Exactly. That’s your greatest failure of understanding, and I don’t see any way of getting you to realize it. Neither Ewert’s silly notion nor separate creation can do anything to explain nested hierarchy.
Once again, encapsulated in a single sentence, you entirely fail to understand the difference between the pattern of changes and the causes of changes. Hopeless.
I respectfully disagree as a standard design process will create an approximate nested hierarchy.
I understand the difference. What we disagree on is how relevant the pattern representing the changes represents. Your assertion is valid under methodological naturalism.
What you do not appear to understand is the significance of new models that go beyond sequence comparison.
You may think so, but it just isn’t true. Design produces no such hierarchy. Note especially that this hierarchy in life occurs throughout all sorts of data, including sequences of junk DNA for which there is no possible functional reason. Nor, for that matter, does function come in a nested hierarchy.
Everything you say contradicts that claim.
It’s valid under methodological supernaturalism too. Why do you reject divinely guided evolution?
If “junk DNA” turns out to be functional your claim has a problem.
I don’t reject this as a logical possibility. I also don’t reject that we may find a reproductive mechanism in the future that validates common descent and the exceptions to the nested hierarchy.
What I think is that the best explanation for the “pattern of the data” is very tentative at this point.
Seeing how methodological naturalism is basically a core framework and part of the definition of modern science—as established by Christian philosophers of past centuries, among others—I don’t understand why this is an “If … then” matter for discussion. (Do I need to list some of those well-known pioneers of natural philosophy, which became modern science?)
If one “expands” science to include the non-natural (or supernatural or whatever one wishes to call it), it becomes philosophy or even theology. Why conflate the terms? Nothing about the methodological naturalism of science prevents philosophers and theologians from exploring every and all potential additional and even ultimate explanations they wish to consider!
In the classroom long ago I used to use the analogy of classical geometry (aka Euclidean geometry), which is limited by definition to using only an idealized compass and an idealized straightedge for everything it does. Yes, that is the rule. (No pun intended.) But that does NOT mean that classical geometry is anti-protractor or anti-theodolite or anti-GPS. It simply means that there is great value in working within the “definitional framework” of classical geometry.
I’ve never met a mathematician who thought the confines of classical geometry were somehow too limited or sinister. Likewise, I’m a retired scholar of computational linguistics and Biblical texts with a lot of theology and Christian philosophy study in my background—and I can’t understand why recognizing the methodological naturalism of modern science is considered by some to be problematic. (I’m looking at YOU, Discovery Institute!)
Hi Allen
I agree methodological naturalism (MN) works most of the time to help us understand the natural world. The issue is simply to recognise when it may push us into faulty models.
The design hypothesis usefulness IMO is to help us recognise when MN maybe pushing us into faulty models.
Methodological naturalism is not a limitation. It is the acknowledgement of a limitation. The limitation in question is not a matter of choice, but of fact: There cannot be, even in principle, any means to investigate things that follow no rules whatsoever.
A discipline that attempts to operate within the intellectual constraints we are stuck with is not a limited one because of that. And a practice that attempts to operate ignoring the intellectual constraints we are stuck with is likewise not a more liberated or open discipline for it. It is no discipline at all, really. If anything, a markedly childish lack of discipline is what it is.
Except in instances where it does not – examples of which are ubiquitous among things we know are designed (because humans design them), but are wholly absent from living organisms, the things we have zero reason to think even could be designed.
I probably spend more time than is necessary thinking about “methodological naturalism” and what that term actually means. I recall a discussion a while back where it was suggested that a better term might be “methodological empiricism.” That seems reasonable, but I think an even better one would be “methodological monism”. The reason being the fundamental assumption underlying MN is that everything we encounter is made of the same “stuff” and follows the same laws. i.e. there are no gods or spirits or souls or demons or whatever who are made of stuff other than the fundamental particles and for whom the laws of physics do not apply.
Dualists like Bill and his heroes at the DI work under a different assumption, that such entities do exist and, moreover, interact with the physical world to produce effects we can observe.
A chief shortcoming of this view is it is never explained what laws govern what can happen in this other realm of existence, and how we can determine what those laws are. This is a matter of convenience for them, because they can then just assume anything they want to happen, can happen. However, this also makes their viewpoint useless for any purpose other than religious apologetics. Which is why all legitimate and honest scientists adhere to MN (or whatever we wish to call it) in their professional work, even if they do not personally believe in “naturalism”.
Thanks for the correction.
A standard design process can contain create an approximate nested hierarchy. Software design is a case which often can.
That is the case if, by “approximate nested hierarchy”, you mean “not a nested hierarchy.”
Living organisms create an approximate nested hierarchy.
This is a false assumption. The evidence in the material points to something beyond it that exists.
Just like software does, you think?
Yes as Winston showed software programs that integrate modules does.
So, you believe that conclusion can be reached thru methodological naturalism? For instance, by looking at data like this?
And so it goes…
Personally I wouldn’t commit to saying that, be it for the purposes of scientific inquiry or even just philosophically on my own, everything is made of the same stuff in some sense. For all I know, maybe there are things that are nothing at all like anything we are familiar with. For sure everything doesn’t seem made of fundamental particles alone – spacetime itself comes to mind.
In my interpretation, methodological naturalism is not a statement about nature, so much as it is a statement about the ways in which we can investigate it. It is not a commitment to discard or ignore gods and spirits, but rather a recognition that these things have not been established to follow any sort of patterns any fraction of the time. Magic, as you say, is a land of everything-goes, and that’s just impossible to work with. A game without rules is no game at all, and as much as we may enjoy entertaining such, a scientific inquiry needs to have more form than none at all. That’s not a limitation we choose to put on ourselves, as Bill portrays it as, but just the recognition of a practical circumstance we’d save some precious time remembering.
I think this is a piece of the evidence that could bring you to the conclusion. The fact that new animals can be generated with different sequences as new software can be generated by different sequences is also evidence for intelligence being fundamental to our universe.
What does that even mean?
No. Just because intelligence (what ever that is) may be able to cause things within the universe does not in any way whatsoever indicate that it might be fundamental to it (what ever that means).
Evidence in the material world.
Okay, my bad. Let me correct myself:
