True, although if you go back to the OP, I think the question was “ultimate ancestor”. I wonder, though, if there are folks out there who have no poblem accepting that humans and chimps have a common ancestor, but who can’t accept that humans and fish (or amoebas) have a common ancestor.
Exactly.
God knowing something doesn’t mean he’s making it happen. God can know the choices you will make before you make them, that’s still free will.
“If you show that whales could not have eovlved from terrestrial vertebrates, you have only disproven the idea that whales evolved form terrestrial vertbrates. What you have not done is proven that evolution could not, or did not, happen. Scientists then go backto the drawing board and attempt to determine where whales really did come from.”
Out of interest, would a non-aligned scientist who expressed a willingness to believe that whales were created as whales and a desire to spend some time studying that option be considered a nutcase?
It was written that it’s ‘frustrating to see the phrase “intelligent design” and realize that it’s usually a smokescreen for Biblical creationism’.
Is the phrase “foetus” a smokescreen for “baby in the womb”? Most of the empirical evidence available suggests that adult humna beings consider the growing life form to be a baby, not a foetus. Ever heard a mother say “My foetus is kicking”, or a father say “The foetus will probably be delivered by caesarean”?
Linguistics is my field. (I could suggest plenty of links for further reading, but I won’t, not least because I’m likely to send you only to those sites that favour my position. Genetic adaptation shared by intelligent well-educated humans?!) Only to point out that one person’s “purr” word is another person’s “snarl” word.
If the person who wrote this, or anyone else, really believes that there is no real difference intended to be signalled by the fact that someone uses I.D. rather than B.C., then we’ve reached a pretty pass. Does it need to be spelt out that B.C. has connotations (if not downright denotations) of young earthism, intolerance, fundamentalism, neo-con, etc., while I.D. has none of these?
Thanks for those who have gone out of their way to understand what I have written as I have written it and for pointing that out to those who have for whatever reason misunderstood it. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, how can we trust those who say they can read between the lines, when they can’t even read the lines themselves?
This is a subject that genuinely interests me. It’s difficult (and perhaps a little threatening)for some people to appreciate that one who believes in God (the Judaeo-Christian God) can engage in a debate such as this for genuine rather than disingenuous reasons. But I do. All my life I have had two convictions, which I think I would be happy (or at least willing) to overturn should I be convinced of the cases against these cherished beliefs. One is that God created the world. Two is that human beings have free will.
After I wrote the above, I read Holden’s (love the book BTW – read it when I was 12 and recovering from serious illness) comment re free will: “God can know the choices you will make before you make them, that’s still free will.” I would go further and say that God himself (sometimes) chooses not to know what we will do, BUT that is highly speculative, of course, and based on my (imperfect, to say the least) understanding of God’s character.
I’m a ‘he’, so no need for the PC stuff!
What is a “non-aligned” scientist?
A scientist who asserted the special creation of whales would simply not be considered at all until he presented some sort of formal theory for peer review. Personal opinions don’t enter into it. All that matteres is the evidence.
The dismissal of ID as religious creationism is not semantic gamesmanship. It actually doesn’t have a scientific meaning. In order to be a legitimate scientific term it would require a hard definition and make falsifiable predictions. “Intelligent Design” is completely useless to scientific research and yes, most of the time it’s proponents are really asserting theistic “intelligence” despite their pretense that they just happen to see intelligence per se (an “intelligence” which they are not able to identify or define in any sort of scientific manner, btw).
It is certainly possible to assert intelligent design without asserting a belief in Young earth Creationism. That doesn’t make ID any more scientific, though. It’s still just an assertion of faith at its bottom.
I guess it boils down to respect, Diogenes. If someone prefers to be seen as someone who believes in I.D. rather than S.C. (with all its negative connotations), then it’s up to their opponents to choose whether they will accede or not. Not entirely dissimilar to ‘black’ versus ‘African-American’, or ‘pro-abortion’ versus ‘pro-choice’. Respecting the wish of others in this way has payoffs in terms of a) keeping the emotional tone of the debate at an acceptable level and b) building trust, which leads in turn to more dialogue and richer discussion. Hopefully, this is what each side aspires to.
Falsifiability (hypotheses, tests/observations, new hypotheses) and deduction are excellent in the realms to which they apply, but do some things not come into a priori category? For me, the existence of God is one such thing. Is that anti-scientific per se?
If we don’t know how a whale “evolved”, how do we know that God does not exist? Isn’t it dodgy to rule in every possible means of “proving” the former, while ruling out the latter out of hand merely because it is beyond empirical proof?
Does science really function to disallow out of hand that which it is not set up to cover? Is knowledge (the meaning of science) to be limited in this way?
It appears to me going back to Dawkins comments re wickedness that at the heart of the “scientific” thrust against anyone who believes in I.D. is a terrible insecurity. I would never even raise the possibility of people who believe in evolution being wicked, purely because they held that position. Of course, like me or anyone else, they might be wicked for other reasons!
Maybe a better term would be non-scientific. Theistic belief has no relationship to scientific method one way or the other. The question of whether gods exist is something that is not able to be addressed by science.
I will say that inserting “god” into scientific investigation impedes the method unless you are willing to show a necessity for a god (and you would still have to define “god” in empirical terms)
Who said God does not exist?
This is a non-sequitur and not even accurate in its predicate. We DO know (pretty much) how whales evolved. More importantly, we know without a doubt THAT whales evolved.
And once again, you are conflating evolution with questions of theistic belief. Evolution is not atheistic. The question of whether god exists is something which is not addressed by evolutionary theory. It doesn’t matter one whit to evolutionary theory if God exists or not, any more than it matters to making observations about the arrangement of the solar system. Your question is akin to asking "If we don’t know the chemical composition of soil on Mars then how can we say that God does not exist? It’s a senseless question and it’s founded on a mistaken presumption of what the other side is asserting.
There’s a false dichotemy in this question. The choices are not “evolution or God” and there is no conflict between those two things.
Thje question is how did whales evolve and natural explanations abound. If anyone wants to assert divine intervention then it is incumbent on them to show some sort of empirical support for that claim, just like any other hypothesis.
“God did it” is not entitled to some sort of special treatment as a hypothesis (i.e. accepting it at face value with no evidentiary support) but that doesn’t mean that science or scientists are hostile to the existence of God in any general sense. It’s just that science is not able to examine that which cannot be examined. Science is based on observation. If something can’t be observed then science can’t say anything about it at all except (in some cases) that there is no demonstrated necessity for a given unobservable hypothesis.
It’s limited to what can be observed.It makes no judgement about that which cannot be observed.
That’s not what Dawkins said. What he said was that anyone who expresses a disbelief in evolution* was (paraphrasing) either uniformed or deluded or possibly lying. This is not equivalent to a judgement about theistic belief or necessarily ID unles the IDist is denying evolution.
Not anti-science, but non-science. It doesn’t come into consideration when discussing scientific ideas because it is outside the realm of science. It has no impact on the discipline we call science.
How do you know that the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist? How about the Invisible Pink Unicorn? The problem here is that there is no evidence for God, so there is nothing to test or explain.
Science does not offer “proof”, it offers explainations.
If it can’t be observed, it can’t be discussed by science. Show us something that God does that can be measured, and we can talk. Otherwise it is not in the realm of science.
This doesn’t mean that scientists aren’t religious or spiritual, or that science makes pronouncements about God existing or not existing. Science can’t comment on the supernatural. It is possible that God made everything look like it does now but was created 10 minutes ago, but it’s not testable, so it’s not a scientific hypothesis.
The big problem with ID is that the central hypothesis is that things are too complex and interdependant to happen by themselves. This is demonstrably false, and that’s why, as a scientific theory, ID is bankrupt.
Intelligent design could become a valid scientific hypothesis. And then it would be falsified and we’d all move along. For the most part, however, ID arguments seem to consist of making bad evolutionary hypotheses and then showing that these bad evolutionary hypotheses are bad.
You don’t build an arch starting with the keystone.
No need to paraphrase Dawkins, Diogenes. What he wrote was:
No mention of ‘lying’; he uses the word ‘wicked’.
I’d be interested, both Dio and Tele, what you take to exist a priori.
What I was correcting was your assertion that Dawkins made this claim about IDists.
He used the word “wicked” as the least likely in a list of possiblities as to why a person would “claim” not to believe in evolution. He was alluding to the possibility that a person might be dishonest in his claim not to believe in evolution, not to any sort of sincere religious belief. He doesn’t say they might be wicked because of anything they believe, but because they may be lying about what they believe. He also said it was a possibility he preferred not to think about. In other words, it cannot be logically ruled out that a person may be lying if says that he doesn’t believe in evolution but that he (Dawkins) prefers to assume that they are honestly mistaken
Do you understand this distinction?
A priori to what?
For me, anything that I accept as “knowledge” is contingent on observation, so I guess my answer is nothing. I accept nothing a priori.
Logic and math. Beyond that, no assumptions.
And I’m willing to question logic and math, but it better be for a good reason.
How is this demonstrable?
(And as an aside, and I apologize if this is already part of the discussion but time contraints won’t allow for reading the entire thread, why does it seem to be that God and evolution are mutually exclusive? Could God not have created life and also created the process of evolution to allow for future development and adaptation?)
It’s demonstrable that things which were once alleged to have been “too complex” to have arisen from natural processes did, in fact, arise from natural processes. Irreducible complexiy, OTOH, has never been demonstrated to exist.
It’s been addressed a number of times in this thread and many others but you are correct. Evolution has nothing to say about the existence of God. It seems to be a pernicious misconception among some creationists that evolutionary science is somehow atheistic, or that it represents an attempt to disprove God. It proves no such thing and scientists make no such claim that it does.
It is perfectly reasonable to believe in God *andi/i] to accept the evidence for evolution. In fact, I would guess that this is the majority position in the world in that most people claim some sort of religious faith and most (I hope) accept evolution.
How is God getting dragged into this discussion?
That God cannot be proven or disproven to everyone’s satisfaction indicates that God is not a scientific topic. There are certainly people who both support the scientific method and who do not believe in God, but there are many people who support the scientific method who do believe in God, but who recognize that we are not going to discover information about God through scientific analysis.
A failure to demonstrate the evolutionary path of cetacean development means only that we have not found enough evidence to describe that development. The general process of terrestial evolution is sufficiently well documented that we know how it works and can recognize that gaps in knowledge of a single genus or order do not destroy that general knowledge. If God is the author of all, then God is outside that knowledge and is not a proper subject for biological inquiry.
I seem to see a subtext in your posts that supporters of evolution are, in some way, “opposed” to God and that you are attempting some sort of reconciliation. This is not the case. Supporters of evolution include both the atheistic and the theistic. Dobzhansky, who brought the light of Mendelian genetics to bear on evolutionary inquiry, providing the “engine” for evolution that Darwin had never found, was a devout Christian.
The reason that Intelligent Design is usually considered a smokescreen for Creationism is that every single one of the spokespersons for Intelligent Design just “happen” to either be Creationists or strongly associate with Creationists. Intelligent Design is non-scientific. It says, "I have found a place where evolution could not explain a development, so someone must have had a hand in developing that characteristic. (Thus spoke Behe.) Of course, the scientific approach is to find a gap in development and attempt to discover how that gap might have been bridged. Every one of the gaps that Behe has claimed could not be bridged by evolution have either been demonstrated to have evolved (and the pathways described) or, at the least, interim steps have been discovered to narrow the gaps, implying that those pathways will also be discovered.
Scientifically, what is the functional difference between a person who says that God created the whole world without evolution and the person who says, evolution has occurred some of the time, but God has stepped in and made changes to keep it going? In each case, the person simply declares that science must stop because “God did it.” The only difference is where they draw the line to arbitrarily halt scientific investigation.
You may be able to find an atheistic supporter of ID, but such a person will bring their own baggage to the discussion. (If there is no God, who or what is the designer?)
These discussions always fascinate me, and every time I read them I learn something new. This time it has struck me how polarized and adversarial the religious viewpoint seems (to me) to be: that it perforce requires an Enemy, good and evil, God and Satan, sinners and saints, sacred and profane, and so on. Do some religious people in fact envision the theory of natural selection as The Enemy because their religious teachings encouraged them to construct enemies?
It seems to me that much of the misunderstanding that some people (in this thread and elsewhere) have about evolution is trying to construct parallels and opposites to religious teachings: that if the Bible says where Life began, then Evolution must also. (Evolution says no such thing.) Or that if the Bible says that God exists, they assume Evolution must say the opposite. (It doesn’t.) Or if the Bible says that Adam begat Cain, who begat Fred down at the liquor store, who begat Reg (who worked in the deli until his leg started to act up), and so on, that they imagine Evolution somehow ought to say something similar—that it should draw a straight line from APE to MAN. (Evolution doesn’t do that, either.)
Yet the arguments are always drawn, against all reason, in parallel to religious viewpoints, whether any such comparison is even justified. Interesting.
Anyway, that’s just an observation and a hijack to boot. Carry on.
Bodswood, like you, I am a devout Christian and a linguist. I’m also somewhat of a regular in these debates, so I thought I’d put in my usual contribution. From what I’ve read, you seem to be of the opinion that belief in evolution cannot comfortably exist with Christian faith. I’ve heard other people say that one cannot accept evolution and still be a Christian and that acceptance of evolution is somehow inherently damaging to faith and/or God. As I’ve written many times on this board, the more I know of evolution, and of biology, geology, and cosmology in general, the more my faith in God deepens and the more my awe and wonder at His works grows. Like you, I believe that "God created the world . . . [and] that human beings have free will. " How does evolution change the former?
Among other things, I’m a programmer (my degrees are in Japanese and Computer Science). One thing a program I was working on last week does is display a list of parts used to make a product. Which parts are shown will vary depending on which product a person selects, and the program will only display the parts used to make that product. Getting to that point took a certain amount of work, and even a few false starts. When you get right down to it, though, the elements which comprise the program could be considered the same as the elements which comprise this e-mail, although the syntax is dramatically different and computers are far less forgiving of typos! If I can use the same words and similar processes to build a program, compose an e-mail, or write a hymn, why can’t God use the same DNA and similar evolutionary processes to create the woman who types this, the fly which was buzzing around my porch a few minutes ago, and the flowers on my porch. There is a rational, scientific explanation for the sunset which I’m watching as I type. One could analyze the cloud patterns, light diffraction, not to mention the geologic processes which created the hill’s the sun is rising over, and the physics of a star of the type of the sun. Some of it could even make for a fascinating discussion. Those processes in no way change the fact that it’s a beautiful sunrise and my home is now filling with light, nor do they reduce my awe and joy at the beauty of this sunrise.
You’ve objected to Dawkins calling people who believe in Creationism “wicked”. Is it any less wrong when someone who believes that non-Christians are doomed to eternal hell tells someone who has read lessons, sung in the choir, and taught Sunday school at church that she cannot be a Christian because she believes in evolution? The entire range of religious beliefs include jerks, at least from what I’ve seen. People who believe in creation would use their religious beliefs to limit what my niece and nephew can be taught in public school. As I said, I’m a Christian, and I find that highly objectionable. Those two show signs of having “inquiring and discerning hearts” as my church’s Baptismal prayer puts it. Should they shut down those “inquiring and discerning hearts” because someone else says they should? Christ commanded us to love God with all our minds. To me, to stop questioning, to stop trying to better understand life and the world around us, to accept Creationism blindly merely because someone whose mind and whose experience with God is very different from mine tells me to is directly disobedient to that commandment, and is therefore sinful.
Paul wrote that each of us have been given gifts and that we are to use those gifts to serve God. That lesson is also implicit in the parable of the talents. I will not dispute a person’s right to be a Creationist or someone who believes in Intelligent Design. I will object when they tell me that, in order to be a good or true Christian, whatever they choose to mean by those words, I must also be a Creationist. Whether God created life through a metaphorical snap of His fingers or through the intricate dance of evolution is something which I believe I ultimately cannot know. As I said, the latter deepens my awe and faith, while the former is a bit too simple. Then again, I also knit for a hobby and, when I start on a new project, I’d much rather make something intricate than something plain.
I hope I’m not rambling too much, and it will be a while before I can get back to this thread, but I’d be interested in reading your response.
Respectfully,
CJ
I’ve read the thread, but I’m not sure what you mean by ‘T=O’?
The problem with ID, imo, is that it assumes that what we have now was the ultimate result of all this design. In actual fact, all life is still evolving.
The ID’ers say ‘look at the complex eye, how could that have evolved by chance?’ They say look at the astronomical odds. Look at the extremely low probability that all steps required to arrive at ‘x’ would have occured at the right time, etc.
What they are missing is that we (meaning all life on Earth) are not necessarily the desired outcome. We are what has evolved to this point. There is no chance about it, its simply what has happened. Here we are.
There are two main theories (with several subtheories) on the creation of existence.
One posits that there was a point where T=0 (time = 0). Where there was nothing, then everything started, whether by some divine force or by sheer chance or by some unknown force. This gets fuzzy, because it is hard to define what exactly existed when T=0.
The contrary theory is that T=(infinity), or that existence has always, well, existed, and has no starting (or end) point.
Frankly, my tiny little mind has a hard time comprehending either in scientific terms. I’m more likely to posit that there is more to it than we can see or measure (AKA, spirituality).
You seem to think that intelligent design is equivalent to Biblical creationism. It is not. ID says nothing about the age of the earth (I think Behe agrees with the commonly accepted view of the earth being billions of years old) and ID does not even rule out speciation, which is something creationists don’t accept because of the mention of God creating “kinds” in the Bible. From what I have seen Behe does not emphasize these differences because his support comes from creationists.
So why do creationists support ID? Simply because creationism cannot be taught in schools contitutionally, and ID could, if it were a valid scientific hypothesis. Philip Johnson and his ilk use ID as a back door to try to get around the constitution. That counts as wicked in my book, but no matter.
If Behe said the designers were aliens (a perfectly scientific hypothesis, for which there is no evidence, of course) do you think ID would be supported by creationists? It would still be ID, and there is just as much support for god being the designer as Martians.
These debates always end with no solutions, and for a purpose.
It takes the same amount of faith to believe in evolution as it does in creation.
The reason is simple. How this world began is unknowable.
While science says it began with a Big Bang and an electrical spark striking a unique group of chemicals, no one says where the Big Bang and the electricity came from. No one knows how the very first matter and energy came about.
So all the theories are moot, meaningless, where this world came from is simple unknowable. That’s called honest logic, truth.
I feel for all the children raised in the doctrine of science, as well as those raised in the doctrine of religion. I know, I know, science is the only way to truth, as well as the Bible is the only way to truth.
About here the scientists come in and start talking about probability being truth, which it ain’t.
Some day all people will be able to “see” beyond their raising. Then we can come together in the peace of unknowing.
Love