The Evangelical Universalist Forum

'Unlocking the Mystery of Life'.

Studies Film, Movie & Video Clips
#21

Hi Catherine

Very briefly, a few thoughts and observations on a most interesting and challenging subject:

Jeff A is absolutely right that we tend to accept evidence that supports our beliefs, and reject evidence which contradicts our beliefs. I believe (!) clever people call this confirmation bias. (It is related to what even cleverer people call apophenia, ie the tendency to discern meaning in what are actually random or coincidental events or data). This doesn’t tell us anything about the truth or otherwise of ID, or irreducible complexity. But it should give us pause for thought.

As I have said before, I have read Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, and found it very convincing at the time. But most of what I have read subsequently, including Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, leads me to conclude that ID and irreducible complexity (IC) do not ‘fly’ scientifically. Of course I may be wrong. Annoyingly, and again as Jeff A points out, I simply do not have the knowledge or training to arbitrate on such matters for myself. Hence I must rely on the testimony of others. And the consensus of qualified others goes against ID and IC; that is a fact. (But it doesn’t make it true! It is a ‘fact’ that the majority of Christians reject the glorious truth of UR!)

At the end of the day Catherine, my young :smiley: Christian friend, does it really matter whether ID or IR are true? Because surely the ultimate fact about the universe is that God created it, and everything in it is His. Again, as I have said before, it is in cosmology that I find the strongest ‘challenges’ to materialism – the so-called anthropic principle, which asserts that our universe must have been designed in order to be life-sustaining. But ultimately, science cannot arbitrate on these metaphysical questions. For if God is indeed real, which I absolutely believe He is, then He is, by definition, beyond the detection of scientific instruments. His existence can be inferred, or ‘known’ in a spiritual sense. But it cannot – and this is axiomatic, as most honest scientists and theologians will admit – be ‘proven’, in the way that it can be ‘proven’ that 2 + 2 = 4.

And do you – or I? – really want a God that small, a God who can be summed up in some puny mathematical equation? :smiley:

Peace and love

Johnny (eyes rolling like marbles on the bonnet of a Ferrari :smiley:)

#22

I’m so pleased you got a chance to watch the film and that you thought it was ‘pretty impressive’. :smiley: I too was impressed with Kenyon’s change of position as regards ‘chemical evolution’, considering he’s written the text book on it, and now has had to disown it. It couldn’t have been easy. I’ll check out the article you’ve linked to, and hope I can understand it. :blush:

#23

As I ‘pause to think’- :laughing: it’s beginning to occur to me that the clever people are wrong. :open_mouth: When I consider the complexity of a molecular machine like the flagellum, I clearly see calibration, specification, complexity, in fact, I see a machine- albeit a living machine, but a machine nevertheless. Now a child usually sees the truth of things, and maybe that’s why Jesus said we are to be like children, so given I’ve got a child-like knowledge of molecular things, the finshed product i.e the flagellum is certainly a working, multi-part machine. The film goes through it’s parts and how it’s constructed and the order in which it’s constructed and I defy anyone who watches that film to tell me this is not design we are witnessing. :wink: One of the things the apostle Paul said, always sticks with me and is certainly apt when discussing this:

‘‘For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.’’ Rom 1:20.

I can agree with Miller that the ‘creation’ came about very gradually, and so elephants prior to Adam, were rather different to those we are familiar with today, but I see a designer when I look at the ‘old’ elephants and when I look at our elephants, as I do when I look at the molecular machines inside the cell.

I’m in the same boat- I have to rely on the ‘experts’ to try to determine the truth. This is very frustrating, but I think I’ve got enough grey matter to know a design when I see one. :sunglasses:

I think ID matters A LOT. The apostle Paul asserts that we can perceive God by the things created and even if Paul had not made that claim, I believe this universe and everything in it, if brought into existence for a purpose, will bear witness to this, because as you rightly say, we can’t perceive God in the way we perceive each other. But we are without excuse if we look at a computer and say that it wasn’t designed- we’d be called mad if we said that. We’re learning that living things are far more complex and sophisticated than a computer. It’s very simple even a child can see it. :smiley:

In a few weeks I’m going to post a thread on a mystery that seems to be unlocked and that if true is another witness to design in the universe. It could just be coincidence but I’d love your verdict on it Johnny, so can’ wait to post it. I’m gathering my facts and figures so be prepared… :laughing:

Peace and love

Catherine

#24

I compare situations to Marvel supervillains and orgies, so hopefully it won’t be too boring. :mrgreen:

#25

Hi Catherine, my young Christian friend :smiley:

Of course, the clever people may be wrong. :smiley: They often are. :smiley:

But for me, there are a number of obvious problems with ID and IC, many of which are exposed – in my opinion respectfully, honestly and thoroughly - by Ken Miller (and many others of course). While lots of things in nature have the *appearance *of design - especially to the layman - modern biology and genetics can demonstrate how this apparent design came about purely through the Darwinian process of natural selection acting on genetic mutations. As I understand it, this is basically Richard Dawkins’ argument in The Blind Watchmaker (which I haven’t read), refuting William Paley’s famous argument - a version of which you reproduce in your post – that if we see some complex machine such as a watch (or a computer) we conclude that it was designed, and apply that logic to a complex biological ‘machine’ such as the eye or the flagellum.

Whether we like it or not, there is a strong consensus among the global scientific community a) that Darwin’s theory of evolution is correct - as near a scientific ‘fact’ as any theory could be; and b) that ID and IC are incorrect.

ID is, I tend to think, sort of self-refuted by all the evolutionary ‘dead ends’ – those prototype animal species that quickly died out because they weren’t very good at surviving. If God wanted to design, say, a whale, why didn’t He just design a perfect whale and be done with it? Surely the Great Designer wasn’t so incompetent that He had to have numerous ‘goes’ at a particular animal before getting it right? (I believe Miller says something along these lines, don’t have the book with me right now.)

IC is, to coin a phrase, a more complex subject to a dolt like me. But at the most basic level IC asserts that some complex biochemical structures or ‘machines’, such as the flagellum, mammalian eye, or mammalian blood clotting mechanism, are so complicated that if you remove any one of their parts they no longer work. Hence they could not have evolved from simpler cells, simpler machines, because evolution (which they accept) can only act on an existing structure, cell, machine or whatever, it cannot simply ‘magic up’ a new one out of thin air.

But Miller and others refute this by saying that simpler – much simpler – versions of things like the eye or the flagellum do serve some useful purpose. A bunch of light sensitive cells do not constitute an eye as we know it. But they could confer some evolutionary advantage on the primitive species possessing them. Hence a very crude eye could, over millions of years, evolve into the complex eye we have in our heads today, even though according to Behe the eye is irreducibly complex. (Again I am basically paraphrasing Miller from memory.)

Now I may well have got all this wrong. Please let me know if I have misrepresented anyone or any theory here.

And naturally (!) there are a substantial number of scientists who dissent from the majority view. And as I said in previous post, just because the majority believe something to be true, doesn’t make it true! :smiley: However, with Ken Miller - and CS Lewis, actually - I am very wary of declaring *anything *in the Universe that God has made to be totally impenetrable to scientific study. Science tells us how things work. It cannot, ever, tell us *why *things work, or how the seemingly immutable laws of physics that govern how things came about themselves came to be. Much as atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking would wish it to be so, a ‘law’ cannot create anything, it simply explains the workings of something that is already there.

Hawking has gone on record as saying that a) cosmology is purely a matter of science, and religion and philosophy are irrelevant to such puzzles as how the Universe began, or whether it was designed to sustain life (which it certainly appears to have been); and b) the laws of physics are themselves sufficient explanation for our life-sustaining universe. Unfortunately he completely fails to recognise that he shoots himself spectacularly in the foot here. Because of course, statement b) is purely philosophical, not scientific. It is also just as much a faith position as theism.

My worry is that if we posit the necessity of ‘supernatural intervention’ by God in evolution, in the form of ID, and science subsequently demonstrates empirically that we are wrong, this could well have the damaging consequences both of undermining our faith and confirming what the atheist already says, ie that Christians are gullible, ignorant, irrational, anti-scientific etc. This is basically Lewis’s argument, articulated in a number of places but specifically in his essay Religion and Rocketry.

The bottom line for me, Catherine, is that the Bible says God created the Universe and everything in it. I believe it and Him. I do not believe the Universe created itself. But I also believe science can and does reveal the wondrous mechanisms through which God created, and continues to create every day. That God does not need to ‘intervene’ in evolution by special creation or ID or whatever, does not diminish His glory; if anything it makes it even more wondrous!

I look forward to your ‘mystery’. :laughing:

Peace and love

Johnny

#26

Appropro of nothing: the very first book I ever wrote. :smiling_imp:

Straw Man Burning.pdf (1.44 MB)

I wrote it back in early 1999, and started Sword to the Heart late in 1999. Both books were written for self-critical purposes; both were largely also written for the one who became my most beloved (though moreso the latter than the former. Ironically I’m not sure she ever read the latter, but she nearly killed a printer at college eventually trying to print out the former when I sent it a year or so later. :wink: )

It’s a persistent criticism of the 1996 revised edition of The Blind Watchmaker. Chapters 12 and 13 summarize my results, which for the record were at least 64% strongly in favor of TBW material. :slight_smile:

#27

Hi Jason

Thanks for your post, and for posting your book. I’ve downloaded it and started to read it. It does look a little daunting (or should I say dauntingly long :smiley: ), but I hope can find the time to read it in full, because I would be very interested to hear your arguments against Dawkins and TBW.

Perhaps I should make something clear. I may agree with evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins and Ken Miller that science can refute ID and IC, and that ‘supernatural intervention’ is not required for evolution to ‘work’. However, I reject Dawkins’ view that theism and evolutionary theory are mutually exclusive, or that the latter 'disproves’ the former (which seems to be your view too, from what I gather of what I’ve skimmed of your book so far).

With more respect to Dawkins than he affords us ‘gullible theists’ (or whatever pejorative term he uses to describe people of faith), I would say that when it comes to philosophy and theology, he doesn’t know his fundament from his olecranon.

Or as leading British literary theorist and critic put it, in his devastating review of Dawkins’ notorious anti-God polemic The God Delusion, “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

Not only is Dawkins an atheist, he is a rabidly fundamentalist proselytising atheist who holds all believers of whatever hue in vitriolic contempt – a ‘secularist bigot’, to coin Professor Antony Flew’s phrase.

(And if you want proof of this, look no further than Dawkins’ despicable attempt to ‘smear’ Flew after that previously leading light of atheism published his book There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind. The exact quote from TGD reads as follows: “We might be seeing something similar today in the over-publicised tergiversation of the philosopher Antony Flew, who announced in his old age that he had been converted to belief in some sort of deity (triggering a frenzy of eager repetition all around the Internet).” )

Dawkins does not come at any subject – evolutionary theory included – from the point of view of the true student of science, willing to go wherever the facts lead him. He is as biased as all hell.

We – me especially :smiley: – would all do well to bear this in mind when weighing the truth, or otherwise, of anything Dawkins says. (Which, I guess, is half the point, or the message, of your book. :smiley: )

All the best

Johnny

#28

Johnny,

I went into the book prepared to be as rigorously fair as possible to Mr. D, and I think I accomplished this, since a large portion of Chapter 12 is dedicated to reiterating portions of TBW I thought he did especially well at.

I also went into the book expecting him to be rather dunderheaded about religion, theology and philosophy, and in these things I was not disappointed. :wink:

What surprised me greatly was that I figured he would at least be competent at mounting an argument for neo-Darwinian gradualism; and I figured that as someone who grew up with neo-Dargrad, whose most admired Christians believed neo-Dargrad, and who was fairly comfortable with neo-Dargrad. But by the time I finished the book–indeed rather before then–I felt like I had to make adjustments for Mr D.'s incompetence in favor of neo-Dargrad! Because the case for neo-Darwinian gradualistic biological evolutionary theory couldn’t really be as weak as Richard Dawkins was presenting it, could it???

Well, no.

But in other ways, actually–yes. I learned over subsequent years that neo-Darwinian gradualism did indeed have as many or even more problems than were evident to me in reading Richard Dawkins. He just wasn’t as good at covering them up as other proponents had been.

Well, I can think of another strong consensus we have to deal with whether we like it or not, having to do with the reason for this forum’s existence. :wink: But, yes, I’m fine with the professionals hashing it out and just making some amateur observations of my own on the side.

ID doesn’t necessarily say God did the designing. Or that God worked alone in the designing. Or that there are no possible ways for the designs to be messed up, by natural mechanism or through intention, along the way.

And as long as the species weren’t consciously rational, so what? Natural accidents clear out a species of living machine working in an ecosystem, making room for better equipped machines. If they aren’t persons then it doesn’t really matter. And no species could get going enough to be considered a “species” at all to be “wiped out” without being successful in surviving to breed effectively in its environment. Multiple organic machines refine each other over generations, contributing to environmental pressures which weed out (and so in a negative fashion select for) various genetic expressions of the original design. Occasionally new design modifications are introduced by God and/or by subordinate designers (themselves having been produced in other natural systems and/or being spiritual survivors of deceased prior species.)

Whereas, if they are (or were) persons, then their souls still exist, and we may expect them to one day be embodied (with better bodies than before), just like us. And maybe still contributing to our history now. Not necessarily in ways cooperative with God; but also not necessarily in altogether competent ways though cooperating loyally with God.

ID allows a LOT of complexly different leeway. It isn’t only a theory that simply requires Goddidit. :slight_smile: Theoretically an ID proponent could still be utterly an atheist (like Francis Crick): he would just be stuck with an explanation for the emergence of the designers from foundationally non-rational behaviors. (Come to think of it, most of Mr. Dawkins’ crippled attempts at trying to ontologically criticise theism, may stem simply from the inter-atheistic smackdowns given to Crick’s panspermia hypothesis, figuring theists are only trying the same thing as Crick! Although by now he really ought to know better. So just being generally and naturally inept at that topic may be the better explanation. :laughing: )

Anyway. Rather than plod through 500 pages of my earliest writing, I strongly recommend you skip ahead to the final two chapters (12 and 13), and then go back for the others if you really care to. Even I don’t want to read though all that other stuff again. :smiling_imp:

Mr. D Science Theater 3000!
http://www.wargamer.com/forums/smiley/mst3k.gif

#29

Thanks Johnny and Jason for your continuing thoughts on this. Sorry I’m late coming back to you. I’ve not felt too good the last few days. Better now though. :slight_smile:

Johnny, I understand and share your concerns regarding undermining the foundations for our faith, if ID or IC could be shown to be wrong e.g they discover the most basic element and show in a lab how it ‘evolves’ into the first molecules etc. Even then though, they’d have the problem of explaining where this ‘element’ came from and so God can always be found somewhere. :laughing: There’s a good chance they’ll crack the code of how organisms evolved from other organisms (if that is indeed the case) in our life time so it’ll be interesting to see what science discovers. :wink:

Jason, I’ll check out those two chapters. Hope I can understand them. :blush:

#30

I am new here, I hope noone minds my two cents worth. Even if, and its a BIG if, science finds that missing basic element and shows in a lab how it evolved into a living molecule, that only shows how something could have ocurred, not that it did occur that way. And there is a long way between a living molecule and a human being. And isn’t setting up the lab a part of ID?

Most mutations have a negative, or at best neutral effect on living beings (retired RN here) so I am not sure why neoDarwinism relies on mutation so much, altho I am no expert in this area.

I grew up with the original Darwinism taught in high school and college so I am trying to catch up with this “neo” part and I am a long way from understanding it.

My husband is a scientist (Natural Resources Management) and the Scientific establishment is as fraught with Questions that must not Be Asked as Christianity is. In my husband’s field the current untouchable is global warming or climate change. In Biology it seems to be ID or questioning Darwinism.

I believe in ID but am undecided about the whole Adam and Eve thing. After all, God communicates a lot in stories and parables, He wasn’t going to say " In the beginning there was life giving primordial soup" to people who didn’t even know the world was round. The people weren’t any less intelligent than us, they just didn’t have the tools to understand that kind of creation.

#31

Hi Lizabeth, lovely to meet you and welcome to this wonderful forum. :smiley: I do appreciate your contribution to this topic and you make much sense. :wink: I don’t understand very much with regards to biological things and so am at a disadvantage but it doesn’t stop me being irresistably drawn to trying to understand if ID and IC and are real possibilities which only a puny few scientists seem to be able to ‘see’ and the majority can’t- a bit like UR and mainstream Christianity as Johnny noted in an earlier post. :laughing:

#32

Neo-Darwinian gradualism started back in the 30s or 50s (I forget which–quite a while before Crick and Watson discovered DNA anyway) as a synthesis by a number of scientists from different disciplines looking to improve Darwin’s original theory and answer strong scientific criticisms of it. It has been taught as scientific gospel publicly ever since then. The biggest relevant change was the specification of random copy-error mutations as the sources of the changes from which natural selection would ‘select’.

They knew random copy-error mutations, even back then, would be mostly neutral or even negative (insights which we have drastically increased in validation since then), and they also knew that at best random copy-error mutations could only provide gradual improvements–and they knew perfectly well that the mathematics, even for the long periods of time they were expecting, indicated that such gradualism would be utterly neutralized in any sufficiently large population–but they needed a positive mechanism for actually altering genetic information (instead of selecting from a set of variations, since natural selection per se builds nothing and actually is a negative process: it kills off certain variants faster than others!) More precisely, they needed a purely accidental non-directed mechanism that would, by its characteristics, not indicate intentional design per se.

They went out of their way to presumptively exclude intelligent design, not based on prior science (since prior science had been shooting holes in the prior theory of non-intentional development) so much as on philosophical expectations. Well okay, that’s one legitimate way to go about it in an abductive theory: presume the hypothesis and test the data to see how well it fits with the hypothesis. They did the best they could to come up with a hypothesis they thought would be experimentally verified, but mutation has always been the huge glaring flaw (yet a necessary flaw) in the design of their theory. That’s why often proponents of biological evolutionary theory will talk as though natural selection per se is the only important feature of neo-Darwinian gradualism, and even that natural selection builds up effective new species characteristics (which is utterly the opposite of what natural selection really does, and for which mutation was introduced to provide functionality in the theory): natural selection is the only part of the theory that can be solidly demonstrated to work! But then only under a certain set of conditions which constrains against other parts of the total theory of biological development (which, for example, is why Kenyon, the ID proponent who originally wrote the book on biochemical origins, eventually gave up on ever expecting undirected non-intentional processes bringing about biochemical origins.)

Small population development (such as in “punctuated equilibrium”) seemed to promise a way out of the problem of large populations swamping gradual improvements–it’s still neo-Darwinian gradualism, just operating on isolated populations small enough that good mutations won’t most likely be lost in the gene pool–but it turns out there are huge conceptual problems with that, too, and it doesn’t even begin to solve other huge conceptual problems. Again, it helps natural selection between genetic variation expressions roar along quite nicely (which is of course why human breeders prefer to work with controlled small populations :wink: ), but natural selection by itself isn’t neo-Darwinian gradualism. In fact natural selection by itself in a scientific theory would point toward original intentional design! (A point recognized even by Darwin himself; also a point recognized by some of his staunchest early defenders who were Christian and otherwise theistic. :laughing: )

#33

Jason: Thank you very much for your reply. I am going to have to think about it tomorrow. By the time I actually got to selecting a career at college I chose nursing, hence all my Biology classes were devoted to very contemporary things. This ID/Evolution alone debate is new to me.

In my High School Darwinism was completely accepted and Creationist were looked at with pity. It didn’t help that most of their arguements were kind of circular, “Its true because the Bible says so” How do you know the Bible is true? “Its the Bible”
So I am glad to learn the arguements have advanced in knowledge.

.