I certainly don’t mind being challenged, and I can usually count on my regular commenter, Ocham, to do just that. He seems to take issue with nearly everything I say. My last post on Intelligent Design was no exception. Here’s his latest:
Ocham: I don’t see how the designist argument counts as an explanation. As Dawkins says, it’s a cop out. How do you explain how the designer came to exist, in all its complexity and so forth.
Another problem: as Einstein said, all arguments from probability disappear in the face of the improbable event actually happening. In the case that any highly improbable event occurs, namely the event that there exist conscious beings capable of asking how probable their existence is, naturally they will come to the conclusion that their existence cannot be chance at all. But in that case they would be wrong.
My reply: I’m surprised you’re bringing in Dawkins here, Ocham. His favorite “Who designed the designer?” line, which he clearly takes to be a knock-down refutation of the design argument, is hardly that. When the ID theorist proposes that a mind or designer might serve as a basic explanation, she does not automatically commit herself, as Dawkins supposes, to such claims as
- Basic designers must be complex beings.
- Basic designers must be contingent beings.
What Dawkins’ question does show is that the ID theorist is implicitly committed to a denial of both (1) and (2) – a truly basic designer must be an undesigned, non-emergent designer. But a being like God fits that bill perfectly, since God is a metaphysically simple, noncontingent being. So, far from refuting design arguments for theism, Dawkins’ line actually helps the theist connect the dots from premise to conclusion. That Dawkins fails to see this shows only that he doesn’t understand theism and refuses to take it seriously as a worldview.
Secondly, the probabilistic considerations you raise ignore the important distinction between prior and posterior probabilities. A priori, for example, any specified string of 10 poker hands is equally likely to be dealt. Hence, getting a string of 10 spade suite royal flushes in a row, say, is just as likely as getting any other string of 10 poker hands. In short, where X and Y are two arbitrary sequences of 10 poker hands, Prob(X)=Prob(Y). But when we are evaluating explanations we’re not interested in prior probabilities but posterior probabalities. According to Bayes’ theorem, the probability of a given explanatory hypothesis H given evidence E is
The prior probability of an arbitrary sequence of 10 poker hands gives us only Prob(E). The other quantities on the RHS also need to be evaluated before we can draw any interesting conclusions regarding the respective merits of chance-type hypotheses and design-type hypotheses. Intuitively, if a person gets one royal flush, we’d say he probably just got lucky. If he gets two in a single game, that’s awfully suspicious. If he gets 3 or more, someone’s likely to get shot for cheating. The reason is that a royal flush is not just any hand in poker. It’s a very special hand, one that intelligent poker agents take (or are likely to take, or should take) particular interest in. So as the number of royal flushes in a game goes up, the design hypothesis (it’s rigged; someone’s cheating) rapidly becomes more plausible than the chance hypothesis (it’s sheer luck or coincidence).
Hello. On the fact I appear disagree with everything, that is simply because I never comment on any blog unless I see something that might be challenged. I often challenge claims that I in fact agree with. The key thing in philosophy and logic is, what are the arguments for and against. Not whether you yourself agree or disagree with something.
On the conditional probability issue, that wasn’t quite my point. In any kind of investigation, we have to be very careful of ‘selection bias’, ie. the bias introduced by the way the particular data arrived on our doorstep. Suppose some aliens are looking for data on humans, and take the police department files. They will conclude (erroneously) that humans are mostly homicidal, thieving, violent &c. How the data is selected is crucial.
In the case of design, how is the data ‘selected’. Simple: by the fact we are here, now, observing it. We are intelligent life forms examining the probability of our being intelligent life forms.
But the only way the data can get there to be intelligently examined, is by there being an intelligent life form to examine it. But there you have a clear ‘selection bias’.
W.
Ocham,
It’s not a matter of selection bias, its a matter of observing the given data as a whole.
For me the whole argument must be taken past the simply biological to the universe as a whole.
What underlies the material universe? Random processes.
But life itself could not exist without the determinate processes of chemistry and phyics.
The real question is How do the predictable, determinate laws of nature arise? The biologists need to wake up and realize that life doesn’t exist in a vaccume. It exists precisely because there are physical processes rather than a random set of events.
Let me give another example. You are part of an experiment. As far as you know, you are the only person involved in the experiment. The designer of the experiment puts you in a room where there is a poker hand on the table. You look at the hand, and you are required to assess whether the cards were especially chosen by the designer, and not randomly selected.
You get a full house or other similarly improbable hand. You conclude, wrongly as it happens, that the designer selected the hand artificially.
In fact, you are the millionth person to do this experiment, and the hand was randomly selected. What the designer found was that all the subjects of the experiment who had been dealt ‘improbable’ hands all thought there was some design involved. All those with quite ordinary hands, thought it was by chance.
The problem is the single view that the subject of the experiment gets of the hand which has been dealt out. Probability theory only works when you get many views.
Of the universe, in this life, we get only one.
Ocham,
You reiterated your point quite well and the example you gave is very clear, and I agree with it, however, you did not deal with my point at all.
Using your example to explain. Completely independent of anything I may think about the hand itself, there is the underlying reality that poker has rules which I use to judge the hand. Apart from these rules the cards would be meaningless and I would never make the mistake of judging one hand differently then any other.
Ocham, your example is disingenuous because it’s a event designed to look like
a non-random event when, in fact, the five unique cards are chosen randomly.
A better example with three designed parameters:
You’re going to drop playing cards into a room. The designed parameters:
1. Only playing cards will be dropped.
2. They will be dropped in a room.
3. From 1 to 4 trillion cards will be dropped.
Despite the three design constraints, this better models a random event than your
event designed to appear non-random.
Now what is the probability that you will walk in the room and discover only five
unique cards, lying on the table face up, representing a “full house”? Pretty slim.
You’re more likely to encounter cards scattered everywhere, some face up, some face down,
some on the table, most not. Let’s say you also see five 2 of spades in the corner together.
Pretty coincidental yet not a valid poker hand.
The probability of you finding only five unique cards, lying on the table face up,
representing a “full house” is so slim that if you did, you’d suspect it was designed that
way and not a truly random event.
Your whole argument seems to be, “It’s a slim chance all these designed processes came
about randomly? Ta-da, here we are!”
c grace said
>>>
however, you did not deal with my point at all.
I didn’t mean to! For some reason the posts came out in in an order, that made it look as though I was replying to you.
>>>
Your whole argument seems to be, “It’s a slim chance all these designed processes came
about randomly? Ta-da, here we are!”
No, that’s not the whole argument, and moreover you have missed out the most important bit.
My point was that if there is any causal or logical connection between the evidence in front of us, and the **way** it got in front of us, then you have to be careful of selection bias. The books in the biography section of my library are all about people who achieved almost improbable distinction in some field or other. Is that improbability suggestive of some sort of design? No, because biographies, are typically are about people who are unusual enough to have a book written about them.
Now, the evidence before us is of something that looks highly improbable, namely of conscious processes arising out of matter. But ask yourself, how is it that we are conscious of this evidence?