When you look at what the designer has accomplished the only options are God or aliens. If you want to say ID is only response for first life and then evolution took over from there that would make the aliens a little more likely.
Or angels, or demons, or time travellers. Or Plato’s Demiurge. Or we could say that there is some sort of teleological force inherent in nature that is either pushing toward or being pulled toward new designs.
Natural selection in other words.
No. Natural selection merely selects whatever survives long enough to reproduce. It doesn’t produce new designs. This would need to be something else.
How do you know this? Other than that is just your belief.
Natural selection takes an existing design and makes a minor tweak. Each minor tweak improves upon the earlier design. Enough minor tweaks and you end up with something that doesn’t look the same any more.
Natural selection isn’t what makes the tweak. It selects the tweak. Neo-Darwinism would say that random mutation makes the tweak. Assuming that Behe has made a reasonable case (and it appears to me that he has), then I think we should have a healthy dose of skepticism regarding neo-Darwinism.
That’s not relevant. Natural selection scrutinizes variation (the source is unimportant) and acts ratchet-like to move the selected things (whatever they are) closer to some local optimum (of function or whatever). This is clearly a directional process and can’t be distinguished, empirically, from a mindful design process. I think that was @Bill_II’s point, and it’s irrefutable.
Natural selection acting upon random mutation is a blind process. It selects whatever will survive to reproduce. But it is not directed towards constructing new binding sites, let alone new multi-protein molecular machines. If there are enough trials, it will occasionally get lucky and create a new binding site. But in his latest book, Darwin Devolves, I think Behe argued persuasively that Darwinian evolution will more often work by breaking or damaging genes. That’s not a direction that is likely to produce the molecular machines used by living organisms.
The questi9on is not did God arrange for evolution to create fins out of paws. The question is “Did God create a way that mammals to transition from land to the ocean?” Clearly God did. God created the land and the oceans to form the ecology of the earth. God created mammals on the land and enables them to also hive in the oceans. It is that simple, but of course it is not simple enough to happen by accident.
If all it required genetically was the breaking or damaging of genes, then maybe it did happen “by accident,” by which I would mean natural selection acting upon random mutations.
Thanks for sharing his summary. This quote is particularly striking to me:
Design theories can allow conceptual space for gaps in the course of nature.
As a scientist, I don’t even quite know how to respond to that statement… In part I want to chalk it up to the types of statements that can appear when philosophers write about what scientists actually do and how we learn things about nature. In another sense, it characterizes a lot of Christian thinking about science in that unapologetically glorifies the god of the gaps. It basically says, ‘cdesign proponentists have a superior ability to understand the natural world because they consider the possibility that gaps are there due to the activity of the god of their choosing unlike those other scientists.’
I am thankful there are many Christian scientists who don’t ascribe to such nonsense that generally all tend to fall into the evolutionary creation tent interestingly enough.
The least you could do is quote Ratzsch’s explanation of why he thinks that would be an advantage:
“Being open to design offers a further possible scientific benefit.36 Design theories can allow conceptual space for gaps in the course of nature. There may or may not actually be such gaps (that is an empirical question, and design as such cuts neither way here), but (paralleling an earlier point) if there are gaps, then any science which denies their existence will of necessity be either incomplete (offering no relevant explanation of some aspects of the phenome- non in question) or mistaken (offering a full, gapless explanation where a gap in fact does exist).”
I think it is understandable to have mistaken Del for a gap-loving design shill, but he’s not. I don’t believe in gods, and I think Del and others are wrong to claim that design requires a designer, but his essay still rings mostly true to me as a reasoned response to many of the more simplistic responses to design thought. Notice that he actually wrote about design, something almost completely absent from the blabbering of the ID movement today. He was my colleague for 10 years, and I learned a lot from him.
What do you think of his explanation of counterflow and how that can’t be used to detect design in nature? Personally, I like the all-too-brief treatment of cognitive resonance, and I think the Martian bulldozer is a perfect thought experiment to show that it is not necessary to know of, or even be able to guess at, the identity of a designer to recognize design. The only difference between Ratzsch and me at that point is that I follow Dennett in adding that the design that we can see need not come from an intelligence at all, because the ingredients in design (which we can summarize as “reasons” and are analogous to “function” or a weak sense of “purpose”) can be free-floating, discoverable by evolution.
I haven’t read it yet. Do you think he dealt persuasively with epistasis? How did he address or discuss new research into de novo gene birth? Did he choose some examples of positive selection, perhaps from examples of putative selective sweeps, and apply his reasoning to those? Does the book mention critiques by subject matter experts, or cite any communication from his attendance at conferences? I’m not sure when I’ll read the book (the reviews by knowledgeable scientists indicate that, like his previous work, it has almost no technical merit), so I’ll be curious to know your thoughts on these questions.
I’m sorry, what does that even mean or how is that helpful in learning about nature? All that that says is “we don’t know if there are gaps” and “if there was a God sized gap then we’d make a mistake not filling it with God.”
I am not a fan of gaps in evolution and anyone filling these - however, I am bemused by the notion put by ECs, who say God guides evolution, but He does not design it. Both of these views seek a god to ‘fill such gaps’, even if the semantics differ.
My view is that biology with the evolutionary paradigm are inadequately understood (gaps) and any theological statement that uses the inadequate paradigm must by default indulge in error (theological).
I didn’t have high hopes after reading this in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/
where it says:
Lee Smolin estimates that when all of the fine-tuning examples are considered, the chance of stars existing in the universe is 1 in 10^229. “In my opinion, a probability this tiny is not something we can let go unexplained. Luck will certainly not do here; we need some rational explanation of how something this unlikely turned out to be the case” (Smolin 1999, 45).
Most physicists agree with Smolin that the discovery of fine-tuning cries out for an explanation. One explanation is that the universe appears to be fine-tuned for the existence of life because it literally has been constructed for life by an intelligent agent.
This demonstrates to me that he completely misunderstands what Smolin did (i.e. what physicists can actually model is we can arbitrarily set bounds of physical constants and then assume some probability distribution within those bounds and see what combinations of constants work). That is not the type of calculation that ever could lead one to conclude that it “has been constructed for life by an intelligent agent” because the boundaries and distribution are entirely unknown. I could just as easily make a calculation where I assume different bounds and distributions and find that the odds of getting a universe with a star when randomly selected out of all possible universes is 25% like Cosmologist Fred Adams does.
I think that’s a good explanation and appreciate you helping me take a second look at the article. One of the flaws that others can employ is that many can be ignorant or deny “what characteristics which nature unaided by agency does not, would not, or even could not produce.” If one takes an approach like (as I understand it in his recent book) Behe where all nature can do is ‘break stuff’ even if it is advantageous. Therefore anything that appears to be contrary could fall into the category of ‘requiring intentional intelligence.’
I’m not sure how I could speculate on what ‘looking designed’ even looks like- at least in the sense of what kinds of things can occur over time frames of thousands to millions to billions of years. I still don’t quite get why the abstract reads:
“…design theories may bring to science deeper cognitive richness,broader conceptual resources, and more substantive anchors than a purely (methodologically) naturalistic science can achieve.”
Do you know how he concludes this?
Hi Steve,
I’ll just give you the current list of Behe’s replies to the critical reviews of his book:
To the pre-publication review in the journal Science:
To Jerry Coyne:
To Richard Lenski:
To his Lehigh colleagues, Greg Lang and Amber Rice:
I’m not sure that I know of anyone who believe that God guides evolution but didn’t ultimately design the mechanisms behind it.
Like I believe that God is ultimately responsible for the baryogenesis event and there is a legitimate gap in our knowledge of what caused the asymmetry between matter and antimatter (a difference of about one part in 10 billion), but what do I think we should do about this? Maybe we shall discover axions and that will simultaneously solve the question of what is dark matter and how CP violation occurred in the early universe that led to this baryogenesis.
I’m not quite following can you unpack that for me?
We know there are gaps in our understanding of evolution. If I asked you for a detailed explanation of the evolution of the bacterial flagellum, could you give one? Correct me if I’m wrong, but no you couldn’t. Instead, you would point to homologous proteins and do some handwaving while talking about all the different mechanisms we know that organisms use in evolution. But is someone allowed to doubt that those mechanisms could actually account for the evolution of the flagellum? Right now, no. Not if they want tenure. Once they get tenure, then you will occasionally find some biologist positing a different mechanism, such as Margulis’s symbiogenesis.
But it had better be mechanistic, Because we know that there was no designer involved, don’t we?
I would do what? You know there are two paths that scientists can take. It appears there’s the path of the intelligent design theorist that has never produced any papers on the bacterial flagellum but just keep insisting ‘its a problem too hard and impossible to occur step wise.’
I’d supply this review paper that highlights results across ten or so studies on the topic:
The bacterial flagellar motor and the evolution of molecular machines
And a nice summary of the interplay between theory and experiment:
The biophysicist’s guide to the bacterial flagellar motor
I would hope someday that you can stop reading sources that make such claims.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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