Saturday, September 14, 2013

Man is Wolff to man


As a follow-up to my series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s take a look at philosopher Robert Paul Wolff’s recent remarks about the book.  Wolff is not nasty, as some of the critics have been -- Nagel is Wolff’s “old friend and one-time student” -- but he is nevertheless as unfair to Nagel as some of them have been. 

Most of his post is not about Nagel at all, but consists of an anecdote about Edward O. Wilson and some remarks about the wealth of knowledge Wolff has found in the biology books he’s read.  The point is to illustrate how very meticulous good scientists can be, and how much they have discovered about the biological realm.  All well and good.  But so what?  What does that have to do with Nagel?

Well, Wolff’s complaint is:

Tom Nagel undertakes in his slender 128 page book to show that "the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false," and yet in those pages, there is not a single chapter, a single paragraph, a single sentence, indeed not a single word about all of this extraordinary science.  On the face of it, that just cannot be right.

End quote.  This is, of course, a common complaint about the book.  Indeed, some of Nagel’s critics seem to think that in order to justify dismissing Mind and Cosmos, it suffices merely to note that it doesn’t read like a Scientific American article or pop science book -- without, you know, engaging Nagel’s actual arguments at all.  As Wolff would say, on the face of it, that just cannot be right.

It seems right to these critics because “the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature” concerns biology, biology is a science, and therefore (so these critics conclude) any criticism of that conception had better be hip deep in the scientific details.  But this is fallacious, because while “the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature” concerns biology, it also -- as the word “materialist” should make blindingly obvious -- concerns metaphysics.  And it is that aspect of the conception, rather than the biological aspect, that is Nagel’s main target in the book.  No one who’s actually read the book and is trying to be fair to Nagel could leave that fact out, and it isn’t a small point.  It’s the whole point, as I’ve shown in my series of posts on Nagel’s book and its critics.

The expression “materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature” rather obviously covers several distinct theses, including the following (the list is not intended to be exhaustive):

1. Species arise from earlier species via evolution.

2. Evolutionary change is gradual.

3. All species share common ancestors.

4. The key mechanisms of evolution are natural selection operating on variations resulting from mutation, gene flow, and sexual recombination.

5. The first living things arose from inorganic precursors via purely material processes.

6. Matter and material processes are devoid of any irreducibly qualitative, intentional, or teleological features. 

7. Evolution interpreted in a materialist way suffices to account for every aspect of the biological realm, including consciousness, intentionality, and value.

As anyone who has read the book knows, Nagel’s main concern is with theses (6) and (7).  He does not deny (1) - (3), nor even necessarily (4) and (5), though he would certainly qualify the latter in light of one of the alternative, non-materialist conceptions of matter he entertains.  But it is definitely the “materialist” rather than the “Neo-Darwinian” part of the expression “materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature “ that most exercises Nagel.   It is the nature of the basic material substrate of the evolutionary process, rather than the process itself, that he thinks is the problem with trying to account for consciousness, intentionality, and value in “materialist Neo-Darwinian” terms. 

That is why he devotes attention to ideas like panpsychism, neutral monism, and Aristotelian teleology.  And that is why he does not, and need not, devote attention to biological details of the sort cited by Wolff.  Nagel’s critique goes far deeper than anything evolutionary biologists have much to say about.  For again, it is, for the most part anyway, materialist metaphysics rather than evolutionary biology that he is concerned with.  And I have explained what his arguments actually are, and how certain critics persistently misinterpret them, in the series of posts linked to above.  In particular, many critics ignore the fact that Nagel’s arguments against materialism in Mind and Cosmos are essentially just brief summaries of arguments he has presented in more detail in earlier works like The Last Word and “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”  And they falsely suppose that the arguments are concerned with weighing probabilities, when in fact they are mostly concerned with what is possible in principle.

Hence it is no good for Wolff to complain that Nagel has failed to “trac[e], step by step, the neurological development of species that appear to be located somewhere along the continuum between consciousness and non-consciousness.”  Nagel and other very prominent philosophers have developed arguments which purport to show that no amount of neurological evidence could by itself even in principle explain consciousness.  These arguments are extremely well-known in academic philosophy; more to the present point, they are surely well known to Wolff.  Wolff may disagree with the arguments, but insofar as he pretends that they don’t exist, it is he rather than Nagel who is guilty of “philosophical malpractice.”

As I say, all of this should be pretty obvious to any fair-minded person who has read the book.  It should be especially obvious to a philosopher trained to make careful distinctions and familiar with the sorts of metaphysical issues Nagel addresses.  Any philosopher should also see the glaring problems with another example Wolff offers of the purported ineptness of philosophers when addressing scientific matters.  He writes:

Consider a different example, this one from the medical field of neurology.  One of the bits of philosophy put forward back in the day when I was actually reading philosophy was the notion of "contrast terms."  It was said that pairs of terms such as "left/right" or "up/down" were defined in relation to one another in such a manner that it was impossible to understand one without understanding the other.  Nobody offered any evidence for this claim.  Its truth was taken as self-evident.  Well, along comes the wonderful neurologist Oliver Sacks, who reports the case of a woman who, having suffered a massive cerebral stroke, lost all understanding of the concept "left" while retaining a complete understanding of the concept "right."  She ate only the food on the right half of her plate and complained that the portions were too small.  When she made herself up, she only put lipstick on the right half of her lips.

End quote.  Well, did the woman in question really lose the concept of “left”?  Maybe.  Or maybe she still had it but lost the ability to apply it.  Or maybe her problem was merely visual rather than cognitive.  And maybe she could focus on the right side of things after her stroke only because she had had the concept of “left” to contrast “right” with before the stroke.  On the other hand, maybe all this is wrong.  For example, maybe there’s no sense to be made of having the concept unless you can apply it.  (Though what does “can” mean here?  “Can” in practice or only in principle?)  Maybe there’s no way neatly to distinguish the perceptual and cognitive here.  And so forth.

One thing is for sure, though, and that is that neuroscience by itself is not going to be able to answer these questions, because they are philosophical.  In general, neuroscientific results never tell you anything absolutely straightforward about philosophical issues like free will, perception, consciousness, and the like.  Typically, the lessons purportedly read off from the neuroscience were in fact first read into it, by neuroscientists and others unreflectively making highly challengeable philosophical assumptions.  We’ve seen in earlier posts how true that is when neuroscience is claimed to shed light on free will, introspection, “mindreading,” and the mind-body problem.  M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker have, in their book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, shown how permeated with fallacies is the literature purporting to shed neuroscientific light on philosophical problems.  (If Wolff were still “actually reading philosophy” he might know this.)

One of the ironies of the Nagel affair is how some of the same people who can easily see vulgar scientism for what it is when peddled by an arrogant ignoramus like Lawrence Krauss suddenly lapse into an equally vulgar scientism when the topic is evolution.  Some physicists think their discipline can show how something might come from nothing?  Oh dear, let us count the fallacies.  Some biologists claim to be able to explain consciousness and intentionality?   Have mercy on us o high ones!  How low do you want us to bow?  Someone in our ranks disagrees?  How high do you want us to hang him?

This is a phenomenon whose explanation should be looked for not in philosophy but in social psychology -- specifically, the black sheep effect.  All you have to do is put the words “Darwin” and “disagree” in the same sentence and a certain segment of the herd collectively freaks out, tripping over themselves to report the errant sheep to the wolf.  And you know what wolves do to sheep.

220 comments:

  1. Urban Jean,

    I think you are setting an impossible target here.

    Not really. I'm willing to grant all kinds of things are science, so it's not like there's no way for anything to qualify as science in my view.

    I don't think there is any special mode or style of reasoning associated with science or mathematics or any other discipline.

    I certainly think there is. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between physics and math, despite physics using a whole lot of math, to give one example. Yes, I'm sure there are fuzzier cases - but not every case is fuzzy.

    Tell me what for you would suffice to make a piece of reasoning scientific.

    Empirical measurements of wholly third person objective phenomena (weight, size, shape, motion, etc) and processes investigated with the scientific method with an appropriate fine-grained hypothesis, experiment, and comparison to the results.

    Again, what is this thing 'science' that makes determinations and detections? It's people who make determinations using whatever relevant knowledge comes to hand.

    It sure is. I'm using shorthand here for 'people using the scientific method'.

    These are genuine questions---I have a rough idea of how GCT is conceived but am far less sure about GPT.

    The GPT is just a human being but more powerful, I think it's generally put. Vastly more powerful - even omnipotent, omniscient. Maybe an omnibenevolent sort. But at the end of the day, a person like any other, but magnified immensely.

    Scott, does that sound about right?

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  2. @Crude:

    "Scott, does that sound about right?"

    Yes. In effect the God of personal theism is one being among others, albeit very powerful, and thus pretty much a "human being writ large," i.e., like us but without our limitations. And . . .

    @urban jean:

    . . . that's exactly why there was no need to introduce an analogical sense of "guidance" in the first place. The God of personal theism is no different in principle from Superman or some other powerful nonhuman/extraterrestrial, or even a human being with telekinetic powers, and all such beings are "in the running" as possible guides (in an entirely univocal sense) of an apparently "unguided" boat.

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  3. @urban jean:

    Just a thought or two before you continue your exchange with Crude.

    "Scott [following Crude] asks me for a scientific account of design and how to test for its presence. I don't have one."

    At that point the argument is essentially over qua argument. But there's a bit more to be said by way of tidying things up.

    Crude's original point was about the neo-Darwinian synthesis and the fact that, without the metaphysical baggage that usually accompanies it, it has no bearing on the issues its proponents often count on it to defend.

    He said long ago: "Strip 'neo-Darwinism' of the extraneous metaphysics, and you're left with a process that is utterly silent on the question of God's existence, on whether particular instances of evolution were or were not designed or intended, and more." You yourself agreed with this in fairly short order while appearing to disagree with it:

    "Could I ask that we don't load the term neo-Darwinism with spurious metaphysical content, please? The term is used by biologists to refer to the so-called 'modern synthesis' of Darwin's ideas with Mendelian genetics, today augmented with our understanding of the physical basis of genetics. Every time someone talks of 'stripping neo-Darwinism of extraneous metaphysics' I want to scream 'There isn't any there to begin with!' GRRRR!!!"

    That's more than "water under the bridge"; that's you starting out your part of the discussion by conceding the very thing Crude was contending.

    But in his exchange with one of the cowardly Anons, Crude also said, "There is no scientific test for the presence or lack of God's activity, immediate or historical, in a process." And this is the point you've seen fit to follow up on.

    [cont'd]

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  4. [cont'd]

    Now, I want to make three points here.

    (1) Crude has not said that science can never in principle have any way to test for the presence or absence of design. That may or may not also be true, but it's a stronger statement and Crude hasn't made it, nor is it necessary to his point . . .

    (2) . . . because that point is about present science, and in fact primarily about the neo-Darwinian synthesis and the overweening manner in which its proponents attempt to draw metaphysical conclusions from it. Since you long ago conceded that the metaphysics didn't belong in the science in the first place, and since you appear now to be condeding that current science does not have any test of the sort Crude describes, thus endeth the dispute. All else is mopping up.

    (3) Moreover, and finally: to counter Crude's argument, it's far more important to have a reliable scientific test for the absence of design than one for its presence. Even if the neo-Darwinian synthesis had a reliable test for the presence of design (as I think you've acknowledged it doesn't), that still wouldn't be enough to rule out the presence of design in the very cases necessary for the neo-Darwinists' arguments against theism. That—indeed, for the neo-Darwinian synthesis to have much of any weight at all against nonprobabilistic metaphysical arguments even for theistic personalism—would require a test that reliably gave very few false negatives. And in order to insure that it didn't, we'd have to have a clear, testable, non-question-begging concept of "design" that we already know accounts for all possible types of designer and all possible indications of design. That sort of test isn't a realistic goal for "science" no matter how narrowly or broadly interpreted, and it certainly isn't a sort of test we have now. (We don't even a complete list of all possible types of designer, even of the perhaps-naturally-occurring sort, let alone access to samples of their work that we can use to confirm or disconfirm the accuracy of our test. For that matter, it seems that any apparently random result could have been brought about by design.)

    Of course for its own purposes science itself, even at its most rigorous, doesn't generally require such unrealistically exacting tests—but then that's pretty much the point, isn't it?

    So don't let me stop you from carrying on your discussion with Crude, but really, I think the horse is dead and now we're just disposing of the corpse.

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  5. I see that I wrote "personal theism" in one post and "theistic personalism" in another. I meant the same thing in each case, and the latter term is the one I actually prefer. (The term is due to Brian Davies, and I like it better than Norman Geisler's term "neo-theism.")

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  6. This is a bit off-topic, but it's good for a laugh.

    I was just watching this video of our old friend Alex Rosenberg replying to Jerry Fodor in "The Darwin Wars," and my jaw hit the floor during the bit from about 2:30 to 3:00. Rosenberg doesn't know the difference between a modus ponens syllogism and the fallacy of affirming the consequent!

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  7. That's what makes it a different level.

    You said it was a tertiary level as if there was a real connection between the two when there isn't. Your example requires there be a disconnect to work but under your worldview that disconnect doesn't exist. Secondary causes are not fictional but that is the difference that allows you to say the author is not responsible.

    You will find that it is more complex and subtle than typical glib presentations.

    Unless it concludes omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible with free will it isn't subtle enough.

    Thanks for that clearly defined and meticulously reasoned argument, but, uh, no.

    Good luck with a "standard of objective morality" that drowned nearly all of humanity and killed all firstborn Egyptian children and animals just to impress the Pharaoh and his court.

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  8. Crude, I'm guessing here that you see a difference between physics and maths because the latter contains nothing like scientific method? Actually, mathematicians, in producing new mathematics, do follow a process somewhat analogous to scientific method, but all traces of this have been erased in the finished product. Defending this claim would take us too far afield, and isn't relevant. Instead let me say this. Scientific method is a psychological process in which guesswork is mysteriously transformed into knowledge. We form the hypotheses, deduce predictions, perform enough possibly falsifying experiments, and the hypotheses become accepted knowledge. So the method appears only in the generation of new knowledge. My examples about detecting design are applications of existing scientific knowledge. So asking for scientific method in them is indeed setting an impossible target. Expanding the shorthand 'science makes determinations . . .' to 'people using the scientific method make determinations . . .' doesn't get things quite right. We should be saying 'people using existing scientific knowledge make determinations. . .' Now a scientific theory of design would indeed involve scientific method, and I agree we aren't going to see this soon. But we don't need such a theory to detect objective, measurable, third person, etc, evidence of its products. This is why I took exception to your (September 17, 2013 at 4:00 PM )

    But the presence or lack of an intelligent designer's efforts or intention is not a scientific issue - it's a philosophical and metaphysical one, at best. There is no scientific test (unless you subscribe to ID being science - I dissent on that one) for design in nature. If you disagree, I'll simply ask you to show me the peer reviewed research purporting to examine nature to determine whether or not it was designed by God - or even by a powerful agent. That'll be a fun read, if you can find one.

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  9. Urban Jean,

    Crude, I'm guessing here that you see a difference between physics and maths because the latter contains nothing like scientific method?

    The difference between physics and math is that one is a hard physical science relying on experimentation and labwork, and one is a discipline dealing entirely with abstract concepts and axioms.

    Actually, mathematicians, in producing new mathematics, do follow a process somewhat analogous to scientific method,

    'A process somewhat analogous' doesn't mean anything to me. I can find broadly analogous things-in-common between theology and science. In fact, I can find broadly analogous things-in-common between Senator Harry Reid and Sonic the Hedgehog if I really want to. So what?

    Scientific method is a psychological process in which guesswork is mysteriously transformed into knowledge.

    It really doesn't seem all that mysterious. I can happily grant that there's a demarcation problem without granting that the whole field is a big mystery.

    My examples about detecting design are applications of existing scientific knowledge.

    Except they're not. Maybe existing knowledge, but not all knowledge is scientific. Your aluminum example just didn't get anywhere - you came up with an anomaly, but going from that anomaly to detecting intelligent design, or its lack, is what you need. And you'll be needing that scientific method while you do it - otherwise you're just engaged in reasoning, period. Great stuff, but it ain't science.

    Expanding the shorthand 'science makes determinations . . .' to 'people using the scientific method make determinations . . .' doesn't get things quite right. We should be saying 'people using existing scientific knowledge make determinations. . .'

    That doesn't help - just because I've used scientific knowledge and made a determination doesn't make the whole thing a 'scientific process' automatically.

    Now a scientific theory of design would indeed involve scientific method, and I agree we aren't going to see this soon.

    If we're not going to see it soon, then we haven't seen it yet - and all the talk of science supplanting design, whether of the GCT or GPT or just plain Designers, turns out to be mistaken.

    But we don't need such a theory to detect objective, measurable, third person, etc, evidence of its products.

    Apparently, you do - what with the complete and utter lack of published research on this front. Once again: so long as we're excepting Intelligent Design. Really, I almost wish you had some of that peer-reviewed research purporting to scientifically demonstrate that, say... evolution is not, after all, guided by God, gods or any powerful beings. It would be fun to absolutely shred into pieces.

    I have zero doubt that we can infer design in the world. We're just not using science to do it. And we don't need science to do this and at the same time have reasonable confidence in our arguments and conclusions.

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  10. Doesn't this look like the result of design? Wouldn't an alien who'd done a genetic analysis of the tomato (an undertaking requiring much scientific knowledge) think there was something fishy going on?

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  11. Urban Jean,

    Doesn't this look like the result of design? Wouldn't an alien who'd done a genetic analysis of the tomato (an undertaking requiring much scientific knowledge) think there was something fishy going on?

    The genetic analysis of the tomato will get you, possibly, as far as an anomaly with science. (I can easily imagine an evolutionary biologist punting and talking about a horizontal gene transfer event, or something along those lines.) But you don't need an anomaly, Jean - you need a conclusion of design or its lack, and for that conclusion itself to be scientific. And you don't need to google for anything more bizarre than Mount Rushmore for me to point out the flaws with that jump.

    For that matter - I have an example of design of my own. Should I go, 'a-ha, that sure seems out of place and lacks a good explanation. Science says design!'? I say no, but if we're going to call it science when we look at strange things in nature and call it design, well - won't be stopping with the examples you pick. I've got many of my own. And it won't suffice to point at evidence that these things evolved - because evolution is just one more design tool.

    Let me ask you this: are you really taking the position here that if we have knowledge - if we come to what seems like a reliable conclusion - that we must, as a matter of fact, be engaging in science? That our conclusion MUST be scientific because... what, anything accurate or likely just has to be scientific? If so, sorry - I think that's silly, and says more about about the individual than about the form of reasoning.

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  12. Hello Scott,

    (0) Regarding the 'no metaphysics in Darwin' point I am generally in agreement. I can sympathise with your irritation when philosophically unsophisticated people do draw such conclusions. I watched the videos of the 'Moving Naturalism Forward' conference in which Jerry Coyne appears. I was not impressed. He was advancing the 'there is no free will' line and didn't give the impression of being at all well up on the literature. However, I have a caveat, outlined below.

    (1) My beef is with the passage from Crude I quote at (October 1, 2013 at 3:55 AM ). This certainly looks to me like a never in principle claim.

    (2) See (0) and recent replies to Crude concerning the quoted passage.

    (3) if the argument from Crude in question here is the 'no metaphysics in Darwin' point then I don't wish to counter it. However, . . .

    Having given the 'no metaphysics in Darwin' issue further thought I think I'd want to say the following, and this continues the discussion we had earlier. Agency and guidedness are two very closely related concepts. We have, I think, the notion of unguided, agent-free, natural motion. Any non-natural motion necessarily is guided and agent-involving. This is conceptual necessity. A boat zig-zagging across the current looks unnatural and hence guided. If there is no obvious helmsman present we have an anomaly, which we can approach in two ways. We can seek a way of accommodating this kind of motion to our concept of natural motions. We make a change in our theory. What counts as natural expands. Alternatively we postulate an unseen guider and develop a theory about such agents and their behaviour. I guess there's a third option, which is just to live with the mystery of the anomaly. If we take option two we can try to make our theory of unseen guiders scientific. For this it has to be falsifiable. If our theory sails through our attempts at falsification it gains much credibility and we begin to believe in the unseen guiders. This is a psychological phenomenon. If our theory is unfalsifiable I think it's reasonable to say that it's a metaphysical theory. The unfalsifiability puts it beyond the scientific, by definition. A good way to be unfalsifiable is to be in terms of human-like agents with all their fickleness and unpredictability. Little-g gods, in other words. How does this relate to Darwin? Before Darwin we had no concept of natural motion in the evolution of species. Hence all explanation was in terms of unseen guidance. This explanation was unfalsifiable and hence metaphysical. Post Darwin we have a concept of natural motion in speciation. Much of the detailed working out of this theory is falsifiable, especially following the modern synthesis and our understanding of the physical basis of genetics. So it has great credibility. We have taken the first option. To that extent the unseen guider alternative shrinks, post Darwin, and that's about as far as the metaphysical impact of Darwinism goes. But one can resist this by accepting the expanded notion of natural speciation and claiming that, relative to this, nevertheless some degree of guidance has gone on buried deeply within the Darwinian motion. From the pure naturalist point of view disproving this is next to impossible. On the other hand, the guidist can hope that this 'tinkering', this slight steering off the natural path, is detectable from our present vantage point, though there can be no guarantee of this.

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  13. Urban Jean,

    A boat zig-zagging across the current looks unnatural and hence guided.

    Once again - your 'theory of natural motions', if it is declaring 'this is unguided entirely', isn't scientific. You seem to keep trying to go back and get basic theory claims of science 'unguided' by default, no experiment needed - but that happens to be precisely where I'm raising my objection, and really, you don't seem to have a reply to it.

    What's more, science doesn't need people to determine that sense of 'guided' at all to do the job everyone expects of it. Here is the theory, here's what motions we predict. Are these motions guided by God, gods, powerful beings? Good question - science has no answer. Other kinds of reasoning may well supply answers.

    Before Darwin we had no concept of natural motion in the evolution of species. Hence all explanation was in terms of unseen guidance.

    No, it wasn't. For one thing, 'the evolution of species' wasn't necessarily even on the radar: it could well have been that species were brute facts going back unto eternity. Or reference could have been made to 'some process, we know not what' - which is certainly common even nowadays. Scientifically, at best, there was a knowledge gap. But a knowledge gap in science doesn't mean 'God did it' is used as a scientific placeholder.

    Post Darwin we have a concept of natural motion in speciation.

    Post Darwin, what we have - as far as science is concerned - is an explanation that makes zero reference to guidance one way or the other, insofar as it's scientific. Which is why I've asked probably a half dozen times, 'If it's not guided, show me the research and the experiments demonstrating this', and every time not only is the data not supplied, but the question is actually ignored. As I said at the start, this alone is enough to completely sink the claim that science has been 'reducing the unseen guider alternative'.

    It's a popular mantra, but on inspection, it's void. Scientific investigation, at best, has helped uncover processes taking place in the world, upon which we can make predictions. But whether or not those processes or their outcomes are guided, either in whole or in part, is the question science leaves untouched - and that happens to be the very question you need an answer to.

    From the pure naturalist point of view disproving this is next to impossible.

    Scientifically, it's 'next to impossible' to disprove either the presence or lack of guidance in the operations of the world, certainly when we're talking about an ultimate or grand enough sense. The metaphysical naturalist makes claims that there is no guidance behind everything from evolution to other processes in the world - but if they want to say science supports their view, they're going to have to provide that research, those experiments, those theories I keep asking for, and which no one provides. Or they're going to have to embrace Intelligent Design in principle - and even there, there's no guarantee they'll get what they want.

    Which is why it's high time for self-described naturalists, really, to stop abusing and misrepresenting science. It turns out that science has left the question not only of God's guidance untouched, but even of 'gods' and powerful agents. We can come to conclusions about such things for ourselves, but we'll be doing so in the land of non-scientific reasoning.

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  14. Crude, in reply to your (October 1, 2013 at 6:52 AM )

    In answer to your question, No, of course not. A conclusion is scientific in so far as an argument involves scientific knowledge, as I have said before. For scientific read legal, historical, geographical, ethical, etc, etc.

    Mere strangeness doesn't make guidism more credible, I'd say. One needs at least inexplicability under existing knowledge or ideally, flat contradiction, to drive radical rethinking. The longer the anomaly survives theory revision the more credible the guidist alternative becomes. This is human psychology of belief.

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  15. @urban jean:

    "A conclusion is scientific in so far as an argument involves scientific knowledge[.]"

    So by that standard, is the following conclusion "scientific"?

    (1) Lead has an atomic mass of 207.2.

    (2) Whatever has an atomic mass of 207.2 is intelligently designed.

    (3) Therefore, lead is intelligently designed.

    If not, why not? The argument is formally valid and it clearly "involves scientific knowledge."

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  16. A conclusion is scientific in so far as an argument involves scientific knowledge, as I have said before.

    So, intelligent design is scientific - after all, they refer to scientific discoveries ranging from the bacterial flagellum to fundamental constants to more in the course of arriving at their conclusions.

    Theistic evolution is also scientific: all they need to do is discover that intelligent agents are capable of directing and using evolutionary processes towards particular goals, or make reference to similar 'science', and voila - their conclusion of guidance is scientific.

    Which just impales you on the other prong: if you want to define 'science' so loosely that any argument that makes reference to some scientific knowledge is therefore a scientific argument itself, you -still- don't get the conclusion you want to, because you've exploded 'science' into so broad of an area of reasoning that the history and development of science can't credibly be said to have arrived at the conclusion you want it to.

    The longer the anomaly survives theory revision the more credible the guidist alternative becomes. This is human psychology of belief.

    I'm not interested in 'human psychology of belief'. I'm interested in what is, as a matter of fact, justified to believe in.

    And you keep ignoring the fundamental point: the 'theory' you're dealing with must establish itself as 'guided' or 'unguided' for your argument to get off the ground to begin with. You're trying to make any given scientific theory about the world 'unguided' by default - but you're not going to get that. Instead, you have to argue and demonstrate and even perform experiments to illustrate either its guidance or its lack of guidance - and if you can't do that, or can't think of a way to do that, then your 'guidance' conclusion doesn't scientifically get off the ground. Now, you may be able to take various metaphysical and philosophical and theological arguments and assumptions and argue from there. But as I keep saying - that's all well and good, but 'science' it is not.

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  17. @urban jean:

    Crude writes: "And you keep ignoring the fundamental point: the 'theory' you're dealing with must establish itself as 'guided' or 'unguided' for your argument to get off the ground to begin with. You're trying to make any given scientific theory about the world 'unguided' by default - but you're not going to get that. Instead, you have to argue and demonstrate and even perform experiments to illustrate either its guidance or its lack of guidance - and if you can't do that, or can't think of a way to do that, then your 'guidance' conclusion doesn't scientifically get off the ground."

    And this really is the basic point, isn't it? You can't just make the question-begging assumption that normal = "unguided" and call it "science."

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  18. Step2: Secondary causes are not fictional but that is the difference that allows you to say the author is not responsible.

    I think you misunderstood me, since you attribute to me the opposite of what I actually said.

    Unless it concludes omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible with free will it isn't subtle enough.

    I don't know what you mean.

    Good luck with a "standard of objective morality" that drowned nearly all of humanity and killed all firstborn Egyptian children and animals just to impress the Pharaoh and his court.

    Luck has nothing to do with it; and your Biblical exegesis seems flawed as well.

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  19. @Scott,
    Part of what I think Urban Jean is doing is making instinctive arguments, which aren't really scientific but they are grounded in an innate sense of tracking motion. Infants are fascinated by motion that is irregular (esp. animated faces) but they give minimal attention to motion that is regular (constant, linear). So there is a deep visual filter that differentiates types of motion into what roughly corresponds to our common sense ideas of guided and unguided.

    @Mr. Green,
    Your authorship example was based on fictional characters for the purpose of deflecting responsibility. What you seem determined to deny is that the author/primary cause of a real entity is responsible for the entity in the same way a puppeteer is responsible for a puppet.

    It is also a little bizarre that a crude person began all this with an appeal to the explanation of God's responsibility which is apparently difficult to place on God even for God's direct actions in the Bible.

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  20. Step2: Your authorship example was based on fictional characters for the purpose of deflecting responsibility.

    You may want to go back and read my comments again. But frankly, you give a strong impression of not being particularly interested in understanding the original point, but rather of trying to push your competing view. I readily acknowledge that your competing view results in the problems you keep bringing up — that's why I (and others) don't subscribe to such a view in the first place.

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