You are not the first ID / Creation-science person to compare your struggle to that of Indian independence, it's quite absurd to compare the two "struggles". Here is a variant of the argument that is even more absurd than your own:

http://www.overwhelmingevidenc...
It's quite a hoot, as are most of the articles on OE.com.

As to particulars, the question that Dawkins was asked was

"Professor Dawkins, can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?"

The time he took to answer was actually longer than the eleven second pause in the published video. According to Dawkins, his reason for pausing was that the question itself indicated to him that the interviewers were creationists.

"The suspicion increased sharply when I was challenged to produce an example of an evolutionary process which increases the information content of the genome. It is a question that nobody except a creationist would ask. A real biologist finds it an easy question to answer (the answer is that natural selection increases the information content of the genome all the time "” that is precisely what natural selection means), but, from an evolutionary point of view, it is not an interesting way to put it. It would only be phrased that way by somebody who doubts that evolution happened."

However, when he finally did answer this supposedly easy question, his response did not answer the question at all. (In a relevant thread, it would be fun to discuss why his after-the-fact retrospective answer is also nonsense. Natural selection can never add genetic information. It only subtracts genetic information.)

Johnson found it interesting that supposedly only creationists would actually ask for "an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome".

I also find that very interesting.

MikeGene: there is really nothing in the scientific literature that addresses such questions, let alone even raises them.

That is because the question "Could natural processes accomplish this on their own? (i.e. with no aid of intelligent agency)" is a forbidden question. It is not allowed in the current paradigm, because the definition itself requires that we axiomatically assume that natural processes are sufficient.

Third, because of the socio-political undertones, this makes me a Bad Boy. How dare I think about such things aloud. How dare I ask such questions. Yet over the years, I have not heard a good argument for self-censorship. No one has come up with a good argument that compels me to ignore such questions.

You're a "Bad Boy" because you're asking the forbidden questions.

I recall that Phillip Johnson once reflected on a very long pause by Richard Dawkins when he had been asked a question about evolutionary evidence and had trouble coming up with an answer. Johnson generously and correctly observed that anyone can be caught off guard or have a momentary lapse, so the long pause wasn't itself the interesting thing. The interesting thing was what Dawkins said about the question. He realised that that was a question only a creationist would ask.

What Johnson was interested in was why only a creationist would ask such a question about evidence.

p.s. The old non-telic paradigm will fall (as failed paradigms consistently do) because a new generation appears that is not willing to not ask the forbidden questions.

For example, it was not so long ago that the idea of rocks falling out of the heavens was regarded as ridiculous. Aristotle's view of the content of the heavens still held sway. Those that reported events to the contrary were dismissed. And those who took it seriously were ridiculed. IIRC, it took around 100 years to move all the way from ignoring the idea, to laughing at it, to attacking it, to eventually reaching acceptance.

This is a good example of ridicule and subsequent acceptance. A rock falling from the sky would have appeared ridiculous and counter to normal experiences. It also seemed to lack a cause and effect explanation.

Rocks falling from heaven huh.:roll: We'll rid ourselves of such notions when we all become atheists.

inunison Says: The level and type of ad hominem and otherwise derogatory rhetoric is quite remarkable coming from the likes of Oxford University Press and top scientific journals.

One has to wonder what is going on in science when this kind of discourse can be published as serious argumentation in reputable scientific publications?

What is happening is a paradigm shift, and this is how they proceed.

For example, it was not so long ago that the idea of rocks falling out of the heavens was regarded as ridiculous. Aristotle's view of the content of the heavens still held sway. Those that reported events to the contrary were dismissed. And those who took it seriously were ridiculed. IIRC, it took around 100 years to move all the way from ignoring the idea, to laughing at it, to attacking it, to eventually reaching acceptance.

Gandi's quote applies to scientific paradigm shifts:

"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

stunney: From this and previous posts, I take it you see the OOL issue as key. I'm wondering if there is not another one, either in addition to, or even instead of OOL. And that is the origin of human reason"”the type of rationality that enables us to discuss this issue, as well as do very abstract mathematics and apply it, translate Japanese into Finnish, and fret about the limits of free speech, the causes of rising gas prices, and what to do about global warming.

Of course, I've long doubted that reason can be given a complete naturalistic reduction. But I was struck by a specific objection to that project that I had never come across before, and in a place I wouldn't have ordinarily expected to find it"”-in Peter van Inwagen's book, The Problem of Evil. His objection is that human rationality simply did not have enough time to evolve naturally.

That last claim is hard to assess given the disparate natures of brains and rational thought processes. I do not believe there is a means of predicting how a brain could be constructed so as to yield a capacity for human like reasoning. There is more to this than the quantity of brain matter or even associated biochemistry. Can anyone explain why John Doe is a physics dunce and Einstein a genius based on an analysis of their respective brains? Stunney, I am in accord with your statements about human reason. My focus on OOL has a number of advantages though. I believe it to be the wormhole through which support for ID friendly concepts most easily flows.

stunney: So Bradford et al, I'd like to read your and others' thoughts on this question. Presumably ID can only advance by looking for anomalies in the RV+NS paradigm. OOL may or may not be one"”I am genuinely agnostic about whether a persuasive naturalistic theory regarding OOL can be constructed.

I did not intend to convey the impression that anomalies in the RV+NS paradigm are an exclusive means by which ID can be advanced. However it could clearly be useful. I'm very receptive to the view that consciousness and reasoning have a non-material basis. My concern is how to put the claim on an empirical footing. I've previously suggested that timing is revealing although I see numerous practical difficulties with experiments intended to demonstrate a timing linkage. It seems to me that if reasoning is nothing other than a manifestation of underlying physical processes then there should be a definite flow to events. Changes in the underlying physical processes should preceed, even by the briefest of nanoseconds, changes in rational thought processes. If the pattern is found to be reversed then one can build the case for an independence of reasoning and a relationship between brain matter and reasoning thought processes that is reciprocal in terms of causes and effects.

stunney: But it strikes me that the origin of human rationality is, if anything, an even tougher nut to crack for the naturalist.

If the "emergent property" view is wrong it is even worse than that. In that case there is simply no means of matching evidence to the claim. I have more that is relevant to your views which will appear in my response to bFast.

bFast: Bottom line as I see it, chance, yes; necessity, yes; design, yes. Where chance + neccessity end and design begins "” highly unclear.

Then I'll try to provide you and stunney with reasons to believe its best chance is linked to origins. When we observe unicellular organisms adapt to environmental changes we are witnessing events that could be ascribed to any of the three depending on the exact nature of the response in question. ID critics believe such events are evidence for mainstream evolution and therefore counter an intelligent inference. I believe the first claim is irrelevant to the second. It is as if we begin a movie at midpoint and base all our assessments of it on its second half.

All that is needed to enable cells to reproduce and vary is found within the cells themselves. One can get into arguments about limits to variation within time frames if one wishes, but even this does not directly address the question of how it is that self-replicating capacities and mechanisms that support replication were derived in the first place. I believe the correct theoretical framework was supplied by von Neumann and that he was correct about making a distinction between replicating machinery and a transcripting tape containing the information required by replicating mechanisms.

Mike Gene posted a blog entry some months ago which briefly delved into the history of what is now referred to as information and its transmission. There was one remark about which I had been unaware. It indicated that the initial term for what we now describe as information was intelligence. That intuitively correct term was abandoned in favor of information for unknown reasons.

Information is made manifest through physical patterns. It is through such patterns and their preconceived encoding convention that we are able to both express and record intelligent reasoning. The ink in your newspaper is not information; only a useful tool to convey it.

From Huxley to PZ materialists have ultimately relied on assertions and verbal bullying to define rules that make desired outcomes inevitable. We are taught to assume that the only acceptable logical flow is reason eminating from pre-existing matter. That is the unspoken guiding assumption behind OOL and a belief that a genetic code and the functional order of nucleotides found in an initial genome was caused by unspecified and unknown forces of nature. What would you look for however, if that assumption is untrue?

When you absorb information through the symbols you see on your computer screen you know the sender's pet cat or infant toddler cannot be implicated. That type of chance event is ruled out by probability. But what about selection? If a mutation in a unicellular organism can generate an adaptive response then why could a similar process not generate an initial genome? The reason lies in the properties of functional genomes. In contrast to "emergent properties" these ones are identifiable. Selection is linked to replication. If a self-replicating molecule is the object of study the only valid assumption that can be made, from a selection POV, is that changes disrupting replication will not be passed on. One cannot even assume that changes that make a replicator a more efficient one will be selected without knowledge of the supply of relevant nucleotides or AAs. A theoretical change that enhances efficiency might exhaust a natural supply source. In any case there is still no directional indicator pointing toward a cell. There is no theoretical support for von Neumann's insight when "information" and its replicating mechanism are one and the same. The type of materialist preconceptions represented by self-replicating molecules are inconsistent with what we actually observe. We observe encoding conventions and symbolic representations and accurately attribute their cause to intelligence. We are more justified in logically linking codes to intelligence than the materialist is in linking them to unknown forces of nature. The intelligence linkage needs to be the base assumption. When it is, ID arguments for an independence of reason from brain matter easily flow. Intelligence predates brains, stunney and the design you are looking for, bFast, is found in biology's first von Neumann transcriptor.

If evolution is strictly described in terms of chance and chemical necessity, but initial life forms include the element of design, then evolution itself would be a manifestation of design.

Telic vs. non-telic approaches are ultimately viewed in origin terms; making them philosophical equivalents in the absence of a smoking gun favoring either one.

From this and previous posts, I take it you see the OOL issue as key. I'm wondering if there is not another one, either in addition to, or even instead of OOL. And that is the origin of human reason—the type of rationality that enables us to discuss this issue, as well as do very abstract mathematics and apply it, translate Japanese into Finnish, and fret about the limits of free speech, the causes of rising gas prices, and what to do about global warming.

Of course, I've long doubted that reason can be given a complete naturalistic reduction. But I was struck by a specific objection to that project that I had never come across before, and in a place I wouldn't have ordinarily expected to find it—-in Peter van Inwagen's book, The Problem of Evil. His objection is that human rationality simply did not have enough time to evolve naturally.

It should be noted that van Inwagen, though a Christian, is also a materialist in his philosophy of mind. So he has a pressing need to make it the case that whatever our minds are capable of is just the same thing as what our brains are capable of. But natural evolution of our brains, he thinks, cannot plausibly make the jump from what our ancestor primates' brains were capable of 500,000 years or 300,000 years ago to what they are capable of now. 500,000 years is just too short for natural evolutionary mechanisms to accomplish the leap. So he thinks God intervened by a special act that went beyond anything one could have expected to occur from the operation of natural laws. He guesses that this special act affected a small, geographically isolated breeding group of human primates and, for the sake of argument, speculates upon the date: about 190,000 years ago.

And if I was to agree with van Inwagen's idea, I might put the date even closer to the present. If we look at the emergence of modern homo sapiens, something very dramatic does seem to have occurred roughly 50,000 years ago.

Since I'm not inclined to materialism in philosophy of mind, I'm happy enough to let brains evolve naturally. My theory would instead be that God, say 50,000 years ago, created a new contingent connection between certain human brain states and certain types of essentially non-material higher mental states—-those, for instance, involving language, abstract thought, morality, and so forth. I think I would also say that earlier, either at the OOL point or subsequently, God created a contingent connection between physical life (or forms of physical life of a certain minimal degree of complexity), and what we can call broadly sentience —which would include a lot of different kinds of consciousness: frog consciousness, bat consciousness, dolphin consciousness, bonobo consciousness, human baby consciousness, all the way up to fully mature human consciousness.

My reason for insisting on the contingent nature of organism-consciousness connections derives from one of Saul Kripke's celebrated arguments against mind-brain identity: roughly, if the mind just is the brain, this would have to be necessary truth (since for all x, x=x); and surely it is not. For if it were a necessary truth, that would entail that in every possible world containing minds, those minds would all be brains. But that seems extremely implausible. It seems quite possible to conceive of minds that are not brains. These could be angelic minds, alien minds, robot minds, Cartesian soul minds, etc; or, perhaps just as plausibly, our minds.

But it's extremely implausible that an impersonal natural process would generate a contingent connection to such a thing as a rational mind (with all its knowledge of the basic necessary truths of math, logic, etc). So, such a connection in my view almost certainly had to have been created on purpose by a very intelligent non-material agent. By the way, not just Descartes and Leibniz but also Locke essentially argued along similar lines that human rationality had to be specifically created by God. So my view has a decent enough pedigree.

At any rate, that's why I think the mind-brain connection has to be treated as a contingent one. Van Inwagen, being a materialist about our minds, can't afford that luxury, and so thinks that God miraculously made our brains as such different. For me, the brain is the same in terms of its material composition, but it, or some part of it, is connected by God to the realm of non-material reason that on its own it could not ever, no matter how evolved, connect to.

People say nice things about the mental abilities of chimpanzees and such like. But chimpanzees and other similar primates are no closer to mastering theoretical physics than their ancestors of 1,000,000 years ago. And as I wrote in another thread:

…Then all justified beliefs about, or dependent on mathematics, would be the result of a reliable non-naturalistic belief-formation process, forever beyond the reach of sense-perception. At the very least, giving a persuasive naturalistic account of how mathematical beliefs are justified is far from easy, which is worth mentioning if only because of how much reliance is placed on mathematical beliefs in the methods and practice of the natural sciences.

Incidentally, van Inwagen remarks:

If I may judge by some unguarded remarks I've heard, I think that some adherents of philosophical naturalism are a bit uneasy of the time span in which the gulf between non-rationality was bridged—-but, unlike us theists, they have no alternative to supposing that the gulf was bridged by purely natural mechanisms within this time span, and, in one way or another, they have made their peace with it.

So Bradford et al, I'd like to read your and others' thoughts on this question. Presumably ID can only advance by looking for anomalies in the RV+NS paradigm. OOL may or may not be one—I am genuinely agnostic about whether a persuasive naturalistic theory regarding OOL can be constructed.

But it strikes me that the origin of human rationality is, if anything, an even tougher nut to crack for the naturalist.

It is my impression that chance and necessity are significant players in the development of life as we know it. For instance, on the ISCID Brainstorms forum there was a discussion of disease producing mutations that were common between the rhesus, the chimp and the human. My best interpretation of the presented data was that the disease producing mutations were, in fact, the product of pure chance. Further the 80ish mutations that were common between the rhesus and human but not the chimp represented mutations that the chimp line perged after the split with the common ancestor. This data seems to indicate that natural selection is a rather strong preservative, and even a repairative mechanism.

Some have suggested that ID is a "science stopper". (Somehow extending that for this reason science may not consider it, despite acceptance of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a clear science stopper.) It seems to me that there is lots of room to tease out the "it's designed" from chance + necessity explains it equation.

Bottom line as I see it, chance, yes; necessity, yes; design, yes. Where chance + neccessity end and design begins — highly unclear.

In a way there is a potential fourth. We have chance, necessity, and design. The potential fourth, if the neo-Darwinian model is correct, is "mechanism that was developed via chance + necessity". Alas, if we are the product of chance + necessity alone, though we would tout our work as "design", yet our work can be diminished to chance + necessity. There are also many other less "design" type mechanisms floating around. I think of the O2/CO2 cycle. A mechanism, presumably the product of chance & necessity, has become the causal agent for a whole bunch of other stuff.

Biology is really the study of necessity. Despite the emphasis on chance and selection, that with which we actually observe and interact with, are almost completely causal phenomenon that would fall in the necessity category. If we attempt to trace an historic causal trail to origins, it becomes apparent that whatever is the correct paradigm describing initial conditions is also the reigning paradigm for what follows. So if initial life forms are the result of an intelligent design process then all life forms that descend from them are also products of intelligent design. This makes disputes over an evolutionary process largely irrelevant to the more encompassing issue of ID. If evolution is strictly described in terms of chance and chemical necessity, but initial life forms include the element of design, then evolution itself would be a manifestation of design.

Telic vs. non-telic approaches are ultimately viewed in origin terms; making them philosophical equivalents in the absence of a smoking gun favoring either one. So you are right in that a chance and selection process could theoretically generate a necessity mechanism but the reverse is also true. Purposeful causality can generate the appearance of a chance process.

In a way there is a potential fourth. We have chance, necessity, and design. The potential fourth, if the neo-Darwinian model is correct, is "mechanism that was developed via chance + necessity". Alas, if we are the product of chance + necessity alone, though we would tout our work as "design", yet our work can be diminished to chance + necessity. There are also many other less "design" type mechanisms floating around. I think of the O2/CO2 cycle. A mechanism, presumably the product of chance & necessity, has become the causal agent for a whole bunch of other stuff.

Just a thought, to be complete.