Thanks Eddie. I appreciate it.
Sorry to keep messing with your image of the organization, but you owe us some money! (there’s a “give” button in the upper right of most screens). Ted didn’t have anything to do with the divine action series. He’s working hard on other things.
Which is why I keep insisting that EC is no more prone to deism than ID.
We’re getting closer when you say this. Language causes all kinds of problems in this area (and in philosophy of action in general). More to come…
Hi Eddie,
Your schematization seems fairly solid, and I think you are right that where ECs and IDs differ (your variety of ID that is, and I am convinced that this is not a majority view for those who identify themselves with the position) is in their tendency to admit special divine action as a likely causal factor at key stages in natural history. Such a difference in outlook, being reduced to a simple matter of intellectual inclination when considering likely hypotheses for the formation of life on this planet, strikes me as a fairly trivial issue on which to build such a strong disagreement.
If this is really the crux of the issue, then this strikes me as hardly worth discussing, especially when both sides seem to concede that the question is open, regardless of what they personally happen to find more convincing. I have long guessed that the reason this might disturb you is that you strongly suspect the motives (and perhaps the naturalistic bias) of those who don’t think that special divine action is a likely solution for abiogenesis. If this is the case, I think you may be jumping to conclusions, and in spite of your frequent characterization of your dialogues with ECs, in any discussions I’ve seen you having with the biologos staff, their replies always struck me as being anything but shady, evasive and disingenuous. Maybe this characterizes some of your earlier discussions that I did not read, but I’m sort of hesitant to accept this (though I’m open to any link you want to provide).
It is clear that the ECs under discussion have no trouble with the idea that God can intervene (your well-considered concern for what this term might be thought to imply is noted), so it is a good guess that something else is driving the disagreement. It could be that social pressures stemming from an ambient naturalist worldview are hard at work behind the scenes. But on the other hand, it could be a whole range of other influences.
It could be that abiogenesis left us with nearly no evidence at all (for obvious reasons), so we have good reason to suspect that scientists addressing the question have essentially been flailing about in the dark with very few helpful pointers, like detectives at an 80 year-old cold-case crime scene. It may be the consideration that scientist have only been at it for half a century in a limited number of labs with highly limited ideas of what to look for, while the formation of early replicators would have arisen in an abiotic world-wide lab filled with an immense range of conditions and deriving from an unparalleled high-throughput experiment with infinitesimally graded variables and an enormous range of substrates over millions of years, making it a bit absurd for us to throw up our hands and admit failure (yes I realize you aren’t suggesting we do this). It may be due to the consideration that in every one of the untold number of times when some feature of the natural world did not seem susceptible to a natural explanation, further scientific investigation has proven that this intuition was wrong, with this pattern playing out this way so often that to bet against this outcome has become a bad idea. It may be because science has progressively uncovered such a self-consistent vision of the natural world through space and time, that any interruption in continuity (a causal gap) starts to look like an unlikely bet unless it has some purpose other than connecting the dots in an otherwise continuous space-time matrix (this is how special divine action leading to the creation of life tends to look, like it or not). Is it not reasonable to consider that a combination of these factors might result in what you end up viewing as an unreasonable bias?
I admit that I see no problem in principle with your view, but special divine action leading to the creation of life would strike me as an odd and surprising outcome given the elegant self-consistency that scientific investigation has otherwise uncovered. It is difficult to avoid automatically associating it with the idea of angelic adjustments of planetary motions, whether or not it is the same thing. It is easy to interpret it in this way, whether you call it an intervention or a special divine action, and whether or not you normalize it against the backdrop of the Hebrew perspective.
I also understand where the admittedly denigrating term “tinkering” comes from, since from this point of view, it becomes odd and inexplicable, when the rest of the picture seems to have unfolded from a singularity with such astonishing uniformity, that some unique feature was not made available in this unfolding. It simply becomes a kneejerk reaction to picture it as the boss showing up to handle some glaring lacuna in the company SOPs, even if this isn’t the necessary interpretation. The bottom line is that the conclusion that abiogenesis likely has a natural explanation is probably usually an induction from what we know about the natural world and the history of science rather than a deduction from what we think should be the case based on some bias toward naturalism.
This is really quite separate from questions of general divine action, which is something that both ECs and IDs need to consider without either position really offering much of an advantage.
That said, your observations about the worldview that is codified by the Hebrew language are well expressed and I think very helpful, as are your caveats about the terminology being used for these debates.
Hi Eddie,
Thanks for a balanced response. I think we find ourselves in agreement on most of the points that you touch on. I am glad that you are carefully distinguishing between ECs on some of these issues, since I have often felt that some of your somewhat sweeping characterizations did not reflect the views of many of us. I tend to agree that the bend-over-backward efforts to explain miracles in rationalistic terms comes off as silly, unconvincing and biased. And it’s also pretty 19th century (David Strauss viewed this rationalistic tendency as one of his main targets when writing his Life of Jesus), and therefore; bad;-). I remember a friend (who otherwise didn’t have a rationalistic bone in his body) trying to convince me many years ago that the red sea crossing could be wholly explained by winds and tides, and whatever my leanings at the time, I just couldn’t see the point of such an explanation when discussing the activity of an omnipotent God.
So yes, I do get where you are coming from on these issues, which is why I don’t tend to disagree with you here. As usual, my disagreement is with respect to your global assessment of the sciences and of what we can confidently include in a reliable (if approximate) body of knowledge. Since this impression for each of us is largely a culmination of all of the intangibles of our reading, discussions and work experience, I don’t think it’s useful to go into why each of us ends up with a different impression of where the sciences are at and what we can reliably expect from our future investigations. I recognize that the scientific method in all of its forms has very clear limits, but if in addition to this, I was under the impression that there were all sorts of aspects of the natural world that had no scientific explanation in principle, not because of human or technological limitations, but because we would find that they were at base supernatural, then I suppose I’d take your view.
The fundamental problem with this is (a) this does not match my impression of scientific progress, and as I said, it isn’t that science has routinely explained routine observations, it is that science has routinely explained things that were considered by many to be beyond any possible or accessible scientific explanation (rather like this very question), and (b) I can’t imagine reaching a place, in theory, were we can feel confident that we have exhausted all possible natural explanations for something like the origin of life, and I think it is absolutely incredible that anyone can reach the conclusion that we have more or less shown it to be all but impossible through our limited investigations. This second point is critical, because it means that special creation at this juncture in natural history can never really be established, because we will simply never have any idea how many of the realistic and possible hypotheses we have actually falsified in the limited time we have had to work on the limited number of ideas we’ve cooked up. If we knew that there were only 100 possibilities for how life formed and we felt that we have done enough work (another unlikely conclusion) to fully discard 85 of the most likely, then we could almost slap a probability on our assurance that God skipped the middle-man at this stage, but this is just not a realistic scenario. As I pointed out, the massive experiment that may have led to the formation of life is absolutely impossible for us to replicate on any scale or to any tiny degree, and we have hardly a clue or a scrap of evidence directing us to a starting point. I not only think that it is wildly premature to start discussing supernatural options, but I think that based on this thought experiment, we will never be in a position where we can reasonable decide to label any continuing investigation a “forlorn hope” unless it is because we have exhausted our own limited resources as investigators. Further, the origin of life seems to be receiving special treatment here; there are all sorts of scientific mysteries that have continued to baffle us for similar lengths of time, yet there isn’t a whisper of; “well then, maybe we need to start seriously considering Gods direct action here”. A tough question is a tough question, not an invitation to de facto wave the white flag even if the investigation continues in practice. That doesn’t mean that the naturalist explanation is true, it means that we have not yet reached the point, and probably never will, where we have any special reason to think that this scientific question has a less natural explanation than any other scientific question that is still the subject of ongoing investigation. So this combination of points leads me to suspect that the ID community is pushing to consider it a failed attempt, not because it is the least bit reasonable to think that we have covered every possibility and ruled out the scientific route, but because there is a driving predisposition to be able to point to a scientific failure and impel the recognition of God’s direct action. You probably have a more nuanced view on what is driving this ID push, but there it is.
I will look into Nagel’s book, and I know that there are a few others that deal more with the limits of science (like Barrow’s Impossibility) than with the fundamental incompleteness of the scientific picture. I am open to a mind-change here, but even if convinced that the holistic picture we’ve created is badly flawed, I’m not sure that this invalidates a probability inference that the origin of life is likely to be as susceptible to a natural explanation as so many of the apparently improbable steps in the evolution of life.
As usual, I think we will agree on most of the well-defined surface questions, while disagreeing on some of the less tangible considerations, but my main point it is that it is possibly wholly reasonable and hardly obviously biased for someone who views these questions in light of the above considerations to reach the conclusion that the natural explanation is probably the good one. I therefore think that you are mistaken in viewing this as an unjustified prejudice instead of a well reasoned impression of what we can likely expect, and I think that this mistake is largely related to your personal assessment of the state of scientific knowledge (which, as you must concede, is quite different from the assessment of many of the ECs you debate with). If we switched overall impressions of the sciences, there is some reason to think we’d switch expectations as well.
Thanks Eddie,
You view any confidence that abiogenesis is likely to have a natural explanation as a probably subconscious naturalistic bias ingrained by scientific training. I think that such psychological conjectures put you on extremely shaky ground, especially when those who actually hold the position explicitly state that their reasons lie elsewhere, lay out their reasons for coming to this conclusion and state that they are convinced by these instead of by some feeling of how it “must” be. On my own account, I’m not addressing the question against some sweeping background of an inflexible worldview, I’m addressing it with a number of points in mind that convince me that natural explanation just happens to be the right horse to bet on.
I’m not unsympathetic to the influence of bias, even when a position is reasoned through, but since any thoughts on this topic for me immediately gravitate to the specific points I have been trying to bring across instead of to any deductions from my scientific training or my worldview, I tend to view your description of the EC mindset on this topic as simply inaccurate as a generalization, even where I’ll admit that it may characterize some thinkers. You could suggest that the considerations I’ve listed are just a smokescreen I have set for myself to hide my true reasons for coming to this conclusion, but I’m sorry to say that I can’t take such psychological second guessing seriously and it is intrinsically a weak argument unless it is supported by something greater than a hunch. As I’ve said, some ECs are probably motivated in this way (or by all sorts of other bizarre considerations), and their statements will give the game away, but you have vastly overextended this to ECs who have given no such hints and who are ready to give reasons why they vouch for the a non-interventionist account.
I don’t think I should relist the reasons why I take a different view, since I think they were clear enough. You have offered a number of reasons that contribute to your own background tendency. Some of them are philosophical and I was not unaware of them, but since I am addressing a question about probabilities relating to a natural phenomenon, these philosophical considerations strike me as being intrinsically unlikely to be directly helpful and very likely to be misleading when working out the probabilities of any given hypothesis. Philosophical considerations do not contribute to the probability calculus that leads us to our personal conclusions on probability questions, it can only serve to expand or restrict the range of options.
Since we both agree on what not to rule out, the philosophical considerations you bring are not useful for differentiating our positions (though they are good for distinguishing from the strict materialist position), while we clearly disagree on the psychological considerations as I mentioned above (on this point I can at the very least state that you are incorrect in one case and probably incorrect for many other ECs).
What’s left? This is where it get’s interesting. You make statements like “But so far that is not what the best science tells us. So far, the best science tells us that life has specific arrangements which by their very nature do not proceed from natural laws alone and which are very unlikely to have arisen by chance” and your reference to James Tour lay the groundwork of your position. James Tour is an expert in his field, but he is also someone who seems to take the argument from personal incredulity far more seriously than the question warrants. Both the statement and the reference make it clear that probably your main exposure to this question is mediated through the discovery institute and those who are associated or sympathetic with it. Nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but it is difficult to deny that they are strongly motivated to view the scientific effort to assess the question as a failure and their entire raison d’etre is related to their efforts to identify God’s handiwork by scientific means. James Tour seems to be connected with this drive to see the scientific account in general as incomplete and he is simply not representative of the perspective of the vast majority of scientists on questions like evolution. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong, it means that with the exception of more specific questions relating to nanotechnology, he is a very poor envoy for delivering any message about what the best science tells us on subjects like evolution and abiogenesis.
And much more to the point, your above sentence is very problematic. You start by saying that the best science tells us that life has specific arrangements; though I would clarify this by correcting it to “life has a range of specific arrangements that are mapped to niche specific fitness landscapes”, since this probably is a more realistic description and it avoids the sense that only a discrete and very limited set of molecular arrangements are viable overall. That aside, you go on to say what the best science tells us; “…which by their very nature to not proceed from natural laws alone and which are very unlikely to have arisen by chance”. I strongly take issue with this; I can’t imagine where or when the best science has concluded that the very nature of these molecular arrangements requires something beyond natural laws or where the probabilities have been worked out in a way that is generally accepted by scientists. It seems to me that either finding would be viewed as a breakthrough scientific discovery. You say “the best science”, but since I don’t think it’s possible that I would have overlooked these conclusions if they were generally recognized conclusions, I’m guessing that what you mean is “ID science”. The very terminology being used is well outside the limits of scientific investigation (how on earth would one go about determining whether some arrangement in nature required the involvement of something beyond nature to come into being)?
Some of your follow up sentences bring me to a similar conclusion; “So what is the evidence, at present, that life could be formed out of the unguided movement of atoms and molecules? Close to zero.” This almost automatically reminds me of the absurd tornado in a junkyard argument. Not a single scientist is investigating the possibility that unguided atomic and molecular movements on their own produced complex arrangements that led to life. Obviously a “ratchet” approach (well described by Dawkins for evolution) is the best one, which is why scientists like Cairns-Smith have considered clay crystal minerals as a first step, whatever the merit of his approach. They are looking for how patterns and chains can spontaneously form and they are looking for what conditions will make each step toward self-replicators locally favorable, rendering the overall string of events likely or even inevitable. Obviously probabilities calculated on all of the atoms just happening to bump into each other in the right way are silly and are not taken seriously by anyone. You have essentially guessed at an overall probability (“close to zero”) without any of the knowledge about the specific conditions and interactions that are wholly necessary for determining the probability of each step that leads to this overall outcome, and this knowledge is logically prior to even beginning to think in terms of probabilities.
Your analysis of theological and philosophical questions are generally excellent, but these few statements on scientific/probability questions have very serious problems associated with them and are very poor fodder for any assessment.
Even your discussion of thermal vents is problematic, because it fails to account for the fact that any nascent early steps in the formation of life are rendered nearly impossible by the fact that this is no longer an abiotic world; any formation of some organic soup in today’s world is almost immediately food for scavengers in the food chain, and even controlled lab experiments are always in danger of being upset by contamination from the highly evolved life-forms already present.
In short, I do not think your scientific account stems from sources that can be relied upon to be unbiased, and I think the statements you have offered about scientific considerations have very clear problems and can’t be used to arrive at any conclusions. Nor do I think that they directly respond to the stated reasons that I view the natural account as more likely. Much of what you say is clear and advances the discussion, but I think that our biggest disagreement continues to be on scientific questions, and I think that my original and overall point was simply that your view that some naturalistic bias is all that is driving the EC position is very far from the mark. I’m open to new philosophical considerations but so far I can’t see them resolving these issues.
I enjoy our discussions and particularly your depth and clarity, so thanks for giving your thoughts on this!
Hello Eddie,
I think it’s much more accurate to say that the lecture tells us merely that James Tour thinks this, not that the best science tells us anything of the sort. If you disagree, let’s discuss the actual science (without name-dropping) that you think tells us this.
[quote=“Eddie, post:26, topic:4758”]
Thus, the Christian always has, as a real possibility, the hypothesis of a non-natural origin of life. [/quote]
And the real Christian scientist tests her hypotheses. Pseudoscientists do not.
[quote]And this is where Meyer’s discussion of “the best explanation” comes in. In the historical sciences, we often have to settle for “the best explanation” – we cannot obtain the sort of confirmation that lab-based sciences can obtain.
[/quote]Your distinction is not nearly as bright as you wish it to be. There’s still plenty of hypothesis testing to be done in the allegedly historical sciences. Your problem is that Meyer has never tested a hypothesis nor advanced a single hypothesis that makes empirical predictions, despite a great deal of sciency-sounding rhetoric.
Scientists all say that we should test the hypotheses, and the good ones do that.
Some will grossly misrepresent the scientific method as mere debate over data produced by some lower group of scientists, while in the real world the recognition goes primarily to those whose labs produce the paradigm-changing data.
Hello bren,
I agree completely, but should add that those who actually hold the position are actively trying to disprove their hypotheses.
Exactly. This also holds for RNA, as AFAIK every living thing secretes ribonuclease, which is miraculously stable. This makes perfect sense as a way for life to outcompete and obliterate most of the preceding RNA World, with only stable RNAs like rRNA and tRNA able to survive.
Hello Eddie,
You wrote that Tour’s opinion is what science tells us. That’s not accurate.
No, there is no such ruling out. That’s a mere hypothesis and you are simply asserting it.
Speaking of arbitrariness, maybe you could explain the central feature of the ribosome: that the enzymatic core is a ribozyme. Meyer clearly can’t.
If you’re being at all scientific, the opposite is true: the onus is clearly on you to test your own hypothesis.
For crying out loud, Eddie, it was a response to your “I would bet that Ted Davis has something to do with that.” In other words, you lose that bet, you’re wrong. No one is trying to shake you down,
Sorry, this will be a slightly long post (along with transparent euphemisms and out of place jokes, it’s one of my major weaknesses)
That rather misses the intended point. It was not meant as a personal defense, I was explaining why I personally happened to find your sweeping characterizations of EC psychology difficult to take seriously; it was just so far off the mark when comparing it with my own reflections that it seemed as though you couldn’t possibly be describing a genuine position held by a real person (yes I realize that real people think all sorts of odd things). While I don’t assume that my thinking perfectly reflects that of other ECs, I do assume that many of the same motives and arguments drive them, so I found that your zeroing in on naturalist biases is unbalanced at a minimum and I find that it comes off as a refusal to accept what they say at face value in favour of what you think they really mean. Did that whole list of people and those thousands of pages really involve a blanket admission that they think that the origin of life must be natural because God would never interrupt his own laws or because it simply must be true according to naturalistic principles, regardless of how intrinsically unlikely? I appreciate that your reading is extensive, but is this really the unbroken message that is directly expressed by EC leaders or is it what you think is going on behind the scenes and between the lines?
While your survey is extensive, you seem to be describing not what they say, but their motives for saying it and their underlying psychology, which makes the conclusions less easy to view as conclusive.
For Nagel, I will also take your word for it that he doesn’t associate with ID, but he is obviously the darling of ID leaders, since he has the rare distinction of professing to be non-religious while dissenting from the majority view of evolutionary biologists. I understand that scepticism about anything always manages to look like the intellectual high ground, and I recognize that his being one of the very few dissenters who can’t be said to have a religious motive gives him some extra clout. That said, his clear outlier position on some of the core consensus of biology does not warm me to the idea that he represents the majority view for something like the origin of life, and that was really my only point about Nagel. I just think he’s the wrong messenger to send for announcing what the best science should tell us, and I think I was clear that this was the point. You tell me his arguments are great? Well and good; my field is immunology (with some molecular biology in the background), so I recognize he has far greater expertise on the details of how life might have formed and I’m willing to take any difficulties he wants to share quite seriously. But a representative of the best science on this question? I certainly do not take him as a representative of the best science on a closely related question, and I do not think he represents a majority view on this one either, so this is not a promising start, regardless of how many brilliant things he may have to say.
And you have misunderstood me if you think I am pitting my limited judgement against Tours. What I am doing is wondering out loud how you can be sceptical that something could happen when you haven’t the foggiest how it might have happened and you are three and a half billion years removed from the scene. Yes I understand that the onus is on the person making the positive claim, but this is exactly the point; anyone who suggests that something is unlikely to be possible based on our knowledge is making a clear and unequivocal positive claim about the sufficiency of our knowledge for making such a judgement call. This is very important and it bears repeating: in expressing skepticism that something could have happened without outside help, you are making the claim that you have enough evidence to go on; the positive claim is implicit but still extremely obvious. And it is the main positive claim in play here. My observations related to the fact that we don’t even know where to start, we don’t have any evidence to guide our way, and we are incredibly ill-equipped to address such a question (give us a water-filled abiotic planet, a thousand orbiting research stations and a few million years and we’ll see what we can come up with). That makes it entirely unsurprising that we haven’t come up with, let alone confirmed a solution. Nagel has good reasons, based on his expertise, to think that some of the steps will not have obvious solutions? Good, all the more reason to think that we shouldn’t have stumbled over a complete or even a promising account by this point.
We aren’t talking here about the not-all-that a propos assertion that someone flapped his arms and flew, and if we were, we certainly would have had enough prior knowledge and contextual information to judge the likelihood of such a claim. We are talking about a stretch of time and chain of events that would have occurred billions of years ago and left no trace at all; we have almost no prior knowledge at all and no comparable situation to relate it to. That amounts to an exceedingly poor analogy, though I realize that you did not intend to place too much weight on it, so I will not belabor this point. The analogy is so different that the locus of the positive claim needs to be looked for a little more carefully and I think you will find that it ends up in a very different place, as discussed above. I understand that you meant to point out that we are making a positive claim by suggesting that a natural solution is the right thing to look for, but given that science has successfully been doing exactly this for hundreds of years it strikes me as strange that we should now suddenly step back and have an existential crisis about our presuppositions. And for what? Because we haven’t recreated life in 50 years? Because we don’t know where to start? You don’t visit a crime scene from an unsolved murder a hundred years after the fact, after 10 families have lived in and renovated the house (burning and rebuilding it twice) and then come to some new conclusion about how unlikely some scenario was based on your analysis of the living room furniture layout. The only conclusion you should reasonably come to is that you are not in a very good position to solve the crime, and any re-enactment or hypothesis you might have is destined to remain nothing more than a hypothesis. This is even more the case when the event in question may have taken hundreds of millions of years, involving a lengthy sequence of events that left no trace, with the scaffolding of each stage being erased by subsequent stages, occurring in a hundred sequential contexts that served as ideal settings for some otherwise unlikely step and repeated in possibly millions of parallel step-wise progressions across the globe. It just amazes me that any of us can think we are in a position to reach some kind of conclusion after a few decades of tinkering and undeniably deep thought, let alone slap a probability assessment on it (which you clearly did with very little obvious underpinning; your conclusion was that the probability is right around zero).
Not only this, but in the context where your statements have repeatedly suggested that the interventionist position is more reasonable and better supported by the current evidence, a suddenly limited and far more sober claim like “I’m expressing doubt about all existing proposals for naturalistic origin, and trying to show that the divine action notion is rational” seems like a very surprising turnaround. If all you are saying is that the current ideas for how life formed are likely dead ends and that it is not irrational to propose that God may have done it directly, then what’s to argue about? The most upbeat of origin of life researchers likely agrees that the current ideas are at least profoundly incomplete and in many cases just plain wrong, and I haven’t heard anyone suggest that there is some sort of a logical fallacy involved in positing God’s direct activity. Suddenly we are all on the same page (a round of kumbaya anyone?;-). But quite frankly, this is not at all what has been coming across in your writings (or the debate would have fizzled out a while back). You have been quite clear in your claims that we have good reason to think that the interventionist solution is the right one and that scientist have given good reasons to think they are barking up the wrong tree, though you are at least balanced and reasonable in suggesting that the natural solution is still a live option.
More to the point: Scientists, in continuing to investigating a challenging problem, are doing precisely what they have always done, and they have been given no particular reason to think it’s a bad idea or that they’ve somehow reached the end of the line, only that their initial hunches have not born the hoped for fruit and that it is an especially difficult question that is no different in kind from other low evidence natural history questions from the remote past. Its business as usual as they continue to propose and look into new ideas. I really can’t understand why so many ID proponents have this “stop the press” response to the whole thing. Scientists have publicly displayed all of the usual outbursts of sanguine hope based on exciting and promising new hypothesis (for which they are accused of unrealistic naturalistic bias) and dejection at having a lack of promising leads or when dealing with a fizzling hypothesis (for which they are commended for having unintentionally prophesied the fall of the naturalistic paradigm). They probably go too far in some of their statements on either end of the spectrum, but I find this to be very human. Yet unlike for any other challenging scientific investigation, these scientists are repeatedly accused of being biased and irrational for continuing to show hope while seek mechanisms instead of admitting failure and invoking what can crudely be called a deus ex machina (you probably won’t like this term, but I can’t yet think of a reason why it isn’t an appropriate one).
Many ID proponents are reaching the conclusion that the natural account is unlikely when the only conclusions they should really be reaching is that we have barely scratched the surface so far and that it would have been all but a miracle if we had it all figured out by now. This lack of evidence and the reality that this is one of the most challenging scientific puzzles we have faced is the simple reason why I look to other grounds for coming to my conclusion that the scientific approach is the reasonable one. I’ll review a few;
(a) If any experiment could lead to the outcome of producing basic replicators that are constantly competing and improving through natural selection, it is the one that undeniably existed billions of years ago on our planet, a planet full of water, volcanic activity, complex environments and chemical soups, and with no competition at all from any fully developed life forms.
(b) As Dawkins pointed out, basic replicators that could start the evolutionary ball rolling do not need to be all that complicated. All we need is a situation where Darwin’s basic reasoning would work, with inheritance through replication, mutations, competition for resources and selection of more competitive varieties. After that, who knows what paths may have been taken leading to life as we know it, all we know is that this mechanism is guaranteed to surprise us with its outcomes and its winding pathways, especially in an open world filled with niches that are wholly available to adaptive radiation.
(c) Everything in the natural realm that has been investigated using scientific tools has either proven to be too knotty to unravel, inaccessible to instrumentation, or it has led to a consistent tapestry of causality (although things get admittedly strange on the quantum level). This has consistently been the case across space and time, and there has simply never been a case where we fell into a causal gap in the scientific account of the development of the universe that needed to be filled in using divine intervention as an explanation. And this is not because it was ruled out of court unfairly, but because the pattern of discovery simply made the invocation of divine intervention to solve some scientific question a worse and worse horse to bet on (sorry, I seem to like this analogy). It would have been perfectly legitimate a few centuries ago, but it no longer looks like a remotely good guess. Admitting that science is as limited as human senses and human instruments force it to be; this record is simply unbroken. We just never reached a place where we had to say, “Yup, turns out that tarot cards are for real. Go figure.” It isn’t that we have thrown the spotlight on every single step in this unraveling picture of the universe, it is that our investigations have uniformly uncovered a natural progression and we have never been given a good reason for recourse to a supernatural explanation that hasn’t later been overturned by further investigation. You are now hypothesizing a single place in space-time where this pattern is said to be broken, and this based on the fact that we have not figured out in 50 years how a single event occurred billions of years ago with no evidence at all to guide our guess-work. Does this not strike you has premature in some way? At a minimum, you need a much more serious justification for such a singular and so far never successful move than what you have offered. You may even sell it as intellectual fairness, but it looks far more like special pleading against such a backdrop, and I have so far found your explanations of such a unique and difficult to justify approach unsatisfactory and overly philosophical. It isn’t enough to say that there are still dark corners in the scientific account that may hide such interventions; the above pattern still doesn’t just dissipate with this observation and the corners obviously only tend to be dark because we hardly have the means to shed light on them.
(d) The origin of life is continuous with evolution and there are parallels and connections worth considering; evolution has produced unlikely and complex structures by natural means using a very simple mechanism, providing an obvious parallel with abiogenesis, and rendering any guess as to what is unlikely very suspect. Also, the unrelenting ratchet of natural selection is likely to have kicked in as soon as there was a substrate that met its basic requirements, so there is some very early overlap between what is not known, and what is known to work very effectively to produce adaptive change.
(e) The amino acids and nucleic acids that are now fundamental to all life forms are in part based on the very molecules that seem to have been commonly produced by inorganic reactions in a pre-biotic world, making them extensively available. If God set up the first cells, then it is unclear why it would be necessary to make use of just these molecular arrangements (yes I understand alternate explanations can be thought up, but this is very much consistent with a natural explanation).
(f) The announcement that our apparently conclusive failure to come up with a scientific account for the origin of life should lead to an admission that divine intervention is a front-runner solution is not at all the common approach to most of the other unsolved problems in the sciences. For some reason this issue seems to get special treatment and a hall-pass instead of being treated as a difficult problem to be investigated like everything else. My view is that this is a strange reaction to an otherwise unexceptionable scientific mystery (well, all such mysteries are special, but it makes no sense that this one is suddenly the hill to die on, to use your term).
(g) This one is less clear and it is difficult to know what weight it should bear; given the apparent consistency of the universe through space and time, at least to the extent that it is known, and given that incredible complexity and adaptation is apparently possible through natural means, it is difficult to account for why a single event like the origin of life would go in for special treatment and direct involvement. If we found a series of unaccountable events in natural history that needed to be traced to God’s direct activity, well and good, this could just be one more, but it is far from the reality. The incredible unraveling of all things from the beginning as an expression of God’s consistently applied laws in conjunction with God’s will and sustaining presence is a majestic vision that may be said to arise as a fair inference from the findings of modern science (the consistency part anyway), and the breaking of this symmetry by a direct divine intervention at a single point in order to jog matter to a new level of complexity is not a particularly satisfying account for many of us. You seem to be more uncomfortable with such a consistent unraveling than with such a breach in the symmetry otherwise inferred so I expect you to look at this one with very little sympathy! That said, as the moderators here have pointed out, a vision of natural consistency is hardly less satisfying or more problematic than a vision of episodic consistency punctuated by direct interventions, let alone a vision of consistency punctuated by one or very view such interventions. This one, as I said, amounts to a feeling of what is more likely and it carries little obvious weigh, especially since it dips into questions of divine motives, which is generally an all-around bad idea!
On the whole, I expect to convince you of little to nothing, since I don’t expect you to begin doubting that your views are rooted in solid science. It was not my purpose. My hopefully more modest purpose to was to convince you that your statements about what truly influences the perspective of origin of life researchers is very unbalanced since it seems to unaccountably rule out the possibility that they (including the long list of EC thinkers you have in mind) might actually have reasons above and beyond the prejudices that you are sure you see behind their thinking. This is regardless of whether or not those reasons happen to convince you; you only need to know that they are there and that other people are convinced by them to recognize that your account of an overriding bias simply doesn’t do any justice to those you happen to disagree with. This seems like a fairly modest goal on my part and I’d like to hope that I am not overreaching in thinking that it might be openly granted.
Thanks
Hi Eddie,
Yes you have been clear, but I think there is a point you are perhaps not seeing clearly, which I will get to below. But first, your arguments about what has so far been established by origin of life scientists seem fine to me, although I am inclined to believe that some of their hypotheses are hopeful directions for further exploration, though difficult to test in practice. I have agreed from the beginning that they have not come up with promising results and that you are hardly under any obligation to take what they have come up with so far very seriously. Also you are of course right that I mixed up names, so my apologies for the confusion. You are also right that I write too much by any standards, so I’ll try to scale back. A side note as to the theological arguments you have heard; you seem to look at them with some distain, and I’ll admit that I don’t really give them much thought and that I consider them to be tentative and somewhat aesthetic, but at first blush, they don’t seem like intrinsically bad arguments for all that. Since you seem to have heard or given conclusive counterarguments that have never been answered, I’ll grant that you find yourself in a good position to dismiss them, even if I do not at this point. That said, I take what you say seriously and I don’t give them too much weight. Since your view of the discreditable nature of EC thinking on the subject seems to be based on the exceedingly poor nature of these theological arguments (which I guess implies that there is something deeper driving the EC position, though I’m not sure I’m convinced here), then I will have to withhold judgment until pointed to something like the thorough, and unfortunately inaccessible, refutation that you have in mind.
The point that concerns me, and has all the way through, is your “default setting”. Your writings have basically made it clear that until scientists provide a plausible and rigorously tested hypothesis, the default setting is to accept the interventionist position as the reasonable default position. Yet I have clarified that the history of science gives essentially no support to the idea that this should be the default setting! The default setting, especially for a problem that has almost no evidence and no easy solutions, is exactly what the history of science has made it! The reasonable default position, based on centuries of research on every scale, throughout the entire timeline and in every direction, is that there should be a natural solution, and the only way this stops being a reasonable solution, is if we have exhausted every reasonable avenue in looking for a natural mechanism. But this is the very point you have agreed to: we – have – not. Not even remotely close. We are hardly beginning, and we may never have the resources to get on the right track. So why on earth would we switch to this as the default probability if we have nothing left to justify it?
And as a side-point on using intervention as a default setting; we don’t view this as a reasonable solution anywhere else, except perhaps from the pulpit. I have heard a preacher point out that given that we have not figured out what dark matter or dark energy are; they don’t exist and it is actually just atheist scientist trying to slap a name on God’s direct activity. As he put it “It is our God who is holding the galaxies together! You see, this scientific mumbo jumbo is yet another proof of God that the atheists refuse to accept”. A few of us were cringing, and I’d like to think you would have too. But this could get more silly. There are all sorts of scientific mysteries about everything from subatomic particles to the nesting habits of rare tropical birds, and no one is suggesting that the default position should be a supernatural one until we have a working hypothesis in place, especially when we don’t expect the solution to come easily. We all agree on this way forward not because we are collectively an intellectually prejudiced house of cards, but because based on the long and consistent history of the scientific endeavor; we are placing a bet, and one that has simply never failed to pay up where we expected it to.
I’ve already worked through these points, and when pressed on the subject, you lean heavily on what you view as your reasonable skepticism about all current hypotheses (“all I am saying is…”) and you suddenly say little about how unlikely the natural abiogenesis position is in your opinion as a whole (since you apparently agree with me that we are not in any position to know that we have exhausted even a limited subset of all possible avenues). If it were true that this was all you were saying, then no, it wouldn’t be up to you to establish your position; it would be up to the scientists to establish theirs, and my disagreement with your position would not be justified at all. And this limited skepticism is of course the safer and less assailable position for you to hold, but based on what you have said, it is not the extent of your view. If you only had this to say, I would grant you your reasonable skepticism, but this is not what’s going on, and this is a mischaracterization of the whole discussion: I have not been supporting these particular hypotheses, and you have not been stopping yourself at the point of doubting them. You have clearly said that the naturalistic position is exceedingly unlikely and you have inferred that you think we are in a position, based on the best science, to come to that conclusion. And I think we’ve addressed this; this is not an available argument given the limits of our knowledge.
So we are back to the beginning; you are holding a default position that you have every right to, but which is not supported by the history of science, and is not necessitated by the failure of the naturalistic account on this issue. And I am left not seeing what rationally justifies this position.
I hope that was shorter! Thanks for your clear discussion and as I said, I will take your caution about theological arguments seriously since you are definitely in a position to critique these approaches.
Hi Eddie,
I certainly never meant to suggest that you speak with a forked tongue;-), but I am glad that you see where I may have had trouble placing your views between the neutral and the decided positions. This is important, since we would have had far less to discuss if I had perceived you as consistently advocating a neutral position. You have basically given me reasons why you intuitively trend to the decided position while still arguing a neutral view (I guess explaining why you appeared to weave between the two).
Regarding the neutral position; I’m not sure that we can conflate the perspective that both outcomes (natural or supernatural) are just as likely with the so-called “neutral position”, since a position is only neutral based on known prior probabilities, and aside from the fact that we have zero scientifically verified priors for a supernatural solution in any field of science, you are apparently not prepared to recognize the prior probabilities I have suggested and that generally underpin the decision to not introduce supernatural conjectures. The fact that you refuse to fully accept this backdrop due to your very different view of the history of science obviously does not somehow reset the prior probabilities to 50/50 or even to “supernatural until proven otherwise”. I won’t push the point, but I think we have a tendency to confound popular concepts of “fair play” and “equal opportunity” with prior probability (which explains why journalists have so often give equal time to pseudo-scientific views). I doubt you’ll disagree that this is a danger that we need to watch for.
In the end, with respect to the two-pronged argument I was looking at in the previous post, yours is a mixed position; you recognize that we are in no position to know how much ground we have actually covered in investigating origins and you seem to agree that there is little reason to think we’ve covered all that much of the theoretically possible ground at all, but you just happen to personally suspect, based on some of your readings etc, that we’ve covered enough to guess at a certain outcome (because of the reasons I’ve brought forward, I strongly disagree, but we’ll stop it there) and on the other hand, you don’t think the history of science justifies a default expectation of naturalism particularly on questions of “historical science” (again, I think we can now confidently agree to disagree!). More to the side, you don’t like the perceived trend of attempting to chase God out of the scientific account, and I understand this concern, since I do get the sense that this has the appearance of leaving God with no active (or unconstrained) role in nature, a sharp contrast with the Hebrew perspective that hardly differentiated at all between direct and indirect modes of action. While understanding this last as a concern and as an important problem for theologians and philosophers to digest, I’m not sure it does much to change the tendency or the outcome of what we have already discovered, even where we can continue to picture origin of life, consciousness etc as possible holdouts that continue to resist this trend. Nor am I convinced that we need to see this as pushing God out of the picture as opposed to a progressive recognition of the general tendency of God to work through secondary causes in the unraveling of the universe (I am open to the various proposals for God’s ongoing input in the natural direction of the universe, though I am far less convinced by the proposals of episodic influence that I have seen), but that is another discussion.
I can say that I see some truth in your understanding of the history of science, much as I do in some of the weak post-modern appraisals of the history of science (which seem to me to be a generally a useful recognition of some of the social factors that have played into the short to middle-term results of scientific debates and research agendas). That said, on my own part I think it is a somewhat incomplete and imbalanced reading that rightly recognizes that many questionable ideologies have meddled in the scientific process, while seemingly rejecting the importance of the data-driven and self-corrective elements in science over the long-term in favor of too narrow a focus on a perceived overall driving philosophical agenda, particularly for the historical sciences. There is no denying that scientific research projects have been linked to all sorts of wild and often contradictory ideologies, yet we can never ignore that the testing continued all the same and where the evidence continually opposed a conclusion, a few generations or a few years eventually forced a general confession that this was the wrong trail. And besides, I am not sure that there is a necessary dichotomy between this agenda and the actual patterns of historical discovery, since the results, generally well supported by critical debate and repeat efforts at falsification, seem to have generally converged on the expectations built into this partially held agenda, whether we like it or not. And regardless of all this; given that the supernatural has never yet proven to be the only viable hypothesis for any fully explored scientific domain, I just can’t see how we can justify the idea that it should get a “fair shake” when we encounter an almost completely unexplored domain. I continue to be sympathetic with your motives while not fully seeing how your conclusions stand.
I also can’t make the same distinctions in kind that you make between consilient historical extrapolations and the innumerable other types of extrapolations that are constantly being made in every other field of science. Whether this is intended or not, it is suspiciously close to the creationist division between historical and operational science, which is unsound but very convenient for them in that it leaves room for and protects their vision of history. Just like any other domain in the sciences, and to a far greater extent than for many fields of inquiry, we have a great deal of evidence and it is independent extrapolations from multiple lines of evidence that provides us with an assurance that we are on the right track, not individual extrapolations that may or may not be sound. The mapping of this evidence to historical forces and events is verified when the coordinated mappings being used to interpret these independent lines of evidence lead to the same conclusions, an outcome that tends to be extremely implausible if the interpretations are largely incorrect. This is neither here nor there for our topic of discussion; it just helps me to see where some of your difference in perspective comes from, and I get the sense that such a dissimilar and wary view of science history is likely to strongly influence and limit your tendency to trust scientists, unless they themselves display a similar degree of distrust of other scientists and scientific conclusions. This is my guess and it certainly may be off the mark. It does sadden me that there is such a mutual mistrust between scientists and so many sectors of the Christian world (probably driven by the scientism and the YEC parties more than by you or me).
You have pointed out that you are low on time and that you have other issues to handle and I realize I am being somewhat insensitive by going on like this. I will let you get in a last word or no word, as you wish, and thanks for the very interesting discussion.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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