Posted by
Rob on Thursday, July 21, 2011 1:23:14 PM
One of the comments on the
previous post caused me to do some further analysis, which I had said I wouldn't post, but have reconsidered. The comment was:
This seems like an odd tact on Dennis’ part and I don’t understand the point.
If, Dennis’ position (I’m going to call it “Agnostigner” – someone
who is agnostic about the Designer) is correct and the Designer is
irrelevant, then what does ID bring to any table scientifically?
If the Designer is irrelevant, what does the explanation of design
tell us about the world/universe? Does it impact any other scientific
explanation in anyway and if so, how?
So let's start by analyzing the "odd tact" of Dennis, which seemed odd to me as well, until I realized it was a version of the demarcation problem.
The Odd Tactic
a) In 1963 physicists proposed a Big Bang solution to the riddle of cosmological data. But it looks like it undermines the Epicurean/Democritean materialism that says matter and time are eternal. So after 20 years or so of fretting (documented in Robert Jastrow’s “God and the Astronomers”) physicists come to the cognitively dissonant position that it is impossible to discuss anything shorter than a Planck time after the Big Bang. It’s just a physical and metaphysical boundary, a DMZ.
Similar debates occurred in 1870 when Presbyterian James Clerk-Maxwell found evidence for atoms, which seemed to undermine the Christian story of creation. His answer (
given in a lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science) was that atoms exist, but we can’t say anything about how they are created. So the DMZ was erected by theists to protect theology in 1870, but now used by atheists to protect atheology in 1970.
b) Then in 1990, along comes ID claiming that the fine-tuning of our universe is evidence of design. The DMZ is breached. In 1890 it was atheist Bultmann’s development of statistical mechanics, that generalized this atomic stuff to the entire universe. Maxwell’s DMZ line was breached.
Just as atheism spread rapidly in 1900, leading to two World Wars, so also this ID stuff is spreading rapidly in 2000, looking to undermine Darwinism, evolution, and the whole Materialist enterprise. Angry atheists like Dawkins or PZ Myers are name-calling and fuming, but the whole time they are back-pedalling. What is a thinking atheist to do?
c) Dennis is trying to defuse the ID advance using the same strategy as physics did when they were confronted with the Big Bang. You develop a plethora of theories that diffuse the boundary, until it seems as if the breach of the DMZ never occurred. Big Bang bounces, quantum-loops, quantum-foam, multiverses, landscape theory, string-theory are all diffusing the fact that the data all support a beginning to our universe.
So Dennis says, “This Designer thing is getting to you, right? So lets make a lot of Designer theories to diffuse the impact of admitting a beginning. And after you see all these theories of alternate Designers, you will realize that ID may be true, but you still don’t need to admit a personal designer.”
My problem with both physicists and Dennis is that a bucket-load of bad theories does not change the fact that there has been a sea-change in philosophy, with Materialism losing all the credibility it had gained in 1900.
BTW, theists in 1900 also tried to resist the atheist tide, the two most notable solutions being German liberalism and fundamentalism. Liberalism tried to find a theology that didn’t care whether the Creation account was true or not, and Fundamentalism denied the validity of any theology. Dennis is applying the first solution and Dawkins the second.
So perhaps what is puzzling you is the conversation occurring between Dennis the Liberal Atheist and Dawkins the Fundamentalist Atheist.
The ID Advantage
Why would Dennis want to admit ID in the first place? What advantage is gained in acknowleging ID?
This is so obvious as to be unnoticed. Nearly every advance in biology in the past 40 years has been made by asking "What is the purpose of that?" Say you discover that it takes 12 steps for coagulating blood when one or two would do just fine, and so someone spent a long time deciphering the purpose of such a complex procedure. Or we find that DNA is composed of 4 nucleotides that appear in random proportions, and Nobel prizes were awarded for discovering why. That is to say, purpose is not just a nice thing to find, but essential to scientific progress. Darwin denies purpose, claiming that all these things are merely "apparent purpose." But after 150 years, this mantra is wearing thin. Only by making "apparent purpose" into real, bona fide, functional, designed intention, can we make the sort of progress that is observed in the past 30 years.
Let's see how this works. Darwin says, "No, the tongue of the hawkmoth wasn't made a foot long just to get the nectar of the star orchid, rather, the hawkmoth accidently discovered that a longer tongue got more nectar, so it evolved toward longer tongues." Ignoring the special pleading for Lamarckian evolution, what Darwin is saying is that functionally useful stuff will be selected by Natural Selection. But what happens when the functionally useful stuff has an intermediate step? What if the hawkmoth could survive by appealing to human beings who bred it in captivity? How is "human appeal" a functional thing that natural selection would select for? It's completely arbitrary, and not a linear thing, like "the more red the wings, the more appeal it will have".
In exactly this same fashion, DNA has no functional properties. Longer DNA doesn't make the cell live better, nor shorter DNA. Rather its the intermediate step that turns DNA into proteins that has functional properties. So the only reason DNA gets "selected" by natural selection is because it has a non-material, informational purpose, not because it does stuff. In fact, you don't want your computer hard drive to do anything else but store stuff, because if it turned out to be needed for heating coffee or making nice noises, then you couldn't upgrade your hard drive and you'd never be sure if you wouldn't lose data because your teenagers were playing rock music on it or making too much coffee. Likewise, the DNA has to be functionally inert, or it wouldn't store information very well. Chemists knew this had to be true of any information molecule long before DNA was discovered to hold information.
Once again, if DNA has no function, then natural selection can't select for it. So any theory that discounts purpose, cannot explain why DNA is a non-functional, but highly purposeful molecule.
ID is just such a scientific theory that includes purpose. And biology, despite its attempt to call everything "apparent purpose", is finding that purposeless functionalism cannot predict, cannot describe, and cannot explain most everything learned in the last 30 years.
So when scientists switch to ID modelling, they can make predictions (why convergent evolution should be common), construct functional models (why a computer hard drive works for DNA transcription), and explain anomalous behavior (why altruism is hard-wired) far better than their colleagues who cling to a purposeless functionalism. Then when ID scientists make dramatic progress in fields where Darwinists are stagnant, people sit up and notice.
And that's why Dennis Jones is trying hard to reap the benefits of purpose without the consequences of purpose--he wants design without the designer.