Hi Argon
I regard myself as an independent in the matter of design, so neither feel an obligation, nor qualified, to speak on how any particular ID writers view things. Still less do I want to speak for Eddie, who speaks for himself… however, as a Platonist, he is surely symptathetic to the concept of formal causation.
But here is how I would parse your paragraph about Paul Nelson, without endorsing or rejecting its factual accuracy. In this context, “natural mechanisms” is taken to mean “independent of any design”. That is, specifically, “random mutations” are ontologically random either because there is no designer, or because he chose to make such processes autonomously random, ie unpredictable even to himself.
That is, there is no organising principle of formal causation, but only the particular efficient causes proposed by current evolutionary theory, which we all know and love.
Any particular change in the genome can be attributed to mere chance, but the proposed mechanisms are, the design theorist concludes, insufficient in their cumulative effect to produce the number of unique and useful DNA sequences seen in the transition from ape to human… especially in the context of the whole phenomenon of similarly harmonious living species.
Ergo, the dice have been loaded by design, and further explanations must be found either within or outside science, but in any case beyond the present scientific theory. In brief (and without trying to be too correct and exhaustive) those explanations could either be “miraculous” (or perhaps better if one wants to remain agnostic on the designer’s nature, “saltational”), “providential” (agnostically, “incremental”), or “lawlike”, all to the same end of introducing formal causation.
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“Miraculous” would mean the designer taking an ape, or even a bag of chemicals, and changing it saltationally into the human. Could one ever observe that, it would of course mean, in efficient causation terms, a whole bunch of lucky genetic changes at once. Analogy: Jesus is born of a virgin.
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“Providential” would mean that the changes happened over time according to the observed, or future improved, scientific observations, but improbably luckily from the point of view of outcome, compared to ontologically random events. In terms of efficient causation, the God who directs all “natural” events by concursus directs them, in this case, towards humanity. Analogy: God decides that his special prophet John the Baptist shall be born to Zechariah and Elizabeth.
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“Lawlike” would mean that the suspect “random” changes turn out not to be ontologically random at all, but subject to laws of chemistry, or emergent physics, or convergent evolution, or inherent teleology, etc. In other words, formal causation was built into the fabric of the world, but hitherto ignored and, actually, excluded from full scientific study methodologically. Example: we actually don’t seem to have any examples of that kind of inherent organisation, but we do analogously have inherent order in crystals, the propensity of carbon chemistry for endless variation, etc.
The point is that any, or all, of these, infer design from the net result, not from the efficient causation. In the Nelson example, “net result” is “too many Orphans”, but I’d equally go with “compare a human with an ape.” I don’t see any reason not to infer design at any particular level of detail in principle.
Saltation could be seen, like spontaneous generation, to be natural. Incremental change could be (and usually is) seen to be just the way the dice falls (or the arrow flies to Ahab’s weak spot). Natural law could be taken to be just the way the universe happens to be. But, as Asa Gray argued, the more felicitous organisation one sees, the less plausible the principle of “order arising spontaneously from chaos” becomes.
The actual issue, then, is “undirected” or “directed to an end by “intelligent” final causation, instantiating formal causation by whatever efficient and material causation may be observed or inferred”. Thus far we have the basis of both Aristotelian metaphysics and all natural theology, as well as Intelligent Design per se. Anexagoras has to work hard to make his case against proponents of cosmos.
My own 2 penn’orth is that one can only draw any conclusions about final and formal causation by sitting loose to science’s self-limitation to efficient and material causes. Science cannot possibly say why John the Baptist, rather than his stupid hypothetical sister in the next spermatozoon, was born, except by recourse to chance. But the Evolutionary Creationist is not merely a scientist, but a theologian, and should therefore be thoroughly cognisant of the need for, and the likely means of, God’s final and formal causation in Creation: God creates John the Baptist by design, as well as and beyond sexual reproduction, and the human species by design, as well as and beyond neutral drift, mutation, selection and so on.
That is certainly the level that Vincent Torley, Stephen Meyer, or William Dembski see things (not to mention William Paley, Thomas Aquinas, Justin Martyr or Alfred Russel Wallace). I just don’t know about Paul Nelson - but he has, at least, done more philosophy of science than the average biologist.