Karkianman101

I was on topic when I said that Intelligent Design was akin to faulty Aquinian logic...

Pokerface

Therein lies the rub here.

ALL logic (and not just Aquinas) is predicated on postulates. Certain things must be taken as given in order for further logic to follow. If A then B PRESUMES A, and can not function without this presumption. Hegel (if I've not forgotten my philosophers already) worked hard to pull this back to something as basic as possible when he made his philosophy: the best he could come up with was "Sein" (German for "to be" or "being").

Evolution's postulate is something along the lines of "From Soup Came Stuff", and ID's postulate is "From A Designer Came Stuff". So far as logic function goes, they're exactly the same; they're the "given" in the logical equation.

Now, to pull in what Addict mentioned, separating ID from religion is a hard sell, especially in the Bible Belt. That the Designer is meant to be the Christian God is a pretty transparent fact, in my opinion.

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Wulfyn

On logic:

Logic is of course based on assumptions (called Premises), and is a very old way of trying to figure out the way that that things work. In its most basic format:

PREMISE A
PREMISE B
CONCLUSION

eg.

P(A): Socrates is a man
P(B): All men are mortal
C(AB): Socrates is mortal

Logic thus has 2 points of error, called Truth and Validity. An example of validity is whether the logic function works, and is basically a test of whether you can get the conclusion from the Premises.

P(A): Unripe bananas are green
P(B): You should not eat unripe bananas
C(AB): You should not camp a UCB on TG Server 1

You see that the conclusion has nothing to do with Premises. That is invalid. The other test is truth, and this is whether the statement is correct or not, and is almost always based on the premises.

P(A): Socrates is a dog
P(B): Dogs have 4 legs
C(AB): Socrates has 4 legs

But we know Socrates does not have 4 legs, as he is a man. The statement is valid, but because of premise A it is false. Even more confusingly the conclusion can still be false whilst being correct.

P(A): Socrates is a dog
P(B): All dogs are mortal
C(AB): Socrates is mortal

Here the conclusion is correct, but the statement is still false as premise A is not true.


Overall we can see that logic is a much more powerful tool for disproving things than proving them. It can take a lot of proof to actually proove something is true, and only one incident to prove tat it is false. For this reason logic is used very heavily in mathematics, but very little in science. Mathematics is very provable, science is not. Philosophy (once termed natural science) greatest implementer of logic was probably Descartes (the guy who also invented cartesian equations). He sought to reduce logic back to bare fundamentals, and to do this he realised that all premises had to also be a conclusion for them to be absolutely true (and valid). He sought to think up premises that were true by definition, as opposed to things that had to be based off of other things. Are all men mortal? Well, just because we have never encountered an immortal man doesn't mean they don't exist. We have records of immortal men in the guise of Greek and Roman gods (although they weren't unkillable). This might allow us to define men as mortal, and anyone who we thought of as an immortal man as a god. The problem here however is that we don't know if Socrates is a man or a god until he dies.

Sat in his room late one night (with a pipe and his dog we are led to understand) he struck upon something which definitely could not be disproven. His thoughts had to exist. If his thoughts did not exist, what existed to contemplate that his thoughts did not exist other than his thoughts themselves? He could not prove his body existed, as that could be an illusion (caused by a malevolent daemon no less ), but his mind had to exist. Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. This of course spawned Rationalism, Mind/Body debates, Internalism/Externalism (and incidentally British philosphy).

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On science:

Science does not seek to prove anything. Science is about modelling the real world in order to make accurate predictions as to what will happen. The difference is subtle, but fundamental, and in fact quite often understanding is not a necessary part of this process. We cannot prove that Mars will be in a certain position in the sky at a certain time, but with the work of Newton and Kepler we can predict where it will be. As long as these models keep working then they are useful. An asteroid could strike Mars and put it out of postion, in which case any attempts to prove that it would be in a certain place at a certain time would be invalidated, but science is very careful to make apparent that models are just models.

Cosmology is a model, and we do not understand all the fundamentals. Einstein came up with the general and special theories of relativity, which modelled the solar system in terms of a 2-d landscape of gravitational wells that other bodies 'rolled' around. This theory was more advanced and more accurate than anything that Newton had come up with, but does that make Newton's laws of motion incorrect or obsolete when dealing with planetary bodies moving? Newton said that a body will continue to move with no acceleration (same speed, same direction) unless acted upon by an external force (gravity in this sense). Einstein simply refined the theory to show that the body was still moving in a straight line if you considered it in a different way.
A lot of science is to do with perspective, after all does anything that recent scientists have done invalidate the special or general theories of relativity? Einstein was very religeous, and thus refused to believe his own findings (which led to Quantum Mechanics), stating that God does not play dice. Schroedinger famously backed Einstein with his cat in the box experiment, citing that under the laws of Quantum physics a cat in a box that would be filled with poisonous gas upon the decay of a radio-isotope (something that is seen as fundamentally random) would be both dead and alive. It is often mistaken as a demonstration of Quantum mechanics in action, but in fact Schroedinger used it to show how ludicrous the concept was. How honestly can the cat be both dead and alive at the same time - it cannot. And yet Quantum mechanics still exists as a very good model of how things work at a very very small level (anything larger than a few atoms does not follow the model at all, to the grace or dismay of the cat).

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On Evolution:

Science gets even more complicated when dealing with biological organisms, mainly due to their complexity and inconsistency. Thus models become much harder to create, and more often are 'proven' and 'disproven'. Anyone alive in the UK in the 80's will probably be able to testify the battle of the margerines, as adverts were flooded into our homes through the television successively informing us that saturated fats were healthier than unsaturated ones.. oh no we meant unsaturated.. oh no back to saturated again (ad nauseum). That is not to say that biology does not make good science, it's just that the models have to be a little fuzzier at times, and you have to accept that somethings will not be able to be replicated every time (not because they are not replicatable, the basis of scientific 'proof', but because the base materials you are working with will not always be the same). It would be like having your premises written in a random laguage every time you use them, and whereas they more or less mean the same thing, slight nuances in how languages convey meanings would mean that it was not always replicatable. For example one polynesian tribe has only 3 words to deal with colour (black, white, coloured), and thus would be useless in our banana logic (although to my knowledge they have no issues with the concept of capture and bases).

A few years ago I once undertook an experiment to show the effect of neurotransmitter saturation upon receptors (using a guinea pig ileum). Of course the whole class came out with very different results using different segements of the same tissue, due to operator and muscle tissue inconsistency. In another experiment we were testing the effect of noradrenaline (norepinephrine) upon a frog heart. The concentration we needed to elicit a textbook result was around 50x that of the one given in the textbook. The textbook model was obviously flawed in some way until we realised that the experiment in the book must have taken at a different time of year. We were conducting the experiment in late November, a time when frogs reduce the number of receptors in their heart tissue in order to begin hibernation.

Thus applying logic to evolution is fundamentally flawed, as it is simply the wrong way of looking at it. Evolution, like much of the rest of science, is a model for how things came to be the way they are. At the time when Darwin was travelling to the Galapagos islands he was reading a book that contained a radical new theory. At that time in the geological circles it was hailed that the land and seas shaped themselves by a method known as calamatism. The basic idea was that anything so large as a mountain range could not possibly have been created in any other way than by a huge upsurge from the ground. This new theory claimed that this was not true, but instead it was formed slowly over time. We now readily accept the latter to be true. We can see erosion in affect, we know that geological plates slide over the earth's magma, and where plates connect cause huge fault-lines. We 'know this to be true' because we have taken measurements, seen the results, have made predictions that have since happened to be true. But this of course proves nothing. We believe that the himalayas have been created by the oceanic indo-asia plate crashing into the continental asian plate, forcing it up. But can we prove it?

Similarly can we prove that life originated by the interaction of amino acids to form viral-like entities, that somehow picked up a cell-wall at some point, before going on to group together into multi-cellular organisms, before developing on to mutli-organed organisms? well if we did try to do ust that (and only that) then it would be history not science. The theory of evolution is ongoing, and it has just as much to do with what will happen now, and in the future, as what happened in the past.

There used to be a species of moth in the north of England. They were almost entirely white-ish in colour. Every now and then you'd see a black one, but they did not survive for long in general, as they had pretty poor camoflage in their natural habitat. Of course the moth was not intelligent enough to realise how much they stuck out, and with no intuitions to adapt to the environment the black ones generally got on with the business of being a good source of food for birds. Then along came the industrial revolution. A clear example of survival of the fitest, and for me this is the alluring thing about the theory of evolution, and how it is self reinforcing. We know that reproductive biology proves that our genes are passed down to our offspring, and so we are likely to be similar to our parents. Evolution simply ties it up that strong offspring are more likely to survive to have offspring of their own, and so on. In the case of the moth the black gene was not particularly recessive. The only reason why the amount of black moths being born was so much fewer than the white ones was because there were so few black moths that got to breed that the gene was in very low circulation. Of course then the industrial revolution came and covered all the trees with soot, all but wiping out the moth population as the white ones were now very very visible to the birds, and the black varient became the predominant strain.

You find examples of evolutionary process in many places. Whenever organisms are presented to a new environment they adapt. We know this as there are some very specific things that organisms do that are very niche to their environment. These organisms do very well where they are, beating other less specific species, but do very badly when presented with new opportunities, environments, or disasters. There is a gazelle-like animal that lives in the southern sahara desert, and is one of only a few animals that live in this region. There are bones of this animal in other deserts in the south of africa, but none live there any more. This is all due to climate change. The southern deserts used to be very arid, but started to become wetter. As they did so other animals in the area started to compete for food, and adapted to the changing environment. At the same time the sahara became very dry. The gazelles, a nomadic creature by nature, found that there was less competition to the north. That is not to say that they all walked in that direction, it's just as they spread out they found the conditions to the north favourable and did well. In the south they did not adapt as fast (large or expansive populations don't mutate as quickly), and thus the population thinned, and eventually died out. It is not that evolution is the only thing that can account for this (Descartes malevolent daemon could have dragged every animal kicking and screaming by a daemonic rope to the north), but the evolutionary model does would have predicted that such a thing would happen in that situation (even iof the details are not always predicatble due to the complexity - much like the weather), and this is what makes it a science.

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On Intelligent Design:

The thing that is fundamentally flawed about intelligent design as a scientific model is that it boils down to 2 possible paths. Either the intelligent designer is a god that is still around, or he is not. If the creator is not still around (in the sense that it cannot come back), but still got things set off and left them running then it cannot be classed as religeon (after all if such an entity cannot come back then it no longer exists). This sparks a big question - who created the creator? This is much like Descartes 'man in the box' or humonculous idea, where the thing that controlled a person's actions was a little person inside his head. This begs the question who is inside his head etc etc, until you realise that it can never end. So if we accept that the creator that no longer exists was created we must either accept that he was created (which follows the humonculous path), or that something came out of nothing. If we accept that such a creator can come from nothing, then I think we have to also accept that other things can come out of nothing.

The second path we can follow is that such a creator is still around. This would follow along with a lot of people's 'god' idea. Now of course 'god' and 'evolution' are not mutually exclusive, and I am sure that a lot of people that believe in intelligent design do also accept the science of evolution, just giving this as another example of the beauty of god's will. Yet to take this posture we would also have to accept that god, in order to have intelligently designed everything that has ever happened, will also know of everything that will ever happen. If you accept intelligent design and evolution together then I think you come across a lot of problems. We were once racoon like creatures, and evolution thus predicts that other racoon like creatures could develop to be very similar to us (if you are interested I could debate for hours on the factors that led to the development of human-level intelligence). So either god has allowed for other organisms to eventually surpass us, or the evolutionary model is flawed at a basic level. For this I do think that the two are mutually exclusive.

So for intelligent design I think we are left with 4 options:

Creator no longer exists - cannot come from nothing
Creator no longer exists - can come from nothing
Creator still exists - used evolution to create life
Creator still exists - did not use evolution to create life

For me the 1st is flawed, and thus cannot occur. The second is not science but history, and the last is not science but religeon. The 3rd is the most difficult, but it does, in my mind, force exclusivity. I do not think that you can believe that evolution can be used as a science to predict and model whilst at the same time accepting other religeous facets. For god to exist, in this sense, then evolution would not be a science.

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Upon reflection:

I apologise for the length of the article, but I feel it was the only way necessary to get my point clearly across. I have no problem with Intelligent Design being offered as a different concept for the creation of life. Science could never disprove it, but this is because I feel that Intelligent Design is nothing to do with science. It cannot be modelled, it cannot be used to make predictions or experimentations. Whereas I accept that it has a place to be offered as an alternative to what happened to get us to where we are now, I do not think it has anything to do with science, but is rather a historical fact or a religeous one. Its existence (if proven) might be used to alter evolution from a scientific theory to a religeous one, but I do not think there is enough evidence to put that in place.

This is why I do not think that Intelligent Design (no matter how true it might be) can be taught as a scientific theory.

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leejo

Good LORD man! Drink! Chaise tail! Get out!

OK:

Ah but mathematics is the language of science. Ipso facto loopty-loo, science is highly logical.

Yep. That's some cat, that Schroedinger's cat. Contrariwise, Bell's inequality (mathematics in science again!) shows that the subatomic MUST be stateless until observed - spin up, spin down, etc. It's a weird world that subatomic world. Where the particle meets the cat, something happens that no-one has been able to explain.

I would chalk it up to the paucity of evidence instead of complexity. Science has a pretty good handle on how things work *now*. It's all those missing links that vex.

That and my background is physics, so I'm biased.

A few years ago I jumped off a moving truck with an MP5 and smoked a squirrel. Your move Sherlock.

That is an excellent point, but I disagree with your conclusion that science is only a model. Science is mostly supported by mathematical statements that are logical and which rely on no outside evidence. I can prove that 2+2 always equals 4. I cannot prove that parallel lines never cross because in fact in some non-euclidian geometries, they always cross. The geometry is a model, the mathematics that provide the framework within which the model exists are absolute.

Some particles have been predicted by mathematics: we KNOW that there must be x amount of a certain particle because the mathematics have predicted it, we just don't have the instrumentation to detect the particles yet. Relativity came to be because Einstein matched observation to mathematics and determined that time and space MUST be malleable because the mathematics proved it. Subsequent experimentation (2 notable experiments over Japan) confirmed large parts of his theories, and other experiments showed that his theory is incomplete.

So I guess I would challenge your assertion that science is not logical and doesn't prove anything, only models. The main issue that causes scientific theories to come and go is the increased precision with which we can measure. Newton's theories are 100% correct if you measure with a yardstick, and I can prove it because the mathematics are sound. Goedel's proof states that all systems complex enough to be self referential (I am a liar) must either be inconsistent or incomplete. The scientific flaws you're pointing out are inevitable because our body of knowledge is incomplete. But the conclusions aren't inconsistent (sometimes a ball drops, sometimes it floats into space): they are, were, and will be logical, but the models evolve as new evidence goes through the mathematics machine and spits something the model didn't predict out.

Intelligent design is useless as a scientific assertion because it is not provable, not refutable, and predicts nothing. Evolution at least makes assertions about the future (organisms will change over time) that time and observation can confirm or deny.

Intelligent design may be in fact true. Intelligent design may have created a process we call evolution. But it ain't science.

Wulfyn

Nice reply. It's good to know that even though we seem to have slightly different ways of getting there we still have the same basic idea.

Not to get too off topic:

See I'd disagree here, citing maths as more of an art than a science. It may be utilised by maths but that does not mean that it takes all of its properties. I utilise english as a way of discribing scientific qualia, but I don't think by definition (or even by loopty-loo ) that it makes science highly irregular.

I'll definitely agree with that, but I do think we have to be careful of thinking that just because an item is made up of units that has a property that the item shares that property. It is commonly known that subatomic characteristics such as those described by bell break down when scaled up. Just because every single sub-atomic particle in my car keys might be stateless until observed doesn't mean that my car keys just hop around when my back is turned (no matter how much it seems like they moved themselves). Additionally I can quite clearly observe both my car key's position and velocity when I hurl it at the neighbour's cat rumaging through our bins

Hahaaa.. maybe you should get out of the comfy world of physics and into the mysteries of what I used to do (but then maybe there are already too many neurophysicists about... Dawkins might disagree... the fool). From a background of neuroscience I can quite clearly tell you that sometimes it is purely down to the complexity of the system rather than the paucity of evidence. I used to do a lot of research into the visual system, and the complexity of it was staggering.

Science also has bugger all idea on how consciousness works, and many many other aspects of neuroscience.


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As to the rest I think you have misunderstood the point I was trying to make. The mathematics within the science does prove things, but that is a mathematical proof. Mathematics is the driving force of the models, and thus it is how we apply the (concrete provable mathematical) model to the observations. It's the application that is science.

Newton observed and derided the mathematical model that are the laws of motion from it. From these laws Kepler worked out that a body orbiting the the sun will subtend the same area per set unit time. He then used the model to make predictions that turned out to be correct. But whereas we can prove the mathematical model that states that the sun will rise in the sky in the morning we cannot actually prove that it will.

Do you see that or am I being confusing?


(ps 2+2 is easy, it's 1+1 that is difficult

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Beatnik

I hate getting involved in these discussions, but tau's post is exactly right on. Let's not group some questions about the mechanism(s) of evolution with questions about the established proof of the results of evolution, which is v a s t.

Santa I think you might identify a lot with Humanism or more specifically Secular Humanism. I consider myself a Secular Humanist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut.

I also, not surprisingly, consider myself a pastafarian. Jah provide the garlic bread.

BoingBoing had a great idea for a contest for the ID inclined, as well.

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leejo

You bastard. Take that back.

Mathematics is a logical language. All science flows from mathematical statements. Your neurophysiothingies rely on other sciences that used mathematics as their proofs. I bet you took Quantuum Chemistry. Did a little number crunching there. Every use a chromagraph? Math. Maybe YOUR science is an art and mathematics is the science.

Biznitch. Don't make me come over there.

Cats either live or die but cannot be both or neither. Subatomic particles have proven undefined states until measured. Until the Grand Unified Theory comes along we'll have to live with that disconnect.

We were talking about evolution. Meteorology deals with hopelessly complex systems too. No, I can dig it. I'll still whip your ass at goofy golf, mon frere.

That's because consciousness is God's turf.

No it isn't. The theories of relativity are not practical statements about how to build bombs or what to do if you notice your neighbor stretching and speaking very slowly. Science is the process by which the natural world is explained as much as it is about putting those discoveries into practice.

Edit: just re-read this and I think I missed your point. You weren't claiming that science is practical, just saying that the theoretical and the modeling are on the math side and the science side is the experimentation and observation. Is that closer to the mark?

Anyway, I dunno. Seems these days that science is experimentation and mathematics and computer programming. Hell it's even being the fix-it man when the instrument breaks if not the engineering to design it in the first place.

"Man that's one stupid model."

To me it's all x+x=2x baby. At higher level mathematics we don't mess with your silly real numbers any more. Unless you abstract them (let x be a real number). Then, maybe.



All this reminds me of Woody Allen's old joke: maybe the universe doesn't actually exist, but it's the only place you can get a good steak. Science may not be provable, but it gets things done. Same with God. I can't prove that He exists to anyone, but I've lived life not believing and I've lived life believing and it's like going from a black and white 13" with twisty knob channel changers to a 52" HDTV with surround sound and a remote that makes your best friend hate you. Times 11.

It's sweet.

Cain

Well... yes and no. Quantum mechanics are only meaningful on a single-particle scale. However, just because I can't write down and solve the wave function for your car keys doesn't imply that they can't behave strangely. Remember, it's all about probability and while HIGLY unlikely there's still a non-zero probability for, say, all the air molecules in your room hiding in that corner over there, leaving you short of breath. Now this is particles where we don't really need wave functions to begin with, Newton will do just fine describing non-relativistic air molecules. Schrödinger's cat is just an unfortunate analogy of a commonly observable behavior on single-particle states.

Oh, and on the math vs science bit. QM is actually nothing but matrices and operators.

-=[dMw]=-Cain

madscientist

I believe that both ID and Evolution are religious ideas. Both can be supported by scientific method in certain areas. The battle is between A belief in no god and a belief in god. Darwins philosophy was adopted by the scientific community only because it is the most feasible and certain scientific discoveries seem to back the theory. The majority of the scientific community has adopted a religious belif of humanism, trying to explain the laws of nature and the universe eliminating a god from the equation. If you study both ideas in depth, they both do not follow the laws of scientific theory. Incredible leaps of faith are made on both sides. In addition much of the scientific data used to back up both ideas can be contested. All science is based on theories created by someone, some have been proven, others disputed. The reliability of those theories determine the basis for proving and disproving all future discoveries within that field. Sometime they are even disproven by later discoveries or can add validity to the theory. The fact is no-one can claim Evolution or Intelligent Design are "fact" because neither can be proven as fact.
One example of debate within the scientific community:
We all look at things through our own interpretation, and the scientific and biblical based communites are guilty of this as well. They all look for ways to use scientific data to back their theories, and sadly do not look at the data objectively. I have researched both sides of the spectrum and both hold valid claims and evidence. I think the people who jump to a prejudiced conclusion and accuse people who believe in ID or god as being "in the stone age" or "Backwards" are stupid and intolerant themselves. If they think they are enlightened because they evolved from a "rock" (Research the theory of Evolution in its entirety and you will see what i mean) just as uninformed and irrational as those they claim are such.
The truth is, those who want to believe there is no god and thus no basis for a devine law or morality base, will look to evolution to justify their existence. Those who want to believe in a higher being and a devine law or moral base, believe in a god and practice a religion to fulfil what they believe is the ultimate "will" or "destiny" created for them by that god.
I am not saying a person who believes one or the other is going to be more "moral" or a better person than the other, because the fact is we are all human. Human nature has proven itself time and time again through history.

By the way, that quote was pulled from:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/vie...d=view&id=2732

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AzzMan

This page in this topic killed my will both to live and to read anything ever.

TheFeniX

I would love to see where you got your information from considering everything I've read on the subject (not as much as I'd like) shows a trend towards his basic principals gaining more acceptance rather than less.

It's also amusing to see the general trend that science tends to be more pretentious than faith. Whereas most theories tend to make educated guesses based off of observed evidence, faith tends to say "It's this way and you're wrong."

Who's being more pretentious?

They've got some books about a mean-sprited and spiteful magic man in the sky punishing his followers.

There's probably at least 1000 AD&D novels out there telling similiar stories. I'd be more inclined to believe them.

Just because you believe in something doesn't make it rational.

That's the benefit of deabting rationally: you don't have to try to prove a negative. That would be because it's impossible.

Using your logic, I could claim that I am God and that I cause all of life's problems. Now should you have to disprove me through no help on my part, or should I be forced to prove to you that I am God?

You call the creation of the universe and it's fundamental laws simple? The reason there is such heated debate on scientific theories is that they ARE NOT "simple" and people don't care to learn.

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RandomGuy

Proofs of their correctness? Contradiction, I say!

His neurophysiothingies rely on other sciences that used mathematics for their models.

leejo