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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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?
The footnote references in the linked Linde paper include journal publications by Guth, Davies, Sakharov, Weinberg, Hawking, and Susskind.
Getting closer. Are the cited papers about fine-tuning? You might be able to tell based on Linde’s statements they are intended to support.
I have to say that it’s a little bit disturbing that Linde’s work was supported by a Templeton grant.
P. C.W. Davies and S. D. Unwin, “Why is the Cosmological Constant so Small,” Proc.
Roy. Soc. 377, 147 (1981).
S. Weinberg, “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 59, 2607
(1987).
A. D. Linde, “Quantum creation of an inflationary universe,” Sov. Phys. JETP 60, 211
(1984) [Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 87, 369 (1984)]. A. D. Linde, “Quantum Creation Of The
Inflationary Universe,” Lett. Nuovo Cim. 39, 401 (1984).
A. Vilenkin, “Quantum Creation of Universes,” Phys. Rev. D 30, 509 (1984).
While both are used, it seems that the term anthropic is preferred to the phrase fine tuning, but both are about universal constants being conducive to life. Anthropic doesn’t have any connotation of an agent, so it is perhaps a little more neutral.
“Anthropic” seems far more neutral. It’s all about “why is the universe one in which life is possible?”, but “fine-tuning” assumes a particular conclusion. The answer could be that this is the only possible universe, or that all possible universes have constants suitable for life, or something else having nothing to do with fine-tuning.
Fair enough. I haven’t specifically looked for such a statement, but it’s not the only point of contention with Thomas. He also believed that the stars indirectly to influenced life on Earth, and not in the way a modern physicist would. Free will is not affected but our bodies are. This stems from his reading of Augustine and the general knowledge of the day.
Thomas never had the scientific knowledge we have today While formulating his ideas. Knowing his commitment to reason such that “science” mustvcomplimentary and congruent
with Scripture, he would have (and all Thomists must) always be ready to reevaluate what we consider to be theologically true.
Finally, you fail to appreciate the role Thomas has had upon the Catholicbchurch. I guess that makes sense since you as a Protestant lack federal authority of the Church.
I don’t have time to write more, though I wish i did. Typing on a phone is cumbersome at best and takes too long.
It depends on what you mean by “viable”; I don’t think that I originally used that term. I think I said something more like “logically possible” and “consistent with ID.” That is, when Behe was asked (and I supplied the passage where he was asked it) whether he considered front-loading logically possible within an ID framework, he answered with a decisive “Yes.” But he did not, in that place, indicate whether he preferred front-loading or intervention.
If the question is not, what possibilities are logically allowable within ID, but what possibilities does Behe favor, then the answer must be more cautious. He seems to go out of his way never to explicitly say that he thinks miracles or breaks in natural laws happened, but, as many here have pointed out, he says many things which seem to imply such a position. I regard his current position as not determinable beyond doubt, but I do agree with those who think Behe inclines to the view that evolution is sped along in intended directions by one or more acts of intervention. My only objection is to their claiming that “Behe says” or “Behe asserts” this. If they limit their claim to “Behe’s lines of argument suggest this,” I would not contradict them. It is confidently uttered overstatements that I object to, not properly qualified judgments.
I wouldn’t put it that way. I think the part of me that was raised in the wake of the Enlightenment and Victorian mechanism, and is still very much influenced by these things, would favor some kind of front-loading or “intelligently planned naturalistic evolution.” When I initially read Denton, I saw that if he was right one could have macroevolution and a naturalistic mechanism for evolution, yet also accept design. He seemed to wisely split the difference between classical teleology and modern science, and retain all that was best in “evolution” and “creation,” synthesizing the two notions and dissolving the conflict.
However, one has to be honest about the strength of an argument. While I still think Denton’s arguments are interesting and suggestive, I don’t think he offers a sufficiently detailed picture of how pure natural necessity could construct irreducibly complex structures. I don’t say that he is wrong, but he has not shown that he is right. It’s reasonable to withhold assent until he can provide more.
I suspect, from Behe’s remarks, that he thinks in this way. I think he respects Denton – he gave the 1998 book some definite praise – but I get the impression that he thinks Denton’s arguments have not attained the level of demonstration.
From a theological point of view, I have no motive to “favor” divine tinkering over front-loading, since either view is compatible with divine sovereignty and omnipotence. But in terms of visualization of the evolutionary process, it is easier to imagine how an irreducibly complex structure could be built under tinkering than under pure natural necessity. So if by “favor” you mean nothing more than “deem more probable within ID possibilities, given our current understanding of biology,” then yes, I suppose you could say that I “favor” tinkering. But the “favoring” is qualified by the considerations I’ve just set forth. I wouldn’t want anyone running away from this conversation claiming, “Eddie has clearly admitted that he affirms divine tinkering” and trying to score points off it. (But of course, given the way things go in these conversations, that’s exactly the outcome I will get. All statements here tend to be read in crude and misleading ways, especially if they can be used polemically when so interpreted.)