Intelligent Design, Edward Feser's views

[tafan2]

There have been lots of creation vs evolution threads, but not many have more than a passing reference to intelligent design. I used to find intelligent design arguments somewhat convincing. It still seems somewhat reasonable that God directed evolution to produce what we see now as to life around us. The completely random aspects of evolution is where I have problems with it.

But, then I came across Edward Fesser’s writings. Without commenting on evolution directly, he does not like the idea of intelligent design at all.

Here is one of his blogs on the subject.

The trouble with William Paley

In The Last Superstition and elsewhere, I have been very critical of both William Paley of “design argument” fame and of contemporary Intel...

edwardfeser.blogspot.com

It seems like it would be an interesting topic on this forum.

 

[Kei]

Know that when evolution is called random it just means that the mutation happens randomly

 

[tafan2]

Oh, I understand that. Its just that we rely on the natural selection of these random mutations to develop into rather complex objects. I understand that there is lots of time involved for this to happen. I am not meaning to argue evolution, that’s not the point of my thread. It is rather to argue Intelligent Design.
Fesser, a Catholic Thomist philosopher, takes greater exception to the idea of intelligent design (as commonly understood) than he does evolution. Well, he doesn’t seem to argue against evolution much at all, as long as it is inline with the Church teachings.

One of his problems with intelligent design is that it does not express the need for a final causality. It simply says that evolution is improbably, but it could happen. So an intelligent designer theory just solves the problem of improbability but :

“The metaphysically necessary connection between the world and God is broken; in principle the world could exist and operate just as it does apart from God. The most we can say is that this is so improbable a hypothesis that it can safely be ruled out; for as Paley and Co. assure us, it is far more likely that an extremely powerful and intelligent “designer” put together the “machine” that is the universe.”

His final sentence:
“The trouble with Paley-style arguments, then, is not that they are bad science – they may or may not be, depending on which ones we are talking about – but that they are bad theology. If you assume otherwise, then perhaps – as J. B. Phillips put it in a different context – your god is too small.”

 

[Wesrock]

Feser’s issue with “Intelligent Design” is not against the idea that God is the designer of all creation. The academic defenders of the Intelligent Design argument make some philosophical assumptions about the nature of Creation that Feser disagrees with. He sees it as a concession to a mechanistic view of nature which paints God as some type of changing tinkerer who created (past tense, as if it’s not ongoing) the universe such that it runs on its own without Him, and that God steps back in to actively tinker, then stops and lets it runs, then tinkers, then stops, etc… That conception of God and more particularly casting God’s relationship with creation in that way is what he has a problem with. That, and ID philosophers often speak of things, including people, as having their ends extrinsically imposed on them, say the way a chair (an artifact) has no meaning in itself but for the purpose given to it by its designer and user, whereas Feser distinguishes between artifacts and substances, where substances have their ends intrinsically by virtue of what they are, not just because it’s been imposed.

Really he takes more of an Aristotlean approach to nature than a mechanical one. He agrees that God is behind everything and nothing could be apart from God and that if there is evolution it’s in the grand scheme of things because God created a universe that way.

Oh, and he doesn’t feel that appeals to improbability prove anything. He doesn’t think they’re useless, but saying there’s one in a google-bazillion times a decagoogle (nonsense terms) chance that life could have started without intervention isn’t going to convince any skeptics that God is necessary, because that chance is still there. It’s simply inserting God as an explanation into a gap.

 

[IWantGod]

I stand with Edward Feser. God the creator, not God the builder. I think most Thomists, accept for perhaps the odd one or two, are fine with natural evolution.

 

[tafan2]

That’s a good way to put it, the Creator vs the builder.

 

[buffalo]

IDvolution incorporates design without the tinkerer objection:

What is IDvolution?

IDvolution - God “breathed” the super language of DNA into the “kinds” in the creative act.

This accounts for the diversity of life we see. The core makeup shared by all living things have the necessary complex information built in that facilitates rapid and responsive adaptation of features and variation while being able to preserve the “kind” that they began as. Life has been created with the creativity built in ready to respond to triggering events.
Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on Earth have the same core, it is virtually certain that living organisms have been thought of AT ONCE by the One and the same Creator endowed with the super language we know as DNA that switched on the formation of the various kinds, the cattle, the swimming creatures, the flying creatures, etc… in a pristine harmonious state and superb adaptability and responsiveness to their environment for the purpose of populating the earth that became subject to the ravages of corruption by the sin of one man (deleterious mutations).
IDvolution considers the latest science and is consistent with the continuous teaching of the Church.

Arrows show information flow.

IDvolution

ID=Intelligently Designed
volution - having a volute or rolled-up form.

“(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
“The process is astonishingly simple. In the embryo’s first moments, the Hox genes are dormant, packaged like a spool of wound yarn on the DNA. When the time is right, the strand begins to unwind. When the embryo begins to form the upper levels, the genes encoding the formation of cervical vertebrae come off the spool and become activated. Then it is the thoracic vertebrae’s turn, and so on down to the tailbone. The DNA strand acts a bit like an old-fashioned computer punchcard, delivering specific instructions as it progressively goes through the machine.”
“A new gene comes out of the spool every ninety minutes, which corresponds to the time needed for a new layer of the embryo to be built,” explains Duboule. “It takes two days for the strand to completely unwind; this is the same time that’s needed for all the layers of the embryo to be completed.” This system is the first “mechanical” clock ever discovered in genetics. And it explains why the system is so remarkably precise.” Source

“The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” Astrophysicist Sir James Jeans

“This now tells how precise the Creator’s aim must have been, namely to an accuracy of one part in 10 to the 10123rd power. This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full in the ordinary denary notation: it would be 1 followed by 10123 successive 0’s.” Even if we were to write a 0 on each separate proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe- and we could throw in all the other particles for good measure- we would fall far short of writing down the figure needed.1

Roger Penrose - English mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science

 

[Bradskii]

You get this junk from risible sources like ‘The sceptics guide to eternal bliss’ or from someone who has decided to quote from it but obviously don’t read it. Just cut-paste rinse and repeat. Or maybe you do read it and just don’t understand it.

Ten to the power of 10,123 is indeed a 1 followed by 10,123 zeros. And if you wrote a zero on a proton then you’d need 10,123 protons. That’s not very many if you didn’t know. But why you’d bother I don’t know.

Maybe you’d like to work out the chances of you sitting there reading this. That is, the chances of literally everything from the beginning of time working out exactly in a way that enables you to do so. All your ancestors, every single male and female living long enough to meet each other and have a succesful pairing. It’s a lot bigger than Penrose’s number. But unless I’m very much mistaken you are indeed reading this.

I’m pretty certain that you don’t realise that the chances of something happening IF IT’S ALREADY HAPPENED is exactly 1. You don’t need any zeros.

 

[Usagi]

buffalo,

Why is the preservation of “kinds” an important goal of your thinking? I notice this with a lot of ID theorizing, complete with the existence of “baraminology” as a field of study.

Thanks!

 

[buffalo]

Perhaps you don’t understand a huge search space and a teeny little target.

To deal with fine tuning such abstract unprovable nonsense is dreamed up such as the multiverse. But, consider there is a universe where Bradskii is a faithful Catholic.

 

[buffalo]

buffalo,

Why is the preservation of “kinds” an important goal of your thinking? I notice this with a lot of ID theorizing, complete with the existence of “baraminology” as a field of study.

Thanks!

Common descent from achetypes is in line what the fossil record shows, abrupt appearance, stasis and limited variation within.

In addition, it lines up nicely with common design and convergent evolution.

 

[HarryStotle]

You get this junk from risible sources like ‘The sceptics guide to eternal bliss’ or from someone who has decided to quote from it but obviously don’t read it. Just cut-paste rinse and repeat. Or maybe you do read it and just don’t understand it.

Ten to the power of 10,123 is indeed a 1 followed by 10,123 zeros. And if you wrote a zero on a proton then you’d need 10,123 protons. That’s not very many if you didn’t know. But why you’d bother I don’t know.

Maybe you’d like to work out the chances of you sitting there reading this. That is, the chances of literally everything from the beginning of time working out exactly in a way that enables you to do so. All your ancestors, every single male and female living long enough to meet each other and have a succesful pairing. It’s a lot bigger than Penrose’s number. But unless I’m very much mistaken you are indeed reading this.

I’m pretty certain that you don’t realise that the chances of something happening IF IT’S ALREADY HAPPENED is exactly 1. You don’t need any zeros.

I’m not sure what to make of your post, Bradskii. If you are arguing that chance just isn’t a very good explanation for how we – collectively or individually – got here, then you are agreeing with the design advocates who state that we are here either from chance, from necessity, or by design. Since, as you point out, chance is just an unworkable option, that leaves by necessity (determined by necessary causality) or by design.

Yet, you bring up the observation that things that have already happened have a chance of ”exactly 1” to occur. If they have occurred already, then it is no longer probability that can be invoked as still in play as explanatory. In fact, to invoke chance after the fact and pretend chance is still explanatorily in play at that moment would be an instance of a fallacy – the fallacy of retrospective determinism.

You are simply conflating chance and necessity into a singular explanation by fiat as if “it just happens” ought to be explanatorily sufficient for everyone involved.

Yeah, no. Nice try, though.

 

[Bradskii]

You’ve got it exactly right, Harry.

If someone had said thirty years ago that at this exact moment you would be sitting exactly where you are, reading something that a guy from Australia had written about statistics and chance, then what would the chances be that literally everything in your life and mine had to align EXACTLY over a period of thirty years for that to happen?

It would be a number too large to calculate. But it is happening right now.

One could say that that was just the way the world worked out. It wasn’t preordained by anyone. Nobody designed the universe from the moment of creation just so you coukd sit there reading this.

Before you can calculate the odds of something happening, you need to have a specific event sometime in the future in order to be able to do so. It’s a waste of time calculating what the odds must have been for an event that has already occurred. It’s like dealing a perfect hand in poker. You can calculate the odds for a full house but they are exactly the same odds as for any other 5 cards.

We are only amazed at the full house because we consider it to be somehow special. We are not amazed at you reading this because it is not.

Extrapolate from that and you’ll understand my point.

 

[HarryStotle]

One could say that that was just the way the world worked out.

One could say that, but one wouldn’t know that for certain.

Clearly the outcome could not have been chance because the mere chance is impossibly small.

At the same time, there is no way of knowing whether the outcome was completely determined, completely designed or some combination of design, causality and conscious/super-conscious intention.

We also have no way of knowing whether things could have been different and the extent to which they could have been.

It wasn’t preordained by anyone. Nobody designed the universe from the moment of creation just so you coukd sit there reading this.

Except we, as humans, have no way of knowing whether things were not preordained and the extent to which they were. Your claim is pure assertion. Since you cannot rise above the physical or observable order, you have no way of knowing the metaphysical reality behind it.

Before you can calculate the odds of something happening, you need to have a specific event sometime in the future in order to be able to do so. It’s a waste of time calculating what the odds must have been for an event that has already occurred. It’s like dealing a perfect hand in poker. You can calculate the odds for a full house but they are exactly the same odds as for any other 5 cards.

This may or may not be true of specific or unique events within the causal order. However, even if we grant you that, cosmologists do have a pretty good grasp of the cosmological constants and their specific values, which could have been set pretty much along an infinite range and yet they weren’t. Given that there are twenty or thirty constants which were finely tuned to each other for no reason, there is a compelling argument to be made that the fine tuning of the array of constants to the specific values that permit carbon based life forms to develop is virtually impossible o properly explain without intention and design.

We are only amazed at the full house because we consider it to be somehow special. We are not amazed at you reading this because it is not.

Well, no I continue to be amazed at conscious and individuated personal identity which, I would argue, is a requirement for the ability to read because reading presumes a mind with intentionality.

Reading is a complex mental activity which isn’t well understood in terms of how humans can form images from written symbols and connect those to meaningful concepts.

Extrapolate from that and you’ll understand my point.

Actually, I would need to simplify your point to the point of ignoring and explaining away the vast number of not properly understood gaps in our knowledge to accept that your point can be understood.

 

[HarryStotle]

HarryStotle:

Well, no I continue to be amazed at conscious and individuated personal identity which, I would argue, is a requirement for the ability to read because reading presumes a mind with intentionality.

Actually, one of the few things that we can be absolutely certain of, is that a conscious mind doesn’t require a designer. So if you’re going to point to the existence of the conscious mind as evidence of a designer, then you’re obviously misguided.

We can be “absolutely certain” that a conscious mind doesn’t require a designer, how?

Oh, I get it we humans have conscious minds and we “obviously” evolved through purely physical processes!

And that doesn’t beg the entire question at all because it is so “obvious” to your straight thinking mind that hasn’t begun the whole thought process with materialistic presumptions, how?

 

[HarryStotle]

There’s no need for you to be condescending. However, you don’t seem to have thought the problem through.

If my conscious mind requires a designer, then that designer must also possess a conscious mind. For designing implies intent, which is a hallmark of a conscious mind.

But if consciousness requires a designer, then my mind’s designer must also require a designer. Which leads inevitably to an infinite regress of conscious minds. The only alternative being that at some point we come upon a conscious mind that didn’t require a designer. Which means that it must be possible for a conscious mind to exist without a designer. And if it’s possible for one mind to exist without a designer, then the claim that a conscious mind requires a designer, is wrong.

Well, no, actually. You need to read both Feser and Aquinas on the difference between per se and per accidens causation. Existence in the present moment is not dependent upon a per accidens chain of causation since the accidents of existence may be “passed on” by the type of causation you point out can go back ad infinitum in time. However, per se causation requires that the existential nature of the caused effect is sustained in existence in the here and now. It isn’t dependent upon prior causes, but contingent upon the actualizing cause effecting the existence of the contingent entity in the real and present now.

If human consciousness is dependent only upon God as the immediate cause of human consciousness in the here and now – which is the position I would take following John, the Apostle – then there is no need for an infinite series of consciousness causes, merely one sufficient cause now.

The analogy would be the difference between the “designed” mechanical watch which has a separate designer we can point to and a performed musical piece which depends entirely upon a musician performing the piece in the here and now. When the musician stops playing the music stops. The designer’s watch does not depend upon the designer to keep it existing each moment in time. Ergo, the designer is a per accidens cause, but not a per se cause. If we identify the cause(s) that sustain the watch in existence in this moment then we are speaking of per se causation.

Human consciousness may be much more akin to God “performing” (the per se cause) our consciousness in the here and now – the truth or light that “enlightens” or “makes aware” every human being – than akin to an effect from prior but no longer existing causes per accidens (the watchmaker analogy).

Both Aquinas and Feser argue that the essences of things must be held in existence by per se causation in the here and now. The accidents of things might change by per accidens causes changing what is changeable about things, but existence of things in the here and now is not sustained by per accidens causal chains.

Ergo, consciousness as an aspect of the essence of what it means to be human would not be susceptible to your infinite series trap. It would only require one sufficient and sustaining per se cause in the here and now – God.

 

[Bradskii]

You look at cosmological constants as if they were a winning hand: ‘Look, the deal must have been fixed because I got these specific cards which means I win’.

Except that you have decided what wins the hand only after the cards have been dealt.

If someone had said a billion years ago that a winning hand would comprise humanity as it is exactly at this moment and it turned out to be so, then that woukd be a fixed deal. Someone definately dealt the cards in a specific way.

But if we get to this point and say, after the cards have been dealt: ‘This is what we will now define as a winning hand’, then it’s entirely random.

I’m constantly bemused by the fact that very few people seem to be able to grasp that.

 

[buffalo]

The size of the search space is huge.

Change these constants even a tiny bit and we are not here. How many constants will convince you?

 

[Arkansan]

Intelligent Design relies on the same metaphysical premises as standard evolution, it just differs from it on a question of natural science (whether or not it is practically possible, given entropy, for the diversity of life currently seen on Earth to have arisen randomly).

 

[Wesrock]

Clearly the outcome could not have been chance because the mere chance is impossibly small.

This is exactly the type of argument which Feser shuns as clearly, limited only to this argument, the outcome could have happened randomly because a small chance is still a chance, “fine tuning” or improbability doesn’t rule out the possibility. What were the odds that you’d be sitting where you are at this exact moment reading these exact words at the moment you were born? However small it still came about.