Of course you may. But it is you that has assumed a privileged rationality, unaccountable to reality.
So how would you evaluate mental states, and remember - no recourse to external reality and observation?
I hereby claim grass is green. Seems realistic. I doubt any psychiatrist will look for irrational causes.
The state of mind is measured against reality, not the other way around.
When you choose to make claims you are unable to substantiate, the blame is not with those who expose that to you.
You seem to not show this somehow. You wanting there to be some fundamental basis you can reference, all because empiricism feels insufficient to you does not make others feel the same dissatisfaction. Nor does it make there actually be anything more to fundamentally justify our reasoning.
Needless to say, “our reasoning’s reliability is transferred/inherited from the fundamentally reliable reasoning of the magical essence that permeates this universe” should not do much at all to alleviate your doubts. You have no more basis to trust God’s reasoning than you do your own, and the fallibility of at least the latter also bars you from completely trusting this argument, even if you did.
No. “The unreasoning spirit of tiredness made me do it” would be shoveling responsibility off to some “unreasoning cause”. Being tired is an explanation of what happened, but it is not an excuse, and people who have wronged someone when their reasoning was so compromised should and often do still apologize. Because even when the deed or its consequences were unforeseen or unintended at the time, many still understand that it is not, in fact, someone or something else’s doing just because of the regret they feel afterward – something, incidentally, I’d think they would not feel, if indeed they felt that it wasn’t them.
No, but that so very physical influences should have such a noticeable impact is curious, if the mind is ultimately non-physical.
What part of his calculation is actually incorrect, though? He was just summing up the years between one man’s birth and the birth of his heir. Where in that math did he make the mistake?
The problem with Ussher’s estimate was never the calculation. It was the unwarranted assumption that an ancient book of folklore was a reliable source of facts about nature. Rather than going out and measuring anything, rather than reviewing the earth itself in an effort to find out its age, he went to review and cite literature instead. He trusted the words of an authority, and drew conclusions hence, without ever bothering to compare his conclusions or the authority’s against the actual facts of nature. You disbelieve now his conclusion, you say. Good. But what have you to criticize about his methods that applies not to your own?
I am now persuaded you are intentionally obfuscating to prevent this discussion from progressing, indicating your aim is to engage in apologetics, not to seek truth.
So I will simply proceed in my next post to demonstrate that Axe’s “response to objection 3” doesn’t, in fact, work and simply begs the question.
But apologetics is a way of seeking truth! The two are not somehow mutually exclusive. You certainly can try and hammer people and win arguments with it, but that is not my aim, I really do want to know what is true, as Wes Huff said, “My first priority is truth, even above Christianity.” If my conclusions are false, I want to know it, if they are true, I want to know it. Especially in areas of importance, such as the nature of reality, and the existence of God.
Along these lines! Another quote came to mind, about naturallists and madmen, which seemed appropriate here.
“Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small.” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
“Pippin thought he would liked to have said the same thing. The explanation did not seem to explain.” (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings)
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
From an outsider POV, apologetics looks to be more about tribalism and quenching existential fears than anything to do with truth.
If my conclusions are false, I want to know it, if they are true, I want to know it. Especially in areas of importance, such as the nature of reality, and the existence of God.
Considering the number of different views on the nature of the reality and existence of a god (or god-like being), you’re much more likely to be wrong than right.
But again, it’s not really about whether one is objective right or wrong. It’s more about satisfying a personal (emotional) need than anything to do with objective reality.
Apologetics begins with a set of beliefs, and then formulates arguments to justify them.
That applies to a lot of things! Like looking for my keys, there are so many wrong places to look, but I don’t sit down in a puddle of tears, and not look for them.
More Chesterton!
“The modern habit of saying ‘Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me’ – the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos.”
And let’s not give up on truth! Like Nietzsche did, it didn’t end well…
“With his ‘perspectivism’, Nietzsche claims no one can ever escape their own perspective. It’s thus absurd to think of objectivity as ‘disinterested contemplation’. Knowledge comes not from denying our subjective viewpoints, but in evaluating the differences between them.”
Well, it can be that, but let’s not assume that there are no sincere seekers of the truth. Dawkins claims to be one. Are you? May I ask…
Why Axe’s response to “objection 3” doesn’t work.
What is objection 3? Axe writes:
Objection 3: Because Axe measured mutational sensitivity from a weakly functional starting sequence rather than the fully functional natural enzyme, the mutants he generated were inappropriately disadvantaged, and this is why he arrived at such a low value for the prevalence of functional sequences.
According to Hunt, I “molded a variant that would be exquisitely sensitive to mutation.” [2] Venema expressed the same concern, that the starting sequence I used was “intentionally ‘hamstrung’ with multiple mutations to render it far less functional than its natural counterpart.” [7]
Both Hunt and Venema seem to think the outcome would have been more favorable (i.e., functional sequences would have been more prevalent) had I used the highly proficient natural enzyme as a starting point rather than the handicapped version. Actually, as a demonstration will show, the opposite is true.
In Axe’s response to objection 3 he intends to show that, had he used the wt enzyme in his experiment, he would have obtained an invalid result.
I will show that Axe’s analogy that claims the result would be invalid simply assumes that as his conclusion. His analogy doesn’t show that the result with the actual proteins would have been invalid, it assumes it. And further, if Axe’s analogy-argument here was correct, it would undermine his own experiment too, giving us zero reason to think ANY number he has estimated can be trusted.
In Axe’s analogy to his lab experiment, he breaks a 42 character sentence into six fragments of seven characters each, then mutates each fragment individually and puts it back into the full sentence context, and then assessess whether the sentence has retained readability with this specific 7-character fragment having mutated.
He does this for each of the six fragments. Importantly, the 35-character remainder of the sentence is unaltered in his analogy. He does this to see how many mutations each fragment can tolerate before the full 42-character sentence loses readability. He doesn’t really show where that limit is, but suggests it is somewhere in the range of 2 to 5 mutations for each 7-character fragment.
When he puts all four mutated fragments together, it’s gibberish Axe writes:
Here’s the problem, though. In calculating this higher P value, we have effectively assumed that the typo rate we found to be tolerable in the individual collections (two typos per seven positions) remains tolerable when we apply it to the full 42-character string. However, when we try this by generating full-length strings with twelve typos (maintaining the 2-in-7 ratio), we get completely unreadable gibberish:
So Axe says because the result is gibberish, it shows we can’t extrapolate the per-fragment tolerance to the entire sentence. Doing this, the result is invalid. The mutations in each fragment were tolerable only because the remainder of the unaltered sentence retained enough meaning to sort of “buffer” against the loss of meaning each mutation would create in an individual fragment:
Evidently we have made a mistake, because mutants that ought to be readable according to our calculation clearly aren’t readable. As you may have guessed, the mistake is that the 2-in-7 typo rate was tolerable only because it was restricted to a narrow section of seven positions. The fact that the remaining 35 positions were without error compensated in large measure for the errors in the mutated section.
So Axe’s analogy here actively relies on our abilities to assess the readability of a sentence. We are supposed to think that because we can see that introducing the same number of mutations (say 2 in 7) that were tolerated in each 7-character sentence fragment—when introduced at the same ratio (2 in 7) into the full sentence—results in loss of readability of the sentence, then we should now think that we would have obtained the same invalid result with the protein enzyme.
That the enzyme’s “readability”, which would have been it’s enzymatic function, would have been lost too if we had put the same number of mutations found to be tolerated for individual enzyme fragments in the context of the wild-type enzyme, back into the full enzyme sequence at a similar ratio (2 mutations in every 7 residues, say).
This analogy therefore assumes that sentence readability and character typos must function analogously to how mutations affect protein enzymatic function. First of all Axe gives us zero reason to think that is the case anywhere. That means his analogy, as it currently stands, is flat out question begging his conclusion. He has not shown the result for a protein enzyme using a similar method would be invalid. He has merely declared it. His analogy is not grounded in enzyme biophysics.
Axe gives us no reason to think that the changes to the readability of a sentence borne from typos has enough of a meaningfully comparable relationship to the functional effects of substitution-mutations on enzyme functions, such that his analogy demonstrates what results we would obtain had we performed a similar experiment with actual enzymes.
To justify his conclusion, Axe would need to show that something like the following would be true.: That the wild-type enzyme is already so close to the edge of functional collapse that its apparent mutational tolerance is mostly an artifact of global buffering, and therefore fragment-level tolerance vastly overestimates true functional density. But he never demonstrates this either experimentally or theoretically. Rather, he merely asserts it using the sentence analogy.
Just one argument to think there are some dis-analogous affects in play: In real protein sequences specific residues can not only compensate for the deleterious effects of mutations at other locations, they can even some times combine in a way where two individually deleterious mutations become beneficial when together in the same protein’s amino acid sequence. But misspelings in later words generally never compensate for misspellings in earlier words, much less do they ever combine to improve sentence readability.
This is not to say that there is no analogous relationship at play (as we randomly increase the number of mutations, we would also expect protein function to eventually degrade), but Axe’s analogy does no work to establish that it is even close to the relationship between mutations and enzyme function. It is not at all clear from his analogy that a more stable enzyme being tested against a ~10ug/ml concentration of antibiotic would produce skewed results.
Having now dealt with how Axe’s analogy simply begs the question, let’s move on to see how, if his argument worked, it would undermine his own experimental results. In that he would be forced to conclude his own experiment has produced a skewed result too.
This one should be fairly obvious. If we can’t extract a valid result by extrapolating the mutational tolerance of a single fragment, to the entire sequence, then that would apply both to the temp-sensitive enzyme and to the wild-type.
Either way, he has a sequence that is more tolerant to mutation to begin with before mutating the fragments of it, then mutates fragments of it even further. At best Axe could argue that the magnitude of error would be larger if he had used the wt enzyme as a context for the fragment, since this could presumably buffer more mutations before losing function, than his temp-sensitive enzyme.
But since his temp-sensitive enzyme also has some, though lower, capacity to buffer mutations (if it didn’t he should find a pass rate of 0%, not 38%), his own analogy with sentence-readability should still apply and he must now argue that he is deriving an invalid result even with a temp-sensitive enzyme. What reason do we have to think that an enzyme being tested at 25 degrees C against a concentration of 10 ug/ml, that yields a 38% pass rate, is closer to the correct value for functional and nonfunctional sequences, than if we had used the wt enzyme against the same or a higher concentration? His analogy doesn’t tell us, rather if we believe it despite being given no reason to, it simply undermines that claim.
No, it’s the act of defending a particular position or viewpoint. I would agree that the position being defending might be true, but apologetics is not what one should be doing to find out if it is.
Before one begins to engage in apologetics one first needs to determine which position is true, if possible. Only then should you proceed to try to convince others. But the apologetics part is not the truth-seeking part. That would simply be science and critical thinking (rigorous philosophical analysis).
We’re not talking about finding misplaced keys. We’re talking about existential questions that are arguably not objectively answerable.
No, I was thinking more along the lines of Ernest Becker, author of “Denial of Death” and foundation for modern terror management theory.
That latter of which seeks to explain human behavior in the context of the conflict between our survival instinct (fear of death) versus knowledge of our own mortality (death is inevitable).
Yeah, it still looks like the Chewbacca defense to me. There is no semblance of a coherent argument. But his intended audience is people who are easily baffled by BS, so long as the conclusion fits their preconceived beliefs.
And that is not even taking this into consideration: Taking a functioning enzyme and seeing how many mutations it can tolerate before losing function tells us little to nothing about how that enzyme may have evolved in the first place. This is an example of how that is correctly done:
Exactly. It’s important to emphasize here, again and again, that even though the fact that Axe used a temp-sensitive enzyme in his experiment gives us reason to think he has underestimated the fraction of TEM-1 like enzymes, that is not even the main issue anyone has with Axe 2004 and how ID-creationists use his paper to make their case against evolution.
The problem is that the fraction he calculates for the TEM-1 structure-function relationship, even if we suppose he is even approximately correct, simply cannot tell us whether new enzymes (TEM-1 or otherwise) can evolve, since he does no work to connect the fraction to the mechanisms of evolution.
He does nothing to tell us how hard it is to evolve new enzymes by all the different mechanisms we know enzymes can evolve by. Ultimately, the fraction by itself doesn’t really matter.
Axe needs experiments that show much more broadly what the degree of interconnectivity between different protein functions are, how many alternative structure-function relationships there are, how often mutations can alight on rudimentary function, whether there are bridges in sequence space from simpler and more likely, to more complex functions, whether or to what extend selection or mutational biases can push sequences towards the rarer/more complex functions, etc. etc.
He does no such work anywhere.
And, all the while, evolutionary biologists are doing this work. The example I provided is just one of many.
Apologetics, in this analogy, would be trying to convince oneself and others of a location one has decided they are before looking, and without ever actually looking there. Some apologetics no doubt would be about how there is no need to look either, what with the senses being unreliable, and evil spirits doing all they can through this fallen world and us fallen beings to deceive us regarding the capital-T True location of the keys.
What I find interesting about this response is what you don’t mention. We’re talking about assessing reliability in the context of scientific inquiry.
Yet at no point do you mention things like assessment of methodologies of experiments, the resultant data, independent verification of results, nor assessment of their work in lieu of subsequent discoveries or experiments.
You appear more interested in assessing perceived character traits rather than assessing the veracity of their work.
By those criteria, Douglas Axe and James Tour should definitely not be trusted.
So this would be an example of a statement that is so obviously divorced from reality that the person making it should not be considered rational.
I’m actually presenting arguments, not mere assumptions. But this statement is rather unclear to me. I don’t claim special privilege, and I think the naturalist view is disconnected from what people think is real, like people do think they are responsible for their thoughts, that they are not puppets!
As I have mentioned with the psychiatrist, I would evaluate any evidence for statements I hear, while keeping in view that people can have thinking that is irrationally caused. I haven’t foresworn evidence and observation! I only state that once you’ve seen an irrational cause for some thinking, you then try and help them out of it, you don’t still give credibility to their view by continually looking for evidence.
I don’t claim every thought is irrationally caused! You should present your objection to the naturalists, they think that. But please answer my challenge, you answered a straw man, you responded to something I didn’t say. One psychiatrist, please.
I agree, actually.
No, they don’t. And this is part of your problem. There is no reason to suppose that a purely physical system, the brain for example, can’t support a process of rational thought. You think a soul is necessary, but that’s just a version of the homunculus theory of consciousness: it’s a black box that saves you from infinite regress by truncating your curiosity about causation. Otherwise you would have to ask whether there’s a homunculus inside the homunculus, and another inside that one, and it’s homunculi all the way down. You also use “supernatural” in a similar magical way. If your thoughts come from atoms, they can’t be rational, and yet if they come from whatever souls are made of, they can. But why? No way even to ask what souls are made of. Out of sight, out of mind, as it were.
Naturalism does not entail that people are not responsible for their thoughts, nor that they are puppets. By the same token, dualism does not entail the opposite. The question of whether free will exists is independent of the question of whether the mind is produced only by physical processes.
Yes?