Chance and Providence

That’s a big problem with the naked hypothesis “things were designed”. No evidence is possible either for or against anything so vague.

You are asking about the motives of a designer. That involves metaphysical or religious speculation. Notice how I avoid it, and raise more concrete questions. The issue is whether the sort of causes that allegedly produced bacterium to man evolution would be likely to have produced camera eyes more than once. Are you saying that the probability of the unplanned evolution of camera eyes is very high, and so we would expect them to be produced more than once, in quite different lineages?

I told you that the argument of the book is cumulative, so no, I can’t. I would not want to see you trying to tear apart isolated pieces of the argument. It would be like asking to you make a judgment on a Mozart symphony based on hearing two or three widely separated strains. I would assume that a professional phylogeneticist is not averse to reading books on the subject of evolution.

We notice how you avoid most anything which involves you backing up your many vacuous claims.

How’s that positive evidence for ID coming?

I see your evidence for design is all going to be negative. “We don’t know how that happened” becomes “a designer must have done it”. Camera eyes have evolved only three times, as far as I know. Is that “high” probability?

True, but I’m not big on pseudoscience. Anyway, my understanding is that Denton was claiming that the universe was designed to produce life through natural evolution. Is that true?

Yes, that’s true – which is why I thought you might be more open to reading Denton’s book than the books of other people associated with ID.

I’m not an expert on that. Dawkins claimed in one interview that it’s no problem for evolution to make an eye, that they have evolved 30 or 40 times. Whether he meant the camera eye, or any old sort of eye, I don’t know. But anyhow, based on your understanding of evolutionary theory, would you have expected a complex camera eye to have developed more than once, in the absence of direct guidance or advanced planning? Do you regard it as highly probable that such a thing should happen? Or as a fairly unlikely coincidence?

I consider “camera eye” to be a misnomer. But yes, I do not find it surprising that it evolved more than once.

I regard it as highly plausible. I won’t say “highly probable”, because I do not know how to estimate a probability. There are many contingencies involved.

But I’m not really concerned with design of the universe. Life is my thing.

He means the latter; that’s the only way you get above 3.

We don’t really have a theory that can tell you how often a complex adaptation should evolve. Way too many variables there. Still, I presume you’re familiar with Nilsson & Pelger 1994, which has been cited here fairly often. That certainly shows it can happen given the right initial conditions and selective environment. Direct guidance doesn’t seem necessary, and I don’t see how advanced planning would be possible; camera eyes are not implicit in the starting conditions of the universe. Camera eyes in vertebrates, cephalopods, and box jellyfish, even less implicit. That would seem out of the range of Denton’s design.

Well, his argument in the book is that the fine-tuning responsible for the emergence of stars, planets, etc. continues to have repercussions all the way down, shaping geological, biochemical, biological and human reality. The realms of astrophysics, chemistry, geology, chemistry, biology and anthropology are ultimately expressions of one unifying set of cosmic givens.

That is what I suspected.

I suspect that the second remark is true, though to give Denton’s view a fighting chance, he seemed to think (at least back when he wrote the book) that though a camera eye specifically in mollusks and specifically on this particular planet would not be dictated by the starting conditions, it would be likely to occur somewhere in the universe, given the strong tilt of the initial conditions which seemed set up to make such things possible.

As for the first remark, I consider the jury to still be out. I neither insist on nor reject direct guidance.

I now have to take a break from this stuff – I have a writing assignment in the real world. We can pick up later. Best wishes.

Jon, what you’re missing here is that the most common mutations, transitions, are not really “copying errors,” because the keto-enol transition of the base is driving them and the polymerase is working correctly. So if you’d like, that can be seen as providence more than chance.

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That’s what people often say about handwaving that they want to believe.

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The difficulty with your position is that you keep saying that there is evidence for design, but you never produce any.

I’m not going to reply further to anyone who could say the vile thing you said about Behe.

Eddie once again admits he has no scientific argument for his ID claims.

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Not so much “missing” as “not emphasizing” (since it comes under “the whole gamut…”). My point was that if quantum events are viewed as uncaused, that has little bearing on biology.

But your point about “the polymerase working correctly” being providential rather than random is a good one.

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This is the quintessential crappy excuse Christians come up with when their own standards are pointed out to be completely ridiculously low. Usually it amounts to “A fits into B quite well, and if a tornado did it it woulda been unlikely to, therefore it musta been made to”.

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That’s not an answer to anything relevant to whether his metaphysical or epistemological standards are too high to allow him to infer design. At all. How “doctrinaire” someone’s statements on the topic of free will are imply nothing wrt how one would go about detecting design.

This statement is rather uninteresting. Yes, the present state of the universe have in large part been conditional upon it’s conditions in earlier times, so what? Why does that make those earlier conditions seem like they were “set up” to yield later conditions? You could apply that same argument no matter what the present conditions were like.
In so far as there is some determininistic causal connection between the conditions of the past and the future, then the past must have been somehow arranged so as to give rise to the particular conditions that will obtain in that future.

This is where fine-tuning arguers will invoke that the types of conditions that yield life look to be extremely rare, so if the starting conditions were to have been generated at random they’d have been extremely unlikely to fall as they did. From this they reason, it’s more likely they were designed. One small problem: What’s the likelihood they were designed? We aren’t given a probability, that’s just skipped over.

Out of all conceivable designers capable of creating a cosmos and setting it’s initial conditions, if we were to pick one at random, how likely is it we’d pick one that would yield our starting conditions? Turns out design doesn’t solve the “unlikely initial conditions” problem. Oops, back to square one!

Now, is this me having a standard too high to infer design, or am I actually just doing epistemology and metaphysics correctly and unbiased?

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You are trying to argue wholly on broad general principles. Denton’s books take one away from such broad general principles and into the nitty-gritty of how living nature actually works: the physiology and biochemistry necessary for sight, a cardiovascular system, etc.; the geochemistry needed for sustaining life; the properties of gases and water needed to permit photosynthesis, etc. If you would descend from big generalities and look at the details of Denton’s case, you might be more impressed than you are. But I can’t force you to read anything; if you aren’t curious enough and open-minded enough scientifically to look into views of nature different from your customary one, there is nothing I can do about that.

Sorry but this isn’t going to fly. It doesn’t matter what the nitty gritty of the details are (though interesting they might be in their own right) if as I showed the argument could be applied to the situation no matter what. Which it clearly can. So when you respond that I lack curiosity and open-mindedness to look closer at this detail it has no logical force, it is pure rhetoric.

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6 posts were split to a new topic: Eddie and PS