Design without creation? Sure.

The Darwin lobby insists that design in nature must mean "creationism", which is currently as popular among Our Moral and Intellectual Superiors as any kind of actual dissent from their easily falsified nostrums.

Philosopher of science Del Ratzsch, whose work first inspired me to write By Design or by Chance?, offers an example of design without creation, where origin of life is concerned:

For instance, suppose that we finally discover that life can arise spontaneously but only under exactly one set of conditions. One must begin with 4003.6 gallons of eight specific, absolutely pure chemicals, exactly proportioned down to the molecule. The mixture must then be sealed into a large, light green Tupperware container with one sterile copy of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Do that, and life develops spontaneously by natural means (catalyzed by the precise surface characteristics of "Sgt. Pepper"). Its development, subsequent reproductions and characteristics are completely according to normal natural laws. And life in this case was not directly specially created. But those initial conditions involve interjection of deliberate intent and design with a vengeance." (Ratzsch D., "Design, Chance & Theistic Evolution," in Dembski W.A., ed., Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design, InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1998, p. 291)

Now, a dullard might object that Del's is an unlikely recipe for life; his point is, of course, that a recipe is design using existing ingredients, not creation ex nihilo of the ingredients along with the design.

Intelligent design theorists are harassed, in my view, for the precise reason that the origin of life really is best attributed to design, not law or chance, as Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009) affirms.

The law and chance people know well that that is what it looks like, and are constantly advising the rest of us not to trust our lyin' eyes.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

He said it: The importance of feeling confident where probability is concerned

Personally, given the resources of geological time, I feel confident that
sooner or later that hypothetical chimpanzee sitting at a typewriter, will one day type Hamlet.


- D. V. Ager, The New Catastrophism: The Importance of the Rare Event in Geological History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, p. 149.

Confidence in confidence alone is a heartwarming thing if nothing depends on it.

Hat tip: Stephen E. Jones.

Coffee!: Evenhanded, sure - provided you have only one hand

A friend writes to note, "Evolution and its rivals" - a special issue of the philosophy journal Synthese focused on the creationism/evolution controversy - was just published.

Fortuitously, as part of a special promotion on the part of the journal's publisher, access to Synthese is free until 31 December 2010. When you get there, you will find the following bias-free introduction to the intelligent design controversy:

Coedited by Glenn Branch and James H. Fetzer, "Evolution and its rivals" [Synthese 178(2)] contains Glenn Branch's introduction; Robert T. Pennock's "Can't philosophers tell the difference between science and religion?: Demarcation revisited"; John S. Wilkins's "Are creationists rational?"; Kelly C. Smith's "Foiling the Black Knight"; Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit's "Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski's 'complex specified information'"; Bruce H. Weber's "Design and its discontents"; Sahotra Sarkar's "The science question in intelligent design"; Niall Shanks and Keith Green's "Intelligent design in theological perspective"; Barbara Forrest's "The non-epistemology of intelligent design: Its implications for public policy"; and James H. Fetzer's "Evolution and atheism: Has Griffin reconciled science and religion?"

Some of these people seem to actually make a living out of opposing design in nature. I sometimes wonder who they think they're kidding - but come to think of it, if you can make a living out of that, it doesn't matter, does it?

Don't you feel better already, knowing that your innards are accidental globs of goo?

Darwinists complain about the use of machine metaphors for intricate cellular machinery and processes.

That might give the impression that all that stuff was designed. Which is bad for business.

Here are British physicist David Tyler's comments:

Are machine-information metaphors bad for science?

According to Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry, the widespread use of machine-information metaphors is unfortunate and misleading. They complain about textbooks that develop metaphors to a considerable level of detail. As an example, they cite Alberts, who is often quoted for his analogy between a cell and a "miniature factory, complete with assembly lines, messengers, transport vehicles, etc." Another machine metaphor they dislike is that of the genome as a "blueprint", notably in the hype surrounding the Human Genome Project. Whilst these analogies are widely held within the scientific community and by educators, the main target of Pigliucci and Boudry's paper appears to be intelligent design:

"The analogy between living organisms and man-made machines has proven a persuasive rhetorical tool of the ID movement. In fact, for all the technical lingo and mathematical 'demonstrations', in much of their public presentations it is clear that ID theorists actually expect the analogies to do the argumentative work for them. In Darwin's Black Box, Behe takes Alberts' machine analogy to its extreme, describing the living cell as a complicated factory containing cargo-delivery systems, scanner machines, transportation systems and a library full of blueprints."

For more, go here.

Design: A military perspective

A friend points out an article written by two professors at the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, that addresses the question of design, in general:

In practice, design progress is neither smooth nor orderly, it is iterative and recursive as problems and solutions emerge, new experiments are conducted, consequences are evaluated, obstacles are overcome, and old problems are reframed. (p. 114)

We might expect this in a universe that, at the quantum level, is not absolutely determined. Some retooling is always needed to deal with current problems, whether they are foreseen or not.

Even if problems are foreseen, they cannot necessarily be fore-prevented, because they do not exist in the past, and efficiency prevents carrying a toolkit for all future occurrences, as opposed to developing a solution, using design principles, later on.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Intelligent design: Chance cannot do all that atheists (and theistic evolutionists) hope

A friend writes to tell me how intelligent design is applied in crime detection.

"Back Door" Cheating Scandal Rocks Online Poker

In roughly four years, an online poker cheat ring netted approximately $10M. A Australian player outed the ring via statistical analyses that demonstrated that showed that cheating must have occurred.

Detective work by an Australian online poker player has uncovered a $US10 million cheating scandal at two major poker websites and triggered a $US75 million legal claim.

In two separate cases, Michael Josem, from Chatswood, analysed detailed hand history data from Absolute Poker and UltimateBet and uncovered that certain player accounts won money at a rate too fast to be legitimate.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, an internal investigation discovered that employees had defrauded players for three years because a security hole had allowed cheats to see other players' hidden cards.

Actually, the same thing happened here in Ontario (a province of Canada)

So are all these people wrong? Is chance king?

Or is there design in the universe? And can design be detected by rational methods? One must hope so.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

God is not dead, and in fact ...

... not even feeling poorly.

In a most interesting article at Christianity Today, philosopher William Lane Craig points out that the recent "village atheist"genre of cool books is behind the curve.

Modern philosophy takes God seriously. For example,

The teleological argument. The old design argument remains as robust today as ever, defended in various forms by Robin Collins, John Leslie, Paul Davies, William Dembski, Michael Denton, and others. Advocates of the Intelligent Design movement have continued the tradition of finding examples of design in biological systems. But the cutting edge of the discussion focuses on the recently discovered, remarkable fine-tuning of the cosmos for life. This finetuning is of two sorts. First, when the laws of nature are expressed as mathematical equations, they contain certain constants, such as the gravitational constant. The mathematical values of these constants are not determined by the laws of nature. Second, there are certain arbitrary quantities that are just part of the initial conditions of the universe—for example, the amount of entropy.

These constants and quantities fall into an extraordinarily narrow range of life-permitting values. Were these constants and quantities to be altered by less than a hair's breadth, the life-permitting balance would be destroyed, and life would not exist.

Accordingly, we may argue:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due either to physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

Of course one can argue against that, but one must argue - not rant, or explain how miserable Sunday School was.

What exactly is the "design" part of "intelligent design"?

Bill Dembski asked about design vs. mechanism over at Uncommon Descent, and quite a long thread ensued. I thought I'd post my own thoughts here, to break up the thread a bit.

Here are five things I know that may be useful to someone:

1. Design works primarily through patterns of relationship that require intelligent selection. That is why many mechanisms can achieve the same design. If the relationship works, the design is achieved.

2. Design creates mechanism but mechanism only instantiates design. Mechanism does as much as its design allows. That is why computers are not conscious. The people who are trying to make computers conscious do not understand the nature of the problem. Consciousness includes the instantiation of a series of relationships, and is not a mechanism.

3. You cannot work back from a design to identify a designer unless you already know which features of the designer are instantiated in the design AND can trace those features to a specific designer.

Hence all the controversies about Shakespeare's disputed plays. If the controversialists had fingerprints or DNA there would be no problem. As it is, they fight about WHICH features of the plays should determine the verdict (yes, they fight about a bunch of other things as well).

4. Design resists mechanistic description. Case in point: Writers find it hard to explain how to write well. We describe mechanisms, but the mechanisms do not produce the outcome directly, only indirectly. Many people try the mechanisms and produce the most awful, unreadable prose.

One cannot rule out the role of the mind. So one is reduced to saying things like, "It's easy to write well. Sit at the laptop until drops of blood form on your forehead."

But that is not what we really mean. We mean that the questioner should just go away unless he is willing to suffer as serious writers suffer. Otherwise, he is unlikely to succeed.

But that does not answer the HOW question, it only clears the no-hopers out of the way, to make time for those who have a chance at instantiating the necessary relationships. Those are the people whom the master writing teacher can usefully counsel.

5. Here is some limited-use information: When I write, I select among patterns of expression, often unconsciously, though not always so. If you believe that no mind exists and therefore no one selects and there is nothing to select, I do not have any means of describing how I write well. So we are back to mechanism, which doesn't explain anything.

Alternatively, I can explain the principles by which I select some patterns of expression and reject others. But we are still - I am afraid - solidly in the realm of the mind.

Mario Beauregard and I talked about issues related to this very subject in The Spiritual Brain (Chapter 5 - Are Mind and Brain Identical? And Chapter 6 - Toward a Non-Materialist Science of Mind). That is a critical concept to "get": There is no point looking for a mechanism in systems that do not require a mechanism. (Quantum systems, for example, do not require a mechanism, because they are governed by relationships.)

And if you end up denying that a system does not exist because it does not need a mechanism - even though it obviously does exist - that is your own fault.

A case in point is consciousness. Various worthy researchers are looking for a mechanism for consciousness. Or else they deny that consciousness exists. Thousands of researchers deny that the mind exists. All because they are looking for a mechanism that does not actually NEED to exist. What a waste of time. But, with grant money converted to mental activity, it will take a while for their Time Sink to run out of steam.

Design arguments: Does bad design mean no design?

In Of Designers and Dunces, Roddy Bullock entertaininglyly addresses the claim made by Professor Donald Wise of the University of Massachusetts that defects in the human body show that there is no design in nature.

Unwise person: I’ll admit it's art, but it's bad art.

Wise person: But you will agree that it is the work of an artist. Yes?
Unwise person: No.

A "bad design" claim, if sustainable, might come better from a medical doctor than a geologist, but medical doctors do not appear to be among materialism/Darwinism's fans.

My other blog is the Mindful Hack, which keeps tabs on neuroscience and the mind.