Origins TheologyForum for the discussion of Creation Science (Young/Old) vs Theistic Evolution. Discussion of Atheistic Evolution should be taken to the Discussion and Debate forums.
I did answer. If your argument has no possible set of truth conditions then the conclusion is vacuous. My argument has a possible set of truth conditions that make it possible. That is an answer.
Yes, you answered, but your answer was wrong, and it continues to be wrong every time you repeat it. Trying to carry on a discussion with you is a little frustrating, since all you do is keep repeating the same wrong answer, without ever responding to my arguments.
Still, I will try once again. Your argument has exactly the same possible set of truth conditions as my argument. My argument requires the existence of an featherless biped when DNA originated. Your argument requires the existence of an intelligent being when DNA originated. Neither an intelligent being nor a featherless biped is known to have existed at the time, nor is there any direct evidence for the existence of either. The only known intelligent beings arose long after DNA came into existence, as did the only known featherless bipeds; in fact, they arose at the same time, because they are the same creatures.
Now, could you please tell me why your truth condition is possible and mine isn't?
This is still a red herring. Chance does govern outcomes. That is what is important. Philosophical rumination about why we observe chance is irrelevant. We have an entire discipline in mathematics describing how to quantify chance called probability theory, and we have an additional discipline in mathematics describing how to harness chance observations called statistics.
And we have an entire approach to probability and statistics, which many would argue is the only coherent interpretation of probability, wholly based on the idea that probability is a measure of our uncertainty, rather than a statement about a physical system. That's what Bayesian statistics is.
I have been pretty explicit about why I think talking about chance governing outcomes is incoherent. You have yet to give a coherent explanation of what you mean by the phrase, so simply repeating it is not going to advance your argument at all.
Like I said, it is a good example of why your conflating of necessity and chance are irrelevant, because we recognize both concepts and yet we distinguish between the two models and use probability theory to do the analysis, ergo, using the notion of necessity and chance as a way of viewing how the results in the world are produced is not an "incoherent" view. Far from it.
The first part of the paragraph is correct. We distinguish two concepts, two models, as two ways of viewing the same events. So we describe exactly the same system as either the result of chance or of necessity, depending on how we choose to view it. That is perfectly coherent.
What's not coherent is what you are attempting to do, which is to view chance and necessity as mutually exclusive attributes of the events themselves. Or at least you have yet to offer an explanation of how that is coherent, given what we know about physics.
I'm not responding to your red herring. You pretended that introducing necessity, chance and design constituted in some vague way an incoherent argument. This is non sense. You introduce a red herring by pleading chance and necessity are ultimately the same. I directly responded to your argument. My example of the dice clearly demonstrates that design is detectable as bias in the game. Someone rigged the dice. This is the fundamental and relevant point.
And I told you why your example didn't work. I'm sorry, but contradicting your central claim premise is not a red herring. You have to make an argument for chance, necessity and design as mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories; that's something you haven't done. What I did do was show that in your own example, chance, design and necessity were overlapping categories.
You can infer design. That is the point. No one is claiming there is a physical law that says X was designed. This is an inference, which is done all the time in historical sciences. Inference to the best explanation is a legitimate form of scientific reasoning.
Sure, you can infer design. But as a suggested earlier, we almost never infer design by the process you've claimed. Instead we infer design based on known properties of the designer, often combined with detailed knowledge of the possible behavior of the materials in question.
The laws of nature allow life as a chemical machine to function. Chance provides random mutations. You know this and I should not have to explain it.
You didn't answer my question. How does evolution depend on distinguishing between chance, necessity and design. (And note that you did not mention the third one here.)
No, our theories of the quantum world allows us to predict with fantastic accuracy, but we still do not know why the world is the way it is. We do not know if there are yet more fundamental laws which will explain the bizarre world of QM.
Perhaps, but we do have constraints on what "more fundamental laws" if they exist must do: they must replicate Bell's inequalities and hence there can be no local determinism.
Originally Posted by OrdinaryClay
The problem is not our lack of knowledge of the initial conditions. It is the systems sensitivity to the initial conditions (minuscule variations produce wide results in chaotic systems), and the shear complexity of any real world system. At some slice in time you can pick a set of initial conditions, but the total system is unpredictable and unmodelable because of its complexity. Furthermore, even if a system is chaotic and complex this does not mean that real randomness may not play a role in nature. We can not say with surety that all systems are ultimately deterministic. They may appear to be so at the macro level, but this does not mean the appearance is the full truth.
This is still all a red herring because it is perfectly legitimate to talk of chance as a governing factor in results.
I nearly broke out in a rash when you said "chaos". I suffer from buzzword-itis: the tendency to react violently when people throw around buzzwords they don't understand. And most people here who invoke chaos have no idea what it is.
1. Many systems are not chaotic. Cars do not blow up every day on the freeway, because the behavior of a few gazillion air molecules in a piston is on the macroscale entirely predictable.
2. Quantum systems are for the most part not chaotic. The time evolution of quantum systems is exactly governed by differential equations that are linear in their solutions (anything non-linear is normally an approximation): this decouples the fundamental source of randomness in nature from chaos.
3. Chaotic systems have complete causal models. In fact, we can't possibly identify a chaotic system unless we have a model for it. For, how exactly do you think we determine that a system has "sensitive dependence on initial conditions"? That's right, we plug in a set of initial conditions, see where the system goes, plug in another set, see where that goes, plug in a third set of initial conditions ... which requires that we have a completely deterministic model for how the system works.
4. Model reduction often creates chaos where nature does not have it. An ideal system of pendula is chaotic; however, a real pendulum with damping forces is not.
I hope the picture is clear: randomness often results specifically from lack of knowledge of initial conditions; and chaotic systems in which such randomness is most acutely demonstrated are completely deterministic.
To me this raises serious issues with the so-called "explanatory filter". After all, if the "separate categories" of necessity and chance aren't really separate categories, what are the chances that "design" isn't a separate category either? In fact, a moment's thought shows that, since no designer ever gets to break the laws of physics and chemistry, there is in fact a fundamental connection between "design" and "necessity" too, and the entire filter framework is thrown into disarray.
Some brief thoughts about Kolmogorov complexity - it seems to me that it's the worst possible measure of ID "information". Suppose I flip a coin 2,000 times and encode the result in a binary string. There is a good chance that this string will be mostly or entirely incompressible, and so the most random string is also the most "complex". On the other hand, strings with apparent randomness that are produced by deeply deterministic processes, such as the decimal expansion of pi or DNA strings, should have surprisingly small Kolmogorov complexity.
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And who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? - Origen, 215AD [De Principiis 4.1.16]
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I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth:
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, dead, and buried:
He descended into hell;
The third day he rose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
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The Forgiveness of sins;
The Resurrection of the body,
And the Life everlasting.
Amen.
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