Intelligent Interference vs. Creation

from The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose

Perry Marshall dismisses ID as Old Earth Creationism because he seemingly is against any inference to the interference of an Intelligence that might turn out to be an Entity that resists scientific inquiry--or at least admitting any such inferences into science...  But in this broad characterization of what constitutes "Old Earth Creationism," how does Marshall's view differ?   

Marshall seems to be claiming at times that something has been introduced into the universe long after its beginning (which he accepts, I think, to be the consensus time of about 14 billion years ago).  Stardust somehow finds itself getting into interesting configurations over the course of 10 billion years and then, poof, God introduces information somehow, before there are cells intelligently manipulating their own genetic information, in a way that is a total game-changer.  Marshall asserts:

• In the history of the universe we also see the introduction of information, some 3.8 billion years ago. It came in the form of the Genetic code, which is symbolic and immaterial.
• The information had to come from the outside, since information is not known to be an inherent property of matter, energy, space or time. [bold emphasis in original; red highlighting is mine]

So ... at some point around 3.8 billion years ago, configurations in matter arise that aren't explicable in terms of the configurations that were there 3.9 billion years ago.  Why?  Because information is introduced from outside the space-time continuum that serves as the substrate for matter and energy, otherwise the information cannot be inferred to have been introduced without some qualitative difference that would invoke an abductive inference to ... design.  I can't help but wonder how this fails to meet Marshall's own broad criteria for God-of-the-gaps.

Is Perry Marshall the Reza Aslan of Intelligent Design?

There is a sense in which Perry Marshall almost neuters the relevance of Intelligent Design the way that Reza Aslan attempts to neuter the historical context of Christianity.  Reza Aslan appears to concede that the resurrection of Jesus could have been a historical event, and yet proceeds as though there was truly nothing extraordinary about what the historical Jesus did and said (that is, Jesus was an otherwise unremarkable man who was only later made remarkable because men invented a religion about him because he just may or may not have been an unremarkable man who happened to come back to life after suffering a gruesome death).  According to Aslan's book Zealot, since history is about what probably happened, historians can't infer improbable events (such as miracles) even though he sometimes argues that there is some historical plausibility to the resurrection. 

Marshall, on the other hand, appears to concede that a supernatural God may or may not be interjecting design into the natural world along its history; however, scientists just can't really make money doing science if we allow that there might be evidence of the need for an intelligence injecting information into natural processes.  (Huh?) We must only acknowledge such evidence in a hazy metaphysical sense (an ultimate sense) but never in any way that effects what historical conclusions we come to.  Because the scientist who thinks that a natural process is not solely sufficient to explain the prehistoric event has stopped the gravy train for producing papers about speculative (but "100% natural"!) events.

Marshall says that he has witnessed miracles personally.  But has he really investigated whether these "miracles" were merely natural events that aren't currently understood in the present paradigm and body of scientific knowledge?  Aren't such assertions just miracles-of-the-gaps until they eventually get explained away according to a consensus paradigm?  By calling these events "miracles" is he stating that there are good reasons to think that there is no "natural" explanation available in principle and therefore not likely to ever be found in anyone's lifetime ? or just no such explanation present at this time? --or is he vacuously asserting that since they are not repeatable natural events they can't provide scientific data?

I'm not equating these two men in terms of their sincerity or credibility.  I think Marshall is a much more sincere and credible figure than Aslan, but they are in some ways both masters of spin and presentation over content, and some of the similarity of their errors may be due to venturing outside their realm of expertise.  They both excel at marketing, and in either case, I think the effectiveness of marketing comes at the expense of conceptual clarity. 

Omniscience and Omnipotence in Evolution 2.0

The word 'omniscience' seems to play an important role in Perry Marshall's characterization of the Intelligent Design research program as a specie of Old Earth Creationism.  In at least two places (here and here) Marshall seems to claim that Stephen Meyer has brought in omniscience into their debate on Unbelievable.  What Meyer actually said (twice) was that Marshall seemed to be attributing a "near omniscient" knowledge to various kinds of cells.   

Before teasing apart what this means, let's look at one of Marshall's criticisms of neo-Darwinistic evolutionary theory:

Darwinists have this naive conception that random copying errors with natural selection have godlike powers and can do anything.
Of course this violates every principle of information theory and probability known to man; this is why Darwinists scream bloody murder any time someone brings up statistics. But it’s impossible for accidental processes to do this. They may as well believe in Superman or the Easter Bunny.

Marshall claims here that neo-Darwinism attributes to mutation+selection a near-omnipotence if not omnipotence.  However, the sort of omnipotence that neo-Darwinism claims for mutation+selection (+ even more accidental mechanisms such as genetic drift) is just the power to get from a prokaryotic cell even more simple than a bacterium to every "leaf" on the evolutionary tree.  But this is the same sort of power that Marshall claims for a "Swiss Army Knife" of mechanisms that are "in principle, capable of getting you [from] anywhere on the tree of life to anywhere else." Not truly omnipotent per se, but presumably capable of accounting for anything we've ever seen.

Drunkard's Search: The Many Problems With Perry Marshall's Conception of Intelligent Design

Annotated for clarity, another comment that is lost in moderator limbo:

April 21, 2017 at 2:58 pm

I recently attended a play (“Disinherit the Wind”) by Matt Chait in L.A. (who is definitely NOT a creationist in any generally accepted sense) after which a group largely composed of ID people applauded a monistic take on ID—not because they think its monism is correct but because it showed a serious grasp of both ID and the academic freedom that is desired for it.

There are many problems I have with the way ID is characterized on this site [Evolution 2.0].
  (1) It is generally difficult (if not impossible) to have a clear discussion about the claims made concerning ID without first having a clear discussion of what constitutes “miraculous” and “supernatural” (and whatever other related terms) in a scientific or meta-scientific sense. I agree with what Paul Brown wrote on [the] Meyer debate thread. You’ve defined god-of-the gaps so broadly that any abductive inference to X becomes an X-of-the-gaps if it’s possible for some new finding to make Y seem much likely than X. “Science” becomes by definition naturalism-of-the-gaps, with the gaps defined as anything not yet explained naturalistically (whatever “naturalistic” means). What Thomas Nagel writes here is a decent consideration of the “inference to best explanation”:   http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/papa_132.pdf

The Drunkard's Search

  (2) There are some implicit assumptions about the relationship of science to paychecks that seem both unrealistic and philosophically flawed (i.e. both descriptively and prescriptively deficient).

  (3) It is not clear to me that even a young earth creationist would disagree with macroevolution in the sense that I see it construed here. In the range of being a theistic evolutionist (in the Behe sense) to being a baraminologist, I [think] there are people who are very interested in understanding what sorts of speciation are actually possible. It would be especially interesting to see you debate Cornelius Hunter, who draws very different conclusions from the same sorts of “overnight evolution” findings that you admirably draw attention to. 

Is Evolution 2.0 Question-Begging?

Oh, ok. So you're gonna make a lot of money, right? 
Yeah. 
Right. It's not yours? 
Uh...Well, it becomes ours. 
How is that not stealing?
... Uh, I'm not explaining this very well.
Okay...

How did evolution come about?  Well, you see, first there were cells that became smart enough to evolve and then they evolved to become even smarter at evolving.  Until they're super-smart!  See?  ... Hmmm.  This sounds awfully familiar.  

#comment1
I fully understand that how cells got to be so smart is a HUGE unanswered question. I agree that information always infers intelligent agents. And perhaps God is the answer. But my position is that living things are agents too and we can and should trace the progress from one evolutionary step to the next. I invite you to consider that the capacity cells have to evolve is a far more impressive miracle than, say, God beaming Zebras on to the savanna Star-Trek style where they suddenly appear eating grass.

It's not simply A huge unanswered question.  It is THE critical problem in terms of this "third way" approach having any real explanatory value in terms of purportedly supplying the completely naturalistic account for life that scientists have been purporting neo-Darwinism to be.  When you find a robot factory in the woods, is its presence there explained by the "fact" that the robots seem super-sophisticated?  It isn't explained by attributing intelligence to the obviously sophisticated factory.  It isn't even explained by attributing intelligence to the woods themselves.    

Does Perry Marshall Mispresent Intelligent Design?

 

The challenge continues to understand Perry Marshall's quasi-ID point of view.  It is almost as if Marshall is saying that rarefied design is philosophical proof of God's existence but of necessity there can be no be scientific proof of actual design because scientists "can't get a paycheck" with that sort of thing.  (While I disagree with Marshall on this point, I think he's hit upon something important: who, ultimately, is paying for the science--e.g. Joe Taxpayer--and what sort of science would they like their money spent on?)

At any rate, a possible elucidation of Marshall's antipathy toward the ID movement shows up in a response to a commenter's opinion about whether it makes more sense to attribute the intelligence to the evolving cells than to an "omniscient" designer's influence.  Marshall effuses: 

A Response to Perry Marshall

Part of my response (in moderator limbo since the first week of April) to Perry Marshall's explanation is below.  Marshall seems to argue on his blog that unless we attribute/limit all the intelligent design in macroevolutionary diversity to intelligence that is in the evolving organisms themselves, the recognition of intelligent design becomes a science-stopping God-of-the-gaps philosophy of science.

It is hard to understand your position in a way because sometimes you seem to making a design argument, and sometimes you seem to be arguing like Ken Miller that any influence God has had on history must somehow be undetectable. [Note: Actually, this is probably more like a BioLogos argument; Miller might argue that God refused to interfere with history altogether before Biblical events.] Near as I can tell, your version of a 3rd way is an attempt to keep theists from disengaging from the facts and/or basing their faith on certain scientific mysteries remaining mysteries. I can sympathize with that. In some ways you seem to be saying that the evidence for intelligent design stands regardless of the time frame that the information is put into the system. A lot of ID people would be on board with you there—except that most wouldn’t _require_ that the information be limited to the law-like behaviors of the universe and have specific evidential reasons (which you and others may disagree with) for rejecting that limitation.

Whether there is a coherent 3rd way depends on precisely what _is_ being added to the table and whether it is something more than a porridge of what is already on the table. It depends on whether one is proposing some sort of law that explains how watch-innovating factories are plausible (not merely possible) with no guiding influence. The reference to the Biocentrism book makes me suspect that the third thing being put on the table is a conscious universe akin to the thoughts of Thomas Nagel or Rupert Sheldrake, but somehow more dependent (in an unclear way) on material mechanisms. The problem with Sheldrake’s ideas (aside from the lack of academic engagement) is that they don’t present anything more clear than I have so far heard about the third way, although some of the things you’ve written sound like a front-loaded ID position. Positing a consciousness in cells and then arguing that cells can perform macroevolution over deep time because they are conscious, creative geniuses — if that is the hypothesis — is an intriguing hypothesis but seems like another extraordinary claim in need of extraordinary evidence.  If the “weak version” of 3rd Way is that “consciousness needs to be considered as a fundamental part of the problem and not merely epiphenomenal” then that much is easy to agree with. If one is applying the same sort of “in[de]finite departure” extrapolation to cell intelligence (as has been applied to mutation), that is the thing to be proved and that potential explanation has its own problems.

PZ Myers: The Biology Does Work

Evolution 2.0

Perry Marshall is raising some eyebrows and saying some interesting things about his Evolution 2.0.   I mostly like what he has to say, although I don't think he is giving proper credit to what Intelligent Design is or where some of his arguments come from.  He presents 'Evolution 2.0' as a kind of bridge between evolutionary thinking and design intuitions (what started as 'Mere Creation') and this is essentially what Intelligent Design already is.  Marshall does seem to bring a lot of the collective arguments of Bill Dembski, Steve Meyer, and Mike Behe framed succinctly within the past 30 years of genetic discoveries.

However, the confusion is in no small part because of the willful conflation of ID with creationism by ID's critics.  'ID Creationism' is a worthless term that is nothing more than a dishonest advertising campaign co-developed by Barbara Forrest and the NCSE.  Its effect has been to shut down discussion before it happens, and I believe that was precisely the intention.  This ploy was opportunistic ideological propaganda "in a cheap tuxedo."  If this lame political stunt now ends up causing people to pick up a book like Marshall's, so be it.  In the end inquiring minds will probably find that Evolution 2.0 is simply the more evolution-friendly version of ID.  

An interesting exchange between Perry Marshall and PZ Myers appears online and I was struck by various attempts by Myers to dismiss an engineering perspective of biology.  This one stood out in particular:

Over and over again what you do is you tell me ‘well from my perspective as an electrical engineer this doesn’t work, it can’t work’ and I’m telling you yeah but biology does work, so maybe your perspective is wrong.

What does Myers mean by "biology does work"?  In context, he seems to be saying that even though perspectives from engineering and computer science cast doubt on the very idea of a coding system arising through natural, random processes, it does indeed work so phooey on perspectives outside the fiefdom of biology.  Does he mean that the science of biology gives us useful technology (e.g. penicillin) and therefore we shouldn't question that life had a spontaneous origin?  Or is he dogmatically asserting that in modern biology it is a matter of unquestioned orthodoxy that natural processes are sufficient to produce whatever exists?  Fossils therefore abiogenesis?

Marshall challenges (with a 3 million dollar prize) the realm of biology to generate a coding system through an undirected chaotic process, and Myers states that this challenge is a sham because he should be able to present the already naturally occurring genetic code as evidence that this can happen and thus get the prize.  He doesn't need to question his assumption that abiogenesis happened because "biology does work"!  It is obvious that he, like so many others in evolutionary biology, are completely unaware of just how much intellectual laziness is represented here. 

He then goes on to ironically accuse Marshall of assuming what he intends to prove.  While Marshall is simply using the same abductive argument championed by Stephen Meyer, PZ Myers is unaware that museums full of fossils do not demonstrate that our DNA has a perfectly coherent natural explanation.  He fervently believes no one should actually have to do the work of demonstrating the random genesis of a code to get that 3 million dollar prize.  Darwin's "one long argument" showed the world that science had no need for God, and since there is no God we know that amazing codes like DNA have a perfectly natural explanation, even if we don't know what that could be (RNA, crystals, abiogenetic molecules du jour). 

I wish that Myers had promoted Tom Schneider's work as proof of a randomly generated code.  Then there might be some interesting back-and-forth about what a coding system is vs. a lock-and-key system.  While I suspect that there are flaws in the applicability of Schneider's model to actual site recognition, the bigger flaw is in its applicability to the sorts of biological "innovation" that Wagner and others have tried to characterize. 

Myers also criticized Marshall for what he considers an 'appeal to authority'.  Now you have to keep in mind that to Myers a 'creationist' isn't necessarily someone who believes that the world was created in 6 days, a 'creationist' is anyone that thinks that there are evidential reasons for thinking that life is the result of a conscious, creative act.  This is never more evident than in Myers' insinuation that Perry Marshall is a creationist.  As a rabid anticreationist, Myers will not only belittle 'creationists' for citing other 'creationists', but will get much more upset if they cite a figure that has some weight and is not already discredited as being skeptical of neo-Darwinism.  When 'creationists' do this, it must be characterized as an 'appeal to authority'. 

But if you read carefully, you'll see that Myers doesn't think it's wrong to appeal to authority; he faults Marshall for not appealing to the correct authorities. 

Myers and likeminded crusaders against anti-science tend to dismiss the engineering/software analogy.  Dawkins and others embrace the analogy because they don't see the problem.  Regardless of the definitions, orthodox evolutionary biology has the unique problem of trying to explain how engineering happens without an engineer, how a coding system develops without a coder, how purposeful machines arise in entropy-ridden purposelessness.  The Myers approach is to claim that the analogies from digital engineering don't apply to the digital wetware in our bodies.  It is too different they claim because it is (a) complicated, (b) replicated, (c) fault-tolerant, and (d) so darn wet.  All that math and computer science that is applicable to artificial digital systems is therefore not applicable to biological wetware (except when it seems to confirm an evolutionary point of view, of course).  Biological matter is too different in its complicated, self-reproducing electrochemical wetness to be beholden to information principles.
Engineering analogies must not be applicable because fossils and stuff show that the "biology does work", and after all, there are random errors that follow known distributions.  Therefore we can safely conclude that all the non-randomness is due to the accidents of genome arrangement.  After all, hundreds of thousands of biologists show up for work each day, and do science, and get their findings published.  There's no need to demonstrate how such elaborate order arises from disorder, because evolutionary biologists already know that it did.  All this "brute force molecular biology" really has no place weighing in on the matter.  Myers can join Jerry Coyne here in lamenting how molecular biology is not bolstering evolutionary theory--the weed of secular creationism seems to be sprouting up in molecular biology.  Seems like we will have to extend the Salem Hypothesis to include molecular biologists. 

Pay no attention to any ramifications of Craig Venter's work.  Why?  'Cause biology does work already!  It works!  We're not going to give up a hundred years' worth of conjectures and plausibility stories for some preposterous "brute force molecular biology" experiments!  The biology has worked just fine without them.