Meyer Responds to the Charge that ID Was Created to Get Around Court Decisions

[Jonathan_Burke]

@Eddie

(i.e., they were latching onto ID in order to smuggle creationism in, because they – wrongly – took ID to be identical with creationism),

Goodness, why would they make a mistake like that?

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Jonathan_Burke

Goodness, why would they make a mistake like that?

Because they were laboring under the popular misconception of “evolution versus creation,” and reasoned that anything that sounded vaguely “anti-evolution” must be creationist. But they didn’t bother to read any actual ID literature, or they would have learned that “creation vs evolution” is a faulty analysis, the important opposition being “design vs chance.”

[Timothy_Horton]

@Eddie

Because they were laboring under the popular misconception of “evolution versus creation,” and reasoned that anything that sounded vaguely “anti-evolution” must be creationist. But they didn’t bother to read any actual ID literature, or they would have learned that “creation vs evolution” is a faulty analysis, the important opposition being “design vs chance.”

"Cdesignproponentist" refutes that silly claim in one (hybrid) word.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Eddie

Thank you. I have said this scores of times, on BioLogos and here, that the Dover board was religiously motivated (i.e., they were latching onto ID in order to smuggle creationism in, because they – wrongly – took ID to be identical with creationism)…

Well, that certainly is an interesting take on it.

You might also consider the ramifications of the fact that these religiously motivated creationists recognized a book that teaches the allegedly non-creationist, non-religious doctrine of “Intelligent Design” to be well suited to forward their creationist, religious doctrine.

Maybe they understand ID a bit better than you think they do.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Eddie

Thanks for acknowledging this. Now, perhaps, you are starting to see where I am coming from. I am one of those non-creationists you have just admitted to exist.

No, you’re a creationist. Larry Moran disagreed with Jones’s views on the demarcation problem. But he knows ID is creationism.

[Jonathan_Burke]

@Eddie

But they didn’t bother to read any actual ID literature, or they would have learned…

…cdesignproponentist! Clearly they did read it.

[Rich_Hampton]

Eddie, does this sound like an atheistic-Christian to you? Because I think it might:

Last October 27, Pope Francis addressed members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, during its fourday meeting entitled “Evolving Concepts of Nature.” As reported in Carol Glatz’s article for Catholic News Service, the pope said that the Big Bang theory and evolution do not eliminate the existence of God, who remains the one who set all of creation into motion. Pope Francis added that God’s existence does not contradict the discoveries of science.
According to the Academy’s website, he said: “When we read the account of creation in Genesis, we risk thinking that God was a magician, complete with an all-powerful magic wand. But that was not so. He created living beings, and he let them develop according to the internal laws with which he endowed each one, that they might develop and reach their fullness.”
Pope Francis noted that God gave creation full autonomy while also guaranteeing a constant divine presence in nature and people’s lives. The world comes not from chaos but from “a supreme Principle who creates out of love.”

[Rich_Hampton]

@Eddie

the important opposition being “design vs chance.”

If ID theory is agnostic, perhaps even weakly supportive, of evolutionary theory, then why do you present these ideas as being diametrically opposed?

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

I haven’t studied enough of the thought of Pope Francis to be sure. I do know that Thomas Aquinas would not agree that creation had “full autonomy”; he says explicitly that man and the higher animals had to be directly created, i.e., could not have emerged by purely secondary causes out of what was created earlier. It sounds to me as if Francis is more inclined to defer to modern thought than Pope Benedict was. In any case, one would have to read the thought of Francis on other things: angels, demons, the Devil, miracles, the efficacy of prayer, etc., to be sure how to interpret the above passage in relation to “atheism.”

@Rich_Hampton

If ID theory is agnostic, perhaps even weakly supportive, of evolutionary theory, then why do you present these ideas as being diametrically opposed?

Chance and design are conceptually opposed, taken in themselves. Of course, a design might make use of chance, e.g., a smoke alarm (of one type) makes use of radioactive decay. But the overall working of the alarm is a product of design, not of chance. I’m open to accounts of evolution which encase “chance” events within a design framework. But on most of these blog sites where Christians scramble to harmonize evolution with their faith, I see a lot more emphasis on the chanciness of the events than on the design framework.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Faizal_Ali

But he knows ID is creationism.

But does he say that all ID proponents are creationist, as you do? I bet that he would say that Denton is an evolutionist (but with an incorrect mechanism of evolution). But let me know what he does say.

[Rich_Hampton]

@Eddie

Of course, a design might make use of chance, e.g., a smoke alarm (of one type) makes use of radioactive decay. But the overall working of the alarm is a product of design, not of chance.

Which is exactly the point I made several days ago and what Pope Francis said above. God designed a universe that included chance and Free Will. Neither of which required God to assert himself to guarantee the outcome he foresaw and instantiated. To believe otherwise is to suggest that God is not all-knowing because chance blinds him and that God is not all-powerful because chance is greater than Divine Providence (both of which YECers apparently believe!)

[Rich_Hampton]

I thought I’d add this wonderfully dark view of Pope John Paul II and evolutionary theory, as put forth by Dr. Henry Morris, Founder and past President Emeritus of ICR.

Evolution and the Pope

All cults and movements associated with the “new world order” of the so-called New Age Movement have two things in common—evolutionism as their base and globalism as their goal. It is disturbing now to see even many large evangelical movements (e.g., Promise Keepers, charismatic ecumenism) inadvertently drifting into the same orbit while eulogizing this evolutionist pope.

[Rich_Hampton]

@Eddie

]Aquinas] says explicitly that man and the higher animals had to be directly created, i.e., could not have emerged by purely secondary causes out of what was created earlier.

Aquinas vs. Intelligent Design

One day I received a phone call from a professor of philosophy at a nearby private, religiously affiliated college. He had just returned from an international conference devoted to challenges to evolutionary biology from intelligent design (ID) theory. There was a bit of urgency in the professor’s tone, so I agreed to meet him. As it turned out, he had something of a complaint to make, for he opened our meeting by showering me with a series of questions: Where are the Thomists? Where are the Catholics? How come you are not out there defending us ID advocates? After all, we are on the same side, are we not? He explained that the conference organizers had invited several Thomists to participate, and he was dismayed that, far from expressing sympathy with the ID movement and its challenge to Darwinism, they were quite critical of it. Perhaps feeling a bit betrayed, he wanted to ask me, a Thomist, just what was going on.

[Chris_Falter]

@Rich_Hampton

Aquinas vs. Intelligent Design | Catholic Answers Magazine

This is an excellent article. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

In a previous thread, @Eddie explained that not all modern Thomists have an identical opinion of the relationship between modern biology and natural theology.

Best,
Chris

[Rich_Hampton]

@Rich_Hampton

international conference devoted to challenges to evolutionary biology from intelligent design

The conference may be this one, mentioned here “A Scientific History — and Philosophical Defense — of the Theory of Intelligent Design” by Stephen C. Meyer, October 7, 2008

And recently, a major conference about intelligent design was held in Prague (attended by some 700 scientists, students and scholars from Europe, Africa and the United States), further signaling that the theory of intelligent design has generated worldwide interest.

Conference on "intelligent design" meets with little interest among Czech...

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

Why to you respond to my statement about what Thomas Aquinas said with a quotation from Tkacz? The statement does not address Thomas’s views. (Since writing the last sentence, I have since gone on to look at more of the article, and I see no place where Tkacz faces the explicit statements of Aquinas re man and the higher animals.)

You may or may not be aware that Tkacz’s views (along with those of Feser and Beckwith) were taken down very ably by Vincent Torley on Uncommon Descent, and part of the argument rested on actual passages of Aquinas, which, as Torley showed, did not sustain Tkacz’s reading of Aquinas. Similar arguments have been made by Michael Chaberek, O.P., based on a close reading of Aquinas’s text. See the second edition of his Aquinas and Evolution. Chaberek’s historical study, Catholicism and Evolution, is also very helpful.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Rich_Hampton

Neither of which required God to assert himself to guarantee the outcome he foresaw and instantiated.

Yet the Bible frequently reports God as “asserting himself” to shape the history of Israel and the world. If you have no theological objection to a God who “asserts himself” in human history, why would you have any theological objection to a God who asserts himself in the historical emergence of the physical world?

But I see that we have gone off-topic. How did we get from Meyer’s discussion about the history of ID to God and chance? Let’s take up this topic another time, in another place.

[Rich_Hampton]

Marie George, 01 October 2013

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nbfr.12035/

In light of Aquinas’s teaching, I first critique William Dembski’s mathematical approach to design in nature, and then critique Michael Behe’s failure to distinguish between causes that physically produce an object and causes responsible for the plan for that object. I then investigate Aquinas’s Fifth Way, both comparing it to Paley’s argument, and attempting to discern where it disagrees with atheistic accounts of evolution. I show that Aquinas acknowledges that living things can result from finality at one level and chance at another level; in other words, he acknowledges that contingent intermediary causes are able to be part of God’s plan or design for the production of new species. Thus, the disagreement between Aquinas and the proponents of atheistic versions of evolution is not due to any denial on his part that chance may have role in the production of new species. I then show that even atheist biologists and philosophers recognize a regular tendency in nature to something good, namely, the tendency for niches to be filled, resulting in the good of biodiversity. Where they and Aquinas part ways is as to whether things that lack cognition can only tend to an end when directed by an intelligent being.

[Chris_Falter]

Eddie vs. Eddie

@Eddie

Tkacz’s views (along with those of Feser and Beckwith) were taken down very ably by Vincent Torley on Uncommon Descent, and part of the argument rested on actual passages of Aquinas, which, as Torley showed, did not sustain Tkacz’s reading of Aquinas. Similar arguments have been made by Michael Chaberek, O.P., based on a close reading of Aquinas’s text. See the second edition of his Aquinas and Evolution . Chaberek’s historical study, Catholicism and Evolution , is also very helpful.

“Torley and Chaberek are reading Aquinas truly. Those who are trying to reconcile Aquinas with evolution are plainly wrong.”

@Eddie

The debate among Thomists rages on. I’m not asking anyone to endorse Chaberek’s side, but for those whose ideas on Thomas and evolution are shaped by philosophers like Edward Feser and theologians like NIcanor Austriaco, and think that such writers have settled the question, it is good to have an alternative interpretation of Aquinas available, for comparison and contrast.

“Well, maybe not.”

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Chris_Falter

“Torley and Chaberek are reading Aquinas truly. Those who are trying to reconcile Aquinas with evolution are plainly wrong.”

It’s a question of direct, unambiguous statements by Aquinas. Torley quoted the passages from Aquinas in an article addressed to Feser, Beckwith, and Tkacz. To the best of my knowledge, several years later, none of them has referred to those exact passages of Aquinas and explained them. Why would they avoid dealing with the primary text, if they thought it could be given a more favorable interpretation? Avoidance suggests weakness in one’s position.

As for what I said about alternative interpretations of Aquinas, that still goes: it is good for people to have alternative interpretations. But the strength of an interpretation lies in how well it deals with the text. All Thomists claim that their views are based on Aquinas. Therefore, when Aquinas says something that appears to directly contradict their views, they are obliged either to abandon those views, or explain why Aquinas doesn’t mean what he seems to mean. If they do neither, then one suspects that they have lost the argument, but don’t want to acknowledge it.

I’m open to alternative interpretations of the Aquinas passages, but so far, all I’ve seen from Austriaco, etc. is general argument from “Thomist principles” – arguments which skirt around the passages.