God designed autumn foliage for human enjoyment

Conversation
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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!

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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…

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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.

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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.)

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Regrettable. :confused:

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

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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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Well, if he in passing makes particular scientific claims, then I have no problem with scientific criticism of those claims. But I’d say the same thing even if he had published the essay in First Things instead of ENV. So I don’t think that’s the main problem here.

The main problem is why Discovery put it on ENV. It’s an odd fit with the sort of thing that Nelson or Behe or Meyer would put up there. The only thing I can think of is that it makes an argument for design, and ENV readers are interested in arguments for design. I suppose if you think of ENV as analogous to a general interest magazine rather than a scientific journal, you could justify the inclusion. I think the overall aim of ENV is broader, more newsy, as much oriented to “science and culture” issues as to science questions narrowly. Compare ENV with another (indirect) Discovery publication, BioComplexity, which would never publish anything like the Gilson piece. The Gilson piece may be somewhat tangential on ENV, but it would be massively out of place on BioComplexity.

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Of course not! There’s no such thing as “ID theory.” It’s all rhetoric.

If ID theory existed, there’d be ID empiricists too.

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I hold them to their own standard. :slight_smile:

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Now you are losing me. Are you saying that your standards are lower than the standards of Christians? Maybe that is what you mean, and it is correct. I’m just asking to clarify :slight_smile: .

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Not lower. Different. For example, Christians are implored to “turn the other cheek,” which is not a humanist position that I’m aware of. Another example: Christians declare a whole set of sexual morals that humanists would either reject or be ambivalent to. Humanists, generally speaking, have considered and rejected some Christian mandates as not morally required or justified. Most Christians still maintain them so when they fail at them, they invite criticism such as mine. :slight_smile: Tom Gilson is not behaving as a model of Christian charity. I’m not either, but I don’t claim that I should.

A parallel: If a secularist had done what Jerry Falwell, Jr. had done with the pool boy, and said, “Yeah, so? This is part of the sexual experience that my wife and I enjoy and we’re all consenting adults,” no humanist would have mocked him. Falwell brought the criticism on himself with all his past statements about the sanctity of marriage, etc. By my standards, he did nothing wrong. But by his own standards, he did.

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