And it’s cool to look back and see God’s hand in events that I was not aware of at the time.
…there wouldn’t have been any of those events.
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How do you know this?
Um, why did I call the urology clinic?
Apparently, because you had blood in your urine. There can be many, many causes, such as transient bleeding from a kidney stone that you had passed all on your own. If you had passed a kidney stone and there were no further problems to worry about, would you have assigned the same meaning to those previous events?
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There was only one, though, wasn’t there. And in any case, the devotional applied there and then.
And what is the problem with recognizing God’s hand in retrospect?
I hope you get the ‘chance’.
No problem… I was flexing a bit of Socratic rhetorical muscle in attempting to show that ‘answers’ tend to move beyond philosophy.
Exactly! I love Lewis. He is a gifted writer and thinker, but I’m also predisposed to his arguments because I’m a Christian. The “goodness” of his philosophy, as I see it, was in his ability to get even people who disagree with him to see things in a new way. Philosophy is good at that, but it isn’t good at giving answers. That is probably why you were frustrated with it as a student – too wishy-washy. It is also more of what I was thinking about when I said:
Cheers!
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My point is that meaning was applied afterwards, which it was.
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Not to the busy signal, the devotional nor the appointment cancelation. And so what if it was?
My point is that we can easily find a long stretch of unrelated coincidences that led to any event we find meaningful. It’s not that hard to do.
For example, I was driving towards an intersection one time and saw the car 50 feet in front of me get sideswiped by a car that ran a red light. There are all sorts of coincidences during that day which could have changed the time I arrived at that intersection, all of which were unrelated to the accident. However, that poor guy who got hit didn’t have those lucky coincidences. I see no reason to assign any type of guidance to that event, even though there are plenty of coincidences that potentially saved my life that day.
One thing that did become apparent quite soon, but sure, ‘in retrospect’ of a few days, was the significance of getting the appointment that soon – the bleed was intermittent. I can imagine a farmer out peeing next to his tractor, and then the bleeding stops for several days or more, or someone else who gets an appointment three months away, and the bleeding stops. They could just let it be, minimizing the significance. Then, …too late.
You are still missing the bit about disparate and unrelated events. You are talking about a related series of events that affect the timing.
As an olive branch, I am not trying to discount your beliefs. If this is what you believe, then go for it. I see no reason why you shouldn’t believe as you do. What I am trying to communicate is why I have doubt. Most of all, I am extremely grateful that you are here discussing these topics with us.
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There’s probably no such thing.
If you can find fault with the philosophy, then it cannot be good philosophy. On the other hand, if you cannot find fault, then it must be bad philosophy – because what would be the point of philosophy that is not controversial?
Thank you, that was very gracious! (More so than I frequently am, regrettably. 
)
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At the risk of going really nerdy, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem applies to more than math.
Cheers to you as well 
I had similar sentences in the earlier posts. You must have missed them. Maybe you read too fast.
I simply reported a fact. Your biology colleagues would refuse to write in support of any proposed ID research. They would say that the methodology of the proposed study was fundamentally flawed. The refusal would follow by logical necessity, given the narrow definition of “science” that they work under. Denton’s book (which you refuse to read) contains more than enough evidence to convince any reasonable, objective person that there is design in nature. But none of it would count as “scientific” argument by you or your colleagues. They might grant it as philosophical argument and say that he should apply for a Philosophy grant. That would be the most charitable thing they would say about it.
You know this. If you yourself thought there might be some scientific arguments in Denton’s book, you would be reading it, to see how strong they were. Obviously you think there aren’t any. You’ve come an a priori conclusion, along the lines of “Denton supports design, so it’s very unlikely that there is anything of scientific merit in his book.”
The way you and every other biologist on this site has argued, and the way EVERY biologist I have ever talked to on EVERY origins site has argued since these origins debates began, makes this outcome certain. For you, it’s not enough that an argument be based on sound empirical science and be rational; there has to be something else before it counts as “scientific.” And that something else, ID will never be able to supply, as long as “scientific” is understood in the narrow sense that you insist on. So there will never be a grant for ID research funded by mainstream universities or government granting agencies.
Yes. It is the overall pattern that indicates design, not any single mutation. Any single mutation might have been caused by chance, necessity, or design. It is only when one considers a connected sequence that one can infer design. If you are dealt an ace in poker, you do not suspect design. If you are dealt a royal flush, you might suspect design. If you are dealt three royal flushes in a row, you would be almost certain of design.
The problem with your approach to mutations and design is that it limits you to the time scale of human observation, while as an evolutionary theorist you insist on speculative extrapolations involving a much longer time scale. In the lab, we can observe mutations, but the mutations we can observe don’t tell us whether or not they are designed. Your first instinct as a scientist is to say that they aren’t designed, and you use the word “natural” to convey that. But then you assert that over X million years a deerlike (it used to be wolflike, but evolutionary theorists keep changing their minds) animal became a whale by a series of such mutations. So you are now claiming that a whole sequence of mutations (none of which you can specify, because you weren’t there to observe any of them with your modern lab apparatus), each allegedly occurring without any plan or purpose, and blind to whether or not it would provide any selective advantage, added up to something exquisitely functional. And when people try to employ reasoning (the same reasoning you would gladly grant in the case of the royal flushes) to say that such an outcome would not be expected, that such an outcome looks more like design, you would say that in using such reasoning, they were not doing science. So any grant proposal written up along such lines, you as a referee would turn down.
But the changes you observe are trivial. They aren’t the building of complex organic machinery such as eyes, flagella, etc. from scratch. The ID argument is that the mechanisms you propose would not produce such machinery.
Behe grants that the kind of changes you observe can make a difference. He grants bacterial resistance, changes in moth colors, and all kinds of microevolutionary stuff. What he doubts is that such unguided changes can account for the big stuff. All ID research is based on the suspicion that such changes don’t account for the big stuff. But since most working biologists take it as GIVEN that such small changes CAN account for the big stuff, and that the only thing left to work out is the detailed hypothetical evolutionary pathways, they are not going to be interested in ID research. They are not going to support grant proposals of that kind. They are not going to give tenure to a biologist who wants to spend ten years firming up arguments of that kind.
There is no conspiracy theory here, because the “conspiracy” is quite open. The only thing secretive about it is that the formal reasons for denying jobs, tenure, grants, etc. usually do not directly say “ID is not and never could be science, and besides, we know for certain that the mechanisms we propose can account for all major evolutionary change, and we won’t tolerate objections to such settled science.” Direct statement of reasons in that form would make universities look very bad to the general public. So the language used is different. But the real reasons, which in official contexts are smoothed over with euphemisms, can be seen on blog sites like this, where people aren’t restrained by formalities, and acknowledge their real motivations: (a) we KNOW that currently proposed evolutionary mechanisms are adequate to produce everything from bacterium to man, without any need for guidance, planning, or design; (b) we don’t want any ID people as colleagues in our biology departments, because we consider it a waste of time to try to construct design arguments which could never be valid anyway.
You can’t make that claim until they actually do so. Also, if the methodology is flawed then they are in the right to make that criticism. Surely you don’t think ID grants should not be open to the same criticism any grant faces.
Just because you find an argument convincing does not mean it is scientific.
If there were scientific arguments in Denton’s book then you would be relating them here, but you aren’t. Obviously, there aren’t any scientific arguments in Denton’s book.
Actually, that is enough. The problem is that you can’t come up with any sound empirical science.
This makes ID unscientific. No matter the observations, you will conclude that it is designed simply because it is beneficial. ID is unfalsifiable.
That’s a hollow argument since even if we watched these mutations happen in real time you would still say that they are the product of design. There is no possible observation that would falsify your beliefs with respect to design.
How do you know that? The evolution of these systems would necessarily involve trivial changes that accumulate into large changes over time. So how do you know that these aren’t building into the very things you claim can’t evolve?
Your argument would hold more weight if they were producing ID science, but they aren’t. All they are doing is making really bad arguments against a well supported theory, and doing so for religious purposes.
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