Polemics

Does intelligent design commit the “God-of-the-gaps” fallacy?

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Stephen C. Meyer explains, with reference to his newest book “Darwin’s Doubt”. He is responding to a critical review of the book published in Science.

Here’s the relevant part of the review:

Meyer’s scientific approach is purely negative. He argues that paleontologists are unable to explain the Cambrian explosion, thus opening the door to the possibility of a designer’s intervention. This, despite his protest to the contrary, is a (sophisticated) “god of the gaps” approach, an approach that is problematic in part because future developments often provide solutions to once apparently difficult problems.

And here’s part of Meyer’s response:

[B]y claiming that my approach is a purely negative one based solely upon “gaps” in our knowledge or in the evolutionary account of the Cambrian explosion, Marshall implies that Darwin’s Doubt makes a fallacious kind of argument known to logicians as an “argument from ignorance.” Arguments from ignorance occur when evidence against a proposition X is offered as the sole (and conclusive) grounds for accepting some alternative proposition Y. Arguments from ignorance make an obvious logical error. They omit a necessary kind of premise, a premise providing positive support for the conclusion, not just negative evidence against an alternative conclusion. In an explanatory context, arguments from ignorance have the form:

Premise One: Cause X cannot produce or explain evidence E.

Conclusion: Therefore, cause Y produced or explains E.

Critics of intelligent design often claim that the case for intelligent design commits this fallacy. They claim that design advocates use our present ignorance of any materialistic cause of specified or functional information (for example) as the sole basis for inferring an intelligent cause for the origin of such information in biological systems. For example, Michael Shermer represents the case for intelligent design as follows: “Intelligent design … argues that life is too specifically complex (complex structures like DNA) … to have evolved by natural forces. Therefore, life must have been created by. . . an intelligent designer.” In short, Shermer claims that ID proponents argue as follows:

Premise: Materialistic causes or evolutionary mechanisms cannot produce novel biological information.

Conclusion: Therefore, an intelligent cause produced specified biological information.

Marshall echoes Shermer’s criticism. But the inference to design as developed in Darwin’s Doubt does not commit this fallacy.

Why not? Because it argues that the best explanation of an effect in nature – new information -is an intelligent cause, and that we are familiar with how these intelligent causes operate already.

More:

[T]he book makes a positive case for intelligent design as an inference to the best explanation for the origin of the genetic (and epigenetic) information necessary to produce the first forms of animal life (as well as other features of the Cambrian animals such as the presence of genetic regulatory networks that function as integrated circuits during animal development). It advances intelligent design as the best explanation not only because many lines of evidence now cast doubt on the creative power of unguided evolutionary mechanisms, but also because of our positive, experience-based knowledge of the powers that intelligent agents have to produce as digital and other forms of information as well as integrated circuitry. As I argue in Chapter 18 of Darwin’s Doubt:

Intelligent agents, due to their rationality and consciousness, have demonstrated the power to produce specified or functional information in the form of linear sequence-specific arrangements of characters. Digital and alphabetic forms of information routinely arise from intelligent agents. A computer user who traces the information on a screen back to its source invariably comes to a mind — a software engineer or programmer. The information in a book or inscription ultimately derives from a writer or scribe. Our experience-based knowledge of information flow confirms that systems with large amounts of specified or functional information invariably originate from an intelligent source. The generation of functional information is “habitually associated with conscious activity.” Our uniform experience confirms this obvious truth.

Thus, the inadequacy of proposed materialistic evolutionary causes or mechanisms forms only part of the basis of the argument for intelligent design. We also know from broad and repeated experience that intelligent agents can and do produce information-rich systems and integrated circuitry. We have positive experience-based knowledge of a cause sufficient to generate new specified information and integrated circuitry, namely, intelligence. We are not ignorant of how information or circuitry arises. We know from experience that conscious, rational agents can create such information-rich structures and systems. To again quote information theorist Henry Quastler: “creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.” Indeed, whenever large amounts of specified or functional information are present in an artifact or entity whose causal story is known, invariably creative intelligence — intelligent design — played a role in the origin of that entity. Thus, when we encounter a large discontinuous increase in the functional information content of the biosphere as we do in the Cambrian explosion, we may infer — based on our knowledge of established cause-effect relationships — that a purposive intelligence operated in the history of life to produce the functional information necessary to generate those forms of animal life.

Instead of exemplifying a fallacious form of argument in which design is inferred solely from a negative premise, the argument for intelligent design formulated in Darwin’s Doubt takes the following form:

Premise One: Despite a thorough search and evaluation, no materialistic causes or evolutionary mechanisms have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified or functional information (or integrated circuitry).

Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified/functional information (and integrated circuitry).

Conclusion: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the specified/functional information (and circuitry) that was necessary to produce the Cambrian animals.

I do think it’s very important for Christians to make their case for God based on the progress of science.

If you are going to argue for God, you want to use arguments like these:

  1. origin of the universe
  2. cosmic fine-tuning
  3. origin of life building blocks
  4. biological information at origin of life
  5. biological information at Cambrian explosion
  6. galactic fine-tuning
  7. stellar fine-tuning
  8. observed limits to mutation-driven change
  9. mental effort studies
  10. corroborated NDEs

And so on.

Each of these arguments is based on what we know about nature. They are not based on gaps in our knowledge at all. The more we do science, the more evidence we get for each argument. For example, at one point we only had redshift for the beginning of the universe (#1), but then we added light element abundance predictions and the cosmic microwave background radiation. For the cosmic fine-tuning (#2), we started with the fine-tuning of gravity, and then added more examples, like the cosmological constant. In each case, the continuous progress of science strengthened the need for a Creator/Designer. The more we know from science about how nature works, the stronger the case for Christian theism gets.

It’s the atheists who are now taking refuge in the gaps and holding out speculations as a way of maintaining their atheism against the science. It’s the atheists who are hoping for aliens, multiverses, undiscovered fossils, and so on. There is no God-of-the-Gaps anymore. There’s only Atheism-of-the-Gaps.

News

An orphan who lived his whole life in foster care goes to church and asks to be adopted

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Here’s a very sad story that I hope will help us all to think about making better decisions that respect the needs of children. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

As soon as they pulled into the church lot, Davion changed his mind.

”Miss! Hey, Miss!” he called to his caseworker, who was driving. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

In the back seat, he hugged the Bible someone had given him at the foster home. “You’re going to be great,” Connie Going said.

Outside St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church, she straightened his tie. Like his too-big black suit, the white tie had been donated. It zipped up around the neck, which helped. No one had ever taught Davion, 15, how to tie one.

”Are you ready?” Going asked. Hanging his head, he followed her into the sanctuary.

This had been his idea. He’d heard something about God helping people who help themselves. So here he was, on a Sunday in September, surrounded by strangers, taking his future into his own sweaty hands.

Davion Navar Henry Only loves all of his names. He has memorized the meaning of each one: beloved, brown, ruler of the home, the one and only.

But he has never had a home or felt beloved. His name is the last thing his parents gave him.

He was born while his mom was in jail. He can’t count all of the places he has lived.

In June, Davion sat at a library computer, unfolded his birth certificate and, for the first time, searched for his mother’s name. Up came her mug shot: 6-foot-1, 270 pounds — tall, big and dark, like him. Petty theft, cocaine.

Next he saw the obituary: La-Dwina Ilene “Big Dust” McCloud, 55, of Clearwater, died June 5, 2013. Just a few weeks before.

In church, Davion scanned the crowd. More than 300 people packed the pews. Men in bright suits, grandmoms in sequined hats, moms hugging toddlers on their laps. Everyone seemed to have a family except him.

In church, Davion scanned the crowd. More than 300 people packed the pews. Men in bright suits, grandmoms in sequined hats, moms hugging toddlers on their laps. Everyone seemed to have a family except him.

Davion sat beside Going, his caseworker from Eckerd, and struggled to follow the sermon: something about a letter Paul wrote. “He was in prison,” said the Rev. Brian Brown. “Awaiting an uncertain future … ”

Sometimes Davion felt like that, holed up at Eckerd’s Carlton Manor residential group home with 12 teenage boys, all with problems. All those rules, cameras recording everything.

Davion wants to play football, but there’s no one to drive him to practice. He wants to use the bathroom without having to ask someone to unlock the door.

More than anything, he wants someone to tell him he matters. To understand when he begs to leave the light on.

”You may be in a dark place,” said the preacher. “But look for the joyful moments when you can praise God.”

Picking at his fingers, Davion wondered what to say. And whether anyone would hear him.

It’s the saddest thing in the world for a child to not grow up with the two people who chose to engage in activities that would make him. Yet we as a society seem to be hell-bent on celebrating behaviors that cause children to be without their mothers or fathers. Or both. We push for policies that make it easier for people to have babies out of wedlock (because we are paying them to do it). We educate children to believe that premarital sex is OK, that hooking up is OK, that moral relativism is OK, that cohabitation is OK, that no fault divorce is OK, and now… that gay marriage is OK. But this isn’t what children need.

We have to look at these situations with motherless/fatherless children and decide that what we promote has some effect on this. It doesn’t happen by accident. Many of the things we support that make us feel “compassionate” are actually causing these problems. The solution is to start pushing for chastity, marriage and parenting. We need to shame behaviors and policies that deprive children of the safety and security that they obviously need. We need to name and shame the forces that cause these problems – secularism, feminism, socialism, relativism, and so on.

Polemics

New Oxford University study links non-family day care to anti-social behavior

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From the UK Telegraph. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

Academics at Oxford University discovered that exposure to some forms of early education contributed to bad behaviour and could be linked to emotional problems.

The study, based on an analysis of infants from almost 1,000 families, showed that the strongest influence on children came from within the home itself.

Children raised in poor families with high levels of parental stress or mental health problems were most at risk of developing emotional problems by the time they started school, it emerged.

The research also uncovered trends relating to children who were in formal child care — away from their parents.

The disclosure will revive debate over the best way to raise children amid a surge in the number of under-fives enrolled in nurseries and with childminders in the past 20 years. Figures from the Department for Education show that 441,000 children under five are in day nurseries while another 272,000 are being looked after by childminders.

[…]In the Oxford study, researchers recruited 991 families with children aged three months. Mothers had an average age of 30.

Researchers assessed children at the age of four through questionnaires about their behaviour and emotions completed by teachers and parents. They also observed care provided by mothers and observed non-parental care for at least 90 minutes for those children placed in formal childcare settings.

The report, published in the journal Child: Care, Health and Development, said that “children who spent more time in group care, mainly nursery care, were more likely to have behavioural problems, particularly hyperactivity”.

The study, led by Prof Alan Stein, of Oxford’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, found that “spending more time in day care centres, over the total period was a predictor of total problem scores”.

“Children who spent more time in day care centres were more likely to be hyperactive,” it said. “Children receiving more care by childminders were more likely to have peer problems.”

The authors added: “The findings in relation to childminding suggest that it might be out of home care rather than group care that raises the risk of behavioural difficulties.”

The researchers also tracked other forms of early years care and found benefits to different approaches.

They found that children who spent more time in pre-school playgroups – normally for a few hours a day, rather than a full-time nursery – had fewer problems.

More time with a nanny in parents’ own home predicted higher levels of “pro-social behaviour”, showing willingness to help others, it emerged.

The study said: “These findings suggest that interventions to enhance children’s emotional and behavioural development might best focus on supporting families and augmenting the quality of care in the home.”

A study like this will be useful when debating people with open minds, but hardcore feminists and socialists, who want women to work in order to fund bigger government, will not be moved. Because for them, it’s not about evidence. It’s about ideology. That’s why we have to be careful about letting people like that get elected.

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