A recent article in Science & Theology News refers to a survey of neuroscience by Anthony Matteo, a professor of philosophy at Elizabethtown College. Neuroscience could be the next (and perhaps the last) refuge of Intelligent Design, a view implied by Dr. Matteo's argument:
Evolutionary epistemology is an attempt to provide a thoroughly “naturalized” epistemology; that is to say, there can be no appeal to any nonnatural power to explain the origin and proper functioning of our intellectual abilities. Yet, clearly, an epistemological theory that could not give a credible account of the “reliability” of theory in general is disappointing, to say the least….
In other words, why is the theory of evolution so reliable? (And why does irony have such irresistible appeal?)
The point is that the mindless interaction of physical processes in the brain seems not to be just different in degree, but also in kind, from the mental processes we rely on for determining the validity of our beliefs. If such physical processes alone are in fact doing all the real causal work in belief formation, and the mental processes are a mere epiphenomenal afterglow, then indeed such beliefs have a nonrational foundation….
The problem is that this argument won't impress anyone who isn't anxious to be impressed. Is it remarkable that humans developed a capacity to tell the difference between a reliable theory and one that's not reliable? On the face of it, no. After all, if we hadn't developed a fairly canny ability to distinguish what's reliable from what isn't we wouldn't be here, so the debate really must go beyond that, to whether we're equipped with profound abilities (or a unique constellation of abilities) that have no survival value. A few weeks ago Wretchard posted an interesting piece about a theory by Julian James on the "bicameral mind." It concerns the idea that humans used to think differently, objectifying and projecting part of their own skill and insight. This was the origin of our belief in "supernatural beings" from forest spirits and muses, to angels. But how is it that we know what's beautiful, and does beauty extend beyond what enables us to reproduce and nurture the next generation? The real question has to do with the fact that we're a seeming constellation of technologies attempting, with modest success, to understand our own intimate nature. Who is the angel in Jacob's dream? Is the dislocation reliable evidence of someone who left a blessing?
We must also consider the "God Gene", which my wife says is in the manufacturer's specifications.
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This brings to mind a recent TCS Daily piece on how populist socialism has managed to avoid being discredited despite all the failure and destruction in its wake: It has been transformed into a religion in its own right, one that works by "tap[ping] into something deeper and more primordial than mere reason and argument" in the human mind.
I suspect something similar is at work here with Intelligent Design. No matter how much it is discredited, it never goes away, simply because a lot of people want badly to believe that our world is the product of something greater than a mindless, nebulous, random process of evolution without a benevolent intelligence to steer it. That sort of desire is not something that can be reasoned away.
I may be misapprehending Matteo's argument, but it seems to be that the ability of the theory to always explain empirical observations isn't completely explained by the theory itself. And he's possibly pointing toward a kind of irony, that the ability to produce theories that are this reliable is partly based on cognitive abilities that transcend rational thought.
I think I'd amend the Science and Theology News (a publication of the Templeton Foundation) article a bit, to say that this might become an argument for teleology rather than ID. I really don't think ID has the horsepower to get into this realm yet, so about the best it can do is go along for the ride.
But I'd welcome some other responses on this, because I'm not sure whether we're actually in the deep end of the pool or not.
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I think the first quote nailed the appeal of evolution, it explains what we observe without supernatural forces. That or it simply tip-toes up to them...
The problem in this debate is that there are so many different hydra-heads all competing for the same name. Evolution, that things change over time, is the stable refuge of the evolutionist. Evolution, that randomness produces an increase in order, is the spear. That randomness produces order is philosophy.
Intelligent designers have their own duality. There is intelligent design where intelligence can produce order, and intelligent design where the world was created in six days by a god carefully concealing evidence.
As with most debates the jeering philosophers on each side cheer these hydra-heads into battle like gladiators for their personal egos. Its the Rumble and the Jungle pay per view event, and not science.
Truth is many great scientists see the paleo record and know what we can infer. Or more importantly, what is just suggestion and inference above that. In their eyes the gladiators are fighting in an ethereal plane loosely attached to the real world. Belief in the intelligent designer is orthoganal to the debate, something unknown and perhaps unprovable.
"The problem is that this argument won't impress anyone who isn't anxious to be impressed. Is it remarkable that humans developed a capacity to tell the difference between a reliable theory and one that's not reliable? On the face of it, no."
Hmm, on the face and underneath too. Its far less impressive that humans have developed the capacity to whittle down bad theories than it is they have developed the capacity to theorize in the first place. After all, inventing the pointed stick is amazing. Realizing that using it to hunt grizzly bears is what killed your friend Ughh is less amazing. Thats more or less just Pavlovian. Making a consious decision to plant seeds is amazing. Not eating them again after they made you violently ill is not amazing.
Rejecting ideas that experience have indicated are failures amazes me much less than creating ideas in the first place. Science has long understood that direct experience is at the heart of all human interaction and hence science. Yes indeed, science is based on the 'faith' that the universe is rational, understandable, and that our perceptions are (if not reliable) at least not out to screw us. The fact they have kept us alive this long is indeed a legitimate argument that our sense arent completely out to lunch.
This does not put science and Intelligent Design or faith back on the same plane. Science still relies on reproducibility, prediction and experiment. In other words if collectively our minds are messing with us, they had better be messing with all of us because science relies on the same experiment no matter who is performing or recording it, be it humans, Vulcans, or Angels.
"...this might become an argument for teleology rather than ID..."
It's definitely teleological in nature. ID is such a vague, nebulous concept that it's impossible to say either way. There is no one "ID"
"...Belief in the intelligent designer is orthoganal to the debate, something unknown and perhaps unprovable..."
Yes. In my view, ID is the belief in the manufacture of the universe in terms we do not understand. Since science articles are about things we DO understand, the two are necessarily orthogonal.
I recently became aware - via an American Scientist article behind a subscription wall, of a body of research that demonstrates that the human visual sensing and sense-making systems are set up to create pleasurable sensations (think opiates!) in the presence of complex and novel scenes. Evolutionary rationales are immediate.
It's my own handwaving extrapolation that similar reward systems could be wired in for complex and novel visualizations resulting from daydreaming (excuse me, ideation). Certainly the degree of such internal rewards, and the quality of visualization stimulating them, could be individually variable, and subject to both evolution and to some extent of cultural stimulation.
It's even more speculative to conceive of market systems as evolutionary mechanisms themselves, searching a 'fitness landscape' of attention partially determined by this biologically evolved rewards system, and explain a lot about the current structure and activities of the mass media.
( I agree with the prior that ID is an orthogonal issue. I don't believe in ID, but I can see it can be compatible with evolutionary thinking if you are only willing to drop Einstein's visceral "God does not play dice with the universe" and substitute "No only does He, but He loads the dice, and that's the point." Still utterly nonfalsifiable, of course!)
Evolution happens. People who want to argue that it doesn't happen have a tough problem.
Can it explain everything about biology? It can make a kind of meta-explanation. But we can't know whether that's workable in all cases until we know everything about biology there is to explain.
As we learn more about molecular genetics, it's starting to look like evolution has spent over a billion years evolving ways to evolve better. If we find things that are hard to explain by traditional evolutionary theory, evolving evolutionary theory is likely to work. But right now that leaves us with a hand-waving exercise. We have every reason to think evolution works better than we can explain. This is another meta-explanation. If you're already inclined to believe it can explain the whole thing, that makes it easier. If you're inclined to disbelieve it, this will just look like double-talk.
As we learn more about chemistry and biology we'll eventually be ready to do intelligent design ourselves. We might not be the first to do that. Evolution evolves in ways that let it evolve better, and it will evolve intelligent designers -- and maybe already has.
But if there happened to be an intelligent designer who wasn't evolved -- there's no scientific reason to assume that, but no real evidence against it -- then there's nothing to keep such a designer from designing systems that evolve.
Evolutionary theory can already explain enough things that it isn't a big jump to suppose it could explain all of biology. And evolution happens. But supposing that it could have all happened that way isn't at all proof that it did happen that way. Beliefs about how it did happen come from personal preference. Like Joshua said about populist socialism, and I claim is also true of free market capitalism theory, these are basicly religious beliefs. People choose their poison and then interpret the world in terms of the theories they believe.
The argument that thinking must involve something more than mindless physical processes is just like the idea that computers must use something more than mindless movement of electrons. But computers are implemented in silicon because it's convenient. I saw an old Scientific American article that described a computer build to run on air pressure. A gate involved a little side blast that tilted a stream of air from one hole to the next. It was slow, but it worked and was impervious to EMP. The issue isn't which mindless physical process the design is implemented in. The issue is how to create the design and implement it to run with some mindless physical process. And that's something that can be evolved, but might have been designed. Or some combination.
J:
Why is it so hard to get that simple idea across? It's interesting to speculate that we might not be quite finished with the bicameral mind, and that we're still contemplating the dislocation as though we think an angel left it behind as a sign. All this as we catch up to ourselves, gathering along the northwest/southeast axis for some kind of uprecedented leap.
What would be more amazing, that there really are angels or that what we thought were angels were merely poorly perceived reflections of a wiser self, talking us up the ladder?
"there can be no appeal to any nonnatural power to explain the origin and proper functioning of our intellectual abilities"
This web site has a good review of scientific research relevant to the above quote.
http://www.victorzammit.com/book/index.html
For an accessible work on how the evolutionary approach to cognition is based on neuroscience, see The Symbolic Species: the coevolution of language and the brain It's from 1998, so the neuroscience has been expanded since it was written, but it gives a good account of the position.
There's an extensive body of research that addresses, from the biochemical level through the neurological level, how cognition develops as an emergent result of the interaction between the frontal cortex of the brain and the limbic system in normal people and why, for instance, those with autism develop hypersensitivity to very discrete sensory inputs but have grave difficulty with language and more abstract concepts.
Re: capitalism vs. socialism.
Experiments have been run at great cost. The results are in.
The only faith based economic system of any major importance still left is socialism.
M Simon, no, all economic systems to date are faith-based.
People have faith that the actual economic system they are participating in fits their ideology, and that helps them avoid noticing that it does not.
Evolved economic systems tend to work catch-as-catch-can, they develop however they happen to develop that works. People who come along and try to impose an ideology on them fail to observe the parts that don't fit the ideology.