Little Things Filling Up Little Souls

"The reason that is so is because the human soul was made to see Christ, to know Christ, to love Christ, to enjoy Christ, and to be enlarged by the greatness of the glory of Christ. Without this, our souls shrink. And little souls make little lusts have great power. The soul, as it were, contracts or expands to encompass the magnitude or minuteness of its treasure. The human soul was made to see and savor the glory of Christ. Nothing else is big enough to enlarge the soul as God intended and make little lusts lose their power....Inside and outside the church, modern culture is drowning in a sea of triviality, pettiness, banality, and silliness....Therefore, the deepest cure to our pitiful addictions is to be staggered by the infinite, everlasting, unchanging, all-satisfying glory of Christ." (John Piper)

What Christians and atheists both get wrong about Intelligent Design

I recently had a conversation with a friend who brought up Intelligent Design (ID), and it reminded me of something I’ve mentioned several years ago. Given how much time has passed, I thought it was worth reiterating it now. And that is the strange fact that both atheists and Christians, especially Young Earth Creationists (YEC), both fall into the same error in thinking that ID requires the existence of God.  Atheists use this claim to argue that ID should not be taught in schools.  Christians tend to use ID as an apologetic to defend Creationism against Darwinism.

The problem is that when we see what ID claims, it’s nowhere near requiring a deity.  Put simply, ID states that the evidence we have for evolution does not make any sense if we hold to random processes causing it all.  Rather, the evidence that we see indicates that the way that organisms exist now makes sense only if they were designed to be specific ways.  That is, evolution only makes sense if it is teleological, not random.  (Teleological just means that it has an end or a goal in mind, something which Darwin specifically rejected.)

Now the temptation is that the intelligent designer of ID must be God, but that’s not actually what ID is saying.  ID is only saying that the evidence of what we see indicates that life on Earth has been designed by some form of intelligence.  Given that ID does not require a YEC view of time, this means that it is perfectly consistent with ID to limit the claims of ID strictly to something along the lines of, “The evolution of life on Earth over the past 4.5 billion years came about from an intelligent designer intending a specific outcome.”

Such a designer need not be any more intelligent than human beings already are.  In theory, if we wanted to do so, we could set up labs on Mars and grow some microscopic organisms, guiding their evolution in the lab by selecting certain breeds of organisms over others (the same as people already do for dogs and other animals), genetically modifying those that don’t have the required genetic sequences already in place to form new organisms, and we could release those organisms into the Martian wilderness.  We wouldn’t even really need a few billion years to tinker around with the life forms we’ve introduced there.  If we were to build up a sufficiently advanced life form that was able to be self-aware, and it surveyed its historical settings, looking at fossils left behind and so forth, our intelligent design of those life forms would look indistinguishable from how life forms came about on Earth, in this scenario.

Really, the only thing that is keeping humans from doing this right now is the fact that it takes a lot of time and money to get to Mars, and this isn’t something that very many people would want to spend those resources on.  But it’s easy to imagine an alien race very similar to human beings who might wish to tinker around on some planet.  They discover Earth and set up their labs on Earth, terraforming the planet and guiding the evolution of life until one day humans are on the planet.  Those aliens do not need to have any divine characteristics at all.  In fact, they could even by slightly stupider (on average) than human beings are, and still have a statistical chance of having enough smart aliens to pull off such a scenario.

And since ID is limited solely to the evolution of life on Earth, the fact that the evolution of life on Earth makes more sense from a teleological perspective than from a random perspective does not even imply the existence of God for the rest of the universe, because the aliens who created us may have come about from completely different methods.  Our evolution appears guided.  Perhaps if we saw the evidence of this hypothetical race’s origins, a completely different theory might be proposed that would not require God.

That is why ID is neither proof of the existence of God, nor should it be disbarred from being taught in schools.  It is also why Christian theists need to have better arguments against atheism (and the good news is, we do!).  Sure, ID can disprove Darwinism, but that doesn’t prove God when someone even slightly less intelligent than we are could replicate the results we see on Earth.  So while ID isn’t bad by any means, especially since it does help show how ludicrous Darwinism is, Christians need to be very wary about relying on ID as an apologetic silver bullet against materialistic Darwinists.

Some comments on theistic evolution

For what it's worth, here are some comments (revised) on intelligent design and theistic evolution that I recently left in a previous post in a friendly conversation with Eric:

1. I'll use evolution as shorthand for neo-Darwinism. And I'll use ID for intelligent design.

2. To my knowledge, ID is relatively "new" in the sense that Dembski describes it in his chapter "How does intelligent design differ from the design argument?" in his book The Design Revolution. An excerpt is available here. However, ID is "old" in the sense that it's in the same or similar vein as teleological arguments in general (aka arguments from design, which might be more clearly termed arguments for design). This stretches back as far as Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways if not earlier.

3. I'm very sympathetic and greatly appreciate the work of the ID guys. At the same time, I think I'm persuaded by Alvin Plantinga (e.g. "design discourse") and Del Ratzsch (e.g. "the persistence of design thinking") when it comes to assessing their work.

4. My impression is, relatively speaking, secular physicists (cosmology) seem more open-minded about arguments for design (e.g. fine-tuning) than secular biologists. I mean, there are plenty of close-minded cosmologists, but I'm speaking in comparison to secular biologists. Secular biologists seem like the dwarves in the stable in C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle, imprisoned in their own minds, and "so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out". They stick their fingers in their ears and refuse so much as to entertain the possibility of anything other than a strictly material world. I guess most of them take after Lewontin: "materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door". Regarding fine-tuning, see the works of Robin Collins and Luke Barnes.

5. An interesting question to explore is whether evolution itself requires design to operate. By contrast, if the universe and all it contains including life is not designed, then would evolution even be able to get off the ground?

For starters, evolution appears to be goal-directed, that is, it appears to be teleological. It appears to be able to adapt means to ends. However, if the universe and all it contains is not designed, then how would evolution come to be goal-directed? How would it come to be able to adapt means to ends? For example, if all is undesigned, without teleological purpose, then how did the heart come to exist to pump blood to the body? A happy accident? Not to mention all the other functions in every organism on this planet. Multiply all this together and the chances of all these serendipitous events occurring seem improbable to say the least.

Stepping back, what are the chances of the origin of life? Next, of the origin of the first cell? Next, of the origin of the first multicellular organism? Next, of the origin of the first warm-blooded animal? Next, of the origin of intelligence or consciousness? And so on. Each step is not one small step, but a giant leap. A leap as giant as a human being becoming a star-child à la 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And all this is in addition to the chances of finely-turned laws to drive all this, but what are the chances of a law like natural selection in an undesigned universe?

Perceiving design

Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies:

Perceiving Design?

In this chapter and the last we have been thinking about fine-tuning arguments for design, and Behe's biological arguments for design. We have been calling them, naturally enough, "arguments." But perhaps there is a better way to think about what is going on here. You are hiking up Ptarmigan Ridge towards Mt. Baker in the North Cascades; your partner points out a mountain goat on a crag about two hundred yards distant. She thus gets you to form a belief—that there is a mountain goat there. But of course she doesn't do so by giving you an argument (you are appeared to in such and such a way; most of the time when someone S is appeared to that way there is a mountain goat about two hundred yards distant in the direction S is looking). Perhaps what is going on in the arguments like Behe's, as well as the fine-tuning arguments of the last chapter, can be better thought of as like what is going on in this sort of case, where it is perception (or something like it) rather than argument that is involved.²⁰

What is intelligent design?

William Dembski offers one definition:

Intelligent design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence.

What is intelligence? Intelligence is teleological. It's basically about adapting means to ends. Intelligence is a causal power that can bring about purposes by arranging the means to bring those purposes about. An intelligence has to make choices. If it's adapting means, then it's this means, not that means. In fact, the very etymology of the word intelligence is inter lego - "to choose between". That's the characteristic of intelligence. Whereas something that operates by brute necessity always does the same sort of thing. Even chance is not really intelligence; it's not goal-directed. So it seems there's this fundamental distinction. Intelligence is about adapting means to ends.

The starting question for intelligent design is, what are the markers? How do we detect the effects of intelligence? There seem to be three main things we're looking for. Contingency: whether something happens that didn't have to happen. So it was optional. There are different live possibilities. Complexity: it was hard to reproduce by chance. If chance and necessity were operating, would it have been unlikely? And third specification: does it conform to some independently given pattern? So it's not just something we're imposing after the fact, that we're cherry-picking and looking for something that we're hoping is there, but that there's this independent pattern to which it conforms. If we have those three things that come into place, then it seems we're triangulated on the effects of intelligence.

So lots of questions are then open. What's the nature of that intelligence? What were the purposes of that intelligence? How did the intelligence implement that design?

Where intelligence design starts, not where it ends, is having reliable methods of design detection. Specifically: contingency, complexity, specification.

Is evolution a big deal?

I recently watched this informal debate or dialogue between Josh Swamidass and Doug Axe:

I thought it was pretty good on Axe's side. I'd recommend it for Axe's contributions.

Swamidass, however, was a challenge to listen to. For example, Swamidass frequently interrupted Axe (and Swamidass often interrupts others in several other videos I've seen). At times Swamidass didn't seem to try to make a good faith effort to try to understand Axe but perhaps even the opposite. Swamidass seemed condescending toward Axe around the 50 minute mark when he suggested to Axe that Axe's description of cancer is "not what we find" because Axe hadn't been through medical training (MD) or worked in a cancer lab. Axe's description of cancer was fine for his purposes.

At 56:20, Swamidass claimed "Dembski himself backed off from his book The Design Inference". However that's false. Dembski himself responded to Swamidass here.

Swamidass further questioned Dembski over on Peaceful Science. (By the way, the Peaceful Science forums seem anything but "peaceful" in my opinion.) Others replied including Paul Nelson. Nelson mentioned he'll do a 4-part series on Evolution News. This is the first one.

The Return of the God Hypothesis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV-FSYQiE5s

An interview with Gunter Bechly

"Interview: Gunter Bechly (Paleontologist)"

Behe vs. Swamidass debate

I watched the debate (above) between Michael Behe and Joshua Swamidass over intelligent design (ID). Behe argued for ID while Swamidass was highly skeptical about ID. This post will mostly be my summary of their debate, with some opinion and evaluation interspersed throughout.

Craig on random mutations

Here's William Lane Craig's most recent Q&A "#-671 Do 'Random' Mutations Occur by 'Chance'?".

As explained, too many people on both sides of the creation/evolution debate think that “random,” when used by evolutionary biologists to characterize mutations, means purposeless or without direction or by chance. But that’s not at all what they mean. Rather they mean that the mutations occur regardless of their benefit to the organism in which they occur. Such an understanding of “random” is not at all contrary to God’s having a purpose for the mutations that occur or even Himself causing the mutations to occur.

1. If we want a strict biology textbook definition, sure, mutations are "random" in the sense that the mutation that occurs is unpredictable in relation to what is useful to the organism. The mutation that occurs is unrelated to the usefulness of the mutation to the organism.

2. However, that's not always what we're talking about when we talk about random mutations. It depends on the context. Surely (surely!) Craig knows when people debate creation/evolution/ID, they're not always or solely talking about the strict biology textbook definition of random mutations. Rather creation/evolution/ID debates likewise involve questions over more fundamental issues. Such as the existence of God as well as the nature and scope of God's intervention in nature. So the use of both kinds of definitions for random mutations aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

3. To be more specific, in the context of naturalistic evolution (e.g. Dawkins, Coyne), it's legitimate to argue that these mutations are ultimately purposeless or unguided. Given naturalistic evolution, what is the ultimate source of these "random" mutations?

We come to see that evolutionary theory does not assert that the mutations which lie at the root of evolutionary development and, hence, evolution itself occur purposelessly or by chance, as popularizers and even careless scientists often claim. By properly understanding the meaning of “random” in evolutionary theory, we come to see that evolution is wholly compatible with God’s providentially directing the evolutionary process.

However, this doesn't depend on evolutionary theory (neo-Darwinism) in and of itself. Rather, as I've just said, it depends on whether we're talking about (say) theistic evolution or atheistic evolution. The textbook definition of random mutations is consistent with either theistic evolution or atheistic evolution.

I’m implying that the theory of evolution is not incompatible with Christian theism because it does not assert that the mutations which advance evolutionary change occur by chance or without purpose...What I’m implying is that God, while quite able to create fully functional biological organisms de novo, may have instead chosen to create them indirectly by deliberately causing the mutations that drove evolutionary advance.

1. Now, it could be Craig is simply answering this question or objection without offering his personal beliefs about the matter. Perhaps that's the case.

2. However, maybe I'm mistaken, but my impression is Craig has been becoming more sympathetic to theistic evolution as well as more skeptical about the historical Adam and Eve over the years. Again, that's not to suggest Craig currently accepts theistic evolution or denies the historical Adam and Eve. But it seems to me he is at least intellectually sympathetic to both positions, even if that's not his personal conviction.

Take the historical Adam and Eve. It seems to me Craig might be sympathetic in believing either there may not have been a historical Adam and Eve (e.g. Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve lived thousands of years apart from one another), or if there was, then they were "chosen" by God out of a pool of other hominids and "made into" the historical Adam and Eve.

3. If it's true Craig is becoming more sympathetic to accepting theistic evolution and/or denying the historical Adam and Eve, then I presume his main influence is the Christian physician-scientist Joshua Swamidass at Peaceful Science. I think Swamidass is in essence a theistic evolutionist, but he often seems circumspect about saying so explicitly. The latest two Reasonable Faith podcasts involve Swamidass (here, here).

Phillip E. Johnson (1940-2019)

"Phillip E. Johnson, Who Put Darwin on Trial, Dies at 79"

"Died: Phillip E. Johnson, Lawyer who Put Darwin on Trial"

Update:

Bill Dembski reflects on his friendship with Johnson. Of course both were leading lights and brothers-in-arms in the ID movement.

Dawkins on simplicity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb4aanpsx6Q

Between 114-117 min, agnostic lapsed Catholic philosopher Kenny corrects Dawkins on simplicity.

Low audio but it has captions

Dembski interview

https://billdembski.com/interview/bill-dembski-interview/#more-54391

Nobel laureates vs. evolution

This looks like a useful compilation, though it's from Vincent Torley:

"Seven Nobel Laureates in science who either supported Intelligent Design or attacked Darwinian evolution"

DNA is code

The Science Uprising series has been great. I wish I could have made these videos. There are six videos in the series so far. I recommend all of them, though that's not to suggest I agree with everything in them. Here's #3, DNA is code:

Giving up Darwin

This is from a generally sympathetic review of Meyer's book. The reviewer, a Yale computer science prof., seems to agree that the theory of naturalistic evolution, as currently formulated, can't deliver the goods, but he remains unpersuaded by intelligent design as a satisfactory alternative:

If Meyer were invoking a single intervention by an intelligent designer at the invention of life, or of consciousness, or rationality, or self-aware consciousness, the idea might seem more natural. But then we still haven’t explained the Cambrian explosion. An intelligent designer who interferes repeatedly, on the other hand, poses an even harder problem of explaining why he chose to act when he did. Such a cause would necessarily have some sense of the big picture of life on earth. What was his strategy? How did he manage to back himself into so many corners, wasting energy on so many doomed organisms? Granted, they might each have contributed genes to our common stockpile—but could hardly have done so in the most efficient way. What was his purpose? And why did he do such an awfully slipshod job? Why are we so disease prone, heartbreak prone, and so on? An intelligent designer makes perfect sense in the abstract. The real challenge is how to fit this designer into life as we know it. Intelligent design might well be the ultimate answer. But as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go.

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/

That raises a number of general issues, as well as issues specific to intelligent design theory:

i) The reviewer erects a false dichotomy between deistic providence and continuous divine intervention. But it's not as though there can't be something reasonable in-between those two extremes. There's a sense in which the degree of divine intervention is arbitrary inasmuch as God could intervene one more time or one less time. There's no absolute logical cutoff for exactly the right number of times God should intervene. 

ii) Moreover, divine intervention involves tradeoffs. It can be a good thing, but it also has a disruptive impact on the future. As such, there can be too much divine intervention as well as too little. Human existence needs a fair measure of stability and predictability. 

iii) If we view evolution as the process by which life originates and/or diversifies, then evolution is an inefficient process for achieving a long-range goal. Of course, that takes the truth of evolution for granted, which is the very question at issue. 

On this view, some organisms are the means by which other organisms come into existence. So their purpose, if they have a purpose, is instrumental. And if we cast that in terms of theistic evolution, the process is very convoluted and "wasteful", as a way of reaching the final outcome. If, on the other hand, we're talking about naturalistic evolution, then that's not a goal-oriented process to begin with. Species are the incidental byproduct of a blind process. 

iv) If, however, we reject an evolutionary narrative, then life on earth is not primarily a process for deriving newer species from prior species. Prior species don't exist as a bridge to more advanced species. On that view, doomed organisms aren't evolutionary dead-ends, since it never was the primary way of producing new species. 

To take a comparison, sometimes a family line dies out. There are no more descendants. But it doesn't follow that that linage was a waste of time. There's value in individual human lives even if the linage terminates at some point. That's not a blind alley–as if the value of the linage was instrumental, in producing decedents for the sake of descendants. 

v) Suppose we consider old-earth creationism as an alternative to naturalistic evolution or theistic evolution. On that view, species may become extinct, species may be phased in and phrased out, not because God lacks foresight and repeatedly backs himself into a corner (although that is a realistic scenario in open theism), but because not all species can coexist. For one thing, there's not room enough for all species to coexist. 

In addition, some species require a different biosphere. A different atmosphere. Different ratio of oxygen to nitrogen or carbon dioxide. Fauna that require a different kind of flora (e.g. tropical swamps). In that event, creation will be diachronically staged, in part to make room for new species, and in part because the conditions for the life of certain species are variable. 

vi) As for disease prone or heartbreak prone, in Christian theology that's not a design flaw or artifact of creation but a consequence of the Fall. And the Fall has a purpose, too. 

vii) It would still be the case that intelligent design theory is guilty of postulating ad hoc divine interventions to resolve unexplained problems in the fossil record. I'm not commenting directly on that. 

Questions of ultimate causation

What is the God-of-the-gaps?

Atheists frequently accuse Christians of committing the God-of-the-gaps fallacy (hereafter GOG). But what is the God-of-the-gaps fallacy, and what makes it fallacious? From what I can tell, there are at least two different GOG allegations.

1. GOG short-circuits the search for natural mechanisms. For instance, prescientific people don't know about viruses and bacteria, so they explain epidemics in terms of divine displeasure. 

i) There may well be examples of that. However, Christian theism doesn't regard direct divine agency as a general substitute for natural mechanisms. Rather, the role of God is one step removed. God created the natural mechanisms. 

ii) This is not to deny that divine agency is often invoked to explain certain events within the ongoing history of the world. Miracles are a classic example. 

But that's not GOG reasoning, for atheists are the first to admit that certain kinds of events are naturally impossible. If they happened, they'd require supernatural agency. Atheists generally respond to reported miracles, not by crediting the report while attributing the cause to an undiscovered natural mechanism, but by denying the accuracy of the report. 

2. Another version goes something like this: GOG is fallacious because naturalism is the standard of comparison. To say "God did it" is unscientific because physical causes are the only admissible explanation. On that view, any appeal to supernatural agency is by definition a fallacy. It's sufficient to identify the explanation as theistic or supernatural, then slap the "fallacy" label on the explanation. Nothing more is required to refute it. 

But that's a transparent rhetorical ploy. Concoct a tendentious fallacy, then apply it to the position you oppose. 

Yet that begs the question of whether it really is a fallacy and why. That's a shortcut that endeavors to win the argument without having to even present an argument. 

To make naturalism the standard of comparison begs the question. The very issue in dispute is whether there is supernatural agency. That can't be settled at the outset by prejudicial stipulation. 

Strategic inscrutability

There's a family of objections to God as an explanatory principle. There's Elliott Sober's objection that you can't draw a design inference unless you know the intentions of the designer. There's a related objection to skeptical theism as a double-edged sword: it relieves the problem of evil at the expense of making God generally inscrutable and our corresponding intuitions generally unreliable. 

But let's take a comparison. In games like chess, poker, and football–as well as stratagems in warfare–the intentions of the agent are often inscrutable to an outsider. Why did the chess player make this move rather than that move? 

It would, however, be erroneous to conclude that just because we may not be able to figure out what the agent is up to, therefore the agent's actions are random. That there is no reason for what he did.

Indeed, we can put a sharper point on that. In the aforesaid examples, the agent will deliberately mask his intentions. He doesn't want his opponent to know what he's up to. He tries to throw him off the scent.

Not only are his intentions obscure, but they are obscure by design. Strategic inscrutability. 

So even if an agent's intentions are puzzling, that doesn't mean we should be agnostic about his having intentions. That doesn't mean the outcome is equivalent to chance. Indeed, in cases like military deception, we should infer design especially when the agent's behavior is puzzling. It's not merely that the agent's intentions happen to be obscure; rather, they are intentionally obscure. 

Apollo and Daphne

Suppose you discovered Bernini's Apollo and Daphne on a desert island. The island has no human inhabitants. And there's no other evidence that it ever had human inhabitants. Still, you conclude that the statue is an artifact. It didn't pop into existence uncaused. It did not and could not have a natural cause. 

That's analogous to the cosmological argument. But that's very coarse-grained. A more fine-grained argument is the teleological argument. That's more powerful, runs much deeper.

The original slab of marble didn't select for that particular sculpture. There are so many different sculptures that might be made from the same block of marble. And they're mutually exclusive. If a sculptor carves it one way, he can't carve it another way. He has to make a choice.

Possibilities greatly outnumber actualities. Although the size, shape, and texture of the material impose built-in limitations on the number of potential sculptures in that block of marble, yet for every sculpture, there's ever so many alternate sculptures. So it's not just a question of why there's something rather than nothing, but why there's this particular something rather than another something.

The block of marble doesn't really contain the sculpture. Rather, the sculpture began as an idea. The sculpture represents the union of something conceptual with something concrete. A relation between the block of marble and something outside the marble. The sculptor has a mental image which he instantiates in the physical medium of the marble. 

It would be absurd to say time and chance can produce the sculpture. Rather, it takes intelligence to make a selection from the panoply of abstract possibilities and actualize that one possibility to the exclusion of all other candidates. In a sense, intelligence is a simplifying device.