Doubting Marcus

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

I previously outlined an argument which says we can rule out design as an explanation for life if designers have a massive amount of options but without design there are only a few options, one of which we are observing. That is to say if gods have millions of ways to create life, one of which is evolution, but unguided nature only has a few ways to create life, also one of which is evolution, the the correct inference when you observe evolution is to believe life wasn’t designed. The clever response to this claim I only recently heard is to say whatever we observe could have happened by non-design as well as by design.

So, this argument goes, if we observed tigers can’t reproduce but the species continues to exist and we found a factory which produces tigers in the center of the Earth that wouldn’t count as evidence tigers were designed. After all, it could just be a brute fact about reality that there is a factory underground that produces tigers. In fact, it is possible reality could randomly produce anything you observe. It certainly isn’t logically or physically impossible for this to be the case and therefore no matter what we observe it would be compatible with non-design.

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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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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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