I know. That it was an analogy to taking “God explicitly guides evolution” versus “Evolution can be explained entirely with respect to natural processes” positions was clear.
Now you are mixing your metaphors and I’m confused. Do you think claiming to be Arminian somehow necessitates picking a firm position on “God explicitly guides evolution” versus “Evolution can be explained entirely with respect to natural processes”? Because the idea that “I have committed to a theological position on God’s sovereignty” equals “I have committed to a position on how God intervenes in creation” is highly debatable.
Okay, fair enough. But it sure seems to me that when someone says, “I have not made a theological decision here” or “I don’t know what scientific conclusions can/should be drawn from my theology” you either don’t believe them, or criticize them for being intellectually lazy. Because in your mind, they darn well should have come to a firm position before talking.
Right. You want a point by point argument with premises and conclusions laid out for you so you can argue with it because you have your argument that you think is best and rightest and you want the world to see things your way, but it is hard to argue with people who won’t engage. But if someone believes the idea of coming up with a point by point argument is futile because we really can’t draw a firm conclusion, if someone is truly agnostic on the issue of whether or not God directly intervenes in the evolutionary process, you want to make it out like they are hiding something that needs to be exposed or they should never talk about God and science because they haven’t thought about it enough or read the books you have read. We get it. You’ve explained your complaint a hundred times. The state of things is not nearly as irritating to the rest of the world as it is to you.
What do you think it actually accomplishes to bring this complaint up every other day? Do you perceive it as fulfilling some mission to educate the readership here? Because it seems to me that the majority of the readership just ignores you or thinks you’re being obnoxious?
So if someone repeatedly claims that “neo-Darwinism” has been superseded and many/most biologists are unaware and/or resisting this, that someone needs to needs to explain PRECISELY what he or she means by “neo-Darwinism.” That is not asking for anything unreasonable.
It’s merely a reasonable request that discussions focus on issues instead of on people and ill-defined labels.
As someone who has in times past been guilty of the very same lapse into the “You’re just scared!” debate tactic, I’d like to think that we can all do better than that type of empty argument. Please. Yes, sometimes it can feel emotionally satisfying to taunt our opponents in such a manner—basically calling them a “scare-D-cat”—but I hope we can aim for something more substantive than that.
Accusing is such a mean word. And we’re such nice people. Why can’t we be suggesting or hinting or alluding to?
Right. Something you manage to bring up all the time, no matter what the original topic is. Just an observation, not an accusation.
Not you. Just the behavior of repeating the same esoteric complaint over and over again, long after it has become obvious that most people don’t share your passionate response to the situation.
Brad said:
and
I think Brad nailed it on the head. I should have said, “how” not “whether or not,” and it would have been more clear. In previous conversations people have drawn all these fine lines between direct intervention and guidance and ordaining. I meant that I did not think most people had a point by point argument connecting their theology of God’s sovereignty to their view on how God intervenes in/guides/directs/ordains evolution. (And you have repeatedly mentioned that sketchy is no good.) It is around the “how” and it’s connection to theology that I presume agnosticism exists among hypothetical BioLogos writers, just like Brad said.
BioLogos is an ecumenical non-profit with a vision for facilitating education and dialogue. It’s not a church. It doesn’t exercise spiritual authority over it’s contributors. It doesn’t have a particular theological agenda other than promoting the very basic idea that science and faith can exist in a harmonious relationship because the God of the Bible is the God of nature. It has a vision statement and a statement of very general core beliefs. To my knowledge, “BioLogos” doesn’t write position papers or tell people what to believe. They host discussions and provide access to information.
Maybe the person was only sketchily committed to the idea.
We know. You have mentioned it a few times.
But that’s just it. It’s not interesting to me. I’ve read yours and Jon’s pages and pages of discussion on this issue and I just don’t really care that much about the things you care about. I don’t care if they are never clarified or resolved. Which was the motivation behind my last “unfair” paragraph. I’m genuinely interested in why you are so bent on insisting everyone care despite all the signs that the vast majority of people here don’t? Are you ever going to resign yourself to the fact that we are happy to carry on with our deficient view and move on to another topic, or have you sworn to never rest until at least some of us are converted?
I hereby officially assign half the blame to @gbrooks9 for intentionally provoking you.
Exactly. And has anyone ever found these things obnoxious? I am just trying to promote peace and harmony and good will on the playground.
Most people don’t faithfully read everything we publish, or spend sizeable chunks of their day on this forum. So, is this a round-about way of saying that you have to keep repeating your complaints on the off chance that some uninitiated new user will stumble upon them? Okay. But most of the people who read the long involved laborious threads that we are talking about are already familiar with your views.
[quote=“Eddie, post:135, topic:3653”]
I am quite willing to believe that the average churchgoer, who in most cases does not read gobs of theoretical material, has only a fuzzy idea about the “how” and doesn’t care much about improving the clarity…In any case, even under the distinction between “how” and “whether,” Brad’s account, even augmented by your defense of it, doesn’t add up. You now seem to be saying; “Brad and I and BioLogos all agree that God directs evolution, but we have no view on how God directs evolution.” But “directs” – in the mind of most people – who aren’t academics and aren’t into hairsplitting quarrels over terms, but rely on everyday language – already implies a “how.” It means, for most people, “guides” or “steers” or “pushes” or “pulls” or “coaxes” or “manipulates”. It conjures up images of God secretly generating mutations, or subtly altering environmental conditions to help a new mutations establish itself, or the like. It suggests that God has his hands on individual stages in the process. But I don’t think you and Brad mean that. I think you both mean something vaguer and more general than what the word means in popular usage. [/quote]
I can only speak for myself. I am an average churchgoer. I have not read these books you refer to and I am not sensitive to all the nuances you and others have so carefully delineated between front-loading, and guiding, and ordaining. Though I have tried to pay attention and be a good listener. When I think of God guiding evolution I think of manipulating, pushing, and pulling and being hands on, not something vaguer and more general. I don’t really care if scientists don’t use those words. You’re right it does “conjure up images,” very imaginative and unscientific ones, that are fun to daydream about.
It sounds to me like you should write and present a paper at an academic conference where these people whose interaction you desire hang out, and where it would be professionally worth their while to respond. They don’t hang out here. So it’s all pearls before swine.
They don’t hang out here. They pop in from time to time and respond to comments on their own posts, true. They aren’t going to use the forum as their main vehicle of academic publishing.
Brad and I have our own special cross to bear. It takes a unique kind of person dedicate precious Saturday free time to post 134 on a thread called “Should BioLogos produce science textbooks for college use?”
Bachelors in philosophy, politics, and economics, Master of Divinity. Yes, the number of Middle Aged Men With High Levels of Education is absurdly high here on the Forum, as compared to the general population. We’re working on that.
Can’t do it, technology isn’t there. Believe me, we’ve thought of it.
I’ve been away from this thread for a while (I’ve been busy with some of that evolutionary stuff), and things have moved on. Shapiro is a dead horse as a subject at this point, I’d say.
I think you’ve misunderstood both the structuralists (at the least the mainstream ones I’ve encountered) and me. What I’ve said (I believe) is that natural selection acting on random mutations is still understood to be overwhelmingly the most important mechanism by which adaptive evolution, including adaptive evolution in macroevolution, occurs. (It also happens to be what’s actually studied by lots and lots of biologists, including me some of the time.)
I don’t think most structuralists would disagree with that; Wagner and Newman wouldn’t, from what I’ve read of them. What they would say is that that fact, while it’s true, tells you very little of interest about evolution, and in particular about the phenotypic possibilities that are available to a species. And that’s something I agree with. Explanations of evolution in terms of physical forces, or of self-organization of complex systems, or of the potential of existing developmental modules, or of aerodynamics, or of biophysics, are all richer and more interesting descriptions than explanations in terms of mutation and selection, even though both kinds of description are talking about exactly the same events and are non-contradictory descriptions of exactly the same processes.
The difference in perspective between a structuralist and a population geneticist does matter. Researchers think differently if they’re conceiving of an existing developmental module as causal, or if they’re thinking of it as a constraint on the real causal factor, but these are different perspectives, not contradictory theories. And in practice no one hold exclusively one or the other.
In principle, I’d be fine with focusing more on the big-picture explanations in evolution. There are a couple of reasons for emphasizing mutation and NS, though. One reason is that an organization like BioLogos is directed primarily towards those who deny that those processes are indeed a mechanism by which much meaningful evolution occurs. Another, broader reason is that natural selection and mutation are simply better understood than the causal factors that structuralists propose. We focus on the end of the stick we can actually see. The situation has improved considerably in developmental biology, which is why you’ll find whole chapters on the subject in evolutionary biology textbooks. Newman’s ideas about the origin of early animal body plans, on the other hand, are fascinating, plausible, and very hard to verify.
As you’ve expressed it here, your view is so rare among biologists as to be approaching nonexistence.
That large parts of evolution, including such important events as the development of multicellularity, is fundamentally nonadaptive, on the other hand, is a widespread view. One difficulty with your neat dichotomy between die-hard supporters of neo-Darwinism and the new thinkers who are attacking it, by the way, can be seen in someone like Michael Lynch. He is one of the strongest proponents of the importance of non-adaptive forces in evolution, but he’s also a population geneticist and one of the most scathing critics of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis folks; he’s also sharply critical of the tendency of some developmental biologists to assume adaptive explanations.
[quote=“Eddie, post:131, topic:3653”]
By neo-Darwinism I’ve always meant the view that evolution is driven mainly by the filtering of variations – including some “random mutations” – by natural selection.[/quote]
Hello Eddie,
I challenged you to define ALL THREE TERMS with detail and rigor. You’ve defined one term with neither detail nor rigor. “Mainly” is not rigorous at all, but I suspect that you know that.
No one is under any obligation to provide you with anything.
YOU use the term “neo-Darwinism” with reckless abandon. It is YOUR obligation to define it and other terms rigorously. Otherwise, you’re just engaging in sophistry.
That’s completely irrelevant to my challenge to you. YOU are using the term “neo-Darwinism,” today, YOU need to define it today. What specific mechanisms are included in “neo-Darwinism,” what ones are excluded?
[quote]You will see probably a dozen columns on BioLogos stressing the centrality of “randomness” in evolution, but I haven’t seen any columns specifically devoted to “drift.” Nor do I see much mention of “drift” in the popular arguments of Miller and Collins.
[/quote]Eddie, you’re evading. Stop pointing at other people and follow the principle YOU claim to follow.
My challenge is to YOU to define YOUR OWN FAVORITE TERM and two others you use only slightly less often. If you can’t define them, you shouldn’t be using them in virtually every comment that doesn’t demand that BL people state detailed theological assumptions (and some that do).
BTW, I have no idea why you have decided that drift requires scare quotes.
ed it yesterday, when you first posted it; I was the first one.
