No, I typically refer to it as “Einstein’s theory of relativity”, as this helps distinguish it from any other particular formulations, especially if i were discussing it in a context where other people embrace alternate theories of relativity. And that seems to be the most common use of the terminology…
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Good decision. It will make your life easier and your rhetoric slightly more palatable.
Well, you’re talking to a bunch of Christians, with a few exceptions, so you shouldn’t assume that everyone on BL forum has the same opinion on “without foresight” or “randomly.” To say that “God is intelligent” is to state the obvious, and every Christian believes God had a purpose/design. As @Nikolai mentioned, BioLogos as an organization endorses lower-case “intelligent design.” Whether God had foresight or used random processes is not the point of contention.
The point of contention is whether God’s involvement can be empirically demonstrated. So far, every attempt has failed. I’m not surprised. I agree with Isaiah and Pascal. Our God is a God who hides himself. If he wished to provide proof of his existence, he surely would’ve given an obvious sign by now.
“A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah."
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Exactly! So let’s test the hypothesis. If evolution is guided by God, then changes will not be random, i.e. without foresight, and we can detect this. If it is not guided by God, then changes will be random, which we can also detect as Schaffer has proposed.
Anyways, Schaffer’s paper is trivial to test, and I hope to get some results by tomorrow. Stay tuned!
Since you all get triggered by the word “Darwinian”, I’ll use the terms guided vs unguided evolution. Same difference.
“If evolution is guided by God, then changes will not be random.” - EricMH
“It is accidental to us, not to God.” – J.H. Newman
“Divine providence does not exclude fortune and chance.” – St. Thomas Aquinas
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Your conclusion doesn’t follow the premises, and it’s equivalent to the “Bible Code” fiasco of years back. If God has chosen to hide his involvement and thereby deny us mathematical proof, he can easily hide behind what mathematically appears random.
Let’s take the “whole genome duplication” event that @DennisVenema mentioned a long time ago. At an instant, this doubled the genetic raw material for evolution’s “random” mutation algorithm to work with. I see God’s fingerprints all over that, but I see with the eyes of faith. Good luck mathematically demonstrating his involvement.
Here’s my view: God’s Presence and Guidance in Evolution
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Sure, but at that point we are arguing how many angels dance on the head of a pin. If it’ll make you happy we can use the term empirically detectable guidance. Whatever words you want to use, the question is whether we can empirically detect it.
I think everyone is clear what we are doing here, so let’s move on to settling the question with some living room science!
When I design genomes I tend to use exact copies of genes/sequences. If I do change sequences I never look at the ratios of transitions, transversions, and CpG mutations in order to match the rates of de novo mutations. I don’t know of any reason why any molecular biologist (i.e. designer) would do that.
Indels and repeat regions occur naturally, so I’m not exactly sure what you are getting at. Also, biologists will often use existing systems in living organisms to manipulate DNA. CRISPR/Cas9 is an excellent example.
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All too often, evolution deniers use the term “Darwnism” to try and make the theory of evolution appear more like religion or philosophy. It gets a bit old.
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It’s an attempt to make the theory of evolution look less scientific. As I state above, it wears a bit thin over time.
That’s not what I observe. What I see are people stating emphatically that something more is needed, but they fail to back any of these claims with evidence or reasoned arguments. They continually misrepresent data, and outright deny that data exists as we have seen in this very thread. I have a real hard time seeing any honest inquiry from that side of the discussion.
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??? You and I are obviously reading very different books on ID (I am assuming you actually read the works of those you critique).
Now, one might say the evidence does not support the conclusions, or you disagree with the reasons, but one thing the the ID publications do not have is lack of evidence or (very rigorously) reasoned arguments!
After you get done clutching at your pearls, perhaps you could present these arguments and evidence?
Let’s start with a simple example. Behe claims that irreducibly complex systems can not evolve. Why? Because Behe can’t think of a way that they could evolve. Combine an argument from incredulity with an argument from ignorance, and point to the complete lack of evidence for any of it.
Explanatory filter? In your own words, hasn’t been applied to biology at all.
In this very thread, @Daniel_Fisher claims that there hasn’t been enough time to produce the genetic differences between humans and chimps. He also claimed that there had be just the right mutations. No evidence to back up any of these claims.
I could go through some articles at ENV if you want. Plenty of more examples just waiting.
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LOL!!! You are too funny! 
Me: I have yet to see a single person apply the filter to real genetic sequences and real biology which is why I am skeptical, but still hopeful.
EricMH: I too haven’t seen any inference to big D Design in biology.
Find a stretch of homologous DNA shared by humans and other apes. Find the genetic differences. Use the explanatory filter to tell us which of those differences came about due to design. If you can’t do this, then the explanatory filter is useless.
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God creates ecology. That is how God does ecology. God made our physical world and out the the physical universe comes the biological world. This is not by magic, but by a rational Being known as God.
God is not intervening in ecology. Ecology gas a structure, a meaning, a purpose and a plan that comes from its Creator, God. Again the earth has changed a great deal in the 4 billion years since it has been formed and it is not by magic by a rational plan.
The INTRINSIC purpose of ecology and evolution is to create a rational observer who can understand ands appreciate our rational universe per the Anthropic Principle .
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Human Genetics Confirms Mutations as the Drivers of Diversity and Evolution
The purpose of this post is to outline 3 lines of evidence from the field of human genetics that clearly demonstrate that the slow accumulation of mutations over generations is responsible for the genetic diversity of modern human populations, and that the same process is responsible for the genetic differences we have compared with chimpanzees, affirming the fact that we share a common ancestor. from Evo Grad - 20 Feb 19
Here you go again. Defending “evolution” by ignoring Natural Selection. So which is it? So you accept Darwin’s basic theory of Variation and Selection or not?
Yes, you can make a premia facia case based on common genes, but you cannot demonstrate how evolution works without natural selection which was the genius of Darwin. So, does that mean that it is right to destroy the theory, because you do not understand how natural selection works? Wake up and smell the coffee. .
When I say that rivers erode canyons I am not ignoring the fact that rivers deposit sediments in deltas.
If neutral drift destroys Darwin’s theory then perhaps you should embrace the modern theory of evolution that includes neutral drift. Wake up and smell the 21st century. The theory of evolution includes more than just positive and negative selection.
I don’t think this follows. No tool of science can detect God’s involvement or lack of involvement in apparently random processes. That does not stop any Christian from making a truth claim by faith that God is involved in random processes. By random mutation biologists are saying that whether the outcome of the mutation turns out to be beneficial or harmful does not play a role in the natural causes of the mutation.
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And, a bit later in the same comment,
Right after I question whether you really read what you critique 
Alright, now back to the science.
Here’s Schaffner’s article: Testing Common Ancestry: It’s All About the Mutations - BioLogos
I reproduced Schaffner’s experiment using the Levenshtein edit distance on some mitochondrial DNA. I took the collection of edits, and then separated out the replacement edits. I then counted the substitutions based on Schaffner’s scheme, and got the same sort of distribution between human and chimps, and humans and gorillas. So, it looks like reproduction is successful.
Then, I randomly generated DNA sequences using the nucleotide distributions for each organism, and ran the same comparisons. I could reproduce the almost the same distribution, but this is from independently randomly generated genomes. So, the part that Schaffner attributes to random mutation is actually just due to the nucleotide distribution and tells us nothing about the genetic linneage.
Now note, I said ‘almost’. The part of the distribution that randomly generated data does not reproduce is the A<->C/G<->T bar. Additionally, this bar represents the substitutions unlikely to happen by random mutation. And finally, this bar represented the biggest discrepancy when I compared the pair human/chimp to the pair human/rat. So, it looks like non random changes are distinguishing the different species. Can we say design inference??? Oops, I mean “empirically detectable guidance”…
Chalk one up for armchair science everyone!
If there’s interest, I’ll put in the effort to stick this in a Github repo, and maybe even throw in some pretty graphs. Let me know!
Sure, go ahead and post it to Github.
While we’re at it, you seem quite impressed with yourself. I suggest it would be helpful to get some feedback from someone who’s published some papers in this very discipline before you break out the victory dance. What insights would you have on this, @glipsnort ?
Best,
Chris
Why would any Christian do that? Of course rationality, supervening science, preempts the imparsimonious.