Behe on why do some scientists still not accept intelligent design?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Well here is Stapp in his own words, as opposed to someone else’s interpretation of his view (taken from the very end of that link I gave):

This situation is concordant with the idea of a powerful God that creates the universe and its laws to get things started, but then bequeaths part of this power to beings created in his own image, at least with regard to their power to make physically efficacious decisions on the basis of reasons and evaluations. I see no way for contemporary science to disprove, or even render highly unlikely, this religious interpretation of quantum theory, or to provide strong evidence in support of an alternative picture of the nature of these ‘free choices’. These choices seem to be rooted in reasons that are rooted in feelings pertaining to value or worth. Thus it can be argued that quantum theory provides an opening for an idea of nature and of our role within it that is in general accord with certain religious concepts, but that, by contrast, is quite incompatible with the precepts of mechanistic deterministic classical physics. Thus the replacement of classical mechanics by quantum mechanics opens the door to religious possibilities that formerly were rationally excluded. This conception of nature, in which the consequences of our choices enter not only directly in our immediate neighborhood but also indirectly and immediately in far-flung places, alters the image of the human being relative to the one spawned by classical physics. It changes this image in a way that must tend to reduce a sense of powerlessness, separateness, and isolation, and to enhance the sense of responsibility and of belonging. Each person who understands him-or herself in this way, as a spark of the divine, with some small part of the divine power, integrally interwoven into the process of the creation of the psycho-physical universe, will be encouraged to participate in the process of plumbing the potentialities of, and shaping the form of, the unfolding quantum reality that it is his or her birthright to help create. (Henry Stapp, “Minds and Values in the Quantum Universe,” in Information and the Nature of Reality , ed. by Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen (2010)).

There are several other quotes of his there that contradict that Springer’s version of Stapp’s stance.

The wave function itself is immaterial. That was not the kicker though because that’s not any different from saying that all of mathematics is immaterial. The kicker was that the scientists themselves could effect the outcome depending on their choices. This is where, Stapp in the quote above, talks about people having been bequeathed some power.

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I still see nothing about the immaterial. Stapp is saying that quantum mechanics has replaced classical mechanics, but that says nothing about materialism.

How so?

How does that relate to materialism? Would humans have no effect on their environment in a materialistic universe?

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I have to say that in ~35 years in science I have never heard a scientist express any position remotely like Lewontin’s – not in public, not in private, not over beer. All the scientists I’ve known have been diligently looking for material causes for observable phenomena, but (as you point out) prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism is a very different thing, and it’s not a thing I ever see promoted or assumed among working scientists.

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FWIW, I have never heard this expressed either, not even from the few scientists I have come across that were vocal atheists. I’ve always found that Lewontin quote to be an odd outlier.

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Schaffner and Venema, I’m so glad to hear that and I don’t doubt what you’re saying. I believe the majority are focused on their science and trying to avoid the fray. However, I can give you many more current-day quotes that may not be as brazen as Lewontin’s, but are definitely toeing the line with him. I’m a bit self-conscious that I’ve redirected this thread, but I think it’s safe to say that it started off talking about how Behe was biased in his science. And so I’m saying that, most definitely, the establishment (and most universities) are zealously biased in favor of metaphysical naturalism, and they are especially brazen when it comes to neuroscience and the study of consciousness and the mind. That’s what I pay particular attention to. (I’m just a pastor, not a scientist, so I worry about what my kids are being fed.) They presuppose that we are our brains and that we will eventually discover, as a recent Scientific American article title put it, “How Matter Becomes Mind”. Many branches of science have taken an interest in consciousness and they all start with this same assumption.

Here is Kenneth R. Miller, professor of biology at Brown University:

“Let’s assume the obvious, which is that human consciousness is a product of the workings of our nervous system as it interacts with the rest of the body and with the outside world. In other words, that consciousness is a physiological function in the broadest possible sense. What that means, of course, is that consciousness, like every other human characteristic, is a product of evolution.” ( The Human Instinct (2018), 150.)

Now, BTW, he says he’s a devout Catholic, but it’s not at all uncommon for people to embrace materialism and religion at the same time. Some key figures in the Bible were Jewish leaders called Sadducees, who did not believe in spirituality or angels or an afterlife. Anyway, later Miller writes, “Consciousness is a process generated by the hugely complex interactions of highly active cells within the brain and associated nervous tissue.” (p. 168)

And then there’s Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and head of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, takes the same position. He wrote a book last year in which he sought “to examine how matter makes minds”. ( The Consciousness Instinct (2018), p. 7).

Many physicists have taken an interest in the issue since it has everything to do with the perception of information (and information itself being the golden egg of physics). Michio Kaku and Sean Carroll have both written books in which they theorize about mind being matter. And here is MIT physicist Max Tegmark:

“I approach this hard problem of consciousness from a physical point of view. From my perspective, a conscious person is simply food, rearranged. So why is one arrangement conscious, but not the other? Moreover, physics teach us that food is simply a large number of quarks and electrons, arranged in a certain way. So which particle arrangements are conscious and which aren’t?” ( Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence . 2017. (p.284-285)

Linguist Noam Chomsky operates on the same assumption:

“Assuming that we’re organic creatures, and not angels, we have certain fixed capacities which yield the range of abilities that we have—but they impose limits as well…[Thought] is an aspect of matter, just as electrical properties are an aspect of matter.” ( Noam Chomsky on the unsolved mysteries of language and the brain - ABC listen)

Here is Dr. Werner Loewenstein, former professor of physiology and biophysics at Columbia University and director of its Cell Physics Laboratory:

“What is it that pulls all those scattered sensory-information pieces together? What draws the results of the information processings in the various brain compartments into a whole? This is what among students of consciousness is known as the ‘binding problem.’ We will assume that Evolution solved it by standard neuronal communication, presupposing that conduction of information in digital form along axons or dendrites between the compartments is fast enough for the binding.” ( Physics in Mind , 2013, pp. 221.)

Of course there’s an older couple of quotes by Francis Crick the lead the way:

“‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” ( The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), p. 3.)

Did you notice the quotation marks he put around “You”?

“The view of ourselves as ‘persons’ is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth,” he explained in an interview with The New York Times . He said he hoped that “this sort of language will disappear in a few hundred years.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/scientists-work-francis-crick-christof-koch-after-double-helix-unraveling.html)

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There are thousands of Christian scientists spread out across these universities, so I don’t think it is nearly as strident or zealous as you may think. I suspect that you are being improperly influenced by the polarizing political rhetoric that is flying around in today’s culture. As I and other scientists have noted, religious beliefs or metaphysical axioms really aren’t something that comes up in the day to day work of scientists, or in their interactions. I think we would all agree that there are isolated cases, but I have never seen field wide pressure on scientists to adopt metaphysical naturalism. In fact, I have worked with quite a few undergrad interns in summer programs that came from Christian universities (not wishy-washy Christian universities, but overtly Christian universities). I have also worked with professors on research programs at Christian universities. We were all focused on the science, and the topic of metaphysical naturalism never comes up, and it doesn’t need to be brought up. All we need is methodological naturalism.

The reason that the scientific community has not adopted Intelligent Design is because of methodological naturalism, not metaphysical naturalism. ID has failed to explain the scientific evidence in a scientific manner. At the same time, the theory of evolution does a spectacular job of explaining the evidence. It has nothing to do with hostility to religious beliefs or a need to reject the idea of a creator. It has everything to do with the facts.

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I think that’s a promising approach and I say this as a Christian. Why do you think this is a bad quote? It’s clear that our minds are made up of matter and it is made up of particles that follow certain physical laws. It’s complicated sure, but I have no idea why you propose metaphysical mechanism will ultimately underlie such thing. It’s obvious that you have some belief that leads you to that conclusion. What specifically are your expectations for the topic based on your theism?

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What do you base this on? In all my years in the sciences, I think I’ve maybe run into one or two metaphysical naturalists. That’s it. And it was their private belief that they didn’t impose on anyone, though one prof did like to make vocal critiques of creationists. I don’t know your background, but I suspect I’m in a better position to make this judgment than you are; and Steve even more so. The vast, vast majority of scientists just want to do science.

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Okay, on the one hand, I’m sorry that I might have overstated the case of bias though, on the other hand, in regards to consciousness you all seem to agree with the presupposition that “matter makes mind”—in line with all those quotes I gave you. (Two scientists, Koch and Tolino, have a quasi-spiritual theory that they say embraces panpsychism, but they still hold to the presupposition that we are our brains.) And if you want to say that this presupposition is rooted not in metaphysical naturalism but rather in methodological naturalism, that’s fine, I won’t disagree.

But when I say that the presupposition is wrong and that it demands blind faith, I truly think my own religious beliefs are completely irrelevant to why it is wrong. Because if we set aside the presupposition that matter makes mind, then we are allowed to ask some very good questions and draw some very clear conclusions (and this has nothing to do with Intelligent Design):

  • IF there were any nonphysical phenomena in the universe, is there any way that our brains could perceive them? Of course not. For if there are no light waves bouncing off of something or emanating from it, then no data can enter through the eyes. If there are no sound waves bouncing off of something or emanating from it, then no data can enter through the ears. Etc., etc., etc. As atheist neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene put it, “In what extra-sensory way would the brain perceive them?”
  • In what way is mathematics a material phenomenon if it is at all? Can we even theorize about it having any physical/material qualities? What exactly is it? (By the way, Dehaene insists—“If I insist so strongly on this…”—that we not ask these questions.) Of course math doesn’t have any physical qualities. To the extent that we can know anything at all, we can know that it is immaterial. We may not know what it is, but we do know what it is not. It is not physical.

Am I biased to think those are valid arguments? If you toe the line with methodological naturalism, then you will presuppose that these arguments must be invalid.

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A better way to approach it is to ask how you could use the scientific method to test Dualism (i.e. separation of the mind and brain). If Monism is all that science can test for then it isn’t surprising that scientists tend to focus on Monism.

I tend to treat mathematics the same way I treat language. They are abstractions of concrete and physical things. Logic may exist one layer down from mathematics, so it might be more interesting to ask if logic exists in a physical sense.

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Well see that’s just it: I think science can test for dualism or, more accurately, test for the absence of physical qualities in mathematics, language, or any other form of information. That’s what this other blog stream (What Words Are Not) is all about. I’m sorry for invading this bog stream as well. I’m obsessed. It’s all I ever think about. If I’m in a trance, my poor wife usually doesn’t ask me what I’m thinking about because I might say something like, “I’m thinking about what exactly the number eleven is and how we can test for its lack of physical qualities.”

No matter what you call them–“abstractions” or “qualia” or “memes”, etc.–you can’t articulate a theory (much less test one) as to what physical qualities they may have. I don’t know of anyone who actually tries to say they’re composed of neurons.

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Thanks for the encouragement to look at the other thread. We should probably move this discussion over to the other thread. Thanks for the replies, and I may take a look at what you have presented elsewhere.

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Of course so. Why should our brains be unable to conceive logical constructs?

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Okay, I’ll reply in the other stream…

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And I’m telling you, based on direct experience with hundreds of scientists and six or eight major research institutions, that I have never experienced any such bias, much less a zealous one.

I think I see the problem. What you’ve quoted isn’t a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism – it’s an assumption (backed up with quite a lot of evidence) that a particular observable phenomenon is the product of material causes. As I said earlier, that’s what scientists do. Now, I quite agree with you that a purely materialistic, reductionist description of human thought is inadequate as a full description, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be a materialistic description of thought or consciousness.

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Actually, that’s exactly what it means. I assure you that you cannot find a theory as to how the physical brain can perceive nonphysical phenomena (like mathematics). The most common way to resolve the dilemma (which I think is the same thing as what they call “the hard problem of consciousness”) is just to say that our ability to do math and language is instinctive:

  • The Language Instinct by Pinker.
  • The Number Sense by Dehaene
  • The Math Instinct by Devlin
  • The Human Instinct by Miller
  • The Consciousness Instinct, by Gazzaniga. (At the end of his book, he admits that his solution is “not very scientific”.)

But to call our ability to perceive numbers and words instinctive is an incredibly ironic answer. After all, instincts are things we do without thinking, so to say we can do math or language instinctively is like saying we can thinking without thinking!!! A laptop can instantly solve massively complex math equations and then give you the answer in one of a dozen languages because that’s what it’s programmed to do. My liver can do all kinds of complex chemistry because that’s what it’s programmed to do. But it would be incoherent to declare that either the laptop or the liver is actually thinking. By contrast, we ourselves cannot do such things without thinking very slowly and carefully. You cannot comprehend this sentence if you’re on autopilot. (And if you are on autopilot it’s because you’re thinking about something else!)

With apologies again for invading this stream, I’ve been encouraged to redirect it over to What Words Are Not. In the most recent post I summarized the answer of one leading neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene, in his book The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.

You know a couple of you questioned my motives in–in a gracious and appropriate manner–for making this argument. But I really don’t think this threatens evolutionary theory. (Although we couldn’t speculate on how an immaterial mind evolved, we can still accept all the theories about how the brain evolved.)

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I believe you’re missing my point. I don’t believe a materialistic description is an adequate one, but I think it’s pretty clear that, however else may want to characterize it, thought occurs via physical processes in the brain. As far as we know, those physical processes involve ordinary chemistry and physics and can be described as such.

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You seem to have extrapolated your “words are non-physical” discussion to “We do not know what brains are for. We do know, however, what brains are not for. They are not for thinking.”

Brains can think. What more theory is required?

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Oh okay, thanks for clarifying, Schaffner. Yes, we can certainly agree on that. And I might add that all of those books I listed were excellent reads–especially Pinker’s and Gazzainga’s–even though their conclusions got skewed by materialistic presuppositions.

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WOW!!!
When I read Matthew’s introductory summary, saying that Behe claimed: “When Darwin first proposed his idea, many scientists were skeptical that his mechanism of random mutation and natural selection would work” – I thought Matthew had to be wrong. No way could Behe make such an absolutely unarguable and fundamental error: Darwin did not propose the mutation / section mechanism! Nobody had any idea of mutations or even (given the languishing of Mendel’s work) of genes! The m/s proposal of the synthetic theory didn’t arise for another century. Really an astounding error from anyone claiming to comment - critically or supportively - on evolutionary theory.

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