Refuting fallacious ID arguments and explaining randomness in biology for students

You seem to be retreating into irony. What I don’t get is that, as a Calvinist, you can’t see evolution as a subset of God’s providence. In providential miracles, as we’ve discussed before, there is design. Is it design that is scientifically detectable? No. The events are empirically observed or detected, but the meaning, the telos, the design, that is inferred is not.

meaning can be inferred from empirical observation

that is the basis of communication theory and shannon’s channel capacity derivation

it is why you can talk over your cell phone an type your comments on the internet

that is why ID is based on information theory, the math is the same

I haven’t been active over at PeacefulScience.org lately, and I don’t remember how your discussions over there concluded, if they have or if they are ongoing. I do remember discussions about Ewert’s work, but as I recall, there was insufficient data to be compelling to the computational biologists.

I absolutely agree. Hence the meaning inferred from providential miracles, miracles of time and place, timing and placing, where no natural laws are broken.

scientifically inferred

i convinced zero people at PS

one or two were intrigued and asked follow up questions

swamidass spent a long time trying to publicly shame me and then patrick tried involving me in ffrf lawsuits. that is all toxic so i left for good over a year ago

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Well, you can also blame PS in large part for my ‘conversion’ from OEC to ‘evolutionary providentialist’, them and the evidence of God’s providence in DNA mutations with respect to the timing of events associated with my nephrectomy.

It seems to me from what I picked up there, that the complexities that can arise from neutral drift were within biostatistical possibilities. And then there’s exaptation.

A significant factor helping to convince me was ‘why there is no proof of God’, not that there is not plenty of evidence pointing to him, but nothing ‘scientifically demonstrable’. ID is part of that because, if you can prove the existence of uppercase Design, then you have proven the existence of a Designer, not that ID specifies any particulars, or even necessarily an uppercase D.

I used to be a big Behe fan, and Trifonov’s code-crowding lecture is amazing. But what is counterintuitive to me, at least, is they are both evolutionary scientists.

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No, what you are doing is taking him out of context. Where does he refer to the sharpshooter fallacy at all in TBW? Where does he agree with Hoyle and other IDi…sts that the appearance of design in biology cannot merely be attributed to it?

You insinuate insinuation.

I assume you’re responding to my comment to @Christy about the ten commandments? If so, no irony whatsoever - rather a very real question (that no one seems willing or able to answer) and I think very relevant and analogous. Thus I would ask you also…

Were the Hebrew words carved into the stones that Moses carried down from Sinai a result of “providence” working through the regularly observed course of nature, wherein any teleology was in no sense “scientifically detectable”?

Or were they the direct result of God’s immediate activity, producing the kind of result that simply does not happen through His normal course of providence? One wherein any rational scientist would defend detecting bona fide “teleology” in those Hebrew words?

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Please catch me if I’m wrong, but it appears to me that ID is asking science to find an area in the universe that science can’t explain. Since science is only a tool to explain things–how are we going to get any forrader? Thanks.

Anyone interested in assessing the accuracy of this account should read this entire thread: We Are Mystified by Eric Holloway - Peaceful Science

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Essentially, ID seems to me to use the identical philosophical methods employed by SETI. Examine a phenomenon, determine if it is better explained by unguided natural processes, or by intelligent purposeful agency. SETI could be paraphrased as the “Search for extraterrestrial Intelligent Design within cosmic radio signals”, after all.

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So what does that tell you?

Not cannot explain, different kind of explanation. Like when we get to chemistry we explain things differently than when looking at physics. Intelligent causation is a different kind of cause and has a different mode of explanation.

There is no analogy between physics and chemistry including physical chemistry, and evolutionary biology and ID; science and pseudoscience.

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Sure there is. e.g. ewerts module theory vs phylogenetic tree, gmos detection, network intrusion detection, forensic sience, SETI, etc. all are empirically testable. i don’t ynderstand the issue. can you provide more concrete detail about what you think cannot be empirically tested?

Good point, I think. I was just mentioning this to my wife, and she did not think ID was scientific. Logical and deductive, yes, but scientific, no.

Wasn’t it Behe in Black Box that used the analogy of an aborigine looking under the hood (bonnet for you Brits :slightly_smiling_face:) of a car and knowing that it was not organic nor a function of unguided natural forces? Is that a scientific deduction?

I think minimal viable science is something that make predictions about the physical world that can be falsified and/or confirmed, and also leads to granular empirical explanations, e.g. like chemistry’s periodic table. ID does all this, so is a science in the Eric book.

I’m not sure I buy into the aboriginal scientist notion. All he did was look under the hood.

was his inference to design based on empirical data? was it valid? if so, what is the problem?

Did he do any of that? No, it was intuitive, and not science.