So now support sometimes.
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Eddie could you explain your view on this? Why does the nested hierarchy or tree pattern demarcate how many starting points there are?
Bill:
Actually I was putting more emphasis on the second part of the sentence, not the first. I don’t think that nested hierarchy is automatically evidence against design, and was agreeing with J Harshman about that.
As for whether nested hierarchy is evidence against separate creation, I doubt it is “proof” but I guess I think it’s “evidence”. It hasn’t been a major focus of my thinking, because I’m more focused on teleology vs. antiteleology than common descent vs. special creation.
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But did it ever really happen? You seemed very sure of yourself as you expressed your solidarity with Bill. And I still put it down to tribalism.
Spoken like a true “big tent” IDer. And thus you abandon science to enforce your membership in the tribe.
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Have you discussed this view of yours with your friends at the DI? What was their reaction?
Short of the Second Coming, how would we know if we indeed found the correct answer? As you have pointed out yourself, the ‘big questions’ have been discussed by philosophers and theologians for thousands of years, yet it seems that we are no closer to an answer than in the time of the ancient Greeks.
When it comes to the big questions, answers that are suggested don’t appear to be so much descriptions of what actually happend as stories that individual thinkers feel comfortable with.
If people want to engage in philosophical thinking that is fine by me, but when they pretend that their conclusions have scientific merit we need to push back. From what you write here it seems you would agree that this whole debate is more about philosophy than about science. It would be of great help if all participants would clearly say so. I’m not holding my breath however.
By the way, you have ignored the actual point of my comment, which was that nothing can disprove an unspecified, transcendental designer. Whatever is observed, this designer can always have designed it.
Would you agree with this, or not?
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Oops, “Eddie”. It looks like Bill Cole is too smart for you. He sees right thru your ruse to try and support your fellow tribe member while he is saying things with which you disagree.
I might have to rearrange my ranking for the intellectual pecking order of creationists in this forum.
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Eddie has “clarified”. When he said “I agree with this” he was actually only agreeing with the second part of my statement, “not against design”. He leaves open the possibility that the first part of my statement, “Nested hierarchy is evidence against separate creation”, might be wrong, but he hasn’t thought much about it and doesn’t care if it is. No problem.
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I think for myself, not as an agent of the DI, so I’ve never thought I had to ask their permission or get their approval for anything I say or write. Nor have I thought that as a Christian I ought to seek the approval of a Christian organization like BioLogos for what I say or write. I came into these debates from the world of scholarship, not from the world of advocacy organizations (secular or religious) or churches. I’m not built to be a “true believer” in any cause or theoretical position. I’ve said many times here and on BioLogos and elsewhere that I think both IDers and their opponents make too much of whether or not ID is “science.” And as far as I can remember, no one from the DI has written to me to say “We don’t like what you’re saying on PS and BioLogos, and if you don’t stop we are going to cancel your ID membership card and take away your DI washroom key.”
Obviously whether or not something is “science” depends on definition. If one insists that “science” is what the typical anti-ID scientist means by it, then ID is not and never could be science. On the other hand, if one understood “science” more broadly, as Newton and Boyle understood it, ID could be science. In any case, it’s quite obvious that ID makes extensive use of current scientific data, and so even if it’s classed as philosophical argument, it’s a philosophical argument based on the results of modern science, and therefore tethered at points to the reality of nature, unlike some philosophical arguments which seem to be wholly deductions from principles accepted a priori.
The same applies to claims by some scientists that a complete materialistic explanation of everything has been or will one day be found. I’m not sure we will ever be in a position to know if life began by an accidental sloshing around of chemicals, without design. And I’m not sure we will ever be in a position to know what preceded (and caused) the Big Bang. When it comes to questions of ultimate origins, what are called “scientific” explanations are often more like “research programs built on the confidence that a materialistic answer will eventually be found, or can in principle be found.”
My point is not that we can “know” with “Cartesian certainty” that design is real. My point is (1) it might be true that the basic order of the universe is designed, and (2) the procedure insisted on by most (actually all, as far as I can tell) of the atheists on this forum means that even if it were true, we would never be able to conclude it – because of a set of methodological “rules of the game.” The goal is always to maintain methodological purity, even at the cost of (possibly) missing the truth. And this leads to the meta-question I’ve spoken of, a meta-question which cannot be settled by the methods of science.
Paul Nelson is good at explaining what’s at stake in the meta-question. The only place I differ is in emphasis. Paul writes as if he wants to change the rules of science to accommodate design inferences, whereas I’m willing to tolerate narrower rules of science as long as scientists don’t claim with a swagger that science, by its own admission self-constricted in aims and methods, is certain to get us to the truth of what actually happened in the past.
In the culture-war context, what has happened is something that never happened in the age of Newton, Kepler, and Boyle: many scientists (and their non-scientist groupies) are claiming that Science (reified into an entity, as if it were some cosmic oracle of Truth) has shown that belief in God is impossible, that only uneducated people (or insane people, or liars) can maintain belief in God in the face of Science. I think it’s important to reject this claim of some scientists and many science propagandists. And even if no one here is so bold as to make such a claim in its absolute form, it seems hard to doubt that the attitude that leads some people to this claim is pervasive here.
I’d tentatively agree with this, but again I would note that nothing can disprove the claim that everything that happens in the world can now be, or one day will be, explicable solely by material-mechanical causes, and I don’t think most of the frequent posters here would acknowledge that this fact disqualifies the claim from contention.
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Nobody takes that view. I think that what you’re mixing up here is that while it is clear that we NOW have no evidence of any type which points to design in the universe or in living things, there is nothing about methodological naturalism that excludes it. When something which is not relevant or in any way helpful is raised as evidence of design, the fact that it’s not relevant gets pointed out. That’s not because of some a priori prejudice against design; it’s because evidence that isn’t relevant doesn’t help.
Now, you can contend that the nature of Satan, or whichever of those postulated divine personalities you’re relying on, is that he is ineffable and inscrutable and triple-secret-probation invisible, and therefore his Mighty Works will always be indistinguishable from the works of nature. If that’s the contention, then it’s not methodological naturalism, but the philosophical peculiarities of the Satan-worshippers, that are buggering the whole thing up. But you can hardly expect people who are doing empirical inquiry to accept, without evidence, the proposition that something exists for which they can never have any evidence, and that they therefore should modify their methods to admit irrelevant evidence as though it were relevant, on the supposition that such things as fine-tuning, though unhelpful and irrelevant, must be the best we will ever get, and therefore extravagant and fanciful leaps into the genre of fantasy (you expressed disapproval for fantasy a while ago, which seemed odd as it is the genre of gods and monsters) are suddenly to be deemed permissible.
I have a hard time thinking that there is anyone here who would characterize that claim as scientific. Nor, I suspect, is anyone quite so optimistic.
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Especially since one of the great joys of doing real science is that answering one question leads to many more questions. The idea that any scientist would ever say that
Is just laughable, but hey, Eddie desperately needs to divert attention from his inability to defend what his hero Denton actually says.
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I didn’t say that anyone called it a scientific claim. My point was that it’s not falsifiable, any more than claims about unspecified designers. And yet it seems to be the tacit working conception underlying all discussions of origins here.
I don’t know of any scientist who actually believes that.
This is nonsense. That’s not how science works.
Then so much the worse for the “world of scholarship”.
Yes, that’s possible. But then evolution might be part of that designed basic order of the universe. So that possibility doesn’t actually get us anywhere.
There you go again with that naive view of truth.
Neither @Paul_Nelson1 nor you understand why ID isn’t science. I am doubting any ability at a meta-question about science.
There isn’t any rule of science that rules out design inferences. What is actually ruled out, is jumping to conclusions without sufficient supporting evidence.
May I again remind you that science is a pragmatic enterprise. It is not a search for truth.
I’m not aware of any scientist who makes such a claim.
I’ll repeat that I do not know of any scientist who makes such a claim.
Yes, some scientists talk of a “theory of everything”, but it doesn’t follow that they actually believe there will ever be such a theory.
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I don’t see that at all. In fact, I don’t know why that would even be a useful “working conception.” Ordinarily problem-solving is directed at particular problems, not at the notion of whether the unimaginably large set of all problems might all be solvable.
The issue, it seems to me, is that when the point is raised that there’s no blasted evidence for design, people insist on saying that this is a limit of methodological naturalism. It of course is not a limit of methodological naturalism; MN allows any ascertainable cause. It’s a limit of the evidence. When there is no evidence demonstrating that any of the features of the world are designed, and no candidate designer that could be responsible for such features, then this is not a methodological problem. It’s an evidentiary problem.
Now, it is true, of course, that various kinds of theology propose the existence of gods whose nature and existence is undetectable. But if they are indeed undetectable, we just wind up where Wittgenstein does: of some things one cannot speak, and of such things one can only remain silent. This isn’t a limitation of methodological naturalism; it’s a limitation of the kind and character of evidence available to us. If we cannot have evidence of a thing, we cannot know it, in any meaningful sense, at all. And science is about ascertaining, not about “knowing,” anyhow: it is about substantiating claims, not merely making them, and not merely asserting our confidence about claims we make in the absence of evidence.
Is it possible there are things that are true and that are not knowable by us? Sure. I’d bet that most people think that there are plenty of such things. What are the political systems of intelligent creatures living in a distant galaxy? Any number of true statements might be made about such things, but we have no way to check whether they are true or not. We are not restricted from knowing what forms of conservatism exist on Zargon-3 by methodological naturalism; we are restricted by the fact that we just haven’t got the evidence. The same is true for the propositions of ID.
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That is a lot of words to avoid answering a straightforward question. Did you, or did you not, discuss the view you expressed here (that design inferences are more like philosophical than scientific conclusions) with people from the DI? And if you did, what was their reaction? I’d be curious to know.
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Your reply completely avoids addressing the questions.
You routinely brag about being an insider in frequent DI discussion, so those are perfectly reasonable questions.
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It does seem past the useful stage of the conversation. We’ll close it now.
Apparently you do not understand the meaning of words like required and exception. Or maybe you just didn’t read what I wrote.
Now who is making an ad populum? Also, needless tagging people is Spamming. As it happens I don’t think the assessment of the greater science community should be ignored. Pole that.
Some of us have better things to do.
why computer families like apple generate a nested hierarchy. This was before Winstons paper where he showed how Java script programs generate a nested hierarchy.
Cherry picking.
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