Questions About Intelligent Design, Evolution and Creation

Faith & Science Conversation
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From this ID sympathizer, I would point out that “programming” a system to be able to adapt to some extent to an environment is a rather intelligent design to start with.

Moreover, nothing about basic intelligent design concepts rule out the idea that some small fortuitous changes to an already carefully constructed design can optimize them to new environments… that is unsurprising. Once we developed nuclear submarine propulsion, for instance, it is not surprising that, by tinkering, by trial and error, by using the system and discovering minute optimizations, we continually discover and stumble upon small improvements that help optimize the system as we use it and learn it, that are discovered not by “forward-thinking intelligent planning” so to speak. But that seems to me a categorical difference from thinking that this trial and error process is how we got from diesel submarines to nuclear ones, by a small trial and error process continually optimizing Diesel/electric-battery engines. It just doesn’t work that way.

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@cristero wrote:

“its just that at this moment the point of view I want to learn more about is Intelligent Design.”

If you just mean “thinking God’s thoughts after God”, then that is understandable. We should all want to learn more about that. Not just conceptually, but living & acted. As for me, I don’t call that “Intelligent Design”, for many reasons.

A key problem here is that ID theory people are claiming they are really doing science, producing science, giving scientific answers, asking scientific questions. Some even believe in their minds that they are starting a “scientific revolution”. Grand yet unsubstantiated claims have come out of the ID ‘wide tent’, which has been rather off-putting to many people.

The leaders of Discovery Institute appear to be rather quite “confident” in being able to see God’s “fingerprints” (Phillip Johnson’s terms) scientifically. Thus, they argue for a kind of “supernatural” (Divine Intelligence) variable in “natural” science. Experienced and mature religious thinkers and scientists have repeatedly warned them against doing this. It’s a kind of category error they make right from the start. Do you see what I mean here or have you not seen it happening yet?

@Jay313 wrote:

““Darwinism” and “Neo-Darwinism” are old-fashioned terms used by people who think the name “Darwin” is a slur.”

Yeah, sadly that is appearing to be true for many of the self-proclaimed “anti-Darwinists” (attacking the man, not the argument or evidence). They come across as actual haters of Darwin, and use slurs at his name, almost as if they couldn’t make an effort in their heart possibly to try to love Darwin or Dawkins also as child of God.

“In short, ID is not a single view of creation. It’s actually more of an apologetic, in my view.”

Yes, it does come across as mainly an apologetics tool. The fixation of Discovery Institute people on that one metaphor makes for a very uni-dimensional Creator. But if ID “theory” as a kind of quasi-science or proto-science is used mainly in apologetics environment, as a way of getting people to open a Bible or to pray or to inquire about questions of meaning or purpose or personal calling, then it cannot be thought about as really a “scientific” theory. It would be helpful it they admitted this.

What do you think, is ID theory something you “use for apologetics”, @cristero, even a little bit?

@Daniel_Fisher wrote:

“programming” a system to be able to adapt to some extent to an environment is a rather intelligent design to start with.”

Discovery Institute tries to mimic this, but cannot duplicate or exceed the already-existing science of design theory and design thinking.

The most important update in recent years from Discovery Institute is the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligences. Yet they continue to blur the meaning of “intelligence”, apparently as part of a polarizing and divisive agenda. If cristero finds the Discovery Institute’s projects somehow “unifying”, I’d be curious “around what” does he/she find ID theory unify people. Personally, I believe that God unites people, but that ID theory divides them.

Wasn’t it the case that all main leaders at BioLogos accept “intelligent design” anyway, that is, if it means “God created the universe and human beings in it,” just not what the Discovery Institute insists is a fully “scientific” theory of Intelligent Design?

Not that anyone here agrees with Jerry Coyne’s atheistic propaganda, but this shows BioLogos leadership views in agreement with “intelligent design” (the original BioLogos link now has Error on the site): Guest post: BioLogos embraces ID – Why Evolution Is True

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An excellent ressource on the whole subject is the Youtube channel “is Genesis history” I highly recommend it.

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What are the most commons faults that you or others with your perspective find with this kind of ID? Do you not believe irreducible complexity to be a compelling idea? I find it very much so, but then, I’m just a layperson. Would you recommend reading Meyer/Behe or not? Their take on things really clicks with me, and I don’t see any issues with their approach. If there are problems I’d be open to hearing about it.

I kind of understand what you’re saying here, but what it seems to me that you’re saying is that evolution only occurs because God is there, kind of guiding it, like someone would guide a hammer. Yes/no? Is evolution not more of a natural law, that does not need to be guided, it simply works of it’s own accord, according to the rules and laws contained within it?

With regards my question in the OP, could you touch on that, from your perspective? That is, about how exactly does evolution “know” what needs to happen next in the evolutionary timeline?

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I’m a lay-person just like you when it comes to this biological world. So whatever comments I share on ID will be heavily shaped by responses I’ve heard from much more knowledgeable people in these areas. I can repeat what I’ve heard them say, though, I won’t be able to plunge very deeply into it, much less defend it beyond saying that I trust those from whom this comes. That said … in a nutshell, I think the gist of the push-back against ID is in the form: “They are presuming, in advance that this ‘difficult-to-explain’ circumstance can be shown to be permanently inexplainable using currently known models or mechanisms. Therefore this must be evidence of input from an external intelligent agent of some kind.” The push-back to this is, "how can one know that something will remain forever unexplainable? Because in fact, in many cases (such as the eye) strides have already been made to significantly close a lot of gaps, making it seem quite plausible that the development could indeed be completely described in physical terms.

As to whether you should read Behe or Meyers - I won’t say ‘no’, though others here will be happy to heap opprobrium on them for this or that which they apparently get wrong. I’ve read both, and found it a rewarding experience (to the extent that I could even follow it all) to get insight into their own thoughts. Then I also found it rewarding to hear rebuttals and responses around here (which you could also find buried in essays or the forum as well.) I think it is always good to get arguments from the people making them, and not merely from the lips of their detractors. It gives them a more fair hearing I think.

I will be happy to say that God guides evolution … just like God guides a raindrop to the ground. Others may balk at that language and prefer more “open theism” or “hands-off deity” kinds of approaches to this. But I’m happy to [will consent to] just bite the bullet and say it’s all happening on God’s watch, whether it be the good stuff we like to praise God for, or the evil stuff that makes so many either hate God or stop believing any god is doing anything at all.

Evolution doesn’t know. How could it … it has no ‘mind’ to know or have purpose at all, any more than a hammer could be said to know whether I’m using it to drive in a nail, break a window, use it as a paperweight. It’s current purpose is 100% in my mind and 0% in the hammer. Evolution, ‘randomness’ (as it appears to us anyway), convergence - or any other mechanisms known or as yet unknown … I suggest are all part of a large tool set in the hands of the Almighty. That’s my take anyway.

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These would be the faults I see as an atheist and scientist.

  1. Subjectivity. When someone says that something looks designed that is their subjective opinion. Science needs empirical and objective data.

  2. Limited by imagination. Behe and others claim that something can’t evolve because they can’t imagine it evolving. Reality isn’t limited to what humans can imagine.

  3. Lack of positive evidence. ID is primarily driven by arguments against evolution. By contrast, the arguments for evolution never mention ID and are instead supported by positive evidence that supports the theory. ID does not have positive evidence to support it, and instead relies on rejection of all other theories in order to make ID more attractive, a sort of God of the Gaps argument.

  4. ID is scientifically sterile. There is hardly, if any scientific research being done on ID. I am unaware of any scientific experiments being done now or in the past that directly tests ID. What experiments ID proponents have done try to test evolution, but not ID. Intelligent design just doesn’t lead to scientific research because it starts with the answer and ignores the questions.

Evolution knows as much about what needs to happen as a river knows about what path it needs to follow.

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Okay but let’s say there’s a fish and it wants to get onto land and walk. How does that process occur? A fish can’t will it’s fins to turn into feet, and evolution has no mind, it is not conscious, so how does it happen?

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The methods are several, from mutation of genes to duplication of genes to re-use of genes, to suppression and loss of genes, just to name a few. Evolution does not know what is needed, but better function as measured by reproductive success is the determinant of success. Sort of like how does the lottery know how to pick a winner. It always does eventually, but lots of lost causes along the way.

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Focusing on the bird beak thing, which is an observable change over time, could you explain it to me like I’m 5? Because I don’t get it. The thing I can’t get my head around is getting from A to B, fat beak to thin beak, when no consciousness is involved in making that beak change. How does it actually occur?

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Evolution doesn’t work that way. Individuals don’t evolve. Populations do … and that only through many, many generations. There is nothing that gives birth to something radically different from itself. Changes that occur from one generation to the next are very small.

You might benefit from reading this essay about evolution fundamentals.

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Ok, I will try. Birds in a population have a range of size of beaks, just like people have different sizes of noses. We can call that “genetic drift.” Maybe a tasty bug lives in the crevices of bark on the common tree, and in a time of climate change, that bug is the primary food. The birds with longer narrower beaks can reach the bugs and eat them. They are healthier, have more chicks, and over generations the birds with short beaks die out or come to live in areas that have other food sources, and the long beaked birds flourish. Rinse and repeat for thousands of generations with different traits and environmental pressures, and you wind up,with a bird quite different than when you started.

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I have yet to see an example of irreducible complexity that is really irreducible. What they do, for example, is say consider a mouse trap. Remove one part and it no longer is a mouse trap. Which is true. But depending on the part you remove what you are left with might have many other functions. They just don’t include being a mouse trap. And if you do want to have a mouse trap consider how many different ways a mouse trap could be build. How can something be irreducibly complex when there are many different ways to get there?

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That’s young earth creationist, which he has already said he’s not interested in.

I don’t know if a five year old could get this, but maybe fifth grade. If a longer thinner beak is advantageous in a certain population of birds because it helps them survive (find food, defend against predators) and reproduce (attract a mate), then it might evolve in the population as a whole as an adaptation. An adaptation is any inherited change in a trait of an organism that makes the individual more suited to its environment and more successful at surviving and reproducing. Beneficial adaptations become more prevalent in a population through natural selection.

Natural selection refers to a process originally described by Charles Darwin in which organisms better adapted to their environment are “selected” by nature for survival and pass on their beneficial traits to their offspring. It is considered one of the main driving forces of evolution. Natural selection causes the dominant features in a population of a species to change in small ways over many generations by acting on genetic variation within the population. Selective pressures (factors in the environment that affect chances of survival and successful reproduction) cause beneficial traits to become more prevalent in the population, whereas less beneficial traits become rare or are lost altogether.

Although all the organisms in a species usually share all the same genes, many genes can have slightly different DNA sequences in different individuals, resulting in differences in their traits. These various forms of the same gene are called alleles. In sexual organisms, each individual has two copies of most genes, one inherited from the mother and one from the father. These two copies might represent the same or different alleles. The specific combination of two alleles that an organism inherits from its parents is the organism’s genotype, and it affects how hereditary traits are expressed. Different combinations of alleles in a population lead to variation in the expression of a given trait within the population. For some genes, many different alleles can exist in the population’s gene pool.

The changes that make natural selection possible happen at the level of DNA and genes. Changes in genes are called mutations and are one way of introducing new alleles into a population. Mutations can be introduced into an organism’s genome by random errors in DNA replication or repair, or by damage caused by chemicals or radiation. Most of the time, mutations are either harmful or neutral. On rare occasions, a mutation is beneficial and leads to a trait that increases the organism’s fitness, its ability to survive and reproduce. Beneficial mutations become more prevalent in successive generations by natural selection, and they eventually spread throughout the population.

Individuals with a mutation that increases their fitness (like a longer thinner beak instead of a short fat one) are more likely to survive and pass on their genes (and the beneficial traits the genes control) to offspring, which increases the prevalence of the variant allele in the population over time. Over long periods of time, an allele may become fixed in a species, so all the members of the species have the trait that provides the beneficial adaptation.

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Ahh, this is enlightening! I did not know that this was how it happened. Thank you. I feel stupid but at least I’ve learned something. But is this referred to as “evolution”? What is the term for this process. (Edit: I just read Christy’s post above so assume it is called “natural selection”?) Because this, to me, seems very, very different to the process of, say, going from a fin to a foot. The beak already existed, the bigger or smaller beaks bred, and passed on their traits to their offspring, the others died out, makes sense! But you can’t “breed in” an non-exsistent trait that doesn’t exist surely? I mean, I picture a fish in water and it starts to flop around on the land, and it breeds with another ground-flapping fish, but they both have fins, and the baby fish has fins? No? Evolution can’t “design” a foot? I get that if the fish was a big fish, or a brown fish, or a fish with long fins, that would be passed on to it’s offspring, and maybe over time it’s fins might get longer and longer, or it might get browner, or whatever.
Also, do the (presumably) millions of millions or more of species from amoeba to man exist in the fossil record? Is the age of the earth enough time to get from there to here?

Sorry if my questions are tedious, feel free not to reply if so lol.

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I don’t know a huge amount about it but I found this video interesting: The Complexity of Life (Secrets of the Cell with Michael Behe, Ep. 2) - YouTube

And yes, he uses the mousetrap! :stuck_out_tongue:

If there are problems with this idea maybe you or others can point them out. It seems logical to me, considering how incredibly complex even the smallest structures in a living thing are.

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Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply in detail, I appreciate it!
Ok, so in my mind, based on the things I’m reading here in this thread there are at least two different processes: natural selection and random? mutation, and maybe other processes.
But these two processes seem very different. My post above to ‘jpm’ kind of explains my confusion there.
I now understand natural selection, it makes a lot of sense, and obviously it is a fact, it happens. But to me, going from a bird with a bigger beak because the birds with bigger beaks bred seems a lot different to getting from a trilobyte to a human.

Gah, I know too little and have too many questions. Maybe book recommendations would be good?

Christy do you accept human evolution as most atheistic scientists do, just with the difference being that God started the ball rolling by “planting” the first living thing on earth, or how do you view this whole thing?

The reason I’m trying to understand all this is because I want to reconcile it with my faith in a coherent, logical way - I don’t want to shut the walls of my mind to scientific truth just because it is hard to reconcile it with the Bible. But I also don’t want to end up having a crisis of faith, because I could see that happening if I accept a certain view of evolution.
Something I find impossible to reconcile is the Biblical account of Adam and Eve, their creation and fall, with evolution as we commonly hear it.
I’d be interested in your thoughts.

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I think Dennis Venema’s series here at Biologos is excellent, also its free!

You can look at them as two different processes but they work together.

Natural Selection is just short hand for the results of reproductive success.

Mutations are what can create differences between organisms.

So the way in which they work together is that a mutation can give an organism a reproductive advantage increasing its reproductive success. (Reproductive advantage can look different depending on the kind of advantage gained).

I will use an example of human evolution to try and illustrate this.

Humans would become lactose intolerant after a certain age. What happens is this, when humans are born they produce an enzyme called Lactase which breaks down milk sugar for digestion. At a certain age most humans would stop producing Lactase and so were no longer to make use of milk as a food source, today we call people who stop producing lactase and cant digest milk when they get older lactose intolerant. For a long time there was no need for humans to digest milk when they were older, most human populations would rely on food sources and strategies that weren’t dependent on milk.

When some human populations began livestock domestication this made milk a viable possible food source. What happened in these populations is that mutation occurred which allowed some people to be able to digest milk into adulthood, this ability is referred to as Lactase Persistence. People with this mutation were able to take advantage of milk from domesticated livestock as a food source. What happened as a result of this is that this gave people in these populations a reproductive advantage (perhaps they were more likely to live to reproductive age, or they were able to grow up stronger and made more suitable mate choices, etc.) So what happens is that as time goes on this mutation is able to spread through population because of the reproductive success of those who have it.

This is an example how mutation and natural selection work together to produce a change in an organism (mutation) that gives that organism a reproductive advantage resulting in that change being spread through a population over time.

I had a similar problem with evolution at first. How is it possible to get something new? The answer is mutations. Once you understand the different types of mutations that can occur and how they can affect an organism it really isn’t too hard to understand that going from fin to foot is a matter of mutations affecting the fin that alter its structure to make it more and more foot like over time.

I think C. John Collins’s book Reading Genesis Well is great. I don’t agree in every detail with Collins, but I think he his approach is easier to get a handle on for people with a more literalistic understanding of Adam and Eve etc.

Here is an article describing different way people have tried to handle the issue of Adam and Eve

The Fossil Record accords extremely well with evolutionary theory here is another Biologos article that you can use to start thinking about fossils.

Finally I would point to this article by Dennis Venema where he puts together different pieces of evidence in consideration of whale evolution,

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Natural selection is the process. It isn’t random, it is a response to selective pressures. Random mutations provide the genetic variation that natural selection works on. Mutations can add genetic material through gene duplication (where a gene gets copied twice by mistake). There are other processes that contribute to evolution like neutral drift, but they aren’t important to understand at the moment. And yes, natural selection can only work on the genetic variation that is available in the population.

Yes. By the theory of evolution every offspring is always the same species as its parents. Its only looking back at whole populations over long periods of time that you can draw lines. When one species diverges from another, it’s not a single moment because a new species was born. Part of a population gets separated in some way from the ancestor population, either by geography or ecological niche. For example in a population of birds, maybe the birds born with longer beaks spend more time eating insects because their beaks aren’t as effective as the fat-beaked birds for cracking seeds, but they can easily pick bugs out of tree bark that the fat-beaked birds can’t reach. So over time, it happens that the thin beaked birds mostly stay in the trees where the bugs are, and the fat-beaked birds stay on the ground where the hard to crack seeds are. The thin-beaked birds become even more prevalent in the trees and the fat-beaked birds on the ground until they stop mixing to mate. Over many generations the two populations would become reproductively isolated (either unable or unwilling to mate with each other) and that would signify that the two populations have evolved into a different species. The same thing could happen if a part of the ancestor population got blown to a different island in a storm and were geographically isolated. They would adapt to their new niche by natural selection until they could no longer reproduce with the descendants of their ancestors who stayed in the original place.

True. But all tetrapods (four-limbed creatures) share limb-creating genes and structures with lobe-finned fish. Genes that led to one trait and function in fish were appropriated for new traits and functions. It sounds crazy but it is actually well-understood and there are piles of evidence in fossil that can then be verified at the genetic level. That’s why we have so many “poorly-designed” but amazingly functional traits and why we have vestiges of our evolutionary past in our biology. The reason we get hiccups is genetically related to a nerve impulse that controls breathing both water and air in tadpoles, for example. Common descent provides an incredibly effective explanatory framework for countless observations about how we develop and why different functions work the way they do. I just got done reading Your Inner Fish to my son. It is a really interesting look at evidence for shared ancestry.

Not every species exists in the fossil record because fossilization is rare and some kinds of bodies (bony or shell) are much more likely to become fossilized. But many, many transitional species do exist in the fossil record. And the amazing thing is that evolutionary theory is highly predictive. The people who discovered Tiktaalik, a major transitional fossil between fish and tetrapods, predicted exactly where in the Arctic they would need to look to find it based on which fossils had been found in which rocks in other places in the world.

The earth is really old. There is enough time and we can calculate how long it took to get from a given here to there using rocks and fossils.

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Yes, I think common descent is a well-documented scientific fact. I think we tend to categorize things as natural (things science can explain) and supernatural (miracles only God can do), but I think reality is actually an integrated whole that can’t be separated like that. I think God is involved in sustaining, providing for, and continuously creating all aspects of the natural world all the time. I think he does it in ways that can be described with reference to natural, scientific laws and processes, but that doesn’t mean those descriptions capture all of reality. Science can only describe the natural world, it can’t study God’s presence or action in it. I don’t see the scientific description of evolution as any different than scientific descriptions of anything else, like weather or planetary movement. Science only speaks to part of reality. I can scientifically describe how I got pregnant with my children, but that would only describe part of the whole reality of having a family with my husband and being a mother to my children. Love and commitment and the ties that bond humans together go well beyond the science of gametes meeting and forming a new organism. Similarly, I see evolution as one kind of description that provides part of the picture of reality. It definitely doesn’t answer any of my big existential questions.

Adam and Eve is a big question. I might have to get back to that. It basically comes down to how you read the Bible, which is a huge topic of its own.

By word of encouragement, I spent about five years “figuring out” how my faith and science could get along. No one does it in a week, so don’t feel like you have to work stuff out before some metaphorical buzzer goes off.

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I would suggest some books that discuss Genesis and how it doesn’t conflict with modern science. Then you’ll be more free to explore science without risking your faith. It’s pretty common to be taught a false dichotomy - that either the Bible is true or evolution is true. Both can be true, as many here believe, including myself.

Books I’d recommend:
John Walton’s The Lost World of… series (Genesis One, Adam and Eve, the Flood)
Gregg Davidson’s Friend of Science, Friend of Faith
Carol Hill’s A Worldview Approach to Science and Scripture

All of these come from a viewpoint of a historical Adam and Eve and that the Bible is inerrant.

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