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Topic: Benjamin Wiker: Review of Ric Machuga, In Defense of the Soul
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posted 20. October 2003 09:36
Review of Ric Machuga, In Defense of the Soul
by Benjamin Wiker
ABSTRACT—Ric Machuga's In Defense of the Soul challenges materialist approaches to the mind-body problem from an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective. In so doing, Machuga charges the theory of intelligent design with many of the same faults that he finds in materialistic theories of mind. Machuga's critique of intelligent design hinges on his distinction between "form" and "shape." Those who are not familiar with Aristotle or St. Thomas will have a difficult time trying to understand the distinction at all (and hence how it helps recover the soul), and those who are familiar with Aristotle and St. Thomas will immediately recognize that Machuga is either being inaccurate or he is so drastically modifying the actual Aristotelian-Thomistic account that it is nearly unrecognizable. This review analyzes Machuga's handling of this distinction and argues that the consequent criticism he raises against intelligent design is seriously flawed.
To read the entire paper, please click here
[ 20. October 2003, 11:49: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Claire
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posted 25. October 2003 00:02
Moderator,
I have read some of this with total interest for what it says about the relationships between mathematics and reality. The relationships between these two topics and reality become much more fuzzy of course, a bit like the quantum world. Most of the universe that we know that does not include exotic matter, or the reality that the subjective mind could be related to 80% of what design could be and also the other 80-90% of the universal dark matter that could be included in what matter cannot be accounted for just yet, even if we include such exotic thinking in biology for example.
As \I am tired now I will return and read some more later today.
thanks
Claire
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posted 01. December 2003 20:28
A Reply From Ric Machuga
Benjamin Wiker writes, "Machuga does not take into account, in [his criticism of Intelligent Design], the difference between unspecified and specified complexity. . . For Machuga, the difficulty seems to be ID's ultimate reliance on what is quantifiable. . ."
I completely agree with Mr. Wiker's second point -- it is ID's reliance on the quantifiable that makes me dubious of their project. However, I thought I did consider the distinction between specified and unspecified complexity. In fact, I took Dembski's argument one step further to consider his notion of detachability. But I won't repeat here what I said in the Appendix to In Defense of the Soul.
Instead, let me pose what I take to be a dilemma for Mr. Wiker. I have two sets of channel lock pliers in my garage -- one is a 6-inch pair of pliers, the other is a 12-inch pair of pliers. Which is more complex? The question is ambiguous. Until we know what constitutes the parts of these two pliers, we will not know what we are comparing. Are the parts the two arms plus the pin that hold them together? Or are the parts each of the quarks in the two pliers? (I'm using quarks as the stand in for whatever physics finally decides is the fundamental unit of mass/energy.)
Obviously, we get two very different answers. If the parts are the "middle-size" arms and pin, then these two pliers have the same complexity. If the parts are the "mirco-size" units of the atomic physicists, then the 12-inch pliers are more complex than the 6-inch pliers. Presumably it is the "middle-size" parts that specified complexity would have us consider, while unspecified complexity would have us consider the "micro-size" parts.
Now Mr. Wiker chides me for ignoring the fact that Dembski's interest is in specified (not unspecified) complexity. Okay, my challenge to Mr. Wiker is this: sketch for me a wholly quantifiable/operational test which concludes that the 6-inch and 12-inch pliers have the same complexity without smuggling into the test that it is pliers whose parts we are counting.
Why the prohibition against mentioning "pliers"? Simply this: "pliers" names a form (albeit it an artificial form) and "form" is another word for "species" and "species" is the root of "specified." It is a tautology to say that two things of the same form/species have the same specified complexity. Unspecified complexity is quantifiable; specified complexity is not. Until the human intellect abstracts the form/species, we will not know what it is that we are to count. ID, as Wiker himself says, proceeds in a wholly mechanical/algorithmic fashion. But the intellect cannot be reduced to an algorithm.
Of course, ID wants to be scientific. But as Wittgenstein famously said -- knowing that it will either rain or not rain tomorrow does not make one a weather man. So too, knowing that two pairs of pliers have the same specified complexity does not make one a scientist.
Ric Machuga
Butte College
[ 01. December 2003, 20:28: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Evan
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posted 01. December 2003 22:49
Ric Machuga writes,
quote:
But as Wittgenstein famously said -- knowing that it will either rain or not rain tomorrow does not make one a weather man.
This is a great line, and it encapsulates a problem of tautology that I see in most ID formulations. Various definitions and assertions are offered to show that natural processes can’t do this or that, and that therefore ID is to be considered, but the definitions and assertions carry an embedded circularity that insulates them from any real empirical test.
And I also like Machuga’s point that “the difficulty seems to be ID's ultimate reliance on what is quantifiable. . ." (which is Wiker’s quote about Machuga, I believe.) The claim that design is detectable, if it is to be scientifically meaningful, must be a quantifiable claim. And yet, as many have shown, efforts to quantify the design inference in respect to the biological world have been negligible, and when offered, irrelevantly unrealistic.
As I have pointed out before, last winter here at ISCID, Dembski wrote,
quote:
Even if the trajectories are continuous, it still remains to be shown that they are Darwinian. I'm entirely comfortable with the evolution of the immune system, for instance. In fact, I'm comfortable with full common descent. My argument, always, is that evolutionary pathways to irreducibly complex systems, even if they exist, are non-Darwinian.
My question to Dr. Dembski (and I really wish he would participate in these discussions) is how will you quantify this claim? If scientists were able to show evolutionary pathways to an irreducibly complex system (perhaps even in the present under controlled conditions), how will you quantify the probability of such pathways so as to establish that natural processes (regularity and chance) are eliminated on the grounds of improbability?
And if this claim can’t be quantified, but rests merely on the tautological argument that IC systems can’t have evolved, and that no matter what pathways we see there are still improbable gaps that must be behind (or between) the steps of those pathways, then the design inference is a variant of Wittgenstein’s weatherman - logically unassailable but empirically empty.
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