I have to take a break from JB Peterson, and I will not be posting the next section for some time. Here is a recent argument I got into regarding design and God. I thought Richard Dawkin’s sledgehammer approach converted all the believers years ago, at least persuaded them that we cannot possibly be designed. Of course, he did not since people believe what they want to believe. This may not be new stuff for most of us, but I want someone special to read it because they believe in the design argument.
I have not thought about God for a long while. However, a recent conversation that I had reminded me that I can still get agitated when someone does not see it as I see it. That is interesting in itself and worthy of its own post. I get especially perturbed when someone is unfamiliar with the topic and doggedly persists without considering my points. But my points were not articulated well, and I have forgotten what my favorite authors’ names and arguments were. This post will revisit this topic as well as ask an important question. Are we too hard on believers? I think so. The argument from complexity is not that bad, yet I am still an atheist.
Those Stubborn Beliefs
Two things said by my opponent were that we do not all use the same criteria when evaluating arguments and that the theory of evolution cannot account for all of life’s complexity are good points. For the former point, our myside bias, which is what we want to believe, will make us weigh evidence in favor of our belief more heavily. Our belief becomes a hypothesis which is a kind of confirmation bias. That is, we seek evidence that supports our belief and discount other evidence. But all of science works this way because that is how the mind works. We cannot imagine two beliefs and simultaneously filter two different kinds of evidence. But what if our belief is not the right explanation? Obviously, we must always challenge our beliefs, despite how stubborn they can be.
Beliefs are stubborn things because we probably show an emotional commitment to them, and our identities may be tied to them. What I mean is that these beliefs become “etched” over time in our brains and become reinforced the more we access them. The more emotion that is tied to them, then the more difficult it is to “rewire” them [1]. These beliefs or “frames” become filters for how we view the world and can create much meaning in our lives. Beliefs are reinforcing because when we find that something fits our beliefs, then we do not feel dissonance. What my opponent said, however, was misleading because although we may not all accept the same evidence because of our bias, there are objective ways and criteria for determining which explanation is better.
The best way of determining the strength of our explanations within an argument is by ABE or Argument to the Best Explanation*. In fact, this can be framed in terms of Bayes’ theorem which is just a mathematical way of expressing ABE. ABE tells us a lot of obvious but important things. One, our explanation needs to be plausible, which is a measure of how typical our explanation is. Two, it must have explanatory power which means that it must fare better than other hypotheses. Three, the explanation must have explanatory fitness and not contradict our background knowledge. Four, it must have explanatory scope and be able to explain a wide range of observations. Lastly, we cannot add a bunch of other arguments (ad hocness) to make our argument work.
I do not wish to bash anyone for their beliefs unless they are harmful to others. Believing in God is mostly innocuous, so I respect this person’s belief. But if we are posing it as a hypothesis to explain phenomena, then it is open to criticism as much as the next one. We cannot just throw our hands in the air and say that this is a matter of opinion. Our preference for believing in God is subjective, but the claim of whether or not God caused complexity has an answer. Let us look at the evidence and reasoning used. Note, for those who say that God works in mysterious ways and that evidence and reasoning are irrelevant, then their beliefs are nothing more than beliefs. They forfeit any rights that they may have had to have any sort of intellectual conversation.
It’s Complex; Ergo Godditit
Argument: Life is complex, therefore God designed it.
Evidence: consciousness is too complex; science is not the only way to understand; it hasn’t explained everything
The argument that was given is shown above. This is the God of the gaps fallacy which says that if there is a gap in our scientific understanding, therefore God did it. The God of the gaps argument has historically been the wrong position to take. It would be incorrect, however, for me to say since it has been wrong in the past, then it is wrong now. This is the problem of induction, for which there exists no solution. But this type of reasoning works nevertheless. It probably works because nature over time seems to be uniform and predictable. In any event, I will not rely on this type of reasoning. The argument as it stands is circular, and it does not tell us anything new. It is missing premises and is a last-ditch effort to save God. I suspect that it is also a somewhat more acceptable way of smuggling in a personal God. Science easily explains why we may have a belief in an intimate God, so unless God operates against all reason and logic, we have no reason to give credence to the idea that there is a personal God.
To help my opponent, we can easily change any circular argument into a valid argument by adding premises. In fact, Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute did just that. Meyer says that since our experiences tell us that many complex things are designed, then we can make the inference that life was designed. This is a perfectly reasonable argument. Atheists use this same type of argument to illustrate that Jesus Christ, like all the Gods before him, is just another God. We do not believe in any of those dozens of other Gods, so why should we believe in this God? No, you see because this God is special. As true as this reasoning probably is, we cannot just dismiss the divinity of Jesus (ii). Jesus may be a “special” God and defy our analogous reasoning (iii). But the same thing is true then for Meyer’s reasoning. Meyer could say that just because major gaps have been filled by science, it does not mean that the inference that life was designed will also be filled. In both cases, we must appeal to the actual evidence at hand.
It is very intuitive for us to think that things are designed because they often are—technology obviously is one such thing. But not all things that we observe have a designer other than nature. I could give an exhaustive list, but for many, this will not suffice. It will not suffice because comparing snowflakes to human cells is not believable. This is why we must turn to natural selection as a force of nature that is guided by a species’ environment and random mutation. But to some scientists, like Marc Kirschner who wrote “The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma”, Darwin’s theory of natural selection is not the complete picture. I plan on using this evidence to at least show that life is, as the book states, very plausibly not designed…
References
[1] The Bias That Divides Us. Stanovich, Keith E.
I won’t go on about it, but I strongly disagree with this position. Even just the business of capitalising the word, as you have done, is not innocuous. Belief in a god, or gods, has so much underlying it that I think you can’t just go “well, you do you”.
Re: “design” – the strongest argument against for me, as a professional engineer who has spent decades making my living designing things that have to work, is that nature’s “designs” are objectively and demonstrably shit. There’s a deep well of information on the many, many examples one could point to so I won’t ennumerate them at length. Instead I’ll mention just one: you can choke.
Your biology requires that from time to time, food and water is conveyed from the environment into your insides. It also requires that air is conveyed from the environment to a different, completely independent part of your insides, and if that supply is interrupted FOR ANY REASON even for a couple of minutes, you die. The design argument proponent’s contention is that the supposedly genius designer thought a system with ONE incoming route for both those systems, with a complex and failure-prone valving arrangement near the top, was a preferable solution to simply keeping both systems completely separate. This just doesn’t make any sense. It is, self-evidently, NOT “designed”, it’s bodged together from whatever happened to be at hand. It doesn’t kill people often enough that it’s selected against, obviously, but it kills people often enough that you can probably name at least one person who has choked to death. There’s no possible justification for it, unless you’re going to retreat to the “mysterious ways” argument, and then, as you rightly state, you’ve lost.
That is a great example of an argument from poor design. I haven’t reviewed this material, however, since Dawkins came out with “The Greatest Show on Earth” over a decade ago. Still, I am hesitant to say that all things that look poorly designed are. For example, it is well known that testosterone levels in males drop with age, and some have claimed that that is but another example of poor design. But medical experts have hypothesized that it is nature’s way of protecting the body from excessive exposure to hormones since sex hormones are correlated with certain cancers later in life. A lot of these designs that we think of as poorly designed may be the only way to accomplish such a design given the constraints of the body. So maybe we can’t call every organ optimally designed, but they still are all quite amazingly complex and functional. Despite all of this, I need no convincing that it was not an anthropomorphic God who engineered the body but rather natural selection and recycling of body plans (more on this later).
Even just the business of capitalising the word, as you have done, is not innocuous.
Capitalizing the names of fictional characters is the standard, whether it’s Romeo, John Henry, or God.
This is mostly a failure to recognize complexity. Things like the course of a rivers and the wear pattern of a building are extremely complex. People don’t think of them that way in part because they are random and complex in a way not natural to humans.
The power grid of New York City is complex, especially if you get down to in-room wiring, therefore god did it.
Complexity can arise out of fairly simple rules and a few rolls of the dice. That’s not the same as “random” it’s more like “guided random” – e.g.: the power grid is not strictly random since it is (presumably) built along a relatively small set of rules, which are applied iteratively and recursively. It’s not quite fractal but it’s the same concept. Christians ought to know this stuff and not make such dishonest arguments from ignorance. But that’s christians for ya.
This is a good point. I have seen many simulations starting with simple rules that when iterated over many trials yield complexity. Although designed by us, the very enormously complex thing we are typing on at its root is based on simple rules of arithmetic. And you are right that a good way to conceptualize this is “guided random” since, at least in natural selection, we are keeping the stuff that provides a survival benefit to the organism relative to other organisms. But the evolutionary biologists are a little hazy on the details. I don’t think I will even entertain what happened before the first replicators appeared or prior to evolution taking place in the next post. But somehow I need to show that complexity at the level of a cell and organism can take place without a handyman. I think to make it convincing, however, I will have to use evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo.
As far as your point on Christians, I used to be in the business of criticizing them. But for some reason, I have lost that zealotry that makes me want to anymore. I think some Christians truly want to believe in a God and also believe in evolution. But I don’t think you can have your cake and eat it too. Well, you can, but they are fundamentally incompatible then. Other Christians, as you mention, fall prey to the myside bias and will do anything in the capacity to undermine evolutionary arguments in order to support their theistic belief system.
Meyer annoys me, because it seems he doesn’t understand “design”, doesn’t understand the mathematics of “complexity”, and doesn’t even grasp the notion of “explanation”. (It also seems likely he doesn’t understand the notion of “random” well enough to avoid the Bertrand paradox in probability, but that’s mostly tangential here.)
That turns out not to be entirely accurate. However, what seems the soundest solution (a mathematical counterpart to Occam’s Razor) involves application of several sorts of mathematics that most people are not familiar with and is seems considered difficult; also, the result still presents some limitations, and most loudly noticeable gives a “solution” that many people simply do not like. (Additionally, a few philosophers may hold reservations as this derivation relies on an axiom that may instead be asserted in Refutation, if one doesn’t mind how ridiculous the alternative is.)
To address that need it might be helpful to first become familiar with the formal mathematics of computational complexity theory and associated formal grammars; Linz and Sipser seem commonly recommended college texts.
Those already familiar with that math may note that DNA mutations allow not only context-sensitive grammar productions of αAβ➞ αγβ form, but also the αAβ➞ αβ productions to give rise to an unrestricted grammar, implying evolutionary processes produce at least recursively enumerable complexity. After that, assert as lemma that cell/organisms are not capable of (fully general) hypercomputational complexity, and challenge anyone who disputes the conclusion to demonstrate a disproof of the lemma — possibly pointing out how profitable such demonstrated capability could be. (For as start, every currently available algorithmic code becomes breakable as a constant time function, which would likely interest the NSA.)
I recall they tried to apply Turing machines to how the mind reasons, akin to a computer. It turns out that how we reason can’t be modeled like a computer. I am not saying that DNA can’t be modeled with some complexity theory, but I have my doubts. I just found a free text by Linz online, and I will be sure to check it out.
I am trying to make sense of your last paragraph. You are saying that evolution yields a grammar with chemistry? Break that down for me because I am not familiar with what your notation designates. Also, you are speaking of how DNA mutations can give rise to new information, but where did the DNA come from to being with?
Meyer claims that there is no evidence that chemistry or physics will bias DNA in its favor; that is, there is no “law-like necessity.” He also says: “As the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the base sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule.” Polanyi argued that it is precisely this chemical indeterminacy that allows DNA to store information and which also shows the irreducibility of that information to physical-chemical laws or forces.”
That’s not what the papers I’ve read said. What I recall is engineering findings that it’s not efficient to try and model or emulate how humans reason through such means, which is different from “can’t”, especially as a philosophical absolute. However, I’d be interested if you have a particular reference in mind.
That paragraph was discussing DNA complexity. The chemistry of a DNA strand corresponds to a character string on the alphabet {A,C, G, T}. When DNA copies, it may mutate, which corresponds to a “production” in the mathematics of “formal language” and “formal grammar”, which in turn are closely related to the formal mathematics of computational complexity. In typical notation, the arrow represents “may produce”, the “α”, “β”, and “γ” various strings, and (in the production rule) “A” represents some generic character of the alphabet.
There’s several pirate editions of Linz around the web; they’re usually not the most recent, but they seem entirely adequate for learning the math to a sufficient level, which seems necessary to grasp how absurdly complicated the phrase “recursively enumerable complexity” denotes.
Not only new information, but new information of potentially absurd complexity. I’ll also note it’s not specific to DNA, but any information string representation capable of mutating replication; DNA is merely a known particular instance, demonstrating an existence case. A “designer” (beyond 2nd law thermodynamic selection for least action) is unnecessary thereafter, in the case of chemistry.
Where DNA comes from seems a slightly different question from how it becomes complex. I’m less familiar with the details there, but know DNA is a special case of autocatalytic chemistry.
While DNA may be the most favorable such mutating self-replicator in some sense of thermodynamic chemistry, that doesn’t seem necessary to explaining any evidence. As such, it seems not a question of necessity, but sufficiency.
To a first approximation, yes; but only in so far as when you start getting to macroscale phenomena, humans tend to stop considering the description “chemistry”, just as when phenomena start getting to the scale of molecules humans tend to stop considering the description “particle physics”.
Not completely true; but it definitely seems one aspect that allows DNA to store it.
Slight misquote? Anyway, what I suspect is the full essay is apparently reprinted online here. My impression is that Polanyi demonstrates in that essay fundamental misunderstandings about information in the formal sense of modern physics, particularly where he asserts “A printed page may be a mere jumble of words and it then has no information content”. That is simply wrong. (While the information does not have correspondence to the external world, that is still “information content”.)
And, while he claims that there is “irreducibility”, it doesn’t seem clear that he shows such a property even for his discussion of machines, let alone for living things or the information of their DNA. I’d also highlight where he says “The pattern of atoms forming a crystal is another instance of complex order without appreciable information content”, to point out that while a (typical) crystal may be an instance of order without appreciable information content, it’s precisely that lack of information content that makes it seem merely “macroscopic” rather than “complex”.
Finally, he seems either misinformed or dated where he asserts that principles of “communication of information” are “additional to the laws of physics and chemistry”; the statistical formulations of theremodynamics via statistical mechanics are closely tied to the mathematical formulations for information theory.
To paraphrase the colorfully acerb physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it seems clear Polanyi isn’t right, and unclear that Polanyi is even wrong.