Friday, June 21, 2013

Evolution and the Indian Rope Trick

Last month, I was privileged to be a part of the Great God Debate II: The Origin of Life, which pit atheist Michael Ruse against intelligent design advocate Fazale Rana. In Dr. Ruse's opening statement, he made an argument on what he has labeled the "fallacy of selective attention or illicit focus." It was probably Ruse's most powerful point and he admitted it carried the bulk of his reasoning for why the idea of intelligent design can be dismissed.

Ruse showed a picture of an Indian guru climbing a rope suspended into the sky. This is a well-known illusion called the Indian rope trick. He then states:

"You look at this and you say 'Oh my God! Newton was wrong! Gravity doesn't work.' Hang on a minute, hang on a minute. Of course gravity works. We don't just look at the Indian rope trick in isolation. We take it in context. We ask ourselves, 'Why would we say that the Indian rope trick must be a trick and not magic?' Why do we think that Newton's laws do hold in a case like this? Why do we think that there's something fishy going on here? And the answer of course is that we're not just judging the Indian rope trick on its own, but against the background knowledge that magic simply doesn't work and that Newton's laws do."
(You can see Ruse make this argument here.)

Ruse follows up this analogy by summarizing his argument thusly:
  • We don't just look at it (the cell) and say "Oh my goodness, it is so complex and works so well. It must be designed in a hands-on fashion."
  • We judge the cell against all our knowledge, and that includes our knowledge of evolution through natural selection at the macro level.
Now, I think Ruse is onto something here. He's right that we cannot take the cell in isolation. However, I think when studied carefully his argument actually works against him.

Ruse assumes that when judging the Indian rope trick, all we need to do is appeal to Newton's laws. That's not exactly true. We appeal to our past experience of the world and we find that we never experience a violation of gravity. It is our experience that things, without any external force, will fall to the earth. However, that is exactly the argument that intelligent design proponents are making! In our experience, when we see very complex, information -bearing systems, we understand that an intelligent agent is the cause of those systems. It would be the extraordinary thing to find an information-carrying code that is complex but arose naturally. Cryptographers and archaeologists base their vocations on this principle.

If we expand Ruse's level of examination beyond the cell, we have the same issues. If we look to life, we never see life arising spontaneously from non-living material. Louis Pasteur proved this and we bank on it every time we go to the grocery store. I don't know about you, but I don't want to find new life in my peanut butter jar!

If we judge the cell against ALL knowledge, then our past knowledge of life coming from life and complex information-bearing systems coming from minds are the equivalent of our experience of our past knowledge of how gravity affects ropes and people. It is the evolutionist that seems to be seeking an Indian rope trick explanation for what we now know to be true. And I, for one, am not buying it.

9 comments:

  1. RE: Lenny wrote:
    "If we look to life, we never see life arising spontaneously from non-living material. Louis Pasteur proved this and we bank on it every time we go to the grocery store. I don't know about you, but I don't want to find new life in my peanut butter jar!"

    Lenny- you either don't understand Ruse or else you are misrepresenting him. No evolutionist, not one, says fully formed complex life arises spontaneously from non-living material. How life arose from non-life is a mystery, in science, for now. But there is also lots of known info on the steps, such as it being possible that amino acids can be built from basic gasses and electrical charges (shown in the lab). Also we know that asteroids have contained amino acids (basic building blocks of life brought to Earth from elsewhere).

    When life arose, it was very primitive. It is like looking at a house being built, but in the early stages, there is nothing but a foundation, or scaffolding. After the house is done, the scaffolding is removed. Evolutionists are looking for the pathways, the scaffolding, for life to come from non-life. No one says the complex life just arises from nothing; it goes through scaffolding phases first. So no evolutionist thinks that a bacterium, virus, or baby elephant (etc.) will spontaneously generate in your peanut butter bar. So it is a lame example.

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    1. There is no evidence that first life was not complex. It is an assumption made by naturalists.

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    2. You know that the scaffolding doesn't build the house, right? It is just a tool or support used to build the house. It is the "carpenter" who builds the house. We don't expect that the woods and the stones build themselves along with the scaffolding to be a house. There is always someone; who builds and designs.

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  2. RE: Lenny wrote:
    "If we look to life, we never see life arising spontaneously from non-living material. Louis Pasteur proved this and we bank on it every time we go to the grocery store. I don't know about you, but I don't want to find new life in my peanut butter jar!"

    Lenny- you either don't understand Ruse or else you are misrepresenting him. No evolutionist, not one, says fully formed complex life arises spontaneously from non-living material. How life arose from non-life is a mystery, in science, for now. But there is also lots of known info on the steps, such as it being possible that amino acids can be built from basic gasses and electrical charges (shown in the lab). Also we know that asteroids have contained amino acids (basic building blocks of life brought to Earth from elsewhere).

    When life arose, it was very primitive. It is like looking at a house being built, but in the early stages, there is nothing but a foundation, or scaffolding. After the house is done, the scaffolding is removed. Evolutionists are looking for the pathways, the scaffolding, for life to come from non-life. No one says the complex life just arises from nothing; it goes through scaffolding phases first. So no evolutionist thinks that a bacterium, virus, or baby elephant (etc.) will spontaneously generate in your peanut butter bar. So it is a lame example.

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  3. I'm pretty sure I understood Ruse appropriately. I linked to the debate video so you could see it in context AND I reproduced his bullet points from his slide.

    If you watch the debate, you will see how Fuz Rana takes apart each of the three primary theories (replicator-first scenarios, metabolism-first scenarios, and membrane-first scenarios) on how your "scaffolding" process could come about. But no matter the process, you must claim that life arises from non-life and there is a precise moment in time where non-living material becomes alive. Otherwise, the material has always been alive and my point about life arising from previous life stands.

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  4. Thank you for your post Lenny, I enjoyed it.

    There's been an attempt to quantify the probability of even the simplest amino acid forming by chance. While I take those numbers with a grain of salt, the implication is obvious. The odds of even a simple protein forming by chance is so minuscule as to almost be impossible. What then the odds of a fully upright primate with eyes, nervous system, immune system, brain, sentience, intelligence, self-awareness? Looking at it from a dispassionate point of view, the answer is obvious: it is impossible this came about by chance.

    And no, time is not a sufficient factor to explain everything. I call atheists who fall back on time as "Time of the Gaps" as a nod to their sometimes accurate assessment of apologists who rely on "God of the gaps" as the main thrust of their arguments.

    God bless...

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  5. I notice that all of Lenny's examples FOR the evolutionary theory include things (buildings, scaffolding) that are being built BY something FROM A DESIGN...

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    1. Well ya. How else has man observed things being made? Spontaneously and randomly? Not from predictable and orderly events?

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  6. @Walter: YUP! And I always get a kick out of the just-so stories such as "...when life arose..." as if someone saw it "evolve". No "may have" or "might have been". Just-so.

    I guess Nat Geo or History channel has the video.

    Again, ultimately, "nothing made itself out of nothing. with nothing".

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