‘…..the mathematical complexity of Mount Everest is greater than the mathematical complexity of a single-cell organism… Yet, single-cell organisms are alive and Mount Everest is not. No degree of mathematical complexity is either a necessary or sufficient condition for life. Therefore, no definition of life in terms of mathematical complexity will ever capture the essence of what is to be alive. Not understanding this point and the principles behind it is like not understanding why even a million atheists in a room will never add up to the intelligence of one Einstein. Why? Because you can’t compare apples to oranges!’

I agree that complexity does not equate to life.I would surgest that Dembski makes a distinction between the mountain and the single celled organism via the idea of specified complexity.That doesnt go far in explaining the essence of life but it does make a distinction between contingent and noncontingent entities,allowing the possibility of describing something as designed.

‘But as soon as it is admitted that only a rational entity (a nous) can reason from the knowledge provided through the senses by the MESs to the existence of design, then it is no longer science is it? It’s philosophy… but then there goes the whole ID project out the window.’

Do you mean stating an object as designed, constitutes an exclusively philisophical statement ?
Is n’t Science, at least in part about categorising the cause of things ?
If a rational entity describes from the knowledge provided through the senses by the MESs to the existence of a necessary object is that science ?
Can you clarify Im missing the point here somehow.

I understand what you’re asking, but with information there is only change. In a way, any change is “new” because it wasn’t there before.

Really? This is only change:

as;dlkn34tkjnd df;klajneltn q;kfne; nqwefkjnpnapseonjqpoij :KLNE; asdklen;lknnu34rn14nv
a;lskn qewjkng q35ijnasd.le asd;lkn4nalkn

Do you see my point?

Thank your for your comment; it spurred my thinking in a way that led to my most recent blog post.

I’m surprised by some things you say, though. This, for example:

My comment was written from the perspective of one who views ID as a prospective scientific theory. I have no quibble (or interest) in ID as philosophy.

You repeated the same point in different ways later in your comment. My surprise is best summarized by this question: what if ID as philosophy turns out to be true? As philosophy, is it separable from science? As science is it separable from philosophy? How could it be?

I’m also surprised you say that ID does not “rise to the level of rain dancing,” in its ease of testability. You could as easily have said ID doesn’t rise to the level of a baking soda-vinegar volcano. At least in the way you presented it, rain dancing is about at the complexity level of an eighth grade science project. Not that eighth graders could recruit willing volunteers to rain dance, or that they could run enough tests to provide sufficient statistical power, but that those are the only complexities.

But you must recognize there are levels and there are levels. There are levels of scientific testability, and levels of complexity. Baking soda-vinegar volcanoes and rain dancing are highly testable. BSV volcanoes have no complexity whatever (from an observational standpoint, at least). Rain dancing has considerably higher complexity from a social, cultural, and religious standpoint, but not from the standpoint of testing their effectiveness.

In its level of testability, which is what you were pointing to, evolution does not rise to the level of rain dancing. Neither does Bell’s theorem. So I’m surprised you tried to make a point about that.

I’m going to meld two quotes from your comment here:

My comment was written from the perspective of one who views ID as a prospective scientific theory. I have no quibble (or interest) in ID as philosophy…. I don’t know how ID proponents imagine that ID is going to be hypothesized. I think that this is a persistent problem that should bother you, because you consistently talk about ID as being something that should be studied by science.

You’re right on the second half of that. There is significant difficulty in defining ID’s scientific predictions in such a way that its results can be absolutely distinguished from those of evolutionary theory. This does bother me, and I think it bothers other ID proponents. It bothers them enough to work on it. Black-body radiation bothered Einstein.

I’m not the scientist who will solve it; my role in this debate is to observe and discuss the swirl of philosophical, religious, cultural, and media-related surrounding it. When it is solved, if it is, it will be solved partly through good philosophical thinking about what intelligence is and what natural processes can be expected to accomplish. Philosophy and science are inseparable in this debate.

I’m also surprised by this:

to my reading you are advocating that we treat ID’s philosophical inferences with the same certainty we reserve for the Modern Empirical Sciences.

What surprises me there is that your response seemed to have nothing to do with the point you were responding to: that I’m not sure what kind of hypothesis you’re asking ID to produce and do research on, but that there is a certain set of hypotheses that would be illegitimate to expect. I can’t figure out how your answer connects with the question in any way.

No, you can’t prove a negative. This is a dead end for ID.

Wrong.

Yes, there are certain kinds of negatives you cannot prove. (“There is no teacup-shaped object anywhere in the universe except on earth.”)

But there are negatives you certainly can prove. (“There is no possible sequence of chess plays that can result in seven same-colored pawns arranged in an L-shape, three on a side plus one at the corner in front of the rook.”)

And there are negatives you can show to be extremely likely. (“There is no teacup-shaped satellite orbiting the sun exactly opposite to the earth.”)

One branch of ID research is directed toward positive inferences (see esp. Stephen Meyer’s latest book—I haven’t read it, as Charlie apparently has, but I’ve heard enough discussion to know that’s what it’s about at least). One branch is devoted to the negative: showing that evolutionary explanations are either impossible, like the chess game, or highly unlikely, like the flying teacup.

I understand what you’re asking, but with information there is only change. In a way, any change is “new” because it wasn’t there before. I gave one example in the other thread about an experiment in which single-celled organisms went through a few key mutations and then began using citrate in a different way. Keep in mind, evolution suggests descent with modification. Each change is a modification from the previous state. Thus, each “new” thing is going to be modified from the old. There is one hypothesis on bird evolution that suggests bird digits evolved from dinosaur digits due to a few mutations and a frame shift (there is even a fossil that catches this in the act). I’m not sure of the state of this hypothesis, but it illustrates how evolution tends to work. Furthermore, genomes can be added to or deleted from. There are examples that suggest genes can be duplicated and modified (like antifreeze). Genes are like shifting sands, and there are all kinds of methods for change.

You’d have to state the information argument directly (if it’s anything like the one in the “fine tuned cosmos” thread, then I mounted two arguments there). The argument of IC is interesting, but I question its efficacy for two reasons. 1) As I stated before, evolution is essentially descent with modification, which means that functions change over time. Old ones get hijacked to perform new functions. 2) Things always tend to be constituted in simpler ways. Like I was telling Dave, some organisms don’t need a brain to have nerves. Functions only seem irreducibly complex in retrospect because they’ve evolved an interdependent relationship.

My knowledge of cell evolution is somewhat limited, but as I understand it, there is an ambiguous line between the chemical origins of life and a robust cell. The question is whether these building blocks and ancient cells could be sustained so that modern pieces could be built. There is one theory that abdicates a traditional reading of evolution in favor of some form of gene transfer (paper here). Cells wouldn’t have been complete as we understand them, missing parts that would seem important today, and they would be compromised, which means that perhaps there was a certain plateau, the modern cell, that needed to be reached before diversification and evolution could begin. Once the modern cell arose, it would take over. In addition, all cells today have obviously undergone billions of years of additional evolution, even the simplest ones.

I’ll respond to the second half later, but for now I have to go.

I knew that in order to establish a cause as the best explanation, the historical scientist must do more than establish that a proposed cause could have produced the effect in question. He must also provide “evidence that his candidate [cause] was present” and show via ” a thorough search” that there is an “absence of evidence” of “other possible causes.” In other words, in addition to meeting a “causal adequacy” condition, a best explanation must also meet a “causal existence” and/or “causal uniqueness condition”.

Unproven and self-refuting negative claim.

Science doesn’t require or produce “proofs”.

What do you mean, “at best, a philosophical inference”? What’s wrong with that?

My comment was written from the perspective of one who views ID as a prospective scientific theory. I have no quibble (or interest) in ID as philosophy. But I apologize because my words were not sufficiently clear on this point.

Why does “as science…” rule your opinion of knowledge? And if philosophical inferences are of no value to you, I call on you to answer these questions without employing any.

As I said above, I was trying to talk about ID’s need to clear the minimum hurdle of scientific acceptance. In my opinion, it does not rise to the level of rain dancing in this regard. By that I mean that it is easy for me to imagine how to test rain dancing scientifically. (Test rain dance, see result. Repeat. Compare to control. Etc.) I don’t know how ID proponents imagine that ID is going to be hypothesized. I think that this is a persistent problem that should bother you, because you consistently talk about ID as being something that should be studied by science.

There you go equating science with “relevantly ‘true’” again. Could it be “true” (or even true without the scare quotes) without being 100% reliant on science as its foundation for its truth?

I used the quotes because you used the word “true” in your review. (I would not have chosen that word.) Again, and this is my fault for not being clear enough, I mean the word “relevant” in my comment to mean the extent that it pertained to scientific inquiry. This may be, as I read other comments here, because I mistake the term ID to mean a scientific movement; it appears that you, and others, consider it to be philosophy as well. (I really don’t have any interest, meaning I don’t take any side, in the issue of ID being true in a philosophical sense. My concern is with ID as science.)

Anyway, I don’t advocate for teaching ID as science. I advocate for studying and researching it as a matter of science and philosophy.

I am glad to hear that you do not advocate teaching ID as science. (As an aside, I think that I agree with more of the comments here in that regard that I thought I would – I think we’re all closer to agreeing what ID embodies than it sometimes appears.) And, believe it or not, I advocate researching ID as science. But that advocacy is contingent on a hypothesis.

What kind of working hypothesis are you looking for? If you’re looking for some hypothesized mechanism by which the design would have been carried out (what did the designer do and how did the designer do it?), that would be contrary to the whole sense of what ID is saying. Even though theism is not entailed by ID, the possibility of a supernatural designer God means that ID must remain open to the possibility that there is no purely natural mechanism by which design was carried out. Therefore to hypothesize such a thing would be to hypothesize something that might be contradictory to ID. (Theists like myself would state it even more strongly like that, but I’m trying to represent ID in general here.)

I believe that you and I part company here, because to my reading you are advocating that we treat ID’s philosophical inferences with the same certainty we reserve for the Modern Empirical Sciences. Sorry, but if you want that stamp of approval you have to go through the same channels as everything else.

So again, what kind of hypothesis are you looking for? Something we could test and control for? That’s not the nature of historical sciences. Even evolution can’t boast that kind of hypothesis testing. The best evolution can do in the lab (i.e. with controls) is that certain kinds of genetic changes can happen. It can’t show that they did happen in history. (And it has failed miserably in the lab showing that significant new information can be produced via evolutionary means.)

A lot to unpack here – we could spend one or two whole postings on this paragraph alone. I’d suggest that you consider doing that – offering Evolution or other theories as examples, and comparing where ID can conform and where it must diverge. I think the comparison might be illuminating for everybody.

In the matter of origins, either there was design, or there wasn’t. If it can be shown that the natural world as we see it could not have arisen apart from design, then design would be entailed.

No, you can’t prove a negative. This is a dead end for ID.

No one’s saying that a designer couldn’t have designed life (and the history of life) to make it look like it evolved.

Isn’t that the whole point of the ID debate? You say it looks like it evolved (an assertion with little empirical support) and ID says it looks designed (an assertion with at least as much empirical support as evolution).

The point is that there are vastly many more ways to design it, and so it is, all things being equal, extraordinarily unlikely that life is designed.

You could look here and below for the same discussion last week.
http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2009/07/science-and-religion-reason-vs-authority/#comment-14724

At every step in the creation of life, a designer could alternate between breeding and manufacturing, evolution and traditional design, organic materials and non-organic, etc.

Your point being….?

Yet, as far as we have ever observed, every step of life appears evolved through common descent.

Is doctor(logic) begging the question?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Evolution predicts descent, common descent, common architecture, and common composition.

But the question was,

It is just this understanding of the mechanisms of life which has revealed the inadequacy of evolution to explain more than trivial changes in biology.

None of your aforementioned predictions has anything to do with explaining more than trivial changes—at least not until a mechanism can be produced by which RV & NS through common descent can be shown actually to have the power to create the changes attributed to them. That power has been postulated, it has been assumed as necessary (by people with a priori anti-teleological convictions), it has been taken for granted, but it has never been demonstrated.

You mean to say you haven’t figured it out yet? The frog factories are frogs! Just as bunny factories are bunnies…

And car factories are cars?

Look, breeding is the only way evolution can make life. It’s not the only way to create life if design is allowed.

No one’s saying that a designer couldn’t have designed life (and the history of life) to make it look like it evolved. The point is that there are vastly many more ways to design it, and so it is, all things being equal, extraordinarily unlikely that life is designed. At every step in the creation of life, a designer could alternate between breeding and manufacturing, evolution and traditional design, organic materials and non-organic, etc. Yet, as far as we have ever observed, every step of life appears evolved through common descent.

If I deal cards off a deck – 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 of clubs, is the deck shuffled or sorted? Yes, it might be shuffled, but the odds are 310 million to 1. We only have to find one card (species) that’s obviously shuffled (designed), but, as it stands, it would be irrational to believe the deck was shuffled given the first 5 cards off the deck.

It is just this understanding of the mechanisms of life which has revealed the inadequacy of evolution to explain more than trivial changes in biology.

No, it isn’t. Evolution predicts descent, common descent, common architecture, and common composition. That is what has been observed. In contrast, we see metal clocks, plastic clocks, electric clocks, gravity clocks, metal cars, fibreglass cars, and never have two clocks mated to get a third clock, and cars aren’t even distantly birth-related to clocks.

While we may use evolutionary algorithms in rare cases where traditional design is problematic, we’re not limited to evolutionary algorithms. However, evolution is limited to evolutionary algorithms, and that’s why it predicts what we see rather than what we don’t.

If you’re saying that evolutionary biology hasn’t yet explained everything, then I agree, but that’s not an argument for ID unless arguments from ignorance are in good standing with you.

Evolutionary literature is filled with interpretive bias and vague promises that further investigation will ultimately reveal that all is in accord with the materialist paradigm, despite the abject failure of observation to confirm theory.

Common descent? Yep.

Common biology? Yep.

Transitional fossils? Yep.

DNA? DNA evidence for evolution? Yep.

Not one of these things need to be here in a designed world.

It’s ID that’s the abject failure. Evolutionary biology is a stunning success.

I guess biologists can just keep searching for nuclear fawns, robot bunnies, and those frog factories we would expect to see if the world was designed.

You mean to say you haven’t figured it out yet? The frog factories are frogs! Just as bunny factories are bunnies, cell factories are cells, and human factories are humans. It is just this understanding of the mechanisms of life which has revealed the inadequacy of evolution to explain more than trivial changes in biology.

The point of most scientific practice is the elimination of bias.

There is a world of difference between scientific practice (observation and experimentation) and the way those obervations are interpreted. Evolutionary literature is filled with interpretive bias and vague promises that further investigation will ultimately reveal that all is in accord with the materialist paradigm, despite the abject failure of observation to confirm theory. I’ll spare the readers another reiteration of the numerous anti-teleological quotes.

Little point in your return at all. Just lonely?

Ooh! I get it. Now, if I return here to make a comment, I’m proclaiming that I’m a lonely man. Clever.

I love you, too, Charlie.

Rather I believe (as I’ve written here before) that God provides strong internal assurance of his reality to believers, and that this assurance lines up strongly with external (philosophical, historical, and existential) evidences for God.

What’s the difference between “strong internal assurance” and cognitive bias?

None that I can see. The point of most scientific practice is the elimination of bias. Yet the (allegedly) convincing part of Christianity is immune to scientific inquiry. In other words, Christianity is where the bias is.

Where science aims to reduce bias, religion aims to amplify it.

Of course, you already know my position on ID, so there’s little point in my expounding on it any further. I guess biologists can just keep searching for nuclear fawns, robot bunnies, and those frog factories we would expect to see if the world was designed.

To reiterate: we have witnessed and documented small changes to the point where new subspecies and species have emerged.

Fine. How about significantly new structures and functions?

On top of that, there is no good science to suggest that there are divides that segregate large portions of organisms other than evolutionary divergence through time.

Sure there is. The lack of any demonstrated ability by evolution to produce significantly new information in organisms is good evidence that there is a huge information divide there.

And it’s pointless to deny that it’s primarily a Christian vehicle, not because it couldn’t be anything otherwise, but because of who is piloting it.

The follow-up question to that is, so what?

There are very few ID arguments I’ve seen that haven’t lived off of some misunderstanding of the way things are. The rest are just arguments from incredulity, themselves living off of what we do not presently know.

The argument from information is immune to both of these criticisms. The argument from irreducible complexity can be attacked by the second of these criticisms, but it can also mount a defense (what we know about cell biology indicates a very low probability of it having arisen without intelligent involvement—that’s an argument from knowledge).

That’s what makes these arguments so hard to track. ID can range from young earth creationism to old earth creationism to some sort of intelligent selection to evolution with natural selection. I suppose that ID could even work in the cosmic sense.

So where’s the problem with that? Why does ID have to be one unitary statement? Why can’t it be a broad research program, being approached from multiple perspectives? It’s silly to suggest there’s something wrong with that. By the way, if all of the approaches fail but one, that’s still success for ID. The overall point of ID is (in one formulation, and may Bradley Monton forgive me for not following his more tightly defined version) that there are basic features of the natural world that are best explained by an intelligent process. It only takes one of those to establish ID’s general proposition.

I haven’t actually seen an atheist who uses a mere scientific argument.

That’s good. I agree. I have, however, seen ID opponents who want to treat ID as if it must be a mere scientific argument. There’s a thread at Telic Thoughts where that’s under discussion even today.