My ID Challenge

[Swamidass (Peaceful Science)]

@GJDS

None of the quotes you give are of scientists properly teaching atheism. The quote you give us of a scientist doing very questionable philosophy, that many (most?) philosophers would dispute. Of course scientists do this all the time, but this is in no way germane to the scientific definition of evolution.

I am not innovating on this position. The point I am making is widely accepted in science by groups like the AAAS, the National Academy, and the NABT. The non-theist Engenie Scott writes:

Because creationists explain natural phenomena by saying “God performed a miracle,” we tell them that they are not doing science. This is easy to understand. The flip side, though, is that if science is limited by methodological materialism because of our inability to control an omnipotent power’s interference in nature, both “God did it” and “God didn’t do it” fail as scientific statements.Properly understood, the principle of methodological materialism requires neutrality towards God; we cannot say, wearing our scientist hats, whether God does or does not act.
Science and Religion, Methodology and Humanism | National Center for Science Education

I’ll point out that this is from the NCSE, the main political body that organized opposition to ID in the Dover Trial of 2005. NCSE is not a theistic evolutionist group, but an organization devoted to promoting the mainstream science understanding of evolution.

To be clear, this God-neutral view of evolution is the dominant view in science right now. Any scientist that tries to argue otherwise is extending science much farther than it can go, and disputing the current consensus. Of course, some scientists do conflate evolution and atheism in their scientific work, but it is not a proper use of science or scientific interpretation of evolution. Thankfully, this happens much more rarely than we might fear, and even when it does you can tell them they are wrong, quoting the NCSE to them if you like.

As to your statements here:

@GJDS

I think with some effort, other papers can be obtained to show that atheistic evolution is equated with the paradigm in biology. Some more effort may be needed to follow the patchwork of changes in claims, and attempts to rescue TOE from scientific scrutiny. But the serious criticism, to my way of thinking, geos back to (perhaps) the TOE is a semantic statement, and the only paradigm in the sciences that cannot be derived from first principles (mathematical rigour), nor can we perform straightforward experimental verification of its fundamentals (which by definition ought to be equated with first principles).

I must respectfully and forcefully disagree on several points.

This make come as a surprise, but there is a very solid mathematical foundation to evolution, and a very strong experimental grounding. This doesn’t make it “True” (because science does not make truth claims), but evolution is very compelling in science.

1. Atheistic evolution is absolutely not the paradigm in biology. Period. No scientific theory, not even evolution, makes any statements about God’s existence or action. Any conclusion otherwise would also (for logical consistency) also conclude that the theory of gravity (for example) is atheistic, because it does not explicitly invoke God.
2. You use “first principles” in a strange way, as if it means “straightforward experimental verification of its fundamentals.” Just to be clear, you use the terms very differently than we do in science.
3. There are several other theories that are derived in a very similar way as evolution, and are not verifiable by straightforward experimentation. A great example is inflation and the Big Bang. Also black holes, the age of the earth, the Higgs Boson, and many many more things. Even things that are “testable” were often settled upon long before their truly seminal experiment (e.g. heliocentricity, general relativity,and many more).
4. Moreover, there is whole fields of science focused on “emergent” properties that are not derivable from “first principles,” thinks like protein function (because we cannot derive protein structure from sequence) and (e.g. action of psychiatric drugs) medicine are great examples.
5. It is totally false to say that evolution does not have experimental verification. The truth is that it has an immense body of experimental work behind it. To be clear, its not that we have “evolved a mouse from an amoeba” in the laboratory. Rather, if specific mechanisms of evolution are true, they make testable predictions about how biological systems behave today. We can test these predictions in biological systems experimentally, and there is an immense body of work that does just this, finding that predictions from some mechanisms are wrong (e.g. neo-Darwinian positive-selection dominated change) and of others are correct (e.g. neutral theory and common descent). This one of the big reasons that I (as a biologist) say there is very strong evidence for evolution.
6. Also, and this is widely underappreciated, there is a solid mathematical basis underlying genomic change in evolution: neutral theory. This mathematically explains why humans and chimps are 10x less different than mice and rats, making precise predictions about de novo mutation rates that we have now experimentally validated. This has immensely important implications for genomic medicine, and evolution really guides the way here.

I think the real issue here, respectfully, is that you are not aware of precise scientific definition of evolution (common descent), the rules of science (that we never explicitly invoke God in scientific theories), the widely agreed upon (within science) limits of science, and the actual science of evolution. I hope I am not being presumptuous here, and I mean no disrespect.

I understand that evolution means different things in pop culture, but in science it has a much more precise meaning. This cannot just be ignored in conversations about evolution.