Is PS Against Using Scientific Arguments as Evidence for God's Existence?

@eddie,

And yet overly zealous faith has ruined their ability to use these demarcation tools and skills… pity.

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Almost no discussion here can be summarized, Jordan, because almost no discussion stays on topic. The subject here was supposed to be the question asked in the title line: “Is PS Against Using Science Arguments as Evidence for God’s Existence?” But as you can see from the recent replies from Mercer and Brooks, some are eager to change the topic to whether or not Behe has done any research lately, whether or not the Wedge Document represents DI’s policy for the schools, etc. Yet none of that addresses the question at hand. Certain people here keep returning to talking about ID and the DI, no matter what the topic. It’s almost to the point where I could write, “The sky is blue,” and someone would reply, “Oh, yeah? Well, ID is just garbage!”

In my answers to you and to Neil and to Daniel, I tried to address the subject of how knowledge of God and knowledge of science are related, and I dealt with ID only because some people here were suggesting that ID wrongly conflated science and theology, unlike the virtuous people at BioLogos who carefully separate them. I explained why ID folks adopted the strategy they did – but only because of the charges being made against ID. I wouldn’t have mentioned ID otherwise. But it keeps getting dragged into these discussions.

And that might not be bad where there is some relevance of ID to the subject. For example, there is a connection through the notion that ID is or aspires to be scientific. But once we are arguing about the Wedge document, or the DI’s policy on science in the high schools, we are now arguing about other questions. I would request that Mercer and George restrain themselves from off-topic culture-war shots at ID and Discovery, and stick to the theological subject-matter established by the title. If they want to talk about whether Behe still counts as an active scientist, or the Wedge document, or DI’s schools policy, let them start their own discussions on those topics! They know how to use the software to do that. This habit of cluttering every thread with standard complaints about ID and the DI turns every discussion murky and incoherent.

I actually find the question in the title line somewhat ambiguous. Does it mean, does the management of PS oppose using science arguments…?" In that case, it would be more accurately put as “Does Joshua oppose…?” since he is the site owner and the opening statements on the site state his views. Or does it mean, “Do the majority of people posting at PS oppose…?” In that case, we would need to formally survey the posters. And will the count be weighted, i.e., will those who post more often get more votes than those who post only once every three months? The question itself is flawed, because the referent of “PS” is not clarified.

This is false, but it should be discussed elsewhere. Start a thread on demarcation criteria and ID proponents’ academic training, if you like. I will respond there.

Your statement that my statement about Discovery is erroneous, is itself erroneous. However, this belongs somewhere else. Start a thread on DI science education policy, if you like.

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To everything (spin, spin, spin)
There is a season (spin, spin, spin)
And a time to every purpose, under DI.

– with apologies to The Byrds

I made no such implication, Eddie. I appreciate your taking the time to respond but I’ll leave it to others to decide on whether they find it convincing or spin.

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This is a potentially fruitful suggestion, Jordan. If one could articulate the difference between the two things you compare, one might be able to make some progress in understanding the nature of ID argumentation for design.

I have often heard people (e.g., Stephen Barr) say that ID makes argument for design, and that they are reasonable arguments, but not scientific arguments. This implies that there is a difference between “rational argument for design based upon consideration of the facts established by the most recent scientific study of life” and “scientific argument for design.” It would be interesting to hear what a “scientific argument for design” would have to look like (according to those who doubt that the thing could exist), and what a “scientific argument” generally looks like.

Galileo apparently did not consider the suggestion of forces acting at a distance to be a scientific hypothesis, but mystical, pseudoscientific claptrap, but I doubt anyone today would say that arguments concluding the existence of forces acting at a distance are scientifically invalid arguments.

I wonder if the arguments for the multiverse and for string theory (neither of which, if I understand the situation correctly, can currently be empirically tested) would count as “scientific” under any rule that excluded design inferences from being “scientific.”

I’d be interested your further thoughts on this, Jordan.

Stereotypes exist for all groups. I’m not sure what the solution is for this problem, but it certainly isn’t limited to scientists. I would suspect that there are people who paint all Christians with the Westboro Baptist brush.

There are also people who seek out the most strident voices out of a group in order to feel persecuted. This is why some Christians may seek out the Dawkins stereotype instead of other voices like Dr. Collins or @swamidass.

Accident implies intent. I think you need to find a different description.

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Not according to any common use of the word in general English. This is a rather startling claim. Would care to justify it? Or do you just expect that everyone will agree with it?

I can’t speak about an indefinite “some Christians,” but before I started voicing opinions on origins on the internet I made a point of reading the books of “other voices” such as the books of Collins and Miller.

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Sure it does. If you have a car accident it implies you intended not to hit someone. If mutations are accidents, it implies that those mutations weren’t supposed to happen, but somehow did anyway.

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You are supplying a context that is not always there when the term “accident” is used. The term is not used exclusively when discussing human beings or other voluntary agents. We can speak of the accidental collision of two asteroids, and we aren’t implying that either asteroid intended not to hit the other. Your statement incorrectly generalizes.

And even for your example, your phrasing is confusing and misleading. You said “accident implies intent” when you could have said “accident implies lack of intent”, and thus made your meaning clearer and more precise.

“Supposed to happen” is vague. To be more precise, it implies that those mutations were not produced by design. I.e., no organism was thinking, “This mutation would be really useful if I want my great, great … grandchildren to have wings and be able to fly, so I will generate it.” And that is exactly how the vast majority of evolutionary theorists have represented mutations – as things that happen to an organism’s genetic material, without the organism’s foresight, planning, or consent.

In science, “accident” isn’t a very good term. We don’t say that light accidently produces an interference pattern in the double slit experiment. Instead, that pattern is due to the random distribution of photons within areas defined by the wavefunction.

Random is a much better term since it defines the observed pattern as a product of natural laws, which is exactly the case for mutations. “Accident” introduces a lot of metaphysics that simply isn’t present in the actual science. I doubt you would describe Brownian motion as the accidental collision of particles.

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As far as I have seen the term used, “random” doesn’t bear any necessary connection with the notion of “natural laws.” It describes a mathematical pattern of outcomes, without necessarily making any statement about causality. A “random” pattern might be generated by the operation of a combination of natural laws, but it isn’t natural law as such that characterizes randomness. If you are dealt a royal flush, it isn’t any “natural law” of playing cards that produced that result; no law compelled the dealer to shuffle the cards in exactly the way he did.

Agreed, but that is not parallel to the examples I have been talking about. Natural regularities and chance occurrences are not the same thing. The double slit experiment, when performed in exactly the same way (size of slit, etc.) always produces the interference pattern, does it not? The result is therefore the product of law rather than chance. But you don’t always bump into a friend you haven’t seen in 20 years at your local grocery store at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday evening. That’s said to be the result of chance rather than law.

The typical presentation of origin of life accounts, certainly at the popular level, has been couched in terms of chance rather than law. If you want to say that “introduces a lot of metaphysics,” then fine, but that is how many of your colleagues in fact think about the origin of life – as a contingent event that need not have happened, and could just as easily not have happened. Indeed, I have frequently seen the argument that all life on earth almost certainly goes back to one progenitor (if you take it back as far as possible), because it would be unlikely for life to have originated twice on earth by chance. Such an argument implies that the origin of life was accidental, in the everyday and quite clear sense of the word.

Further, if you object to the “metaphysics” implied in “accidental”, you need to consider the metaphysics implied in the notion of “natural laws” – a notion you use above freely and without critical caveats. This is one of the big problems here when scientists here keep saying that we must separate ideas like design, which are metaphysical, from science proper. You can’t do even “science proper” without recourse to metaphysical conceptions. It’s just a question of what metaphysical conceptions one is willing to employ uncritically, vs. what metaphysical conceptions one protests about.

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That’s how it is used in science.

Sure it is. The chances of being dealt a royal flush are described by a random model that follows natural laws.

Chance defines natural laws. Where a photon lands on the photographic film in the double slit experiment is random within the probability defined by the wavefunction. The laws of thermodynamics are defined by random interactions of particles and energy.

I don’t think you understand how chance, randomness, and natural law are tied into one another.

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That’s one interpretation of the existence of natural laws. Philosophers of science and scientists do not all have the same interpretation.

Even if that is true, it does not follow that all natural laws are so defined. You are massively over-generalizing, and using examples outside of your field of scientific expertise, to boot.

You’re not responding to what I said. I said that the particular outcome of the royal flush was not dictated by natural laws. I was not talking about “the chances of being dealt a royal flush.” There is no law of nature that says that if Jesse James shuffles the cards at 7 p.m. at the O.K. Corral, he must deal someone a royal flush. The parallel regarding the origin of life would be that a particular outcome (life) is not dictated by natural laws; only the possibility of that outcome is. The fact that a probability for that outcome can be calculated by the use a model doesn’t affect my point one way or the other. You seem almost determined to misunderstand simple points by tossing in all kinds of scientific jargon that aren’t necessary.

I don’t think you know how to make proper intellectual distinctions. You are badly blurring concepts, and your definitions are careless. You started out with a sloppy statement, “Accident implies intent”, which is not universally true, even in the sense you meant it (which was not clear). You have continued with sloppy responses (confusing what a probability distribution allows with what it guarantees), and large generalizations about the cause of natural laws which you lay down arbitrarily without any reference to hundreds of years of discussion among scientists and philosophers about why there are natural laws and what the term “natural laws” means.

That’s why I have stressed the idea that randomness in science is a statistical model. When the observations are statistically consistent with what we would expect from a random process then it is tentatively considered to be random. Scientists don’t make any other claim about gods or supernatural deities producing patterns that just look random, but aren’t.

Of course I am generalizing. You don’t expect me to go through every single theory, do you?

I understand physics enough to know the basics. I even took Quantitative Chemistry as an undergrad, so I at least have the beginnings of an education on the subject. All of biology comes down to chemistry, and all of chemistry comes down to quantum mechanics. It does boil down to natural laws that are defined by stochastic processes.

Where does this chart come from? How was it calculated?

image

I’m not seeing anything that contradicts what I have described.

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I’m fully aware of this, and I’m surprised you would think that I wouldn’t be.

I have nothing against scientists concluding that something is random, in the technical sense that you set forth. But your wording skirts the metaphysical issue. “What we would expect from a random process” – do you mean by “random process” there nothing more than a “natural process”? And if so, what do you mean by “natural”? You can’t define random by natural, and then turn around and define natural by random, or you’d be offering a definitional circle which settles nothing.

I am aware of this, and don’t contest it. I don’t see your point. When Meyer etc. talk about the origin of life, they aren’t talking about “patterns that look random, but aren’t.” In their view, the patterns in living things don’t look random. That is where they differ with you.

I also took Chemistry and Physics courses as an undergrad, as well as courses in Probability Theory at both first and second year level. And I’ve been reading history and philosophy of science for about 50 years now. So I’m not completely without understanding of general science and the use of terms like “random.”

Again, these are huge claims that not all philosophers of science and not all scientists would assent to. You are imposing your conceptions as the voice of “science.” I would rather you spoke as one particular scientist, who has drawn particular grand conclusions, and not as the authorized representative of science itself.

Irrelevant. I said that no particular outcome is generated by any natural law. Nor is any particular outcome generated by any mathematical model, such as someone would use to generate the table. Probability distributions don’t cause particular events. They are mathematical abstractions, not causes of anything. The cause of a particular poker hand lies in the physical particulars of the card deal. Similarly, the cause of the origin of life is not a probability distribution, but a particular sequence of contingent events which the probability distribution can assign a number to, but does not create.

What exactly do you mean by “natural laws” and how are they defined by “stochastic” processes.

Can you apply this to a delayed choice experiment and show me how it “boils down” to natural laws and stochastic processes?

@terrellclemmons

I think you aren’t understanding the novel stance I have in all this:

Though I am from a “liberal” denomination (Unitarian Universalists), I am okay with God performing special creation for Adam and Eve … in exchange for accepting the mountain of Evolutionary evidence for the origins of a large “Pre-Adam” population of humanity …

I am an “i.d. supporter (no caps)”… because I accept that God executed creation by means of Evolutionary processes, sometimes referred to as God-Guided Evolution (or EGG - “Evolution, God-Guided”).

“I.D.” < historically linked to the idea that “Intelligent Design” can somehow be introduced to public schools, is flawed because perfectly competent scientists don’t seem to understand that there is no experimental procedure that can successfully isolate God’s design as a “variable” to be tested.

(This paragraph is my gift to you this week, Joshua! @swamidass)
This is explosively ignored in Behe’s new book!: he points out how brilliant evolution is when it is guided, and how flawed and degenerated evolution is when God does not guide it … but he has absolutely no way to test (or explain) how God’s Billiard Ball Shot of Design can bring important evolutionary steps into existence … while leaving other steps in evolution ignored and unguided.

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Well, of course I wasn’t aware of what your novel stance is, apart from your title of UU. Now I do. Thank you.

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Randomness is defined independently of natural laws. That breaks the circle.

“Looks random” is not scientific. They need a statistical model if what they are doing is scientific.

I’m not seeing anything that contradicts my claims.

When you are ready to address my post, let me know.

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I agree!! That is why I was puzzled by your remarks that seemed to tie up the definition of randomness with the idea of natural laws, e.g.:

I probed into this connection you were making, because your exposition was not clear.

You are the one who first used the phrase “looks random”:

I incorporated your phrase into my answer, because your statement implied a misunderstanding of how ID people think about appearances.

I’m not contradicting them so much as saying they are arbitrary. You don’t provide a broad range of passages from leading philosophers of science, or leading scientists who write philosophically about the nature of natural laws. You simply assert your own understanding as the understanding of science.

I did address it. I showed exactly why your table was irrelevant to the point were were discussing. Probability distributions aren’t a cause of anything. It isn’t a “probability distribution” that caused the particular person on that particular night to get the royal flush, and it wasn’t a “probability distribution” that determined that life would first emerge on earth on a particular day at a particular spot in the primeval ocean. Natural events have physical causes. A mathematical analysis isn’t a physical cause.