Gentleman's Disagreement

Going on Arni Zachariassen's report here of the debate between Rowan Williams and Richard Dawkins it sounds as though it was a very civilised affair indeed. This is a breath of fresh air.

In contrast, I can't help feeling that the politicisation, polarisation and primitive savagery we see nowadays on both sides of the debate is in good part down to the growth of fundamentalism; and Christian fundamentalism has its fair share of the blame here: Disagreement with particular Christian fundamentalist "jot and tittle" doctrines provokes charges of compromise, heresy, paganism, apostasy, siding with a conspiracy and even of being an emissary of Satan.  Posts where I have touched on fundamentalist extremism can be found here:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/07/evidence-of-hams-religious-extremism.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/07/faith-test.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/06/cloistered-academics-vs-punks.html

Trying to sum up my thinking here: It seems to me that the paranoiac and hysterical Christian fundamentalist overreaction that we are seeing today has its roots in the sixties when Christianity started to face some fundamental challenges and was quasi-disestablished.

William Irwin Thompson: At the Edge of History

In the late sixties William Irwin Thompson was professor of humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It seems that MIT’s image makers wanted a tame humanities department to act as window dressing that would help humanize and soften the stark lines of their “Hard Science” modernism. But in Thompson they got more than they bargained for: This was a man who was acutely aware of the deep existential angst that so often accompanies the science and technology driven industrialised West, an angst that in good part is down to the world view paradigms that are too easily assumed to go together with a technoscience based society. Using some first rate wordsmithing Thompson turned on his employers with very biting criticisms. But then what did MIT expect? As a cultural historian Thompson’s area of expertise, by definition, is criticism and so MIT got what they paid for; they employed a cultural critic and they got a cultural critic – with a vengeance. They could hardly expect Thompson to respond with a belly-up acquiescence to the epistemic exclusivism that is the habit of mind of many an aficionado of the hard sciences.

At the beginning of the 1970s Thomson published At The Edge of History, a book I have recently read. It is the story of Thompson's reaction to his experiences at MIT. Much of the material in At the Edge of History deals with the subtle existential difficulties many Westerners have in coming to terms with technological society and the crisis of meaning that the revelations science bring; this is subject matter that is very much a theme of my blogs. Thompson is one of those thinkers who takes in the whole of sweep of reality and paints a breath taking broad brush picture of the vista he sees. It’s a sobering the fact that Thompson was writing this kind of stuff when I was only just out of shorts and still thought that science was all about space travel.

Perhaps I find Thompson just a bit too New Agey to connect with his aspirations and tastes, but he is so perceptive and expresses things so well that I found myself underlining much of what he had written. Below are some passages that stood out for me, particularly passages to do with that pervasive theme of my blogs: Technoscientific angst.

Page 63: The new paradigm alienates: In the seventeenth century we took a turn into what Alfred North Whitehead calls “scientific materialism” and introduced a whole new readjustment of the mind’s relationship with nature; now the effects of that readjustment are becoming visible, tragically visible.

Page 65: Feeling vs. Mechanism: When men are trained to strive for power over their environment [via science and technology], they are socially constrained to achieve that success through suppression of consciousness in which ambiguity, complexity, feeling, intuition and imagination are dismissed as irrelevant distractions….. And this is what “the aerospace syndrome” is all about. Operating with a strictly logical and mechanistic model of self, MIT training reduces the self’s truly complex nature to a few relatively standard industrial functions.

Page 70: Phallic science rapes nature: And what the adolescent engineer rehearses in miniature in his fantasied relations with women, he is even freer to do at large with nature, for the instinctive play of our technology is the exploitation of passive, female nature in a celebration of power and phallic dominance. In keeping with this sexual mythology of rational male dominance over irrational female nature we have constructed an ideology of progress that places our industrial culture at the pinnacle of human civilization.

Page 75: Mystical “Pythagorean science” is Thompson’s ideal: We somehow have to outflank the ignorant armies of the Left and Right to find the space and time to convert out industrial technology to new kind of Pythagorean science.

Page 79: Our humanity is reasserted and expressed through the overtly palpable and sensual: In the face of the machine, man now affirms his humanity in nudity, sexuality, and the polymorphous sensuousness of Esalen.

Page 84: Modern science’s mechanistic reductionist hegemony: If at MIT biology is molecular, psychology is the physiology of the brain, and political science is computer generated biostatistics, then it follows that if the humanities and arts can show imaginative ways of giving up their atavistic inclinations, funds will be found to turn philosophy into information theory, history into the comparative modernization of the Third World, and literature into linguistics.

Page 128: Freak out as luddites or become initiates who unite mythos and logos: When information is so immense that man cannot keep up with it and still be purely rational, he has a choice: he can freak out and become tribal again to attack the old naïve rational values in the guise of a Luddite-student; or he can effect a quantum leap in consciousness to re-vision the universe….re-vision the universe in the mystical, mathematical, and scientific foms of the new Pythagoreanism….

Page 132: Thompson’s New Age Drift: But at the beginning of Phase IV it is all the triumph of the Pythagorean, the Scientist-Shaman of the Aquarian Age….

Page 144: On Fundies vs. Liberals: The liberal feels that liberal values will become increasingly triumphant; the powerless fundamentalist feels that apocalypse will tumble the proud and mighty into the dust, and that he will be found living in the truth.

Page 145. Industry vs. Romanticism, Logos, vs. Mythos: Seventeen hundred and seventy saw the beginning of the industrial revolution, but it also saw the beginning of the movement of Romanticism, which as a movement in European culture, had a fairly profound effect on human history, artistic and political.

Page 147: Techno-liberalism is totalitarian:….one can make a much stronger case that it is the Technological society that is totalitarian, for it reduces all cultures to mere ideological impediments to the advance of “rationalization”. Technology is “total” because it sees everything other than itself as reactionary, irrational, and primitive.

Page 159: Lewis and Tolkien attack technology: Lewis’ and Tolkien’s Oxford attack on the modern machine age is not novel, but it is subtle and clever. By saying in effect, “Of course, all this is rubbish and nonsense, but it is entertaining,” they can sneak unnoticed into the iron palace of technology.

Page 165. Thompson and Evolution. Prior to this page Thompson discusses some “heretical” theories like Atlantis and catastrophism and then we read this: I remember how startled I was in 1967 when Professor Robert Ockne told me he did not accept the theory of human evolution as proved because he thought it was an enormous overgeneralization on very fragmentary data…..I was very surprised because I always thought, without question, that only ignorant hicks from the south or Jehovah’s Witnesses questioned the theory, and since I saw myself as definitely on the side of science against orthodox religion, I positioned myself in the matter without a thought for what was really only a matter of snobbery.

Page 169: On Imagination vs. Reason: Had the mystical and Pythagorean nature of pure science not been vigorously suppressed in favor of a scientized political ideology, men like Tennyson might not have had to tear themselves apart over the supposed conflict between visionary experience and reason.

Page 170: On Mythology: There is indeed a “mythopeic mentality”, but it is not restricted to precivilised man, but is to be found in geniuses as different as Boehme, Kepler, Blake, Yeats, Wagner, Heisenberg, and that student of Boehme’s theory of action and reaction, Isaac Newton. Myth is not an early level of human development, but an imaginative description of reality in which the known is related to the unknown……{then follows a definition of myth}

Page 182 Balancing criticism and imagination: Between the cracked-open minds of the enthusiasts of lost tribes, lost continents, and flying saucers and the firmly shut minds of the scholars, it is a very difficult to find a healthy way of using one’s head. ….The double-bind was as true of scholarship as of politics: one purchased imagination at a cost of discipline; a disciplined imagination was a contradiction of terms.

Page 189: Thompson and Maverick science: Thompson is favourably disposed toward alternative “Atlantean” histories and thinks we may be due for a paradigm shift here: All in all, when one takes into account the problems that are not honestly faced and questioned in our notions of evolution, primitive culture, and archeology, one can see that the specialists of what T.S. Kuhn would call “normal science” are retreating from the “anomalies” and burrowing more deeply into the security of the minutiae. If one lifts one’s gaze to take in the whole historical horizon of man, as now only an amateur or a non-specialist can, one can see that once again we are entering an era of scientific revolution with its sudden shift in paradigms. [or perhaps not yet – that was written about 40 years ago]

Page 189: Monsters from the id: The liberal humanists dread the collapse of their world structure with some reason, for if progress and materialism have made technology possible by ignoring all the other subtle forces in nature, then the death of materialism will open man up to beasts and demons he has not feared since the middle ages. …..Already the hippie dropouts from the universities and high schools are becoming caught up in black magic, sorcery, and the crudest forms of occultism…Charles Manson….

Page 200 The “cargo cult” is a universal template: The universal cargo cult takes in the multitudes, from Oxford professors like Lewis waiting for Christ to invade, through [Arthur C] Clarke and his followers, to Mixtec Indians, looking for Apollo II and remembering their Ancient gods from the sky. And even the Russians have held conferences on extraterrestrial civilizations and begun to wait, with Mick Jagger, "for something to come out of somewhere".

Page 201 The angst of the Cosmic perspective: The film [2001 space odyssey] itself is the perfect American irony: a gadget-filled, special effects ode to technology is at once a requiem to all technology. The very movie [2001 space odyssey] that dazzles us with all its tricks is the movie that shows how trivial all these toys are when set upon the cosmic scale.

Page 205: Myth is the/a paradigm of the impending New Age: Birth and death are ultimately confusing; to make sense of them we will have to make our peace with myth…. At the edge of history, history itself can no longer help us and only myth remains equal to reality.

****

The following are links to blog posts of mine relevant to Thompson’s subject matter:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/11/science-and-imagination.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/10/self-referencing-nature-of.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/07/study-in-cognitive-dissonance.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/06/2001-spaced-out-odyssey.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/03/fate-of-man-by-william-shakespeare.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-consciousness.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2008/09/heres-interesting-book-cloudspotters.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-1.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/2011/08/cosmic-perspective.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-3.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2007/02/time-travel.html

Of Funnels, Pandeism, Simulations and Grace.

The Thin End of the Cosmic Funnel***

(Picture from the Wikipedia page on the Big Bang)

In this post I want to reply to “Anonymous” who left a comment on my blog entry here. My blog is a pretty quiet backwater of the www, so when someone comes along with some intelligent comments it’s a big deal on this part of web and so worth showcasing. I actually think of my blogs more as a kind of “get-it-off-my-chest” quasi-private diary of thoughts and reactions to life. But if fair minded people stumble upon them and comment intelligently they’re more than welcome. It’s a bonus!

Anyway, let me first publish (again) Anonymous’ comment:

Tinkering, interruptions, call them what you will, but at the end of the day the question remains, has the deity of your conception sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe which from its initial state unfolds in accordance with the laws of physics thus established to bring about complexity, life, ultimately intelligent life, without need for any 'interruptions' of any kind? And let me raise the stakes a bit, is able to set forth a Universe in this manner which in its unfolding ends up exactly as the Universe we perceive today, in every particular? For this is precisely the capacity asserted to be that of the Creator in Pandeism.

But I would not wish to leave an incomplete sense of what Pandeism proposes. So here it is.

Pandeism proposes that prior to the existence of our Universe (or, in some sense 'outside' the existence of our Universe, for those who would limit the existence of linear time to being within such existence) there was an entity of, as supposed above, sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe of the scope and operation of our own. This entity had some rational motivation compelling it to set forth a Universe, perhaps because as a unitary being it could only learn the lessons of dichotomy by experiencing the existence of limited beings interacting with one another. And so, it set forth laws of physics designed to bring about the complexity which would ultimately create these beings, and it poured its energy into that which is now the energy of which our Universe is ultimately made. The laws of physics point to an end but are not determinative. Imagine a large funnel into which many small rubber balls are thrown against the wall; the balls may bounce randomly, unpredictably, but will ultimately end up going down then hole at the narrow end of the funnel. Just so, our laws of physics. No telling when or where exactly intelligent life will develop, or what form it will take, but the brilliantly constructed governing dynamics of our Universe make it highly likely that it will happen at some times and places.

And where is the Creator in all this? Well, it has become our Universe, so it's everywhere; it's power continually sustains all things in being, but it has not the need to 'interrupt' the obedience of every particle of energy in existence to the laws of physics which were well-enough made in the first place to bring about everything required to fulfill its initial motivation. Indeed, it would have an overriding incentive to not interrupt the natural development of things, which would be to not interrupt the natural development of things, and instead see how things unfold, how the true randoms play out, absent any intervention at all.

And what of man's millions of competing revelations and prophecies, visions, scriptures, oracles, miracles, spiritual emotions, supernatural feelings, ghosts, answered prayers, egrigores, and like beliefs? These are after all a constant across all cultures, even those whose take from them is completely opposite to their neighbors, suggesting either a deity doing a rather sloppy job of trying to communicate a single truth, or man doing a rather sloppy (and often self-serving) job of interpreting the unconscious manifestations of the mind of a deity not trying to communicate anything at all. For if, after all, our Creator became the Creation, then we are all fragments of it, and some talented few of us may in our own minds touch some small portion of the incomprehensibly vast and complex mind which underlies all things for however long our Universe is set to bounce around before it ends up down the funnel.

Hi Mr. Anonymous (Or Ms. Anonymous?)

I like your metaphor of a funnel: It gives us a good picture of the blend of law and disorder* that constitutes our physical regime as we understand it. However, we really need to turn the funnel round to get a closer approximation to our Cosmos where the Second Law of Thermodynamics rules OK. In effect the universe is coming out of a funnel and not being pushed into it; but in its “early” stages it is still in the narrow neck of the funnel where there are relatively (and I stress “relatively”) few states available to it. This inverted funnel metaphor gives us one way of picturing why the second law is consistent with self organization: The “neck” of the funnel may be constrictive enough to ensure that of the states available in the constriction the class of life bearing states is proportionately large enough to give them a realistic probability of making a showing. Although I’m actually equivocal about this possibility, the inverted funnel metaphor is one way of picturing why, in spite of the claims of those who should know better such as Granville Sewell, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, in and of itself, not inconsistent with evolution. But I digress from the real thrust of your comment.

OK, so let’s assume that living structures have a realistic probability of forming given our Cosmic law and disorder regime. That is, expressed mathematically Prob(Life|Physics) has a significant value for realistic Cosmic times. But given these circumstances what I don’t see is why pandeism follows from this; after all, as I have expressed many times before on this blog the law and disorder logic implicit in expressions like Prob(life|Physics) really only amounts to sophisticated descriptive statements from which one infers the likely patterns of cosmic behavior. It is conceivable that the Cosmos could have other patterns of behavior such as the inclusion of many irregular one-off exception events (= “the miraculous”?) making it intractable to the epistemology of law and disorder science, a science whose efficacy depends very much on a strict coherence. Why then should a Cosmos rich in irregularity be any less subject to a pandeist interpretation than the intelligible cosmos we are used to? What difference does the mathematical category of the cosmic behavioral patterns make?

But then again I think I can see where you are coming from. When anyone talks about Deity, particularly transcendent Deity, and its relation to the Cosmos, they have little choice but to talk about it using imaginative metaphorical models that have their origins in this-world-experience. In this connection I can see from the way you write that you intuitively invest far more in the notion of physical law than just a device of mathematical description. Viz:

“….of physics designed to bring about the complexity which would ultimately create these beings, and it poured its energy into that which is now the energy of which our Universe is ultimately made” …. And …….. the obedience of every particle of energy in existence to the laws of physics which were well-enough made in the first place to bring about everything required to fulfill its initial motivation."

You have made an intuitive leap here from physical laws as descriptive devices (which is about as far as the physicist can or should go) to physical laws as some kind of quasi-divine dynamic that is truly creative. Well, may be; who knows how Deity can delegate its energies, but we can’t make much progress on this theology using empirical science: The mathematical category of the patterns of cosmic behavior doesn’t in and of itself reveal much about an ex nihilo creative dynamic. In fact I would go as far as to say that the laws of physics are meaningless unless reified on some kind of ontological substrate, a substrate upon which observation and test can be made; that is, “physical law” is secondary to the primary matrix on which it is reified. Using a Marxist turn of phrase: Physical Law is the secondary mathematical superstructure raised upon a primary ontological foundation.

The “prescriptive” (as opposed to the merely “descriptive”) notion of physical law as a proactive creative dynamic is a very metaphysical, exotic and debatable notion that resides deep in the psyche of Western man. In fact it is intriguing to note that some atheists take it for granted that physical law constitutes a creative dynamic of quasi-divine status transcending the ontology which it appears to “control”. For example Stephen Hawking is somewhat overawed by the apparent “something for nothing” properties of gravity. But as the joke goes, when Hawking claimed that all he needed was gravity and no God, the Almighty said in reply “Go and get your own gravity Hawking!”

What then is at the bottom of this crypto-deist intuition that physical law is autonomous to such an extent that it is itself some kind of self-managing creative/controlling dynamic? I would suggest that this belief has its source in metaphors taken from the world of our everyday experience; I have given more detail in this post. I would therefore put it to you Mr. Anonymous that the pandeism you have expressed and which through physical law finds such a compelling reason to equate deity and the Cosmos, is based on this-world-metaphors.

However, having said that Mr. Anonymous, let me say that the first set of comments you left me gave me an issue I’m still very much chewing over. I was struck by your suggestion that perhaps Deity has the motive of creating a universal simulation because the outcome is unknown; after all, if Deity is pure Mind then perhaps like ourselves it passes from states of unknowing to knowing as it thinks through and explores the implications of certain problems in algorithmic logic. A corollary of this seems to be that the Cosmos is in some sense Deity – or at least the thoughts of Deity and therefore we have here a hint of pandesim.

But even if we take that latter suggestion on board it is still far too strong an identification to equate the Cosmos with Deity and Deity with the cosmos. By way of illustration let’s use the metaphor of a computer running a software simulation, a metaphor of which you said in the comments section here you liked. Let us note the paradox inherent in computer simulations: The simulation is in one sense part of the computer and yet in another sense it is very much other than the computer; the computer has a deeper and “firmer” reality than the simulation and significantly the simulation at no time has a life of its own; the software can’t run itself – the computer must be always there sustaining the simulation. Moreover the computer has the power to interrupt the flow of “normalcy” at anytime either through a hardware or system software interrupt. (Hence my preference for the notion of “interruptions” rather than “interventions”). Also it is possible for the computer to hold meta-information about the simulation it is running, information that may not exist in the simulation itself.

This computer simulation, like much talk about God, is, after all, a metaphor and therefore likely to only capture a facet of the nature of Deity and its relation to creation. However I like this particular metaphor for two reasons: Firstly because it conveys the sheer contingency of the cosmos; no simulation has a logical necessity to exist; the internal logic of the simulation is descriptive of the simulation but it in no way delivers aseity or self explanation. And secondly I like it because the simulation metaphor conveys something of the paradox of the simultaneous eminence and immanence of the Godhead that seems to have been recognized in Acts 17:27-28.

I also quite like the author-book metaphor as it has some features in its favour. But I do take your point that this metaphor has the failing of leading to a problematical dichotomy between God’s vision and a separate created world. I have always been in favour of employing multiple metaphors about God in order to bring facets of His nature to the fore and I try to avoid the over interpretation and over selling of any particular metaphor.

You refer to the “The deity of my conception”. My guess is that the majority of people have a conception of deity somewhere in the corner of their minds. In fact there are probably nearly as many conceptions of God as there are people, although those conceptions will likely have a lot of overlap with one another. Exclusive use of proprietary pet metaphors in trying to express our ideas about God can lead to much grief. For example attempts to put the doctrine of the Trinity on a clearer footing by over interpreting and overselling a particular metaphor such as “modalism”, for example, quickly leads to shouts of “heresy” from others**. But in the face of human cognitive infirmity we really need to bear in mind some of the other attributes God might have. You talk about God setting up a cosmic simulation motivated by an experimental curiosity. But if we are to hazard such an anthropomorphic motive why not hazard other motives such as love of the objects created? In fact this affective attribute of God is largely the concern of the New Testament; such a Deity may well be gracious toward our cognitive infirmity as we attempt to conceive His nature. He may look upon our attempts to describe Him as might a Parent who sees His child drawing a stickman depiction of Him. The offspring of the Almighty may abuse one another over the state of their respective stick-man depictions of deity, but I suspect God Himself has a very different point of view of those attempts.

Thanks again Mr. Anonymous for turning up. In these days when brain dead bigotry and block-headed religiosity gets such an airing it’s nice to see some fair minded intelligence being applied. I’ve really benefitted from your input.

A Note on Science

What is the scientific status of the speculative ideas I have discussed above? Scientific testability comes in degrees: Roughly speaking the higher the level and the more significant the conjectured ontology becomes the less tractable it is to an elementary hypothesis testing epistemology. This leaves little choice but to proceed with a “post-facto interpolation method”; that is, joining the dots of experience with imaginative background sense making structures. See here for more details.

Foot notes: 

*  Law and Disorder is my short hand for patterns described by a combination of algorithms (or "functions") and statistics.

** Here are some so-called Christian “heresies” (re: the Godhead) as listed by Reachout Trust, Ministry to the Cults: Aphthartodocetism, Monophysitism, Apollinarianism, Alogi, Arianism, Docetism, Ebionitism, Encratite, Eutychainism, Gnosticism, Marcionism, Monarchianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism, Montanism, Nestorianism, Pelagianism, Sebellianism. The criterion used to identify these attempts at grappling with the nature of God as “heresy” sometimes involves a splitting of hairs that would probably make most of us “heretics”. God help us!

*** The funnel like shape of space-time diagram here is only meant to be symbolic of the funnel like shape of  the  disorder vs. time graph. 

On God Concepts

The Blank Slate Atheist is a rarity, even in the secular West.

I have remarked before on the fact that many Westerners hold in their minds a conception of God regardless of whether or not they actually believe in God. This is really no surprise given that ideas about God float around in the conceptual ether of our social interactions. In spite of secularization in Western society it is all but impossible not to pick up “God concepts”. As Cornelius Hunter has very succinctly and effectively put it:

It is perhaps one of the great enigmas in religious thought that one can profess to be an agnostic, skeptic, or even atheist regarding belief in God yet still hold strong opinions about God.

This phenomenon is particularly pertinent to atheism; so often the atheist mind set clearly demonstrates that belief in God is something different from beliefs about God. Now it is possible, I suppose, to declare that God is such an incoherent concept that  the statement “God exists” is meaningless – this is what one might call “intelligibility atheism”. However, it is not often one comes across intelligibility atheists; as a rule the rank and file atheist zealout is uncomfortable with “intelligibility atheism” because it’s likely to be too philosophical a gambit for the aficionado of scientism. It is more likely that one will cross the path of the “evidential atheist”; that is, the atheist who declares “There is no evidence for God”; from which it follows that such atheists presumably hold in their minds beliefs about God with sufficient clarity for them to make a comparison between their experience and their theoretic notion of God and on that empirical basis declare God’s existence to be unlikely. Theology, then, is in principle both the domain of the atheist and the theist. In fact I have touched on this subject in the following posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/11/larry-morans-atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/09/crypto-deism.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/god-theology-evidence-and-observation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/02/atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/10/mr-deism-speaks-out.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/05/atheist-atheology.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/03/atheist-theology.html

Anyway, in this connection I was fascinated by the comment of someone signing in as “Anonymous” in the comment thread of this post of mine. I have to say that I’m not at all clear where “Anonymous” is coming from and in spite of a request to clarify his position he has not obliged me. Is he promoting pandeism, the subject of his post? Is he an anti-evolutionist? Is he an atheist? Or is he simply non-committal? I don’t know! But it doesn’t matter. What he has written is necessarily so concept laden that there is far and away enough there for me to get a secure purchase on his comment in my next post. Crypto-deism here we come. Watch this space....

Here’s the comment from Anonymous:

Tinkering, interruptions, call them what you will, but at the end of the day the question remains, has the deity of your conception sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe which from its initial state unfolds in accordance with the laws of physics thus established to bring about complexity, life, ultimately intelligent life, without need for any 'interruptions' of any kind? And let me raise the stakes a bit, is able to set forth a Universe in this manner which in its unfolding ends up exactly as the Universe we perceive today, in every particular? For this is precisely the capacity asserted to be that of the Creator in Pandeism.

But I would not wish to leave an incomplete sense of what Pandeism proposes. So here it is.

Pandeism proposes that prior to the existence of our Universe (or, in some sense 'outside' the existence of our Universe, for those who would limit the existence of linear time to being within such existence) there was an entity of, as supposed above, sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to set forth a Universe of the scope and operation of our own. This entity had some rational motivation compelling it to set forth a Universe, perhaps because as a unitary being it could only learn the lessons of dichotomy by experiencing the existence of limited beings interacting with one another. And so, it set forth laws of physics designed to bring about the complexity which would ultimately create these beings, and it poured its energy into that which is now the energy of which our Universe is ultimately made. The laws of physics point to an end but are not determinative. Imagine a large funnel into which many small rubber balls are thrown against the wall; the balls may bounce randomly, unpredictably, but will ultimately end up going down then hole at the narrow end of the funnel. Just so, our laws of physics. No telling when or where exactly intelligent life will develop, or what form it will take, but the brilliantly constructed governing dynamics of our Universe make it highly likely that it will happen at some times and places.

And where is the Creator in all this? Well, it has become our Universe, so it's everywhere; it's power continually sustains all things in being, but it has not the need to 'interrupt' the obedience of every particle of energy in existence to the laws of physics which were well-enough made in the first place to bring about everything required to fulfill its initial motivation. Indeed, it would have an overriding incentive to not interrupt the natural development of things, which would be to not interrupt the natural development of things, and instead see how things unfold, how the true randoms play out, absent any intervention at all.

And what of man's millions of competing revelations and prophecies, visions, scriptures, oracles, miracles, spiritual emotions, supernatural feelings, ghosts, answered prayers, egrigores, and like beliefs? These are after all a constant across all cultures, even those whose take from them is completely opposite to their neighbors, suggesting either a deity doing a rather sloppy job of trying to communicate a single truth, or man doing a rather sloppy (and often self-serving) job of interpreting the unconscious manifestations of the mind of a deity not trying to communicate anything at all. For if, after all, our Creator became the Creation, then we are all fragments of it, and some talented few of us may in our own minds touch some small portion of the incomprehensibly vast and complex mind which underlies all things for however long our Universe is set to bounce around before it ends up down the funnel.

Watchman, What is Left of the Night?

Here is another song by Francesco Guccini with translation from the Italian (interleaved) supplied by my brother-in-law Jonathan Benison.

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell
Watchman, what is left of the night?
Watchman, why you don't answer my questions?
Watchman, why am I lost in a silent, red, stony desert?
Watchman, why the darkness is only broken by the lightening of my rage?
Watchman, why you don't let me in?
Don't you know that I can only hear weak echoes from the past?
Watchman, do you really know when the day will break?
Watchman, is your answer too big for my heart?
[based on Isaiah 21:11-12]

La notte è quieta senza rumore, c'è solo il suono che fa il silenzio
e l' aria calda porta il sapore di stelle e assenzio,
le dita sfiorano le pietre calme calde d' un sole, memoria o mito,
il buio ha preso con se le palme, sembra che il giorno non sia esistito...

The night is quiet without a noise, there is only the sound of silence
and the warm air brings the taste of stars and wormwood,
the fingers skim over the calm stones warmed by a sun, memory or myth,
the darkness took with it the palms, looks like the day has never existed...

Io, la vedetta, l'illuminato, guardiano eterno di non so cosa
cerco, innocente o perchè ho peccato, la luna ombrosa
e aspetto immobile che si spanda l'onda di tuono che seguirà
al lampo secco di una domanda, la voce d'uomo che chiederà:
Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell ...

I, the watchman, the enlightened, eternal warden of something I do not know,
I seek, innocent or because I sinned, the shady moon
and I wait immobile for the thunder wave to spread in the wake
of a lightning sharp question, the voice of a man who will ask:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?

Sono da secoli o da un momento fermo in un vuoto in cui tutto tace,
non so più dire da quanto sento angoscia o pace,
coi sensi tesi fuori dal tempo, fuori dal mondo sto ad aspettare
che in un sussurro di voci o vento qualcuno venga per domandare...

I have been standing for centuries or for just a moment in an emptiness where everything is still,
I cannot say since when I feel anguish or peace,
with my senses on edge, out of time, out of the world, I keep waiting in case
within a whisper of voices or of the wind, somebody will come to ask...

(Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell ...)
e li avverto, radi come le dita, ma sento voci, sento un brusìo
e sento d' essere l' infinita eco di Dio
e dopo, innumeri come sabbia, ansiosa e anonima oscurità,
ma voce sola di fede o rabbia, notturno grido che chiederà:

and I am aware of them, sparse like fingers, but I hear voices, I hear a buzz
and I feel I am the infinite echo of God
and afterwards, uncountable like grains of sand, anxious and anonymous darkness,
but only a voice of faith or rage, a cry in the night asking:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?

La notte, udite, sta per finire, ma il giorno ancora non è arrivato,
sembra che il tempo nel suo fluire resti inchiodato...
Ma io veglio sempre, perciò insistete, voi lo potete, ridomandate,
tornate ancora se lo volete, non vi stancate...

Listen, the night is about to finish, but the day is still not here,
it’s as if time flowed no more but had become stuck ...
But I’m always on the lookout, so you must insist, you can do it, ask again,
come back again if you want, do not tire of it ...

Cadranno i secoli, gli dei e le dee, cadranno torri, cadranno regni
e resteranno di uomini e di idee, polvere e segni,
ma ora capisco il mio non capire, che una risposta non ci sarà,
che la risposta sull'avvenire è in una voce che chiederà:

Centuries will fall, the gods and the goddesses, towers will fall down, kingdoms will fall
and the remains of men and ideas will be dust and signs,
but now I understand my non understanding, that there will be no answer,
that the answer to the future is in a voice that will ask:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?
Francesco Guccini

With thanks to Marco Zuliani in California for the translation (modified here)
http://marcozuliani.blogspot.com/2008/07/shomr-ma-mi-llailah-shomr-ma-mi-lell.html

From the album “GUCCINI” (1983)

Unintelligent Design

Chemist Professor John C Walton **(above) may believe in Homunculus Intelligent Design and Seventh Day Adventism ….but at least he doesn't believe in Yogic flying unlike physicist Professor John Hagelin (below)....

….so things can't be as bad as all that.

I recently reviewed a video on this post at Uncommon Descent. It is a lecture by Professor John C Walton, a Research Chemist at St Andrews University (Scotland’s first university founded 1413). The video is entitled “56 minutes that may change your life”. However, it follows a pattern I’m all too familiar with.

Much is made, too much in fact, of the improbability of the spontaneous appearance of life’s essential biopolymers; the figures Prof Walton shows us might leave the heads of the scientifically illiterate spinning, but few scientists, as the good professor well knows, seriously suggest that abiogenesis was resourced by such extremely improbable events. Putting it mathematically, most evolutionists realize that the probability we are interested in is a conditional probability like Prob(Life|R) where R is a given physical regime, conjectured pre-conditions that favour life’s generation in a realistic time. (True R, may not exist physically or even exist mathematically; in which case the version of Intelligent Design promulgated at UD should be at least given some space.)

In response to these improbabilities Prof Walton goes on to tell us that there is active research in the area of self organization Viz a) Attempts have or are being made to discover “laws of chemical affinity” which predispose matter toward the formation of certain amino acid configurations b) Computer simulations are being constructed which attempt to simulate models of abiogenesis. Regarding research of this kind the professor rightly emphasizes that it is necessarily resourced by human intelligence in order to a) contrive suitable chemical environments or b) contrive the algorithms controlling the patterns of bits and bytes needed to simulate something that at least looks just a little bit like abiogenesis. In both cases preconditions are being diligently sought for that have a realistic chance of generating the required configurations and structures.

Well, as I have already said this sort of stuff is all too familiar to me and I can only respond by banging on about the same old thing: The selection of a physical regime that has a realistic probability of generating life (if indeed such has a mathematical existence) is very likely to be a task that is computationally complex in the extreme; i.e. finding such a regime amongst all the possible spurious cases is no small search. Even if we assume that a life generating physical regime has actually already been found for us in the form of our own Cosmos we may then face yet another problem: The generation of life using our cosmic regime could conceivably be a computationally irreducible task; that is, the only way of checking that our Cosmos has a realistic chance of creating life is to run the whole damn show, right down to the last atom in order to verify that it does what we think it does; there may be no shorter algorithmic way of performing the task. If so then this task, too, is well beyond our current technology and we are thrown back onto the fossil record which, needless to say, may be too incomplete to be unequivocal in its testimony.

Unfortunately Prof Walton doesn’t explore these crucial issues in any depth; this may be because he is either unaware of them, or he understands that this is the hard problem where little progress has been made. However, given his religious background I suspect that it is more likely that the good professor is driven by an unstated conclusion; namely, the conclusion that life was created with what I refer to as the Homunculus Intelligent Design model ; that is, that God an intelligent agent descended upon the Earth at some point(s) in the past and tinkered with molecular configurations, thus directly imposing Divine fiat the agent's will on matter like some super-human molecular engineer. Like many in the de facto “Intelligent Design” community I suspect the good professor may well have signed up as one of the patrons of anti-evolutionism. Many theists see homunculus ID as the only option because the only other theistic position they can conceive is deism.

Nevertheless Prof Walton does hold out one interesting idea that I’m taking away with me. He provided evidence that the Earth’s atmosphere has always been an oxidizing one, especially during the early OOL stages – an environment that is very unlikely to favour the delicate chemistry that the formation of biopolymers requires. If this idea was developed it would certainly cut across the notion that life was generated on Earth in small incremental stages: A highly oxidizing environment is likely to tear apart biopolymers nearly as surely as would the interior of the Sun; that is, at least with life as we know it.

However, I’ll keep my options open, as this sort of argument could be subject to revision. Even so, as a “prepared to take the risk” theist, I can myself can live with the concept that somehow the configurations of life have been very directly imposed on matter by God by some intelligent agent; after all the alternative of selecting the right life generating physical regime looks to be at least equally as computationally complex (in fact, perhaps a lot more computationally complex). So if I’m asked to accept that the right life generating physical regime is a given then perhaps I can just as easily accept highly improbable molecular configurations as a given. However, there is one stickler of a aside effect in homunculus ID that is unfortunate; we have to kiss goodbye to much epistemological tractability and with it much of the coherent rational readability of our cosmos, especially in relation to natural history. There is also an irony here. If life is a consequence of the selection of the right physical regime then this would likely represent the solution of a computational problem requiring a level of intelligence well in advance of what is needed to carry out Homunculus ID. In fact, in comparison Homunculus ID looks distinctly  “Unintelligent" in design”!

As for UD poster V J Torley’s 56 minutes that may change your life I think we can forget it. Unfortunately for me the video has done precisely the opposite: It has simply meant that I have had to cover the same old ground for the umpteenth time and express the same old gripes I have with the Homunculus ID community.

Notes.
According to the British Centre for Science Education John Walton shared a platform with extreme fundamentalist John Mackay in Oct 2007. (See here http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/JohnWalton) As for some of the rather unsavory accounts surrounding John Mackay see here http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/JohnMackay and here http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/MargaretBuchanan.

31/1/12:  The articles from BCSE linked to above are worth perusing. John MacKay is one of those persons whose religion marches worryingly close to some kind of mental illness of the ego and yet whose air of brazenness and utter confidence in his own pronouncements succeeds in confidence tricking the gullible. MacKay was Ken Ham's business partner in the early days of Ken's foray into the "Creation" trade, and MacKay is implicated in an acrimonious dispute between Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International (apparently settled in 2009). Overall, as I'm "in religion" the whole thing gives me the creeps; this may be because I have to confess to having actually witnessed something of this sort first hand more than once, at least in embryo. I would certainly not want to meet MacKay in a dark alley, or even Ken Ham for that matter. They both come over as rather muculant characters whose chief strength is the conviction of their tongues. I trust that Professor Walton was unaware who he was hobnobbing with.

Footnote
** Oops! Sorry folks, he doesn't have a wiki page!

The De-facto “Darwin vs. God” Paradigm

The Natural History Museum, Romanesque cum Gothic cathedral of natural history, designed by Alfred Waterhouse. The black figure of the Victorian naturalist Richard Owen has gone, replaced by the white enthroned figure of Darwin which now occupies the central landing of the escalia; the "high altar" of the building; rather appropriate perhaps; don't forget that the engine of evolution entails death! (“search, reject and select”)

I was interested to see a report in the February "Christianity" magazine on Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech promoting Christianity and the project of sending Bibles into schools. In response the National Secular Society Spokesman Terry Sanderson said:

“…if Mr Gove (the governments education secretary) intends to go ahead with this, will he please ensure that a copy of “On the origins of Species” is sent out on Darwin day”

The subtext here is, of course, the “Darwin vs. God” paradigm; namely, that if you’ve got Darwin you don’t need God and if you’ve got God you don’t need Darwin; in short either “God did it” or “Darwin did it” and that is the view of the secularist–anti evolutionist axis of polarization.

As I’ve tried to indicate this axis of polarization is a false dichotomy : If anything “Darwinism” compounds the problems of improbability that prompts thoughts of Intelligent Design. How ironic.

God is pictured as a kindly old bearded gentleman all in white, seated on a throne surrounded by light and who lives upon high.

(Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimshannon/3823248802/)

Conspiracy Theorist’s Corner.

Picture from: http://naturalplane.blogspot.com/2010/12/fortean-alternative-news-conspiracy.html

I’ve long been aware that the fundamentalist whipping boys have a deep seated affinity with conspiracy theory, but I would, nonetheless, find it difficult to point to the “chapter and verse” where I picked up this observation. Ken Ham, however, has recently obliged me. In a blog post dated Jan 20th and entitled “Deadly Disclosures goes epub” Ham enthuses over the novels written by a fellow Christian Fundamentalist. The novels depict a world that is ranged against (fundamentalist) Christians in hidden and malign conspiracies. Wonderful captivating stuff in Ken’s opinion.

But think about it; the fundamentalist is almost inevitably going to be drawn to conspiracy theory:

Firstly the whole scientific establishment is “against” them, although to be fair that establishment actually (and rightly) by and large ignores them.

Secondly, the evidence and theory against fundamentalist “science” is so coherent and the world wide scientific establishment forms such a united front that the only way fundamentalists can explain the highly systematic “error” of the establishment is to attribute it to some background malign will, either in the establishment itself or to some dark presence pulling the strings and skewing human epistemological assumptions. In one sense all this is a telling “own goal” by the fundamentalists because it is an admission that the establishment’s evidence and conclusions are coordinated and coherent enough to only allow those with a conspiracy theorist’s frame of mind to dismiss it. (Compare the fundamentalist’s anti-science)

Thirdly there is much self-kudos to be gained in seeing oneself as part of a holy remnant that is heroically and gloriously holding out against the goliath of a huge worldwide conspiracy; one fancies oneself to be important enough for that conspiracy to have one personally in its gun-sights; literally in the case of Ken’s favourite novel writer who glorifies the fundamentalist’s marginalized lot.

However I must concede a measure of understanding of the fundamentalist’s reaction; in the face of marginalization increasingly paranoiac and extreme fantasies about being specially targeted are a perverse way of satisfying the ego. If you’ve backed yourself into a corner it’s tough when the whole world is apathetic about your self-proclaimed prophetic status. They will tell us about the persecution of Christ but then so will every other contrary religious sect between here and Salt Lake City.

Warning: The False Dichotomy Zone

I see from this Guardian Web article that the anti-evolutionists have been barred from British schools.

The de facto “Intelligent Design” movement are partly responsible for trapping the creation debate in the false dichotomy of Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. This has lead to the insinuation that if one is an evolutionist then one is in opposition to intelligent design creationism. The resultant effect has been to obscure important questions about the computational complexity of the class of physical regimes required to make evolution and/or OOL work. (see my last post) In this needlessly polarized debate anti-evolutionism has become too closely identified with theism and evolution too closely identified with atheism. Introducing “Intelligent Design”, so-called, into schools then, is very likely to automatically cast the creation debate into a dichotomized mold of “Evolution did it” versus “God did it” and science versus revelation – the kind of dichotomized paradigm we get from anti-science fundamentalists like Ken Ham

All this is very regretable because there are some worthy people naturally identified with the anti-evolutionist front such as William Dembski, Cornelius Hunter, Robert Sheldon, and Richard Johns who are nonetheless presenting interesting material in relation to evolutionary theory and who, in my opinion, should be given a fair hearing. Trouble is, the polarized and politicized state of the debate, for which the “ID” community share a  measure of culpability, has made people like Dembski et al persona non grata in established scientific circles; understandablely enough Dembski et al have thrown their lot in with the disaffected anti academic establishment outlaws. For me the situation is exacerbated by some very partisan desperados who post on the blog "Uncommon Descent" such as Granville Sewell, Denise O‘Leary, and Gil Dodgen, persons who it would have been better if they had not have been let loose on the subject.

C of E physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne has described himself as an Intelligent Design creationist and yet because the appellation “Intelligent Design” has been blighted, abused and given partisan meaning he was forced to declare his hostility to the “Intelligent Design” community, a community who have become thoroughly identified with anti-evolutionism.

On balance, then, the misunderstandings over the term "Intelligent Design" leads me to support the policy that bars “Intelligent Design”, so called, from British schools. May that ban last as long as it takes for the polarized anti-evolutionists to come to their senses and change their philosophy. That philosophy has the effect of driving a wedge between evolution and intelligent design and between science and revelation. It is worth recalling here that the government which has ratified these measures is headed by David Cameron who identifies himself as a Christian: The source of these measures, then, is not necessarily anti-Christian unless we are predisposed to read it that way.

Unfinished Business.

I was interested to read  Larry Moran’s post about the “Top Ten Darwin and Design Science News Stories for 2011”. As an over a zealous evolutionist Larry is rather contemptuous about the whole Intelligent Design (ID) thing. What particularly piqued my interest, however, was that Richard Johns’ paper entitled “Self Organisation in Dynamical Systems: a Limiting Result” came in at number 10. The reason for my interest is that I looked at a preprint of this paper a few months back and remarked on it in the following blog posts:

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

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/11/self-organisation.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/12/more-on-self-organisation.html

Richard Johns himself very kindly got back to me on my comments and his response can be seen in the above posts. As Richard didn’t respond to my response to his response I was left feeling that there was unfinished business here.

I very much regret the polarized quarrelling between the anti-evolution community (who appear to have picked up Johns’ work) and scientists like Larry Moran. I myself respect professionals like Johns and Moran and I don’t really want to fall out with either. So, whenever I approach a competent technical paper like that of Richard Johns' I don’t particularly feel that I’m on the side of anyone and therefore under no partisan obligation to either defend them or attack them. I’m a disinterested party whose main interest stems from a curiosity about the riddles and mysteries our world confronts us with, although it’s true that I’m having a serious romance with theism.

Although I don’t share his anti-evolutionism I do have one thing I have in common with an “ID” leader like William Dembski; namely, the understanding that in terms of absolute probabilities high improbabilities cannot be banished from our science: We may be able to arrive at high conditional probabilities such as Prob(Life|R₀) where R₀ is the class of life generating physical regimes, but this still leaves us with the enigma of the selection of a member from R₀, a selection which seems to mysteriously appear out of a huge range of mathematical possibilities thus imbuing it with an improbability beyond measure. R₀ has a rarity in platonic space which means its existential weighting is inexplicably skewed far in excess of its statistical weighting. For Dembski this fact leads to the conclusion (via his assumption of equal a-priori probabilities and his explanatory filter) that intelligence has selected our physical regime from R₀. Ironically the problem with the existence of a member taken from R₀ is best appreciated in the context of Multiverse theory: Multiverse theory attempts to place R₀ within a greater physical regime, call it R₁, whereby it is hoped that Prob(R₀|R₁) is high. But if pressed this quickly leads to a “Turtles all the way down” regressing series of the form of Prob(R₁|R₂),…...., Prob(R_n-1|R_n), ultimately leaving us with an enigmatic R_n whose probability, if it is not meaningless, appears to emerge from an incalculable number of possibilities.

But although I believe workers like Johns and Dembski have lessons for us I am not wholly uncritical of the anti-evolutionism that has so thoroughly got hold of the community who identify themselves under the rubric “Intelligent Design”; their anti-evolutionism, due to an impassioned and angry polarization, is now all but irrevocable as they cannot backtrack without loss of face before their evolutionist critics (but the vice versa is also true – polarization cuts both ways). This combative atmosphere is not conducive to self-criticism.

Richard Johns’ paper is a case in point. I could see no fault with the technicalities of his argument; the problems were more to do with the interpretation and use of his results and this interpretation and use is encouraged by the combative pressures the “ID” community is under. Richard uses a cellular automata system to draw his conclusions about limits on the dynamical generation of complex configurations (what he calls “irregular” patterns). He refers to a particular cellular automata program as a “dynamic system” which in turn I identify as the computational equivalent of a physical system taken from a subclass of physical regimes, R. In summary my criticisms were as follows:

a) The concept of complexity (or “irregularity”) used by Richard lumps together, biological complexity, fractal complexity, and the output of random number generators.

b) Richard’s limitative theorem states that a large maximally irregular object cannot appear by self organization in any dynamical system whose laws are local and invariant. But we know that there are such things as algorithms (which could be written in cellular automata form) able to generate fractal and disordered patterns in realistic times. These algorithmically generated configurations classify, on Richard’s’ definition, as large configurations approaching maximal irregularity. Therefore at first sight these latter facts appear to contradict Richard’s limitative theorem – or at least in the way he has stated it.

c) When one reads Richard’s paper one realizes that his limitative theorem is not as strong as it looks because one finds that what he really means is that a blindly selected dynamic system is, in terms of probability, very unlikely to be one that generates a specified subclass of complex configurations in realistic time. This conclusion is, I believe, correct; but if an outcome is improbable that is not to say that it is impossible.

d) If couched in terms of probability Richard’s limitative theorem is correct, but because the theorem is, in fact, referring to improbable outcomes we are lead to overlook the possibility that there may be members of a class R (although it may be a very small class) that have a realistic probability of generating a specified class of irregular configurations in a realistic time.

e) My conclusion is this: In drawing our attention to self organization as an improbable possibility the limitative theorem fails to rule out OOL and evolution as a mathematical possibility.

Richard has effectively hamstrung the possibility of self organization by demanding that the physical regime be chosen at random, “blind watchmaker” style (Thus making it very unlikely it be from the life generating class R₀). Hard-line anti-ID evolutionists like Richard "Blind Watchmaker" Dawkins would perhaps be inclined to concede this practice, thus, ironically, conniving with the anti-evolutionist community that OOL/evolution, by definition, is not resourced by the improbable pre-condition R₀ . It is surely an irony that Richard’s over interpretation of his conclusion actually falls over if one assumes a creative intelligent agency is available; for in an ID context improbable and/or mathematically rare classes of conditions are the name of the game! If a small class of R exists which promotes the self-organisation of living structures then an intelligence with sufficient processing power and motive could presumably find that class...in other words the physical regime is not chosen at random!

In his response to my original post Richard commented as follows on the possibility of self organisation being an outcome of a carefully selected physical regime:

…..in that case, self-organisation theories of evolution will be in a difficult position. For they will then be committed to the claim that living organisms are algorithmically (and dynamically) simple. In other words, living organisms are like Pi, merely *appearing* to be complex, while in fact being generated by a very short program. (Vastly shorter than their genomes, for example.)

My reply was:

…..it is wrong to conclude that life must be algorithmically simple for this reason: The space of all possible (short text) algorithms, though a lot smaller than the space of all possible configurational objects, is still a very very large space as far as we humans are concerned. I suspect (and this is only a hunch) that not any old algorithm has the right Self Organising properties required to generate living things - in which case selecting the right algorithm is then a computationally complex task; that is, life is not algorithmically simple in absolute terms.

One more thing: Imagine that you were given the problem of PI in reverse; that is you were given the pattern of digits and yet had no clue as to what, if any, simple algorithm generated it. The hard problem then is to guess the algorithm – generating PI after you have found the algorithm is the easy problem. So to me life remains algorithmically complex even if it’s a product of SO.

That’s where the discussion ended. Once again the same lose end is left dangling; namely, the fact that in order to contrive a physical regime taken from the class R₀ favouring the self organization of life requires an extraordinary level of computational complexity to sift through the possibilities and secure a member from R₀. If OOL and evolution have occurred then it entails quite a “miracle”! Trouble is, the expression Prob(Life|R₀) seems to have the effect of obscuring that “miracle”. As a consequence many evolutionists and anti-evolutionists continue to inappropriately caricature the development of life as a putatively “blind” process; hence humunclus ID is an abomination to zealous atheists but the darling of anti-evolutionists.

Musical Inrterlude: Classix Nouveaux: Forever and a Day

The Wrong Sort of Scratching

(Click to enlarge)

The above illustration was posted by Prof Larry Moran in a blog post where he makes special note of the Cambrian Conundrum. What is the Cambrian Conundrum? Let me explain:

The blue profile in the illustration plots the graph of the very sudden rise in the diversity of phyla at the start of the Cambrian era (Phylum: a category of organisms with the same basic body plan). This sudden diversification was also accompanied by a parallel prolific diversification of classes (a class is a subdivision within a phylum) as shown by the yellow profile.

Shown as an overlay on the two aforementioned graphs is the “tree of life” as deduced from genetic molecular sequence analysis together with an assumed rate of mutation. Larry points out that the molecular tree of life fits in very well with the tree of life as determined from morphological analysis. But there is one big and obvious problem here: The molecular tree of life appears to show no obvious relation to the phyla and class profiles, profiles that are determined by observation on the fossil record. Why doesn’t the fossil record concur with the tree of life as constructed from molecular sequence analysis? How is it that this tree of life extends for hundreds of millions of years before the Cambrian and yet there is little in the way of fossil evidence prior to the Cambrian?

As a diehard evolutionist Larry is a good sport in being candid about this problem as he well knows that anti-evolutionists are attracted to this sort of thing like flies to an open wound. A couple of his correspondents give a stab at trying to explain this apparent inconsistency in evolutionary theory: One (schenk) suggests that chemical conditions prior to the Cambrian didn’t favour preservation: The other (nwrickert) submits the very interesting idea that the gene pool had developed to a point where the potential for sequence crossovers constituted a kind of “recombinant DNA laboratory” paving the way for a combinatorial explosion that gave organisms the DNA language needed to match a rapidly changing environment. I must admit I find this latter idea very appealing; it’s a special case of the more general idea that some “non-linear” bio-tech threshold was crossed at the start of the Cambrian ushering in a tremendous potential for change and development – in fact we see something similar with human society; farming, writing, industry, microchips and other technological changes entailed the crossing of thresholds that opened up huge vistas of possibility once the initial invention had made an appearance; these vistas were then rapidly explored resulting in rapid change.

But be that as it may, the fact is that there is an important lesson here for evolutionary theory. Evolution is a theory of a very complex object – namely, the history life. As such it has many degrees of freedom and adjustable variables. This implicit flexibility helps “rescue” evolution in the face of the sort of conundrum we have just looked at by allowing an adjustment of its many degrees of freedom until a fit to the dots of observation is achieved. But evolution’s strength in theoretical flexibility is also its weakness: Like some sprawling battle front evolution is vulnerable to myriad different kinds of attack on its many varied claims. In fact evolution is interdisciplinary and high level enough an object to be tantamount to a world view perspective. With byzantine objects like evolution there exists a constant tension between their vulnerability to criticism and the measure of latitude that comes of realizing that their complex ontology is never going to return the standard of observational “verification” we might expect of simple objects like Hooke’s springs and Newton’s gravity. The balancing act needed here is not easy to keep in the polarized North American environment where anti-evilutionists and atheist zealots are clawing one another’s eyes out in order to win their noetic battles. If with an eye on fair play one endeavors to be generous to either side one is then in danger of having one’s eyes scratched out by the other side.

In this connection I was fascinated by this post on PZ Myers’ blog where he tells his readers about theologian Alister Mcgrath’s comparison between the sense making facility of the conjectured Higgs boson and the theist positing Deity as a world view level sense making object. PZ Myers agrees that the Higgs boson is a valid theoretical sense making construction, but he takes Mcgrath to task for not taking the next scientific step; namely, that of proposing a test for deity; after all, says PZ, a lot of money was spent in order to test for the existence of the Higgs Boson; shouldn’t theists do the same for God?

Well yes, I’ll concede the admirable sentiment behind PZ’s remark, but in doing so I make all due allowance for the ontology of the objects we are proposing to test; that ontology may make these objects less than voluntarily accessible and/or give them a complex of adjustable variables that compromises the value of any number of tests; this in turn will impact the epistemological standards we employ. You see, whilst we may accept that PZ Myers' demand for a test is fair enough, we nevertheless should acknowledge that voluntary high standard testing at will is not an option with many real objects of study; historical objects are a notorious case in point; in particular evolution.

After all, it is clear that an object like evolution cannot be tested at will; as we have seen the fossil data needed to test for the existence of the conjectured evolutionary cladogram beyond the Cambrian is not forthcoming; it might, of course, come to light at some future date but that is not something over which we have control. Moreover, the conjectured extended cladogram may in fact not exist at all, and its absence explained by adjusting the parameters of history’s many degrees of freedom. (As a couple of Larry’s correspondents do; feasibly and plausibly in my view). In doing so, however, we are not using evolutionary theory predictively but instead invoking its flexibility to make post facto sense of the observed situation. Provided this is carried out with all due caution and awareness this post hoc practice is in my view perfectly legitimate science in the face of an absence of other choices. (See here for more comment along these lines: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/11/science-and-imagination.html )

It would be nice, of course, if we could test at will, or be lucky enough to have the necessary test data involuntarily fall into our laps, but unfortunately life is not always like that, particularly when the objects we desire to test shade over into the high level objects that are the stuff of world views. On balance, then, I would say that Mcgrath’s treatment of theism as a post facto sense making construct is rational enough given the ontological nature of deity; although having said that many Christians would claim that the ultimate (anecdotal) test of theism is in the tasting (Ps 34:8).

World view construction is largely a post facto activity that sometimes boarders on myth construction not because this is a rational ideal, but simply because force of epistemic circumstances make it so. Toy town science practitioners might find difficulty in accepting this inconvenient fact and may even be inclined to scratch our eyes out for breaching their narrow jot and tittle view of rationality. But then the purveyors of toy scientism are not the only ones unprepared to give leeway in the face of epistemic challenges. The zealous anti-evolutionists are in no mood to give all due allowance to evolution’s measure of post-facto sense making science. This is particularly ironic given that many anti-evolutionists are theists and that theism itself is not exactly the epitome of readily testable science!

The Right kind of scatching: If you scratch my back I'll scratch yours.