Why I remain a Darwin Skeptic

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@Daniel_Fisher

In college, though, when I started my Biology/Biochemistry major… I Began to get blown away by a few things … one of my professors had done significant work with mutations and shared with us that he considered it impossible that mutations could have much to do with evolution

No offense, but how long ago was this?

@Daniel_Fisher

Then the line I’d heard about somehow organic matter getting zapped by electricity or thermal vents or sunlight, then just somehow getting formed into these processes began to move for me into the realm of high fantasy.

Okay, this is one of my pet peeves. Sorry. I see it all the time from anti-evolution Christian apologists. You’re confusing the origin of life (OOL) with evolution. Biological evolution is an explanation of how existing organisms change over time. I happen to believe that this particular problem may be too difficult to solve, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want people to stop trying to solve it. More on that later …

@Daniel_Fisher

I’d never done the math before reading “Signature in the Cell.” I had brushed off my creationist friend’s “just forming one protein is so unlikely” claim by the “sure, but given enough time and opportunities” hand-wave. But Meyer’s book walked through the actual math involved, and I started doing some calculations myself.

Never trust your intuition, or your own math. Haha.

@Daniel_Fisher

BACTERIA / VERTABRATE GENERATION EVOLUTION COMPARISON - I at one point also turned my mathematical analysis to comparing evolution across species.

See above. The earliest forms of life were microbes around 3.7 billion years ago, followed by cyanobacteria 2.4 billion years ago. The first “animals” (sponges) appeared around 800 million years ago. According to the evidence, bacteria took 1.6 billion years to evolve into something more complex “in the wild.” Complaining that nothing has happened in 50 years? Hmmm. I wouldn’t trust your back of the envelope calculations.

@Daniel_Fisher

The system works one way, but to make the propellers function to give both forward and vertical flight is something that is remarkably precise, and has to be done in just a certain way… and trying to get to it by numerous slight modifications of preexisting plans is simply doomed to failure

Some modifications might occur quite quickly. For example, here’s an article that explains how the complex protein haemaglobin arose from a simple monomer in only a few steps:
Story: Extinct proteins resurrected to reconstruct the evolution of vertebrate haemoglobin
Scientific article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2292-y

Here’s another interesting example. One point mutation in the ancient gene ARHGAP11A may have been enough to cause the neocortex of the human brain to start expanding.
https://www.mpi-cbg.de/news-events/latest-news/article/news/evolutionary-key-for-a-bigger-brain/
Primates possess only the ancient gene, while humans possess ARHGAP11B, which substitutes a C for a G at a single point, thereby triggering the production of a larger neocortex. Interestingly, a 2015 article on the subject says Neanderthal and Denisovan possess both genes (paralogs). How did that happen? I know @sfmatheson is interested in the subject. Frankly, I didn’t understand 3/4 of the paper, but I’m well-versed enough in the English language to get the gist.

A single splice site mutation in human-specific ARHGAP11B causes basal progenitor amplification

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/2/12/e1601941.full.pdf

@Daniel_Fisher

PHILOSOPHICAL OBJECTIONS
OK, To finish up… It is not lost on me that any atheist scientist is compelled to find a naturalistic process by which human life happened. If there are some aspects of life that are, in fact, too complex, too intricate, too precise to have ever happened by chance mutations helped by natural selection, an atheist scientist will never acknowledge that. They can’t. Their worldview precludes this as something even to consider. They will seek, find, affirm, and defend a strictly natural process. Even the hypothesis, “This may be too complex to be explained by any natural process” is impossible to allow.

I know that no one ever changes their mind on this site or anywhere else in internet-land, but let me throw out a few things for you to chew on (and spit out).

I know your big beef is with Methodological Naturalism, but take a deep breath and step back for a minute. MN is really nothing more than a “method” of doing science. It’s the scientific method in modern dress, and the inventors of the scientific method were almost exclusively Christians.

That aside, the method of MN really means nothing more than scientists must keep looking for a natural explanation as long as that possibility exists. That means that however impossible the problem may appear, scientists should never stop looking for an answer. It doesn’t matter whether they’re atheists or Christians. The quest for understanding never should end with “too hard, so God did it.” I happen to agree with you that the question of the origin of life is too complex to answer, but that doesn’t mean I want scientists to stop looking for an explanation.

@Daniel_Fisher

My biggest challenge, difficulty, and complaint about EC as articulated by Biologos is that, in embracing Methodological Naturalism, they put themselves in exactly the same position as said atheist scientist. So long as they are following methodological naturalism, they will seek, find, affirm, and defend a strictly natural process - however much they might acknowledge that God’s hand was “somehow” behind it, that there is no hard/fast boundary between natural and supernatural, however much they credit God’s overarching providence… they simply would not and will never recognize any biological phenomenon as “too complex” for it to have happened “naturally.”

Well, I would never say that any problem is definitely “too complex” to solve, but I suspect that certain problems are. I’ve already identified one in the origin of life, but I may be proven wrong one day. We’ll see.

Now, you’re mistaken in giving MN some sort of mystical power as the be-all-end-all motivation behind evolutionary creationism (EC). That’s simply not true. The only time I give MN a thought is when it’s brought up here. I do care about truth and strive to believe things that are true, not false, but that’s why I accept evolution. It is a fact of history supported by mountains of evidence. I didn’t decide to exclude God and seek a natural explanation for the beautiful variety of life on this planet. That’s just not how it works in real life.

@Daniel_Fisher

They will arrive at a predetermined naturalistic conclusion, and their inability to recognize that this conclusion was predetermined by their philosophical commitments makes me extremely dubious in this approach as a means to determine what is actually true .

I was a Christian long before I learned anything of evolution, let alone even heard of Methodological Naturalism. My commitment is to Christ, not to a philosophy. As for determining what is true, science is never the final word.

@Daniel_Fisher

I’ve tried to go that route - could that be how God is working with evolution? could he just, in providence, be working out a beautiful plan, bring about the marvels of the natural world, and the wonder of humanity, by what seem serendipitous circumstances, such that when we examine them, they seem in every way “natural,” but clearly God had a purpose and design “behind the scenes”?

But try as I may, I simply can’t go there. There are fortitous things, and things that are beyond obvious that they require direct intelligent intervention.

What you’re talking about here is the stupendous string of “coincidences” that resulted in the final product. I happen to agree with you about that fact. I also chalk it up to God, but I don’t agree on a couple of points. First, the “hiddenness of God” extends to mathematical proofs of his existence. If God exists (which I believe he does), then he obviously has left humanity in an ambiguous position. Absolute proofs of God’s existence or non-existence are denied to us. That’s why I place the same confidence in mathematical proofs as I do in Anselm’s philosophical proofs, which is to say “none.” Second, I defer to Pascal:

… it is certain that those who have the living faith in their heart see at once that all existence is none other than the work of the God whom they adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, … to tell them that they have only to look at the smallest things which surround them, and they will see God openly … is to give them ground for believing that the proofs of our religion are very weak. And I see by reason and experience that nothing is more calculated to arouse their contempt.

@Daniel_Fisher

All these random mutations operating with natural selection in what, evolutionarily spekaing is a blink of an eye (mere 6-7,000,000 years with 10-15+ year generation times) had to stumble upon just the right changes to make us what we are. The just right random mutations had to come along to perfect human language, ingenuity, intelligence, art, etc. The differences between chimps and humans I find to be so terribly minimized by those wanting to defend the naturalistic evolution between them … Talk about dealing multiple royal flushes in a row. Everything about it appears to me as if the deck was stacked.

The deck was stacked, but that’s our Christian interpretation. Facts never stand alone. Science never has the final word. We have to integrate factual knowledge about the world with all sorts of other types of knowledge about the world. Simply because a person accepts that common descent is a fact doesn’t mean their interpretation of the world stops there.