182 Comments

Joe Carter
January 7th, 2010 | 10:36 am

Excellent post, Steve. I’m not sure I agree that its not possible—logically possible—to rule out that structures have been developed by small successive steps. It may be the case as some (most?) evolutionary biologists believe that such structures are not possible because they start with the theory and assume that nothing falls outside it.

But if we don’t start with that assumption, then we have to look for an addendum to the theory. That is where I differ from neo-Darwinists (and some ID advocates). I think that there are processes that we haven’t discovered yet that can build irreducibly complex structures.

Simply saying “God did it” is not really a good explanation, either theologically or scientifically. I think the problem is more that we are still in the primitive stage of understanding when it comes to biology. (The discovery that prions evolve is an example of how we are finding all of the time how much we still need to learn.)

Barry Arrington
January 7th, 2010 | 11:33 am

Dr. Barr, you say that ID claims, in effect, that complex biological structures such as the blood clotting system or the bacterial flagellum arose by miracles. I have read extensively in the field and have never seen a single ID proponent make such a claim. Indeed, they are constantly bending over backwards to ensure that no one misunderstands them as making that claim. They argue that the irreducible complexity and specified information in living systems is best explained as the result of an intelligent agent acting for a purpose. They never claim that the designer is necessarily God. It seems to me that you either do not understand what ID claims, or you are attacking a strawman of your own construction for ease of demolition.

Arch-atheist Richard Dawkins says in The Blind Watchmaker, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” He goes on to argue that the appearance of design is an illusion. ID simply makes the modest claim that the apparent design is in fact design. It says nothing about miracles or the nature or purpose of the designer and concedes that the designer could in fact be “natural” himself. Here again, ID is on the same page as Dawkins, who has conceded the possibility of a form of ID called “directed panspermia,” the theory that the earth was seeded with life by aliens.

If you were walking through a desert and found a computer, you would assume, quite correctly, that the computer was designed for a purpose by an intelligent actor. You would not wonder how natural forces (chance and mechanical necessity) combined to create the computer. Every cell in your body is a marvel of nano-engineering and micro-information processing technology more complex than a computer by many orders of magnitude. Is it really so unreasonable to conclude that the best explanation for that nano-engineering and micro-information processing technology is “intelligent agent acting for a purpose” as opposed to “matter spontaneously organizing itself”?

Curt Cameron
January 7th, 2010 | 12:01 pm

Barry, if I found a computer in the desert, I might at first think that it was designed by an intelligence. But then if I learned that this computer was capable of self-replication, and each generation was selected for which models could best perform as computers, and that they had been doing this for billions of years, then I would reconsider and investigate the mechanisms involved. If I then found that mechanisms were in place for all this to have occurred naturally from the beginning, and there were tons and tons of old historical computer remnants left in the dirt showing a clear line of descent with modification, then I’d probably be convinced that there was probably no intelligent designer involved.

Also, your attempt at distancing ID from miracle claims falls flat. The idea of natural alien beings shaping molecules throughout an extended period of Earth’s history in vast swaths of the population of life on the planet is patently ridiculous, and that’s what would be required if we accept things like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting cascade as evidence of design. Imagine an alien civilization hanging around for literally billions of years to regularly swoop in and make small changes in the molecules inside the cells of billions of life forms of a population, only to disappear without a trace as soon as creatures came about with better observational abilities. No one buys all that for a minute – every ID creationist, whether he admits it or not, is positing a magical God as the designer.

Stephen M. Barr
January 7th, 2010 | 12:20 pm

Dear Barry, I am quite aware that the ID theorists “are constantly bending over backwards” to disavow that they are making are claims about who or what the Intelligent Designer is. They do indeed argue that “the designer could in fact be ‘natural’ himself.” But I don’t take this seriously. Let us look at their list of possible Intelligent Designers. In the words of Mike Behe, “Possible candidates for the role of designer include: The God of Christianity, an angel — fallen or not, Plato’s demi-urge, some mystical new age force, space aliens from Alpha Centauri, time travelers, or some utterly unknown intelligent being.” A space alien from Alpha Centauri would obviously be himself be an organism exhibiting the kinds of “irreducible complexity” terrestrial organisms exhibit. Thus the space aliens would themselves have to be (acciording to the ID arguments) designed by an Intelligent Designer? Who would that be? ANOTHER race of space aliens? Obviously we cannot have an infinite regress of space aliens. The same problem arises with time travelers, if those travelers are biological organisms from the future. Were they designed by creatures from the yet farther future? Indeed, this is a problem with any “natural” candidate for Intelligent Designer. One is really driven, if one wants to avoid infinite regress or circularity, to invoke a supernatural being (such as God or an angel). And that is what I mean by a “miracle” here, an effect produced by a supernatural being. I don’t know what a new age force is, but here it must mean either some natural “intelligent agent” — leading to the same regress problem as space aliens have — or it is a supernatural agent.

I think that list is pure smoke. One is talking about a supernatural intelligent being.

In any event, this doesn’t really affect the points David B. Hart, Joe Carter, and I were making. The question of “personal incredulity” arises as much for demi-urges and new age forces as for miracles produced by God — far more, I would imagine, for the great majority of people.

Rusty Lopez
January 7th, 2010 | 12:27 pm

ID proponents, such as Behe, are careful to explain that they are making their claims based on what we have learned about biological systems, not what we don’t know about them. One would expect that, as we continue to learn about the biological realm, we will discover structures and processes that will either support or contradict the neo-Darwinian approach.

Care should be taken when criticizing the concept of irreducible complexity. For example, the notion of a Roman arch rests not simply on whether it can be built one stone at a time. Of course it cannot. Yet Roman arches exist, so they are constructed in another manner – a manner which mandates planning and sequenced execution (trademarks of design). Another point of irreducible complexity is that while a Roman arch is being built, it is not a Roman arch (compare to a bacterial flagellum not being a flagellum until it is operational).

Another point to consider is that as we continue to expand our knowledge of biological structures and processes, we discover more and more complex systems. Increasing complexity, integrated at that, is problematic for a Blind Watchmaker constrained to using perishable resources in a hostile environment. While it is certainly possible that we may discover some previously unknown process or force which causes some immense naturalistic gaps to be filled, shouldn’t we base our claims on what we do know now?

Joe Carter
January 7th, 2010 | 12:35 pm

Stephen M. Barr I think that list is pure smoke. One is talking about a supernatural intelligent being.

I agree that the ID advocates are talking about a supernatural intelligent being. But I think you underestimate both the creativity of some scientists and the lengths they will go to in order to avoid conceding the possibility of a supernatural agent.

Consider, for example, the Big Bang theory. It seems reasonable to assume that a non-natural agent had a role in the creation of the universe. But instead the most popular explanation is the multiverse—a form of non-intelligent, non-natural phenomenon.

I suspect that if “irreducible complexity” ever developed to the stage where it couldn’t be doubted, a multivere-style explanation would suddenly become very popular. Rather than a space alien from Alpha Centauri, it would likely be credited to a non-supernatural intelligent agent that developed outside the normal laws of nature (possibly in another universe that is able to interact with our own).

My own view, of course, is that irreducible complexity should just lead us to consider that there are processes that are more complex than any we’ve yet discovered.

Barry Arrington
January 7th, 2010 | 12:50 pm

Mr. Cameron, you are certainly correct that self-replication is key to any naturalistic explanation of origins. And like every other Darwinist — from Darwin to this day – you simply assume the beginning of the process. But I won’t let you off the hook that easily. Even the most simple cell has hundreds of inter-connected parts, and if any one of those parts is missing there is zero function. Do you really expect us to believe that all of those hundreds of parts in the first cell combined spontaneously? Secondly, you need information codes in DNA for self-replication. Where did those codes come from? Did they spontaneously poof into existence too? Keep in mind that you cannot invoke natural selection to get the process started, because natural selection works only on variations in organisms resulting from random variations in the replication process. As Lewis Wolpert conceded only a few days ago in a debate with William Dembski, materialist scientists have absolutely no idea how life originated.

And the problems don’t stop even after you somehow get the self-replicating process started. You still have to account for the irreducible complexity to which Joe Carter alluded in his original post. Sorry; no one has come close yet.

Also, like every other Darwinist, you like to throw “billions of years” around as if invoking deep time can somehow replace an explanation. ID proponents are often accused (wrongfully in my view) of invoking a “God of the gaps.” In reality, it is Darwinists who invoke “deep time of the gaps” or “random chance of the gaps” to fill in the considerable holes in their theory.

You say the fossil record unequivocally supports Darwinian theory. Perhaps you have not actually read Origin of Species, in which Darwin admitted that the evidence of the fossil record is a great argument against his theory. He thought that as additional discoveries were made the record would come to support the theory. He was wrong. It has not; which is why Gould’s life work was to come up with a theory of the fossil record that explained why it does not support Darwinistic gradualism and at the same time preserve the core of the theory.

You say that all ID proponents believe in their heart of hearts that a “magical god” is the designer. Perhaps you have not heard of leading ID proponent David Berlinski, an atheist.

Finally, you misunderstand my directed panspermia comment. I do not personally believe “aliens done it.” My point is that even open-minded atheists concede the possibility of a “natural” designer. Therefore, there is no need to dismiss a designer out of hand.

Stephen M. Barr
January 7th, 2010 | 1:07 pm

I don’t doubt, Joe, that atheists will believe almost anything rather than believe in God.

I am actually quite open to the idea that at certain key stages of evolution “divine intervention” may have occurred. I find this more plausible for evolutionary steps needed for man to evolve than for things like the bacterial flagellum. (I am assuming man could still have evolved even if bacteria had no flagella, but maybe I am wrong).

Actually, I will go even further: As a Catholic I most definitely DO believe that supernatural intervention was required for man’s origin — specifically for the creation of the human spiritual soul. Indeed, such intervention happens every time a new human being comes into existence.

As for the multiverse, it is an interesting idea that has more going for it than atheist fear of God. but we can discuss that another time.

Steve

Barry Arrington
January 7th, 2010 | 1:26 pm

Joe Carter writes: I suspect that if “irreducible complexity” ever developed to the stage where it couldn’t be doubted, a multivere-style explanation would suddenly become very popular.

We are already there Joe, and this article is an example: http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/15

The author, an avowed Darwinist, gives up on Darwin to ever explain the origin of life. He admits: “to attain the minimal complexity required for a biological system to start on the path of biological evolution, a system of a far greater complexity, i.e., a highly evolved one, appears to be required. How such a system could evolve, is a puzzle that defeats conventional evolutionary thinking.” And as you suggested would be the case, he posits a “multiverse” to fill the gap.

Michael Currie
January 7th, 2010 | 1:37 pm

I have only a passing acquantance with the theories of evolution or I.D.but I do understand that each is an attempt to make sense of the world around us. Darwinian materialists seem to miss the oddest of things, for instance, that their noble endeavor is only possible because of the seemingly relentless intelligibility of the world they explore and that their efforts in extracting understanding from this directionless, dumb world are purpose driven. At the very heart of their lifes work is the very thing they deny. Another thing, what strictly scientific fact in their work allows them to conclude that God did not do this. At best they should remain silent on this issue and keep digging. As for the IDers, while their lists of incredible fine tunings and unlikely occurrences are impressive their attention to irreducible complexity, again impressive, no more points to god,for the deists among them,than does a rock.I would presume that for IDers everything was designed in some way, at some point.Is it fingerprints their looking for. That said , my sympathy lies with the IDers for the simple reason that the direction of their search implies a meaning to the hope that lies within me. The materialist, while not impugning their motives,are just searching for another thing.

Barry Arrington
January 7th, 2010 | 1:48 pm

Dr. Barr, I think you misunderstand Dr. Behe. Of course, Behe does not believe that any of the entities on his list is the designer. As a committed Christian, he believes God is the designer. His point is very different: Intelligent agents are the only known cause of the objects that are irreducible complex. Intelligent agents are the only known cause of complex specified information. Therefore, in contexts other than biology when we see irreducible complexity or complex specified information, we automatically conclude they were caused by intelligent agents. This is not controversial, and, indeed, whole fields of scholarly inquiry rest on this common sense conclusion (e.g., forensics, archeology, cryptology, etc.). And when we make a designer inference in these other fields, we never feel compelled to assume, as Mr. Cameron facetiously puts it, a “magical god” did it.

Behe’s point is that in the same way, when we make a design inference in biology, there is no reason NECESSARILY to conclude that God did it. In other words,

Also, your “infinite regress” argument falls to a simple thought experiment. Assume we find indisputable proof that an alien designed a living creature here on earth. For example, as you probably know, Craig Venter has successfully inserted a “watermark” in a synthetic genome he designed. Let’s assume that next week we find a similar watermark inserted into the genome of an indisputably natural creature that says “made by Alien Industries.” That, I think, would be indisputable proof that an alien race designed the genome of that creature. It is no answer to say, “Well, we can’t conclude that an alien race designed the creature, because we don’t know who designed the alien.”

Arrington and Stephen Barr Mix it Up | Uncommon Descent
January 7th, 2010 | 1:55 pm

[...] At the First Things blog. [...]

Francis Beckwith
January 7th, 2010 | 2:08 pm

Steve, there’s another way to look at the arch example. The person who is moving the stones has a pattern in his mind to which the completed arch should correspond. Although you are correct that this shows that the arch is not irreducibly complex, it does mean that arch’s construction requires final, formal, efficient, and material causes.

And this, by the way, is why I think that ID theorists are right to be skeptical of materialism but wrong in thinking that they have the answer. For in the case of a “natural arch” that can be accounted for by natural processes, someone like Dawkins would say, “See, God was not involved, since I can give an account based on known mechanisms and laws of nature.” The ID advocate says, “But wait, your account includes ad hoc hypotheses that you have not demonstrated to be true; so, therefore, ID is currently the better explanation.” In both cases–in the case of Dawkins and the ID theorists–the thinkers are assuming that “design” is an arrangement of parts imposed on inert matter by an external mind. This means that when ID advocates isolates a particular sliver as “designed” (e.g., the bacterial flagellum), it implies that everything else is not designed. (I understand that ID advocates claim that something can be designed that does not fit their criteria. But that seems to me to give away the store to the materialists, for the ID advocate is in fact playing by the materialist’s rules).

RobC
January 7th, 2010 | 2:54 pm

Barry, in the case of David Berlinsky, I think you confuse a evolution skeptic with an intelligent design advocate. At least publicly he has said:

Unlike his colleagues at the Discovery Institute—a religious think tank that sponsors his work and promotes intelligent design—Berlinski refuses to theorize about the origin of life. He describes his attitude towards ID as “warm but distant. It’s the same attitude that I display in public toward my ex-wives.” He calls himself an agnostic and claims to live life only by the stricture “to have a good time all the time.” And while he has attacked evolutionary theory over and over again, by his own pen and through his tutelage of Ann Coulter, he’s always quick to point out that he has no particular agenda beyond skepticism.

http://www.slate.com/id/2189178/entry/2189179/

Perhaps he espouses different views in private than in public. I’m not sure how atheism and belief in a supernatural tinkering designer would ever be compatible.

Larry Tanner
January 7th, 2010 | 3:00 pm

@Barry Arrington, post #2

“They [ID proponents] argue that the irreducible complexity and specified information in living systems is best explained as the result of an intelligent agent acting for a purpose.”

Please forgive if these are basic questions (and if so, perhaps you’ll be so kind as to direct me to specific sources of information for answers):

(a) Are “irreducible complexity” and “specified information” established and widely accepted concepts in biology?

(b) When you say “best explained” what are the specific criteria you apply to determine the merits the intelligent agent/purpose explanation over the natural explanation?

Aaron Frampton
January 7th, 2010 | 3:07 pm

I’m not a scientist or a theologian. I’m a college educated individual who follows this debate with great interest (A mind of whom these scientists wish to influence). I read all I can on the subject, to the extend my limited science background will allow me to understand.

Admittedly, my comments are somewhat a tangent, but still, here they are:

My greatest frustration with this debate is this “either/or” situation. ID proponents bring two separate but often confused ideas to the debate in my opinion..

1. An alternative explanation to Dawinism
2. Strong evidence AGAINST Darwinian evolution

The frustration lies in the fact that usually only number 1 is ever on the table. Irreducible Complexity, Specified Information, etc…argue STRONGLY againt darwinian evolution, regardless of the degree to which they support ID. This fact seems to be rarely refuted.

It can be argued that ID implies the supernatural, and is tantamount to religion, fine. It cannot be argued however, that the scientific questions it espouses do great damage to darwinian philosophy, and THAT is what needs to taught, examined and discussed honestly and openly. For students not to hear about IC etc. because of what it “implies” (God) rather than what is observes (science), does them a disservice.

That there is “no designer” does not make Darwin correct. He must answer for the fossil record, IC, specified information etc.

What I have learned most from following this debate is that scientists are more concerned with winning an arguement, than discovering the mysteries of our existence. Its disappointing.

R Hampton
January 7th, 2010 | 3:10 pm

No miracle is necessary for protons, neutrons, and electrons to combine into the simplest of atoms.

No miracle is necessary for great accumulations of those atoms to fall into a self-started gravity well, enabling the first stars.

No miracle is necessary for those stars to fuse new, heavier elements from Hydrogen and Helium, or to disperse their creations through flares, novas, and other phenomena.

No miracle is necessary for stellar disks enriched with heavier elements to form planets, even Earth like (life-friendly) planets.

Nor miracle is necessary for those heavier atoms to form water, ammonia, methane, salt, etc. in the depths, on the surface, and in the atmosphere of planets.

No miracle is necessary for those simple molecules to naturally combine into amino acids, lipids, sugars, etc. (we’ve found them in comets)

It’s the next step in the every increasing complexity – a great and natural expansion of information – that is somewhat speculative. A number of methods have been proposed to account for the formation of complex proteins and fatty acids (hydrothermal vent chemisty, clay catalysts, et. al.), though none require miracles.

Now the assemblage of these parts into the first reproducible proto-cell is still a guess, and that’s the gap that Intelligent Design fills. But once life can reproduce, there is no need for divine intervention to account for a continuance in physical (chemical) complexity – a.k.a evolution, and that’s the failure of Intelligent Design.

For example, it was just announced this week that prions – a protein without DNA or RNA or even a cellular structure – can naturally evolve through selective pressures. It may very well be that reproductive capable chemistry (proto-life) predates cells. That is, the assumption that the cell was the first form of life is wrong.

Stephen M. Barr
January 7th, 2010 | 3:22 pm

Dear Barry, I am well aware that Mike Behe is, like me, a believing Catholic. I think you are missing the point. the ID contention is that certain kinds of complexity (which presumably would characterize ANY sentient organic being in our universe, including humans, time travelers, and space aliens) cannot arise except by the intervention of an intelligent designer. That logic, if accepted, must lead one ultimately to posit an intelligent designer who is supernatural. Consequently, the ID argument requires — at some stage — supernatural interventions, which is what I meant by the word “miracle”. Yes, of course, organisms on one planet might be designed by beings from a different planet. But if what the ID people regard as “irreducible complexity” is a feature of all intelligent organisms (as presumably it is) and if such “irreducible complexity” must have an intelligent designer, then it is hard to escape the conclusion that some of the organisms in the universe (not necessarily us) were miraculously, i.e. supernaturally, formed.

jerry
January 7th, 2010 | 3:38 pm

I find the discussion almost surreal. It has been over 10 years now since I was first introduced to ID and in general the discussions about it are never close to what it is really about. The only person here who is somewhat skeptical of ID and who has a good grasp of what it seems to be, is Joe Carter. The rest of the skeptics of ID have a flawed understanding of it.

I could go into a long litany of the misunderstandings but to cut to the heart of the current debate, there is one specific ID belief that is criticized here. ID believes the universe was designed and I do not think that there are too many skeptics here on this. No, the thing that ID believes that rubs most here the wrong way is that there is no current information to support a naturalistic view of evolution. Proponents of ID believe this strongly and in the 10 years that I have watched this debate carefully, I have yet to see a coherent presentation supporting naturalistic evolution. Some will read this last sentence and think, he has got to be kidding. How stupid can you get. No I am not kidding and very few have called me stupid in my life time. And almost to a person the ID proponents believe this and the anti ID people do not. So there should be future discussion on this issue.

This debate started around a review of a book which is being held up as the gold standard for supporting naturalistic evolution. One way to further a mutual understanding would be to discuss just what this book contains and to see what evidence or lack of evidence forms the basis for each side’s beliefs. How much is empirical, how much is speculation. Any criticisms of irreducible complexity are generally speculative. I have seen no empirical discussions.

Barry helps supervise the Uncommondescent site and Joe Carter and Stephen Barr are frequent contributors to First Things. Maybe at some future time, say three months, there should be a series of discussion on the content of Dawkins book at one of the two sites. Or maybe a third site is set up for the debate. Then each side can see what forms the basis for the other’s beliefs. On the other thread on this issue I spent a lot of time trying to clarify just what ID believes or what is compatible with ID. It is important that all leave these discussions with such an understanding. Maybe each side is not that far apart.

StephenB
January 7th, 2010 | 3:39 pm

Dr. Barr, I am afraid that you misunderstand the significance and texture of the design inference. When one observes a design pattern in nature and concludes that an intelligent agent was responsible for its existence, he does nothing more than follow the evidence where it leads and no further. In parallel fashion, when one returns home from a business trip and notices that his house has been ransacked and that the dresser drawers have been pulled out, he draws an inference to design, that is, he rules out a hurricane or other natural causes, and concludes that an intelligent agent was responsible. If he told you that he cannot possibly conclude from the evidence the identity of the apparent vandal, would you say that you do not take his protests seriously and that he was, wink, wink, really only thinking about his mother in law. With all due respect, you do not seem to have thought this through

John Farrell
January 7th, 2010 | 3:40 pm

If I recall correctly, Behe admitted on the stand during the Dover trial that, even by the standards of his 2004 paper (co-authored with Snopes) that an irreducibly complex pathway (in this case, a new binding site between two proteins) could evolve by standard Darwinian variation and natural selection in 20,000 years or so.

Far more telling, however, I think is the incoherence of even accepting common descent as he claims to while insisting on design for select aspects of the natural order.

Discussed at length here:
http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/korthof86.htm

Stephen M. Barr
January 7th, 2010 | 3:45 pm

I agree with you Frank. To an orthodox Christian, everything is designed. Everything is part of a divine plan conceived from all eternity. God’s providence encompasses all. This snowflake, with its beautiful geometric structure came about by natural processes, which the physicist can explicate without adverting to God’s existence, but it also is the work of God. God willed that a universe having certain laws and having certain particular conditions would exist, laws and conditions which naturally entail the existence of snowflakes. He also willed THIS particular universe, with THIS particular snowflake to exist.

I think what you may be saying — anyway, I am saying it, and I’d be interested if you agree — is that some people think of this as a zero-sum game, where the more Nature does the less God does, as if God were not the author of Nature. What we need is for people to have a livelier sense of God’s sovereignty. Whether they get it from Calvin or from St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and the idea of the concursus divinus, it would have a salutary effect and rescue us from a lot of confused controversies.

I always use the old analogy of the universe as a play and God as the playwright. Did Polonius die because Hamlet stabbed him
(the “natural explanation”) or because Shakespeare wrote the play that way (the supernatural explanation)? Both, of course. It makes no more sense to ask whether an insect exists because it evolved or because God willed it.

Steve

Curt Cameron
January 7th, 2010 | 3:52 pm

Barry Arrington, I think you’re still not understanding several points. First, there is no belief among anyone that all the molecules in a fully-functional cell combined spontaneously without any precursors. The idea is that self-replicating proteins existed first, and went through their own sort of natural selection, before functioning together in a cell. Far from having absolutely no idea how life originated, people in this field have quite a few ideas about it. Specifically which way it happened will be really hard to prove simply because these molecules leave no fossils to verify our ideas with.

The fossil record DOES unequivocally support the Theory of Evolution. In Darwin’s day, there weren’t that many fossils available. Darwin didn’t say that the evidence of the fossil record argued against his theory – he said that the fossil record AT THAT TIME wasn’t complete enough to support it. Since then we’ve filled natural history museums with transitional fossils, all of which point without question to the fact that he was right. And Gould’s work addressed the rate of change, not whether it occurred. It was all about how gradual is gradual, and whether it was sometimes faster and sometimes slower. I’m sure Gould turns over in his grave every time a creationist uses his work to try to undermine the idea of evolution.

I am aware of David Berlinski, but I’m pretty sure he’s not an ID proponent. He is a critic of the philosophy of science, but if he’s advocated ID somewhere I’m not aware of it.

It’s you who misunderstands the huge differences between the idea of panspermia, and the idea that a designer is responsible for such irreducibly complex features such as the flagellum or the blood clotting cascade. While directed panspermia could be considered a very weak form of intelligent design, it does not include the ridiculous notion of an alien race hanging around for billions of years to keep tweaking the molecular features of life, which would be required for a non-god version of ID. Proposing ID as the explanation for those two examples is either saying that a god did it with magic, or that some natural designers interceded over billions of years of development. And people who say that irreducibly complex features are evidence for design, never argue for the latter. They ALL credit God.

Barry Arrington
January 7th, 2010 | 4:22 pm

Dr. Barr, I have a tremendous amount of respect for your work, especially your discussion of quantum theory in FT. But for the life of me I can’t understand why you insist that in order to make a design inference for a biological system, we must assume the designer is supernatural. Surely you will concede that if we project out by 100 years the work of someone like Craig Venter, there is, in principle, no barrier to humans designing living organisms from scratch. It is all a matter of physics and chemistry — super-sophisticated physics and chemistry beyond our current technological ability to be sure – but nothing supernatural. If humans can, in principle, design a living creature, why must the designer be supernatural?

Collin R.
January 7th, 2010 | 4:27 pm

Mr Barr,

It is my understanding that some in the scientific community did not want to accept the idea of the Big Bang because it had religious implications.

Does truth depend on the motives of the proponents of an idea? If creationists push intelligent design, and say, for the sake of argument, there is no god, then is intelligent design therefore false? Of course not, but that is what you are arguing, isn’t it?

Also, you say, “First build a stone wall one stone at a time and one layer at a time. Then remove stones, one at a time, to leave an arch.”

If you can do that from ordinary bricks, making a real Roman arch, with a keystone and everything, then I’ll give you $100 dollars.

halo
January 7th, 2010 | 4:32 pm

Stephen Barr/Roman Arch:

Thankyou for your post. I would like to suggest that caution should be used before using the Roman Arch analogy. Here is something I wrote a while back in an e-mail debate concerning Dawkins’ use of the Roman Arch to debunk irreducible complexity in the ‘God Delusion’:

Since Dawkins’ Roman Arch analogy purports to indicate how an irreducibly complex biological system came about, to be a correct (i.e to be applicable to a biological system such as the flagellum) it would have to display the following components:

1) A step by step process in which each successive step confers a functional advantage on the system (‘functional advantage’ simply meaning that each successive step confers a benefit on the system thus enabling natural selection to favour it).

2) A naturalistic explanation of how all of these parts might have been assembled into the irreducibly complex structure.

Dawkins’ analogy fails on both counts:

1) there is no functional advantage described for any of his steps (in fact he does hardly anything to detail the steps – ‘pile a solid heap of stones, then carefully remove stones one by one’ – not even showing how the addition/removal of each stone confers a functional advantage – but unless there is a functional advantage for every single step natural selection is impotent.

2) What also makes the analogy weak is that presumably he is requiring an intelligent agent to carry out the process of stone piling/removal. But only naturalistic mechanisms are allowed – and for the analogy to really hold they must be ones that are representative of what occurs inside a cell (even if he said ‘wind and rain caused the removal of the blocks’ it is irrelevant as wind and rain are no help in the assembling a flagellum). Hence the analogy appears to fail on this count also.

It is actually very telling that analogies are used so much – there simply do not exist any credible examples from biological reality.

One final question: when observing the nano-machinary in the cell that so clearly looks designed, and in the absence of any plausible naturalistic explanations for their origin, is it really more reasonable to hold out in hope that one day we will find naturalistic explanations than simply to conlude that they very probably were designed? What is the basis for the hope of naturalistic explanations for irreducibly complex systems? There are no precedents to look back to.

endnote: If you havn’t read it already, may I commend to you Dembski’s chapter ‘The Significance of Michael Behe’ in ‘The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design.’ It is the strongest presentation of the argument from irreducible complexity that I have seen. I will send you a free copy if you like…

halo
January 7th, 2010 | 4:35 pm

Barry:

why does it matter so much if the designer is supernatural?

Jack Hudson
January 7th, 2010 | 4:45 pm

As someone who has considered and discussed ID for some time, I have observed that the discussion often seems to get too complex and off on too many tangents. ID can be reduced to certain statements that are readily falsifiable, and thus, subject to investigation, certainly of the scientific sort.

For example if we take the notion “information systems only originate from intelligent causes” we see it would be very similar to the claim investigated by Pasteur – namely that “living organisms only arise as the result from biogenesis”. Now Pasteur didn’t prove that spontaneous generation never occurred – but he did do a good job of showing that there were no known observable cases of life arising through spontaneous generation, and this led to fruitful research into what actually caused microorganisms to arise and proliferate.

I think in the same way ID could make the above claim confidently, and it would be rather straight forward thing for someone to demonstrate a purely material cause originating the development of an information system, and thus disproving the ID claim – to date, no one has done this.

Notice that nowhere in this consideration is it necessary to postulate ‘who’ the intelligence might be, only that one is required. There is no scientific reason at this point why an intelligent cause for the origination of information systems can’t be the default position until it is displaced by another well documented cause.

Rich
January 7th, 2010 | 4:55 pm

Here’s why the designer IS supernatural. ID claims that NATURE does not have enough probabilistic resources for certain events to happen. So the cause must come from outside nature. I think there’s a word for that..?

Stephen M. Barr
January 7th, 2010 | 5:02 pm

Dear StephenB (from another Stephen B), I think I understand the arguments of the ID people very well.

It seems to me that both you and Barry are saying, basically, “The ID people only say this much; they don’t say all the things you attribute to them.” Quite so. I am aware of that. I don’t claim that they say these things. I only claim that these are conclusions that follow naturally from what they say, even if they pretend not to draw these conclusions themselves.

I have nothing against design inferences. Yes, of course, if I come home and find my house ransacked, and valuables missing, I will infer that an intelligent agent was involved. More precisely I will infer that the agent was a burglar. But I won’t stop there. My scientific curiosity won’t allow it!! When the police find the burglar, I will look at him and say (having read the books of Behe and Dembski), “You are irreducibly complex — or, at least, your blood clotting system is. You or your ancestors must have been intelligently designed.” After some further investigation (funded by the Discovery Institute) I will reach more detailed conclusions. Let us say, in particular, that I reach the conclusion that the burglar’s remote ancestors were designed by a race of space aliens. And suppose that after I announce this I am vindicated by a space alien presenting himself and admitting to the whole thing. At that point, as a good ID-er, I will say to the space alien, “Boy, are you ever complex — at least your blood clotting system is. Someone must have designed you.” The alien being intelligent, is himself an ID-er, and he will say, “You are right, our race was designed by time travelers.”

Where does this end, StephenB? In all this, I am assuming, for the sake of argument, that the ID movement’s inference to design is correct. Where does it lead, in the end? It leads to a supernatural agent. One cannot invoke space aliens and time travelers forever.

You want to stop at a bare inference that SOMEBODY, who cares who, designed the human race. You say — as the ID people say — that an inference to design can be made without specifying who the designer is. All well and good. But if one begins to probe a little further, one finds that miracles have to be invoked if the ID movements arguments are correct. I am quite sure that the ID people and all their followers realize this. That is why so many religious folk look to the ID movement as an antidote to atheism.

There is nothing wrong with that in itself. No one would be happier than I if a slam-dunk argument could be made for an intelligent supernatural agent using ID-type arguments.
I do fear, however, that putting so much weight on dubious arguments for the existence of God may distract people from better arguments that are available, and may actually hurt the credibility of religion in the long run rather than help it.

Anyway, somehow I have managed to get dragged into a debate over the validity of the ID movement’s arguments.

Stephen M. Barr
January 7th, 2010 | 5:05 pm

Dear Collin R., The answer to your question
(“that is what you are arguing, isn’t it?”) is NO.

Stephen M. Barr
January 7th, 2010 | 5:06 pm

Dear Barry, (“But for the life of me I can’t understand”) What is so hard to understand about an infinite regress argument?

Steve

Barry Arrington
January 7th, 2010 | 5:08 pm

Good question halo. The answer is that it does not matter. That is the point I have been trying to make. Dr. Barr wants to dismiss ID as nothing more than “Poof! God done it” creationism. That mischaracterizes the ID project. The ID project is very simple: Intelligent agents leave “indicia of design” that are objectively detectible (complex specified information; irreducibly complex systems). Certain traits of living organisms exhibit these objectively detectible indicia of design. Therefore, we conclude, objectively, that the best explanation of these traits is “act of intelligent agent.” If you want to go on to conclude that God is the designer and you have found one of his “fingerprints,” that is all well and good, but that last step is not part of the ID project per se.

Rich
January 7th, 2010 | 5:08 pm

Jack Hudson – “Information systems” is a Jello argument. Define your terms and concepts precisely if you want to go down this path..

Stephen M. Barr
January 7th, 2010 | 5:17 pm

Dear halo,

Suppose that a wall is built up because it is useful for supporting a roof, thereby protecting something from rain and snow, and also useful for keeping something dangerous outside. Maybe at first, the wall is not very tall, but in successive generations gets made taller, as that has the advantage of allowing more things to be protected by the roof. At some point, the dangerous somethings being kept outside go away. It no longer matters whether the wall is solid. Its only function now is to keep the roof up. But that can be done with fewer bricks. Bricks are costly. It is advantageous, therefore, to make use of fewer of them. In successive generations, unneeded bricks are done without — weeded out by natural selection.

Of course, I am using “brick”, “wall”, “roof”, etc. to stand for some biological feature in this analogy.

Rich
January 7th, 2010 | 5:19 pm

Barry – “but that last step is not part of the ID project per se.”

Why not, Barry? You folks seem keen to avoid censorship, revisionism, ‘expelling (no intelligence allowed)’, etc. Why not tell the whole story?

Slightly off track – do you have a book that you’ve written on ID I could buy ?

Stephen M. Barr
January 7th, 2010 | 5:24 pm

Dear Barry, It doesn’t matter whether miracles are part of the ID “project”. A hypothesis must be judged by its logical consequences, not by the intentions of those who advanced it. Everyone can see that the ID hypothesis entails miracles — or something very much like miracles. That is why some people defend ID with such fervor and why some other people attack it with such fervor.

My purpose is not to attack ID. My purpose is simply to note the obvious fact that it does entail miracles — or something very much like miracles.

I know why many ID-ers disavow this. It makes ID look less “scientific”. But the arguments lead where they lead. I can’t help that.

Collin R.
January 7th, 2010 | 5:26 pm

Mr. Barr,

Do you hold that when humans design something, then it is supernatural?

Also, do you think that a reliable, scientific tool can be found that would be able to detect design in biological systems, whether man-made, god-made, or alien made? What tool would that be? How would you go about finding that tool? Is it unscientific to try to do it?
Mr. Cameron said:
“If I then found that mechanisms were in place for all this to have occurred naturally from the beginning, and there were tons and tons of old historical computer remnants left in the dirt showing a clear line of descent with modification, then I’d probably be convinced that there was probably no intelligent designer involved.”

I certainly don’t see why. After all, we have tons of car fossils, showing greater diversity as time goes on, greater complexity as time goes on, and precursers (wagons, steam engines). Do you believe that cars were not intelligently designed?

Rich
January 7th, 2010 | 5:30 pm

Barry – having studied the content of your intelligent design blog (uncommon descent) – It seems IDists are *actually* interested in religion, what’s wrong with atheism / materialism, etc. There appears to be no design detection occurring at all. What’s the hold up?

Here is the website:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/

So folks can make their own minds up.

Jack Hudson
January 7th, 2010 | 5:32 pm

I was trying to save a little space, but my claim could be restated more precisely to meet Rich’s criteria:

“Systems in which data is stored, encoded, transmitted, received, decoded, and made available for use only ever originate as the product of an intelligent cause”

Precise enough?

Rusty Lopez
January 7th, 2010 | 6:22 pm

The entire ID approach needs to become more robust in its approach by addressing design in terms of how humans engage in it via, for example, engineering and construction. I’ve noticed that whenever some biological structure is deemed a “bad design” it is done without regard for design parameters, the likes of which may include longevity, cost, timing, and even personal preference. If you’ve ever sat in a design review for an oil refinery revamp project, then you’ll be quite aware of the intricacies – and complexities – found in how integratedly complex systems are designed. What may be the “best” design may be rejected for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being cost. If you’ve ever planned and scheduled a large construction project, then you’ll be quite aware of how precise timing coincides with a carefully thought out execution (e.g., the arrival of certain pieces of equipment at the time they’re needed, or simply the coordination of when material arrives vs. where it is to be stored). If we begin to see biological analogs to methodologies, systems, and structures we have intelligently designed, what are we to make of the correlation?

Tom English
January 7th, 2010 | 6:24 pm

I used to refer politely to “intelligent design,” but since Bill Dembski and Bob Marks have come out of the closet and proclaimed that “Intelligence Creates Information,”

http://www.evoinfo.org/Publications/Life.html ,

I feel no compunction about referring to “intelligent-design creationism” instead. For Dembski and Marks, as for most denizens of the Big Tent, information is physical stuff, and to create physical stuff out of nothing is a miracle. Saying that humans can create physical information ex nihilo does not “naturalize” the supernatural act of turning nothing into something with evident purpose. It is merely an indirect assertion of the conventional notion that humans are godlike in self-determination of their actions.

For a few more relevant comments, see my “Bad Theology and Bad Science,”

http://boundedtheoretics.blogspot.com/2009/10/bad-theology-and-bad-science.html

halo
January 7th, 2010 | 6:37 pm

Stephen Barr

Thankyou for your new analogy, but I do not see that you avoid the same mistakes that Dawkins made.

First your new analogy, unlike the Roman Arch, does not seem to form an irreducibly complex system, which is crucial to the ID argument.

Second, like Dawkins’ example, an intelligent agent is presumably being used to guide the process of the wall getting built. But that is exactly what needs to be avoided if the analogy is to be credible. Wind and rain do not cut the mustard, just like natural selection and random variation have not been shown to cut the mustard in biology in making IC systems. Your analogy seems to be more helpful in making the opposite point – intelligence is required!

And it is not clear that the addition of every single brick gives an advantage (you say that ‘needless’ bricks can be taken away at the end – well why put them there in the first place? – this is not a Roman Arch remember). So again there are steps in your process that give no functional advantage – so natural selection is impotent.

Anyway, your analogy is still largely irrelevant because the fact is that the problem resides in biology not house-building. And biology is immensley more complex.

Until biologists can give some plausible explanations of how IC systems can form by naturalistic mechanisms it seems most reasonably to infer that the appearance of design is not illusory.

And to many who have observed the interdependant complexity in biology it is hard to see how this search is not, as Dembski has said, like searching for leprechauns. They don’t exist.

Jessie
January 7th, 2010 | 6:39 pm

Dr. Barr,

I think your infinite regress argument treats ID as something more akin to a claim of logical necessity than a simple inference to the best explanation.

As I understand it, the modern ID argument is not anything as strong as the claim that absolutely anything exhibiting certain features logically MUST have been designed. Rather, it claims that based on our observations and experience it is more reasonable to infer design as an explanation in the presence of those certain features (specified complexity or whatever the terms are), than to infer that natural processes are responsible for those features.

If a 17th century thinker said that the theory of spontaneous generation was false because according to his observations living things only come from other living things, wouldn’t that modest inference be acceptable without having to stretch it out into an infinite regress of biogenesis leading to supernaturalism?

I think that it would precisely because it is not a strong claim of logical necessity but a rather more modest claim of inference to the best explanation.

StephenB
January 7th, 2010 | 6:43 pm

Dear Stephen Barr, [it is fun to do a double StephenB isn’t it], the issue is not whether we care to stop at the inference to the existence of the vandal [design agent], but whether the design inference itself and the associated ID paradigm can, in fact, produce information about the agents [vandals] identity. If that identity is to be found, other methods and other paradigms must be used. From a single scientific paradigm, I don’t think it can’t be done at all. It has nothing to do with ID’s level of curiosity and everything to do with what can be inferred by the scientific method that is being used. .We are all curious about a scientific method that would identify the agent, but science, bound by the phenomenological, cannot that leap, nor should it when philosophy can do that for us.

From the fact of existence, we can deduce the fact of a personal, self-existent creator, or what most men “know as God.” Aquinas made that demonstration 800 years ago. Why would ID science want to repeat that which philosophy has already demonstrated. Indeed, the Catholic Church, and the Bible, [Romans 1:20, both of which insist that we can infer God’s existence from his handiwork, makes a much stronger claim that ID could ever make. ID, however, makes its own stronger claim in its own context, it can’t identify the designer, but it can, in its own way, measure something about the effects of that design, something philosophy cannot do. Context, my friend, context.

You ask where it ends. It ends where the paradigm ends. It ends at the threshold of science and at the beginning religion and philosophy. One could, using your objection, ask a parallel question to Aquinas.” St. Thomas, you have proven that God exists, but you have not indicated how we could possibly know by your methods or your five proofs whether this God is Trinitarian. Why don’t you use your reasoning powers to show us how philosophy can prove that Jesus Christ has two natures, or that God is love?” Where is your curiosity, St Thomas.”

Do you not see how unreasonable this is? The only reasonable answer is to say that philosophy can’t do theology’s job just as science can’t do philosophy’s job. It cannot go from patters to inferences about the identity of supernatural agents any more than St. Thomas can go from deductions about contingency and necessity to the reality of Trinitarian God.

StephenB
January 7th, 2010 | 6:45 pm

Oops, sorry about the double negative. That should read, “From a single scientific paradigm, I don’t think it can be done at all.”

jerry
January 7th, 2010 | 6:50 pm

Dr. Barr,

I find your use of the term “miracle” to be revealing. It is nothing more than a rhetorical device. One that seems intended to denigrate someone’s else’s argument. It has a little more polite ring to it than to accuse the other of superstition or belief in magic but in reality it is the same. Do you define every instance of an intelligence intervening with the laws of nature, a miracle. If not then why is one instance a miracle and the other not. It is an odd choice for a word on a site devoted to religious issues.

And if one believes that the laws of nature are so designed to facilitate evolution on the scale that has been witnessed, why is that qualitatively different than if the designer of those laws also intervened at a later time to affect the course of life’s path. You admit such an intervention was made for man. So why would other interventions be out of the question. They seem to be for you. It seems to be an arbitrary choice and not one held by theologians for centuries prior to recent times. Why is it necessary now?

You seem bent on exposing the man behind the ID curtain but if you are, are you not also exposing someone behind another curtain a little further back to support your own thesis. Aren’t they not the same man? I do not see the logic for your pursuit unless you want to impugn the man himself. This has been the tactics of atheists such as Dawkins. Why would you care at which level the designer operates. It seems the only issue should be how the evolution that has been seen since the beginning of the planet was accomplished.

My only conclusion is that there is something else that propels this pursuit. Something left unspoken.

Bill Lawrence
January 7th, 2010 | 6:51 pm

Dr. Barr

Here is a thought experiment:

One way to falsify ID you have to show that natural causes are capable of producing complex and specified information.

So you set up some video-cameras in the desert and wait, and along comes a heavy storm that causes an avalanche, and that’s followed by some tornadoes, and that’s followed by a large earthquake and when it’s all over the cameras show that these forces have rearranged the boulders to read “ID is right! Listen To Demski!” exclamation points included.

Have you disproved ID?

halo
January 7th, 2010 | 7:10 pm

ah I see why you need the all bricks to begin with but not at the end – you are envisioning a solid wall vs a wall with holes in it. I retract that bit. The other points still remain however…

halo
January 7th, 2010 | 7:13 pm

edit concerning leprechauns: last line ‘They don’t exist.’ it would be more accurate to say, ‘There is no evidence that they exist.’

steve_h
January 7th, 2010 | 7:50 pm

Barry writes that one day humans may be able to create life from first principles, but I do not think he actually believes that at all. At UncommonDescent he and most of the other pro-ID folks argue that no arrangement of physical and/or chemical elements could ever produce a living conscious organism — one which is stirred by music and experiences love and qualia (eg the “blueness” of blue) and so on. And no one can restore to life any organism from which the life force had departed, no matter how simple that organism. Am I right Barry?

Officially/legally, ID does not rule out alien designers. Out of court, it does rule out aliens in two distinct ways:

Firstly, it insists that life can not arise from non-life without intelligent design, and secondly, it claims that the universe itself shows signs of design – which means any proposed alien designer would have had no where to live.

Alan Niven
January 7th, 2010 | 8:14 pm

Stephen M. Barr

It becomes apparent even with something as simple as an arch how complicated and convoluted the just-so story has to become, in order to explain it’s formation via naturalistic processes. The difficulty groes exponentialy with the complexity of the arch.

At the same time, these analogies (used as someone pointed out earlier because there is no empirical evidence of actual biological IC structures arising through naturalistic evolution) tend to involve a great deal of intervention and information being smuggled in. They remind me of the intelligently designed, and highly contrived origin of life experiments.

If we see an crude arch at the seaside beneath an outcrop of rock, we can assume wave action caused its formation. If, however, we see Arc de Triomphe, while it is still possible to cobble a best naturalstic explanation together, in order to account for it’s origin, no one would take this seriously without a very detailed and persuasive argument (or probably ever)

Real biological systems, like Arc de Triomphe, are enormously complex and improbable. Probabilities must be considered, based on what we know naturalistic processes can achieve, if naturalistic routes are to be proposed. Usually the maths is impossibly hard, or leads to the “wrong answer”, so these calculations are rarey done. They would effectively expose the proposer to ridicule.

With this convention uderstood, naturalists proceede to speculate endlessly on possible evolutionary pathways, without ever having to make contact with the facts. Provided they are arguing with each other about the best naturalistic route that’s OK, so long as nobody questions the paradigm.

The arch example is not intended as a serious answer to IC, but, like National Lottery advertising, intended to soften the masses up to the possibility that it could be true.

Francis Beckwith
January 7th, 2010 | 8:32 pm

Tom English writes:

I used to refer politely to “intelligent design,” but since Bill Dembski and Bob Marks have come out of the closet and proclaimed that “Intelligence Creates Information,”

Tom, that’s just adolescent snarkiness. Who doesn’t believe that intelligence creates information? The real question is whether information requires intelligence. But even there, a theistic evolution could believe that, if he were to hold to some sort of incipient design at the outset of the cosmos coming to be. What are you going to call that guy, “an intelligent design theistic evolutionist creationist”?

At the end of the day, it’s about arguments, not labels. And that distinction, by the way, requires not only intelligence, but manners.

R Hampton
January 7th, 2010 | 9:53 pm

Jack Hudson,
“Systems in which data is stored, encoded, transmitted, received, decoded, and made available for use only ever originate as the product of an intelligent cause”

I give you the humble peptide – it’s data is encoded in naturally forming amino acids, and it can reproduce itself.

Jack Hudson
January 7th, 2010 | 10:53 pm

A peptide does not in and of itself store data unless it is part of a larger information system.

Just like the electrical impulses which connect our two machines don’t naturally transmit data, but may be used by the respective systems to transmit data.

Vincent Torley
January 7th, 2010 | 11:39 pm

I’d like to respond to steve_h’s comment:

“Officially/legally, ID does not rule out alien designers. Out of court, it does rule out aliens in two distinct ways: Firstly, it insists that life can not arise from non-life without intelligent design, and secondly, it claims that the universe itself shows signs of design – which means any proposed alien designer would have had no where to live.”

Three points in response.

1. The argument that life was designed is based upon features (complex specified information) which are different from those adduced to support the proposition that the cosmos was designed (fine-tuning of physical constants, mathematical elegance of the laws of nature, and so on). It is possible for someone to accept the argument that life was designed while rejecting the argument that the cosmos was designed – and vice versa.

2. Even if one could establish that the cosmos was designed, that would not establish that the Designer was God. All it would show is that the cosmos was not a closed system, and that intelligent life exists outside the observable universe.

3. One might respond that since an infinite regress of designers must terminate somewhere, ID is forced to postulate a Deity. But that’s a philosophical argument, not a scientific one. Scientifically, all one could hope to establish with reasonable probability is that life – and perhaps the cosmos itself – was designed by some intelligence. The inference that this intelligence must be a self-sufficient Deity is a philosophical one, and lies beyond the ken of science proper – as ID proponents would agree.

In any case, there’s a logical flaw in the oft-repeated anti-ID argument that because ID implies a supernatural Designer, it’s not science. ID contents itself with arguing for an intelligent designer. Intelligence is not a supernatural attribute as such, and it falls within the legitimate provenance of science. There may be compelling philosophical arguments for subsequently identifying this designer with a supernatural Being, but those are not arguments made by ID proponents in their textbooks.

It’s intellectually dishonest to reject the conclusion of a scientific argument, simply because one can see that it has theological implications.

I’d also like to respond to Stephen Barr’s assertion that irreducible complexity arguments are either attempts at rigorous proofs that certain structures could not have arisen by small successive steps (in which case they fail, as they lack the requisite rigor), OR mere statements that it is difficult to see how certain things could have arisen by small steps (in which case they are arguments from personal incredulity). There is a third possibility: the arguments are attempts to show that the observable universe does not have enough probabilistic resources for certain structures to arise through undirected processes. Arguments like these are more sophisticated than APIs, because they attempt to quantify the likelihood of irreducibly complex structures arising. Mathematical arguments about the likelihood of certain events occurring do indeed belong in the scientific arena.

Perhaps the best recent attempt to show this in a rigorous manner is Dr. Stephen Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell.” Anyone who has read that book would not attempt to assert that peptides reproduce themselves, as R. Hampton does.

To all the ID skeptics, I say this: please read Dr. Meyer’s book – and then come back and argue, if you wish.

John D'oh
January 8th, 2010 | 12:30 am

Dr. Barr: it seems to me that your argument about drawing “logical conclusions” from ID reasoning is weak because the exemplary evidence is not available; you posit hypothetical aliens. What can we conclude if we restrict ourselves just to the available evidence?

Logical arguments have a habit of breaking down when confronted with the bigger, empirical picture. Only when we have learned a little about the bigger picture through evidence (cf. Aquinas and the senses) can we provide the missing premises in our “purely logical” arguments.

I think the concept of irreducible complexity (IC) poses a significant evidence-based challenge to the reigning, mindless Darwinian orthodoxy. While you may be correct that there are better (if I may call them) “logical” arguments for God’s ultimate responsibility for what we observe, IC properly understood is a healthy corrective to the notion that we can prove the contrary.

andrew
January 8th, 2010 | 2:09 am

thanks to all for the discussion. a few thoughts:

(1) when a scientist posits that randomness and chance are the only possible operating forces in the universe (i.e. that metaphysical naturalism/materialism is true), he is no longer speaking as a scientist. he may be a swell theoretical physicist or biochemist indeed, but this statement is not one that can be proven or falsified empirically.

therefore, this scientist should stop pretending that his assumption is a scientific fact and simply admit the truth — the truth that his claim is a philosophical one. of course, his claim may be defensible, but it is not scientific.

(2) science as we know it ceases to have meaning “before” the big bang or “inside” black holes. in fact, there are more things under heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in our “sciences,” to paraphrase hamlet.

(3) if i were an orthodox catholic and an evolutionary biologist, i think it would be possible and coherent to hold the following positions simultaneously:

a. as a human being, i find evidence of design everywhere;

b. as an evolutionary biologist, i am confronted with natural phenomena which at this time have no natural explanation. i simply don’t know how molecular machines could have arisen naturally. i don’t have a good natural explanation and should keep looking for one, perhaps in vain. my science colleagues, in turn, should not be required to believe in a designer; but neither should they play philosophy instead of doing real science.

(4) stephen barr’s critique of the “zero-sum game” and his hamlet analogy deserves its own critique. unless “nature” is sentient herself, what “nature” does (randomly and by chance) necessarily excludes what God does. for what is the meaning of the proposition that “God uses chance”? if God uses chance, then chance is no longer chance. therefore, when properly framed, it seems we are indeed stuck with an either/or, zero-sum situation.

secondly, polonius and hamlet are characters in a play, both of whom have intellects, wills, and emotions. surely they are allowed to “cause” stabbings. but this analogy is not quite true to the issue at hand — the question is whether or not quarks can bring themselves into existence, then lead to atoms, elements, amino acids, enzymes, information, life, cells, organs, organisms, and humans with reason, will, conscience, soul, all merely by chance and randomness.

in other words, hamlet is categorically different from a quark. (i can’t believe i just wrote that sentence.) therefore, stephen barr’s analogy is not completely accurate.

Joe G
January 8th, 2010 | 8:38 am

Rich has problems with dictionaries-

If the designer- ID’s designer(s)- came before nature then the designer would be PRE-natural, not supernatural:

Thanks to my buddy Rich Hughes we have hammered out the proper adjective for the Intelligent Designer and the forces that brought nature into existence- Pre-Natural- as in before nature.

As Rich and I were bickering back and forth- as buddies are known to do- I came to realize that the designer of the cosmos cannot go beyond what does not yet exist. Therefore the prefix of super does not fit.

However, as Rich so rightly pointed out, the designer of the cosmos did come before the universe! And the prefix for before is pre-.

So I introduce you to the pre-natural intelligent designer.

If/ when the designer is caught violating the laws of nature we can then supersede the prefix pre-, with super-.

Rich
January 8th, 2010 | 10:09 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural

“The term supernatural or supranatural (Latin: super, supra “above” + natura “nature”) pertains to being above or beyond what is natural, unexplainable by natural law or phenomena.[1] Religious miracles are typically supernatural claims, as are spells and curses, divination, the belief that there is an afterlife for the dead, and innumerable others. Supernatural beliefs have existed in many cultures throughout human history”

We’re not arguing timeline, but taxa. The ‘creator’ would have to be both “pre” before AND “super” beyond / above natural. Enough conflation games.

No one is positing that the creator is a subset of his creation, which is the point.

So we have a supernatural creator.

jerry
January 8th, 2010 | 10:32 am

This is for Dr. Barr. It is based on the previous comment by Andrew and some other comments here by various people. There seems to be large misunderstandings here about ID.

You have a high standing at First Things and could probably sum up better than most what the ID position is, even if you do not agree with it. Let me just give two positions that most who support ID will agree with. Then you can compare it to your own point of view of what ID is and your personal position on the same issues.

ID bases it positions on science and while it is often expressed in laymen’s terms as too complex to have arisen naturally, the actual basis for its claims is that the information necessary for an organism to exist and persist is so great that this information is extremely unlikely to have arisen naturally. So ID’s claims are essentially built around the origin of information.

There are two main claims made by ID.

1. That the information necessary for the origin of life is so complex and improbable that it is extremely unlikely that it could have arisen through law and chance in the time available since the Big Bang. It is possible that such functional complexity necessary for life could arise through the intervention of an intelligence.

2. That the information necessary for the origin of complex capabilities in life is so complex and improbable that it is extremely unlikely that it could have arisen through law and chance in the time available since the first organisms appeared on Earth. It is possible that such functional complexity seen in the progression of microbes through man could arise through the intervention of an intelligence.

Each claim has two parts. First, that it is improbable that natural processes could lead to the information necessary and second, that an intelligence could create the information. The information is a specific form of information that is analogous to the coding information seen in computer programs and the information in language.

Usually few dispute that if an intelligence existed, this intelligence could create the machinery and information necessary for life given enough time. The dispute is over whether an intelligence existed or not. If there were no intelligences then the process by default had to happen naturally.

ID says it is extremely unlikely that either process could happen without intelligence intervention so the most likely answer that an intelligence existed and intervened. One form of ID says that the information was embedded in the original machinery and Man was inevitable given the initial and boundary conditions after the first life form was created. A far more reaching form of ID is that the conditions were built into the design of the universe and life and man were inevitable as the universe was designed. And then there is the form of ID that says that at appropriate times life forms were changed by an intelligence during the history of the earth.

So what I am asking of you is an understanding that is what ID is about. I am not asking you to agree with any particular proposition. The identity of the designer is a question of interest but ID claims that it is hard to determine the nature of this designer from the science alone and because of that makes few claims about the nature of the designer. So to push ID proponents to make claims about the designer pushes the discussion outside the boundaries of science.

One reason for this sharp demarcation is that ID believes that bad science is being taught to the people of America and the rest of the world under the guise of truth. This is a egregious distortion of both the scientific and educational process and has had social effects on the populace. It is one thing to say as you do that Darwinian evolution is not at odds with Catholic teaching, it is quite another to claim that it has no effect on people’s beliefs.

Stephen M. Barr
January 8th, 2010 | 11:05 am

I am outnumbered so I cannot hope to answer every particular point raised against me.

I have the sense that some of the people responding to me completely miss the point of my original post and of my subsequent comments. Maybe I can defuse the situation by saying something about my own views:

I believe in God and that he is an intelligent being who designed the cosmos in whole and in part. I believe arguments can be made for the existence of God that are strong enough to ground a rational conviction that he exists. I myself have written a 300 page book defending belief in God using arguments drawn from physics. (I strongly encourage people to go out and buy a copy.) I also spend a lot of time traveling the country giving talks defending religious belief from the attacks made by scientific atheists. I believe that God performs miracles. I believe that God acts in a special way to create each human being. Finally, I am open to the possibility that God might intervene in a miraculous way at key junctures in the process of evolution.

My basic point is that one can believe all these things and still find the arguments of the ID movement unpersuasive, or at least lacking in compelling force. This seems to bother some ID enthusiasts. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is because they are unaware that there are other ways to argue for God’s existence, including ways that make use of scientific facts, and so they feel that everything is riding on the ID movement’s arguments. It may also be that they equate the ID movement’s arguments with the traditional “design argument” for the existence of God. That is a mistake: the kind of argument the ID movement is making is a relative late-comer on the scene. It is not the kind of argument found in Scripture or in early Christian writing — not the main kind of argument, at least.

Jerry has taken me to task for my use of the word “miracle”, seeming to imagine that I am using it in a sneering way. He therefore says that it is a strange word for me to use on a religious site. But, you see, Jerry, I have made it very plain on many occasions on this site, in First Things itself and elsewhere, that believe in miracles. That should give you a clue that you are fundamentally misreading me in some way.

You raise the right issue, however, Jerry, when you ask the following:

“And if one believes that the laws of nature are so designed to facilitate evolution on the scale that has been witnessed, why is that qualitatively different than if the designer of those laws also intervened at a later time to affect the course of life’s path.”

The answer is that “intervention” is only one of the ways that God causes things to happen in the world, and not the ordinary way, so to speak. God’s causality is at work in EVERYTHING that happens. This is the teaching of both classical Protestantism and of traditional Catholic theology (e.g. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas). In Catholic theology it is called the concursus divinus. One place one read about this is at http://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/nath47.htm
There one can read that

“God DIRECTS, as it were, the active principles and forces of created natures to their operation, and …, inasmuch as the created activity [is] thus influenced by Divine motion, all things act in virtue of the Divine power, SO MUCH SO that He is the cause of ALL THE ACTIONS OF EVERY AGENT.” [emphasis mine]

This includes free agents such as ourselves as well as agents lacking freedom.

So God is the maker and the cause of all things, but only on rare occasions does he act in the way that is usually called “divine intervention”. (God “intervenes” when he directly causes something to occur without the activity of so-called “secondary causes”.) Many people have a hard time understanding the distinction. The only way that they can conceive of God’s acting in the world and being the cause of specific events is by such intervention. However, here is what Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), perhaps the most influential Catholic scholastic theologian after St. Thomas Aquinas said: “God does not interfere directly with the natural order where secondary causes suffice to produce the intended effect.”

The traditional attitude is not to see divine “interventions” everywhere (though God is everywhere at work). The default option, so to speak, is to seek a natural explanation. Even when investigating the miracles purported to have been done by (or rather through) saints, the Vatican body that does these investigations demands rather strong evidence.
One is asking a lot, even of a thoroughly traditional Christian, to ask him to prefer a miraculous explanation to a natural one where a natural one might well exist.

#John1453
January 8th, 2010 | 12:04 pm

If scientists can put multi-verses on the table without laughing, it is certainly possible that the intelligence responsible for life on this planet could either be a resident of one of the multi-verses, or have orginated in this universe but not by evolutionary means, or originated by an evolutionary means different than that which has been hypothesized for this planet. Perhaps in one of the multiverses the rules of physics are such that life inevitably arises, and then that life has a way of seeding across multiverse boundaries.

Furthermore, doubting or not pursuing a hypothesis because of its potential theological implications cuts off research. It is science cutting off its nose to spite its face. It is well known that a steady state universe was the more popular hypothesis than the big bang and predated it. The big bang was originally rejected in large part because of its theological implications. However, much good science has come of pursuing that theory in spite of its theological implications.

Similarly Pasteurs theory that spontaneous generation did not occur is technically an argument from silence, lack of proof, incredulity. But the hypothesis was nevertheless valuable and useful and led to a great deal of research and learning.

Given that philosophy of science has found it impossible to define science, it does no good to create boundaries to the nature and scope of hypotheses such that fruitful areas of research are cut off.

regards,
#John

John Farrell
January 8th, 2010 | 12:32 pm

However, here is what Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), perhaps the most influential Catholic scholastic theologian after St. Thomas Aquinas said: “God does not interfere directly with the natural order where secondary causes suffice to produce the intended effect.”

The traditional attitude is not to see divine “interventions” everywhere (though God is everywhere at work). The default option, so to speak, is to seek a natural explanation. Even when investigating the miracles purported to have been done by (or rather through) saints, the Vatican body that does these investigations demands rather strong evidence.
One is asking a lot, even of a thoroughly traditional Christian, to ask him to prefer a miraculous explanation to a natural one where a natural one might well exist.

Exactly. An earlier example can be found too in the writings of Jean Buridan, from the mid 14th century: “In natural philosophy one should consider processes and causal relationships as if they always came about in some natural fashion…”

Indeed you could consider, and I do, that the methodological naturalism at the heart of modern science is itself an offspring derived from the natural philosophy of the medieval university tradition.

Yet methodological naturalism is precisely what William Dembski and others of the ID movement want to attack. This is why they are not taken seriously by their peers–whether in mathematics or science.

Stephen M. Barr
January 8th, 2010 | 12:51 pm

Dear John1453,

You laugh at the multiverse idea. What do you mean by the multiverse idea, and what aspect of it strikes you as particularly amusing?

Pasteur (and before him Spallanzani) did experiments that showed that spontaneous generation did not occur. That is ordinary science. The Big Bang theory is a perfectly naturalistic theory. It may have theological implications, but it explains phenomena by purely natural mechanisms.

As far as arbitrarily cutting off research, it is not clear what an Intelligent Design research program would look like even if they had all the grant funding in the world.

Bill Lawrence
January 8th, 2010 | 1:31 pm

The Big Bang theory is a perfectly naturalistic theory. It may have theological implications, but it explains phenomena by purely natural mechanisms.

You have a point in the sense that The Big Bang explains things such as why light wavelengths indicate galaxies are receding from each other but explanations as to what caused The Big Bang such as multiverses that do not follow our laws of nature are obviously not attempts to explain phenomena by purely natural mechanisms.

Now, let’s consider ID which simply makes the observation that design has unique characteristics and that these characteristics are found in living things. Why should that objective observation be dismissed and dismissed for arbitrary reasons not less?

StephenB
January 8th, 2010 | 2:00 pm

Dear Dr. Barr, your recent comments trouble me since they seem to reflect a significant misunderstanding of many of the objections that have been posed. No one, as far as I know, has even come close to questioning your faith in God or God’s act of designing the universe. Nor does anyone mind the fact that you find ID’s arguments unconvincing. What many of us fear is that you do not fully appreciate the model that you are criticizing. Among other things, your dissatisfaction with ID’s alleged level of curiosity about the identity of the designer indicates that you do not fully comprehend the methods used for design detection, and, yes, your use of the word, “miracle” to characterize a process that reveals physical evidence of design does cause us a certain amount of consternation. The unfolding of a design, program, or front loaded process, or whatever one wants to call it, is not a miracle; and, as one who believes that miracles are real, I don’t hesitate to make the proper distinctions here.

Further, ID advocates know that “intervention” is not the only way that God causes things to happen in the world, so, once again, raising that issue sheds no new light. ID advocates also know that a front-loaded, programmed design is no more of an “intervention” that the kind of imperceptible design you appear to prefer. Nor is it news to many of us that God’s causality is involved in creating natures and the power of action in creatures. So, telling us the God is involved in everything is not a new concept to us nor does it speak to the objections we are posing. Indeed, both of us appear to be arguing on behalf of an “unfolding” evolution that reflects the ultimate will of God insofar as both of us agree that it was a process that had man in mind. The only difference appears to be this: we think the design is perceptible, while you do not.

You have alluded to the Bible, and rightly so, yet our position aligns itself more faithfully to the teachings in Scripture than does your position. You have stated on other occasions that “design is inherent in the evolutionary process,” meaning, as I take it, that it is real at some level, but its reality is so subtle and so difficult to ascertain that the only way we can get at it is to muddle through some discursive reasoning process solely dependent on the principles found in evolutionary biology.

On this matter, the Catholic Church, with which you and I both identify, takes a different view as it follows the teachings found in the Bible, most notably the arguments expressed in Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19. According to Scripture, design can be perceived by the senses, and its beauty can be appreciated by anyone whose disposition is open to it. Beauty is something that we see and take in through the senses; it has evidential power of a different texture than that which must be accepted through an assent of faith. To say that God’s handiwork has been made manifest is to say that God speaks through nature and that he has demonstrated the reality of his existence in a way that anyone with an open mind can apprehend. True, nature is not always what it seems, and sometimes, science contradicts our intuitions. On the matter or design, however, the Bible’s message is clear: what we see is what we get. There is no way around that Scriptural principle.

I suspect that you acknowledge the “anthropic principle,” and appreciate the notion of finely tuned constants in the universe as evidence of God’s cosmological design. But that is only half of the story. God’s handiwork is evident at both the cosmological level and at the biological level, or as Father Thomas Dubay puts it, [a Thomist who really is a Thomist (please excuse me for saying that)] design is evident in both the “macro marvels” and I the “micro marvels.” If God communicates through nature, as Catholics believe, it would be unreasonable to assume that he has sent us a mixed message. A reasonable God would not speak to us from the heavens and then go silent on the earth; much less would he communicate in a language that can be translated only by theistic evolutionists.

Rich
January 8th, 2010 | 2:38 pm

“As far as arbitrarily cutting off research, it is not clear what an Intelligent Design research program would look like even if they had all the grant funding in the world.”

If we look to what has been achieved so far, it would be a rigorous scouring of other’s research for ‘design sounding words’, an exhaustive search for things “Darwinism” hasn’t (yet) explained and a series of book of be bought.

R Hampton
January 8th, 2010 | 2:42 pm

For ID to have any scientific value, it must be able to objectively identify 1, what constitutes information; and 2, what is irreducible complex. But as we have seen is obviously subjective as evidenced in the wide difference of opinion about Common Descent between Michael Behe and the Discovery Institute.

Even DI’s refutation of Common Descent, by itself, is subjective as there are no physical attributes nor theoretical definitions to delineate the boundaries between organisms that prevent speciation, or to simply identify species.

Some who refute Common Descent hold that the Wolf and Dog are a singular species because they share the same number of chromosomes, but deliberately avoid the question of the Fox. Not only does very Dog/Wolf-like Fox have a different number of chromosomes, within the Fox family the number of chromosomes differs between at least a half dozen Fox species. So are Foxes actually six or more distinct animals without a common ancestor, or is the chromosome barrier a false distinction between species?

Unlike Evolutionary Theory, ID doesn’t even try to answer the question. Which begs the question, if ID can’t determine which animals were intelligently designed – despite rejecting Common Descent – then what good is it?

Jack Hudson,
How is it that a peptide is able to self-reproduce? It must “know” what it is made of in precise quantities and in a purposeful arrangement. That information is encoded by its very structure and transmitted to its “offspring” through the process of replication.

#John1453,
The Multiverse is more than hypothetical speculation, for it is a testable theory. The Great Void offers one such opportunity for it can provide, “the first empirical evidence for a parallel universe. It would also support recent developments in String theory.“

Stephen M. Barr
January 8th, 2010 | 3:23 pm

Dear Bill Lawrence,

The “multiverse” idea comes in more than one form. Those physicists who take the idea seriously generally are NOT talking about other universes that do not obey the laws of physics.
On the contrary, most of them are thinking about a single universe governed by a single set of fundamental laws, but a universe with many widely separated regions in which the fundamental laws are manifested in different ways.

You say, “Now, let’s consider ID which simply makes the observation that design has unique characteristics and that these characteristics are found in living things. Why should that objective observation be dismissed and dismissed for arbitrary reasons not less?”. Where did I dismiss it? i am not convinced by the ID arguments, at least so far, but that doesn’t mean that I “dismiss” them. The problem with what you are saying is the claim that design’s characteristics are “unique”. The counter-argument is that natural selection can produce effects that look “designed”. Even the ID theorists themselves admit that with enough “probabilistic resources” natural selection could produce very complex structures that appear designed. So the issue is not as clear cut as you present it. My own view is that one cannot tell at the present time whether the ID arguments are correct, since we simply don’t know enough about the relevant biology and natural history to do the calculations that would be required to establish that they are correct. That is not to dismiss what they say.

Bill Lawrence
January 8th, 2010 | 3:27 pm

For ID to have any scientific value, it must be able to objectively identify 1, what constitutes information;

Which it does: see link.

and 2, what is irreducible complex.

Which it does, think Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box

Now might say these attempts fail for one reason or another but the objective identifications are there.

But as we have seen is obviously subjective as evidenced in the wide difference of opinion about Common Descent between Michael Behe and the Discovery Institute.

–Michael Behe is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture

–ID does not reject common descent.

andrew
January 8th, 2010 | 3:46 pm

to stephen barr,

i agree with you that ID’s “intelligence” must be supernatural. this fact, in turn, is nothing of which to be ashamed; it’s simply a logical conclusion.

regarding catholic theology, if God’s agency is involved in everything including secondary causes, do we then not have a zero-sum game? what is the role of chance? in other words, isn’t the entire play hamlet contingent on shakespeare?

i believe the answer is “yes” (but am no longer a calvinist!) — yet that is beside the point. the possible role of chance is significant because to materialist neo-darwinists, chance is the only factor at play in this or any other universe. to them, there are no minds, only matter.

which calls to mind (pun intended) alvin plantinga’s argument (and c.s. lewis’ before him, and blaise pascal’s before him): if only matter exists, what warrant does anyone have in trusting reason and logic? what warrant would there be for relying on what bertrand russell calls “accidental collocations of atoms?”

indeed, if materialism is true, the intelligibility of the universe crumbles; we might as well just enjoy our beers and stop talking.

cheers!

derwood
January 8th, 2010 | 4:11 pm

Jack Hudson wrote:

“Systems in which data is stored, encoded, transmitted, received, decoded, and made available for use only ever originate as the product of an intelligent cause”

I would say that this is certainly true of all human contrivances. So I think a more accurate definition might be:

“ Human created systems in which data is stored, encoded, transmitted, received, decoded, and made available for use only ever originate as the product of an intelligent human cause”

If one is goinng to employ a circular argument, one should probably be as circular as possible so as not to appear to be trying to gloss over one’s presuppositions.

Rich
January 8th, 2010 | 4:12 pm

I was trying to save a little space, but my claim could be restated more precisely to meet Rich’s criteria:

“Systems in which data is stored, encoded, transmitted, received, decoded, and made available for use only ever originate as the product of an intelligent cause”

Precise enough?

Not really, Jack. We need an empirical framework for demarcation that comprises of a robust methodology even a dunce like me can follow.

Joe G
January 8th, 2010 | 4:18 pm

Rich,

Wikipedia is not a valid reference.

Also the designer(s) cannot be above or beyond what does not yet exist.

Then there is the fact that your position requires something beyond nature as natural processes only exist in nature and therefor cannot give rise to it.

So if we use your “logic” your position requires supernatural causation.

Joe G
January 8th, 2010 | 4:22 pm

Intelligent design- ie the design inference- is based on observations and a vast amount of experience.

It can objectively tested.

How can we test the premise, for example, that the bacterial flagellum “evolved” via an accumulation of genetic accidents?

R Hampton
January 8th, 2010 | 4:36 pm

Bill Lawrence,
Yes, Intelligent Design (as promoted by the Discovery Insitute) refutes common descent:

Evolution claims that all species are descended from common ancestors, and that new species have emerged by random variation and various forms of selection (not just survival of the fittest, but also sexual selection, linkages between genes, some amount of random drift, and no doubt others). Intelligent design makes one large and vague affirmative claim—that some form of intelligence must have designed existing life forms. Most of its claims are negative: that in various ways, evolution cannot account for the existence of life or the variety of species.

Evolution accounts for the variety of species due to mutations in one species leading to another (hence common descent). If ID claims that this is impossible without an Intelligent Designer, then it rejects a descent of species in favor of gaps bridged by divine engineering.

R Hampton
January 8th, 2010 | 4:40 pm

Joe G,
Science can prove that the bacterial flagellum evolved in much the same way it can can prove that mountains formed from geological processes that move, at best, a few inches a year. While we can not place Earth in a laboratory and speed time to watch mountains rise, we can deduce the truth from empirical evidence.

Rich
January 8th, 2010 | 4:41 pm

Hi Joe.

“Wikipedia is not a valid reference.”

Okay….

“Also the designer(s) cannot be above or beyond what does not yet exist.”

Let’s try some really easy set theory. Does the set “The universe” contain “The designer”?

“Intelligent design- ie the design inference- is based on observations and a vast amount of experience.”

Vast in universal terms, which is clearly the timescale we’re looking at?

“It can objectively tested.”

Okay -give me a methodology where everyone will get the same answer from the same inputs.

Stephen M. Barr
January 8th, 2010 | 4:48 pm

Dear StephenB,

I don’t think I am being unfair to the ID movement at all when I say they are invoking miraculous events. The godfather of that movement, Phillip Johnson, was very clear that the enemy being combated by the ID movement was “naturalism”. Naturalism, methodological or otherwise, would not be an issue AT ALL unless the ID movement were proposing something that went beyond natural mechanisms. When I suggested in an article in First Things that science had “natural explanations” of the formation of stars, I aroused the indignation of Chuck Colson. I think fans of the ID movement, including every single one of them who has argued with me here, would be quite disappointed if the ID arguments led to nothing but a new (and non-Darwinian) “natural explanation”.

Front-loading, which seems to be Mike Behe’s preferred idea for how ID happened, would not be a natural mechanism, if I understand correctly what he means by that term. The front-loading idea is that the designer injected certain genetic information long before it was needed by any organism. That injection would require a tuning of the configuration of matter to a state that it would be extremely unlikely for it to have if it were left to chance, so to speak. That, indeed, is the whole point of their claim that “information” doesn’t just happen by itself, it has to be injected into the syetem by an intelligent agent.

There is nothing unreasonable with that idea, but it is invoking what almost anyone would call a miracle. To explain why I say this, I will have to explain some physics to the audience.

Take a film of a wineglass falling off a table and shattering on the floor. Now watch that film in reverse at the same speed. It would show fragments of glass jumping off the floor and assembling into a wineglass that leaped up onto the table. Impossible, you say? NOT impossible in the sense that it violates the laws of physics! Just fantastically improbable. For that “un-shattering” event to happen, all the countless number of particles and fields that make up the glass shards, the floor, the air in the vicinity, etc. would have to be moving in just EXACTLY the right way, and that is absurdly improbable. But an omnipotent Designer certainly could decree that the particles and fields were doing just the right things to make the un-shattering of a wineglass happen without violating the mathematical laws of physics in any way. Similarly, any “thermodynamically irreversible” process (to use the physics jargon) could be made to occur backwards if one had complete control over the initial movements of the particles and fields. A dead and decayed dog could be made to come to life in that way, to take another example. Now, to intelligently adjust of the motions of particles and fields to what would otherwise be fantastically improbable configurations is PRECISELY to inject or front load “information” into the system.

I think almost everyone would call the unshattering of a wineglass or the undecaying and coming to life of a dog a “miracle”.

There is nothing fundamentally different from the kind of “front-loading” of “information” in those examples and the front loading of information to produce biological complexity that the ID people talk about. Indeed, a dead dog “undecaying” would be an instance of biological complexity being produced.

So, again —- and I feel I have been around this barn many times now— “design” as the ID movement conceives of it requires what most people would regard as miracles.

And AGAIN, that’s not necessarily bad. It all comes down to what one regards as “plausible”, credible”, etc. in particular cases. If someone actually turns water into wine, I would regard a miracle as the only reasonable explanation. Ditto for parting the Red Sea. If I saw a man walk to the moon, to use Joe Carter’s example, again ditto. The question is only whether miracles are the most plausible explanation of the biological complexity we observe around us. to some yes. To others no. On this reasonable and equally religious people can differ. It depends on what each person finds credible — i.e. it is ultimately a matter of “personal incredulity”. That was my point to start with, and I am baffled why anyone would find that unreasonable.

As for what the Catholic Church teaches, it does not include the hypotheses of the ID movement. Yes, God can be known through the things he has made, as St. Paul, the Book of Wisdom, and the First Vatican Council all clearly teach. And yes, the beauty of nature is evidence of God’s designing activity (as the Book of Wisdom also clearly teaches) — INCLUDING the beauty of living things. I would not dream of denying it. All that still does not get one to the point where one has to accept the claims of the ID movement.

You say that I claim one needs Darwinian evolution to see evidence of God in the biological realm. I could turn that around: do you think we need the discoveries of modern molecular biology and biochemistry to see God in nature? Did we need the discovery of the bacterial flagellum, the chemistry of vision, the chemistry of the blood clotting system, and all the other things to which the ID movement points?

That nature is beautiful, orderly, lawful, and harmonious is evidence of God’s existence and designing activity. One does not need either Darwin or ID to make that argument.

I am sorry to hear that my viewpoint and way of expressing it “cause [many of] us a certain amount of consternation”. That causes ME consternation. I don’t like to dismay my fellow religious believers. But I think if people take a deep breath, and slowly and calmly reread my original post in light of all the elaborations and explanations I have made in this comments thread, they will see that I didn’t say anything that should have provoked all this consternation.

Stephen M. Barr
January 8th, 2010 | 4:58 pm

Dear Andrew, I agree with everything you say (except about the zero-sum game). My views on chance can be found in may article The Design of Evolution in FT (http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/the-design-of-evolution-22).

Steve Barr

Rolf Aalberg
January 8th, 2010 | 5:27 pm

andrew,
you say “i agree with you that ID’s “intelligence” must be supernatural. this fact, in turn, is nothing of which to be ashamed; it’s simply a logical conclusion.”

OK, I accept that that is your logic but it isn’t mine.

I just am curious, and since it is so difficult to get clear answers from ID’ers, I wonder if you have any thoughts about the identity if the designer, his origins, and how and when he is doing his work. I don’t know anything about you, but if you accept a 3+ billion years history of life on the planet, the geological and fossil record, do you propose a continuous intervention in nature to create new species?

I hope my question is relevant; I am no scientist, just curious about what ID is and how it works.

R Hampton
January 8th, 2010 | 6:23 pm

Bill Lawrence,
Note that by Dembski’s definition of Information (and I’m not at all convinced that it is the Information cited by the “Intelligent Design” theory since there does not appear to be anything like a consensus) does not allow for Quantum states to contain information.

According to Dembski, “the actualization of one possibility to the exclusion of others” would mean that only an observed (determined) quantum event is informative, and not its actual indeterminate state. Yet as quantum computing research demonstrates, indeterminacy represents all possible outcomes, meaning it contains a multi-dimensional array of information. That’s just one of the errors common to ID.

Bill Lawrence
January 8th, 2010 | 6:52 pm

RHampton — Yes, Intelligent Design (as promoted by the Discovery Insitute) refutes common descent:

Where in your link regarding a debate about the Establishment Clause between Francis Beckworth and Douglas Laycock does it say that Intelligent Design refutes common descent?

I searched for the phrase and the only time it is used is by Laycock who said ” Science is strongest with respect to the claim of common descent, where enormous quantities of evidence have been accumulated both from living species and from the fossil record.”

I don’t see where Beckworth refuted him. I saw a post by Beckworth on this thread earlier so he is certainly able to chime in and elaborate.

My link specifically saying that it doesn’t, btw, was from Dembski’s site.

And how is Behe, a senior fellow in good standing at the Discovery Institute, at odds with the Discovery Institute?

Bill Lawrence
January 8th, 2010 | 7:04 pm

Dr. Barr — The “multiverse” idea comes in more than one form. Those physicists who take the idea seriously generally are NOT talking about other universes that do not obey the laws of physics.

So when a multiverse is pondered that doesn’t obey the laws of physics that when be considered science?

And in the multiverses that are pondered that do obey the laws of physics from whence does the initial energy come?

Where did I dismiss (ID)?

I don’t want to be unfair to you and it is possible I’m confusing you with another poster but when one accuses ID of invoking the supernatural and/or implying that it is not science one is dismissing it.

The problem with what you are saying is the claim that design’s characteristics are “unique”. The counter-argument is that natural selection can produce effects that look “designed”.

And a claim such as that would not be dismissing ID. It would be treating it as a scientific hypotheses and it would be putting it on the same playing field as evolution to which I would have no objection.

Cubist
January 8th, 2010 | 7:10 pm

I see that some ID supporters have tried to argue that ID isn’t religious, not in the least, and that those nasty ID critics who say otherwise are just making stuff up or lying or something. Unfortunately for those ID supporters, the truth is otherwise: When ID critics declare that ID is *really* all about religion, it’s not because said critics are making stuff up; rather, it’s because *ID* *P*R*O*P*O*N*E*N*T*S* *SAY* *that* *ID* *is* *all* *about* *religion*.
Case in point: Philip Johnson, Program Advisor of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (which Center’s original name was the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture), who wrote DARWIN ON TRIAL. In a 2003 interview on American Family Radio, Mr. Johnson said, “Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.” There it is: Mr. Johnson thinks “the issue of intelligent design” *is* “the reality of God”. Nothing religious *there*, huh?
Case in point: William Dembski, Senior Fellow of the DI’s CRSC/CSC, who came up with the so-called ‘Explanatory Filter’ methodology for detecting design. In an article which appeared in a 1999 artice in the Christian magazine TOUCHSTONE, Dembski wrote, “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.” Nope; no religion *here*, either — it’s all science so far!
Case in point: The Discovery Institute, whose Wedge Document explicitly states that one of the two primary goals of their Center for (Renewal of) Science and Culture is “To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God.” Now, what fair-minded observer could *possibly* think that religion has *anything at all* with “replac(ing) materialistic explanations with the THEISTIC understanding that nature and human beings are CREATED BY GOD”? (emphasis added)
Again: When ID critics say that ID is all about God, it’s because *ID proponents* emphatically say so. If ID proponents can deny something as bloody obviously true as the religious underpinnings of ID, one has to ask whether they are merely ignorant of ID… or, instead, if they are lying through their teeth. Me, I’m not a believer, but I am given to understand that the Christian belief system holds that the eternal post-mortem fate of false witnesses involves reserved seats in a lake of fire…

jerry
January 8th, 2010 | 8:09 pm

Stephen Barr, you said

“I think fans of the ID movement, including every single one of them who has argued with me here, would be quite disappointed if the ID arguments led to nothing but a new (and non-Darwinian) “natural explanation”.”

Not true. More than a few of us are past believers in Darwinian evolution. I believed in Darwin’s ideas because they are so simple and obvious. So when I saw an ad about 10 years ago for an ID conference in New York City sponsored by a Catholic organization I got intrigued and eventually found out that no one can defend Darwinian processes for major changes. I mean that literally. It makes sense for small changes which the general public can understand and ID has no problem with that. But I found no defense of Darwinian evolution for the major changes that have happened from even its most ardent believers. Generally all they do is evoke deep time and micro evolution. I can usually defend Darwinian processes better than most of its believers. But I also know its Achilles heel.

There is an evolutionary biologist who comments regularly at Uncommondescent who says Darwin’s ideas are dead. He does not endorse ID and holds out for other naturalistic mechanisms that are more sudden. He rightfully emphasized what he calls “the engines of variation” which are all the ways the genome gets changed. At last count he has listed 50 or more. ID has no problem with any legitimate biological process including all these ways the genome gets changed.

One example which he endorses would be the gradually changes of a section of the genome over time in the non coding regions until a new gene arose and it could cause a sudden change to both the genotype and the phenotype and certainly not be Darwinian. The problem is that there are not too many examples to support this thesis.

Hate to spoil your image of many ID folk. There are a great many of ID supporters who are young earth believers and ID has a problem due to this because everybody thinks that is all there is who support ID. But there are a lot of Catholics who support ID and some have been here the last couple days arguing against you for ID.

Many who support ID are like myself, just looking for good science. And Darwinian evolution is very bad science.

Stephen M. Barr
January 8th, 2010 | 8:53 pm

Dear Bill Lawrence,

At first I was baffled this question you posed to me about the multiverse: “from whence does the initial energy come?” Then I realized that you have a basic misconception. As discussed within the physics world, the multiverse idea is not an idea for explaining the Big Bang. It is an idea for explaining the cosmic coincidences that some people call anthropic coincidences.

You say “when one accuses ID of invoking the supernatural and/or implying that it is not science one is dismissing it.” That would only be true if one rejects the supernatural or rejects all ideas that are not scientific. I reject neither. I would say that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a “scientific” theory. Do you imagine that I dismiss it on that account? I think that the divine inspiration of Scripture, prophecy, sanctifying grace, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, miracles, and many other things in which I believe have a supernatural cause. Do you imagine I thereby dismiss these things? Perhaps for you science = good and supernatural = bad; but not for me.

R Hampton
January 8th, 2010 | 9:31 pm

jerry said: I found no defense of Darwinian evolution for the major changes that have happened from even its most ardent believers. Generally all they do is evoke deep time and micro evolution

I don’t understand your comment, so I’m left to conclude that your contention is that entirely new organs must develop in the course of one generation – no other mechanism is possible.

For example, you would doubt that the eye could not have evolved from simple light detecting nerve endings, and instead must have appeared fully formed in an offspring from a parent completely lacking an eye. Yet I’m sure that you know science has shown that the eye – among other “irreducibly complex” structures have evolved numerous times, in different ways, in different branches of the tree of life.

So how is it that you do not except step-wise explanations when there are so many of them out there?

Furthermore, if we take your thought to its logical conclusion, you must believe that every unique species was divinely created. And that supports my argument that ID doesn’t even have an agreed upon definition of itself.

Common descent, speciation, etc., what specifically does the ID theory predict/claim are sequences of natural development as opposed to intelligently engineering? Did God make the Wolf/Dog or did it evolve from the Fox? ID has nothing to offer.

StephenB
January 8th, 2010 | 10:07 pm

—–Dear Dr. Barr, thank you for taking time out to respond to my comments. I understand that you are trying to meet the challenge of answering several people at once. I have been there, so I know what it is like.

It is unfortunate we are using the language of “miracles” in discussing our respective speculations because all scenarios, if analyzed in the right light, can be made to appear fantastically improbable or miraculous, and the ID scenario is surely less improbable than the prospect of going from hydrogen to you and me in a few billion years using nothing but a naturalistic process. You seem to think, for example, that the Darwinian mechanism, or something like it, is adequate to explain biological complexity. Yet, many of us consider that proposition impossible to believe, and we have good reasons for thinking that inasmuch as no one on your side of the controversy can conceive of the possible steps that could lead to such a thing. Not only does your side have no evidence to support such an idea, it doesn’t even have an imaginary solution to bridge the needed gaps. Thus, it seems to us that it is your camp that believes in miracles. We, at least, have the patterns of nature on our side, but your side has only faith—absolute faith in the claims of evolutionary biologists, 95% of whom, are atheist/agnostic and who have not a shred of evidence to support their most ambitious claims.

In keeping with that point, you responded to one of my questions about our capacity to detect design by writing that “nature is beautiful, orderly, lawful, and harmonious is evidence of God’s existence and designing activity. One does not need either Darwin or ID to make that argument.” That is very good news, but it does leave me a bit perplexed. Perhaps, I misunderstand your position, and if so, I am open to understanding it. Again, I don’t want to over-generalize and attribute to you a position that you do not hold, but, as you know, most who hold to a theistic/natural evolution invariably characterize God’s design in terms of something that happened behind the scenes, as it were—something that must be believed and not apprehended, meaning that what we really see is only the appearance of design.

Indeed, I recall reading in one of your articles at First Things in which you wrote that “design is inherent in the evolutionary process.” What was the point of saying that if not to assure us that even though we cannot “perceive” God’s design with their senses, we can, nevertheless, “believe in it? ”In that context, you appear to be arguing on behalf of a naturalistic process that yields no physical evidence of a true design while, at the same time, acknowledging that nature reveals God’s design. Do I misunderstand?

StephenB
January 8th, 2010 | 10:11 pm

Obviously, that should read, “What was the point of saying that if not to assure us that even though we cannot “perceive” God’s design with [our] senses, we can, nevertheless, “believe in it?”

Bill Lawrence
January 8th, 2010 | 10:13 pm

R Hampton — Note that by Dembski’s definition of Information (and I’m not at all convinced that it is the Information cited by the “Intelligent Design” theory since there does not appear to be anything like a consensus) does not allow for Quantum states to contain information.

If you want to argue that Dembski’s definition fails or is incomplete, feel free. But to claim he fails to “objectively identify what constitutes information” is inaccurate. He most certainly does objectively identifies it, even to the point of giving you the chance to try to show that he is incorrect.

Yet as quantum computing research demonstrates, indeterminacy represents all possible outcomes,

If you want to think that indeterminacy is information is information you may as well believe Schrödinger’s cat is dead and alive.

Or since you believe ID to be false, you may as well believe it to be true as well.

Bill Lawrence
January 8th, 2010 | 10:36 pm

Dr. Barr

I will concede your point regarding The Big Bang.

I would say that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a “scientific” theory.

And of course you are right. The Doctrine of the Trinity is a claim of faith.

ID has nothing to do with faith.

It is simply the recording of observations about nature which are potentially falsifiable. You even pointed out a possible means when you said “The counter-argument is that natural selection can produce effects that look “designed”.”

If the counter-argument is science then the argument is science.

Those who say otherwise are making a political statement, not attempting to describe reality.

Now, again back to The Big Bang — would any attempt to explain it without resorting to God be considered science even if it should be as materialistically unprovable as the claim God did it?

andrew
January 8th, 2010 | 11:23 pm

a response to rolf, if i may interject.

thanks for your thoughts. to clarify, i’m working with a definition of “nature” as matter and “minds” as supernatural. these definitions form a framework, a starting grid. whether or not it’s true is up for grabs. (see below for a defense.)

ID posits that in nature we find material structures and information that appear to be designed, and that the best current explanation is that they were actually designed by a “mind.”

now the reason this “mind” cannot itself be “natural” is that it would then itself need a “mind” to design it, ad infinitum (to echo stephen barr). this enterprise of possible “natural minds” quickly becomes cumbersone; though it does not necessarily lead to a supernatural “mind” (one can get off the train to infinity at any time), it leaves crucial questions unanswered that can easily be avoided by positing a supernatural “mind” from the start.

there is more: in nature, miracles excepting, one can “never get more out of less.” in some circles, this is called “the emergence problem” (described by plato in the symposium, i think, where he asks questions about a musical instrument leading to beauty, and matter leading to soul).

for example, some scientists ask us to believe that quarks form atoms that form elements that form amino acids that eventually form life that eventually forms humans with intellect, will, emotions, and conscience. let’s not move so fast: how can quarks and atoms ever give rise to anything more than collections of quarks and atoms?

in other words, can matter give rise to mind?

steven pinker’s answer, for example, is a resounding “yes,” and he’s funded for life at MIT to speculate how. my answer — and i think the honest, orthodox answer — is that it can’t. which means, inter alia, that any “mind,” whether the designer’s or ours, is a supernatural entity.

before proceeding, i must clarify that in no way am i flirting with gnosticism or platonism — nothing i’ve written so far denigrates matter. as far as i know, i am also not a cartesian dualist.

to answer your second set of questions, i’d have to start by stating that i am no longer sure i am an ID’er, as you put it. i am not sure what i am anymore. :)

my own thoughts on the identity of the designer is that he is God. as for the origins of God, i believe he has no origin. importantly, if the preceding line of reasoning is valid, God is doing his work all the time at all places, giving the universe/multiverse existence itself. i believe he is truth, goodness, and beauty; each time a child learns that 1+1=2, refrains from stealing a cookie, and delights in a flower, she is somehow coming into contact with the eternal “mind.”

as for the origin of new species, it seems life itself is supernatural, for it seems inanimate matter cannot give rise to animate matter (life). more broadly, as an analogy, God acts on the universe as a novelist writes a novel.

(john polkinghorne mentions that God may not know the future because the future does not yet exist. but that question is a matter for another time.)

finally, notwithstanding all of these convictions, if i were a scientist (i’m a physician, for what it’s worth), and given the only workable definition of science i know, i’d still be obligated to look for natural explanations for natural phenomena. if there are no natural explanations, then i should remain silent. but so should the metaphysical naturalist neo-darwinian.

perhaps what bill dembski does — mathematics and probability in relation to design– is in its own category?

sparc
January 8th, 2010 | 11:23 pm

jerry
January 7th, 2010 | 3:38 pm

I find the discussion almost surreal. It has been over 10 years now since I was first introduced to ID and in general the discussions about it are never close to what it is really about. The only person here who is somewhat skeptical of ID and who has a good grasp of what it seems to be, is Joe Carter. The rest of the skeptics of ID have a flawed understanding of it.

Didn’t you blame Dr. William Dembski for the same recently? after which he called your approach hamfisted?

StephenB
January 9th, 2010 | 1:04 am

All those who keep claiming that “ID is religious” are missing the mark on at least two counts. For those who are open to the truth, there are two things to keep in mind [A] motives are not methods and [B] Truth is unified.

[A] When I say that motives are not methods, I mean exactly that. The statement “ID is about religion,” misses the entire point and reflects an imprecise use of the language. For some, the ID “movement” may well be about religion, just as the Secular Humanist movement, is about anti-religion, which is another expression of the religion of Darwinism. On the other hand, ID “methodology” has nothing at all to do with religion any more than Darwinist “methodology” has anything to do with atheism, It is impossible to extract anything religious from the paradigms of “Irreducible Complexity,” “Specified Complexity,” “Counterflow,” or any other ID formulation. Anyone who doubts this is invited to make the leap: Go ahead and develop the pathway from any one of these concepts to God if you can. I can assure you with no fear of refutation that it can’t be done. Motives are not methods, and, from a scientific point of view, it wouldn’t matter if ID scientists began conducting altar calls for the rest of their natural lives, the disposition or personal beliefs of the scientist has nothing at all to do with the rigor or lack of rigor in his approach—nothing. Motive mongering may satisfy the ID critics, but it doesn’t change the fact that ID’s approach, as a method, cannot be religious. Parts of the ID “movement” may well be about religion, to the extent that it seeks the elimination of atheistic materialism from our culture, just as the Secular Humanist Association is about anti-religion, pushing materialist Darwinism it down our throat and persecuting anyone who dares speak out against it. None of this has anything to do with methods.

[B] When I say that truth is unified, I mean that there is only one truth with many aspects. What is true about religion can never contradict what is true about science. Further, the same truth can often be expressed in both disciplines with each expression comprehensible either on is own merit or in the context of the other. We find, for example, that the scientific idea of the “big bang” finds its theological counterpart in the Book of Genesis, expressed in the words, “Let there be light.” In a very real sense, it is the same truth expressed first as a theological concept and second, as a scientific concept. Similarly, when William Dembski, a theologian, stated that design theory in science is similar to the “Logos theory” in the Gospels, he was, in the same spirit, expressing the same truth in more than one way, first as a theologian and then as a scientist. The context of his remark, for anyone who cares about the truth, was “the bridge between theology and science.” To use that quote, therefore, in an attempt to label ID as religion is to display a misunderstanding of the context, a lack of familiarity with the true relationship between religion and science, and an apparent hostility to the unity of truth.

Theistic evolutionists, on the other hand, conduct their business as if truth was, indeed, fragmented, holding fast to Darwin’s theories, with no real evidence to support them, while abandoning basic Biblical truths about perceptible design in nature, our first parents and, in some cases, even about the fall itself. If they really believed in the unity of truth— if they really believed that their scientific world view was compatible with their faith— they would not feel the need to subordinate vital Scriptural truths to Darwin’s theory. They would hold fast to both and make no compromises. Of course, if they did that, they would immediately recognize the self-contradictory position they hold. As it is, it is much easier to simply characterize ID science as religion, even though ID methodologies cannot be religion nor can they be made to be. Almost daily, it seems, Christian Darwinists whistle past the graveyard with their well-rehearsed mantra, “There is no conflict between our faith and science.” If only they really believed that. For ID, there is no conflict at all: Nature appears designed; nature was designed.

jerry
January 9th, 2010 | 1:07 am

“For example, you would doubt that the eye could not have evolved from simple light detecting nerve endings, and instead must have appeared fully formed in an offspring from a parent completely lacking an eye. Yet I’m sure that you know science has shown that the eye – among other “irreducibly complex” structures have evolved numerous times, in different ways, in different branches of the tree of life.”

All eyes appeared out of nowhere during the Cambrian Explosion. They have changed little in the last 520 million years. How they appeared no one knows, just that they appeared with no known predecessors. If one wants to use the term evolved with eyes then one should point to what preceded all the eyes from the Cambrian. Speculation doesn’t cut it. The term evolve implies a change over time. It certainly wasn’t simple light detecting nerve endings.

Here is a quote from the atheist and ID hating PZ Myers:

“A while back, I summarized a review of the evolution of eyes across the whole of the metazoa — it doesn’t matter whether we’re looking at flies or jellyfish or salmon or shrimp, when you get right down to the biochemistry and cell biology of photoreception, the common ancestry of the visual system is apparent. Vision evolved in the pre-Cambrian, and we have all inherited the same basic machinery — since then, we’ve mainly been elaborating, refining, and randomly varying the structures that add functionality to the eye.

Now there’s a new and wonderfully comprehensive review of the evolution of eyes in one specific lineage, the vertebrates. The message is that, once again, all the heavy lifting, the evolution of a muscled eyeball with a lens and retinal circuitry, was accomplished early, between 550 and 500 million years ago. Most of what biology has been doing since is tweaking — significant tweaking, I’m sure, but the differences between a lamprey eye and our eyes are in the details, not the overall structure.”

You notice nothing about any evolution since then. The best that PZ goes is some tweaking. Hey 500 million years is just a short time and in another 500 million more maybe we will see something else.

Vincent Torley
January 9th, 2010 | 1:10 am

I’d like to respond to R. Hampton’s comments on the evolution of the eye. To demonstrate the viability of the Darwinian scenario, a workable model is required. The nearest thing to such a model was put forward by Nilsson and Pelger in 1994. However, evolution takes place at the level of the gene, not at the level of the organ. Without an understanding of the underlying biochemistry of vision, no model is worth considering seriously.

Nilsson and Pelger, like you and like Darwin, take the appearance of a light-sensitive nerve for granted. Yet this is precisely what needs to be explained, as Professor Michael Behe argued at length in “Darwin’s Black Box” and in a 1994 paper which may be read online at http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_mm92496.htm .

David Berlinski has critiqued Nilsson and Pelger’s article at
http://www.discovery.org/a/1416 and follow-up correspondence (including a response by Nilsson and a reply by Berlinski) can be accessed online at http://www.discovery.org/a/1509 . You may also find this article of interest:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/08/the_vampires_heart_a_response.html .

I, too, find it intriguing that the eye appeared in 40 different lineages of organisms. But I find it even more intriguing that the master control genes coding for eye development appeared long before these lineages diverged, while the common ancestor lacked vision. Front-loading, perhaps? Maybe. And maybe not. Time will tell.

andrew
January 9th, 2010 | 3:21 am

dear stephenB,

thanks for the comments. motives should indeed be left off the table and ideas considered on their own merits. and i, for one, certainly believe truth is unified.

nevertheless, i am not so sure that the definition of “science” should/can be expanded to include considerations of “supernatural” causes.

to be clear, the search for truth and wisdom — and the pursuit of human flourishing in general — should definitely include considerations of “supernatural” causes.

but science as a human practice becomes a very different sort of inquiry if “supernatural” causes are admitted as hypotheses. if i posit that at sea level water boils at 58.5 degrees celsius and someone else posits that it boils at 79.2 degrees celsius, there is a way to test which hypothesis is true, or closer to the truth. but if someone claims that the spirit of pocahontas causes water to boil, such a claim may be true or false. scientists relying on empirical data would simply not know.

perhaps it would help to consider that ID operates along the interface between science and philosophy/theology/religion? it is a fascinating interface, to be sure.

good night, and thanks again.

steve_h
January 9th, 2010 | 8:36 am

Vincent Torley: You didn’t address my point that ID advocates insist that life can only exist if it is designed. Let’s assume that the first life was not designed by a deity. Now, putting aside the fact that no intelligent life form has ever been known to design another form of life, which means that ID is not merely extending known principles to the unknown in this case, it does rather suggest that the designer of the first life was not alive in the conventional sense.

Or is it that only life similar to ours must be designed? I.E. that natural forces arranging simple molecules could produce entities possessing great intelligence but just lacking stuff such as DNA and flagella which ID argues must be designed? Given that such entities’ intellect and creativity greatly surpasses our own, I wonder why they opted for such inefficient means to produce inferior intelligences such as ours.

Presumably these aliens would have possessed intelligence, which they needed for designing, but not consciousness (which requires design and/or magic, but then again I thought intelligence could only come from intelligence too, so how does that work?). And how would they have come up with the novel concepts of consciousness and qualia which they lacked themselves and known how to realize them in clunky DNA based life forms?

What do you mean by “outside of our observable universe?” Are they just are very far away so we can’t see them because light could not have reached us? If so, how do they observe us? Are they using faster light? How do they exert the necessary tinkering forces on our matter from such a distance?

Or do they exist in some alternate universe (cue howls of derision from any ID proponent I’ve ever come across who think that alternate universes are a materialist cop-out). Or is it something like Heaven^w a privileged transcendent realm from which they can observe us in real time, but not the other way round, and which is in no way supernatural, no sirree?

Finally why do some ID proponents think that life is designed but not the universe and others get it the other way around, when ID is an objective science. I’ve not read Meyers’ book; Does it included any objective CSI calculations for biological organisms? Or does he stick to cards, coin-tosses, and hand-waving like everyone else?

Joe G
January 9th, 2010 | 8:59 am

Rich,

Why are you ignoring the fact that your position regresses to the SAME point?

Is it because if you declare ID requires the supernatural that means your position also requires it?

Does the set “the universe” contain “the cause”?

It cannot because natural processes only exist in nature and therefor cannot account for its origins.

Also no one gets the same answers with your position.

Joe G
January 9th, 2010 | 9:02 am

R Hampton,

Science is not about “proof” and there isn’t any way to test the premise that the bacterial flagellum evolved via an accumulation of genetic accidents.

Face it your position cannot even muster a testable hypothesis based on the proposed mechanisms.

And that is because there is no way to predict what will be selected at any point in time and there is no way to predict what mutation will occur at any point in time.

Rich
January 9th, 2010 | 1:37 pm

Joe wishes to conflate biological and cosmological origins. I think that the universe has enough resources in term of time and stuff to create life, which is what we are talking about.

Also, his comment to R Hampton suggests he doesn’t think stochastic processes can be science. Good luck.

Vincent Torley
January 9th, 2010 | 1:53 pm

steve_h:

Thank you for your response to my post. You write:

“You didn’t address my point that ID advocates insist that life can only exist if it is designed.”

That’s because you didn’t make it. What you actually said was:

“Firstly, it [ID] insists that life can not arise from non-life without intelligent design, and secondly, it claims that the universe itself shows signs of design – which means any proposed alien designer would have had no where to live.”

Claiming that life cannot arise from non-life without intelligent design is quite different from claiming that life can only exist if it is designed. As a Catholic, I believe that God is alive, but that He never arose from anything, having always existed. Angels have not always existed, but as spiritual beings, they certainly did not arise from non-life. The claim that life cannot arise from non-life without intelligent design is simply meant to rule out spontaneous generation.

Regarding the alien scenario which I proposed: a religious skeptic who endorsed the biological (but not the cosmological) claims of ID could consistently avoid the dilemma you propose – namely, where did the first life come from – by denying that there ever was a first life-form. If, for instance, the universe always existed, then there’s no problem of where the first life came from. Admittedly that goes against the Big Bang theory, but after all, the Big Bang theory is just that: a theory, albeit a powerfully supported one. Supposing that the universe always existed might suggest an infinite regress of designers, but it would be an accidental infinite regress, going back in time forever, rather than an infinite regress of causes in which each cause is dependent on its predecessor for the very act of causing its successor. Only the latter kind of regress is philosophically impossible, as Thomist philosophers are well aware. (See “Infinite Causal Regress and the Secunda Via in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas” by Professor Edward Martin at http://www.phc.edu/gj_6_martin_e_aquinas.php.)

Another “way out” for a determined religious skeptic who endorsed the biological claims of ID would be to say that the aliens who designed life came from another universe. Discussing this possibility, you write:

“cue howls of derision from any ID proponent I’ve ever come across who think that alternate universes are a materialist cop-out.”

Even if you were factually correct, this observation would be irrelevant. The point is that ID does not rule out the multiverse. If you want to argue for or against it, you will have to do so on philosophical rather than scientific grounds. ID concerns itself purely with the scientific criteria for identifying certain patterns in nature as being designed.

I should also add that some Christian ID advocates do in fact endorse the idea of a multiverse. Here’s a quote from Robin Collins’ essay “Universe or Multiverse? A Theistic Perspective” at http://home.messiah.edu/~rcollins/Fine-tuning/stanford%20multiverse%20talk.htm :

“…I think that the theistic hypothesis is perfectly compatible with the universe generator versions of the multiverse hypothesis. Since God is infinite and infinitely creative, it also makes sense that creation would reflect these attributes of God, and hence that physical reality might be much larger than one universe. Indeed, it makes sense that an infinitely creative God might create these many universes via some sort of universe-generator, since this would be somewhat more elegant and ingenious than just creating them ex-nihilo.”

Collins, by the way, makes a very good mathematical case for God’s existence in his essay. His argument works even if you suppose that the multiverse is real.

Finally, you ask:

“I’ve not read Meyers’ book; Does it included any objective CSI calculations for biological organisms?”

Meyers’ book is over 500 pages long, and I’m certainly not going to attempt to summarize it here. Please, go and buy it, and judge for yourself.

In the meantime, if you want to read something online which attempts to quantify CSI, please see the following:

(1) “The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity” by Dr. David Abel, in International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2009, 10, pp. 247-291, at http://mdpi.com/1422-0067/10/1/247/pdf
(2) “Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins” by Kirk Dunston, David Chiu, David Abel and Jack Trevors, in Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, 2007, 4:47 at http://www.tbiomed.com/content/pdf/1742-4682-4-47.pdf and
(3) “Intelligent Design: Required by Biological Life?” by Dr. K. D. Kalinsky at http://www.newscholars.com/papers/ID%20Web%20Article.pdf .

John Farrell
January 9th, 2010 | 2:56 pm

All eyes appeared out of nowhere during the Cambrian Explosion. They have changed little in the last 520 million years.

How do you substantiate that? I don’t see any references, whether to pop science books, however dubious, or published papers.

Scott
January 9th, 2010 | 3:24 pm

Re: naturalist complaints about miracles.

I’m always amused when I hearing Darwinists posing as though they occupy the high ground in this debate because they eschew miracles, while dismissing ID because it supposedly embraces them. First, this is nonsense, because an intelligence causing life is no more necessarily miraculous than an intelligence causing a car.

Further, among those singularities (to use de Duve’s preferred word) which must be explained are the origin of life from non-life, the emergence of the pure ‘chemistry of life’ from dirty, mass action ‘environmental chemistry’, and the transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells just to name a few.

Darwinists, faced with the obstinate refusal of nature to comply with their theory constantly invoke unknown mechanisms (i.e. Darwinism of the Gaps) and speak of putative ‘emergent properties’ of chemistry and/or organisms to reconcile their theory with observations.

This is simply a rose by another name. Putative ‘emergent properties’ arising from unexplained, phantom ‘natural’ mechanisms are, in principal, indistinguishable from miracles. Darwinists pretend to escape this charge by promising that these phantom mechanisms & emergent properties are ‘natural’. But this simply begs the question; such mechanisms and properties might not, in fact, exist.

The difference between ID’s take on such problems and that of the Darwinists is that at least ID proposes a cause (intelligence) sufficient to explain the effect. In contrast, the more we learn about the biochemistry of life, the more of the gap between a naturalistic cause and the effect to be explained grows (as Meyer powerfully demonstrates in his new book).

StephenB
January 9th, 2010 | 3:26 pm

Dear Andrew, thank you for taking time out to comment on my post, and thank you for your expressed concerns about the limits of science. Indeed, as I suggested earlier to Dr. Barr, in spite of his insistence that we should show a little more intellectual curiosity by seeking to reveal the identity of the designer, ID methodologies are so constructed that they can only verify the high probability of the designer’s existence. But, of course, you have something a little different in mind, I am sure. According to the principle of methodological naturalism, which I assume is your basic operating principle, science cannot explore any area that transcends “natural” causes, and, of course, that means it may not address the “supernatural.” In that context, one gathers, research questions that explore the possibility of cosmological or biological design ought to be addressed by philosophy or theology.

Let’s take a closer look at that proposition and see what it could mean. First of all, that definition of science does one of two things: [A] Drawing on the dichotomy between the “Natural” and the “Supernatural” It elevates all non-natural causes, God, angels, human agency, including the operation of the intellect and will to the level of the supernatural, placing them all in the same category, or [B] It defines all things that are not supernatural as natural, placing human volition, earthquakes, and tornadoes in the same category. In other words, by abandoning the ID paradigm of Law, chance, and agency, and reframing the issue as natural vs. supernatural, we begin to characterize real events in ways that defy common sense explanations.

Let’s take a quick example: How would the methodological naturalist explain the cause of an ancient hunter’s spear, or for that matter, the cause of the paragraph that I just wrote. Using the [A] formulation, both events are assumed to have occurred as the result of a supernatural cause. Thus, God’s act of creating the universe, my mental activity, and the hunter’s mental activity are all classified as a supernatural causes, UNLESS we assume that immaterial minds don’t exist and that our brains caused the acts, in which case, it suddenly becomes a natural cause. Does that really make any sense? Does anyone really believe this? The Darwinist insists that it is a natural cause, since there are no minds, and yet we refer to it as a supernatural event because we do believe in minds?

Now, staying with methodological naturalism, let’s move to alternative [B]. All activity that is not supernatural qualifies as natural, meaning that the cause which designed my paragraph should be placed in the same category as mountain slides and snowstorms. With this formulation, the mental activity which generated the paragraph [or the spear] is natural because it happened “in” nature, whatever that means. So, that means that there is no possible way to even detect the presence of intelligence in any way since we are cannot distinguish between the wind, rain, snow, and our own mental activity. Under the circumstances, the anthropologist cannot even assert that any human activity was involved with the construction of the spear because, with this standard, the wind, rain, and snow are just as likely to be responsible for the spear as human agency, since we are not permitted to speak of human agency as a different kind of cause.

The problem here, of course, is that no one other than the ID scientists, have defined his terms. I have idea what MN advocates mean by their use of the word, “natural,” except as a counterpoise to “supernatural,” which also has not been defined. More importantly, I don’t think that THEY know what they mean by the term. For those who disagree with me on this, I invite them to take time out right now and define the term, and, if they are so disposed, allow me to ask them a few follow up questions about the usefulness of their definition. If they go through this mental exercise, they will soon discover that it is not as easy as it sounds. Indeed, no one that I know has ever done it. Is this not a bit bizarre? MN advocates tell us that we may not transcend the natural, but they don’t know what natural means and they don’t know what supernatural means, except to explain one in terms of the other.

Also, what happens when the Catholic Church decides to enlist the aid of medical scientists for the expressed purpose of investigating a miracle healing at Lourdes? May the medical scientists even offer their opinion about nature’s limits to heal? Or, are they bound by the principle of methodological naturalism to beg off and tell the Bishops that science cannot address any subject matter of that kind? The methodological naturalists I have interacted tell me that insofar as the scientists are rendering any opinion at all on the matter, they are not doing science. Yet these medical scientists think that they are doing science, and that is one of the reasons that the Church asked them for help. So, who gets to decide? Would it not be better for Darwinists to just stay out of it and refrain from trying to define science for everyone else, especially since they refuse to subject themselves to any standard of rigor at all in their own discipline? ?

From our perspective, a natural cause refers to law and chance, while an agency cause refers to an act of intelligence. By that standard, everything falls into place and all descriptions are comprehensible. ID scientists, as other scientists, have every right to define their own terms and choose their own methods because they are the only ones who know which problems they are trying to solve. Does any group of scientists have the moral right to tell another group of scientists which methods they may use? Not in my book.

Have a great day,
StephenB

jerry
January 9th, 2010 | 3:50 pm

“How do you substantiate that? I don’t see any references, whether to pop science books, however dubious, or published papers.”

Eyes first appeared during the Cambrian and have changed little since and no new one has appeared since the Cambrian. I was quite surprised when I first heard this.

I don’t have to substantiate it but I could because the claim is that eyes evolved several times and it is up to someone making a positive claim to provide the details. I gave the ultimate reference, PZ Myers to dispute that. If you don’t believe it, produce the examples. By the way I have other references from equally anti ID sources but I will leave it for you to complete the assignment because it is on the internet.

I make the claim several places that there is no evidence for naturalistic causes leading to large changes in life forms. Prove me wrong. You have a small opportunity here. A few years ago I actually thought there was evidence for the development of the eye because there were so many reviews on the topic. Then I found the sources who were experts on the topic disputing this and these were anti ID people. So what am I to think?

Scott
January 9th, 2010 | 7:51 pm

How do you substantiate that? I don’t see any references, whether to pop science books, however dubious, or published papers.

Trilobites first appear in the Cambrian and had extraordinarily complex eyes. Trilobite expert Riccardo Levi-Setti wrote:

In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. And a final discovery—that the refracting interface between the two lens elements in a trilobite’s eye was designed in accordance with optical constructions worked out by Descartes and Huygens in the mid-seventeenth century—borders on sheer science fiction. The design of the trilobite’s eye lens could well qualify for a patent disclosure.

~Levi-Setti, Riccardo (1993), Trilobites (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), pp. 54,57.

Likewise, Niles Eldredge wrote:

These lenses—technically termed aspherical, aplanatic lenses—optimize both light collecting and image formation better than any lens ever conceived. We can be justifiably amazed that these trilobites, very early in the history of life on Earth, hit upon the best possible lens design that optical physics has ever been able to formulate.

(as quoted in Ellis, Richard (2001) Aquagenesis (New York, New York: Viking), p. 49.

Trilobites and their incomparable eyes – not to mention the ‘brain software’ to process those visual signals – did appear in the Cambrian with no trail of antecedents. We don’t see anything like trilobite eyes today (save for human technology) – if anything eyes have gotten less sophisticated since…

Ted Davis
January 9th, 2010 | 8:44 pm

Way back up there, Barry Arrington said to Steven Barr:

“Surely you will concede that if we project out by 100 years the work of someone like Craig Venter, there is, in principle, no barrier to humans designing living organisms from scratch. It is all a matter of physics and chemistry — super-sophisticated physics and chemistry beyond our current technological ability to be sure – but nothing supernatural. If humans can, in principle, design a living creature, why must the designer be supernatural?”

Surely I would not, Mr Arrington, if I might offer my own answer to your question for Mr Barr. I would not concede that “humans” had “designed living organisms from scratch” in the scenario you suggested. Not at all. You go on to say, “it is all a matter of physics and chemistry … but nothing supernatural.” You seem to imply here, Mr Arrington, that physics and chemistry—by which you apparently mean an Ubernaturwissenschaft, according to which humans acquire essentially exhaustive knowledge of the physical properties of matter—somehow are sufficient to “explain” the presence of real design in nature, without involving anything “supernatural,” i.e., anything “above” or beyond “nature.”
This is what we disagree about, Mr Arrington. A super-knowledge of the properties of matter might be enough for future people to “design living organisms from scratch,” but it would be utterly insufficient to account for the knowledge itself: why is matter like this at all? Why does it have the properties that it has? We might have been able (in your scenario) to “design living organisms,” but not “from scratch.” Rather, from matter whose properties and powers we had discovered. Those properties and powers might also have been “designed,” by some unnamed Designer; I absolutely believe that myself, and so does Mr Barr (and so do you, to the best of my knowledge). But the only Designer capable of determining the nature of matter and indeed the nature of nature itself – the only Designer capable of designing living organisms “from scratch,” as you put it, has a capital “G” on the office door.

The idea of a natural or material “god,” the sort of imaginary being proposed by the likes of Thomas Hobbes or Richard Dawkins, has no more reality and makes no more logical sense than Descartes’ evil genie. It’s a thought experiment designed (if I may borrow a word) to avoid confronting the implications of the design that you and I both see behind the wonders of nature. We probably agree about this paragraph. I am aware of no possible Designer for nature itself, including both the living and non-living things within it, than Someone with the power to create or annihilate matter itself: any being powerful enough to give matter certain specific properties—the very properties discovered by the super-scientists in your scenario—must surely be “bigger than,” or “above” or “beyond” mere matter. That’s what it takes to “design living organisms from scratch,” Mr Arrington. If this isn’t “God,” then good Lord really needs to get acquainted with that other person behind the curtain.

Ted Davis
January 9th, 2010 | 8:54 pm

Now let me add another, unrelated comment. There has been a call here for a lively discussion of Steven Meyer’s new book. The executive director of the American Scientific Affiliation, Randy Isaac, has just launched the ASA book discussion blog by choosing Meyer’s book as the first topic. This is found at http://www.asa3online.org/Book/
Presently only ASA members can contribute posts, but Steve Meyer is an ASA member and (as the current president of the ASA) I very much hope he will accept Randy’s invitation to participate.

I also invite any Christians in the sciences, who may be interested in participating,to consider joining the ASA. We’d be glad to have you.

steve_h
January 9th, 2010 | 9:08 pm

Vincent:

I specifically asked you to assume that the designer of the first life was not a deity. If ID is to claim that a deity is not necessary, then it should be possible to envisage a situation in which non-deity-life arose by natural means and subsequently designed us (possibly via a series of natural intermediaries), without generating conflicts with basic ID tenets.

You chose to answer the question in terms of how you, as a Catholic, see it – not how a non-religious ID scientist would. There is no avoiding the deity in the room. You also suggest that there may be some religious sceptics who think there are life forms all the way down despite the claims of the big bang theory. In effect, you are asking us to believe that ID can be “technically” rescued by saying that there may exists some “fringe” followers who are completely satisfied with the concept of infinite regress. This “concept of the majority bowing to the wackiest minority viewpoint” may lead to conclusions you’d rather not consider regarding your own religion.

Robin Collins’ essay, again is an example of what religious people think, not what objective ID researchers believe. What’s with all the red herrings?. I’m not asking what some Christians believe but what ID objectively and scientifically supports. You go on to make more claims for gods – I’m not asking for proof of God but for examples in which ID can be god-free.

Oh and FWIW, I didn’t ask you to summarize the whole of Meyers’ book. I asked a specific question about whether he gave concrete CSI examples. Instead of the “Yes of course, here it is” response one might expect in ideal circumstances, you answered “go read the book” and “go read these papers”. Neither of the on-line papers references CSI directly so I am left to conclude either that you are sending me on a wild goose chase, or that ID proponents are just making up new measures of complexity as they go along in order to avoid detection.

andrew
January 9th, 2010 | 10:19 pm

to stephenB,

excellent points. any meaningful discussion needs clear terms from the outset.

a previous post of mine above (january 8th, 11:23 pm) indicated my own perspective: i have found myself squarely in the [A] camp, where all mental activity including reasoning and wrestling with logic is “supernatural.” the cause of the hunter’s spear is “supernatural.” intelligence, whether ours or anyone else’s, is “supernatural” at all times and all places. i defend this framework in the aforementioned post.

from where i have stood, “matter” represents “nature” and everything else is “supernature,” including “life” and “minds.” within this framework, i think it follows that a discipline such as archeology, strictly speaking, is not science. it is more like history/sociology.

but this framework raises very thorny questions: for example, in what sense would mathematics be scientific? numbers are not matter. mathematical rules are not material. which means mathematics, at least within this framework, is metaphysical. it is closer to philosophy and logic.

but all of science depends on mathematics. (if 1+1 does not actually equal 2, then reality is a joke, and the edifice crumbles.) all of physics depends on mathematics, all of chemistry depends on physics, and all of biology depends on chemistry. at least i think these relationships are true.

which means science is fundamentally and inescapably a metaphysical enterprise. furthermore, “science” only makes sense if it’s “done,” and only supernatural intelligences can “do” it.

indeed, at the bottom of the study of the material world as we know it (as scientists, not as poets!) are numbers, but alas, numbers are not material. therein lies the mystery.

thus, having taken up your challenge to find rigorous definitions, i think i’ve failed miserably. any thoughts? where do we go from here? i’m ready to abandon the framework if needed, at least for these sorts of questions. perhaps it is still useful elsewhere. i’m not sure. somehow the word “seamless” comes to mind….

perhaps absolutely “natural” causes for “natural” phenomena simply don’t exist? it may well be the case that “science” as we’ve come to know it (intuitively and without rigor) will go down in history as a momentarily useful parsing of the pie, but a parsing leading to fragmentation of the whole.

it is possible we simply have our categories confused and have reached the limitations of reason. mind/matter, nature/supernature dichotomies might be too simplistic. and c.s. lewis might liken my feeble inquiries to asking whether a square is yellow.

one thing, however, is certain. the proposition that all that exists is matter — metaphysical materialism — is not based on mathematics.

the peace of the Logos be with all of you!

Stephen M. Barr
January 9th, 2010 | 11:38 pm

Dear StephenB,

I am responding to your comments and questions addressed to me on January 8, 10:07 PM.

One reason I am responding to you even though I had intended not to continue on this thread is that you seem to be someone in the ID movement rather than just a fan of it. You speak as if you are speaking for a group (“many of us”, “we” etc.)

This really will be my last comment here, however.

You attribute to me, or at least suspect me of holding, the view that the existence of a designer cannot be inferred from the facts of nature but must be a matter of faith or a conclusion drawn from revelation. Where you get this idea I cannot imagine. It is not one that can reasonably be inferred from anything I have written here or anywhere else — and I have written a lot that is relevant to these issues. You seem to have read some of my articles in First Things, so I am even more puzzled.

I have only once before had this particular (and rather unusual) idea attributed to me, and that was by Cardinal Schoenborn in an article he wrote in First Things. In that article, he also wondered aloud whether I was a “fideist”. These were shots in the dark on his part — it was quite evident that he (unlike you) had read nothing of my writing on science and religion. Since there is nothing whatever in my writing that could justify such suspicions about me, I wonder how it is that you can have come to express the very same suspicions. A thought therefore occurs to me: is it possible that you got these ideas about me from reading Cardinal Schoenborn’s FT article? If so, then I have further reason to regret the cardinal’s mistaken guess, since if you were misled by it, then doubtless many others have been as well.

The short answer to your main question is this: I think that human reason, without the aid of revelation, can see evidence of design in nature. I believe the evidence for design is principally to be found in the natural order itself and not in departures from the natural order or phenomena that go beyond the ordinary course of nature or what can be naturally explained.

I assume, since you are very interested in these issues, are obviously a reader of First Things, and are sufficiently concerned about my views and tendencies to express “consternation” about them here, that you have read my book “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith”. In case you haven’t, I will note that one of the major sections of my book, consisting of several long chapters, was entitled “Is the Universe Designed?” In those chapters I develop some arguments, based on what we know about the physical world, for the conclusion that the universe is indeed the product of design. If you want to know my thinking on this matter, I suggest you read those chapters, if you haven’t already.

A few other points before I sign off. You keep talking about my “side” and my “camp” having the view that natural explanations can explain evolution completely and that the contentions of the ID movement are demonstrably wrong. But these are NOT my positions. Anyone who has read what I have said here and in many other places with any care would know that. You say you want to be fair to me. The best way is to read what I say carefully.

Several people in this thread seem to think that the issue I was raising when I talked about miracles and supernatural agents is whether the ID arguments are “religious” and whether this did not somehow cast doubt on the “motives”, the candor, etc. of the of the ID movement. I know that the people in the ID movement are quite sensitive to such charges — quite naturally, since they have taken a lot of lumps over these issues, and probably feel very bruised. I think this is one reason that so many of the comments addressed to me have been so widely off the mark.

Actually, I was not raising the issue of the motives of the ID movement or of whether they were “religious”. My point was to explain why even a person who is quite religiously traditional and orthodox (like David B. Hart or me) might demand a great deal of evidence before accepting the contentions of the ID movement. The reason is this: the logic of the ID argument leads ultimately (if followed out consistently) to the conclusion that certain biological structures had to arise by means outside the ordinary course of nature. But, as I noted (quoting Suarez as evidence), it is the traditional Christian view that where they might reasonably be supposed to exist natural explanations are to be preferred. Another way of saying this is that there is a very strong presumption in favor of natural explanations even for Christians. There are certainly reasonable people who think that the chances of there being a natural explanation of certain biological structures is so remote that it virtually compels the conclusions that the ID movement draws. I did not assert that these people are wrong or that they are unreasonable. I only said that there were also reasonable people (including religious people) who remain skeptical of those conclusions.

One reason that I am bowing out of this thread (aside from time constraints) is that I seem to be having a hard time being understood, no matter how precisely I frame my statements or choose my words. It seems to be always thus when the ID movement is involved. It is one reason I tried for a long time to stay out of this particular tar pit.

Steve Barr

Steve Barr —- signing off from this thread.

jerry
January 9th, 2010 | 11:48 pm

Ted Davis,

Welcome to the ID camp. I do not know how to parse your statement in any other way. Maybe there are some caveats we are unaware of but if there are none then you have stated an ID position. And if Stephen Barr believes what you do then he is also in the ID camp.

Vincent Torley
January 10th, 2010 | 4:01 am

steve_h

1. In response to your question of whether Stephen Meyer gives examples of complex specified information (CSI) in his book, the answer is “Yes, he does.” He also gives lots of concrete examples. CSI is at the core of Meyer’s argument, which can be summarized as follows:

(a) Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

(b) However, intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

Therefore,

(c) Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell.

2. If you want to know whether he provides a detailed method of measuring CSI, I ‘ll have to answer that I’m still reading his book myself, and I don’t want to put words into Dr. Meyer’s mouth until I have thoroughly understood his case. What I can say is that his book makes the best case for ID that has been made to date. Ignore it at your peril.

3. The reason why I linked to the three ID papers above was that I knew for a fact that they included mathematically rigorous measures of something called functional sequence complexity (FSC), which is one kind of CSI. It is a great pity that you concluded I had sent you on a wild goose chase, simply because you couldn’t find the phrase “CSI” in the article. I spent quite some time tracking down those articles for your benefit.

4. I have tried twice to explain to you why ID is not supernatural. It appears you have a problem with my far-fetched alien scenarios. I was not being disingenuous; all I was trying to show was that the mere conclusion that life on Earth arose from non-life does not require us to posit a Deity. You could posit aliens in a multiverse, or an eternal universe, if you wished. I thought I made my point quite clearly.

5. But even if you could show logically that only a supernatural designer could have been the Designer of life on Earth, you would still be wrong to say that ID was supernatural. Consider:

(a) Scientific argument X shows that it is extremely probable that life was designed by an intelligent being.

(b) Philosophical argument Y shows that if life on Earth had a designer, either that designer was supernatural, or its designer was.

(c) Therefore: scientific argument X coupled with philosophical argument Y point strongly to a supernatural designer.

Does that make argument X supernaturalistic? No. By itself, it has no supernaturalistic conclusions. Only when coupled with philosophical arguments does it point to a Deity.

Argument X is ID. Now I hope you can see why ID is not supernaturalistic.

That’s all I have to say. And I hate to sound like a broken record, but please buy Dr. Meyer’s book, and peruse its arguments. Best wishes, and good luck in your search for truth.

jerry
January 10th, 2010 | 5:23 am

Dr. Barr,

I know you will not respond but there is an issue that is clearly left on the table and is at the heart of the Hart article which started this discussion. It is not his assessment of ID that is really at issue but something else which you have carefully avoided. I do not believe you have accurately described all the issues nor taken all the stands that have to be taken. It is quite one thing to have an honest disagreement with another on the level of evidence needed to assert to something especially something as contentious as the ID proposition, but it is quite another to remain silent on an equally contentious and equally important issue. And as far as I know you have.

The article that started this discussion was a review by Hart of a book by probably the most famous and flamboyant atheist in the world today. It was a glowing review, almost a fawning review of the real topic under contention that separates ID from the theistic evolutionists. Namely, Darwinian evolution. You made no assessment on this topic. You made no stand that this theory is reasonable or not and by your silence on this, we have to assume you approve. However, your appeal to the desirability of secondary causes should not commit you to support a particular theory of naturalistic evolution. As a scientist each such theory should be scrutinized and if a theory is found wanting, it should be sent to the scrap heap. Why are you not criticizing this particular theory of science.

The real issue is not whether Darwinian evolution is compatible with God’s plan, but whether Darwinian evolution has any merit as a theory of science. And as such should be taught in the curriculum of the United States or for that matter in any country. That is the real issue on the table, not the contentiousness of whether God acts through secondary causes or not. ID does not want ID to enter the curriculum. They want Darwinian evolution out of it. And as a scientist so should you. It is bad science.

You may respond that it makes no difference as you alluded to the speculation that we would be equally upset if some other form of naturalistic evolution was shown to be true. But I do not buy that. I am ready to accept whatever is true if it is true. I believe in one truth. Why are you ready to accept the same. We should not accept whatever is convenient whether it is true or not.

Do you really believe Darwinian evolution is the truth? Now that is an issue that stretches credulity to affirm. Why not subject it to an honest debate? It is one thing to believe, have faith, that the answer lies in secondary causes, it is something very different to back bad science. And you do back this bad science by your silence on it.

A whole generation do not believe because they have been inundated with what the atheistic academy says is the logical alternative. Who has said it better than Dawkins himself. And at the heart of this so called logical alternative is bad science. One could argue and I will so argue that the awareness of the shallowness of this naturalistic approach will make the young even more appreciative of the truth once it is found and how the God you and I love actually works. But to offer up a false god, is not one I would do and by judging the results so far, this false god is winning and actually preventing just how the real God works.

StephenB
January 10th, 2010 | 11:06 am

Dr. Dr. Barr, I appreciate the time you have spent in dialogue with me, and I sincerely hope that my attempts to clarify your position have not complicated the correspondence. I can understand your frustration about not being properly understood since ID is also misunderstood on a grand scale. Since you have signed off of the thread, I will be brief since I don’t want to take undue advantage of your absence.

Earlier, when you wondered why ID does not demonstrate more curiosity about the designer’s identity, it seemed evident to me that you had not fully taken into account ID’s limited methodologies or their purpose. I still believe that to be the case.

On the matter of design in nature, I accept your account that you think design can be apprehended. What I did not understand, and still do not understand, is how you can accept the reality of design and also be sympathetic to the Darwinian paradigm, which holds that design is an illusion, or any TE paradigm, which characterizes God’s handiwork as having been planned behind the scenes, so to speak, such that there is no physical evidence of it.

Finally, I don’t understand how you can accept design as real, when confirming your fidelity to Scripture, and then characterizing it as a “miracle,” as a means of discrediting intelligent design.

I sincerely hope that I have not been unfair, but since this is a blog, I assume that my questions are in order. They were, after all, questions, not affirmations, and they persist.

Thanks for your time,

StephenB

Firefly
January 10th, 2010 | 11:55 am

Stephen B. is having difficulty posting, so I will relay his final(?) message for him. This was posted here:

“Dr. Dr. Barr, I appreciate the time you have spent in dialogue with me, and I sincerely hope that my attempts to clarify your position have not complicated the correspondence. I can understand your frustration about not being properly understood since ID is also misunderstood on a grand scale. Since you have signed off of the thread, I will be brief since I don’t want to take undue advantage of your absence.

Earlier, when you wondered why ID does not demonstrate more curiosity about the designer’s identity, it seemed evident to me that you had not fully taken into account ID’s limited methodologies or their purpose. I still believe that to be the case.

On the matter of design in nature, I accept your account that you think design can be apprehended. What I did not understand, and still do not understand, is how you can accept the reality of design and also be sympathetic to the Darwinian paradigm, which holds that design is an illusion, or any TE paradigm, which characterizes God’s handiwork as having been planned behind the scenes, so to speak, such that there is no physical evidence of it.

Finally, I don’t understand how you can accept design as real, when confirming your fidelity to Scripture, and then characterizing it as a “miracle,” as a means of discrediting intelligent design.

I sincerely hope that I have not been unfair, but since this is a blog, I assume that my questions are in order. They were, after all, questions, not affirmations, and they persist.

Thanks for your time,

StephenB”

Vincent Torley
January 10th, 2010 | 2:01 pm

steve_h

My reply to your last post hasn’t gotten through to this Web site yet. I hope it comes up soon. In the meantime, FYI: yes, Dr. Stephen Meyer does discuss complex specified information (CSI) in his book. In fact, it’s a vital part of his argument. See pages 341-344, in particular, where he argues that despite a thorough search, no material causes have been found that demonstrate a capacity to produce large amounts of complex specified information;
however, intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information; therefore, intelligent design is the best explanation for the complex specified information in the cell. The definition of CSI appears on pages 106-107, and again on pages 352-353. And yes, Dr. Meyer does give examples. Does he calculate the total amount of CSI in a living cell? No, but the paper by Kalinsky which I linked to in an earlier post does just that, for a simple bacterium. Here is what Kalinsky says:

“It is estimated that the simplest life form would require at least 382 protein-coding genes. Using our estimate in Case Four of 700 bits of functional information required for the average protein, we obtain an estimate of about 267,000 bits for the simplest life form… [I]t is about 1080,000 times more likely that ID could produce the minimal genome than mindless natural processes.” (See “Intelligent Design: Required by Biological Life?” by K.D. Kalinsky at http://www.newscholars.com/papers/ID%20Web%20Article.pdf .) Oh, and by the way, what Kalinsky calls functional information is a kind of complex specified information. The other papers I cited used the term functional sequence complexity; that’s a form of CSI too.

If there’s one thought I want to leave you with it’s this: the scientific argument that the large quantity of complex specified information in even the simplest forms of life on Earth points to an intelligent designer, is what the ID project is all about. The philosophical / theological argument that this intelligent designer must be a supernatural Designer is a separate argument, which is logically distinct from the ID project. Even if the latter argument were 100% airtight, it would still not follow that ID infers the existence of a supernatural Designer.

Best wishes,

Vincent

John Farrell
January 10th, 2010 | 10:02 pm

“I don’t have to substantiate it but I could because the claim is that eyes evolved several times and it is up to someone making a positive claim to provide the details.”

No, I am asking you again to reference articles in the scientific literature to substantiate your claim. As you cannot or will not, there is no reason to take your claim seriously.

jerry
January 11th, 2010 | 12:10 am

“No, I am asking you again to reference articles in the scientific literature to substantiate your claim. As you cannot or will not, there is no reason to take your claim seriously.”

Why should I take seriously any claim that the eye evolved just because you think it did. You have no proof for it. Am I supposed to give you proof that it doesn’t exist. How about you give proof on when and how they evolved if in fact they ever did. How do I know you cannot do it, because I know it doesn’t exist. How do I know it does not exist. If it did they would be all over it and people would be pointing out examples. All they do is show some computer model. I pointed you to one of the most outspoken atheists and obsessive anti ID persons in the world. PZ Myers is a buddy of Richard Dawkins and he denies the eye evolved and says it first appeared in the Cambrian. PZ is a great guy, he was asking for communion hosts so he could desecrate them. Maybe they mentioned him here. This is the type of people Hart is supporting. But PZ says no eye evolution of any consequence so I will take his word for it. Maybe some time in the future it will exist but as of today, it doesn’t.

Somebody already gave you another reference above on the trilobites.

Check out the eye institute at Lund university in Sweden. They are virulent anti ID people and the developer of the computer model for supposed eye evolution. They are the premier eye research institute in the world and they don’t give any examples.

http://www.lu.se/vision-group/research/research-projects/evolution-of-vertebrate-vision

And then check out that very friendly ID website known as Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

Notice no one says any new eyes appeared after the Cambrian. In Richard Dawkin’s book which began this discussion, he did not even discuss the development of the eye. All he talks about is what happens to eyes for organisms in dark places. Don’t you think this wonderful book which Hart implied was the gold standard would mention something like the eye if anything existed. Jerry Coyne in his recent book on evolution does not mention any specifics on the evolution of eyes either. All he provides is a computer model which supposedly show how it was done and they all now use this pseudo claim. But he has no actual examples to point to. Norman Johnson wrote “Darwinian Detectives: Revealing the Natural History of Genes and Genomes” in 2007 and makes a big deal about the evolution of the eye. What does he present, the same computer model. Doesn’t that give you a clue. The evolutionary biologists don’t have any examples to point to but they got this neat computer model.

Now examine what you have done. You asked for someone to prove that something doesn’t exist because you think it does exist but have no knowledge about the subject at all. Now that is what I call chutzpah. Maybe you should ask Hart about it since he seems to think he knows something about evolution. But it is obvious he doesn’t. But we should thank him for his bogus review or else there would not have been any opportunity here to set things straight.

I will repeat: there is no coherent presentation of the evolution of complex novel capabilities in existence. People have been asking anyone, from evolutionary biologists on down to lowly biologists for one and haven’t received one. We are always told it exist if we would just listen and look for it. We cannot find a book where it exists either, even books on evolutionary biology.

Dave Mullenix
January 11th, 2010 | 4:20 am

Vincent Torley: “(a) Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.”

That’s because ID has a preconceived notion that variation and natural selection cannot create Complex Specified Information, so it doesn’t even look at it. Which is too bad, because variation and natural selection (or Darwinian evolution as it’s also known) IS a mechanism for producing large amounts of Complex Specified Information.

Suppose you have a healthy organism with this pattern in its DNA:

CATGCATGCATG
and it mutates to
CATCCATGCATG

while making a new organism.

That second “C” in “CATCCATGCATG” IS new information. It’s different from the old information and it didn’t exist before. It’s new information.

Now let the new organism try to make a living with this new information in its DNA. If it doesn’t, the new information is noise and it’s discarded when the organism dies.

If the organism survives and prospers, the new information is good information – Complex Specified Information in ID parlance, where the specification is “a DNA pattern that will create and operate a healthy organism”. The organism multiplies and passes the new information on.

Add duplication of DNA and you’re now ready to increase the amount of New Complex Specified Information. Let this go on in trillions of organisms for billions of years and it easily accounts for the CSI we observe today.

jerry
January 11th, 2010 | 11:38 am

“That’s because ID has a preconceived notion that variation and natural selection cannot create Complex Specified Information, so it doesn’t even look at it. Which is too bad, because variation and natural selection (or Darwinian evolution as it’s also known) IS a mechanism for producing large amounts of Complex Specified Information.”

This is nonsense. We have discussed numerous times on Uncommondescent what are called the 50+ engines of variation in the genome. We know that variation is the key and the generating of it is the issue. An evolutionary biologist from Cornell developed the list and ID has no problem with it. The problem is that no one can identify more than a few instances when these 50+ engines of variation did anything of note. You should read the Edge of Evolution. So I think you should retract your comment.

“Add duplication of DNA and you’re now ready to increase the amount of New Complex Specified Information. Let this go on in trillions of organisms for billions of years and it easily accounts for the CSI we observe today.”

Another shortsighted comment. Such events as duplication (one of 50+ engines of variation) would leave a trail and no one has identified these trails except for a few possible examples. Also you are not correct about the amount of time necessary. It takes several magnitudes more than you have estimated to get even small changes of really useful information. Oh, some small changes are possible and did happen but the real issue is what have they generated. It is not science to just theorize. One must have facts to back up ones thesis.

Ted Davis
January 11th, 2010 | 12:14 pm

Jerry,

Thank you for the cordial welcome into the ID movement, but I think it’s premature. Like Steve Barr, I can’t get involved in a lengthy exchange, so I will simply state the reasons for my hesitation. We’ve had some exchanges in the past elsewhere, Jerry, from which I know that you are a fair person who will not be suggesting that my hesitations about ID derive from cowardice: that charge is often leveled at those who hold, as Steven Barr does, that there are good reasons why some Christian scientists do not embrace ID. The reason Mr Barr gave above, about the reasonableness of continuing to think that “natural” causes may be sufficient to account for biological complexity, are shared by me. Most ID advocates believe this to be a “slam dunk” on their side, but I do not share that view. I think it is reasonable for ID advocates to hold their view, and unreasonable for their opponents to deny them the intellectual right to hold it. But, I do not believe it is reasonable for ID advocates to hold that their view is the only reasonable one. I am simply not convinced that science can settle this issue, at least not presently.

Mr Barr articulated my own view above, when he talked about the need to keep science focused on the search for “natural” causes; I also agree with him that ID is ultimately an argument about the need for a “supernatural” agent as the source of “designed” features, and thus that ID goes well beyond science itself into metaphysics and theology. I further agree with him that such arguments are legitimate; they simply are not scientific. To the best of my knowledge, the combination of views I have just endorsed does not qualify as an ID position.

Astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich has talked about id (lower case) vs ID (upper case) in his book, *God’s Universe.* I reviewed that book for First Things, and I suggest that you might want to read my review to see more of my own views as well as a summary of Gingerich’s views.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/04/300-all-things-bright-and-beautiful-36

I certainly endorse id. My hesitations concern ID, which seems to require one to hold that the design inference is scientific, per se, and that it’s an inference of sufficient strength to topple “naturalism” not only in science but also in the larger culture. I at least cannot separate the cultural piece from the theoretical piece, in practice; I can do so only in theory. In this connection I note that you, StephenB, Barry Arrington, and perhaps others who have contributed to this thread, overwhelming Steve Barr with the number of your comments, are very active on Uncommondescent.com, which claims explicitly that “ID needs to be vigorously developed as a scientific, intellectual, and cultural project.”
http://www.uncommondescent.com/about-2/
Christian scientists and scholars with different ideas about how science — and “Darwinism” — relates to morality and religion may well have reasons not endorse ID.

Finally, Jerry, I know from other conversations that you believe “Darwinism” is very bad science, including the part about common descent of humans and other organisms. I am much less doubtful about common descent. I am often told that ID does not necessarily entail the rejection of common descent, but frankly I almost never encounter an ID advocate or supporter who accepts it–or at least, who considers common descent a very good working hypothesis. Furthermore, many ID advocates have told me, or stated somewhere, that conclusions in the so-called “historical” sciences (such as evolutionary biology, cosmology, geology, and paleontology) are inherently more suspect than those in the so-called “experimental” sciences (such as chemistry, physiology, or physics). I understand why such a distinction may have some validity, but I simply do not share a general disregard for the conclusions of the historical sciences that seems to be part and parcel, either explicitly or implicitly, of the ID position. Indeed, there are at least some conclusions of the historical sciences that seem to me so well established as to be essentially “facts,” such as the claim that the earth and the universe are far older than the human species. Yet, ID officially leaves one open to reject such a conclusion, by maintaining a careful agnosticism about the details of natural history, no matter how well established they may be. I can’t accept such an attitude myself. Before supporting ID, Jerry, I’d have to be convinced that ID entails a general acceptance of, not an agnosticism toward or rejection of, the standard narrative of the development of the universe.

Thus, Jerry, it’s partly what ID does claim and what it deliberately avoids claiming, that leaves me in doubt about the basis for your welcome. However I always welcome your thoughts, and I’ll sign off now expecting to see more of your thoughts even though I do not expect to add more to mine.

StephenB
January 11th, 2010 | 4:06 pm

Dear Ted Davis, inasmuch as you have indicated that Dr. Barr’s thoughts reflect your own thoughts, perhaps I could ask you some the same questions that I asked him, and perhaps, a couple of others.

Consider Dr. Barr’s earlier argument. On the one hand, he indicates that ID scientists are not nearly as curious as they ought to be about the designer’s identity, remaining content to speak only of its existence. On the other hand, when ID emphasizes that very point as an example of the limitations of its methodology, Dr. Barr says he doesn’t take the point seriously at all, holding that ID really is really alluding to God and the supernatural. The first argument reflects the conviction that ID is not ambitious enough; the second argument reflects the conviction is that ID is so ambitious as to be presumptuous. Do you see the problem here?

On the matter of God’s handiwork, my question about reconciliation persists. How do you, as a Christian, who claims, at times, to accept the reality of a perceptible design in nature, also be sympathetic to the Darwinian paradigm, which holds that design is an illusion, or any TE paradigm, which characterizes God’s handiwork as having been planned behind the scenes, so to speak, such that there is no physical evidence of it? Do you see this problem as well?

Further, I don’t understand how you, or your TE colleagues can, when claiming fidelity to Scripture, admit that design is perceptible and part of God’s plan for nature, and yet, when you criticize ID and defend your own paradigm, you abandon Scripture and suddenly insist, in contrary fashion, that the design is not perceptible at all and that it must be taken on faith— that it can only be “understood” as part of evolutionary process.” How is it that when you are speaking from the perspective of a Christian, nature’s design is elegant and part of God’s plan, but when you put on your ID critic hat, that same design get’s demoted to “miracle” status? Again, do you see the problem here?

Also, we have the little matter that theistic evolutionists have provided no evidence [take that literally, none at all] that naturalistic forces, such as random variation or natural selection can generate biodiversity or coded information, accepting as they do, the claims of evolutionary biologists, 95% of whom are atheist/agnostic [yes, that is a fact] and are likely inclined to stack the deck against any evidence for design in nature.

On the matter of Owen Gingerich and his catchy little terms, “upper case ID” and lower case i d,” there is nothing really new in his formulation so far as I can tell, nor does he even come close to solving the aforementioned riddles. So, recommending him as a reading source cannot serve as a reasonable substitute for providing cogent arguments right here on this thread.

steve_h
January 11th, 2010 | 7:11 pm

Vincent Torley,

When you say “yes, he does” (give examples of CSI in biological entities) are you sure that they really relate to biology and not card shuffling and coin tossing?

I’m surprised to read that you are still reading his book, I rather assumed that when you told me
“Meyers’ book is over 500 pages long, and I’m certainly not going to attempt to summarize it here. Please, go and buy it, and judge for yourself”, I assumed that you had already read it. My bad.

You say that FSC is one kind of CSI. Could you elaborate on this? AFAICT FSC is related to the number of permutations of units in some system. In CSI terms, that number is only relevant to the complexity of that system, but CSI also considers the _specificity_ of the arrangement. It does that by considering the existence of independent descriptions (at which point it gets a bit hand-wavey and changes the subject). If FSC is to be a type of CSI it should take into consideration: permutations of the parts; the length of the independent description; and something else – but ignore any of the first two and it’s not a type of CSI any more.

I visited your site and skimmed your PhD thesis “The Anatomy of a Minimal Mind”. I’m sure a designer would need at least a minimal mind. What would you say the chances are of something with a minimal mind developing from nothing by natural causes alone? AFAICT you argue that a mind requires life, and here that life requires a mind – which puts us in a catch-22 situation as far as the first non-deity designer is concerned.

R Hampton
January 11th, 2010 | 8:28 pm

RE: Eyes

The genes that build the eyes in vertebrae were adapted from those that build compound eyes in insects (from A Crystallin clear view of eye evolution, April 15, 2005, Development):
At first glance, the eyes of chicks and Drosophila have little in common. However, Blanco and co-workers report that at least one of the genetic regulatory circuits involved in eye development has been largely conserved during evolution. In chick, lens-specific regulation of the δ1-crystallin gene is achieved by the cooperative binding of the transcription factors PAX6 and SOX2 to the 30 bp DC5 fragment within the gene’s enhancer. Using reporter genes, Blanco et al. show that the DC5 fragment is active in the Drosophila compound eye, specifically in the cone cells that secrete Crystallin. Other studies, including a loss-of-function analysis, indicate that the DC5 element in Drosophila is regulated by the cooperative binding of D-PAX2 and SOXN. Since PAX6 and PAX2 derive from the same ancestor, this indicates that while Pax6 took over Crystallin regulation in vertebrates during evolution, Pax2 retained this function in flies.

Granted, that’s just one small line of evidence. The journal Nature has an excellent list of articles on this topic. Of particular interest to you should be Evolution of opsins and phototransduction which describes how these universal photoreceptors evolved at the molecular level throughout the animal kingdom.

R Hampton
January 11th, 2010 | 8:42 pm

Michael Behe:
Another membrane protein that binds cGMP is called an ion channel. It acts as a gateway that regulates the number of sodium ions in the cell. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions to flow into the cell, while a separate protein actively pumps them out again. The dual action of the ion channel and pump keeps the level of sodium ions in the cell within a narrow range. When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged sodium ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane which, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.

Ultimately, though, this is what it means to “explain” vision. This is the level of explanation for which biological science must aim. In order to truly understand a function, one must understand in detail every relevant step in the process. The relevant steps in biological processes occur ultimately at the molecular level, so a satisfactory explanation of a biological phenomenon such as vision, or digestion, or immunity must include its molecular explanation.

The journal Nature has a series of papers providing EXACTLY what Michael Behe asked for in 1996:

Organisms first evolved spiral swimming and thereafter acquired photopigments of diverse kinds (often by horizontal transfer from prokaryotes), which were able to modulate ciliary activity.

Arendt et al. (2009) then present a new model, coined ‘division of labour’, which accounts for the evolution of photoreceptor cells and the various specializations needed to construct ‘proto-eyes’ and visual circuits. Their model is based on the concept that the separate functions of an ancestral multi-functional metazoan cell became distributed between the different members of its descendant cell types.

Vopalensky & Kozmik (2009) analyse the finding that only a restricted set of transcription factors (e.g. Pax, Six, Eya, Otx and Mitf) has been deployed in the evolution of disparate eyes across phyla, thereby providing support for the notion that the regulatory controls for essential photoreceptor genes had already been established in the ancestral metazoan photoreceptor cell.

Nilsson (2009) next analyses the way in which entire visual systems may have evolved, through the sequential addition of capabilities (i.e. innovations such as efficient photopigments, screening pigments and optics), to produce proto-eyes and thereafter eyes capable of image formation. For instance, the evolution of membrane stacking is seen as a prerequisite for the transition from directional photoreception to the first imaging eyes…

The later articles in the Theme Issue concentrate on the evolution of vertebrate eyes. Peirson et al. (2009) review the recently discovered system of inner retinal photoreceptors in the vertebrate eye, comprising a subset of retinal ganglion cells that express the photopigment melanopsin and that provide the signals for circadian synchronization…

Kusakabe et al. (2009) examine the evolution of the biochemical pathway for the dark resynthesis of 11-cis-retinal that is unique to vertebrates, and they provide indications for the existence of a proto-RPE65 isomerase in an early chordate ancestor of vertebrates.

Next, Lamb (2009) argues that the advent of this biochemical pathway, together with the ability of ciliary opsins to release their all-trans-retinal, provided a selective advantage at the very low light levels encountered in deeper waters, which led not only to the adoption of ciliary rather than rhabdomeric photoreceptors, but also to the ‘inside-out’ organization of the retina, in the early vertebrate eye.

Subsequent stages in the evolution of vertebrate photoreception are addressed by Collin et al. (2009), who describe the emergence of five classes of retinal photoreceptor with cone-like specializations, using five classes of cone opsin, presumably for daylight vision and very possibly underlying colour vision.

etc., etc…

StephenB
January 11th, 2010 | 10:53 pm

—-Ted Davis: “Finally, Jerry, I know from other conversations that you believe “Darwinism” is very bad science, including the part about common descent of humans and other organisms. I am much less doubtful about common descent. I am often told that ID does not necessarily entail the rejection of common descent, but frankly I almost never encounter an ID advocate or supporter who accepts it–or at least, who considers common descent a very good working hypothesis.”

—-R. Hampton: “Yes, Intelligent Design (as promoted by the Discovery Insitute) refutes common descent”…………….

Again, ID challenges only the claim that unguided, naturalistic forces alone can account for the common descent of humans and other organisms. ID does not challenge common descent, nor does it affirm it. Please make a note of it. (Under the circumstances, personal anecdotes involving ID advocates who deny common descent are irrelevant, just as personal anecdotes involving those who accept common descent are irrelevant.)

jerry
January 11th, 2010 | 10:58 pm

“However I always welcome your thoughts, and I’ll sign off now expecting to see more of your thoughts even though I do not expect to add more to mine.”

Ted, I also welcome your thoughts and many others at ASA and expect this conversation will continue someplace but probably not here. You are one of the few people on the other side I have respect for. The thing I am eternally grateful for is your facilitating the responses of Timaeus to ASA on ID. To those of your here, you probably have no idea what this is about, but Ted presented comments from a well educated ID supporter to a group of Christian scientists starting in September 2008 and lasting about a month. My assessment is that none of these scientists could counter the arguments of Timaeus but maybe Ted would disagree.

This thread is dying since the originator has signed off. But I will issue a rather long reply to Ted’s comment for two reasons. First, many of the people here do not seem to understand the debate and assume a priori that ID supporters are wrong and ill informed. Ted can certainly straighten anyone out on the ill informed part. Whether we are wrong, is to be seen. And second I use these comments to focus on what I actually believe is true. I personally do not want to be wrong so I keep searching. So it is really for myself and if everybody including Ted wants to stop right here, it is perfectly reasonable. I will make this in three separate comments so that each is not interminably long.

Ted, let me answer a few of your comments which I will list:

1. There was nothing in your long comment that ID would disagree with which is why I said “Welcome to the ID camp.” So if anyone wants to understand ID, read Ted Davis’s long comment and know that ID has no problem with any of it. So where are the differences? Not I believe where Ted believes.

2. “I do not believe it is reasonable for ID advocates to hold that their view is the only reasonable one. I am simply not convinced that science can settle this issue, at least not presently.”

I will admit that one of the main things that those who support ID believe is that science has not shown that naturalistic causes could have produced the changes in life forms over time since the first cell appeared on the planet. While you use the term “slam dunk,” I was once a very good basketball player and know that even slam dunks can bounce back in your face. I once missed a lay up all by myself that would have won a game.

But this simple statement is not quite true and hides a lot which I will try to get out in the open. First of all naturalistic evolution can encompass a lot of things and it is possible to discuss a wide range of options that would come under the domain of naturalistic processes. You use the phrase “the reasonableness of continuing to think that “natural” causes may be sufficient to account for biological complexity.” Does that imply that you and Dr. Barr have a specific set of natural causes in mind or does it just mean you believe that someone or some group will in the future show some naturalistic processes capable of generating novel functional biological complexity. I had to add the extra words to your phrase because ID knows about all the processes by which the genome can be changed and complexity is not the issue but functional complexity is at the heart of the debate. So gene duplication is not disputed but getting a useable new quite different protein is more like blindly throwing the ball from the opposite base line or probably much harder harder.

It cannot possibly mean that there are natural processes currently understood which are the causes for this novel and functional biological complexity. They don’t exist and anyone showing such a capabilities could buy their tux right now and wait for the invitation from the Nobel committee to arrive which should be shortly after the research was validated.

ID has no problem with this. The ID point is that at present it does not exist. ID also gives good reason why it may not be possible but is in no way absolute about it. I assume you read Behe’s Edge of Evolution and he is certainly not absolute but does an excellent job of showing the lack of success as well as the problems that any natural process would encounter. But neither he nor a lot of the ID people I know are absolute and just as the slam dunk that sometimes comes right back at you, the world can surprise you by rejecting what almost seems certain. I personally hold out for tremendous novel solution to problems and would be intrigued by any legitimate method that adds complex functional information to the genome. So far there are none.

But this is a complicated problem in that there is a reigning paradigm in evolutionary biology and can best be summed up as the latest evolutionary synthesis and will include things such as epigenetics, traditional genetics, numerous theories on how the genome get modified, evo devo, the relative contributions of gradual versus punctuated change, umpteen concepts of selection etc. ID does not have any problem with any of this. All these are sometimes classified under Darwinian evolution though this is a misnomer since some of these processes point to almost instant changes and not any form of gradualism. What ID has a problem with are the conclusions that scientists make using these research techniques. They claim that they explain all the life forms that ever existed. ID says nonsense. None of these techniques can explain the origin of complex functional novelties in life forms and in the road from the prokaryote cell to man, these complex functional novelties are probably near a million with each one posing an immense problem for naturalistic processes.

Thus, to show one huge difference between what we see as the TE position or whatever people want to call it, is that there is no current proof for any theory of the evolution of these functional complexities. But that is not what the textbooks say and it is not what the general public understands. They are being purposely misled. They are not being told that they do not have a solution for this problem and that one may be found in the future, they are being told it is a “slam dunk.” And that the ID people are kooks. I think I have described it correctly.

There are two other rather long comments to follow and thus, they may not be posted in a timely matter as the moderation process is in place.

jerry
January 11th, 2010 | 11:09 pm

Part 2 of comments to Ted Davis

3. “Mr Barr articulated my own view above, when he talked about the need to keep science focused on the search for “natural” causes;”

I personally agree and believe most of ID agrees because if even the basic processes are designed not everything is. Most of the world and most of life flows from some initial conditions. It is a question at what level the design took place. Is it at the universe level and life and evolution are inevitable once the find tuning of the universe was created. Or was it once life was designed and installed on this planet with its appropriate boundary conditions. Or was it further down the line when certain populations were seeded or modified. Dr. Barr, you and most of ID would agree that something was done with humans so if God intervened into the physical world long after the Big Bang, why was the only time necessary with humans.

It would be just as shortsighted of ID as it is for the current science community to exclude certain explanations. Are you drawing the line somewhere for theological reasons, scientific reasons or for some other reason. ID is not using any philosophical reasons or theological reasons to draw the line anywhere. It uses the tools of science only and if the tools of science pointed to naturalistic evolution, it would accept that immediately. However, science does not point to any specific cut off. If you or Dr. Barr disagree, then we can have a discussion but let’s not have non science issues enter into the debate. You and Dr. Barr are scientists.

4. “I also agree with him that ID is ultimately an argument about the need for a “supernatural” agent as the source of “designed” features, and thus that ID goes well beyond science itself into metaphysics and theology. I further agree with him that such arguments are legitimate; they simply are not scientific. To the best of my knowledge, the combination of views I have just endorsed does not qualify as an ID position.”

ID tries to separate the science from the philosophical and theological as best it can. I will let StephenB’s comments speak for myself since he can explain it much better than I. In all my discussion on this topic, I try to keep my religious beliefs out of it except to say that ID whether true or not does not affect them. Dr. Barr is a Catholic and I believe you are not. I know from talking with both many Catholics and Protestants that whether God intervened in evolution or acted totally with secondary causes in no way affected their religious beliefs. As one commenter in the last few days said, “Are some overwhelmed by the possibility of God touching His own Creation? It is by our respect in His sovereignty we accept that He does as He sees fit.”

5. “I certainly endorse id. My hesitations concern ID, which seems to require one to hold that the design inference is scientific, per se, and that it’s an inference of sufficient strength to topple “naturalism” not only in science but also in the larger culture. ”

I see no reason why a design inference is not scientific and if it is the most likely explanation then it should be considered. I did not say must be accepted. The very word inference does not mean absolute. There are two alternatives, something was completely naturalistic or it had some elements of it that were designed. ID only points to some elements that were probably designed. A perfectly reasonable position as opposed to what modern science dictates, which says that nothing was designed. They rule out design by fiat. ID on the other hand just says that a design inference is plausible and in some cases very probable. Who is flexible and who is not?

6. “StephenB, Barry Arrington, and perhaps others who have contributed to this thread, overwhelming Steve Barr with the number of your comments, are very active on Uncommondescent.com, which claims explicitly that ‘ID needs to be vigorously developed as a scientific, intellectual, and cultural project.’ ”

I think your line is misleading. Here is the actual statement on the UD website.

“Materialistic ideology has subverted the study of biological and cosmological origins so that the actual content of these sciences has become corrupted. The problem, therefore, is not merely that science is being used illegitimately to promote a materialistic worldview, but that this worldview is actively undermining scientific inquiry, leading to incorrect and unsupported conclusions about biological and cosmological origins. At the same time, intelligent design (ID) offers a promising scientific alternative to materialistic theories of biological and cosmological evolution — an alternative that is finding increasing theoretical and empirical support. Hence, ID needs to be vigorously developed as a scientific, intellectual, and cultural project.”

You quoted phrase is at the very end of the statement that describes what ID is about. There are 103 words in this statement and the first 99 are about science and the last two or three are about culture. Given, the stated objectives of those who most push Darwinian evolution and vigorously try to suppress ID, how could ID not have cultural implications as well as scientific and intellectual? Is any one blind enough to say that Darwinian evolution is mainly about science. Do you or Dr. Barr believe that? I believe this is a red herring and StephenB has answered that very well.

R0b
January 11th, 2010 | 11:49 pm

Vincent Torley, as always, I appreciate your amiability in these discussions. Having said that, I’ll offer some responses to your comments regarding CSI and Meyer’s book:

- I don’t recall Meyer calculating the CSI of anything, or telling us how to calculate it. As Meyer’s understanding of specified complexity is not the same as Dembski’s, it would be interesting to see how he quantifies it.

- You summarize the first premise of Meyer’s CSI-based argument thusly: “Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.” I don’t recall Meyer documenting a thorough search of anything, and I don’t know how a search could be conducted based on Meyer’s vague account of CSI. (Dembski, on the other hand, defines specified complexity such that material causes are ridiculously unlikely to produce it, so such a search would make no sense in Dembski’s framework.)

- You summarize the second premise as follows: “Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information”. By “intelligent causes” you presumably mean humans. Given that humans and other biological organisms presumably contain quite a bit of CSI, who has done the CSI accounting to show that humans actually create CSI from scratch?

- According to Dembski’s definition, quantifying specified complexity involves calculating the probability of a given specification occurring under a chance hypothesis “that takes into account Darwinian and other material mechanisms.” Have you ever seen anyone do this? Every calculation of CSI that I’ve seen takes into consideration a hypothesis of uniform randomness and nothing else. As such, the most we can infer from such calculations is that the hypothesis of uniform randomness should be rejected. Since nobody posits pure noise as an explanation for biological structures, I don’t see how quantitative CSI has accomplished anything for biological ID claims.

- In my very personal opinion, the following two statements do not bode well for the ID movement: “his book makes the best case for ID that has been made to date,” and “the scientific argument that the large quantity of complex specified information in even the simplest forms of life on Earth points to an intelligent designer, is what the ID project is all about.”

jerry
January 11th, 2010 | 11:56 pm

Part 3 of comments to Ted Davis

7. “I know from other conversations that you believe “Darwinism” is very bad science, including the part about common descent of humans and other organisms. I am much less doubtful about common descent. I am often told that ID does not necessarily entail the rejection of common descent, but frankly I almost never encounter an ID advocate or supporter who accepts it–or at least, who considers common descent a very good working hypothesis.”

This is a complicated issue and I will make two points. First, common descent is a conclusion from the data not an axiom of biology or evolution. What people usually call common descent is really common ancestry. Namely, what is used to prove common descent is mainly the analysis of genomic elements and this information only point to limited relationships between certain taxonomic elements. Sometimes it will encompass a large number of species but never encompasses all. It might be true that all mammals have a common ancestor but is there evidence that all mammals are clearly descended from another species. From what I understand this is far from clear but would be willing to see the data and I personally have no preconceived notions as to whether it is true or not. But others take common descent as a given and I believe there is not enough information to judge whether that is true or not. But given that, there is the very real problem of the Cambrian Explosion where all the phyla originated and the lack of any clear predecessor either logically or physically in the fossil evidence. We had a brief discussion here on the eye and how could this complicated organ have arisen in so short a time with no known predecessors. That is an example of the problem that has to be addressed.

Second, given that common descent is true, what this really means is that each organism has a series of ancestors and one of these ancestors is also the ancestor to every other organism on the planet. The term is universal common descent. Is this true? The only evidence is that there is a common system of protein and RNA production that is shared by all life. But even if true this still begs the question just what was the mechanism for the creation of complex novel capabilities. Common descent does not point to any naturalistic mechanism and specifically does not point to Darwinian processes. So to consider common descent as a very good working hypothesis does not be mean it can be used as an argument for Darwinian processes as many now use it. That is an example of bad science and bad logic. It also does not even mean that it can be used as an argument for naturalistic processes. It does not logically follow. I believe there is a fallacy called affirming the consequence that describes this argument. If naturalistic evolution is true, then common descent is also true. But if common descent is true, it does not necessarily mean naturalistic evolution is true.

This is not the place and time to have a full discussion on common descent but it should happen somewhere. It would be an interesting discussion.

8. And last. “Yet, ID officially leaves one open to reject such a conclusion, by maintaining a careful agnosticism about the details of natural history, no matter how well established they may be. I can’t accept such an attitude myself. Before supporting ID, Jerry, I’d have to be convinced that ID entails a general acceptance of, not an agnosticism toward or rejection of, the standard narrative of the development of the universe.”

Ah, here is the real issue and the thing that underlies most if not all of the opposition to ID. It should be noted that personally I am a thorn in the side of many in the ID movement because of my disdain for young earth creationism and their acceptance of bad science. That does not prevent me from accepting what I find the most persuasive explanation for the world and its history. I believe that science and theology are one, not non-overlapping magisteria as Stephen Gould held. There are several others that believe the same.

I find many YEC’s very smart and extremely knowledgeable and I personally like a lot of them. There is a very interesting thread on Uncommondescent right now that had its origin with a YEC believer. It is straight science and does not entail anything more than common sense and an appreciation of the fossil record whether it is 540 million years or not. (540 million years is the approximate limit of multi-cellular organisms that have progeny in the world today. The Edicarian which preceded the Cambrian has some forms that are difficult to classify but no longer have anything like them existing.)

It is true that YEC’s have been very active with ID and I have seen it used as a conversion tool on people who have their doubts about what current science is telling them. It is also true that many YEC’s find the ID implications too secular and misleading for them so they reject ID because it is not religious. That’s ironic isn’t it.

The foot soldiers of the current ID movement are mainly YEC’s. To deny that would be absurd. So on college campuses the Christians who embrace ID are mainly YECs. That does not make ID bad science because some people who espouse bad science accept ID. There is another group that is getting friendlier to ID and do not have the scientific problems that YEC’s do and that is Catholics. While the numbers are still very small there is nothing in Catholic theology that prevents one from accepting ID. In facts many of those here arguing against Dr. Barr were Catholics and some are very knowledgeable about Catholic theology. I think that Catholics have an undeserved fear of two people, Galileo and LaPlace. They should not worry about either because the so called “Galileo Affair” has been misdescribed and the Church and Urban VIII are actually the ones that acted properly. And LaPlace was just observing the natural world after something was designed. He never dealt with the problem of origins which ID deals with. He just might have had to consider that hypothesis. Catholics should listen to Lagrange who said “Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.”

I personally believe that ID entails an old earth. Because if you implement the Explanatory Filter of Dembski on science in general then you must conclude an old earth. This will make many groan at Uncommondescent (UD) but if you watch the discussion at UD you will rarely ever see any conclusion made based on the basis of a young earth. And if they are, there will be many pro ID people there to argue against it. That stricture is working to attract more than just YEC’s and in fact has attracted many Catholics.

This has been way too long but Ted’s arguments needed to be addressed and I do not agree with many of the assessments he has made. But there will be more time someplace else in the future.

Dave Mullenix
January 12th, 2010 | 3:47 am

Jerry, saying, “The problem is that no one can identify more than a few instances when these 50+ engines of variation did anything of note.” won’t do, since you and the other IDers will accept nothing other than a complete base-pair by base-pair listing of every change in the genome, the exact time it occurred and its exact effect on the organism as a satisfactory answer. (And of course, ID can’t meet that requirement either and doesn’t even try.)

It does not take “several magnitudes” of changes to get a new species. Here’s a nice Christian website discussing the evolutionary path that took teosinte to modern maise (corn):

http://sacredday.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/the-evolution-of-maize-corn-from-teosinte-2/

Teosinte has a small seed head with 5-12 rock hard indigestible kernels. Maise heads have up to 500 soft kernels. “The change in ear morphology was determined to be due to approximately five genes by crossing teonsinte and maize and taking it to the F2 generation…” Changing teosinte from a widely branching shrub to a single stem ala maise took a change to a single promotor gene.

I can’t find an article I once read, but the total difference between teosinte and maise is about fifteen genes. Real researchers are actively crossing the two plants and knocking out genes in order to accurately reconstruct the exact sequence teosinte took to evolve into maise, exactly what ID demands to know. ID researchers are doing nothing that I know of.

I’m 100 percent sure they will find a way to pooh pooh the studies when they are published because they don’t agree with ID’s idee fixe that an intelligence is necessary for evolution.

Kay Carlson
January 12th, 2010 | 5:28 am

Dave Mullenix,

Whole gene sequencing of organisms began in 1995 and quickly led to comparative genomics. Even before this, though, there were inklings that all organisms did not fall into the gradients of change of which you describe. The Archaea, a simple organism thought to be similar to the bacteria, was found to have a completely different set of molecules which copy DNA, even though the DNA has the same composition. Archaea and bacteria are different in other ways, (for example, their cell membranes), so that Archaea are placed into a different domain (similar to a kingdom) than bacteria. Therefore, there are not just one but two sets of molecular machinery in life origins.

Eugene Koonin is on the front lines of comparitive genomics, being a director of this research at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), under the National Institutes of Health now directed by Francis Collins. Koonin has written and co-written many papers documenting the increasing discoveries of the genomes of organisms. The NCBI is on the front lines of this research, providing databases and search engines to researchers.

Koonin has written and co-written papers to present the research. He recently summarized over a decade in this work in a paper called “Genomics of Bacteria and Archaea: the emerging dynamic view of the prokaryotic world” in Nucleic Acids Research, 2008, Vol. 36, No 21. He and his co-author Yuri Wolf feel there has been enough study to represent a reasonable sampling. They presented an astounding array of diversity of the genes of one-celled organisms that they have studied. One of the most surprising results is the uniqueness of many genes found in one or just a few species. In other words, different species have very different genes as well as similar ones, much unlike what was expected by the neo-Darwinian scenario.

In another recent paper is “Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics,” in Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 4. Koonin asserts that “Evolutionary genomics effectively demolished the straightforward concept of the TOL [Tree of Life]” (p 1027). He says, “There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity” (p 1011).

Kay Carlson
January 12th, 2010 | 5:45 am

R. Hampton,

In Darwin’s Black Box (Touchstone, 1996), Michael Behe described the molecular biosynthesis of AMP and GMP on pages 140-161. As he summarizes on p. 149, AMP takes thirteen steps and involves twelve enzymes, requires ATP molecules to provide the energy to drive chemical reactions at each step, and lists a variety of other needs for the process to continue and be regulated. He mentions the GMP pathway on p. 158.

ATP synthase is the system used to provide the molecule of biological energy known as ATP, mentioned above. In the bacteria E. Coli, ATP synthase is made of 8 types of proteins used in various amounts (some once, some three times, etc.), for a total of about 6000 amino acids, all in a specific order needed for their folding and fitting together so that they can do the job of adding a high-energy phosphate to an ADP molecule. In order for the ATP synthase system to function, many other issues are involved. These include: the need for a cell membrane which regulates many ions in order to keep the osmotic pressure of the cell within a balance so the cell does not either collapse or explode; the electron transfer system so that hydrogen protons will be transferred across the membrane to create an electrical gradient to turn the synthase mechanism; and existence of the many enzymes needed to break down glucose or other energy sources to get the electron transfer going. A wonderful picture of ATP synthase is at this link: ATP Synthase at RCSB Protein Data Bank . RCSB, by the way, is one of the many excellent sources to study the marvelous world of proteins.

When I taught our church secretary to use a computer, at first she wanted to skip steps. To her consternation, the computer would not work.

jerry
January 12th, 2010 | 10:57 am

Dave Mullenix,

Thank you for the example. ID does not deny that the modification of even a single SNP may cause a large morphological change in an organism. You seem to imply that the people who support ID are narrow minded and dunces and will not accept what has been established by science. It is just the opposite as ID considers each finding by science and accepts the conclusions of about 99.999% of what the researchers claim. It is for a small group of research studies that ID says the conclusions are not justified. I have seen many individuals who support ID jump on something that later proves to be due to naturalistic processes but most will accept the obvious explanation once it is demonstrated. But it is rare for one of the main contributors to ID to look for design for every phenomena. Most think that nature is allowed to play out once the design has been implemented and as I mentioned before some think the only design event was the fine tuning of the universe. So design events are probably very rare. Natural forces explain most phenomena but not all.

Now to your example of corn or maize and teosinte. I believe maize and teosinte are like first cousins. They are the same species though morphologically they are very different. Things that are morphologically very different are often genomically very similar.

For example, chihuahuas and wolves can interbreed (though it would be interesting to see how) and essentially are the same species. A paleontologist 100,000 years from now without knowing about dog breeds would probably classify them as very different. There are humans that are over 7 feet tall and humans that are 3 feet in height. The typical human has 1 million base pairs difference with another human and that means a lot more than 15 different proteins or expressions of proteins in each.

The interesting question is why does someone bring up teosinte and maize. It is certainly an interesting breeding process but evolution wise it is trivial. There are approximately 2000 proteins involved in the vision system and nearly all have to be coordinated to produce a functional eye. When someone goes to an example as simple as the maize – teosinte one, it means that they do not have any more involved ones. Otherwise they would be emphasizing the more complicated one.

My personal effort here is to clarify what ID is about and to try and remove any misconceptions about it. Nearly every article, blog post or conversation I have seen has it wrong. My long reply to Ted Davis was an attempt to do so with him. Even Ted who probably understand the ID world better than most, has some misconceptions based on my reading of what he wrote.

ID is no threat to Catholicism as many of the ID people are Catholics. Michael Behe is a practicing Catholic as well as Bruce Chapman who is the head of the Discovery Institute. And so were many of the ID supporters here on this thread. ID is about good science and that should never be a threat to any religion.

Ted Davis
January 12th, 2010 | 1:32 pm

Thank you for the replies, Jerry, which I have fully read. I have nothing to add here to my points, nor do I withdraw any of them. You and some other regulars on the UD blog seem to have almost unlimited time, a luxury that seems to elude my grasp. In an ideal world we would continue this conversation at much greater length.

StephenB also seems to own a time generating machine, but I lack time to respond to most of his points (addressed not simply to me but also to others) either. I would be able to respond to all of them, for I teach and write extensively about the origins controversy and the larger science & religion conversation, but it’s difficult to teach a course in half a dozen posts to a blog.

Just as I responded to just one of Jerry’s statements–the most important one IMO–I will choose the most important one of your statements, StephenB, and respond to it. Then, as with my exchange with Jerry, I will have to bow out for my part. My day job is calling.

Way back up there, StephenB addressed this to Mr Barr: “Theistic evolutionists, on the other hand, conduct their business as if truth was, indeed, fragmented, holding fast to Darwin’s theories, with no real evidence to support them, while abandoning basic Biblical truths about perceptible design in nature, our first parents and, in some cases, even about the fall itself. If they really believed in the unity of truth— if they really believed that their scientific world view was compatible with their faith— they would not feel the need to subordinate vital Scriptural truths to Darwin’s theory. They would hold fast to both and make no compromises.”

There are so many things to respond to here, StephenB, that it can’t be done in a single blog, which is all I will allow myself to write. So, let me respond to the guts of this by putting a thought experiment for your consideration. Suppose, StephenB, that Charles Darwin had never existed, and that no one else had ever proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection–despite Huxley’s observation that it was so obvious that he should have thought of it himself. Suppose further, that Lamarck’s version of evolution never had any important adherents, either, so that by the late 19th century no type of evolutionary theory was accepted by more than just a handful of cranks. And, suppose that this situation was still true today. That’s a lot to suppose, but please go with me in order to see my point.

In this case, StephenB, I think that Paley-style design arguments would still be used by some leading scientists; your comments about design and the Bible are partly headed in the right direction. Darwin did pretty much undermine that type of argument; or, more precisely, the Hume-Darwin combination did that pretty well. However, already in the 1830s there had been a turn away from design arguments based on “contrivances” (as Paley often called specific parts of living things), in favor of much more general design arguments based on the lawlikeness of nature–the kinds of arguments that remain in force now. Dr Barr has indicated already his preference for them; so have many other modern scientists and theologians, in a trend that (as I want to underline for you) goes back before Darwin had yet published a word about biology. John Polkinghorne, Robert Russell, Steven Barr, Robin Collins (a former fellow of TDI), Owen Gingerich, and many, many other advocates of “theistic evolution” advance arguments of this sort. So, your comments about undermining the biblical view of design are not exactly accurate. To be sure, Polkinghorne, Gingerich, and some others (Asa Gray in 1880 was an early example) realize that post-Darwinian forms of natural theology probably seem less like “slam dunks” (I note Jerry’s comments but still use this term) than the older ones. As Polkinghorne sees it (and I fully agree), inferences to design or purpose are metaphysical in character, and metaphysical questions are not subject to knock-down arguments; nevertheless they are still very strong. The universe when seen as a divine creation still makes more sense of all things, including our experience of that universe, then a universe that is simply the product of a grand cosmic lottery. IMO, StephenB, the difference in tone here between ID proponents who want to have invincible design arguments in order to overthrow what they see as the cultural legacy of “Darwinism” and TE proponents who take a more nuanced, subtle view of this, is quite profound–and fundamental to understanding the differences between their points of view. So much for design.

Now, as for the historicity of Adam & Eve and of the fall, two very important issues, you need to be aware of something. Even in our imaginary world without Darwin, StephenB, those issues would be coming up anyway. The problem is this: Adam & Eve are placed into a neolithic cultural context, with agriculture and cities already in place; whereas creatures who were anatomically and behaviorally just like us have been around a very great deal longer than farming and cities. Furthermore, animal death and suffering have been around for hundreds of millions of years before the “fall” of Adam & Eve, and the recent efforts of Bill Dembski (in his newest book, “The End of Christianity”, which openly borrows from 19th-century sources that I’ve taught for decades) notwithstanding, it’s mighty darn hard to reconcile “death before the fall” with traditional Western Christian understandings of the “fall” (a doctrine that Jewish scholars do not have, and something that is understood somewhat differently in Eastern Orthodox churches). The two problems of the historicity of Adam and of the fall are not identical, but they are closely related. Even very conservative Calvinists, such as William Henry Green and Benjamin B Warfield (both of whom were active at the turn of the 19th century), had to stretch the geneologies in Genesis very, very far in order to accommodate human antiquity without discarded an historical first human pair. Their view was frankly not very convincing, and I have not seen a convincing treatment of this by any modern scholar who holds to the historicity of Adam & Eve and of the fall. All of this, StephenB, entirely without Darwin.

Finally, StephenB, both Warfield and Green fit very well your description of people who “really believed in the unity of truth” and who “really believed that their scientific world view was compatible with their faith.” Neither was willing “to subordinate vital Scriptural truths to Darwin’s theory.” I leave it to you to determine whether they were able to “hold fast to both” science & scripture without “compromises.” StephenB, the general question is here is one I’ve studied for nearly 35 years. I share your deep desire for the unity of truth and for the importance of not “subordinating vital Scriptural truths” to any scientific idea, including “Darwin’s theory.” One person’s careful reconciliation can be another person’s “compromise,” as anyone who knows the work of both Hugh Ross and Jonathan Sarfati (to offer a pertinent, obvious example) will realize.

Proponents of “theistic evolution” come in at least two fundamentally different types, StephenB; you don’t seem to realize this crucial fact. There are on the one hand, those (such as John Haught, Ian Barbour, or the late Arthur Peacocke) who do not believe in a God who is transcendent over nature in anything like a traditional sense, who do not believe in the deity and resurrection of Jesus, and who do not believe (at least in Peacocke’s case) that humans are “fallen.” Then there are on the other hand, those (such as Russell or Gingerich or Polkinghorne or me) who believe that nature is the free, thoughtful, and purposeful creation of a transcendent, self-existing Creator, who literally took human form and suffered unto death, before being literally raised bodily from the grave into the eschatological kingdom, as the first fruits of them that slept. All in order that we, truly “fallen” persons, created in God’s image, might be redeemed.

As I say, StephenB, all forms of “theistic evolution” are not the same. Please try not to imply that the acceptance of evolution leads inevitably to heterodoxy, and please realize that many of the important questions that sciences poses for Christians are still there to be confronted, even if Darwin and evolution had never come along. My sense is that quite a few ID proponents are confused about both of these things; for some, indeed, the very existence of theologically orthodox proponents of evolution is an oxymoron, notwithstanding the fact that some of the best writers on Christianity and science are in this category. Please therefore pass along this information to your friends.

With my thanks and best wishes as I exit this thread,

Ted

John Farrell
January 12th, 2010 | 3:56 pm

“As I say, StephenB, all forms of “theistic evolution” are not the same. Please try not to imply that the acceptance of evolution leads inevitably to heterodoxy, and please realize that many of the important questions that sciences poses for Christians are still there to be confronted, even if Darwin and evolution had never come along. My sense is that quite a few ID proponents are confused about both of these things; for some, indeed, the very existence of theologically orthodox proponents of evolution is an oxymoron, notwithstanding the fact that some of the best writers on Christianity and science are in this category. Please therefore pass along this information to your friends.”

Well said, Professor Davis.

jerry
January 12th, 2010 | 4:18 pm

Ted,

I will only say one little thing which does not have to be answered here but maybe eventually.

Natural selection is so obvious a concept that Huxley admonished himself for not thinking of it himself. I agree. Natural selection is a “slam dunk.” But when one looks past it, one sees that it is very limited in what it can do. And that is not so obvious at first. Natural selection turns out to be a minor player in evolution. It cannot select what is not there and a lot of things there will never be selected in a trillion years.

ID and TE’s can debate the process of evolution in the future on some ground where it can be informative and pleasant.

As to time. I own my own small business and I owe my wife two nights work on taking down the Christmas decorations and putting them away because I spent all of last night writing comments to you when she told me she felt like Martha as Mary got to do all the interesting stuff.

If this is duplicated, I apologize but my computer said database error when I tried to post it 10 minutes ago.

StephenB
January 12th, 2010 | 8:33 pm

Dear Ted Davis, thank you for your comments. I understand that your time constraints [and Dr. Barr’s time constraints, for that matter] prevent both you from engaging in a long term give and take, and I am sure that everyone respects that fact. [For the record, I, too, must make certain sacrifices to visit this site].

On the matter of design, we can profitably frame the issue in the form of two basic questions: Does God, through his handiwork, communicate to us through nature in a language that all rational people can understand or does he not? Can we apprehend God’s beauty and majesty through his revelation or can we not? We need not accept Paley’s argument to answer yes to both of these questions, and, given Scripture’s account, the answer clearly must also be, yes. It would hardly make sense for St. Paul to say that those who refuse to accept the existence of this design are “without excuse,” if that design was not detectable. That should be obvious.

So, I submit to you that the meaning of the word “detectable” defines the standard by which we judge the design argument as being Scriptural or non Scriptural. You argue, rightly, that the less compelling arguments, which disavow the idea of perceptible detection, characterized as a mere “appreciation of the Lawlikness of nature,” did, indeed, precede Darwin, but I hasten to remind you that the more compelling formulations, characterized by scientists who said that they were “thinking God’s thoughts after him,” came first. In other words, the arguments in favor of detectable design launched the entire scientific enterprise. Were they “slam dunk” arguments? Well let’s put it this way. They were compelling enough that the scientists who embraced them were willing to risk failure after failure with one experiment after another until nature finally began to reveal its secrets, and there can be no doubt that their courage and persistence stemmed from the conviction that the design in nature is, indeed, perceptible. Given that standard, my reflections on Scripture are accurate and the theistic evolutionists, of both stripes, are inaccurate [Yes, I am aware of the differences].

So, the question we have to ask ourselves is this: From whence came the doubts that followed? Clearly, it happened in philosophy, not in science, when Hume and Kant visited their epistemological errors on the world, insisting that we can know nothing at all about reality. Obviously, that is a self-refuting, nonsensical argument. If we know nothing about objective reality, we cannot know that we know nothing about reality. But never mind, Western Philosophers, looking for loopholes to avoiding both philosophical and design arguments, seized the opportunity even though Reid refuted Kant in his own day and thoughtful philosophers, such as Mortimer Adler, refuted him in the 20th Century [Consult: “Little Errors in the Beginning,” by Adler, which can be easily found on the internet.]

You suggest that ID proponents want invincible arguments to overthrow the legacy of Darwinism, and you imply that they are metaphysical for that reason. No one has used the word, “invincible,” here, so this is one more example of anti-TE partisanship miscasting the arguments being presented. Once again, I must gently remind you about the danger of conflating motives with methods, a TE staple, and, about the escalated danger of characterizing ID arguments as “metaphysical arguments.” As I have tried to point out, ID arguments cannot be metaphysical or theological since they are based solely on observation. My challenge here still holds. If anyone can make the leap from “irreducible complexity” or “specified complexity to philosophy or religion, please show me how that can be done. I don’t know what it so hard about this. Claiming it to be so in order to discredit ID without an argument reflects an ideological bent that ignores the facts in evidence. For the most part, it seems that the TEs presume the right to scrutinize ID while, at the same time, feeling that they, themselves, should be exempt from scrutiny. So, they are shocked when they have to go off the offense and go on the defense, possibly a result of sitting pretty with the entrenched power structure, inhabited by Darwinists and Darwinist sympathizers.

On the matter the historicity of our first parents, the fall, and other Scriptural teachings about sin and death, I have, on many occasions noted that TE’s compromise those truths on the basis of inconclusive scientific evidence and speculation—and it is speculation. When push comes to shove, they have judged the word of atheistic evolutionary biologists as non-negotiable and the word of God as negotiable. And yes, I do realize that TEs are not the same, so your attempt to cast me as someone who doesn’t understand that fact does not work. It is ironic. On the one hand, you insist that the most skeptical among them deny basic Gospel truths, while the more faithful ones embrace Scripture, yet it is the second group, the so-called faithful ones, that you characterize the following way:

“The two problems of the historicity of Adam and of the fall are not identical, but they are closely related. Even very conservative Calvinists, such as William Henry Green and Benjamin B Warfield (both of whom were active at the turn of the 19th century), had to stretch the geneologies in Genesis very, very far in order to accommodate human antiquity without discarded an historical first human pair. Their view was frankly not very convincing, and I have not seen a convincing treatment of this by any modern scholar who holds to the historicity of Adam & Eve and of the fall. All of this, StephenB, entirely without Darwin”

So, even the most faithful of the TEs, by your own testimony, cannot accept the historicity of Adam and Eve and of the Fall, which is what I have been saying all along. What kind of fall could it be if not a historical fall that occurred in time/space/history? And, just as I have indicated, all TEs, at least those who are visible and influential, hold to a solely naturalistic evolution, with no real evidence to support that view. So, in spite of your attempts to make me the issue, and, in spite of your protests that you have been teaching this subject for 35 years, you have failed to place the relevant subject matter in its proper context. Sorry.

R Hampton
January 12th, 2010 | 9:18 pm

It cannot select what is not there

Of course not, that’s where genetics comes in to play — there are plenty of detailed examples in the links I provided on the genetic evolution of the eye.

Seemingly different organisms that share the same set of genes can build very different structures if the activation of those genes differs. For example there the genes that genes create the middle ear ossicles in mammals are the same genes the create jaw bones in reptiles.

In 2007, paleontologists unearthed a remarkable fossil – Yanoconodon allini – that preserves a point in time when the mammalian inner ear was still attached to the lower jaw with Meckel’s cartilage. In mammals today, however, genetics switches during fetal development cause the embryonic Meckel’s cartilage to be reabsorbed, and that disconnects the ear ossicles from the lower jaw.

Thus we can demonstrate how “new” genetic information can be the result of natural evolution.

Dave Mullenix
January 13th, 2010 | 5:27 am

Kay Carlson, very good, I agree with everything you said. What was your point?

Are you trying to say, like the IDists, that there wasn’t enough time to generate that kind of variety?

Using humans as an example, we have about 3 billion basepairs in our DNA. If the average human is born with about 30 mutations, then with a population of 100 million every single basepair in the human genome would be mutated at least once per generation. Other multi-celled organisms have similar rates.

Mutation rates are higher for bacteria and their populations are vastly higher, so there’s plenty of time to accumulate all those differences.

Dave Mullenix
January 13th, 2010 | 5:51 am

Kay Carlson, the first living thing certainly didn’t use ATP. Use of ATP and ATP synthese undoubtedly came after a very long period of evolution. Please tell us what came before ATP and we’ll be able to give you a better idea of how long it probably took.

ID does have this information, right? If ATP sysnthesis didn’t evolve, that’s okay, just tell us when it was created and whether it was “poofed” into being all at once or in a series of steps. And if it was a series of steps, we’d like to know when each step occurred and some details of how it happened. We won’t trouble ID theorists for the identity of the “poofer” because we know they’re sensitive about stuff like that.

And all IDists should understand that if science’s ignorance of what happened billions of years ago at a sub-microscopic level that left no fossils is a point for ID, then ID’s ignorance of the same thing is a point for science.

Plus, science still has a mechanism for producing ATP synthesis (evolution) whie ID, as our host has explained, has nothing but a claimed miracle for an “explanation”.

Dave Mullenix
January 13th, 2010 | 6:26 am

Jerry: “You seem to imply that the people who support ID are narrow minded and dunces and will not accept what has been established by science.”

That’s a very common belief, but I attribute most of the ID weirdness to being forced to support a false idee fixe in the face of overwhelming evidence. Ask a devout Mormon about early American history and you’ll get the same thing, yet the average Mormon is at least of average intelligence.

“I believe maize and teosinte are like first cousins.”

They are indeed. Only a dozen or two mutations separate them. Do you realize that this difficulty in distinguishing between species is EXACTLY what evolution predicts?

If you really think that teosinte and maize aren’t different species, try living on teosinte. If you grow enough teosinte and smash enough kernels between two rocks and winnow out the tiny edible kernels, you might survive, but if you take time out to read or post you will surely starve.

The fact is that maize has entirely new and different body parts (the soft kernel compared to the originall rock hard one, the huge cob compared to the narrow stalk holding the teosinte kernels), exactly what ID says only an intelligent designer can produce. Yet it only took two or three thousand years for the handful of mutations that produced maize to appear. Extend that to the six or seven hundred million years we’ve had multi-cellular life and your ID idee fixe should at least shudder a bit.

“My personal effort here is to clarify what ID is about and to try and remove any misconceptions about it.”

As a long time UD lurker, I’ve enjoyed watching you try. However, I’ve got to go with Ockham’s Razor here.

Dave Mullenix
January 13th, 2010 | 6:44 am

StephenB: “You suggest that ID proponents want invincible arguments to overthrow the legacy of Darwinism, and you imply that they are metaphysical for that reason. No one has used the word, “invincible,” here, so this is one more example of anti-TE partisanship miscasting the arguments being presented.”

No, this is an example of a fellow believer taking a look at ID and accurately describing its true nature.

Dembski contributed the first “invincible argument” to ID with his claim that only intelligence could produce CSI. Living organisms contain CSI, therefore God … er that is The Intelligent Designer.

That didn’t work out too well, since mutation and natural selection produce plenty of CSI, but no matter, because Behe came along with Irreducible Complexity: Darwin said that evolution could only produce change one tiny bit at a time, there were objects in organisms that couldn’t work if one single part was removed, therefore Go… excuse me again, The Intelligent Designer.

Dembski jumped right on that bandwagon and references to CSI became rarer and rarer until he finally admitted that he no longer supported it last summer. Then the whole world laughed and he quickly said that yes, he did so support it after all and always had. But the CSI argument was still dead in the water.

Meanwhile, Irreducible Complexity had also failed as an Invincible Argument. Examples were soon found of pre-existing structures being re-purposed for other uses and, lo and behold, these re-purposed structures wouldn’t work if a single piece was removed. But they had worked just fine at their original job, where they didn’t need all the pieces, so there went ID’s second “Invincible Argument”.

We’re still waiting for number three.

Kay Carlson
January 13th, 2010 | 9:43 am

In Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell, (HarperOne, 2009) he has a chapter in which he talks about some of the studies going on in protein functionality (Chapter 9, Ends and Odds). Proteins are made up of molecules called amino acids, which are in turn made up of atoms (such as hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen) in specific relation to each other through chemical bonds. Though there are hundreds of amino acids in non-living nature, only 20 appear in proteins. And of course, atoms don’t form only into amino acids. They can take on all kinds of configurations.

On page 213, Meyer relates that well-known cosmologist Fred Hoyle “calculated the odds of producing the proteins necessary to service a simple one-celled organism by chance at 1 in 10^40,000.” That is a chance of 1 in a number that starts with 1 and has 40,000 zeros after it. Since then, others have worked on the proportion of combinations of amino acids that are functional as proteins. Meyer describes the work of one researcher, Douglas Axe, who experimentally confirmed Hoyle’s prediction. Axe’s work also verifies the predictions of Hubert Yockey who used information theory to arrive at his conclusions.

The point many Intelligent Design advocates are trying to get across is that people are not realizing the huge improbabilities associated with any chance formation of the functional proteins of life. This applies to any functional protein, not just ATP synthase. And no, there isn’t time to go from one to the other. There can only be about 10^43 quantum events per second, and there have been about 10^16 seconds in a 14-billion-year universe so far (under the Big Bang theory, which Meyer uses in his calculations). There are an estimated 10^80 particles in the universe, so when Meyer multiplies them all, he gives a calculation of the total events of the universe of 10^139 (pp 216-217). This provides the measure of probabilistic resources.

So even if the universe were 14 billion years old, much more than the paltry 4 billion years of Earth (about 4 x 10^6), there would not be enough time to try all the combinations of atoms possible to make an organism work. There is research being done in abiogenesis to find some way it could have happened. But the work that’s been done by people like Robert Shapiro and Leslie Orgel on these questions has not been considered conclusive. Each camp that does experiments on whether life started by DNA/RNA or by proteins has been active in pointing out the deficiencies of the other camp. That is because there are chemical laws to be considered. These include questions of concentrations of chemicals, their energies needed to combine and come apart, their equilibriums, side reactions, and half-lives, among other things. If this were all worked out in a theory, fine. But the ID people are telling us it is not. What they get is speculation from tiny possibilities.

As for myself, I identify myself as a Roman Catholic Christian. I admire the work of the ID people, and I appreciate their efforts to show the reasonableness of their science. Many ID people are Christian, but many are not. Some hold to other religions, some are atheists or agnostics. I feel the questions of theology and science still need to be worked out, but I think there are significant distinctions between believers and non-believers. A believer already knows the entities like atoms that he or she studies are designed. No one has to prove it to them. And all of us humans and all of our surroundings are designed. Science for believers is the study of created entities.

As to how and when God did His work, we should speculate in a respectful manner. I believe God created us in some way and the odds look pretty good that He created the cell after the Big Bang. I think human knowledge will probably never be able to grasp the totality and enormity of God’s creative acts. But that is not very difficult to accept when we appreciate the miracle of life.

jerry
January 13th, 2010 | 10:33 am

Dave Mullenix,

I say that ID has an open mind about science and you insult me and others. I am quite willing to accept that corn or maize arose from teosinte naturally but the most likely scenario is that it was cultivated or artificially selected and to use a another description, intelligently designed. Just as much of modern agriculture is intelligently designed and would not have arisen naturally.

Corn or maize is considered a sub species, whatever that is, of teosinte. Not what I would call a major evolutionary advancement in the argument which focuses on the origin of complex systems in living things. Obviously a very important achievement for the feeding of the people in the Americas but in the scale of evolutionary advancements from prokaryotes to man, of no significance. You say “try living on teosinte.” like that is an evolutionary argument.

I am always fascinated by people who use Occam’s razor. What is simplest. A designer did it or there was a procession of extremely unlikely events which no one can document.

You claim there is overwhelming evidence and imply that we refuse to accept it. You give us a trivial example probably done under artificial selection and then call us weird. I am sorry but that shouldn’t deserve a response. The only reason I am giving one is that there may be confusion by other readers who think that what you presented was relevant. And it was not. The typical argument against ID is ad hominems and irrelevancies and you have used both in your replies.

And you also use deflections. Just how did ATP synthase arise? You pass it off like it was nothing. For those who do not know what ATP synthase is about, it is as complicated as the space shuttle and it arose out of nowhere and without it no life as we know it could exist.

I have a question, was the resurrection a poof event? Did Jesus just poof back to life? If humans will shortly be able to poof major life changes in a laboratory, is modifying the genome of an organism in general a poof event? Is it beyond God’s capabilities or even a very smart intelligence? I like to call those who use the word, “poofers,” because they chose the word to belittle the person they are supposedly having a conversation with. So I often throw it right back at them. Was your comment here in response to all the other comments a poof event? If not, explain just how did your comment appear which is untold magnitudes more complex than the changes that took place to teosinte.

John Farrell
January 13th, 2010 | 10:40 am

R Hampton and Dave, excellent points, all.

Kay Carlson
January 13th, 2010 | 11:58 am

Sorry, I had the Earth age as 4×10^6 which I need to correct to 4×10^9 for a 4 billion year old Earth, although some estimates are putting it at 4.5×10^9. Meyer assumes an old Universe in his calculations (1.4×10^9).

Kay Carlson
January 13th, 2010 | 12:07 pm

Sorry sorry sorry, universe age is 14×10^9 in Meyer’s calculations (from comments at 1/13 9:43am and 1/13 11:58am).

Kay Carlson
January 13th, 2010 | 12:31 pm

Please don’t hold it against Meyer’s theory that I have made some mistakes with the numbers. (Re my comments at 11/13 9:43 am and 11/13 11:58 am). For the old universe theory that Meyer uses, the Earth age is about 4.5 times 10 to the 9th power (4.5 billion) years old; and Universe age of 14 times 10 to the 9th power (14 billion) years old. Of course, Young Earth Creationists see the Earth as thousands of years old, but if Meyer’s theory proves against total materialistic evolution of life for an old universe, it will hold for a young Earth.

StephenB
January 13th, 2010 | 12:34 pm

Dear Mullinex.

There are many reason’s why ID does not characterize its own arguments as “invincible,” and here, once again, we find more evidence of critics misunderstanding the points being made.

Let us consider the argument that you place in that category: For all CSI that we have observed, and whose source we can track, an intelligent agent was the cause. There is nothing presumptuous or ambitious about that statement; it is simply a fact. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please present it. Given that fact, we find, at times [not usually] that these same patterns occur in nature, we infer as an inference to the best explanation, than an intelligent agent was responsible. This process is neither an induction nor a deduction. The formal word for it is “abduction.” It is not, nor has it ever been, characterized as an “invincible” argument, except perhaps, by TEs and Darwinists, who either misunderstand it or choose to misrepresent it.

Because TEs misunderstand the nature of an abduction, they have difficulty understanding why ID cannot draw conclusions about the identity of the designer, [that is when they are not making the opposite false charge that you are making, namely that ID concludes, from a scientific perspective, that the designer MUST be God. As I tried to explain to Dr. Barr and Ted Davis, apparently without success, the inference to design cannot make leaps from observational data to identity. If you come home and find your house ransacked, you infer that natural causes were not responsible and conclude that an intelligent agent [vandal] was responsible. Using that method alone, it is possible to detect the “existence” of the vandal [intelligent agent, designer] and it is impossible to detect the “identity” of same. I don’t see what is so hard about this.

It is Scripture that makes the claim for an “invincible” argument, insisting that those who deny the Creator God after having witnessed the glory and grandeur of his creation, is “without excuse.” I gather that you disagree with Scripture on this matter, but that is your affair, not mine. In any case, if Scripture says that design is self evident and perceptible, and if ID, from a scientific perspective, says it is merely a reasonable conclusion we can draw from evidence, ID is on solid ground, at least from a Catholic/Christian perspective. Of course, theistic evolutionsts do not accept the teaching of Scripture at all, insisting as they do, that design is not perceptible to the senses, depending as they do solely on the speculations of evolutionary biologists, 94.8% of whom are atheist/agnostic. Theistic evolutionism, as least as it is formatted today, is both bad theology and bad science. Macro evolution, if it occurred, and it may well have, was most likely designed or programmed to unfold according to a plan. Theistic evolutionsts cannot accept this very reasonable and likely proposition, presumably because they are unduly attached to the Darwinist paradigm, which rules out purpose and design apriori.

StephenB
January 13th, 2010 | 2:41 pm

—-Mullinexa: “Meanwhile, Irreducible Complexity had also failed as an Invincible Argument. Examples were soon found of pre-existing structures being re-purposed for other uses and, lo and behold, these re-purposed structures wouldn’t work if a single piece was removed. But they had worked just fine at their original job, where they didn’t need all the pieces, so there went ID’s second “Invincible Argument”.

Irreducible complexity says nothing about the capacity of parts to work independent of the whole as other functions. It says only that the whole requires all the parts. By no means does it purport to be an invincible argument. On the other hand, it is clear that most who oppose it do not understand it.

R Hampton
January 13th, 2010 | 2:57 pm

StephenB,
So you might accept that corn evolved naturally, but what of the Wolf/Dog evolving from the Fox? They do not share the same number of chromosomes and Fox – Wolf/Dog pairings do not produce offspring.

So what irreducibly complex structure is found in Wolves and Dogs but not found in Foxes? In other words, what in particular required to be engineered by an intelligent agent in order for the Wolf/Dog species to exist?

Ted Davis
January 13th, 2010 | 3:02 pm

StephenB: As I said, and meant, I don’t want to enter a prolonged debate, and I won’t add any points to those I already made. However you have badly misunderstood some of my points, and I do feel compelled to sort that out. Then I hope I can disappear. I will quote the parts of your reply where you failed to see my point, and then correct them.

ONE: “Can we apprehend God’s beauty and majesty through his revelation or can we not? We need not accept Paley’s argument to answer yes to both of these questions, and, given Scripture’s account, the answer clearly must also be, yes.”

StephenB, I brought Paley explicitly into this b/c many ID arguments are specifically Paleyan in type. Mike Behe realizes this and so do some other prominent ID advocates. The Scriptures are talking about intuitive responses to nature, not formal logical arguments. As you know, formal logic was invented by the Greeks, and the Bible eschews using it in both Old and New Testaments. One can easily affirm the legitimacy of the powerful sense of “design” or purpose that is evident to all—even Dawkins (as you know) admits this—while not necessarily accepting that a specific formal argument for design is valid or even strong. They are simply not the same thing. Furthermore, I affirm without hesitation that we can detect evidence for the divine design of the universe—provided that we have a specific idea of Who that Designer is (i.e., the God of the Bible who has wisdom and intellect partially shared by we who are created in his image). Unless I miss my mark, StephenB, this type of design detection is not what ID is about.

TWO: “You argue, rightly, that the less compelling arguments, which disavow the idea of perceptible detection, characterized as a mere “appreciation of the Lawlikness of nature,” did, indeed, precede Darwin, but I hasten to remind you that the more compelling formulations, characterized by scientists who said that they were “thinking God’s thoughts after him,” came first.”

StephenB, here you implicitly quote Kepler in the final phrase (which is often attributed to Kepler, who did say something to that effect though not in those words). Kepler had very powerful notions of Who the Designer is, coming from his Lutheran upbringing and formal education. He came to believe in the Copernican universe (as vs the Ptolemaic) precisely b/c he believed that a heliocentric universe was the physical representation of the Triune God. He then sought to prove the Copernican universe, as one great argument in natural theology—Trinitarian natural theology. This is absolutely not ID, unless ID involves starting from Neoplatonism and Trinitarian theology, then using the detection of specific geometrical forms in nature as, ultimately, proof of the Trinitarian God. My point about the lawlikeness of nature is not one of “mere” appreciation. For people like William Whewell and Charles Babbage, whom I was thinking of here (1830s), the very best design arguments were those that were based upon natural laws themselves, not specific biological artifacts. As you probably know, StephenB, opposite the title page in the 1st edition of Darwin’s “Origin” are two epigrams. One comes from Bacon (the famous passage about the books of nature & scripture), the other from Whewell. IMO, StephenB, the most powerful design argument presently available to us is the fact that the subtler forms of mathematics that we “invent,” turn out to be precisely what we need in order to understand nature, deep down. That is either a brute fact crying out for a deeper explanation that an atheist can’t provide, or else it’s precisely what we would expect if God were a mathematician—Kepler’s view in a nutshell. If this is ID, fine and dandy; it’s what I believe, and what I was implicitly referring to in the comments you object to here.

As I keep having to say, StephenB, not only to you but to many other ID proponents: lots of “theistic evolutionists” believe in design arguments. Many of us, however, see those arguments as ultimately philosophical and theological in character, not scientific. I understand that we may differ on that analysis, but *please* stop claiming (as I have often seen you do) as if it were a valid generalization that theistic evolutionists believe that God is utterly invisible in the universe. A few do say this (and I understand why they do—do you?), but most do not. Those I mentioned in my post to you do not believe this, and neither do I. To quote your own words, StephenB: “I don’t know what it so hard about this. Claiming it to be so in order to discredit TE [you have ID here] without an argument reflects an ideological bent that ignores the facts in evidence.” You might do well to read the book by Gingerich, instead of advising to put his arguments here. I haven’t time to go beyond the review of his book that I pointed you to, StephenB. Or go read the opening chapter in Polkinghorne’s “Belief in God in an Age of Science.” Both such places (among many others) substantiate what I said. You aren’t going to understand me very well if you won’t read the relevant books, just as critics of ID won’t understand ID very well if they don’t read Behe, Dembski, or Meyer.

THREE: “For the most part, it seems that the TEs presume the right to scrutinize ID while, at the same time, feeling that they, themselves, should be exempt from scrutiny. So, they are shocked when they have to go off the offense and go on the defense, possibly a result of sitting pretty with the entrenched power structure, inhabited by Darwinists and Darwinist sympathizers.”

This borders on a collective ad hominem, making implicitly the very charge that I told Jerry I knew he (at least) would not be making: namely, that “theistic evolutionist” are simply gutless, or at best just looking out for their own careers. Anyone who knows Gingerich, Polkinghorne, Russell, or me, knows that this is a hollow claim, StephenB: my views are constantly scrutinized, and I don’t cow-tow to academic orthodoxies. You’ve implicitly misunderstood me, StephenB. Most of the historical work I do is aimed at toppling a secular orthodoxy in my field. You might enjoy reading some of it. I’m not trying to steal your dignity; don’t try to steal mine.

FOUR: “And yes, I do realize that TEs are not the same, so your attempt to cast me as someone who doesn’t understand that fact does not work.”

Then please try harder to make this evident, StephenB. Please show some evidence of reading people such as those I have cited. Until you do, my “attempt” does work. I cannot recall seeing you do anything other than tar all advocates of TE with the same brush. For example, you said in another post, “Theistic evolutionism, as least as it is formatted today, is both bad theology and bad science.” Have you read any of the people I’ve been talking about, StephenB? I’m not talking about most of the popular writing on this topic, much of which is not very thoughtful on the theological side (we agree about that, StephenB.) Have you read anything by Russell, Polkinghorne, Southgate, Lamoureux—or Barr? Have you read Gingerich’s “God’s Universe,” in which he answers the question, “Dare a Scientist Believe in Design?” with a resounding “YES”? If not, you’re shortchanging yourself—there’s some wonderful material there, and I think you would like quite a bit of it. (At the end, I have added the URL for another review that highlights some of what I’m talking about.) If you have, StephenB, I must have missed seeing where you engage such folks, where you display an understanding of their ideas. If however you are already convinced (as Phil Johnson is) that “theistic evolution” is an oxymoron at best, and a gutless sellout at worst, then I doubt that you bother. The decision is yours; the facts speak for themselves: the kinds of distinction I made in my post are very, very important, and anyone who does not want to do violence to the truth will pay attention to them, not ignore them.

FIVE: “It is ironic. On the one hand, you insist that the most skeptical among them deny basic Gospel truths, while the more faithful ones embrace Scripture, yet it is the second group, the so-called faithful ones, that you characterize the following way:

“The two problems of the historicity of Adam and of the fall are not identical, but they are closely related. Even very conservative Calvinists, such as William Henry Green and Benjamin B Warfield (both of whom were active at the turn of the 19th century), had to stretch the geneologies in Genesis very, very far in order to accommodate human antiquity without discarded an historical first human pair. Their view was frankly not very convincing, and I have not seen a convincing treatment of this by any modern scholar who holds to the historicity of Adam & Eve and of the fall. All of this, StephenB, entirely without Darwin.”

“So, even the most faithful of the TEs, by your own testimony, cannot accept the historicity of Adam and Eve and of the Fall, which is what I have been saying all along. What kind of fall could it be if not a historical fall that occurred in time/space/history?”

Wow, StephenB, a lot of this indicates a misunderstanding of what I said. William Henry Green was an old-earth creationist, not an evolutionist; no question about that. Warfield is usually seen as a TE (he once called himself a “Darwinian of the purest water”), but he might have believed in the separate creation of humans (someone who knows his writings better is invited to comment), in which case I would call him an OEC. No matter; my point in all of this, StephenB, was to say that *leaving Darwin entirely out of this* science still poses hard questions to theology about Adam & Eve. I was talking about human antiquity, not human or animal evolution. The OECs of the late 19th century began to realize how long humans have been on this planet, and they realized that it posed a serious challenge to the historicity of Adam & Eve as our first parents. G.F. Wright nearly had a faith crisis over this, and Warfield was also somewhat troubled by it. Green, Warfield, and Wright *did* accept the historicity of the fall, but they found it very, very hard to reconcile human antiquity with Genesis. In other words, even without Darwin there are serious questions about the existence of Adam & Eve—questions that would still be coming up even if no one accepted evolution of any sort.

I stated very clearly that this was unrelated to Darwin, StephenB, and I’m puzzled why you missed this so badly. Let me state my point once more, even more forcefully and at greater length: the acceptance of “deep time” in the early 19th century (quite independently of any kind of biological evolution and well in advance of Darwin) and the acceptance of human antiquity in the late 19th century (quite independently of any commitment to human evolution) raised hard questions for the historicity of Genesis One (“deep time”) and Genesis Two & Three, including the fall story (human antiquity). These challenges came from geology and anthropology, StephenB, not from evolution, esp not from “Darwinian” evolution. You seem to think that non-traditional views of the fall are all a result of accepting evolution. It’s true that evolution only reinforces that trend, but the challenges are already there without evolution—especially the challenge to theodicy, as it relates to the fall. Anyone who accepts an “old” earth has to confront that one, and has to take a non-traditional view of that aspect of the fall. If you don’t believe me, trust what Dembski says in his newest book. Scads of Christians see this, and that’s one of the main reasons for the “young” in “young-earth creationism.”

Contemporary TEs have various views of the “fall,” such that it’s impossible accurately to generalize about the specifics. The one accurate generalization is that human evolution pretty much rules out an historical fall. Your instincts are on target there, StephenB, but please don’t ignore what I just wrote about the challenges that would still be there apart from evolution. (In other words, the conversation involving evolution is not happening in a vacuum, separated from geology or anthropology. ID ignores geology and thereby appears to skip neatly past these issues, but they are there independently of “Darwinism” and independently of the whole issue of “intelligent design.” This is what you need to see.) What many TE’s mean by “the fall” is best explained as follows. Both Niebuhr and Chesterton said that the fall is the most empirically verifiable doctrine we have; Polkinghorne’s view is similar: the fall is a fact about who we are, not a claim about how we got there. Our relationship with God and the creation is broken, and Christ can heal it. If you don’t see how that counts as being “fallen,” I’m fine with that opinion. It would be wrong, however, to ignore the significance of holding to the traditional view that humans are sinful creatures—this is what being “fallen” means, for Christians who accept evolution—as Polkinghorne and many others believe. That’s enormously different from the view, held by quite a few “theistic evolutionists” over the years, that human nature is perfectible through the evolutionary process. As you probably know, that was in part the basis for the support that many liberal Christians gave to eugenics in the first part of the last century. The problem IMO was not their acceptance of evolution, but rather their failure to believe in sin and redemption. (Incidentally, plenty of people have failed to believe in sin and redemption without also believing in evolution; a pertinent example is Thomas Jefferson.)
So, Stephen, that’s where I will leave this conversation. I close by recommending that you read this:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/07/the-motivated-belief-of-john-polkinghorne

andrew
January 13th, 2010 | 5:42 pm

sorry to interrupt, but a quick question to anyone who’s still reading this thread:

stephenB posed a challenge a few days ago to methodological naturalists (of whom i was one) — a challenge to define what is natural and what is supernatural. i’ve been thinking about the challenge. so i’m asking again: how is “natural” as in “natural explanation” defined?

i read somewhere up there about “law and chance.” in what sense could physical “laws” be describe as “natural?”

did the universe’s atoms and energy one day decide to obey such laws? are such laws made up of atoms? does a law imply a law giver? how is mathematics “natural?” in what sense is a mathematical proof a “natural” explanation, especially since it relies on logic (a metaphysical reality)?

relatedly, biochemists often think they have an “explanation,” which on closer inspection amounts to a “description.” for example, to say that a DNA transcriptase “knows” what to do is to describe what it does, not explain how it does it. how does a folded chain of amino acids “know” what to do?

thanks to anyone who can clarify these questions for me.

R Hampton
January 13th, 2010 | 5:46 pm

Father George Coyne, S.J., is a Jesuit priest, a formally trained astronomer and astrophysicist, and the former director of the Vatican Observatory:

We shouldn’t, therefore, look for God as part of the “mechanics” of nature, as though he enters in a fussy way alongside of other competing causes. In accounting for the emergence of a planet, for example, we wouldn’t appeal to the detritus of a star, hydrogen gas, God, and the gravitational force! God is, instead, the answer to a different kind of question, viz., “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

This is precisely why Fr. Coyne is impatient with the advocates of intelligent design, who hold that, at certain points in the evolutionary process, God intervened to fine-tune things. He feels that this is not only scientifically superfluous but finally insulting to God. It’s also why he disagrees with one of his colleagues, the Anglican priest-scientist, John Polkinghorne, who argues that the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics gives God “room to work” as he pushes, pulls, and influences the cosmos.

Once again, the problem is an interventionist construal of the God-universe relationship. For the same reason, he disagrees with the Christopher Hitchenses and Richard Dawkinses of the world who maintain that “science” disproves the existence of God by showing that he is not ingredient in the causal processes of nature. Both the “new” atheists and the advocates of intelligent design need to get a clearer sense of who God is.

Dave Miller
January 13th, 2010 | 9:15 pm

stephenB posed a challenge a few days ago to methodological naturalists (of whom i was one) — a challenge to define what is natural and what is supernatural. i’ve been thinking about the challenge. so i’m asking again: how is “natural” as in “natural explanation” defined? Good point, andrew. In responding to criticism for his choice of Meyer’s book as one of the TLS “ten best of 2009,” atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel responded, “The tone of Fletcher’s letter exemplifies the widespread intolerance of any challenge to the dogma that everything in the world must be ultimately explainable by chemistry and physics. There are reasons to doubt this that have nothing to do with theism, beginning with the apparent physical irreducibility of consciousness. Doubts about reductive explanations of the origin of life also do not depend on theism. Since I am not tempted to believe in God, I do not draw Meyer’s conclusions, but the problems he poses lend support to the view that physics is not the theory of everything, and that more attention should be given to the possibility of an expanded conception of the natural order.”
It seems that defining what is “natural” is one of the tasks before us.

John Farrell
January 13th, 2010 | 9:36 pm

R Hampton, well said. As has been explained by other philosophers, (Ed Feser is one example), intelligent design, like modern atheism, is undercut by the basically bankrupt metaphysics of Protestant theologian William Paley.

I highly recommend this post.

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/11/trouble-with-william-paley.html

“…Paley and Co. conceptualize this designer on the model of human tinkerers, attributing our characteristics (intelligence, power, etc.) to him in a univocal rather than an analogous way (to allude to a crucial Thomistic distinction explained in a previous post). To be sure, “design arguments” also emphasize that the differences between human artifacts and the universe indicate that the designer’s power and intelligence must be far vaster than ours. But we are necessarily left with a designer conceived of in anthropomorphic terms – essentially a human being, or at least a Cartesian immaterial substance, with the limitations abstracted away. The result is the “theistic personalism” (as Brian Davies has labeled it) which has displaced classical theism in the thinking of many contemporary philosophers of religion.”

Read the whole thing.

StephenB
January 13th, 2010 | 10:12 pm

—-Ted: StephenB, I brought Paley explicitly into this b/c many ID arguments are specifically Paleyan in type. Mike Behe realizes this and so do some other prominent ID advocates. The Scriptures are talking about intuitive responses to nature, not formal logical arguments. As you know, formal logic was invented by the Greeks, and the Bible eschews using it in both Old and New Testaments. One can easily affirm the legitimacy of the powerful sense of “design” or purpose that is evident to all—even Dawkins (as you know) admits this—while not necessarily accepting that a specific formal argument for design is valid or even strong. They are simply not the same thing. Furthermore, I affirm without hesitation that we can detect evidence for the divine design of the universe—provided that we have a specific idea of Who that Designer is (i.e., the God of the Bible who has wisdom and intellect partially shared by we who are created in his image). Unless I miss my mark, StephenB, this type of design detection is not what ID is about.”

Ted, bless your heart, please understand that the Scriptural argument is distinct from yet consistent with the ID argument, but they are, in no way the same. On the other hand, the TE argument is simply inconsistent with Scripture.

Let me make this as basic as I possibly can. According to Scripture, we can recognize God’s existence [the designer] by observing his creation. It is, in no way, dependent, as you say, on having “a specific idea of who the designer is.” This is where, please excuse me, you are making a serious logical error.

The process does not, as you suggest, begin with faith in or assumption about the designer. Such a formulation would be of no use to us as Christians at all. Do you not see that Romans:1 is not a theological statement at all, but is, rather, a philosophical statement. The Bible is saying here that we need no faith at all to recognize the existence of the designer, which is exactly why those who deny the point are, as the passages describe it, “without excuse.” They are without excuse because they are rejecting a self-evident truth that can easily be perceived and registered in the consciousness.. The point of the passage is to ground the Christian faith, which requires a leap, in the evidence of reason, which does not require a leap. If the foundation required a leap, all would be lost and Christianity would be no different from any other world view—a pure, mindless, act of faith.

So, in spite of your protests, you do not accept the Scriptural account, the substance of which can be characterized as a bottom up type apprehension. If it began with a specific idea of “who the designer is,” then deniers would, indeed, have a very good excuse. There are a lot of reasons why someone can be excused for not believing in something, or for not accepting someone else’s account of who God is, but there are no good reasons at all for rejecting the obvious.

Imagine that you enter your dining room and you notice that a red ball is sitting on the table. Now imagine that someone joins you and asks, “Ted, how did that red ball get there.” Naturally, you would answer, “What do you mean, how did it get there.” Obviously, someone put it there. Now blow that ball up to the size of a house. Has the argument changed? No. The only thing that has changed is the size of the ball. Now blow it up the size of your city, or you state, or the world, or the universe. Has the argument changed? No. Obviously someone put it there, and anyone who would deny it is, “without excuse.”

The fact of design is equally evident and the conclusion that a designer is responsible for the design is equally obvious. In spite of your protests, you do not accept the Scriptural account, which is very clear: We move from the “seen” to the “unseen” from the designer’s handiwork to the designer.

ID makes a much weaker claim, saying only that certain features in nature demonstrate patterns, the texture of which are best explained by a designing intelligence. Clearly, if one believes the Bible’s teaching, which makes the stronger claim, one will certainly believe the weaker claim, that one can make an inference from the effects of intelligence to intelligence. On the other hand, they may NOT accept ID’s scientific paradigm — that the evidence for design can be “measured,”— that a scientific inference to the best explanation can be made ON THAT BASIS. While that argument is consistent with Scripture, it is not identical with it. Now, it would be perfectly reasonable for someone to say that, while they accept a real design, a bottom up inference, and an intellectual designer, the evidence for design cannot be measured and, therefore, ID science falls short. While I disagree with that point, I would not seriously question the sincerity of anyone who holds that position, nor would I question that person’s fidelity to Scripture. However, theistic evolutionists always give their hand away saying, as many do, that the design cannot be perceived, or, as you did, that recognizing that design depends on knowing something about the designer.

Yes, I have read numerous theistic evolutionsts, and, yes, they invariably find a way to avoid the clear teachings of Scripture. Sure, the less radical group that you allude to say they believe in “design arguments,” or in “the fall,” but when you narrow it down, they find a way to dilute them, redefine them, or explain them away.

As you write, “The one accurate generalization is that human evolution pretty much rules out an historical fall.”

Yes, of course, that is why I made the generalization —not to oversimplify but to emphasize what is important and leave out what is not important. To rule out a historical fall is to give the store away, just as ruling out a design inference from the bottom up is to give the store away. Do you not see that the fall must be historical in order for Christianity to be true? Is it necessary for me to explain why? If so, I will certainly do so.

So, here is reason’s obligatory principle, informed by the unity of truth: If, as a Christian, scientific conclusion is in conflict with a clear teaching of the Bible, then we don’t just leave it there. [A] If we come upon an undeniable scientific fact, we go back to Scripture and review the texts to see where our interpretation went wrong. [B] If, on the other hand, we come upon an undeniable Scriptural truth, we go back to our scientific world view, to find out where the teaching [or conclusion] was wrong. You seem comfortable with [A] and uncomfortable with [B]. But the process is, and must be, a two way process. According to Scripture, the fall occurred in time/space/history. If it didn’t occur as a historical fact—-if our first parents did not, in singular fashion, disobey God and cause misery for everyone else, then Christianity isn’t true. We don’t trade away non-negotiable articles of faith for the sake of unproven, scientific speculation. We just don’t–or at least, we shouldn’t.

Ted Davis
January 14th, 2010 | 1:59 am

After this final clarification of my own views, StephenB, I will have nothing more to say here. I’m sure that both of us could say a great deal more, but for my part that isn’t going to be possible.

Let me return your blessing, from one believer to another, and let me praise the depth of your conviction and the clarity of your expression. I entirely agree with the *spirit*, if not the letter, of your final paragraph. I apparently have more confidence than you do (though I hardly have complete confidence) in the general validity of the historical sciences–even leaving evolution completely out of this–and less confidence than you in the general historicity of early Genesis. For me, probably, fewer things in both science and Scripture are “undeniable,” while at the same time I view some of the relevant scientific claims as more than just “unproven … speculation.” On matters like these I have more truth values than negligibly small or one. Briefly stated, this accounts for our divergent views on that particular topic.

It’s also clear that we have different ideas about what constitutes an adequate affirmation of design in nature. It’s a fact that many “theistic evolutionists” endorse and/or advance design arguments, whether or not you like their approaches. I take your point about Paul’s *philosophical* appeal to the Greeks, but I still can’t ignore the *theological* point of the passage: that despite their *knowledge* of God from nature, they then went out and worshipped the wrong god(s). Partly for this reason I put more weight on the revelation of God in Christ than in natural theology, and partly for this reason I find Christocentric varieties of theistic evolution (such as those of Polkinghorne, Russell, or George Murphy) much more persuasive than you do. (Though it is still unclear to me that you have read any of their books for yourself.) For me, following the prologue to John’s gospel and the second chapter of Philippians, the Creator is most clearly revealed in the God whom we crucified. I interpret the creation in terms of the incarnation and resurrection, giving theology of nature more weight than natural theology and bringing theodicy into the foreground. Thus, it’s difficult for me to have too much enthusiasm for a generic designer, no matter how much evidence we might find for its existence. (I intend this only as an explanation of my own views, not as an implicit or explict attack on yours.) And, it’s even more difficult for me to see why such a view would be unbiblical.

These, StephenB, are legitimate differences of opinion. You owe me no reply, unless you think I have misunderstood your views in drawing out my own.

I would be interested in hearing specifically how you approach scientific claims about human antiquity (not evolution, simply antiquity) in relation to Genesis, but I won’t have anything to say about that here, not even to respond to anything you may say. I’m interested in *hearing* your view, not questioning or contesting it, since a full discussion could go on for a very long time…

Dave Mullenix
January 14th, 2010 | 2:12 am

Kay, those massive improbability arguments are one of the “invincible arguments” that ID proposes in lieu of a scientific argument in favor of their position. This particular one is named “Hoyle’s Fallacy” in his “honor”.

Those odds are for forming a protein or other molecule in one step. Evolution doesn’t work that way, it uses cumulative selection which is exponentially faster. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program for an explanation.

Or, to get ID’s take on it, Google http://www.uncommondescent.com for weasel. See an idee fixe in action.

Did you get those steps in ATP synthesis yet?

Dave Mullenix
January 14th, 2010 | 3:31 am

StephenB, it doesn’t matter that ID doesn’t label its arguments as “invincible”, it’s still what ID does. CSI, irreducible complexity, Hoyle’s Fallacy, Dembski’s “No Free Lunch” fiasco, Dembski & Marks’s silly search arguments – they are all presented as invincible arguments that will win the case for ID without ID’s having to present any messy scientific facts or arguments. They have all failed, regardless of what ID calls them.

“For all CSI that ‘we’ have observed, and whose source we can track, an intelligent agent was the cause.” “We” in this case consists of ID advocates and, like you just did, they just plain ignore the CSI caused by evolution. The only inferences that can be made from your argument are about the quality of ID “researchers”.

There’s no mystery about why ID supposedly can’t draw conclusions aabout the identity of the designer. Phillip Johnson, the father of ID, has already told us: “Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.” http://www.christianity.ca/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=2830

Dave Mullenix
January 14th, 2010 | 4:06 am

Jerry, the handful of mutations that turned teosinte into corn certainly weren’t caused by the Indians. They just picked the plants that were best to eat and planted their seeds. That speeds evolution up a thousand fold, but doesn’t make it an intelligent process.

Regarding Ockham’s razor, what’s the simpler explanation? A handful of random mutations, every one of which we can name, combined with natural selection (in this case hungry Indians eating and planting the best plants) or an Infinitely Intelligent, All-Knowing, All-Powerful, All-Benevolent Intelligent Being who uses some of His knowledge, Intelligence and Benevolence to create the Malaria parasite? (See Behe’s “Edge of Evolution”.)

Let me put this a different way. Most anybody, ID researchers included, can understand the concept of mutating one DNA basepair to another. Ditto for Indians selecting the best plants and planting their seeds. I have no doubt that you could explain each of them, in detail. Now describe how intelligence works, in equal detail. Take your time.

Being an ID enthusiast and hence under the ID idee fixe, I don’t expect you to see the ID weirdness. If you did, you’d probably cease to be an ID enthusiast.

So tell us all, Mr. ID, how DID ATP synthesis arise? ID doesn’t hesitate to demand an answer to that and dozens of other questions from science and ID doesn’t hesitate to claim that science is falsified if it can not (yet) answer any of the questions. So let me return the favor. Sauce for the goose, etc. What is the ID theory of how the complex ATP synthesis process came to exist? What were the steps, when did they occur and what caused them? But of course, you can’t and neither can anybody else in the ID field and they never will be until science figures it out and tells them. ID isn’t a science and it does no scientific research. It’s merely a political attempt to get a few people’s religious beliefs taught in the schools and to sabotage science because ID doesn’t agree with its findings.

“I have a question, was the resurrection a poof event?” Like I said above, ID is a religious movement, designed to get a narrow religious argument into the schools and gut science.

Kay Carlson
January 14th, 2010 | 9:30 am

Dave,

I am aware of the weasel program. It is supposed to show natural selection, but I think falls pretty short. For one, it is based on computer programs and digital processing, not chemical and physical laws. There’s a big scenario put forth by evolutionists, I know, about pre-biotic chemical evolution, but we need to know the exact science of it, not the results of a human computer programmer designing a program. The exact science includes temperature, chemical concentrations, chemical affinities (forces between the elements), dissociation constants and things such as this before we believe that molecules floating in the water formed into ATP synthase. You need to figure in the law of mass action, reactions rates, equilibrium, thermodynamics, etc. for how chemicals interact with each other. Water is a molecule, yet we don’t call it a pre-biont. One big problem for chemical evolution is that amino acids have mirror images of each other, and only the left is part of proteins. Also, amino acids make various types of bonds in non-living nature, but only one type in proteins.

I am not saying science should stop looking for answers. But I think people should get used to the fact that some of us believe God made nature and may have intervened at certain times. It is perfectly possible that corn evolved from natural reasons. But, for example, Eugene Koonin of the NCBI wrote a paper in which he named 6 areas that show huge mathematical improbabilities of neo-Darwinian intermediates (not just that they are now extinct). These are: origin of a protein fold, origin of a virus, origin of a cell, origin of Archaea and Bacteria major groups, origin of Eucharyotic supergroups, and origin of animal phyla at the Cambrian explosion. See Eugene Koonin The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution at Biology Direct, 2007, 2:21. I know you don’t want to accept mathematical probabilities—what can I say? Disciplines such as thermodynamics, quantum physics, and mass action laws are intricately involved with mathematical probabilities. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, based on probabilities, was a fundamental understanding in the early days of science to describe the nature of gasses.

It is unfair to say that religious people would water down science. James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday, the two persons who did the most in my opinion for the understanding of electro-magnetism, were both Christians.

R Hampton,

I’ve never encountered the fox, dog/wolf problem, so I am not really sure of your question. ID proponents do not rule out microevolution, so what you are asking may well be natural phenomenon. A great tool for anyone interested in genomes is the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) site. They have on-line books about microbiology and genetics, databases on taxonomy and all kinds of data on specific genes. The home is:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

and the taxonomy site is:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/taxonomyhome.html/

jerry
January 14th, 2010 | 9:32 am

Dave Mullenix,

You distort every thing said by me and others here. How is that the basis for an argument or support for your point? I say that ID agrees with 99.999% or what science concludes and you say ID wants to gut science. There is not one thing that is currently done by science today that is at odds with ID. ID would only expand the explanations for a few phenomena, mainly in the areas of origins of certain things. So to imply that ID will change science is a bogey man that does not exist and I have to ask you why you invoke this false argument more than once.

I say ATP synthase is so complex and you must know how complex it is and that it appeared out of nowhere. ID says that it is unlikely to have been the result of natural forces and you in response ask me how ID would describe how it arises. How is that an argument for your point. You just admitted that you do not know the answer and tried to deflect it away. Well ID says the most likely answer is an intelligent intervention. There is a rapidly growing discipline called synthetic biology that may have some good explanation for how an intelligence might eventually create ATP synthase. For example how did your comments appear above? What natural processes can explain the sudden appearance of your comments. ID can explain it very easily. How can natural forces only explain it? Do you really want the blueprints and lab design of the designer of ATP synthase. Or perhaps you would want a video of the event.

ID says that mutations happen and individual organisms of a population are different. So what is the big deal. Maize had tens of millions of years to appear and didn’t but given the intervention of an intelligence it appears within maybe a few hundred years or even sooner. And that is supposed to be an example of natural evolution. Maybe given another 100 million years a maize hybrid might appear and ID would have no problem with that. But yet you distort the example and what ID says. Why?

ID does not deny such is possible but even this relatively simple change did not happen naturally but only with intelligent intervention. If after tens of millions of years it did not appear by natural processes, what does that say about things like eyes, the avian oxygen transport system, brains, methods of flight etc. Why not point to something that did not require an intelligent intervention. It would make your argument stronger. There are some out there and ID denies none of them. You distort.

Your answer is to sneer and belittle. I have a background in science in college and graduate school and currently have a business that requires that I understand energy metabolism. I believed in Darwinian processes till I found out that these processes could not explain the origin of the complex functional parts of life. They certainly can explain simple changes as you have indicated with maize but even with this simple change of some genes, it resulted from an intelligent intervention, not by natural processes. So your example makes my point and yet you still call ID weird. I would call your example as support of your position unusual to say the least. You invoke an intelligently designed process to disprove intelligent design. ID is completely flexible on what it assesses and you demand one type of explanation only and yet we are implied as narrow minded. And the type of explanation you demand is one that ID accepts and considers.

As I said, you distort what has been said. That is not a good way to support your position.

StephenB
January 14th, 2010 | 11:08 am

For all CSI that ‘we’ have observed, and whose source we can track, an intelligent agent was the cause.

—-Dave Mullinex: “We” in this case consists of ID advocates and, like you just did, they just plain ignore the CSI caused by evolution.”

No, “we” consists of any human being that has ever lived. You are confusing facts with conjecture. In all cases in which we factually know the source of CSI, human agency was the explanation. A good example would be a sand castle or the paragraph that I just wrote. We know beyond any reasonable doubt that the cause was an intelligent agent in both cases. Whether or not evolution can cause CSI is precisely what the debate is about.

—-”StephenB, it doesn’t matter that ID doesn’t label its arguments as “invincible”, it’s still what ID does.”

No, it does not. An inference to the best explanation [abduction] is not an invincible argument, nor has it ever been characterized as such, except by anti-ID partisan. You are misinformed.

—”There’s no mystery about why ID supposedly can’t draw conclusions aabout the identity of the designer. Phillip Johnson………………….

You are confusing motives with methods again, possibly because you read only anti-ID literature. Plenty of ID supporters, myself included, hope that atheistic materialism will be overturned since it is obviously destroying our culture. None of that has anything at all to do with ID methodology. [I have already explained this at least three times]. You cannot extract religion from “irreducible complexity,” [which you have already demonstrated that you do not understand] or “Complex Specified Information.” If you think otherwise, go ahead and try to do it and report back to us.

StephenB
January 14th, 2010 | 12:08 pm

Ted Davis, thanks very much for your magnanimous reply. You have a wonderful talent for presenting your arguments in a spirit of friendliness and mutual respect that many could learn from. Also, I think you are a fine writer.

I will try to make my final reply on points of agreement and try to avoid any contentious challenges. I, too, hold that much of Genesis cannot be interpreted in a historical context, meaning that I am not a Biblical literalist. As a Catholic, I take the Church’s attitude about Biblical interpretation. On the matter of those things which are, as it were, “non-negotiable,” I suppose we have both already made our respective arguments.

Also, I am guessing that further dialogue would have brought us closer together on many points, a happy prospect that is not always facilitated when two bloggers are “volleying” and tying to hold up their end of an argument. I fully agree for example, that the upper regions of theology are prior in “importance” to the elements of “natural theology,” that is, articles of faith are of a higher order than their basis in reason. We are saved by faith, not by reason.

Where we disagree, I suspect, is over the matter of which one is prior in “time.” I submit that reason, properly understood, both supports and leads to faith, at which time, faith illuminates reason, and unless reason does its job, faith cannot mature or even endure, except in its most naïve form. In keeping with that point, faith cannot presume to illuminate reason until it has first passed the test of reason. For my part, that is why I put such a heavy emphasis on Psalm 19, Romans 1, etc. Without that standard, we have no basis for saying that one religion or world view is any better than any other, and, as you can undoubtedly surmise, I feel no hesitancy in saying that Christianity is superior to all other world views, in no small part because it is grounded in reason. I am guessing that we may be more in agreement with that principle than would be evident from our all-too-short dialogue, and I also suspect that it is in the application of the principle that we differ.

I also agree that we have different ideas about exactly what it is that constitutes design. I often wonder how many disputes follow from advocates of contrary positions who never really get around to defining their terms. In any case, I look forward to our next dialogue, whenever that is.

jerry
January 14th, 2010 | 12:51 pm

This thread is getting near its end and this comment is about the supposed religious nature of ID. I find this interesting as ID tries its best to distance it self from religion because its implications support no particular religious belief. Its supporters are from several Protestant denomination, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Muslim, Jews, eastern religions and agnostics. So it is hard to pinpoint just what religious beliefs it entails or what religious doctrine it leads to. But that does not prevemt the non stop assault on ID as being religious as one can witness here from Stephen Barr on down. Does ID have religious implications? Most definitely yes, it implies an immense intelligence created the universe and for most that has religious implications. But for many who see this implication, they also see that this intelligence could just be the god of the Deists and has no particular long term meaning for human beings. ID suggest a creator of the universe. Nothing further. But the creation of the universe while interesting in its own right is not the issue that generates all the heat. That issue is evolution.

There are essentially four broad groups interested in the evolution debate and three of the four are ideologically religious based and one is not. The one that is not is ID and the irony of this is that ID is the one that is constantly accused of being religiously based. Sort of a funny position. Are ID’s adherent religious. Most definitely for most but not for all. Do some use ID to support some of their religious beliefs. Most definitely yes but only in a limited way, namely that there is a creator. But that does not mean that ID is religion nor are its findings determined by religion.

For ID, science is not determined by ideology but for the other three, it is. The other three groups are atheists, theistic evolutionists and young earth creationists. Each of the latter three groups determine their science based on their religious beliefs. Not ID. For many ID supporters like myself I believe that theology, reason and science are one and will not contradict each other. I take God at his word and what He has revealed in nature will not contradict what He has revealed in scripture, reason or elsewhere.

The two most obvious of the four groups as to their religious beliefs and evolution are the atheists and the young earth creationists. The atheist must have a naturalistic basis for evolution, life and the universe or else their whole world view falls apart. It is a theological view because it is based on confirmed commitment to an existence that excludes the presence of a God. The commitment is often so strong that it accepts no deviation from others and proclaims a vigorous proselytizing of others. If one is a committed atheist then one can not in any way accept any exceptions to naturalistic evolution. So anything written by such a person, supposedly in the guise of scientific truth must be suspect. It does not mean that it must be tainted, but one should realize that it definitely could be and will be if anything would suggest that there is a creator. So look to anything that has to do with origins and keep one’s green eye shade on as to what is being claimed and what supports it. It is something Hart did not do with Dawkins in his review of his book.

For the young earth creationist, they are equally committed to a worldview and that is one described in the bible and especially Genesis. It is a literal interpretation and as such the earth must be very young as they believe in the days of the bible to be literally one 24 hour earth day. Since I am quite unfamiliar with all their theology I really cannot speak in great detail for them and have been told there are a number of interpretations of Genesis that leads to different points of view such as there may be an old universe but a young earth and for others both the universe and earth are young. Others can speak for their theology since I an ill suited to do so. Whatever it is, this theological view will then require what is believed about evolution. Thus, for two of the major players in the evolution debate, theology or ideology plays an obvious and direct role.

For the third ideological group, the theisitic evolutionists, it not quite so obvious. But for this group too, their theology trumps science and in some cases almost insists that some scientific views be accomodated to their religious beliefs. Let’s look at the statement that R. Hampton used in an earlier comment.

“He feels that this is not only scientifically superfluous but finally insulting to God. It’s also why he disagrees with one of his colleagues, the Anglican priest-scientist, John Polkinghorne, who argues that the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics gives God “room to work” as he pushes, pulls, and influences the cosmos.”

So what someone considers is insulting to God, influences or determines what science can say even to the point that God would not use quantum mechanics to implement His wishes. Again this is nothing more than theology determining what is acceptable for science and just a variation of what the atheists and young earth creationists are doing. This argument that is would be beneath God, even the concept to use quantum events to influence the world is common with most of the theistic evolutionists. I have often discussed this position before as one that entails a Tinkering God, One Who could not get it right the first time, so He had to constantly meddle in His creation. After reading such a sentence, few could be expected to worship such a being. So the third group also comes down hard on ID.

ID is an unwanted step child whose very existence threatens their world view. It must be gotten rid of. And so must the YEC’s. Both the TE’s and atheist want to eliminate ID and YEC’s. While far from an official partnership, it is ironic that TE’s and the atheists have a common objective, to eliminate two groups who protest the materialistic nature of our society. When this implication is pointed out to the TE’s it generates a lot of anger at the ID supporters as Ted Davis has pointed out. By the way part of this anger is based on the suspicion that ID is nothing more than a front for young earth creationism. And it is certainly true that young earth creationists exploit ID as a front for their activities.

The only trouble is that ID is much different from young earth creationism and just uses logic and science to express its point of view and eschews religious implications. I said earlier that many of its adherents are Catholics and there were more than a couple here defending ID that are Catholics. So ID’s adherents do have religious beliefs but they will vary from person to person and as an adherent to ID my religious beliefs could be much different from the next person who supports it. My religious beliefs also have not changed one iota since first reading about ID.

I want to point out that a lot of the anger between ID and theistic evolutionists is over how religion determines science. You will find with some TE’s that Darwinian processes are almost sacrosanct and must be protected because this is the way God did it. ID points out that Darwinian processes are bad science and the TE’s have adopted the same bad science as the atheists use to support their positions. TE’s reply that Darwinian processes are not at odds with religious beliefs. ID concurs but that still does not make Darwinian processes good science when in fact it is bad science. TE’s and atheists accuse ID of bad science but can never seem to show how. ID will accept Darwinian processes for most events but just not all. There are lots of accusations and distortions as have happened on this thread but nothing in specific that is true. It is common practice to define ID as something that it is not because that way the straw man that has been created can be mocked and knocked down. When ID protests, they are told they do not know anything about what they believe. It is kind of hard to accuse ID of bad science when it accepts nearly everything the scientific community proclaims except for a few things to do with origins.

So for onlookers to this debate here, that is the essence of it.

R Hampton
January 14th, 2010 | 2:17 pm

I’ve never encountered the fox, dog/wolf problem, so I am not really sure of your question. ID proponents do not rule out microevolution, so what you are asking may well be natural phenomenon.

Kay, you really ought to learn how the various ID proponents circumvent this obvious problem. In a nutshell, how can one scientifically determine where microevolution ends and macroevolution begins? Case in point, the Fox – Wolf/Dog problem. At some point, as we trace the origins of the Dog to Wolf to Fox to Leptocyon and beyond there must be a point where “microevolution” becomes “macroevoltuion”.

Invariably those who defend ID submit that there is a biological barrier that prevents “macroevolution” – a gap so wide that only an intelligent designer could have filled it. If ID is the answer, then that means this barrier must be an irreducibly complex structure.

Therefore if ID proponents claim to know that “macroevolution” is impossible then they must also know what in particular prevented natural evolution to have occurred (otherwise they are just guessing). Specifically, ID proponents must know what new protein or antibody or organ causes the separation of a species from its predecessor.

Actual Scientific theories must make predictions for them to be of any value. Is Fox – Wolf lineage an example of micro- or macro- evolution? If macro-, then what is the irreducibly complex difference? In fact, at no point in the path backwards through the evolution and diversification of mammals does ID specifically point to even one signature event of the Intelligent Designer.

ID makes no predictions and takes no stance because it is a flawed hypothesis.

jerry
January 14th, 2010 | 9:01 pm

“ID makes no predictions and takes no stance because it is a flawed hypothesis.”

I am sorry but your whole comment was not accurate about what ID thinks or is about. You like many others here and at other places create straw men that don’t represent what ID is.

Over the last couple years I have written some summaries of arguments and ideas about ID in some long comments at Bill Dembski’s blog, Uncommondescent. For those who are interested in understanding ID, here are four links which represent one person’s perspective after ten years of reading and debating it. If you are going to criticize ID, then you should really try to understand what it is about rather than take what someone says on a blog or in an article or make erroneous remarks about what ID says and believes. You have had numerous times here to understand what ID is about but you keep distorting the issue. The links are to the specific comments and one of them is a series of three comments.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/november-apologetics-conference-we-need-more-than-good-arguments/#comment-296129

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/ud-commenters-win-one-for-the-gipper/#comment-299358

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/lenny-susskind-on-the-evolution-of-physicists/#comment-326046

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/faq2-is-open-for-comment/#comment-304029

When you have read them, you will see that your comment about the fox/wolf/dog has no relevance. You seem to confuse ID with some theory of physics or chemistry which is based on the operation of natural laws. ID is when an intelligence intervenes with natural processes and this might have happened only once in terms of evolution.

The reason why a fox has a different number of chromosomes than most of the canidae family sounds like an interesting problem and probably happened through natural processes. I doubt many scientist who support ID would have any problem with a naturalistic explanation.

R Hampton
January 14th, 2010 | 10:27 pm

William Dembski, February 17, 2003:
“The question, then, that requires investigation is not simply what are the limits of evolutionary change, but what are the limits of evolutionary change when that change is limited to material mechanisms. This in turn requires examining the material factors within organisms and in their environments capable of effecting evolutionary change. The best evidence to date indicates that these factors are inadequate to drive full-scale MACROEVOLUTION. SOMETHING ELSE IS REQUIRED — INTELLIGENCE.”

From the Discovery Institute website, 2009:
“This fall Meyer came out with a full account of what science has learned in recent decades: Signature in the Cell shows that the cell is incredibly complex and the code that directs its functions wonderfully designed. HIS ARGUMENT UNDERCUTS MACROEVOLUTION, the theory that one kind of animal over time evolves into a very different kind. Meyer thus garners media scorn for raining on this year’s huge celebration of the birth of Charles Darwin 200 years ago and the publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago.”

From the Discovery Institute website, 1999:
“Let’s teach students to decipher conflicting usages of the term evolution. No one denies the fact of limited, cyclical variation, represented by dog breeds, crop varieties, and insect resistance to pesticides–sometimes called “microevolution.” WHAT IS PROBLEMATIC IS “MACROEVOLUTION,” the conjecture that these minor variations are unlimited and directional, capable of producing dogs and corn and insects in the first place.”

Dave Mullenix
January 15th, 2010 | 4:26 am

Kay, the Weasel program doesn’t use natural selection. It’s designed to demonstrate the literally universe-shaking difference between the type of random selection that ID thinks happens in evolution and the cumulative selection that actually occurs.

You can run one of the Weasel programs (not one written by any ID programmer, please, they all get Dawkins completely wrong) and see for yourself.

If you try to form even a short sentence such as, “Methinks it is like a weasel” using random selection, where you choose every letter in the sentence at once

Dave Mullenix
January 15th, 2010 | 5:13 am

Sorry! Mouse slipped and the above message was sent VERY prematurely! As I was saying,
If you try to form even a short 28 character sentence like, “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” that Dawkins used in “The Blind Watchmaker” using random selection, the program will run and run and run and run, printing out a line of pure gibberish each time through the loop. I’ve never let it run long enough to actually find the sentence. As you mentioned in a previous message, finding the sequence for even a medium length protein would take longer than the age of the universe. It’s effectively impossible.

But if you start with random gibberish, and keep copying it, occasionally changing one character at a time, and replacing the old sentence with the new sentence whenever the new sentence is closer to the target, the correct answer pops out in a remarkably short time. Minutes or seconds on even an 8-bit computer using interpreted BASIC.

Google Uncommon Descent, as I advised above, and you will find a truly sad (or incredibly funny, depending on which side you’re on and your sense of humor) collection of denials and misunderstandings of this simple fact. They have to deny and misunderstand cumulative selection because if they acknowledge it, all of the ID and YEC arguments about the incredible unlikeliness of evolution are instantly disproven.

As I recall, UD’s main complaints were that:

1: Weasel has a predetermined target. This is true, as Dawkins takes pains to point out in Watchmaker. The program is just to demonstrate the incredible speed of cumulative selection compared to random selection.

2: Weasel somehow latches in correct answers. If you understand Weasel, Googling UD for “latch” and “latches” can provide hours of merriment / forehead thumping.

3: It just can’t work. But it does.

NOBODY knows how life started, which makes discussing it difficult. Maybe someday a researcher will crumble some 4+billion year old sandstone into a beaker full of chemicals, watch it slowly cloud up and discover that a molecule is endlessly reproducing itself. If the researcher is a scientist, he will soon be famous and maybe a Nobel Laureate. If the researcher is an ID advocate, I wonder what he’ll do with his discovery.

When it comes to evolution of DNA, however, things get pretty logical and you no longer have to worry about reaction rates, thermal equilibrium, etc., only about whether the new DNA string builds and runs and organism better than the old string.

I assure you that I accept probabilities, but I do want them to have some sort of relationship with reality and the YEC / ID probabilities don’t.

If someone wants to believe that God made nature and intervenes sometimes, I can’t gainsay them, but I have to point out, along with Michael Behe, that God is then responsible for what He makes, including, among many many other horrors, the malaria parasite.

Lastly, I agree that Maxwell and Faraday were devout Christians, as were Newton (though he denied the Trinity) and most every other pre-20th century scientist. Back in those days, scientific findings didn’t conflict much with Christianity or religion in general. But ever since Lyell started to contradict Genesis, that has changed. Today, it’s rare to find a top scientist who is a believer.

Dave Mullenix
January 15th, 2010 | 6:05 am

Jerry, I say that ID wants to gut science because Phillip Johnson has made it very clear that he wants to remove naturalism and materialism from it. Science didn’t become science until it decided to ignore philosophy and religion and stick to what could actually be observed. The things that can be observed are naturalistic and materialistic.

Nobody cares if ID SAYS that ATP synthase must have appeared out of nowhere. Where is your EVIDENCE that it did? It has none that I know of and it has no mechanism for producing it. Evolution doesn’t know exactly how it appeared either, but it has a mechanism and that alone puts it almost infinitely ahead of ID. It is also investigating how ATP synthesis and everything else about life came into existence, which puts it even further ahead. When ID has some evidence, let us know. As long as ID has nothing but opinions, who cares?

What “intelligence” went into the production of maize? Nothing beyond planting the seeds of the tastiest plants and that has nothing to do with designing maize. If you claim those Indians designed maize, tell us how they knew which DNA base pairs to mutate, how they knew what to mutate them to and how they mutated them. That would be design.

StephenB, are you trying to tell us that no extra CSI was put into the teosinte genome to produce corn? Or that we don’t understand how mutations occur? Or are you denying that we know every mutation that went into that CSI? Remember, we have both plants and we know how to sequence genomes. If we’ve made a mistake here, what is it?

All of the ID arguments are of the “invincible” type. Whether CSI, irreducible complexity, No Free Lunch, search algrithms or you name it, they are ALL arguments that try to prove that evolution is impossible. None of them makes a positive case for ID. ID is nothing but one long complaint about evolution and a series of failed “proofs” that it cannot occur.

You haven’t “explained” anything three times, you’ve asserted it. And I love this: “You cannot extract religion from “irreducible complexity,” [which you have already demonstrated that you do not understand] or “Complex Specified Information.” If you think otherwise, go ahead and try to do it and report back to us.” You’re right, I can’t and I won’t try.

Dave Mullenix
January 15th, 2010 | 6:47 am

Some of you may have noticed that I don’t have much respect for ID. There’s a reason for that. I’ve been following ID for a long time. In fact, when I started following ID it was still called creationism.

I’ve read most of the big ID books, starting with “Darwin’s Black Box”. I’ve also read “Darwin on Trial”, “No Free Lunch”, “The Edge of Evolution” and a few others that don’t immediately come to mind. I even own a copy of Dembski’s original “The Design Inference”, which I bought from a creationist web site that was selling what was apparently a review copy.

I’ve also followed ID on several web sites, principly ARN until Uncommond Descent opened up, but also ISCID, the Discovery Institute site and various minor ID sites.

In my considered opinion, backed up with years of reading both sides of the argument, ID advocates do not understand science, evolution OR ID! You’ve seen some stirling examples of this on this thread.

That alone wouldn’t be so bad, but in the process of watching ID, I’ve seen Dembski single-handedly destroy Robert Sloan’s career at Baylor, post the names, home addresses, private email addresses and home telephone numbers of the entire Baylor board of directors. I’ve also seen him report Eric Pianka to Homeland Security because Pianka made a speech very much like an Old Testament prophet about the earth’s probable future if we don’t repent our environmental sins when he was accepting the Texas Academy of Sciences Distinguished Scientist of the Year award.

In fact, everywhere, at all times, I’ve seen slander, slander and more slander spewing forth from the ID contingent. They seem to be unable to make a positive argument in favor of their position, but if anyone disagrees with them in any way, there’s always a prominent ID advocate ready to call you stupid, ignorant and a moral degenerate out to destroy the world.

Throughout all those years, I’ve also seen ID advocates ceaselessly “defend” themselves by censoring messages, banning those who raise valid points against ID and closing down or “disappearing” entire threads when they were hopelessly losing an argument.

I’m delighted to see some of the ID stars light on a forum where the banhammer is not available and where people can speak the plain truth about ID without seeing their messages disapper and their accounts banned. Thank you, First Things!

I’ve got a very rare three day weekend coming up. See you all Monday night if the thread is still open.

Kay Carlson
January 15th, 2010 | 10:08 am

Dave, R Hampton & any interested persons,

I appreciate the efforts of all persons in the past week at this forum. I will eventually try to think about the things you have said. I hope you will think about what I have said. And I thank the good people at First Things for the venue here. I imagine they wonder if this thread will ever end. I am planning to sign off after this comment.

I know many people are concerned, to put it mildly, about the acceptance of God’s touching hand into any scientific proposition. Yet it was not that long ago that God’s creative power was taken for granted. We all know Newton’s belief that God guided the planets in some way was proven wrong by Laplace. However, Laplace was a determinist who thought that if we knew all the positions of atoms, we could determine all their eventual movements. He was proven wrong in that area of study by quantum mechanics. That’s the way it goes in science. Newton is in any event still considered one of the greatest scientists in history.

I’m not an ID advocate as they define themselves. I think one weakness is they assume they compare design with non-design, which if you believe God made everything, does not work. I note the frustrations of critics in the inability of ID advocates to come up with a perfect scientific theory or solution for the beginning of life or specific evolutionary events. I admire scientific enterprise, but do not think it is above theology. I personally don’t insist on a scientific proof for the beginning of life or certain areas which were formally called evolution but are now called “emergence.” That said, I think scientific phenomena point in certain directions. People have been wrangling over the relationship between theology and science for ages and it will continue. But believers in my opinion can accept that Creation is above science and does not have to be analyzed in the same way.

Each area of study must be evaluated on its own. We learn from past times, but if we constrict ourselves too much, we may never get to the truth. Once in a very long while, Copernican-type revolutions come about both in science and philosophy. I think the people who are studying comparative genomics are heralding the scientific part of that revolution, although the inklings have been showing for years. They actually started in the 1950′s when we learned about the structures of DNA and proteins.

In Eugene Koonin’s article “Darwinian Evolution in the light of genomics,” he says, “There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non-adaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation.” I think this is portending great transformations in the ways we think about biological organisms. Today we experience a very exciting time in biology and I marvel at the new discoveries.

As to Dave’s comment (1/15 5:13am) that it’s rare to find a top scientist that is a believer, remember that when revolutions come along, people can change their minds about a lot of things.

jerry
January 15th, 2010 | 11:43 am

I will have no more to say here other than that supporters of ID say we are reasonable, informed and will accept nearly everything that science has to offer. Any description other than that does not meet what I have seen while looking at this discussion for 10 years. It is the other side that is dogmatic about what must have happened and to be accepted and because we do not affirm their dogma that we are lacking in many things. So I suggest that anyone interested read the comments of the pro ID people here to see how unreasonable and ill informed they are.

And then use the same criteria for those who oppose ID.

SL Page
January 20th, 2010 | 10:31 am

I agree with Jerry, but not for the same reaons.

Derwood
January 20th, 2010 | 10:37 am

Joe G wrote:

“Intelligent design- ie the design inference- is based on observations and a vast amount of experience.”

I would ask How much experience do you have in inferring design in biological structures/entities? How much designing of the same have you engaged in such that one can make such a claim?

“It can objectively tested.”

How? What criteria – other than making analogies ot human activity – are employed?

“How can we test the premise, for example, that the bacterial flagellum “evolved” via an accumulation of genetic accidents?”

Via comparative genomics, for one.