Secular folks should worry.

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Physics Guy
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by Physics Guy »

I think there may be two schools of thought within Intelligent Design. One is the old-school, tornado-in-a-junkyard, watch-implies-a-watchmaker camp, where they insist that no set of natural laws could possibly produce complex organisms. The fine-tuning people are trying to be a newer school, I think, in which they agree that some sets of natural laws can produce complex life by themselves, but just not any old random set of natural laws. In effect the set of natural laws is now the new watch, rather than any particular life form or ecosystem.

I don't like either school, but I'm not sure that the fine-tuning version is necessarily contradicting the basic ID idea. I think they're fully abandoning any claim that brains or eyes or whatever could never evolve naturally. Instead they're trying to say that design must have been needed to finely tune our natural laws, to rig them properly to produce brains and eyes.

It may well be that individual ID supporters get confused between their own schools of thought, and argue inconsistently for design at both law level and organ or organism level.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

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I may be more than a little rusty here, but I think what you're saying is what they should be saying, but I don't think they are actually saying that.

I don't think the biology guys* and the astrophysics guys ever got together to work it out consistently.

Behe's IR examples, the flagella, blood-clotting, poison compartments in bugs, are all, um, "statistical" arguments against evolution, that these are systems that have to be introduced in one fell swoop, and the odds of so many mutations happening simultaneously are absurd. In other words, the machine can't produce them. Dembski? I honestly can't remember enough to say, but I thought he toured with Behe etc.

But I think we're on the same page as far as the dilemma goes. If you have a machine that spits out horseshoes, you shouldn't be in awe when a horseshoe gets spat out. You have to choose between saying, "no way a machine can produce that horseshoe!" and saying, "no way the machine just came together by itself!"

*as DCP rightly observes, apologists are usually combative males
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

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Malkie wrote:Might this require an inverse god-of-the-gaps setup: as the religious believers (and IDers) keep finding mechanisms that would require a god's hand for guidance, they identify another spot in the machine where a tweak is needed. It makes me think of the old non-CD carburetors, except god would be constantly not only tuning the carb but also adding more and more jets and adjusting screws to try to accommodate all of the special cases and try to keep the engine running smoothly.
They've got Isaac Newton. Newton believed that the universe is a "finally tuned machine" but also that it requires maintenance. There has to be breakdowns for angels to have a role to swoop down and intervene. He might have been ahead of his time. Smart guy...
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

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Newton sometimes said things like that but I don’t think it’s clear how serious he was. He was sometimes sarcastic. On the other hand Newton was a convinced theist who spent more time on Bible code stuff than he did on science.

I forget who said of Newton that he was not the first scientist but the last magician. Whoever it was had a point.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

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Physics Guy wrote:
Fri May 05, 2023 4:23 pm
Newton sometimes said things like that but I don’t think it’s clear how serious he was. He was sometimes sarcastic. On the other hand Newton was a convinced theist who spent more time on Bible code stuff than he did on science.

I forget who said of Newton that he was not the first scientist but the last magician. Whoever it was had a point.
Especially towards Robert Hooke. I don't know if it is true but apparently the phrase "we see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants" was a jab at Hooke's stature.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

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Yeah, although now the "shoulders of giants" line is known as something Newton said, I've read that in Newton's time it was already a trope of intellectual modesty, and he was probably being sarcastic.

The line never really made sense as something Newton would have said sincerely. Newton's own personal contributions dwarfed those of all his predecessors back to at least Aristotle, and having been smart enough to reach his insights, he was smart enough to understand how much more he had done than others had. Seriously representing himself as a merely normal person standing on the shoulders of giants would have been false modesty so absurd that it would have to have been part of a personality disorder, and Newton's character flaws don't seem to have been in that direction.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

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Physics Guy wrote:
Fri May 05, 2023 6:42 pm
Yeah, although now the "shoulders of giants" line is known as something Newton said, I've read that in Newton's time it was already a trope of intellectual modesty, and he was probably being sarcastic.

The line never really made sense as something Newton would have said sincerely. Newton's own personal contributions dwarfed those of all his predecessors back to at least Aristotle, and having been smart enough to reach his insights, he was smart enough to understand how much more he had done than others had. Seriously representing himself as a merely normal person standing on the shoulders of giants would have been false modesty so absurd that it would have to have been part of a personality disorder, and Newton's character flaws don't seem to have been in that direction.
Do you think he was calling Hooke a dwarf?
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

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The Wikipedia article on Hooke quotes a contemporary physical description of Hooke as “of middling stature”, and since the description doesn’t shrink from mentioning his bulgy eyes, it probably wasn’t just a euphemism for “short”. So I’m guessing that Newton wasn’t digging at Home’s physical height. It sounds as though Hooke did like to think himself a giant, intellectually, so in this case maybe Newton just overcame his own documented pettiness enough to pull off cool irony.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

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Gadianton wrote:
Fri May 05, 2023 1:04 am

.... I'll point out one thing. Believing in both fine-tuning and intelligent design puts you in a weird conundrum. What you're saying is that God created the laws of physics as a necessary, but insufficient condition for complex life to arise, when he simply could have created the laws of physics such that the laws of physics are a necessary and sufficient condition for complex life to arise.

In the former situation abiogenesis can't happen but the field is dry and God just needs to light a match. Then life explodes and evolves to a point, but it can't cross the line of speciation, and so God jumps in to create all the different species including the hundreds of thousands of distinct species of beetles. The bacteria flagella must be specifically created by God, the human eye, and all the ID examples. But if you believe God had to create the entire physical backdrop such that life can thrive and evolve to a certain degree, then why do 95% of the job when loading the dice for the big bang? Why not fix the initial conditions such that life is guaranteed to evolve, and then he doesn't have to keep stepping in to perform tweaks?.....
Gadianton, I left out your comments focused on Mormon particulars in order to consider the more general picture. I can imagine God creating by setting it all up like a trick pool shot from the beginning. But I do not see any reason God would have to do it that way. Perhaps it is more practical to make adjustments along the way. In fact I could wonder if perhaps adjustments along the way were unavoidable. I have wondered about how much a complicated of system of cause and effect limits possible arranging choices in time. In fact I am inclined to think of it as systemic resistance which would be unavoidable. I do not know anyway to think of it to be sure of how extensive such limitations are but the possibility of such resistance is reason I would not require God to refrain from tinkering in time with the creation process.

For me the problem with intelligent design argument is that what they attempt to demonstrate is beyond their reach. Portions of the cause and effect chain in the development of life which are not well understood may well be understood soon or may be part of that natural chain even if we do not understand the how.

Like you I found myself impressed when it first came out by Behe's Black Box argument only to find myself schooled on line and by further reading. A difference being previously I was a pro Darwinist going back well into my teenage years. I thought this new ID movement was a break from the hopeless absurdities of young earth creationism. It made more sense to me to see Gods creation in back of and within the process of deep time and development called evolution. As a matter of faith I still see it that way but I do not see the ID movement as being able to demonstrate it.(or doing much in the way of science),

If I think what about the world most indicates a living creator i think of the fact that atomic structure is such that complicated structures like organic molecules are possible and strong. I do not know a way to reflect on how that could have been different however. What if is boundless.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by honorentheos »

In the bigger picture, the question remains why it matters if there is a creator involved or not? I don't think the answer to that is universal to everyone. But in the context of this thread it comes down to power. The assertion there is a creator god actively involved in the universe isn't a conclusion being drawn from evidence, but an assertion being made. And that assertion is tied to other assertions about morality, about authority, and about superiority.
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