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Perplexed comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong
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Comments (161)
What?
Do theists really ask this?
Oh, yes. It is asked pretty regularly in the forums that deal with such things. Places like talk.origins.
Creationists have a world-view which places God-the-creator at the base of all explanations regarding the nature of reality. Remove Him and much that was explained is no longer explained. Asking an "evolutionist" to explain the natural existence of the eye - a mechanism of considerable intricacy and sophistication - is perfectly reasonable in this context, particularly for someone who doesn't understand natural selection at all. Which most people, theist or atheist, don't understand.
Even theists who understand natural selection, people like Behe or Dembski, can find evolutionary explanation unconvincing when they change the question from "How did the eye become so nearly perfect?" to something like "How did eyes get started, anyhow?". To be fair, they find the explanations unconvincing because the standard explanations really are unconvincing and they are unwilling to accept a promissory note that better explanations will be forthcoming in time.
There is some truth to the claim that even atheists currently take some things "on faith". The naturalistic origin of life, for example.
I thought that it didn't quite make sense to speak of non-naturalistic events at all. What would a non-naturalistic event look like?
It's not so much that we take it "on faith." It's that, in a certain type of thinking (the kind of thinking where sentences represent claims about the world, claims must be backed by evidence, inferences must follow from premises) the very notion of a miracle is incoherent.
I was trying to help a friend write a role-playing game -- yes, I'm a geek -- and build in some kind of rigorous quantitative model of magic. It's surprisingly frustrating. I invite anyone to try the exercise. You wind up with all kinds of tricky internal contradictions as soon as you start letting players break the laws of physics. I appreciate physics much more, having seen how incredibly irritating it is to try to give the appearance of structure and sense where there is none.
Of course, in a different mode of thinking -- poetic thinking, or transcendent thinking -- you can talk about miracles. "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands" is good strong poetry and (to me) has a ring of truth. But it isn't a proposition at all!
I think if non-naturalistic means anything, it can be clarified as follows.
Assume we are running as a simulation on someone's computer (Nick Bostrom has argued that we probably are). Our sim defines the boundaries of the world we can directly interact with, even in principle. Call that "realm" the natural.
A non-naturalistic event is an event in which the programmers interfere with the sim while it is in progress. Maybe after 9 gigayears they insert the first replicator, brute-force.
We can suspect it's non-naturalistic because it (a) had no apparent physical causes or (b) was so unlikely as to be ridiculous (although anthropic arguments muddy that last consideration when we discuss the origin of life).
Other senses of "supernatural" I find to be incoherent.
Hold on, the naturalistic origin of life is pretty plausible based on current understanding (Miller-Urey showed amino acid development would be very plausible, and from there there are a number of AIUI chemically sound models for those building blocks naturally forming self-replicating organisms or pseudo-organisms).
Are you genuinely arguing that its probability is so low that it would be less productive to investigate naturalistic abiogenesis mechanisms than it would be to look for new hypotheses? Or, alternately, do you have a more specific idea of what minimum level of probability it takes for a hypothesis be "plausible" rather than "being taken on faith"?
And that claim by you is based on ... what exactly? Experiments you have performed? Books you have read explaining the theory to your satisfaction with no obvious hand waving? Books like the ones we all have read describing Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection? Or maybe you have encountered a section in a library filled with technical material beyond your comprehension, but which you are pretty sure you could comprehend with enough effort? For me, something in this category would be stereo amplifiers - I've seen the books so I know there is nothing supernatural involved, though I can't explain it myself.
From what you write below, I'm guessing your background puts you at roughly this level regarding abiogenesis. Except, the difference is that there is no library section filled with technical material explaining how life originated from non-life. So, I think you are going on faith.
No there aren't. There is not a single plausible theory in existence right now claiming that life originates from amino acids arising from a Miller-Urey type of process. There are no chemically sound models for creating life from Miller-Urey building blocks.
There are some models which have life starting with RNA, and some which have life starting with lipids, or iron-sulfide minerals or even (pace Tim) starting with clay. But you didn't mention those more recent and plausible theories. Instead you went on faith.
No. Not at all. I don't have a clue as to what it would even mean to look for, let alone investigate a non-naturalistic hypothesis.
What I am saying is this: Suppose I have before me a theist who claims that a Deity must have been the cause of the Big Bang. "Something from nothing" and all that. Suppose further that my own version of atheism is so completely non-evangelical and my knowledge of cosmology so weak that I say to him, "Could be! I don't believe that a Deity was involved, but I don't have any evidence to rule it out."
So that is the supposition. Next, suppose he says "Furthermore, I think the Deity must have been involved in the origin of life, back 3+ billion years ago. From what I know of chemistry and biochemistry, that could not have been spontaneous." I would tell him that I too know quite a bit about chemistry and biochemistry, and that there are many, many clues indicating that life based on RNA probably existed before modern life based on DNA and amino acids and proteins. There is strong evidence that life in its current form came from something more primitive.
Now, suppose he says "Yes, I understand all that evidence. But you still have no theory to explain how life based on RNA might have started. All you have is handwaving. My belief, since I already believe in a Creator-Deity for the Big Bang, is that a Creator-Deity was also involved in the origin of the RNA World." If he said that, then I would answer, "Ok, you can believe that, but since I don't already believe in a Creator Deity, I would prefer to believe that the first living organism on earth arose by some unknown natural process. In fact, I have some ideas as to how it might have happened."
Yes, I said "prefer to believe" this time. I don't have a good explanation for life's origin, though I have spent a good deal of my spare time over the past 30 years looking for one.
I think what's happening here is that the theist's preexisting belief about a creator god is causing them to privilege the hypothesis of divine RNA-creation.
The trouble is, you seem to be privileging it too. The way you've set up the scenario makes it seem like there are two hypotheses: (1) goddidit, (2) some unknown natural process.
But (2) is actually a set of zillions of potential processes, many of which have a far better prior than Yahweh and the Thousand Claims of Scripture, even if we can't actually choose one for sure right now. Taken together, all their probability mass dwarfs that of the goddidit hypothesis.
You don't have to know all the answers to say "you're (almost certainly) wrong."
I don't see any reasons why (2) - unknown natural process - gets to benefit from being a "set of zillions of potential processes, many of which have a far better prior" and (1) - goddidit - does not.
If you want to sum the probability of a hypothesis by performing some weighted sum over the set of zillions of it's neighbors in hypothesis space, that's fine. But if that is your criteria, you need to apply it equally to the other set of hypothesises you are considering - instead of considering only one specific example.
Bostrom's simulation argument gives us one potential generator of 'goddidits', and a likely high prior for superintelligent aliens gives us another potential generator of 'goddidits'. Either of those generators could spawn zillions of potential processes which have far better priors than Yaweh, but could look similar.
None of this leads to any specific conclusion - I'm just pointing out an unfairness in your methodology.
You're quite right. When I said this, I was thinking of "goddidit" as a set of very specific claims from a single religious tradition, which I should've stated.
Mmm actually you did state it as a fairly specific claim. I'm just saying one can't fairly compare highly specific complex hypothesizes vs wide general sweeps through hypothesis-space. This is itself a good argument against the specific "yawheh did it", but not against the more general "goddidit" which you originally were referring to:
You're right - but there is another side to this coin. An atheist has a top-level belief (or it's negation) which sends down cascading priors and privileges naturalistic hypothesizes. So far this has worked splendidly well across the landscape.
But there is no guarantee this will work everywhere forever, and it's at least possible that eventually we may flip or find an exception for the top-level prior - for example we may eventually find that pretty much everything has a naturalistic explanation except the origin of life - which turns out to have been seeded by alien super-intelligence (ala Francis Crick) - for example.
I entirely agree. While I don't know of any good reasons to think the origin of life was not a happy accident, it is not inconceivable a priori (simulations, seeding etc.).
When I describe myself as an atheist (which I try not to do), I really mean that
(1) all the anthropomorphic creation myths are really laughable,
(2) there's not much positive evidence for less laughable creators, and
(3) even if you showed me evidence for a creator, I would be inclined toward what I will call meta-naturalism - i.e., still wanting to know how the hell the creator came to be.
Basically, I doubt the existence of gods that are totally ontologically distinct from creatures.
Bostrom's simulation argument does NOT give us a generator of "goddidits" regarding the origin of life and the universe, because implicit in the question "How did life originate?" is a desire to know the ultimate root (if there is one), and us being in a simulation just gives us some more living beings (the simulators "above") to ask our questions about. Where did life in the universe "one level above us" come from? Where did our simulator/parent universe originate?
There is nothing unfair in dismissing "A MIRACLE!" in comparison to the set of plausible naturalistic processes that could explain a given phenomenon. And to second SarahC, it's somewhat incoherent to talk about non-naturalistic processes in the first place. You need to be very clear as to what you're suggesting when you suggest "god did it". But, no one here is suggesting that, so I'll stop tangenting into arguing against theists that don't seem to be present.
Well, I certainly don't have to know all the answers in order to think that. But my brand of atheism tells me that I ought to have at least some of the answers before saying that.
Different strokes for different folks.
Thanks for catching me in this error. I was very vaguely familiar with those theories, but not enough to realize that they require source materials not available from Miller-Urey building blocks.
The problem I see is not so much with the source materials or "building blocks". It is putting them together into something that reproduces itself. When Miller performed his experiment, we had no idea how life worked at the mechanical level. Even amino acids seemed somehow magic. So when Miller showed they are not magic, it seemed like a big deal.
Now we know how life works mechanically. It is pretty complicated. It is difficult to imagine something much simpler that would still work. Putting the "building blocks" together in a way that works currently seems "uphill" thermodynamically and very much uphill in terms of information. IMHO, we are today farther from a solution than we thought we were back in 1953.
But, isn't the issue not only the amount of information required but also the amount of time and space that was available to work with?
To pick one scientific paper which I think summarizes what you're talking about, this paper discusses "[...][t]he implausibility of the suggestion that complicated cycles could self-organize, and the importance of learning more about the potential of surfaces to help organize simpler cycles[...]".
The chemistry discussed in that paper is well above my head, but I can still read it well enough to conclude that it seems to fallaciously arrive at probabilistic-sounding conclusions (i.e. "To postulate one fortuitously catalyzed reaction, perhaps catalyzed by a metal ion, might be reasonable, but to postulate a suite of them is to appeal to magic.") without actually doing any probability calculations. It's not enough to point out that the processes required to bootstrap a citric acid cycle are unlikely; how unlikely are they compared to the number of opportunities?
Am I missing something important? The above is my current understanding of the situation which I recognize to be low-level, and I present it primarily as an invitation for correction and edification, only secondarily as a counterargument to your claims.
It is important to realize that Orgel is a leader of one faction (I will resist the temptation to write "sect") and he is critiquing the ideas of a different faction. Since I happen to subscribe to the ideas of the second faction, I may not be perfectly fair to Orgel here.
Orgel does not calculate probabilities in part because the ideas he is critiquing are not specific enough to permit such a calculation. Furthermore, and this is something you would need some background to appreciate, the issue here isn't a question of a fluke coming together somewhere here on earth of the right ingredients. It is more a matter of a fluke coming together of laws of chemistry. Orgel is saying that he doubts that the cycle idea would work anywhere in this universe - it would take a suspiciously fine-tuned universe to let all those reactions work together like that. It is a reasonable argument - particularly coming from someone whose chemical intuition is as good as Orgel's.
I think Orgel is pretty much right. The reductive citric acid cycle is a cute idea as the core of a metabolism-first theory, but it is probably too big and complicated a cycle to be realistic as the first cycle. Personally, I think that something simpler, using CO or HCN as the carbon source has a better chance of success. But until we come up with something specific and testable, the "metabolism first" faction maybe deserves Orgel's scorn. The annoying thing is that our best ideas are untestable because they require enormous pressures and unsafe ingredients to test them. Damned frustrating when you want to criticize the other side for producing untestable theories.
Orgel was fair to the extent that he also provided a pretty good critiqueto his own faction's ideas at about the same time. But it is possible that Sutherland's new ideas on RNA synthesis may revive the RNA-first viewpoint.
If you really dig watching abiogenesis research, as I do, it is an exciting time to be alive. Lots of ideas, something wrong with every one of them, but sooner or later we are bound to figure it all out.
That's about what I would say in the same situation, though I might go on to say that I "prefer to believe" in that hypothesis because its probability of truth seems high enough, although it is not as probable as more established theories such as common descent.
Let's taboo "faith" from here out because otherwise I think we're likely to fall into a definitional argument. My next question is: what actions do you feel are justified by the probability of the naturalistic abiogensis hypothesis, and why isn't the flat statement "Life on Earth came about naturally" part of that set?
Ok by me.
Actions? I don't need no steenkin' hypothesis to justify actions... [Sorry, just watched the movie]
To be honest, I don't see that it makes much difference to me whether life on earth arose spontaneously, or by directed panspermia, or as a once-in-a-multiverse fluke, or by the direction of some Omega running a sim. My actions are the same in any case. It is a fascinating question, though, even if it matters so little.
You are asking why I am not justified in coming out and saying it? But I am justified. I am justified in saying flatly that life on earth came about naturally. The statement is justified by my <Censored - Taboo Word>
By "taboo" I meant this LW meme which requires that you not just replace taboo'ed words by alternate symbols, but with working definitions. So, I'm still curious about your last paragraph: how is that statement justified? Why do you, why should you, feel comfortable saying and believing it? Should that comfort level be greater than you'd have saying "Earth-life was created by directed panspermia"?
Well, recall that the tabooed word is one which I sought to apply both to the theist "goddidit" and to the atheist "unknown-natural-processes-didit". So what definition fits that word?
So how about this: "I make that statement because no other possibility fits into my current worldview, and this one fits reasonably well". Or, if the taboo be removed, "I can't prove it to your satisfaction. Hell, I can't even prove it to my satisfaction. Yet I believe it, and I consider it a reasonable thing to believe. I guess I am simply taking it on faith."
Why not just have an amount of belief proportional to the amount of evidence? That is, wouldn't it be more rational to say "I think naturalistic self-organized abiogenesis is the most plausible solution known, and here's why, but I'm not so confident in it that I think other possible solutions (including some we haven't yet thought up) are implausible" and skip all this business about worldviews and proof? Proof isn't really all that applicable to inductive reasoning, and I'm very skeptical of the idea that "X fits with my worldview" is a good reason for any significant amount of confidence that X is true.
Because, as a Bayesian, I realize that priors matter. Belief is produced by a combination of priors and evidence.
Sure it is. Proof is applicable in both deductive and inductive reasoning. What you probably meant to say is that proof is not the only thing applicable to inductive reasoning.
I think that you will find that most of the reasoning that takes place in a field like abiogenesis has more of a deductive flavor than an inductive one. There just is not that much evidence available to work with.
Well, then how do you feel about the idea that "X does not fit with my worldview" is a good reason for a significant amount of skepticism that X is true?
Seems to me that just a little bit ago you were finding a nice fit between X = "Miller-Urey-didit" and your worldview. A fit so nice that you were confident enough to set out to tell a total stranger about it.
The point of tabooing a word isn't to replace it with a <censored> mark. The point is that it forces one to expand on what one means by the word and removes connotations that might not be shared by all people in a discussion.