Hopefully your question can spark a well-needed conversation.
I’m wondering if @swamidass and @sygarte and @Perry_Marshall would agree with me, that one of the biggest separations between ID and organizations like Peaceful Science and BioLogos is that many times, ID equates evolution WITH materialism. By evolution, I mean the philosophically neutral notion of descent with modification which may or may not include mutations that are random with respect to fitness and which may or may not include a natural explanation for the origin of life. By materialism, I mean the belief that the physical world is all that exists and that the universe is NOT teleological in any Aristotelian or Platonic sense.
One meaning is scientific, the other is philosophical.
I’ve seen posts by @NLENTS showing that Behe seems to equate evolution and materialism in his new book.
I think this is the main problem with ID and sets up an unecessary dichotomy.
@Agauger,
Do you see a difference between evolution as portrayed in the most up-to-date peer reviewed journals and materialism? If you do, then there’s a lot we could agree on.
Exactly. If, speaking hypothetically, God intervenes to cause particular mutations or fixations, that’s an evolutionary process. Mind you, no evolutionary biologists are proposing or seriously entertaining divine intervention as a process, nor do I see how it could be tested. But it would still be evolution.
It certainly could not be tested. But Robert Russel, John Polkinghorne and others have suggested God does something in the quantum world to somehow influence the evolutionary process. Behe has suggested similar things, the difference being he sees it as detectable design placed in the category of science rather than philosophical inference.
@Mark
I I am afraid that most of what I have seen falls into the camp of materialism of the most extreme kind, like the article I linked to. The kind of materialism that leads to despair, denial, suicide, anti-socialism, and worse. I have encountered it in science classes and lecture halls . I have encountered it in science textbooks and science magazines. I have encountered it in scientists themselves. I know there are scientists who don’t hold this view but I don’t know how they ground it in anything other than some sort of personal belief or philosophy above and beyond evolution.
What about organizations like this one, BioLogos, Templeton, Faraday?
Certainly these don’t make people suicidal. And yet they aren’t disputing the science. You say, it’s
not a radical enough of a break with the mainstream?
I’m pretty sure the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biologists don’t make people suicidal either. Perhaps Dr. Gauger’s basic premise is just plain wrong.
Haha. Given how free market oriented Jay Richards and the DI institute is, I think she meanings anti-social-ISM. Like cutting oneself off from family and friends. Right, @Agauger?
I’m not saying you can’t have faith or some sense of a higher purpose that gives meaning and believe in evolution, but it is not a natural progression. There needs to be a reason to believe.
I see nothing in there that makes a connection between materialism and suicide, other than unsupported claims by a few of the people mentioned. Is that how you do science?
