For what it’s worth, I will also share my final reflections on this conversation.
First of all, I want to echo the sentiment of @Jon_Garvey concerning the importance of this conversation. I must say, I had fun! I appreciate @Cornelius_Hunter’s willingness to come here and express his views. I wish more people involved in the origins discussion would do that. Imagine we could have such conversations here with Jason Lisle, Hugh Ross, or Stephen Meyer!
Mulling over the arguments that Cornelius brought to the table here, a certain frivolous image struck me that seems to capture the discourse quite well. Bear with me as I lay out this imagery:
Imagine a very long obstacle course, with obstacles of a large variety of difficulty levels. At the end of the course, there’s a group of scientists who study the way the athletes cover the course. It turns out that most of the course is parsimoniously captured by a single framework. For lack of a better word, these researchers call this framework “natural processes” (including, e.g., gravity, muscle biology and physiology). This framework helps the scientists to identify which obstacles were the most difficult ones. There are even some obstacles of which it is not completely clear yet how these were overcome by the athletes. However, the efficiency of the description provided by natural processes (for the rest of the course) generates a confidence that even the most problematic obstacles can in principle be understood in terms of the same processes. This confidence is reinforced by the fact that the athletes already covered the whole track and that the researchers are still making new progress in understanding how the different obstacles are being covered.
Then a certain Dr H comes along. Dr H starts pointing out all the difficulties he perceives to be present in this natural description. He spends hours on end arguing about how difficult certain obstacles are, while using the same framework of natural processes for that evaluation of difficulty. What’s more, he looks at the confidence these researchers have in the framework of natural processes (generated by its success for the large remainder of the obstacle course) and misidentifies it as religious zeal. Because of this, that whole framework looks like a religiously motivated story to Dr H. Some of the group of researchers ask him, “Then how you think those athletes covered the obstacle course?” He remains silent. Unfortunately, Dr H does not have any description to replace that framework with. The only solution Dr H offers in return is to back off from trying to understand the obstacles in terms of “natural processes”. However, without them, there would not even be a way to evaluate the difficulty level of the obstacles. Adopting his proposal would not only take away the fun of exploration from the researchers, it would leave Dr H himself without an interpretative framework because he has not proposed an alternative.
I know that analogies are never perfect, but this little story seems to capture the discourse here quite well. Cornelius thinks in terms of problems, while mainstream science is more about finding solutions. You can only fairly criticize a framework by confronting it with a more viable alternative. Thus far, I haven’t seen Cornelius come anywhere close to specifying such an alternative to the evolutionary paradigm.
My two cents,
Casper