In my estimation, “front-loaded” and “unguided” yield exactly the same outcomes when it comes to scientific exploration of our universe. Which makes design (in this instance) to be superfluous and unnecessary. I do not understand why anyone would go that route. It is little more (perhaps no more) than making stuff up.
As for other scenarios, if ID is all about detecting design, and if design implies guidance, and if guidance implies (for example) “evolution directly steered by some intelligent being”, then the conclusion must include some idea of the nature of the designer. As I asked above - human? alien? other possibilities? How does one distinguish? How can one distinguish? How can any of these possibilities be accepted before “we don’t know” (which is always a possibility when it comes to understanding natural processes)? What are the criteria? Metrics? Standards?
I note that you have not clearly described the “view of language” that you think I hold, and that you give no passages of Wittgenstein in which my view is “debunked.” So your comment is not of much use in advancing the conversation. However, it happens that I did two graduate seminars covering writings of Wittgenstein, one entirely dedicated to Wittgenstein, and would be glad to discuss his thought with you at some point. I suspect I know what elements of Wittgenstein’s thought you have in mind when you make this statement, and believe I could show that you are misapplying his thought, but that would take a long textual discussion of his writings, and I think that does not belong here, and in any case your habit of one-line or otherwise extremely brief replies would make such a discussion hard to have.
Note also that your reply is a non sequitur. I had written a series of questions:
And your reply was:
I am surprised that a mathematician would not realize that such a reply completely fails to deal with the questions that were posed.
I will take it that you have no intention of addressing my straightforward and reasonable question, i.e., about what intellectual procedures you use when deciding whether idea A belongs under category B. Since you are not willing to answer that question, I don’t see how we can have a productive, non-polemical discussion.
The only examples you gave were of those who had explicitly or implicitly re-written the previously existing meaning of creationism (the very meaning they all gladly assented to before ID came on the scene) for the very political reason of making sure ID was included in it. Call it circular reasoning, or call it drawing a circle around the target after it has been hit, or call it whatever you like, it’s still inadmissible procedure.
You failed to provide a single example of an author who, reasoning from the already-existing definition of creationism (i.e., the definition agreed on in origins discussions before ID came on the scene), showed that by logical necessity ID, as defined by Discovery, has to be creationism or a form of creationism.
Yes, it includes the idea that the designer is intelligent, and that the designer has some means (possibly incomprehensible to human minds) of interacting with the material world. If such a being exists, or even might exist, then guided evolution is completely plausible. Of course, if you have a proof that such a being could not possibly exist, you are welcome to provide it.
In the rest of your answer, I think you are confusing the question, “How we could know with certainty when a designer had influenced the course of evolution” with the question, “Did a designer in fact influence that course?” Robert Russell, for example, has argued that God in fact tinkers with mutations etc. but that his tinkering occurs “at the quantum level” and is thus not detectable by our scientific methods, which cannot distinguish between tinkered results and chance results. But he still believes that God has been tinkering. Russell would agree with you that “science” cannot prove that evolution is guided, but he does not think that “science” is the only source of human knowledge, so it is not a problem for him to assert, on philosophical or theological grounds, that tinkering has happened. (I’m not, by the way, here endorsing or defending Russell’s specific arguments, but merely giving him as an example of someone who would agree with you about what “science” can prove yet disagree with you about what actually happens in evolution.)
Only if “guidance” is used loosely, and not in the sense that people who advocate guided evolution mean. In fact, Darwin conceded that that metaphor of natural selection could be misleading, since it’s based on the analogy of human selection, and he did not believe that there was any intelligent selecting agent in the evolutionary process. He conceded that the term “survival of the fittest” was in some ways better, as it avoided the suggestion of intelligence or planning.
I understand this point. But you’re talking about her formal justification. I’m talking about her actual personal and political motives. If you’re not interested in that subject, we can just agree not to discuss it between us.
You haven’t yet seen that the use of “natural” in these debates generally implies such an absence of guidance, and thus slips “unguided” in beneath the radar.
You couldn’t possibly have read my posts with any care and concluded that. But then, given you’ve only been here since March, not for the whole four years I’ve been posting here, and given that you seem to have formed an opinion about all my beliefs and motives based solely on what I’ve said in this one conversation, it’s not surprising that you might misunderstand where I’m coming from. Still, even given what I’ve written here, your surmise is completely unwarranted, and it’s in fact incorrect. I don’t want ID put into the schools.
Quite right. I have no intention of addressing your “straightforward and reasonable question”, mainly because it is neither straightforward nor reasonable.
Ah, so once again “Eddie” tries to weasel out of meeting a challenge that he himself promised to meet. Let us remind ourselves about what “Eddie” actually said he would do:
And here is one of the definitions that I recall providing to him, as quoted from a peer-reviewed scholarly publication:
In its basic generic sense, creationism refers to any view that rejects evolution in favor of the action of some personal, supernatural creator. Creationism is not limited to Bible-based views because other religions have their own creation accounts that may be in conflict with evolution. For instance, some fundamentalist Hindu sects, such as the Hare Krishnas, reject evolution in favor of their own specific theistic account. Many Native American tribal groups do this as well, as do various Pagan religions.
On the other hand, not all religions are creationist. Many religions and theological traditions accept the scientific understanding of evolution and therefore are not forms of creationism. The Catholic Church and most mainline Protestant denominations, for instance, do not consider evolution to be in conflict with Christian faith, holding that God could have ordained the evolutionary mechanism as the process for creating the biological world.
Most forms of creationism arise in fundamentalist or evangelical religious sects, which tend to hew to a literal or at least a strongly traditional or conservative interpretation of the religion’s creation story. The most common form of creationism today rejects not just evolution but much of geology, cosmology, and other sciences, and it affirms a Bible-based view that takes the world and all its life to have been created in a six-day period 6000 to 10,000 years ago. The Institute for Creation Research (ICR), founded by creationist pioneer Henry Morris but now led by his son John Morris, remains the leading and probably the largest organization promoting this view. Answers in Genesis (AiG), led by Ken Ham, now rivals it in size and influence, and there are many other smaller ministries that take the same line.
Another major category of creationists, however, holds that a literal or traditional reading of Genesis does not require this belief in a young earth. They accept that the earth is billions of years old. This view is commonly referred to as “old-earth creationism” in contrast to the “young-earth creationism” of ICR and AiG. Hugh Ross’s Reasons to Believe is one major creationist organization promoting this kind of view. Old-earthers and young-earthers disagree with each other’s views as much as they disagree with evolution.
One may find similar factional divisions among creationists regarding other common Genesis-based commitments. Most hold that a catastrophic, universal flood engulfed the earth, killing all life except those that were saved on Noah’s ark, whereas others believe the flood was only local or “tranquil.” Most now accept microevolution within “kinds” of animals, but hold that such changes are strictly limited and can never form new species, though previous generations of creationists would have found microevolution unacceptable.
The ID Movement was singled out by the AAAS board resolution as the new player in the creation/evolution controversy. It coalesced in the late 1980s and early 1990s under the leadership of Philip Johnson, then a law professor at University of California, Berkeley, and now is unofficially led by members of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. The key feature of ID creationism is its attempt to unite various creationist factions against their common enemy under a banner of “mere creation” or “design” by temporarily setting aside internal differences. As Johnson told Christianity Today, “People of differing theological views should learn who’s close to them, form alliances, and put aside divisive issues ‘til later.” Aiming to quell the battle between young- and old-earthers to redirect their energies in tandem against evolutionists, he continued, “I say after we’ve settled the issue of a Creator, we’ll have a wonderful time arguing about the age of the Earth” (90). The ID Movement calls its strategy for defeating evolution “the Wedge.” Its target is not just evolution, but also the materialist philosophy it believes props up science and is the de facto “established religion” of the West. The organization hopes to affect a renewal in our culture of Judeo-Christian theism, in which man is again understood as created in God’s image.
Because of these and other significant differences among forms of creationism, precise terminology is essential, so one should include the specific modifier—young-earth creationism, Hare Krishna creationism, ID creationism, and so on—as appropriate. However, all forms of creationism share certain characteristics—not just the defining characteristics of rejecting evolution in favor of special creation, but also their standard reliance on arguments from ignorance, for example—so one may reasonably use the generic term when the claim is generally applicable.
You, gentle reader, may decide for yourself whether the above meets the criteria that “Eddie” set for himself for a definition that he would use to determine if ID fits the criteria.
Guidance need not be intelligent, nor need it be restricted to the sense that people using the term “guided evolution” mean - indeed, doing so would be potentially misleading. So I don’t think that these objections stand.
Pointing out that there were valid reasons for making that statement apart from the motives you attribute to her is relevant. If you want to talk about motives I’d expect more substantiation.
Not at all. Artificial selection is natural guidance even in your sense. It’s just that the evidence is lacking.
Well I know you get angry when DI people get criticised but I doubt that that is the whole story. It still seems a plausible motive.
The author of this definition makes arbitrary assertions. He provides no empirical justification for them, as I did, in my own lengthy study of the actual use of the term “creationism.”
Further, I specified that I was talking about American popular discussions of origins, an American popular discussions of origins, creationism has been a Bible-based phenomenon. Whatever objections they have to evolution in India or elsewhere, based on other religious traditions, are not within the sociological/historical scope of the American discussions about OEC, YEC, TE, etc.
Finally, even if we grant the author’s extension of “creationism” to include objections to evolution coming from non-Biblical religions, it still does not cover ID, as ID defines itself. As ID defines itself, in all its formal definitions from the Glossary of the second edition of Pandas in 1993 through to the present, the crucial element of “rejects evolution” is not part of the definition.
Unless your source can prove, not merely arbitrarily declare, that it is essential to the definition of ID that it rejects evolution, then ID (again, I repeat for the thousandth time, understood as theory or view regarding nature, not as a set of social and political activities of conservative Christian evangelicals) it has no warrant for grouping ID under creationism.
The positions of individual ID proponents is another matter entirely. I conceded almost the day this site opened that the majority of ID proponents were creationist, and that many creationists supported ID to buttress their creationism. My consistent position has been, “Yes, most ID proponents are creationists, and many of the leaders of the DI are creationists, but the view of nature they are articulating, i.e., that empirical evidence shows that there is design in nature, is not in itself creationism.” It is not creationism, first of all, because it is not inherently anti-evolution, and it’s not creationism, second, even by the broader definition above, because it makes no use, not only of the Bible, but of any of the Scriptures the author above refers to.
Of course there’s a sense of the word “guidance” which does not require intelligence; for example, a gutter carved in the floor may “guide” a bowling ball, and the gutter isn’t intelligent. But that’s utterly irrelevant to what people are concerned about when they debate whether there is “guidance” in evolution. When they speak about guidance in evolution they have in mind (to keep up the bowling analogy) an invisible someone or something slightly nudging the ball as it travels down the lane so that it hits the pins in the right way and produces a strike. They have in mind end-directed behavior, behavior aimed at a distant goal – and behavior aimed at a distant goal is exactly what classic neo-Darwinism cannot accept. You’re speaking as if you have little to no knowledge as to how the phrase “guided evolution” has been used in popular discussions over origins. I’m not interested in discussing other meanings of “guidance” that aren’t relevant to the subject at hand.
I agree that such a statement, coming from certain people in certain contexts, might not warrant any investigation of motives. But given who she was, and her culture-war activities, the question of motivation is warranted.
The evidence for her motivation has been discussed in many places, but apparently you aren’t up on the discussion. When I get time, I’ll dig up some sources and post links to them for you.
In any case, my attack on Scott is a side-point. I believe in all honesty that she is a Machiavellian manipulator and that she uses Christian evolutionists as (from her point of view, I mean) useful fools in part of an overarching goal of bringing about a secular humanist society, but even if I’m wrong about her motives, it doesn’t affect any of the main points I’ve argued here about the definitions of ID and creationism.
I have no objection to criticism of any DI people, as long as the criticism is fair, i.e., based on what they have actually argued, not on what they supposedly secretly believe but aren’t telling.
Another one-liner, again with a complete absence of argument. You are very different from other mathematicians I have known. They always took delight in stepwise arguments, even in fields outside of math. I could always have long and productive debates with them, because the spirit of Euclid lived in them, as in me. But some other spirit, whose nature I can’t fathom, seems to guide your postings here. Anyhow, I’ve led you to water multiple times in this discussion, but I can’t make you drink. So I give up on you.
But that is not what we are concerned with at all. The real point is whether a preference for “natural processes” over “unguided processes” is reasonably justified.
Or I am addressing the real subject, and you are off on a tangent.
I don’t see any sign of investigation, just implausible claims which seem to be the product of your obsessive culture-warring.
Your record here says otherwise.
Anyway, let me ask a simply question. Do your Christian evolutionists who believe in guided evolution believe that this guidance was accomplished through “natural processes”? If not “natural processes” rules out their view just as much as “unguided”,
I suppose now the argument will be that Henry Morris has no business defining “creationism.” Indeed, neither he nor most other YECs qualify as creationists under the Eddefinition of “creationism,” because the view that modern diversity arose from “kinds” aboard the Ark requires evolution on hyper-drive, while the Eddefinition requires denial of evolution.
How is it, then, that you’ve obviously absorbed so little of the contents of the scientific literature about evolution, despite witnessing, and presumably participating in these conversations?
Why is so much of the scientific literature about evolution ignored and grossly misrepresented by these same people in their communications with the public?
Yet you objected strenuously, for months, when I criticized Meyer, Dembski, and Wells for concealing the most powerful evidence for the RNA World hypothesis, that the enzymatic center of the ribosome is a ribozyme.
Then it turned out that you were so ignorant of the scientific literature about evolution that you claimed that ribozymes are proteins, dutifully parroting their falsehoods.
That behavior does not appear to be consistent with your claim.
You don’t explain what point you are making by (after the above words) quoting a large block of Henry Morris at me, but let me guess: you are saying that Henry Morris of all people ought to know what creationism means, and his definition differs from mine? So my account is flawed?
If that’s your implied argument, it doesn’t weaken my case at all. My study attempted to define the meaning of the word “creationism” when used without qualifying adjectives. When people start adding adjectives in front of it, that of course changes the meaning. “Scientific creationism”, “evolutionary creationism,” and so on are going to be different in some respects. But if someone says that he or she is a “creationist” without any qualification, he or she usually means: (i) evolution didn’t happen; (ii) what really happened is what is described in Genesis 1-2.
Or is your point that Morris’s “scientific creationism” sounds a lot to you like “intelligent design,” and therefore ID is really just “scientific creationism”? That would not follow, because, while “scientific creationists,” like ID proponents, offer arguments for design that don’t rest on Genesis, they (SCs) are all Bible-based Christians and, when they do interpret Genesis, they do in fact interpret Genesis literally. Genesis, interpreted literally, is what really happened, according to them. And if push ever came to shove and they had to choose between Genesis interpreted literally, and what mainstream science seemed to show, they’d go with Genesis, without hesitation. But many ID proponents aren’t Bible-based Christians, and such ID proponents would never have to go through any contortions to hang onto a literal Genesis. You don’t see Behe, Denton, Sternberg, Flannery, Richards, etc. giving talks in their churches (of course, Denton doesn’t have a church, but the others mostly do) on six literal days or a global Flood. They just don’t read Genesis that way.
In short, if you reject a literal reading of Genesis, you give up your “scientific creationist” membership card, whereas if you reject a literal reading of Genesis, you don’t give up your ID membership card. Despite the superficial resemblance of the two, they aren’t the same.
Specify the range of “we”! You can speak for yourself, but not for others. I was reporting on how others use the term (or similar terms), and what their ideas and concerns are. Their intellectual and theological priorities may be quite different from your personal ones.
One of the problems is that, while some Christians will openly use a term like “guided evolution” or “directed evolution”, many will not. And some of the ones who do not use the term “guided” may in fact believe that evolution is guided, whereas some of those who do use the term “guided” or some similar word may in fact mean something entirely different from what the lay person would mean by it.
The question is complicated by the fact that many Christian TEs go to conservative evangelical churches which are somewhat suspicious of evolution in the first place, and are unlikely to accept it if they think it’s an unguided process, which means that evangelical Christian TEs who do think evolution is essentially unguided have to use guarded or nebulous expressions to conceal the full force of their thought, lest they be banned from teaching Sunday school or be kicked off the Board of Elders. It’s all very complicated. I would not suggest you make any generalizations about Christians and “guided” evolution until you have read the books and articles of a lot of people such as Lamoureux, Venema, Robert Russell, Conway Morris, the Haarsmas, Polkinghorne, Oord, etc. There is a very wide range of views on whether something like “guidance” operates in evolution, and a very wide range of views on whether, even if it exists, “guidance” is the best term to use for it.
I note that this must be close to the 100th Peaceful Science column in which the topic was not RNA world or origin of life, and in which no one was discussing RNA world or the origin of life, but in which Mercer has complained about Meyer’s alleged major error on this topic. Carthago delenda est.
You were. Literally. You were claiming that scientific literature about the origin of life was more important in these alleged ID discussions than labeling people as atheists. Why do you know so little?
Hmmm. Alleged? It’s objectively false, so are you saying that Meyer deliberately misled his readers?
What happened to Dembski and Wells, who made the same false claim?
I’ll read the rest of your message when I feel like a good laugh, or maybe to feel pity for someone so consumed with hubris he is incapable of acknowledging the barest and simplest facts that contradict his beliefs.
I mean of course for the purposes of discussion. Surely the fact that the “unguided” terminology is potentially misleading is relevant. The particular intellectual and theological concerns of Christians who do believe in “guided evolution” would be of concern in establishing whether the alleged “Machiavellian” manipulation was even possible, yet you seem unwilling to actually establish that point.
Either you have adequate knowledge of their beliefs to say whether they are compatible with “natural processes” but not “unguided” or you do not. If you do not then you can hardly allege that the change in terminology deceived them. And this does not require knowing the particular beliefs of individuals, just the knowledge that there are a significant number of people who hold such a belief.
Evangelical Christian TEs who think that evolution is essentially unguided would not be deceived by the change in terminology. Unless you are arguing that the change in terminology gave cover to these individuals and you object to that it is hard to see the relevance.
I would also point out that those Christians who do not believe that the guidance was detectable or through direct intervention are unlikely to support the DI and may well hold that the idea of guidance has no place in science classes. Indeed, explicitly ruling it out would seem a greater offence than simply not mentioning the idea.
You are jumping in as a third party on the discussion I was having with Arthur Hunt. When Arthur Hunt asked me what I meant by “unguided” he did not frame his question as a challenge to anything I said about Scott. Indeed, his emphasis seemed to be on the question whether “guided” evolution would amount in practice to anything empirically different from evolution due to natural causes. So I was trying to discuss the general idea of guided vs. unguided evolution, no longer with particular reference to Scott or the political situation which led her to do what she did. But your post keeps trying to pull the discussion back to my remarks about Scott.
I indicated that I would, at a later point in time, dig up a list of sources for you regarding the “unguided” discussion in relation to the motives of Eugenie Scott. I will post my summary under a separate topic here, and we can discuss it then. In the meantime, I’m talking about the conception of “guided” evolution, regardless of what Scott and various other people said about “unguided” in the culture-war context.
You seem to prefer discussing things based on off-the-cuff “general reasoning” rather than based on research into the works or thoughts of individual thinkers. We are quite different, that way. When I asked you what your academic background was, I was not asking for the purpose of questioning your credentials, but in order to try to get a better idea where you were “coming from” in these discussions, since it is hard to discern. (Other than that you come from a position of hostility toward both Discovery and the idea of intelligent design as an intellectual enterprise.) I come from a traditional humanities background, and my natural approach is to focus on texts and authors: analyzing passages and characterizing positions of authors. I am guessing that your academic background, whatever it is, is not traditional humanities, because you want to sidestep discussion of the wide range of thought within theistic evolution/evolutionary creation, which requires knowing a lot about what people did say, and talk instead about what such people probably would say, or what would be unlikely to fool them, or the like. You resist my request to anchor your discussion in texts or authors.
I get the impression that you have not read many of the texts or the authors I’m talking about, but even if you have read them, you don’t want a texts-and-authors discussion, but a sort of barroom conversation where the talk is about general ideas and probable consequences. I’m trying to figure out why you have a preference for that sort of discussion. That’s why I asked you what you had studied, etc. Are you willing to describe your academic background to us? I’m not asking for intimate personal information or even for the names of places where you studied, just what you studied, and at what level. Most of the rest of the people here have indicated their academic background and training, either in their “handles” or by direct discussion of their studies or both. But your background remains shrouded in mystery.
I anticipate that you may say that it doesn’t matter what you studied or what your expertise is, and that people here should just answer your particular challenges as they stand. In many settings, i.e., in non-polemical, non-politicized settings, I would probably agree with that. But as someone who has been involved on this site for years, and in internet discussions about origins for nearly 15 years, I cannot agree that “who the participants are” does not matter. If often influences what they choose to talk about and what to avoid, what epistemological biases they bring to discussions, and so on. It would help me at least to know a little more about you.
By which you mean that I joined the discussion to talk about what I wanted to talk about and not what you want me to talk about. That is not much of an objection.
The rest of your post seems to be essentially posturing.
The question I’m asking is whether the alleged deception even makes sense. It is far from clear that it does - and are we supposed to think that Eugenie Scott did a lot of deep reading to discover that it could work? That doesn’t seem to make it any more plausible.