Intelligent Design and Christology

Or, what does Jesus mean when he says he is the Truth?

In John 14:6 Jesus identifies himself with the truth.  Is Jesus saying he is a truth, one of many truths?  Is he saying that he is leading us to an ultimate truth?  Or, is Jesus literally saying that he is the ultimate truth?

Interestingly, Intelligent Design seems to shed some light on this question.  While Intelligent Design itself cannot logically imply the existence of God, it is consistent with atheism, after all:
http://appliedintelligentdesign.blogspot.com/2012/07/intelligent-design-and-atheism-are.html
that doesn't preclude Intelligent Design from still painting an interesting picture of what the true nature of reality may be.

To arrive at this picture requires a bit of upfront brushwork.  For this post, I'm assuming the reader is already familiar with the basics of Intelligent Design theory, most importantly the definition of complex specified information (CSI).
http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf

Furthermore, I'll assume the reader is familiar with the basic implications has for the nature of reality, that there must be at least four different kinds of entities: chance, necessity, CSI, designers.
http://appliedintelligentdesign.blogspot.com/2012/07/intelligent-design-goes-beyond.html

So now that you've swallowed the red pill, it's time to show you how deep this rabbit hole really goes.

Let's revisit our fourfold picture of reality.  Logically, CSI entails that information cannot explain itself, without resulting in a contradiction, so there must be a fourth entity that is neither CSI, chance, nor necessity.  I will call this entity a designer.  That is about as far as mere logic can take us.  Now let us start bringing empirical data into the picture.

From observation, it is clear that there is more than one designer in the world (unless you happen to be a solipist).  But, where did all these designers come from?  It is also clear that we designers cannot create other designers, even though we give birth to new designers.  We have a hand in a process, but as far as we can tell, the only thing we can create is CSI, which is merely a reconfiguration of existing things.  Since designers are beyond CSI, that means we cannot create designers.

Again, where did all these designers come from?  Well, linguistically at least, there is a difference between a designer and a creator.  A designer makes use of existing materials to create CSI.  And that is creation, to an extent.  But, such creation requires already existing substances, so it is not creation proper, as in the actual creation of substances and entities.

Now our picture is developing a hole.  We have many substances and entities, but no known means of bringing such things into existence.  Surely they do not pop into existence arbitrarily either.  We now have a gigantic explanatory gap.  It looks like the logic of ID combined with the empirical data takes us beyond even designers, as we now see a need for a fifth entity.  There must be a fifth entity that can create, and not merely create CSI, but create the very substances that CSI is embodied within, and the very designers that are creating CSI.

Thus, this fifth entity must be a creator, and a creator in the proper sense in that the creator can bring into being substance itself.  What an intriguing development, to say the least!  But, this creator is not the same as a capital 'C' Creator, such as a god, demiurge, or what have you.  Or, at least the logic here does not entail such a being, though it is getting closer.  We are still a long way from the beings described in the Bible, Koran, and other such religious texts.

However, we do know some things about this creator.  Most importantly, this creator logically precedes chance and necessity.  So, this creator cannot be the gods of the Homeric myths from which our Western culture originated.  The gods of Homer and Hesiod all came from chaos.  But, according to intelligent design, the creator logically cannot come from chaos, since chaos is another name for chance, and the logical progression has already placed the creator at a much prior position to chance.  The creator, in turn, also logically precedes CSI and designers.  If we were to construct a causal chain with all our elements, the creator would have to be at the start of it all.

Another important thing we know, and here is where we start seeing Christological implications, is that such a creator does not introduce an explanatory gap like the designers did.  We designers cannot explain ourselves.  We all seem to come into being at some point.  Logically, something that only contingently exists, i.e. did not exist at one point in time and did exist at another point in time, does not suffice as an explanation for itself.  Otherwise, it might just pop out of existence again, and perhaps pop into existence again a bit later.  Perhaps at the quantum level things work like this, but at our everyday macroscopic level, we don't tend to think things pop in and out of existence without some kind of more fundamental explanation than mere randomness.  Thus, we designers introduce another explanation problem because we cannot create substances.

Notice how this problem disappears with the fifth entity, the creator.  The creator's unique ability is that it can create substances.  All the previous entities in the hierarchy were substances.  In fact, another name for things and entities is substance.  What does this mean?  Why, the creator is itself also a substance.  Logically, this means creators can create creators, and consequently no new explanatory gap is introduced.

Since the explanatory gap disappears with the creator, yet existed with all the other substances in our list, this means the creator is the most fundamental kind of being in our list.  And once we've arrived at the creator, our list appears to be complete.  Of course, we can always imagine even more exotic kinds of entities, but if we did we'd be risking our necks to Dr. Ockham's vicious razor.  As Einstein's famous dictum goes, we've simplified as much as possible, without over simplifying, contrary to how the disciples of chance and necessity reductionism tend to oversimplifying.

At this point, we've established the creator is both the initial being in the causal chain, and the creator completes our list of causal explanations.  Another way we could say this is that the creator is the explanation for everything.   What would we say if we'd discovered the explanation for everything?  I think it'd be fair to say we'd discovered the fundamental truth that explained everything we know.

Now, say you were to meet the creator on the street, and you asked the creator who it is, how could the creator most succinctly identify itself?  Well, the creator would say it is the fundamental truth.  In other words the creator would say "I am The Truth".

Perhaps this is what Jesus meant?

Intelligent Design goes beyond information

Whenever we Intelligent Design proponents talk about ID, "information" is a word mentioned quite often.  Information is the key to ID, so it seems.  But, how just how much does information explain in ID?  Is it a necessary or sufficient component of ID?  I claim that information is merely a necessary component, and that information points beyond itself to something even more fundamental.  But first, we must see the ID hierarchy of being.

Let us start with the basics.  We have a universe filled with objects.  Some of these objects are intelligently designed, some are not.  How do we know whether an object is intelligently designed?  By whether is exhibits complex specified information (CSI).  What creates CSI?  Why, an intelligent designer, of course.

But, what or who is the intelligent designer?  That is the perennial question lobbed at us ID proponents.  As I explained previously, the intelligent designer is not necessarily the same as God, and in fact ID can be said to be consistent with atheism:
http://appliedintelligentdesign.blogspot.com/2012/07/intelligent-design-and-atheism-are.html

However, there is still more to be said about the designer.  The big question is, is the designer itself CSI, or something else?  Well, as also discussed previously, CSI cannot explain itself, otherwise we end up with the Dawkins paradox:
http://appliedintelligentdesign.blogspot.com/2012/07/must-designer-be-more-complex-than.html

Consequently, the designer must be something other than CSI.  Yet, the definition of CSI excludes the designer from itself being an agent of chance and necessity, since chance and necessity cannot create CSI.  So, the designer is both other than CSI, and it is also other than chance and necessity.  The designer is a fourth kind entity, and therefore the designer is itself beyond information.

Intelligent Design and Atheism are logically consistent

Many people think that Intelligent Design necessarily infers the existence of God.  Therefore, it must count as a religious doctrine since it is necessarily connected to an essential article of all religions.  However, this analysis relies on hasty reasoning, without giving due consideration to the definition of Intelligent Design.

Many also know that Intelligent Design proponents often claim that ID agnostic about the designer, that it only cares about examining the activity of said designer.  Many claim this is disingenuous, since who else could a designer of our world be but the God of the faith traditions?

Maybe the many are correct.  But, let us first take a moment to examine what ID on its own merits entails.  To start with, let us see what the basic claim of ID is.  The basic claim of ID is that only intelligent agency (IA) is capable of creating complex specified information.  This claim takes a bit of unpacking, and has been adequately unpacked in many other arenas, so I will forgo the unpacking for now.

Back with the core claim, then.  Does it imply that the IA must necessarily be God?  Well, no.  There are many other potential IAs that can can account for a given portion of CSI.  For instance,  humans are a great candidate.  In fact, humans account for all the CSI for which we have direct, unequivocal, historical evidence of its creator.

Plainly, then, ID does not necessitate the designer be God.  Otherwise, you'd have to say God created the computer you are reading this article on, instead of a number of American and Chinese researchers and workers.  Perhaps in certain theologies that statement is true, but in the everyday common sense understanding of that statement, it is false that God created your computer.

Now that we have identified that the intelligent designer can be many other agents besides God, it is clear that the initial claim that ID necessarily entailed the designer be God is false.  But perhaps an infinite regress argument gets us back to the necessity of God?  Maybe, but this is not straightforwardly the case.

To understand why, let us consider physics.  In physics, in order for anything to happen, we must at least have matter and energy.  Now, if matter and energy inherently necessitate the existence of God, then physics too is a religious doctrine, and should be removed from the schools.  But, it is not immediately obvious that matter and energy do inherently necessitate the existence of God.  Instead, matter and energy are considered basic substances in our universe.  Kinds of substances that have existed for the entire duration of the universe.

Consequently, there appear to be some things which we don't account for their origin.  If intelligent agency is shown to exist, it may be the same sort of substance.  If ID turns out to be correct, physics may say that there are three basic substances: matter, energy and intelligent agency.  Accordingly, there is no inherent reason to account for the origin of intelligent agency, at least not any more than there is an inherent reason to account for the origin of matter and energy.  And, just as the mere existence of matter and energy does not tend to convince atheists they must become theists, so the mere existence of intelligent agency has no more reason to dissuade atheists from their atheism.

In fact, a number of existing and ancient religious narratives are consistent with a non-theistic existence of intelligent agency.  If we define theism as a belief in an all powerful, all knowing God, such a view of God is fairly recent in the religious timeline.  There are even religions today that don't believe in a deity with omnipotence and omniscience.  Without these qualities, the gods in these religions are essentially super men - humans that have acquired greater than normal powers.  As such, there is no ontological difference between these gods and humans, and in fact ancient myths tell of humans supplanting the domain of the gods.  Consequently, these religious traditions are actually atheistic in the logical meaning of the term, and are additionally consistent with ID.

That being said, while Intelligent Design is logically consistent with such an atheism, it may not be evidentially consistent, such as demonstrated by events like the big bang.  And, upon further reflection, it may also turn out there are deep logical problems with intelligent agency existing without any further explanation.  But, if so, then these same logical problems also apply to the existence of matter and energy, and are not unique to Intelligent Design.

Sketch of experiment using Stylus and Complex Specified Information Collecting (CSIC) to falsify Intelligent Design

The central claim of Intelligent Design is that only intelligent agents can create complex specified information (CSI).  However, Intelligent Design research has not focused very much on how intelligent agents actually impart this information, choosing rather to focus on detecting information in the first place.  This makes sense, since we have to detect the information in order to then determine whether it was deposited by an intelligent agent, or some other causal agent.

In a previous post, I outlined a practical approach of discovering how intelligent agents, such as humans, impart information.  The approach is called Complex Specified Information Collection, and I describe CSIC here:
http://appliedintelligentdesign.blogspot.com/2012/04/background-experiment-and-results-of.html

In CSIC, human interaction is incorporated into an algorithmic search process to add active information to the search process.  The amount of active information imparted can be measured during each stage of the search process to determine just how responsible the intelligent agents are for the information that is in the search.  The concept of active information is explained by Dr. Dembski's work on the No Free Lunch Theorem:
The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search


In "The Search for a Search" Dr. Dembski shows that the effectiveness of a search algorithm in finding a target is limited by the amount of active information the search has about the target, which is information that reduces the area the algorithm must search.  Thus, extremely effective search algorithms should correspondingly possess large amounts of active information.

Dr. Dembski, with the aid of Dr. Robert Marks and Mr. Winston Ewert, have shown this correspondence holds true with Avida.  Avida has been purported to generate complex specified information without the intervention of an intelligent agent.  However, Dr. Dembski et al. have shown that the active information was actually front loaded into the search algorithm by the programmer.

ID experimental researcher, Dr. Doug Axe, has been investigating the implications of ID for evolution.  He has developed a cutting edge simulation called Stylus to examine how well functional specification can be acquired through stepwise mutation:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002246

The notion of active information also applies to Dr. Axe's stepwise mutation algorithm.  If it ends up being especially effective at creating functional specification, it is possible to take the algorithm apart and examine it piece by piece to see how the active information has been integrated into the algorithm.  With this analysis we have a baseline of active information to characterize the search process.

Now we also have the tools to go the next step and see how intelligent agents can increase the amount of active information in a search.  This is very valuable since we can learn how conditions, behaviors, techniques exhibited by the intelligent agents impact the amount of active information created, if any.  We can also falsify Intelligent design theory by detecting an increase in active information within the search with no corresponding intelligent agent interaction.

Thus, by combining Stylus and CSIC, we have a full fledged scientific experiment with which we can either falsify or confirm intelligent design, as well as gain valuable insights into how intelligent design works.

Intelligent Design Links Epistemology to Ontology (Part 1)

A famous argument against Artificial Intelligence is John Searle's Chinese room argument.  In this argument, a person resides in the room who possesses a perfect ability to translate Chinese character strings to semantically equivalent English character strings.  However, the person himself has no knowledge of Chinese or English.  This argument shows that even observing a presumably intelligence based behavior tells us nothing about whether the responsible agent has intelligence regarding the content of the behavior.  Thus, there is a strict division between the syntax (form) of something and its semantics (meaning).

While a brilliant argument in its own right, it still leaves us with the most important question unanswered, which is, how do I know whether an agent is in fact intelligent?  I don't have any direct insight into the minds of others, the best I can do is infer internal states from external effects.  But, if Dr. Searle's argument is correct, then even if my friends all exhibit behavior I would classify as intelligent, I still have no clue whatsoever whether they are conscious beings or just robots.  I must take a leap of faith to assume that I even have friends, instead of a bunch of fancy mechanical dolls.  Though it is quite disturbing to take this leap of faith, it is rationally unjustified under Ockham's razor.  If in theory intelligent agency is strictly independent from and unnecessary to account for intelligent behavior, then it violates Ockham's razor to infer intelligent agency from intelligent behavior, as the former is unnecessary for the latter.

Thus, even though Dr. Searle's argument has been hailed as a definitive blow against the concept of Artificial Intelligence, it seems an even greater blow against real intelligence.  Due to his argument, we become eternally stuck within a world filled with automatons in which we seem to be the only conscious beings, in other words we become Dwayne Hoover in Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions".

Intelligent Design provides the metaphysical equipment to get us out of this dilemma.  Stay tuned to find out how!

Part 2

Is Neo-Platonism consistent with Intelligent Design?

I don't believe Neo-Platonism, in which Platonic forms have some kind of causal power, whether directly or through an intermediary, is Intelligent Design proper.  This is because the Platonic forms are necessary entities, and insofar they are necessary their instantiation in turn exerts necessity upon the instantiation.

However, if the causal agent that brings a particular object into being is necessitated in doing so, then that object is a product of necessity, at least in some way.  Per the CSI criteria, said object does not possess complexity, as it has a probability of 1.  On the other hand, perhaps it has a probability less than 1 but greater than 0.  In this case, Neo-Platonism does not explain the existence of the object any better than materialism does.

This argument is very similar to the proof that ID implies the supernatural, in which Neo-Platonism is substituted for the physical laws of chance and necessity.

http://appliedintelligentdesign.blogspot.com/2012/07/does-id-imply-supernatural.html

That being said, Platonism does serve a very valuable purpose for Intelligent Design in that it provides an objective specification.

SETI needs Intelligent Design

As Dr. Gonzales' and Dr. Richards' show in the book "Privileged Planet" a SETI project with materialistic metaphysics does not have a hope in heaven to expect to find a habitable planet.  The improbabilities involved in the formation of habitable planet in the universe are extremely small, much smaller than the probabilistic resources available in our universe.

Fortunately, the fact we live on a habitable planet within our universe makes the possibility of a trans-universal designer extremely strong.  At least it makes such a possibility the much preferable explanation to a process that works through merely chance and necessity.  If an intelligent designer created our planet, despite the enormous probabilistic barriers to doing so, then this makes the possibility of other habitable planets a live possibility.

This possibility gives SETI a way out of the probabilistic hole they dug for themselves with materialism.  It is only if SETI allows for the possibility of intelligent design that they can justify further searches for other habited planets in the universe.

That is not all.  The very interesting result from "Privileged Planet" is more than the fact our planet is very finely tuned for highly complex living beings.  Additionally, our planet has been uniquely placed and constructed to make the discovery of the universe a tractable task.  Furthermore, the extremely amazing thing is that the finely tuned parameters for life are the same parameters for discovery.  This requires an even higher level of design than if these parameters were independent.

However, this third aspect is not explained by either the function of survival or discovery.  Also, it is both not necessitated by the situation while at the same time exhibiting a highly intelligent design decision.  Since design decisions are made for a reason, we need to identify a third reason for this third feature of our finely tuned abode.

So, what does the convergence between survival and discovery entail?  It entails that wherever there are  habitable planets in the world, they will share a common frame of conceptual reference.  What purpose would a common set of concepts serve?  On the Pioneer space mission, a disc was placed on the craft that attempted to communicate aspects of our world to extraterrestrial beings, and part of this communication made use of concepts that should be universal, such as mathematical concepts.  Or another example, in CS Lewis' "Out of the Silent Planet" the protagonist at one point attempts to communicate with an inhabitant of Mars by making use of common concepts the two share.

With these considerations in mind, one possible explanation for the convergence between survival and discovery is that it provides a means for disparate inhabitants of the universe to understand each other.  Why provide a means of understanding?  Perhaps because the inhabitants are meant to discover each other...