I Don’t Know

2008.07.26   prev     next

A recent ARN blog entry by Tom Magnuson says that the stopping point of ultimate explanation is mind (presumably the mind of God, which has always existed, or something like that). His reasoning is that if all minds are constructed from material substances, then where did matter come from — not necessarily this universe’s matter, but whatever kind of matter on which is built the highest mind(s) that exist anywhere?

It’s tempting to take this speculation on its face and start arguing that if a mind can exist forever with no cause, then maybe the ultimate form of matter can too. But to me that’s a wild goose chase that distracts from the really important point.

The stopping point of ultimate explanation is just this: I don’t know. Arguing about which came first, matter or mind, certainly can be a fun diversion, and I’m not against it. But it’s sheer speculation. The real stopping point of explanation is always, “I don’t know.” We can explain things only in terms of other things we know, and the chain of trace-back connection always ends with the admission of ignorance.

The popular, anti-ID, rhetorical question, “Who designed the designer(s),” is intended to imply that if we can’t provide plausible answers to an endless, child-like series of “why”s, then we know nothing — our whole set of claimed knowledge collapses. This is not so; we know that the planet Earth exists, even if we don’t know exactly how it formed. (And we’ve known that the planet exists long before we had even a loose scientific explanation of how it formed.)

A cause and an explanation are not the same thing. (See my prior comments in Mechanism, pp. 38-43.) A causal chain is necessarily a complete sequence of fully specified entities, such as:

But an explanatory chain rapidly weakens and fails as it gropes backward in time:

The same is true for trying to predict the future. If the future holds this:

we may be able to see only this:

Scientific explanation is the attempt to see backward in time as far as we can, and scientific prediction is the attempt to see forward in time as far as we can. Both are limited, and we must always admit that we don’t know what lies one more step beyond what we can see in either direction.

By treating their “who designed the designer(s)” question as a sort of trump card, the anti-ID people mistakenly apply the necessary completeness of the causal chain to the unavoidable incompleteness of the explanatory chain. A causal chain that is missing a piece won’t work. An explanatory chain that terminates in “I don’t know” (as do all explanatory chains) just means there’s a limit to how far back our current science can take us into the past. Causal chains move forward in time; explanatory chains move backward. Explanatory chains end with “I don’t know,” just as attempts to predict the outcome of existing causes (i.e. the future) chaotically diffuse into “I don’t know.”

Of course, substituting the omniscient, singular deity of your favorite religion in place of the phrase “I don’t know” is also a mistake. Both the Darwinists and the religious, it would seem, can’t bear to be without a currently-known, creative entity at the start of their explanatory chain. They can’t bear to say, “I don’t know.”