Intelligent Deism or an Evolving Creation? (A response to "Mishmash Darwinism")

[shernren]

http://christianforums.com/t7123368-mishmash-darwinism-understanding-challenges-to-id.html

The past two weeks haven't been very good for me. I had to rush preparation for camp (nearly sacrificing a mid-sem in the way), got involved in a minor car accident, survived a hailstorm, had to manage nearly 30 uni students who wouldn't sleep early and wake in time for breakfast, and to top it all off I essentially suffered a breakup without even being in a relationship.

Oh, the wonders of uni life. Through it all God is good, thankfully. And a silver lining in all of this is that I finally plonked down hard-earned money to buy myself more books on science and theology. So I'm now the proud owner of Perspectives on an Evolving Creation by Keith Miller and The Order of Nature by Alister McGrath. While I have finished neither, I've read enough to wholeheartedly recommend both of them interested in the debate. Alister McGrath in particular seems to have taken on the mantle of being Richard Dawkins' number 1 public Christian foil, and as a well-read academic theologian and former practicing scientist he carries the role well. And to put the icing on the cake, the university's arts library stocks all three volumes of his recent Scientific Theology. ^^

The two weeks away from CF.com have given me enough time and new intellectual input (through books) to consider the issues that busterdog tried to raise in his post over at Creationism. If he wants clarification, who better to give it than the person he originally quoted?

Let me outline essentially the problems I see in his position, and a brief description of my approach to each.

Explicit issues:

1. Self-organization is not some mysterious, intangible concept that can be randomly (heh heh) and arbitrarily applied to systems that display unpredicted behavior. It falls out from the mathematics that describe multiple systems as they interact. I will demonstrate this with suitable simple examples.

2. Self-organization and its attendant naturalistic explanations are not incompatible with a Biblically-informed, Christian view of the world. This is demonstrable from Scripture.

Implicit issues:

Intelligent Design is really nothing more than Paleyism dressed up for a new generation. Even if one does not take into account the tremendous pressure that evolution puts on it, Paley and the tradition of natural theology he represents are woefully inadequate to shape a Christian theology of creation - these discontentments were already being voiced long before Darwin published Origin. History shows that in Britain it was not long before natural theology developed into Deism, and it is no surprise.

And now I shall go for a long-overdue lunch.

 

[busterdog]

http://christianforums.com/t7123368-mishmash-darwinism-understanding-challenges-to-id.html

The past two weeks haven't been very good for me. I had to rush preparation for camp (nearly sacrificing a mid-sem in the way), got involved in a minor car accident, survived a hailstorm, had to manage nearly 30 uni students who wouldn't sleep early and wake in time for breakfast, and to top it all off I essentially suffered a breakup without even being in a relationship.

What, no frogs or boils?

The two weeks away from CF.com have given me enough time and new intellectual input (through books) to consider the issues that busterdog tried to raise in his post over at Creationism. If he wants clarification, who better to give it than the person he originally quoted?

At least one reader appreciates how well those points were made. That would be me.

Let me outline essentially the problems I see in his position, and a brief description of my approach to each.

Explicit issues:

1. Self-organization is not some mysterious, intangible concept that can be randomly (heh heh) and arbitrarily applied to systems that display unpredicted behavior. It falls out from the mathematics that describe multiple systems as they interact. I will demonstrate this with suitable simple examples.

2. Self-organization and its attendant naturalistic explanations are not incompatible with a Biblically-informed, Christian view of the world. This is demonstrable from Scripture.

Implicit issues:

Intelligent Design is really nothing more than Paleyism dressed up for a new generation. Even if one does not take into account the tremendous pressure that evolution puts on it, Paley and the tradition of natural theology he represents are woefully inadequate to shape a Christian theology of creation - these discontentments were already being voiced long before Darwin published Origin. History shows that in Britain it was not long before natural theology developed into Deism, and it is no surprise.

And now I shall go for a long-overdue lunch.

Evolution has mutated from a theory based upon randomness and lots of time to a theory of inherent information or inherent properties that tend toward organization.

The Paley watch maker argument is just as good as it ever was. It is so good that the evolutionists now use it. As the argument now goes, no-one needed to build the watch, the parts just inherently tend towards assembly.

Well, indeed they do have that tendency. But, if the tendency is inherent in matter, have we really said anything that means anything?

Your thesis seems to be that the more complex the description of that tendency, the more certain one can be that one has said something of importance about the nature of what it is that is being described.

What exactly do "inherent" properties tell us?

First, there is at least some inference about how they got to be as they are. Perhaps this is the least transparent and helpful observation, unless you accept the categorical distinction between God speaking and His fallen creation trying to speak for Him.


Second, they tell us something about how things endure. One problem we Christians have is with time. How long has it been and how much longer will it be for us as a species? Time is a question of changing conditions, as Peter teaches us. But, how this relates to inherent properties is the question of what exactly does this "inherent property" do under different conditions? Phrased as such, the problem with "inherent properties" is that they represent enormous potential variation. They suggest the potential for huge, huge dynamic change simply because we cannot account from whence they came and because our sample, our experience with their behavior is very, very short indeed. A couple hundred years is nothing by which to judge them.

How do we know that the latter is true? Cause the science tell us so. It chooses a word like inherent, because it has no source for the information displayed in the tendency to organize. The word "inherent" means, "just because it is that way," which as every child can tell you is no "because" at all.

How else do we know this is true? Because the apparent power of inherent properties only increases with time, or more properly, study. Darwin made his observations on the basis of simple cells. What appeared to be an advance in descriptive power of how things belied the unfathomable complexity studied by his later disciple, Kaufman, who describes the enzymatic reactions within that simple cell as an order of complexity completely beyond the realm of practical human engineering (that is origination, not cutting and pasting). In short, the math for how this could happen or why it would happen got much, much harder with time. So hard, that science must settle for calling such tendencies "inherent." In short, the difficulty of the origins question, with time, gets harder with more and more information. There is no end in sight.

Thus, the power of these processes is apparently enormous. Expressed mathematically, they are ciphers that tend to vary only more wildly and to greater and greater extremes the more closely they are examined. As expressions of mathematical power, they certainly do beg the question of whether there is enough power suggested to created them in a matter of days or to dissolve the very elements with which we are so familiar, again as taught in the Epistle of Peter.

The notion that increasing descriptive power confines these engines of life into a narrow band of well behaved, slowly progressing changes is to simply deny two things: 1. the very narrow view of our experience; and 2. the raw power suggested in these enormously unlikely processes. Many idols sprang up by the De River Nial. Many things assumed to be well in hand by the magic of exacting and complicated ritual proved to be quite beyond the scientists of that day. But, at least they acknowledged that religion was what they were doing.

 

[shernren]

Again, to be blunt, busterdog doesn't know how self-organization works. Just because the buzzword has been abused in media representations of science doesn't mean the word itself has no more meaning. It's like the word "entropy". I don't think one in ten of the people I know, know what entropy is. That doesn't mean that the physicists who use entropy every day don't know what it means.

So here's an example of a related concept from electronics.

Most people have seen the insides of an electronic device at some time or another. In particular, you might recall seeing little devices inside them that look like mini tin cans:

They're capacitors, and they basically store up voltage. They're normally used on their own to store up current, block off DC and let AC through. For example, if you're a perceptive digital camera user, you might notice that your camera takes longer to get ready to use after taking a picture with flash, as compared to if you don't use your flash: the camera needs to recharge a capacitor to run the flash, since a capacitor can supply the sudden burst of power that your normal battery can't.

There's another component called an inductor, basically a coil through which current runs. It stores up power magnetically instead of electrically. The best example I can think of is that they're found in the old magnetic ballasts that are used in fluorescent tubes - they plug up the AC and let a large burst of current start up the fluorescent display.

Here's the heart of it:

Capacitors plug off DC but let AC through by storing up electric energy.
Inductors plug off AC but let DC through by storing up magnetic energy.

What happens when you put them in series?

If you'd seen capacitors and inductors for the first time (as a few readers here might) you'd think: "Nothing will get through!" The capacitor would prevent DC from flowing, and the inductors prevent AC from flowing, so nothing should be flowing, right?

In fact, a beautiful strange thing happens when you pass AC through an LC circuit:

You don't get a dead flat line. You get, in fact, a proper sine wave: and not just any sine wave, but the closer the supplied AC frequency is to the system's natural frequency (which is simply the capacitance of the capacitor, the stronger the sine wave is. In other words, we have a frequency selector.

Capacitors on their own don't have oscillating components. Neither do inductors. In fact, the entire system doesn't have a single moving part: and yet it can select out frequencies and reject others.

In a nutshell, this is emergence.

Did something mysterious and un-understandable happen here? Not at all. This is merely a consequence of the fact that capacitors and inductors interact in ways which are not obvious from their individual behavior. Indeed, I have portrayed the LC circuit's behavior as being complex - but really, it is described by the fact that a capacitor's equation when put together with an inductor's equation gives, instead of zero, a "second-order" equation, and a simple one which any first year student in university doing any serious math will learn to solve.

Of course, "second-order differential equations" isn't sexy stuff, media-friendly stuff. So call it "emergence" and act like something strange and wonderful has happened. The fact is that media portrayals of science feed off its image as something mystical, hazy, barely understandable - the fact of it is that things are precise in here, even if they don't seem to be.

==========

Structure emerges from interactions:

Capacitors on their own can't filter frequencies.
Inductors on their own can't filter frequencies.

Therefore, the fact that capacitors and inductors combined can filter frequencies

shows that they are beyond the realm of all currently understandable electrical engineering.

Right, busterdog? ^^

Go tell your radio that it relies on miracles to work.

 

[shernren]

At least busterdog recognizes that ID is really nothing more than spruced up Paleyism for a new generation.

Very well recognized! Paleyism led many a poor soul to stray from Christianity and into deism in its heyday. The only reason ID isn't as successful in doing so is ironically because it has already been thoroughly refuted by evolution.

This happened because Paleyism takes it upon itself to determine how creation speaks of God. Note the fine intellectual arrogance here. Yes, it is true that creation speaks of its Creator. However, how can fallen man elucidate on its own how creation speaks of its Creator? Yes, creation is comprehensible to man, and it reveals and elucidates itself - the study of creation itself is sufficient to reveal this independent of any a priori assumptions about its nature, which is precisely why science works as well as it does.

However, if man's fallenness lies in his inability to reach God on his own, then it is the height of hubris to assume that man can on his own find the correct metaphor for God from creation. And yet Paley does that. What does he compare God to? A watchmaker. To me that is clearly not a biblically sanctioned image. The perfect watch does not need tuning, winding, or indeed any interference at all; the perfectly designed machine should have no further need of its designer's intervention. It is no coincidence that in Paley's parable the watchmaker is nowhere to be found and must be inferred (through the operation of human logic, not divine revelation); the watch is found on a beach, abandoned and yet still ticking as it performs its function. Any conception of God that begins with the watchmaker must conclude that God the watchmaker is either absent or blind.

What does the Bible tell us?

The moon marks off the seasons,
and the sun knows when to go down.
You bring darkness, it becomes night,
and all the beasts of the forest prowl.
The lions roar for their prey
and seek their food from God.
(Psalms 104:19-21 NIV)

"The moon marks off the seasons and the sun knows when to go down" - in other words, the period of daylight and night that we experience is governed by natural processes. That a Hindu or Muslim or agnostic or atheist could agree with. And yet "You bring darkness, it becomes night" - the period of daylight and night are controlled by God, the God of Israel.

Again, "The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God" - in other words, the lions are responsible, by the natural process of predation, for their own sustenance. Again, that anyone can agree with. And yet they "seek their food from God" - that is to say that their sustenance is divinely decreed.

This is not something new. The psalmist had already defused the bombshell of scientific atheism, thousands of years before Darwin was even born. Compare his wise and reserved statements with what little the ID movement has to offer us:

"I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed. [...] And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he's done - and he's not getting it."
(William Dembski "The design revolution?" TalkReason.org 2004)

On some level I agree that evolution is being abused to support atheism - but that doesn't make it wrong. I wonder what would happen if he read Psalm 104?

"Oh, the psalmist can't possibly mean that 'the moon marks off the seasons and the sun knows where to go down'! When you are attributing the wonders of daylight and nighttime to mindless material things like moon and sun and gravity, God's glory is getting robbed!"

"And why does the psalmist say that 'the lions roar for their prey'? When you are attributing the wonders of lions' predation to mindless material things like lions, God's glory is getting robbed!"

But let God be true and every man a liar.

Indeed, what does Phillip Johnson think the best way to talk to people about God is?

If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this,...We call our strategy the "wedge".

("Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds", pp. 91-92)

Whatever happened to knowing nothing but Christ crucified and resurrected? And the psalmist had no qualms to attributing phenomena to materialistic and naturalistic causes, like night to the moon and predation to lions; one wonders if Johnson wouldn't view Psalm 104 with more than a little suspicion. Indeed:

What I am not doing is bringing the Bible into the university and saying, "We should believe this." Bringing the Bible into question works very well when you are talking to a Bible-believing audience. But it is a disastrous thing to do when you are talking, as I am constantly, to a world of people for whom the fact that something is in the Bible is a reason for not believing it... You see, if they thought they had good evidence for something, and then they saw it in the Bible, they would begin to doubt. That is what has to be kept out of the argument if you are going to do what I to do, which is to focus on the defects in [the evolutionists'] case—the bad logic, the bad science, the bad reasoning, and the bad evidence.
(recorded on The Kennedy Commentary)

Perhaps when Johnson sees such skepticism, he is in part projecting as well?

Paleyism drew many in its time to deism: and seeing a Christian argument that will not admit the centrality of the Bible should make any thinking Christian wary. ID can bring nothing good to the Christian community - other than an example of how Christians should not approach science.

 

[busterdog]

Again, to be blunt, busterdog doesn't know how self-organization works.

What a shame.

What you mean to say is that I don't agree with you and you want to frame all questions to exclude reasonable debate.

Hello Ben Stein.

 

[Mallon]

What a shame.

What you mean to say is that I don't agree with you and you want to frame all questions to exclude reasonable debate.

Hello Ben Stein.

(Pssst! This is the part where you show shernren you do know how self-organization works. Not cry persecution. )

 

[shernren]

(Pssst! This is the part where you show shernren you do know how self-organization works. Not cry persecution. )

Indeed, busterdog.

The difference between me and you is very simple:

I back up my points.
You don't.

When I try to explain what emergence is, I reference a simple example from electronics, complete with (admittedly not quite helpful) diagrams. I show that emergence, even though it involves the observing of qualities not immediately recognizable from the individual properties of isolated components, is not mystical or intangible or divinely miraculous. I'm putting together a similar post on self-organization, for which I need a good analogy. Indeed, the analogy of the LC circuit that popped into my head was really the main reason I started this series in response: I wasn't going to communicate my opinion (that you don't understand self-organization) until I was ready to communicate what self-organization and the related concept of emergence was.

You, on the other hand, glibly dish out one-liners complete with emotive (but non-rational) references.

If you think your previous posts demonstrate sufficient understanding of self-organizing, all you need to do is repost pertinent bits of it here.

And you have said nothing at all with regards to my second post concerning the immense, if subtle, theological difficulties surrounding ID. Are you conceding it so substantially? Will you not honor it with at least another rhetorically irrelevant one-liner if nothing else?

 

[busterdog]

(Pssst! This is the part where you show shernren you do know how self-organization works. Not cry persecution. )

Every issue was answered my my post.

I am not crying. I dont have the time for this.

 

[shernren]

How else do we know this is true? Because the apparent power of inherent properties only increases with time, or more properly, study. Darwin made his observations on the basis of simple cells. What appeared to be an advance in descriptive power of how things belied the unfathomable complexity studied by his later disciple, Kaufman, who describes the enzymatic reactions within that simple cell as an order of complexity completely beyond the realm of practical human engineering (that is origination, not cutting and pasting). In short, the math for how this could happen or why it would happen got much, much harder with time. So hard, that science must settle for calling such tendencies "inherent." In short, the difficulty of the origins question, with time, gets harder with more and more information. There is no end in sight.

Thus, the power of these processes is apparently enormous. Expressed mathematically, they are ciphers that tend to vary only more wildly and to greater and greater extremes the more closely they are examined. As expressions of mathematical power, they certainly do beg the question of whether there is enough power suggested to created them in a matter of days or to dissolve the very elements with which we are so familiar, again as taught in the Epistle of Peter.

This argument is so simple that even Talk.Origins can defuse it.

... On the early Earth it is likely that the ocean had a volume of 1 x 10^-6 M (a moderately dilute soup, see Chyba and Sagan 1992 [23]), then there are roughly 1 x 10^50 potential starting chains, so that a fair number of efficent peptide ligases (about 1 x 10^31) could be produced in a under a year, let alone a million years. The synthesis of primitive self-replicators could happen relatively rapidly, even given a probability of 1 chance in 4.29 x 10^40 (and remember, our replicator could be synthesized on the very first trial) litres.

Assume that it takes a week to generate a sequence [14,16]. Then the Ghadiri ligase could be generated in one week, and any cytochrome C sequence could be generated in a bit over a million years (along with about half of all possible 101 peptide sequences, a large proportion of which will be functional proteins of some sort).

Although I have used the Ghadiri ligase as an example, as I mentioned above the same calculations can be performed for the SunY self replicator, or the Ekland RNA polymerase. I leave this as an exercise for the reader, but the general conclusion (you can make scads of the things in a short time) is the same for these oligonucleotides.

Search spaces, or how many needles in the haystack?

So I've shown that generating a given small enzyme is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as creationists (and Fred Hoyle) suggest. Another misunderstanding is that most people feel that the number of enzymes/ribozymes, let alone the ribozymal RNA polymerases or any form of self-replicator, represent a very unlikely configuration and that the chance of a single enzyme/ribozyme forming, let alone a number of them, from random addition of amino acids/nucleotides is very small.

However, an analysis by Ekland suggests that in the sequence space of 220 nucleotide long RNA sequences, a staggering 2.5 x 10^112[12]. Not bad for a compound previously thought to be only structural. Going back to our primitive ocean of 1 x 10^24 litres and assuming a nucleotide concentration of 1 x 10^-7 M [23], then there are roughly 1 x 10^49 potential nucleotide chains, so that a fair number of efficent RNA ligases (about 1 x 10^34) could be produced in a year, let alone a million years. The potential number of RNA polymerases is high also; about 1 in every 10^2012]. Similar considerations apply for ribosomal acyl transferases (about 1 in every 10^15 sequences), and ribozymal nucleotide synthesis [1, 6, 13].

Similarly, of the 1 x 10^130 possible 100 unit proteins, 3.8 x 10^61 represent cytochrome C alone! [29] There's lots of functional enyzmes in the peptide/nucleotide search space, so it would seem likely that a functioning ensemble of enzymes could be brewed up in an early Earth's prebiotic soup.

So, even with more realistic (if somewhat mind beggaring) figures, random assemblage of amino acids into "life-supporting" systems (whether you go for protein enzyme based hypercycles [10], RNA world systems [18], or RNA ribozyme-protein enzyme coevolution [11, 25]) would seem to be entirely feasible, even with pessimistic figures for the original monomer concentrations [23] and synthesis times.

And by the way, if you like Stuart Kauffmann so much, you should know what he really believes instead of the words you're putting into his mouth.

would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

http://www.ucalgary.ca/ibi/kauffman/

The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend! ID needs to stop clutching at straws and pulling fragmented views of people who in their entirety are its worst enemies. Such behavior just goes to show the vacuity of ID and its inability to construct an effective, robust paradigm of any sort of its own.

Furthermore:

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Let's turn to the biosphere. If a random mutation happens by which some organism can detect and utilize some new source of free energy, and it's advantageous for the organism, natural selection will select it. The whole biosphere is a vast, linked web of work done to build things so that, stunningly enough, sunlight falls and redwood trees get built and become the homes of things that live in their bark. The complex web of the biosphere is a linked set of work tasks, constraint construction, and so on. Operating according to natural selection, the biosphere is able to do what Maxwell's demon can't do by himself. The biosphere is one of the most complex things we know in the universe, necessitating a theory of organization that describes what the biosphere is busy doing, how it is organized, how work is propagated, how constraints are built, and how new sources of free energy are detected. Currently we have no theory of it—none at all.[/FONT]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman03/kauffman_index.html
(emphases added)

Oops. Your revolutionary isn't quite the anti-Darwinist you paint him to be. For him self-organization and emergence are things that come out of natural selection and random mutation, and don't supplant it - just in the same way that capacitors don't stop being capacitors and inductors don't stop being inductors just because they've been hooked up in an LC circuit and do so much more than they do on their own.

Go on, misquote someone else ...

 

[busterdog]

And by the way, if you like Stuart Kauffmann so much, you should know what he really believes instead of the words you're putting into his mouth.

* * *

Go on, misquote someone else ...

Everything I have written answers all of your prosecutorial impulses. While you would like me to reinvent the wheel, apparently, lets just test you for intellectual honesty.

We all know that what Stuart Kauffman believes is of know consequence to our ability to reason from his ideas.

If it were not so, I would be berating you for believing in Little Green men simply because you agree with Crick's conclusions about DNA.

This is tendency of yours is one you would do well to eradicate. It is embarrassing and demonstrates the futility of trying to discuss these issues.

One could ridicule the notion that acceptance of the watchmaker argument makes one a deist simply because of the identity of the popularizer of this idea.

 

[shernren]

Everything I have written answers all of your prosecutorial impulses. While you would like me to reinvent the wheel, apparently, lets just test you for intellectual honesty.

We all know that what Stuart Kauffman believes is of know consequence to our ability to reason from his ideas.

One wonders why your supposed objectivity cannot quite extend to those you don't find so easy to quote.

When Stuart Kauffman says something that you find easy to twist, obviously "what [he] believes is of [no] consequence to our ability to reason from his ideas". And yet in another thread you say: It certainly seems to me that the lines being drawn are not to make a careful separation of disciplines, but simply to be rid of theists. Those who are TEs I am sure know of academic institutions who are absolute unreasoning luddites for every Deus Ex Machina. Hold on - what institutions believe is of no consequence to our ability to reason from their ideas, right?

To you, if Stuart Kauffman is scientifically right, then his beliefs - including his unwavering faith in self-organization to vanquish God - are inconsequential to you utilizing his scientific ideas. Well, to me, if Richard Dawkins is scientifically right, then his beliefs are inconsequential to me utilizing his scientific ideas. If an ID stuck his head out at the University of Calgary I'm sure Kauffman would be one of the voices shouting him down. To you, that's fine, as long as he's scientifically right. Well, how then can the "fact" that evolutionists are persecuting creationists be any form of argument against the rightness of their beliefs?

If Stuart Kauffman's beliefs don't matter, then Richard Dawkins' beliefs don't matter. The fact that you (as well as the ID movement) are grasping at the names and reputations of those who would obviously disown them in a flash shows the bankruptcy of the whole idea. Why abuse Stuart Kauffman's voice unless your own has nothing left to say?

If it were not so, I would be berating you for believing in Little Green men simply because you agree with Crick's conclusions about DNA.

Perhaps. But even if Kauffman's beliefs are irrelevant (a position you can't tenably hold unless you admit that Dawkins' beliefs and the beliefs of other militant atheistic evolutionists are also irrelevant), let's look at his scientific ideas. Again:

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Let's turn to the biosphere. If a random mutation happens by which some organism can detect and utilize some new source of free energy, and it's advantageous for the organism, natural selection will select it. The whole biosphere is a vast, linked web of work done to build things so that, stunningly enough, sunlight falls and redwood trees get built and become the homes of things that live in their bark. The complex web of the biosphere is a linked set of work tasks, constraint construction, and so on. Operating according to natural selection, the biosphere is able to do what Maxwell's demon can't do by himself. The biosphere is one of the most complex things we know in the universe, necessitating a theory of organization that describes what the biosphere is busy doing, how it is organized, how work is propagated, how constraints are built, and how new sources of free energy are detected. Currently we have no theory of it—none at all.[/FONT]

He is not saying that natural selection doesn't happen. He is not saying that random mutation doesn't happen. Indeed, he isn't even saying that natural selection and random mutation cannot possibly produce new information - indeed, he assumes it. ("[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]If a random mutation happens by which some organism can detect and utilize some new source of free energy, and it's advantageous for the organism, natural selection will select it.[/FONT]") Kauffman is not saying that we don't understand random mutation and natural selection, and he is not saying that they can't do the job. He is saying that our current theoretical framework is insufficient to quantify and accurately describe their cumulative effect.

In analogy, if you knew first-order differential equations, you would be able to describe the behavior of capacitors in isolation, and of inductors in isolation. If you didn't know second-order differential equations, however, you would have no idea how to describe the combination of a capacitor and an inductor in detail.

That does not mean that an LC circuit cannot filter frequencies.
It doesn't even mean that there must be some kind of "other" thing or influence, apart from the capacitors and inductors itself, that determines the behavior of the combined circuit.
And it certainly doesn't mean that our first-order equations for capacitors in isolation and inductors in isolation are insufficient to describe them.

It simply means we don't have the framework to understand in detail the behavior of the circuit - not because the equations are wrong or incomplete but because we're not quite sure how to describe the way we put them together.

In the same way, Kauffman isn't saying natural selection and random mutation don't work. He's saying they do work. And he's saying that precisely because they do work, and because they work together in such an interlocked complex relationship, we don't yet have the language to describe the relationship between this fundamental process and the expressed behavior of the biosphere. He is saying something fundamentally different from you who try to twist him into saying that natural selection and random mutation do work.

This is tendency of yours is one you would do well to eradicate. It is embarrassing and demonstrates the futility of trying to discuss these issues.

My forthrightness is embarrassing indeed, but to who? ^^

One could ridicule the notion that acceptance of the watchmaker argument makes one a deist simply because of the identity of the popularizer of this idea.

Except that I never said Paley was a deist. I didn't say Phillip Johnson or William Dembski were deists either.

Ironically, you are now trying to turn into a personal attack what I meant as a display of logic. If you will not trust me, will you trust Robert Boyle?

The universe is like a rare clock, such as may be that at Strasbourg, where all things are so skilfully contrived, that the engine being once set a-moving, all things proceed according to the artificer's first design, and the motions... do not require the particular interposing of the artificer, or any intelligent agent employed by him, but perform their functions upon particular occasions, by virtue of the general and primitive contriance of the whole engine.

For him the logic is inescapable:

- The perfect design is one which needs no further interference or adjustment from its designer.
- God is a perfect designer.
- Therefore, God has designed this world perfectly.
- Therefore, this world needs no further interference or adjustment from its designer.

Where is the flaw? Do you think a perfect machine ever needs to be sent back to its maker for repairs and tweaks? ("Oh, I need to download a 'critical security update' for Windows XP. What wonderful programmers the people at Microsoft are!") Do you think God is not perfect? Do you think God did not design perfectly? If you cannot answer "yes" to any of these then the argument follows - and it seems ironclad precisely because it is set in human, fallible logic, the same kind that ID wishes to use to prove God sans the Bible.

The only flaw can be the one buried in the assumptions: that to speak of God as an artificer or a designer or an architect is the right way to speak of Him, especially for those as yet unacquainted with the Word. And it is obvious that the deist tendency is not the only flaw associated with this image. For example, what designer is not constrained by his material? If I paint on paper I cannot use too much watercolor; if I wish to graffiti a wall, a fountain pen will not do. Engineers exist precisely because all building materials are imperfect and the art of engineering is really the art of choosing the least unfavorable weakness in the materials; designers exist precisely because goals are mutually exclusive and one must choose whether the design will appeal more to the young or to the old, will be more safe or more convenient, will be more stable or more portable.

Indeed, ID sneaks this assumption of the limited designer into its premises. To ID, only structures that are "irreducibly complex" or "specifiably complex" or "utterly improbable of evolving" can truly be called designed. (If evolved structures are also designed, then ID might as well pack its bags and go home, for it has nothing left to prove or say - and this is precisely what we contend.) Well then, haven't you limited God - sorry, the Intelligent Designer? Of course the Intelligent Designers must be like the intelligent designers we know and since none of those we know use evolution, the Intelligent Designer doesn't either! (This ignores the huge applicability and profit in the field of evolutionary programming using genetic algorithms which in many cases produce solutions unexpected by humans and yet far better than the result of deliberate design.) If ID presents itself as philosophy it falls soundly flat on this point. For why can't an Intelligent Designer use evolution?

Obviously because we think He can't use evolution and we must be more intelligent than Him.