From: Howard J. Van Till (hvantill@chartermi.net)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2003 - 08:25:28 EDT
>From: "Josh Bembenek" <jbembe@hotmail.com>
> Regarding Howard's questions regarding double speak earlier from this
> thread:
>
> I do not find any direct use of this "ignorance trump" to fortress your
> argument against criticism in the December PCSF article,
So far, so good....
> however I do not agree with your vehement opposition to ID.
I have been engaged in evaluating the ID movement for about a dozen years,
during which time my disillusionment has grown considerably. The more
carefully I examine what its advocates say, the more I find myself in
opposition to the ID movement as characterized by Johnson, Dembski, Wells,
Behe, et al.
> Firstly, perhaps it would help
> to have a catalogue or reference list of all bold "proof" claims IDers make
> such that the rest of us can be more familiar with the exact arguments that
> are detestable.
I have not made such a collection; perhaps I should. If anyone else on this
list has done so, please send your collection and I'll see what conclusions
can be made.
> For myself, I cannot think of when Dembski went around
> "asserting that he has empirically demonstrated that to be the case" wrt a
> "right stuff universe." In the works of his that I am familiar with, he has
> not done any specific calculations that could demonstrate such a thing, but
> laid out a technique that would allow us to make rigorous conclusions about
> probabilities/possibilities instead of guessing whether or not event X is
> possible. I see nothing wrong with this mathematical approach, although I
> haven't seen any application of it to date.
Read No Free Lunch carefully. Look in particular at his computations for the
probability for the pure chance self-assembly of the flagellum as a
"discrete combinatorial object" and evaluate the relevance of that
computation.
> You repeatedly suggest that IDers should frankly spell out that their
> hypothesis is simply an informed judgment, and that nobody really KNOWS.
> But a hypothesis = educated guess, and my impressions from Dembski and Behe
> are that they are offering a hypothesis, not formalizing a proof. Behe
> states in the Black Box that when empirical evidence disproves his
> perspective on biochemical structures, that his concepts will quickly die.
> This sounds more like a hypothesis than a proof claim.
Dembski occasionally also uses this language, but on numerous other
occasions this appropriate modesty vanishes.
> Also, find me a
> textbook, mainstream media outlet, or evolutionist or AAAS statement who
> does this (besides yourself.) I see little problem with stating their
> hypothesis in a manner that says "because we find structures that evade
> evolutionary explanations, we believe this indicates that a designer must
> have been responsible, and here is a mathematical analytical tool that can
> determine what threshold must be reached before such an inference can be
> reasonably made." I haven't seen where they say, "this data analysis that
> we have performed is proof," especially since no specific calculations have
> been made.
The problem that I pointed out in my analysis of No Free Lunch (AAAS
website) is that the calculations Dembski does present are meaningless.
> I would say that you do appeal to ignorance toward the end of the article
> when you suggest that the filter fails to tell us anything if it cannot
> compute whether or not All of Life occurring on planet Earth is either
> caused by design or chance. But you state clearly that nobody could
> possibly know this and that you would need a God-like omniscience to answer
> such a question.
Correct
> Perhaps then, we should throw evolution out the window
> just as quickly, since it cannot make any definitive statements about this
> particular question.
What evolutionary theorizing attempts to do is to make as much sense as
possible out of what the empirical data does display. What ID is trying to
do is to say that in spite of all of the genealogical relationships
displayed in the data, and in spite of the mechanisms for change that we do
see, the fact that science cannot give complete and detailed explanations
for the formational history of some particular structure means that it was
probably assembled by the form-conferring action of some unidentified and
unembodied non-natural agent.
> Demanding that the "first node" of demonstrated
> utility for the explanatory filter be in answering an unanswerable question
> with an infinitely large set of unknown variables (in theory), is ludicrous
> to me.
I agree, but I'm merely following Dembski's lead here.
> I believe the filter can answer quite well some questions about a
> smaller, more contained system, such as bacterial propulsion, or maybe just
> isolating on the flagellum.
My point in "No Free Lunch" (AAAS website) is that Dembski does not have
enough knowledge to apply his filter for the more modest computation either.
> Why should someone address unanswerable
> questions before testing the possibilities for bacterial motility? To
> demonstrate that entropy always increases within a contained system, must we
> prove it for an entire galaxy or solar system or universe before we can
> accept the results we might obtain from a carefully controlled experiment?
> I think not, and if it can be demonstrated that the flagellum is a structure
> that cannot be derived with any reasonable probability using known physical
> processes, we can conclude that there are either additional unknown physical
> processes to be discovered, or that features found in biology bear the
> hallmarks of design.
One of the things that your use of the word "design" here reminds me of is
my continuing annoyance of the ID movement using the term "intelligent
design" when in the vast majority of instances the term "supernatural
assembly" would be far more accurate and far less misleading. Why sneak in
the religiously motivated appeal to supernatural form-conferring
intervention under the banner of a term that appears to have a very
different meaning? Candor and honesty will get far more respect from the
scientific community that clever subterfuge.
>
> This leads me to something you stated in your dialogue with Dembski found on
> the AAAS website:
>
> "Given these considerations, I remain fully justified in saying that, as a
> general rule, Dembski?s computations of P(X|n)?because they include the
> positive contributions of only a partial list of the natural processes that
> may have contributed to the natural formation of X?will generally constitute
> an underestimation of P(X|N) and thereby open the door to numerous false
> positive indications of a need for non-natural action to accomplish the
> formation of some biotic system X. The whole point of that portion of my
> essay was simply to point out that this vulnerability to false positive
> indications of the need for extra-natural assembly must be candidly
> acknowledged by advocates of ID and that unqualified claims of having proved
> the incompleteness of natural processes and the consequent need for
> supplemental designer action are completely out of place. Dembski has done
> nothing to preclude the possibility of false positive indications."
>
> While false positives are important to think about, this argument jumps the
> gun entirely. Show me where any evolutionist who has made bold sweeping
> claims about the feasibility of evolutionary processes to derive any
> structure has detailed any calculations whatsoever on the P(X/N)!
As I see it, most people understand the provisional character of scientific
theorizing. But perhaps you are correct to suggest that there could be more
frequent reminders of this.
> If Dembski performs such calculations, it will be an advance for science all
in
> itself, whether or not he then moves forward to inferences that may or may
> not be false positives. Generating these P(X/N) calculations will move the
> evolution debate out of the dark ages in my opinion.
But doing so requires more knowledge that we ordinarily have. So we must
make the best provisional case that we can.
> I'd love to get away
> from "this evolved, because hand waving explanation X clearly is reasonable
> and believable, plus I'm a scientist and you should believe me because I
> have a PhD with the concensus of the ENTIRE scientific community backing me,
> and you don't." Even if evolution is ultimately true, it would be much more
> satisfying to hear that structure X evolved because of natural processes Y
> and Z with given probability of such and such percent.
In an ideal world we would have enough info to do this for a very large
number of cases. In the meantime we must work with plausibility arguments,
and I find the arguments generated by professional science generally far
more credible than the claims of the ID movement to have demonstrated the
need for some biotic structures to have been "intelligently designed"
(translation: to have been assembled by means of occasional acts of
form-conferring intervention by an unembodied non-natural agent).
Howard Van Till
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