Tim's comments on What if Evolution is Compatible with Design After All?

[Rope (Rope Kojonen)]

@Tim

@Rope

You mention critique of the design argument’s logic (arguing that a designer would make any phenomenon more probable, and therefore explains nothing). But you do not mention that I discuss this same criticism in the book and respond to it. I suspect you would react quite critically if a book defending your own position was criticized in this same manner - repeating arguments that are actually responded to in the book, without even mentioning the responses. Regardless, such philosophical critique of design arguments is distinct from critiques based on evolution as such.

Kojonan, if you had read that thread with any degree of care whatsoever, you would have noticed that I made that comment before I gained access to your book (access which I noted here).

I make no apology for, at the time, addressing the material that I had been presented, rather than an expansion of it that, at the time, I was not even aware existed.

I have since read your exposition on the subject in the book. It did not strike me as particularly compelling. However, given your patronising tone, and your less-than-careful characterisation of my own comments, I have very little interest (or even stomach) for discussing the issue with you further.

Tim,

Sorry to hear you found that patronizing! I was hoping that some counter-criticism could help slightly improve the quality of the feedback here, not just regarding my work, but also any other scholar. But it seems this attempt failed once again.

And I actually did notice that you wrote those before getting access to the book! It just does not make a difference in my view. If I had written a public critique of someone’s argument and only got access to their book later (for some weird reason - typically I would read the book before criticizing), one of the first things I would do is to check if the author takes my criticism into account. If they did, I would see it as my responsibility to publicly revise my previous critique, in the interest of fair representation. Even if I did not find their response convincing, I would write something along the lines of “to his credit, Tim himself develops this same critique, and then responds to it as follows”. Usually my goal would be to try to summarize an argument in terms that (hopefully) the author themselves can recognize, and then offer the critique after that. But it’s ok if your goals are different - and I also do not have that much more time to spend on this discussion anyway.

I guess many of the posters here see me as a theologian intruding on the territory of science, and so see it as their responsibility to defend science against such intrusions. Maybe that explains the hostile tone of much of the discussion, and the lack of interest in reading the material. Hostile to the extent that even the clarification of cross-discipline terminological confusion can be interpreted as a creationist tactic, and high quality philosophy articles are called akin to output of the postmodernism generator . However, it seems clear that evaluating the issue of the compatibility of evolution and design is not limited to just biology, but is actually mainly a philosophical and theological issue, while it does require engagement with science. And in those realms I do have relevant training and publications, whereas most biologists are non-experts.