Posted on 09/13/2005 4:20:14 PM PDT by rob777
True. This leaves open the very real possibility that any "designer" tests I define in terms of known processes may be doomed to fail.
OTOH, the means by which a particular physical process can be harnessed are probably fairly constrained. It certainly seems reasonable to base scientific tests on the assumption that there will be commonality. If that assumption turns out to be incorrect, then gosh, I guess my tests didn't support the hypothesis: which is exactly how it's supposed to go.
What would be bad science would be to simply assume we couldn't recognize non-human design, and not try to test it at all.
That being said, where's your baseline for non-human designers? Where's your collection of known products of non-human designers, from which you can draw inferences about unknown artifacts? Hate to say it, but the answer is: you don't have one, and hence it's of a wholly different nature than spotting signs of human designers.
Actually, we do have a collection of known products of non-human designers. For example, it's known that crows and other animals invent and use tools. True, they're not terribly sophisticated tools. If we take sticks as an example, we find that animals use them in the exactly same way you or I use sticks as tools. The point being, the evidence points (weakly) to there being a likelihood of commonality in human and non-human design.
What you are lacking are data points requiring an explanation other than natural selection. That would seem to be the minimum requirement for a paradigm shift.
I don't know that, and neither, I suspect, do you. We know that human processes are constrained, of course - some of the proposed candidates for Grand Universal Designer are not, shall we say, posited to be quite so limited. In which case, there's no reason to expect commonality, nor does the lack of it count as evidence against a presumably ineffable designer ;)
What would be bad science would be to simply assume we couldn't recognize non-human design, and not try to test it at all.
I'm not saying you can't test for it at all - I'm saying you can't test for it the way you test for human design, because you don't have the tools (facts and inferences) that you use to determine human design. That's why the two cases are not at all analogous - to do it that way, the way you examine things to decide if they're human artifacts or not, you need knowledge about non-human artifacts that you don't have. Worse still, you need knowledge about non-human artifacts that, thus far, you can't get.
Or you have to find some other way to test. Dembski thinks he has another way - I think it's complete bunk, but there you go.
For example, it's known that crows and other animals invent and use tools. True, they're not terribly sophisticated tools.
I believe you've mentioned the crows before. The problem is, the crows very neatly refutes your argument, insofar as nobody recognized the artifacts as tools in and of themselves - the only way anyone knew that the crows were using tools was by observing them in the act of using them. Do you expect to be able to observe the Designer in the act of designing, so that you may recognize his handiwork later? ;)
Are you stating that Darwin hypothesis was sufficient for the paradigm shift in science that now excludes all telic arguments? Natural Selection caused the paradigm shift?
It has been said that Natural Selection “… is empirically, that is, scientifically, meaningless, but it makes a pretty metaphor. It originated in a categorical error parading as an analogy. For the past 150 years, it has deluded unthinking simpletons into mistaking it for a real phenomenon, when it is nothing but a collective anthropomorphization of non-specified natural causes of mortality presented as a mystical, animist 'presence' possessing the intelligence and powers of discrimination necessary to make actual choices, i.e., 'selections'. As such it may be accurately summed up as a childish religious mystique, that is, as a superstition for the godless.”
If the universe and humans are the happenstance result of a Blindwatchmaker, than “Natural Selection is the Blind Gameskeeper (he works on the Estate of the Blind Watchmaker), and he kills everything he catches. Natural Selection is a synonym for bad luck, misfortune, and getting the pointy end of the stick.”
But… But… This also could be due to the ‘noodly string theory’ and all the appendages (or universes) which formed due to the ‘noodly string theory’ ; )
But for ID to challenge natural selection, it must propose an alternate history that would expect to find some different kind of evidence. Your hypothetical insulin gene is a step in the right direction, but to be science, you would need to predict a specific finding and give a reason why you expect to find it.
In other words, you would need to predict the finding of something completely out of place, but which makes sense to your designer. To do this you need to specify something of the means and motives of the designer, and those means and motives have to explain everything in biology -- bunnies and herpes -- the whole nine yards.
If you can't specify the means and motives of the designer, how on earth do you expect to infer design?
And I asked ---
Are you stating that the Darwin hypothesis was sufficient for the paradigm shift in science that now excludes all telic arguments? Natural Selection caused the paradigm shift?
Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life
Impact of forty years of advances in chemistry on evolutionary theory
Do orthologous gene phylogenies really support tree-thinking?
The Methodological Equivalence of Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic Origins Theories
The first article seems to be dealing with abiogenesis and is irrelevant to evolution. I'll woork on the othes as I get time.
That would be one way to force it, but there are others. For example, we could test current scientific methods against cases where we already know the right answer. If we wanted to test the ability of science to detect design, we have plenty of human examples to chose from.
I think the paradigm shift would (or should) come no matter what the result.
If the scientific method was shown incapable of providing the right answer, then clearly there is a significant gap in science's explanatory power. Scientists would have to rethink what constitutes a "proper" solution space.
OTOH, if the scientific method could reliably detect design, then it would no longer be possible for science to automatically reject the design hypothesis: it would, by your own standards, have met the definition of a "scientific" theory.
The reason for the paradigm shift is simply that it's no longer possible to deny that "design" can happen. The design hypothesis is valid, because we know that it's actually correct in specific instances.
But once again: none of this relieves one of the responsibility to actually verify a design hypothesis.
The first discovery startled evolutionary biologists: contrary to the Darwinian notion of competition among species for survival, microbial species cooperate. While a species in pure culture will grow to the limit of the resources available, as Darwinian theory expects, in a natural setting species form a stable community where the numbers of each species stay constant so long as the environment of the community does not change radically.
Excuse me, but just where in Darwin is cooperation forbidden? Life is full of symbiotic communities, as well as stable parasitic communities. What is this guy talking about?
You could, but it wouldn't be original science. It might weed out hopelessly wrong assumptions, but there an infinite number of ways to get to a predetermined conclusion. The Bible Code quackery comes to mind. If you know the desired text, you can manipulate any long document mathematically to find it embedded.
I can't prove it, of course. But if we suppose that the hypothetical non-humans work within our physical reality, and are subject to the same physical laws, then I'd suggest that there are only so many ways to, say, float on water or generate artificial light; any vehicle would have to be of a proper scale to carry them; they'd probably have to carry heavy objects, and we could probably recognize the characteristics of a carrier; their sensors would likely detect the same sorts of things that ours do; they might very well generate and use electricity; and so on.
If we turn our attention to living things, the "solution space" for manipulating cellular, DNA-based life would be constrained by the properties of the organisms being manipulated.
I'm saying you can't test for it the way you test for human design, because you don't have the tools (facts and inferences) that you use to determine human design.
All that really means is that any test based on such an assumption would not be successful. However, the "human approach" test would still have explanatory in caseS where there was a strong enough similarity between human and non-human approaches.
The problem is, the crows very neatly refutes your argument, insofar as nobody recognized the artifacts as tools in and of themselves - the only way anyone knew that the crows were using tools was by observing them in the act of using them.
Yes -- although one could say the same thing about the early efforts of stone-age humans. But if you'll recall, the question was whether or not we have a catalogue of non-human products against which we compare our own works -- in the context of whether a solution space is constrained by the physical characteristics of the problem at hand. The lesson of the crows is that those non-humans used their stick tools in ways that are recognizeably similar to what we would do.
It's not intended to be original science. It's supposed to be a verification of methods and assumptions against a known baseline.
That's how weather prediction models are tested, for example. If a model can't use last Thursday's data to accurately predict last Friday's weather, then we know there's a problem.
But no human, other than a psychopath, would design the ecosytem as it is. Humans, aside from criminals, do not design machines that eat other machines. And it's quite possible to have living things that don't eat other living things.
It's true that humans build war machines and destructive machines, but an entity capable of designing life, and which designed what we see, would be criminal.
I covered that scenerio. That test weeds out the hoplessly wrong models, but it says absloutely nothing about whether it is right. There are an infinite number of ways to predict things that have already happened. Predicting stuff that hasn't is the trick.
If ID could predict a fossil find that is different from what natural selection would predict, it would have a large foot in the door.
Thinking a bit more about your predictive model.
If you come up with a predictive model, it will necessarily embody a theory about the nature, capabilities and "motives" of the designer.
Such a theory would be science, unless it includes the "insert miracle here" experssion in its equations.
May I ask your interpretation of the cloud in the Exodus?
Ain't it fun to have a civilized discussion on one of these threads?
But I have a little cautionary tale for anyone who thinks you can find the signature of the designer.
In Carl Sagan's Contact, the book, not the movie, there's a chapter called The Signature of the Creator (or something close to that). In this chapter, on advise from an alien civilization, the expanded binary digits of pi are searched for patterns. Of course a pattern is found; a string of digits that can be placed in an array, like a digital camera image, to form a picture.
The problem -- not mentioned in the book -- with this is that the digits of pi are effectively random. If you expand pi indefinitely, you will find every possible finite string, including the ascii encoded works of Shakespeare.
Patterns do not automatically reveal their history.
So? You will find them encoded in Hebrew, backwards.
Infinity is rather large. Darwinism relies on that "fact".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.