Answers in Genesis?

[Mallon]

I think that you missed a key word: "interpretation". They are not saying that they reject the evidence itself, but that the interpretation of the evidence, if contrary with the Bible, is mistaken or flawed, and rather than simply dismiss it as that they will seek to explain why that particular interpretation is flawed (e.g. point out some fallible assumptions) and then offer up an interpretation that explains the evidence within a biblical framework. Hardly dishonest and well within the scientific approach to things: point out flaws in a theory and present a new one that seeks to explain it.

Neocreationists DO reject evidence, though, in the sense that they willingly discount evidence from their explanations. And at the risk of sounding "dishonest" in saying so, I'll provide a couple examples...
1) Life is patterned after a nested hierarchy. All animals with fur have amniotic eggs. All animals with amniotic eggs have backbones. All animals with backbones have bilateral symmetry. Etc. Chimaeras do not exist, and the nested hierarchy is never broken. In fact, this pattern is so built into the fabric of life -- whether we consider the level of the phenotype or genotype -- that any explanation for the diversity of life must address this most basic pattern of organization.
Darwin did this when he proposed his theory of common ancestry via descent with modification. His theory both explains the hierarchical pattern exhibited by life, and predicts the extension of this pattern into the fossil record -- a prediction that continues to hold today. Unfortunately, neocreationist explanations are not so robust. Beyond "God did it", there is little attempt to try to explain the nested hierarchy into which life fits. When pressed about why life is arranged in such a fashion, the answer often comes, "... because God wanted it that way." Such thoughtless answers explain nothing and rather explain AWAY everything. It is a dismissal of the evidence.
2) The most common neocreationist explanation for the fossil succession observed in the rock record is that popularized by Morris. He hypothesized the differential sorting of fossil life according to three parameters: ecological zonation, hydrologic sorting, and locomotor ability. Of course, thinking about the consequences of Morris' hypothesis for more than a few minutes reveals all sorts of exceptions not predicted by his model. Turtles are an obvious one. So are grasses. And whales. And snails. But rather than confess to the overwhelming amount of evidence that stands contrary to Morris' model, neocreationists continue to bandy about his explanation in order to defend their presupposition of scientific concordism. Contradictory evidence be damned! Heck, even people like Hovind and Woodmorappe are starting to argue that the fossil succession doesn't even exist!
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v14/i1/fossil.asp
What better way to explain away the basic evidence in favour of evolution than to abuse age range extensions in order to deny that fossil succession exists?! And all in an effort to cling to a hermeneutic that was falsified hundreds of years ago.
Your citation of Humphreys provides another example of someone who ignores evidence. His ideas about starlight and the rapid cooling of the earth have been falsified time and time again. Not only by atheists, but by fellow Christians alike:
http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/unravelling.shtml?main
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/rn..._flaws_in_a_youngearth_cooling_12_30_1899.asp
To say that "further work will probably need to be done" is an understatement. His entire apologetic foundation for a young earth needs to be rebuilt because his theories have been demonstrably falsified (again, see the links above). Humphreys' arguments don't warrant a lot of my time, but assuming that he's still pushing his young earth apologetics, he can only do so by ignoring or by explaining away ("God wanted it that way!") the contradictory evidence that has been brought to his attention.

That, for instance, is the difference between rejecting the evidence and rejecting an interpretation of the evidence. Evolutionists do the same thing: they will reject creationist interpretations of the evidence and explain it within their framework. It isn't deceitful or dishonest ... it's just how they interpret the evidence is influenced largely by their underlying belief systems. At least Answers In Genesis is up front and honest about their bias and presuppositions.

The reason why scientists don't accept the YEC framework isn't because they have some "underlying belief system" that prevents them from doing so. They aren't biased against the YEC framework as a matter of principle. Scientists reject the YEC framework because IT DOESN'T WORK. There are simply too many discrepancies between the predictions a YEC model makes and what we observe in the real world.
If a flat-earther suggested that you rejected his theory concerning the shape of the earth because you had some "underlying belief system" that biased you against seeing things his way, what would you tell him?

An atheist could never, by definition, accept and interpretation of the evidence that leads him to conclude that Noah's flood actually happened, because then he'd have to accept that God exists and that he'd be held accountable to Him for his life, so he'd point out possible flaws in the creationist arguments and/or explain how it is consistent with evolutionary thinking, an example may be their interpretations of the rocks and the fresh feldspar in Uluru or Clark and Caswell's attempts to reconcile evolutionary model with the lack of observed third stage supernovas.

This argument might make sense if it were only atheists who rejected the historicity of Noah's Flood. But it's not. In fact, Christian geologists were among the first to doubt whether the world actually suffered a global deluge. And they weren't motivated by some unsung desire to reject God. They were motivated by a desire to understand God's creation. And God's creation told them that the Earth is necessarily older than any age that can be extrapolated from the Bible. Ditto the findings of Copernicus and Gallileo.
Lesson? Scientific concordism is a bunk hermeneutic fit for the trashcan.

 

[Merlin]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

An inquiry from a friend over in 'Creation & Evolution'
"Was reminded of this by another site I frequent and I was wondering, how many people actually believe the Answers in Genesis stuff? That dinosaurs and man walked together and the earth is only 6,000 years old? I'm genuinely curious."
Thanks for your input!

The Bible doesn't say that.

 

[Assyrian]

Its a fair cop.

Is there another way to do science?

Yes and you give a great example in your very next post.

And yet Darwinism is giving up on randomness. The Christian a priori successfully predicted how that data would turn out. That is a test of a viable theory for many?

Now physics is having trouble with physical constants. Again, a creationists a priori and we beat the physicists to the punch.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=inconstant-constants

It is hard not to be smug.

The way to do science is to test all your concepts and preconceptions, and follow the evidence, just like these guys are doing, checking whether constants actually are.

But where does this article talk of randomness being given up, or what Christian a priori says there is no such thing as randomness? The bible accepts there is such a thing, only that God is greater.
Eccles 9:11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
Prov 16:33 The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.

As for Creationists beating science to the punch on constants, I don't think a variation in [FONT=&quot]α[/FONT] of 1 part per million over 6 to 12 billion years ago is anything young earth creationists predicted. What you need is the speed of light a million time faster just 6,000 years ago. The measured variation is a trillion times too small, and a million times too long ago. Incidentally the article say scientists have been speculating on whether the constants are really constant since the 1930s. Do you have any idea when creationists came up with the idea of c-decay? The earliest I know of is late 70's.

 

[busterdog]

The way to do science is to test all your concepts and preconceptions, and follow the evidence, just like these guys are doing, checking whether constants actually are.

ok. i do however get the impression that by your rules, creationists should have adopted random selection as the cause of speciation, perhaps in the 60s or 70s. now it turns out that the foolish things of the world, by 70s standards, have been exalted again.

But where does this article talk of randomness being given up, or what Christian a priori says there is no such thing as randomness? The bible accepts there is such a thing, only that God is greater.
Eccles 9:11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
Prov 16:33 The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.

As for Creationists beating science to the punch on constants, I don't think a variation in αof 1 part per million over 6 to 12 billion years ago is anything young earth creationists predicted. What you need is the speed of light a million time faster just 6,000 years ago. The measured variation is a trillion times too small, and a million times too long ago. Incidentally the article say scientists have been speculating on whether the constants are really constant since the 1930s. Do you have any idea when creationists came up with the idea of c-decay? The earliest I know of is late 70's.

the scale that you mention is not the setterfield scale admittedly. however, we are now 'sort of pregnant' regarding these constants. this is a sea change, regardless of how much change is involved. lets look at the issue as a question of when to give up, which is quite different from really have a very accurate and detailled cosmology or model. te's keep telling us we should give up altogether, though that is a position not vindicated by the history of science. i dont care much about whether we do have a very good scientific model of anything. isnt that fair enough?

 

[Assyrian]

ok. i do however get the impression that by your rules, creationists should have adopted random selection as the cause of speciation, perhaps in the 60s or 70s. now it turns out that the foolish things of the world, by 70s standards, have been exalted again.

Random selection?

Anyway, Creationists should have accepted evolution when the scientific consensus went with it over a century ago. Just as the church should and did go with heliocentrism when the science went with Copernicus. The church should have gone with an ancient earth in the nineteenth century. In fact the church did and all the early Fundamentalists had old earth interpretations of Genesis and many were open to the idea of evolution too, just not the Richard Dawkins atheistic versions of the day.

The problem with Creationism is that they have gone backwards. So what if science is changing and developing, that is how it works. What is foolish, isn't finding science has advanced over the last few decades, but being two hundred years out of date. You might as well teach geocentrism and a flat earth.

the scale that you mention is not the setterfield scale admittedly. however, we are now 'sort of pregnant' regarding these constants.

No YEC is not a little bit pregnant over the constants, it is a little bit dead. They have looked at the amount of variation in the distant past, measured it to a couple of parts per million and not only do you not have the change in speed of light YEC needs, not only is the change a trillion times too small, and measured to be a trillion times too small, they measured the amount of variation 12 billion years ago, not very encouraging for YEC's 6000 year old universe.

this is a sea change, regardless of how much change is involved.

Yes I suppose it is. Before there was only the possibility of changing constants, an intriguing speculation but way beyond any possible answer. Now they can measure the change, not only can they measure it, they can measure it in precambrian rock 2 billion years ago and in distant stars 12 billion years ago.

lets look at the issue as a question of when to give up, which is quite different from really have a very accurate and detailled cosmology or model. te's keep telling us we should give up altogether, though that is a position not vindicated by the history of science. i dont care much about whether we do have a very good scientific model of anything. isnt that fair enough?

Do you think the geocentrists shouldn't have given up? How about the flat earthers? Should they have stuck with Cosmas Indicopleustes' biblical flat earth cosmology? The history of science is not encouraging for YEC. When science has passed by it does not go back, not once it has been well established. Do you think science will abandon atoms? Electromagnetism? Sometimes movements try to hold out, but they become more and more fringe as the centuries go by. That is the nature of truth, once you have figured it out and verified it, it is not going to change.

Yes you should give up altogether. That is what the church did when science showed them the earth went round the sun. They accepted the fact, and went back to the bible to see where they had gone wrong in their interpretation. Do you think they were vindicated? Or did they look foolish when Kepler showed the earth's orbit was elliptical rather than circular as Copernicus thought. Did the church look foolish for accepting heliocentrism when measurements of the orbit of Mercury showed Newton's gravitational equations were out? Or is it the geocentrists who stuck with the old literal interpretation who look more and more foolish as the centuries go by?

 

[shernren]

And yet Darwinism is giving up on randomness. The Christian a priori successfully predicted how that data would turn out. That is a test of a viable theory for many?

Now physics is having trouble with physical constants. Again, a creationists a priori and we beat the physicists to the punch.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=inconstant-constants

It is hard not to be smug.

It is hard indeed, isn't it, seeing as physicists are now saying that the Big Bang theory is in error because ...

This theory makes appealingly simple predictions. Variations in

of a few parts per million should have a completely negligible effect on the expansion of the universe. That is because electromagnetism is much weaker than gravity on cosmic scales.
​

(page 5, empahsis added) whoops. They weren't!

Speaking of varying physical constants, good old Cygnus Mac came up with a great little paper online showing how wrong Setterfield's ideas are here (warning: PDF). Good news Busterdog, it has almost no explicit math. Be sure to check appendix D for documentation on how Setterfield reversed himself two or three times in the course of half a year based on scrutiny of his ideas on an Internet forum.

The challenge I would put to you, busterdog, is to find me any creationist reference before 1995 to self-organization as a challenge to evolution. You seem to be suspiciously able-handed at picking up on scientific buzzwords about six months after they have been sufficiently castrated by science magazines for public abuse. Indeed, I don't recall you ever having said anything about self-organization of life and how that affects Darwinism's claims during your Setterfield period as late as two or three years back; in contrast Murray Gell-Mann's The Quark and The Jaguar was confronting issues relating to the self-organization of life as early as 1994. "Predicted"? Don't flatter yourself.

 

[shernren]

A brief parable

In the middle of a fancy-dress party the CEO of a large company is dragged into the men's washroom and strangled to death.

The detective arriving on the scene voices his opinion: "The butler did it."

The security feed shows a woman dragging the victim into the washroom.
But the detective responds, "Well, the butler was a woman."

The security feed, upon further examination, shows that the woman is actually the CEO's jilted ex-wife.
But the detective responds, "Well, the woman was the ex-wife's previously unknown twin."

The CEO's personal assistant tells the detective that the CEO didn't have a butler.
At this the detective exclaims: "So he had a butler and none of you ever knew! Oh, how dark the deception and how skilled the murderer."

See the problem with inviolable presuppositions?

I think that you missed a key word: "interpretation". They are not saying that they reject the evidence itself, but that the interpretation of the evidence, if contrary with the Bible, is mistaken or flawed, and rather than simply dismiss it as that they will seek to explain why that particular interpretation is flawed (e.g. point out some fallible assumptions) and then offer up an interpretation that explains the evidence within a biblical framework. Hardly dishonest and well within the scientific approach to things: point out flaws in a theory and present a new one that seeks to explain it.

An brief and basic example of this may be the light time problem, for instance. A common interpetation of the evidence is that since light travels at a constant speed and some of the stars are millions and billions of light years (a measure of the distance light can travel within a year) away, then it must have taken the light millions and billions of years to get here. Obviously, this interpretation conflicts with a literal understanding of Genesis, which says that the Earth is roughly 6,000 years old. They don't ignore the problem or say that the measurements are wrong or whatever, rather, they come up with new theories or approaches to explain how it is possible that the light from distant stars can reach us in a young universe, Dr Humphreys' approach (Humphreys, 2002) which seems to be a plausible explanation, though further work will probably need to be done.

That, for instance, is the difference between rejecting the evidence and rejecting an interpretation of the evidence. Evolutionists do the same thing: they will reject creationist interpretations of the evidence and explain it within their framework. It isn't deceitful or dishonest ... it's just how they interpret the evidence is influenced largely by their underlying belief systems. At least Answers In Genesis is up front and honest about their bias and presuppositions.

That AiG is upfront and honest about their bias and presuppositions I certainly don't doubt. What I don't get is how they, given their bias and presuppositions, can claim to be doing science, and claim to be able to supply positive evidence for their views. That to me is philosophically naive at best and downright dishonest at worst. After all every presupposition has to reach a point where it can be destroyed by evidence. Otherwise why bother with any evidence at all?

The lifecycle of a creationist argument

The usual pattern of creationist arguments is that what begins (quite legitimately) as a quirky interpretation of data turns into the "next big thing that disproves evolution". (Yes, I do read AiG, and they do have an article talking about there being no "silver bullet". How often does that actually happen in practice?)

Creationists incorporate this new quirky reinterpretation into their anti-evolutionary spiels, and in doing so the new argument attracts attention from the jobless nerds who have enough free time to spend on debunking creationist arguments. The data is scrutinized, cracks appear in the creationist explanation, experts are contacted and they explain features in the data that appeared to be counter-intuitive at first sight. The conventional explanation looks to be shored up against creationist attack.

In return creationists invent more and more far-fetched explanations for why their reinterpretation makes sense; in doing so they often show up their own inexpertise, and finally when there remains almost no scientific integrity left to the creationist argument, they then pull in the invalidity clause. At which point one is left to ponder: why bother? Everyone else has left the scene of discussion by that point; more often than not the creationist really is talking to himself or herself.

Indeed, Humphreys' white hole theory itself is probably a good example of this process in motion. The pieces are all over the Internet; you should try following the trail in your own free time. =)

Respecting Choice (or, do unto others as ... )

Here are some thoughts on this point that I made some time ago:

You see? If both theories explain the same corpus of data, then one theory cannot be said to explain it "better" than the other. Even creationists will admit it, and contradict themselves in the process:

I then respond, ‘Actually, as a creationist, I have no problem with your science; it’s the same science I understand and trust. The argument is not about science or about facts—ultimately, the argument is about how you interpret the facts—and this depends upon your belief about history. The real difference is that we have different “histories” (accounts about what happened in the past), which we use to interpret the science and facts of the present.’

I then give an example. ‘Let’s consider the science of genetics and natural selection. Evolutionists believe in natural selection—that is real science, as you observe it happening. Well, creationists also believe in natural selection. Evolutionists accept the science of genetics—well, so do creationists.

‘However, here is the difference: Evolutionists believe that, over millions of years, one kind of animal has changed into a totally different kind. However, creationists, based on the Bible’s account of origins, believe that God created separate kinds of animals and plants to reproduce their own kind—therefore one kind will not turn into a totally different kind.

‘Now this can be tested in the present. The scientific observations support the creationist interpretation that the changes we see are not creating new information. The changes are all within the originally created pool of information of that kind; sorting, shuffling or degrading it. The creationist account of history, based on the Bible, provides the correct basis to interpret the evidence of the present—and real science confirms the interpretation.’
​

(emphases added; from Searching for the 'magic bullet') In the first paragraph Ham states that the only difference is in how creationism and evolution interprets the same set of data, not the ability of either paradigm. However just two paragraphs after, he supports the origin of kinds by appealing to "scientific observations". But wait a minute! I thought that evolution and common descent can explain the same corpus of data that creationism and the origin of kinds can - in which case, these scientific observations support evolution as well! You see that in order to prefer creationism, Ham has to introduce a set of data ("scientific observations") which cannot be explained by evolution.

So what is it now? Is there a set of data which cannot be interpreted within an evolutionary framework but within a creationist framework?

http://christianforums.com/showthread.php?t=5654347&page=4

The question I have to creationists who fully accept the invalidity clause is: "What do you think you are doing?" How do you expect an evolutionist to be swayed by your presentation? Fundamentally, the creationist endeavour must rest on the fact (or assumption) that there is some body of evidence which the creationist interpretation explains but the evolutionist interpretation doesn't.

Try it yourself. Read a creationist article about a particular piece of evidence and ask yourself what impression you get. Do you get the impression that the creationist interpretation of that evidence and the evolutionist interpretation of that evidence are on equal footing - that which interpretation you choose depends fundamentally on your eternal goal? I don't. The second bolded part in the quote above says as much. Instead the creationist seems to be touting the existence of some body of evidence which the evolutionist interpretation simply cannot assimilate.

You may protest that according to you, the two interpretations can explain the same body of data - just one not as well as the other. But as far as I can see interpretations don't explain data better - they explain more data. When there is one set of data, the "better" interpretation is the one which pulls in additional data (or scrutinizes the existing data to a higher degree - which really is equivalent to additional data) which can be explained by it which the worse interpretation cannot explain.

So the creationist thinks that there is a corpus of data which no evolutionist interpretation can explain convincingly. But what about the creationist interpretation? Unfortunately there is no possibility, given the invalidity clause, for the same form of invalidation to be available to the creationist position.

And that is why its presence in the AiG's articles of faith is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

An atheist could never, by definition, accept and interpretation of the evidence that leads him to conclude that Noah's flood actually happened, because then he'd have to accept that God exists and that he'd be held accountable to Him for his life, so he'd point out possible flaws in the creationist arguments and/or explain how it is consistent with evolutionary thinking, an example may be their interpretations of the rocks and the fresh feldspar in Uluru or Clark and Caswell's attempts to reconcile evolutionary model with the lack of observed third stage supernovas.

As such, I personally believe it is dishonest (either ignorantly or otherwise) to claim that Answers In Genesis are intentionally any more dishonest than evolutionary organisations like Talk Origins, particularly without specific examples.

Odds and ends

• I don't see why there is anything particularly theistic about the physical hypothesis that the Earth was recently inundated by a global flood. Why would the fact that Canberra was once under water force me to believe that God exists?
• As far as I know the only Clark and Caswell paper on supernovae dates back to 1970, while the creationist argument on third-stage supernovae was first seen in 1994. Were those scientists prophets too? You seem to be aware of TalkOrigins but you don't seem to have read their lengthy argument on supernovae: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/supernova/#BM10

 

[busterdog]

Do you think the geocentrists shouldn't have given up? How about the flat earthers? Should they have stuck with Cosmas Indicopleustes' biblical flat earth cosmology? T

This is an interesting type of argument. It has a corresponding argument that goes like this: the Nazi's were evolutionists and they were wrong, so shouldnt you give up on evolution? We all agree that this form of argument is not terribly persuasive.

Going back to the creationist criticism of randomness, we were right about that. How does geocentrism take away from that fact? Again, we are talking about giving up on a worldview completely, despite the fact that it has been proven right.

In your example, geocentrism is equivalent to randomness. So, arent the evolutionists the ones that should give up completely on every single article of belief? Of course they shouldnt. Not every single belief.

 

[Assyrian]

This is an interesting type of argument. It has a corresponding argument that goes like this: the Nazi's were evolutionists and they were wrong, so shouldnt you give up on evolution? We all agree that this form of argument is not terribly persuasive.

The Nazi argument is a very poor analogy. There is the problem that the Nazis argument is simply bad history as the Expelled discussions have shown. The main reason the Nazi comparison is ever used in debates, and used to show how intrinsically evil your opponents must be, is because the Nazis were mass murdering genocidal psychopaths inflicting misery on all of Europe and responsible for 50 million deaths. To my knowledge Cosmas never hurt a fly and was only guilty, if that is the right word, of thinking he could show how the science of the day was wrong with his literal interpretation of scripture.

Instead of dodgy history and name calling, there is a much closer analogy between modern YEC and the flat earth of Cosmas Indicopleustes or Luther calling Copernicus a fool. I suppose Luther had an excuse as Copernicus' theory was very new. But what you have each time is Christians rejecting science on the basis of their literal interpretation of scripture. And each time they have been wrong. You brought up the issue of positions not being vindicated by the history of science. Well anti-science literalism goes back an awfully long way in the church and it isn't vindicated by history or science.

Going back to the creationist criticism of randomness, we were right about that. How does geocentrism take away from that fact? Again, we are talking about giving up on a worldview completely, despite the fact that it has been proven right.

In your example, geocentrism is equivalent to randomness. So, arent the evolutionists the ones that should give up completely on every single article of belief? Of course they shouldnt. Not every single belief.

Not much I can say about randomness as you still haven't explained what you mean by random selection.

I suppose if creationists are going to keep rejecting the greater part of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, geology, geophysics, radiometric dating, palaeontology and evolutionary biology, and saying its all wrong, then as science progresses and develops, there is bound to be something they said was wrong that falls by the wayside. As they say even a stopped clock is right twice a day. If you keep saying everything is wrong, you are bound to get something right, just through random chance.

 

[busterdog]

It is hard indeed, isn't it, seeing as physicists are now saying that the Big Bang theory is in error because ...

This theory makes appealingly simple predictions. Variations in

of a few parts per million should have a completely negligible effect on the expansion of the universe. That is because electromagnetism is much weaker than gravity on cosmic scales.
​

(page 5, empahsis added) whoops. They weren't!

Speaking of varying physical constants, good old Cygnus Mac came up with a great little paper online showing how wrong Setterfield's ideas are here (warning: PDF). Good news Busterdog, it has almost no explicit math. Be sure to check appendix D for documentation on how Setterfield reversed himself two or three times in the course of half a year based on scrutiny of his ideas on an Internet forum.

The challenge I would put to you, busterdog, is to find me any creationist reference before 1995 to self-organization as a challenge to evolution. You seem to be suspiciously able-handed at picking up on scientific buzzwords about six months after they have been sufficiently castrated by science magazines for public abuse. Indeed, I don't recall you ever having said anything about self-organization of life and how that affects Darwinism's claims during your Setterfield period as late as two or three years back; in contrast Murray Gell-Mann's The Quark and The Jaguar was confronting issues relating to the self-organization of life as early as 1994. "Predicted"? Don't flatter yourself.

If you have to ask, we are already divided.

Let me ask you the most basic Sunday School question of all. What is the best explanation for the singularity that preceded the Big Bang? 1. God; or 2. it is fundamentally beyond my capacity to say. (See Kaufman's book, which makes that latter assertion about several areas of science.)

Part of the problem is a language limitation invited by ducking, but still implying, the issue. The phrase "self-organizing" implies a chain of creative cause and effect. By finding an immediate "cause" for an effect, which cause is "inherent" in the way things are, one necessarily must answer the next logical question: "and what caused that?" Othewise, one is not really talking about "causation" at all. It is certainly an incomplete exercise to talk of "cause" without talking of a chain of causation.

One may wish to simply view "cause" in a narrow slice of time convenient to your worldview or religion. But, that choice of a narrow timeframe is itself a highly biased and tendentious choice.

However, it shares a remarkable similarity to "intelligent design", which simply says the chain of causation itself represents breath-taking complexity that is beyond our our capacity to analyze. At some point, we no longer have causes, except for mysterious and unaccountable forces of causation. Both self-organizing and ID share these common ideas. Both assert: 1. complexity; and 2. at some point, virtually unfathomable compexity.

Whether one chooses or rejects God as a cause is beside the point, once we arrive here. ANd this is where "self-organizing" must arrive. And as we all know, at this point, there is no basis for rejecting God on logical grounds, but only stylistic, biased or methodolical grounds.


If you go back to the Altenburg article, you will see all kinds of poetry by scientists showing that they have the same take that I do. They wax religious on why it is that matter just happens to be made in such a way that tends toward evolution. http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0465003001/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link "Reinventing the Sacred" was written by To say "Just because it does" is extremely naive and the Altenburg group seems to agree with me. They say that the stuff has or is impelled by awesome god-like qualities, even if on a very tiny scale. That is intelligent design expressed in different words.

Some may say they have faith in the ability to chase the causative chain farther and farther, ie, as if the chase itself is enough, regardless of whether when can arrive at the final prize. That is laughable as an answer, and is no answer at all. In fact, implicit in Altenburg is the notion that acquiring more detail yields increasingly unlikely and therefore unaccountably complex chains of cause and effect.

 

[Assyrian]

Welcome to TE busterdog

Seriously this is the problem I have always had with the Intelligent Design movement. God is the supremely Intelligent creator and designer, but ID seems to think that God could not possibly have designed and created that dazzling array of life we see through evolution, and they think that if they can come up with some clever scheme to disprove evolution they by default prove God.

So now it is looking more and more like the self organizing processes that gave us evolution are written into the very fabric of the universe? You are right we are seeing the hand of God here, you are right it is the most intelligent design, but it is not the anti evolution ID of the Discovery Institute, and it is a design set to work on a very different timescale to YEC. Instead it says God created a universe where life would burst out naturally. This isn't even Theistic Evolution it is Deistic. Oh there is plenty of scope for believer to go beyond the Deism and see God their Father, the gardener, nurture, protect and guide the seeds that grow up as he planned. But the recognition that the driving force behind early evolution was written into the universe from it creation is not what we know as Intelligent Design it is basic Deistic Evolution.

 

[busterdog]

Welcome to TE busterdog

Seriously this is the problem I have always had with the Intelligent Design movement. God is the supremely Intelligent creator and designer, but ID seems to think that God could not possibly have designed and created that dazzling array of life we see through evolution, and they think that if they can come up with some clever scheme to disprove evolution they by default prove God.

I dont find ID to be very demanding at its core. Yes some use it to prove the full panoply of creationist ideas, but at root, and as often proposed for public school, its just the simple argument that things are too complex not to have been created by God.

So now it is looking more and more like the self organizing processes that gave us evolution are written into the very fabric of the universe? You are right we are seeing the hand of God here, you are right it is the most intelligent design, but it is not the anti evolution ID of the Discovery Institute, and it is a design set to work on a very different timescale to YEC. Instead it says God created a universe where life would burst out naturally. This isn't even Theistic Evolution it is Deistic. Oh there is plenty of scope for believer to go beyond the Deism and see God their Father, the gardener, nurture, protect and guide the seeds that grow up as he planned. But the recognition that the driving force behind early evolution was written into the universe from it creation is not what we know as Intelligent Design it is basic Deistic Evolution.

We are seeing two different things in selforganizing. The latter assumes the race is itself the prize, though it admits it can never reach the finish line. That is sort of Kafkesque. The process, the detail must point somewhere other than to itself to be logical -- or to be true to God.

 

[shernren]

If you have to ask, we are already divided.

Let me ask you the most basic Sunday School question of all. What is the best explanation for the singularity that preceded the Big Bang? 1. God; or 2. it is fundamentally beyond my capacity to say. (See Kaufman's book, which makes that latter assertion about several areas of science.)

Part of the problem is a language limitation invited by ducking, but still implying, the issue. The phrase "self-organizing" implies a chain of creative cause and effect. By finding an immediate "cause" for an effect, which cause is "inherent" in the way things are, one necessarily must answer the next logical question: "and what caused that?" Othewise, one is not really talking about "causation" at all. It is certainly an incomplete exercise to talk of "cause" without talking of a chain of causation.

One may wish to simply view "cause" in a narrow slice of time convenient to your worldview or religion. But, that choice of a narrow timeframe is itself a highly biased and tendentious choice.

However, it shares a remarkable similarity to "intelligent design", which simply says the chain of causation itself represents breath-taking complexity that is beyond our our capacity to analyze. At some point, we no longer have causes, except for mysterious and unaccountable forces of causation. Both self-organizing and ID share these common ideas. Both assert: 1. complexity; and 2. at some point, virtually unfathomable compexity.

Whether one chooses or rejects God as a cause is beside the point, once we arrive here. ANd this is where "self-organizing" must arrive. And as we all know, at this point, there is no basis for rejecting God on logical grounds, but only stylistic, biased or methodolical grounds.


If you go back to the Altenburg article, you will see all kinds of poetry by scientists showing that they have the same take that I do. They wax religious on why it is that matter just happens to be made in such a way that tends toward evolution. http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0465003001/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link "Reinventing the Sacred" was written by To say "Just because it does" is extremely naive and the Altenburg group seems to agree with me. They say that the stuff has or is impelled by awesome god-like qualities, even if on a very tiny scale. That is intelligent design expressed in different words.

Some may say they have faith in the ability to chase the causative chain farther and farther, ie, as if the chase itself is enough, regardless of whether when can arrive at the final prize. That is laughable as an answer, and is no answer at all. In fact, implicit in Altenburg is the notion that acquiring more detail yields increasingly unlikely and therefore unaccountably complex chains of cause and effect.

Please note the way busterdog evades the issue at hand.

He claimed that creationists predicted that the notion of self-organization would uproot randomness.
I challenged him to show that this was a prediction by showing me any creationist reference to self-organization before 1995.
He hereby entangled himself into an inextricable web of semantics all to get away from the fact that he has nothing to show for his vacuous statement.

Quite frankly, busterdog, you have no idea what self-organization is. Murray Gell-Mann writing in 1994 stated quite frankly:

Recently, there has been a great deal of careless writing about chaos. From the name of a technical phenomenon in nonlinear dynamics, the word has been turned into a kind of catchall expression for any sort of real or apparent complexity or uncertainty. When I give a public lecture on complex adaptive systems, for example, and mention the phenomenon perhaps once, or maybe not at all, I am bound to be congratulated at the end on having given an interesting talk about chaos.

It seems to be characteristic of the impact of scientific discovery on the literary world and on popular culture that certain items of vocabulary, interpreted vaguely or incorrectly, are often the principal survivors of the journey from the technical publication to the popular magazine or paperback. The important qualifications and distinctions, and sometimes the actual ideas themselves, tend to get lost along the way. Witness the popular uses of "ecology" and "quantum jump", to say nothing of the New Age expression "energy field". Of course, one can argue that words like "chaos" and "energy" antedate their use as technical terms, but it is the technical meanings that are being distorted in the process of vulgarization, not the original senses of the words.

(The Quark and The Jaguar)
​

So busterdog, are you ready to show us that you actually, hmm, know what you're talking about? You could for example tell us what Zipf's Law is and explain why its scale-invariance naturally arises in self-organizing systems, from the word distributions in text to the rankings of Fortune 500 companies.

Otherwise, you might as well tell us that all physicists are Catholics, since they all observe mass. And that is the amount of credence you deserve right now, no more.

 

[shernren]

I dont find ID to be very demanding at its core. Yes some use it to prove the full panoply of creationist ideas, but at root, and as often proposed for public school, its just the simple argument that things are too complex not to have been created by God.

And is everything else too simple to have been created by God?

If God's presence is assured only by inscrutability, then what can accessibility imply but God's absence?

(Kudos if you can spot the logical error, by the way. I'm baiting you as much as responding to you.)

ID as you have proposed it is nothing less than a heretical distortion of the orthodox Christian doctrine of creation - which states simply that God made all things, whether by natural or supernatural processes, scientifically scrutinizable or not. The evolved is as much God-created as the "intelligently designed" (if there are such forms of life); and ID completely misses the point.

==========

Incidentally, economies are complex things. One might claim based on ID ideas that economies are irreducibly complex - any one industry depends simultaneously on the industries that provide its inputs, the industries that provide for its workers (like the food and housing industries), and the industries that turn its capital into machinery; take away any component and the industry crumbles.

One might also claim therefore that centrally designed economies will be fundamentally more stable than economies that are allowed to evolve on their own.

And of course, what do we see? Communism with its intelligently-designed economies is far more economically successful than the hubristic chaos of capitalist economies, right?

 

[busterdog]

Please note the way busterdog evades the issue at hand.

He claimed that creationists predicted that the notion of self-organization would uproot randomness.
I challenged him to show that this was a prediction by showing me any creationist reference to self-organization before 1995.
He hereby entangled himself into an inextricable web of semantics all to get away from the fact that he has nothing to show for his vacuous statement.

Quite frankly, busterdog, you have no idea what self-organization is. Murray Gell-Mann writing in 1994 stated quite frankly:

Recently, there has been a great deal of careless writing about chaos. From the name of a technical phenomenon in nonlinear dynamics, the word has been turned into a kind of catchall expression for any sort of real or apparent complexity or uncertainty. When I give a public lecture on complex adaptive systems, for example, and mention the phenomenon perhaps once, or maybe not at all, I am bound to be congratulated at the end on having given an interesting talk about chaos.

It seems to be characteristic of the impact of scientific discovery on the literary world and on popular culture that certain items of vocabulary, interpreted vaguely or incorrectly, are often the principal survivors of the journey from the technical publication to the popular magazine or paperback. The important qualifications and distinctions, and sometimes the actual ideas themselves, tend to get lost along the way. Witness the popular uses of "ecology" and "quantum jump", to say nothing of the New Age expression "energy field". Of course, one can argue that words like "chaos" and "energy" antedate their use as technical terms, but it is the technical meanings that are being distorted in the process of vulgarization, not the original senses of the words.

(The Quark and The Jaguar)
​

So busterdog, are you ready to show us that you actually, hmm, know what you're talking about? You could for example tell us what Zipf's Law is and explain why its scale-invariance naturally arises in self-organizing systems, from the word distributions in text to the rankings of Fortune 500 companies.

Otherwise, you might as well tell us that all physicists are Catholics, since they all observe mass. And that is the amount of credence you deserve right now, no more.

Fine, then go in peace.

I am not interested in being prosecuted.

I am happy with what I have written.

If anyone who has an interest in anything I have posted, I am happy to elaborate. But, I dont see the point of arguing with someone who wont even hear anything I have said.

 

[shernren]

I just think it is reasonable for someone who claims that "self-organization" overturns the past hundred years of biological science to actually demonstrate that s/he actually knows what "self-organization" is. After all, remember what Stuart Newman said in that Altenberg interview?

I think in order to understand self-organization and not just the term, it really takes a certain level of sophistication in the physical sciences as well as the biological sciences.

All I'm asking is for you to show you know your stuff. Not beating you over the head - just want to see you use it.

 

[Assyrian]

I dont find ID to be very demanding at its core. Yes some use it to prove the full panoply of creationist ideas, but at root, and as often proposed for public school, its just the simple argument that things are too complex not to have been created by God.

It is a simple argument, but deeply flawed. It sets up a false dichotomy between the work of God and natural processes, forgetting God created the natural world in the first place. In effect it hands nature, God's Creation, to the atheists.

It also, strangely, denies the power of God as Creator. It says these features are too big, God could not have designed a universe where they would arise naturally. In effect they do not believe God could create a universe where he could command 'Let the earth produce living creatures' and nature, the natural process he created, would obey him.

As I said if you see the hand of God behind the wonder of self organisation that gave us evolution, then ID is out the window.

We are seeing two different things in selforganizing. The latter assumes the race is itself the prize, though it admits it can never reach the finish line. That is sort of Kafkesque. The process, the detail must point somewhere other than to itself to be logical -- or to be true to God.

Perhaps you might have a point if molecules really could suffer existentialist angst. The point is they do not know what they are doing, they don't think about what they are doing, and they don't try to do anything, though that anthropomorphism is often used teaching chemistry 'sodium want to lose and electron and chlorine really wants...' But combine normal chemical reactions with the 3D structures of amino acids that can only react if they approach each other from specific angles, and you have the basis for very interesting structures to form automatically. It just takes the unique shape of the water molecule and hydrogen bonding to create all the beauty of snowflakes and frosted windows. It is self organisation. But we also know God created a universe where water molecule would have that shape and a strong hydrogen bond.

 

[shernren]

I think part of why ID doesn't make sense to me as a physicist is because I study the simple as well as the complex, and there is beauty enough in both for me to exclaim God's praises.

The very idea of "complexity" is quite ambiguous. Whoever said a bacterium is complex? If I'm a biochemist studying genomic manipulations of Salmonella in response to environmental levels of lactose, sure it's complex. But Salmonella is hardly complex to a chef. If I'm preparing food, Salmonella is essentially whatever I eliminate by keeping my hands clean and raw meat away from cooked food. I wash, it's gone. Hardly brain science. Who's to say the chef is wrong and the biochemist right?

Another example is planetary motion. There's nothing to it. All I need to specify the position of everything (major) in the Solar System are a few dozen initial coordinates and Newton's laws of motion and gravity. It's about half a page of information. Whoever said astronomy was hard? But to a spaceship captain, planetary motion is the most complex thing in the world (heh). If he asked me whether he should be making a right turn in the next half hour to avoid slamming into Mars, and I gave him my half-page of initial positions and Newton's Laws, I'd be fired (and possibly spaced) - even though I technically gave him all the information he needed. Simple, or complex?

The astronomical issue is also important because ID never talks about it. Is the Milky Way too complex to have come together by chance? The Solar System? The Sun? The reason ID fails as a Christian apologetic mechanism is that (Unless it is very careful - but its proponents are so often proud of performing philosophical surgery with metaphorical chainsaws.) if it asserts that teleology and "complexity" go hand in hand, then it forfeits the right to assign teleology to anything that is not complex (no matter how beautiful it is). If one can tell what is designed and purposeful by how complex it is, then surely what is not complex was not designed and is not purposeful.

And so one by one the old covenantal symbols fall by the wayside. Which ID treatise, for example, ever tried to argue that the rainbow is designed? The rainbow is as simple as optics gets - and yet it is immensely beautiful, and it is the first material symbol of a covenant God ever institutes. We can look back even further. Which ID theorist ever argued that the stars and moon and sun are irreducibly complex, clearly designed to mark the passage of time for Earthbound humans? Never. And yet as much is clearly stated in Genesis 1.

You see? ID grasps and gropes for a "design inference" where it has neither rational warrant nor divine mandate to look for them. And yet in the very things God declares clearly were created purposefully ID falls mute. No human will ever observe DNA with the human eye; yet every eye turned upwards at night sees the panoply of the stars. What difference does it make if microscopic fuzz in my body is designed, if the entire universe in which we are but a speck operates by the cold sparse laws of gravity (which by ID standards is "natural" and "undesigned"), with sign of neither design nor purpose?

It reminds me of a passage in Scripture:

The LORD said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by." Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.
(1 Kings 19:11-12 NIV)

The logical conclusion of ID is that God's design is in microscopic detail, but not in wind or earthquake or fire or anything mankind has developed since. And what kind of a world is that?