Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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| Quote (Daniel Smith @ Nov. 30 2008,14:27) | | Quote (Reciprocating Bill @ Nov. 30 2008,06:04) |
Let's tote up the recent arguments I've made that, by your own standards (no response), you have have conceded:
- ID/god theory provides no causal story (mechanism) other than uttering "design." It therefore completely fails as explanation for the origins and evolution of life. |
I've given you the mechanism. I can show the exact same mechanism in action. I can show that my mechanism can organize complex materials for specific function. |
Sorry Daniel. "Just as people design things, God designed things" isn't a mechanism. "People design things" has a causal story behind it - the actual history of the representational and planning procedures we call design, and the execution of those procedures. That is exactly what is missing from your tale. It must remain missing, because the supernatural agency that you assert is, by definition, not amenable to the constraints entailed in constructing such a causal story. The analogy fails.
| Quote | | I can show that my mechanism can organize complex materials for specific function. |
Because the analogy fails, that demonstration has no relevance to the question of supernatural design.
| Quote | | Quote | | - Ordinary design detection works because of background knowledge and inferences about the designers. We lack that with respect to supernatural design. |
That's bull and you know it. Just because we know a lot about "ordinary" designers does not mean we could not detect design elsewhere under different circumstances. It's a non sequitur. |
Ordinary design elsewhere, by unknown authors? Perhaps (as I said before vis Stonehenge on Mars), because we can infer a causal history similar to our own, and hope to support or disconfirm those inferences with further observations.
Supernatural design? Not so much. No plausible causal story capable of being constrained by empirical facts has been advanced analogous to the above, and never can be. (Does god slip a pencil behind his ear?)
The fact that 15 years of ID theory has produced no examples of the formal application of "design detection" - zero, zip, nada - in a world supposedly awash in "designed" organisms should also tell you something.
| Quote | | Quote | | - Design and agency, and the products of design and agency, emerging without a causal history are no less miraculous and supernatural than matter and energy poofing into existence at God's whim. |
Essentially you're saying that if we don't know the history of something, that 'something' is miraculous. Another non sequitur. |
The non-sequitur is yours. I am saying that design originating from supernatural agency is no less supernatural than God's willful poofatude of matter and energy from nothing.
It is not that we don't know the history (if knowable in a scientific sense, then that history is essentially a natural history), it is that you are postulating a process that is, by definition, without a natural history. Something that arises devoid of a natural history of any kind is 'miraculous,' by definition.
| Quote | | Quote | | - Front loading fails because the contingent and inherently unpredictable physical circumstances that adaptations must track over time demand implausible foreknowledge of, or control over, those circumstances on the part of the designer. |
It requires what only God has. Life requires what only God has. |
Now respond to the problem I described for front loading.
| Quote | | Quote | | - Numerous examples of predictions and tests of predictions made from the perspective of evolutionary theory have been citied. No testable predictions originate from "God theory." |
The "God theory" predicts that there will be organization for function at the heart of everything. |
Again, "predicting" things we already know (that life displays extremely complex functional organization) is not prediction.
(Everything? Stones? Rivers? Gingivitis? Everything?)
| Quote | | In essence it predicts that life's technology and complexity are consistent with what we would expect from a creative being of infinite intelligence. |
Also, one doesn't "predict" one's conclusion.
I am referring to a testable empirical prediction, which you have amply demonstrated you are unable to produce.
| Quote | | Quote | | - More generally, theories invoking the supernatural are incapable of guiding research, because any observation can be reconciled with the action of an "all powerful" being capable of moving matter and energy by acts of will. |
Maybe you should go back and reread my posts where I already addressed this and the other issues you're regurgitating here. Are you really that stupid? Or do you just play dumb in front of your internet friends? |
I must have missed it. I don't recall you addressing the problem that any observation can be reconciled with the action of an "all powerful" being capable of moving matter and energy by acts of will. And I don't see any examples above of unique, testable empirical predictions arising from "God theory" in any of your posts that have, or in principle could, usefully guide scientific research. I do recall you stating that you are unable to supply any. I must have missed your revision. Please repeat.
| Quote | | Quote | | - It is not enough to point to lacunae - even large lacunae - within an otherwise fertile and productive theoretical framework to reject that framework. Also needed is a competing framework that accounts for all of the facts and data subsumed by the prior framework, fills some of those lacunae, and generates unique, testable empirical hypotheses and predictions that have the potential guide further empirical work (extra points for ignoring this about a dozen times). |
I addressed this as well. Remember "endless appeals to future knowledge"? At some point a theory has to generate sufficient explanatory power or else be abandoned. Kudos to you for ignoring everything you don't want to hear. |
"Addressing this" consists of supplying the alternate theory, showing how it accounts for the data already accounted for by the current theory, showing that it fills additional lacunae present in the current theory, and specifying the unique, testable empirical hypotheses and predictions that emerge from your alternative that have the potential to guide further work.
Your response is yet one more claim regarding the failure of current theory, and hence recapitulates the very problem I point to in my 'lacunae' remark. You haven't addressed this at all.
| Quote | | In the meantime, no one here has addressed my original challenge. |
Also in the meantime, contemporary empirical research on these topics many have alluded to here (such as work on the blood clotting cascade described by Kenneth Miller and other papers we have examined here) continues apace - yielding new knowledge every day. It is hard work, much more difficult than spouting reactionary armchair bullshit, and it goes where it goes and yields what it yields. Our burden is to show that the framework is fertile and continues to yield that new empirical knowledge, not to satisfy your demand for the finished work. No one claims that we see solutions to all existing problems. Nor do we need to make that claim.
The only party appealing to "future knowledge" to support his argument is you, Daniel, when you "predict" outcomes that can't be known until the end of history.
[Edits of this and that]
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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