My ID Challenge

Faith & Science Conversation
996

Oh brother … well, I’ll give it a try, @Eddie:

  1. God is omniscient.

  2. His omniscience includes even phenomenon not controlled or ruled by natural lawfulness.

  3. Based on his knowledge of all events, and all potential events, he precisely configures the entire Universe at the moment of creation.

  4. All of the above does not preclude the additional opportunities for God to either effect a non-lawful work-around for some event that would otherwise not conform to his design.

  5. Some Christians think Moses crossing the Red Sea or the resurrection of Jesus to be examples of God’s special involvements.

  6. Some Christians think the creation or the direction of the meteor that contributed to the extinction of Earth’s dinosaurs are examples of God’s special non-lawful others. Others think the creation and direction of the meteor were a direct lawful result of the exact configuration of the Universe at the moment of its creation.

  7. Cosmic rays, other forms of electromagnetic radiation, as well as molecular activity within cells are part of the range of elements that God uses to shape, guide or direct the form and pace of the Evolution of Life on Earth.

Let me know if I need to add an item or modify an item to make it more clear … this is my first attempt at this, and I doubt that it is perfect in my first attempt!

998

I think it is adequate to say that it is either part of a front-loading … or a miraculous intervention.

But I personally prefer that it was part of a front-loading.

[Typo Fixed: @Casper_Hesp… good catch! Sorry I missed that one!]

999

[quote=“Eddie, post:990, topic:4944”]
It seems to me to be a rather arrogant position for someone to take, to cavalierly dismiss discussions by biologists on the level of Yale’s Wagner. I would imagine that Wagner, Newman, etc. think that their discussions are relevant, or they wouldn’t offer them.[/quote]
Eddie, that’s absurd. You know full well that I am stating that their discussions aren’t relevant in this context. (bolding for George!)

No, Eddie, there is zero evidence that Joe has any familiarity at all with the evolutionary biology literature. One tell: Joe goes on about how “evolution,” not the “evolutionary biology literature,” makes claims.

Again, some of the best evidence against the notion of ID comes from developmental biology: there is no mechanistic distinction between plan and implementation. There was a fad among some evolutionary biologists that transcription factors were the primary manifestation of a plan, but that’s long buried in complexity.

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1001

[quote=“Eddie, post:1000, topic:4944”]
…it was pretty clear to me from context that he had in mind larger structural features than the patterns of veins in the forearms.[/quote]
What I wrote applies to those larger structural features. I used veins as a simple, obvious example that there’s no real plan in the design sense.

The vast majority of us scientists do both. They aren’t separate castes as you repeatedly and falsely portray them.

My routine is “science is all about empirical testing of hypotheses.” Please stop misrepresenting my position. Just because you avoid all empiricism doesn’t mean that I avoid all theory. The hypothesis is the theoretical part, you know. :slight_smile:

[quote]benkirk:
Again, some of the best evidence against the notion of ID comes from developmental biology:[/quote]

[quote]Eddie:
I would say quite the opposite.[/quote]

No, I don’t think you would, because you omitted the part after the colon.

My statement had nothing to do with gene-centrism, and I think you know it.

My statement was, “there is no mechanistic distinction between plan and implementation.” If you would say “quite the opposite” (bolding for George), then you would have deep knowledge of mechanistic distinctions between plan and implementation. Otherwise, you’re just pretending to address what I wrote.

[quote]Developmental patterns are often very much “top-down” affairs – just as ID would predict.[/quote] Really? Well, would it or does it? Your avoidance of the integral part of science (prediction) that connects theory to the empiricism you arrogantly denigrate as “crude” or “brute” is striking. Or are you finally going to make an empirical prediction?

Let’s look at the handedness of the vertebrate body “plan.” Is the establishment of that large, fundamental pattern a “top-down” affair mechanistically? (more bolding for George)

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1002

@glipsnort - You make a really good point about the inherent limitations of prediction based on “natural law.”

Your conclusion becomes stronger when we realize that, just as it is theoretically impossible to represent a continuous variable with perfect precision, it is logically impossible to represent certain numbers with perfect precision. I speak, of course, of irrational numbers.

Mathematicians have provided incontrovertible proof (not just strong evidence, but proof) that certain numbers, such as pi, cannot be represented precisely. This would seem to imply that not even God can express the precise area of a circle whose radius is equal to 1. He could easily provide an approximation whose precision is smaller than the Planck length, yes. But that’s not the same thing as being able to express the exact area of the circle.

This point could quickly race off in any number of theological directions. It is not my intention to spark a theological war on this forum. My intention is only to show that @deliberateresult is provably incorrect in asserting that

predictability and certainty of outcome … are essential attributes of natural law

When the outcome of a “natural process” could only be predicted by an equation that uses an irrational number, the outcome cannot be predicted exactly–it can only be approximated. To challenge that statement, you would have to overturn the mathematical proof that pi is irrational.

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1003

The flipside of Glipsnort’s point is that God has oceans of space in which to govern the world providentially. It’s the death knell for any principle of the universe as a closed causal system as a conclusion of science.

And as a basis for science, it’s purely an arbitrary working assumption.

1004

Hi Chris,

You make an interesting point, but I wonder if you are on the right tack, so to speak. There are many areas that human intellect finds difficult (imaginary numbers, non-Euclid geometry, values of pi, distributions of electron density, just to name a few) to provide precision, and often are to us, counter intuitive. This area is often expressed as ‘the unreasonable’ capability of science to model reality, and may be summarised as the intelligibility of the creation, or some mysterious ‘property’ (again, even these terms lack precise meaning to us) that enables us to investigate and express in a meaningful way, what is ‘out there’.

I take the phrase, “natural law” in the sciences, to represent this aspect of rendering the creation meaningful to us. The fact that we must use constants and provide for ourselves mathematical proofs, also speaks of a Universe that is, and this provides confidence to scientists of reproducibility and precision, that often challenges our capabilities. This too points to God as Creator. Thus, to end on your example, God knows the precise area of a circle, and of all circles, and He does not have a need to express this in numbers and symbols we use to communicate our knowledge. But we need to do just that, to enable us to know (that is, use constants, numbers and equations).

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1005

GJDS

Your post reminds me that Sy Garte wrote a provocative piece on his blog called The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences, in which he pointed out:

Of course, mathematics doesn’t describe the real physical world very well, either. What it does is describe models of the real world perfectly, and the best laws for the models are used for real-world calculations. If the model is very good, the laws work well in the real world also.

He might have added that mathematics itself is a symbolic system rather than, necessarily, a basic reality. In which case God’s “problem” in Chris’s question about pi would be that God, who knows the exact relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle as it is would be unable to express it using our models. He would certainly be able to express it in the communion of the Trinity, and equally in the creation of everything circular that exists (or they could not exist).

In other words, the limitation is not God’s ability, but the limitations of our models, including mathematics. That seems to accord with what you say in your reply.

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1006

This is to me, the central theological lesson we may learn from Science - and also why I do not take a strident approach to (true) atheists (but not anti-theists). Knowledge, be it science, maths, biology, or whatever, is a human activity and we are not ‘reading God’s mind’ - instead we should as Christians, seek greater understanding of God’s glorious creation (and as we do, we also understand why He made it for our benefit).

Instead of reasonable ineffectiveness, I (as a chemist) refer to the unreasonable effectiveness of maths. I understand what Sy is saying and I have taken the view that the bio-sciences are a number of increasing levels of complexity compared to chemistry and physics (what a mouthful!!! :grinning: ). My view of the bio-sciences oscillates between fascination at the fantastic systems studied and anger at the hubris displayed by some as they tout ToE as the all-encompassing theory of all sciences (I want to say, is this a dual position? or will this encourage Relates - please, please, I AM joking).

1007

@GJDS and @Jon_Garvey - The scope of my comment was very narrow; I was just trying to explain how our friend and brother, @deliberateresult , has a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific models. The two of you have provided much edifying insight into the relationship of science and theology in these four posts, and I thank you enthusiastically!

Chris Falter

1008

I was hoping that at some point @deliberateresult would defend his claim in this thread that “every single time we trace functional prescriptive information to its source, that source is always an intelligent agent, and never natural processes,” since it seems to me obviously false. But I haven’t such a defense.

1009

Hi Steve,

What counterexample would you provide? I don’t find the ID argument persuasive, but even a single counterexample would pretty much put it to bed.

Thanks!

1010

I’m thinking of antibody specificity. Presumably the DNA that codes for a functional protein contains functional prescriptive information, since that’s precisely what ID proponents are usually talking about when it comes to biological information. But that kind of information comes into existence all the time without the action of an intelligent agent, when the adaptive immune system develops antibodies in response to infection.

For example, I have DNA in my body that codes for antibody proteins that are perfectly tuned to bind antigens produced by the 1968 Hong Kong influenza virus. I wasn’t born with DNA that had that information; instead, the information was created by repeated rounds of mutation (somatic hypermutation) and selection, part of an immune system with no conscious controller.

1012

…which was, of course, what Asa Gray repeatedly stressed vis a vis evolution, as the first “theistic evolutionist” after Darwin.

That said, I’m not actually sure on what basis one can confidently exclude the activity of an intelligent agent inputting information (let’s say God, since we’re discussing “Evolutionary Creation”, in which “God creates through evolution”, rather than ID, in which the issue is merely “evidence for a designer”), except on some theological, rather than scientific, basis.

One has to assume that the hyper-mutations that the immune system undergoes, which are more often than not successful in providing a “fit” for invading pathogens, “would have happened naturally anyway”. But If they’re random, they’re not lawlike and can’t be adequately predicted by science - except statistically. And of course, as Glipsnort himself has helpfully pointed out, we can’t know enough about the causes of individual events in a statistical system to pronounce them random at all.

A limiting example would be statistical studies of mass human behaviours like voting patterns, in which each vote is actually an “intelligent” (with scare quotes given the current US situation) decision. The science can only observe the patterns of outcomes: the individual unrepeatable events are beyond science’s purview.

This is not simply nit-picking in the context of a science-faith discussion, because in classical Christian philosophical theology, the three broad positions possible are:

  • Conservationism, which historically has only really been held by Deists, in which God sustains all events in existence without actively influencing them: in this view only is God not actively governing the outcomes providentially.

  • Occasionalism, in which God is the sole “true” cause of each event (this had some traction in mediaeval theology, though is far less popular today).

  • Concurrentism, in which secondary causes are always actively under the governance of God, in his guiding providence. This has historically been the majority position.

So to claim “information comes into existence all the time without the action of an intelligent agent” is to be assuming, without justifying arguments, a particular philosophy of divine action (or, I suppose, if one were an atheist, assuming a naturalist philosophy in which there is no divine action).

But as you rightly say, a complex system like a coin-toss or an immune system, which exploits what is phenomenologically perceived as “chance”, is itself the evidence of design, the alternative ultimate source being (as Gray said, reminding his readers that the stark choice went back to Aristotle and Epicurus) that chaos can produce order.

One might as well say that the process of human fertilization is so random that it demonstrates God has no active role in creating an individual like you, me, or John the Baptist. Such a conclusion is not scientific, but philosophical and theological - and needs therefore to be justified on those terms rather than smuggled in as “science”.

1013

I didn’t offer it as an argument against ID. I offered it as a counterexample to a particular claim made in this thread.