That there’s teleological talk, George, as in the fact that if opportunity knocks, only those who recognise it and seize it benefit. There are maybe three ways to describe an otter becoming a whale, which are actually more or less mutually exclusive:
1 (The “Attenborough evolution” mode): “Otters seized the opportunity to exploit a marine niche.” That’s kind of Lamarckian, in fact.
2 (The prosaic but correct evolutionary mode): Otters underwent random changes which, either by neutral change and luck or natural selection and luck, progressively adapted them to a marine niche. The blind process itself then seems to have remarkable persistence towards a particular end.
3 (The creation or guided evolution mode): God governed a large set of coordinated changes to otters and had them move progressively into a new, exclusively marine, form.
You could sum up those three alternatives as choice, chance or design.
I don’t follow the logic of that response, scd. Obviously gbrooks is aware that marsupials exist on other continents. How does that change the fact that we observe striking nested hierarchies among Australia’s marsupials? If marsupials existed prior to Australia separating from the world’s other land masses, we would expect the kinds of taxonomic trees and differential geographical distributions we observe today.
And how do you explain these facts?
(1) Australia is the only continent (other than Antarctica) which still has all three major groups of mammals: marsupials, monotremes, and placentals.
(2) Australia stands alone in having such a diverse array of native marsupials. It is truly “a land of marsupials”.
(3) Other than a narrow selection of relatively recently introduced species, Australia has a striking lack of placental mammals. Why?
(I realize that scd is not a Young Earth Creationist. Nevertheless, when I was a “creation science” enthusiast long ago, I would have shared many of scd’s positions. Learning about Australia’s mammals played an important role in my changing those positions. This also encouraged me to improve my Hebrew exegetical skills and lexicographic studies in order to rethink my position on a global Noahic flood. Also, learning more about nested hierarchies prepared me for better understanding evolutionary processes. I became aware that my creation science colleagues rarely addressed nested hierarchies in a meaningful way. I got very frustrated with the Morris & Whitcomb explanation that “God loves order. So the tree of life simply reflects special creation happening according to orderly patterns.”)
And you would be quite off the mark. What if he supernaturally arranged for a less ambitious mutation (or set of them)?.. and the only reason he made the arrangement is that he knew it would be a year too late otherwise (But not a million years too late).
If God creates the whole creature miraculously, that’s not evolution. But if God creates the mutation (naturally or supernaturally)… then THAT is god-guided evolution.
Whenever I see the term “god-guided”, I wonder exactly what is meant. When Newton’s apple fell to the ground, was it God-guided? I would say yes. It was God’s will that objects are subject to natural forces which scientists have managed to describe and quantify. It all goes back to the Ultimate Causation of theology-philosophy and the Proximate Causations explained by science. The same event or phenomenon can have both ultimate and proximate explanations. So what do we mean by something being “god-guided”?
Indeed, in the mind of a Christ-follower, what things are not God-guided? (Is sin entirely free of “god-guidance” of every sort?)
When I say God-Guided… I mean that God is 100% in charge of genes and ecosystems!.. and uses evolutionary principles to “grow” what he wants!
(@jongarvey, please note this posting!)
At the same time, @swamidass is so gun-shy on the matter of God’s will… not only does he demur on the Science side (naturally, he says we will never get science to confirm God’s participation or engagement, that is perfectly correct!)…
… but he’s even afraid of using the phrase “god-guided” in his theological statements!!! - - aren’t you, @swamidass?! You really don’t need this “providential” qualification!
While @jongarvey is busy at trying to invent new meanings by saying that when god literally makes specific mutations and ecosystems …
we should really call that Creationism!
@AllenWitmerMiller, SOMETIMES I think you and I are the only ones not high on pot when we write these posts!
(1) I wonder if some people would be more comfortable with “God-ordained”, seeing how “God-guided” has connotations, if not necessarily denotations, of some sort of ongoing necessity of superintending and tweaking. For example, God has ordained that masses experience forces of attraction as explained by various natural laws but God need not intervene or specifically “nudge along” in some direct way the forces at work for gravity to operate.
(2) Is a random event, such as which specific atom of some radioisotope sample will decay next, a “God-guided” event in terms of God making some sort of individual-separate decision concerning that event? As a Molinist, I would say no because God chose to create the specific universe (and all of its space-time coordinates which we view as describing the flow of events) out of all of the possible universes he could have chosen to create. So I think in terms of “God chose this particular reality” as a single creative act and did so outside of time (because time was created when the universe was created because it is an attribute-dimension of that universe) and “God-guided”, on the other hand, at least implies that God “customizes” that reality path as an “intervention in time.” And that is why I find the term “God-guided” so ambiguous. The term “God-ordained” seems to me to cover the broader set of interpretations of what “God-guided” means. We can surely agree that “God the Creator is in charge.”
(3) Most agree that the Bible makes various concessions to human limitations in understanding, such as in anthropomorphic descriptions of God. I think we fail to see that in a pre-Einstein (i.e., prior to an understanding of relativity theory) scriptures which appear to place God within the arrow of time are among those anthropomorphic concessions. Yes, God “supervises” the universe in the sense that that is a human parallel that can be easily understood—but I would claim that the matter-energy world that God created is not somehow subject to deviation from God’s divine will in such a way that he must constantly intervene and “keep it on path”.
A creator who has to constantly guide, nudge, tweak, and keep-within-bounds his created universe is one who (a) somehow didn’t get it right from the beginning, and (b) is lacking in omniscience and omnipotence. And that is why I personally tend to avoid the term “God-guided” in favor of something like “God-ordained.” And “God-guided” leads to questions of “What matter-energy phenomenon are not God-guided”—just as I ask ID advocates for examples of objects and phenomena which are ultimately “non-Intelligently-Designed.”
I think a lot of problems in these areas tend to evaporate when we finally grasp that God is outside of time even while “at times” (!) we describe him as intervening in time. (I wonder: Are the Divine interventions we call “miracles” simply specially ordained events which God “engineered” into the specific Molinist reality path he decided upon but not by utilizing typical “natural forces” to bring them about. That is why we describe miracles as unexplained by typical natural processes.
Anyone who rejects the I.D. premise (i.e., that science should be able to distinguish between God making a mutation vs. God making the whole creature de novo) would have no other definition available to him!
If Science is blind to God’s engagements, it would be impossible to know when God is supernaturally arranging a mutation that can virtually never happen without his participation …
vs.
when God is supernaturally arranging a mutation that otherwise would happen 1 minute too late, or 1 year too late, or 5 billion years too late.
This is an internally consistent definition. I presume you reject it because you think that, ultimately speaking, humans will (or ultimately could) know the difference between mutations that would never happen on their own vs. mutations that are just a little too slow (on their own) for God’s purposes.
If God creates the mutation, then it’s creation. THAT’S grammar. The question, then, is what added value the word “evolution” gives - answer, simply change over time, common descent. But it’s still creation by instalments (and I don’t object to that, by the way).
The more interesting remark for you to to interact with is this from Allen:
This is virtually a paraphrase of the Deist Leibniz’s accusation of Isaac Newton for his theism, though it was dealt with several centuries earlier by Aquinas. It depends on seeing the world as a mechanism, in which case being constrained to adjust it all the time is the sign of a poor engineer, perhaps. That was very attractive, I guess, to early scientists with their “mechanical philosophy”, but now we’re in the world where the centrality of mind - and the importance of social interaction - are clearer.
But suppose the universe is not a machine, but one of the things Scripture actually describes it as - a temple, a household, a family, a garden? A God who lets the worshippers get on with their services but never visits them, or a householder who leaves others to manage affairs, or a parent who leaves food for the kids in the fridge and goes on holiday, or a gardener who never touches a plant - all those metaphors would indicate a monster.
But easier still - the agent of creation is Christ, according to the New Testament. Has he no interest in being active in his world?
But @AllenWitmerMiller has been having some priorities that made me unwilling to tap incessantly upon his noggin regarding this issue.
@AllenWitmerMiller, are you still somewhat indisposed? We would love for you to address this issue!
However, in the meantime, let’s talk about your grammar, Jon Garvey!
Imagine, if you would, a moment (the briefest of moments) a Christian Evolutionist who has no thought of being able to determine, via Science, whether God created a mutation by miracle or by natural causation.
How would such a person be able to have the knowledge to apply your grammar?
Evolution, like evaporation and the water cycle, are technical terms referring to what part of the natural world is active to produce certain results.
The water cycle is a natural fact which, in part, makes rain storms possible.
Mutations are natural facts which, in part, make evolution possible.
It hardly seems to matter whether the mutation occurred lawfully or by God acting supernaturally. From a Christian viewpoint, God is actively a part of everything. So what difference could God making a mutation supernaturally have to do in the equation for how to define what happened after the mutation is created?
I think you are arguing for a difference without a distinction!
The only way for a Global Flood to accommodate even the very basics of Australia’s pre-human mammalian population is that after the Great Flood (assuming it happened), the marsupials released from the Ark migrated to Australia before the large “continental island” drifted so far into the ocean that no other animals could follow after the marsupials.
Naturally, it is much easier to imagine all this over a period of dozens of millions of years. Young Earth Creationists have to compress this migration to Australia (and its movement into the midst of the ocean) as all within the last few thousand years.
Before I learned about the nature of the marsupial speciation/radiation into unoccupied eco-niches, I used to focus entirely on the improbable nature of just the Marsupial migration to Australia. Somehow, and rather implausibly, the marsupial forms headed towards Australia and were well ahead of any placental mammals also leaving the area of the ark.
All these marsupials, some of them rather notorious for slow movement, made it to Australia just before it moved off-shore … ahead of some very speedy placental predators (like cougars, leopards, wolves, etc).
So, right from the very start, @scd, YECs have a rather impossible task of fitting the lack of placental mammals (post-Global Flood) in the vast lands of Australia!
Do you really think this is the best explanation for Marsupial-only occupation of Australia after the flood? If they existed on Australia before a global flood, they would have been wiped out. And frankly, there would be little reason to think any group of mammals (let alone slow moving marsupials) would have reached the shores of Australia - - without a single mating pair of placental mammals in sight … just in time for Australia to move off shore, beyond the reach of even swimming mammals!
I think you’re presenting the micro-/macro- distinction purely from the creationist perspective. It’s a real thing, real scientists originally defined it, and real scientists do use the term. Microevolution is defined as evolution within a species, macroevolution as evolution above the species level, with speciation as the boundary. One can also define microevolutionary processes as those happening within populations — changes in allele frequencies — and macroevolutionary processes as those that don’t involve allele frequency changes, species selection being a common exemplar. Nothing wrong with that.
Probably John doesn’t want my help, but he really shouldn’t have to supply expanded definitions or references. Here’s what came up when I entered “macroevolution” in the search box at a university science library I use:
If anyone is interested in the literature, just to to PubMed, and enter “macroevolution” in the search box. Or use Google Scholar, enter “macroevolution,” and start following the citation threads.
