Saturday, June 02, 2012
Darwin and ID--A Brief Comment
There is a lot of noise in the channels of Darwin versus ID
Most adherents of Intelligent Design have very carefully and firmly differentiated themselves from creationists. This includes Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Stephen Meyer, the latter having perhaps written the most definitive tome on ID—Signature in the Cell. None of these scientists, and that is precisely what they are, ascribe to the 6,000-year creation meme, nor do they ascribe to equating design with a designer, and hence God. They merely observe in nature that there are highly regular structures that appear to have the quality of having been designed. It was Dembski that devised a logical test for that quality. They leave the ancient saw: “Who designed the designer” to philosophy and religion.Abiogenesis, or the origin of life, has been excluded from Darwinism, where Thaxton among others have suggested that it is difficult to begin the evolutionary process without accounting for how DNA information was created in the first place and only then passed to succeeding generations of species.
Further, in considering evolution as descent with modification, they argue that the random selection process is completely inadequate to construct in an unplanned manner either the collection of molecules found in the human cell, or their purposeful functions, or the information transfer processes that these molecules perform, all leading up to Man.
One critical point they cite is the so-called pre-Cambrian explosion of fully formed body types with no precursor intermediate forms. Not only does this aspect mitigate against Darwinism, but also the fact that from that period till now further limits the time for random modification evolution to about 500 million years, and not the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, or even the 4.7 billion years since the formation of Earth. Of course, there is the stopgap idea of Punctuated Equilibrium to try to make it all work anyway. There are several mathematical calculations whose results indicate that 500 million years is simply not enough time for the complex structures of primates to be formed by blind chance (Dembski, among others). Then, too, they cite the rather obvious facts that species breed true, and that true examples of species cross-breeding are not found.
Michael Behe introduced the concept of irreducible complexity, which states that for an animal to be functionally complete there is an irreducible set of organs, limbs, feeds, and controls without which the animal cannot function. This leads to the conundrum of how such animals could be constructed by successive small modifications when the modifications from nature are random and unplanned, but the poor animal needs all of its minimal parts working together simultaneously, and they cannot be acquired instantly, plus, there are no prior versions of the animal or its parts in the pre-Cambrian set of species. It is my understanding that all attempts so far to disprove these allegations have been abject failures, but I am sure that there have been later tries that could possibly have been more successful. In that case, I would want to see the evidence, and never mind the author.
Yet another hit on ID comes from the circular reasoning used by publishers. Since there have been few peer reviewed publications on the subject, ID isn’t accepted science, so ID is refused publication. The fact is that a number of key books on the subject, including most on the reference list below, have been peer reviewed, as have a number of articles in scientific publications.
The attitude I abhor is the closed-minded one that says Neo-Darwinism is absolutely right, it is settled science, the ID people are not scientists, and what’s more, we will explain all of these anomalies sooner or later, given time and resources. These are most unscientific attitudes.
Anomalies indeed! Why such a theory has to be so sacrosanct is beyond my comprehension, and champions of these statements appear to me to violate the dictum of science that you follow the data and the evidence wherever it takes you. Thesis is, or should be, contrasted with antithesis and the synthesis that follows. Darwinism has been a productive concept in many ways and deserves respect, but it isn’t a theory without flaws and knowledge gaps.References:
1. Signature in the Cell, Stephen C. Meyer, HarperCollins, 2009.
2. Why Us? James Le Fanu, HarperCollins, 2009.
3. Intelligent Design 101, H. Wayne House Editor, Kregel Publications, 2008.
4. Intelligent Design, William A. Dembski, InterVarsity Press, 1999.
5. Darwin’s Black Box, Michael J. Behe, The Free Press, 1996.
6. The Darwin Myth, Benjamin Wiker, Regnery, 2009.
7. Doubts about Darwin, Thomas Woodward, Baker Books, 2003.
Most adherents of Intelligent Design have very carefully and firmly differentiated themselves from creationists. This includes Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Stephen Meyer, the latter having perhaps written the most definitive tome on ID—Signature in the Cell. None of these scientists, and that is precisely what they are, ascribe to the 6,000-year creation meme, nor do they ascribe to equating design with a designer, and hence God. They merely observe in nature that there are highly regular structures that appear to have the quality of having been designed. It was Dembski that devised a logical test for that quality. They leave the ancient saw: “Who designed the designer” to philosophy and religion.
Abiogenesis, or the origin of life, has been excluded from Darwinism, where Thaxton among others have suggested that it is difficult to begin the evolutionary process without accounting for how DNA information was created in the first place and only then passed to succeeding generations of species. Further, in considering evolution as descent with modification, they argue that the random selection process is completely inadequate to construct in an unplanned manner either the collection of molecules found in the human cell, or their purposeful functions, or the information transfer processes that these molecules perform, all leading up to Man.
One critical point they cite is the so-called pre-Cambrian explosion of fully formed body types with no precursor intermediate forms. Not only does this aspect mitigate against Darwinism, but also the fact that from that period till now further limits the time for random modification evolution to about 500 million years, and not the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, or even the 4.7 billion years since the formation of Earth.
Of course, there is the stopgap idea of Punctuated Equilibrium to try to make it all work anyway. There are several mathematical calculations whose results indicate that 500 million years is simply not enough time for the complex structures of primates to be formed by blind chance (Dembski, among others). Then, too, they cite the rather obvious facts that species breed true, and that true examples of species cross-breeding are not found. Michael Behe introduced the concept of irreducible complexity, which states that for an animal to be functionally complete there is an irreducible set of organs, limbs, feeds, and controls without which the animal cannot function. This leads to the conundrum of how such animals could be constructed by successive small modifications when the modifications from nature are random and unplanned, but the poor animal needs all of its minimal parts working together simultaneously, and they cannot be acquired instantly, plus, there are no prior versions of the animal or its parts in the pre-Cambrian set of species. It is my understanding that all attempts so far to disprove these allegations have been abject failures, but I am sure that there have been later tries that could possibly have been more successful. In that case, I would want to see the evidence, and never mind the author.
Yet another hit on ID comes from the circular reasoning used by publishers. Since there have been few peer reviewed publications on the subject, ID isn’t accepted science, so ID is refused publication. The fact is that a number of key books on the subject, including most on the reference list below, have been peer reviewed, as have a number of articles in scientific publications.
The attitude I abhor is the closed-minded one that says Neo-Darwinism is absolutely right, it is settled science, the ID people are not scientists, and what’s more, we will explain all of these anomalies sooner or later, given time and resources. These are most unscientific attitudes.
Anomalies indeed! Why such a theory has to be so sacrosanct is beyond my comprehension, and champions of these statements appear to me to violate the dictum of science that you follow the data and the evidence wherever it takes you. Thesis is, or should be, contrasted with antithesis and the synthesis that follows. Darwinism has been a productive concept in many ways and deserves respect, but it isn’t a theory without flaws and knowledge gaps.
References:1. Signature in the Cell, Stephen C. Meyer, HarperCollins, 2009.
2. Why Us? James Le Fanu, HarperCollins, 2009.
3. Intelligent Design 101, H. Wayne House Editor, Kregel Publications, 2008.
4. Intelligent Design, William A. Dembski, InterVarsity Press, 1999.
5. Darwin’s Black Box, Michael J. Behe, The Free Press, 1996.
6. The Darwin Myth, Benjamin Wiker, Regnery, 2009.
7. Doubts about Darwin, Thomas Woodward, Baker Books, 2003.
Labels: Darwinism, Intelligent Design
Sunday, April 08, 2012
On Scientific Atheism
The Scientific Atheist Sees Chimeras
Isn’t it ironic that a scientific atheist decries our Transcendent God as so much chimera and smoke, and at the exact same time exalts modern science as the only real purveyor of truth? He is fooling himself, of course, since at the heights of today’s science lie chimeras and smoke of equal or greater etherealness.
What do we find there? Multiple Bubble Universes that can never be observed, directly or indirectly and cannot be tested; a General Theory of Relativity that cannot be reconciled with probabilistic Quantum Theory, a mishmash of mathematical netherworlds that goes by the name of String Theory, or later on, Superstring Theory, that has lost its promise to perform the reconciliation of those theories so devoutly wished for into a “Theory of Everything” because they find that many thousands of solutions exist to the equations put forward; and, an Anthropic Universe that suggests strongly that our Universe was designed for Man, and this simply cannot be. These entities and theories are no less chimerical than that of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. There lies the irony!
This highly charged scientific soup is constantly stirred around hoping that something intelligible will magically pop out of the mixture to put order into our understanding of the origins of everything. They propose a God Particle(!) that permeates the Universe and gives mass to the particles of the Standard Particle Model—the so-named Higgs Boson, that physicists hope will be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and France; and talk about measurements needed that are many, many orders of magnitude smaller than we can ever measure-- the so-named Planck Length (1.62 exp -35 m); Gravity waves are supposed to be carried by an ocean of Higgs Bosons; again, more unobservable entities. They fervently believe that there is a “Wave Function of the Universe” that accounts for all phenomena in the Universe, but this function is a figment of their imagination. It doesn’t exist.
For all of their prowess in creating scientific theories they cannot explain the origin of life, or abiogenesis, and their revered Darwinian Theory of Evolution is so riddled with holes it is laughable that scientists still defend it religiously in public with all their might, while admitting in private that the theory needs some serious overhauling. The atheist gloried in the theory of evolution since it bypassed the need for God to perform his creation of the Universe and life. No more. That theory cannot explain the simplest of cell structures or molecules and how they were formed by random steps, or what information must be supplied and how, because it turns out that the number of steps needed for them is virtually unknowable and uncountable! This in turn means that there has not been enough time since the Big Bang for random actions to create complex biological structures on Earth.
Science therefore has totally let the atheist down in his need for a mechanical, Godless self-creation. The problem is, most scientific atheists don’t know these facts and still hold to their outdated views, and as for other atheists, they hold to their beliefs without any support at all.
Truly ironic!
The Scientific Atheist Sees Chimeras
Isn’t it ironic that a scientific atheist decries our Transcendent God as so much chimera and smoke, and at the exact same time exalts modern science as the only real purveyor of truth? He is fooling himself, of course, since at the heights of today’s science lie chimeras and smoke of equal or greater etherealness.
What do we find there? Multiple Bubble Universes that can never be observed, directly or indirectly and cannot be tested; a General Theory of Relativity that cannot be reconciled with probabilistic Quantum Theory, a mishmash of mathematical netherworlds that goes by the name of String Theory, or later on, Superstring Theory, that has lost its promise to perform the reconciliation of those theories so devoutly wished for into a “Theory of Everything” because they find that many thousands of solutions exist to the equations put forward; and, an Anthropic Universe that suggests strongly that our Universe was designed for Man, and this simply cannot be. These entities and theories are no less chimerical than that of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. There lies the irony!
This highly charged scientific soup is constantly stirred around hoping that something intelligible will magically pop out of the mixture to put order into our understanding of the origins of everything. They propose a God Particle(!) that permeates the Universe and gives mass to the particles of the Standard Particle Model—the so-named Higgs Boson, that physicists hope will be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and France; and talk about measurements needed that are many, many orders of magnitude smaller than we can ever measure-- the so-named Planck Length (1.62 exp -35 m); Gravity waves are supposed to be carried by an ocean of Higgs Bosons; again, more unobservable entities. They fervently believe that there is a “Wave Function of the Universe” that accounts for all phenomena in the Universe, but this function is a figment of their imagination. It doesn’t exist.
For all of their prowess in creating scientific theories they cannot explain the origin of life, or abiogenesis, and their revered Darwinian Theory of Evolution is so riddled with holes it is laughable that scientists still defend it religiously in public with all their might, while admitting in private that the theory needs some serious overhauling. The atheist gloried in the theory of evolution since it bypassed the need for God to perform his creation of the Universe and life. No more. That theory cannot explain the simplest of cell structures or molecules and how they were formed by random steps, or what information must be supplied and how, because it turns out that the number of steps needed for them is virtually unknowable and uncountable! This in turn means that there has not been enough time since the Big Bang for random actions to create complex biological structures on Earth.
Science therefore has totally let the atheist down in his need for a mechanical, Godless self-creation. The problem is, most scientific atheists don’t know these facts and still hold to their outdated views, and as for other atheists, they hold to their beliefs without any support at all.
Truly ironic!
Labels: Agnosticism, Anthropic Principle, Atheism, Darwinism, God, Intelligent Design, Origins, Universe
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Are We Really Anti-Science?
I do not think so at all for the following reasons (among others):
There are over 5,000 cataloged theorems in science, some of the most famous of which are:
The General Theory of Relativity
The Special Theory of Relativity
Quantum Theory
The Standard Model of Particle Physics
Newtonian Physics
The Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution (NDT)
Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory (AGW)
Some scientists would have it that if we have serious doubts about the latter two theories we are anti-science. Never mind that we buy into by far the majority of the 5,000 theories in the catalog, if we doubt Darwin or Man-made Global Warming we are not supporting science! This is rank nonsense.
Not only is it nonsense, in itself the statement is anti-science, since science is an open quest for the truth, and along with that quest comes reasonable doubts about the existing base of evidence supporting the current theories of science.
Let us examine Darwin briefly:
1) There are no intermediate forms for the species, especially for the Pre-Cambrian period as Darwin’s Theory demands. None!
2) Speciation during the Pre-Cambrian period was almost immediate and left virtually no time at all for gradual evolution as Darwin demands.
3) Microevolution requires infinite time to hopefully produce the complex molecule structures in animals by random selection, which is mathematically impossible.
Therefore, one can quite properly have doubts about NDT.
Then let us examine Anthropogenic Global Warming briefly:
1) Base data was massaged to fit.
2) Sufficient knowledge of the interaction of the sun, clouds, water vapor, and cosmic rays is lacking in the formulations.
3) Earth’s natural rotation cycles account for most temperature variations.
4) There are unscientific motivations to sell the public on AGW by frightening them in order to gain massive economic and fiscal control over our resources and governments.
Thus, there are valid reasons to doubt AGW has been properly analysed.
I do not think so at all for the following reasons (among others):
There are over 5,000 cataloged theorems in science, some of the most famous of which are:
The General Theory of Relativity
The Special Theory of Relativity
Quantum Theory
The Standard Model of Particle Physics
Newtonian Physics
The Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution (NDT)
Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory (AGW)
Some scientists would have it that if we have serious doubts about the latter two theories we are anti-science. Never mind that we buy into by far the majority of the 5,000 theories in the catalog, if we doubt Darwin or Man-made Global Warming we are not supporting science! This is rank nonsense.
Not only is it nonsense, in itself the statement is anti-science, since science is an open quest for the truth, and along with that quest comes reasonable doubts about the existing base of evidence supporting the current theories of science.
Let us examine Darwin briefly:
1) There are no intermediate forms for the species, especially for the Pre-Cambrian period as Darwin’s Theory demands. None!
2) Speciation during the Pre-Cambrian period was almost immediate and left virtually no time at all for gradual evolution as Darwin demands.
3) Microevolution requires infinite time to hopefully produce the complex molecule structures in animals by random selection, which is mathematically impossible.
Therefore, one can quite properly have doubts about NDT.
Then let us examine Anthropogenic Global Warming briefly:
1) Base data was massaged to fit.
2) Sufficient knowledge of the interaction of the sun, clouds, water vapor, and cosmic rays is lacking in the formulations.
3) Earth’s natural rotation cycles account for most temperature variations.
4) There are unscientific motivations to sell the public on AGW by frightening them in order to gain massive economic and fiscal control over our resources and governments.
Thus, there are valid reasons to doubt AGW has been properly analysed.
Labels: Anti-Science, Darwinism, Global Warming, Science
Friday, February 20, 2009
Intelligent Design (Rev II)
A Very Brief Sketch of the Current State of Affairs
A number of critics of Intelligent Design (ID) have rejected this effort as interfering with their thrust to discredit Darwinian evolution. These critics believe that injecting what they see as yet another theory of evolution that is incomplete and certainly not as comprehensive as Darwinian Evolution Theory, or DT, to be simply off target and a waste of intellectual energy. Other critics have a different view, that of welcoming any attacks on DT, especially if they are as scientifically valid, as ID proponents believe, and that make a serious contribution to the understanding of macro and micro evolutionary biology, or biology per se.
These critics look to ID as merely a tool of discovery of some new and important phenomena and relationships to add to the general knowledge, and not a new theory of biological everything. Their view is that if it is good science, it should be supported for where it leads, and if the stronghold of DT is breached, so much the better, since random genetic mutation over complex organisms as in DT is the main target. The ID community has been jumping into the conceptual breaches of DT almost from its inception, notably using what they call the Wedge Approach.
What is the Wedge Approach used by many Intelligent Design adherents today? As I understand the wedge approach, it is meant to divide strong Darwinian Evolution Theory adherents, on the one hand, from those who are beginning to doubt DT; and on the other hand, to divide those who believe ID is merely unscientific Creationism, from those who believe ID does not champion Creationism at all, and is actually quite scientific in nature and useful.
This approach, then, is meant to stress marginal DT advocates by showing the deficiencies of random genetic mutation and natural selection. It is also intended to establish a hard decoupling of ID Theory itself from the stigma of Biblical Creationism. Their honest approach thus says "We don't know who, what, when why or how the universe, man and life has been created and evolved, but we are chipping away at a few aspects of the question."
There has been no secret about this approach. It was well-documented by Phillip Johnson in several of his books years ago, so there should be no surprise to it for anyone that has kept up.
The attack on DT by ID adherents (and others as well) is being carried out on both the macro and micro levels of evolutionary biology. From the macro level, it has been demonstrated that virtually none of the proposed hierarchies of evolving species have any true, unfettered, fundamental organizing principles—not, morphology, not DNA, and not genomes, for instance. They are all in startup trouble beginning at the Cambrian Period, demonstrations of valid common descent chains notwithstanding.
A more telling factor is that the billions of years that DT evolution supposedly required for random mutations and natural selection to work has been severely reduced, to the point that it appears to be mathematically impossible for random mutation/natural selection to have worked at all beyond single trivial steps, let alone the millions and millions of steps between the cell and a human being. That is, except for trivial adaptations entirely within species.
It has been pointed out that mutation/natural selection cannot create new biological information. Just how speciation takes place without the generation of new biological information is an unknown. However, it is true that single mutations of lower cellular structures do occur, just not at the scale of eukarotes.
Further, one of the standard retorts of DT adherents is that DT predicts what will be discovered in the so-called gaps in the fossil records. So the current lack of fossil proof, which many important DT’ers now acknowledge, will be taken care of in due course. Thus, DT’ers have exercised faith in their theory of an "inverse" version of “The God of the Gaps”, just as the ID’ers have been accused of having in their theory.
The ID’ers, on the other hand, have firmly divorced themselves from the Creationist label by demonstrating that they looking for sure signs of design, but not trying to identify the designer at all. No longer are they in the position of supporting a God of the Gaps.
Their tests to detect design have evolved around common sense identification of unnatural material things, the Dembski mathematical elimination or Explanatory Filter test, and the Behe “irreducible complexity” test, among others. When applied to such systems as the bacterial flagellum the tests clearly leave us with the question: “If this is not an example of intelligent design, and it is mathematically impossible for it to have evolved by mutation/natural selection, then what could possibly be the answer?” The ID’ers of today do not inject God as the answer into this situation.
Many people in science are reluctant to accept the idea that it is actually intelligent design that is at work, for that might mean that the next step would be a religious or transcendental interpretation that is unacceptable to them. Unlike true scientists, they are not going where the data takes them, but are ignoring it, because one of the possible outcomes does not fit into their preconceived notions of how things should be for methodological naturalism to hold. Thus, they still attack ID Theory ferociously, using somewhat specious definitions of what science is, and is not, in order to exclude ID from consideration.
So, the attack on ID immediately revolves around the definition of science, which the methodological naturalists or materialists claim to be the study of natural phenomena, and that only. Philosophers of science, however, totally reject this definition, and as a matter of fact, reject the current attempts at defining science canonically at all as being woefully incomplete and exclusive of what they believe science to be. They cite the existence of immaterial entities such as numbers to extend the universe of possibilities beyond the material, thereby negating methodological naturalism.
Further, they state that there is no fine line that can be drawn between what is science and what is not science, because no definition can bridge the problems of necessity and sufficiency adequately, without leaving some number of activities on the wrong side of the line that otherwise measure up to being true science. Not the least of which are most of the scientific investigations of the past 100 years or more, which is rediculous. Of the ten or fifteen most revered scientists of the past century, at least nine of them are avowed theists, including Einstein, but that most certainly does not invalidate their work.
These philosophers of science are dismissive of other scientists in various disciplines who state that ID is not science, because they are way out of their area of specialty, and are pontificating on things for which they have no proper foundation in scientific philosophy.
J. P. Moreland states that; “There is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions by which to define science.” He does agree, however, that there are useful rules of thumb that can help to clarify what science is. He believes that the application of the methods and tools of science in ID Theory can be accepted, then, as being within the purview of science.
But what of the usual tests of good science practice? The utility of a theory can be demonstrated by its ability to explain phenomena, and by its ability to predict further aspects of phenomena. Does ID Theory demonstrate these capabilities? The answer is yes.
ID Theory provides an excellent explanation of some observed phenomena that other approaches have not equaled. It is a theory that generates not only explanations, but also testable results, either positive or negative, as has been shown in the cases of the bacterial flagellum and blood clotting mechanisms, among others. The attempts at refuting these two examples have all failed as of this writing.
The argument rages on, with each side--pro and contra ID Theory--taking hard hits and then recovering to throw their own punches back: a “How could you possibly believe in ID?” from the DT’ers, and a plea from the ID’ers to “Please look at the evidence objectively!”
It is a show with an ID David facing a DT Goliath !
References:
1. Intelligent Design 101, H. Wayne House, General Editor, Kregel Publications, 2008.
2. The Edge of Evolution, Michael Behe, Free Press, 2007.
3. Intelligent Design, William Dembski, InterVarsity Press, 1999.
4. Doubts About Darwin, Thomas Woodward, Baker Books, 2003.
5. Darwin on Trial, Phillip Johnson, InterVarsity Press, 1993.
6. Intelligent Design Report, http://www.arn.org/
Labels: Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Science
