mick
Member (Idle past 5016 days) Posts: 913 Joined: 02-17-2005
|
Re: How to Measure Complexity
Chiroptera writes: there is no need for an unparsimonius addition like an "intelligent designer" unless and until there is good evidencw that there was such a designer Just to back up Chiroptera here, I am quoting a long section from "The argument from biogenesis: probabilities against a natural origin of life" by R.C. Carrier, and published in the journal Biology and Philosophy (2004) 19: 739-764. Please note "AFB" = Argument from Biogenesis, the argument that life could not have arisen by natural forces, which is the argument that Carrier is attacking here (but more broadly, he attacks creationist argument per se). "Proposition A" is the proposition that natural explanations for biogenesis are not credible.
quote: Just because something isn’t proven doesn’t mean it is false, and a hypothesis that can’t even be tested yet cannot be said to have failed. However, one might argue that theism has greater explanatory scope than scientific naturalism if we can point to genuine explanatory failures in the latter (Snoke 2001; Ratzsch 2001: 143-146; Moreland 1989, 1994). If we can show that all hypotheses for a phenomenon proposed so far are false (not merely unproven, but actually discredited by contrary evidence) then theism could become the best available explanation of biogenesis - though tentatively, for the AFB is a purely negative argument, which succeeds only by the effective elimination of all available alternatives. So the arrival of any new alternative will scrap the AFB, as will any alternative supported by a positive argument. Therefore, only if there are no alternatives in contention can the formal validity of a gaps argument be established - and then only as an inference, not a necessary truth. But even a valid inference can be defeated by a stronger contrary inference, and this is one problem that Proposition A might never overcome. For example, if I observe my wallet missing, and know that a known pickpocket brushed against me recently, that my wallet was stolen would be a valid inference. However, if I also had a known tendency to forget my wallet, it would still be a valid inference that I simply forgot it, even given knowledge of the pickpocket. This could be a sufficiently strong inference, in fact, that I would be more justified in searching for where I usually leave my wallet before accusing the pickpocket. With regard to Proposition A there is a very strong contrary inference: since natural explanations have so far been confirmed for every phenomenon that could be fully explored, probably other phenomena will have them, too. Since we cannot access much of the data or exactly recreate the conditions surrounding any origin-of-life scenario, it is to be expected that we cannot confirm any of our hypotheses. Our inability to do so is thus not the product of the failure of our hypotheses, but of the inaccessibility of the evidence. In such circumstances it is reasonable to draw inferences from past cases. And this leads to naturalism: the view that everything (probably) has a natural cause. For example, ancient scientists said lightning was caused by friction between colliding clouds, by analogy with colliding flint stones. They had no proof, but it wasn’t unreasonable - and it turned out to be closer to the truth than the theory that God caused lightning. They only lacked the missing details of pressure and electricity. Since then, natural explanations have had a flawless track record: every time we get to the bottom of things, it is always a natural explanation that ends up being true. Natural explanations also have wider explanatory power than supernatural alternatives, predicting more things, more successfully. They succeed so routinely it is impractical to expend any effort testing supernatural theories before natural ones can be thoroughly tested first. Hence “there is a natural explanation for everything” is a valid inference from the fact that all reliable and unambiguous evidence available supports the rule, and so far offers no support for breaking it. So uniform and massive is this body of evidence, representing centuries of steady scientific progress in hundreds of fields, it is hard to imagine any contrary inference, such as Proposition A, ever achieving the same force. This does not mean miracles are impossible. It only means that very reliable and unambiguous evidence is necessary to justify believing in them, given the weight of the inference to naturalism. Proposition A also suggests a theory with almost no explanatory utility. The theory that a god started life makes hardly any testable predictions regarding the nature of life. In contrast, every natural theory entails a vast range of predictions that, once confirmed, would explain a large amount of data - for example, why life is coded with a DNA molecule instead of something else (e.g. see Mulkidjanian et al. 2003), why some life breathes sulfur, some oxygen, some carbon dioxide (and what the first life breathed and why), why life began as a microscopic cell, and so on. Creation theory predicts none of these things, and thus cannot explain them except by appeal to God’s enigmatic whim, which is unhelpful as a contribution to scientific progress. As Frank Salisbury (1969) put it, “Special creation or a directed evolution would solve the problem of the complexity of the gene, but such an idea has little scientific value in the sense of suggesting experiments.” Nevertheless, lack of utility is not an objection to a proposition’s truth, and I will grant for the sake of argument here that Proposition A might yet meet the high standard of inferential power posed by naturalism. As I will show, even granting that, no one has successfully demonstrated the truth of Proposition A.
I keep going back to Carrier's paper because it so clearly spells out the logical fallacies of creationism - it's worth a read by any member of this forum. Mick This message has been edited by mick, 09-19-2005 09:32 PM This message has been edited by mick, 09-19-2005 09:33 PM This message has been edited by mick, 09-19-2005 09:38 PM
This message is a reply to: | | Message 37 by Chiroptera, posted 09-19-2005 5:53 PM | | Chiroptera has not replied |
|