Paul Mirecki
Many have been blogging about Mirecki, but Jim Davila's post says it all. I agree with every sentence, phrase, and comma.
posted by Loren Rosson III @ 12/10/2005
The Busybody
Just as cooks pray for a good crop of young animals and fishermen for a good haul of fish, in the same way busybodies pray for a good crop of calamities or a good haul of difficulties that they, like cooks and fishermen, may always have something to fish out and butcher. (Plutarch, "On Being a Busybody")
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12 Comments:
I agree absolutely.
How can you agree with a comma? ;-)
I take commas far more seriously than hobbits. Hobbits on the other hand are much funnier than commas.
Well, Steph, I would never want to slight hobbits, but maybe they're a lot like commas after all -- small, underrated in what they accomplish, tending to go unnoticed.
I'm not inclined to take seriously criticisms from people who don't actually present any arguments against what I've said and who don't have enough confidence in what they say to sign their own name to it. If you want to debate with me, then engage with what I say and do it under your real name.
I feel much the same as Jim regarding the use of nicknames. While anonymous (or quasi-anonymous) comments are welcome on this blog, the authors shouldn't be surprised if I (and others) don't waste time responding to them.
Sorry Loren - I have been feeling a bit guilty in case I offended the REAL hobbits (although I must be the only Kiwi not drooling over Tolkein).
eek - Tolkien!
Bear with me: this is the last week of teaching and I'm swamped with end of semester things and family holiday things. I'll try to comment within the next week or so.
No, I am not a physicist and I haven't read everything on teleology. I've read some of Leslie's work, but not that particular book. Yes, my original post contained some errors. But I stand by its main point and its conclusions.
First, as as aside, it's easy to tell who I am, since I speak under my own name and you can Google me all you like. I stand behind what I say and I correct it when I find that I've gotten it wrong. Mr. "Bloggins" (since he is "Bilbo" and not "Galadriel," I assume he's male), however, is still unwilling to tell us who he is, for "personal reasons." It's hard not to read this to mean that he doesn't want someone to know he holds the views he holds, which isn't the best recommendation for the views themselves. He hasn't told us anything about himself and, if he did, there would be no way to verify it. I don't like debating with people who hide behind anonymity and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it. But I will respond once in this case.
Next, BB tells me that I have oversimplified the modern teleological argument. Okay, I'll take his word for it. Again, I'm not an expert in that area and I should have phrased some of my objections more cautiously. But his corrections do not affect the central point I was making and which I said explicitly in my original post: the "intelligent design" movement is using the teleological argument to try to bring creationism into schools through the back door and this argument cannot bear that weight. This is obvious even to someone who is not a scientist or a philosopher, but who tries to keep up in a general way with what is going on in both areas. Let me come back to that at the end of this post, but first let me respond to some specific physics-related issues BB raises.
1. On my first point, that the universe is larger than we can observe, it is true that this in itself is not an argument against "intelligent design." But according to the "chaotic inflationary model," which BB mentions, different regions of the universe can have different physical laws, so the fact that we can't see those regions (for various reasons) is relevant. It is also perhaps relevant for point 3, below. I should have spelled this out more.
2. BB is right about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics; the physical laws in that sort of multiverse are the same as ours. Apologies: my mistake.
3. Interesting observations on the fluctuating-vacuum scenario, but this is a matter for debate, and BB's objections are not decisive. I won't pretend to have the expertise to debate the fine points, but one possibility physicists are discussing is the generation of bubbles of "false vacuum" in the (infinite) "spacetime foam," and these bubbles produce universes in which symmetries are broken in unpredictable ways. We get an infinite number of these universes with the full possible range of physical laws. Whether they could have contact with one another or be seen or detected by one another and under what circumstances, I leave to physicists to debate. What exactly there is between them and if and how it would transmit information isn't clear to me, but maybe someone does know. I suspect, and perhaps my point in #1 is relevant again, there isn't any obvious way we could detect the spacetime foam or other universes in it from our current vantage point (in our own past-light cone and within the limitations of the red shift) with our current measuring instruments. Maybe someday with better technology ...
In any case, physicists still take this as a real possibility, so it serves my purpose. Indeed, it is served by the fluctuating vacuum, a chaotic inflationary universe, "bubble theory" (universes with different physical laws budding through cosmic wormholes), string theory (I believe "M-Theory" and "string landscape" theory both apply), etc. I hope I have these straight, but if I've glitched some of them, the fact remains that there are a number of serious scenarios which present us with a multiverse that has a wide range of physical laws, many quite different from ours.
All these scenarios are illustrations to make my larger point, one that BB does not seem to take on board.
BB writes:
"Jim further tells us that there are 'plenty of reasons to doubt' that all of reality is contained within our observable universe. Why? Because we haven't observed or measured the entire universe yet. Well, there's a no-brainer, Jim. True, all of reality probably isn't contained within the *observable* universe, if we *know* we haven't observed the entire universe yet. But this trivial statement, as a counter to ID arguments, misses the point entirely."
I don' think so. If we don't know what, if anything, lies outside the reality of the Big Bang (our universe), but we have good reason on various grounds to suspect that there may be quite a lot that is fundamentally different from what we see, the "fine tuning" argument doesn't hold water. We simply can't put our knowledge of the very limited region we can see into any kind of context so as to be able to draw grand metaphysical conclusions from it. It may well be that we are like the ancient Greeks trying to formulate a theory of matter while working from a theory of four elements. It's not a question of these cosmological theories being in principle unfalsifiable, although, granted, we can't falsify them at present. These are deep waters and any explanation is very hard to test, but given sufficient technology in the future, it's reasonable to hope that most of them could be tested. (Lewis's "modal realism" is a multiversal scenario that is probably unfalsifiable, but it's an exception.)
Let me emphasize the following, which comes to the heart of the matter: it is particularly ironic that BB wants to replace multiversal explanations of apparent "fine tuning" with "intelligent design," which is a theistic explanation and which therefore also invokes infinity. Theism is in principle unfalsifiable. I have nothing against theism -- I am a theist, and I've already said that these issues are worth debating in philosophy and theology courses. But invoking theism as a scientific explanation is destructive because it's a complete show stopper, considerably more so than any of the explanations I've noted above. Once you say, "because God did it," there's no point in asking more questions, which leaves us unlikely to find more answers.
All that being the case, let me just bring the discussion back to the larger issue of the use of "intelligent design" by the creationist movement in places like Kansas and Pennsylvania, which was the starting point of my original comments. (I have no idea what BB thinks about these issues, so I don't know if we're still debating. But this is what I was talking about in the post that started the exchange.) Did any of those physicists and philosophers to whom BB alluded who debate teleology (Flew, for example) testify in court on behalf of the Dover School Board in the Pennsylvania case? I think not. Moreover, "intelligent design" as used in this context is particularly pernicious because it is so superficially persuasive. It sounds very impressive to point out that the fundamental forces and constants of physics are all fantastically finely tuned to produce carbon-based intelligent life. Most lay people and certainly most secondary-school students don't have the basic background in scientific cosmology that would allow them to see why the argument is specious. It is irresponsible to the point of dishonesty to suggest that secondary-school students should be exposed to this misleading "intelligent design" package as an alternative to evolutionary theory. The Dover case, not untypically, combined this with the dishonesty of saying that "evolution is a theory, not a fact," giving the impression that there is some other "theory" that is a competitor and neglecting the fact that evolutionary theory is the result of numerous converging lines of evidence which have themselves robustly survived various processes of falsification.
This is as far as I'm willing to have a debate with an anonymous blog-post commenter. "Bilbo" is welcome to the last word.
Commas are very important things. Behold: "No war!" versus "No, war!"
Re Anthony Flew: funny how his repudiation of Schroeder never got as much publicity as his supposed conversion to deism:
"I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction...I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder...it was precisely because he appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said about physics."
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