Posted by Paul Nelson has left a comment on the previous post that detailed his misrepresentation of the views of Keith Miller during an email exchange. He asked Miller for the full exchange and has now pasted in part of that exchange that, apparently, he believes vindicates his representation of Miller’s views as accurate. Unfortunately for him, it does no such thing. Below the fold, I’ll post the full comment from Nelson and then explain why he has done nothing to free himself from the charge of dishonesty.
Keith Miller kindly provided me with the remainder of our ASA correspondence about inferring intelligent causes. As I suspected, the exchange I recounted at the Palos Verdes debate occurred later in our email discussion than the passage Keith quoted above.
I was trying to establish (i.e., get Keith to accept) that science could infer that an intelligence had acted to cause some particular pattern or event. Keith had already agreed that my car theft thought experiment showed that inferring intelligent causation — some agent deliberately breaking a window and removing valuable objects, in this instance — was reasonable. I wanted to take that agreement as a point of commonality for the remainder of our discussion.
But Keith disagreed, strongly. He argued that the thief was a “natural physical regularity.”
And I would say that this is still a misrepresentation of MIller’s views. The distinction that he was making was between human intelligence, which exists within the natural world and is bound by the natural laws and about which we absolutely can make valid inferences in science, and a disembodied, superntural intelligence, about which science cannot make any valid inferences because there is no way to test them or falsify them. Miller says so quite clearly in the response that I quoted. I’ll repeat it here:
Such analogies are completely inappropriate. The thief is a natural causal agent. Humans are part of nature – in fact a part of nature that we know a considerable amount about. As a paleontologist I can similarly infer the action of long extinct animals. We can study the patterns of breakage on shells or bones to infer the likely predator. We can infer much about the interactions of organisms from the fossil record – that is in fact one of my research interests. But you are proposing that science can infer the action of a cause external to the physical universe. Can science verify a divine miracle (in the sense of breaking causal chains)? Only in the sense of concluding that there is no presently known cause-and effect explanation.
So the fact is that Miller agreed with Nelson’s first premise, that science can legitimately infer human intelligence, but he explicitly denied the analogy between human intelligence and supernatural, disembodied intelligence. And Miller further argued that human intelligence was well within the category of “natural regularity” because humans exist within nature and are bound by its laws (which is exactly why the analogy to disembodied intelligence is invalid). Now here is the passage from their exchange that Nelson thinks rescues him from the charge of misrepresentation:
PN: I just want to make sure we agree on this point. Let’s not move too quickly to other issues. Let me state the point again so it’s clear:
Science can legitimately infer that an intelligence has acted to cause a pattern or event in nature.
Do you agree, Keith?
KM: No, I cannot! I thought I made that clear. The thief is an available natural physical regularity within the known universe.
But remember the context. In the earlier passage, Keith explicitly agreed that science can legitimately infer that human and/or animal intelligence has acted in nature. In fact, he lists examples of such inferences in paleontology and is well aware of inferences of human intelligent action in archaeology. No one in their right mind disputes that science can infer the action of willful human action, or that scientists do so every day. But again, let’s go back to Nelson’s characterization of what Miller said:
Now what would you infer from that pattern, I put the question to Keith. And rather than do what everyone in this room would do, namely get out your cell phone and dial 911 and infer that someone had broken into his car, rather than say that event, that intelligently cause event had happened, Keith said a natural regularity occurred.
It is Nelson, not Miller, who makes a distinction between human intelligence and “natural regularity”. Nelson is clearly claiming that Miller denied that a human thief had stolen the items and instead had argued for a “natural regularity”. But this is obviously a misrepresentation of Miller’s position. Miller not only did not deny that a thief had stolen the items, as Nelson claims he did, he explicitly agrees that it could only be a human thief. But he then argued, additionally, that a human thief is within the natural world and subject to natural laws and therefore, A) is a natural regularity and B) is not analogous to the attempt to infer a disembodied, supernatural intelligence allegedly acting in the natural world.
There is no way to get out of this, Dr. Nelson. When you said that Miller had denied that a human thief was responsible for the missing items in your hypothetical, you lied. He absolutely did not deny that, he in fact agreed with it. His disagreement with you is on the analogy you make between human intelligence and disembodied intelligence, not over whether science can infer the action of human intelligence.
In light however of Keith’s unhappiness with how I recounted our exchange, I will post an expanded apology and clarification later today at the blog ID the Future (www.idthefuture.com).
So let me get this straight – despite the evidence, you continue to deny that you misrepresented Miller’s position; you’ve already passed up the chance to apologize for it; you’ve now attempted twice to explain away the misrepresentation; but still, since no one seems to be accepting those rationalizations, including Miller, you’ll post an insincere apology and claim to be sorry for what you’ve spent the last two days insisting was nothing to feel sorry about? And you think this is going to help your case here?
Update: Nelson has now posted that apology, and here is what he now has to say, the portion directly relevant:
Brayton charges that I lied about Keith’s response to my thought experiment. In brief, in my Palos Verdes summary of the Miller/Nelson exchange, I said that Keith inferred a natural regularity when given my car theft thought example. This is a lie, Brayton says, because Keith clearly acknowledges that a thief — an intelligent cause, not a physical regularity — had acted in the hypothetical case.
However, Keith denied this later. See the third back-and-forth for 17 June 1998: Keith wrote that he disagreed with me about science inferring intelligence as a distinct type of cause. The thief, he said, was a “natural physical regularity.”
This later denial is what I was recalling at Palos Verdes. My spoken summary, however, made it seem as if Keith could not recognize if or when someone broke into his car, and that was unfair. Wrong, in short, and for that, I apologize.
I think Nelson is still missing the point. The reason his characterization of Miller’s position is a lie is not because of any disagreement over what is or is not included in the category of “natural regularity”. Nelson here even misrepresents his own position when he says, “I said that Keith inferred a natural regularity when given my car theft thought example.” But that isn’t what Nelson said that indicates the dishonesty. He didn’t just say that Miller inferred a natural regularity, he also said that Miller denied that a human thief was required to explain the missing items. Here it is, for the 50th time:
Now what would you infer from that pattern, I put the question to Keith. And rather than do what everyone in this room would do, namely get out your cell phone and dial 911 and infer that someone had broken into his car, rather than say that event, that intelligently cause event had happened, Keith said a natural regularity occurred.
Nelson claimed that Miller claimed that a natural regularity had occured rather than inferring that a human thief had stolen the items from his car. That is the lie, folks, and the text from the later discussion does absolutely nothing to rescue Nelson from that lie.
It’s nice that Nelson is owning up to the fact that this was “unfair” or “wrong” at this point, but given that he spent the last two days trying to explain it away and deny it, this would seem to indicate that he is doing so only because he was caught red-handed and has been unable to wiggle out of it with his previous rationalizations. The facts are no different now than they were two days ago. The lie was obvious two days ago. In fact, it was obvious 4 days ago when Nelson issued the first faux apology while still denying that he had done what he now admits he did. That makes this apology just a little hard to accept as motivated by sincerity rather than by the desire to cover one’s posterior. The fact is that Nelson blatantly misrepresented Miller’s position, claiming that he said the exact opposite of what he actually said. The further fact is that he would have gotten away with it if not for a single person in the audience with a recorder, and would likely have repeated this lie to untold thousands of people.
May 30, 2006
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