further Intelligent Design

My Comment: Yes, given the work of DEM it does follow that the generation of life demands frontloading; either that or the ad hoc fiat of tinkering and intervention. Felsenstein is plausibly maintaining that the mutually acceptable frontloading is down to physics.  Essentially then DEM and Felsenstein aren’t at odds; for they both see the need for some kind of frontloading (If not interventional tinkering). But they disagree over the significance and meaning of this fact.  What makes the situation more complex is that for reasons I’ve already outlined the IDists are unwilling to admit that this frontloading could be down to common-or-garden physics; they’d much prefer their opponents to talk of some exotic and speculative “self-organization”, a vague idea which currently has little real intellectual traction. But for polemical reasons the IDists are unwilling to entertain the prosaic physics solution; a choice imposed on them by the dualism implicit in the explanatory filter which excludes any middle ground in their intelligence versus natural forces dichotomy. The IDists have committed themselves to the idea that some special ingredient X is needed for life to exist. Felsentstein says that that ingredient could well be the physics we all know and love. The IDist is inclined to say “no!” to that because otherwise it would cut across his anti-darwinist raison d'etre he has fashioned for himself. For the IDist ingredient X is likely to be thought of as some inaccessible “black box” intelligence and not mere prosaic physics; to admit the latter would be a terrible anti-climax to the de facto IDists' 2001 space odyssey message; namely, that they have found an artifact not created by common-or-garden “natural forces”;  this is in spite of the fact that even if Felsenstein is right the IDist still have a case to argue!

The ID community's loathing of "Darwinism", even if it actually doesn't directly cut across DEM's ideas, nevertheless, goes deep enough to cause division within the ID community. See for example this post by Vincent Torley on Uncommon Descent where in the comments section Torley is accused of supporting “Darwinism”. See comment 86 where we read: It almost seems as if VJ Torley is turning Darwinist on us. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong. Regardless of whether it is consistent with conservation of information ideas or not as a rule the average right of centre ID follower hates "Darwinism" and can not abide by it.

The added irony is that Felsenstein himself takes for granted the same dichotomy of intelligence vs. natural forces. Given his outlook on life it is likely, of course, that he believes “natural forces”, whatever that means, have done the job of evolving life.  Since he has shown (plausibly) that physics could be the seat of so-called active information, then his conclusion, as per the explanatory filter, is that intelligent agency is not required as an explanation. He, like his IDist antagonists, sees it as a straight choice between natural forces and God. Felsenstein is a dualist in his conceptual categories when it come to thinking about God. As Felsenstein says above: "But Tom English and I have shown that their Active Information can come about without that", and by "that" Felsenstein means an "Intelligent agent". For him physics trumps intelligence.

Epilogue

Even if Felsenstien is winning the argument this still leaves us with the question of Why our particular physical regime with its miraculous fine tuning? For IDists, of course, this is the work of the God of the Gaps, but for Felsentstein it’s probably the work of Physics of the Gaps, perhaps some kind of multiverse. But whatever way we look at it, finite chains of human logic will always leave an inevitable grand logical hiatus unfilled. The irrational arbitrariness of an impenetrable wall of brute fact contingency faces us at the end of our quest for obliging reason; positing neither physics nor intelligence will rid us of this super gap (But see appendix).  Therefore I suggest we leave it and get back to the thing we do best and that is to describe the cosmos we have been provisioned with using the intellectual tools the good Lord has also provisioned us with. 

From where I’m standing the results of Dembski, Ewart and Marks are starting to look like a misinterpreted mathematical trivialism, I hope to expand on this topic in later posts. What ID is missing is that those much despised so-called “natural processes” are actually provisioned, in any practical sense of the word, to do exactly what IDists dread and fear in their darkest dreams; namely to create information. But then why should a Christian be surprised at that? God is immanent in his world.

Appendix (Added 21 Nov)

Is there any hope that the finite human mind could ever grasp the concept of Aseity? Two lines of inquiry respectively from the atheist and theist camps might be as follows:

Atheistic Aseity: This line or argumentation might be based on some kind of super-copernicanism; that is, the super-multiverse where all options are somehow realised, an idea having its strongest form in Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe. Because everything exists in the super-verse then it follows that everything has an existence probability of unity. The Shannon “suprisal value”, that is, the information value of the existence of any particular state of affairs then sinks to zero. Since the human intellectual demand for explanation comes in large part from our intuitive sense of surprise as to why particular things are as they are, then it may be argued that super-copernicanism goes someway to assuaging our sense of surprise at apparent contingencies;  for in the super-verse nothing conceivable is given preferential existential treatment; the only surprise left is why there is something rather than nothing. But it might be argued that if everything exists it is no more surprising than everything failing to exist at all!

Regarding the epistemic question as to why human beings can know anything at all in such an indifferent and dispassionate universe it might be argued that in a universe of indifference we aren’t going to be specially targeted for deception; hence errors average out and we can be reasonably sure that we can acquire knowledge about somethings if not everything. To claim that we could know nothing in an impersonal universe is tantamount to the inverted conceit of the conspiracy theorists who believe that they are being specially targeted for deception. One thing to be said for Copernicanism is that it seems to be an antidote to the narcissism of fundamentalist paranoia!

However there are problems with this view: Namely, the simulation argument and why we know as much as we do; we would expect the universe to be far more random and unknowable if some form of super-copernicanism held sway.

Relevant link: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/not-lot-of-people-know-that.html

Theistic Aseity: This line of thought is potentially much more fruitful to my mind. Early on in my intellectual career I was attracted to positivism; the general idea that everything swings on observer experience to a high degree; in fact strong positivism suggests that all else besides experience is meaningless. Strong positivism is counter intuitive when it comes to in-practice and in-principle realities that cannot be experienced like the planets of distant galaxies or other minds. But nevertheless positivism has left me with the general feeling that without the presence of an experiencing sentience to apprehend it in some way “reality” is a meaningless and incoherent idea. This view is clearly related to Berkeley’s idealism. So, if reality is meaningless without a sentient apprehender then the organised high complexity of the cosmos immediately follows: The experiencing sentience has to be sufficiently complex in order to possess the coherence needed to cognitively apprehend the cosmos, But since coherent human observers are composed of the very stuff of the cosmos, then it follows that the cosmos must be sufficiently organised and complex to support the human sentience that apprehends it. When human's describe the cosmos they are in effect describing  themselves. I advance a related idea in the introduction of my book Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity. Viz; that conscious sentience is described in its own terms, much like a computer language compiler is written in the language it compiles.

The foregoing line of thought is essentially the strong anthropic principle. It attempts to show that sentient observers are logically necessary because a cosmos without them is regarded as an unintelligible  notion. These prototype ideas on the aseity of sentience may throw light on the aseity of God.

  Atheistic visions of the cosmos which are founded on the elementary elemental such as bits and particles will always face a logical hiatus: Simplicity is simply too simple to self-explain. (I touch on this idea of elementary elementalism being unable to self-explain in the following posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/epistemic-humility.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/ghost-and-machine.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/paul-nelson-computer-simulations-and.html)

Appendix II

Without the spongeam conventional evolution is a non-starter