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So in your mind, if there is something that science has yet to explain, then there are two possibilities: divine origin or natural origin.The scientific approach is to only consider explanations for which we have evidence. We have no evidence of divine action. Some might suggest that things we don't know might have divine explanations. Science would answer that there will always be things we don't know, and that to ascribe divine causes to them is to be not only premature, but unscientific becuase of the lack of evidence. But some might still reply that the reason we haven't found a scientific explanation could be because it has a divine origin.Naturally this argument can go round and round. Ultimately, science's historical and most legitimate reason for excluding the divine is one of experience. Millenia ago man knew almost nothing about the inner workings of nature, and his explanation for things he couldn't explain was ascribed to the divine. But we can examine the history of this approach. Here's my list of things that used to be mysteries, along with an indication of whether they were eventually explained using the natural or the divine:

[b]Phenomenon	[b]Natural Origin	[b]Divine Origin
fire	yes
lightening	yes
disease	yes
earthquakes	yes
volcanos	yes
floods	yes
tidal waves	yes
hurricanes	yes
droughts	yes
planetary orbits	yes
comets	yes
stars	yes
meteors	yes
nova and supernova	yes
geological formations	yes
power of the sun	yes
conception	yes
heredity	yes

In other words, no resolved phenomological mystery ever turned out to have a divine explanation. This is why Creationism is forced to retreat before the ever expanding sphere of scientific understanding. Where once religion could point to spectacular phenomenon like light lightening and enormous structures like the Grand Canyon and say, "This is God at work," those who still believe there's tangible evidence of the divine have had to withdraw into microbiological structures and DNA.The history of ascribing the unknown to the divine is driven by the consistent necessity to focus on the frontiers of science where not much is yet known. But science studies a while, finds the natural explanation, and then Creationism yet once again has to pack up its tents and move on.--Percy

Several people have already commented on this, but I have to say I can't imagine how on earth you could believe this. There seem to be a fair number of idiots and geniuses on both sides, but the objective evidence (and I believe this has been cited for you already in other threads) is that the brightest and most productive scientists are those least likely to believe in God. Of course, you and I both know they're wrong, but we also know they're not stupid. --Percy

If you think that than you misunderstand the history of religious beliefs and of man uncovering natural explanations. But I doubt you really misunderstand. Taking the example of lightning, I think you know very well that man once attributed lightning to the anger of the Gods. They believed lightening had a divine origin. They definitely did not believe what you imply here, namely that the lightning had a natural origin but that God was ultimately responsible because he created the universe "in the beginning."So your argument fails to address the original point. Independent of whether you or I believe the ultimate cause of the universe is God, the history of divine explanations for mysterious phenomena is that every resolved pheonomological mystery has found a natural explanation, and not a single one has found a divine explanation. Now you're putting words in my mouth. I've often said things like, "There will always be things science doesn't know," probably in threads you've not only read but participated in, so you really do know I don't believe what you just said. I actually believe the universe is far too complex a place for us to ever know everything.But I *did* cite a long list of phenomena, Mike, that were once thought divine in origin but turned out to have natural causes. You can believe that the information in the genome had a divine origin if you like, but as I've just shown, the history of such beliefs has an exceptionally poor track record.--Percy

Sure. This is science. Remember tentativity and all that? Remember that you can't prove a negative? We'll never be able to exclude the possibility of the divine, but there is no evidence for the divine at this time. Sure, and that's fine, as a matter of faith. Just recognize that as a matter of science (and I hope we're talking science, here) you have no evidence, and so not a leg to stand on. I know that was your point. And as I explained, this is irrelevant to the point you were attempting to respond to about all phenomonological mysteries resolving on the side of natural causes. You can offer this rebuttal as often as you like, but it's still irrelevant to my original point. I believe as a matter of faith. I understand based upon evidence and reason.You're like me in that you believe as a matter of faith, but your understanding keeps encountering conflicts because you've got certain preconditions, derived from your religious beliefs, that you insist the universe meet. You'll have to take the universe as you find it. You can have faith all you like that earth is 4500 years old or that God created DNA with all information for all species already present, but belief in God requires none of these things.--Percy

Hi Dshortt,You mentioned the holes in our knowledge regarding the origin of the universe, life and man in Message 37, and here you make reference to how science continually discovers just how little we really know. But it would be incorrect to conclude that finding new and unexplored scientific relams means that the holes in our knowledge are becoming larger. Yes, the more we learn, the more we discover previously unsuspected phenomena, things we never even suspected existed. As science learns it uncovers more and increasingly subtle layers. It's like discovering entire unsuspected universes. But even though the vistas are more vast than ever imagined, our scientific understanding and knowledge are continually growing and the gaps diminishing.What you're doing is filling in the ever diminishing gaps in our knowledge with the divine. As the gaps become smaller (though more numerous), there is less and less room for the divine. Looking at current trends, where once God was the explanation for all natural phenomena, IDists have now limited his role to microbiological structures and DNA. The God of thunder and lightning has been reduced to the God of nucleic acids.If history is any guide, God is doomed to have an ever diminishing role in the physical universe. But modern Christian theology has no need to hold to the beliefs of prescientific nomads, and there is no reason why Christianity should continue to supervise the retreat begun in earnest around Galileo's time. God's realm is the spiritual. It may have suited prehistoric psyches and needs to ascribe physical events to gods or God, but if science has taught us anything spiritual it is that God lives in our hearts and minds and not in natural phenomena.--Percy

Well, let's think this through. If I can express the same thing differently this time, what I actually said was that inexplicable and capricious nature was a constant influence upon the evolving homind brain. And I'm a product of that evolutionary process. Therefore it makes perfect sense that I believe in God, doesn't it. I can have my spirtual cake and my science cake all at the same time. My spirtual belief in God derives from faith. And my understanding that my faith derives from my evolutionary past comes from evidence and reason. Like I said before, you can offer this as often as you like, but it is still irrelevant to my original point, which is that you have no evidence. When I reminded you of tentativity and that we can't prove a negative it was to agree with you that you *are* thinking logically, and that science *does* agree with you that the possibility of divine origin cannot be excluded. But look at the table again back in Message 43 with its 20 or so natural origins and no divine origins. I didn't bias that table. I didn't purposely leave out all items that have been shown to have divine origins. The fact is nothing has ever been scientifically shown to have a divine origin. None. Nada. Zilch. Zero.In other words, the important point isn't that you can't exclude the divine. Of course you can't. In science you can never exclude anything. Even falsifications can be falsified, so nothing is ever permanently falsfified.The important point is that you haven't gotten a single supporting shred of evidence for the divine origin of anything. Once again, are we talking science or faith? Read the reply I just posted to Dshortt. If you want to know that God's responsible for everything as a matter of faith, I have no argument with you. But if you claim this as a matter of fact then I'll have to see your evidence. God needs no defending. What you're actually defending is your own vanity that your beliefs are correct. I'm surprised to see you wandering into the "us versus the atheists" territory. Science is not atheistic. Uncovering evidence and developing theories that contradict the beliefs of a prescientific people is not anti-religious or atheistic. Belief in God does not require one to believe that ancient spirtual writings are literally true.--Percy

This isn't something you buy or don't buy, it's just a fact. At one time the gaps in our knowledge were huge. That which we couldn't explain by natural means, i.e., the gaps, were provided a divine explanation. The gaps in our knowledge were filled by attributing them to God. As time has gone by we've gradually filled in, bit by bit, the gaps in our knowledge, making the gaps smaller, or perhaps replacing a large gap in knowledge with many smaller gaps. Those who attribute what we don't know to God are finding that as we know more and more, the gaps into which God can be inserted are growing smaller and smaller.You wouldn't attempt to explain lightning with God, would you? But man did at one time. That's an example of a gap that's now been filled. You spoke of the origin of the universe, life and man. Do you really want to go through an examination of these areas one by one and argue the position that we don't know hugely more now than we once did?Don't think that I don't know where you're coming from, because I do. I know that regarding the origin of the universe you'll say that we don't know what came before the Big Bang. But prior to Hubble's discovery of the red shift, we didn't even know there was a Big Bang. Not much before Hubble we didn't even know that our Milky Way galaxy had company in the form of billions of other galaxies. Going back further, we didn't know that the stars in the sky were suns like our own, or that the "wandering stars" were planets like our earth is a planet. At one time it was explained that God made the heavens and earth, but we now know that the stars and their solar systems condensed from cosmic dust.Growing knowledge is also the history of the origin of life and the origin of man. I didn't say ID has retreated, I said Christianity has. ID is just the latest line of defense of evangelical Christians against the ever expanding frontiers of science. Oh, come on! Need I quote from the Bible? Genesis is a bunch of unsupported assertions contradicted by evidence. And if you're an IDist then you're a strange one, since ID normally attempts to distance itself from Biblical associations. If you visit other ID threads you'll see very explicit denials that ID has any religious affiliations at all, that it's just a young science. You're making assumptions again. I know I believe there is one. But I'm not so deluded as to think I have scientific evidence supporting that belief.--Percy

Hi dshortt,Things have been too busy for any replies that take some thought, and I'm only just getting around to this now. Sorry for the delay. Unless you mean something other than the natural physical laws of the universe when you say "mechanical, physical workings", this is precisely the main issue of the gaps. The term "gaps" refers to gaps in our knowledge of the physical universe. It refers to things we don't yet know or understand. Look at my list again. Lightning, floods, earthquakes, stars are all phenomena of the natural universe. At one time we thought they had supernatural or divine origins, now we know they have natural causes.IDists do the same thing. They take a gap in our knowledge, for example the origin of complex organic molecules and life, and thereby conclude that because we don't know how it happened that it had a divine cause. It wasn't my analogy, but a point is not rebutted by overextending an analogy used to explain it. An analogy is for explanatory purposes only. It makes the unfamiliar easier to understand by pointing out similarities to something familiar. "My love is like a red, red rose," is wonderfully apt and poetic, but it can be torn apart by overextending it. Rebuttal through overtending an analogy is a common debate fallacy. I think it is encumbent upon Dembski to provide evidential support for his ideas through experimental approaches. The design of experiments takes time, so I won't propose any experiments, but what Dembski must do to demonstrate that his ideas have merit is to develop his information theory ideas so that the design content of an object can be quantified. He needs to be able to analyze an organic molecule according to his information theory and report that, for example, thymine has a design content of 87.3. At this point in time there is no connection between his information theory and the real world.At present, IDists are using the precise same arguments Paley used long ago: you can tell an object is designed just by looking at it. Subjective approaches like this are useless scientifically, so until ID can provide objective assessments of design content (objective means that atheists and Jews and Christians and Buddhists and so on can all apply the same methodology and come up with the same answer) that have experimental support, ID is no further along now than it was 200 years ago.--Percy

I think you've got both the definition of evolution and the definition of ID wrong. Both evolution and ID are biological theories of the origin of life and the origin of species. Science argues they were due to natural causes, ID argues they're the work of intelligence. Neither evolution nor ID are a theory of the origin of universe, nor of the origin of the earth.When we talk about the causes of lightening we're talking about the buildup of charge in the atmosphere and other related phenomena. That we don't know the causes of the Big Bang isn't relevant to this issue except at the remotest limits. Arguing as you are is like claiming we don't really know how houses are built unless we first understand the origin of trees.Your spaceship analogy actually works against you, because it gets back to ultimate causes. As I said before, and I think it would be worth your while responding to this point, you're very odd for an IDist because you're making a theological connection. Every other IDist I've had discussions with has gone to great lengths to distance themselves from such implications, because it just makes the connection to traditional Creationism that much more obvious. Since your spaceships can't go infinitely back in time, there had to be a first spaceship. Either it had a divine origin, or it came about naturally. If you're advocating the divine as a cause, then you're doing religion, not science, because you have no evidence that the phenomona you're advancing as the explanation, the divine, is real. Maybe it will. But until that time, you're acceping ID without any evidence. If Dembski has an objective method for detecting design then please describe it for us. You might have trouble doing this, given that Dembski himself never describes such a method. Here's what you said to PaulK: As people have been telling you over and over again, since we don't know how and under what conditions the first chemicals of life were constructed, and we don't know how and under what conditions the first life came into being, we can't calculate these probabilities.What we do know is that reproduction is imperfect and that the variations thus introduced are selected by the environment. Scientifically, we can only project backward in time the mechanisms we're able to uncover thus far. ID would like to include mechanisms for which there is no evidence, but that wouldn't be science.--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 11-25-2004 04:50 PM

What you have in ID right now is a theory in search of supporting evidence, and a method in search of some connection to reality. ID hasn't yet demonstrated any scientific basis as an alternative to evolution, so it's premature to contemplate extending its application to the rest of science.Furthermore, evolution is not a theory of the origin of the universe, so even if you could legitimately extend ID to ultimate origins, evolution would no longer be part of the discussion. Ideas about the origin of existence are usually discussed in [forum=-2]. I'm not quoting the full paragraph, but as Nosy has already commented, you've managed to draw conclusions opposite to my point. I think it would be time well spent for you to explain why we need to know more than the laws of physics to explain lightning. For example, you could explain what the origin of the earth has to do with the causes of the last lightning bolt you saw. We already understand that you believe there's a tie-in to ultimate origins, but I don't see this, no one else sees this, so this seems like an appropriate issue for you to spend some time addressing.Let's not lose sight of the original point. I characterized ID as the old God of the Gaps approach to science, and I explained how many, many phenomena once believed to have a divine or supernatural origin resolved to have natural explanations, like lightning, comets and planetary orbits. I even provided a long list in Message 43.Your answer throughout has been that even though we explain these things in natural terms, that doesn't address the issue of ultimate origins. This is true, but irrelevant to the debate between ID and evolution. In the context of this discussion they are both biological theories of the origin of species (in ID's case it is also a theory of the origin of life). And ID's premise is no different than Paley's 200 years ago: if it looks designed, it was designed.ID is a God of the Gaps approach that proposes divine or supernatural answers for things which as yet have no natural explanation. History reveals the approach of attributing what we don't know to the supernatural to have an exceptionally poor record. Not a single previously unknown phenomena has ever been resolved in favor of the supernatural.--Percy

Of course we all wonder about these things, but this is a different subject. You made a different claim, namely that understanding how lightning is produced requires knowledge about the origin of the earth. I said that no one sees this and that it would be a good idea for you to focus on clarifying this. Okay, but this is a different point. You were arguing that we need to understand origins before we can understand how lightning is produced, and I pointed out that one only needs to know the physical laws of our universe. Now you're making the different argument that understanding how lightning is produced is not the same as understanding why there is any such thing as lightning. Ultimately this raises the question of why our universe has one set of natural laws instead of another. Why is the mass of the proton 1836.1527 times greater than the mass of the electron and not 1836.1526? Was is the speed of light 299,792,458 m/s and not some other value? Why is there something instead of nothing?But like I said, these are different questions altogether. Given that we accept that the laws of our universe are what they are, we need understand no more than that to explain how lightning is produced. The details of the origin of everything or the origin of the earth are not relevant. Oh, come on, you do, too! I never mentioned Christianity. I was talking about the history of human understanding. Pre-historic man ascribed lightning to the Gods. The Greeks had Zeus the God of lightning, and the Vikings Thor the God of thunder. And during the middle ages Christian apologists advanced the notion that the planets were moved along their paths by wind from the wings of angels. Science examines and explains evidence, so it doesn't preclude the supernatural. If today Mount Everest was instantly transported from Nepal to Kansas, we'd have pretty strong evidence of the supernatural.Instead of responding to my arguments about ID you're introducing extraneous and mostly irrelevant points. You've yet to directly address my primary point. ID is in the old tradition begun by Paley of explaining what we don't yet know by claiming "God did it," and as I've pointed out, this approach has been in constant retreat since the time of Galileo. And if ID is actually a theory of why then it isn't a competitor of evolutionary theory, which is only a theory of how.--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 12-02-2004 12:59 PM

We understand. But given that no connection has been made between Dembski's information theory and the real world, how is proposing to ascribe design mathematically different from proposing that someday we'll all drive to work in antigravity cars? Neither is impossible, but neither has any significant supporting evidence, either.We're talking about the here and now. We're asking about the evidence available for ID today because so far you appear to be buying into ID for philosophical reasons, as is apparent from your focus on what we don't know rather than what we know. Perhaps ID could help, but not until it has been placed on a scientific footing. And I don't think any researcher in the evolutionary sciences would agree with your assessment. Progress has been and continues to be so rapid and so astounding that the idea that we've run up against some walls would strike most as ludicrous. If you're trying to follow Dembski, then you must ammend this to say only an intelligence can create information. This is the topic of this thread, and it is quite clearly wrong since just the simplest mutation creates new information. This is the claim that though made many times, you've yet to support it. You have an interesting perspective, and it reminds me of the joke about the way Pravda, the official news service of the former Soviet Union, once reported on a car race. Their article said that the Russian car finished second, while the American car finished next to last. The article didn't mention that there were only two cars in the race. No one within evolutionary circles feels that they're running for cover, this is just the propaganda that Creationists spread within church circles. It's very similar to the claim that Creationists have been making for well over half a century now, that more and more scientists are discovering the poverty of evolutionary theory and are switching to Creationism, or now the more trendy ID. For your view to be an accurate reflection of reality there would have to be evidence that contradicts currently accepted theories, because otherwise there's no reason to run for cover. Got any evidence? A simple example of application of Dembski's information theory, perhaps?--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 12-05-2004 10:44 PM

The scientific method is grounded in pragmatics and evidence, not philosophy. Your lack of evidence is why you're seeking refuge in philosophical arguments that have no apparent connection to the real world.While you *are* taking a philosophical approach, by no stretch of the imagination is it the philosophy of science. And even the philosophy of science has limited application in the day-to-day workings of science. As Feynmann once said, the philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. This probably overstates the case, but you get the idea. You misunderstand how science works. Science isn't static. If it were we'd understand no more now than we did hundreds of years ago. One does not formulate a theory to explain evidence, and then hold to it regardless of what new evidence or insights emerge. Science is a changing, growing organic creature that responds to new evidence and insights by modifying or even replacing theory.Scientific debates, disagreements and evolving scientific theories are not an indication of science hitting a wall, but of science dynamically moving forward. Your couldn't be more wrong. Consider a single gene of a population of organisms that has only 2 alleles. A mutation in the form of a change to a single nucleotide of the gene is sufficient to increase the number of alleles of this gene from 2 to 3. In information theory terms, the message set size has increased by one, and new information has been created. If you're interested I can plug this into the Shannon equations for you. We observe this all the time at the microbe level. It's well documented, old hat, even.The complexity of higher organisms makes finding correlations between mutations and expression very difficult, but there are some well-known examples. Down's syndrome is one. Since you're promoting this propaganda yourself, why don't you just go ahead and call a halt? Seriously, you're the one who claimed evolutionists are running for cover. As I explained before, this would mean that they're trying to hold to theories that are contradicted by the evidence. You haven't provided any examples of this, since your mention of proposals like punk-eek are examples of science exploring how best to modify theory to better correspond with evidence.It appears that those who have evidence do science, while those who don't can only philosophize. The way I see it, you're the one running for cover, since the only question that matters is the one you still haven't answered: got any evidence?--Percy

If by "fairly recent" you within the past few hundred years since Francis Bacon, then I suppose you're right. This makes no sense given the advances of modern science accomplished through application of the scientific method. No argument, but that is the realm of religion, theology and philosphosphy, not of science. If ID is science, then it must fulfill the criteria of science. That you're making supernatural arguments in favor of ID means you have already lost the debate for ID as science. The soul? Are you arguing science or religion?ID supporters must shudder while reading your posts. The field of ID goes to great lengths to distance itself from the supernatural, and here you are opening the barn door wide open to the divine. No, it doesn't. Perhaps you're thinking of multiverse theories, branes and such. But let's stay on topic.Speaking of which, do you plan to actually touch on the thread's topic at any point? Oh, well, reading on... Yes, we know. Goddidit. You attribute what we don't know to God. Even things we know but that you don't happen to accept you attribute to God. Your approach is the old God of the Gaps. Perhaps so, I wouldn't know myself. You seem to place much more confidence in your own speculations than in facts. You reach many conclusions in the absence of understanding or information.Predictions of the pace of scientific progress have a long history of being notoriously off the mark. Despite all the popular science articles in the 1950's, we're not riding to work in helicopters or flying cars. Despite all the hoopla about fusion power in the 1970's, fusion seems destined to always be the power of the future.If you accept ID on philosophical or religious grounds, more power to you. But if you want to claim ID has some sort of scientific foundation then I pray you, please offer some evidence.By the way, should I presume by you're failure to address my descriptions of how mutations add information to the genome, and how changing DNA changes the physical organism itself (i.e., genotype changes causing phenotype changes) that you now understand and accept these points? For whether you actually agree or not, these points did have the saving grace of at least being on topic.--Percy

You seem to be forgetting the claims of IR (irreducible complexity), an argument for ID first advanced in detailed form by Behe, who many regard as the father of modern ID theory. IR argues that some microbiological systems are irreducibly complex, that taking away any single part would render them useless, and that therefore they could only have been designed. The bacterial flagellum is the most commonly mentioned example of IR.I'd like to also focus on your statement, "ID says let's test objects and systems for evidence of design..." Could you please describe how you conduct such a test? For example, tell us how you would test the bacterial flagellum for the presence of ID. Your posts so far have been remarkably free of any quantitative details, and this information would resolve this lack.My inquiry is rhetorical, of course, because I already know this test doesn't exist. Dembski has never defined a connection between his version of information theory and the real world. This is a typical Creationist attitude reflecting much ignorance. There is no indication that you understand how such relationships are implied from the data, and it seems that you are reaching conclusions based on insufficient information and personal incredulity. If you're truly interested in such things then we could discuss it in another thread, but for now I'd be happy if you could just focus for a bit on the topic at hand. This is once again way off-topic, but so egregious that I cannot refrain from addressing it. There are a few misconceptions reflected here.First, evolution does not strive upward. What evolution actually produces is increasing adaptation.The second misconception is that there were time constraints, that the evolution of the early Cambrian had to have happened quickly. It *did* happen quickly in a geologic sense, a mere blink of the eye in the context of the billions of years of geologic history. The Cambrian explosion occurred over just some 15 million years. But you can't compare millions of years to the thousands of years of dog evolution that was mentioned earlier.There's also somewhat of a misconception concerning the view of the early Cambrian evolutionary period as an explosion. Certainly it appears explosive at the boundary between the Precambrian and the Cambrian, and a good portion of it was a very real and high level of evolutionary change, but the Cambrian also brought with it the evolution of hard components in organisms, which makes them much more likely to preserve. But as time goes on we're finding that many novel Cambrian forms actually had softbodied predecessors in the Precambrian.Yet another misconception is that the Cambrian evolution was too intense and too rapid to be accounted for by known evolutionary mechanisms. This could not be further from the truth, especially given the huge number of new environmental niches made available by the presence of hard body parts.--Percy