How do you prove "purpose"?
The question of whether science can establish intentionality/purpose by intelligent agents depends on a distinction. Do you want to know whether something was caused intentionally, or do you want to try to understand why it was done (i.e. purpose in terms of motivation)? Science can do the former, but would find the latter less accessible.
Life is based on information encoded in a symbolic language (i.e. the genetic code). Creating and implementing a symbolic language is one example of an effect that requires intentional action by an intelligent agent. It cannot be done by accident, even by an intelligent agent.
This is because symbols only acquire meaning when there is also a translation between them and something else they represent. To create both meaningful symbol sequences and the mechanisms that translate these into their real counterparts requires coordinated, intentional construction of independent parts along a common symbolic convention.
By definition, a blind watchmaker natural process cannot plan ahead, use forethought, or act intentionally. Thus it has no ability to create symbolic language processing.
The translation mechanisms would be useless in the absence of meaningful symbol sequences to translate. For example, it is useless to devise means to play DVDs in a universe with no DVDs to play. On the other hand, symbol sequences (e.g. those on a DVD) are not only useless without translation, they are meaningless. Because they are symbols (not the things themselves), without the conventions to translate, they are literally without meaning.
To detect intentional actions by intelligent agents, science can look for the implementation of conventions that require coordination of independent, improbable configurations that are mutually dependent for their utility. Symbolic language processing is one such case.
Creating and implementing a symbolic language is one example of an effect that requires intentional action by an intelligent agent. It cannot be done by accident, even by an intelligent agent.
This is because symbols only acquire meaning when there is also a translation between them and something else they represent. To create both meaningful symbol sequences and the mechanisms that translate these into their real counterparts requires coordinated, intentional construction of independent parts along a common symbolic convention.
I'm not sure I understand this - when I personally look at symbols they acquire meaning in my own mind however the process that sees DNA replicate in life does not create "meaning" as a bacteria is not conscious of it's own complexity. I always think of meaning as being something that a mind perceives, and not something that exists in the absence of minds.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by purposeless design: A friend of mine who is a very gifted artist is also a prolific doodler. She often doodles her pictures with no clear idea of where they are going or what the end result might be. The end results are spectacular and far more beautiful than the best thing I could draw if I gave it all my care and attention.
Looking at her final works they are full of all kinds of apparently meaningful symbolism. Once she asked me to interpret one of her pictures. After spending five minutes explaining what I thought the composition meant she laughed at me and confessed that she had no idea herself - and that it was merely a collection of absent minded doodles she had constructed while on the phone.
The images were what had entered into her stream of consciousness and the quality of the composition was more a consequence of her innate visual talent than any purpose. I think we would both agree that her drawing was the product of intelligent design - but it was also accidental and free of purpose or desire (other than perhaps to pass the time during a boring job). I'd call it accidental design or free improvisation.
I put it to you that presence of information that could be interpreted by human minds as symbolism is not necessarily proof of intentional design or purpose. It could also be the result of accidental design or the side effect of some other purposeful act of which we are not aware. I also suggest that a supremely talented artist or designer might do something accidentally that would take you or I a great deal of hard work. We might mistakenly identify it as an act of purposeful design, whereas from the perspective of the designer it might seem like an insignificant side-effect of some more important work.
Let us consider two extremes - perhaps there was a purposeful intelligence who started life on earth with the clear, premeditated intent of creating you and me, in which case this conversation is also part of his plan and everything we have ever said or done is part of his scheme. To me, that sounds dangerously close to an admission that we have no free will.
On the other hand, we might have a supremely intelligent designer who merely took the materials available at the moment and made the best with them - I imagine this designer like a director of an improv theater who has no idea what the show will end up like, in which case the designer did not forsee you, me or this conversation.
A final question: Your main evidence of purpose is the existence of the genetic language - however most IDers and neo-Darwinists believe that the first genetic may have existed millions of years ago. Does this mean that creation of the genetic code was the final purposeful act, and after that the designer's work was free of purpose? Is there something more recent that betrays purpose or intent?
I'd agree that there definitely can be emergent properties of an intentioned design that come about by accident. I've written AI programs where combinational effect and emergent behavior provide interesting results that I never intended.
In response to BobMort and in part to Patrick as well, I have not claimed that there cannot be unintended consequences to design by intelligent agents. Rather, I was responding to the original question of whether we can scientifically detect intention (as distinguished from motive).
On that score, I do claim that a symbolic language, such as the genetic code, cannot be created and implemented by accident, even by an intelligent agent. It requires intentional design.
Although we might or might not attach meaning to images, that wouldn't be an example of implementing a symbolic language that encodes information and functional instructions. When I refer to "meaning" I am not using it in the sense that assumes consciousness. I am strictly using it in the sense of a symbolic code with symbols that are defined to correspond to specific counterparts that they represent.
So, in Morse code, dot-dot-dot means or corresponds to "S" whereas dash-dash-dash means or corresponds to "O". A computer could translate between these forms without requiring any conscious understanding.
But notice that since the relationship between symbols and what they represent is a convention, it need not be one particular way. It could be defined otherwise. So dot-dot-dot doesn't mean anything on its own. Until you have the translation convention established, there is no inherent meaning to dot-dot-dot.
That is why we can end up with different encoding standards for information such as for DVDs. Not all DVD players will play all DVDs because they haven't adopted the same translation conventions. Likewise, not all organisms use exactly the same genetic code. We once thought it was "universal" but that turns out not to be true. Some use alternate codes, not the canonical one.
Establishing a consistent convention requires intention.
More later.
BobMort: "Your main evidence of purpose is the existence of the genetic language - however most IDers and neo-Darwinists believe that the first genetic may have existed millions of years ago. Does this mean that creation of the genetic code was the final purposeful act, and after that the designer's work was free of purpose? Is there something more recent that betrays purpose or intent?"
I did not intend to imply that the genetic code was the most recent case where we might detect intentional design. I only offered it as an example that I believe is a particularly strong one.
Keep in mind, for example, that every attempt to explain away the origin of symbolic language processing would have to do this without the benefit of symbolic language processing. One cannot use something to explain its own origin. In particular, one could not resort to explanations that included information based reproduction. All the mechanisms of translation would have to be created by a process devoid of symbolically encoded information.
If you needed to make a new (possibly slightly revised) copy of a clock or engine, which would you rather do?
a) Try to copy it physically while it is running without breaking it.
b) Copy encoded instructions that will guide the construction of a new instance.
Life can make use of the latter, while the origin of the symbolic code cannot.
Regarding your question, I would suggest that you read Behe's new book "The Edge of Evolution". He is building the case that blind Darwinian processes are insufficient to explain the development of life. These results point in the direction of requiring the input of intentional design. However, what is not at present clear is whether this would need to happen repeatedly or if it could be front-loaded in some manner.
Eric, Patric, Bob - this is a fascinating discussion.
So basically what you are all saying is that the evidence for intentional creation is the existence of languages - foe example the language of DNA, the language of bees indicating how to reach nectar and the language of people.
Am I right in understanding that the reason these cannot be accidental is that every language requires a transmitter as well as a receiver and no accident can account for the creation of both.
My only concern with this list is that I'm not sure they are all examples of the same thing: Human speech and the dance of bees are definitely languages. DNA does not seem to be a language at all, it's more like a cell's memory device for transmitting it's form to the next generation.
What is common feature in all of these that could not have possibly been accidental?
DNA is an interpreted code comprised of a set of symbols, which is a type of language. In software engineering terms, genomes are like byte codes, in base4 (nucleotides) or base20 (amino acids), and interpreter is the ribosome. Unfortunately, even that explanation is too simplistic as there are multiple layers of information encoded, which leads to pleiotropic effects. Pleiotropy means that a single gene, with multiple encoded layers of information, influences multiple phenotypic traits.
I agree, the scheme by which DNA codes for proteins and regulatory behavior is very complex - surely too complex to be the result of an unintelligent process. But what is the key common feature in all of the examples that you listed which cannot be done by accident?
Honestly I am still not convinced that a sufficiently intelligent designer could not design a rich and complex language - I cannot think of any way of knowing what the Intelligent Designer might not be able to do on purpose, unless of course we were to assume that it's mind was subject to similar limitations to our human minds.
And on a slightly different track, we can observe the development of human languages. These also seem to be designed without particular intent by a sort of collective intelligence.
The key feature that excludes accidental creation is the nature of symbolic representation. A symbol or symbol sequence represents something other than itself according to a convention.
If you duplicate something, that is not symbolic representation. It is just more copies of what you already had. It might be that something could be duplicated by accident, unintentionally.
But a symbol does not represent itself. It has been made to represent something else according to a convention. A convention of some kind is needed because the association is between two different things.
So, just as the Morse code dot-dot-dot might mean/represent different letters according to different conventions, so also some particular codon (a triplet of nucleotides) might mean/represent one amino acid according to one genetic code or a different amino acid (or possibly a "stop" code) according to some other genetic code in a different organism.
Until you have established some convention, there is no association between symbol and reality -- no connections, no translation, and therefore no symbolic language. You don't really even have "symbols" then -- just meaningless sequences of "stuff".
To physically implement a convention that can actually translate between symbols and their corresponding counterparts requires a non-trivial amount of machinery. (Even if it is only implemented conceptually, it still requires someone to form in their mind all of the necessary associations and share this with any other participants. But for studies of nature and the language of life, we are explicitly dealing with physically implemented symbolic codes.)
BobMort: "And on a slightly different track, we can observe the development of human languages. These also seem to be designed without particular intent by a sort of collective intelligence."
I wouldn't say that an established language can't ever change by accident. That may happen. And it is not beyond consideration that there might have been unintentional/non-planned changes to the genetic codes over time. (That is its own deep topic.) But a symbolic language couldn't be created unintentionally to start with.
We are fooled in part by how natural symbolic language is to humans, especially for mature native speakers. Our facility with grammatical symbolic language is an amazing distinguishing quality of humans.
In order to get past the bias of how easy it seems, think about learning a new language or about communicating with someone who does not yet share a common language with you. Before communication can happen, some conventions have to be established, e.g. by pointing to objects and saying their names. You couldn't expect by accident to just speak a symbolic language to someone who had no prior knowledge concerning it and expect it to make sense to them (at least without their getting some kind of help).
Eric, I can see where you are heading and but part of me remains skeptical. I think languages are a special category of things but I am not convinced that it is symbolism alone is what makes languages special, and I am not convinced that we have material evidence that shows us that symbolism can never result from an accidental process.
The other day I saw a TV show about meerkats, a form of desert-dwelling tribal mongoose. It has been known for some time that they have a simplistic language which is mainly used to indicate danger and emotional state. For example, the meerkat makes an entirely different sound for a ground-based predator as it would do if it observed an airborne predator. The system of calls seems to allow the tribe to take very specific action against a wide range of threats and we do not fully understand the nuances behind their calls.
The warning bark is certainly a symbol - you do not have to be a hemp-smoking new-age semiotics / evolutionary psychology postdoc to accept that proposition: The barking noise the guard-meerkat triggers the same kind of fear response in the foraging tribe as if they had all seen the source of the the threat themselves. Notice that the warning-call is not in itself a threat, it is merely a symbol that a threat exists. The symbol stands-in for the actual sight or sound of the threat. It clearly conveys information about the ongoing threat - we cannot deny that it is a symbol.
The reason I mention the meerkat is that their simple communication system is many orders of magnitude simpler than human speech. I think it is entirely feasible that the system of barks and grunts might have been the result of accidental design since they could have come about as a result of learnt behavior in a meerkat family or even some kind of simple behavioral adaption which modified an intelligently designed but more generic vocalizing behavior. I think this example shows that symbolism on it's own cannot show intentional design. There must be something else.
By the way, up until now I've tried to keep my own belief out of this debate, but I am going to break that rule for a moment. I do believe that design was intentional, however my source of that belief is the special revelation provided to me by my faith. Since I am told what the Intelligent Designer's purpose is I can validate that against what I see in the world, and I believe it seems consistent. I do not believe the existence of this purpose is revealed at all through the 'general revelation' of materialist, empirical scientific evidence.
I personally believe that your attempts to prove purpose without referring to some form of specially revealed knowledge will be futile since you will always hit the problem of not knowing the precise nature of the designer's intelligence, or even having a theory about what the purpose might have been. You have nothing to validate against the material world.
While the evidence of intelligence in the design of life is overwhelming, my belief in purpose of life is a matter of faith, I honestly believe that yours is too.
BobMort, Thanks for the comments. We may be able to clear up some things.
Intentional vs. Purpose/Motive
For starters, take another look at my original post "Whether? or Why?" in this thread. There I was attempting to make a clear distinction between identifying Whether something was intentionally designed vs. identifying purpose in the sense of motive or greater objective, i.e. Why something was done. Nothing I've said is meant to take away from the fact that we may need to go beyond science in order to find answers to the Why questions. So I believe we are in agreement about that.
BTW, John Lennox addresses this distinction in the excellent book God's Undertaker? when he discusses Aunt Matilda and the cake she baked. If we want to know Why she baked it, we can't get that from studying the properties of the cake itself. It needs to be revealed by Aunt Matilda. She needs to tell us.
Accidental vs. Intentional
Does the meerkat example show that a symbolic language can be accidentally / unintentionally created?
In the case of the meerkats, it may be that the conventions and associations are learned and held mentally / conceptually. It might also be that they are hard wired (in which case, we would need to change the focus to the origin of the hard wiring), but I will suppose the former. Either way, does that mean that the existence of these symbolic conventions is not intentional?
When a meerkat makes the appropriate sound, it would seem that they are acting intentionally. If the various sounds made were only accidental, there would be no regular association between one sound and one kind of attacker, or even whether that sound went with an attack at all. Without any regularity, there would be no basis for the hearers to make a regular or consistent association.
A learned symbolic language does not make the language accidental rather than intentional. If there exists a symbolic convention (i.e. a consistent though not necessary association between the symbols and something else), that convention could not be learned if there were no consistency to the associations as they are presented. If the connection is a convention, i.e. not required, then it does seem that the source of the meaningful symbols is acting intentionally. Accidental coincidence of a "symbol" and its "meaning" would not repeat consistently apart from intention.
With meerkats or human language, these are examples where conventions are held mentally or conceptually, whatever that may mean.
My primary interest is in pointing out that a physically implemented language such as the genetic code requires intentional design. The essential machinery that provides the translation by physically implementing the particular conventions of the language could not come about by accident.
The machinery has to be constructed by a source that can seek a future goal according to a plan. Mindless natural processes do not have that capacity. Even supposing replication were possible, natural selection cannot select for the future goal of translating symbolic representations into assembly instructions, e.g. from nucleotide combinations to protein manufacture.
When a meerkat makes the appropriate sound, it would seem that they are acting intentionally.
When I am talking about intent or accident I am refering to the Intelligent Designer. I do not seriously suggest that meerkats are sufficiently intelligent creatures to design their own language. Nor do I think it matters why the Meerkat thinks it is raising the alarm call - the fact remains that the call is a symbol.
My primary interest is in pointing out that a physically implemented language such as the genetic code requires intentional design. The essential machinery that provides the translation by physically implementing the particular conventions of the language could not come about by accident.
Eric, you seem to be hedging a bit here -
If the meerkat's ability to communicate is purely an innate ability then you argue that it must have been designed on purpose.
If the meerkat's ability to communicate is cultural (something learned in it's childhood) then it might have evolved or been designed accidentally.
This seems to be contradicting what you said earlier which is that it is the presence of symbolism in a language alone which indicates purposeful design, whereas now you are saying that it is the hard-wired behavior of symbolism which indicates purpose.
I put it to you that symbolism (whether in art or communication) is not on its own a signifier of purposeful design.
Regarding the Whether or Why question - I suspect that (unless you have special revelation) you cannot have one without the other. The cake story is a terrible analogy because it is such a familiar cultural object.
We know what purpose cakes serve in human culture and we know from personal experience that cakes are seldom the result of accidental human behavior, and assuming that you are waiting in your Aunt's house you even know the identity of the cake-maker.
To my mind the reasons why your arguments fail so far is that you have not yet identified the thing which cannot be designed by accident by a sufficiently intelligent designer.
The reason you have not done this is because without special revelation you can only make assumptions about what this designer might be able to do by accident or on purpose. I think you are also guilty of assuming that an Intelligent Designer might have similar intellectual limitations to a human mind, specifically what it might accomplish un-intentionally.
Until somebody produces a general theory of intelligence which allows us to infer the limits of any hypothetical non-human intelligence then any attempt to answer this part of the puzzle is going to be little more than conjecture.
I think that this is a trick question - the answer is the one that was provided to us by the early Catholic scholars who correctly deduced that general revelation is insufficient to determine if purpose exists. If purpose could be determined from general revelation we wouldn't need any special revelation.
BobMort: "...you have not yet identified the thing which cannot be designed by accident by a sufficiently intelligent designer."
I am specifically pointing to symbolic language in which symbol sequences acquire a specific meaning by a non-essential convention that associates them with something else. The genetic code is such a symbolic language and that is the particular case I claim shows recognizable intentional design.
A materialist predictably resists the idea that matter/energy could not have constructed the symbolic language processing needed for life. But you seem to want to suggest that this complex machinery might have been "designed by accident by a sufficiently intelligent designer" such that we are unable to be sure of intentional design, whether in this case or any other case.
It is not yet clear if "designed by accident" is meaningful in this context. It is easy to juxtapose conflicting terms, but is it meaningful? Are you wanting to defend that this machinery was designed but that the sufficiently intelligent designer did not recognize or understand the consequences of the design? It would seem that a greater intelligence should increase the ability to understand consequences, not lessen it.
If you want to make a persuasive case that the symbolic conventions needed for life might have been "designed by accident" rather than intentionally designed, you will at least need to make your meaning more clear. It is not yet apparent to me that this is not just self-contradictory in the context of functional cell machinery.
What does it mean to suggest that it was designed unintentionally? What would it mean to suggest both that the parts were arranged in such a way as to create living functioning cells that self-assemble according to symbolic instructions, and that this was done by a designer who did not intend to make living functioning cells that self-assemble according to symbolic instructions?
Appendix: Clarifications on Other Points of Possible Misunderstanding
To take your last point first, I haven't at any time claimed that general revelation eliminates need of special revelation. Quite the opposite. So I don't see that anything is gained from continuing to beat that horse. Its not a contested point.
You also said "Regarding the Whether or Why question - I suspect that (unless you have special revelation) you cannot have one without the other." However, this is clearly not a case of having to have either both or neither. I would agree that we cannot establish purpose if we can't even establish intentional action, but the reverse is simply not true.
There are many situations where we can tell that something was done intentionally without understanding the motives or ultimate purpose of agent behind it. Start with any number of murder mysteries. Was it intentional murder? Yes. Why? We don't know yet. Or observe that we have examples of ancient languages that we cannot translate and ancient tools for which we cannot identify the function or purpose. Are they intentional? Yes, without doubt. Why was this written? Why was this made? For what purpose? We do not know. We could go on to Stonehenge or any number of examples actual or hypothetical.
Clearly, we can recognize intentional actions even when we do not understand motive or purpose.
On the rest of it, I don't believe I am hedging, but perhaps I have not been clear, since your description does not seem to fit. For example, you seem to attribute to me this idea:
BobMort: "If the meerkat's ability to communicate is cultural (something learned in it's childhood) then it might have evolved or been designed accidentally."
However, I have not taken the position of "designed accidentally" at any point.
Also, I have not claimed that the broad and vague idea of "symbolism" in art is relevant to what I am saying. If you want to say that someone doodling can unintentionally (or a least not consciously) create art with hidden "symbolism" (perhaps from the unconscious), I have no objections since that is not what I am talking about.
Tell me, do you want to imply that the implementation of the genetic code could have been an unintended doodle such that it's designer had no idea that the DNA sequences would be used to create functional protein machines? I would guess not, but then I'm not confident about what you are proposing.
Helena asked some questions that I've meant to get back to.
"DNA does not seem to be a language at all, it's more like a cell's memory device for transmitting it's form to the next generation."
Patrick has already provided an excellent response indicating that genetic codes are indeed languages, with similarities to the much simpler languages we use to program computers. About the second part of your question I just wanted to add that you are not wrong to think of DNA as a memory device. But even with memory devices, e.g. in a computer, digital camera, phone, etc., the information stored there must be encoded in some way so that it can be translated back again (e.g. from nucleotide sequences to protein amino acid sequences).
In all of our digital media, the information is stored as sequences of 1's and 0's. But that binary data must be interpreted, and the translation (encoding and decoding) depends on conventions that can differ. An image might be stored as a .jpg or .bmp or .gif or .png. Use the wrong convention on the data and you get back only meaningless garbage. Likewise there are different conventions for audio files, for moving images (such as DVD formats), and so on.
So even though the memory can store any of these kinds of information, it would all be meaningless nonsense 1's and 0's if it were not for the matching conventions that make it possible to translate the binary data back to something meaningful and useful.
"Am I right in understanding that the reason these cannot be accidental is that every language requires a transmitter as well as a receiver and no accident can account for the creation of both."
That is not the whole problem. The problem is not simply about the ends (the transmitter and the receiver). It is about the problem of translation that goes in between. What is the origin of consistently implemented symbolic conventions that control the translation of the symbolic information?
Mindless matter does not think and cannot think symbolically. Nor can it pursue a distant goal. Darwinistic processes are Blind Watchmaker processes because they cannot see ahead to future value. They only react blindly to current realities. Mindless chemicals and chemical reactions do not have any need of symbolic representation to entirely fulfill their nature.
Consequently, the have no way to make the leap to creating both appropriate symbolic data and the machinery that implements matching conventions that translate those particular symbols into something that is really useful. To create both the symbolic data and the matching conventions and machinery for symbolic translation requires planning ahead. It requires intention.
Eric,
Sorry that it's taken me so long to respond to your messages - it really did take me a long time to think through what you propose:
That is not the whole problem. The problem is not simply about the ends (the transmitter and the receiver). It is about the problem of translation that goes in between. What is the origin of consistently implemented symbolic conventions that control the translation of the symbolic information?
You are effectively claiming that systems which *appear* to be symbolic languages are irreducibly complex, and then you are claiming that no unintentional intelligence can produce irreducibly complex features. Both of these claims are unproven conjecture.
I still feel that this statement is easily refuted - we have proposed and agreed that there are some cases where symbolic languages which have meaning (e.g. meerkat calls) can arise without any particular design intent.
We have also agreed that it does not matter what the Meerkat 'feels' about hearing an alarm call - we can easily prove that it is symbolic communication.
If your conjecture that ALL symbolic communcation must be the result of intentional design then you would have to say the same thing about the meerkats. The fact that you cannot say this with certainty means that the conjecture falls.
I think there MIGHT be certain features of language that require intentional design. We could do an experiment - try comparing a language which we know is designed for a purpose (e.g. Esperanto, C++) with a language which we know to be the result of goal-free intelligence (e.g. English, Arabic).
We could then try to determine if the "language" of DNA is most like the first or second category.
Mindless matter does not think and cannot think symbolically. Nor can it pursue a distant goal
Some ID proponents (notably Mike Gene) believe that evolution was set up by a human-like intelligence designer with a distant goal in mind. Do you support this theory?
Darwinistic processes are Blind Watchmaker processes because they cannot see ahead to future value. They only react blindly to current realities. Mindless chemicals and chemical reactions do not have any need of symbolic representation to entirely fulfill their nature.
I was not specifically referring to darwinistic processes - I was trying to consider what a sufficiently intelligent designer might be able to achieve without intent or purpose. It seems to me that you believe these are equivalent... why is that?
For the record - I support the basic ideal of ID (that we can detect intelligence). I reject the notion that we can detect purpose (without special revelation).
Thanks for the feedback, Bob. You mentioned:
"I reject the notion that we can detect purpose (without special revelation)."
That statement is ambiguous with regard to the pivotal distinction running througout the conversation. No one is claiming to reliably detect Why something was designed (although revelation can provide this). On the other hand, we do routinely detect that directed causation was intentional (see above for examples given earlier). Surely you do not reject the latter, do you?
It is important to be clear about that distinction, since it would be impossible to think clearly about the topic if that distinction is lost.
"We could then try to determine if the "language" of DNA is most like the first or second category." (i.e. "a language which we know is designed for a purpose (e.g. Esperanto, C++)" vs. "the result of goal-free intelligence (e.g. English, Arabic)".
Another important distinction: Any example of something that was made as a designed object could be subsequently affected by undirected processes. This fact is not relevant to the point I have been making, which is that the origin/creation of the symbolic language processing required intelligent causation that was intentional. Such things cannot appear by accident completely apart from the intentions of intelligent agents (even though they can later be affected by accidents).
[BTW, regarding your question, the genetic codes are languages like our computer languages. They are "assembly languages" that guide hardware operations according to symbolic conventions, just as we program computers and computerized equipment.]
In particular, any time someone intends to communicate and creates a symbolic means of doing so, that is intentional design by an intelligent agent.
"...we have proposed and agreed that there are some cases where symbolic languages which have meaning (e.g. meerkat calls) can arise without any particular design intent."
I have never agreed to that. I leave as an open question whether the meerkats were designed from the start with their symbolic communication hard wired in, or else that they developed it among themselves over time (having some capacity to do so). Even if the latter, I submit there was still an intention to communicate.
Consider what it would mean for any verbal "communication" language to have no intention behind it. What keeps the symbols associated consistently with meanings? If one agent makes a set of noises but with no intended associations (whether built-in or adopted, whether inherited or learned), then even if another agent were to try to attach meanings there would be no consistency because no association is intended. It would be random noise, i.e. gibberish.
A recipient cannot form a language to translate meaningful messages out of random noise. You cannot get a message from static, no matter how hard you try. For abstract symbols to allow consistent translation into a message, there needs to be an association, i.e. a symbolic convention, that is applied with consistency by the sender to convey the message.
"Some ID proponents (notably Mike Gene) believe that evolution was set up by a human-like intelligence designer with a distant goal in mind. Do you support this theory?"
I respect Mike and I have liked much of what I have read from him online, but I have not yet read his book and so cannot comment on it.
If you are referring to the idea of "front-loading", I would not exclude the possibility that life could be designed to be front-loaded from the time of its origin with programming that can later unfold under various environmental conditions. But that would not change anything I have said about the fact that the origin of the symbolic language and information processing used by living organisms would have to have been the result of intentional design.
A universe devoid of symbolic conventions and processing could not invent it without the aid of intelligence and intentional design. To "front-load" the universe itself for making living organisms with symbolic processing would require building the symbolic conventions into the universe itself in some pre-wired manner. We have not observed anything remotely like that. But even if something like that were discovered someday, that would only change when the symbolic conventions were implanted, not whether they were intentional.
One more clarification -- by "Blind Watchmaker processes", I am referring to any and all undirected natural processes that are blind to future goals, benefits, or results. I don't mean only processes that apply after living organisms exist.
That statement is ambiguous with regard to the pivotal distinction running througout the conversation. No one is claiming to reliably detect Why something was designed (although revelation can provide this). On the other hand, we do routinely detect that directed causation was intentional (see above for examples given earlier). Surely you do not reject the latter, do you?
I deliberately put that point (which you are replying to) at the end of my previous note, simply because it was intended as an expression of my personal FAITH position rather than a well-argued point in a debate. I'm glad I did because I think your response is very interesting.
Much of archeology deals with the study of designed artifacts, the products of mysterious cultures. In all of archeology I'm not aware of a single kind of artifact for which we can claim that it is a purposeful artifact yet we have no clue at all about it's purpose, makers or time of origin. Often we cannot say with certainty what purpose an object served but there is nothing for which we can say absolutely nothing. That is we can always form a testable hypothesis about one or more of: who made it, why did they make it, when was it made.
It has always seemed odd to me that my friends who advocate the Telic approach feel comfortable arguing that there is STRONG evidence of purpose in certain features of life, and yet there is no evidence at all of what this purpose might have been. Why is it that artifacts of an intelligent designer might be so different from artifacts made by human intelligent designers?
Another important distinction: Any example of something that was made as a designed object could be subsequently affected by undirected processes.
Are you alleging that C++ or Assembler are subject to these undirected processes? I'd suggest not, since the "evolution" of these languages is nothing at all like the micro-evolution we see on earth. There is no random mutation or natural selection of C++ or the iPod.
[BTW, regarding your question, the genetic codes are languages like our computer languages. They are "assembly languages" that guide hardware operations according to symbolic conventions, just as we program computers and computerized equipment.]
There really does seem to be big differences between naturally occurring languages (e.g. English, DNA) and languages which we know are designed: (e.g. C++, Assembler, Esperanto). One thing is that the artificial languages have very compact, regular grammars. It's almost as if a hallmark of intelligence in design is optimized simplicity. One need only look at the sleek lines of a well designed product like an iPod to recognize that good design is often the process of simplifying rather than embellishment.
Take by comparison English - one of the most preposterously complex languages in the world - a language so diverse that it is impossible to produce a complete and coherent definition of grammar (as there are so many variations). It has very little of the simplicity and regularity of C++ or Esperanto. It constantly acquires new features and we know that this process will never stop.
To my mind, the English language more closely resembles a 'doodle' than a design. It's clearly the product of intelligence, but a sort of intelligence that acts without purpose and does not know when to stop.
We might undertake many kinds of comparison, but on this basis alone I'd say that DNA (while sharing a superficial similarity with assembler) is actually more like English.
Also consider the well-known phenomena of gene coding for two proteins. This would be absolutely impossible in Assembler (or at least vanishingly improbable), however it happens all the time in English and is the basis of much of our humor. I'm sure you are familiar with the idea of texts which can mean two very different things depending on how you read it. These kinds of features are simply not present in Assembly programs.
A recipient cannot form a language to translate meaningful messages out of random noise. You cannot get a message from static, no matter how hard you try. For abstract symbols to allow consistent translation into a message, there needs to be an association, i.e. a symbolic convention, that is applied with consistency by the sender to convey the message.
I never alleged that languages would form from static or white-noise. Amongst evolutionary biologists and studies of linguistics there are models for language evolution - are you familiar with them?
A universe devoid of symbolic conventions and processing could not invent it without the aid of intelligence and intentional design. To "front-load" the universe itself for making living organisms with symbolic processing would require building the symbolic conventions into the universe itself in some pre-wired manner. We have not observed anything remotely like that. But even if something like that were discovered someday, that would only change when the symbolic conventions were implanted, not whether they were intentional.
As I stated before, you seem to be stating that symbolism in language is "irreducibly complex". I gather from your previous comments that you reject my notion that we could account for the origin of meerkat grunts via a non-telic process. What about something simpler:
As you know many of the simplest life-forms communicate via chemical signaling. Such signals apparantly convey messages like "we are under attack" or "we are running out of food". These chemical signals clearly carry information which aids the colony's survival - this has been shown experimentally. The signal is not an attack or a famine, but in some way represents an attack or a lack of food.
Do you accept that this is indeed symbolic communication.
If yes, do you insist that this must be a purposefully designed feature in life? How is it that you can be sure that no micro-evolutionary process (the kind that most of my fellow ID proponents accept exists) can account for the phenomena of chemical cell-signaling?
If no, can you explain why it is that you think cell-signalling is not a form of symbolic communication. What is different about this compared with the other kinds of "languages" we have discussed, e.g. the Meerkats.
Later, when I have more time, I will provide a more general response on the larger points regarding symbolic language. (So I'm not ignoring those points.) For now, I will give some quick answers to several of BobMort's other points.
BobMort: In all of archeology I'm not aware of a single kind of artifact for which we can claim that it is a purposeful artifact yet we have no clue at all about it's purpose, makers or time of origin.
We can and do recognize artifacts as such, even if we don't have extra information about the source or the process.
As a fun illustrating example, suppose that archaeologists (who have never seen or read "2001: A Space Odyssey" discover a mysterious black rectangular monolith (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monolith) that is a "black, extremely flat, about 3 feet wide, slightly reflective cuboid whose dimensions are in the precise ratio 1:4:9 (the squares of the first three integers)". It is "virtually indestructible and impenetrable, resisting all attempts to analyze [its] composition or internal structure". Assume further that we know nothing about who put it there or when or what function it serves.
Would the archaeologists conclude the following? "Oh well, until we know something about who put it here or when or what function it serves, we cannot infer that it is an intentional artifact. We will have to assume it is the result of undirected causes and try to explain it according to undiscovered geological processes."
Or would they make the immediate inference that it is "an obvious alien artifact" (emphasis added to the quote) even before learning anything more about the makers or their possible purposes?
The reality is this. Our inference from an effect to intelligent agency does not depend on understanding the intelligent agent. It depends on recognizing that an effect is outside the reach of undirected, natural processes according to our observations and best understanding of the limits on those undirected processes. If the evidence indicates that undirected processes could readily have done it, then inference to intelligent agency is not justified as the best explanation.
BobMort: Why is it that artifacts of an intelligent designer might be so different from artifacts made by human intelligent designers?
I'm not aware of anyone wanting to take such a position. It is self defeating. By definition, "human intelligent designers" are members of the set of "intelligent designers". The actual position is that they are not "so different". I believe you are misunderstanding the inference to intelligent causation as the best explanation for an effect.
BobMort: It has always seemed odd to me that my friends who advocate the Telic approach feel comfortable arguing that there is STRONG evidence of purpose in certain features of life, and yet there is no evidence at all of what this purpose might have been.
If you are not yet making the distinction that I have been emphasizing, that could be why it seems "odd". You here use "purpose" twice, but are you making the fundamental distinction? Until you do, I expect it will continue to seem "odd". It would be more accurate and hopefully more clear to say something like this.
"There is STRONG evidence of the intentional action of intelligent agency (i.e. directed causes rather than undirected causes), even though the full purpose (i.e. the "Why?") may not always be discernible."
BobMort: I deliberately put that point (which you are replying to) at the end of my previous note, simply because it was intended as an expression of my personal FAITH position rather than a well-argued point in a debate.
Understood, and there is no problem with that. However, even a statement of faith needs to make clear distinctions. Otherwise, it leads to errors in thinking.
For example, did the sources advocating that position exclude all possibility of recognizing whether God has intentionally acted? (If so, then that would appear to conflict with Paul's position in Romans chapter 1.) Or did they rather insist that one cannot understand God's purposes (i.e. the "Why?") apart from revelation? (That is entirely consistent with Paul's position.) The distinction is fundamental, even as a statement of faith.
Appendix: Some Responses Regarding Computer and Genetic Code
BobMort: Are you alleging that C++ or Assembler are subject to these undirected processes? I'd suggest not, since the "evolution" of these languages is nothing at all like the micro-evolution we see on earth. There is no random mutation or natural selection of C++ or the iPod.
I said any designed object is also subject to undirected processes. Ask anyone with a broken iPod. Likewise, statues weather, memory or hard drives or CDs containing C++ compilers can go bad, and on and on. Every designed object is subject to subsequent undirected processes.
BobMort: Also consider the well-known phenomena of gene coding for two proteins. This would be absolutely impossible in Assembler (or at least vanishingly improbable) ...
When the information in a gene is used to construct two or more different proteins, different parts of the information can be turned off vs. being on, depending on conditions. Other controls can vary the ordering of the active portions. Far from being impossible, conditional execution of computer code is normal and almost always utilized. The order code sections are executed can also be varied according to controls.
The cell does even more complicated things with DNA code, but we can also do more complicated things with computer code as well. We have not written software as complicated as the cell, but we have written software more complex than any book written in English.
Also, be careful not to confuse the size of DNA with the size of a genetic code. The language of the genetic code of an organism is indeed very compact, very regular, very simple -- very much like a computer processor's assembly language (especially for older processors). Four bases arranged in groups of three give 64 possible codes, each with one regular defined meaning for that organism. How that language is used can be much more complex, just as how an assembly language is used can be much more complex.
Eric, let me summarize and then i will try to address your specific points.
We originally got to this very interesting line of debate from your proposition that no symbolic system of communication could evolve or be un-intentionally designed. My response was to argue that symbolism on it's own is not particularly special and that there are other features of language which seem to better indicate purposeful design other than mere symbolism.
Finally, in my previous email I suggested that we could look at the properties of certain languages which are generally agreed to be artificial (e.g. C++, Assembler, Esperanto) with those that are not (e.g. English), finally we can look at the language of genetics and see if it resembles either or none of these categories.
I suggest we continue down this line, not because I think we will quickly agree but because i find what you are saying quite fascinating.
As a fun illustrating example, suppose that archaeologists (who have never seen or read "2001: A Space Odyssey" discover a mysterious black rectangular monolith
I would be more convinced by your line of argument if somebody had found an object as utterly inscrutable and mysterious as Clarke's monolith: If you could show me that there was a class of real designed object for which we definitely knew was purpose-built and yet we could not say a single thing about it's maker, it's purpose or it's mode of manufacture.
In the case of the fictional monolith, I think it would be entirely reasonable to offer the conjecture that it is indeed of alien origin however any claim to know that it is of alien origin would be a step too far. It's much the same with my Telic ID associates who claim to 'know' that the intelligence was purposeful. They are claiming to know that which they can no more suspect.
As with language - I think you have offered very reasonable conjecture that certain language features must be both intelligently and purposefully designed however you have not come remotely close to proving this.
"There is STRONG evidence of the intentional action of intelligent agency (i.e. directed causes rather than undirected causes), even though the full purpose (i.e. the "Why?") may not always be discernible."
The problem with your statement above is that the "Why?" has never been naturalistically discernible - not for the whole of life nor the tiniest aspect of life.
If you could determine the "Why" for even the smallest part of the known universe then we could study that object's properties and then determine if it seems consistent with what you claim the intelligent designer's purpose was. If it was a good match then you would have started to establish the Telic position.
I see strong evidence of intelligence, I just do not see how you know that the intelligence was 'directed'.
For me 'directed' implies working towards a goal. 'directed' implies 'purposeful' behavior. I'd use that adjective to describe what some of us here call the Telic perspective. Please tell me if you think I am abusing these words.
Also, be careful not to confuse the size of DNA with the size of a genetic code. The language of the genetic code of an organism is indeed very compact, very regular, very simple -- very much like a computer processor's assembly language (especially for older processors). Four bases arranged in groups of three give 64 possible codes,
No - when I say a language is complex I really did mean that. The language of the genome is spectacularly complex - this is an entirely different thing to the (also true) statement that the genome itself is complex.
The vocabulary of DNA may appear simple however a means of fully parsing this code is currently outside the grasp of the world's most capable computational geneticists. Nobody has yet identified a complete grammar of the "language" of DNA. This code is very complex with far more rules than have been discovered to date.
To the extent that our genome can be called a 'language' then it is a very complex language. Even though very complex programs can be written in Assembler, it is actually one of the simplest turing-complete languages in the whole history of computing.
All useful programming languages have very simple grammars: ANSI C which is regarded as one of the most expressive languages in the entire history of computing has a grammar which will fit on 2 sides of A4 paper. It's this simplicity and perfect regularity which is a strong sign of purposeful design.
This is C's grammar:
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pjj/bnf/c_syntax.bnf
We know that one thing that human designers often like to do is engage in simplification: We eliminate irregularities, get rid of redundant features and try to present a designed object that is simple and consistent.
The English language knows no such simplification. Over time particularly clumsy and troublesome constructions might become extinct, however our written language is rife with redundancy, inconsistency and has an excessively complex grammar (despite being composed only of sequences of letters and spaces).
Indeed, as I hinted before English allows you to write an expression which has multiple meanings. There are genes which if read with varying frame-shifts can produce multiple important proteins. You claimed that this is also possible with machine languages - I'd challenge you to find an example of machine languages that has the same property.
In summary, i'd put it to you that the genomic code seems to resemble natural languages like English much more than it resembles assembly language even if superficially both assembly-code and DNA can be represented as number-sequences. That's just about the only thing they have in common.
Finally, I wanted to point out that assembler is an odd choice of analogy: Human programmers do occasionally write assembly code but most of the time we do not. This is because we have discovered that unlike English and C++, Assembler it is not a practical language for design.
99.99% of assembler code in the world is not designed but produced automatically by a compiler. Assembler is therefore merely an intermediary form. It is found in-between design and execution.
Indeed, subsequent compilations might produce entirely different assembly code (even with the tiniest changes to the source code). This is clearly quite a different thing to DNA, because we all agree that micro-evolution acts directly upon our genetic code. There is no cosmic C++ or compiler which made our DNA.
FINALLY: Take some computer code (e.g. C++, Python, Assembler) and try introducing some random mutations into it. Does it still work? Does it even run?
Take some natural language code (e.g. an English story, the DNA of a bacteria) and try introducing some random mutations into it. Does it still work? Does it live or make sense?
:-)
BobMort, Some short responses for now.
1)
eric: "Also, be careful not to confuse the size of DNA with the size of a genetic code. The language of the genetic code of an organism is indeed very compact, very regular, very simple -- very much like a computer processor's assembly language (especially for older processors). Four bases arranged in groups of three give 64 possible codes,"
You responded in part by shifting the focus to something you called "the genomic code":
"In summary, i'd put it to you that the genomic code seems to resemble natural languages like English much more than it resembles assembly language ..."
I did a Google search and found zero hits for "genomic code". No one else seems to be writing about such a concept.
Kidding aside, you are confusing two different concepts, the genome and the genetic code. The genetic code is indeed "very compact, very regular, and very simple" just as I said, and the standard or canonical version of that code has been known for quite a while now.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code.
2) You raised questions about why I described the genetic code as an "assembly" language. I'm afraid that part of the reason is that I couldn't resist the pun, given that codons are the basis for specifying the assembly of amino acids in proteins.
Strictly speaking, I was thinking more so at that moment of the machine level binary language of the processor, not even just to the human readable form of "assembler" (though they correspond to each other). The instructions or operation codes in a processor's language can bear a strong similarity in the sense that they are composed of a small set of meaningful markers that represent operations symbolically. The association between codes and actions are determined by conventions, not by any physical or chemical requirements.
As an example, if we designed a processor with 16 bit operation codes (i.e. two bytes), there could be up to 64 distinct operation codes -- exactly the same number of codes as in the genetic code.
3) BobMort: "Indeed, as I hinted before English allows you to write an expression which has multiple meanings. There are genes which if read with varying frame-shifts can produce multiple important proteins. You claimed that this is also possible with machine languages - I'd challenge you to find an example of machine languages that has the same property."
First, your analogy is faulty. English allows multiple meanings through ambiguity. The genetic code, though containing redundancy, is not ambiguous. (see link above)
If you wanted to try frame shifting with English, try move spaces into different locations so that letters move forward or backward into different words. Ify ouw ant edt otr yfr ame shi fti ng. And see if you can get multiple meanings that way. Perhaps one can.
If I were to use a general purpose computer and any general computer language to model frame shifting, the easiest way to do this would be to model it after the way it is done in cells with the shifted application of the genetic code. It would be trivial to assign codes to each nucleotide, string a sequence of them together (following any frame shift example from biology), and then interpret them from different starting points with results equivalent to the biological case.
This could also be done at a lower level. With byte addressable starting points, one could interpret a series of instructions at different starting points.
Would every series of instructions be meaningful if one frame shifted? No, but this is not true for biology and the genetic code either.
The question at hand is whether both are symbolic languages -- and they are. Can similar things be done with both? Yes, without any doubt.
Bottom line:
To assess whether something is a symbolic language, one looks for symbols that are interpreted or translated into meaning according to a convention, i.e. an association that is consistent but not required.
Hi, I just wanted to introduce myself. I'll be doing (well, trying to learn) Sam's job.
Regarding the original subject we started out with here, there is a difference between motive and intent. Confusion on that subject can sometimes result in confusion about detecting design.
Legal cases typically turn on intent, not motive.
Here is an example: Harry and Jack are having a somewhat tense conversation over a beer and steak at the local pub.
Harry seizes a steak knife and tries to plunge it into Jack's ribs.
Pub regulars overpower him and the police are called. He is charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
That's intent.
No one knows his motive, but no one needs to know his motive. What he intended was obvious. And it is a crime.
A later investigation may turn up a motive - perhaps Jack had informed Harry that he was very friendly with Harry's girlfriend, and becoming more so all the time - and that it would be best if Harry would just disappear at this point.
But what if the investigation doesn't turn up a motive? What if Harry steadfastly refuses to say what they talked about?
For that matter, what if Harry doesn't know his own motives very clearly? He might be the sort of fellow who mumbles, "I never liked that guy. And then one day I just got really mad."
That's not insanity.
Design, in these matters, is inferred from a pattern of events, not the detection of motive.
Whenever we can, we like to know the motive, but it is not essential.
I will put this comment up on the main page to draw attention to your most interesting discussion.
Denyse O'Leary is a Toronto-based journalist, author, and blogger. She is co-author with Mario Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain (Harper One 2007) and author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004).
Thanks Denyse! I completely agree that it is of fundamental importance to take into account the difference between detecting whether something was done intentionally by an intelligent agent and uncovering their motives/purposes (i.e. why they did it). I hope your explanation made the distinction more clear.
A claim was made earlier that "early Catholic scholars ... deduced that general revelation is insufficient to determine if purpose exists. If purpose could be determined from general revelation we wouldn't need any special revelation"
I don't want to turn this into a discussion of the details of Catholic theology, but it does seem that for some there is the impression that ID is making claims that violate or run counter to the position of those early Catholic scholars. This then can become an obstacle or stumbling block for some.
However, I suspect that this is actually another example of failing to distinguish between detecting intention and uncovering motive/purpose. As far as I am aware, the claim of ID (i.e. that some effects are recognizably best explained as the result of intentional acts by intelligent agency) in no way conflicts with the position taken by those early Catholic scholars. For example, I doubt that they were intending to disagree with Paul's position in Romans.
Since you have familiarity both with Catholic teaching and with ID, I would be very interested in your assessment of that matter. Is there any real conflict between their position (accurately understood) and the claims made by ID?
BobMort: "Indeed, as I hinted before English allows you to write an expression which has multiple meanings. There are genes which if read with varying frame-shifts can produce multiple important proteins. You claimed that this is also possible with machine languages - I'd challenge you to find an example of machine languages that has the same property."
I want to amend my response to your question about frame shifting. We can go beyond what I said to indicate simple requirements that guarantee that a computer code/machine language has the property that it supports frame shifted multiple meanings.
This property would exist for any computer instruction set where
1) Each instruction is composed of N units, where N is a fixed number greater than one. (Example: Each instruction is 3 bytes long. Or each is 2 words long. And so on.)
2) All possible binary values of those instructions have a meaningful interpretation. There are no unused, forbidden, or disallowed values. (Example: If every instruction is 2 bytes long, then each of the 64 possible codes has a meaning.)
3) The system allows interpretation to begin at any arbitrary unit boundary. (In other words, frame shifting is not prohibited or excluded by the system itself.)
Under those conditions, starting at any arbitrary unit boundary, one could interpret the codes as meaningful instructions in that machine language. (This does not guarantee that the instructions will do something we find useful, but that also is not the case for randomly frame shifting application of the genetic code.)
Compare these properties with the genetic code.
1) The genetic code uses a fixed size of 3 bases per codon.
2) Every one of the 64 possible codon codes has a meaning (though that meaning can be different for different creatures -- not all organisms use the standard code).
3) Frame shifting is allowed (though doing so randomly does not guarantee that the result will be useful).
The English language is also a symbolic language. For the sake of responding to your point, contrast the two similar cases above with the English language. Which is more like the genetic code in this respect? Computer codes (i.e. designed machine languages) or English?
Note, it is not really relevant to my own point which is closer, since both are symbolic and neither could be created by an undirected process. English also depends on the intention of intelligent agents who wish to communicate and who adopt shared symbolic conventions. English is "messier" simply because it is design-by-committee over a long time on a global scale. That doesn't mean that it is not the result of intention. It simply means that where many contributors are involved over a long time, the results are not as neat and tidy as they can be when one designer makes the decisions.
As a final thought regarding frame shifting, even though a symbolic language is assuredly the result of intention, we might want to ask whether we can detect if the frame shifting in cells is the result of an accident or the result of intentional design. This is a separate conjecture from whether the language itself is intentionally designed.
If frame shifting is the result of genetic accidents, I suspect that it is unlikely and implausible that this could happen all at once where a cell suddenly has the ability to reliably select the frame shifted version of the gene and use that when needed to produce a functional and useful protein to meet the need. More reasonably, if it is just an accident, this would develop in accidental steps, in an uncoordinated and unintentional manner. If that is so, I believe we should expect to find many cases where the progression along those steps is only partial.
On the other hand, if it is not a simple change and we do not find a progression of steps in various stages of progress, then that would be evidence in favor of frame shifting by design.
Eric, I am no expert in Catholic teaching.
But I am unclear why general revelation would be insufficient to determine that purpose exists.
(For convenience, I assume that we mean a purpose for human life.)
Cultures worldwide have assumed that we exist for a purpose, though opinion differs as to what that purpose is. Because we ourselves have purposes, we tend to assume that there is a purpose for our lives.
Indeed, what do depressed people say? They say, "I feel my life has no purpose." They say this whether they are religious or not.
As I understand it, special revelation means that God tells people information that they cannot infer from themselves or nature.
We can infer from nature, for example, that if there is a God, he is not at all like an animal, but, on the contrary, immensely greater than any human.
Hence Paul's denunciation of the worship of gods in the form of animals.
Most of us can infer from our own consciences that some acts are better than others, so we know that some sort of moral law exists. ("The good that I would, that I do not, the evil that I would not, that I do ... wretched man that I am")
Some argue that this moral law evolved because it happened to help us survive, but that is clearly not the case. The moral law is most keenly felt when we are depriving ourselves of something that would help us survive, but we forego it for the sake of the law. People who are highly moral may prefer to die rather than break the moral law, as they understand it.
But can we, for example, infer from nature the forgiveness of sin? Nature never forgives. From our consciences? Many of us torment ourselves uselessly over our sins. Others are blithely unaware of destruction to self, others and nature caused by their sins and do not even think they need much forgiveness.
In the Christian worldview, the central content of special revelation is the forgiveness of sin, which is not a doctrine that can be inferred either from ourselves or from the world around us.
So, while inferring a purpose for human life does not require special revelation (so far as I can see) bridging the gap between what we are and what we know we should be does require it.
Denyse O'Leary is a Toronto-based journalist, author, and blogger. She is co-author with Mario Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain (Harper One 2007) and author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004).
Denyse,
It's good to have you in the discussion, and I think you raise an interesting point - specifically the difference between intent and motive. The original question in this thread used the word "purpose". In common speech these words are often used interchangeably but you are quite right to point out that they have distinct meanings.
I think your pub-story is a good example of where intent can easily be observed via direct observation, specifically when somebody is caught in the act. If we were able to catch the intelligent designer in the act we would have good materialistic evidence of intelligent design. Do you ever speculate why we have not found such evidence?
Unfortunately with the origin of species we have no direct observation, so we must infer what we can from the material evidence we have available: It's undeniable that creation exists, but can we know whether the splendid variety we see was the intended consequence of the designer or an entirely unintended (even accidental) consequence of some entirely different scheme?
For example, suppose the primordial earth was merely a dumping ground for the chemical by-products required for some other project. Complex molecules were designed for a specific reason entirely unrelated to life as we know it but fell to earth where they reacted and organized themselves in ways that their designer had never originally intended. Is that possible?
Personally, I believe that life on earth as we know it is the specific intent of a Creator God, and that his motive, purpose and purpose are revealed exclusively in the Holy Bible. I think knowledge of God's intentionality (i.e. the state of God's mind at the time of creation) is something that is fitting topic for theologians and is not within the domain of science which cannot nor should have any say in this matter.
I am gravely skeptical of the kind of science promoted by the DI as I think they make the mistake of confusing that which is "general revelation" - i.e. what we can learn through a study of nature and what is the special revelation contained exclusively in the scriptures.
I want to amend my response to your question about frame shifting. We can go beyond what I said to indicate simple requirements that guarantee that a computer code/machine language has the property that it supports frame shifted multiple meanings.
Eric, I can see what you've done here: You've constructed a hypothetical digital version of a gene and you've specified some (but not all) of rules of this genetic "language": Of course, this language is utterly unlike any real computer language.
I remind you, originally claimed that genetic code is similar to "assembly language". Your hypothetical language is not at all similar to assembly language.
Note, it is not really relevant to my own point which is closer, since both are symbolic and neither could be created by an undirected process. English also depends on the intention of intelligent agents who wish to communicate and who adopt shared symbolic conventions. English is "messier" simply because it is design-by-committee over a long time on a global scale.
The human genome also seems to be a "messy kind of thing" - just like the English language. Do you think it could have been designed "by-committee over a long time on a global scale"?
That doesn't mean that it is not the result of intention. It simply means that where many contributors are involved over a long time, the results are not as neat and tidy as they can be when one designer makes the decisions.
That's right, I think the "messyness" is a sign of what you call "design by committee" rather than a single-minded vision. English is a very hard to learn and complex language, not just because the vocabulary is huge but our grammar is irregular, plus the language will be spoken differently depending on which country you hear it.
Who specifically are the "designers" of the English language? Is it just the people who write the dictionaries or is it everybody who has ever used the language?
BobMort: "I remind you, originally claimed that genetic code is similar to "assembly language". Your hypothetical language is not at all similar to assembly language."
And I will remind you that I previously explained that "assembly" language was in quotes in my original post because I could not resist the play on words. But as I explained earlier, it is the binary form of the processor's language that I was thinking of primarily. (For most readers, the distinction is unnecessarily technical.)
In hard fact, assembly or computer machine languages can be represented in either of two forms: one is as text that is more human readable while the other representation is binary. One can assemble the text form into the binary form, or disassemble the binary form back into a text representation. Only the binary representation actually works. One of my early programs for a research job was to write a dissassembler.
What I described was the nature of the binary representation. I wasn't being hypothetical. Real languages are like what I described. Typically it would be wasteful, for example, not to use every binary combination available for a computer instruction. And yes, sometimes we did work with the binary representations directly, not just with the text representation.
BobMort: "Would this ever work... ...Eric, I can see what you've done here: You've constructed a hypothetical digital version of a gene ..."
It is revealing that you think that what I have done is to make "a hypothetical digital version of a gene..." -- yes, very revealing, since that is not what I did. I had computer languages in mind.
BobMort: "Of course, this language is utterly unlike any real computer language."
The strong resemblance is a natural resemblance between the two. There is nothing hypothetical about computers using multi-byte instructions that would be interpreted differently if you started at a different byte address.
If you don't want to believe me, you will need to learn more about computer machine languages. You also might want to try learning about interpreted byte code and the byte code underpinnings of popular languages such as Java or C#. (Again there is the text for humans and the binary for the computer. -- Only the byte representation actually works.) I'm not going to try to do that within this space.
Bob, you also asked about the human genome.
It is difficult to say how "messy" the genome is. We used to think it was mostly junk. Now it seems we were mostly wrong. It may turn out that it is far less messy or junky than we supposed. Aspects that seemed unimportant are turning out to matter.
That said, it matters little to my point whether there were many designers or one. The pivotal distinction is between no designers and any designers.
The crucial distinction is that undirected processes are unable to create any symbolic languages at all, messy, neat or otherwise. To create any symbolic language requires intentional choices to form and implement conventions that associate symbols to functional meaning.
Final thought on this:
You didn't ask for it, but we can and do also dissassemble the working representation of a genome into textual representations that humans read. So this is yet another way that they are similar -- as humans we work with them similarly by using helpful textual representations for the functional counterparts that actually work. Not only that, but when biotech companies want synthesized sequences, someone must take a human representation of the sequence that is requested and use that to guide the steps of constructing the actual sequence.
BobMort: "I think knowledge of God's intentionality (i.e. the state of God's mind at the time of creation) is something that is fitting topic for theologians and is not within the domain of science which cannot nor should have any say in this matter."
Bob,
Please read again Denyse's fine post above on Motive vs. Intent from Fri, 2008-03-14 18:56.
What you call "God's intentionality (i.e. the state of God's mind at the time of creation)" is what Denyse refers to as motive, not intent. The law is interested in the externally discernible fact that someone tried to / intended to kill someone else.
If we try to avoid using words in conflicting and different ways, it will help to avoid misunderstandings, such as the following.
BobMort: "I am gravely skeptical of the kind of science promoted by the DI as I think they make the mistake of confusing that which is "general revelation" - i.e. what we can learn through a study of nature and what is the special revelation contained exclusively in the scriptures."
I'm sorry, but on this one, the mistake of confusion is yours. You still seem to have it in mind that ID claims to know "the state of God's mind at the time of creation" or something like that. What would it take to remove that false impression from your assumptions? You are objecting to claims that aren't being made. You are swinging at the empty air and boxing shadows.
ID does not even claim to prove that "God did this". So how can it be claiming to know what God was thinking? Your concern makes no sense. There is no basis to your fear that ID is somehow going to trespass on the territory of special revelation.
All ID is claiming to discern is that "the best explanation here is that this was done / caused by an intelligent agent, i.e. it is by design, not by any undirected process, e.g. by mindless matter moving about subject to natural selection.
You also asked "For example, suppose the primordial earth was merely a dumping ground for the chemical by-products required for some other project. Complex molecules were designed for a specific reason entirely unrelated to life as we know it but fell to earth where they reacted and organized themselves in ways that their designer had never originally intended. Is that possible?"
Complex molecules won't organize themselves in ways that invent language and encode symbolic information. So, no, that is not a plausible explanation.
If you want to learn more, please read either of Dr. Behe's books, since he addresses the question of accidental construction of molecular machines.
For the origin of life aspect, you could read "Intelligent Design or Evolution? Why the Origin of Life and the Evolution of Molecular Knowledge Imply Design" by Stuart Pullen
ARN description.
And I will remind you that I previously explained that "assembly" language was in quotes in my original post because I could not resist the play on words. But as I explained earlier, it is the binary form of the processor's language that I was thinking of primarily. (For most readers, the distinction is unnecessarily technical.)
I'm glad you were joking - for a moment I thought you were serious. I apologize for not getting the joke. Such is the nature of the Internet debate that this kind of misunderstanding is all too easy.
For the record, I think we agree that there is an obvious superficial analogy between a computer-memory and the way information is stored in a gene. One uses bits organized into bytes. The other uses bases organized into codons. To summarize, we could say that both are 'digital'. That alone is not a sufficient for claiming that any two languages are "similar". You could definitely say that they have similar alphabets.
Incidentally, according to a friend who works in the field of computational genetics it is currently a topic of speculation whether the archetypal cell is a "turing-complete" information-processor or something simpler or more complex. If it could be shown that a cell's machinery is indeed turing-complete then it would be feasable to one day make an accurate simulation of how a cell works. If this conjecture were proved true it would prove a very practical kind of equivalence between celular genetics and a modern computer. My associate stresses that this idea should be considered science-fiction for the time-being.
If you don't want to believe me, you will need to learn more about computer machine languages. You also might want to try learning about interpreted byte code and the byte code underpinnings of popular languages such as Java or C#. (Again there is the text for humans and the binary for the computer. -- Only the byte representation actually works.) I'm not going to try to do that within this space.
What concept do you think I am mis-understanding here? I should point out that my background is in computing and have spent some of my professional career working on compilers and the development of programing languages - this entails a some familiarity with the nature of computer languages and the underlying hardware.
You seem to be making the point that we can represent genetic information on a computer just as we can represent genetic information in human-readable English script. We can also represent photos as computer information, this does not mean to say that photos and words are the same thing only that binary code can be made to accommodate almost any kind of information we wish to store. If you were to look at the binary code for a book or a photo they would look superficially similar, it does not follow that there is any similarity beyond the superficial.
Bob, you also asked about the human genome.
It is difficult to say how "messy" the genome is. We used to think it was mostly junk. Now it seems we were mostly wrong. It may turn out that it is far less messy or junky than we supposed. Aspects that seemed unimportant are turning out to matter.
I've heard geneticists describe the human chromosomes described like a disorganized filing cabinet in which genes are filed in no apparent order. Indeed while some genes presumed to be junk have turned out not to be so there are many which have been confirmed as non-coding (the term Junk DNA is obsolete). Finally, even though geneticists have a good understanding of how DNA can be transcribed into protein we have very little understanding of the myriad of regulatory pathways by which a gene can express a protein which regulates some other gene and may in turn cause a cascade of activity.
Does this not seem like a messy system to you? It only seemed simple before because you were only describing the basic rule for protein transcription, The simplest cell is a tangle of complex interacting feedback loops and perplexing biochemical pathways.
That said, it matters little to my point whether there were many designers or one. The pivotal distinction is between no designers and any designers.
But surely this is an interesting question? I'm asking if the materialistic evidence is best explained by the notion of a single-minded designer or a committee of designers.
I think you've noticed that the genome seems to have the a similar kind of messiness and irregularity that we see in the English language but is absent from languages (e.g. Python or Java byte-code) which seem single-minded and tidy by comparison.
Perhaps the genome has acquired the same kind of tangled complexity because it was designed in a similar way to the English language, that is it is the product of what you described as "Design by committee".
Every day we shape the English language just by using it. Our intent is merely to communicate but we have become the unwitting Intelligent Designers of the English language. Our language is the product of a great many intelligences but it is also something which we have designed without specific intent to do so.
That seems like unintentional intelligent design to me - how would you explain it?
:-)
To BobMort,
As I indicated before, the human genome is not a language. The genetic code (concise, regular, etc.) is a language. The human genome stores information expressed in a language.
Whereas the genetic code is highly similar to the inherent languages of computer processors (language to language, concise, regular, etc.), the human genome or any other genome is analogous to a work in a language, such as an encyclopedia or a database. Likewise, whereas a computer processor's language is concise and regular, the programs written in it may potentially be large and messy.
So in this regard, when appropriately aligned, the analogy between computer languages and works in those languages and the genetic code and genomes that use a genetic code, remains valid.
You asked "What concept do you think I am mis-understanding here?"
You seemed to not understand that frame shifted interpretation is just as possible using a computer processor's language as is the case with frame shifted interpretation of codons in a genetic code. Now it seems that you simply didn't catch that I was describing the properties of the binary representation of that language (the only representation that actually works), rather than the textual equivalent (which doesn't work but is more easily read by humans).
The properties I gave earlier are sufficient to specify a computer processor and language where frame shifting is guaranteed to be possible, i.e. starting the frame of interpretation in a shifted location leads to an alternate interpretation that is meaningful in the language (though not just any frame shifting is guaranteed to be useful or helpful, just as with the genetic code).
You pointed out that it would be interesting to consider the difference between one designer / developer and many. Without excluding that as a separate topic, it is outside my original point.
It goes back to the distinction between a language and a work in the language. It may be that many designers / developers contributed to a total work in a given language. It may also be that accidental events or undirected processes have affected a work in a language. (A book, though written intentionally, may have pages accidentally torn out, the printing may malfunction, etc.)
Nevertheless, there could not be a language at all (e.g. a processors language or the genetic code) apart from
a) the existence of suitable conventions linking symbols to meanings, and
b) the consistent implementation of that convention in a working system (e.g. in a processing system, or in the hardware of the cell that converts genetic information into RNA and proteins that function).
The creation and implementation of a set of consistent symbolic conventions requires intentional intelligent agency. That was and is the point I've made. Undirected processes cannot do this. They have no perception of the symbolic and no need, desire or ability to invent it. The translation machinery is also far, far too complex and specified to appear by chance accident, and there is no mindless selection filter that can select and prefer progress toward a future benefit of symbolic translation.
Thus we can indeed infer that the translation machinery that makes genetic symbolic information possible, meaningful, and effective is the result of intentional intelligent agency. It cannot be reasonably explained by accidental processes.
[Thanks for the exchange. I"m going to be away for a bit.]
Hi Eric, and thanks for taking time to reply!
As I indicated before, the human genome is not a language. The genetic code (concise, regular, etc.) is a language. The human genome stores information expressed in a language.
let me be clear that I agree that the relationship between the genome and the genetic code is analogous to the relationship between the windows kernel and binary code. One is an expression in a particular coding system and the other is
By definition every proponent of ID accepts the notion that an intelligence was at the very least partly responsible for the diversity of life on earth. The notion that some kind of intelligence (whatever or whoever it is or was) has helped shape life seems very plausible to me.
Some ID proponents go a step further and claim that the intelligence had a purpose and that the designer or designers were following that purpose in act of design. That seems slightly harder to deal with because how do you prove that something was done intentionally?
One way to do it is the way things work in a court of law: For example supposing a convicted fellon in a murder trial had been boasting that they were going to kill somebody and take their money. We might reasonably infer that their crime must have been with intent or purpose because the actions are entirely consistent with the criminals stated goal, and just as importantly we have a motive - we know why the criminal committed the crime.
But what about creation? We cannot put the intelligent designer on trial and we have no way of asking them what their objective may have been. And if we do not know what it is they intended to do how do we check if the development of life on earth was consistent with that goal?
Is there another way to show that life has been purposefully intelligently designed rather than the accidental product of an intelligent designer?
---
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
login or register to post comments | 0 points