Comment on Elliot Sober: Just Don’t Call the Designer “God” by Sean Pitman.

@Brad:

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.

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.

Second, keep in mind that the likelihood argument is about which way the evidence points, not about which hypothesis should be believed.

Are you saying it is possible to have a reasonable belief in a particular hypothesis without evidence?

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.

Isn’t that what science is all about? – appropriate background information?

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 “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.

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.

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?

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.

Indeed. The LGM hypothesis was falsified in the case of pulsars. The same potential for falsification is there for all valid scientific hypotheses – to include the current SETI hypothesis for narrow band radio signals. That’s simply the risk of doing science.

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.

This is only true given what we currently know. This doesn’t mean that future information will not come along to falsify this ID hypothesis as well. After all, science is based on what is currently known; not on what might be known in the future. This is why science is a method that is only useful given limited information. If all information relevant to the topic at hand was already available, science would not be needed.

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.

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.

We are talking about equivocal cases here. We’re talking about cases where all currently known non-intelligent forces of nature are clearly surpassed by the phenomenon in question – a phenomenon that is still in line with what at least human level intelligence could produce given the proper technology and directed energy.

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.

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.

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…).

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. 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?

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.

That’s correct… this is the SETI assumption.

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.

Not when it comes to a highly symmetrical polished granite cube with geometric etchings on each face – or perhaps etchings denoting some mathematical sequence like Pi or the Fibonacci series. Most scientists would consider such a find to be overwhelmingly conclusive evidence in support of the existence of ETI. No one would consider such evidence to be “highly tentative at best”.

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?

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.

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.

A summary. If we discover SETI signals and granite cubes, we should search for further evidence concerning their explanation.

Obviously. If one discovers overwhelming evidence of design why not look for the designer? – or a least for further features which might help to answer other questions about the designer(s)? However, the notion that such features are clearly artificial would be downright obvious, even to scientists, worldwide – given the evidence that is currently at hand.

Could such an “obvious artifact” really be the product of some as yet unknown non-deliberate process of nature? Sure. However, scientific hypotheses and theories are not based on what might be known in the future, but on what is known right now. This is why all scientific theories are open to future testing and potential falsification – a process that should never end. All hypotheses and theories should be subjected to continued testing and efforts at falsification. However, until falsification actually takes place, one should go with, or “believe”, what is best supported by the currently available evidence…

It certainly is not the case that we can immediately infer design without further ado.

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.

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. – Sean Pitman

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.

You’re talking about absolutes here. I’ve already made it very clear that when I use words like “known” or “known limits” I’m talking about what is currently known – not what is knowable in the absolute sense of the word.

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. Without both types of information, you wouldn’t be able to pick out the watch vs. the rock as being the true artifact.

Again, this isn’t a statement of absolutes here. As you’ve already noted, none of us are omniscient. If we were, we wouldn’t need science. However, given a great deal of past experience we have a very useful idea as to the limits and potential of non-deliberate natural processes. Is this idea perfect? No. If it were, again, we wouldn’t need science…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

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