Vincent Torley, pt.1
John Loftus, pt.1
Vincent Torley, pt.2
John Loftus, pt.2
UPDATE: Instead of writing another reply at Uncommon Descent, Vincent Torley is posting his replies at John Loftus's last thread.
Stand by for Torley's reply, which I expect will pop up anytime, now. Loftus misunderstands the distinction between accepting evolution and common descent and disagreeing with what the mechanism for it is. He also misunderstands the difference between what ID claims to be able to infer: Not a specific religion, nor the identity of the designer. Just that something was designed by somebody.
However, I think Loftus does make a good point: If Nature wasn't (pretty much) regular, we couldn't have science. So in what sense could design events be considered science?
11 comments:
Hi Bilbo
I would answer your final question by saying design is scientific to the extent that we can predict future design from existing patterns. That is, evolution ought to be predictable.
Design in human affirs ditto - one should be able to predict what humans will design next.
Not sure it happens that way, though...
I don't think evolution has been predictable, do you?
Nope. Seems to suggest that Loftus is wrong in saying design can be a feature of regular nature.
But read Mike Gene's latest:
Is Evolution Predictable?
Well, "unpredictably predictable" was Mike's phrase! But in frontloading all the design is in the initial cell. So the question would have to be whether, starting from non-life, that designed, frontloaded cell could be scientifically predicted. Which would not seem to be likely.
Let's assume that Behe's Edge is correct, so that the distance random mutation can travel before it must have a selective advantage is rather short.
Let's assume that the first cells were designed with this limit in mind. The designer wanted to reach point Z, starting from point some initial point. If the designer had enough knowledge they could work backwards to an initial point that would make Z a very likely outcome.
Ah, but working back to an origin is different from predicting forward to a result. Would you rather construct an alphabet from the Bible or predict the Bible from the alphabet?
I don't think the alphabet/Bible analogy is appropriate here. I think something like a tricky shot shot might be better. The player wants to knock the 15 ball into the side pocket, and working backwards realizes that this can be accomplished by aiming the cue ball so that it hits the 1, which hits the 2,...until the 14 ball hits the 15 ball into the side pocket.
Ah - I wish I could remember a statistic I read somewhere about the physics of billard balls and the huge magnification of minor errors after a few shots. As I remember it effectively makes up a chaotic system, and therefore your trick shot is probably impossible to predict.
If so, and if billiard balls are the archetype of predictable behavior, then could we predict anything with any accuracy?
A good question, Bilbo.
Scientific prediction is something of an approximation that is only valid under quite restricted conditions. You can be pretty confident where your satellite will end up in space, once your approximate rockets get it into a measurable trajectory. But in the real world, say in medicine, there are so many confounding variables that you're just talking about better than random.
That doesn't deny that the universe is usefully reliable, by God's grace, but does rather dilutescience as an absolute.
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