ID is a Theory of Epistemology

I think the ID movement would have bowed out of the science debate long ago if there wasnt a political goal so clearly in mind:

If they dont say it is a science, then they cant justify I.D. being added to public school curricula!

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Well, Behe has told you that his reason for engaging in ID research isn’t to prove the existence of God, but you won’t believe him, so what can I say?

If Behe would just confess his interest in the Prometheus Scenario, i would most likely send a donation!

Discovering which alien race sponsored Eden as a laboratory has a strong appeal!

Can you give me an example of an ID hypothesis?

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We keep looking for them but don’t find them. Vitalism keeps making stands and failing miserably. Note, Eddie, that some of this vitalism has come from the scientists you claim are uninterested in philosophy.

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So as not to be misunderstood, I would say a few things:

  1. Scientists don’t need to be thinking about philosophical foundations of their work all the time, any more than historians, sociologists, etc. need to do so. So I’m not blaming scientists for not spending every waking moment philosophizing about what they are doing.

  2. However, the difference between a university education and a community college/polytechnic sort of education is that at a university, one not only learns skills, techniques, bodies of theory, etc., but also has an understanding of the philosophical foundations of one’s discipline. So I think that scientists at some point in their training should reflect on such questions. (It is standard for undergrad programs in religion, sociology, history, etc. to include a course in which the crucial foundational assumptions and methods of the discipline as currently practiced are examined.)

  3. A lot of what currently passes for philosophy of science is dry-as-dust verbiage in which I have no interest. I am not defending everything or even the majority of what goes on in that academic field. I am speaking of more general, less specialized, ruminations about the nature of the scientific enterprise. One doesn’t have to read an abstruse article by Elliott Sober filled with logical symbols in order to think philosophically about science. One can reflect on a few passages of Hume, or Aristotle, or Descartes; or one can read a philosophically informed account of a particular science, e.g., Gould’s superb historical and philosophical discussion of structuralism and adaptationism in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory; or one can read a book by Scott Turner which rethinks the nature of life and evolution, and read it without one’s mind snapped shut by professional orthodoxy, and without harrumphing all the way through the reading. That’s all I’m asking of scientists – at least, of scientists who debate about science and religion in the public sphere.

@Eddie

You are dodging the point.

If Behe is interested in something other than God, he can apply all sorts of criteria and controls.

But as soon as he attempts to investigate something supernatural like God (!)… how is he going to control for the Supernatural?

This was the hurdle the Alchemists couldnt surmount, and neither will you or Behe!

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“We keep looking for them” is not my impression of the attitude of most biologists, or at least, of the attitude of most biologists who debate science and religion on the internet, especially those who identify themselves as atheist. They convey the strong impression of holding an a priori conviction that everything about life and mind will eventually be explained by a mechanistic, reductionist physics and chemistry. “Looking eagerly for evidence that there is nothing fundamentally different about life” rather than “Looking for what is unique about life” is the strong impression that comes across from such people – whether they intend it or not. Scott Turner, on the other hand, conveys quite a different attitude.

But as I just told you, he isn’t trying to investigate God. So why do you keep telling Behe that he is doing something that he explicitly says he’s not doing? Do you know Behe’s mind better than he does?

@Mercer, how, in principle, would you even expect to detect or rule out God’s action?

@Eddie

My point is the only way to prove the ID point is to control the variables.

This means he might prove aliens beought life to Earth… but nobody will ever be able to prove, scientifically, that God was the originator.

I’m skeptical. On which specific pages are ID theories presented formally? You know, that axiomatic form that is covered in the philosophy of science?

Why do you so often resort to shilling for books? Are you one of those authors?

Behe engages in ID research? Where has he published it? What ID theory did he test?

I wasn’t talking about God, but the far more general phenomenon of vitalism. It’s a negative claim.

Well, which is it? Because those two sets are very different.

Have you ever read anything about the philosophies of working scientists?

For example,

Hughes

Was there hesitation, perhaps a reflection of vitalism, to accept the possibility that one could synthesize a biologically active viral DNA, that one could synthesize life?

Kornberg

Vitalism will never die as long as there are systems as complex as cells and organisms; there will be a reluctance to accept reductionism. A valid objection to enzymology in the test tube is that it can’t be that simple in a complex creature. We’ve been over that and its absolutely true.

I’ve cited F. G. Hopkins as my hero, and that’s his picture [points to framed photograph on wall]. Unfortunately, I never met him. I had reason to go back to For the Love of Enzymes , and I’m pleased I quote him at some length as to his view of biochemistry versus biology, or vitalism versus reductionism. In essence he says that biochemistry cannot explain biologic phenomena, but without the biochemistry, biologic phenomena will never be properly understood. He says it better than that. And that’s it: vital functions can be and often are beyond our current capacity to explain them chemically. But every so often, we learn so much that we never anticipated about a biological phenomenon, from very modest, disciplined biochemical or chemical studies.

Right now there is a new vitalism, because now we can knock out genes in mice, or alter them; the transgenic mouse or the knockout mouse is now very popular. And I think it is forgotten by those practitioners that simply because you have a mouse that lacks or retains a genetic function that you know what’s going on. That’s a new kind of vitalism. You bypass or ignore the lack of chemical details of the process and focus on the end result and try to draw conclusions from that. It provides information, often an extensive amount of important information; it doesn’t tell the whole story. You can find that the gene that you thought was essential in humans for making a blood cell or a brain cell is not essential in the mouse; lacking that gene, the mouse is perfectly normal. To be sure, it has gone through an embryonic development in which other genes and their functions have replaced that one. Or maybe that function isn’t in the main line, but rather a spur off the main track. Vitalism is something that one has to fight all the time in order to preserve the commitment to do the biochemistry.

https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt6q2nb1tg&brand=oac4&doc.view=entire_text

More philosophy follows this bit, and you can get more from his book “For the love of enzymes.” Eddie, it’s not the kind of philosophy you agree with, but here you have an example of a real scientist discussing real philosophy.

I don’t see anything I’d call philosophy here, unless you mean the repeated tossing around of the word “vitalism” in the passage. And a philosopher would define his terms, but I don’t see any definition of vitalism here. You’ll have to do better than that.

And nobody in ID is trying to prove, scientifically, that God was the originator of anything. You are criticizing a straw man.

I would be surprised if Jeff Schloss answered at all! Why break his long-running silent streak on the question?

Not long ago, but when the world was still quite young, a pretty girl named Atok lived in an earthen shelter with her family. Day after day, she would get out of bed, eat, help her mother clean, cook, and take care of her brothers and sisters and then go back to bed when the sun went down. Occasionally, a predator would venture close to their humble home and they would kill it or scare it away, but that was the extent of her adventure.

Her simple life would take a dramatic change when one day, as she was starting the morning fire, the smoke from the embers took shape right before her eyes. She almost cried out, but she suddenly noticed she felt no fear. She was calm and her attention was drawn to the apparition which now looked like a large crow.

As she watched the crow with curiosity and awe, it began to speak. It told her that she would become the mother of great nations and that she would guide them toward a long, peaceful existence. After giving Atok all the instructions she would need to share with her people, the crow disappeared. Atok quickly ran to tell her mother, who laughed at her childish imagination.

But sure enough, 5 years later, Atok started her family and raised them in the ways of the crow. She started developing powers and performing miracles so everyone in the village believed. Atok never died, instead, she took the form of a crow and travels the world to this day, bestowing good fortune on her many followers around the world.

If I were to tell you this story, and assure you it is true and that you too should believe, you would probably ask me for some kind of proof. The burden of proof would be on me to provide supporting evidence for my claims. It would not be your responsibility to disprove the story, or to prove it untrue. Yet believers expect us to believe in their ideology with no evidence to support their claims. When asked for evidence many of them point out that we also have no evidence that their claims are not true. Yet, if we were to believe everything that we cannot disprove, then any unfalsifiable claim that we come up with, should we believed.

Bertrand Russell made this point by using an analogy of a celestial teapot. Russell suggested the following thought experiment to illustrate the burden of proof and falsifiability:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.

But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Carl Sagan addressed it with his story, “The Dragon In My Garage” which is a chapter in his book, The Demon-Haunted World. . In the story, the existence of God is equated with a hypothetical assertion of a dragon living in someone’s garage. Sagan described the discussion as follows:

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage” Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle–but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.” And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

There is also the possibly even more widely known is the invention of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) by Bobby Henderson, the deity of the Pastafarian religion, depicted as a knot of spaghetti, two meatballs and eyes who created the world using His Noodley Appendage .

“On the seventh day of floating around infinite nothingness, after six days of rest, the FSM said, ‘Let there be a Universe, or something!’ And there was a Universe, or something not terribly far off. And the FSM saw that it was pretty damn good, especially the bits with a light sauce.” - the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

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Hi Eddie,
I agree with you that I think it would be a good idea to put a little bit more philosophy of science into the education and training of a scientist. It will make them more able to dialogue with the public and non-scientists instead of sometimes saying embarrassingly ignorant things about subjects they don’t know about (such as philosophy). But I doubt that it will lead to an observable improvement in the quality and quantity of science research being produced. Part of what makes science so successful, “objective” and relatively value-free is because what matters are the observables, which more people can agree upon, compared to the metaphysics, which mostly depends on your intuition about the world.

In physics, terms like “cause” and “natural” have a very technical, narrow, rigorous meaning. Naturalness in particle physics, for example, simply means that dimensionless parameters in your theory have to be of order ~1. To give a crude example, say we have a particle with two properties called \sigma and \tau, and you want to explain this particle’s behavior by writing a theory that involves two different interactions contributing to its energy, e.g.
H = a \sigma + b \tau
We figure out the values of constants a and b by performing appropriate experiments. Then naturalness simply means that a and b have to roughly be of similar magnitude. That’s it. Rather than any grand metaphysical statement about nature, it’s more of a pragmatic principle that physicists have found useful to make successful theories. And lately we’ve been finding that naturalness doesn’t hold in several cases. In response, physicists are starting to rethink whether this principle is still useful or not.

Now, individual physicists might have a variety of opinions as to why nature should find a and b to be the same magnitude. It is likely that some physicists secretly hold, or hope, that there is some underlying scientific or philosophical principle that makes naturalness hold in all cases. But a lot of these reasons are not purely scientific, but aesthetic or philosophical. We can talk about those about our science doesn’t depend on it. We can still agree on the observables. This is the great thing about science.

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Now, to respond to your other questions.

I think you are taking this issue too seriously. This is likely more of a problem of miscommunication between scientists and non-scientists. Scientists are well aware that their arguments all have a significant inductive component, unlike mathematicians, which are purely deductive. This is why technically, we have no proof that the sun will rise everyday. We have no deductive certainty that it will do so. This is why scientists don’t like to use the language of “proof” to describe empirical evidence for a theory. (Especially since there are actual mathematical proofs used within science, such as the proof of the no-cloning theorem in quantum mechanics. But these are proofs based on an assumption that some mathematical theory perfectly describes nature.) However sometimes when speaking with the public it is easier to use the term “proof” when you have extremely strong evidence for something, because the public doesn’t demand pure mathematical deductive certainty.

As I mentioned above, scientists are mostly interested in figuring out empirical, observable truths about nature - truths that adhere to what their experiments or observations say and also help them figure out more such truths in the future (predictive power). No scientist disagrees that there are certain observational facts, or truths, that we know are true because of centuries of empirical research. Scientists also agree that the foundational theories of their field - e.g. quantum mechanics for a physicist - are faithful in describing nature given certain conditions that have already been agreed upon. In that sense, everyone agrees that quantum mechanics is “true”.

But within science, there is no “party line” on “fundamental truth about nature” beyond the observables. Based on my experience, scientists likely hold a variety of positions regarding philosophical issues such as realism or interpretations of quantum mechanics, if they think about this at all. Some of this might subtly influence which theories they are likely to create or pursue. But as long as you agree with everyone else on the observables, it’s OK to hold a wacky view about which interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, for example, as long as you can articulate it coherently. Most likely, people will rarely ask about it except for curiosity’s sake.

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