Teacher, there's a god in my evolutionary soup...

Descartes remarks in the third (I think) Meditation that "reasoning by ends" is useless in matters of natural science, cause of our finite minds can't work out what ends God is seeking to achieve-- or, even if we can say in general terms ("the best"), can't work out what particular natural effect will best achieve it. So a belief that the course of evolution is divinely ordained (either controlled on an ongoing basis or set up as an infinitely-many-railed billiard shot at the moment of first creation) wouldn't have committed to any prediction about the phenomena of evolution. In other words, it seems to me, a Cartesian could consistently say both that the course of evolution is divinely ordained AND that it is, in its detailed dependence on "secondary" (i.e. natural) causes, totally opaque to our attempts at teleological analysis.
Such a position, it seems to me, is compatible with full acceptance of everything biology teaches about the randomness of evolution. That's because I take "random" to be a quasi-epistemic notion: to say a process is random is to say that there is no law we can specify to keep it from being random (in the precise technical domain: no computable betting scheme that will allow us to beat the house). Maybe God sets it up to lead to some goal, but if we can't point to a pattern of goal-directedness that allows us to predict things better than purely naturalistic theories do, then the course of evolution is random. Random doesn't, I want to claim, implie not guided. ... When I did my first psych course, we ended up trying to train mice in low-tech Skinner boxes: boxes in which the mechanism determining the "schedule of reinforcement" (= when the food pellet got sent down the tube) was the watching experimenter. The fact that the experimenter had a page of the Rand Corporation's "One Million Random Digits" and was counting the times a mouse pressed the bar-- next digit odd, so mouse has to press three times, or some such-- didn't keep the connection from being random as seen by the mouse!

"it seems very hard to have a deity achieve specific goals without intervening in history and biology"
"It must overcome the need for a deus absconditus, an absent god who wound the clockwork up 13.7 billion years ago and retied to watch the fun. "

I think these two problems are easily overcome once you consider the god as being out of our time. Consider a book author as an analogy - he may write events up to chapter 17 and then realise he needs something to happen in chapter 1 for the story to proceed as it should. Characters inside the book will never notice.

The author also relies on the natural laws inside the book-world for things to happen without the need to micro-manage (you don't have to micromanage something falling to earth, you just rely on the fact that inside the book-world there is a law of gravity).

And, like in a book, the less you notice the author managing anything and the more the story seems to flow by its innate laws, the better it is.

That reference to Wasmann is interesting, as it seems to be a very early instance of what the baraminologists do - identifying a "kind", not with a "species", but with something like a "family". I'll have to get around to looking at that book. (I'm interested because currently the Wikipedia article "Baraminology" is sort of a mess.)

The pope, a good and holy man, has just said a stupid thing. (Catholics have extensive experience with this phenomenon.)

Claiming "such and such can only be supported by..." requires proof of a negative, which is difficult to an empirical standard and impossible to a philosophically absolute standard. In particular, a "natural law account of rights" can (with much work) be derived from the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

@abb3w:

You seem to be claiming that there is no such thing as support, to a philosophically absolute standard, for a negative.

Can you support that claim?

Moving away from purely anthropogenic projections of God (i.e "Big Daddy in the Sky" etc), the idea of god implies two certain ideas. One is of a separate being, at least some being(ness) that has a self-definition and is aware of itself as separate from all the processes that happen within its domain. Further, if you are trying to define "the One and Only God" it is required that is is impossible to have any level of self-awareness senior to that being(ness).

So there's problems with that definition right off the bat. If God has awareness of (him,her, it)self as a separate being, does then God have an ego? If God has awareness of (him,her, it)self as a separate being, where are the boundaries - where does God begin and end? If the conjecture is of an eternal, endless God,with no beginning and no end, then he has no boundaries, and therefore, how can you keep the notion of a separate God-being?

This also implies that God is not a process (that is, it negates the idea of God as simply the process of Nature). The implication is that God either initiates or oversees the process(es) of the universe(s), but God (he,she,it)self exists beyond the process(es). Further, most ideas of God include God interfering at will, according to moral judgments or some other great wisdom, with the process(es) he initiated.

The second certain idea is of consciousness itself. The idea of a God means that consciousness itself exists separate from everything else in existence. In this model, God's consciousness is kind of like neutrinos, an invisible essence that penetrates everything in existence but is nearly impossible to capture, or even to catch its traces. Except consciousness is finer, more pervasive, and more invisible even than neutrinos.

So already the idea of a simple, elegant deity that originated, maintains, and knows everything becomes complicated, fraught with self-contradictions, and in the case of God-as-Consciousness, impossible to observe with any certainty.

I agree with the physicist (was it Einstein?) who said that if there's a theory of everything, you should be able to write it out in one simple, one-line equation.

So far, the one-line equation God has eluded us.

So it's not looking good for the believers. But don't throw in the towel just yet, O Ye of Little Faith!

We still have the essential problem that the existence seems so confoundingly elegant, and from what we are learning about the presence of organic molecules and water throughout the cosmos, so full of the potential for life (if not full of life itself).

Proving that it is a random creation, and that there is no organizing consciousness behind it is turning out to be equally difficult to proving that there is, or that it is not random. We seem to be stuck constantly discovering elegant new laws, but unable to find the Lawmaker. Some would conclude that the laws show by inference there must be a lawmaker, but for many of us, an inference is not enough. That is to say, if Neptune is down there controlling all the ocean currents with magical hand motions, we should be able to see him, given that we can image the entire ocean floor. But he's not down there, we've looked, many times.

And of course, being a character in the movie myself, (i.e. - just another projection of light onto the screen of existence) I can't see the projector, or the director, or the playwright. As noted before, I occupy the unfortunate position of being stuck in the book, and so do all the scientists in my existence.

The problem is that being a fish is not enough to qualify as an expert in oceanography. In a real sense, I don't even know what I am.

I don't think that arguments based on an a priori need for natural selection to be "pure" and "complete" are all that convincing; the idea of a God who operates on some optimal balance between intervening and letting things take their course is not so easily dismissed. (Crude analogy: a teacher who occasionally gives students feedback on their work-in-progress.) Personally, I think that the biggest problem with theistic evolution is that it means accepting a God to whom death and suffering are tools, which doesn't mesh so well with the sort of God that Christian evolutionary theists like to believe in.

Of course, it was the increasing secularisation of western democratic societies that gave people these rights in the first place, after a over a thousand years of theistic rule in which rights were either inherited from the Roman law or were nonexistent.

Well, no. The rational behind natural rights was well worked out by folks like Aquinas and Ockham. The latter, iirc, in the 90 Day Work, even specified life, liberty, and property as three of these natural rights. Aquinas wrote in On Kingship that as a last resort the people had the right to overthrow their king if the king had become a tyrant. They were called "natural" because they belonged to humans by their nature as human beings; and as De Soto noted, all humans shared in these rights, regardless of their state of grace.

Now, getting the secular kings to recognize these rights was an uphill battle. Still, peasants could vote in manorial elections, own the use of property, bring suit even against the lord, women, too, if they were head of household.

To the extent that "natures" and "natural law" are nowadays disparaged and rights are thought to be something "given" by the state to that same extent the underpinnings of the whole concept of rights has been undermined.

Not sure when this "theistic" rule began. The key event of the early middle ages was the Hildebrandine revolution, which declared the church independent of royal control, asserted the right to appoint her own bishops, etc., and stripped the kings of religious rights and duties, creating the "secular state" separate from the church, a religious doctrine paradoxically enforced by the US Constitution.

Mike, I'm not sure this undercuts my claim. While I realise the natural law tradition is a medieval invention, it follows on from deep classical roots, and anyway the actual rights were inherited, either from classical non-theistic sources or from pagan European traditions. The relations between church and state in that period is complex, but in general it seems to me the church was either opposed to secular rights, or followed along reluctantly.

Allen: the sense of "random" required in evolution is that there is no bias in variations toward future utility. They may in fact be fully determined (and I think that, pace QED, they are). Evidence that later-favourable mutations occur would be evidence that the modern view of evolution is false. It is the old criticism of teleology - the cause needs to occur after the effect for it to be true.

[This is also an argument against the Intelligent Design notion of "frontloading" - how could an agent foresee what will occur down the track to affect the front-loaded genes, let alone that they would be useful in some as yet unspecified ecology, unless they were a God? Hence ID is religious.]

MartinB: I suggested God was a block theorist in the linked argument.

yogi-one,

Moving away from purely anthropogenic projections of God (i.e "Big Daddy in the Sky" etc), the idea of god implies two certain ideas. One is of a separate being, at least some being(ness) that has a self-definition and is aware of itself as separate from all the processes that happen within its domain.

Any notion of God as "separate from" rather than, say, "inclusive of" is to some extent anthropogenic, as it is the human brain that draws the dividing lines that categorize/isolate all that is into separate items.

Of course, it was the increasing secularisation of western democratic societies that gave people these rights in the first place, after a over a thousand years of theistic rule in which rights were either inherited from the Roman law or were nonexistent.

Well, no. The rational behind natural rights was well worked out by folks like Aquinas and Ockham.

I think you are missing the real underpinning of modern rights, which is the relative might of the citizenry. The aristocracy and the theocracy didn't give us these rights, we took them and they conceded them. As soon as the we look away they start to disappear (the Bush years are a stark warning). After the fact there are always some scholars whose ideas can be reconciled with the current state of affairs. That does't mean the scribblers caused it.

Thanks for the reply! Helpful to my own thinking (I may send you something if it gets written).

My imagined Cartesian evolutionist's reply to your reply is: no, THAT's not a useful sense of random, because (finite intelligences that we are) we can't identify what does and what does not have utility. A bias for PERCEIVED utility would be a pattern that would let us win against the house (e.g., looking at an ancestral sea turtle and thinking about the REALLY REALLY risky part of its life cycle and saying "I'll bet that critter's descendants will evolve viviparity," and we'd win because there is a bias in favor of what we can perceive as intelligent design).

...it was the increasing secularisation of western democratic societies that gave people these rights in the first place, after a over a thousand years of theistic rule...

Well, no. The rationale behind natural rights was well worked out by folks like Aquinas and Ockham.

I think you are missing the real underpinning of modern rights, which is the relative might of the citizenry. The aristocracy and the theocracy didn't give us these rights, we took them and they conceded them.

In the medieval world rights were clearly spelled out in various documents, such as the Weistuemer or by-laws of the manor. These were often in the form of pages pastes sequentially into a roll and were brought out at the annual Michaelmas court (the hallmote) and consulted by the jurors in disputes over conflicting rights. There are numerous instances of such rights being asserted against the lord of the manor. E.g., the peasants refused to load sheaves into the lord's cart claiming that the laws and customs of the manor required them to gather the sheaves but not to load the carts, and that they had done so only in the past "out of love for the lord." An inquest of the jurors appointed at the hallmote found in favor of the peasants. It was not at all unusual to find that the lord's arbitrary will was bound by law and custom.

Moderns and, more so, post-moderns often have a caricatured understanding of the medieval, filled with story-book situations informed all to often by deliberate distortions fostered by the post-medievals.

I'm still waiting for evidence of the "theocracy" stuff.
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After the fact there are always some scholars whose ideas can be reconciled with the current state of affairs. That does't mean the scribblers caused it.

"Scribblers" seldom "cause" anything; but they can document. Neither Aquinas nor Ockham wrote in a vacuum, after all. The former was famously influential not only in theology but also in natural philosophy; and Ockham, of course, finished his life as a PR flack for the Holy Roman Emperor, so we cannot imagine he was totally without influence. And beside them we have manorial by-laws, court cases, proclamations, customs and town statutes, cartularies, notarial acts, in short, "facts of everyday life."

While it is true that we first encounter the notion of "conscience" (synderesis) in Plato's Timaeus, and find it used somewhat in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, the idea was largely absent in legal thought until the middle ages. Then, influenced by Paul's adoption of it in Letter to the Romans, it became the pivot point of Western law. This was largely absent in the House of Submission -- we have no evidence the Timaeus was ever translated into Arabic -- which lacked a word for conscience until the 19th century; and also in Chinese law. [Huff's The Rise of Early Modern Science devotes considerable attention to the differences in the legal traditions of the three and the influence on the birth of Science.] The idea of rights was already present in Western law in the middle ages; absent elsewhere.

In particular, as Berman and others have argued, the post-Hildebrand Church was in a real sense the first secular state, and by asserting the primacy of natural law over custom (and thus of reason over tradition) set the whole basis for what came later.

...it was the increasing secularisation of western democratic societies that gave people these rights in the first place, after a over a thousand years of theistic rule...

Well, no. The rationale behind natural rights was well worked out by folks like Aquinas and Ockham.

I think you are missing the real underpinning of modern rights, which is the relative might of the citizenry. The aristocracy and the theocracy didn't give us these rights, we took them and they conceded them.

In the medieval world rights were clearly spelled out in various documents, such as the Weistuemer or by-laws of the manor. These were often in the form of pages pastes sequentially into a roll and were brought out at the annual Michaelmas court (the hallmote) and consulted by the jurors in disputes over conflicting rights. There are numerous instances of such rights being asserted against the lord of the manor. E.g., the peasants refused to load sheaves into the lord's cart claiming that the laws and customs of the manor required them to gather the sheaves but not to load the carts, and that they had done so only in the past "out of love for the lord." An inquest of the jurors appointed at the hallmote found in favor of the peasants. It was not at all unusual to find that the lord's arbitrary will was bound by law and custom.

Moderns and, more so, post-moderns often have a caricatured understanding of the medieval, filled with story-book situations informed all to often by deliberate distortions fostered by the post-medievals. But it is after all a medieval legal dictum that laws are to be make "by the people or by the better part of them."

I'm still waiting for evidence of the "theocracy" stuff. Perhaps there is a confusion between "a country ruled by a church" and "a country in which most everyone gives at least lip service."
+ + +
After the fact there are always some scholars whose ideas can be reconciled with the current state of affairs. That does't mean the scribblers caused it.

"Scribblers" seldom "cause" anything; but they can reflect their times. Neither Aquinas nor Ockham wrote in a vacuum, after all. The former was famously influential not only in theology but also in natural philosophy; and Ockham, of course, finished his life as an aide to the Holy Roman Emperor, so we cannot imagine he was totally without influence. And beside them we have manorial by-laws, court cases, customs and town statutes, cartularies, notarial acts, in short, all those "facts of everyday life." So we don't need to rely on "a few scribblers."

While it is true that we first encounter the notion of "conscience" (synderesis) in Plato's Timaeus, and find it used somewhat in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, the idea was largely absent in legal thought until the middle ages. Then, influenced by Paul's adoption of synderesis in Letter to the Romans, it became the pivot point of Western law. This was largely absent in the House of Submission -- we have no evidence the Timaeus was ever translated into Arabic, which lacked a word for conscience until the 19th century; and even more so in Chinese law. [Huff's The Rise of Early Modern Science devotes considerable attention to the differences in the legal traditions of the three civilizations.] The idea of rights was already present in Western law in the middle ages; absent elsewhere.

In particular, as Berman and others have argued, the post-Hildebrand Church was in a real sense the first secular state, and by asserting the primacy of natural law over custom (and thus of reason over tradition) set the whole basis for what came later.

Why do people find it so disturbing to think that we may be here on this planet, in this life, completely by chance? Does it make life any less miraculous or beautiful? Do we really need big daddy in the sky to make us feel special? I love science, i totally believe in evolution, and I also feel a great spiritual connection to this beautiful, random evolving universe.

a) If there is only matter in motion, there is no "chance," only the intersection of two or more deterministic time-lines. Chance is a term suppositing for "we don't know how." It exists in the gaps of our knowledge. (The "Improbability of the Gaps"?)

b) If there is only matter in motion, there is no "beautiful" for life to be.

c) Humanism (what's left of it after the hammering it's taken from science) is sufficient for humans to "feel" special. "Big daddy in the sky" contains two errors, but taking it allegorically, it certainly provides a basis for humans to feel equal, not special.

@Annie:

I agree with you, but I have to wonder:

Why do people find it so disturbing that "mankind" came about by a natural process involving chance, but don't seem to have the same feelings about how each of us individual humans came about?

There isn't much support for Scientific Storkism - or Intelligent Delivery (the Big Top version that doesn't identify the stork) - or the latest, Teach The Controversy About Where Babies Come From.

Even though genetics is based on the idea of random mixing of genes from the parents, as well as random mutations.

It's not "disturbing." The "natural process" part is a given. As St. Albertus Magnus wrote: In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power; we have rather to inquire what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass. This whole medieval idea of "natural causes" and "natural law" caught on rather well.

The "random" part is more problematical. Randomness is not a material entity and thus cannot be a natural cause of anything. It is a metaphysical statement of ignorance. The theory of evolution works just fine if randomness simply means "some laws we haven't figured out yet." There is no reason to suppose that the laws governing the recombination of DNA in conception is any more "random" than the Newtonian and other physical laws governing the outcome of dice throws. The limitations are on our knowledge of the Initial State and sometimes on the laws themselves. We don't yet know everything.

The analogy of the Origin of Species to the Origin of Babies is not well thought out for two reasons. The biological laws governing conception are well known. I'm not sure why anyone would suppose the equivalence of Storks with Creation unless from ignorance of what creation is or the confusion of "Everything I don't believe" with a scientific genus.

The second reason is that Species and Babies have different status. Babies are actual material bodies, so natural laws clearly apply. Species, otoh, are constructs of the human mind. As Darwin put it: "I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other..." Like any other universal term, they have no real, material existence. Their Origin is therefore somewhat more problematical when it comes to "atoms in motion."

According the evolutionary species concept, species are defined by having an independent evolutionary trajectory. Once populations cease to exchange genetic material their evolutionary paths are not constrained by the drift and selective pressure acting on the other (not including ecological interactions). This meshes well with intuitive views of species, at least with my intuition. There is still a gray area because speciation is a more or less prolonged event so it is difficult to choose a threshold when applying the concept to a group undergoing speciation. Still, in most cases it is very clear whether groups of organisms are members of the same species.

Of course none of the species concepts work particularly well for exclusively asexually reproducing organisms.

@Mike:

In the 18th century, the proponents of preformation argued that all individuals began at the creation, and against the idea of individual generation and development at a later time. They used several of the same arguments that are used today by creationists against evolution:
What is today called "Irreducible Complexity"; The "Watch" analogy; Denial of spontaneous generation.
These were not crackpots, but respectable, intelligent, serious and well-informed investigators into the world of nature. Of course, a lot more has been learned about life since then.

Clearly, all individuals did not begin at creation since new individuals were being born all the time. If you are saying that all kinds of animals began at the beginning, you must define what you mean by "kind." Philosophers leave this open: it's what your kid means when she points at an animal and cries, "Horsey!" But it's also what a Choctaw Indian means when he points at a horse and says, "Subah!" which translates as "like a deer, only bigger!" And how can the question of interfertility arise when dealing with extinct species? Or with me and my great-great-grandmother? (Some botanists claim the whole species concept is animal-centric.) Technical definitions of "species" can sometimes cut too fine. Rose is rose is rose. Darwin was more right than perhaps he knew. The origin of species comes about when humans point to a critter and no longer cry "Horsey!" but rather, "Well, that's different..."

So long as the world was believed infinite, there was no reason to suppose that its furnishings were not likewise infinite. There was no way to determine in philosophy whether the world had always been or whether it had a beginning. So the ancient Greeks and the medieval muslims and Christians never even asked the question. But the =belief= that the world had had a beginning contained the seeds of the belief that its furnishing (animals, mountains) had also had beginnings. The question of the origin of species was religiously rooted, but had no basis in philosophy -- yet. Augustine's insight was key: creation must have been instantaneous, but some forms emerged later, from older forms. Moderns understand the "forms" of living things to be encoded in something called a genome, and it is certainly true that newer forms exist in potential within older forms. The string for a new kind of critter is implicit in the older one, and can be derived from it by a sequence of mutations that realize the potential in conformance with its environment.

The Paley "watchmaker" silliness was the result of the Newtonian revolution, which rejected the idea of emergent properties in favor of dead matter. But dead matter could only be moved from the outside, not through the immanence of self-organizing systems. Physics has long rejected this 19th century mechanistic metaphysics, but biology has not yet had its "quantum revolution."

@Mike:

I'm not sure I understand you, but you seem to be saying that there was no interest in the question of the eternity of the universe among the ancient Greeks and the medievals. On the contrary, this was a matter of dispute. Aristotle, you see, claimed that the universe was infinitely old, and this caused some problems for the medieval followers of Aristotle among the Jews, Christians, and Moslems, who all believed in a creation at some finite point in the past.

The "watchmaker" analogy did not begin with Paley. The earliest form of it goes back at least to Cicero (of course, there were no watches in his time, but he referred to sundials and such). Voltaire, just to pick out one famous name before Paley, was rather proud of his use of the example of the watch as a refutation to the atheists.

As far as fixity of species, the host of this blog happens to know quite a bit about that concept, so I won't attempt much detail about that, except to note that the concept of fixed species of living things doesn't go back before the 17th century.

I know that it seems clear today that new living things come into existence often, but it was seriously doubted for quite a while in the 18th century - and even later. Many of the things that are obvious to us are only the result of a lot of difficult thought and experimentation.

You bring up a lot of other issues, some of which I feel unprepared and unwilling to talk about. I'm just insistent on sticking with the point that it is legitimate to draw the parallel between arguments in opposition to evolution and virtually the same arguments in opposition to reproduction.

it is legitimate to draw the parallel between arguments in opposition to evolution and virtually the same arguments in opposition to reproduction.

That we consider an objection to A to be silly does not really mean that all silly objections to B, C, D, ... are really similar. As in everything, there are degrees of silliness. The origin of a baby, which is a tangible material object, is of a different order from the origin of a species, which is an abstract metaphysical concept.

After all, the Stork Theory can be disproven by ordinary sense impressions. They are a tangible material cause and so can be tested by material means. But something intangible, like "design" or "intent," is much more difficult to assess. For example, the deterministic material process by which a baby comes to be does not eliminate the intentions of the parents "to make a baby" from the scheme. Can one say, "I have no need of that hypothesis"?

The interesting thing about Paley's watchmaker argument is that it was an argument that the medievals never made. They saw no reason to suppose that the complexity or simplicity of any aspect of nature was an argument for or against design (i.e., intent. Design did not mean for them an engineer at a drafting board.) In fact, Tommy A argued that God's creative power included natural law. Comparing it to shipbuilding, he wrote that it would be as if the shipwright could give to his lumber the ability of shape and form and attach itself. (This is the theological argument against ID. It is the common course of nature that is the better argument, not the (so-far) (apparent) exceptions. That is, E=mc^2 is teleological because nature tends "always or for the most part" to this end. Whereas, "we can't fully explain the blood clotting cascade" always has a "not yet" attached to it.

Bishop Oresme made a comparison to the clock back in the 14th cent., but it was not that the clock's complexity argued for its intentional existence, but rather that God has created a cosmos that, like a clock, operated from principles emergent from its own nature.

Aquinas also wrote a treatise "On the Eternity of the World." So it's not that the medievals never pondered that question, but that they concluded that it could not be demonstrated by philosophy. Nor was it, until rather recently -- and some physicists still resist the Big Bang for religious reasons! The pagans and the Averroeists assumed the world was infinite, and "world" (kosmos) included its furnishings. The Christians, believing in a Beginning, were at least mentally prepared to consider a beginning for the items within the kosmos. Their own holy books even said "let the earth bring forth" all the living creatures, and the earth did so at different times ("days"). This was not evolution, but then, properly speaking, neither was Darwin's theory.

@Mike:

I don't think that we have any disagreement about the eternity of the world. Indeed, the only thing that I want to disagree with you is about the relevance of the parallels between arguments against evolution and those against reproduction.

What I am trying to do is to use a reductio ad absurdum, that several of the arguments used against evolution, if they were sound arguments, would be just as sound against reproduction. Of course, I agree that reproduction is about as well-established a reality as one can get. The question that I am raising is that, for example, "irreducible complexity" can, with as much force, be used against reproduction as it can be against evolution. It is of the nature of a reductio that the conclusion be something that all participants agree is clearly false. That you point out that both of us agree that the conclusion is clearly false, in the reproduction case, does not argue against that there is a genuine parallel - it's, rather, part of my argument.

In part, I am arguing that we have a genuine parallel because there were in fact reasonable people who argued to that conclusion about reproduction. But also, I can argue that "irreducible complexity" argues to the impossibility of a natural origin for certain features of life, and has nothing intrinsic about evolution to it. It does not depend upon the points that you raise. It does not depend upon the characters in question being characters of "abstract entities" like species, rather than of concrete individuals. Or, at least, I don't see the distinction being relevant to my point - I am not interested (for the moment) in taking up other potential objections to evolution - but I would be interested if you can show me how "irreducible complexity of abstract entities" is more telling than "irreducible complexity of concrete individuals". My personal opinion is that it is less so, but I'm don't need to insist on that - all I need is that it hasn't been shown to be not less than or equal to (that is, either more, or incomparable with).

Lots of folks confuse "irreducible complexity" with complexity per se. As I understand it, a thing may be extremely complex without being irreducibly so.

There is a further confusion between evolution and natural selection. The former is simply a "rolling out" of the potential into a new actuality. Natural selection is simply one mechanism by which this is said to happen: the Malthusian struggle, based on limited resources and maximum reproduction, results in "the vast majority" of young perishing. Those that survive this winnowing will tend to be those better fit for the ecological niche they occupy. This may be true of "many egg" species, but maybe not of "large young" species. Kimura's theory of evolution may account for far more than Darwin's. (But many people now use "natural selection" in the metaphysical sense of "undirected evolution by unspecified material causes" rather than in Darwin's scientific sense of an actual, specified physical mechanism/process.)

Behe's contention was that certain biochemical mechanisms of an "all-or-nothing" nature were not attainable step-by-step through natural selection because the intermediate steps would not have been survivable by the species. Too often, proponents of metaphysical evolution are content with hand-waving possibilities rather than with establishing concrete actualities. "It could have happened this way" doesn't fly as an answer in physics or chemistry. It shouldn't fly in biology, either. Yes, it could; but did it?

But from this perfectly fine scientific hypothesis he drew a metaphysical conclusion; namely, the existence of a "designer." He also drew that conclusion from the Big Bang, but that did not make the Big Bang theory wrong, either.

Behe has been firm that evolution by natural selection is the norm above the biochemical level, which is why creationists do not like ID; but he contends that the formation of these biochemical structures may depend on different mechanisms than the Malthusian struggles of the organisms containing them. (Personally, I think physics and chemistry may indeed have more to do with these things than competition for food and mates. And then there is also Shapiro's theory.)

Dawkins famously portrayed the "evolution" of the sentence "Methinks it is much like a weasel" out of a random collection of letters, apparently unaware that he was sabotaging his own argument. Not only was the final form of the sentence determined by an intelligence outside the sentence (viz., Dawkins himself) but the intermediate steps were mostly gibberish, too. (Plus, he cheated on the mechanism: once a letter had mutated to the "right" letter, he did not permit further mutations.) This goes against Darwinism, which holds that each step along the way must be advantageous to the individual (or at least not harmful). If the "intelligibility" of the sentence is its "fitness," we must not start with a random string of letters, nor may we pass through others along the way to a sentence that "makes sense."

Behe may have been quite right about the problem of irreducible complexity and still be wrong about his metaphysical conclusion. (It's bad philosophy to do that sort of thing anyway. Cf. Galton, Fisher, and other progressives drawing a conclusion of eugenics from Darwinian science.)

The theological problem with people who go past IC to ID is more pertinent. Suppose you had a jet engine. There is no measurement, no component, of that engine whose "unlikeliness" would demonstrate the existence of Frank Whittle. That's because the existence of Whittle is simply not an engineering problem. Knowledge of Whittle must come from outside the engine itself. It must be superenginal.

The same is true of the universe. It's not the (apparent) exceptions to the natural laws that evidence something behind it; it's the existence of the natural laws themselves. In traditional theology, you don't need "irreducible complexity." Simplicity is actually a better argument. And that objects fall toward the earth as s=0.5gt^2 always or for the most part is greater proof of a rational intelligence than the occasional stone that might fly upwards.

Reductio as absurdum does not consist of making up a "parallel" argument in another domain. You cannot prove one thing with another thing. The reductio consists of following the implications of the stated argument until they generate a contradiction. We used it all the time in mathematics. To prove P, we would assume not-P and show that a contradiction emerged with the rest of mathematics.

I am aware of the distinction between "very complex" and "irreducibly complex".

If you take a look at this essay at TalkReason.org, especially under the heading "Irreducible Complexity", you will see a sample of 18th century writers who pretty clearly had the notion of "irreducible complexity" in mind when arguing against reproduction/development - not just "great complexity":

http://talkreason.org/articles/chickegg.cfm

To complete my point, I am claiming that the argument that "irreducible complexity implies impossibility of natural origins of a feature" is an invalid argument. I am claiming that, on the basis of a reductio: If that argument were valid, then it would lead to the conclusion that reproduction/development cannot happen. It was invalid when used by Malebranche, Mather, and others to reach that conclusion. If an argument can be shown to lead from true premises to a false conclusion in even just one instance, then it is an invalid argument.

I am claiming that the argument that "irreducible complexity implies impossibility of natural origins of a feature" is an invalid argument.

Of course it's invalid. You can't draw metaphysical conclusions from physical facts. It didn't work for eugenics, either; and that has the championship of Galton, Fisher, and the other heavyweights of the day. Behe's mistake was in supposing that "natural" mechanisms do not imply design. To traditionalist theologians it is the very lawfulness of nature that argues for a rational intelligence behind it all. Hence, he is wrong on theological grounds.

But the base argument is that "irreducible complexity implies impossibility of natural selection as the origin of a biochemical mechanism." We ought not confuse the specific scientific mechanism of "natural selection" with the metaphysical belief in "natural origin." The Malthusian struggle for existence by the top organism may not be the only natural mechanism for the adaptation. In fact, Kimura's theory seems more satisfactory than Darwin's. And Shapiro's theory is highly suggestive, despite its being suspiciously au courant.

If that argument were valid, then it would lead to the conclusion that reproduction/development cannot happen. It was invalid when used by Malebranche, Mather, and others to reach that conclusion.

Not necessarily. The argument that "irreducible complexity" falsifies "the Darwinian mechanism" may be valid even if one misidentifies a particular structure as irreducibly complex. A black swan proves that not all swans are white, even if one holds up a raven as a mistaken example of a black swan. That's an error in the data, not a flaw in the reasoning.

The essayist missed that in his little tract. Those early doubters in spontaneous generation were incorrect in their assessment of the developing organism as being irreducibly complex, not in whether irreducible complexity would be an insuperable obstacle for adaptationist just-so stories.

If an argument can be shown to lead from true premises to a false conclusion in even just one instance, then it is an invalid argument.

Possibly. I've used "substitution of variables" in other cases myself. (I would not have called it a reductio.)

However, if the argument is based on faulty =data= that is another story. Example 1, Xenophanes studied marine fossils in the hills of ancient Greece and determined that a great flood had once covered the whole earth. That was the only natural mechanism he knew of that could deposit marine life in the hilltops. So it was the only scientific explanation. Example 2, Copernicanism was falsified by objective evidence. Earth's revolution should have produced parallax among the fixed stars, but did not. And Earth's rotation should have caused objects dropped from towers to strike the ground slightly to the east of the base; and they did not. Of course, with better instruments both the parallax and the deflection were discovered by Italian scientists in 1806 and 1789-92, resp. There was nothing wrong with the arguments of the skeptics. It was the data at fault.

Of course, with better instruments both the parallax and the deflection were discovered by Italian scientists in 1806 and 1789-92, resp.

Really? Which Italien scientist detected stellar parallax in 1806? Just asking!

@Mike:
You seem to believe that the mistake of the preformationists was that the features that they pointed to were not actually irreducibly complex.

Could Behe have made the same mistake?

Of course, with better instruments both the parallax and the deflection were discovered by Italian scientists in 1806 and 1789-92, resp.

Thony C
Really? Which Italien scientist detected stellar parallax in 1806? Just asking!

Giuseppi Calandrelli. Osservationi e riflessioni sulla parallasse annua dell'alfa della Lira. 1806.

Dropping balls from a tower was suggested by Galileo himself, but we have no evidence he ever did. (It would have answered Bellarmino's request for empirical evidence of the earth's rotation.) Perhaps he did so and, unable to detect the predicted effect, he quietly said nothing. Newton was aware of the test and so was Laplace (who suggested it to Lalande.) None of them actually did the test! Until Battista Gugliemini dropped balls from the Torre del Asinelli in Bologna and also inside the tower [to avoid wind issues]. Excited, he informed Benzenburg in Germany, who repeated the experiment from a church tower in Hamburg and down a mineshaft at Schlebusch. These results were replicated in Saxony by Reich and at Harvard by Hall.

[Historical fallout: Giuseppi Setttele wrote this up in a new edition of his physics textbook, and showed it Olivieri, who was Commisary of the Holy Office. Olivieri convinced the board that this was the long-awaited empirical confirmation, and they lifted the ban on teaching Copernicanism as a proven fact.]

TomS
You seem to believe that the mistake of the preformationists was that the features that they pointed to were not actually irreducibly complex. Could Behe have made the same mistake?

Absolutely. He made theological and philosophical mistakes, but that is expected of scientists; so he may have made errors in measurement or identification. Folks used to thing a horseshoe crab was a crab, no? And when I was a kid, Protists were classed as plants or animals, depending on which they most resembled. And the fungi were classed as plants, too. So classification errors are not uncommon. Personally, I think Darwinists pay too little attention to physics. It might could be that many basic chemical structures are the result of the laws of chemistry or physics and not of natural selection of the containing organism.

That link you supplied was interesting, but I didn't see that a "computer scientist" has any special expertise in either history or philosophy. I noodled around the site and found other essays replete with tendentiousness and innuendo. I figure it's a mirror-image of those places like 'answersingenesis,' only here they put on white lab coats to assert their authority instead of thumping a Bible.

@Mike:

So, you have no objection to the substance of the essay, and prefer to challenge it on the basis of what you think of the author (even though you know nothing about the author) and what you think of some of the other essays at the same site.

Really? Which Italien scientist detected stellar parallax in 1806? Just asking!

Giuseppi Calandrelli. Osservationi e riflessioni sulla parallasse annua dell'alfa della Lira. 1806.

I'm sorry to have to contradict you Mike but Calandrelli's claim is just one of numerous 'false alarms' in the attempts to detect stellar parallax, the figure that he published being of many magnitudes too large. Stellar parallax was first detected, independently of each other, by Bessel, Struve and Henderson in 1838

So, you have no objection to the substance of the essay, and prefer to challenge it on the basis of what you think of the author (even though you know nothing about the author) and what you think of some of the other essays at the same site.

Oh, no. The essay itself seemed somewhat light and, protest to the contrary notwithstanding, somewhat whiggish. I'm not sure he understood Aristotle at all. Understand, it wasn't as bad as some of the others on the site. He may have been a victim of his own need for brevity. But a man is known by the company he keeps, and the site did not inspire confidence. (Compare: one would not especially go looking for theologically correct reasoning on AnswersinGenesis.) If it is read carefully, much of his own evidence leads toward other conclusions. And as I said, his credentials in "computer science" do not confer any special expertise in history or philosophy. He may be one of those really competent amateurs, like Tuchman in history or Heisenberg in philosophy, but there was nothing to inspire that confidence. He seemed, like others, to confuse errors of fact with errors of reasoning. One may drill any number of dry holes without invalidating the notion that drilling is how you find oil.

+ + +
Giuseppi Calandrelli. Osservationi e riflessioni sulla parallasse annua dell'alfa della Lira. 1806.

I'm sorry to have to contradict you Mike but Calandrelli's claim is just one of numerous 'false alarms' in the attempts to detect stellar parallax, the figure that he published being of many magnitudes too large.

As may be. The history of science is full of instances where parameters were over- and under-estimated, but the underlying physics was true. Example: Theodoric of Fribourg over-estimated the angle of refraction, but the mechanism he described for the formation of the rainbow was entirely correct. Example: the Greeks measured the distance to the fixed stars using relative luminosity and found they were an unimaginable distance away: 73 million miles by the modern measure. They underestimated greatly -- even the sun is farther than that! -- but they were still correct in that the fixed stars were an unimaginable distance away. The usual bugaboo: there was a factor missing from their model. (We now use the relative redshift, so we know we're right.) If Calandrielli mismeasured the parallax, he at least mismeasured a parallax. This is a very different thing than a failure to detect it as all.

In any case, your claim that the Copernican system was not empirically proven until 1838, and the Church jumped the gun by nearly two decades in approving it, could be a source of endless amusement.

@Mike:

OK, I eventually get it. You're not going to say anything substantive. I do miss the opportunity, though, to get educated.

But, I wonder whether we might get a response as to why the author's claims of credentials in "computer science" bear repeated mention - especially as I didn't detect any such claims.

Mike, if you are going to argue from the history of science you should at least get your facts right. Firstly Calandrelli did not get his parameters wrong, his figures show that what ever it was that he had measured/calculated he had not detected stellar parallax. Also the attempt to detect stellar parallax in no way qualifies as getting the physics right the crucial point is whether stellar parallax is present or not. Secondly the Catholic Church abandoned its prohibition on the teaching of heliocentricity in 1758 and Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and Galileo's Dialogo were removed from the Index in 1835. Both acts had nothing to do with the detection of stellar parallax but were based on the Church's recognition that all scientists, including the Catholic ones, had long since accepted heliocentricity; I should also point out that this was not the Copernican hypothesis but Newton's version of the Keplerian hypothesis, a different beast all together.

Contrary to popular belief the detection of stellar parallax was not the first empirical proof of heliocentricity. The elliptical orbit of the Earth around the Sun was proved in 1725 when James Bradley detected and measured stellar aberration, although he only published his results in 1727. The diurnal rotation of the Earth was proved in the 1730s when the French expeditions to Ecuador and Lapland proved that the Earth is an oblate spheroid as predicted by both Newton and Huygens as a consequence of diurnal rotation. All that the detection of stellar parallax in 1738 proved is that there is stellar parallax.

TomS
OK, I eventually get it. You're not going to say anything substantive. I do miss the opportunity, though, to get educated.

But, I wonder whether we might get a response as to why the author's claims of credentials in "computer science" bear repeated mention - especially as I didn't detect any such claims.

You have to search out the author on the web. The site you linked to made no mention whatever of the credentials of the posters. This is all well and good: in some cases background, education, and training may not matter. But I had recently read some Midgely, where she comments on the propensity of the technically trained to "colonize" other domains of scholarship, so in a way I was sensitized to it. The white lab coat becomes the priestly vestment. (One is reminded of Michael Schermer writing about the mutiny on HMS Bounty.) Like I said, the insightful amateur is not unknown -- Heisenburg in philosophy, or Tuchman in history -- but one does like to see some indication of this. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of websters posting their personal testaments and witnesses.

My substantive observation was that an argument is not invalid simply because it has been incorrectly used. I even cited examples. Another: Lord Kelvin proved that evolution was impossible because the sun had not existed long enough to allow time for it to happen. He was factually wrong -- he didn't know about nuclear fusion when he said it. But that doesn't make modus tollens an invalid form of argument. Perhaps you missed the opportunity.

ThonyC
Secondly the Catholic Church abandoned its prohibition on the teaching of heliocentricity in 1758 and Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and Galileo's Dialogo were removed from the Index in 1835. Both acts had nothing to do with the detection of stellar parallax but were based on the Church's recognition that all scientists, including the Catholic ones, had long since accepted heliocentricity

Actually, the latter did. The 1835 removal was instigated by Giuseppi Settele with the second volume of his Elementa di Ottica e di Astronomia. The imprimatur was granted in late 1820. This was when the formal ban was lifted. Removal from the Index a few years later was a follow-up. Settele's reasons, which were made to the Holy Office, included Guglielmini's experiments with falling weights in the 1790's, which directly demonstrated the earth's eastward rotation, and the supposed detection of parallax in beta Lyrae. (If you say the detection was a false alarm, I'll take your word for it. What is your source? The eastward deflections measured by Guglielmini, Hall, and others, were also widely off when compared to modern measures. Nevertheless, it still moves.)

You are correct about Bradley. His observations were translated into Italian as early as 1734. But the effect was variable, very small, and (at the time) detectable only by special instruments. It thus passed by unnoticed.

The Jesuit astronomers had been teaching the Copernican methods of calculation even before Galileo published his tract; and later they were teaching it to the Chinese (to great resistance). In the 1758 Index, the clause prohibiting "all books" teaching Copernicanism was dropped, although five specific books (incl. Galileo's) remained on the list. This was not a lifting of the ban, since there had never been an objection to teaching Copernicanism as an hypothesis or as a method of mathematical calculation.

The diurnal rotation of the Earth was proved in the 1730s when the French expeditions to Ecuador and Lapland proved that the Earth is an oblate spheroid as predicted by both Newton and Huygens as a consequence of diurnal rotation.

IOW, P -> Q AND Q, therefore P. This is a logical fallacy, only partly mediated by Carnap (as Popper pointed out). In the method of resolution and composition, what Galileo called "demonstrative regress," one must show not only that Q has occurred, but that P is the only means of producing Q. That's why Guglielmini's experiments were a more direct experience of motion. And Foucault's pendulum even better (and more refined).

But we have deviated far too much from the host's topic. About the notion that creationists have of introducing theokinetics into ordinary secondary and instrumental causation, I think everyone is in agreement. There is a cardinal Schoenborn in Vienna who put it thus: "I hope all the readers ... would join me in strenuously objecting if God is ever invoked in the course of normal scientific explanation!" By this he merely echoed the 14th century theologian-natural philosopher, Nicole d'Oresme: "I propose here to show the causes of some effects which seem to be marvels and to show that the effects occur naturally There is no reason to take recourse to the heavens, the last refuge of the weak [i.e., astrology], or demons, or to our glorious God, as if he would produce these effects directly."

@Mike:
Thank you for confirming what I wrote.

Mike, I'm not quite sure what your agenda is or whether you are trying deliberately to write a revisionist history of 18th century science however Bradley's detection of light aberration very definitely did not pass unnoticed. As to your logical arguments there are two things to note. Firstly although you are formally correct that doesn't change the fact that Maupertuis' confirmation that the earth is an oblate spheroid was also very definitely accepted as an empirical confirmation of Newton's theories and heliocentricity. Secondly the logical fallacy that you elucidate applies equally to Guglielmini's and Foucault's confirmations.

You can find a complete history of the search for stellar parallax in Alan W. Hirshfeld, Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos.