Not as a criteria, nor undisputed.
Richard
An important interesting thing about our informal intelligent design club (back before the young-Earth creationists hijacked the term) was that it was accepted by everyone that once you conclude from science that there must be a Designer, doing science with that as a restricting premise means departing from science. [Most of the group were atheists and agnostics who due to studying science had come to the conclusion of a Designer.]
Another interesting thing was that the largest contingent in terms of majors were the biology students – they saw in evolution a schema, a system, so elegant as to be brilliant beyond pretty much anything (though the cosmologists argued the point).
And they had no time for anyone who wanted to start with the conclusion of Design and do science from there; once reaching the conclusion that there must be a Designer, the question moved to whether that Designer would communicate with His/Her/Its creatures, and if so what religion was the best candidate? Almost needless to say, they drove the occasional YEC visitor crazy… which was immense fun for everyone except said visitor.
But do you see that these make no difference to the study of science? Unless you can form a hypothesis that makes these testable, they’re not tools for science, they’re an off-ramp to the question “Has this Designer communicated with we whom He designed?” – which isn’t something science can answer.
YECists are inherently doing things backwards – even the scriptures! God invites studying His universe to understand Him in new ways; nowhere does He say to restrict that study by artificially imposed limits that can’t even be found in the scriptures but come from outside.
The point in the above quotes is that Creation was done by God; they don’t care about means other than the mention that God spoke to things that “were not” and commanded them to be.
As for ravaging the Earth, that comes from Western Christianity totally misunderstanding the instruction to “have dominion”: it is taken as license to do as they please, rather than an instruction subject to the purpose of tending and caring for the Earth.
Taking science in a broad sense to include archaeology and linguistics, science has been responsible over the last quarter-century in showing just how badly the Hebrew scriptures especially have been misunderstood – and all too often in a triumphalistic way that pumps up human importance and thus egos. We’ve learned a number of things about the first Genesis Creation account that have shed immense light on the purpose and about the language of the flood account that totally change the traditional image of a huge wooden boat with multiple decks like a floating zoo.
That’s not actually where the change should start: the six 24-hour day interpretation can no longer be sustained just in the face of what we’ve learned about the literary types involved! I think the most striking and shocking thing we’ve learned is that the first account follows the order of events in the Egyptian creation story pretty much down the line – it just totally upends the meaning of the Egyptian version and can sort of be summarized as “All your gods are belong to YHWH!” because point by point it demotes every Egyptian deity involved to the status of one of YHWH-Elohim’s tools.
Yeah, that would be the Deceiver’s version.
Wow. I think I learned more from that paragraph than from many pages read since graduating university!
Makes the insides of cells seem sloppy somehow . . .
I can’t understand that at all. After all, I don’t think it’s an accident that God is called the “Ancient of Days”, which pretty much says right up front that He experienced a lot more days than the entire human race!
Interesting observation – I’m going to have to ponder this.
Though I’ve encountered all too many Christians who do in fact regard it as a “disposable planet” and all the species in God’s choir as disposable voices. Quite unhappily, that sort make up a large portion of Congress.
All it takes is reading the parables in the Old Testament to know that God will not interfere as humans trash the Earth – after all, the owner of the vineyard didn’t stop the tenants from misusing it.
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That sort of depends on which definitions you want to use. Augustine himself didn’t have just one meaning. If by it you mean that “There was a first sin among humans and it changed the race”, then yes, orthodoxy (and Orthodoxy) includes it.
But what’s the relevance here? – this seems rather a departure from the flow of the topic.
It was a dig at me from a previous conversation
Richard
I am glad to see an acknowledgement of this.
Irriducible complexisty has always been the enemy of Evolutionary theory with or without God. Do you think it has been properly addressed? Or has it been buried under several tons of DNA! By going microscopic people seem to think they have bypassed interdependent systems and Ecology. Can a change in DNA instantly produce a new integrated system? What are the chances? From what I am hearing DNA mutations can wipe out one system and invent a new one almost instantaneously. But, how the embryo is supposed to interact (feed and grow) with the completely different mother is beyond me.
DNA matching and nesting Heredity is proven mathematically but how they get from one to the other is not addressed. The connections are there so it must be!
Perhaps I have got this wrong somewhere?
Richard
The question is whether they departed from science before reaching the conclusion of design
In my experience, design conclusions can be broken down into two categories:
- It looks designed based on my own subjective opinion.
- I can’t believe evolution could do this, therefore it had to be a designer (designer of the gaps).
Neither of those are science. I have yet to see a proper scientific argument for design. This is not to say that intelligent design has to be scientific. If design is a personal or religious belief, all the more power to the person who holds that belief. However, if these conclusions are claimed to be scientific then there is going to be scrutiny to see if intelligent design meets those requirements.
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Stochastic might be a better description. Proteins are often portrayed as binding one target or driving just one reaction, but this isn’t the reality. Proteins will bind a whole host of targets and can drive many different types of side reactions. It isn’t surprising at all that proteins like RNA transcriptase can occasionally bind off target and drive the production of RNA from junk DNA. It also isn’t surprising at all that transcription binding sites will naturally appear in junk DNA as it accumulates mutations. DNA isn’t chemically inert, so even junk DNA will react with stuff around it.
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And you never will. It is not a scientific theory. It implies or includes a higher or controlling intelligence. Until or unless science embraces the concept of God there will be no scientific theory on designing.
Richard
How would that work? How does one test scientific hypotheses using your vision of the scientific method?
Let’s say there is a clinical trial for an antibiotic. The standard way of doing this science is to have a control and experimental group, and then you compare medical outcomes. How would this methodology change once God is inserted into the process? If the group taking the experimental antibiotic did better than the control group would I have to withhold my conclusion that the antibiotic works because God could have somehow changed the results?
For faith to exist God cannot be proved. If God was proved to exist and sat in the sky like the moon He has two choices.
1 dominate and remove any free will or choice
2 Do nothing and be pronounced benign and therefore ignored
Faith means you can choose to accept what evidence there is, or ignore it with no consequences. Science cannot exist in conjunction with faith.
Well, actually there is a theory that the accpetance of Evolution is a sort of faith. It is no more provable in reality than God is.
Therefore Theistic evolution cannot be proved either. You are just exchanging one sort of faith for another.
All that a theistic scientist can do is prove that the current theory cannot work. They cannot prove that including God does because they cannot prove the existence of God. They can show a void that God might fill. Or a gap that cannot be bridged (Between the earth and the moon, for instance. You need a carrier, not a physical bridge)
God of the Gaps was a failed attempt at this. It didn’t work for many reasons, not the least because it accused God of “tinkering” with creation.
Evolutionary theory claims that gaps do not exist, but it cannot actually fulfill all the changes needed and keep the poor intermediary creature(s) alive.
So we have stalemate. Your faith against mine. Evolution with God or without. The jury is still out and will come back undecided. Because neither can be proved without doubt.
Richard
It has. I was an ID proponent until I learned of neutral drift and the neutral theory of evolution. It does indeed produce complexity and new information.
So there you are, stuck in a paradox of your own creation, demanding something from science that science never could provide nor ever will. What you are wanting is not science.
‘snot gonna happ’n, cuz ‘saint science, nor ever will be.
No, it is your perception and incredulity that eliminate God from your understanding of science, because you misunderstand what science is. Maybe contemplate how God’s providence works?
I don’t make any statement about God being involved. I am not an ontological naturalist, just a methodological one. I am simply seeing if the evidence is consistent with the natural processes we can observe and test and make no claims about how God may or may not be involved.
You seemed to state that science SHOULD incorporate God.
“Until or unless science embraces the concept of God there will be no scientific theory on designing.”
Am I misunderstanding you here?
So far there hasn’t been a valid case of irreducible complexity, though some of the potential ones were puzzles sufficient to drive some research forward – that’s one reason I love hearing about new proposals for irreducible complexity: either we finally find one, or we end up learning a lot we didn’t now before . . . though come to think of it, actually finding one would itself be a lesson. But since God is one Who hides Himself, I don’t think we’ll actually find one, we’ll just keep running into apparent ones that will serve as puzzles showing just how creative God was in using evolution.
No one in our informal club came to conclude there was a Designer due to some alleged case of irreducible complexity, it was always because of the amazing elegance in “programming” of evolution or cosmology or physics because in every case the entire complex system runs on the basis of just a few rules that guarantee that things will continue to develop and we will continue to learn. In fact one individual who was at the stage of asking if the Designer had attempted to communicate decided for the Old Testament because of how Genesis says God created life: God commanded the sea and land to “Bring forth!” living things, and what evolution says is that living things just keep getting brought forth and increasing in diversity and beauty in a species level adherence to being fruitful and multiplying. To him the fact that the Earth keeps producing new species was evidence that God’s command to “Bring forth!” was still in effect. [And having decided the Creation account in Genesis best fit the evidence of evolution, he set about studying the rest of it, and then the New Testament.] As a computer major in the group put it, that a simple code consisting of just four “letters” could unfold into the amazing complexity of life on this planet is pretty much the ultimate in elegant programming – minimal coding with maximal results.
I haven’t seen that claimed here (or anywhere else for that matter, at least not by actual scientists). A mutation doesn’t change a system it changes a protein and thus a structure, which can tweak how a system functions. At least for survivalable mutations that’s true; I suppose it’s possible for a mutation to occur that would “break” a system, but those wouldn’t be likely to be survivable.
It’s the “how they get from one to the other” that results in a nested hierarchy: the “how” is really one mutation at a time.
I won’t try to speak to the math; the farthest along I got in anything biological used linear algebra to model ecosystems. I think mathematically proving things is graduate level bio.
I would categorize the conclusions as “argument from elegance”. There was a Bloom County cartoon that most of us liked, though it doesn’t quite express the idea–
Interestingly there was an agnostic professor who had that on his office door.
I recall reading a while back about a finding that a given protein doesn’t always fold in the same way, that how it ends up folding can depend on conditions in the cell. It made me think of a guy who argued that there aren’t enough different proteins to support the complexity of life.
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That would fit under category 1) It looks designed based on my own subjective opinion.
That is definitely true. Things like pH, salt concentrations, and oxygen content can definitely affect protein folding. Chaperone proteins can also aid or affect the folding of other proteins. I have had to denature then refold proteins in a lab setting, which can be a very difficult process to get right.
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Oh, nonsense! Try telling that to all the numerous Christian (and Jewish) science professors I had!
The assertion rests on a total misunderstanding of science. In reality science rarely has anything to do with faith, so they can exist “in conjunction” just fine. I think it was C.S. Lewis who pointed out that replacing fairies as an explanation for the beauty of a garden with God as the explanation doesn’t change the science about the garden in the least because science boils down to what human eyes can see, and we can see neither fairies nor God.
Or that it plainly does work. As I’ve noted about our informal intelligent design club (before the young-Earth creationists hijacked the term), the reasons those atheist and agnostic students were coming to faith was because the science does work.
All creatures are intermediary creatures. Every generation is the intermediary between the previous one and the next. And none of them have any problem in surviving; those that do tend to die out.
I’ve witnessed that in my flower garden in a rather common type of mutation: a certain flowering plant in one generation had a single row of blossoms along one side of the stem, while the next had blossoms on three sides. Put their seeds under a microscope and it would be seen that the new generation had ended up with a triple copy of the gene saying “Grow on this side of the stem”.
I actually found one in the wild once that had blossoms on all four sides. That feature didn’t survive well because that amount of blossoms tends to catch more wind which in turn breaks the stem before blossoms yield seeds.
There’s also a floral variety where the ploidy was artificially increased on a mutant stem that had eight sides rather than just four, which made the stem strong enough to hold eight columns of blossoms.
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And don’t make me worry about prion diseases.
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The actual problem is that he’s asking for something that is pointless: even if every scientist on Earth became a Jew or Christian overnight science would not change in the least because there is no test for “Godness”. What he fails to see is that science “embracing God” wouldn’t change science in the least – as evidenced by all my believing professors plus our informal intelligent design club.
Oh, one of my Calvinist professors would have dearly loved to be a presenter at a symposium addressing the issue of how science relates to providence! He clearly saw something that Richard here fails to see: God doesn’t do a change here and a change there in evolution, rather everything that happens in evolution is equally done by God! And that means that it’s impossible to find particular things that God did because it’s a matter of looking for a needle in a haystack of other needles.
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