I think that is a rephrasing of my “We cannot deduce from events that are merely physical how God infuses meaning and order into them.”
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I think this is very true.
I think this is true as well, but what does “harmony” mean? I think that for some people, it means primarily “peaceful co-existence”: you stay on your side of the fence and I’ll stay on mine, and then we can avoid quarreling. For others, “harmony” means synthesis – a blending of notes, as it were, to produce some new music that neither singer could produce on his or her own.
I’m of course interested in “harmony” in that second (and fuller) sense – and that is connected with your first point about philosophy. The philosopher isn’t content to lay two truths side by side, and say, “Well, these two don’t openly contradict one another, so everything is all right.” The philosopher wants to explore fully the relationship between the two truths, bring them together in a synthesis. And that doesn’t mean sloppily mixing elements of them together, indiscriminately, but bringing them together in an intellectually careful way.
Would that they were that precise! I still haven’t seen a BioLogos or ASA leader affirm that God “guided” evolution, and in fact, whenever that question has been put to them, they lead the questioner on a chase that can last days or weeks, as they deny the appropriateness of “guided” or any other term that is suggested. I’ve been asking George Brooks for about three or four years now which BioLogos leaders have endorsed his term “God-guided evolution,” and still he hasn’t been able to provide me with a single name.
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In my view, it is hard to imagine being farther apart. It is very strange that I am placed in the same camp at them. I understand it less and less as time goes by. Objectively speaking GAE did not fit in the EC camp, and was soundly rejected by them, along with me.
I think this is well stated. I think both of those views are well represented within those who call themselves Evolutionary Creationists. Many that I know have gone through lots of personal turmoils, rejection from family and church, confused about how to hold their faith and what they see in science together. Frankly, any kind of harmony between Christianity and modern science is a sweet relief from the fear of having to defend science at church and church in the lab. Some get far enough that they want to dig deeper into what “harmony” might mean. I just know people are in different places.
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So we need a new label that is neither TE/EC nor ID, but the harmonious synthesis. 
Yeah, I haven’t figured that one out. Out of respect I will make sure to not put you in that camp, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how you’re not. I think this may be because:
- I don’t equate EC with BioLogos necessarily. BioLogos is a major organizational structure, but I certainly don’t think they “own” evolutionary creation. I’ve known several scientists who’ve called themselves evolutionary creationists who hadn’t even heard of BioLogos before.
- I typically care much more about what the emerging adults and “nobodies” like me are thinking, than the organizational leaders. I’m trying to catch up on reading (since I started teaching I haven’t had a lot of time for reading), but I typically don’t see statements from people like Deb or Denis as necessarily authoritative for EC. I tend to see it more “sociologically”.
I don’t see EC as being anything specific enough for you to be “out” of it. I would put pretty much anybody who affirms evolutionary biology and historic, orthodox Christianity in the Evolutionary Creationist camp. Maybe I’m just being unreasonably “big tent”, but I haven’t seen any “prescription” of EC that’s much more specific.
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Yes, you are in an important spot, teaching science in a Christian university.
But that method question is not relevant, because I’m not asking anyone for a scientific judgment. I’m asking them what they personally think happened, not to prove it by means of scientific techniques. I’m asking for their judgment as a whole, integrated human being, not as a specialist bound in speech by certain professional conventions.
And no, I did not assent to your statement; I merely reserved judgment on it. You will see that if you refer to my earlier response above.
There might be sloppiness in some cases, and on all sides, I agree; but in principle the distinction between “by chance” and “by design” is not inherently sloppy; it’s quite intelligible, and has been part of Western intellectual discourse since the time of the Greek philosophers.
Partly that, and partly because you asked me, a couple of posts ago, to do so. 
As I’ve already said, Michael Denton thinks the whole universe is shot through with design, so probably the anti-matter/matter balance would be, too. But it doesn’t follow that the design can always be demonstrated. So often we use arguments to demonstrate it in particular cases, not to deny that it could be everywhere, but because only in those cases can we demonstrate it.
Suppose I write an elaborate message in the sand on every beach in the world, and on one beach, write the word “IN.” Now, every single message was by design, but while you will have no trouble inferring that the Gettysburg address on Daytona Beach was designed, you won’t be sure that “In” was designed, because “In” might have been made by chance, by wind or wave action, or by some burrowing crab.
So, let’s say for the sake of argument that the matter/anti-matter balance was designed, but we have no good argument to establish that, whereas the origin of life was also designed, and we do have a good argument to establish that. Affirming design in the one case doesn’t mean denying it in the other. I’m not contesting your warning that all kinds of things might be designed, and that focusing on just one and ignoring all other possible cases is inadequate. I agree with it. But I don’t see why that should be a barrier to accepting particular design arguments that appear plausible, whether they concern the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, or anything else in nature.
I also find it ironic that so many TE/EC leaders accuse ID of inconsistency on this point (charging that ID writers, in arguing for design only in some cases, deny that God designs everything), when almost none of them has the slightest use for ID proponent Michael Denton, who argues for exactly the position they seem to like.
I think the best way of “reclaiming” it would be to go back to using it in the sense it always had in English, before the ID/TE debates started (and they only started in the early 1990s, and the 25-30 years involved is just a blip in Western history). If the TE leaders would stop worrying about the fact that ID people use the word “design,” and simply use it in the standard way themselves, I think a lot of the fuss and bother would go away. But as long as TE leaders keep insisting (against protest after protest by ID people) that “design” necessarily means “by a miracle” or “contrary to evolution,” instead of just plain “design,” i.e., what the word means to architects, engineers, artists, dressmakers, film credits designers, drafters of constitutions, creators of theme parks, etc., they won’t be able to reclaim it. They need to expel the inner demons (demons from their own past connected with the creationist upbringing of a good number of them) that are preventing them simply using a term that is part of standard English.
The top ID thinkers (I can’t account for what everyone claiming the ID label does) do this only where “randomness” (or “chance”) is, in context, being given a degree of creative power that makes design superfluous. None of them object to the “contained” use of randomness to achieve an overall design. For example, the use of radioactivity in smoke alarms, or the use of randomness in the human immune system – where neither the smoke alarm nor the immune system are themselves considered to be the product of randomness – is not something that ID people find offensive. In fact, in such cases, the “randomness” is only productive precisely because it is harnessed into the service of a larger system. When the whole system is taken into account, not just the part that operates solely by randomness, the design inference remains as strong as ever. Behe stresses, rather than denies, the use of randomness in the immune system, but its existence there doesn’t make him doubt the reality of design.
I think one reason why the origin of life is regarded as a useful case is that the scenario is in some ways simpler. Unlike in evolution, where there is already a system of life in place which might be able to make use of limited doses of randomness, before there was any organic system, when all that existed were a few simple molecules, it is harder to see how the environment would have any structural organization that could harness the randomness of molecules bopping around in all directions, and turn them into a living system. It looks as if much would depend upon chance accretions, building up over time into something that could make the leap to life – if those accretions weren’t undone, as they easily might be, by other chance events, before they were solidly in place. It is reasonable, conceptually speaking, to oppose chance to design in such a primordial situation, and then to suggest that design seems more plausible as an organizational factor. Of course, there is a third possibility, a deterministic, front-loaded process. But in that case the “best explanation” would not be chance but necessity. And even then, the laws behind the necessity might be the product of a mind. So either way, “chance” seems the least promising causal explanation for the origin of life. No one can say it would be “impossible,” but we disbelieve a lot of things that aren’t impossible, if we find them unlikely enough.
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When can it ever be demonstrated, scientifically?
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Well, Mike Behe affirms common descent, disagreeing only with certain claims about the mechanism that moves things along from one form to the other. And he’s an orthodox Catholic. So unless “accepting evolution” (i.e., descent with modification) also requires accepting current majority views on the mechanism of evolutionary change, then Behe would fit your definition. And in fact I have heard a couple of TE leaders say that for all practical purposes, Behe is in fact a TE. The fact that he disputes the power of some mechanisms is for them a less important detail.
If all that EC affirmed was that evolution happened, and that God was the cause of it, a lot of ID folks in the Behe camp would not object to calling themselves ECs. But many ECs affirm a whole boatload of other things not strictly necessary to those two main points: the acceptance not just of the fact of evolution (descent with modification) but of the temporary consensus regarding mechanism; the denial that design is or could be detectable; the claim that a good God would never design malaria or other evils; the claim that it’s a nobler and better God who only acts once, at the beginning of creation, than one who “tinkers” along the way; tendencies toward liberal forms of theology such as Open Theism–and it’s those other things that keep the ID people, even the ones who accept evolution, out of the EC fold. (And sometimes I think those gratuitous claims are made precisely for that purpose, to keep the ID folks out, but that’s neither here nor there for my main point.)
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The answer to that question depends on how narrowly or broadly one interprets “scientifically.”
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If the existence of the Designer is rejected a priori, as of course it is, then design can never be inferred. We can infer it because we believe in God’s providence, to one degree or another, but that is not ‘scientific’.
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I think another problem with the entire debate is equating Scientific findings with “general revelation”. It’s not.
General revelation (like any revelation in the bible) is God revealing himself to everyone through nature. What does this have to do with science?
The problem is that the interpretation of data by scientists is put on a pedestal as somehow superior to the revelation in the bible. The reasoning being that as fallible creatures, our interpretation of the bible can be wrong. This is a legitimate concern.
However it’s also true that the scientific interpretation of data can also be false (because it’s done by human beings who are fallible).
IMO, the first place in each Christians conscience must go to scripture and it’s interpretation must be done in a non-profit concordist way.
Yes, but science cannot necessarily impute meaning or design even when God has infused it. In fact, maybe MN necessarily cannot, in spite of how much ID theorists would like it to (I would like it to, as well). I agree regarding general revelation.
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However it seems to do so inadvertently…
Creation is so awesome that someone has to be given credit. So we hear thing like “the inventiveness of nature”, the “the creative ability of natural selection” etc.
Athiests like Dawkins also talk about a sense of awe when doing science. Only, its an awe without God in a world governed by chance.
It’s impossible for human beings to try to understand something without attributing meaning to it.
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That is why we are without excuse. We are not robots doing science.
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Yes, but I would suspect that when you read TE literature by scientists, they are implicitly speaking primarily as scientists. It seems that many Christian scientists do not think carefully about how to synthesize theology and science, and end up sticking to what they are familiar with, which is making scientific judgments. Some of it might also be due to the narrow education of many scientists, who do not appreciate theological sophistication. (Or possibly also the general lack of theological depth in many American evangelical circles, even among some pastors.)
OK. I apologize for misunderstanding you.
Yes, but the error has been the recent equivocation between the traditional philosophical definitions of these terms and how modern scientists use them in their discourse. Not to mention the general disconnect between people trained as philosophers or theologians and those trained as scientists. From my observation, it seems that among Catholics, there is more mutual respect between those two groups.
OK, so you believe that it is more possible to demonstrate design in certain cases, whereas ECs tend to think that such demonstrations are not persuasive, or not rigorous enough to be considered science (e.g. see my comments on providence with @DaleCutler and @terrellclemmons). Now, I’m not going to debate this specific matter on this thread here, but we see that the fundamental disagreement between ID proponents (at least those that you cited) and TE/ECs is a disagreement about method on how to demonstrate design, not content.
I agree. I think the way Josh has often framed it is useful: he doesn’t object against design, only certain bad arguments for design, which happen to be the ones that the DI and similar ID proponents endorse.
It seems that TE/ECs tend to favor the third possibility. But see: arguing for the presence of a Mind from necessity is not something scientists are equipped to do. It is unsurprising that many ECs do not feel comfortable to expound at length about this. Their main concern is making sure the science isn’t misrepresented.
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Philosophical naturalists trying to rationalize away beauty, awe, music, humor, conciousness, ideating, and on and on, always wind up sounding pretty lame. Because they are.
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So just to recap our conversation so far, @Eddie: I believe what I have gotten out of this exchange is that there needs to be more clarity and sophistication in the way TE/ECs use terms such as randomness and design, and that the problem is mainly that of rhetoric. People need to get more comfortable thinking hard about how God’s providence fits into the picture. ID proponents (or at least those you have cited) believe that all of nature is shot through with design at all levels, just as ECs do, but they think that in certain cases like OOL it is more likely to be able to demonstrate it.
I also want to give a final comment on the problems with many attempts to “demonstrate” design. Personally, I don’t think the problem is with design itself; I think it is primarily how IDs frame their argument in opposition to mainstream science, as opposed to complementing it. For example, Michael Behe affirms many tenets of mainstream evolution and common descent, but he still does spend a lot of time saying that “Evolutionary mechanisms are insufficient to explain X”. If he were to say, “Philosophical naturalism is insufficient to account for the evolutionary mechanisms that explain X”, then much less people would object to his arguments.
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Absolutely.
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