Theological Premises in Design Arguments?

[dga471 (Daniel)]

@Eddie

And the no-evolution requirement of YECs isn’t required by ID, either. So if you keep only the core ideas, you can combine ID and TE: God created the world; he created it through evolution; evolution is a designed process to achieve certain results; and some evidence of the design is found in nature.

It’s not required by ID, and as you pointed out, the majority of ID advocates accept some form of evolution or even common descent. But a lot of the rhetoric in ID is “anti-Darwinism”, which for the conservative Christian public translates to anti-evolutionism. We can see an example happening right here in this forum - see the views of Greg in Welcome Greg to the Forum. He seems to be a YEC but is also sympathetic to ID. I have met quite a number of Christians like Greg before. They form a substantial part of the support base for ID.

@Eddie

Behe has about 36 peer-reviewed articles on biochemistry (more, incidentally, than Applegate, Falk, Venema and Giberson combined, which makes it more than a little irritating when they preach to Behe on what “real science” requires – maybe if they had produced a little more real science themselves, their lectures would have more weight).

You are astute in pointing out that many of the regular Biologos columnists are not famous scientists either. I agree that the ID camp contains more qualified people than the YEC camp, for example. But in that context I was also referring to the legions of non-Christian scientists of various backgrounds that all reject ID.

@Eddie

Yet to my knowledge, there has never been a public debate in the USA where Behe and Collins, or Denton and Haarsma, squared off against Coyne and PZ Myers. Why not?

If you read Collins carefully it’s clear why. Collins and Behe both share the same conclusion - that God exists, but they have very different, in fact opposing methods of how to argue that conclusion (or not argue, as you’ve pointed out for the case of Collins). Francis’ counter-arguments against Coyne would be mutually exclusive to Behe’s, so it would be very awkward for them to be on the same team. In fact Behe would be a liability to Collins in a debate against the New Atheists because they would keep emphasizing that Behe’s arguments are bad science, which Collins would agree with.

@Eddie

So actually, for a certain kind of reader – one not already convinced of God on revelational grounds (as Collins is) – Behe’s arguments are more helpful.

I get what you’re saying, as there are some examples of people (such as Anthony Flew) who abandoned strict atheism after reading design arguments. But I can also see this working both ways, especially if ID has such a bad rep among the scientific community. (Much worse rep than many other fringe ideas, partially also due to its past political entanglements.) It could discredit Christianity instead.

@Eddie

I highly recommend J. Scott Turner’s new book to you. It’s very good on the history of evolutionary thought, the history of vitalist ideas, the idea of homeostasis, and other matters which are important to understanding living things. And it’s accessible to non-biologists, for the most part.

Thanks. I will keep it in my reading list.