Bill (He said I should call him Bill as opposed to Prof. Dembski and has requested that I give short bio, so while I don't like talking about myself, I have to be a good guest on his page and follow through:)
My Name is Rabbi Yehoshua Scult. I was raised in Philadelphia Penn. and attended the Talmudic Yeshiva there till age 16. I then immigrated to the Holy Land to continue advanced studies in Talmud and Jewish law. I did not graduate high-school in America and my English writing skills are a little sub-optimal. So I will apologize up front if this comment is not written well. I made it my business to become very fluent in Hebrew and my English was neglected over the years. I studied at the most prestigious Talmud academies in the Holy land. I have authored 6 books (see here https://merhav.nli.org.il/primo-explore/search?query=any,contains,%D7%A1%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%98,%20%D7%99%D7%94%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%A2&tab=default_tab&search_scope=Local&vid=NLI&lang=iw_IL&offset=0&fromRedirectFilter=true) and have many more in the pipeline. While my main area of research is in and around authentic Jewish Law (HALACHA) but I also have a fascination with understanding the deeper meaning of Biblical Hebrew words. I have invested much time in this endeavor and the books i have printed show a lot of that research. I am presently 58, live in Jerusalem. I have 11 children. I have been a follower of Intelligent Design for 30 years and have read many works that Bill has penned over that time. My mentor Rabbi Avigdor Miller dedicated tens of his lectures to expounding on intelligent design in nature. Following below is a off-on-tangent comment that Bill invited me to post on this article, and I appreciate him allowing me to add my comment here)
First of all, let us appreciate and applaud Bill for this awesome article. The ability to explain complex concepts in a clear and concise format, understandable to the layperson, is truly the hallmark of an exact understanding of the subject by the writer And Bill has exhibited that in the extreme.
I am by no means a mathematician or statistician and am not qualified to comment and any of the science of the article even though he has made it very clear and understandable even to a layperson like myself. However, I just wanted to comment on something that is a side tangent, but since it is a subject that greatly interests me, Bill has encouraged me to write this short blurb.
Regarding the Hebrew word TAVNIT. Bill wrote is this word connotates “pattern”. And while indeed in modern Hebrew pattern is translated as TAVNIT, in classical, biblical Hebrew I feel that the prime meaning is slightly different. Now nothing I say here in any way dents in the slightest the message that he wants to confer, as he continues to show from Plato, so I’m strictly talking about the correct understanding of biblical Hebrew and nothing else.
There are many words in Hebrew that as to say are “parents”. Those are the words used to convey their **prime meaning** and then from that prime meaning other words are “born” like, as to say, children.
It is often very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to know who is the “parent” and who is the “child”. Many thousands of pages have been written about this subject and I’ve contributed a few dozen myself to this domain of the study of Hebrew words, and certainly, in the future, many more pages will be written.
Bill is correct that the word TAVNIT comes from the word to build (BONEH verb, BINYAN noun) but I think its **prime definition** is not exactly a “pattern” but is simply “form”, and form is appropriate as a child of "building" because anything that is built is going to possess form, and not a random pile of bricks falling on the street, which doesn’t have any real form.
This can be seen in Scripture (Deut 4:16, 17) that commands not to build any idols of any "form" whether that be a form of something on the earth or something in the sea or something in the heavens. Now you cannot say you should not build an idol that is “the pattern” of a bird or anything in the sea. It wouldn’t make sense, so, therefore, I would like to conclude that the word is primarily connotating “form”. But since a pattern is a subset of things that have form (I think we can say that not every form has a pattern to it in the strict sense of the word "pattern", but that every pattern certainly has some form to it.)
A second reference is a passage in Ezekiel (8:13) that mentions the TAVNIT of a “hand”. Now could you say “the pattern of a hand”? That really would make somebody scratch his head, looking at the speaker wondering what did he mean. But if you would say "the form of a hand" the listener would immediately understand correctly.
As I said Bill is correct that the word is based on the word "to build" or "a building" but let’s take a look at the word “son” (BEN) which is also very close to the verb or noun build or building. Which is the primary usage of the root BEIT NUN and which is the secondary that was it was derived from the primary? Hard to discern. It could be that “building” is the primary and “son” was derived from of the fact that the son builds the extension of his parents’ family. But it could be the opposite way around, that building something is based on the word “son” because a building is the “brainchild” of the architect. It isn’t easy to decide.
It’s interesting to note that the word TEIVA is also close to the word TAVNIT. The word TEIVA means something like is vesicle, like a box, that has a separation between its insides and the outside environment. Noah’s Ark is called the TEIVA. A vessel that has a boundary is what gives it its form, so it could be there’s a relationship, and maybe the words are "cousins". It is also interesting to note that the word TEIVA ends with the letters BEIT HEH which also is the word meaning “inside of something” because that is exactly what a box does and Noah’s Ark did. It was the ultimate “inside” of things, protecting the people inside from the water on the outside.
Many classic Hebrew grammar scholars (an interesting summation of the different opinions is given by Solomon Pappenheim in his book CHESHEK SHLOMO)
held to the opinion that (almost) every classical Hebrew word can be reduced to one letter (!!) which symbolizes its primary meaning.
Biblical Hebrew's words have very subtle, but extremely profound meanings. The space available here nor a thousandfold more would be capable of even scratching the surface of the is intriguing subject.
If we were forced to give the exact biblical Hebrew translation for a "pattern", it might be a daunting task to hit the nail on the head. It might be TAVNIT derived from form. But it could also be derived from the word SEDER, which which connotates order. Or possibly from the word KETZEV which is like a equal beat of something or possibly from the word DFUS which means a mold.
There is no question that biblical Hebrew was intelligently designed. It exhibits all the attributes of an entity not only intelligently designed, but of **something ingeniously designed** and I think we should all appreciate it. It should be noted, though, the disturbing fact that modern Hebrew does not fully do justice to the biblical “father” and when we are studying these questions we should always investigate Scripture for the original and authentic meaning.
Again I appreciate Bill allowing me to post my comment here. Rabbi Yehoshua Scult, RabbiYScult@outlook.com
I sometimes see Darwinists/materialists deny specification in biology. For instance, given an example of some structure with irreducibly complex function, they'll argue that humans have a tendency to project significance and intentionality onto things that do not actually possess it. A frequent example they give is the tendency of people to imagine faces and other images in clouds. You responded to one example of this line of thought here: https://evolutionnews.org/2022/09/rosenhouses-whoppers-seeing-patterns-in-biology-is-like-seeing-dragons-in-the-clouds/
But this is self-defeating. We don't consult a meteorologist on how a cloud came to resemble a face that someone imagined. We don't look for a historical explanation of how the face got there. The face doesn't need a "scientific" explanation, because its origin is in the imagination of the person seeing it, which they are only mentally projecting onto the cloud.
To deny specification in biology is thus to deny that there is anything objectively real in biology that needs to be explained, whether by intelligent design or Darwinian mechanisms or anything else. It is to deconstruct all of biology itself as a sort of illusion that we human beings are projecting onto the world. And since human beings are ourselves part of biology, it ultimately entails that we exist only as an illusion we are having of ourselves, which is obviously circular and nonsensical.
The problem for materialists, however, is that things in biology are specified precisely because they have function. From living organisms as wholes down to the individual organs they possess down to sub-cellular structures, life is absolutely rife with things that can only be described and defined via the teleological language of function, and that are only of explanatory interest because of that fact. But the concept of function is inseperable from intentionality and as such is logically irreducible to blind mechanism.
When we talk about objects designed by humans, the function of an object refers to what that object was *meant* or *intended for* by the person who designed it. An example would be the words written on a page, such as this comment. By themselves, the words are mere ink splots on a piece of paper or pixels on a screen. However, they have a *function*, namely to communicate a meaning that the writer (in this case myself) had in mind when designing the arrangement or pattern of the letters in his mind. Speaking in purely physical terms, the words that appear on a page are nothing more than the sum of their parts. The ink blots or pixels are not doing anything above and beyond the normal operation of physical laws governing their parts. The function comes *purely* from the writer's intentions in arranging them.
When you read my comment and understand it, you are doing what you explained above: "Next, an intelligence at the receiver, witnessing the signal, draws on its prior learning and knowledge to spot a familiar pattern. The pattern thereby becomes recognizable. And provided the signal is also improbable, the signal is inferred to be designed." That is, your mind reconstructs the same abstract pattern that was in my mind when I arranged the letters, and from there you ascertain the meaning or *function* for which I so arranged them.
The same is true of human artifacts in general, such as the pocket watch discovered in a field from Paley's famous thought experiment. Physically speaking, a watch is reducible to the sum of its parts - bits of metal and glass following the same deterministic laws as any other bits of metal and glass. However, the watch has a *function* of telling time by virtue of that being what its creator *intended* it for when coming up with the abstract design in his mind to carry out that intention. When you encounter the stopwatch in a field and ascertain that it is designed and has a function of telling time, you are (just as when reading and understanding someone's writing) reconstructing the abstract pattern that the designer of the stopwatch had in his mind when constructing it and the intentions for which he did so.
Note that you can have a PARTIAL reconstruction of the abstract pattern in the designer's mind without grasping all of it. For instance, you may ascertain that the watch was designed with a function, but not be sure what that function is. Or you may ascertain that it was intended to tell time, but not know *why* the designer wanted to keep time (eg to remember his anniversary) or what have you. The same is true for interpreting writing. You may not understand the language but recognize it as writing, or understand the text but not all the subtext, etc.
Returning to the subject of evolution and specification, the above explains why Darwin used "natural selection" to name the primary explanatory device of his theory, and why he defined it in terms of an analogy to animal breeding by humans. As mentioned previously, materialists cannot afford to deny consistently that biological function (and hence specification) is objectively real, because to do so is to reduce all of biology, including ourselves, to a subjective illusion projected by human beings, which leaves nothing objectively real to be explained by Darwinian evolution in the first place!
Darwin's idea was that if he could come up with a mechanism that was *analogous* to human design (such as animal breeding), then he could naturalize the concept of function without eliminating it. His implicit reasoning was something like:
P1) Natural selection "selects" things analogously to how human breeders do.
P2) Human breeders and other designers confer real function to things when they select them according to their designs.
C) Therefore natural selection confers real function too when it "selects" them.
But all analogies break down when pressed far enough, and the problem with this is that the analogy between natural selection and human design breaks down *on exactly the point that allows human design to confer function onto objects*.
As described above, what gives a human artifact function (whether it be to confer the meaning of a written work or to tell time or what have you) is the abstract pattern and the *intentions* in the mind of the designer for implementing that pattern. But natural selection doesn't HAVE any intentions or thoughts about abstract patterns. That's what is meant by the "natural" part.
In fact, natural selection isn't even a concrete entity such that it *could* have thoughts and intentions or do anything at all for that matter. It's an abstraction - a "useful fiction." It is often said that Darwin provided the mechanism of evolution, but this isn't really true. Darwinism is an EXPLANATORY mechanism, not a physical mechanism. It goes without saying that whatever *physical* mechanisms were involved in, say, the origin of the bacterial flagellum must have been radically different from whatever physical mechanisms were involved in the origin of the mammalian eye. When people say that the flagellum and the mammalian eye both came about by natural selection, it doesn't mean that they came about the same physical mechanisms. It's shorthand for saying that however these two things came about, they and their "function" were unintended. Darwinism is really a catch-all philosophical framework for trying to explain away intention without explaining away function, but function and intention are logically inseparable.
More thoughtful naturalists like Fodor, Searle, and Nagel have pointed out before why natural selection cannot in principle give an account for biological function, and why all the various Darwinian attempt to redefine function in materialist reductionist terms are circular failures, but all these problems are rooted in the same fundamental problem: that when we discern the function of human artifacts, we're actually reconstructing in our own minds the pattern and intention in the mind of the designer, but since natural selection has no mind and no intentions for us to reconstruct, it cannot possibly create any objectively real function for us to discern.
It follows that any function we think we see in anything formed by blind, unintentional processes can only be our own subjective mental projection onto reality, like a face seen in a cloud, hence there is no specification in biology for us to explain (and no us), and hence Darwinism is self-defeating.
The problem turns out to be even more acute when you consider that the sort of function exhibited by human-designed artifacts is derivative of a sort of function that is even more fundamentally incompatible with materialist reductionism.
Consider: As I pointed out above, the words I write on a page, considered only in their physical aspects (the pixels or ink blots, or whatever) apart from my abstract thoughts and intentions, are nothing more than the sum of their parts. They don't have any intrinsic function, meaning, or purpose apart from what I assigned to them by my thoughts. But what about my thoughts THEMSELVES, which I encode the words I write? It makes no sense to say that they have meaning or function only by virtue of my assigning it to them by my thoughts, or else you have a vicious infinite regress.
And this doesn't just apply to abstract thoughts and intentions, but also the the rational minds that have them. The function of the rational human intellect is to grasp truth via the *proper* application of universal laws of logic and reason. That function of our intellects is what allows us to tell when another person is *misusing* their intellect to reason *fallaciously*, and why we refer to such fallacious reasoning and the false conclusions reached by it AS fallacious, incorrect, and dysfunctional rather than merely different. It's why we say that somebody caught in a persistent delusion has a malfunctioning or disordered mind, not merely a different one.
If I were to write an invalid logical proof on a piece of paper, or write a logic CAD program on my computer that persistently gave wrong answers, we wouldn't say that the paper, pen ink, and/or computer were malfunctioning, because they would still be doing what I designed them to do. Their operation would still reflect my intentions and hence the function I assigned. But if God were to afflict my mind so that I reasoned fallaciously, we would rightly say that my mind was malfunctioning, even though He created me in the first place. That's because my mind, unlike human artifacts, has been made with an *instrinsic* function, not merely an externally assigned one.
Or consider phenomenal consciousness, which at least some animals seem to clearly share with human beings. Consciousness is clearly an example of biological function, but again the function is clearly instrinsic. It makes no sense to say that a creature that has subjective conscious experience does so only by virtue of a designer (much less "natural selection") assigning that function to it, the way that I assign function to the words I wrote on a page.
Unlike objects with extrinsic function (like human artifacts), which are physically just the sum of their parts apart from the intentions and thoughts of their designers, things with instrinsic function are MORE than the sum of their parts, and have powers that are irreducible to the combined powers of their material constituents. Consider that no matter how many words I write on a page, their meaning is still assigned by me, using my thoughts. At no point do they "add up" to having intrinsic meaning the way my thoughts do. And no matter how many unconscious molecules you put together following *only* the blind and deterministic physical laws that we know about, it doesn't "add up" to subjective conscious experience, much less rational intellects that grasp truth and universals. But thoughts, and consciousness, and rational minds very clearly exist, and it is incoherent to deny it.
But it is impossible for anything that is objectively greater than the sum of its parts and has irreducible powers to exist given the premises of materialist reductionism, and it is impossible for an unguided bottom-up process to build such a thing in principle. That is why the most consistent Darwinian materialists - the elminative materialists - DO in fact deny that consciousness, and thoughts, and rational minds exist - a position that entails that objective truth doesn't exist either.
And while the irreducible powers of intrinsically functional things (like consciouness and rationality) exist independently of being assigned by the intentions of a designing mind, the fact that they came into existence (and thus have a cause) means that their irreducible powers (or something greater from which their powers are derivative) must also exist in that which caused them to exist. And while the physical specification or pattern of the human body may not be *sufficient* to account for our rationality and consciousness existing and operating in the physical world, it is certainly *necessary*.
Now which kind of function is it that exists in biology, intrinsic or extrinsic? Well, intrinsic function clearly exists, since consciousness and rationality exist in us human beings, and we are also biological creatures. There are also many examples of function in biology (like the flagellum resembling a motor or the heart resembling a pump or the genetic code resembling computer code, etc) that are uncannily reminiscent of human-designed technology, albeit almost infinitely more advanced than our best work, and the operation of the clearly intrinsic function depends on such things as well (eg. I couldn't reason very well without my pump-like heart sending oxygen to my brain). Perhaps there is a combination of both.
But either way, as we have seen, both are incompatible with materialist reductionism, and neither can be produced by Darwinian evolution in principle. To deny that there are specifications in biology is to deny function (both intrinsic and extrinsic), and to deny function is to reject biology and ultimately all reality and truth as a subjective illusion that needs no explanation.
Finally, if there is any criticism I may make of specified complexity in biology, it's that it is perhaps somewhat redundant, because the whole reason life is specified is that it has function, and once you acknowledge that biological function is objectively real, you get design "for free" as it were without having to do any further probabilistic calculations, since the reality of biological function is incompatible with Darwinism in the first place and entails a mind as its source.
But that doesn't mean that specified complexity has no application in biology, because while design may be a given in general, there can still be cases of variations on designed functions in biology that aren't specifically designed themselves, which probabilities could help us tease apart.
And on further reflection, I think your concept of specified complexity anticipates this and entails the same conclusion, since as you have said, Darwinian mechanisms cannot, in and of themselves, produce specification of any sort, but can only arrive at specifications that were smuggled into their landscapes.
I'm not so sure that function entails intention in the strict logical sense. It could be that function is an imposition of our evolved minds, but that the structure exhibiting that function resulted not from intention. I don't personally buy this, but a materialist could make that argument. I could imagine a world in which natural systems evolve increasingly complex functions under selection pressure without needing to cross huge improbability barriers. Again, I don't personally buy this. But it seems that specified complexity is bending over backwards to meet the Darwinist on common ground, and even there it shows that Darwinian materialism does not succeed. Your view, it seems, is that it cannot succeed, but such would be more a philosophical than scientific argument. I'm interested in making the argument on the plain of science. Thanks for your comments. --Bill
Relatedly, I think that Darwinism is ironically "rescued" in large part by its own incoherence.
That is, because the biological function of life is so obvious and undeniable, and because any attempt to account for function in a way that is utterly devoid of intention and design is so unintelligible (especially for irreducibly complex structures, and even more for irreducibly non-mechanistic things like our own conscious selves), people can't help but reify Darwin's analogy by thinking of natural selection as a literally intelligent designer with intentions and foresight, and that in turn makes the theory seem much more plausible than it actually is. Darwin himself did this frequently, when challenged to account for the mammalian eye, for instance.
In short, the actual eliminativist implications of the theory are so radically incoherent that people can't even conceptualize them (the same way you cannot conceptualize a square circle), so both Darwinist and Darwin critic alike naturally tend to substitute a more intuitive theory in its place, with teleology snuck in the back door subconsciously.
You see the same thing with materialist philosophies of mind (which follow from consistent Darwinism). Eliminative materialism is the only view (or non-view) of the mind that is consistent with materialism, but its claims are so unintelligible that even self-identified eliminative materialists can't actually state them coherently or be consistent with them (they would have to give up such concepts as truth and logic and science altogether if they were), but precisely because the implications are so absurd that you literally can't even think about them, materialists DON'T think about them and don't realize just how indefensible their premises are, and instead come up with more intuitive "materialist" philosophies of mind that invariably sneak irreducible intentionality in the back door.
I think the issue for the materialist is that without intention, you're stuck with a purely nominalistic view of function: That is, it's something we're projecting onto living things, not something that's objectively there and needs an explanation.
Of course, it's possible that a complex structure on which a person is projecting function could come into existence accidentally - presumably that's how a cloud that a person imagines a face in comes about, after all - but in that case no explanation is needed for how the structure came to have that function. Complexity alone doesn't require an explanation after all (a purely random pattern being the most complex), but only *specified* complexity, and the specification comes from the function, so if the latter is illusory, so is the former.
It's true that I'm making a philosophical argument, but I think it's appropriate, because I think Darwinism itself is primarily a philosophical argument to the effect that function as a category can be reduced to blind mechanism via an analogy, albeit it's a philosophical argument with secondary empirical or scientific claims that follow from and depend on the philosophical premise.
So it makes sense to point out that the initial philosophical premise is actually incoherent, but also that even if one grants for the sake of argument that it isn't, the secondary empirical claims also fail on mathematical and empirical grounds, which is where specified complexity comes in.
It seems Bill has been tireless in making this argument. It is good to see a rigorous approach to this question that does not veer into supernatural phenomena, though that is where I started and that is where I continue to live.
If you want to find a starting point for this other approach in academia, I suppose it would be with Ian Stevenson. Where a physicist can choose to ignore clear signs of lived human experience, a psychiatrist betrays his profession if he does so. And so it was a psychiatrist that verified the reincarnation experiences of many children; perhaps the first academic attempt to do so in a competent manner.
This work left us with a new causative agent in the "toolbox" of science, the human "spirit" or personality. Though psychology and psychiatry had made something of this idea for some time, all others thought it was a "religious" concept not worthy of scientific inquiry. Though Stevenson was the first trained person in an academic position to challenge this rather naive assertion, he was certainly not the first trained person to take this new causative agent seriously.
In my experience, Hubbard was the first, though perhaps others could be found. And after him, Courtney Brown. Both of these men kept their work out of academia. Hubbard because his work was summarily rejected and Brown because he wanted to keep his professorship in mathematics.
Both these men used this newly-discovered causative agent as a research tool. Each developed their own techniques. But they arrived at quite similar conclusions.
These techniques may never be accepted as "scientific," but they support the work of Intelligent Design researchers, as well as work in other fields. like cosmology - to say nothing of psychology. But I have a fear that if more researchers do not start taking this work more seriously, that science will crash us into a brick wall in a manner that we may not be able to recover from. We already have the specter of the hydrogen bomb hanging over our heads. It is time to build a "spiritual weapon" of equal or greater power to give us a non-materialist exit strategy, for those who are interested.
Bill (He said I should call him Bill as opposed to Prof. Dembski and has requested that I give short bio, so while I don't like talking about myself, I have to be a good guest on his page and follow through:)
My Name is Rabbi Yehoshua Scult. I was raised in Philadelphia Penn. and attended the Talmudic Yeshiva there till age 16. I then immigrated to the Holy Land to continue advanced studies in Talmud and Jewish law. I did not graduate high-school in America and my English writing skills are a little sub-optimal. So I will apologize up front if this comment is not written well. I made it my business to become very fluent in Hebrew and my English was neglected over the years. I studied at the most prestigious Talmud academies in the Holy land. I have authored 6 books (see here https://merhav.nli.org.il/primo-explore/search?query=any,contains,%D7%A1%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%98,%20%D7%99%D7%94%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%A2&tab=default_tab&search_scope=Local&vid=NLI&lang=iw_IL&offset=0&fromRedirectFilter=true) and have many more in the pipeline. While my main area of research is in and around authentic Jewish Law (HALACHA) but I also have a fascination with understanding the deeper meaning of Biblical Hebrew words. I have invested much time in this endeavor and the books i have printed show a lot of that research. I am presently 58, live in Jerusalem. I have 11 children. I have been a follower of Intelligent Design for 30 years and have read many works that Bill has penned over that time. My mentor Rabbi Avigdor Miller dedicated tens of his lectures to expounding on intelligent design in nature. Following below is a off-on-tangent comment that Bill invited me to post on this article, and I appreciate him allowing me to add my comment here)
First of all, let us appreciate and applaud Bill for this awesome article. The ability to explain complex concepts in a clear and concise format, understandable to the layperson, is truly the hallmark of an exact understanding of the subject by the writer And Bill has exhibited that in the extreme.
I am by no means a mathematician or statistician and am not qualified to comment and any of the science of the article even though he has made it very clear and understandable even to a layperson like myself. However, I just wanted to comment on something that is a side tangent, but since it is a subject that greatly interests me, Bill has encouraged me to write this short blurb.
Regarding the Hebrew word TAVNIT. Bill wrote is this word connotates “pattern”. And while indeed in modern Hebrew pattern is translated as TAVNIT, in classical, biblical Hebrew I feel that the prime meaning is slightly different. Now nothing I say here in any way dents in the slightest the message that he wants to confer, as he continues to show from Plato, so I’m strictly talking about the correct understanding of biblical Hebrew and nothing else.
There are many words in Hebrew that as to say are “parents”. Those are the words used to convey their **prime meaning** and then from that prime meaning other words are “born” like, as to say, children.
It is often very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to know who is the “parent” and who is the “child”. Many thousands of pages have been written about this subject and I’ve contributed a few dozen myself to this domain of the study of Hebrew words, and certainly, in the future, many more pages will be written.
Bill is correct that the word TAVNIT comes from the word to build (BONEH verb, BINYAN noun) but I think its **prime definition** is not exactly a “pattern” but is simply “form”, and form is appropriate as a child of "building" because anything that is built is going to possess form, and not a random pile of bricks falling on the street, which doesn’t have any real form.
This can be seen in Scripture (Deut 4:16, 17) that commands not to build any idols of any "form" whether that be a form of something on the earth or something in the sea or something in the heavens. Now you cannot say you should not build an idol that is “the pattern” of a bird or anything in the sea. It wouldn’t make sense, so, therefore, I would like to conclude that the word is primarily connotating “form”. But since a pattern is a subset of things that have form (I think we can say that not every form has a pattern to it in the strict sense of the word "pattern", but that every pattern certainly has some form to it.)
A second reference is a passage in Ezekiel (8:13) that mentions the TAVNIT of a “hand”. Now could you say “the pattern of a hand”? That really would make somebody scratch his head, looking at the speaker wondering what did he mean. But if you would say "the form of a hand" the listener would immediately understand correctly.
As I said Bill is correct that the word is based on the word "to build" or "a building" but let’s take a look at the word “son” (BEN) which is also very close to the verb or noun build or building. Which is the primary usage of the root BEIT NUN and which is the secondary that was it was derived from the primary? Hard to discern. It could be that “building” is the primary and “son” was derived from of the fact that the son builds the extension of his parents’ family. But it could be the opposite way around, that building something is based on the word “son” because a building is the “brainchild” of the architect. It isn’t easy to decide.
It’s interesting to note that the word TEIVA is also close to the word TAVNIT. The word TEIVA means something like is vesicle, like a box, that has a separation between its insides and the outside environment. Noah’s Ark is called the TEIVA. A vessel that has a boundary is what gives it its form, so it could be there’s a relationship, and maybe the words are "cousins". It is also interesting to note that the word TEIVA ends with the letters BEIT HEH which also is the word meaning “inside of something” because that is exactly what a box does and Noah’s Ark did. It was the ultimate “inside” of things, protecting the people inside from the water on the outside.
Many classic Hebrew grammar scholars (an interesting summation of the different opinions is given by Solomon Pappenheim in his book CHESHEK SHLOMO)
held to the opinion that (almost) every classical Hebrew word can be reduced to one letter (!!) which symbolizes its primary meaning.
Biblical Hebrew's words have very subtle, but extremely profound meanings. The space available here nor a thousandfold more would be capable of even scratching the surface of the is intriguing subject.
If we were forced to give the exact biblical Hebrew translation for a "pattern", it might be a daunting task to hit the nail on the head. It might be TAVNIT derived from form. But it could also be derived from the word SEDER, which which connotates order. Or possibly from the word KETZEV which is like a equal beat of something or possibly from the word DFUS which means a mold.
There is no question that biblical Hebrew was intelligently designed. It exhibits all the attributes of an entity not only intelligently designed, but of **something ingeniously designed** and I think we should all appreciate it. It should be noted, though, the disturbing fact that modern Hebrew does not fully do justice to the biblical “father” and when we are studying these questions we should always investigate Scripture for the original and authentic meaning.
Again I appreciate Bill allowing me to post my comment here. Rabbi Yehoshua Scult, RabbiYScult@outlook.com
Hi Dr. Dembski,
I sometimes see Darwinists/materialists deny specification in biology. For instance, given an example of some structure with irreducibly complex function, they'll argue that humans have a tendency to project significance and intentionality onto things that do not actually possess it. A frequent example they give is the tendency of people to imagine faces and other images in clouds. You responded to one example of this line of thought here: https://evolutionnews.org/2022/09/rosenhouses-whoppers-seeing-patterns-in-biology-is-like-seeing-dragons-in-the-clouds/
But this is self-defeating. We don't consult a meteorologist on how a cloud came to resemble a face that someone imagined. We don't look for a historical explanation of how the face got there. The face doesn't need a "scientific" explanation, because its origin is in the imagination of the person seeing it, which they are only mentally projecting onto the cloud.
To deny specification in biology is thus to deny that there is anything objectively real in biology that needs to be explained, whether by intelligent design or Darwinian mechanisms or anything else. It is to deconstruct all of biology itself as a sort of illusion that we human beings are projecting onto the world. And since human beings are ourselves part of biology, it ultimately entails that we exist only as an illusion we are having of ourselves, which is obviously circular and nonsensical.
The problem for materialists, however, is that things in biology are specified precisely because they have function. From living organisms as wholes down to the individual organs they possess down to sub-cellular structures, life is absolutely rife with things that can only be described and defined via the teleological language of function, and that are only of explanatory interest because of that fact. But the concept of function is inseperable from intentionality and as such is logically irreducible to blind mechanism.
When we talk about objects designed by humans, the function of an object refers to what that object was *meant* or *intended for* by the person who designed it. An example would be the words written on a page, such as this comment. By themselves, the words are mere ink splots on a piece of paper or pixels on a screen. However, they have a *function*, namely to communicate a meaning that the writer (in this case myself) had in mind when designing the arrangement or pattern of the letters in his mind. Speaking in purely physical terms, the words that appear on a page are nothing more than the sum of their parts. The ink blots or pixels are not doing anything above and beyond the normal operation of physical laws governing their parts. The function comes *purely* from the writer's intentions in arranging them.
When you read my comment and understand it, you are doing what you explained above: "Next, an intelligence at the receiver, witnessing the signal, draws on its prior learning and knowledge to spot a familiar pattern. The pattern thereby becomes recognizable. And provided the signal is also improbable, the signal is inferred to be designed." That is, your mind reconstructs the same abstract pattern that was in my mind when I arranged the letters, and from there you ascertain the meaning or *function* for which I so arranged them.
The same is true of human artifacts in general, such as the pocket watch discovered in a field from Paley's famous thought experiment. Physically speaking, a watch is reducible to the sum of its parts - bits of metal and glass following the same deterministic laws as any other bits of metal and glass. However, the watch has a *function* of telling time by virtue of that being what its creator *intended* it for when coming up with the abstract design in his mind to carry out that intention. When you encounter the stopwatch in a field and ascertain that it is designed and has a function of telling time, you are (just as when reading and understanding someone's writing) reconstructing the abstract pattern that the designer of the stopwatch had in his mind when constructing it and the intentions for which he did so.
Note that you can have a PARTIAL reconstruction of the abstract pattern in the designer's mind without grasping all of it. For instance, you may ascertain that the watch was designed with a function, but not be sure what that function is. Or you may ascertain that it was intended to tell time, but not know *why* the designer wanted to keep time (eg to remember his anniversary) or what have you. The same is true for interpreting writing. You may not understand the language but recognize it as writing, or understand the text but not all the subtext, etc.
Returning to the subject of evolution and specification, the above explains why Darwin used "natural selection" to name the primary explanatory device of his theory, and why he defined it in terms of an analogy to animal breeding by humans. As mentioned previously, materialists cannot afford to deny consistently that biological function (and hence specification) is objectively real, because to do so is to reduce all of biology, including ourselves, to a subjective illusion projected by human beings, which leaves nothing objectively real to be explained by Darwinian evolution in the first place!
Darwin's idea was that if he could come up with a mechanism that was *analogous* to human design (such as animal breeding), then he could naturalize the concept of function without eliminating it. His implicit reasoning was something like:
P1) Natural selection "selects" things analogously to how human breeders do.
P2) Human breeders and other designers confer real function to things when they select them according to their designs.
C) Therefore natural selection confers real function too when it "selects" them.
But all analogies break down when pressed far enough, and the problem with this is that the analogy between natural selection and human design breaks down *on exactly the point that allows human design to confer function onto objects*.
As described above, what gives a human artifact function (whether it be to confer the meaning of a written work or to tell time or what have you) is the abstract pattern and the *intentions* in the mind of the designer for implementing that pattern. But natural selection doesn't HAVE any intentions or thoughts about abstract patterns. That's what is meant by the "natural" part.
In fact, natural selection isn't even a concrete entity such that it *could* have thoughts and intentions or do anything at all for that matter. It's an abstraction - a "useful fiction." It is often said that Darwin provided the mechanism of evolution, but this isn't really true. Darwinism is an EXPLANATORY mechanism, not a physical mechanism. It goes without saying that whatever *physical* mechanisms were involved in, say, the origin of the bacterial flagellum must have been radically different from whatever physical mechanisms were involved in the origin of the mammalian eye. When people say that the flagellum and the mammalian eye both came about by natural selection, it doesn't mean that they came about the same physical mechanisms. It's shorthand for saying that however these two things came about, they and their "function" were unintended. Darwinism is really a catch-all philosophical framework for trying to explain away intention without explaining away function, but function and intention are logically inseparable.
(Cont)
More thoughtful naturalists like Fodor, Searle, and Nagel have pointed out before why natural selection cannot in principle give an account for biological function, and why all the various Darwinian attempt to redefine function in materialist reductionist terms are circular failures, but all these problems are rooted in the same fundamental problem: that when we discern the function of human artifacts, we're actually reconstructing in our own minds the pattern and intention in the mind of the designer, but since natural selection has no mind and no intentions for us to reconstruct, it cannot possibly create any objectively real function for us to discern.
It follows that any function we think we see in anything formed by blind, unintentional processes can only be our own subjective mental projection onto reality, like a face seen in a cloud, hence there is no specification in biology for us to explain (and no us), and hence Darwinism is self-defeating.
The problem turns out to be even more acute when you consider that the sort of function exhibited by human-designed artifacts is derivative of a sort of function that is even more fundamentally incompatible with materialist reductionism.
Consider: As I pointed out above, the words I write on a page, considered only in their physical aspects (the pixels or ink blots, or whatever) apart from my abstract thoughts and intentions, are nothing more than the sum of their parts. They don't have any intrinsic function, meaning, or purpose apart from what I assigned to them by my thoughts. But what about my thoughts THEMSELVES, which I encode the words I write? It makes no sense to say that they have meaning or function only by virtue of my assigning it to them by my thoughts, or else you have a vicious infinite regress.
And this doesn't just apply to abstract thoughts and intentions, but also the the rational minds that have them. The function of the rational human intellect is to grasp truth via the *proper* application of universal laws of logic and reason. That function of our intellects is what allows us to tell when another person is *misusing* their intellect to reason *fallaciously*, and why we refer to such fallacious reasoning and the false conclusions reached by it AS fallacious, incorrect, and dysfunctional rather than merely different. It's why we say that somebody caught in a persistent delusion has a malfunctioning or disordered mind, not merely a different one.
If I were to write an invalid logical proof on a piece of paper, or write a logic CAD program on my computer that persistently gave wrong answers, we wouldn't say that the paper, pen ink, and/or computer were malfunctioning, because they would still be doing what I designed them to do. Their operation would still reflect my intentions and hence the function I assigned. But if God were to afflict my mind so that I reasoned fallaciously, we would rightly say that my mind was malfunctioning, even though He created me in the first place. That's because my mind, unlike human artifacts, has been made with an *instrinsic* function, not merely an externally assigned one.
Or consider phenomenal consciousness, which at least some animals seem to clearly share with human beings. Consciousness is clearly an example of biological function, but again the function is clearly instrinsic. It makes no sense to say that a creature that has subjective conscious experience does so only by virtue of a designer (much less "natural selection") assigning that function to it, the way that I assign function to the words I wrote on a page.
Unlike objects with extrinsic function (like human artifacts), which are physically just the sum of their parts apart from the intentions and thoughts of their designers, things with instrinsic function are MORE than the sum of their parts, and have powers that are irreducible to the combined powers of their material constituents. Consider that no matter how many words I write on a page, their meaning is still assigned by me, using my thoughts. At no point do they "add up" to having intrinsic meaning the way my thoughts do. And no matter how many unconscious molecules you put together following *only* the blind and deterministic physical laws that we know about, it doesn't "add up" to subjective conscious experience, much less rational intellects that grasp truth and universals. But thoughts, and consciousness, and rational minds very clearly exist, and it is incoherent to deny it.
But it is impossible for anything that is objectively greater than the sum of its parts and has irreducible powers to exist given the premises of materialist reductionism, and it is impossible for an unguided bottom-up process to build such a thing in principle. That is why the most consistent Darwinian materialists - the elminative materialists - DO in fact deny that consciousness, and thoughts, and rational minds exist - a position that entails that objective truth doesn't exist either.
And while the irreducible powers of intrinsically functional things (like consciouness and rationality) exist independently of being assigned by the intentions of a designing mind, the fact that they came into existence (and thus have a cause) means that their irreducible powers (or something greater from which their powers are derivative) must also exist in that which caused them to exist. And while the physical specification or pattern of the human body may not be *sufficient* to account for our rationality and consciousness existing and operating in the physical world, it is certainly *necessary*.
Now which kind of function is it that exists in biology, intrinsic or extrinsic? Well, intrinsic function clearly exists, since consciousness and rationality exist in us human beings, and we are also biological creatures. There are also many examples of function in biology (like the flagellum resembling a motor or the heart resembling a pump or the genetic code resembling computer code, etc) that are uncannily reminiscent of human-designed technology, albeit almost infinitely more advanced than our best work, and the operation of the clearly intrinsic function depends on such things as well (eg. I couldn't reason very well without my pump-like heart sending oxygen to my brain). Perhaps there is a combination of both.
But either way, as we have seen, both are incompatible with materialist reductionism, and neither can be produced by Darwinian evolution in principle. To deny that there are specifications in biology is to deny function (both intrinsic and extrinsic), and to deny function is to reject biology and ultimately all reality and truth as a subjective illusion that needs no explanation.
Finally, if there is any criticism I may make of specified complexity in biology, it's that it is perhaps somewhat redundant, because the whole reason life is specified is that it has function, and once you acknowledge that biological function is objectively real, you get design "for free" as it were without having to do any further probabilistic calculations, since the reality of biological function is incompatible with Darwinism in the first place and entails a mind as its source.
But that doesn't mean that specified complexity has no application in biology, because while design may be a given in general, there can still be cases of variations on designed functions in biology that aren't specifically designed themselves, which probabilities could help us tease apart.
And on further reflection, I think your concept of specified complexity anticipates this and entails the same conclusion, since as you have said, Darwinian mechanisms cannot, in and of themselves, produce specification of any sort, but can only arrive at specifications that were smuggled into their landscapes.
I'm not so sure that function entails intention in the strict logical sense. It could be that function is an imposition of our evolved minds, but that the structure exhibiting that function resulted not from intention. I don't personally buy this, but a materialist could make that argument. I could imagine a world in which natural systems evolve increasingly complex functions under selection pressure without needing to cross huge improbability barriers. Again, I don't personally buy this. But it seems that specified complexity is bending over backwards to meet the Darwinist on common ground, and even there it shows that Darwinian materialism does not succeed. Your view, it seems, is that it cannot succeed, but such would be more a philosophical than scientific argument. I'm interested in making the argument on the plain of science. Thanks for your comments. --Bill
Relatedly, I think that Darwinism is ironically "rescued" in large part by its own incoherence.
That is, because the biological function of life is so obvious and undeniable, and because any attempt to account for function in a way that is utterly devoid of intention and design is so unintelligible (especially for irreducibly complex structures, and even more for irreducibly non-mechanistic things like our own conscious selves), people can't help but reify Darwin's analogy by thinking of natural selection as a literally intelligent designer with intentions and foresight, and that in turn makes the theory seem much more plausible than it actually is. Darwin himself did this frequently, when challenged to account for the mammalian eye, for instance.
In short, the actual eliminativist implications of the theory are so radically incoherent that people can't even conceptualize them (the same way you cannot conceptualize a square circle), so both Darwinist and Darwin critic alike naturally tend to substitute a more intuitive theory in its place, with teleology snuck in the back door subconsciously.
You see the same thing with materialist philosophies of mind (which follow from consistent Darwinism). Eliminative materialism is the only view (or non-view) of the mind that is consistent with materialism, but its claims are so unintelligible that even self-identified eliminative materialists can't actually state them coherently or be consistent with them (they would have to give up such concepts as truth and logic and science altogether if they were), but precisely because the implications are so absurd that you literally can't even think about them, materialists DON'T think about them and don't realize just how indefensible their premises are, and instead come up with more intuitive "materialist" philosophies of mind that invariably sneak irreducible intentionality in the back door.
I think the issue for the materialist is that without intention, you're stuck with a purely nominalistic view of function: That is, it's something we're projecting onto living things, not something that's objectively there and needs an explanation.
Of course, it's possible that a complex structure on which a person is projecting function could come into existence accidentally - presumably that's how a cloud that a person imagines a face in comes about, after all - but in that case no explanation is needed for how the structure came to have that function. Complexity alone doesn't require an explanation after all (a purely random pattern being the most complex), but only *specified* complexity, and the specification comes from the function, so if the latter is illusory, so is the former.
It's true that I'm making a philosophical argument, but I think it's appropriate, because I think Darwinism itself is primarily a philosophical argument to the effect that function as a category can be reduced to blind mechanism via an analogy, albeit it's a philosophical argument with secondary empirical or scientific claims that follow from and depend on the philosophical premise.
So it makes sense to point out that the initial philosophical premise is actually incoherent, but also that even if one grants for the sake of argument that it isn't, the secondary empirical claims also fail on mathematical and empirical grounds, which is where specified complexity comes in.
It seems Bill has been tireless in making this argument. It is good to see a rigorous approach to this question that does not veer into supernatural phenomena, though that is where I started and that is where I continue to live.
If you want to find a starting point for this other approach in academia, I suppose it would be with Ian Stevenson. Where a physicist can choose to ignore clear signs of lived human experience, a psychiatrist betrays his profession if he does so. And so it was a psychiatrist that verified the reincarnation experiences of many children; perhaps the first academic attempt to do so in a competent manner.
This work left us with a new causative agent in the "toolbox" of science, the human "spirit" or personality. Though psychology and psychiatry had made something of this idea for some time, all others thought it was a "religious" concept not worthy of scientific inquiry. Though Stevenson was the first trained person in an academic position to challenge this rather naive assertion, he was certainly not the first trained person to take this new causative agent seriously.
In my experience, Hubbard was the first, though perhaps others could be found. And after him, Courtney Brown. Both of these men kept their work out of academia. Hubbard because his work was summarily rejected and Brown because he wanted to keep his professorship in mathematics.
Both these men used this newly-discovered causative agent as a research tool. Each developed their own techniques. But they arrived at quite similar conclusions.
These techniques may never be accepted as "scientific," but they support the work of Intelligent Design researchers, as well as work in other fields. like cosmology - to say nothing of psychology. But I have a fear that if more researchers do not start taking this work more seriously, that science will crash us into a brick wall in a manner that we may not be able to recover from. We already have the specter of the hydrogen bomb hanging over our heads. It is time to build a "spiritual weapon" of equal or greater power to give us a non-materialist exit strategy, for those who are interested.