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Author
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Topic: Solar eclipses and CSI?
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brauer
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Member # 398
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posted 03. October 2002 11:33
Hi all,
[I'm hoping to use this thread to ask questions of the general form "is X specified?"]
At the IDEA conference last week Jay Wesley Richards discussed the idea that habitability and "measurability" correlate. By this he means that the Earth, conducive to life, is also conducive to intelligent beings discovering more about the universe. [Of course, with n = 1, correlation is a meaningless concept, but I'm willing to let that slide.]
An example of this is the fact that the moon is currently the same angular diameter as the sun, allowing confirmation of the theory of relativity by observations of solar eclipses. Another example is provided by the location of our sun in the galaxy, which is fortuitous for astronomical observations.
My questions are these:
- is the angular diameter of the moon specified, by virtue of the fact that it matches that of the sun?
- how might one estimate the probability that the moon and the sun have the same angular diameter at this point in the Earth's history?
- if this probability under all chance hypotheses is suitably low, does this make solar eclipses examples of CSI?
[edited to make thread title moderately catchier]
[ 03. October 2002, 14:59: Message edited by: brauer ]
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William A. Dembski
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Member # 7
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posted 03. October 2002 22:37
To how many decimal places can the angular diameter be measured? Let's say it's twelve (as far as I know that's about the upper limit for the accuracy of physical theories) and we can't go beyond that. Then an initial estimate of the probability of equality of the angular diameters(assuming reasonably independent processes responsible for sun and moon as well as equiprobability, which in the absence of empirically grounded priors is perhaps the best we can do for now) is going to be on the order of 1 in 10^12. That's a far cry from the universal probability bounds of 1 in 10^150 that I've set in some of my work. It seems that Richards and Gonzalez, to get to that level of improbability, will have to cumulate multiple such coincidences that favor measurability. A possible pitfall here is the file-drawer effect (leaving out instances where measurability is not facilitated).
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brauer
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posted 03. October 2002 23:09
Hi Bill. Thanks for the response.
It seems to me that one would have to account for the following probabilities:
- the probability of an impactor striking the earth
- the probability that the proto-moon is captured by the earth, rather than lost
- the probability that the human species arises at a time when the moon has moved far enough away, but not too far, to result in the close similarity of angular diameters.
- etc. etc.
I agree that that there is precious little to go on in estimating these probabilities (except to say wow). But they serve to illustrate that the model you used is almost certainly too simple. Does this mean that we can't estimate the CSI for this problem?
Gotta run and catch my train home!
[ 03. October 2002, 23:09: Message edited by: brauer ]
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RB
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Member # 263
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posted 03. October 2002 23:17
Also, you probably need to calculate probability of Earth Distance from Sun, the probablity of having a moon, the probability of the gravitation constant (magnitude might effect measurablity) etc etc etc.
At what point is it pointless to continue multiplying probabilities to reach the magic number of 10^150, in a post hoc reflection on probabilities.
What effect does multiple ways of events occuring that would satisfy the condition under study effect these probablities. (ie. bicoid in flies vs no bicoid in other insects, yet all insects, except the really goofy ones, make pretty decent heads and tails as far as I know.)
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Evan
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posted 03. October 2002 23:37
Two comments:
1) Slight differences in the distances involved exist because the orbits are elliptical. Therefore, a precision of 10^-12 is way too precise.
In fact, the subtended angle of the sun varies from 0.498° to 0.492° depending on whether our distance is 92 or 93 million miles from the sun. So the degree to which the moon "exactly" covers the sun is precise only about to the nearest percent.
2) A much more significant question to Dr. Dembski. All my readings about CSI have led me to believe that it applies to biology, and biology only, but maybe I am mistaken. (For instance, Behe says that the concept of IC applies to molecular structures and not even organisms as a whole.) My understanding is that the central concept of ID is that living things are too complex to have arisen naturally, and thus have been designed.
But now Richards offers an astronomical example. Does this legitimately fall under the umbrella of things which can be considered designed, or are designed things limited to biology only?
One of the reasons this strikes me as odd is that we know the natural causes associated with the creation of planetary bodies (although not, of course, all the particular events) in a way that ID theory says we don’t know about biology. Since design says that some things are too improbable to have happened through natural causes, would it ever be reasonable to claim that a non-living thing has been designed?
Even if eclipses aren’t a good example, should design theorists be looking at non-living entities and events as objects of design as well as biological ones?
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William A. Dembski
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Member # 7
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posted 04. October 2002 02:46
Since Jay Richard and Guillermo Gonzalez have developed their arguments in a full-length book and since both are fellows of ISCID, I'll contact them by email and try to get them involved on this thread. I'd rather have them speak for themselves than have me serve as their interpreter.
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Evan
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posted 04. October 2002 09:10
Hi Dr. Dembski.
I appreciate you contacting Richards and Gonzalez about the particulars of the eclipse situation.
However, I am still interested in your views on this question: "Even if eclipses aren’t a good example, should design theorists be looking at non-living entities and events as objects of design as well as biological ones?"
Or is design only a concept that applies to living things, because it is with living things that we find properties (such as IC) that are too improbable to have arisen through natural causes?
Any answer, even short, would be appreciated.
[ 04. October 2002, 10:31: Message edited by: Evan ]
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RBH
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Member # 380
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posted 04. October 2002 11:00
In NFL Dembski discusses the question of whether the Oklo reactor is a false positive for the "complexity-specification" criterion for detecting design. As Dembski describes it (a description consistent with my memories of reading about it a while back) the Oklo reactor is a (putatively) natural formation in Gabon in which a confluence of unlikely conditions created a natural fission reactor. Among the conditions that had to be 'right' are the quantity of uranium confined in one place, the relative proportions of U-238 and U-235, sufficient water flow through the formation for cooling and damping the reaction, and so on.
On pp 26-27 Dembski applies the explanatory filter in an informal fashion. After concluding that at least one of the conditions necessary to the occurrence of the reactor lands on the "necessity" node of the EF, Dembski concludes quote:
Consequently, it is not possible at this time to decide whether the Oklo reactors satisfy the complexity-specification criterion. My own very strong suspicion, however, is that should such probabilities be ascertained, the complexity-specification criterion would not be satisfied. (p. 27)
That's not the end of the story, though. He goes on to write quote:
But suppose the Oklo reactor ended up satisfying this criterion after all. Would this vitiate the complexity-specification criterion? Not at all. At worst it would indicate that certain naturally occurring events or objects initially expected to involve no design actually do involve design. ... If design is as pervasive in nature as design theorists claim, we certainly need to find it is such traditional repositories of design as biology, but we should also not be surprised if we find it in unexpected places. (p. 27)
So not only is application of the EF appropriate outside biology, we should not be surprised to find that it detects design in inanimate phenomena.
RBH
[ 04. October 2002, 11:02: Message edited by: RBH ]
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RBH
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posted 04. October 2002 15:09
The more I think about it, the better the idea of a design detection research program focused on non-biological physical phenomena appears. I see five reasons to pursue that course of action.
First, it provides a (relatively) non-controversial and ideologically less vexatious domain in which to do basic research and development work on design detection technology itself. One might well argue that the development of design detection technology has been set back considerably by its premature application to the set of problems that are most politically charged and ideologically laden. The design detection R&D effort might well be better served by focusing on a less contentious domain of inquiry.
The second advantage is technical. Theories of phenomena in physics are highly quantitative and very specific, and thus provide much more complete and specific descriptions of the relevant variables for a given physical phenomenon. In physics we usually know exactly what variables are relevant and precisely what their relative contributions are in some equation. In particular, Dembski's reservations about the variables involved in the Oklo reactors notwithstanding, it should be substantially easier to estimate the probabilities of occurrence and joint coincidence of those variables and their values and thus to more precisely estimate the probability associated with the design inference engine. In a domain in which theory is well developed the alternatives that must be eliminated are almost certainly easier to characterize and thus the application of the method is more straightforward and less subject to the charge of being an argument from ignorance or failure to sweep the field of all chance alternatives.
Third, because many physical phenomena lend themselves to highly controlled experimental tests (as distinguished from historical sciences in which strict experimental tests are more difficult), the finding of a positive design inference is more likely to lead to specific research hypotheses concerning the inference and thus to a real research program in ID.
Fourth, in that effort one may find multiple instances of inferred design in physical phenomena. At the least, the effort, if it finds multiple instances of positive design inference, may provide the beginnings of a taxonomy of designed structures and/or processes, and therefore provide the necessary foundation for a real theory of ID.
Finally, it may be that biological evolution, viewed as a congeries of interacting genetic algorithms, really does derive all of its information content from the non-biological world. In that case, CSI (and design itself) resides not in the biological phenomena but in the physical environment, and to explain the occurrence of CSI in biological structures and processes it is absolutely necessary to find and describe it in the non-biological physical context in which biological processes occur.
RBH
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RBH
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posted 11. October 2002 15:46
I've been doing a bit more reading on the Oklo reactor, and it's becoming apparent that it can serve as an appropriate test bed for testing and refining the ID design detection methodology. Let me expand a little.
One can specify quite well what is necessary for a fission reactor to operate. Andrew Karam, at this site provides a detailed comparison of the Oklo reactor and man-made fission reactors. Briefly, both require
1. appropriate proportions of U-235 and U-238 in the uranium ore mass, with a sufficiently concentrated ('rich') ore;
2. an appropriate quantity of uranium in a fairly compact mass, 10s of kilograms or more;
3. some sort of moderating and reflecting medium to allow neutrons to induce fission; and
4. a structurally sound containment facility to enclose the reaction.
Analyzing the Oklo reactor, Karam concludes that "The reactor zones found in Gabon have the requisite physical and nuclear characteristics to form a selfsustaining chain reaction, given the abundance of U-235 present at 1.7 Ga. The compact mass of the reactor zones would have been conducive to minimizing buckling and maximizing thermal neutron utilization in the uranium while the surrounding sandstone and conglomerate would provide ample water to moderate and reflect neutrons, as is the case with artificial reactors today." There is more than sufficient reason to believe that a nuclear fission reactor operated in Gabon 1.7 GYa.
What else do we know? I submit that we know the Oklo reactor was irreducibly complex. Take away any of the four components mentioned above and it would not have functioned as a reactor. All four are absolutely necessary for it to have displayed a self-sustaining fission reaction. Further, the physical arrangement of the components is critical: They had to be in a particular configuration, with a relatively compact mass of uranium within a dome-shaped containment structure with a surrounding geological formation that held a sufficient quantity of water to serve as a moderator of the reaction. Still further, it appears that the uranium deposit that fueled the Oklo reactor was large and roughly spherical, which reduced the likelihood of buckling. All in all, the Oklo reactor pretty clearly represents an irreducibly complex structure.
I do not intend to estimate probabilities associated with the Oklo reactor; I don't know enough geology or nuclear physics to do so. But I will strongly suggest that a serious ID research program would profit by a careful, systematic analysis of phenomena like the Oklo reactor. As I said in the post above, quote:
Theories of phenomena in physics are highly quantitative and very specific, and thus provide much more complete and specific descriptions of the relevant variables for a given physical phenomenon. ... In particular, Dembski's reservations about the variables involved in the Oklo reactors notwithstanding, it should be substantially easier to estimate the probabilities of occurrence and joint coincidence of those variables and their values and thus to more precisely estimate the probability associated with the design inference engine.
That is the case for the Oklo reactor, and it therefore forms an ideal kind of test case for escaping the anthropomorphism of the human design analogy and for doing the necessary work of developing and validating design detection methodologies on non-biological structures and processes.
RBH
[ 11. October 2002, 15:48: Message edited by: RBH ]
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Jay W. Richards
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posted 11. October 2002 20:40
To pick up late on a thread, Brauer says:
"[Of course, with n = 1, correlation is a meaningless concept, but I'm willing to let that slide.]"
I'm not sure what this means. Perhaps it means that there is only one habitable and measurable location that we know, so we can't make generalizations. (I hope this isn't what this means, because, if it is, I fear it will be fruitless to pursue this thread very far.)
In any case, obviously we know quite a lot about what confers habitability on an environment. Similarly for measurability. Moreover, we have lots of candidate locations for comparison, even within our Solar System. And the more we learn about the wider universe, the wider becomes the set of potential locations to compare with our own.
On a second point, I also am interested to know whether our argument submits to Bill Dembski's highly stringent criteria for inferring design. I suppose that's an open question at the moment. My own sense is that the virtue of Bill's methodology is that it avoids false positives and provides statistical rigor for inferring design on some small subset of designed events and object. I suspect it's especially well suited for catching objects whose complexity can measured along one dimension(like the information encoded in the DNA molecule). Its vice i
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Matthew J. Brauer
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posted 29. January 2004 01:54
Hello,
I was looking back over this thread, and realized that the issue had not really been resolved.(Also, that Jay Richards didn't even get a chance to finish his last post!)
I remember being interested in what Jay had to say, particularly about systems whose "complexity can measured along one dimension". There seems to be the sense that living systems fall into this category, while solar eclipses do not. Is this simply because living systems have more easily-recognizable (or more easily measurable) information contents?
And are we to take from this last idea that the complexity of an organism is measurable in some sense by the information content of its genome?
More importantly though: after more than a year of consideration, are we any closer to answering the questions:
1. Do solar eclipses exhibit CSI?
2. If so, how can we tell?
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Jay W. Richards
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posted 29. January 2004 14:13
I should respond briefly to Matt Brauer's good question. The short answer to the question of whether perfect solar eclipses exhibit CSI as Dembski defines it: I'm not sure. I think Dembski's work illuminates the case, but whether you can run it through his explanatory filter and have it come out "designed" is another story.
The argument we develop in The Privileged Planet is a cumulative case argument in favor of the conclusion that the conditions required for habitable environments (environments compatible with the existence of complex, embodied observers like ourselves) also provide the best overall conditions for scientific discovery in the universe.
Since it's a cumulative case argument, however, it differs from, say, Mike Behe's argument. If Mike can show that just one biochemical system is inaccessible to the Darwinian mechanism, and is better explained in terms of ID, then he's got a good argument.
But we think that for our argument to be strong, it probably needs several conspiring examples. (It might be that the intuitive judgment about the coincidences surrounding eclipses is enough for someone to properly infer design. But that's not satisfying as a public argument.)
Also, while we use Dembski's criteria for detecting design, we don't depend on them exclusively. We also draw on the work of John Leslie, Del Ratzsch and others. We view Dembski's arguments as a valuable rational reconstruction for capturing an important subset of designed structures. We also think he makes a critical insight that design detection has as much to do with pattern recognition as with probabilities. However, Dembski's reconstruction is optimized to avoid false positives, not to allow a design inference for all discernibly designed structures. So it shouldn't be treated as a Procrustean Bed into which we have to fit everything that's discernibly designed.
Also, it's optimized for that subset of designed objects and events for which it's somewhat easy to run a probability, and for which we can contrast designed events with the background of law like regularity.
We think there are lots of events and structures for which we are rational in concluding "intelligent design," but for which it is impossible (or really hard) to run a probability on them. If we had to do so to infer design, we would almost always be unjustified in inferring design. For instance, I still don't know how to run a probability on Stonehenge or the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, I think both are designed, and I think we're rational in so concluding.
Moreover, both of these things are objects, which we can contrast with the backdrop of natural laws. But what if you want to know if, say, the structure of the natural laws themselves, or the cosmos as a whole, is the result of purpose or design? Well, you'll at least need to modify Dembski's approach.
In fact, Gonzalez and I pursue a more or less pluralistic approach to the design argument. We take a cumulative set of evidence, which we argue together forms a pattern, and then try to show(informally) several more or less complementary ways of explaining why we think it's rational to conclude that this is the result of design. We don't want the argument to hinge on whether one is a Bayesian, Semi-Bayesian, or non-Bayesian.
Finally, we argue not only for design, but for purpose.
My responses here are probably too brief to be persuasive. But, I'm happy to report that our book, The Privileged Planet, will be officially released on March 10. I hope the argument and the evidence, when presented in full, will give thoughtful people much to ponder.
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Matthew J. Brauer
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posted 29. January 2004 14:42
Jay,
Good to hear from you again! I look forward to reading your book.
My question really comes down to this: suppose that I wanted to determine if solar eclipses exhibited CSI. How would I go about applying the filter?
It sounds to me that you and Guillermo have a more sophisticated scenario in mind than was first discussed in this thread, and I agree with that approach.
But it's not clear how one would go about objectively determining the proper probability distribution to use in eliminating chance explanations from even this simple phenomenon.
In your opinion, is there any identifiable system/phenomenon that is accessible to the Explanatory Filter alone? Or must all considerations of designedness rely upon subsidiary arguments as well? That is, must they necessarily be "cumulative case arguments"?
Behe's argument, as far as I can tell, does not rely upon, or even involve, Dembski's filter, but instead relies entirely on subsidiary arguments. That is to say, the "IC" argument is fundamentally different from the "SCI" argument that informs the explanatory filter.
The solar eclipse example is of interest to me because I can see several radically different approaches to calculating the probability of chance occurrence. Additionally, there is no need to invoke "IC-ness," so the "complexity" of the system is unambiguously due to the probability of its occurring by chance.
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Matthew J. Brauer
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posted 29. January 2004 14:46
Some additional points:
Ignoring for the moment the question of designedness: can one attribute CSI to solar eclipses? Why or why not?
Regarding an earlier post of Jay's: in what sense is an organism of "one-dimensional" complexity? Is this simply because the genome is codable as a string of characters? Do other phenomena (such as solar eclipses) have a higher order of complexity?
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