Did Charles Darwin believe in God?

[Nuno]

@Jon_Garvey

I must thank you for your excellent followup - posts like yours make me wish I could Like a post more than once.

@Jon_Garvey

Without arguing the extent to which Dembski et al have, or have not, provided one, do you not think the very difficulty of doing so is the interesting thing, given that intelligent design, in its human iteration, is all-pervasive and blatantly obvious in our world? Why is it not even possible to detect that mathematically (for if we could, we could presumably apply the same maths to nature)?

If there is no mathematical formulation capable of demonstrating the difference between human design and non design, does that not suggest the possibility that it’s the wrong quest, or at least not the most helpful one?

I could not agree more. This is but an example of how we can get caught up with “evidence” and “methods” on everyday things while becoming distracted from the Christian core of faith in God. This reminds me of the apostles’ procedural question to Jesus Christ in Matthew 17:19 (“Why could we not cast it out?”), to which Jesus simply replies ““Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.””. I do not doubt that many ID proponents are true believers seeking to adore God through proposed models of irreducible complexity, but it is crucial to not get lost in the weeds and become distracted from the core foundation of our relationship to God through faith in Jesus Christ.

@Jon_Garvey

Science may be helped by maths, but cannot be said to depend on it, or else your later statements about our inability to model evoloution accurately (that is, to produce a sufficiently representative mathematical formulation) would exclude evolutionary theory from science just as much as ID. No predictive model of evolution exists, unless you count the restricted and idealised modelling of population genetics - a classic case of mathematical abstraction from a highly complex and contingent reality.

I also agree with these points. @GJDS brought up a similar perspective on a separate thread and I also agreed that it is important to acknowledge the nascent stage of research in evolution (post here) while also recognizing the challenges and the sometimes centuries-long coalescence of scientific observations into more precise mathematical models (post here). The main difference I see on this point is that science seeks to devise predictive models that can be tested by experimental observation. As such, even if observations cannot yet be fully predicted by current models, it is important that scientific fields provide models that at least make some predictions that capture some of the observations - this is true of evolution in experiments like LTEE but I do agree that these current models and small-scale experiments are still a far cry from the wild claims of some (e.g., Dawkins).