I have to laugh when people speculate on what Behe is thinking. It seems most obvious that Behe isn’t thinking much at all, in addition to ignoring most of the relevant evidence.
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They won’t even talk about this… because they have no idea how to explain it away.
There is no way to run a laboratory experiment in which they can compare the results for:
When God is present, vs. When God is not present.
I.D. proponents are modern day Christian Alchemists who think things are different if they pray and incoke the angels of god before running the test!
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Thank you. I’ll call upon your endorsement if anyone else here savages my description. 
Since we are talking about chance, a word about Denton. He does not rule out a role for chance in evolution, but chance relates more to the “bells and whistles” in his account. It might be chance that blue jays are blue rather than green, or the like, and “Darwinian” mechanisms might explain such things. But the big picture, he thinks, is governed by something other than chance, by a kind of natural necessity that generates certain basic forms. So yes, he denies that “Darwinian” or like mechanisms are responsible for the big structural forms, but he doesn’t say those other mechanisms don’t do anything. If I can give a very crude analogy (which Denton might or might not approve of), it’s as if “car evolution” was bound to produce a basic Chrysler car, but not necessarily the Dodge Charger.
Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt, John, but in this particular case, I was thinking of the story, “A Sound of Thunder,” by Ray Bradbury, so I did misremember the story. However, I think you are right to say that in other SF stories the greater course of evolution is altered by small changes in the past, and possibly I conflated them in my memory with the Bradbury story. I read tons of science fiction in my teens and early twenties, but it has been a long time since I read any, and it’s not surprising that plots might run together in my mind.
I had a particular fondness for Van Vogt’s Weapons Maker stories. I liked many short stories by Asimov as well, and some by Heinlein where he did pure science fiction, but the novels where he preached his libertarian, hedonistic, experimentalist sexual morality were repulsive (and I felt that even back when I was pretty much a secular humanist myself).
I think that science fiction was attractive to me because it often dealt with the big questions of religion and philosophy, but in a way accessible to my then not very religious self. In the end, SF was probably a major cause of my shift from the study of science to the study of philosophy and religion. I really wanted to pursue those big ideas, and I found that there was very little opportunity to do that in my science program (only a few profs and students were interested), and much more on the other side of campus.
I know you didn’t; I was giving it as an example of the powers I took you to be attributing to chance. If you deny that chance could easily produce any of my examples, then I’d be surprised you would think chance could “easily” produce life from non-life, or human beings from a one-celled creature.
Well, I’m not sure that front-loading models all have to “front load mutations.” One of the problems with the term “front-loading” is that is used by a large number of people and has no standard definition. It’s more a term of popular discussion or philosophical discussion than a precise scientific model, more of an umbrella term for a group of possible models that are driven more by natural necessity than by chance, as opposed to mainstream evolutionary theory in which chance, while not everything, is a very big factor.
We’re not discussing what happens to the universe after emergence of mortal beings with free will. We are discussion the history of life before free will makes its appearance.
Is it your view that in Creation, God just closed his eyes and tossed some indefinite number of hydrogen atoms randomly into space, and then used his foresight to find out just what the result would be? Or is it your view that God used a very precise number of hydrogen atoms (or precursor particles), configured in a very precise way, to achieve an end which he not merely foresaw, but specifically willed? The latter view would be in line with classical Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant; the former view seems to be gaining popularity among Christians who are adjusting their theology to what they imagine modern science requires.
You do not agree- more importantly you don’t seem to understand- that autonomy exists outside of free will, but know that it is the predominant position of Catholic and Thomist thought.
Thomas shows us how to distinguish between the being or exis- tence of creatures and the operations they perform. God causes creatures to exist in such a way that they are the real causes of their own operations.
For Thomas, God is at work in every operation of nature, but the autonomy of nature is not an indication of some reduction in God’s power or activity; rather, it is an indication of His goodness. It is important to recognize that, for Thomas, divine causality and creaturely causality function at fundamentally different levels. In the Summa contra Gentiles (III, c. 70. 8), Thomas remarks that “the same effect is not attributed to a natural cause and to divine power in such a way that it is partly done by God, and partly by the natural agent; rather, it is wholly done by both, according to a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument and also wholly to the principal agent.”
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Yes. He’s clueless and his ideas are BS. I already knew that, but thanks for the reminder.
You might consult The Brooklyn Project by William Tenn, which exactly fits what you were misremembering. And though not so germane, my personal favorite: Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty.
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And of course I never made any such claim, so whoever you are arguing with, it isn’t myself. Nor would Richards, Torley or Chaberek make this claim. If all that is meant by “autonomy” is that natural things have been given certain created powers which do not require miraculous supplementation – e.g., growth in plants, gestation in a womb for mammals, mutual attraction of masses across distances – no Catholic ID thinker I know of denies “autonomy.” But you raised an objection based on “free will” which, according to Thomist thought, is a power belonging only to man among the corporeal beings. In saying that plants, kangaroos, and planets did not have free will, I was not thereby saying that those things did not have “autonomy” in the sense you are talking about. So your rebuttal is to a claim I never made.
Which I am not contesting, as a description of the role of God in the normal operations of nature. You are failing to see the issue that I’ve tried to point out to you.
The issue is whether God, in creating the world, acted only through secondary causation (natural laws), or acted in some cases through primary causation (direct divine action). On this point, Torley shows in detail where Tkacz and some other modern Thomists contradict Thomas Aquinas. If you want the evidence, read his article that I cited. Or read Chaberek.
I believe that the reason you have not seen this issue is that you have been reading Thomas through the filter of modern Thomists bent on harmonizing Thomas with modern thought, instead of simply reading Thomas. In the end, you will have to decide where your loyalty lies, to Thomas, or to certain modern Thomists. I prefer Thomas to modern Thomists. So do the other people I mentioned. Your priority may be different.
You didn’t know it, and don’t, because you haven’t read nearly a large enough sample of his thought to have a really clear picture of what he thinks. But that won’t stop you from totally rejecting him. Ideology, rather than research into an author, controls all your reactions and judgments.
And you know this, how exactly?
One, because you have admitted to reading almost nothing of Denton’s work, and to not having read his most recent 5 books, running from 1998 through to 2018; two, because it’s quite obvious to me from your comments that you have only a hazy idea of what he writes about, and are relying almost wholly on a single interview and hearsay.
You conveniently fail to mention that I have also read his articles written for publication in peer-reviewed journals. I guess you just forgot that.
If you had actually pointed out anything I had gotten wrong about his beliefs, you might have a case. But, then, when I asked how Denton addresses the question of historical contingency, your replied that, gosh, you really couldn’t remember though you were sure he had somehow.
Uh huh.
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What I wrote:
According to evolutionary theory, the homologous structures depicted above are evidence of common descent, and are accounted for by it. All forelimbs are derived from a common ancestor whose forelimbs showed the basic structure in common between the four examples above, and the differences between the examples are accounted for by subsequent alterations, thru mutations, in the specific forms and proportions of the components of the limbs. That is to say the reason these forelimbs all show the same basic pentadactyl structure is that they were all descended from a pentadactyl ancestor, and developmental constraints (which themselves are merely historically contingent and not functional in origin) explain why the pentadactyl trait has been retained in multiple lineages over time.
It is important to note that, according to the above account, there is no functional explanation for the observed homology. Rather, this is a result of contingent factors that occurred in the history of the evolution of life on earth. If the “tape” of life were rewound to sometime before the existence of vertebrate organism, there is no reason to believe that anything resembling vertebrates with pentadactyl forelimbs would again arise.
Denton’s account starts from the (correct) premise that this homology has no functional explanation. He proposes a theoretical frameworks that he calls “structuralism”. According to this idea, the “homology” between those four limbs is an expression of deep, fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. His position is that, if life had arisen on other planets, we would still find vertebrates with pentadactyl limbs, for the much the same reasons we would expect to find quartz crystals under the geological conditions that produce them here on earth.
What do you think I got wrong?
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I was responding to this:
“Yes. He’s clueless and his ideas are BS. I already knew that,”
That was a sweeping generalization. You can’t possibly know that he’s “clueless” and that “his ideas are BS” when you haven’t read more than a fraction of his ideas. The most you could say is that the ideas of his that you have read are BS. But of course, you are constantly overstating things, in your typical internet-atheist rage, a phenomenon so evident here in the savage tones of Roy, Tim, and others. You’re out to destroy your opponents, not to understand them, and you’re here for quarrels, not for dialogue.
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And yet we are cited Tornado-in-a-junkyard type arguments against the origin of life all the time. That’s EXACTLY like the thing Art Hunt pointed out. Here actual chemistry and physics is ignored, and we are just fed meaningless probabilities of assembling some RNA or protein sequence “by chance”.
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I remain open to your corrections on what I have wrong about Denton’s ideas. Until you provide any, I am fully justified in my assessment.
Only partially right. I have no qualms about my wish that the ID Creationist movement be destroyed. But that is because I understand what it is and what its goals are.
BTW, weren’t you the one who just chastised me for making a “sweeping generalization”? I could swear it was, but then it’d be really hypocritical of you to turn around and make a sweeping generalization about my behaviour. Wouldn’t it?
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Not if the generalization is justified by your uniform behavior, in virtually everything you post here, and not if I’ve read a sufficient percentage of your posts to have a valid sample. Your reaction to almost everything is predictable and falls into a formula. Denton, on the other hand, says a number of things that would probably surprise you to hear, coming from an ID person. But you’ll never know, because you’re happy with the pigeonhole you’ve put him in, based on limited acquaintance.
Another blatant double standard from “Do as I say, not as I do” Eddie.
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