Bill I’d appreciate an answer to this question. Thanks.
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Oh, I don’t know – I thought your answer responded to my question very directly! Thanks for that thoughtful response.
I find this part of your characterization of those views sort of funny, and guess you would probably agree (and to be clear in the service of politeness: it is obvious from your post that these are not your OWN views you are describing!):
I get that, and as you say, this is a visceral judgment, so it perhaps isn’t thought through very well. But I would want to say to those people: if God DID use evolution, and if God is good, then perhaps evolution is NOT evil.
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Indeed. I tend to strive towards a certain felicitous humor. (Especially when there is self-deprecation involved.)
Correct. In fact, I sometimes shock Christian friends and associates by saying, “If you really want to understand how God brought about ________, then you need to ask a biologist/physicist/chemist/astrophysicist/geologist/et al.” If it is a question about how something in the universe operates or came to be, my science colleagues are generally much more helpful than my theology colleagues. I defer to relevant expertise. Why would it be any other way? Moreover, if God created everything and God can be trusted, then nature should be filled with what God wants us to know about the history of the universe and the processes he created.
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When characterizing beliefs one has himself held, albeit only in the distant past, it is easy sometimes to find them a bit amusing. I spent much of my childhood completely enraptured by Erich von Daniken’s books, and several scientists I have spoken to were similarly fascinated by Velikovsky, once upon a time. Ah, foolish youth!
Exactly. That’s “natural theology” minus the usual Paley-isms.
In addition to that, I would observe that these same people often retreat behind God’s inscrutability when it suits them. Point to the OT genocides, for example, and some of them will say that parts of God’s plan are not intelligible to us because the mind of God is unknowable. I have considerable difficulty with that when applied to such a subject, but I cannot help but think it applies here. How do you (asking my imaginary interlocutor, not you, obviously) know the mind of God so well that you know God would not use evolution? If he’s inscrutable, well, he’s inscrutable.
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@Puck_Mendelssohn , it looks like I failed to include reason #4: Lots of people assume that a “poof-creation” event is much more impressive than an event-with-a-natural explanation—and that the former is much more befitting an impressive Creator. But why? For those of that poofing-is-better persuasion, I sometimes pose this question:
“Which is more impressive to you: someone who can build a car from the basic raw materials found on earth—or someone who can build a conveniently portable suitcase which, when opened, proceeds on its own to construct a series of factories and eventually starts churning out an endless variety of cars?”
That scenario is also my explanation of why I tell my fellow Christ-followers that I consider evolutionary processes among the most spectacular of God’s creations.
And that is one of many reasons why I can read an evolutionary biology textbook or watch a PBS Nova documentary about the evolution of some form of life and (1) say “That’s really amazing!” and (2) profoundly appreciate the contributions of the many scientists who have made that understanding possible. I have no reason for any theological conflict.
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I find this line of thinking very much to my liking. I am of course NOT a Christ-follower, but if I were, I would agree with you precisely. It is more of a “miracle,” so to speak, to create a universe so wondrous that miracles grow out of the ground itself than to just have a stage-magician-like capability to make objects spontaneously appear.
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And that brings to mind some of the discussions I’ve had with people who insist that Genesis 1 requires “instant poofing” of entire forests, mountain ranges, and ecosystems. I scarcely know where to start with that idea. (Why would God create instantaneous mountain ranges which provide a detailed pseudo-history of destructive erosion forces, for example. Does the Creator enjoy planting false histories to confuse us? And what about soil, which is created very slowly over vast periods of erosion and chemical and biological processes?) Doesn’t the existence of seeds in itself suggest that God creates amazing sequential processes, rather than simply making new trees on a daily basis around the world?
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And how many of us were fascinated by Thor Heyerdahl and his voyage on the Kon-Tiki?
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You quoted me out of context, presumably for trying to make me look like an ignorant pedantic. To set the record straight, here is the whole quote you should have used if you were to convey honestly my thoughts on this topic instead of a straw man version of them.
Indeed, the remarkable thing in gpuccio’s figure is not the sequence divergence but, on the contrary, the high level of sequence similarities that is observed for the six proteins between humans and the common ancestor of fishes. Given that fishes appeared more than 400 millions years ago, it means that these similarities have persisted through deep time. As such, they allow to estimate the FI of the six proteins at the dawn of vertebrates. Now, the level of sequence similarities between pre-vertebrates and humans for the six proteins is much less than what it is between humans and fishes. Hence the information jump associated with the transition to vertebrates.
(*My emphasis added)
That is false. Sequence conservation can not tell us how many different sequences could have had the same function in that common ancestor. The only thing that sequence conservation can tell us is which sequential changes can be made to that original protein without losing function. It can’t tell us how many starting points there are for that specific function (i.e. functional information). Also, it also can’t tell us how many possible functions could have evolved.
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Why can’t you tell us how to calculate FI in human created objects?
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By the way, FNL has no such problem. The only question is whether you want mass-scaled or length-scaled FNL. Mass-scaled FNL is better for detecting human design; length-scaled is better for detecting supernatural design.
There is, of course, some debate between FNL theorists over multiple-necked things. Most go with the maximum length neck measure, but there are good arguments for measuring all necks and taking the root mean squared of neck length.
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After actually reading his work, I have always thought that the Omphalos hypothesis as presented by Philip Henry Gosse is subject to more derision than is due. His main point is not that a mature creation would have built in age, that was really just his premise. What he was leading up to was that created age would be indistinguishable from the real deal, no matter how closely one looked. In modern terms, Adam would not only sport a naval, but be mature right down to his tooth enamel and telomere lengths. This is a scientific non-starter, of course, and rejected theologically due to the false history implications, but it did serve to sharpen a pertinent question: just how does God go about creating a universe populated by mature entities? Is there really age, or was the world filled with idealized platonic archetypes which were somehow mature without showing age? It would seem to me that a Creator with the ability to do either, and who is possessed of the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and eternity, would be able to achieve His teleological aims by just letting the process happen actually and in fact for real.
The big question is if there is a difference between built in age and built in history. Adam having a scar from an umbilical cord he never had does raise questions about built in history instead of age. Would Adam also be created with scars from a bear attach he was never involved in? It is one thing to include maturity in a creation so that it functions, but quite another to include a history that never happened and isn’t needed for the creation to function.
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Exactly - where do you draw the line? Gosse seemed to include a lot that would pass for history in creation. Eventually you can extend this to include false memories and you have last Thursdayism. I have no wish to tell God what to do, but it seems much less arbitrary just to let actual history and age go together as opposed to instant poofing of any sort.
BTY, Ken Ham is firmly in the mature function only camp, actually holding a position on belly button dogma - not there.
I grant you that it is not possible to calculate FI for human objects such as watches. However, this doesn’t mean that watches have no high FI. In fact, it would be utterly unreasonable to deny this obvious truth.
Now, there is at least one type of human productions for which an estimation of their FI that can be calculated and it is texts.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/an-attempt-at-computing-dfsci-for-english-language/
But you can calculate FI for organisms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago.
Sure, if you say so.
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So, then, you cannot compare the FI of objects known to be designed with objects not known to be designed. How, then, is the proposed analogy between those things helpful? Functional Neck Length analysis is looking better all the time!
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LOL! So you can’t actually calculate the FI value for any known designed physical object. It’s an “obvious truth”. Just like "this looks Designed to me so it must BE designed! 
So much science from the ID-Creationist camp!
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That’s great. If I take the English sentence and translate it into a different language (say German or Swahili) then I get a completely different value for the calculated FI. Why does the FI depend on the language used?
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