Bill's Big Stuff

This post by the Maverick Philosopher appeared a couple of weeks ago. At the time, I commented that it was a very different type of argument for ID, and was worth studying. I affirm my original statement, having studied it. This is definitely a new, at least to me, type of argument for an intelligent designer. It has the virtue of not depending on distortions or abuse of data. In a way it reminds me of St Anselm’s Ontological Proof of the Existence of God.

You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.

Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you to take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of your presupposition that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of the presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.

Why do we take the rock piles as more than natural formations? Because we are taught over the years that nature is not perfectly regular. Nature is not grouped, does not display rigid patterns, does not have true straight lines or smooth arcs. Nature is fractal. Subdivide and then expand a subdivision to the original scale, and it will appear similar to the original whole. We are taught to consider anything regular as being man-created. In addition for the cairns to have meaning, we have to have all the knowledge of trails and the concept of trail markers. Without that we might consider them man-made but not know the purpose.

Of course, the two rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but possible. This possibility shows that the appearance of design does not entail design.

This particular example is so unlikely as to be considered impossible. In a vague, abstract sense it might be considered possible that two piles of three rocks could be formed some distance apart. But that possibility is so unlikely based on what we are taught that we are automatically led to think they were purposefully built. But the purpose is not necessarily as certain. Suppose the piles were merely the result of child’s play? Then as trail markers they have no value to the hiker though they were purposefully built. A converse would be if the observer had no concept of cairns as possible trail markers. He would perceive the regularity but not the purpose. However, it is quite likely that a purpose, though unknown, would be assumed, simply because of the properties of the object.

So what constitutes design? Already we have two parts to it, the object and the purpose. Generally we consider the object to have been created to meet the purpose for which it is to be used. So whenever we talk about design there is always the concept of purpose contained within it. As we shall see below, we often include function as a proxy for purpose when discussing design. If something functions in some way, we often accept the idea that it was designed to function that way. Yet, as I will show there are cases where there is no purposeful design in the function, or else we are led to consider everything is designed. So yes, the appearance of design does not entail design.

There is one other problem with using the word design. It often brings up an image of metadata controlling the assembly of parts, i.e. some super blueprint that states precisely the location of each component in the assembled organism. Even scientists use this analogy when explaining to laymen how DNA is the master code for the body. Actually it is not an analogue of a blueprint.

All genes do is code for the creation of proteins. These proteins in turn are either enzymes that create other biochemicals, or form part of the structure of the organism. What is also needed is a timing mechanism, that turns the genes on and off. Nature is very parsimonious. There is a constant reuse of some protein or structure on larger scales for new purposes in new species. The various mutational and gene replication and mixing processes create the opportunity for totally new processes and proteins and constantly new combinations. Survival is then the means by which these are weeded out. As noted above those things or combinations that create a slight advantage will, over time, become fixed and dominant in a population.

It has now been shown that 90+% of human DNA is common to chimpanzee DNA, yet there are vast differences in capability, behavior, and appearance. I would submit the major differences between humans and chimpanzees are the timings of gene expression, especially during development. If this is so, then rather than a blueprint, DNA is a program which has subroutines that are keyed in response to external events.

Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning -- 'the trail goes that-a-way' -- derives from a designer.

The concept of “meaning” is introduced here and is the only place in the post that it is mentioned. Here the use of meaning is very clear, it is what the two piles of rocks are to communicate to anyone seeing them. At this point we are talking about inanimate objects, objects that do not change except from an outside influence. In this case it is very clear that any meaning must be from that put into the objects by their creator and perceived by the observer. To anticipate what is coming, how do we attach meaning to our senses and cognitive facilities? Is meaning necessary to being designed? If so what is the meaning of a motor, or a table, or a house? Meaning is a complex process of mental effort on an individual being represented in the exterior to be perceived, comprehended, and interpreted by another individual. If there is meaning, there must be design, but design does not necessarily convey meaning.

Meaning is something our cognitive facilities extract from external and internal perceptions. The coming argument is going to imply that extracting meaning cannot be trusted unless the object doing the perception and extraction is designed. But extraction of meaning is not the same as representing meaning, and the analogies to the rock piles fail on this account. The two are not the same type of phenomena. The extraction of meaning may be a process that is the culmination of millennia of winnowing of both physiological and mental processes that started with simple stimulus response, and as the responding organism became more complex so did the responses, with various refinements along the way to make them more selective or useful in a survival sense. Our pets have simple forms of comprehending meaning. If we get angry, they sense it and act in a subordinate or “whipped puppy” way. To them the meaning of our anger is “I am in trouble” though not in those words. Accepting that idea means that it is plausible that our concepts of meaning have evolved over time to something much more abstract.

Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by a process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.

Here the apparent design derives from the function. I would take the phrase cosmic accident as connoting something different from evolutionary theory. In a technical sense the phrase can be considered correct in that anything that occurs without an accompanying purpose could be considered accidental. However, the phrase cosmic accident tends to bring up an image of a rare occurrence and a totally fortuitous settling of random processes. Actually I would argue that the processes though not directed by some outside intelligence, are actually more ordered than random, in the sense that competition for survival in the overall organism provides a direction. If some complex form is more suited to a given set of environmental conditions, then the closer an organism comes to that form, the more successful it will be. Given thousands or even millions of generations, the smallest incremental improvement will eventually become the dominant form. Note that the probability of that particular current form occurring from the random combination of all its separate components is vanishingly small, but that is not how it occurs now or how it occurred in the first place. Because it now occurs from the control of a DNA program it is highly likely to be in the form it is.

But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.

Here is where I see the argument as being flawed. The connotations of cosmic accident are taken into a normative context, when they were defined in a factual context. Here there is an equating of an accidental collocation with an evolutionary process. The two are not the same at all. A collocation of rocks is a truly random process. Nothing selected for the collocation, it just happened. An evolved organism has been subjected to constant pressure to survive. That it is the sum of events that occurred randomly once and now are conserved and controlled by the internal environment of the organism places it in a different category altogether.

To use the idea of relying on our senses as if there were a choice takes us to very difficult territory. First of all there is an implied circular contradiction. After spending our lives relying on these senses we then look back and say we had a choice? But did we? If we did not rely on our senses what other option was there?

As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a bent stick appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is: How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations? [emphasis in the original, bk]

How is justification necessary here, and why is it invalidated by the source of the senses if they are not designed? Let’s take an example of a highly reliable phenomenon that actually is more reliable than many human characteristics, Old Faithful Geyser at Yellowstone National Park. This geyser has been erupting at approximately one-hour intervals for hundreds of years. Within a given precision, we could rely on it to mark the passage of time. The cyclical nature of its behavior is due to an intricate plumbing network underground over a plume of hot magma. The magma plume underlies all of Yellowstone and is the source of the heat for its spectacular features. Ground water trickles into the plumbing and is heated. The pressure of the depth of the plumbing and the stillness of the water lead to superheating of the water, a metastable state. At some point, a small amount of the water finally boils over the lip of the geyser, presaging the eruption. This relieves pressure on the next lower amount which rapidly turns to steam and starts the eruption in rapid succession deeper and deeper layers of water flash into steam hurling the remaining water out the top of the geyser. When all the water is expelled the eruption dies and the cycle starts anew.

So was this designed? Since it is a particular instance of a general pattern for geysers, one can say it occurred as the result of the operation of geological processes which ultimately derive from physics. But it does function, in the sense that it does something dynamic at regular intervals. It is also quite complex. But is it purposive? The National Park Service relies on Old Faithful as a central part of its programs at Yellowstone. How are they justified in such reliance? The quick answer is that it has always done as expected. The deeper answer is that the processes that produce Old Faithful are understood, and can be seen to extend to the foreseeable future.

So the next question is, “Why is the source of an object a problem for justifying relying on it?” Implied is that anything accidental or unplanned is not to be relied on. Yet we rely on many things that might be considered accidental, tides, seasons, geysers, etc. As is noted, we rely on our senses. Yet they can occasionally mislead us, as the example of a stick being mistaken for a snake shows. In our reliance we do not concern ourselves with whether they were created by random processes being incorporated into organized larger processes, or by intention. They work and have always worked, with the exception of the congenitally sensorially deprived. We do not have a choice as to whether we rely on them or not, and starting in infancy we learn to rely and use their inputs to comprehend and subdue our world.

To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its naturalistic (Dawkins, Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutuionary processes? I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:

. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, nonpurposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed. p. 104)

I would reply to this, how is it not rational to rely on something that for every individual for millions of years has provided reliable input to the organism? How does its origin in random processes that have been selected, combined, and contained in a program that provides replicative fidelity, so that it no longer is a random accident in its occurrence, automatically make it unreliable or make its reliability unjustifiable?

This suggests the following design argument:
1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.

Actually, I would say it is impossible not to rely on our cognitive and sensory facilities to provide access to truths external to them. There is no other way to access them.

2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.

Or conversely, if an object is not designed it is inherently unreliable. I have tried to show that we rely on many things that may not embody the purposes of an intelligent designer. Unless we place our cognitive facilities in a special class of objects, then we rely on them regardless of their origins as well. I do not see a valid argument that places moral strictures on the origins of something vs. its actual behavior and existence. In human terms it is similar to punishing the sins of the father unto the seventh generation, or condemning a person for where he came from not for who he is.
I would say, “It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties because they work.”

Therefore
3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
To resist this argument, the naturalist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.

To make reliability a normative issue, is to take something that functions at a less than perfect level and state it must have absolute moral value in its reliability, and that only by being designed can it have that. I have tried to show that whether it appears at first irrational, on deeper inspection, it is not irrational, that our cognitive facilities may have arisen over time from the accumulation of processes that occurred at random, but once having occurred became fixed and controlled, and therefore not random. We are therefore justified in relying on them.

To place this at a very simplified abstract level, in order to invoke a designer, there is an attempt to place reliability on senses and thinking in a normative context, when to rely on them is a necessary given to live. It is placing a normative value on something about which there is no choice.