Post by cameron on Jan 18, 2006 12:45:29 GMT -8
Is Evolution Really Science? Tried to post this over at THC but for some reason it violates their standards. Am I missing something when I read through it for the second time I did not catch what the problem was I don't know maybe I'm just missing it.
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The following is the first part of an essay by Jon Koniecki, who is a senior product design engineer for a major supplier of laboratory equipment and supplies, with over 35 years experience designing medical and industrial instruments and controls. He has a Master’s in biomedical engineering and graduated Magna Cum Laude from a highly ranked school of engineering.
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A Product Designer’s Perspective on Intelligent Design - Part 1
By Jon Koniecki
The Dover decision against Intelligent Design asserted (p. 81) that we know the mechanism of (human) design. If this were indeed the case it would have pointed out that many of the so-called “proofs” of Evolution are actually direct consequences of good design practice. These specifically include microevolution, the hierarchical classification of organisms that is misinterpreted as an “Evolutionary Tree of Descent,” and “vestigial” organs. The decision also asserted (p.65) that philosophical coherence was not a measure of a scientific idea’s worth. However, the associate of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels said “Natural scientists may adopt whatever attitude they please, they will still be under the domination of philosophy. It is only a question whether they want to be dominated by a bad, fashionable philosophy or by a form of theoretical thought which rests on acquaintance with the history of thought and its achievements ["Dialectics of Nature"]." According to A.J. Ayer in his “Language, Truth and Logic” what is involved is nothing less than the validity and relevance of what scientists do.
Both “Scientific Creationism” and “Intelligent Design” are unnecessary and undesirable compromises to the truth of the Genesis account as historical fact. The case for Biblical Creationism is a straightforward application of the epistemological basis of Bohr’s Correspondence Principle. An experiment, once performed, becomes part of the historical record. No scientific theory can therefore legitimately contradict nor even question this record without undermining its own observational basis. I will therefore take the bull by the horns and address the issue of whether Christian Theology, the traditional “Queen of the Sciences,” is in fact science.
Scientific vs. Non-Scientific Theories
Whether a theory is “scientific” or not is of great practical importance in product liability litigation to determine the acceptability of expert witness testimony. For this reason the United States Supreme Court, in the decision Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., 113 S. Ct. (1993), set down four criteria for the acceptance of a theory as being “scientific”. The first two, peer review publication and “general acceptance” in the scientific community, are mitigated by the realization by the Supreme Court that a theory may be too new or be too limited to be published. This leaves the last two, a theory must have testable consequences and it must specify the allowable error, as having any real importance.
The testability of theories follows from Peirce’s Criterion of Meaning and refers to the fact that science deals with the explanation, prediction, and ultimate control over human experience. Science therefore must make assertions about what experiences can be expected under certain circumstances. It makes little sense to debate whether Martians are green or red if there is no chance of ever encountering one. Something must make a difference for it to make any difference. The specification of error follows from Popper’s Criterion of Falsifiability and refers to the need for determining the criteria by which a theory is to be accepted or rejected. Both criteria TOGETHER are essential to provide the empirical content needed to insure the validity of the argument forms Reductio ad Absurdum and Modus Tollens, which relate the particular statements of observations to the generalized statements of science.
Peirce’s Criterion of Meaning, or the Verification Principle, was used by the Logical Positivists, like A.J. Ayer, to prove that the concept of God, by referring to the supernatural and therefore beyond the possibility of human experience, was meaningless. Their argument is perfectly valid, and totally irrelevant to Christianity, as the principle is its own refutation. The principle itself, according to Peirce, is an application of the Scriptural principle found in Matthew 7:20, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” relating the doctrine of Salvation by Faith to the doctrine of Salvation by Works, that is also expressed in James 2:26: “Faith without works is dead.” The Positivist argument merely emphasizes the uniqueness of Christianity as a religious/philosophical system, since the Doctrines of the Incarnation and of the Holy Spirit bring the experience of God to human life. The Principle of Falsification, in turn, follows directly from the Christian Doctrine of Sin. God allows sin in the world to prove the wisdom of His laws. What is at stake is God’s right to be God. It is precisely this scientific nature of Christianity that gets people uptight about Christianity as a religious/philosophical system.
The Fundamental Issues of Applied Science
Furthermore, the fundamental issues of applied science – Organization, Control, and Reliability – are intimately linked and lead into the classical proofs of God’s existence – Ontological, Teleological, and Cosmological – respectively. ORGANIZATION, linked to the Ontological Proof, relates to the selection and configuration of subsystems in their relation to the overall system. Paley’s watch implies the existence of a watchmaker. A central fact, in the establishment of a theory of applied science, is that, in any organized structure, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A cell membrane may be separated into its constituent molecules and then reassembled. The reconstituted membrane physically looks the same, yet it is no longer excitable. Proteins scattered throughout the membrane are no longer arranged to allow membrane excitation. It is therefore not sufficient to mix stuff together and hope something useful arises from it. The fundamental qualitative difference between the assembled and disassembled watch of Paley cannot be overcome by simply shaking the bag harder, as Evolutionists would have us believe. An element within a structure retains its independent identity. As a member of the corporate body, however, it ACQUIRES a new identity, function or purpose, which has meaning only within the context of the structure AS A WHOLE.
In similar fashion, it is not sufficient to recite examples of sorting mechanisms, like wave motion sorting pebbles by size. An implication of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is that it is not sufficient to merely have an orderly arrangement. Full knowledge of a system requires two levels of knowledge. For this reason, experiment and theory are intimately linked in a scientific investigation. There must be, in addition to the existence of an orderly arrangement, the cognitive act of recognizing that the arrangement is in fact orderly. To have an organized system, the individual components must first have a predictable behavior, and then there must be the RECOGNITION that this behavior is predictable and can be used to further the goals of the system as a whole. The process of organization thus is top down, rather than bottom up, involving high level cognitive skills of abstraction, association, and drawing analogies. In a theory of applied science, the concept of a “Creator God” shares, with other scientific concepts like “energy” and “momentum,” the essential mathematical property of being a group invariance under physical transformation. The “Creator God” is the highest level of organization and is invariant under the construction and destruction of orderly physical systems. For this reason, the Creator calls Himself the “I Am.”
CONTROL, linked to the Teleological Proof, deals with the mutual interaction of subsystems to act as a coordinated whole. Socrates argued in Plato’s Phaedo that materialistic systems excluding God are incapable of explaining basic human experience. The true cause of his remaining in prison was that he chose to do so, not because he was made of bone and muscle. The precise mechanism whereby the system can coordinate and influence the behavior of its component parts is the Lagrange multiplier. The Lagrange multiplier of analytical mechanics relates a system behavior to its external constraints. A complex system influences and controls its subsystems by altering the initial conditions and constraints that its subsystems operate under, thus setting up a hierarchy of control and organization. “Mental” and “Spiritual” forces thus take on the character of inertial forces, like centrifugal and coriolis forces.
The mechanistic philosophy of naturalism, which dominates formal science education, expressly denies the relevance of “purpose” to the results of scientific inquiry. This rejection is a serious misunderstanding of the views of Galileo and Newton who did not deny the importance of “purpose”, but, unlike Aristotle and Descartes, did recognize it to be a different problem from that of determining the mechanism for achieving that purpose. That “purpose” is a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry is established by the practice of “reverse engineering” whereby a competitor’s product is analyzed to determine how various product features are achieved. An important practical object of reverse engineering is God’s own handiwork. Aristotle’s concept of “Final Cause” failed because of its ad hoc nature, whereby causes of specific behaviors were attributed to qualities whose definitions are nothing more than a description of the behavior being explained. Moliere’s medical student, responding to the question of why opium puts people to sleep, thus explains: “Opium is a soporific because it contains a dormative virtue [Le malade imaginaire (1673)].”
The remaining issue is that of reliability, linked to the Cosmological Proof, ensuring that the performance of a product can be replicated. C. S. Peirce argued that the reality of God was proved by the fact that scientists found it profitable to engage in scientific inquiry. While the natural laws are uniformly true, in accordance with Lyell’s First Principle of Uniformity, a law’s relevance to a particular situation is not. Part of the art of product design is the determination of what physical laws apply to the situation. The “Assumption of Uniformity,” serving as a basis of scientific induction and of “scientific” attacks on the historicity of the Genesis accounts of the Creation and Flood, takes for granted the very point at issue in product reliability. This is that an experiment, once performed, can be repeated. A misguided faith in the “Scientific Method” of Induction, in reality a systematic method of arriving at the wrong conclusion, is the major cause of widely publicized product recalls affecting many years of production. Because tolerances track in the course of a manufacturing run, it may take as long as five years, or close to the entire useful life of the product, before a statistically valid sample is achieved. Induction fails as an inference method because it does not distinguish between “causal relationships”, which are repeatable, and “statistical regularities”, which apply only to the actual observations. A primary focus of any scientific investigation is therefore to determine whether the observed regularities are in fact repeatable. A tentative hypothetical explanation, deductively linked to the phenomenon to be explained, is established by disproving competing hypotheses. The hypothetical-deductive method of Galileo, Newton, and Faraday, is patterned on the Creator’s solution to man’s dilemma of being unable to live up to his own ethical standards. Just as Christ died in our place, the scientific method thereby provides a mechanism for our ideas dying in our place.
-------------------
The following is the first part of an essay by Jon Koniecki, who is a senior product design engineer for a major supplier of laboratory equipment and supplies, with over 35 years experience designing medical and industrial instruments and controls. He has a Master’s in biomedical engineering and graduated Magna Cum Laude from a highly ranked school of engineering.
************
A Product Designer’s Perspective on Intelligent Design - Part 1
By Jon Koniecki
The Dover decision against Intelligent Design asserted (p. 81) that we know the mechanism of (human) design. If this were indeed the case it would have pointed out that many of the so-called “proofs” of Evolution are actually direct consequences of good design practice. These specifically include microevolution, the hierarchical classification of organisms that is misinterpreted as an “Evolutionary Tree of Descent,” and “vestigial” organs. The decision also asserted (p.65) that philosophical coherence was not a measure of a scientific idea’s worth. However, the associate of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels said “Natural scientists may adopt whatever attitude they please, they will still be under the domination of philosophy. It is only a question whether they want to be dominated by a bad, fashionable philosophy or by a form of theoretical thought which rests on acquaintance with the history of thought and its achievements ["Dialectics of Nature"]." According to A.J. Ayer in his “Language, Truth and Logic” what is involved is nothing less than the validity and relevance of what scientists do.
Both “Scientific Creationism” and “Intelligent Design” are unnecessary and undesirable compromises to the truth of the Genesis account as historical fact. The case for Biblical Creationism is a straightforward application of the epistemological basis of Bohr’s Correspondence Principle. An experiment, once performed, becomes part of the historical record. No scientific theory can therefore legitimately contradict nor even question this record without undermining its own observational basis. I will therefore take the bull by the horns and address the issue of whether Christian Theology, the traditional “Queen of the Sciences,” is in fact science.
Scientific vs. Non-Scientific Theories
Whether a theory is “scientific” or not is of great practical importance in product liability litigation to determine the acceptability of expert witness testimony. For this reason the United States Supreme Court, in the decision Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., 113 S. Ct. (1993), set down four criteria for the acceptance of a theory as being “scientific”. The first two, peer review publication and “general acceptance” in the scientific community, are mitigated by the realization by the Supreme Court that a theory may be too new or be too limited to be published. This leaves the last two, a theory must have testable consequences and it must specify the allowable error, as having any real importance.
The testability of theories follows from Peirce’s Criterion of Meaning and refers to the fact that science deals with the explanation, prediction, and ultimate control over human experience. Science therefore must make assertions about what experiences can be expected under certain circumstances. It makes little sense to debate whether Martians are green or red if there is no chance of ever encountering one. Something must make a difference for it to make any difference. The specification of error follows from Popper’s Criterion of Falsifiability and refers to the need for determining the criteria by which a theory is to be accepted or rejected. Both criteria TOGETHER are essential to provide the empirical content needed to insure the validity of the argument forms Reductio ad Absurdum and Modus Tollens, which relate the particular statements of observations to the generalized statements of science.
Peirce’s Criterion of Meaning, or the Verification Principle, was used by the Logical Positivists, like A.J. Ayer, to prove that the concept of God, by referring to the supernatural and therefore beyond the possibility of human experience, was meaningless. Their argument is perfectly valid, and totally irrelevant to Christianity, as the principle is its own refutation. The principle itself, according to Peirce, is an application of the Scriptural principle found in Matthew 7:20, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” relating the doctrine of Salvation by Faith to the doctrine of Salvation by Works, that is also expressed in James 2:26: “Faith without works is dead.” The Positivist argument merely emphasizes the uniqueness of Christianity as a religious/philosophical system, since the Doctrines of the Incarnation and of the Holy Spirit bring the experience of God to human life. The Principle of Falsification, in turn, follows directly from the Christian Doctrine of Sin. God allows sin in the world to prove the wisdom of His laws. What is at stake is God’s right to be God. It is precisely this scientific nature of Christianity that gets people uptight about Christianity as a religious/philosophical system.
The Fundamental Issues of Applied Science
Furthermore, the fundamental issues of applied science – Organization, Control, and Reliability – are intimately linked and lead into the classical proofs of God’s existence – Ontological, Teleological, and Cosmological – respectively. ORGANIZATION, linked to the Ontological Proof, relates to the selection and configuration of subsystems in their relation to the overall system. Paley’s watch implies the existence of a watchmaker. A central fact, in the establishment of a theory of applied science, is that, in any organized structure, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A cell membrane may be separated into its constituent molecules and then reassembled. The reconstituted membrane physically looks the same, yet it is no longer excitable. Proteins scattered throughout the membrane are no longer arranged to allow membrane excitation. It is therefore not sufficient to mix stuff together and hope something useful arises from it. The fundamental qualitative difference between the assembled and disassembled watch of Paley cannot be overcome by simply shaking the bag harder, as Evolutionists would have us believe. An element within a structure retains its independent identity. As a member of the corporate body, however, it ACQUIRES a new identity, function or purpose, which has meaning only within the context of the structure AS A WHOLE.
In similar fashion, it is not sufficient to recite examples of sorting mechanisms, like wave motion sorting pebbles by size. An implication of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is that it is not sufficient to merely have an orderly arrangement. Full knowledge of a system requires two levels of knowledge. For this reason, experiment and theory are intimately linked in a scientific investigation. There must be, in addition to the existence of an orderly arrangement, the cognitive act of recognizing that the arrangement is in fact orderly. To have an organized system, the individual components must first have a predictable behavior, and then there must be the RECOGNITION that this behavior is predictable and can be used to further the goals of the system as a whole. The process of organization thus is top down, rather than bottom up, involving high level cognitive skills of abstraction, association, and drawing analogies. In a theory of applied science, the concept of a “Creator God” shares, with other scientific concepts like “energy” and “momentum,” the essential mathematical property of being a group invariance under physical transformation. The “Creator God” is the highest level of organization and is invariant under the construction and destruction of orderly physical systems. For this reason, the Creator calls Himself the “I Am.”
CONTROL, linked to the Teleological Proof, deals with the mutual interaction of subsystems to act as a coordinated whole. Socrates argued in Plato’s Phaedo that materialistic systems excluding God are incapable of explaining basic human experience. The true cause of his remaining in prison was that he chose to do so, not because he was made of bone and muscle. The precise mechanism whereby the system can coordinate and influence the behavior of its component parts is the Lagrange multiplier. The Lagrange multiplier of analytical mechanics relates a system behavior to its external constraints. A complex system influences and controls its subsystems by altering the initial conditions and constraints that its subsystems operate under, thus setting up a hierarchy of control and organization. “Mental” and “Spiritual” forces thus take on the character of inertial forces, like centrifugal and coriolis forces.
The mechanistic philosophy of naturalism, which dominates formal science education, expressly denies the relevance of “purpose” to the results of scientific inquiry. This rejection is a serious misunderstanding of the views of Galileo and Newton who did not deny the importance of “purpose”, but, unlike Aristotle and Descartes, did recognize it to be a different problem from that of determining the mechanism for achieving that purpose. That “purpose” is a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry is established by the practice of “reverse engineering” whereby a competitor’s product is analyzed to determine how various product features are achieved. An important practical object of reverse engineering is God’s own handiwork. Aristotle’s concept of “Final Cause” failed because of its ad hoc nature, whereby causes of specific behaviors were attributed to qualities whose definitions are nothing more than a description of the behavior being explained. Moliere’s medical student, responding to the question of why opium puts people to sleep, thus explains: “Opium is a soporific because it contains a dormative virtue [Le malade imaginaire (1673)].”
The remaining issue is that of reliability, linked to the Cosmological Proof, ensuring that the performance of a product can be replicated. C. S. Peirce argued that the reality of God was proved by the fact that scientists found it profitable to engage in scientific inquiry. While the natural laws are uniformly true, in accordance with Lyell’s First Principle of Uniformity, a law’s relevance to a particular situation is not. Part of the art of product design is the determination of what physical laws apply to the situation. The “Assumption of Uniformity,” serving as a basis of scientific induction and of “scientific” attacks on the historicity of the Genesis accounts of the Creation and Flood, takes for granted the very point at issue in product reliability. This is that an experiment, once performed, can be repeated. A misguided faith in the “Scientific Method” of Induction, in reality a systematic method of arriving at the wrong conclusion, is the major cause of widely publicized product recalls affecting many years of production. Because tolerances track in the course of a manufacturing run, it may take as long as five years, or close to the entire useful life of the product, before a statistically valid sample is achieved. Induction fails as an inference method because it does not distinguish between “causal relationships”, which are repeatable, and “statistical regularities”, which apply only to the actual observations. A primary focus of any scientific investigation is therefore to determine whether the observed regularities are in fact repeatable. A tentative hypothetical explanation, deductively linked to the phenomenon to be explained, is established by disproving competing hypotheses. The hypothetical-deductive method of Galileo, Newton, and Faraday, is patterned on the Creator’s solution to man’s dilemma of being unable to live up to his own ethical standards. Just as Christ died in our place, the scientific method thereby provides a mechanism for our ideas dying in our place.
