Comments on: Supernatural Science

By: David Billington

David Billington — Sat, 21 May 2005 18:33:01 +0000

An impersonal universe could have an ordering principle too. Evidence of order (“design”) in nature does not necessarily imply an intelligence. For evidence of intelligence, you would need to show that the universe is grounded in some kind of super-consciousness, not just that it has order.

By: Josh Narins

Josh Narins — Sat, 21 May 2005 02:57:55 +0000

One peice of good news for the atheists around.

Traditionally, religion has had a lot of “play” when it comes to legal topics related to morality (“Woe betide those who stand against laws against adultery!”)

I’ve also been led to believe that when Religion takes on the Scientists (directly, as in the ID debate) they get this biggest whoopings.

By: David Billington

David Billington — Fri, 20 May 2005 03:00:31 +0000

Chris: The definition of the supernatural you give is one way to define it, in terms of its method of occurrence. But if you include claims of paranormal phenomena, I don’t see any necessary reason why these couldn’t be repeatable as well. For example, if an electrode inserted in a particular human brain region can reliably produce a subjective out-of-body experience, it should be possible to construct a test that only a disembodied mind could pass. If everyone could have an induced OBE and could pass this test, it would be a repeatable event. The distinction of the supernatural only holds if it is defined in a way that makes scientific demonstration impossible. What I think Julian is saying is that the supernatural might also be defined more broadly. This is not to say that everything associated with the supernatural can be demonstrated.

By: Del

Del — Thu, 19 May 2005 01:31:48 +0000

Bill: Well, nothing is “pretty hard to explain” when one invokes an all-powerful designer! But, to use your malaria example, it begs the question as to why everyone doesn’t carry innate immunity. Perhaps someday we’ll have a model that says something like the relevant mutation increases malaria resistance by 80% but decreases metabolic efficiency by 4% (unless there’s a compensatory mutation present…), and feed that into a population model and predict that the mutation is equilibrated at 30% of the population (in a particular environment, etc). At this point we can only assume such a tradeoff exists because evolution makes so much sense in the big picture. Of course you can say that this is all just details, but these are just the kind of missing details that ID goofballs celebrate.

By: Bill Newman

Bill Newman — Thu, 19 May 2005 00:46:58 +0000

Del wrote “To say why this or that protein complex has one particular makeup instead of another one assumes it’s evolutionarily favorable; however the details are yet impossible to work out.”

Some things are easy, though. E.g., even by 1980 (and probably by 1965, though I don’t know the history) it was clear that the human gene pool is relatively rich in simple mutations that provide half-assed, expensive, but badly needed protection against some horrendous threat, typically a pathogen like malaria. That doesn’t look much like design (or, for that matter, the Ark). We have learned a lot since 1980 — more chemistry, more biology and pathology, and enormously more gene sequences — and this and other patterns have gotten stronger. The statistical relationships between genes and the evolutionary tree that people expected from anatomy and fossils is a pretty impressive pattern, and pretty hard to explain for any theory which doesn’t involve everything starting from a simple common ancestor. That doesn’t exclude the possibility of spectres coaxing the common ancestor’s descendants into spiritually correct directions, but it is a difficulty for most pre-1500AD models, which tend not to involve a simple protoorganism ancestor at all.

By: Del

Del — Wed, 18 May 2005 06:28:52 +0000

Barry,
Points taken and generally agreed with. Except I really see evolution as being less rigorous. To say why this or that protein complex has one particular makeup instead of another one assumes it’s evolutionarily favorable; however the details are yet impossible to work out. On the other hand, to explain why the first excited state of oxygen is an 2x2x4 configuration can be done with a short answer (quantum mechanics) and a highly rigorous, long answer (calculations showing exactly why it is the first excitation and how long we can expect to wait before it decays — something relatively easy to test). Both questions involve expertise to answer, but evolutionary biology does not yet lend itself to long answers nearly as often as physics does.

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 18 May 2005 04:11:22 +0000

I blogged a longer response http://jgrr.blogspot.com/2005/05/supernatural.html

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 18 May 2005 04:11:02 +0000

I'd say it's less about supernatural vs. natural than testable vs. untestable. There are scientific examinations of supernatural phenomena, but only when there are predictable patterns to it. If creationism is about divine fiat, it's unscientific, if it's about God's design, there may be something falsifiable to come out of it.

By: Barry

Barry — Wed, 18 May 2005 04:02:11 +0000

Del:

“The problem with evolution, of course, is that’s less rigorous and harder to test.”

Not less rigorous – IIRC, there are three assumptions, both well-justified by data: (1) there is variation; (2) some of it is heritable;
(3) the variation leads to differing survival/reproduction probabilities.

Those three assumptions lead to probabilistic changes over time. Throw in mutation, and the changes can then be immense. (please forgive this clumsy exposition; a far more elegant form should be available on The Panda’s Thumb)

Testability varies, depending on the hypotheses being tested, just as in physics (e.g., we’re not yet at the level where even grad physics courses require students to create black holes).

“That leaves it open to creationist criticism. ”

But many things in physics are similarly hard to test and hard to comprehend withouth training.
The criticism of evolution draws it’s strength from a particular religous doctrine (a subset of American Protestantism, with others drawn in as tokens). IMHO, take away that feature of one subset of a subset of one country’s religion, and what’s left would be no more noticeable than the ‘Einstein was wrong!’ cranks who periodically bother physicists.

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Wed, 18 May 2005 01:22:36 +0000

Luke-
Chris and I are agreed that the IDers substantive claims are, in fact, bullshit. The question is whether you need any caveats about “natural explanations” *above and beyond* the ordinary scientific rules of evidence and empirical testing of hypotheses. If something like ID *could* be true, it seems wrong to define “science” in a way that rules it out in advance… even if we’ve got lots of reason to think that, in fact, it’s false.