Why are We Disagreeing with ID?

The real issue is not the probability of a particular outcome (a full house) but the probability of a functional outcome (for various definitions of ‘function’). In card games, functional outcomes are hands that will beat the opponents’ hands. This immediately raises the probabilities for most hands you care to specify, and more importantly, it introduces the environment (the opponents) into the equation. Without taking this environment into account, i.e. without knowing the functionality of a ‘win’, you simply can’t calculate the probability of a winning hand. The analogy also fails in another respect: by calculating the odds of a full house you are talking about the probability of a single draw, whereas evolution works with cumulative mutations and selection (the Weasel program nicely illustrates the difference).

So yes, of course you can calculate the probability of drawing a full house even after you have already drawn your hand, but this really has very little to do with biological evolution. To meaningfully discuss such probabilities you have to define the functionality that gives the population an edge, and take into account the starting point, the time available and, most importantly, the environment in which all this plays out. An environment that often changes along with the evolving population, if not in direct response to it, and so hugely complicating the issues.

I don’t think there are any easy analytical solutions to this intricate problem, rather, to get anywhere near a solution one would have to go down the simulation route. Most of us will have seen some of the remarkable simulations of evolutionary change that are out there. Try calculating the probabilities of those outcomes without taking into account the factors I’ve mentioned.

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That still seems an obvious untruth. ID has offered nothing as clear as the Rosetta Stone, and if ID chooses to reject naturalistic explanations for what they do have, then that is hardly the fault of anyone else.

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I do not think that MN excludes design a priori. Quite the opposite. Because MN demands agency or causality, and mechanism, MN demands design in the case of artifacts, including as the Rosetta Stone. Laptops on Mars would demand an explanation, including the prospect we are not alone. Objects which are ambiguous as to whether they are artifacts or just closely appear as such demand hypothesis based on evidence which indicate manufacture or other natural process. My disagreement with ID is, that despite the centrality of design to their whole enterprise, they grant themselves a pass to the demand of agency and mechanism which are essential to design.

The exclusion of agency and mechanism turns the idea into an amorphous blob. Presuming God and not aliens or time travelers did it, did creation proceed six thousand years ago or over cosmological time? ID can accommodate either. Was there common descent or did full grown creatures just instantly materialize into an empty field? ID is good with that. Is there an bureau of quantum biotech angels, whose task it is to manipulate the gametes of designated fish or proto whales so to overcome adverse odds and nudge evolution in the desired direction? ID is for you. Or is the whole sweep of history a perspective of us temporal beings, and eternal God held all of nature’s destiny in his palm at the moment of the big bang? That too is compatible with ID. Bereft of agency and mechanism, ID means near anything, and therefore nothing. What ID is left with is, ironically, just a strained critique of the agency and mechanisms of evolutionary processes.

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Quite so, and moreover one other critical point ID never mentions is the probabilty of the designer being present, willing and able to create the putative design. How can one claim that evolution is improbable without comparing it to the probability of a designer instantiating the observed phenomena?

So go on, ID’ers, calculate the probabilty of a designer designing the flagellum for a change!

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I have not found a single paper that includes design as a possible alternative explanation vs universal common descent. I have also seen evolutionary biologists documented comment that we cannot let a divine foot in the door. This is strong evidence that methodological naturalism is preventing design from being a viable alternative explanation in biology.

And you should not. Highly successful theories do not get displaced by ad hoc speculations. Let us also note that naturalistic design is an option that is not at all blocked by methodological naturalism.

( edit - Although thinking about it, I believe there were investigations of that nature regarding the coronavirus. But then that was not ad hoc).

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That’s a nonsense statement. It’s like saying “If MN was used to exclude the color white a priori we would have to reject the hypothesis that most swans are white.”

That MN does not exclude design a priori is demonstrated by the fact that, hey, we accept that the Rosetta Stone was designed.

I know I have posted this here before, but this is the video on which I base my understanding of Meyer’s position. He speaks for four and half minutes and I don’t think he says a single thing that is not ridiculously wrong. If anything, his first remarks about past mutations not meeting the criteria of observable phenomena is even more off base than what he says about design. Does this sound like someone who studied philosophy of science at one of the world’s most presitigious universities?

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I should have spoken clearer, design is implied when the number of unselected steps results in a probability of say, 1 in 10^40 (using Behe’s edge of evolution) or 1 in 10^150 (using Dembski’s universal probability bound).

Yes, but it’s not pointless to compute the probability of a path in some instances, such as evolution. If the path is improbable, then the result is improbable.

This is a matter of some dispute, I believe that my thoughts are not the result of blind natural processes. Otherwise, I have no reason to trust my thoughts! So each human mind is like a point of the supernatural in the world.

Well, this is getting way off-topic, but there are eureka moments too, when a person realizes a solution to a problem quickly.

So by “design” I mean something outside of the deterministic processes of nature.

I don’t recall him referring to it as deleterious, I had thought it could be neutral.

Highly successful theories have an viable alternative hypothesis to test against.

Oh, but I think Behe’s analysis of chloroquine resistance is scientific, as is his definition of irreducible complexity as the number of unselected steps, the latter of which can give a good definition of design. And “intelligent” seems to just be another way of saying “design”, or so it seems to me.

Again you are confusing the probability of an event viewed before the fact with the probability of that event viewed after the fact.

Yes it is. Because it makes exactly the mistake pointed out above. The probability of the path really doesn’t matter. Only the probability of the outcome.

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It seems to me you have no choice, and I’m not sure what you’d be doing if you truly didn’t trust your thoughts. Stop thinking? Stop caring about making logical sense?

But putting that aside, positing supernaturalism doesn’t solve this question. You have no more reason to trust your thoughts there, and you still have to just posit some question-begging assumption to make your mind trustworthy.

Third, you have to implicitly posit that your thoughts are trustworthy in order to reason about what possible justification you might or might not have for thinking they are. So before you even get to the place where you just make up some story for why your thoughts would be trustworthy on supernaturalism, you’ve already implicitly been assuming they’re trustworthy.

And it’s not at all clear that those occur above the frequency expected by chance. Some times you really can make a lucky guess that is just that, a lucky guess. You didn’t know it, guessed, and are suprised to be right. Nor is it clear that the remainder of them aren’t due to considerable periods of reasoning and toying with a problem. You don’t suddenly wake up one day and just magically know some obscure and difficult to understand technical detail about a topic you’ve never heard and know nothing about. Random people with no math skills don’t suddenly wake up one day and win Fields medals. It’s mathematicians, and they’ve already been working on those problems, or something closely related for a long time.

That seems to make the whole thing fundamentally untestable. That is to say, you appear to be saying implicitly that you have a problem with science itself. It’s not the bias of atheist scientists or anything of the sort. It’s that mechanisms should be testable, predict patterns, and operate with detectable/observable forces you have a problem with. You want the rules to be changed to make a space for ad-hoc magical thinking.

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If that’s what you’re interested in, yes, but you can also be interested in the probability of the development of particular structures by evolution. People do calculate the probability of drawing a full house, and it’s relevant to the broader questions you raise.

But the discovery of laptops on Mars would not require a description of agency and mechanism to conclude design. These are further questions of interest, but not requirements.

Because the events appear to be independent, so the probability of evolution doing something is something we can calculate independently. And if these two options (evolution and a designer) are independent and sum up all the available options, then the probability of a designer producing the flagellum is 1 - “the probability that evolution produced it.”

That’s because those are not alternatives. One could have both, and one could have neither. The proper alternative to design is absence of design. The proper alternative to common descent is separate descent. I’m not sure how you would test the former dichotomy, but the latter has been tested, and you have been directed to multiple such publications.

No, it’s strong evidence that word salad is your favorite mode of argumentation.

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But that’s not MN as it’s generally understood, materialistic explanations do not cover all types of explanations, is the point.

Well, we cannot observe past mutations as they are happening, I think is his view. Observable phenomena do not cover all the items of scientific interest.

Could you demonstrate how that would work in practice? For instance, use those criteria to demonstrate that Mt. Rushmore was designed, and not a natural rock formation.

That doesn’t follow. Flesh out your argument here.

Is nature “deterministic”? For instance, does quantum mechanics entail that if we knew the exact position and velocity of every particle in the universe, we can know their position and velocity at every moment in the past and into the future? (Careful! It’s a trick question!)

Arguably, in the sense that he says a bunch of stuff and tries to support it with empirical evidence and data. By those standards, flat earth theory is also scientific. And Behe’s claims are just as well supported, and based on no better an understanding of the data, as are the claims of the flat earthers. We can discuss why further, if you wish.

We would conclude “design” because we know with near certainty that laptops are only produced by intelligent designers, and that no natural process produces them. It has nothing to do with any of the measures that ID proponents suggest. But, again, if you disagree, please use one of those measures and show how it applies to a laptop on Mars.

What is an example of an explanation that is known to be non-material for something that occurs in the material world?

Which is just a ridiculous misunderstanding of the scientific method. If I leave a glass of water on a table, walk out of the room and on my return find a pile of broken glass on the floor in a pool of water, I know that the glass fell to the floor and shattered. I don’t have to have observed the fall, and yet my conclusion is based on what has been observed.

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Testing common descent against a random pattern is not a real test. Asserting a tree is only explained by common descent is not a real test. Winston showed this.

There is a reason that public does not buy into primate common descent by purely natural means.
https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_19-02-11_darwinday420px/

I believe that my thoughts are the result of my thinking. And I take my thinking to be a natural process, though surely not a blind one.

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