God designed autumn foliage for human enjoyment

I agree with you. I think if this post had been your first post the conversation would maybe have gone quite differently. I think your best posts are when you can slow it down and unpack a little about what you believe and why, rather than starting with telling other people about what you think they believe and what you think about their beliefs. I know it’s hard when you disagree with someone to not start from an adversarial posture, but in my experience conversations that start that way rarely end well (for anyone).

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This is insightful advice for all of us!

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Not just human enjoyment. Surely the autumn foliage was designed with dogs’ enjoyment in mind. See this video compilation of Stella’s Best Leaf Jumps of All Time:

I don’t have the fortunate opportunity of strolling through Central Park in the autumn—but it certainly does cheer my day whenever I watch Stella the dog enjoying a hearty leaf-pile plunge.

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Here is my feeling on this issue. God creates the world with the idea that a conscient being able to enter in communion with him could blossom in his creation. Therefore he designed his creation to welcome this conscient being in the manner of a couple preparing their house for the arrival of a child. In that sense, I disagree with you when you say that creation wasn’t made for us. Indeed, what sense could God make of a world devoid of a conscient being able to enter in communion with him?

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So let me articulate my real issue with this kind of thinking, hashed out with some text messages with @swamidass and the author’s response to my Twitter thread (which I admit was needlessly mocking). This Critique of 'What Passes for Serious Thought' Comes Up Short on Serious Thought | Tom Gilson

When we discuss the beauty and wonder of nature, or of “creation” if you prefer, and of the emotional response that said beauty evokes, that’s all fine and good as poetry. (And I don’t mean that to dismiss. I enjoy poetry and beauty and nature!) And it may also be very good as theology. But where I find it problematic is when it tries to enter the realm of science. And this article, published on “Evolution News and Science Today,” definitely does that.

If we’re going to approach the lovely colors of autumn from the perspective of beauty and calling us toward awe of God’s work in the world and all of that… that’s just gravy. And I love gravy. But if we approach the topic of leaf senescence from the perspective of plant biology or evolutionary biology, there are some real traps we would fall into in claiming that it is has anything to do with human enjoyment.

Leaf senescence is a physiological and genetically programmed process that performs specific functions. Those functions were in response to selective pressures experienced by a population of early plants. This particular adaptation gave the plant an important advantage in the grand and natural struggle for survival and success. That’s why it evolved, and that’s why it persists today, because it benefits the plants.

At the time this evolutionary process first played out, it is more likely than not that NO animal could even perceive let alone appreciate the rainbow of colors that result from senescence. (The vertebrate eye was in its evolutionary infancy.) The process evolved to benefit the plants, not to dazzle the animals. And it has evolved and developed extensively since then, always (or almost always) for the direct benefit of the plants and only the plants.

The notion that this process could have evolved for the purpose of delighting creatures that would only appear hundreds of millions of years later is, to be blunt, absurd, from the biological perspective. Traits and adaptations emerge because they benefit the organisms who harbor those traits, not because they make other organisms happy. (Even attracting and feeding pollinators and seed dispersers is ultimately for plants’ self-interest.) That’s how evolution works. And presenting evolution accurately is important to me, and should be important to all scientists.

To claim that an ancient adaptation was designed to please modern humans is simply not tenable because it violates what we we know about how organisms evolve. If this essay had appeared on Christianity Today, Id have no problem with it because it would be obvious that it is theology. Or poetry even. But this is poetry masquerading as science and that’s why I spoke up. Does the DI wants EN to be taken seriously as a science website or not?

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What bothered me most in Tom Gilson’s rejoinder was:

Nathan Lents answered him, “Maybe @TomGilsonAuthor can enlighten us as to why we can’t say the trees are beautiful.” I didn’t. I said they can’t say it honestly and coherently.

I’m fine with someone expressing their personal belief that among God’s purposes in creating the various processes which produce the various leaf pigments there was also the goal of creating visual beauty. My problem is:

(1) “I said they can’t say it honestly . . .” If they can’t say it honestly, does that imply dishonesty?

(2) “I said they can’t say it . . . coherently.” So are they incoherent?

Implying dishonesty and incoherence—and that was the impression I got in reading that sentence—seems rather insulting, IMHO.

For the record, I’m one Christian who sincerely believes that an atheist can be dazzled by the beauty of nature while being both honest and coherent.

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Thanks, Allen! That’s why you’re a mensch!

Right, that’s why I put the emphasis on just and for in those sentences. I believe God created a world in which beauty could exist, be enjoyed, and shared. We are part of creation, maybe even the most important part (I’m not sure if we’d know), but it’s a real stretch to assume that things we see or enjoy were created especially for us to see or enjoy. I just think it’s easy for theists (and particularly ID folks) to place too much emphasis on an anthropocentric interpretation of “purpose” in natural systems. As @NLENTS pointed out, there’s good biological reasons for the change in leaf colors in the fall. That “purpose” doesn’t negate a more abstract or spiritual purpose, but it should also make us aware that everything in nature isn’t singularly focused on us.

Instead of adding a layer of meaning and understanding (“in light of a Christian worldview”) to an ordinary/scientific/physical meaning and understanding, it seems so often apologists want supplant or tear down the ordinary/scientific/physical meaning. I don’t understand why. The mere existence of this level of meaning is significant and supports the additional level of meaning for the Christian.

This really isn’t a zero sum game, we really can have a Christian understanding of purpose, design, beauty … and all the the wonderful things biologists have learned about how the world works and has developed. What I think we can’t do is go around telling people that what they plainly see in science and nature is really something else entirely.

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In other posts, I have quoted the classic hymn Great is Thy Faithfulness, and it is appropriate here.

Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.

What this here is referred to as a testimony of faithfulness, the YEC contingent in the big tent of ID dismisses as uniformitarianism. The orbit of the planet embeds a annual witness to the passing of the seasons, in the sediments of aqueous bodies, in the ice at the poles, and in tree rings - the annual production of which are directly connected with the leafy green of spring and those brilliant crimsons and golds of autumn. These can all be read as a testament to thousands and tens of thousands of years of reliable history of the earth’s past.

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Consider two questions.

  1. How did God create the universe and everything in it?

  2. Why did God create the universe and everything in,it?

Question 1 can to some extent be answered by scientific enquiry. Even evolution can be explained as how God set the physical laws and the niches that result in the diversity of life we see. There needs be no conflict with religion except when inflexible dogma countermands facts.

Question 2 is unanswerable by science. What answers can religion offer?

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But it doesn’t represent ID. It’s an opinion piece by Tom Gilson, who is not an ID theorist at all, but a writer of popular books concerning Christian faith and related topics. It expresses Gilson’s personal theological interpretation of the beauty of fall leaves, but it’s in no sense a work of ID theory.

Mike Behe, in his writing, has noted that as early as William Paley, design thinkers were going overboard and declaring proof of design in too many places, without rigorous arguments for design being made. I think Mike uses the stock example (which I don’t think Paley used, but apparently some people did, back in the 19th century) of the argument that the human nose was designed so that it could hold a pair of glasses, thus showing God’s providential care for those with poor eyesight. This sort of “design argument” Behe has no use for; and he criticizes Paley for many of the arguments in his book, and judges that Paley’s argument is at its strongest when he focuses on complex systems in organic beings (eyes, skeletal structure, etc.) that exhibit an apparently purposive arrangement of parts. You would never see Behe saying that “Fall leaves are beautiful, so the change in colors must have been designed” is a proper example of ID theorizing.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a Christian (and Tom Gilson is a Christian) seeing in the beauty of fall leaves yet another of the providential blessings of God. But that’s a theological interpretation of nature, not an ID argument, as Behe, Dembski, Meyer, etc. understand ID.

There is, of course, a reasonable question whether Discovery should have published Gilson’s piece. Not that it’s a bad piece, as a Christian reflection on nature, but it’s not an ID argument. But the remark in the opinion column above –

is unjust, because the Gilson piece isn’t an example of ID theory. One could agree with all of Nathan Lents’s criticism of Gilson’s argument, yet still be an ID theorist, for the same reason that one could think that some of William Paley’s arguments are rigorous and others are impressionistic and unreliable.

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There’s no such thing as an ID theorist because there’s no such thing as ID theory. There isn’t even a testable ID hypothesis. There are a bunch of religious zealots at the DI pushing the untestable speculation their particular God directly POOFED everything into existence and trying to convince ignorant laymen they are doing science. Seems to have worked with you.

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Now, now. I agree with your first two sentences, but these two weren’t necessary:

I actually think Eddie makes a good point and I agree with a lot of what he said. However (and there is always a however), firstly, Gilson’s sentences make, or at least approach, scientific claims as well as theological ones, and so they are fair game for scientific critique. He rails against the notions of evolutionary adaptations, and “evolutionist interpretations.” And secondly, Gilson himself connects what he writes to ID theory and the essay appears on “Evolution News and Science Today,” which pretends to be a science website, not a theological one. I’m not going to let them have it both ways. The DI tries to claim that their view is purely scientific and complain bitterly when it is called religious. And they publish essays like this. Which is it, guys?

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For the love of it!

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I really agree with this, so why did ENV publish it?

That is the puzzle on this essay…

The DI always struggles with being consistent and that’s pretty much always going to happen when you say you’re one thing but really you’re something else. Like I always say, the DI is its own worst enemy. They shoot themselves in the foot almost daily.

Oh good, another Stella fan. Definitely not your everyday dog. (Check out Stella braking if you’re not familiar with her.)

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Well, @swamidass, if you or any of the other Christians here (@Jordan, @AllenWitmerMiller) want to explain this to Tom, he’s hard at work insulting me on his blog. A real example of Christian charity. (Not that I was, either, but I don’t claim to be.)

Regrettable. :confused:

Are you saying you hold Christians to higher standards than you hold humanists @NLENTS?

That seems perfectly reasonable to me. I would just expand it to avoid the implication that a believer’s experience is more expansive than an unbeliever’s. I’m not convinced of this. If a believer thinks that natural beauty is only meaningful in the context of a creator, then I wonder if their framework is impoverishing, and not expanding, their human experience. So, maybe, instead of “beyond what an atheist will see” I might try “distinct from what an atheist will see.”

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