Have you considered, Eddie, that some of us here at not especially interested in participating in a graduate seminar in philosophy? It’s clear that you’re quite passionate about the subject, which is appropriate to your gifting and calling. As Ecclesiastes 2:4 says,
A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.
You enjoy philosophy–that’s great! But to demand that everyone here on the forum pursue your gifting and your calling with your passion might be a bit unrealistic.
And if they are going to argue as empiricists, they should not offer up a template replicator as an example of a translation apparatus – particularly after having the very obvious differences between them explained in full. They could simply say “Yes, I see the difference, they are two entirely different physical processes that are fundamentally dissimilar. One is not physically capable of creating the effects of the other. I withdraw the comparison”.
But people do what profits them, and for their own reasons it profits them to ignore the fundamentals.
The specific mechanics of the way God works in nature is particularly elusive. You can’t describe “how” the miracle is done. It is done.
So…fiat Creation–how? God “spoke everything into being”? Explain that at a graduate-level understanding of philosophy.
Or…God’s intervention through ID–how? Explain the specific mechanics of how God is “making it happen”–oh, at a graduate-level understanding of philosophy.
Or…God’s intervention through evolution–how? Explain the specific mechanics of how God is doing this–oh, at a graduate-level understanding of philosophy.
Maybe I’m stupid because I don’t have a graduate-level degree in philosophy, but frankly, I’ve never seen anybody address these questions.
But because I’m not convinced that ID leads to further relevant scientific investigation, then my only option is to explain the nature of God’s intervention in evolution at a graduate-level of philosophy OR shut up?
I want to thank you for bringing to my attention Denton’s interesting work, which I have added to my Amazon queue.
I hope you are willing to accept a little bit of constructive feedback here.
Behe’s writings are, to some extent, a moving target. I do not know what he wrote on the dust-jacket blurb for Denton, but I’ll trust your assertion that he supported Denton’s elaboration of “natural causes” in evolution. However, he did not make any allowance for natural causation as an explanation for many biological phenomena in 1996, when he wrote Darwin’s Black Box. He vehemently argued against mutation and natural selection as a source of instructions for what he described as irreducibly complex biochemical systems. The only alternative he offered was the suggestion that the intelligent designer placed the genetic code for every irreducibly complex system in the entire history of biology, from 3bya to the present, into the first cell. These instructions were largely dormant for billions of years, he posited, until they were switched on at the time of need.
This scenario is of course utterly implausible to geneticists, who would readily point out that a gene that is unused for millions of generations suffers crippling mutations that render it unusable. Natural selection does not weed out those crippling mutations, because the gene is unused. The end result is a pseudogene. One example of such a pseudogene is the vitellogenin pseudogene in non-oviparous mammals, about which the BioLogos community recently enjoyed a lengthy discussion in this forum. Perhaps Denton has come up with an improved theory that Behe now supports; but as of 1996, Behe’s proposal was, in my opinion, a non-starter.
Long story short, it does not make sense to chastise folks for misunderstanding what Behe wrote in 1996, based on how he refined his opinion almost 20 years later. You could, on the other hand, explain that Behe’s stance has changed over the past 20 years in a way you find compelling, and avoid a lot of kerfuffle.
You seem to take on faith Behe’s rejection of mutation/random selection as agents that can yield “irreducibly complex” biological systems. Neither one of us is a biologist, but I’ve read plenty of tertiary literature by biologists that strongly challenges Behe’s assertion on the basis of good evidence. Behe’s stance is considered highly implausible by his colleagues, and it’s not just an argument over philosophy.
You advocate that arguing for an intelligent designer is not the same thing as arguing for supernatural causation. I’m rather skeptical of that stance. An intelligent designer who has the ability to rapidly, if not in an instant, form a complex code for complex biological mechanisms is, pretty much by definition, not explainable by natural causes. The intelligent designer is by definition not within nature–presumably above it. And you know how the English for “above nature” would be translated into Latin.
You seem to scorn randomness as a suitable topic for philosophy. I would argue that the classic philosophers did not discuss the topic much because they felt that every observable phenomenon could be explained by deterministic causes. Newton, Boyle, and Galileo would have agreed. But they did not live in the era of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or of quantum theory. Nor did they know anything of chaos theory. I am not inviting a debate in this thread on this subject; I am just saying that you seem to heap scorn on the subject of randomness, while scientists take it very seriously as a description of the universe that you and I, by faith, describe as being created by God. If we take the book of nature seriously, we have to come up with a way to incorporate randomness into theology. If you do not think it has been done well enough, then please use your gifting to help improve it. I do not know you or your work well enough; perhaps you are already doing this. If not, I would humbly suggest that jeering from the sidelines is not, in my opinion, going to help.
And now I must move on to other things. I have enjoyed the discussion, Eddie, and learned many things from our interaction. I hope you can say the same thing.
Eddie, how do ID leaders describe the details of divine action (or Designer action, if you prefer) in creation? Do you have sources you can recommend? In my years of reading ID materials, I have not seen any significant discussion of how the Designer acts in nature.
Is your position on God’s relation to rain something very much like this?
“God is somehow, in some mysterious way we can’t understand, behind rain, so let’s let science work out the details of how it happens, and have faith that God is in there somewhere,”
Or do you have something less vague and more intellectually rigorous to offer? I hope you don’t offer something loose, vague, and indefinite. I would like to see something closer to the robust conceptions of rain causality which we see in Calvin, Aquinas, Augustine, Job, etc.
That is actually Dennis’ point. As he said, “In my years of reading ID materials, I have not seen any significant discussion of how the Designer acts in nature”. So to return to the question, how do ID leaders describe the divine action in creation? How do you describe the divine action in creation?
[quote=“Eddie, post:192, topic:4930”]
I have not said that ID leaders adequately describe divine action. I have said that EC leaders make statements about divine action that they cannot defend, and in some cases duck out of the argument without even trying to defend. [/quote]
I have not said that you have said such. I merely asked a question to further my own understanding of ID, and I thought it was reasonably clear. I thought you might have read something I had not.
What has Dembski written? Are you referring to his book The End of Christianity? or some other source?
[quote=“Eddie, post:192, topic:4930”]
You also forget that EC by its very nature makes larger claims than ID. ID makes no claim beyond the claim that design in nature is detectable. [/quote]
I’m well aware of this, and it’s one of the many reasons I prefer EC to ID. ID is theologically vague; EC is explicitly Christian. Of course, it is the scientific failings of ID that are by far the most problematic, but the theological muddiness is also an issue to keep in mind.
Behe’s first contribution to ID thinking was the concept of irreducible complexity, which is wholly validated by semiotics. Do you count the concept of IC as a failure of ID?
Would you agree that “There are no peer-reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological systems occurred”?
Jon, do you understand what confirmation bias is? Its a truly poor intellectual position to find oneself in. Confirmation bias virtually always demonstrates weakness in a position being argued for. Very often people who justify their positions via confirmation bias will choose arguments that they will immediately have to evacuate with the mere turn of a card. You might want to keep that in mind. And if your question is not a demonstration of confirmation bias, then it is most certainly a wholesale misunderstanding of ID.
Thanks for this clarification. I haven’t read their articles. I have read Polkinghorne, and he has described the relationship of randomness to divine providence at considerable length. I don’t know whether he has done that here at the BioLogos site, though.
Ah, but scientists don’t accept the distinction that you propose. The same mathematics that apply to quantum, stochastic processes like radioactive decay also apply to mutation rates and population genetics.
An undergraduate science major would understand this. But I don’t think you misunderstand due to lack of intellectual ability, Eddie. I suspect you’re not treading this ground either due to a lack of background or a lack of interest. Nothing wrong with that.
Nope. I read Behe’s book and understood it quite well. The difference between you and me, Eddie, is that (as best I can tell) you think that once the philosophical categories and semantics are clear, it’s somehow wrong to associate any other logically demanded inferences to the author. The design inference is proven; game, set, and match. Once I reached the index on page 293, though, my inclination was to think about the implications for what I would teach my kids, and what I would say in Sunday School class.
More on that in a minute.
The intelligent design reflects an intelligent agent (or agents) who had the capability to implement the design. Without the action of an intelligent, capable agent, an intelligent design can’t be implemented. You seem to think that this is not part of the design inference, but I strongly disagree; without the action of an intelligent agent, an intelligent design cannot be observed. And if an intelligent design cannot be observed, the design inference cannot be made.
Ergo, if a design inference can be made, an inference to the action of an intelligent agent can be made. Q.E.D.
So now I will return to the practical implications of Behe’s book, as I threatened, er, promised.
My wife and I have been blessed with four wonderful, curious, talented, godly, faithful children. (Do I like my kids? YES!) Our youngest daughter was quite the student in ninth-grade. Given the opportunity to write a research paper about the origins of life, she plucked Darwin’s Black Box off my shelf and devoured it.
One evening after dinner, she said, “Dad, Michael Behe is talking about God, isn’t he?”
Ever the believer in the Socratic method, I replied, "Why do you say that, my lovely daughter? He never once said used the word ‘God’ in the book, or talked about supernatural action. "
“But he did, Dad! He said that biological systems like blood clotting can only be explained as intelligent designs that are the work of an intelligent agent.”
“Go on.”
She was getting excited. “When the earth was formed, it didn’t have any intelligent life. It just had rocks and clouds and such.”
“Why is that important?”
“Don’t you see? Life as we know it couldn’t be created without an intelligent agent, just like Behe said. But until biological life existed, there were no intelligent agents–at least, there were no natural intelligent agents.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I said in my ponderous Dad voice.
“So the intelligent agent that created life had to be supernatural!”
“Bingo!” I smiled. “I can’t wait to see your paper.”
So you see, Eddie, an intelligent ninth-grader who doesn’t want to stop at the design inference, but is curious enough to explore what other inferences must logically follow, will understand that Darwin’s Black Box implied supernatural causation for biological life.
Oh, and reasonably intelligent federal judges understand the implications of Darwin’s Black Box, too.
I am asking you a question. Specifically, I am asking you if you agree with a statement which was not made by me. I fail to see how this is confirmation bias, or demonstrates “a wholesale misunderstanding of ID”. Would you mind answering the question?
