Thanks for this link, Ashwin. The article is just the thing I need. It’s from one of the few major ID books I don’t have!
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George:
While we are waiting for some industrious moderator to move this whole set of posts about Behe to a new location, I will provide you with a passage such as you have requested.
But he has suggested it as a possibility, and very explicitly, by affirmatively answering a direct question from a reader about it. Here is a passage I have quoted to you (or linked you to) before:
Q: I understand your current position to be that design is detectable in nature, and that design detection is not merely a theological gloss upon the scientific facts, but is actually an activity appropriate for science. I further understand you to be saying that design detection in itself is neutral regarding the way that the design found its way into nature. Thus, if the bacterial flagellum is designed, it could be that God took a regular bacterium and miraculously “tweaked” it, or it could be that God “front-loaded” the evolutionary development of the bacterial flagellum, in a manner similar to that suggested by, say, Michael Denton. Design detection as a science cannot rule on these things; all that it can show is that Darwinian mechanisms, all by themselves, could not have produced integrated structures such as the flagellum. If there was not direct intervention (tweaking, guiding, steering, etc.) or advance planning (“front-loading”), neo-Darwinian processes would never have been able to produce all the complex varieties of living things that we see today. Have I got your current position correct?
Me [MB]: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Notice that the questioner offers both miraculous tweaking and front-loading to Behe as possibilities, without indicating any preference for one or the other, and without suggesting that Behe has indicated any preference for one or the other, and that Behe’s response is that the questioner has put his position “exactly right.”
This would appear to settle one point. Given a very good opportunity to affirm or deny, or play up or belittle, miraculous tweaking, Behe remained firmly non-committal. He doesn’t give Venema, Coyne, Collins, etc. what they want to hear (that he believes in miraculous tweaking), and he doesn’t give you what you want to hear (that he believes in front-loading, and rejects miraculous tweaking or considers it a second-rate option).
This was written in 2009. I am unaware of any later statement of Behe that negates this. I have seen no statement saying, “I used to think there were two possibilities, miraculous tweaking and front-loading, but now I think there is only one, front-loading.” If you want to assert that he has dropped the miraculous possibility, the onus is on you to find a more recent statement that explicitly drops it.
As for me, I will stick with this very clear statement of his position on miraculous tweaking, until I have textual evidence that he has changed his mind.
There are further interesting comments in his statement, about how far design may extend into nature. He is characteristically cautious on that point, too, coming down somewhere between a whole-hog “Calvinist” position and the loosey-goosey “Wesleyan” position that BioLogos Nazarenes used to push – and even then admitting that he may be underestimating how far design extends. For the full article, see:
No, I demand that you show that there is an actual distinction between chance, law, and design. Something which you haven’t done, but are just assuming.
Can’t you read, at all? I’m saying you are making an assumption that there’s a difference between your so-called hypotheses A, B, and C, and it isn’t clear that this is really the case.
On the matter of design, all the designers we know of are made of cells, which are made of atoms and molecules, they need to consume food to think and act just like a computer needs electricity to run, their heads use a lot of energy and run hot (like the CPU does in a computer) and atoms behave according to well known laws of physics.
You seem to be suggesting there’s something fantastically magical going on that makes design completely unlike law and chance, and it isn’t clear what that is or even how it works.
No not at all, this is just some shitty excuse you give because you now suddenly realize I’m right and you have no actual way to evaulate the relative likelihoods of your various hypotheses.
… and I have no respect for anything you say about science or anything else.
Thanks, right back to you then.
Common sense is worth exactly nothing when trying to figure out how the real world works. You can’t “common sense” that diseases are caused by infectious microorganisms or virus particles (people used to think it was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft, and that was “common sense”), that organisms grow and develop because they’re actually made of tiny cells that divide in two (who common sensed that?), that time slows down when you travel at increased velocity, or that putting a photon detector on your double slit experiment collapses the interference pattern.
Common sense might be fine for working out you can’t make it across the street in time without getting hit by that bus, but that’s about it. Scientists are not employed to “common sense” the answers, sorry. No, it takes hard work. Observation, reason, and lots of testing. Exactly because it isn’t just common sense.
Ahh you’re confused. I’m not opposed to the idea of inferring that some object was designed and manufactured, as I already told you given the example of an advanced computer. But I must repeat myself, such an inference is only possible because the entity in question has certain attributes we recognize as the product of design by ourselves, and there is some approximate model of the designer and it’s means and motivations. And it’s evaulated against some competing models, where you suggested “sandstorms, earthquakes, and cosmic rays”.
“Chance”, “law”, and “design” aren’t models who’s likelihood can be evaluated, as I’ve been trying to get you to understand. Those are words. To have models you need to model something. There needs to be an explanation for how things come to be the way they are. Only when you have that can you start to evaluate relative likelihoods.
To say that an advanced computer was designed is to make a whole host of assumptions about what is happening. Someone is mining for ores, refining them, casting and shaping them and so on ad infinitum to make microchips, circuitboards, casings to house the components, an interface to operate the equipment and so on.
I gave you a very clear example of the automobile. An automobile may run into another automobile by chance; it rusts by natural law (oxidation); it comes into existence because of human design. No one would say that there was a “law” that forced my car to collide with my next-door neighbor’s car; no one would say that the latest Ford model emerged by “chance,” and no one would say that a car rusts in a scrapyard because of the car’s “design.” Everyone who speaks the English language understands these distinctions. And they exist in the language because they correspond to something real.
I read very precisely. But, like many scientists, you don’t write very clearly, when writing for a non-specialist audience. You introduced a sketchy position about brains and mind, and then when I drew an inference (since you weren’t helpful enough to draw it yourself) with examples of real-life designers, you savaged me for not getting your meaning right. Try writing a more full and stepwise exposition of your chain of thought, if you don’t want to be misunderstood.
You are confusing the physical conditions of the possibility of thought (and hence of the possibility of design) with thought itself (and designing minds themselves). I freely grant that human beings have bodies that need nourishment and that the mind does not function well with a malnourished body and so on. It does not take a Ph.D. in biology to be aware of this; human experience shows it. But that fact that material conditions are necessary for the operation of designing human minds does not prove that they are sufficient; it does not prove that there is nothing beyond the material level operating when human minds work. Still less does it prove (which it almost seems you are trying to prove) that the contents of human thought are dictated by the material conditions of the body, and hence ultimately by the laws of physics.
So the designer of an automobile may not be able to think straight enough to design well if he hasn’t had enough to eat, enough sleep, etc., but when he has had enough to eat, enough sleep, etc., his designing thoughts are not mechanistically determined by the physics-governed action of the atoms in the food that he ate this morning. That’s what you appear to be suggesting. If you are suggesting that, you could not prove it with anything less than a complete and adequate deterministic account of nature, and since even Spinoza and Kant failed to deliver that, I doubt you have such an account ready. (And if you do, you can pick up a second Ph.D. in philosophy anywhere you like, for surpassing the greatest minds of the past.) But if you aren’t suggesting that, if all you are saying is that people need biological sustenance before they can think well, we have no disagreement – but then you’re simply uttering facts of common experience which need no academic confirmation.
I said nothing magical. The distinction between nature, art (design), and chance goes back to Aristotle, whose way of understanding the world was certainly not “magical.” The professor of evolutionary developmental biology, Armand Marie Leroi, calls Aristotle the man who “invented science.” (See his book The Lagoon.) A little broadening of your intellectual horizons, perhaps by reading some philosophy, would help you interact better with non-scientists.
[edited by author to take into account paragraphs missed in the original]
I missed this qualification. Your original statement, which I objected to, did not contain it. Your original statement seemed to imply not just that we have to have some idea of what designed objects look like, based on our own experience of design (which I agree with), but that in order to infer that any particular thing was designed, we must have knowledge of the designer (or potential designer) of that particular thing. In other words, if an alien raced designed the thing on Mars, we could not make a design inference unless we knew something about the characteristics of that race. That is how I took your original statement. And understood in that way, your statement would have been wrong.
If you are now saying, “No, we don’t have to know anything at all about the existence of any intelligent race beyond man in order to determine that the Martian object was designed, but we do have to draw upon our experience as human beings of design and designed objects,” then you are saying something I completely agree with. If we could have established that agreement earlier, we could have averted a whole string of annoying interventions by Tim, which would have pleased me no end.
I didn’t mean them as scientific hypotheses in a technical sense, just as broad possibilities. But they could easily generate hypotheses that are testable. I gave some examples of these testable hypotheses to Mercer, above, when he made the same complaint you are making now. You can read them.
Of course. I not only knew all this, but was insisting upon it, against Tim. It’s precisely because we know that “chance” events and “natural laws” don’t mine, refine, cast, shape, etc. to anywhere near the level that would be needed to produce the thing, that we can rule out the whole set of hypotheses which I was encompassing in shorthand with “chance” and “law.” Our realization that law and chance don’t have the “stuff” that it takes to construct such things, while intelligence and foresight do, thrusts design upon us as “the best explanation” for the Martian object, even if we can find no trace on Mars of the race that actually designed it.
Rumraket:
The system tells me that you are already composing a reply to my response above. If you are replying to my original response, please hold off until you have read the newest version, above. I have added new material, amplified discussions, and removed some unnecessary polemical intonations. I would like my reply to be judged by its best version, not its worst.
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I could not care less what everyone you know understands by those words. You’re claiming to be able to reliably infer design by evaluating the relative likelihoods of different explanations. “Design”, “chance” and “law” isn’t explanations, they’re words. What “everyone” understands by those word is neither here nor there. It may be the case that people generally have some sort of implicit understanding of what a “chance”, “law”, or “design” explanation entails, but you’ve not made it clear what those implicit understandings are. If you want to be able to infer that design took place as opposed to something else because you think design is the more likely of those explanations, you’re going to have to give those actual explanations.
You can’t evaluate the relative likelihoods of words.
Now you’ve become hung up on the word proof, as if we need to know to an absolute logical certainty how the mind works in order to be able to say with some confidence that the mind is the product of physics. That’s absurd. There isn’t anything we know about how anything works which we know for certain, and yet we are perfectly fine saying we know how it works.
There is no scientific fact that “proves” that anything works in a particular way. It will always be possible for some future observation and data to “overwhelm” the already collected evidence and overturn our current understanding of how things work. It’s not clear what could ever suffice to “prove” that the mind is the product of physical laws and interactions. All we could ever do is observe that the matter in our brains and bodies behave a certain way, manipulate it physically and chemically in different ways, see how these manipulations change and affect the behavior of the subjects, and then correlate that behavior with the recollections of the thoughts and experiences the subjects have. Interestingly, such work has been done and the results published.
If this is not enough for you to accept that the mind is the product of physical interactions between the material constituents of your brain, body, and physical surroundings, then what could? You want something you call “proof”. And how would that be different from accepting that computation is the product of the behavior of matter in a computer? All scientists could do here to show you, is to explain how they understand microchips to work, then “demonstrate” it by runing different currents through pins on a microchip, and read outputs on a monitor.
Which would be analogous to having biologists explain how they understand braincells to work at a physical and chemical level, then physically and chemically manipule someone’s brain and body, and then observe how they behave, including by having subjects tell you about their experiences. What is really the difference then, and why would you accept evidence that computation is the product of physics from such experimentation, but not accept that thinking is?
So the designer of an automobile may not be able to think straight enough to design well if he hasn’t had enough to eat, enough sleep, etc., but when he has had enough to eat, enough sleep, etc., his designing thoughts are not mechanistically determined by the physics-governed action of the atoms in the food that he ate this morning.
That makes no sense. If you’re saying his thoughts ARE contingent on how much food he ate, given that you agree his thinking will be poor if he didn’t eat enough, then why is it suddenly not contingent on what he hate if he did eat enough? It seems to me you’re conceding a direct causal link there concerning the amount of food. That enough food DOES partly cause certain thoughts.
Eat little food → think a certain way.
Eat lots of food → think a different way.
The amounts and types of food affect how well and what you think. If certain chemicals are present in your food it significantly alters how you think and behave. Physical trauma can cause the experience of pain, which can significantly alter your mood and behavior. You can then consume certain chemicals that stop the pain experience, and your mood and behavior then changes.
If certain nutrients are lacking from your food for long enough, even if you eat lots of food and therefore do obtain enough energy, it will still start to degrade your ability to think. Certain dietary fats for example are known to be important for brain function.
Some of the consequences are just more obvious, or “stand out” compared to your “normal” behavior, more than others. Consume lots of alcohol and your thinking and behavior radically alters. Your inhibitions might significantly degrade and you might behave “inappropriately”. You totally wouldn’t start hitting on that co-worker normally that’s just not who you are, but on enough ethanol, that is who you are.
Other forms of cognitive decline or change might be more subtle. Small changes in mood and priorities that aren’t immediately perceptible because their effects are minor can entirely plausibly result from your intake in the relative proportions of sugars, proteins, and carbohydrates. And then there’s all the other non-essential chemicals in food that can affect your cognitive function, mood, and performance. Caffeine?
That’s what you appear to be suggesting. If you are suggesting that, you could not prove it with anything less than a complete and adequate deterministic account of nature, and since even Spinoza and Kant failed to deliver that, I doubt you have such an account ready.
So this is what it comes down to. You want a “complete” account for everything that happens down to the level of the subatomic, or you don’t accept that is the product of physics? Now it is YOUR standard of evidence that has been elevated “a thousand times”, and this time higher than any standard of evidence used anywhere in science. There are no “complete” accounts for anything at all except “simple” systems involving a few hundred or thousand particles in computer simulations.
Nobody has a “complete” account for any hurricane that ever happened. Yet I take you to have suggested that you have no problem accepting that a hurricane is a manifestation of the laws of physics.
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But that is what I’m saying. To make a design inference you need to have some implicit understanding of what design, and the alternatives to design, involves. It is difficult to conceive of how you could have some implicit understanding of design without it also entailing certain attributes of the designer.
To see why, try to reverse the situation and imagine you are about to infer that “law” took place rather than design. How would “law” be the best explanation for the entity in question? You have to have some implicit understanding of what that “law” is like for it to be able to explain the entity in question, and another implicit understanding about the designer you are ruling out in favor of “law”.
Let’s say you are inferring that gravity caused some star to come into existence from a cloud of gas. Why do you infer gravity instead of design? Well you know that law is capable of creating the star from gas (in this case, a mutual force of attraction between the gas molecules), but why is it more likely than design? Why are you inferring law as opposed to design? You need to have some implicit understanding of what some hypothetical designer is like to reject it.
To reject design as the best explanation, you have to constrain the designer somehow. There’s something that makes it less likely that some designer made the star. You have to make assumptions about the designer then. You have to understand it in some way. What it can do and what it wants.
If you don’t somehow constrain your designer, it becomes impossible to rule it out.
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This is not really logical. If you can define clearly what a “Law” can and cannot do, then you can have patterns which cannot be described or explained by said laws.
End of the day, the difference between Design, Law and chance are just a difference in patterns in which data falls. As of now, its entirely possible that the scientific method comes up with a false positive for law/chance as an explanation for something that is the result of design.
Your arguments all point to this fact.
Not just everyone I know, but English-language users generally.
The point is that is not just I who would infer design in the Martian machine case. So would you. So would Mercer. This is not a case of me imposing my will on you or anyone. You would come to the same conclusion that I do, and for exactly the same reasons. You enumerated those reasons in your last post. I agree with them entirely. Meteoroid strikes (whether you class them as due to “chance” or “laws of celestial mechanics” or both) aren’t going to mine and refine metal. Nor are sandstorms or cosmic rays. Such things aren’t “causally adequate” to produce my hypothetical contraption.
Bear in mind also that in my example I was speaking only of the case of machines. I did not make the further claim that this reasoning applied without any adjustment to organic systems. My original point was only that one does not always have to know something about the proposed designer of something in order to infer that the thing is designed. That is the only thing I insisted on. I wanted to make that very limited point, in order to clear a bad criticism of design inferences off the table. I didn’t say that there couldn’t be good criticisms of design inferences. But something about the ethos of this place causes people not to recognize when someone is trying to make a limited point, and when someone is asking only for a limited concession. There is an over-reactiveness.
I find your long discussion of how matter affects the brain and thought not only tedious (because after 50 years of reading this kind of stuff, I’ve heard it all before), and in part preaching to the choir (since I already agree that physical/chemical things about our makeup can influence our moods), but also rather ironic. For years critics of ID have shouted at ID proponents that mechanical analogies don’t accurately describe organic systems, that organic systems are quite different, etc. Yet here you offer an ultra-mechanical system in which not only the possibility of the brain’s operation but even the contents of its thoughts are determined “bottom up” by mechanical necessities. This is a far more extreme reduction of the organic to the mechanical than anything the ID people have ever proposed! For the ID folks, some parts of organisms have enough resemblance to human artifacts to make design inferences reasonable, but they have never argued that all of life, even up to the contents of our thoughts, can be explained purely in terms of mechanical interactions. I wonder if any of the critics of ID’s “overly mechanical” conception of living organisms will speak up against your remarks here.
How far would you take your mechanical vision of the universe? Would you say that the specific notes chosen my Mozart in his flute concertos were determined by what he ate the morning he wrote them? That we owe a B-flat to a rutabaga, and the subsequent B-natural to the fact that he drank three cups of coffee that morning? Would you say that the structure and meaning of Shakespeare’s King Lear is due to the Elizabethan diet? Would you say that Darwin argued the way he did in The Origin of Species, not because his mind made astute judgments of relevance regarding data scrupulously collected, but because of his recurring stomach problems? That perhaps if he had no stomach problem, he might have remained a Paleyan? Given your principles and your line of argument, you might go as far as to say such things; I can’t tell for sure. So do clarify.
You misunderstand my position. I don’t deny for a moment that both physics and chemistry lie underneath biology and even psychology (to some extent). I don’t doubt for a moment that physical causes can affect our emotions and thus indirectly our thoughts. Some people are extraordinarily depressed on rainy days, for example. (I’m not; I rather like rainy days, but some relatives had what seemed an almost physiological reaction to the rain which changed their mood.) I do not deny connections between the physical, chemical, biological and psychological levels. But you are making the sweeping claim that everything is ultimately explained by physics. And you can’t expect anyone to accept that claim unless you can offer a fully deterministic account of everything in the universe.
I don’t mean that you have to specify every detail of every event that ever happened, but that your account must be shown to cover everything, in principle. And the fact is that greater minds than yours have tried to make the case for such a complete determinism, and the consensus of the greatest thinkers is that none of these accounts so far has succeeded. Maybe you will succeed where everyone else has failed; you are welcome to publish your grand deterministic theory in full form, in a massive tome published by a respected academic publisher of philosophy or science, maybe E. J. Brill or Cambridge or the like. If you do so, and your account gets good reviews from thinkers I respect, I will read it myself. But for now, the claims you make here will be regarded by seasoned metaphysical thinkers as just so much materialist hot air, and will not be taken seriously by major thinkers, even if you can find plenty of philosophically untrained biologists and physicists who agree with you.
It’s not intrinsically implausible that a hurricane is explicable purely in terms of the laws of physics. I have enough training in physics to see this. It is intrinsically implausible that the art of Shakespeare or Dante is dictated in detail by interactions between electrons in the shells of atoms in their digestive system. Such a claim requires far more argument than the claim about hurricanes, on the general principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The onus is not on anyone to refute such a claim; the onus is on you to show that it’s plausible. And certainly nothing you have offered so far makes it plausible.
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Once again, you miss the point.
We know DNA and all other molecules involved in living things are natural molecules that arise thru natural processes. So there is no reason to suspect that the earliest molecules and their precursors were any different in this regard (Unless one has some religious agenda that is being propped up).
It would be no different than saying “Well, we know that, today, structures like pyramids are designed. But maybe, sometime in the distant past, they arose naturally.” Sure, one could suggest it. But what good evidence is there to support the claim?
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Yes, I need some conception of design and designers, but I don’t have to prove that there actually exist any intelligent races other than humans on Earth before I can infer that the contraption was designed. Rather, it’s the other way around. It’s precisely because I’m sure that the contraption was designed that I can (if I’ve correctly ruled out an Earth origin) safely infer the existence of another intelligent race in the universe. And the only attributes I have to impute to any inferred designer are (a) intelligence (their work shows that, so I don’t need to know in advance that they exist and are intelligent) and (b) have the ability to manipulate matter (which physical beings generally do). I don’t have to know how tall they are, what their average weight is, whether they are sexually distinct or hermaphrodites, whether they have two arms or four, or six-fingered or five-fingered hands, that they can or cannot show facial expressions of laughter, what planet they came from (if other than Mars), whether they built the contraption on Mars or built it elsewhere and dropped it off on Mars, what sort of political economy their civilization has, what religion they have, etc. I don’t need to suppose anything about a hypothetical designer of the contraption, other than they any designer of it must be intelligent, and must have ways of manipulating matter. I can make the design inference knowing zero about the race that did the designing.
Yes, my experience of design and designed objects will be involved in my inference. But that experience is of human designers and their designed objects. I have no experience of alien designers and their objects, but, at least in the case of the contraption I described, I wouldn’t need any. If you want to create a more sophisticated example, e.g., some ultra-advanced technological device which looks like a spherical rock, then yes, I might fail to recognize it as a product of technology, and imagine that it is some kind of natural product, maybe of vulcanism or the like. But I did not claim that we can always tell when a something is a product of design rather than nature. I said that we can sometimes tell; and if we can tell even sometimes, then the generalization, “You have to know something about the designer of the object you are studying,” is false, as a generalization. I think I’ve said enough to establish this point, so if you resist accepting it, I will leave it at that.
You are making an unnecessary opposition between design and law here. The formation of a star may well be law-governed, and gravity and nuclear theory may provide an adequate account of it. But a designer might will that the universe have a certain set of laws, precisely so that stars would be produced. And if evolution were conceived of as a lawlike process exactly parallel to that of stellar formation, then one could imagine that a designer might “front-load” all the results of evolution by setting up an initial position of the universe. Indeed, Denton in Nature’s Destiny adopted this as his position. So there is no logical conflict between design and organic evolution.
The case of the machine on Mars is quite different. There is no “lawlike” route from Martian dirt to that machine. So “designed by mind, but executed wholly by natural laws” is not acceptable as an explanation for the origin of the machine, as it could be for the origin of the star.
The case of the first living cell, seen in the light of these two contrasting cases, is ambiguous. Is a cell more like a star, or more like an artificial mechanism? If it is more like a star, then it would be tempting for a design theorist to say that God arranged the laws of nature so that cells would be produced; if it is more like a machine, then the design theorist would be more likely to say that God performed some hands-on activity in order to create it. And the ID folks are in fact divided over this. Denton seems to think that cells must have a lawlike explanation, i.e., the designer executes wholly through laws, never through “interventions.” But Meyer thinks that cells require a “hands-on” or “interventionist” explanation.
And of course, “mainstream” biological thought doesn’t adopt either of these explanations, since it thinks that cells can be explained without recourse to either front-loaded or interventionist design, but by “random” interaction of molecules combined with physical/chemical laws (which themselves need not have been designed, but might just be “there” in the universe for reasons we will never know). Mainstream thought on the origin of the first cell thus rests on a combination of “law” and “chance” that rejects design as superfluous.
So once again, the three general possibilities raise their head, with the mainstream account heavily (though not completely, since laws are also vital) resting on chance, Denton’s account resting heavily (though not completely; he grants a bit of contingency in small things, and sees an overall design as well) on law, and Meyer’s resting heavily (though not completely) on design. It seems that either the universe itself, or the categories of human thought, or both, generate these three alternatives (with various combinations and compromises) over and over again. This has been the case since the time of the Greeks, and I expect it will be the case indefinitely into the future.
That’s all the time I have for this long discussion. I have work to do!
You fail Logic 101. The inference is sloppy and loose, not tight. The movement from living thing to living thing, once the fact of inheritance is established, may be very different from the movement from non-living to living, before inheritance exists. The hands of the clock move in accord with natural laws, but it doesn’t follow that the clock was itself assembled by natural laws. That should caution one against leaps of the kind you are making. Again, it would help if scientists dealing with origins were more skilled in philosophical reasoning.
Do you have a citation for this quote?
It looks pretty impressive… but seeing it with my own eyes is still necessary.
Thanks!
The link is given in the last line of the post, in blue letters. Does it not show at your end?
Oh Eddie, you’ve read me wrong again and jumped to the ridiculous conclusion you desired instead of what actually is. Try re-examining my comments (above) in the context of the conversation I was having with Ashwin.
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Better mousetraps speak for themselves.
But you do oppose them.
Did you forget the analogy you used?
“Teachers decide that a student has plagiarized on the same sort of probabilistic arguments (“What are the chances that this whole paragraph from Bertrand Russell could have been dreamed up by the student independently?”) that ID uses.”
No one is making that extrapolation. The evidence is a phylogenetic signal, and we are interpolating between living organisms, not extrapolating.
Note here that you are opposing evolution and design.
All of the evidence we do have is consistent with evolution. All of the fossils fit into the predicted noisy phylogeny predicted by evolution. The patterns of sequence divergence follows that same pattern.
I grow indignant when the refuse to address the evidence that I pointed to above.
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Wow, speaking of logic fails: We know how clocks arise, and that they do not arise thru natural processes. Absent any evidence, or even the barest beginnings of some kind of account, of how a non-biological designer could come into existence and how it would create things, to claim that the natural process of DNA replication had a non-natural beginning is a total non-starter.
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I disagree. When the watchmaker makes the watch, it arises through natural processes. It’s a false dichotomy to distinguish “design” from “natural processes”. The former is a subset of the latter. The argument theists make often implicitly assumes designers who can think and manipulate objects are unnatural, or supernatural, in some way. I don’t grant this implicit assumption.
Thinking is a particular type of physical and chemical reactions. Information comes in through the senses in the form of photons of light for vision, vibrations in air for sound, and temperature and pressure for touch, chemically propagates through nerves that enter the brain, is processed by moving around through neuronal networks in the brain and are experienced as thoughts, and the output is (as contrasted to a computer that just produces patterns of pixels on a screen) to move the limbs around by chemical signals again traveling through nerves to the muscles, causing contractions and extensions as required. And it all takes the conversion of useful energy to accomplish, in the same way that a machine being controlled by a computer hooked up to cameras and various other physical sensors to provide feedback from the environment, would do. There is no in principle difference here.
We see the watchmaker take gears and springs and assemble the watch. At no point does anything unnatural or supernatural transpire that isn’t governed by the same laws of physics that govern what happens when you boil oats, or the sun shines on the leaves of a plant.
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Why did you need to change his argument to make your point. This appears to be a Materialist epidemic.