@Miracles of God: I am unable to find any credible …

Comment on Ted Wilson: “We will not flinch. We will not be deterred.” by Brad.

@Miracles of God:

I am unable to find any credible reference to a theologian prior to the 19th century who specifically suggested that the Genesis day was longer than 24 hours, or that the creation week was longer than seven days. It wasn’t until Darwinism took hold that this phenomenon occurred.

From http://homepage.mac.com/kvmagruder/hsci/06-Roman/source/augustine.html —

While many patristic commentators, such as Basil, interpreted the creation days as six 24-hour days, Augustine warned that the interpretation of the days of creation was extremely difficult, and argued that the text could not be read as if they were ordinary days. The days lie “beyond the experience and knowledge of us mortal earthbound men,” he cautioned, so that when comparing them to ordinary days “we must bear in mind that these [ordinary] days indeed recall the days of creation, but without in any way being really similar to them”; Literal Meaning of Genesis, Bk. IV, ch. 27; 1:135.

Is the 4th century early enough for you?

Brad Also Commented

Ted Wilson: “We will not flinch. We will not be deterred.”
@BobRyan:

The Bible says that the earth is a sphere hung in space “upon nothing” yet we know that in fact the earth is held in place by strong pillars (gravity comes to mind). So it is not too surprising that the Bible also mentions that concept.

So, just to confirm, Bob—”pillars” sometimes means “gravity” but “day” always means “day”.


Ted Wilson: “We will not flinch. We will not be deterred.”
@Sean Pitman:

P.S. By the way, the whole “firmament” and “flat Earth” idea is a hoax, myths produced in the late 19th century.

Just to clarify, the myth propagated by Draper and White is not that anyone ever believed in the flat earth. It is that belief in a flat earth was predominant in the middle ages. No-one doubts that belief in a flat earth was common before the ancient Greeks, and many scholars are of the view that it is expressed in the Bible. Here for example is a quote from Wikipedia:

Belief in a flat Earth is found in mankind’s oldest writings, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. In early Egyptian and Mesopotamian thought the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean. A similar model is found in the Homeric account of the 8th century BCE in which “Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly all the gods” which forms the premise for early Greek maps such as those of Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus. The Hebrew Bible carried forward the ancient Middle Eastern cosmology such as in the Enuma Elish which described a flat earth with a solid roof, surrounded by water above and below.

Draper and White have of course long been highly discredited. The best account of the problems with their work I know of is given here:

Moore, James R. 1979. “Part I: Historians and Historiography”, in The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwinism in Britain and America, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 17–122.


Ted Wilson: “We will not flinch. We will not be deterred.”
@Lydian Belknap:

2, The earth free-floats in space.
For centuries man believed the earth sat upon the back of an elephant or turtle, or was held up by Atlas. The Bible alone states what we know now to be true–

Job 26:7
“He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.”

This is quite a selective way to interpret this passage, which is more reasonably read as consistent with the view elsewhere expressed in Job that the earth stands on pillars. Here is a passage from Louis Jacobs, “Jewish Cosmology”, in Carmen Blacker and Michael Loewe (Eds), Ancient cosmologies, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1975, pp. 66-86.

The Biblical picture is clearly geocentric. The earth has the shape of a flat disc so that if one were able to travel far enough, one would eventually arrive at the ‘ends of the earth’ (Deut. 13:8; 28:64; Isa. 5:26; Ps. 135:7). This term can simply refer to far-distant places, but its use is evidence of the cosmological picture. The ‘corners’ or ‘wings’ (kanefot) of the earth (Isa. 11: 12; Ezek. 7:2; Job 37:3) may be a synonym for the ‘ends of the earth’. If, on the other hand, the earth is not conceived of as a disc but as a square strip, the ‘corners’ may be understood literally. It is also possible that the term kanefot refers to the four directions, north, south, east and west. The earth rests on pillars (Job 9:6). Stretched above the earth is the sky, `heaven’ (shamayim) or ‘firmament’ (rakia), a solid substance’ (Gen. 1:6-8) resting on pillars (Job 26:11).5 Just as the earth has an ‘end’ so does the sky (Deut. 4:32). The sun, moon and stars are positioned in, or just beneath,6 the firmament (Gen. I : 14-17) and they move across it (Ps. 19:1-7). Beneath the earth is Sheol, ‘the abode of the dead’ (Num. 16: 28-34; I Sam. 28:13-15; Isa. 9: 11; Eccles. 9: 10). There are waters above the firmament (Gen. 1: 6-7) as well as beneath it. Some of the waters beneath the firmament were gathered together at the beginning of creation to form the seas (Gen. 1:9-10) but, in addition, these waters flow beneath the earth (Exod. 20:4; Deut. 4:18; Ps. 24:2) where they are connected to the waters of Tehom, the great deep (Gen. 1:2). Fountains, wells and springs flow from these waters beneath the earth. The Deluge was caused by a tremendous outpouring of the fountains of Tehom as well as by the opening of the windows of heaven (Gen. 7: 11). Rain is produced by the clouds (Gen. 9:11-17; Job 26:8; Eccles. 11:3). The water in the clouds comes from the waters above the firmament so that when the heaven is ‘shut up’ there is no rain (Deut. 1: 17) while when the ‘good treasure’ of heaven is opened the rain falls in abundance (Deut. 28: 12).


Recent Comments by Brad

Elliot Sober: Just Don’t Call the Designer “God”
Dear all,

I hope to be able to reply within the week—real life is getting in the way.

Brad.


Elliot Sober: Just Don’t Call the Designer “God”
@Ken:

One caveat , if I may: there is no need to turn the argument into an attack on personalities. This might suggest an egotistical bias that I’m sure neither of you intend.

Do you have in mind the argument I’ve been running about why I do not take Sean’s argument about protein evolution seriously? I don’t intend that to be an ad hominem attack on Sean. Rather, I have been trying to explain why, even if his argument is perfectly good, none of us can be justified in believing that it is any good until it is at least published in a peer reviewed scientific journal. This, I believe, should be all of our attitudes on any scientific topic we are not experts on and are not confident on regarding the expertise of others.

Brad, I don’t know your faith or non faith background, but I think it would be useful for all of us to know in order to assess any bias of lack thereof.

I was raised a Seventh Day Adventist but am now an atheist in the sense that I do not regard belief in anything supernatural as reasonable. I have many friends and family members who remain Adventists. Is that sufficient?

Can chance be part of design?

Not sure exactly what you mean, but I can infer design from Pollock paintings. Indeed, I can infer Pollock.

Let me give you a hypothetical. Let’s say the three of us climbed into a life supporting bubble ship and were hooked up to an immortality machine, designed by man. The ship has the ability to travel to infinite, different universes and survive the physical characteristics of same (through wormholes of some other Star Trek like fictive concoction) Moreover we are aware each time we enter a new universe( the NEW UNIVERSE light comes on in the bubble and a toy monkey comes out and bangs a drum). Through our clear bubble we are able to observe the characteristics of each universe. Each one is different, but ours is the only one with organic life.

Here’s my question:

1. Would your ideas on ID, or God, be any different than they are know? If so, how?

Yes, I would believe that we were Gods ourselves—there are even three of us! Actually, in so far as I understand the idea, for me the answer is no.


Elliot Sober: Just Don’t Call the Designer “God”
@Sean Pitman:

I had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that you support Sober’s conclusion that SETI is a valid science and that the invocation of ID hypotheses can be quite reasonable short of identifying the intelligent agent as God.

Yes, I don’t think there is anything intrinsically unreasonable unscientific about invoking design hypotheses. The details depend on the context, as I have tried to show. However, I do disagree with SETI if that project is understood as founded on the belief that finding the signals they are looking for would in itself provide sufficient evidence to prefer the design hypothesis over the hypothesis that the signal was due to some unknown natural process. On this point, I am curious what your judgement is on the black hole example.

Are you saying it is possible to have a reasonable belief in a particular hypothesis without evidence?
Isn’t that what science is all about? – appropriate background information?

No, the reverse—it is possible to have evidence for a hypothesis without that hypothesis being reasonable to believe. We all have beliefs for which there is evidence both for and against, and we all have evidence too flimsy to found beliefs on. For example, if I buy a ticket in the lottery, my having the ticket provides some evidence that I will win. But not enough to believe that I will.

The “mass opinion” I’m talking about here is the mass opinion of scientists who are in the know. Given such scenarios as I’ve described scientists all over the world would herald the discovery of ETI – without any knowledge of motive or anything else about the ETI other than the overwhelmingly obvious conclusion the ETI is intelligent.

So to be clear, you are claiming that scientists in general believe that discovery of the signals SETI is looking for would in itself provide sufficient evidence to prefer the design hypothesis over the hypothesis that the signal was due to some unknown natural process? If so, do you have any evidence for this claim? Notice that I agree with you that we would all be very surprised and excited to find those signals, but merely disagree that this is because design would be obviously better supported that an unknown natural hypothesis (rather, I claim it is because design is thought to be obviously better supported than chance).

I don’t see how. For me your two statements here are quite inconsistent. How can you say, on the one hand, that my granite cubes would be obvious artifacts to the vast majority of scientists in the world, even if discovered on Mars, yet, on the other hand, claim that this hypothesis is not in any way superior to the claim that such cubes are just as likely to be the result of some heretofore unknown natural process? That argument simply doesn’t make any sense to me. If two hypothesis are in fact equally likely or unlikely, then, as you originally pointed out, the only reasonable conclusion or belief regarding which one is actually correct is, “I don’t know. Therefore, I ‘suspend judgment’ until more information is available.” It seems almost like you’re trying to backtrack away from your “suspend judgment” argument. Am I wrong?

Yes. I have never said that anyone would conclude that the observations obviously supported design over all other possibilities. You need to distinguish between the design hypothesis (D), the chance hypothesis (C) and the unknown natural process hypothesis (N). Call our observations O. I have claimed that there are two reasonable positions that may be taken (this may have been confusing earlier, for which I apologise). The first is that it is indeterminate what the relations are between p(O | C), p(O | D) and p (O | N) and so we should suspend judgement on where the evidence leads. The second is that p(O | C) < p(O | D) and p(O | C) < p (O | N) but it is indeterminate what the relations are between p(O | D) and p(O | N), and so we should believe that the observations are due to either design or some unknown natural process but should suspend judgement on which.

Indeed. However, consider that this same narrow band signal was received with mathematical tag added such as the first 50 terms of pi or the Fibonacci series. Such a tag, as Shostak pointed out, would be very hard even for a black hole to explain. Therefore, it would be much easier to support the ID-only hypothesis in such a situation.

This brings in quite different and complex considerations, as I am sure you are aware. One thing I have liked about your argument so far is that it hasn’t depended on relying on this sort of information transmission. I would prefer to leave discussion of the case where there is information until we have sorted out where we stand on the narrow-band case, if you do not mind.

This assumption is irrelevant to the question of ID because the actual origin of the ETI need not be known before the ETI can be detected as intelligent. The ETI could have been eternal for all we know yet we could still detect certain types of artifacts of the ETI as true artifacts.

You are still using the language of detection, as if there is some automatic inference that takes us from a certain kind of evidence straight to outright belief, without the interference of background knowledge. I have been emphasising that this is not the case, and that the way in which scientists justify SETI in part depends on their belief that life could arise elsewhere, which in turn reflects their belief that it arose evolutionarily. There is a reason they aim their detection equipment at planetary systems rather than at random. Do you think this is arbitrary?

Yes, very funny…Humor aside, however, this is an entirely different argument. You are now arguing that a mindless natural mechanism is actually known that can produced all of the features of bio-systems, thereby falsifying the ID-only hypothesis. This is Sober’s real basis for distinguishing between SETI scientists and IDists, like myself, who propose the obvious need for ID behind certain biological features.

No, Sober agrees with me that design wouldn’t be supported even if we weren’t aware of the evolutionary hypothesis.

What is interesting here is that this argument is quite different from your original statement were you said that you were “ambivalent” about the Darwinian mechanism of RM/NS. Yet, is this not the very same mechanism promoted by your referenced author above?

This legendary textbook does of course describe natural selection, along other mechanisms of evolutionary change. You have been misunderstanding my remark on natural selection, however. What I said was: “Regarding the relative importance of natural selection, I remain neutral”. I said this to try to sideline the peripheral issue of the extent to which the biological world consists of adaptations, like I have tried to sideline the peripheral issue of whether punctuated equilibrium is correct or not in my exchanges with our friend Roger.

We could get even more obvious here, for illustration, and imagine a situation where our Mars rover came across a polished granite monolith with the following inscription, “Welcome Earth Rover.We have been expecting you. After many years of secretly studying your human culture and various civilizations, we concluded that your technology would allow you to make it to Mars around this time and have decided to leave you a little message of welcome to the Universe.”Would such a message, written in English as well as many of the other main languages of the peoples of the Earth, be enough to convince you of deliberate intelligent non-human activity?

Yes—because in this case I think we can have independent evidence to believe that all natural processes, even presently unconceived ones, would confer a low probability on this event.

The biological case is supposed to be even more conclusive, far more so on a similar basis of logic, than is the SETI argument or those arguments I’ve presented above for polished granite cubes with geometric etchings or mathematical sequences carved on each face.

Do you know some biological facts I don’t? Take me to the Bible verses etched in DNA!

Given enough background information, this statement is not true. SETI scientists can immediately infer design, very rationally, when/if they discover the types of radio signals they are looking for without further ado.This is not to say that further ado is not helpful.It is.Science always looks for additional information regardless of how solidly a hypothesis/theory seems to be confirmed by past experience.However, given a great deal of past experience that is already in hand, the SETI hypothesis seems to be, even in your own estimation (and even more so in Sober’s estimation), built on solid evidence and rational thinking.

So tell me, what are the grounds for believing that p(O | D) > p (O | N) in this case? You’ve said a number of times that it is obvious. It is far from obvious to me.

Every time a design hypothesis has been proposed in biology or physics for a phenomenon outside the then-current scope of explanation, which has later been subject to independent confirmation, it has been false. See for example Kepler on lunar craters, Newton on planetary orbits, Arbuthnot on male to female birth ratios, Paley on the eye, Behe on everything, and (coming to a science journal near you) EducateTruthers on protein handedness.

Without any idea as to the probable limits of what non-deliberate natural forces are likely able to achieve you would not be able to determine that the watch is or is not a likely artifact vs. the amorphous stones scattered round about it. In order to make any rational judgment regarding the artificial nature of the watch you must have prior experience with both the potential and limits of at least human-level ID as well as with non-deliberate natural processes.

This is a good point. That is, for outright belief in the watch case we need background evidence that the overall probability of natural processes producing these things is low. But we have such evidence for watches produced on earth. I claim we do not have this evidence for the SETI case, since we are dealing with remote and exotic physical situations.

So, where do we disagree? You think SETI signal detection would license outright belief, I disagree. You think SETI signal detection would differentially support design over unknown natural hypotheses in advance of further investigation, I disagree. You think that if we didn’t know anything about evolution then the biology case would obviously be exactly analogous to the SETI case, I disagree. And the most important disagreement: you think in our current situation, knowing all of modern evolutionary theory, the design hypothesis stands to biology as it stands to SETI signals. I couldn’t disagree more, and it is astounding to me that you are willing to believe this based on one argument you have formulated in a field on which you are no expert, without having it vetted by experts. By the way, did I tell you about the time I squared the circle?


GC Votes to Revise SDA Fundamental #6 on Creation
@Roger Seheult:

Please show me where Sean Pitman claimed to be an “expert” in proteins.

Sean believes he has an argument concerning protein evolution that if correct would show that most of evolutionary theory is false. I have observed Sean to be otherwise rational, and so infer that he believes he has expert knowledge on this matter. But perhaps we can ask him. Sean, do you take yourself to have expert knowledge on protein evolution?

Sean has been working in this topic for literally years. It’s his Hobby. He’s talked about and read about it and is even writing a book about it. To put it another way, he knows more about this topic then I know about Nantes.

Thanks for telling me you meant literal years. I’m not sure who the joke’s on, but this did make me laugh. If you like, you can add to my mathematical example that I have been working on topology for years, it is my hobby, I’ve talked about and read about it and am writing a book about it. Also, I tell you that I know more about topology than you know about Nantes. Should you believe I have disproved the Poincaré conjecture?


Elliot Sober: Just Don’t Call the Designer “God”
@Sean Pitman:

Two caveats before I reply. First, please resist calling me inconsistent unless you can demonstrate propositions I have asserted that contradict one another. You have alleged that I am inconsistent based on pure speculation concerning what I will say about the SETI case. This is about as uncharitable an interpretative procedure as you could adopt—though given how uncharitably you interpreted Sober, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Second, keep in mind that the likelihood argument is about which way the evidence points, not about which hypothesis should be believed. In some of the cases we have discussed what to believe is more or less obvious, but this is because we have appropriate background knowledge that enables us to estimate the prior probabilities of the various hypotheses in question. In the cases we are talking about it is much harder to determine these probabilities, and correspondingly more tenuous to think that the evidence is sufficient for outright belief.

Obviously you are right that we would all be excited by the discovery of narrow-band radio signals of the sort SETI searches for, or the granite cubes of your example. I trust however that you do not mean to simply appeal to the reliability of mass opinion on these matters. (Ordinarily I would here lampoon the reliability of mass opinion by pointing out how many people believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old, but I’m in the wrong context for that. Better in this context is the empirically well-supported fact that people are in general atrociously bad at reasoning with probability in non-ordinary contexts). The question is why this ought to be exciting. In my view, it is because there are defensible assumptions on which this would amount to the first empirical discovery for which a non-human design hypothesis did better than the pure chance hypothesis (these are the assumptions I indicated in parentheses earlier; I am not convinced they are right, but I do think they are defensible). This is perfectly consistent with the claim that the non-human design hypothesis is not superior to the hypothesis that the observations are due to some heretofore unknown natural process.

The evidence of course would be defeasible. When pulsars were first discovered there was some initial excitement that the signals, for which there was no known natural origin, might suggest the existence of extra-terrestrial life (the original discoverers even gave their object the name LGM-1, after “Little Green Men”). But it was later proposed, and independently confirmed, that these signals were produced by rotating neutron stars. Now the narrow-band emissions are on safer ground here, since it is less easy to concoct non-design hypotheses that explain them—that is why they are used, after all. But as the history of science amply demonstrates, we are not omniscient, and the same thing may happen with any future SETI detection. Consider for example what we should believe if we discover that narrow-band radio emissions are being received from the surface of a black hole—does this support design or not? It would be hard to say, even for you (I think)—because we need assess the evidence in the context of our background beliefs about the conditions under which life is possible, and the conditions under which unknown natural forces may be involved.

All of that is by way of clarification. Now, the disanalogies between this and the biological case. For a start, part of the reason scientists believe SETI is not futile is precisely because they believe that the natural origin of life on earth suggests that life may also naturally arise elsewhere. So part of the evidence for the design hypothesis in this case comes from the evidence against it in the case you are most interested in. Second, and more importantly, there are a suite of natural processes it is reasonable to believe are capable of producing the biological phenomena, which makes for a vast disanalogy. You may have heard of them:

Futuyma, Douglas J. 2009. Evolution, 2nd edition. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland MA.

(I assume I’m amusing no-one but myself, but still…).

However, since I’ve been tying my hands and pretending evolutionary theory is off the table for the moment, suppose you believe that the evidence in the SETI case supports design over naturalistic causes (I have indicated that I am not convinced that it is, but set that aside for now). This would only be reasonable on the grounds that you had independent evidence that it would be more likely that unknown aliens would produce such things than it would be that unknown natural processes would produce such things. And this in turn could only be produced by a reasoned conjecture that these extra-terrestrials do things somewhat like us, perhaps because of hypothesised general constraints on the form life can take in our universe. It would also require a belief ruling out overlooked naturalistic explanations. All of these beliefs would be highly tentative at best, so the degree of support would be very small. If the biological case is supposed to be similar, we need to see how those beliefs all track across to that case. It isn’t enough to simply declare inconsistency.

A summary. If we discover SETI signals and granite cubes, we should search for further evidence concerning their explanation. It certainly is not the case that we can immediately infer design without further ado. Moreover, even if design is a possible hypothesis, in the sense that it does better than chance, it requires further argument to show that it does better than the hypothesis that an unknown natural process is involved. Moreover, the only available evidence here involves a highly fallible inference from the human case. There simply is no other place from which to extract information. If there is supposed to be an analogy between SETI and biology, we need to know that the grounds for this inference are analogous, something which has not been demonstrated. And all of this is without even mentioned the fact that in the biological case we have the complication that one of the most successful scientific theories in history is available to help us out on the natural cause side of the equation.

One final point. You write:

So, it is not enough to simply say that the watch is obviously designed because you’ve seen humans make watches. You must also show that the watch is clearly beyond the known limits of what non-intelligent natural forces can also produce. In other words, you have to appeal to the ID-only hypothesis here.

This is incorrect, and make me worry that you haven’t understood the likelihood framework. No belief about the known limits of natural forces is required (and it’s lucky too, because none of us know the limits of natural forces). What is required is simply the belief that the likelihood of the watch on the design hypothesis is higher than the likelihood of the watch on the natural force hypothesis. This in turn does not require any belief that the natural force could not make the watch—just that it is less likely than design to do so. Thinking about intermediate cases of objects which can be produced by both will help you to think more clearly about this.