Preposterous. The odds of this happening can’t be better than a 747 being farted into existence during a tornado in a junkyard.

What data would you suggest to make such a proposition more “scientific”?

#20 FmsRse12 — I think I see that backwards from you — systems relax into a growth state — chaos (not purposelessness) produces anti-growth in some cases (systems revert to their ancestral systems), but relaxation is when everything is working in synch, isn’t it? Somewhere in there is an energy addition from harmony (constructive interference?), but I’m not sure where.

how about transient order or purpose …..it’s like some sort of fluctuation that gives order or purpose to the system and then after some time the system relaxes back to orderless purposeless state ……..we just need to study modes of relaxation …..

Scientists, or most of them, try (not always successfully) to avoid fooling themselves by not assuming things ahead of time and only looking for data that supports their assumptions. It’s not a personal attack on your assumptions; it’s the methodology they have been trained in and which has produced all the technology you see around you. If you have reproducible data for some kind of purpose, say for the fact that this pebble I just picked up happens to exist at the same time and rough spacial location as myself over all the billions of years of time and billions of light-years of space, present it in a coherent fashion and if it survives peer-review you’ll probably win a Nobel Prize. That’s probably not the example you had in mind, but seriously, scientists will not or should not refuse to look at valid data – although, what you seem to be proposing has been proposed over many centuries and so far the evidence has never seemed to support it past the anecdotal level, so it will be a difficult challenge for you, true. Probably you have better things to do with your time, and I don’t blame you for that, but until you do take up the challenge to present data, you don’t have much justification for slanging scientists who do spend their lives looking at hard data, and providing the basis for the technological advances which I am sure you use.

Back on topic, I think Hume would be a tough read for me, but I like what I’ve heard about his writings from others. Thanks for this post.

This is not a post related to Hume – sorry to interrupt the discussion – but just to point out that on several recent occasions when I have visited the Cosmic Variance website I have ended up being automatically redirected to some other site which tries to tell me about various “viruses” detected on my system and causes my computer to automatically start downloading a file called anti-malware.zip. This has happened from two different computers using two different browsers, and only happens on the Cosmic Variance site.

Could you please investigate this and sort it out? I enjoy reading the blog but this problem will make me and others stay away from the site, which would be a shame.

Thanks.

You’re right that the real value of Hume’s argument is in showing how weak the argument from design is even if correct, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say Hume showed it leads to nothing interesting or useful even if it were true.

I first read Hume’s Dialogues before my deconversion from evangelical Christianity, and not only did Hume convince me that the argument from deign was incorrect, I actually saw that even if the design argument were true it would actually lead more credence to the existence of the kind of god/gods I didn’t believe in (polytheism, gods who weren’t good, weren’t omniscient/omnipotent, etc), rather than the Christian God I did believed in. To me that’s the true genius of Hume’s book; he shows that even if the most intuitive proof for a god’s existence were true it would actually be evidence against the kind of God Christians believe in.

“Hume’s transformation of the problem is the discovery that humanity can only check out of Hotel Supernatural with whichever baggage it brings with it. …Here as well we see the economy of Hume’s aim. A lesser thinker would do as most people do, which is to go bull-headed at the issue of the existence of a deity, and parade more or less unconvincing proofs and disproofs. Scientists who fancy themselves as philosophers usually end up doing just that. Hume can dissect the arguments better than anyone. But he knows the results will be forever contested, and of course he is completely sceptical about anyone’s ability to prove a positive or negative result in these cloudy regions. So what he does instead is to show that the outcome simply does not matter. He discards what he does not need. He can afford to, for he has enough cards left to win the trick. What matters are the alleged implications people wish to draw from their deity. But by directing his scepticism at those implications, Hume simply eviscerates the issue.” from Blackburns’ How to Read Hume.

It is certainly a minority of experts who claim Hume accepted the design argument. The consensus is that Hume’s position in the Dialogues is most similar to Philo (who demolishes the design argument). Yes the narrator at the end of the Dialogues says that his master, who postulated the design argument, won the debate, but that was tongue in cheek and Hume’s real allegiance lies with Philo. If you read Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding you’ll see him use the same tactic; he takes an extremely critical look at some religious proposition and just tears it apart, but then follows with an ironic statement about religion being about faith, even though it was irrational, so his argument shouldn’t shake people’s faith. You have to realize that people were still persecuted for not believing in God then, so skeptical philosophers had to get around that by pretending to be at least vaguely religious.

The vast majority of scholars I have read argue over whether Hume was an atheist or agnostic, not if he was a pantheist, theist, deist, etc. By the labels of the time I think Hume was clearly an atheist (the term agnostic was invented by Huxley decades after Hume died); Hume was labeled an atheist for much of his career and he didn’t deny it.

“all systems (ordered processes) contain a purpose, without which they would not exist.”

Claims without evidence can be rejected without evidence.

“That aside, order without purpose resembles randomly generated order,”

So you reject the laws we observe, which as Carroll notes follows from purpose-less processes.

It makes you look like having a conversation about something else, because it is not engaging the text.

Odd that.

Explaining the origins of order, randomly arrived at? If “absence of teleology” means “absence of perceived final cause, i.e. purpose”, then order would be found without any reference to any purpose — however, all systems (ordered processes) contain a purpose, without which they would not exist. That aside, order without purpose resembles randomly generated order, which depending on your point of view might be paradoxical subtlety or simply self-contradictory claptrap. Would not any order imply an intrinsic natural predilection toward order? “Pure” randomness, then, could not exist. Order is implied in the existence of mathematical truths. Is the order required for mathematics (“things”, i.e. units, and “laws” to manipulate the units, versus a physically real universe of non-mathematical processes) a random, purposeless “feature” of the nature that includes both physical and mathematical reality? To say that, one would have to deny the superiority of order over disorder! Maybe that is why “scientists” cannot tolerate any taint of morality in science: although scientists study natural physical systems whose continuing existence and growth is synonymous with the success of order in its struggle with chaos, they cannot allow that idea of “success” to be associated with “purpose”!

Neither biology nor cosmology comes close to explaining anything of any value to humanity other than the practitioners of “biology” or “cosmology”. Could science tolerate a discovery of universal purpose in universal processes? The universe appears to be a system for growth (as well as an imagination system), since all its systems participate in the creation of new systems, and growth is the creation of new systems by existing systems. And allied to this purpose is the resonant signal provided by harmony, a clear sign that Mother Nature favors the creation of new systems since She lends Her energy to a harmonic union.

Hume, Shmume.

Hume meets modal realism.

Only this morning I was reading an article (or the first page of it, being a chargeable article!) on “Humean supervenience” [ http://www.jstor.org/pss/2254396 ], after seeing a reference to this phrase in “Gauging What’s Real – The Conceptual Foundations of Contenporary Gauge Theories” by R Healey.

At first I thought he had misspelled “human”; but evidently it’s a reference to a concept put forward by Hume.