Questions about God and Science

[Cyberman]

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may not persuade you. That is not my concern here. My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction movie with some kind of android figure — that may have been used in the service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the partisan audience).

Can we put this hoary old myth to bed now, please? It's as old and tired as the ridiculous Lady Hope story.

[IATIA]

@IATIA.-I wasn't aware that there was a suitable theory for the origins of the first self replicating molecules as of yet..links? I was aware of the success at New York University but I'm not sure how that applies to origins, as the techniques they used were not "available to the cosmos" as far as we know. I suppose it does show that self replicating molecules can occur without the presence of magic though......
(are we thinking of the same folks?)

Here you go.



And a follow up.

If aminoacids were formed naturally in the oceans, could they also polymerise naturally to form protein microspheres. Calvin (1965) thought that this could happen under three possible conditions: first, if they are dehydrated and subjected to heat. Second, if aminoacids are absorbed in clay or minerals and third, if they reacted with cyanide or phosphate compounds. Sydney Fox (1957) heated a mixture of 20 amino acids and obtained long chains of polypeptides, which immediately formed microspheres in water. They were equivalent to coacervates of Oparin and were called protenoids. Later in 1965, she placed a mixture of dry aminoacids in a block of hot lava and obtained an amber-colored liquid, which when diluted with hot salt solution formed microspheres. Sydney Fox believed that microspheres exhibited some properties of cells, such as they divided by fission, were covered by a double layer of non-fatty membrane and in the presence of zinc they split ATP to obtain energy.
If peptides were formed spontaneously in the primitive oceans, could they duplicate themselves or synthesize new ones in the absence of genetic material. Steinman & Moser (1967) experimentally proved that peptide production could be stimulated by peptides already present in the substrate, without participation of nucleic acids. Perhaps some of them acted as enzymes.

[The Grand Nudger]

Good stuff (we were thinking about different folks). I think the criticisms of this as it applied to self replicating molecules is that they are no such thing (at least not in the way that we currently understand self replication and even more specifically how self replication applies to life). That they exhibit limited replication (and suprisingly, to some, many of the characteristics of living cells), I don't think, was an issue of dissent, but self replication as we understand it is something else entirely.

Now, as far as a theory of the first self replicating molecule this does not qualify. It is a hypothesis (and there are others) of what the earliest replicating molecules could have been (replicating molecules are quite different from non-replicating inorganics..for example, but still quite different from self replicating organic systems). Unfortunately, as it applies to any discussion of origins these microspheres lack any means of transmitting information and were abandoned for mostly this reason in favor of RNA-as-origin of self replicating molecules, another hypothesis. Not that this hypothesis has cleared the bar to theory either (and as always, there are competent arguments against it).

[Brunitski]

Can we assume that you were exaggerating with this statement? Or do you have a list of what science cannot explain?

So what about the zillion things they can't explain? Why rule out god if you don't have answers?

Much more evidence for God.

...and is this a joke Polaris? I mean - I've looked at the following posts and detected nary a snigger - can I ask what you meant by that?

[IATIA]

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Good stuff (we were thinking about different folks). I think the criticisms of this as it applied to self replicating molecules is that they are no such thing (at least not in the way that we currently understand self replication and even more specifically how self replication applies to life). That they exhibit limited replication (and suprisingly, to some, many of the characteristics of living cells), I don't think, was an issue of dissent, but self replication as we understand it is something else entirely.

Now, as far as a theory of the first self replicating molecule this does not qualify. It is a hypothesis (and there are others) of what the earliest replicating molecules could have been (replicating molecules are quite different from non-replicating inorganics..for example, but still quite different from self replicating organic systems). Unfortunately, as it applies to any discussion of origins these microspheres lack any means of transmitting information and were abandoned for mostly this reason in favor of RNA-as-origin of self replicating molecules, another hypothesis. Not that this hypothesis has cleared the bar to theory either (and as always, there are competent arguments against it).

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True, but there is enough information to show proof of concept and definitely worth following up. We have been able to create each of the pieces of the puzzle on their own, under natural conditions. We are just missing the full connection from one step to another. I expect soon that someone will step out of the 'box' and give us that 'aha' moment, an epiphany, if you will.

[Angrboda]

I'm going to reverse the order of your arguments, in order to bring out the important point, even though Rhythm has partially addressed them.

Why should the example of Mr. Monton be more persuasive than yourself (or the principle proponents of ID)? Why should I give a shit if someone thinks that ID is valid science? In the same vein, upon what metrics do you imagine ID to be valid science (he offered no elaboration), just a short quip about how "some arguments (which ones...he doesn't care to elaborate here either) make him "less certain" about his atheism. Do you think you might be able to fill in those blanks for me?

(reading through his blogs on the subject offer no insight, though they do provide compelling evidence that this guy is a goddamned moron. He thinks ID is science despite having no evidence supporting it, but simultaneously thinks that Quantum Mechanics is bullshit despite there being evidence to support it........just as one glaring example)

3. I also listened to a lengthy interview where he offered more than in his blog. I won't try to speak for him. I suppose if you read his book or spent a little more time reading what he's got to say you could hear his reasons for thinking that ID is worthwhile as science.

You, in the context of a thread asking basically why conjecture in science is accepted for (basically) intangibles when in theology it is not. And here we notice yourself retreating into a world where authority is the basis of credibility, not rationality. We might "say" we have faith in our doctor's diagnosis, and that he is asking his conclusions be accepted on faith in his expertise, but this is a different specimen of faith. If pressed, the doctor could explain in detail why he believes you have X disease, and demonstrate that this belief is reasonable. However if you look to say the Bhaghavad Gita for knowledge, many of it's pronouncements cannot be unfolded to demonstrate their reasonableness. It's the difference between someone making a legitimate appeal to authority to found the claim's credibility, and an illicit appeal to authority where the authority's credibility cannot be established through reason and ultimately derives solely through blind faith.

And it's not the least bit ironic that when referring to someone you claim can provide substance to the notion of possible intelligent design as science, you refer solely to his claims and his authority as a professional, not to any specific argument or evidence he presents. This is an illegitimate appeal to authority, and makes your dwelling on a fallacious appeal to authority all too familiar ground for you. Science doesn't appeal to authority because we revere them as men, but because we have reason to have confidence in their judgments, and, if we wanted, we could duplicate their path to verify its integrity; you can't do that with a holy book.

1. Only because he's a pro philosopher with a PHd and a professor of philosophy at University of Colorado. He's also more sympathetic to atheism than I am.

Again, here we see you appealing to the authority of a professional, but in an illegitimate way. We don't really care what he claims so much as whether he can back up those claims or not. I haven't seen the latter.

And for what it's worth, being a professional philosopher does not make one's ideas about philosophy automatically credible, much less those about science. (In recent months, an atheist book club and I read Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves about free will (at my urging). While there were certainly rewards to be had, to my mind, the second half of the book is fatally flawed by a logical gaffe rendering it invalid. I love Dennett and have been reading him for 20 years, but I'm interested more in whether the ideas make sense, not whether the men behind them make sense.

This is a common theme with Creotards, that they think if they can discredit Darwin, they've debunked evolution. It doesn't work that way. Argumentum ad hominem is still ad hominem, no matter how you dress it up. And illegitimate appeals to authority result in all your sand castles being built on top of quicksand.