On Wed, 19 Mar 1997 20:41:43 -0400, Pim van Meurs wrote:
Pim, could you please adopt the Reflector convention of indicating in
some way who said what? For example, you could put the initials of
the originator at the start of the paragraph. Otherwise we all have
had to spend a lot of time working it out and there is always the
risk of getting it wrong. Thanks.
PM>Possibly but that is perhaps too easy an explanation ? Everything
>we cannot explain or which appears contradictory can always be
>explained as "we don't know god's will and intentions" ? That is not
>science since it lacks the basics of science, predictability and
>refutability.
So "science" is limited to the predictable and the refutable (even
that's debatable), and cannot explain "God's will and intentions". So
what else is new? But if you claim that a limitation of science is a
necessary limitation of reality, you commit scientism.
There is no necessary contradiction between "God's will and
intentions" being in the final analysis inscrutable, and the fact
that "science" works with a methodology of prediction and
refutation.
>GG>"I'm wondering with Mr. Jones how a flaw can be deduced in a
>creature. It seems perfectly reasonable to ask someone who
>postulates that an organism is flawed from what perspective they are
>judging the flaw: aesthetics? ("It's ugly, I don't like it.")
>utility? ("It would be more efficient if it killed its food with a
>stinger") It sounds like a bogus critique to me--the sort of
>handwaving that would be called out of court in any refereed journal.
>The critic must assume *he* knows a lot more than he can possibly
>know. Perhaps the explanation is easy because the argument is
>silly."
I personally have no problem even if it is a "flaw" from the
standpoint of ideal engineering design. There is no requirement
that a designer who is capable of perfect design, must always and in
every case employ it:
"The most basic problem is that the argument demands perfection at
all. Clearly, designers who have the ability to make better designs
do not necessarily do so. For example, in manufacturing, "built-in
obsolescence" is not uncommon-a product is intentionally made so it
will not last as long as it might, for reasons that supersede the
simple goal of engineering excellence." (Behe M.J., "Darwin's Black
Box", 1996, p223)
The argument from imperfection assumes incorrectly that the Designer
has only one motive - engineering excellence:
"The argument from imperfection overlooks the possibility that the
designer might have multiple motives, with engineering excellence
oftentimes relegated to a secondary role." (Behe M.J., "Darwin's
Black Box", 1996, p223)
An Intelligent Designer may have reasons for sub-optimal design. For
example, He may not want any one creature to have an overwhelming
advantage over another, because that would contradict His design
goals for the whole system:
"...we are far from understanding the complexity of individual
organisms, let alone the entire ecosystem in which that organism
lives. What appears to be less than optimal design to us with our
limited knowledge may actually be an optimal design when the entire
system is considered. Consider the thickness of armor plating on the
side of a warship. Since the purpose of such plating is to protect
the ship from the puncture of an incoming warhead, it is advantageous
to make the plating as thick as possible. Yet the plating on actual
warships is much thinner than it could be made. The reason is, of
course, that an increase in plating thickness makes the ship heavier,
and thus slower. A less mobile ship is more likely to get hit more
often and less likely to get to where it is needed when it is needed.
The actual thickness of the armor on a warship is a tradeoff-not so
thin as to make the ship too easily sinkable, and not so thick as to
make the ship too slow. We know too little about the complexity of
organisms and the environment in which they live to conclude that any
one particular feature is actually less than optimal." (Wise K.P.,
in Moreland J.P. ed., "The Creation Hypothesis", 1994, pp221-222)
In fact, the argument from imperfection assumes without warrant that
we would infallibly know what was in the mind of the Designer:
"Another problem with the argument from imperfection is that it
critically depends on a psychoanalysis of the unidentified designer.
Yet the reasons that a designer would or would not do anything are
virtually impossible to know unless the designer tells you
specifically what those reasons are. One only has to go into a
modern art gallery to come across designed objects for which the
purposes are completely obscure (to me at least). Features that
strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the
designer for a reason-for artistic reasons, for variety, to show off,
for some as-yet-undetected practical purpose, or for some unguessable
reason or they might not. Odd they may be, but they may still be
designed by an intelligence." (Behe M.J., "Darwin's Black Box",
1996, pp223-224)
But archaeology has major problems in understanding why *human*
minds did what they did, as no less than Daniel Dennett points out:
"Archaeology at its best is detective work that rivals anything in
science or fiction-from Crick and Watson to Holmes and Watson. At
its worst, it is imagination run wild, underconstrained speculations
which often have the added vice of permanently distorting the data
through erroneous "restorations", or just spuriously authoritative
labels that then make alternative interpretations of those objects
and sites all but unthinkable...To our eyes, the systematic placement
of carefully conserved seeds into the ground in the spring is not a
ritual, while the systematic placement of ancestors bones into the
ground on some other occasion is. But this is only because we know
the former "works" and the latter, presumably, does not. The people
who engaged in both practices made no such distinction. For them a
sacrificial altar and a dry storehouse were equally functional,
equally essential protections against the vicissitudes of nature.
Presumably these people really believed in the efficacy of what they
were doing; they were not, like many of today's masters of ceremony,
just "keeping a tradition alive"....if cognitive archaeology has a
future, it will be by showing how, under the right conditions, one
can extrapolate facts about "ideological" features of ancient
cultures by showing how they are the likely or even obligatory
extensions of the practical concerns that shape all cognition"
(Dennett D., "Sifting the evidence for belief in the past", New
Scientist, 6 August 1994, pp41-43)
And when we are dealing with non-human minds, we have even less idea:
"In discussing why aliens on other planets might build artificial
structures that we could observe from earth, the physicist Freeman
Dyson wrote: `I do not need to discuss questions of motivation, who
would want to do these things or why. Why does the human species
explode hydrogen bombs or send rockets to the moon? It is difficult
to say exactly why.' (Dyson J. F. "The Search for Extraterrestrial
Technology", in R E. Marshak, ed., "Perspectives in Modern Physics",
Wiley: New York, pp643-644, 1966). When considering whether aliens
would try to seed other planets with life, Francis Crick and Leslie
Orgel wrote: `The psychology of extraterrestrial societies is no
better understood than terrestrial psychology. It is entirely
possible that extraterrestrial societies might infect other planets
for quite different reasons than those we have suggested.' (Crick F.
& Orgel L.E., "Directed Panspermia," Icarus, 19, 1973, p344. (Behe
M.J., "Darwin's Black Box", 1996, p224).
So if we don't know why human minds do something (eg. art) and did
something (archaeology), and we won't know why non-human minds did
something (SETI), then how can we be sure that we would know why a
supernatural omniscient intelligence did something?
>PM>We observe certain features in nature which make perfect sense in
>an evolutionary sense but wonder why an intelligent designer would
>design it that way.
Pim, there is a basic confusion here between what is "in an
evolutionary sense" and what is what "an intelligent designer" did.
As you yourself have pointed out, God could have used "evolution" in
creating:
---------------------------------------------------------
On Wed, 19 Mar 1997 17:20:02 -0400, Pim van Meurs wrote:
[...]
>Of course there are many shades between these two. But I am curious why
>christians refuse to believe in evolution if the evidence supports this ?
>Is it beyond their faith that god could have 'created' us through these
>naturalistic means ?
[...]
>And this shows a severe lack in faith in your creator Steve. To
>suggest that he could not have used evolution. Furthermore you
>statement that evolution requires no god is also untrue. Many
>christians have found a way to deal happily with both.
[...]
>And why do you believe that god could not have achieved his creation
>through evolution?
[...]
---------------------------------------------------------
Please make up your mind!
>PM>It is not mere aesthetics but questions like why have a whale
>with legs for instance or snakes with 'vestigial' legs.
Your argument seems to assume that Intelligent Design must
necessarily involve young-Earth creation. This is a fallacy:
"The third reason why Miller's argument misses the mark is actually
quite understandable. It arises from the confusion of two separate
ideas-the theory that life was intelligently designed and the theory
that the earth is young. Because religious groups who strongly
advocate both ideas have been in the headlines over the past several
decades, much of the public thinks that the two ideas are necessarily
linked. Implicit in Ken Miller's argument about pseudogenes, and
absolutely required for his conclusions, is the idea that the
designer had to have made life recently. That is not a part of
intelligent-design theory. The conclusion that some features of life
were designed can be made in the absence of knowledge about when the
designing took place...It is entirely possible, based simply on an
examination of the systems themselves, that they were designed
billions of years ago and that they have been passed down to the
present by the normal processes of cellular reproduction" (Behe M.J.,
"Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution", Free
Press: New York, 1996, p227)
legs" and "snakes with 'vestigial' legs" were because the Creator
made them from a common ancestor which had legs. Even Phil Johnson
accepts that:
"The features Futuyma cites may exist because a Creator employed them
for some inscrutable purpose; or they may reflect inheritance from
specific common ancestors; or they may be due to some as yet
unimagined process which science may discover in the future."
(Johnson P.E., "Darwin on Trial", 1993, p71)
But because homologous organs are not generated by homologous genes,
this common ancestry appears to be non-Darwinian, and more reflect
an Intelligent Designer's common plan:
"From Darwin's time to the present, evolutionary biologists have
believed that common descent implies some very important propositions
about homology and embryonic development. If homologous features are
relics of common ancestry, they ought to be traceable to common
embryonic parts. Conversely, if parts that appear to be homologous
in adult organisms were shown to have developed very differently in
the embryo, this would be evidence they evolved separately and are
therefore not inherited from a common ancestor. This correspondence
between homology in the adult and embryonic forms seemed so logically
inescapable to Darwin in the sixth edition of The Origin of Species
he defined "homology" as "that relation between parts that results
from their development from corresponding embryonic parts." Genes
were unknown in Darwin's time, but by extension of the same logic,
modern biologists have assumed that the corresponding embryonic parts
are themselves controlled by homologous genes...Unfortunately for the
theory, however, the facts do not fit so neatly into the theoretical
preconception. Far from providing the simple confirmation that
Futuyma suggests, the embryonic patterns generate a monumental puzzle
for the theory. Although it is true that vertebrates all pass
through an embryonic stage at which they resemble each other, in fact
they develop to this stage very differently. After a vertebrate egg
is fertilized, it undergoes cell divisions and cell movements
characteristic of its class: fishes follow one pattern, amphibians
another one, birds yet another, and mammals still another. The
differences cannot be explained as larval adaptations, since these
early stages occur before larvae form and thus are apparently not
exposed to natural selection. Only by ignoring the early stages of
development can one fit Darwin's theory to the facts of embryology,
but it was precisely the early stages that Darwin claimed were the
most significant!...from a Darwinian perspective, genealogical
continuity should be reflected in developmental continuity. In other
words, similarity of pattern in the mature limb should reflect a
repetition of ancestral patterns in the developing limb in the
embryo. Unfortunately, detailed comparisons of limb development in
fishes, birds and amphibians, and mammals show that this is not the
case. On the contrary, the embryonic cells that give rise to limb
bones exhibit patterns of division, branching, and cartilage
production which differ from species to species without conforming to
predictions based on the theory of common descent. By embryological
criteria the similarities in vertebrate limbs resemble analogies more
than homologies, and as such do not support Gould's claim that they
are imperfections inherited from a common ancestor...The facts of
homology and embryology have been alleged as straightforward
confirmation of the "fact of evolution," and they are nothing of the
kind. If embryology is our best guide to genealogy, as Darwin
thought, our guide seems to be telling us that vertebrates have
multiple origins and did not inherit their similarities from a common
ancestor." (Johnson P.E., "Darwin on Trial", InterVarsity Press,
Illinois, Second Edition, 1993, pp71-74)
[continued]
God bless.
Steve
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