Did Charles Darwin believe in God?

Faith & Science Conversation
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happy new year to you as well. I’ll guess you find the ball firmly in your court and I look forward to your answers on what I believe to be the private message board on which I posted you. Guess my attempt to talk about a case for religious education as in Germany or in the UK would be well advised in the US as well was locked down early. It looks like a logic approach to the understanding of God that I hoped to find in “biologos” it is difficult to establish.

Looking forward to constructive discussions

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I must agree with this statement. I plan to join in again on January 2. It is necessary that I spend some time with my Nancy.

Best Wishes

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Certainly. Have a wonderful New Year!

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Pardon my ignorance. Computers get more advanced every week. How do I get to the private message board? Please let me know, for I am very interested in your topic. I will not be in contact until January 2, This sounds really interesting. I can’t wait for your response.

Edward AKA Henry

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no rush. you somehow managed to send me a private mail and when I click on my Icon it shows with an envelope icon in front. No idea how you get there yourself. I tried to reply in that thread hoping it would work go back to you as a private message. It might not give you an email alert for that but it should appear as a notification on your icon and in your message list. Still learning the system but it looks like it has a lot of features. When in a conversation you can click the icon of the sender instead of reply and hit message there.

There should be two messages in there. Do not panic, time is on our side. We both love God and Jesus - I assume, perhaps in diffrent ways, but we should have some constructive debate to help those who do not understand him at all.

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@Eddie

After searching around more I have now come across Dembski’s papers on conservation of information (Dembski 09)(Dembski and Marks 10). These are exactly along the lines which I thought a mathematical argument for detection of design would be constructed so I was a bit puzzled that there are no obvious links to these papers either from Dembski’s website or from other ID sites. I also found a number of responses pointing out issues in these papers so maybe these are no longer considered core contributions to ID?

Building on his concept of Complex Specified Information (CSI), Dembski further claims the following in Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information (emphasis mine):

If chance and necessity left to themselves cannot generate CSI, is it possible that chance and necessity working together might generate CSI? The answer is No. Whenever chance and necessity work together, the respective contributions of chance and necessity can be arranged sequentially. But by arranging the respective contributions of chance and necessity sequentially, it becomes clear that at no point in the sequence is CSI generated. Consider the case of trial-and-error (trial corresponds to necessity and error to chance). Once considered a crude method of problem solving, trial-and-error has so risen in the estimation of scientists that it is now regarded as the ultimate source of wisdom and creativity in nature. The probabilistic algorithms of computer science (e.g., genetic algorithms-see Forrest, 1993) all depend on trial-and-error. So too, the Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection is a trial-and-error combination in which mutation supplies the error and selection the trial. An error is committed after which a trial is made. But at no point is CSI generated.

Natural causes are therefore incapable of generating CSI. This broad conclusion I call the Law of Conservation of Information, or LCI for short. LCI has profound implications for science. Among its corollaries are the following: (1) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases. (2) CSI cannot be generated spontaneously, originate endogenously, or organize itself (as these terms are used in origins-of-life research). (3) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes either has been in the system eternally or was at some point added exogenously (implying that the system though now closed was not always closed). (4) In particular, any closed system of natural causes that is also of finite duration received whatever CSI it contains before it became a closed system.

If I read this excerpt right (that CSI cannot be emerge from a simpler system) and I put it together with Ewert’s/your point that “CSI is in the rules” then it would indeed seem that if a specific detailed series of steps is provided (according to the expected probabilities of each type of mutation) showing derivation of complex organisms from a simpler common ancestor, then the only “place” left in this formalism for CSI is in the rules themselves, as Ewert was pointing out wrt to Avida. So then this begs the question of how does one define the concept of “CSI in the rules” to be able to measure CSI in a set of rules before the rules are applied to a system? Only with some such measure would we be able to say whether Avida’s rules input more CSI into their simulation than Darwinian mutations input into evolution.

It would also be interesting to see how such a measure would score genetic algorithms (GA) used in optimization, as Dembski also mentions in this excerpt. I have implemented this type of algorithm in the past so I know that the amount of CSI input into the system is very small - yes, one needs to define what “mutation”, “crossover” and “recombination rate” operators mean when optimizing an objective function (“fitness” function in GA terms) over floating point numbers (each number is usually represented as a “gene”) but those definitions are generic and can be used for pretty much any floating point objective function. In other words, the only thing that needs to change when using GA for different application domains it to write the new fitness/objective function for the specific optimization problem (much like natural selection changes the definition of fitness in different ecological niches).

Just as GAs do not need to change operators for optimization over all functions on floating point parameters, it is important to note that the rules of genetics also do not change depending on ecological niches. But still, it would seem that a Darwinian or neo-Darwinian evolutionary process can be perceived to have an “end in mind” if defined as “adaptation to ecological niche” - presumably that does not count as “cheating” so should ecological constraints also be considered CSI?

GAs have also been extended to represent computer programs as “genomes” (Genetic Programming) so that they become able to “evolve” algorithms and have been shown to be able to derive algorithms for nontrivial tasks such as sorting numbers. These aren’t necessarily the most efficient algorithms for the job but they do seem to show that “information” can be “found” or “emerge” from a Darwinian-like system with simple generic rules. Again it is not clear where the CSI would be in this type of system.

It is unfortunate the Dembski seems to be moving away from ID so he will likely not be extending his models to address the remaining open questions - his website states this under his Books section: “As my interests have shifted to education from intelligent design, so too has my writing.”

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@Eddie

Thank you for considering the response even though I got carried away with the details of GAs :smile: They’re not the most efficient bunch but they’re definitely fun to play with.

But even without worrying too much about GAs, Dembski appears to claim that any input of information into the system would carry “information” (CSI) beyond just a random search so the conceptual question remains - would the natural selection restrictions imposed by different ecological niches count as an “information” input or not? I would say that natural selection does input information into the system and, in fact, “pure” neo-Darwinism will claim that that is all the information input into the system once the fundamental mechanisms of genetic variation are set in place.

It would be great if we could actually build the computer models to just test this question but unfortunately we don’t know enough to accurately predict phenotypes from genotypes, determine phenotype fitness or how to specify natural selection so even if Dembski’s math had held up we would likely still have to wait a while before we could actually test the concepts.

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live is willful control of the movement of matter and energy.

to explain:

in bacteria and viruses this will is encoded inside them in their DNA. It can be terminated by destroying the DNA or by destroying their integrity.
With humans the will is encoded outside the individual in the logos / word. What word moves you is a reflection of your God and it is understandable why some people live in denial about God as they may not want to talk about the words that move them

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Nuno, I’m late to this party, but you wrote:

That said, I unfortunately must agree with the reviewers in that a precise formal definition of irreducible complexity and intelligent design do not seem to exist.

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?

Intrinsically mathematics has to do with repeatable patterns, whereas design has everything to do with non-repeatable contingency - in which, as the ID people rightly say, it resembles chance.

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’m reminded of Michael Faraday, not a great mathematician but scarcely a slouch as a scientist, who considered the reduction of his work to mathematical terms (I’ve forgotten by whom) to be useful confirmation, but to limit the importance of experiment (necessary for contingent matters) and mental intuition (necessary for the imaginative leaps of theory). In other words, unlike Newton and others he did not believe the Creator made the Universe primarily on mathematical principles, though he did not deny math’s utility in symbolising truths of nature. Yet not all nature is equally reducible to mathematics - and how much more would that be true of an organising power outside nature, such as theism demands?

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@Jon_Garvey

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

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.

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).

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Hmm … it would appear that knowledge of human design is, perhaps, like knowledge of other minds - properly basic, in Alvin Plantinga’s terms. Both are equally difficult to prove by “reasons” (a long history in analytic philosophy), but both are foolish to deny - fortunately only the odd solypcist opposes these.

Plantinga also argues that belief in God is “properly basic”, for the same reasons. The proper was to know God is not by proofs, any more than you can prove the existence of other minds. Assume he is right - nevertheless there are many who disagree, so one supposes that it is legitimate to present various non-watertight arguments, from the metaphysical (Aquinas 5 ways, for example), to arguments from design like those of Richard Swinburne and Anthony Flew (just to remind ourselves ID is not quite as out on an intellectual limb as many here assume!). The last, in the tradition of Paley, take empirical findings of nature such as fine tuning as illustrations to drive home the force of the argument. There not scientific in the predictive sense, but they rely on scientific knowledge for their effect.

Turning to Intelligent Design per se (ie the demonstration of design in nature), then, as far as the majority of the human race is concerned, the existence of design (taken as intention and planning, not in a strict engineering sense) in nature is as “properly basic” as belief in other minds or belief in God. Any fool can see we were carefully designed. But in this case too there are also many objectors, who deny that such knowledge is basic, both amongst materialists and those believers who believe in “fully gifted (ie autonomous) creation”, post-Enlightenment misinterpreters of Aquinas’s secondary causes as exclusive, and so on.

The really subtle people in the theistic camp say "Organisms look designed, but behind that is an unguided design substitute, Darwinian evolution, BUT behind that is the invisible hand of the Creator not showing his hand to scientists (but showing it to naive non-scientists in spades - go figure!). But I’ll leave that aside.

By analogy it would seem legitimate, as in the case of doubters in God, to seek to back up the “instinctive” design inference with empirical observations, even if those arguments cannot be turned into mathematical predictive science which, properly, doesn’t seem to belong in the realm of design.

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@Jon_Garvey

I still agree even though your original intended meaning was different from how I first understood it :smile:. I have agreed with @Eddie and others that science is not the only way to obtain knowledge and that other forms of human reasoning are not any less valid just because they are not scientific. I agree that ID can be defined as a concept that can be the object of rational conversations and philosophical models. Where I disagree with ID proponents is in their movement leader’s (Meyer, Dembske, Behe) insistence on presenting ID as a scientific field and type of knowledge. I’m fine if people

take empirical findings of nature such as fine tuning as illustrations to drive home the force of the argument. There not scientific in the predictive sense, but they rely on scientific knowledge for their effect.

but I am not fine with misrepresentations such as this:

Is intelligent design a scientific theory? Yes.

Of course, ID would not have had anywhere near the impact it did if it had not been presented as a scientific alternative to evolution so I can understand why there was a drive to misrepresent it as such. Would you agree that ID is not a scientific theory nor a scientific field of research?

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@Eddie

I agree with you on the sincerity of the faith of ID proponents - that’s what I also stated. But I don’t think you would question the fact that there are many ex-Christians who abandoned the faith because they saw it in opposition with science and did not realize that knowledge of God and knowledge of nature are not meant to be competing explanations of reality. ID is dangerous because it claims to be a science and thus continues to promote a false sense of security that, when removed, may indeed lead some to abandon the faith. Just a few days ago someone mentioned on a separate thread that if he could be convinced that evolution is true then his faith would be at risk - yes, the background was YEC rather than just ID in that case but the risks are the same. Are those risks really necessary?

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It is unfortunate that for some people, the question reduces to choosing either Darwinian evolution or the faith in Christ. Although I find much of the historic conflict has been driven by such an unfortunate choice, it needs to be said that the approach adopted by Christians as far back as I can access in written records, has been to examine how reason and faith are in accord and without conflict. This approach ensures that the person can examine his/her thinking on what it means to be human, what we feel, believe and do as human beings, and in this way understand where faith sits within our life and ourselves. Science becomes an important source of knowledge, but is one of many fields of knowledge, and thus should be subjected to critical thinking and application of reason. This broader approach can help any of us to come to a clear understanding of ourselves and our beliefs - and enables us to make the most important choice of all, and that is what we believe and practice as human beings.

I would say the approach I advocate makes evolution one of plethora of theories and sources of knowledge, but it also enables us to see it is a relatively small part of the scientific enterprise, which in turn is one of many sources of knowledge. We may also appreciate the importance of putting an equal effort in understanding theology.

Perhaps an important point I can make is this - we cannot examine all human knowledge and history - thus the final point is trust in God and our own capacity for reason (and it needs to be said, put Darwinian evolution in the small pigeon hole it deserves).

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Nuno

Would you agree that ID is not a scientific theory nor a scientific field of research?

In the context of my own approach, which includes looking at the history and philosophy of ideas and their theological roots, I find that question more troublesome than it’s worth - the edges of science are a lot more fuzzy than the culture wars over there (and to some extent here in the UK) allow. My own concept of science broadened out greatly at university in 1973 when I added social psychology to my medical sciences portfolio… and even medicine itself is much more than science, but ought not to be excluded from the scientific field for that reason.

If one is researching ways of distinguishing between design and non-design (thereby clarifying the knowledge of what design is), then why is that not an intrinsically scientific pursuit? That’s why I brought up the issue of undeniable human design. What is it? What characterises it? Who in the hard sciences is investigating human invention rather than simply assuming it? In my view the work of probablists like Dembski and of a number of information theorists has cast significant light on what inevitably gets obscured by a physics-up approach to living systems.

But as I said before, such study cannot be reductive, any more than biology is turning out to be. So if ones understanding of science necessarily implies reduction to mathematical and other lawlike principles, then it has become restricted in its most fundamental task of investigating the world by any and all legitimate means - it has forgotten the study of contingency that took western science away from Aristotle.

Certainly I agree with Eddie that ID has not, primarily, been presented as an alternative to evolution, but as an alternative to open-ended undirected evolution - to the cultural dominance of materialistic scientism, in other words. And that’s where, over 5 years or so, I’ve found the problem to be, and it relates to your next post about apostasy because of perceived conflict between science and faith.

Too many theistic evolutionists buy into the non-scientific, purely metaphysical aspect of evolutionary theory that insists it is ultimately directionless, and end up saying, “Don’t worry - your Christian faith and evolutionary science are perfectly compatible. All you have to do is shift your views on God’s sovereignty, involvement in his world, and providential care to match the accepted view of evolution as ateleogical. Then there’s no conflict.”

The God who governs his covenant with Israel through his control of nature, who is concerned about the fate of individual sparrows, and to whom one ought to pray for tomorrow’s bread has to become the non-coercive God who gives nature autonomy and is not responsible for how many fingers human beings have. And who is definitely not responsible for the badly conceived jaw, the birth canal or the spine on pain of blasphemy (so Francisco Ayala on this site). And thus the science - or rather a scientistic interpretation of the science - has come to be the arbiter of theology in a divinely revealed faith.

Where that theological shift is not overt (because it would be too radical if it were admitted) it is as often as not fudged by an incoherent mixture of belief in the universe as a closed causal system and a God who nevertheless answers individual prayer. Maybe.

So is it more important that current definitions of science might be compromised, or that authentic Christian faith should be?

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@Eddie

Unfortunately we disagree on this view - the easier victory against new atheism is much simpler: science cannot make pronouncements on the existence or non-existence of God, period. That is what will disarm Dawkins and other new atheists and leave them with no arguments other than discuss literary styles vs the historical record - a battle that they would lose because they have no strengths there. Legitimizing that science can “suggest” or provide “evidence” either way just makes their position stronger by giving them a platform to argue against God.

I may be missing something (in which case I’d like to know what) but what you wrote is pretty much what ID does claim - it’s not only about the bacterial flagellum of course but that is one key example from which ID tries to generalize the concept of irreducible complexity. From ID’s own definitions:

There are many biological organs which function like "machines”: they work only if all their parts are present. If one part is removed, the entire machine “breaks down. These are called “irreducibly complex.” Evolution cannot build irreducibly complex structures because evolution requires that biological structures arise in small steps, each of which allows for the structure to perform some function.

Also, Dembske’s concept of Complex Specified Information (as discussed earlier on this thread) does claim to be able to mathematically prove the detection of design and is abundantly invoked in ID texts.

While I will agree that science must be circumscribed to the limits of what it can measure, it is a pretty good approach to determine mechanistic rules and exclude ways in which things cannot have happened. Without science people would still “legitimately” argue whether Earth is the center of the universe or not. Similarly, common ancestry indicates that God does not appear to have created a) immediately nor b) independently. These and other observations are valid and useful contributions to the conversation even if they will never constitute the whole of the conversation.