Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The Force Behind Nature

In my last post, I asked why the author of Search Judaism had devoted so much effort to debunking evolution. This isn’t his personal crusade: delegitimizing and ridiculing evolution is common in the frum world, and attempting to disprove it is a Creationist obsession. Last night I came across a short lecture by Daniel Dennet that helped me understand why.

He made the point that absent an alternative, it seems foolish to assert that something that shows every sign of being carefully planned and designed in fact arose by itself. We live in a world with a coherent explanation of how that can happen, so to us it seems obvious that even if evolution were to turn out to be the wrong explanation, we would find a different, naturalistic explanation for the appearance of design in nature. In a world that had never had such an explanation presented, accepting the Watchmaker Argument seems the more rational position.

The universe appears designed. We must account for that. It makes more sense to say it was designed then to say that design arose accidentally, by itself. Sure, there are problems with the Watchmaker Argument, but most people aren’t interested in philosophy and don’t know about them. Even for those that do, it still may seem more reasonable to assume some guiding force designed the universe. In the absence of any alternatives, that force was assumed to be some sort of deity.

What the theory of evolution does is posit a guiding force that is wholly materialistic, mechanistic, and devoid of intelligence or intent.

The debunking of evolution, then, is never intended to “prove” God’s existence. It is instead meant to remove evolution as a viable alternative. If evolution is not the cause of the appearance of design in the universe, then that design must be accounted for. There must be some force that caused that design. In the absence of any alternatives, that force is assumed to be some sort of deity.

That there is still no evidence for God’s existence is beside the point. The point is that there must be some guiding force, and we intuitively assume that such a force must be intelligent. Intelligent force designing the universe = God. To the theist making the argument, the alternative seems to be that it all just happened randomly, which is clearly ridiculous. The argument that there might be some other, wholly physical force at work which accounts for the design we see seems to be just a placeholder. In his mind, the atheist is saying, “I have no idea why the universe seems designed, but I refuse to believe in God, so I’m just going to say that somehow it happened.”

[An interesting thing about framing the argument as a debate over what the force that produced design in the universe is is that it sets up evolution as a direct rival to God, which may be one reason why the religious see it as so threatening.]




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I came across the following paragraph in The Evolution of God by Robert Wright, and I think sums up nicely what I was getting at in this post:

Darwinians who are atheists have been known to celebrate the failure of Paley’s explanation. They love to note how futile this attempt to empirically argue for the existence of God turned out to be. What they tend not to emphasize is that Paley was half right. The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation. It seems clear that hearts are here in some sense in order to pump blood, that digestive systems are here in order to digest food, that brains are here in order to (among other things) help organisms find food to digest. Rocks, in contrast, don’t seem to be here in order to do anything. The kinds of forces that created a rock just don’t seem likely to be the kinds of forced that would create an organism. It takes a special kind of force to do that – a force like natural selection.

12 comments:

  1. The point is that there must be some guiding force, and we intuitively assume that such a force must be intelligent. . . . The argument that there might be some other, wholly physical force at work which accounts for the design we see seems to be just a placeholder.

    (1) Doesn't the word "guiding" imply "intelligent," or at least "produced by an intelligent cause"? If brute force A acts upon object B, it may determine the course that B takes, but I would not describe it as "guiding" B, unless A is itself wielded by an intelligent cause.

    (2) What is it that you are supposing is the "force" here? Natural selection? That seems to me a rather fanciful and potentially misleading application of the term.

    (3) You slide from saying, in your third paragraph, that the universe appears designed to speaking, in your last paragraph, of "the force that produced design in the universe." Which is it -- design or an appearance of design? For my part, it seems to me rather irresponsible to speak of design as a fact to be explained. The word "design" implies intention.

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  2. All right, my semantics are imprecise. I needed a word that implies something that accounts for things happening, and I used "force"; and I needed something to call the (limited) order we find in the universe, and I used "design."

    > (1) Doesn't the word "guiding" imply "intelligent," or at least "produced by an intelligent cause"? If brute force A acts upon object B, it may determine the course that B takes, but I would not describe it as "guiding" B, unless A is itself wielded by an intelligent cause.

    Why? A riverbed guides the water in it without any intelligence or intent. I am using the word in the sense, “cause to move in a particular direction.
    > For my part, it seems to me rather irresponsible to speak of design as a fact to be explained.

    All right then, the appearance of design is a fact that needs to be explained.

    Anyway, what did you think of the main point if the post?

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  3. My picking on such details reflects two things: my uneasiness with your project in this entry and my difficulty in identifying what in your project seems wrong to me. But here is a try: You make it look as if theism and natural science are in the same line of work, offering competing explanations of the same phenomenon. That seems wrong to me, but I don't have a satisfactory explanation of what is wrong with it; hence my picking on details.

    I suspect that the problem here is that you are mixing together two heterogeneous vocabularies. When we speak of an appearance of design, we are talking about how things in nature strike us, not about how they are constituted. One may say that science offers explanations of such appearances, but no such reference is any part of a scientific theory: it is a kind of humanistic gloss on the theory or on some application of it. A scientific theory is successful in virtue of satisfying certain kinds of empirical test and making correct predictions. If it also enables us to understand why things in nature strike us in a certain way, that's great, but it is not a criterion of the success of the theory. One way of looking at what the "intelligent design" crowd is up to is that they are trying to make this a criterion of success; on that basis, they argue from personal incredulity that the theory is a failure. It does not satisfy their sense of the appearance of design in nature.

    The debunking of evolution, then, is never intended to “prove” God’s existence. It is instead meant to remove it as a viable alternative.

    The second sentence says that the debunking of evolution is meant to remove God's existence as a viable alternative. I don't think that is what you meant to write.

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  4. An apposite passage from Charles Darwin's notebooks, just found at John Wilkins's blog Evolving Thoughts:

    We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act, provided with its instincts its place in nature, its range, its — &c &c: — must be a special act, or result of laws, yet we placidly believe the Astronomer, when he tells us satellites &c &c

    The Savage admires not a steam engine, but a piece of coloured glass & is lost in astonishment at the artificer. —

    Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.


    After reading this, I think I can state the point that I was trying to make in my previous comment more sharply: the term "appearance of design" has an inherent subjective reference which makes it unusable for stating an empirical datum for scientific explanation. An appearance of design is always an appearance to someone, and not all persons see it in the same things. The so-called appearance of design says more about the one who perceives it than it does about any putative designer.

    This does not, by the way, amount to saying that there is no appearance of design, or that there is none that requires explanation; merely that the explanation is at least as much about us as about external nature.

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  5. > You make it look as if theism and natural science are in the same line of work, offering competing explanations of the same phenomenon.

    But aren’t they? Both are attempts to explain why things are as they are. Religion uses speculative supernatural explanations while science looks at the physical world and describes it. That religion may speak to our subjective experiences of phenomena while science tries to objectively describe things is more about the methodology than the goal.

    Also keep in mind that I’m trying to understand the ID/evolution debate from a Creationist’s point of view. To the Creationist, it is obvious that there is design in the universe, design which must be accounted for by something. To them, the default explanation is God (or at least a creative intelligence). Evolution is seen as a rival explanation which, if eliminated, leaves either God or the (to them) weak and nonsensical assertion that all of this order just randomly happened somehow.

    That no one is making the claim that things happen randomly, that there are laws which shape the universe we see, is beside the point.

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  6. I think that what the theists are doing is throwing back at our faces, our argument of the "god of the gaps". They claim that what we don't fully understand we fill in with natural law, an artificial construct that we create in our language.

    So general relativity, as an explanation for what we call "gravity", is an explanation in the language of mathematics. Einstein came up with his theories because of what we observed. There is nothing that says it HAD to be that way. The laws of the universe could have been different. C could have been a different value, or relative like any other velocity.

    But when asking why a book drops to the floor when we let go of it, we could just as easily say, "God made it that way". The fact that we can describe it in mathematical formulae doesn't "replace" god. So ID people allow for the possibility of natural selection and mutations as mechanisms for change, but that the guiding force of god is behind it, as with gravity.

    To us skeptics, such an argument would seem to be rejected on the basis of Occam's Razor.

    MKR- I like your point about "appearances of design".

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  7. But when asking why a book drops to the floor when we let go of it, we could just as easily say, "God made it that way". The fact that we can describe it in mathematical formulae doesn't "replace" god.

    I think that this is exactly right. "God made it that way" is as much an explanation of the fall of a book as it is of, say, the intricacy of living things -- which is to say no explanation at all by scientific standards: completely immune to empirical test, of zero value for prediction, disengaged from well-established theories that are testable and that have predictive value, etc. On the other hand, if what someone wants of an explanation of natural phenomena is that they be ascribed to something of the nature of an agent -- a "who" with aims and purposes and an interest in our lot -- then obviously theism of some sort is the way to go. But the latter sort of "explanation," of course, rests on no evidence and one theology is therefore as probable as another.

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  8. This is slightly off topic, but I think it is important to point out the different claims people make about god. To claim that he created the world is to assert only that he existed, not that he exists now. (Since biology and physics allow the continued existence of the world and life without any obvious additional intervention). Therefore, whatever force it was that created life (god, evolution, whatever) happened a long time ago, and this says nothing about the existence of god now or anything else about his nature.

    Somebody made a good comment on another blog about revealing the logical fallacy of special pleading. Here, too, all of the gods in history no longer exist. They died, were killed, forgotten about or otherwise became irrelevant. Yet fundies claim the the god of the bible is different-- he existed then, he still exists, and still cares about and intervenes in the world. In this case, the fundie must prove why his god is different than the general rule-- that gods disappear. He must provide evidence that HIS god is an exception. The claim itself is a fallacy unless this proof is provided.

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  9. "What the theory of evolution does is posit a guiding force that is wholly materialistic, mechanistic, and devoid of intelligence or intent. "

    With all due respect, many atheists use the word evolution too freely without defining what they mean. The idea that evolution is completely devoid of intelligence or intent is not an unanimous opinion, and arguably is in itself a faith based claim.

    Yes it provides an explanation for how complexity was reached, but it does not answer the question of why complexity in itself was the end result. Why does the chain go from simple to complex?

    Evolution itself has many teleological aspects that need to be addressed. After all its interesting you used the words "guiding force"!

    Equating evolution with randomness is a position that is demands a rigid defense, and its a lot easier to argue for design in its place.

    And yes why is there an "appearance of design" at all? Rather than simply take the design for what it is, why is an "appearance of design" postulated? Sounds a bit desperate to avoid theistic conclusions. Do you then apply such hyper skepticism to say the food you are eating? When you are eating do you postulate whether the food is really there or whether it simply appears to you that you are eating food?

    "The debunking of evolution, then, is never intended to “prove” God’s existence. It is instead meant to remove evolution as a viable alternative."

    And that is only true for fundamentalist Jews and Christians, people who put faith in Genesis. There is a whole world outside those categories, including non-fundamentalist Jews and Christians.

    Personally one of the more convincing arguments for the theist side is that simply put on average its a lot easier for a person to come to the conclusion that the universe is designed by God, than it is to believe in randomness. Now before you go quoting the appeal to consequences fallacy, consider the teleological implications of the said argument. Why do those teleological implications exist at all? To a theist the answer is there is an innate knowledge of God dispersed in mankind, which is why (despite how various tribes have defined their gods) there is so much consistent consensus throughout the centuries on how the abstract god works.

    Btw have any of you watched the recent debate between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens on many of these same topics? Even many online atheists en mass are saying Hitchens lost badly.

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  10. Shalmo, when people say evolution, they mean evolution by natural selection. No confusion there. And the mechanisms of natural selection explain perfectly how complexity arises from simplicity. See Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, for example, for an excellent explication of this and the rest of your questions. Seek and ye shall find.

    And, what is "easier" to see is meaningless. It's easier for me to assume Aristotelian physics (a ball falls because it has an innate quality that wants to move downward) than it is for me to take a class on modern physics. Our intuitions about reality are sometimes not bad, but should NEVER be substituted for logical and experimental inquiry in making scientific claims. So much of science is counter-intuitive, and that's life.

    G3, I'm obviously late in responding to this--I've been on a vacation from the blogosphere--but in the last chapter of Philip Kitcher's Living with Darwin, he also discusses reasons people feel honestly threatened by evolution, and writes some similar ideas. It's an interesting and sympathetic read that perfectly expressed a lot of my intuitions on this. (The other parts of the book are his exploration of why intelligent design is what he calls "dead science").

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  11. Ran out of time before, but to add another detail: One thing Kitcher discusses is how Darwinism adds to the entire Enlightenment case against providential religion. In one sense, it is through the aspect you mention--explaining complexity takes away a case for a designer. On the other hand, though, the details make the case for providence much more complicated in an active way. I.e. there had to be billions of years of creatures competing for resources and often suffering to get to the point of humanity's existence? It can make God seem distant and whimsical. To which the response becomes, "God is mysterious," at which point the Enlightenment case presses on further that there's no reason to posit any such knowledge.

    As Kitcher points out, though, this prospect disturbs and frightens people who honestly find solace, comfort, and community in their religious lives, so they want to find an alternative that's more faith-friendly--hence evolution criticism. He talks about the need to address religious needs in new ways, and is one of the first people I have seen write about that.

    Anyway, if you get a chance to take it out from the library or buy it or something, it's a great section--about the last third of the whole book, which is not very long. (I'm sure the rest is great, but I haven't read it yet.)

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  12. Shalmo, I wonder if you are acquainted with a philosophical doctrine called occasionalism. In the 17th century (the article that I cited refers to 9th-century Muslim antecedents, but I only know the modern French variety), philosophers examining the nature of causation reached the conclusion that we have no insight a priori into why one particular event is followed by another particular event—not even into why, say, a billiard ball striking a second billiard ball causes the latter to move. The occasionalists posited divine intervention as the only possible explanation. The reasoning here is: "I see that A is followed by B, but I find no reason in the nature of things why A should be followed by B; therefore, it must be that God makes B follow A."

    I don't know whether you are inclined to adopt this doctrine. To me it seems a reductio ad absurdum of the assumption that causal explanations have to derive from a priori principles: that any explanation that stops at a brute fact—B follows A, we can't say why—is no explanation at all and has to be supplemented by an invocation of the deity. In effect, the occasionalists take a God-like comprehension of phenomena as their standard of explanation, notice that we have no such comprehension, and rather than attributing this deficiency to the fact that we are not God, they attribute it to God himself.

    Your reasoning seems to me of a kind with that of the occasionalists, except that while they, being rigorous philosophers, extended their view to all causation whatever, you apply it only to those phenomena in nature which happen to evoke certain sentiments of wonder or perplexity in you, namely the phenomena of life. It seems to me that the theory of evolution is as good an explanation of the diversity of species as Newtonian mechanics is of the impact of billiard balls (or the motion of celestial bodies). There is no reason to say that we need God to explain living things but not to explain billiard balls.

    Of course scientific explanations never reach the point at which there is no possibility of asking "But why are things like that?" But the intelligibility of the question is hardly a ground for invoking a deity to "explain" the starting points of the scientific explanation. It merely reflects the inherent limitation of our powers of insight into the workings of things.

    And yes why is there an "appearance of design" at all? Rather than simply take the design for what it is, why is an "appearance of design" postulated? Sounds a bit desperate to avoid theistic conclusions. Do you then apply such hyper skepticism to say the food you are eating? When you are eating do you postulate whether the food is really there or whether it simply appears to you that you are eating food?

    I have already discussed this in previous comments, so I will just repeat my point: The fact that phenomenon A appears designed to observer B, when there is no evidence of design ("But it looks designed!" is not evidence), says more about B than it does about A.

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