You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.
Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you to take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of your presupposition that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of the presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.
Of course, the two rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but possible. This possibility shows that the
appearance of design does not entail design.
Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning -- 'the trail goes that-a-way' -- derives from a designer.
Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by a process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.
But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.
As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a bent stick appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is: How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations?
To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its naturalistic (Dawkins, Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutuionary processes? I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:
. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, nonpurposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them.
(Metaphysics, 3rd ed. p. 104)
This suggests the following design argument:
1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.
2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
Therefore
3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
To resist this argument, the naturalist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.
I think you are leaving out a very important alternate possibility here. No Darwinian would ever dispute that our sense organs are indeed very definitely designed for a purpose, exquisitely tuned for exactly the job they do, as are a bird's wing, the infamous bacterial flagellum, et cetera. The question is where does the design come from? Your proposition (2) needs further unpacking, because it seems to me that implicit in your phrase "intelligent designer" is the idea of a teleological Mind at work. This completely misses the possibility that natural selection over sufficient time is capable of generating exquisite design as well. It is rational to trust our sense organs because our very success as living organisms is due to the fact that we have been given an enormous reproductive advantage by trusting them, and reciprocally, the continuing development, refinement, and accumulation of their design has been made possible by the advantages they confer when we rely on them. Although this might seem to be a circular argument, it isn't: as long as small design improvements confer a small advantage relative to the current context, the organism lives to reproduce and to pass variation down into the next generation. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were organs of Corti. Perhaps a better formulation of (2) would be:
This, I think, focuses more on rational uses of designed objects, without conflating this question with questions about the source of the design, which is another matter altogether.
The phrase "accidental products of blind evolutionary processes" similarly misses an important distinction. Evolution is blind, yes, in the sense that it cannot look forward to see where it is going. But it is only variation that is accidental; evolution itself, and the accretion of design, is indeed guided, and forcefully so - but by selection, with each organism's genome pitilessly tested against its environment.
This is the central point that always seems to be missed by ID proponents: nobody is denying that there is a great deal of fantastic design in Nature. The point is that selection and variation can do the job all by themselves without the need to invoke any outside agency, or preexisting plan.
All this of course still leaves open the question of ultimate origins, but there is simply no need to invoke purposeful planning to arrive at biological machinery that is obviously, and reliably, designed for specific tasks. A designer is needed, yes. Even an "intelligent" designer, if you like, but only if you are willing to broaden the term "intelligent" to include mindless processes. I think, though, that what you and the ID camp really are arguing for is something more like a "conscious" designer, and we on the other side have good reason to think that is simply not required.
I have already agreed, in my latest post, that an uncontrovertible instance of sophisticated design entering biological space without any antecedent pathways of evolution by selection would deal evolutionary theory a heavy blow. But the mere fact of having reliable organs does not meet that test.
Regards, Malcolm
Of course, Darwin himself had his doubts in this area.
(1) The bacterial flagellum appears to fit that requirement, unless you mean any conceivable (broadly logically possible) pathways - but then you've effectively ensured that there will be no "uncontrovertible instance[s]." One can always imagine a pathway, even without the data to support it.
(2) Considering the actual data, we really don't have the details on the developmental pathways in biological structures as they exist today, not to mention any supposed intermediates. The pathways of the simplest worms (e.g. C. Elegans, 1.5mm) were a monumental project, and a sight organ on the scale of a human eye has far more cells in it. Given this, the confidence of (neo)Darwinists seems to be highly inflated.
Humans, and large predatory mammals generally, occupy a very different niche from cockroaches, and their cognitive needs are consequently very different as well. Our cognitive skills and sensory equipment reflect our different way of making a living. What confers reproductive fitness for a roach does not suffice for teams of upright primates hunting large herbivores on the savanna.
Perhaps the word "pathways" is not sufficiently clear; you seem to be using it to refer to genome-sequencing, the accomplishment of which for c. elegans was indeed a monumental and historic achievement. Examples of evolutionary pathways abound in Nature, however: the reformation of the reptilian jaw into the bones of the inner ear in mammals, the "Panda's Thumb" made famous by Gould, the vestigial hipbones of constricting snakes, and the reuse of common preexisting structure found in the human hand, the cetacean flipper, and the bat's wing are just a few examples. If a conscious and omnipotent Designer wanted to outfit a panda with an opposable thumb, surely the job could have been done in a more effective way than to make a marginally useful, inflexible stump by co-opting a wristbone from an anscestral animal.
Confidence may be inflated all around, given Nature's penchant for surprises, but the views of Darwinists are actually very well-grounded.
Malcolm
Malcolm
I remember Dennett, in his recent op-ed piece (discussed back on Victor's blog), reminding us that there are people who are willing to exploit a distinction between process and product built into the word 'design', and we should reject in principle what they're selling; but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the theists who built that distinction into the word, and I'm entirely sure it isn't the theists who are making capital out of exploiting the distinction.
Bill is approaching a good point, but I don't think he's quite there yet. Under his contention, I find it difficult to figure out how anyone would be able to distinguish accident at all.
The actual inference appears to be:
a.) I already know that humans make piles of rocks;
b.) I already know that humans make piles of rocks in order to mark a trail;
c.) Here are some piles of rocks;
d.) They look similar to the sorts of piles that humans make in order to mark a trail;
e.) Therefore, they _might_ be those kinds of markers.
f.) Which I can test by looking for a trail
To be followed by
g1.) I found a trail.
g1-2.) Now I can upgrade my previous inference to something much closer to certainty (though still not strictly certain).
or
g2.) I didn't find a trail.
g2-2.) Therefore, however the rocks may have come there, they don't seem to be there to mark a trail. (Unless the trail has been moved or concealed or is only implied; which I have no other evidence handy of yet, except for the piles themselves.)
h.) But they do still _look_ like things I already recognize to be artificial (i.e. intentionally designed by someone for some purpose... by which I mean really designed, not really not-designed. {g})
How would we know they were accidental instead?
Furthermore, if we discovered (_ahead_ of the relevant inference again) that the rocks had been put in those piles by earthquakes (or, to use a more pertinent real-life example, if we discovered that the ocean waves were what were sorting the pebbles and stones on the beach), would it really be true that we would then be properly justified in ignoring the rocks as being any evidence for some sort of truth that could (in principle) be discovered?
Of course not. They would have meaning and information, but it would be us (if no others) as the inferrers who are creating the meaning and information by discovering what other facts are relevant to the situation--those facts now being truths. (Or we might make mistakes; or, invent some facts by hypothesis or simply for play or for some other reason of our own. In which case the meaning would be untrue, though we might use truths in doing so.)
I think what Bill is approaching, is the question: how can we reliably justify that our justifications can possibly be reliable?
We can't. It's impossible.
We can discover that we're _presuming_ our justifications can possibly be reliable. And we can discover that only nonsense will follow in our arguments unless we presume this. But those aren't justifications of the presumption (not this presumption anyway.)
So. What are the implications of this? (Among other things: are there any situations in which we find, out of logical consequence of holding a position, we have to try justifying that our justifications can possibly be reliable? If so, what should we conclude about trying to hold that position?)
Jason
Hello, Malcolm,
Thanks for your reply. A few remarks, including clarification of what I said last time around. You wrote and Regarding the suggested false distinction, yes, truth-discernment could allow for better reproductive success, once attained. The difficulty is getting there when the driving force is reproductive success. The epistemic requirements are far lower to reproduce; any number of pathetically false belief-desire combinations could yield results.
Another way to think of it: organisms are like black boxes. If they carry out certain behaviors (fighting, fleeing, feeding, esp. reproducing), they are successful; otherwise not. What goes on internally matters little except in terms of meeting these requirements. Evolving organisms can have practically successful, but epistemically truncated, faculties and yet get by. There is, again, a big difference between "what works" and "what is true." It's the leap between the two that evolution has little hope of achieving, if undirected. (For the record, I'm not saying it is impossible - at least not with this argument on its own - only highly unlikely.)
You also wrote:The difficulty here is that similarities in structure can arise from markedly different developmental pathways; also, the opposite - thus the reference to C. Elegans. What you would seem to need to show evolutionary pathways - ancestry across organisms (e.g. bats, cetaceans, human beings) - is detailed knowledge of how genetic components (and modifications to them) behave when within particular organisms. Without that, "evolutionary pathways" would seem to amount to little more than "just so" stories. Yes, we can imagine that happening, given certain assumptions, but would it really happen that way? Or would the organisms in question throw us a few curves that we didn't expect, something that barred the sorts of changes needed? How could you know one way or another without doing the sort of hard to come by, detailed work done with C. Elegans?This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of your comments, Malcolm. You are importing theology into the discussion, and a particular theology at that. You seem to have a view of God as Newtonian Engineer in mind. That is, unless biological structures meet certain engineering standards that you have in view, design is ruled out. But why think that God is limited to these purposes in design? God may have some efficiency or engineering-optimality goals in play (and we have some excellent examples of such structures), but He may also have various, broadly aesthetic, epistemic, and moral purposes to meet as well (these branch out into a wide variety of options). Furthermore, there may be factors in addition to God which have had influence on organisms over the centuries, resulting in information loss w/ respect to the original design. Sophisticated, traditional theology wouldn't rule this out, either; in fact, it fits rather easily.
A lot more could be said on this, but here's the short version: What you've suggested is interesting, but at most it has shown that some of the features found in nature are incompatible with some varieties of theism - mainly, simplistic notions that were popular in the 19th century, when Darwin introduced his Origin of Species. If you're going to admit theology into the origins debate, you'd better be willing to recognize its resources, and not just the ones convenient to your views on biology.
Finally, my earlier remark on the flagellum requires some clarification. I don't think there is enough data to settle the issue there yet, but I would lean toward design, given what I'm aware of.
Sorry for the length on this. I appreciate your willingness to dialogue in a civil manner, but cannot, at this time, agree with you that "the views of Darwinists are actually very well-grounded." I could be wrong, but it seems to me that what we actually know is very little, and what the proponents of the theory are claiming that they know seems wildly out of proportion.
Take care,
Steve
Dennett is always talking about Mother Nature. Is he serious? Of course not. Then why does he talk this way? There is no Mother Nature with purposes for her children.
If X is designed, then there is a designer(s) of X. That's an analytic proposition as the philosophers say. But apparent design does not entail design. Apparent design is no more design than a decoy duck is a duck. Apparent design is not a kind of design. Similarly, 'as if' design is not design. If something looks as if it were designed, it doesn't follow that it was designed.
Thus I am somewhat puzzled by Malcolm's otherwise very astute remarks. He says that nobody denies that there is a great deal of design in nature. But isn't this precisely what he denies -- if we use our words literally and strictly? For Malcolm surely does not believe that there is a designer or committee of designers who have embodied their purposes in the natural world in the way I embody my purposes in my largely artificial environment.
What nobody denies is that there is a great deal of apparent design in nature. But apparent design need not be design: it might be only the appearance of design.
Malcolm writes: "Evolution is blind, yes, in the sense that it cannot look forward to see where it is going. But it is only variation that is accidental; evolution itself, and the accretion of design, is indeed guided, and forcefully so - but by selection, with each organism's genome pitilessly tested against its environment."
What does 'evolution' refer to? The huge sum-total of myriad processes of arisal, mutation, etc? How could a sum-total be either blind or seeing? And what does 'evolution itself' refer to? That same sum-total?
And what does it mean for evolution itself to be guided by selection? If I guide you to San Jose, I must already know the way to San Jose (to coin a phrase) -- but surely selection has no foresight. There may or may not be such a thing as divine providence, but surely there is no such thing as selection's providence or foresight. Further, selection is just an abstraction: in reality there are myriad acts of selection.
To Jason I want to say that his first point is not "ultimately trivial" but exactly the objection that needs to be raised. No headway at all can be made with any of this unless we are extremely careful and precise in our use of terms.
As for the rest of what Jason says, I don't think he appreciates the force of the argument and I suggest that he get hold of Taylor's little book. Taylor explains it in a somewhat different way.
I hope nobody will object if I follow up in a response to Bill's latest post.
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