[quote=“Rumraket, post:208, topic:13955”]
Yes, which is why I qualified my response as “not among scientists.”
“Is evolution guided?” and “Are mutations guided?” are two very different questions. Evolution can be guided by natural selection, even when mutations are not.
But I think the bigger issue is between “externally guided” and “self-guided”. The creationists want to insist on external guidance.
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Sure. IIRC you used to be a full-bore YEC; please correct me if I’m wrong.
My question is about all three things you mentioned (except that I’m not a fan of using the verb “affirm” to refer to personal positions in the context of science).
Did the impetus for changing your position come from within you or from what someone else said/wrote/explained to you?
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Sorry, but it’s not clear to me how simply having a drive to understand how things work, whether from mere curiosity or wanting to improve medicine, counts as ideological.
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I became a Jesus follower in high school, found a creation science book that I enjoyed, and was pretty content to believe that the earth was young, and that God had created life pretty much the way we see it now. In the mid 90’s my friend, a biology student, told me about IC and I added that to my YEC toolbox. A few years later the same friend (then a biology teacher) told me that Black Box had not done well in peer review and that he was seeing research that made him question his anti-evolution stance.
That conversation started me on a journey of exploring what I thought Genesis was all about. My thoughts just percolated for a few years during which time I ran across Bible teachers that I respected who were not trying to make Genesis do science, and who thought evolutionary science was valid.
At some point that all resulted in a greater interest in science in general (I had given most of my attention to Physics before that). Reading about the fossil record and genetics discoveries became part of my hobby reading.
I had thought since the early 90s that the culture war was bad news, and the Christians has no business in it if they really wanted to do things Jesus’s way. In the 2000s, after my thoughts changed about how science and religion related, I saw the argument over evolution as part of the culture war, that Christian’s were making it hard for young people to stay in the faith because of how they talked about science (the everyone, including scientists, are out to get us silliness), and were in general not serving society well because of the culture war mess.
I did not know much about ID until a few months ago when I found you guys. I had not run into them since Black Box. As I read posts here from ID folks and saw Josh debate these guys on videos, I developed opinions that are surely informed by my own science and Bible journey as well as the thoughts I had developed about the culture war over the decades.
How’s that? Too much? Need more?
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I’ll save you having to watch 20 minutes. Behe’s case amounts to this: It sort of vaguely resembles something humans have designed, fits well together, and it has an adaptive function = it’s made for that purpose by design.
That’s it. That’s ALL there is to it.
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I suspect that Michael is aware that science doesn’t do “why” questions, so it would appear to me that his inclusion of that word is a clear signal that he wasn’t referring to science.
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Behe’s method is “it looks designed to me”. Subjective opinions really aren’t that compelling.
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Um, I was simply pointing out the extreme difficulty in reconciling the supposed involvement of a loving, all-powerful God in our evolution and the observation of crippling, conditionally strongly deleterious mutations in GULO, a gene critical to our nutrition. This supposed designer had millions of years before the emergence of modern humans to fix GULOP but decided to let it persist and further degrade. This strongly suggests there was no designer and it all happened unguided, or that there was a designer, but a highly malicious one.
If by “guided” you mean being led by a conscious intelligence, then based on available evidence this is false, because the existing conscious intelligent life forms we know of appeared billions of years after biological evolution had begun. This rules out their involvement in moments of natural history prior to their emergence.
Of course, if the mind you have in mind is that of some alien designer, then your point stands, although with the least parsimony.
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Bill, I’ve actually listened to that a couple of times in the past. I’ll take another listen so I can tell you what I think about Mike’s presentation.
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I dunno. I think it’s pretty clear: the creationist borrows, as always, from the postmodernist toolkit. To the postmodernist, EVERYTHING is ideological. Reality? Ideological. Reason? Ideological. Careful scrutiny of evidence? Ideological. Objectivity? Subjective, and ideological, to boot.
I grew up across the street from a rail switching yard, and we had all sorts of dangerous shifty characters who used to show up at the front door looking to sell us the things they’d stolen from other people in the neighborhood. But what these dangerous shifty characters lacked, and their ID Creationist counterparts do not, is a body of apologetic. If they’d been Intelligent Design Hobos, they’d have explained how “private property” was a social construct, and that our understanding of how the world worked was nothing more than an interwoven set of stories, no more valid and no more objectively right than the ID Hobo point of view. They’d have explained that not only did the acetone-like smell of cheap whisky on their breaths have no objective existence, but that if it did exist in some subjective sense it represented a fresh perspective: a solvent that would unbind us from the shallowness of our own lives.
And that is ID: homeless and dirty, inviting us to live on a lower plane and to imagine it to be a higher one. But while the life of these men who rode the rails and did odd jobs and a bit of stealing had, at least, a kind of sense of adventure about it, the intellectual life of ID is not so fulfilling as that.
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Yeah but look at the bacteriophage. It’s got moving legs!.. and an icosahedron.
QED.
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Extreme difficulty? It’s hard to read this with a straight face. This is trivially compatible with the Christian God.
Theologians get thumped for making absurd scientific claims. What should we do about the absurd theological pronouncements by people ignorant of theology?
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Michael, in my opinion, your argument is philosophical, not scientific in nature. What you have here is one side of a philosophical discussion, not an example of science demonstrating that a mind has not been involved somehow in evolutionary processes.
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Fine then, explain to me why a supposedly benevolent deity allowed GULOP get to us?
Well you could get me an empty chair and explain why I can’t make vitamin C thanks to guided evolution by God.
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I wasn’t making a scientific argument.
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I can do that, and I’m an atheist. Endless amounts of possible answers can be made up. My favorite is that since God is defined to be the standard of morality, and perfectly morally good, then God having allowed whatever ailment we suffer is by definition good. See how easy that was? Some people get paid a living to give answers such as that to questions such as yours. Think about that.
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It can tell us what evolution looks like, though. If it looks unguided, then it certainly could be guided anyway. But Occam’s razor is useful. It doesn’t tell us what’s true, but it tells us what we should probably suppose. And god is the ultimate multiplication of entities.
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To support the citrus industry.
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Wanted us to have an enjoyably varied diet.
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