If you don’t believe carnivores were triggered into creation … then God created EAT-or-Be-EATEN.
Which means either system is just as cruel. You deflected my question because you already knew this.
@jongarvey (cc: @swamidass) ,
Maybe you could do a column on this?
You are saying that a painter is intervening in the creation made by one tool by changing to a different tool?
That doesn’t make much sense to me.
The creation is still all God.
Yet he seems to be saying the same thing athiests are saying. I.e that natural selection accounts for appearance of design in life. And people should not misunderstand that it doesn’t.
I find this cause for concern for the following reasons-
Why back up an idea which has no solid evidence, about an intuitive concept which has nothing to do with science with his professional authority as a scientist?
I don’t think he is dishonest. However his concerns do not seem purely scientific to me… perhaps there are philosophical issues involved.
Evolution is far more than eat or be eaten. I didn’t deflect your question. I pointed out a fact.
For example, in the hey days of Darwinism, there were people who justified eugenics and killing the less “fit” in evolutionary language.
This is the kind of cruelty and indifference associated with evolution that I am talking about.
This is a false view of reality.
You are cherry picking George. I responded using your analogy and named each of the aspects of the analogy accordingly.
The intervention was the normal course of events (the brush strokes) being interrupted by the knife instead.
The character who created the painting was God, but only in your version of the story… Many of the participants on this board will describe the process of evolution as one in which no God, god or intelligence is involved at all… except, possibly, to get the process started. Many will agree that God may have intervened at certain points to help the process along (the knife strokes.)
So, as @Ashwin_s said earlier, and I agreed with him, you may have God intervening in the process of evolution.
Will a book do? Currently just finished proofreading stage.
I do think it’s important that one aspect of the “limitation of science” is insisting that its own technical, or even metaphgorical, usages don’t get to hi-jack the language for everybody else.
I guess sometimes it’s inevitable - evolution was an uncommon word meaning literally, and in its ,“unfolding of inherent capabilities”, but has now been so thoroughly Darwinized that it will always hereafter have connotations of open-endedness. The Latin etymology (evolvo, I unroll) is now nothing to do with the word, but we’re stuck with it. But that should not be allowed to happen to core English vocabulary.
For example, Josh urged me not to confuse issues by using the word “information” in discussing a theology of nature (ie meaning something like “the purposes God communicates in creation”). Yet “information” in information theory is a very specialised and limited concept, completely appropriate for Shannon’s work on channel capacity and so on, yet missing the essential element of the kind of information that all communications channels are designed to carry. In retrospect, Shannon should have formed some neologism for what he quantised as “bits”, but he didn’t. Nevertheless, it is Shannon “information” that should always have scare quotes, not information with meaning, which has the primary usage for centuries.
So to say “information is noise” confuses because it fails to stress the contecxtual qualifiers: “In Shannon theory, ‘information’ is noise.” The obvious riposte, illuminating the problem, is to say “Thankyou for presenting that information so clearly.” If the sentence were noise, it would a waste of time saying it.
Likewise, it is simply wrong to call what natural selection does “design”, even if we really mean “variation and natural selection”, because design is, and has been at all times, a teleological word, and natural selection is, and has always been, a substitute for teleology.
So the shorthand found in scientific papers about the “design” of some system or organ may be acceptable in that context (though I’m among those who believe that if one is constantly forced to use teleological language, one is probably observing teleology), but it must never be allowed to prevent those who believe God is actively governing evolution from using the word “design” for the conceptions which, by whatever means, he brings to fruition.
Another way of regarding this is that something which acquires function, beauty, utility or any other “appearance” of design without those things being conscious goals is merely a pareidolia: only if some mind has conceived function as function, beauty as beauty, etc, does the word “design” become more than a misleading analogy.
Likewise, I would add, we must continue to insist that creation (as one poster at Biologos said) is not simply “efficient causation,” at least in serious discourse rather than loose colloquial usage. If it is actually correct to say “a hurricane creates carnage,” then there is no word left for God’s creation of a cosmos of beauty and order ex nihilo. It’s even demeaning to the English usage (from the Latin creo) of making, forming, choosing etc applied to the highest human activities.
In English, “create” has always been used sparingly because it was vaguely recognised as being a translation of Hebrew bara, a world used only of God. If we allow its meaning to slip, then a phrase like “Evolutionary Creation” can simply mean what Richard Dawkins means by it - a blind and undirected series of cause and effect ending in functional organisms.
Brilliant! Thanks very much!! I especially appreciate your reference to disallowing one side to hijack any specific term. What I have seen so often, and firmly believe that discussions like this one can alleviate, is that each camp wishes to clearly define the others, but to leave their own quite open. The dynamic nature of the research and content must allow for some flexibility, but the Golden Rule should generally apply in this realm. Again, thanks for this post. Very helpful!
I really agree with this.
In this case the challenge is that ID arguments have conflated these definitions. As long as you can clearly distinguish from that conflation we are probably fine, even if you use the term.
If there is any position which lacks logical rigor it is pan-adaptionism, where it is claimed that every phenotypic difference between individuals or species is due to positive or negative selection. It is a mistake to see a phenotypic difference and assume that the difference must affect fitness in some significant way.
Another possibility more likely is rhetoric. We are in a multilingual conversation where the same utterances have different meanings in adjacent contexts. I have a certain way of navigating the translation between the two, that is recieved as legitimate, though it is not common. @glipsnort tends to use the scientific jargon here but us very diligent in dilimitting the limits of his position. Notice that he never important his language into theological claims. Because isess engaged in the theological exchange, is correctly engaging and explainigb scientific reasoning in the language of science, I think his approach is legitimate. It places a higher burden on you to appriately translate him.
Notice that @glipsnort and I are not disagreeing on the science. We are just saying things with different emphasis and wording. The difference is rhetorical.
True… it’s entirely possible.
I find this a little strange.
To be honest, I still don’t get why thinking natural selection has nothing to do with appearance of design is a misunderstanding… or why such a “misunderstanding” is a problem among regular people…
As far I understand, natural selection has nothing to do with the appearance of design. It cannot tell us why a particular mechanism works the way it does. Or whether a particular arrangement of molecules/mechanism existed as an idea in God’s mind before it appeared in an organism. In some specific circumstances, it can tell us how a trait/mutation got fixed… And probably how a complex function arose (though such stories tend to be speculative and impossible to verify).
I do not use that rhetoric.
I say that we correctly perceive that life is designed because it is. God created us all.
However there is a different sort of appearance of design that is an illusion. The perception that life is like a human design, like a machine, that is an illusion. The perception that life follows human design principles is an illusion too. Though human design principles and language are often used to make sense of and explain biology because such is the language of humans.
Design is ultimately connected to intent. I don’t think design can be segregated as “human” and “non human”… life is way more complex than anything humans make…
However I don’t think there is anything about how life is designed to make it accessible to natural selection.To get a designed product, we need an ability to look forward and envision what the product is like and how it will functions (this is why blue prints/3d models etc exist)… As far as I know, natural selection does not have this ability.
And there is no way to think God’s designs are “open ended” in God’s POV.
Edit: So when I think of “appearance of design”… I am thinking of the appearance of the end result being foreseen and all components of the design are arranged so as to meet the end result. To what extent natural selection can foresee a result is doubtful… especially when we take neutral evolution into consideration.
There is no mystery here. When a non-ID scientist says “intent” or “intended”… he or she ONLY means the figurative appearance of intention.
A Christian science, when not speaking professionally as a scientist, can soeak to God’s intention.
George what exactly is “figurative appearance of intent”…?
I fear you are speaking in circles in your post to @swamidass.
The forces of Natural Selection are ALWAYS in play. God uses those forces like any other natural process. And sometimes, we presume, God arranges to temporarily counter Natural Selection…
But you are not likely to know when it where or for how long.
That sounds more like philosophy than science. Is natural selection some kind of ghost in the system? What exactly are the “forces” of natural selection?
I personally have no problem with natural selection as long as no one claims it “designed” or “appears to design” anything.
Your last sentence is currently applicable to natural selection in many cases… not just cases of it being “countered”.
I really don’t understand the basis of this assertion? How is the translation mechanism not a similar design concept ASC11 code in computers?