Valerie, I gave you the direct quote. You responded with a different quote, talking about something else. Didn’t you recognize your own words?
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OK - I probably inferred something you didn’t write. Sorry we’re just talking past each other.
I think you’re talking past yourself.
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I think it was a noteworthy moment when Fazale acknowledged that there is good evidence for common descent (definitely a positive surprise), and simultaneously that there is a lack of any good competing creationist/ID hypothesis that accounts for the same data.
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Did he explain why, given that, he’s still a creationist? Todd Wood has taken a similar position and has said that he trusts that new data and/or theories will change the conclusion, based on his understanding of scripture. Is that what Faz says too?
That is not what Fuz says. He is certainly more open handed about this than Todd Wood.
Well, I’m not sure he would accept the dichotomy between creationist and evolutionist. For example, he would probably call me a creationist in important ways.
I think what you mean is, why then does he hold to the RTB model over, with lots of special creation, over some version of TE. In the interview, it seems that he holds it loosely. He is really open to taking a different view of it. I’m not sure how much is related to his place of employment too, because they really are the champions of OEC.
He points to the OOL as a key stumbling block, and also randomness. At the same time, he offers ways around his own objections. I get the sense that he is not okay with the narrative of evolution, and it is important that the telling evolution has an acceptable narrative. That is why, I think, he likes the idea of structuralism and of some of the other work in OOL. So this isn’t really an ultimate problem though, because science doesn’t really force into that anti-God narrative.
Perhaps just as important, he was very clear (as is chapter 25 of the book) that the GAE bridges quite a bit of the gap for him. It isn’t RTB’s preferred position now, but it is acceptable to them. At the end, we talked about how the GAE really does blur the lines for them, such that it is a type of TE that feels a lot more like OEC to them. I think it has that narrative they are going for here.
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I do not understand what you mean by this typically cryptic utterance.
Yes. He’s a creationist in the sense that he denies common descent at, as I understand it, quite a low taxonomic level, including separate creation of most species. So if the evidence doesn’t show that, why not TE?
What does that mean? “Open” is so ambiguous as to mean very little. Accept common descent or don’t. There’s no justification for being on the fence. Unless you’re saying that he would be afraid of being fired if he came out as a TE advocate.
What narrative are you talking about? And what does structuralism have to do with anything?
Would a transcript help you by giving you a chance to hear direction from him?
Yes, definitely. Like many others, I find watching videos like this fairly excruciating.
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We have a system set up now @John_Harshman!
If you join our patron team at the required level ($10/month, Peaceful Science is creating a civic practice of science. | Patreon), I’ll get this video transcribed for you to read; it will be the first one we do. This is asking you, basically, to chip in less than 10% of the cost. i.e. its a good deal.
What I appreciate about Fuz is his willingness to engage with the scientific evidence and his demonstrated ability to change his point of view in the face of new evidence (as he did with data showing Homo sapiens interbreeding with the Neanderthals). I might be wrong, but my take is that his statements could be confusing, because his reasoning and his ideas might be evolving over time. At different points in the conversation he is walking through a narrative of his thought process from where he used to be to where he is now.
@John_Harshman
What he says is, as a biochemist by training, he, “…started off life embracing an evolutionary perspective. I came to faith in Christ after kind of a revelation, if you will, in graduate school that the origin of life, at that time, and even today feels like an intractable problem for chemical evolution. Plus, seeing the elegant design in biochemistry. That convinced me that there was a creator, and that led to my conversion. But up to the first decade or so as a Christian, I held to a view that today you would call Theistic Evolution or Evolutionary Creation. And it was really later on where I felt like I began to see not so much theological issues, but some scientific gaps in the evolutionary paradigm, similar to what I saw with the origin of life. That really motivated me to embrace a position that we would call Old Earth Creation or Progressive Creation.” (note, however, that later in the conversation, Josh and Fuz do discuss some theological challenges Fuz sees with the TE/EC perspective, namely the requirement, in Fuz’ view, for a historical Adam and Eve. I also imagine that science was not his only reason for coming to faith, that there was probably more to his story, as well)
@swamidass also pointed to the discussion starting around 23:00, At that point Fuz said that, “I am not somebody who says that there is no evidence that humans share evolutionary ancestry with other creatures. I think there are really compelling reasons why people would draw that conclusion, regardless of their world view.” Josh also asked Fuz to list the evidences that make a compelling case for common descent, and Fuz replied, “the singularly most compelling evidence would be shared nonfunctional sequences within the human genome and the genome of the great apes, where you can actually construct nested hierarchies with those sequences. That is a compelling reason to think there is common descent. But one of the points we make in the book is this idea that in science you face the under determinacy problem, that theories are always underdetermined by data. What that means is that a set of data can never exclusively support a single theory and rule out other theories, but that there are other theories that could in principle exist that could be radically different than the theory at hand and could still accommodate or account for that data, or that data would be in full support of that theory. So one of the things that we argue at RTB is that you could actually look at those shared biological features as shared design as opposed to shared descent. And we point out in the history of biology there was that idea that did indeed exist prior to Darwin. So that would be where we would say, yes, there would be evidence for common descent, there is no question about it. And I do feel the thrust of the evidence for common descent, but what we are doing with our approach is to say that here is a possible alternative explanation for those shared features that we think could fully accommodate the data. To be fair, we have not really done the hard work of producing what we would call an RTB genomics model to account for those shared genetic features. That is a project that is kind of in the wings that we are looking to do, so to be fair, we have not pushed on that question as hard as we should”
Can I get $10 for this partial transcription? 
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…up to a point. It may not be clear what that point is, but can it possibly extend to common ancestry of humans and other primates?
The question at hand is not how he came to faith, but how he came to OEC progressive creationism. Those are two quite different things, right?
But of course this is not true. Shared design doesn’t explain nested hierarchy unless the designer is trying to simulate common descent. And why would that be?
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Yes. We specifically discused this.
And he agrees with this in th video too!
Again with the cryptic one-liners. Does Fuz now accept common ancestry of all primates? What about all mammals? Etc.
Then I’m at a loss to explain the passage I quoted. Can you reconcile his agreement with the statement? To remind you:
He accepts that there is compelling evidence for it. Any more then that, and he would not be OEC any more.
So what prevents him from abandoning OEC? If I’m a scientist who thinks the order Falconiformes as traditionally constituted is monophyletic, and I get compelling evidence that it isn’t, I abandon that tradition. I don’t say that I hope there will some day be counter-evidence. I just accept what current evidence shows.
I agree with you John, Fuz’s position of accepting that the data point to common descent, but wondering if there could be another genomics model that would fit the data and allow for shared design is confusing. Perhaps he will change his mind and start fully affirming evolution if he could square evolution with some theological constraints, such as a historic Adam and Eve. The only other philosophical difficulty he seems to have with evolution is the idea that evolution is random/unguided, but as discussed above, Josh and Fuz agreed that idea is not actually what the science requires, its more of difficulty in how the science is discussed.
There may be other constraints for him, as well, but those were the ones discussed in the video.
It does sound like he and others at RTB or at least people within their broader scholars network are willing to continue engaging with the GAE model, as discussed with Josh around the 1 hour mark, and people with broader views, such as GAE would be accepted in the RTB scholars network. During this video, Fuz did not mention other scientific questions about evolution that he has, perhaps that would be detailed more in the book. @swamidass does the book go into places where RTB thinks that the current data do not fit with a theory of evolution, or is the challenge with evolution for them more with theology than with science?
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A question: is evolution really ‘narrated’ as being any more random/godless/unguided than other fields of science?
Is Plate Tectonics presented as guided? Cosmology?
This line of argumentation always brings up the absurd image of God standing outside a casino, complaining that he cannot enter, because everything in there is random.
People every day see God’s hand in all manner of apparently-completely-random events, yet many seem to be mortified by the idea that Evolution is, at least as far as any scientist can ascertain, founded upon random events (if, due to Natural Selection, not being completely random in outcomes).
I cannot help but see in this something that appears to be neither scientific nor theological but rather, I suspect, psychological.
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Yeah I’ve been wondering something similar. You could even imagine that a God would use a random process. If God wants a fair coin to land heads a million times in a row, he might as well just keep flipping it till that happens? It’s not like he’s gonna run out of time, right?
Well in a similar way, if God wants a “random process” like evolution to produce humans, he can just create a universe (or multiverse) so big that it will contain so many planets that it is basically guaranteed to happen somewhere in that universe. There is strictly speaking no logically necessary contradiction between the idea of a God that “has a plan” and that God using a random process to achieve it. In this way the process of evolution can remain fundamentally blind, random, and unguided (God never intervenes in the process), yet because he’s “flipped the coin” so many times (in different parts of the universe, or in different universes), somewhere that blind and unguided process still produced what he wanted it to.
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He wouldn’t even need that. God, at least according to Christian theology, is omnipotent. If he wants the coin to flip heads a million times, it would do so – and no scientist would be able to prove that it wasn’t just some mammoth coincidence, if God did not want to reveal the fact.
The belief that God is guiding everything (Providence), without being able to point to evidence that anything beyond chance, the natural, etc, is ubiquitous in Christian belief. Yet the idea that he might likewise use apparently-unguided evolutionary mechanisms in the same way, is somehow anathema.
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