Michael Behe's "Billiard Shot" model

You missed the part where Catholicism and Thomism didn’t stop with the death of Aquinas. Indeed, if Thomas was alive today, I have no doubt that he would rethink his theology in light of 800 years of of knowledge. What he might change, I don’t know.

Realizing that the exhortation to unifying faith and reason would be best supported by an example, Pope Leo provided one: the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. Were we to take St. Thomas as our model and inspiration, we would have a good foundation upon which we could rebuild Catholic intellectual life in the face of the new secular challenge. In the nearly 130 years since the release of Aeterni Patris , a modern Catholic intellectual movement has indeed been established and, following Pope Leo’s lead, its prominent character has been that of a Thomism that seeks to apply the perennial insights of Aquinas to the problems of modern science and culture.

I don’t mind if Thomism develops after Aquinas. I do mind when modern Thomists misrepresent what Aquinas teaches. If they have the guts to say, “Aquinas thought this, but Aquinas was wrong,” then fine. But I don’t hear Tkacz, Carroll, etc. doing that. I hear them pretending that Aquinas taught that in creating the world God used only secondary causes, no primary action. And they’re doing that to curry favor with modern science. But it’s not right to deceive the world about what Aquinas said. Chaberek tells the truth about what Aquinas said. But the truth he tells is not popular among theistic evolutionists, so they prefer to mislead the public about what Aquinas says.

I have. It’s still the same ol’ god-of-the-gaps pig with lipstick. It’s also a whole lotta ignoring and misrepresenting the evidence, which is never corrected when false claims are pointed out.

And using the principles of Thomism, how are we to understand Aquinas’s claim that stars, like God, are eternal? Knowing that Science and Scripture cannot conflict, we must reevaluate. And is there something new that either of the two can contribute? Absolutely!

So, what do you make of Aquinas’s claim?

Likewise evolution or any other facet of modern science. Thomism is more than just Thomas Aquinas in a bottle.

I did not know that he made that claim. In fact, it seems highly unlikely that he would have, given that the Bible explicitly teaches that God made the stars and I have never known Aquinas to directly contradict the Bible. Can you find me a passage where he says the stars are eternal?

Paul Davies did his Post Doc under Fred Hoyle at Cambridge, and in addition to his popularizing works has published academic texts in QM and the nature of time.

Martin Rees is a cosmologist with over 500 published papers, and occupied the presidency of the Royal Society for five years.

I would absolutely construe their books, even if directed to a broader audience, as reflecting discussion within mainstream cosmology and physics.

For what it is worth, neither of them, to the best of my knowledge, are Christian or in any way theist, and they have no interest in promoting an apologetic.

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I’m going to withdraw that claim since Aquinas only argued that it was true if the universe was eternal as some philosophers proposed. Now Aquinas did believe the heavenly bodies were found incorruptible, but that’s a whole different argument.

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Eddie,

Aquinas did offer a detailed argument on the nature of light, and one claim he made was that it did not move locally, meaning it moved instantaneously. ( Whether light is a body or a quality, Summa theologiae, I, q. 67, a. 2, co)

Again, using the principles of Thomism, what would you make of Aquinas’s claim?

I’m not sure why we need to invoke the principles of Thomism here, if our goal is to assess Aquinas’s reasoning. His argument for the instantaneous movement of light is not sound, and we can know that without even thinking about Thomism.

But what is the application of this to the creation of animal life? When Thomas talks about the nature of light in this passage, he is employing purely “natural reason” to answer his question; he doesn’t appeal to or even refer to revelation. In other words, in this passage he is offering a medieval example of what we would now call “natural science.” In the example I gave you, when Thomas talks about the creation of man and higher animals, he is discussing a claim that comes from revelation – that God created these things – and he is asserting that God didn’t create them mediately, through natural causes, but directly. And it’s not from what we would now call scientific principles that he uses to reach this conclusion; he uses philosophical and theological principles.

So if Aquinas in the light passage makes an error (which he does), that is merely a scientific (in our parlance) error, not touching the heart of his philosophical (as we now use that term) or theological thought; but if Aquinas in the passages about creating man and the higher animals makes an error, it is a philosophical and/or theological error. And the very Thomists you are calling upon to defend your view are known for never admitting that Thomas ever made any philosophical or theological error. Scientific errors, they will concede that he made, but not philosophical or theological errors. Or at least, I have yet to see one of them say that Aquinas was wrong regarding any theological or philosophical conclusion.

So if these modern Thomists are sure (based on their acceptance of evolutionary theory) that man and the higher animals were created mediately rather than immediately, then they logically must believe that Aquinas made a major philosophical and/or theological error in his claim.

But does even one of them have the courage to admit that? I don’t think any of them ever will, because all of them put a sort of intellectual halo around Aquinas as if he is incapable of incorrect thought (at least in philosophy and theology). Their attitude to Aquinas is not merely the attitude of admiration for a great thinker; many Protestants have that level of admiration for Aquinas. Their attitude to Aquinas is cultish; he seems to be just below Mary and the Angels in importance, to the point where to think him wrong on anything is to be irreverent, almost sacrilegious. I’d do anything to prick the bubble of this cultishness. It does no service to Thomas as a thinker to make his reasonings, even in theology, too holy to be questioned. Thomas’s work is not Holy Revelation. He was a human thinker, trying to understand revelation and the deposit of tradition, and like all such thinkers, capable of error, even on theological matters.

OK, now I understand what you were talking about, so let me get to the main point:

Manlike animals can’t be produced from just any lineage, according to him. In your examples, you have a parallel between a Triceratops (reptile, I believe, but there may be a more complex classification these days) and a rhinoceros (mammal). I don’t think Denton imagines that manlike beings could come from a reptile lineage – or from a cetacean lineage, or a pinnipedian lineage, or a dermopteran lineage. (And don’t ask me why – I don’t you owe you answers at this level of detail – read the book!) I think he imagines manlike creatures as only possible with a primate (or primate-like if you want to get sticky again) lineage. Could there be two primate lineages leading to manlike animals? Maybe. But there might be local conditions on any particular planet that block the emergence in one lineage. Yet on another planet, that might not be the case. So the fact that earth has produced only one manlike animal doesn’t prove anything.

If you want an analogy from history, one might argue that the march of civilization produces a general tendency to the rise of a modern technological society. Yet on earth, modern technological society arose only once, in the West, not in any of the other high civilizations. Would the fact that it happened only once prove that there is no general tendency of advance toward a modern technological civilization? I don’t think so. Maybe on some other planet two high civilizations independently developed a modern technological civilization. Maybe on another planet, three. We only have one planet to sample, and so negative judgments are premature.

An unfair judgment. I’m not unwilling to think about his ideas. I’m unwilling to look up dozens of things for you, rereading scores of pages in order to be able to give you clear answers about exactly what he says and why. Why do I owe you this? I didn’t even say that Denton was correct, or that I agreed with him. I didn’t offer to defend him to the death against all comers. I simply mentioned that he, less ambiguously than Behe, offered the possibility of a purely natural evolutionary process that was intelligently planned.

I haven’t read the book (other than occasional lookups of isolated things) in over 12 years. I don’t memorize every single argument in every single book I’ve ever read, so that I recall them all instantly in casual discussion. And since I can’t remember everything, if you pepper me with demands for detailed arguments, you are in essence asking me to do lots of rereading for your sake. You are asking me to give up hours of my life to save hours of your life. And that’s unreasonable.

I’m willing to discuss Denton’s ideas with you after you have read the book. Then, if you like, you can say, “Let’s discuss what he says on pages 221-224” and we can have a useful discussion based on a common text. I’m quite open to the idea that I could learn from discussing the book with you. But I don’t like comments suggesting that if I don’t a have a photographic memory and don’t want to look up everything you ask about, I don’t want to think about the book or the author. Such comments are rude and out of line.

They may, and they may not. The way to tell is to find that discussion in the actual scientific literature. What do you have for that?

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Eddie, you didn’t acknowledge that. You wrote it. I was quoting you. I admit I messed up the ‘[quote]’ tags (now fixed), but you still should have been able to recognise your own words.

If you insist: Humans being the intended target of front-loaded neo-Darwinian evolution is incompatible with neo-Darwinian evolution being unlikely to produce humans.

Evolution being biased towards humans might pass muster as a Star Trek plot device, but not only is it incompatible with the evidence, which includes 200 million years of land animals that weren’t humans, it does absolutely nothing to rescue your/Behe’s ideas - even if evolution was biased towards humans, that wouldn’t cause it to produce the irreducibly complex systems Behe says it can’t produce.

But feel free to come up with some argument that explains why an inherent bias towards humans would enable evolution to produce irreducibly complex structures in bacteria.

Why should I show him a tilt/bias when I don’t think there is one?

I don’t think you know what you’re arguing for here. You’ve just introduced possible bias in evolution only to state that Behe rejects the idea, and now you’re effectively admitting that despite having spent days insisting that Behe considers front-loading a viable alternative option, he doesn’t think that at all:

So you’re also favouring divine tinkering.

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It has a great deal to do with free will. It rules out free will for any being that exists prior to the endpoint of that planned course.

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@mercer,

Behe wants to present a world where there are both random and non-random mutations.

This might be the most concise and precise critique of the inherent contradictions of ID that I’ve come across. Brilliant. And this follow up puts a very fine point on it indeed:

@swamidass - this is exactly the kind of thing that you should raise in the Veritas forum with Behe. It’s why the scientific community doesn’t take ID seriously (besides, you know, the lack of evidence). It’s not coherent nor consistent. It aims for explanatory power but makes no predictions about the past or the future. At its very best, it is a collection of critiques with the common theme that science cannot precisely pinpoint the exact order of molecular events that took place millions or billions of years ago. And even with that, several of their critiques have been effectively answered and they’ve retreated.

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But maybe not mentioning the polar bear example. This is because polar bears actually do not carry, as fixed changes, ANY of the mutations Behe cites in his book. It gets too confusing to be talking about mythical changes (that actually are not fixed in polar bears) and their impact on the front-loading hypothesis.

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Then we can ignore his opinion on the plausibility of evolutionary pathways.

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It’s not like these are collections of Rees and Davies favorite recipes. They are both mainstream cosmologists. They are discussing cosmology. There is no may be about it.

If it has to be journals, I do not have access to a university account; but I tracked down the following, which at least have the advantage of being available to anyone here.

Andrei Linde - A brief history of the multiverse
L. Susskind - The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory
A New Fine-Tuning Argument for the Multiverse
Emergence of multiverse in third quantized varying constants cosmologies
Fine tuning and MOND in a metamaterial “multiverse”
Livio, Rees - Fine-Tuning, Complexity, and Life in the Multiverse

But honestly; Davies, Rees, Smolin, Susskind, Linde, Livio, and Hawking have all published on this, just to list some of the more recognizable names. If you do have access to an academic search, just type in “multiverse” and you need not worry about free time.

This thread has gotten quite long and rambled a bit.

I split out the conversation with @Eddie about whether designed was removed as an option post-Darwin here:
https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/eddie-since-darwin-non-design-has-been-assumed/9446/

I further split the conversation with @ThomasTrebilco about the provisional nature of science and how it is portrayed to the public here:

We will try to keep this thread to Behe and co. (Denton and other ID folks) and the “billiard shot” or “front-loading” arguments.

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Yes, but they aren’t discussing cosmology within the field of cosmology but in books for the general public. There is a difference.

Have any of them published on this in the scientific literature? You don’t necessarily need access to a library to find out. Do any of those have references?