Perhaps people here are less critical of Townes than of Denton because Townes is not perceived as advocating pseudoscience.
1 Like
That is a different situation from the one discussed here, where people try to make the case that there is design full stop without further elaboration.
The signs on Mars themselves rather than our conclusion of ‘design’ would tell us things about that civilisation. Again, this is different from the attempts to conclude design from features that tell us precisely nothing about who or what did the designing. By the way I understand that ID’ers generally agree with this: detecting design is a separate issue from the question who or what is the designer.
As an aside, I am already certain that we are not the only intelligent beings to have existed in our universe. Just looking at my dog tells me this.
Once again you smuggle in assumptions unwarranted by a naked conclusion of design. Why does it have to be a ‘being’? Why does it need to be ‘intelligent’? Could it not be a colony of mindless creatures, in the way quite unintelligent termites manage to build quite complex nests? Could the universe(s) not be an unintended by-product of some other instinct-driven activity? Heck, most animals and even some people would fit that description!
There are countless possibilities one you start thinking about it. No, a bare conclusion of design doesn’t tell us anything. Whatever you think it does will just be you reading things into it without evidential warrant.
This won’t stop people claiming that it does tell us things, of course. I wager that just about every religion in the world would claim to be vindicated by the design conclusion, never mind that it says nothing at all about who or what did the designing. The thought makes me shiver.
1 Like
Yes, I am speaking of all possible hypothetical situations in which we might discover evidence of “design”. Not the claims that are currently being made by creationists like “Eddie” and the ID gang.
I am here considering dogs to be one of “us”, ie. earthlings with intelligence. 
We don’t need people to “speak for science.” We have the evidence that speaks for itself; that’s why you can’t cite any from several books by Denton. That’s why Faizal wrote:
See, no people need to be cited, because he wasn’t speaking for science at all.
These failed attempts to draw parallels between real science and IDcreationist pseudoscience only serve to show how stagnant and vapid it is.
Or just offer evidence…
3 Likes
A very fine statement. If Faizal Ali always wrote in this spirit, I think we would agree on much more.
Yes, indeed.
I think that’s true, which is why I introduced Townes as a new subject. Many people are not capable of separating the argument from the man, due to their political/professional/emotional commitments or hangups. So if they will listen with an open mind when Townes says essentially the same thing as Denton, i.e., that the universe evolved through natural processes but is also designed, it makes more sense to refer to Townes than to Denton.
Our minds are wide open to the evidence, but you never cite any. Just vapid name-dropping…
1 Like
For my part, that he advocates that position is not why I think Denton deserves to be treated with scorn and derision. I personally think it’s a dumb argument, but it is certainly within the rules to try make it.
My objection is to Denton making the fallacious claim that the theory of evolution, as currently understood by the consensus of biologists, is not able to account for all features found in biology, and to his continuing to make this claim without acknowledging the scientific errors on which his claim is based after these have been pointed out to him. This makes him, not merely someone who is making a bad theological argument, but a pseudoscientific fraud.
1 Like
It is difficult to separate Denton from Discovery Institute when it was his book that influenced so many people at Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement when he is a senior advisor there. It is much easier to separate Townes who is not affiliated with the ID movement.
News flash: Denton is far from the only person who says that the current “consensus of biologists” around evolution “is not able to account for all features found in biology.” Many people from the Altenberg group, and the people from the Third Way group, and others, have also pointed out inadequacies of current theory. And these people, almost without exception, are agnostics or atheists who have no use for either creationism or ID. Their criticism of some of the claims of current evolutionary are the product of their own researches in evolutionary biology (and in related fields of science).
You are welcome to demonstrate that all of the objections of all of these people are “fallacious”, if you can. I look forward to your technical debates with Shapiro, Newman, Wagner, Jablonka, etc. Please let us know what scientific journals you publish your refutations in, so we can all read them.
In the meantime, since our topic here is not the adequacy or inadequacy of current evolutionary theory, but the thought of Townes on fine-tuning, maybe we should get back to that.
Let’s fix that: …have also pointed out alleged inadequacies of current theory. And each of them has his or her own, personal fix for that, most of which are mutually contradictory. Is there no end to your argument by name-dropping and credentialism?
1 Like
Did I say he was?
Cranks.
Funny you should mention that…
Fine, alleged inadequacies. But the allegations are coming from people who, in many cases, are acknowledged to be highly competent in the field, so the allegations can’t be just dismissed, but have to be addressed. (It should go without saying that I’m talking about inadequacies in the accounts of how evolution happened, not whether evolution happened.)
Sounds like the situation just after Darwin, when there were numerous criticisms of Darwin, coming not from religious quarters but from the scientists of the day most competent to judge, and numerous different proposals for better ways of accounting for evolution, many of which contradicted each other. Yet evolutionary theory carried on. I don’t see the problem with such disagreement, then or now. It’s what makes science or any intellectual field exciting. Others, however, find disagreement a problem, and would prefer that a “consensus” be preached and enforced, a sort of evolutionary orthodoxy, the denial of which, or even questioning of which, expels one from the Church of Biological Science as a heretic.
But anyhow, I shouldn’t have allowed Faizal the opening which enabled him to take the conversation back to his standard gripes about Denton, when the topic here is Townes. What do you have to say about Townes? Anything?
Of these two options:
- We exist, and our universe and our planet appear fine tuned for supporting us.
- We exist even though our universe and our planet do not appear fine tuned for supporting us.
… which most indicates intelligent design of (i) the universe, (ii) our planet, (iii) us?
We can’t conclude anything from ‘finetuning’ because it is a tautology.
Consider this: how could life be possible in a universe that can’t sustain it?
1 Like
There’s nothing to say until you present some kind of argument from data rather than just an appeal to authority.
2 Likes
Neither. And that’s the problem for ID.
They need to get beyond appearances, and they have not done that.
1 Like
“The field” seems deliberately sloppy to me. Which specific field? It appears that you’ve abandoned your obsession with field demarcation to support your political position here.
2 Likes
Here is a list of the people associated with the “Third Way.”
I made no appeal to authority. I did not say that Townes was right because he won a Nobel Prize. The point is that Townes would not have won a Nobel Prize unless he were a competent scientist who understood the methods of science and how scientists draw conclusions. Previously we had been discussing Denton, and it was clear that everyone here regarded Denton as a crappy scientist (even though, it seems, not a single person here has read any of his published work on retinal cancer), and as a biased servant of the Discovery Institute. So I pointed out that someone whom no one here (presumably) would regard as a crappy scientist, and who was clearly not a servant of the Discovery Institute, had come to similar conclusions as Denton. I was not trying to make the case for Townes’s position, but merely to remove the personal prejudice element, by switching authors.
If I had claimed that Townes must be right because he’s a Nobel Prize winner, that would be an argument from authority. But I never claimed that. I was merely pointing that it is possible to be a world-class scientist and hold a view like Denton’s, and that some of the people here, who seem unaware that scientists of undoubted accomplishment hold a view like Denton’s, need to read a bit more broadly and be a bit slower to conclude that anyone who holds such a view must be a scientific incompetent.
As for the substance of Townes’s position, it was my intention that people should discuss it here, with me as primarily an observer of the discussion. If you want to discuss it, criticize it, refute it, whatever – you are free to do so. Nobody’s stopping you.
Technology.
Humans can’t live on the moon without technology, but can live there (temporarily at least) by using it.
Science fiction has lots of examples of humans colonies planets that clearly were not fine-tuned for us and do not contain any evolutionary history leading to us.
Such situations provide far more evidence for intelligent design than our own.