What reason would someone have for teaching theistic evolution in the regular biology curriculum? It would make more sense in a cross-disciplinary program, perhaps as part of a philosophy or theology program.
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Quibble: âfecitâ is perfect tense. âGod made it.â
Thereâs the nub. When we see any theistic evolution that has any explanatory content we can discuss this question. So far, nothing.
There is no difference, thatâs just my point. The governing assumption, going into any investigation, is that a ânaturalâ (meaning: physical / material / non-intentional) cause exists for any puzzle of interest. Failure to find such a cause â say, for the origin of life, or the animal phyla, or human consciousness â merely reflects the inability of the scientist, or the immaturity of the research field, but nothing about nature itself.
Whereas in the 19th c. examples I gave â trying to bust out of the familiar 2019 context â design was a live possibility, or indeed endorsed by Dana and Wallace.
Yup, which is why Iâm not an advocate of TE. What I see is all E, no T.
Do I see U of C PhD precision here? YES. Happily corrected!
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What do you mean by âwhat I seeâ? Presumably you mean itâs what people teach in universities, but that makes no sense in context. Presumably you donât mean thatâs what you see in the data, because youâre a YEC. So Iâm confused about that statement. What I was trying to get at is that theistic evolution has and probably canât have explanatory content, so your complaint regards failure to tolerate the empty set. Why, in that case, bother to make it?
No, you see four years of high school Latin.
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What I see in TE as a theory. Sorry if that wasnât clear.
There is no difference, thatâs just my point. The governing assumption, going into any investigation, is that a ânaturalâ (meaning: physical / material / non-intentional) cause exists for any puzzle of interest. Failure to find such a cause â say, for the origin of life, or the animal phyla, or human consciousness â merely reflects the inability of the scientist, or the immaturity of the research field, but nothing about nature itself.
Whereas in the 19th c. examples I gave â trying to bust out of the familiar 2019 context â design was a live possibility, or indeed endorsed by Dana and Wallace.
I guess then that I donât understand your objection. You seem to want evolutionary biology to play by a different set of methodological rules than other scientific disciplines. Iâm just not sure why this is necessary or how it would even be accomplished.
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When a Christian scientist is researching cancer, do you find it problematic that they are looking for a natural explanation?
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But how does TE differ in that respect from ID or creationism? Does theistic anything have explanatory power in science? If not, why single out TE? If so, do you think it will some day? And if so, why?
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I canât speak for other scientific disciplines, because I donât know them well enough to have a decent opinion.
Biology as a science should be free to pursue design hypotheses, should the evidence warrant them. Such hypotheses must say something that standard theory does not and should be testable by others who do not share the design presupposition, but who want to see if the hypothesis works.
Thatâs all.
We should note that plenty of sciences, other than biology, entertain design (intelligent causation) hypotheses. Remote sensing, archaeology, SETI, cryptanalysis, and so on.
The problem is that these design hypotheses donât exist with respect to biology and natural history.
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Because theistic evolution is creationism which is religion. Whether you call it YEC, OEC, ID, EC or TE, it is creationism and is religion. Creationism is not science and canât be taught as such in the regular biology curriculum at a state university.
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This is a TE discussion board, mostly.
The bookshelves in my study are well-populated with biology volumes using theology for empirical conclusions. John Aviseâs 2010 Oxford U Press book, for instance: Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design. âGod wouldnât have done it this wayâ
arguments are endemic in evolutionary theory and biology. Watch this talk, for instance, by Joanna Masel from the U of Arizona (I follow her work on orphan genes very closely, so I respect her tremendously, just saying):
Just got a warning from the board software to âLet others join the conversation.â Gotta run, maybe more tomorrow.
QED. Wasnât true for Dana, wasnât true for Wallace. Heck, wasnât true for Darwin.
Yes, but these intelligent agents are part of the material world.
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@swamidass and I tend to agree that some of these arguments are seriously flawed. The real problem is trying to predict what we should observe in genomes, distribution of characteristics, and so on if Intelligent Design is true. From what I have seen, ID/TE/Creationism canât make any testable predictions from first principles when it comes to these data sets. Thatâs the problem. ID is so nebulous that it can accommodate seemingly any observation, and is mostly a post-hoc rationalization.
This isnât the case with the scientific theory of evolution. This theory makes very specific predictions, such as the statistical correlation between molecular and morphological phylogenies. Evolution tells us that we can find functional parts of genomes by looking for sequence conservation. ID canât tell us these things, or explain them.
Do some scientists carry around a worldview where science is a subset of a larger metaphysical view of the universe? Absolutely, and there is nothing wrong with that. However, just because you have certain beliefs does not make them scientific or even useful in science.
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No it isnât .
It is called Peaceful Science.
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I guess that, until we reach the point âwhere the theism had some genuine explanatory contentâ is actually something more than wishful thinking, we wonât really know about this, will we?
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