I looked at your website but could not see what you actually doing.
Have you published any of your research? Where can it be found?
@DennisVenema I commented on your article above, but did not yet know how to tag you. In addition to protesting your implication that Intelligent Design is a god-of-the-gaps argument, I wanted to point out another thing: The Bible makes claims about reality. For anyone who believes these claims are true, why is it “misguided” to try to verify them? I understand that some claims must be interpreted through the lens of ancient culture and what-not, but “intelligent design” is probably the most basic claim. If there is no super-terrestrial creative mind, then there is not truth to the spirituality you claim as your own. How, then, would it be “misguided” for somebody like you, who makes spiritual claims about reality, to marshal evidence in the service of verifying the most basic of those claims?
Before anyone responds, I have to reiterate that the abuse of science approach seems incredibly unfair to me. It is not an abuse of science to recognize the effects of intelligence, and then to infer intelligence wherever we observe its effects. The proper term for that kind of reasoning is positive inference. So, one is not abusing science by co-opting the Intelligent Design argument from information to support the most basic claim that [Christianity] makes about reality.
Earlier in this thread, I made 2 suggestions to @God’sBiology. First that he read a standard biochemistry or molecular biology text, and second that he change his focus from “the movements of atoms” in living bodies to the origin of the first cell. These suggestions are similar to @swamidass discussion of the differences between origin of life, ID, evolution and vitalism.
The point is that vitalism is a disproven theory, and will not be resurrected, no matter how much “research” is done. I hope that Tom understands this. For example, one can wonder at the ability of living cells to make most of the amino acids (to get back to the real OP blog here) that it needs to build proteins. But it doesnt require God (or anything) to move any atoms around. We know the chemistry of how alanine or aspartic acid are made. These chemical reactions use biochemical catalysts made of proteins, called enzymes, and I learned the basic chemical pathways for each of these reactions as a graduate student in the 1970s. No mysteries there, just a lot of very complex chemistry.
The same thing is true for how proteins are made, how energy is produced and stored, and how gene expression is regulated, but there the complexity is astounding, and we are still learning more about the details.
So the question is not how does life function. We know that. We also know how carrots and bunny rabbits and primates got here. What we dont know is how the first cells got here. How the basic cellular biochemistry began. That is the area where a lot more research is needed.
My current suggestion is that we agree that vitalism is dead, and that we move on to further discussion of the OP as @bloodymurderlive has done.
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I didn’t see any lesson plans, either.
Do the ideas of ‘souls’ intersect with any variants of vitalism?
I’m not sure why we are talking about vitalism when there are some fairly obvious problems with the rationale in Dennis’ article (see my comments above).
And I mean that in the friendliest way, @DennisVenema
Further discussion about vitalism and atomic biology should continue on another thread.
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Should BioLogos be used to sell books?
Is @DennisVenema still monitoring this conversation, does anyone know? Perhaps he is saving his response for his next article in the series…
@bloodymurderlive and others:
I think generally when the discussion is a) over a week past publication, and b) hopelessly sidetracked, authors tend not to want to respond. Dennis is also overseas at the moment with less availability than usual.
His next entries in this series are coming within the next two weeks. I would save your comments for that entry.
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And Dennis is having a really good time, it seems!
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