What better argument would that be Bill? Why haven’t these ID geniuses published this idea in the primary scientific literature for review by qualified science experts?
First you need to define faith. Certainly you don’t mean blind faith. There is certainly evidence for the Judeo/Christian God which is not direct evidence but indirect evidence of His actions.
Evidence of design is part of that evidence. Evidence of the resurrection and other miracles is also part of that evidence, as is the brilliance of scripture. The only evidence here that could be categorized as scientific is the design argument and that argument is on the edge of science and philosophy.
Certainly not.
The design argument cannot be categorized as scientific, and I’m not sure that it can be considered philosophical, either. It can be considered theological, however.
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I entirely agree.
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Can you explain your conclusions here?
That it cannot be a scientific argument stems from the fact that there are no tests for design, and the irreducible complexity argument is obviated by neutral evolution, in my limited understanding of the subject. If evolution were strictly Darwinian, IC design might have a case, but it’s not. And how could it be framed as a philosophical argument? Understanding that God is the creator and behind all things in his providence, including mutations, is a theological argument undergird by faith.
Design is tested all the time. We are testing it as we communicate. We are not directly testing biological design but we are testing the proposed mechanism (mind).
Do you believe that neutral mutations can build an irreducibly complex structure like a flagellum? What is the basis of this belief?
The design argument is a step before the conclusion of God. When we discuss God I agree the discussion is theological however the observation of design in nature is a step before the discussion of God.
I just finished Antiquity of the Jews by Josephus who makes the statement that Jesus was the Christ, died was resurrected and seen by his followers. This is evidence for Christianity in a history book. Would you consider this evidence theological or historical?
From Josephus Antiquity of the Jews about 90 AD.
- Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man; if it be lawful to call him a man. For he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross;7 those that loved him at the first did not forsake him. For he appeared to them alive again, the third day:8 as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
Josephus must be used with great caution. I don’t want to start a distracting tangent but—for example—the phrase “if it be lawful to call him a man” is a dead giveaway that this is an interpolation by Christian scribes. It is one of a number of elements in the Testimonium Flavianum which are not likely to have come from Josephus himself. How do we know this? We can study the various manuscripts which have preserved this famous Josephus passage in some forum or other, not only in Greek but in other languages such as Arabic, Syriac, Latin, and Slavonic.
One of my professors used to point out that Josephus never used the Greek word POIETES for anything but “poet”, yet in this passage it has the meaning “doer” (as in “a doer of wonderful works”)—and that that use was more consistent with Eusebius, who was very likely one of the later “contaminators” of the Josephus passage. Nevertheless, not all scholars consider the POIETES meaning to be a problem.
I know a lot of evangelical scholars who concur with the almost universally cited problems in the Testimonium Flavianum, so readers should not assume that skepticism about various aspects of this text is a conspiracy on the part of “liberals” or anti-theists. Most scholars agree that Josephus wrote about Jesus but that later Christians tampered with the wording as they copied and preserved the writings of Josephus.
Here’s a plausible reconstruction of the Testimonium Flavianum by James Dunn. I believe that it is reasonably close to what Josephus originally wrote:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
Notice that this reconstruction:
(1) removes the “lawful to call him a man” phrase
(2) does NOT call him “the Christ” (that is, the Anointed One, the Messiah)
(3) contains no reference to the resurrection. It is very hard to imagine Josephus recording “he appeared to them alive again, the third day” rather than something like “his followers claim that …”
All of that said, I should emphasize that the Josephus passage is a solid historical text testifying to the existence of Jesus as a real person who lived in the first century and was the reason why “the tribe of Christians” came to be. Together with many other historical documents, the existence of Jesus is affirmed by scholars of ancient history—and the recent trend of historical-Jesus-denial on many Internet websites and Youtube videos is silly nonsense by people with obvious agendas. (The fact that Josephus wrote of Jesus several decades after his death in no way compromises that testimony to the existence of the historical Jesus. Scholars of ancient history have never demanded contemporary attestation as the only trustworthy testimony to the existence of an historical person.)
Allen, thanks for pointing this out. I have read the skeptics comments and agree with your comments. This is an interesting discussion in its own right and I would like to understand this better.
It’s very hard to picture how an undiscovered forgery could have occurred with the tools available thousands of years ago. How many copies of this do you think we’re made within the first 50 years?
The other issue is that Josephus really understood the prophecies as demonstrated in the earlier parts of Antiquities and would likely have understood how Jesus fulfilled these.
My memories are fuzzy after so many years but I recall a faculty lounge discussion where one of my colleagues (a scholar of church history who apparently had done a lot of Paley reading in his grad work) claimed that Paley was quite comfortable with virtually any natural process being “the wise hand of God at work” [or something like that.] That was among the reasons (I can’t remember the others) why my friend suggested that if the evidence for evolution had been presented to him, Paley would have found it possible to conform evolutionary processes to the early chapters of Genesis.
I have not included the name of the famous church historian because of fear that I have not paraphrased his argument as well as I might wish.
Sorry, but that is the best I can do towards “making a case.”
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I’m not clear what you mean by this. I certainly don’t consider the Testimonium Flavianum to be an “undiscovered forgery”, nor a forgery of any sort. I believe it is simply an ancient text which got “improved” a bit by later copyists. (I put that word in quotations marks in order to describe the view of the copyists, not mine.)
My opinion isn’t worth much (because I’m not at all an historian of the Ancient Near East) but I have a hard time imagining that all that many copies of Josephus’ massive works were made in such a period. Considering that Jewish scholars had no respect for Josephus (because they basically considered him a traitor who joined the Romans), I’ve always been surprised that Josephus’ volumes survived as well as they have.
My impression of Josephus is that he had other fish to fry, so to speak, and that he gave Jesus very very little thought. To him Jesus was just a passing curiosity, the founder of an obscure sect. Compare the brevity of the Jesus passage with the very long “episode” about a far more obscure (to us) figure which was recorded by Josephus in the several pages just before the Testimonium Flavianum.
Here is an argument that Luke and Josephus had a common source. This is from the Josephus website. Josephus.org - The Flavius Josephus Primer Home Page
Reading through this list of parallels inevitably leads to the question: Is there simple explanation for the harmony between the two?
The modern consensus holds that the Antiquities passage was, for the most part, written by Josephus with some later Christian additions. Yet how could a Jewish historian independently compose a text that, by pure chance, so closely matches a passage from a Christian gospel?
There are several alternatives. I shall demonstrate the following:
The similarities are too numerous and unusual to be the result of accident. This will be demonstrated on another page by a statistical comparison of all other known descriptions of Jesus of similar length.
The similarities are not what would be written by a 2nd or 3rd century Christian deliberately mimicking Josephus’ style. This is a consequence of the study on the statistics page.
The similarities are what would be expected if Josephus had employed a document very similar to Luke’s Emmaus narrative as his source for information on Jesus, which he then moderately rewrote. This will be demonstrated on the style page by studying how other passages in his works were rewritten by Josephus from sources known to us.
The conclusion that can therefore be drawn is that Josephus and Luke derived their passages from a common Christian (or Jewish-Christian) source .
The analysis allows us to identify what is authentic in the Testimonium. It also allows is to plausibly uncover the document used by both Josephus and Luke. I will argue elsewhere that this document is a copy of a speech used by early Jesus proselytes of Jerusalem.
For the first time, we will have independent, Jewish documentation of the speech that is called, many times in Luke/Acts, “the word” and “the gospel.”
Doesn’t that repeat the famous challenge made on UD? (Science Grrrl, IIRC)
Let me see if I can nudge this back in the direction I intended. — The methods of ID tend to leap to a grand conclusions, but those methods are not validated. Instead of trying to disprove evolution, ID proponents would do well to set their sight a little lower. How about answering: “Does ID offer a better explanation of the evidence than Lamarckism?”
TOE supplanted Lamarckism, can ID do that too?
Even that might be too much. Most questions in science are very small. On those rare occasions where “big” conclusions are made, there is generally a large body of supporting work leading to that grand conclusion. If ID is science, then it should be about to make conclusions within the existing methods of science, or first validate those methods.
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@swamidass asks me whether I agree with @sfmatheson here. Yes, I do agree with what Steve says here, as far as it goes.
Paley is so famous b/c his book was (IMO) so well written, not b/c (as many today seem to assume) it was particularly original. Mostly, he pulled together ideas that had been advanced by many others for a long time. For example, Cicero knew about Archimedes’ mechanical planetarium, and he felt that the great complexity and regularity of the celestial “clock” strongly suggested the existence of a designing intelligence. Likewise, the standard medieval astronomy text, by John of Sacrobosco, refers to the “machina mundi,” the machine or fabric of the world. John Calvin used identical terminology in the Latin edition of the Institutes. The great Huguenot apologist Phillipe de Mornay spoke of spoke of the sky “as the great whéele of a Clocke,” and “the very instrument of tyme,” requiring “a Worker that putteth him to vse, a Clockkéeper that ruleth him, a Mynd that was the first procurer of his mouing.” So, arguments for a designer based on the machine-like complexity of nature are very, very old.
Robert Boyle probably did more than anyone else to popularize such forms of the teleological argument. Indeed, in his unpublished papers one even finds a paragraph that sounds just like the famous opening paragraph of Paley’s book, where Paley wrote about finding a watch on a heath: “As, if an Indian or Chinois, should have found a Watch cast on shore in some Trunk or Casket of some shipwrackt European vessel; by observing the Motions & Figure of it, he would quickly conclude That 'twas made by some Intelligent & Skilfull Being…” (Boyle Papers 1, fol. 47). Paley never saw that manuscript, so he didn’t take that particular idea directly from Boyle, but Boyle was probably drawing on a work from the 1670s by Matthew Hale, where we find similar language. Paley is often thought to have gotten the idea from an 18th Century Dutch author, and perhaps he did.
As @sfmatheson says, the analogy or argument (I think it’s both) doesn’t actually answer the design question. It does that only if one already assumes or knows that only a mind can be the source of intricate mechanisms. Boyle simply took that for granted, and I sense that Paley did also. They were wholly unable to conceive of how a “blind” process, such as the one Darwin believed he had provided, could do anything even remotely like “designing” the world. Of course, Darwin himself wrestled with the deep metaphysical question here, never entirely giving up on his instinctive belief that order cannot come from nothing, but only from a mind. And, the inclusion of the epigram from William Whewell opposite the title page of the Origin suggests that even a process like NS operating on “chance” mutations can be understood as a type of intentional divine creation. (See The Evolution of Darwin’s Religious Faith - BioLogos)
So, this is still a contested matter for good reasons (IMO).
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I thought he was dusting off Aristotle but this isn’t my wheelhouse. Dennett devotes a chapter of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea to “Hume’s Close Encounter,” which predates Paley by 20+ years. I haven’t read Paley so I don’t know/remember whether he directly addresses Hume.
I haven’t read all of Paley for a long time, so I am also reluctant to go very far with this particular matter. I will say that Paley only sparingly cites anyone explicitly, including Boyle (whose views he parrots, whether or not he knew it) who isn’t cited even once. In the online copy here http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=A142&viewtype=text&pageseq=1, Paley cites Hume just once by name, on p. 512, in a context that seems relatively unimportant to this thread.
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