That just isn’t true. I defy you to find evidence of such a thing in anything I’ve said.
Your statements on free will, for example, are doctrinaire, and show none of the philosopher’s usual balance in presenting the range of views and the difficulties with each. The best philosophers I know find free will a very difficult question, but you write as if you have the answers all sewn up.
Great. Then you should be able to tell me why my statements are wrong. Please do so.
Again you miss the point. Your science training has you constantly thinking in black and white. You want proof that you are wrong on a particular conclusion. I’m not saying your conclusion is wrong. I’m saying your supreme confidence that you are right is unphilosophical. You don’t have the method of philosophy right. You don’t understand the dialectical character of philosophical debate. And you don’t understand how metaphysical and epistemological biases can shape what is allowed and not allowed in science, whether arguments for design are strong or weak, etc. And there is no way this will ever change, until you sit down and do some systematic and regular reading in philosophy, history of science, history of ideas, etc. Not quick lookups on the internet, but slow, thoughtful reading of classic works.
Not true. You don’t seem to know how science works. “Proof” is not a term or concept we use. And I don’t think you have any real understanding of what biases I have or how they influence anything.
Yeah, I’m not about to do that. If you can’t communicate the ideas here, it’s not going to happen.
We weren’t talking about science. We were talking about your philosophical conclusions about free will. Have you forgotten that?
Right. And precisely because you are not about to do that, you will never become a competent philosopher, and will never reach the point of critical awareness of how your unexamined philosophical commitments affect your judgments regarding origins issues.
You were talking about my “science training”. I deny that my “science training” has caused me to have the attitudes and approaches you attributed to me.
I’m cool with that.
Considering that you have misstated my unexamined philosophical commitments, I can’t accept your judgment on that point.
OK, you may be right. I have noticed that many scientists take the black-and-white attitude I mentioned, but I grant that the science training may not be the cause in your case. But whatever the origin of your certainty in the soundness of your philosophical conclusions (the best philosophers are always a bit uneasy about their conclusions, worrying that they may be making a slip or being dogmatic), it’s not a good thing to have such overconfidence. But based on the way you write about science, I suspect that it is just “your way” to sound very confident about whatever you assert, so this is probably a personality difference between us that is not going to go away. You tend to push people to either agree with your conclusions or refute them; I prefer to have discussions in which both sides admit that there are difficulties with either position. If you were a philosopher, you’d be someone like Spinoza, whereas I would be someone like Socrates. The two temperaments rarely get along.
I also deny that I have any such attitude, in case you were confused the first time.
No problem. What are the difficulties with my position, whichever position you’re talking about? If I agree that they are indeed difficulties, I’ll let you know. A scientist is in fact obliged to consider objections to his ideas; more, he’s required to think of them and test whether the objections are correct. But it’s always good to have help; that’s what reviewers are for. Go ahead.
Ideally, yes, and I admire scientists who live up to that ideal.
The difficulty with your position is that, from where I sit, there is no conceivable evidence for design that you would ever allow. Can you give me an example of the sort of thing that for you would count as evidence for (not proof of, just evidence for) design? What could cause you to move from “there is no design in nature” to “There may or may not be design in nature; there is evidence both ways, and I’m no longer certain”?
Hard to say unless we have some clue about how this designer works. If we’re talking about design that exactly mimics natural evolution, then there can be no conceivable evidence other than to catch the designer actually at work. Time stamps embedded in species genomes would be evidence. If we couldn’t construct consistent phylogenetic trees, that would be evidence. If identical parts appeared in disparate species, that would be evidence. “Oh, look, that’s complicated” is not evidence. “I don’t know how that works” is not evidence. What evidence were you thinking of?
That’s a sad comment on your lack of imagination and understanding.
Easy. We’d need to see positive evidence for said Design which could include
- Evidence for the physical mechanisms by which the Design was implemented, including the gathering and processing of the raw materials.
- Physical evidence on the Designed object itself indicative of manufacture i.e. cuts, scrapes, tool or die marks, etc.
- A timeline for when the Design was implemented.
- A place(s) the Design was implemented
Of course a positive identification of the Designer(s) would be really useful.
You claimed such positive evidence exists but when asked to produce it you made your usual lame excuses and failed miserably.
The kind of evidence that is presented at length in some of the books I’ve mentioned, e.g., Michael Denton’s Nature’s Destiny. But I have the impression you would reject his entire line of argument. But maybe I’m wrong. If you ever get around to reading it (the argument is cumulative, so you need to read the whole thing), let me know whether you still think there is no evidence at all for design.
Isn’t “identical” too high a standard? Wouldn’t the existence of camera eyes in completely different lineages count as evidence? Not proof, just evidence?
(Again, always remember that I am talking about design that does not exclude evolution, not design versus evolution.)
Every last piece of “evidence” the ID camp has offered relies on the false dichotomy “evolution can’t explain this to my satisfaction so ID wins by default”.
Go ahead and present some of your ID “evidence” which doesn’t fit that description.
Could you actually mention this evidence rather than just alluding to it?
No. Why would a designer create quite different organs that do the same thing? Even if it’s through some form of directed evolution, why not direct identical, optimal solutions to the same problem?
It always cracks me up when the nested hierarchical evidence for common descent is presented and the IDCers yell “common design!”. Then you ask them why the Designer came up with four different “designs” of wings (birds, bats, insects, pterosaurs) that all perform the same function in the same environment and you get “the Designer likes variety!”.
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?