How to have a fruitful and respectful conversation

Wow that is a scathing review, but also substantive and devastating…

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Thanks, I’ll check out your review.

As far as I can tell, every review by a non-creationist has been substantive and devastating. Look at Charles Marshall’s in Science for another example. (Go UC).

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Thank you

Interesting. I’m curious if you would consider purpose and intent as part of design? Or are you referring to a conception of design which is wholly separated from any sort of intelligent agency?

I think that’s a healthy perspective.

I have discovered myself to be mistaken enough times that I now try to consider my current positions as tentative. This is why I keep seeking alternate views. Of course, challenging one’s own world views is never easy…

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Meyer and others have offered responses to at least some of Charles Marshall’s critiques in: Debating Darwin’s Doubt. I read it, but that was a long time ago.

Meyer responds to Dr. Prothero in Debating Darwin’s Doubt.

I’m currently reading and thinking about this very question: the book I’m reading now is From Darwin to Derrida by David Haig, subtitled “Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life.” Things like intent and purpose do exist, he seems to claim, arising from the existence of organisms who/that make choices.

For me, “purpose” is clearly part of the universe and especially part of the biosphere. “Intent” is squishier and smacks of future-looking teleology but in fact that is what organisms do. Since organisms affect and even direct evolution, it seems to me that we should not be hesitant at all to talk about these things. There is no necessary implication of the involvement of gods, and more importantly, there is no clear departure from norms of scientific thought.

Well, yes and no. Intelligent agency has arisen on earth, so we can’t separate it from design and evolution. But you probably mean to ask whether I’m referring to design without a designer, and yes I am. Gods are human creations, a mixed bag like all human creations, and supernatural designers do not currently have any explanatory value. (Yes, that can always change, but not by gazing at protein sequences or whatever the latest non-scholarship from the ID movement is about.) But more to the point is this: we know that design can emerge from “mindless” processes.

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The mere existence of a response doesn’t make it a valid argument.

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Of course not!

Thanks for the explanation, this helps me better understand where you are coming from.

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While each of the reviews above have their merits, in my opinion the single best critique of Darwin’s Doubt I’ve read is the one Nick Matzke did on pandasthumb. IIRC it’s a three-part series. Though pandasthumb is down atm so I’ll see if I can dig up some links from the wayback machine.

Edit: Found a working link to part II:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130624074055/http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/06/meyers-hopeless-2.html
And to part III:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140625124439/http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2014/06/meyers-hopeless-3.html

Part I is all the way back from 2004, so is a response to older works of Meyer’s.

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I’m interested in this, if you have time could you elaborate a little bit on a few examples? I can think of things that are ordered and elaborate, but I struggle to think about things I’d recognize as “design”.

I have in mind any process in which design emerges from a process that uses random (or even partially random) variation and selection. Here are a few examples:
Avida

Directed evolution of proteins

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15667-1

Genetic algorithms
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14544

We probably think of ‘design’ differently, then.

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These are intriguing (the details are over my head, but I think I get a general sense) but I struggle to see design, probably because …

That’s why I asked for examples, unfortunately it only helped a little (perhaps because I’m not a biologist) . I would like to understand better how you think about it because it seems quite different from the way I normally think about it. I would really like learn more about how you see it and expand my understanding of “design”.

10 posts were split to a new topic: Design Without a Designer?

It’s great to have you here, Eli. Thank you for sharing your testimony and journey with us! I hope you stay, we need more people like you here. The online discussion format is a challenging one, but helps exercise our empathy and challenging our thinking as we hear from people with different perspectives

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