Re: Today's blogs 2

On 5/24/05, Robert Schneider <rjschn39@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> Denyse writes:
> If there is evidence for God's work in nature, can that evidence be
> admitted, or is the evidence itself actually anti-science?
> Controversies like Kansas are simply a proxy for that question because it
> is a question about who gets to say what science is.
> If anyone should say what science is, it should be the people who
> practice it, not an emeritus law professors who buried himself in books for
> a summer and came out a ninety-day wonder (for you younger folks, the last
> phrase was used of 2nd lieutenants who finished basic training during WWII).
> I also would prefer a biologist or whatever stripe to define biological
> science, and not an engineer or a physicist.
> Bob
>

This really should be a more collaborative effort. Engineers like myself are
experts on design itself. The biologists call tell us whether the earmarks
of design exist in biological systems. Here's my advise to ID as an
engineer:

When designing semiconductor chips you need to place the circuits to
minimize the wire length as a proxy for minimizing delay and power
consumption. To actually do this via brute force is order NP complete.
(Computer science speak for a VERY LONG TIME.) NP Complete is the analog to
irreducible complexity in ID theory. How do we as engineers get around this?
We have a friend whose name is the random number generator. An example
technique to do the placement is called simulated annealing. We consider
swapping two circuits. If the cost function (e.g., minimize wire length) is
improved most of the time except we sometimes randomly swap even if the cost
function is not improved. The chance of a random swap decreases following a
cooling schedule. Physicists should recognize now why this is called
simulated annealing. The purpose of the random swaps is to avoid the local
minima problem. If you greedily swap only when a cost function is improved
you can get stuck in a sub-optimal state. (Note to ID theorists this is
where you say it can't be done via random walk. But, you actually need
randomness to solve the problem.) How well this works depends on how random
our pseudo-random number generator is.

The purpose of this illustration is to show that randomness and design are
not mutually exclusive. Denyse's book title is a false dichotomy. Design is
produced by controlling the environment of your so-called random walk. In
fact, there is a class of algorithms known as genetic algorithms that
simulate evolution. The only difference between design and pure chance is
whether the environment is controlled and optimized for a purpose or not. In
the realm of Christian theology, this is labelled providence. If you look at
a randomly placed chip and a designed one the only way you can tell the
difference is if you have access to the design specifications. Then you can
look at the consonance between the specifications and the design and see
which one is designed. You need both the design and the specification in
order to make a conclusion.

Since God has seen fit to hide much of the specification for biological
systems the design may be undetectable. We may be able to "reverse engineer"
some systems but as with any such activities we may make errors. ID is
deliberately agnostic with respect to Scripture (and even this is not the
full specification of which I am referring to above) and thus there is
little hope that ID will achieve their desired proof.

We can show that Darwinian evolution CAN be designed but we cannot show that
Darwinian evolution MUST be designed. This is the weakness of all so-called
a posteriori proofs. You can introduce a prioris in order to get certitude
but then you have left the realm of science and have entered the realm of
philosophy. Presuppositionalists claim that even a prioris might not be
sufficient and all evidence is only arrived at after you have accepted the
premise not only of a Creator but the God of the Bible. Now, I don't buy
this totally but it is not to say that the presuppositional argument doesn't
have merit. Glenn, this is what I mean when I say the nature of the evidence
is not scientific.
Received on Wed May 25 10:53:07 2005