The Explanatory Power of Darwinism

[jongarvey]

@swamidass

Not really. Divine teleology is consistent with evolutionary science, but it is by no means entailed by it (much like the de novo Adam). Nothing in science rules it out. Darwin’s view is gone, but population genetics reigns. Common descent, also, has become (as it always was) the unifying umbrella. @jongarvey, there is nothing wrong with evolutionary science, it is just an incomplete view of origins. It is obviously and inarguably incomplete.

I’m reminded of this post of Ken Keathley:

@kkeathley

So what might EC proponents do? Possibly three things, of which Jeff Schloss is trying to do the first two and you are attempting to do the third.

1. Emphasize how evolution is compatible with teleology. Most popular Darwinists (both historical and current) have been infamously anti-teleological. One doesn’t have to embrace some of the more ham-handed versions of design in order to affirm purpose and intent. Perhaps more attention should be given to biological fine-tuning.

Historically biology stopped doing teleology with Darwin (which is one good reason for my referring back to him - he set the agenda for the research project, and his big question is still important).

But it can’t be intriniscally impossible to discern teleology (whether or not you call such discernment science), or else Sy Garte’s research on “innate intelligence” would be nonsensical, not to mention other realistic possibilities of Aristotelian innate teleology. If it is impossible, it would be a bizarre state of affairs that we teleological beings have no halfway reliable way to recognise our key feature.

I mentioned before that Bill Dembski considers teleology can be discerned statistically (but not distinguished as divine or not), and it seems to me not unreasonable, albeit as difficult in practice as teasing out actual causal chains in population genetics. It would seem that, in that respect, the recession to God as First Cause (specifically, the top of the teleological chain) follows as it does in Aquinas as well as Aristotle in embryonic form, from a rational inference.

So it seems to me that, in the course of time, evoultution may be seen not merely to be compatible with divine teleology, but to point to it via the elucidation of inherent teleology.