Doubting Marcus

Cleverly Designed: Gods, Artists and Bayes (1 of 2)

If gods have countless ways to create something that could only come about naturally in a handful of ways, what should we conclude when we observe the phenomenon occurring in a way it can naturally? This is the question which underlies a very clever argument made by someone I know for unguided evolution. To answer this question of the design of life let us consider something we know has human designers: art.

I’m terrible at creating visual art. I can’t draw, paint, sculpt or take a decent photo and, while I occasionally think highly of myself, I’m below average and inefficient at using Photoshop to make up for these deficiencies. Still, because I’m totally incompetent in all other mediums if you see visual art I created it is guaranteed to be the product of Photoshop.

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‘Mind and Cosmos’ and Teleology

In his recent book Mind and Cosmos the philosopher Thomas Nagel had the ambitious goal of demonstrating, as the subtitle suggests, “Why The Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.” Instead he ended up demonstrating exactly why we’ve stuck with the mechanistic framework he dismisses despite its flaws.

In this work he argues the pervasive understanding of evolutionary science and materialism must be false because they can’t account for moral realism, reason or consciousness. Given the extensive problems with those claims (including those I’ve outlined myself) which Nagel never makes much effort to address it’s no surprise I found his arguments very unconvincing, but even less convincing was his proposed alternative to this mechanistic conception of reality, which was to appeal to teleology.

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Intelligent Design in Practice

I have a challenging question for you: What does Intelligent Design predict? Stumped? Perhaps it’s because, despite the protestations by ID proponents, that it is a trick question. There is a gap between what proponents say and how they behave in practice.

There’s no doubt that if you ask a proponent of ID what it predicts they will rattle off a list including specified complexity, irreducible complexity, no useless DNA, the rapid appearance of complexity in the fossil record, etc. However, this seems to me to be a smokescreen because ID proponents often don’t act as though they believe ID makes those specific predictions.

If you venture over to the Discovery Institute to peek at their definition this is apparent:

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection

This sounds like something that is testable but the devil is in the lack of detail. If I were to tell you that the atomic theory were incorrect you surely would ask me in what specific manner. However, the major contention of ID in practice, as seen in this definition, is that some yet unspecified dimension of biology is incompatible with evolution by natural selection.* This could be said to be the reason why demonstrating a specific claim of ID to be wrong, like the alleged irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, doesn’t in practice cause proponents of ID to abandon the theory as a whole. The details that a specific example of irreducible complexity is wrong doesn’t matter because, to them, there must be some example of irreducible complexity somewhere. If we can find no irreducible complexity, there must be some other trait which proves design.

They are, in essence, looking at a city which grew organically out of the needs of its people, conceding it looks organic but saying that if we look close enough, we know not where yet, we will find that some portion of the city was planned in some way. Making such an argument fails a test of inference when comparing design to competing hypotheses but for those that attempt to criticize the latest specific arguments of ID proponents ID will always be a shifting target.

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*It’s also worth noting it could be seen as a straw-man to say evolution is undirected. In a very real sense it is “guided” by whatever currently available mutations exist which is what leads to the incompetent design we all know and loathe.

Poor PR Decisions: Evolution, God and Design

I think I agree with creationists. No not about the existence of The Real Housewives of Bedrock but about the implications of evolution should have for theism in general and the Biblical religions in particular. Creationist outfits have been telling anyone who would listen that accepting evolution is incompatible with belief in god generally and the Bible in particular and for once I think they are right but naturally for reasons very different from what they’ve been suggesting. Unlike them I readily acknowledge there are lots of Christians and theists in general who accept evolution but the relevant question is are the beliefs really compatible?

The common claim of those who accept theistic evolution that evolution could have been a guided process just isn’t good inference. Modern evolutionary theory places enormous limitations on the history of life on this planet essentially all of which didn’t have to be true. The most common example is the claim that all life has common descent as all life didn’t have to be related but observation and experiment have overwhelmingly confirmed this. Even descent itself didn’t have to be true as a designer isn’t limited to breeding to produce new organisms. A designer just isn’t bound to a “branching tree a life” and could create organisms which have nothing or very little to do with previous organisms which means there were infinite paths to the current set of species.

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“If We Evolved, Naturalism is False and God Exists”

To those unfamiliar with Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism the idea evolution could even conceivably undermine naturalism, when it’s generally considered one of the important pieces in naturalism, may seem a lot peculiar. However, if Plantinga’s argument is right then evolution does indeed undermine naturalism, here defined by Plantinga simply as the philosophical position that “there is no such person as God.” The idea in contention is if an unguided evolutionary process could result in “the great bulk” of our beliefs being true or our cognitive faculties being reliable, he claims it’s not probable or at least less probable than traditional theism, meaning essentially the Abrahamic god. God, if it existed, could easily guide evolution such that our cognitive faculties are reliable.

Plantinga claims the problem is in an unguided process of evolution even if beliefs effect actions, something he doesn’t concede is necessarily true in naturalism, evolution doesn’t select for true beliefs it selects for beliefs that produce adaptive behavior. A human could avoid being eaten by a tiger by correctly believing it as a threat and running away or by wanting to pet it and believing the best way to do so is to run away. Either way the adaptive behavior of running away would be selected for meaning false beliefs could be selected for and this is but one alternative way beliefs could be related to behavior. This, by the way, is already misleading because individual beliefs are not selected for, cognitive faculties which produce beliefs are as there are no genes for individual beliefs. Any geneticist could have told him this but I digress…

He presents his argument as Bayesian but, for clarity, and for my purposes it will suffice as a syllogism:

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