On Thu, 01 May 1997 13:20:35 EDT, David Bowman wrote:
[...]
>DB>My point was that Feynman's work takes away the mystery and shows
>the optimality to be automatically a natural consequence of a
>mindless quantum dynamics which treats all possible paths equally
>without an overt appeal to such a necessary Designer.
>SJ>Of course neither Feynman nor you actually know that this is
>"mindless". This theist at least believes that all laws of nature
>are ultimately grounded in the mind of God.
DB>I think you are reading more into my use of the term "mindless"
>than I intended. Notice the word "overt" in my above quote. I,
>too, believe that "all laws of nature are ultimately grounded in the
>mind of God". My use of the term "mindless" was in reference to the
>physical interference effect, first discovered by Feynman, which
>naturally selects the least action path for a classical-like system
>(i.e. one whose total elapsed action was huge compared to Planck's
>constant) from the plethora of all other competing conceivable paths
>-- each contributing on an equal footing to the complex probability
>amplitude for a physical process. The mathematical mechanism for
>this selection process is mindless in the same sense that the
>production of any interference pattern from any wave-like phenomenon
>is mindless. The concept of a mind does not enter the mathematical
>description for how the effect works. All the scientific physical
>laws of nature are mindless in this sense. They do not make any
>*explicit* reference to a mind in their formulation. Whether or not
>a Mind is behind the very existence of those laws or not is a
>metaphysical and religious issue, not a scientific one. I suspect
>that many atheists would appeal to the very (apparent) mindlessness,
>universality, and inexorableness of natural law to support their
>religious beliefs. Of course this is then just a case of atheists
>using science to do a bit of "natural theology" and is the process
>of stretching science into scientism.
Thanks for the clarification, but what then was the original point?
No theist that I am aware of claims that God is necessarily directing
with His mind "quantum dynamics" or any of His physical laws. Did
Feynman claim that he had shown that "quantum dynamics" was
"mindless" and therefore rendered unnecessary "an overt appeal to" a
"Designer"?
>SJ>In any event, the theist would merely ask why is there
>"optimality" which is "automatically a natural consequence of a ...
>quantum dynamics which treats all possible paths equally"?
>DB>I think you mean here that the theist would treat the very
>existence of natural law (and all of nature as well) as a brute fact
>that science cannot explain and appeal to the existence of God as a
>ground for such existence. If so, then I have no argument with you
>here. We should be cautious though. Just because the current state
>of science (at any stage of development) may some unanswered
>questions we should not be quick to make a God-of-the-gaps appeal
>and say that God is overtly necessary to fill them.
There are two arguments in one here. I have yet to meet or even hear
of any theist who claims that God is a "God-of-the-gaps" who
"necessary to fill" gaps in *the operation" of natural laws such as
"quantum dynamics". But that is a very different matter from "the
very existence of natural law (and all of nature as well)". That
these are "a brute fact that science cannot explain" is not a
"God-of-the-gaps" argument. It is then not about "gaps" but about
the filling as well, in fact the whole shooting match! If God is not
necessary to explain "the very existence of natural law" and "all of
nature as well", then it is hard to imagine what else He would be
necessary for!
>DB>Rather we (scientists who are theists) should look at such gaps
>in the fabric of scientific explanations of natural phenomena as
>places to do further scientific research to see if we can find out
>some "mindless" natural scientific explanation for the mysterious
>phenomenon-- all-the-while confident that any such explanation and
>mechanism (and indeed all that exists) owes its very existence to
>God who has created and sustains all things (albeit in a manner that
>seems to usually be consistent with natural law--which itself may be
>seen to be a reflection of God's faithfulness).
Agreed. Is there any "theist" who actually denies that
"scientists...should look at such gaps in the fabric of scientific
explanations of natural phenomena as places to do further scientific
research"?
>DB>In the biological analog the Darwinian mechanism provides a
>natural(istic) explanation for the biological designs, their
>adaptations, quasi-optimalities, and their occasional
>suboptimalities, again without explicit reference to an underlying
>intelligent Designer.
If this is all that Darwinists did, there would be little conflict
between creation and evolution. But in fact Darwinists have all
along portrayed "Darwinian mechanisms" and an "intelligent Designer"
as mutually exclusive. For example, Darwin later admitted that his
number one goal in his Origin of Species was not scientific but
anti-religious:
"....in the earlier editions of my 'Origin of Species' I perhaps
attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the
survival of the fittest...I may be permitted to say, as some excuse,
that I had two distinct objects in view; firstly, to shew that
species had not been separately created, and secondly, that natural
selection had been the chief agent of change...Some of those who
admit the principle of evolution, but reject natural selection, seem
to forget, when criticising my book, that I had the above two objects
in view; hence if I have erred in giving to natural selection great
power, which I am very far from admitting, or in having exaggerated
its power, which is in itself probable, I have at least as I hope,
done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate
creations." (Darwin C., "The Descent of Man and Selection in
Relation to Sex", 1871, Modern Library, pp441-442).
Dawkins portrays God, Lamarckism and Darwinism as mutually exclusive
alternatives:
"I know of only two alternatives to Darwinism that have been offered
as explanations of the organised and apparently purposeful
complexity; of life. These are God and Lamarckism. I am afraid I
shall give God rather short shrift. He may have many virtues: no
doubt he is invaluable as a pricker of the conscience and a comfort
to the dying and the bereaved, but as an explanation of organised
complexity he simply will not do. It is organised complexity we are
trying to explain, so it is footling to invoke in explanation a being
sufficiently organised and complex to create it." (Dawkins R., "The
Necessity of Darwinism, New Scientist, 15 April 1982, p130)
Gould uses a anti-theological argument as his number two (out of
three) evidence that evolution is a fact:
"The second argument-that the imperfection of nature reveals
evolution-strikes many people as ironic, for they feel that evolution
should be most elegantly displayed in the nearly perfect adaptation
expressed by some organisms- the camber of a gull's wing, or
butterflies that cannot be seen in ground litter because they mimic
leaves so precisely. But perfection could be imposed by a wise
creator or evolved by natural selection. Perfection covers the
tracks of past history. And past history-the evidence of descent-is
the mark of evolution." (Gould S.J., "Evolution as Fact and Theory",
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, Penguin: London, 1984, p258).
But as the theistic philosopher Swinburne observes, even Darwinian
Evolution does not render the argument from design invalid, since
Paley's watchmaker does not need to produce his watch directly, but
can make a machine that makes the watch:
"Despite Hume's objections, the argument [Paley's] is, I think, a
very plausible one- given its premisses. But one of its premisses
was shown by Darwin and his successors to be clearly false. Complex
animals and plants can be produced through generation by less complex
animals and plants- species are not eternally distinct; and simple
animals and plants can be produced by natural processes from
inorganic matter. This discovery led to the virtual disappearance of
the argument from design from popular apologetic-mistakenly, I think,
since it can easily be reconstructed in a form which does not rely on
the premisses shown to be false by Darwin. This can be done even for
the argument from spatial order. We can reconstruct the argument
from spatial order as follows. We see around us animals and plants,
intricate examples of spatial order in the ways which Paley set out,
similar to machines of the kind which men make. We know that these
animals and plants have evolved by natural processes from inorganic
matter. But clearly this evolution can only have taken place, given
certain special natural laws. These are first, the chemical laws
stating how under certain circumstances inorganic molecules combine
to make organic ones and organic ones combine to make organisms. And
secondly, there are the biological laws of evolution stating how
organisms have very many offspring, some of which vary in one or more
characteristics from their parents, and how some of these
characteristics are passed on to most offspring, from which it
follows that, given shortage of food and other environmental needs,
there will be competition for survival, in which the fittest will
survive. Among organisms very well fitted for survival will be
organisms of such complex and subtle construction as to allow easy
adaptation to a changing environment. These organisms will evince
great spatial order. So the laws of nature are such as, under
certain circumstances, to give rise to striking examples of spatial
order similar to the machines which men make. Nature, that is, is a
machine-making machine. In the twentieth century men make not only
machines, but machine making machines. They may therefore naturally
infer from nature which produces animals and plants, to a creator of
nature similar to men who make machine-making machines. This
reconstructed argument is now immune to having some crucial premiss
shown false by some biologist of the 1980s. The facts to which its
premisses appeal are too evident for that." (Swinburne R., "The
Existence of God", Clarendon Press: Oxford, Revised Edition, 1991,
pp135-136)
>SJ>Darwin *claimed* to provide a "natural(istic) explanation
>for...biological designs" but even among biologists there are many
>who disagree that his explanation is adequate as a general theory.
><SNIP>
>DB>Good point. I'm not a biologist and don't pretend to be able to
>evaluate the various claims of sufficiency and of insufficiency of
>the Darwinian mechanism as an explanation for the appearance (and
>extinction) of all the various forms of organisms throughout
>geological time. This seems to be one point where my analogy is
>uneven. Feynman's explanation of Hamilton's Principle of Least
>Action has both intellectual beauty *and* mathematical rigor.
>Darwin's explanation of biological change has intellectual appeal
>but has not been fully demonstrated in actual practice in many
>instances.
That is the understatment of the year! It may seem strange but I
would have no problem with Darwin's general theory of evolution, if
it was shown to be true. Indeed, I agree it has "intellectual
appeal. But I cannot in all honesty believe it because it has too
many facts against it. For example Wilcox lists the
following problem areas:
"1. Life's origin. The origin of life requires the initial
encoding of specified blueprints, a non-Darwinian process.
Specification involves arbitrary definitions for the "letters" used
to write the "messages." How then did specified complexity
(blueprints and their described products/"machines") arise from any
amount of nonspecified complexity (complex machines, but no
blueprints)? Are we really making progress in explaining the source
of the genetic code? "The holy grail is to combine information
content with replication" (Orgel in Amato, 1992). That is, we need
a machine that can write down its own specifications (Thaxton,
1984).
2. Origin of the first animals (Cambrian era). The Cambrian explosion
illustrates the abrupt formulation of body-plan constraints (Erwin, et
al. 1987). But how within 25 million years (impalas have remained
unchanged longer than that) could the full complexity of 70- plus
metazoan phylum level body-plans arise, and be individuated with
error-checking developmental cybernetic controls from protozoans?
Remember that protozoans do not have encoded genetic information
for morphology due to cellular interaction. How can code that does
not yet exist be mutated? Further, given the appearance of new code,
how are phylum level morphological "norms" generated, capable of
holding for the remainder of the Phanerozoic? As David Jablonski put
it, "The most dramatic kinds of evolutionary novelty, major
innovations, are among the least understood components of the
evolutionary process" (Lewin, 1988).
3. Species stasis. Species show morphological stasis in the face of
high levels of selectable diversity (Stanley, 1979 & 1985). But what
sort of genetic anchor can hold constant a species' morphological
mean and variance for several million years (Michaux, 1989), when
enough genetic diversity exists in such species to allow laboratory
selection to cause a ten-fold movement of that morphological mean?
Are current models of the informational organization of the genome
adequate to explain this? This difficulty is reinforced by the still
greater morphological stasis shown by the body-plans of the higher
levels of the taxonomic system, a stasis that seems to shape, direct,
and constrain lower level change in an almost "archetypic" manner.
This is hardly the neo-Darwinian prediction....
4. Sudden individuation. New individuation, the appearance of
adaptive complexes (morphological entities) is typically very abrupt
for instance, limb structure in Diacodexus (Rose, 1982 & 1987) or
the Ichthyostegeds (Coates and Clack, 1991). New "type" forms
usually appear suddenly, with the characteristic morphological
systems already "individuated"-as defined and error-checked entities
(Such definition will almost always require more "bytes" to encode.)
Even if possible ancestors that lack the new complex seem to be
present (usually at about the same point in time), where do the new
control system norms come from? The appearance of new taxa seems
to imply the sudden appearance of packages of individuated structural
information, but how does closed, error-checked cybernetic feedback
start? It may be relatively easy to show that a path across phenotypic
space could be progressively adaptive (Kingsolver and Koehl, 1985),
but explaining the necessary changes in the underlying genome is a
different matter The two seem identical only because neo-Darwinism
has assumed the supply of sufficient additive variability.
5. Mosaic evolution at morphogenic transitions. Intermediate
evidence, when it does exist, usually is mosaic in nature. Mosaic
evolution (the movement of one character with stasis in another)
indicates the constraints of existing genomic diversity. But, if
the characteristic appearance of new suites of characters is similar
to that seen in Archeopteryx, then an almost completely established
(individuated) character set can be obtained for one organ/structure
(flight feathers) with little movement in others skeletal
characteristics) (Wellnhofer, 1990; Sereno and Chenggang, 1992).
This makes sense only if the complexity to be realized was already
available in the genome. If large-scale morphological change
depends on the appearance of a series of new mutations to be
selected by a new adaptive niche, should not characters be mutated
and move together at rates that are at least comparable?
6. Adaptive radiations. The speed, character, and commonness of
adaptive radiations indicate the partitioning and exploration of an
occasionally rich genome. Almost all groups at all taxonomic levels
first appear in the record as "type" forms, and then "explode" into a
number of different lineages with a mosaic of related but not identical
potentials for adaptive morphological change (see #5 and the wealth
of information in Carroll, 1988; MacFadden and Hulbert, 1988;
Larson, 1989). This pattern suggests the partitioning of a very large
common genetic package with a high number of alternate
morphological potentials. But no known mechanism is available for
generating such information-dense primordial genomes. Selection can
act only on phenotype, not on hidden genetic potentials. The idea that
a "key" innovation opens a "new" adaptive field assumes what needs
to be proved about the ability of a genome to be reconfigured in
multiple ways. As a matter of fact, a "key" adaptation would be more
likely to produce a plethora of pleiotropic dysfunctions.
7. Parallel development in lineages. In adaptive radiations, the
diverging lineages will frequently develop in a parallel fashion for a
number of characteristics. Such parallels can be quite detailed,
suggesting that distantly related species are relatively close. This
implies that potentials for the parallel developments were already
present in the parental genome as coherent potential blueprints. Thus,
"convergent" evolution frequently looks as if it is due more to shared
genomic constraints than to shared environments. To what extent can
"random" mutations be expected to parallel each other?
(Wilcox D.L. "A Blindfolded Watchmaker: The Arrival of the
Fittest", in Buell J. & Hearn V., eds., "Darwinism: Science or
Philosophy?", Foundation for Thought and Ethics: Richardson TX,
1994, pp202-203)
>DB>This may be partly due differences in how scientists
>(must) approach biology and physics. In physics the phenomena are
>simple enough for the theories to provide a one-to-one
>correspondence between the physical phenomena (or at least their
>statistics) and a mathematical description. Biology is too
>complicated in most instances for such mathematical rigor. Here
>sweeping theoretical explanations can be expected to have their gaps,
>and there are expected to be cases where the theory may be less than
>compelling. In any event (modern synthetic versions of) Darwin's
>theory plays a paradigmatic role in biology as grand in its
>explanatory scope as quantum mechanics plays in physics, even if
>there is a mismatch in the levels of mathematical rigor and
>verification across the analogy.
In other words, "Darwin's theory" is not true but it is useful?
>DB>In both cases the existence of such a Designer may be suggested
>to the theist by the data, but the atheist doesn't feel (and doesn't
>need to feel) the force of the suggestion.
>SJ>Disagree. As Romans 1 points out, it is normal and natural even
>for atheists "to feel the force of the suggestion", ie. "the
>existence of...a Designer". The agnostic Paul Davies admits that
>there "...is for me powerful evidence that there is 'something going
>on' behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming"
>(Davies P., "The Cosmic Blueprint", 1995, p203).
>
>Or atheist Pagels: <SNIP>
>DB>The invisible qualities of God that Romans 1 (v. 20) says are
>clearly visible are His "dunamis" (power) and His "theiotEs"
>(divinity, deity, divine majesty, or godhead). It doesn't say
>anything about His intelligent designs being such an apparent
>attribute.
The word poiemasin "tthings that are made" (AV) "what has been made"
(NIV) implies this. Nature is "clearly seen"(AV & NIV), by all men,
as a set of manufactured (and hence designed) products.
>DB>Just because Davies and Pagels are impressed by the
>suggestion of teleology found in nature doesn't mean that all
>atheists are necessarily similarly impressed. I think Dawkins and
>Dennett may be considered as counterexamples.
I don't know enough about "Dennett" yet, but Dawkins is very
"impressed" with the (to him apparent) "teleology found in nature":
"I shall explain all this, and much else besides. But one thing I
shall not do is belittle the wonder of the living 'watches' that so
inspired Paley. On the contrary, I shall try to illustrate my
feeling that here Paley could have gone even further. When it comes
to feeling awe over living 'watches' I yield to nobody" (Dawkins R.,
"The Blind Watchmaker", 1991, p5)
>SJ>Atheists have to work hard at denying intelligent design!
>DB>I suspect that they would bring up theodicy problems of suffering,
>injustice and seeming suboptimal design in many organisms as
>arguments that theists work hard to find an imaginary intelligent
>caring god to comfort them in a cold brute world.
That there are "problems of suffering, injustice and seeming
suboptimal design" for the *Christian* God is undeniable, and
Christian apologists must indeed "work hard" to reconcile this with
the Biblical teaching of an "intelligent caring God". But so what?
The point is that these "theodicy problems" can be reconciled, such
that they contain no necessary logical contradictions.
In any event, that these are "problems" for the Christian God, does
not mean they are necessarily arguments against an Intelligent
Designer. All of Dawkins and Gould's railings against the `callous'
and `indifferent' God they think they see revealed in nature are
therefore beside the point as an argument against Intelligent
Design.
>DB>On 21 Apr 1997 Brian Harper wrote:
BH>I think its really difficult, for me anyway, to view the
>principal of least action in the same way its originators did. For
>example, it would never even occur to me to think that particles
>were actually engaged in a conscious act of figuring out which path
>minimizes the action. What is amazing to me is that the action is
>minimized, regardless how its accomplished.
>
>It isn't that often that I agree with Steve Jones on something ;-)
>but I agree with his reply:
>SJ>In any event, the theist would merely ask why is there
>"optimality" which is "automatically a natural consequence of a ...
>quantum dynamics which treats all possible paths equally"?
Miracles will never cease! I should take this, blow it up (on my
word processor - not literally!) and frame it on my wall! ;-)
Seriously, I thank Brian for his words of support on point.
[...]
God bless.
Steve
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