Confusing The Author Of Nature With The Editor Of Nature

"…scientists who regard the phenomena investigated by psychical researchers as impossible seem…to confuse the Author of Nature with the Editor of the scientific periodical, Nature; or at any rate they seem to suppose that there can be no productions of the former which would not be accepted for publication by the latter!" (C.J. Ducasse, cited in Stephen Braude, The Limits Of Influence [Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc., 1997], 20)

Answering some questions on the theological foundations of modern science

"Answering Some Questions on the Theological Foundations of Modern Science" (James Anderson).

Chris Bolt's book is based on his doctoral dissertation "The World in His Hands: A Christian Account of Scientific Law and Its Antithetical Competitors" which is currently available to download for free via SBTS.

Perceiving design

Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies:

Perceiving Design?

In this chapter and the last we have been thinking about fine-tuning arguments for design, and Behe's biological arguments for design. We have been calling them, naturally enough, "arguments." But perhaps there is a better way to think about what is going on here. You are hiking up Ptarmigan Ridge towards Mt. Baker in the North Cascades; your partner points out a mountain goat on a crag about two hundred yards distant. She thus gets you to form a belief—that there is a mountain goat there. But of course she doesn't do so by giving you an argument (you are appeared to in such and such a way; most of the time when someone S is appeared to that way there is a mountain goat about two hundred yards distant in the direction S is looking). Perhaps what is going on in the arguments like Behe's, as well as the fine-tuning arguments of the last chapter, can be better thought of as like what is going on in this sort of case, where it is perception (or something like it) rather than argument that is involved.²⁰

Faith and Science: Observation, and Interpretation | Tim McGrew

Q&A with Dr Peter Atkins & Dr Jonathan McLatchie

A blind and deaf camcorder engineer

1. I'm going to revisit a pet issue of mine. I'm a realist about the external world. There's an extramental world, independent of observers. So I'm not a metaphysical idealist.

But in two respects I'm an antirealist. The uniformity of nature is an axiom of scientific realism. The physical world operates according to a continuous chain of physical cause and effect. It's like a machine. 

And I agree that the closed system view of nature is the default setting. But it has a manual override. There are personal agents with powers of mental causation who can  manipulate nature to produce outcomes that bypass natural processes. Take miraculous healing. That's discontinuous with antecedent conditions. It circumvents the chain of causes. It interjects a new cause, a new starting-point, that's not traceable to the causes leading up to that outcome. 

So that places limits on our ability to extrapolate from the present to the past or future. All things being equal, uniformity is the norm, but all things considered, we must always be open to the possibility of events that circumvent the default mode. 

2. The other is the issue of sensory perception. We don't perceive the physical world as is. Rather, that's mediated through the sensory processing system. 

It's like we have a camcorder in our minds/heads that records sights and sounds. What we see or hear is a mental copy of the external stimulus.

Recording is a representational process, where the copy is supposed to resemble the original. Now imagine a blind and deaf camcorder engineer. Because he can't see and hear, he can't compare the copy with the original. So he can't tell if they matchup. 

Consider naturalistic evolution producing a biological camcorder through dumb luck. And this would have to develop independently on countless occasions. The process can't compare the copy to the original to distinguish a match from a mismatch. It requires an outside observer to make that comparison. An observer who's not part of the circle.  

However, even if the designer can see and hear, there's another complication, because there are different ways to sample the same physical object. Two observers may see the same object: one has color-vision while the other is color-blind. They see the same thing but they don't perceive the same thing. Likewise, one observer may have the acuity to detect a camouflaged animal that's invisible to another observer. 

Some animals have different senses, like infrared perception, polarized light, scent trails, echolocation, and electromagnetic signals. So their inner camera takes different kinds of pictures. 

Science fiction posits superheroes with X-ray vision. Sensory relays can sample the same object at different scales of magnitude. It can peel back the layers to see the inside as well as the outside. So there's no one true viewpoint.  

Or take a music score. That's encoded music. An abstract record to reconstruct a musical performance. The score doesn't sound like anything. It's just a set of symbolic markings. 

Then there's the ineluctable circularity in the fact that we must use our senses to analyze our senses. We can never get behind our senses. My own description of the process is deceptively objective in that regard. 

Ultimately we're dependent on God to design a sensory perceptual system where the mental representation is an approximately accurate and adequate sample of the external stimulus.

Only God can break into the circle to provide an external check. It's like communication. If what you hear on the receiving end is gibberish, then the signal was garbled in transmission. But if an intelligible message comes through, that means there's a match between the input and the readout.  

So we depend on God to design a system in which the copy is an approximately accurate and adequate sample of the original. Even then, appearances may be several steps removed from reality. Mountains seem smaller and closer at a distance. So the mind must interpret what it perceives to make necessary corrections or adjustments. 

Science can never falsify revelation because science requires revelation to provide the intersubjectival benchmark. Only the Creator can stand back of the process to make perception correspond to reality. 

Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atheism-is-inconsistent-with-the-scientific-method-prizewinning-physicist-says/

The species problem

THE THREE SPECIES PROBLEMS

The species problem is actually a number of problems that biologists have dealt with since the term was first applied to biological organisms by Aristotle. I call the three main problems the grouping problem, the ranking problem, and the commensurability problem. It will benefit us to clearly distinguish these at the beginning of our discussion and to bear them in mind as we consider the philosophy of species.

What is a species?

From Appendix B in Species: A History of the Idea (2nd ed.) by John Wilkins:

The Universe: How did it get here & why are we part of it

Roger Penrose and William Lane Craig discuss:

Faith and science

Here's a sobering excerpt from an email I received from @BioLogosOrg. I have seen this firsthand: skeptics are made by bad hermeneutics and bad theology. pic.twitter.com/hsEKmL0GD5

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) September 28, 2019

What Rauser really means is that we should just admit that the Bible is full of scientific mistakes. When we defend inerrancy, that creates "unnecessary stumbling blocks". 

i) Churchgoing teenagers should be taught the limitations of science. 

ii) While their questions shouldn't go unanswered, teenagers should acquire the sophistication to look for answers in the right places. The fact that most Christians in church can't answer their questions doesn't cast doubt on Christianity. It's not their area of specialization.

iii) According to Rauser's "progressive" theology, whenever there's a conflict between Christianity and "science", we should always defer to "science". Think about that for a moment:

• Science says there is no world to come. Planet earth will become uninhabitable, and that's the end of life on earth. 

• Science says humans have no immortal soul. When you die your mind and memories are lost forever.

• Science says people who've been dead for days never come back to life. 

Science and possible worlds

At least since the 19C, if not earlier (16-17C), there's been an ongoing debate about whether Christianity and science stand in conflict. On the one hand, critics say science has falsified the creation account and the flood account while neuroscience has falsified the immortal soul. I've discussed those allegations on multiple occasions and have nothing new to say at the moment. 

But at a presuppositional level, some apologists argue that the Christian worldview is necessary to justify the scientific interpretation. Elements of this argument include the claim that the rationality of the universe implies a mind behind the universe–while the reliability of human reason needs divine grounding. Likewise, it only works if God created man and the universe in a state of mutual preadaptation, so that the rationality of the universe is at least translucent to human reason, if not altogether transparent. 

I think those are legitimate lines of argument, but rather than flesh them out, I'd like to turn to a different line of argument: 

Stephen Jay Gould (1989) famously argued that evolutionary history is contingent...Gould claimed that if we could rewind the tape of history to some point in the deep past and play it back again, the outcome would probably be different.

Beatty (2006), however, has shown that there are two different senses of ‘contingency’ in play in Gould’s work. In addition to what Beatty calls contingency as causal dependence—basically, sensitivity to initial conditions—there is a second form of contingency that Beatty initially called contingency as unpredictability, but now calls contingency per se (Beatty 2016). These two senses of contingency correspond with two versions of the famous thought experiment that Gould (1989) deployed. Sometimes, Gould imagines rewinding the tape of history, tweaking an upstream variable, and then playing the tape back. On other occasions, he talks about playing the tape back from the same initial conditions. Beatty (2016) thinks that both senses of ‘contingency’ are important, and he takes it that the second sense—contingency per se—must commit us to some sort of causal indeterminism. On the other hand, Turner (2011a) has tried to give an account of this second sense of contingency that is neutral with respect to determinism. His suggestion is that what Gould really cared about was random or unbiased macroevolutionary sorting. Processes such as coin tosses, or random genetic drift, can be random or unbiased (in a sense) without violating causal determinism. One way to think about this is by adopting a frequentist conception of probability: the outcome of a coin toss could be causally determined by small-scale physical influences, but the outcome is still random or unbiased in the sense that over a long series of trials, the ratio of heads to tails will approximate 50:50. 

Finally, historical contingency is a counterfactual notion, and although this issue has not gotten as much attention as it deserves, there is a nascent philosophical literature on historical counterfactuals (Tucker 2004: 227ff; Nolan 2013; Radick 2016; Zhao 2017 in Other Internet Resources). The debate about historical contingency can be construed as a disagreement about the truth of various historical counterfactuals. Gould claimed that if things in the Cambrian had been slightly different, there would be no vertebrates today, let alone humans, while other convergentists claim that humanlike cognitive abilities, language, tool use, and sociality would have evolved even if other things had been different in the past—for example, if the non-avian dinosaurs had not gone extinct.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/macroevolution/#HistCont

That's also presuppositional. Is natural history contingent? If so, can we make truth-valued counterfactual statements about natural history (or the future, or that matter)? If that's the case, then what grounds the truth of counterfactual scenarios? According to the correspondence theory of truth, a statement about the past is true if it matches something that happened in the past. But in the nature of the case, counterfactual scenarios never happened in the actual timeline, so what makes them true?

The common explanation is resort to modal metaphysics (i.e. possible worlds). Unexemplified timelines. But that pushes the question back a step. What's the metaphysical basis for possible worlds?

A Christian, or a Calvinist in particular, can say unexemplified timelines inhere in God's imagination and omnipotence. What might have been had God willed an alternative scenario to play out. It may even be the case that these are exemplified rather than unexemplified timelines if God created a multiverse. Unexemplified in our universe, but exemplified in a parallel universe. 

So that's another line of argument for the necessity of the Christian worldview to underwrite the scientific enterprise. Of course, that also needs to be fleshed out. But it's another promising strategy. 

Is God a science-stopper?

I'd like to revisit Richard Dawkins's "science-stopper" objection. He alleges that if you say "God did it," then there's no point seeking a scientific explanation.

i) At best, that only applies to miracles. Take a miraculous healing. There's no causal explanation beyond divine agency.

But even in that regard, there may still be a teleological explanation. If God miraculously heals somebody, there's still the question of why he healed that person rather than someone else. Does the healing have a larger purpose in terms of future outcomes?

ii) In addition, we can generalize the principle. Take the Antikythera mechanism. To ascribe the device to intelligent agency hardly nullifies a scientific investigation into how it works and what it's for. To the contrary, it's only because the product was designed that we presume it has a purpose. It if was like random patterns in sand dunes, we wouldn't ascribe any particular significance to the artifact. 

What is the creation model?

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/08/what-is-creation-model.html

Genesis as CGI

On Facebook I got into a debate with Michael Jones (Inspiring Philosophy). The experience left me less than inspired about his competence. 

Hays

Why did Jonathan pick a YouTube starlet to address the historicity of Gen 1-11 rather than a scholar with real expertise on the topic like John Currid, Richard Hess, or Andrew Steinmann? What makes Michael Jones any different than Alex O'Connor (the "Cosmic Skeptic")?

Jones

"See how condescending this guy is. I think I’ll just block him so I don’t have to see he comments anymore. Not worth my time. One of the most judgmental and condescending people I talked to, judges based on titles not arguments."

Hays

Like whether a cancer patient should prefer an oncologist with bona fide medical degrees rather than a Chinese herbalist? 

Biological relativity

A paper (2011) from Denis Noble, a secular scientist who dissents from neo-Darwinism:

A theory of biological relativity: no privileged level of causation

Abstract

Must higher level biological processes always be derivable from lower level data and mechanisms, as assumed by the idea that an organism is completely defined by its genome? Or are higher level properties necessarily also causes of lower level behaviour, involving actions and interactions both ways? This article uses modelling of the heart, and its experimental basis, to show that downward causation is necessary and that this form of causation can be represented as the influences of initial and boundary conditions on the solutions of the differential equations used to represent the lower level processes. These insights are then generalized. A priori, there is no privileged level of causation. The relations between this form of ‘biological relativity’ and forms of relativity in physics are discussed. Biological relativity can be seen as an extension of the relativity principle by avoiding the assumption that there is a privileged scale at which biological functions are determined.

The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God

https://www.proginosko.com/2019/05/the-laws-of-nature-and-of-natures-god/

Is simpler better?

https://aeon.co/essays/are-scientific-theories-really-better-when-they-are-simpler

Iconoclastic science

1. Recently I read The Fool and the Heretic (Zondervan 2019). It's a dialogue between young-earth creationist Todd Wood and theistic evolutionist Darrel Falk. I haven't read the sections by Falk. I bought the book for Wood's contributions. I think the book would be better without the patronizing, handholding interludes by Rob Barrett. And that would free up more space for Wood. 

To judge by what he said in a post:

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/01/about-that-book.html

I was expecting Wood's side of the dialogue to be rather concessive. Instead, he was quite confrontational–which is refreshing.

2. I find Todd's hermeneutic rather roughhewn. However, he's right about the big picture issues. He stresses the ad hoc way theistic evolutionists treat Gen 1-9 as pious fiction or allegory–while they don't treat other narratives in Scripture the same way, even though other narratives in the Pentateuch or Gospels have the same supernaturalism. 

3. Theistic evolutionists complain that young-earth creationists drive people away from the faith by positing a false dichotomy. And there's certainly a danger of alienating people from the Christian faith if we make a particular interpretation of Scripture identical to what Scripture means–assuming that's just one possible, and possibly mistaken, interpretation.

At the same time, we can't be Christian unless we commit to certain interpretations. Moreover, the danger cuts both ways. Belief in evolution drives many people away from Christianity, even if young-earth creationism didn't exist. 

4. A common objection to young-earth creationists is that they only believe it because they believe the Bible. They don't begin with the scientific evidence but the Bible. They don't have any positive evidence for their alternative. They are just poking holes in the standard paradigm. 

Even if that rather jaundiced characterization were true, science benefits from having sharp, rigorous, relentless critics who spot weaknesses in the prevailing scientific orthodoxies. 

In addition, scientific progress is strategically driven by gifted mavericks. Sometimes their theories are blind alleys, but sometimes they make midcourse corrections or original, fundamental contributions to science as an ongoing research program. 

Compare Todd Wood to Dennis Venema. As a probing, intellectually dissatisfied scientist, Wood has the potential to make original, fundamental contributions to science that a company man like Venema lacks. Science requires balance between creative iconoclasm and stability. It's useful to work within a paradigm. Exhaust the paradigm. But it's sometimes necessary to question the paradigm. 

It's easy for scientists to become prematurely settled in their ways. They stop asking questions because they think they know the answers. Sometimes they discount evidence to the contrary as anomalous. But the mavericks keep extending the frontiers. Ironically, some scientists lack intellectual curiosity. They are satisfied with the received answers. 

Wood objects that commitment to evolution results in losing an amazingly fruitful and exciting avenue of scientific research that goes deeper than Darwin (36).

5. Some of what Wood writes might foster the impression that he isn't only a creationist because he believes the Bible, and not because he thinks there's any evidence for creationism. But based on cluster analysis, he thinks there are patterns in nature that evolution can't explain (154, 200). 

Likewise, he thinks the evolutionary explanation for the PAM matrix (i.e. protein similarities between disparate species) has it upside down (60-62). He wouldn't be motivated to consider the issue from a different angle unless he was motivated by creationism. Scientists who lack that motivation neglect to consider what might be a superior alternative explanation. 

6. It's also important to emphasize that this isn't just about raw natural evidence. The debate over methodological atheism demonstrates a key philosophical component. The mainstream scientific paradigms treat nature as a closed system, a machine. They interpolate and extrapolate, reconstruct the past, fill in the evidential gaps, based on that secular philosophical postuate. 

And it's true that nature is machine-like. But what if creation is dualistic rather than materialistic? What if there's interaction between mind and matter? What if there are discarnate agents who sometimes intervene, who sometimes contribute to the outcome? Incidentally, there's empirical evidence for that.

In that event, secular science isn't simply following the evidence wherever it leads, but disregarding inconvenient evidence and superimposing an artificial filter on what science is allowed to discover. So it's simplistic to frame the issue in terms of one side having the evidence while the other side has dogma. 

There's a certain tension in science because scientists like things to be predictable. They like to be in control. But what if there are uncontrollable variables due to factors like mental causation, discarnate agents, miracles, the efficacy of prayer, and paranormal phenomena (for which there's tremendous evidence). What if that's actually a part of reality? Then, like it or not, that imposes certain limitations the ability of science to achieve mastery over the material world. It will be frustrated in its godlike quest to know and manipulate the world around us.

And that's beneficial. Science is marvelous and dangerous. It has enormous potential for good and evil. We should be grateful for barriers that curb the power of science. 

7. Suppose Gen 1-9 was obviously true. Suppose there was abundant evidence for Gen 1-9 (or the Exodus, to take another example).  

That would make it easy to believe. And that wouldn't leave room for faith. Conversely, that would make it much tougher to be an atheist.

But what if God made a world that's ambiguous in some respects? Where Gen 1-9 isn't obviously true or obviously false? 

Now a critic might object that I'm guilty of special pleading. Yet that's not unique to Genesis. In Scripture, faith is hard. Faith is meant to be hard. That's a principle which antedates the "conflict" between science and Scripture by centuries or millennia. 

On the one hand there's overwhelming evidence for Christianity. On the other hand, there are perennial emotional, physical, and intellectual obstacles along the walk of faith. That's always been the case. It didn't begin with the advent of modern science.

Although there are many lines of evidence for Christianity, it's difficult to be a Christian. God could make it a lot easier. He doesn't. 

So the creation/evolution debate is just one more test of faith. That's nothing new. Generations of Jews and Christians before us had obstacles to overcome, and generations to come will face their own obstacles. The Christian pilgrimage is demanding. A winnowing process. Some pilgrims drop out before the finish line. 

No Buddhist science

One atheist objection to Christianity goes like this: there is no Muslim science, Hindu science, Buddhist science–there's just science. Science isn't sectarian. It's the same everywhere. The transcultural nature of science is due to the fact that science, unlike religion, is grounded in objective, detectable, verifiable reality. I believe Richard Dawkins has popularized this claim, although I don't have a quote at my fingertips.  

Up-to-a-point that's true, but deceptive. Scientific agreement depends on taking many metaphysical and epistemological positions for granted. Given the rules of the game, there's a lot more agreement than in religion. But when you shift from scientific practice to the philosophy of science, agreement disappears. 

Moreover, there are different kinds of science. Some are more abstract than others. When we get into theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, science and philosophy of science blend.  And that's not confined to philosophers of science. For some major scientists like Mach, Poincaré, Einstein, Bohr, Penrose, and Hawking, science and the philosophy of science are interwoven, and fundamental fault-lines surface. To take another example, consider Russell's famous thought-experiment:

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

And here's a formal argument for Last Thursdayism:

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2016/09/a-defense-of-five-minute-hypothesis.html

Pruss doesn't subscribe to Last Thursdayism, but his formulation quickly exposes the specious contrast between science and religion. You only need to peel back a few layers to show how theory-laden science really is.