That sentence just doesn’t make any sense to me…
If we loosely define “Darwinian” to mean “natural selection” … I can’t imagine how you could AVOID the embrace of Natural Selection.
Why are “Laws of Form” NOT Darwinian? Because Darwin didn’t develop the idea? He also didn’t know about genes … but we don’t say Evolution is not Darwinian as soon as we start talking about genetics…
{My initial post of this comment had a lot of corruption from my poor connection. So the email notification version should be replaced by what appears below, although there will still be some dropped characters.}
I’ve read the “classics” of the ID movement and not a lot of the more recent books other than Darwin’s Doubt. I get very discouraged because so much that has been published under the “ID” label and self-description has been of extremely poor quality. (It’s hard to put much credibility in the philosophy and theology of authors whose understanding of science is utterly appalling, especially when they didn’t even bother to get help from a co-author or editor who could help correct their science errors.)
Reading ID books has been very discouraging at times because I probably share most (or even all) of the major theological positions of the authors so I get very frustrated when I can’t recommend the books to anyone.
Probably my biggest frustration with some of the best known authors of ID books is that they seem to have a very small view of God, especially when they speak as if “random chance” is some sort of obstacle to God. (Perhaps they have a view of God that is more akin to a general "Sunday School’ view of God instead of what the Bible actually teaches about God? I don’t know.)
Personally, I feel like the term, “Intelligent Design”, has become so negatively associated with very poor scholarship that I don’t think those negative connotations can be overcome. Unfortunately, ID has become a virtual synonym for pseudo-science in many quarters. (Whether that is deserved or not is another matter for another debate.) I know I am very hesitant to use the term “ID” in describing my own position because I don’t want to spend my time described what I DON’T think.
A few years ago I read some articles where the author suggested a term like “ultimate design”. He said that a new term could avoid the baggage that ID has accumulated (whether fairly or unfairly) and that most Christians are comfortable with saying something lie: “Everything we observe in the universe has its ultimate source in the mind of God. When God designed what we humans call “the laws of physics”, he knew and he willed everything that those natural processes would produce.” Science focuses on the proximate causation of natural processes. Theology and philosophy are not restricted to the scientific method so those fields of academic inquiry can investigate and discuss ultimate causation.
So I have no problem seeing evolutionary processes as part of God’s ultimate design for the development of the earth’s biosphere.
Most of the ID arguments one encounters online are philosophical arguments, often prompted by hatred towards the Theory of Evolution. Rarely is “ID theory” presented in a way that is at all scientific in nature. In fact, I’ve yet to see a presentation of a formal “scientific theory of Intelligent Design” that comes anywhere close to constituting an actually scientific theory.
I’m honored to think so, gingero, but whenever I mention this distinction I’m channeling Stephen Jay Gould: Top Cash Earning Games in India 2023 | Best Online Games to earn real money
Nevertheless, I appreciate the honor, however undeserved it may be.
I don’t understand that statement. EVERY scientific theory can be broken down to the same distinctions: The DATA (also known as evidence) are the facts which are observed. The scientific theory is the EXPLANATION of those facts.
Of course, once a scientific theory has survived many years of falsification testing and has successfully made impressive predictions, we treat it is as a scientific fact.
Thus, one can collect data about the sun and the planets in the world’s astronomical observatories and use them to form the explanation which has become known as the Copernican Theory of Planetary Motion. And because that scientific theory has survived falsification for so many years and is so reliable in terms of predictions—especially when helped out by the further explanatory details supplied by Einstein’s Theory—the theory of the solar system is treated as a fact. And that is what it is. It is factually true.
I don’t know who Ted Davis is. But the Theory of Evolution is both a fact and an explanation of facts.
Yes. Nested hierarchies.
Of course, there are many many other facts support the fact of common descent. For example, ERVs, although ERVs are best understood when one constructs phylogenetic trees.
I think there’s a bit more to this, Eddie. Let me refer our readers to this old column of mine, calling attention to the section just before the Historical Comments: http://biologos.org/blogs/ted-davis-reading-the-book-of-nature/science-and-the-bible-intelligent-design-part-5
Now, perhaps I misunderstood that book from Discovery or otherwise misrepresented it, in which case I trust I shall be corrected. My impression of it, however, is that it amounts to an anti-common ancestry book, and also a book aimed at undermining confidence in the well known conclusion of evolutionary biologists that humans today are descended from a large group of individuals, not from a single ancestral pair. Do I have this right?
If so, then I think we reasons to think that Discovery promotes anti-evolutionism and rejects common ancestry–at least (perhaps) until Denton’s current book, which is as you say, the first “firmly pro-evolutionary” book they have published. Anyway, I hope there are more like it, and fewer like the other one, so that we might indeed find some common ground.
I think I know him. Please see my reply to gingero for a clarification.
What do you consider the #1 biggest problem with the Theory of Evolution?
Mostly what I find in ID books which complain about the Theory of Evolution are complaints which say, “That’s too complex for natural processes to build.”
“Irreducible complexity” helped destroy the credibility of ID researchers. It even got destroyed in the Dover Trial when Behe displayed ignorance of the scientific literature where his “examples” were indeed explained—and the rest of the Discovery Institute “special witnesses” ran to the airport to get out of town quickly when they realized that they were about to be exposed on the witness standard.
I certainly believe God designed everything. But the Theory of Evolution states nothing to deny that role.
Ted Davis is The Biologos Fellow for the History of Science. He is (close your eyes, Ted) a brilliant historian, who you should get to know. I would suggest any of his posts (look in the Biologos Archives) or any of his series. My personal favorite was about the natural philosophy of Robert Boyle, and the nexus between early science and Christian faith.
I am not part of the Biologos team, but have been following this site for about 5 years. I think you will enjoy it, and I hope you will feel welcome here. In addition to the work of Ted Davis, you should explore some of the other terrific posts and series of articles that you can find here.
I agree with your sense of frustration about ID, and I also think that the use of the word intelligent to describe God or his works almost verges on blasphemy. God is far beyond intelligent. Making a watch requires intelligence. Making a rabbit (or a galaxy) goes way beyond intelligence. My preferred term is “Divine design”.
can you give a specific example that show us how a commondescent is a fact because of this?
realy? what about this paper?:
“Second, the PTERV1 phylogenetic tree is inconsistent with the generally accepted species tree for primates, suggesting a horizontal transmission as opposed to a vertical transmission from a common ape ancestor. An alternative explanation may be that the primate phylogeny is grossly incorrect, as has been proposed by a minority of anthropologists.”
and this one:
where is the hierarchy?
i have several. lets start with your example of ic systems. here is one way to check this problem: can you as intelligent designer change one system to another by adding one part at time with a new function in any step? (lets say a gps into a cell-phone).
we will check this later.
I really ought to be praising Sy’s review here - but i’ve done it on his blog. So I’ll just reiterate what I’ve noted before about nested heirarchies as evidence for common decent.
They are indeed supportive of common decent, but not of common decent alone. Linnaeus’ classification was the original nested heirarchy, but predated evolution. Linaaeus saw it as evidence supporting the principle of plenitude, ie that God had created (especially) every possible variation of form, which would inevitably fall into the heirarchical pattern. The father of taxonomy therefore saw nested heirachies as firm evidence for special creation - and what is evidence for two opposing positions cannot be used to prefer one over the other.
The ironic thing is that it’s the new biologists who are proposing that extensive horizontal exchange of information makes common descent a much-diluted proposition, and even (from some workers) that the evidence suggests multiple origins for life with horizontal interconnections thereafter, especially for the first 3 billion years or so.
That makes the usually accepted concept of “common descent” a rather local and partial phenomenon, like other “givens” of the old model like the “central dogma”, the “Weissman Barrier”, the “gene” as a fully-definable entity and many other things we’ve taken for granted.
Common descent and the tree of life form the basis for biological evolution. (I would ask you dcscccc, to refrain from using technological analogies for biological evolution. They dont work). We do know that horizontal gene transfer and many other complex interactions occur as well as direct vertical transfer. In other words the tree, is far more complex than any real tree with branches. I dont agree that this dilutes common descent, it just makes things more interesting.
dcscccc, the quotes you cite say nothing in opposition to common descent. I would suggest checking some basic texts on the subject.
you will see that they are actually work very well.
If machines reproduced in ways similar to life on earth, I might find your claim viable. But they don’t. So I can’t. Therefore, I would need to know more about your argument before I can accept technology as a useful analogy. Can you explain why I should think that technology analogies are nevertheless useful?
Of course, if the purpose of an analogy is that it improves the listener’s understanding of whatever it helps to explain, the very fact that there is disagreement about its effectiveness seems to make an important point.
I essentially see facts as the raw data and patterns/regularities/statistics derived essentially directly from that data. Whereas theory is an explanation of the particular facts and usually allows us to make predictions, for example Einstein’s Theory predicted gravity waves. Theories as Popper said are never totally proven and are always subject to complete rewriting or partial revision. DaveW
we actually have a self replicating robot:
and it doesnt have a conection to the argument. because the question is if there is a small steps between 2 different systems. so can change a gps into a cell-phone?
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