(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

A great Usenet posting on Intelligent Design, by bearded net.god Kent Paul Dolan:

...All the "evidence" you claim to have has no bearing on supporting "intelligent design", and the evidence against it is all too overwhelming.

No I.D. proponent can give any satisfactory I.D. "explanation" for the _vestigal_ components of living creatures, like the human appendix, like mammal males' nipples, like the legbones of whales, all of which would condemn an "Intelligent Designer" as an "Unintelligent OmniBumbler", but which make perfect sense seen from the vantage point of evolution, where they are the remnant "errors" of the "trial and error" approach Darwin documents.

Nor can they explain why the human eye, for example, has its blood vessels on the wrong side of the retina, while the squid's eye got it correct, or why the Panda is stuck with a "thumb" which is just a wrist bone flange, while lots of other creatures have perfectly functional thumbs.

Comments

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

omg, the appendix = cruft!

It puts a dent in God's credibility as an omniscient deity if He has to use billions of years of trial and error to grind out someone in His likeness. :-)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Unless
(a) he doesn't value a billion years as highly as we do;
and/or
(b) it's not the *physical* likeness he gives two hoots about;
and/or
(c) he finds the game of Life (http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html) as fascinating to watch as I do. =:o}

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Uh-oh, isn't this Deism? :-)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily. There are versions of "Life" where you can drop extra blobs onto the grid and see what happens... =:o}

For a more serious example: This computer I'm sat in front of. I only spend a few hours a day at the mouse & keyboard, actively telling it what to do; but since I don't usually power it down at night, on a typical day it spends another 20 hours happily getting on with whatever it's been pre-programmed to do. Sometimes that's a huge and really complex video rendering job that I don't want to wait around for, I just want to see the result when it's "cooked"; Sometimes it's just the machine's basic housekeeping tasks: Defragging the disk, running a virus scan, etc., keeping the machine tuned up and ready for my next burst of active involvement with it.

If I locked the door on this room and moved to Guatamala, never to return, leaving the machine running in my absence, *that* would be deism. Not to mention a complete waste of electricity and some moderately expensive hardware. OTOH, if I personally have to crank a handle to generate all the clock pulses to keep the CPU running, or keep manually pushing the electrons through all the right NAND gates, or keep track of which block of memory is doing what on a huge whiteboard so I can tell the CPU when to swap one page out to the disk and another one in... then what I've got is a computer (aka universe) that was scarcely worth creating in the first place!

Reality: There are some things a creative person (i.e. a person "in the image of The Creator") wants to lavish extra special personal care over - the carving or hand-brushing of fine details - but there are other bits they happily leave to happen by an automatic process: Firing the clay overnight; weathering the materials; etc.

And that's consistent with the biblical record, BTW. People tend to have this perception that the Bible shows God being terribly interactive with his people for thousands of years non-stop, and then suddenly after the New Testament all the miracles and prophecies and stuff just ceased, or tailed off, or something. But if you draw out a timeline of the events as recorded, you see there are several *brief* periods where God is being very active, and then long stretches between where to all intents and purposes nothing much happens. People are just getting on with their lives; empires are expanding or shrinking or swallowing or annihilating each other or whatever. Nature does its thing, and the human race does its thing, and God doesn't seem to step in again until many generations later.

Now, whether he was still active in the lives of individuals or small groups of people, in ways that weren't considered historically or religiously significant and so weren't recorded, we can't directly know. But the testimony of lots of christians (and others) in post-biblical times is that God was active in their lives, sometimes in big ways and sometimes in small ways, even if there was no sign of him being active on a national or global scale.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

several *brief* periods where God is being very active, and then long stretches between where to all intents and purposes nothing much happens

Punctuated divine intervention!

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Aye, it's the little perforations that let the flavour flood out! =:o}

Oh, hang on... That's Tetley tea bags, isn't it? [IS CONFUSED NOW]

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

*Noah's Ark collides with enormous floating teabag*

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

More seriously - what concerns me about the idea of God* intervening in His creation like this is the way this produces another "God of the Gaps". With science explaining a larger and larger percentage of natural phenomena, God gets squeezed down into the last little percent. This is not a dignified position for the Almighty. Moreover, it suggests that every time we think some unexplicable natural phenomenon is God's fingerprint, we'll be proved wrong.

I'd also like to mention Isaac Asimov's essay-disguised-as-story the Darwinian Pool Table, which introduced the idea of a hands-off Creator to me literally decades before I encountered the term Deism (ie last week). :-)

__
* By which I mean the transcendent version of Yahweh, the commonly understood all-knowing all-powerful all-good Creator. The Horned One is all over our backyard at the moment, particularly in the potato patch.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

The assumption here is that because an event *can* be explained in terms of scientifically understood processes, it therefore wasn't God doing it. It's a mis-conception of what a miracle is, one that only arose (or at least only became popular) after modern science had arisen out of deism, and a few scientific thinkers began to challenge the deistic underpinnings of the new philosophy.

Again, consider the parallel with any deliberate human activity: It's all *explainable* in terms of molecular interactions, electromagnetic forces, etc. You can even explain the decision-making process that led to the action in terms of neurotransmitters and synapses and so on... But that's still only the *process*. It doesn't change the fact that, when the events are analysed on a higher level, a human being decided to pick up a cup of tea and drink some of the contents. Or to build a house. Or something.

Some of the ID folks are focussing hard on the question of how to scientifically determine whether an even is a chance occurence, or a deliberate action. The best tool they have for doing this is statistical analysis - But there are huge pitfalls in the field of statistics, arising from the analysts assumptions about what the situation is that they're looking at, and chaos theory tells us there are limits on our ability to analyse situations beyond a given level of complexity, over a given period of time.

My guess - and it is only a alightly educated guess - is that we'll never be able to devise a test that objectively distinguishes a "natural" event from a God-ordained one, because *that's not how God wants us to discover him*. If it was, he'd have made it a helluva lot easier, right?

And why should some near future generation have the privelege of being able to point to hard evidence and say "see! God exists" when every previous generation has had to find God through a personal process of discovery. And would it actually make things any better in any way, or would it merely give that entire generation of humans an excuse to not even try getting to know God personally? "Well, the boffins have proved he's there, so let them figure out how to talk to the guy. That'll keep them busy for another few hundred years..."

Not to mention, with the current declining trust in science, would anyone accept the proof anyway?

Bottom line: If you devise a test to detect the breath of God, you'll still never be able to beat either (a) his ability to hold his breath when people are watching, or (b) invent a better fake God-breath generator. =:o} It's a mug's game.

And speaking of mugs... [GOES TO MAKE MORE TEA]

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

The assumption here is that because an event *can* be explained in terms of scientifically understood processes, it therefore wasn't God doing it.

To be accurate, that it didn't require God's personal intervention - it wasn't an exception to natural laws, but an expression of them. That doesn't rule out God having set up those natural laws, or knowing the outcome. The ID claim is that "such-and-such a thingumy in biology *could not* have arisen without a miracle - it *could not* have come through natural, goalless, mindless processes". That's the claim that science has proven wrong over and over. (However, the claim that "such and such was not caused by God, therefore God doesn't exist" is equally logically flawed.)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

'The ID claim is that "such-and-such a thingumy in biology *could not* have arisen without a miracle - it *could not* have come through natural, goalless, mindless processes".'

Yep, right. If that's how they're stating it, then they're onto a loser with that one. Any process that can occur, can occur by accident - It's just a question of probability, and calculating probability is hella difficult for any complex situation, and impossible for any situation where you don't know all the pertinent data. So the battle ground just moves to one set of statisticians arguing with another about the validity of their initial assumptions - which is exactly what I've been seeing in some of the ID debates. Not that that's a bad issue to be bringing to the public's attention, mind you: Statistics being subject to the law of GIGO, and the number of inputs to any single specific event being essentially infinite, and the cut-off point for the significance of any of those inputs being in principle unknowable except by running the calculation first with and then without that input, against every possible comination of all the other inputs (what's infinity to the power of infinity, anyone?)...

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Mind you, natural selection is the exact opposite of "random". :-)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Exactly. =:o}