Questions about Walter Thorson's latest article in PSCF

Though it won't be available on-line for 18 months, the March 2004 issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith has another piece by Walter Thorson. It follows a two-part work published two years ago, available at http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2002/PSCF3-02dyn.html

Even if you don't get the print version of PSCF, Walter Thorson's earlier work has enough of his thesis for anyone to engage in the dialogue, I think.

Because he is skeptical of reductionistic speculations for the origins of life, he likes the work of some ID proponents, particularly Stephen Meyer's work. Walter Thorson is less enthusiastic about Michael Behe's and William Dembski's writings. He does not support critiques of evolution which imply that macroevolution hasn't happened, so I don't think he would appreciate that aspect of the works of Jonathan Wells or Phillip Johnson, for example.

Walter Thorson clearly regards ID as a kind of natural theology rather than natural science, but he does so without demeaning ID at all. Walter Thorson defends a kind of naturalism, and he does not expect mundane scientific inquiry to detect interventionist action by an intelligent agent, so Walter Thorson is not entirely congruent even with Stephen Meyer. But I think Walter Thorson is trying to bridge the gulf between ID and theistic evolution. Walter Thorson's approach appears similar to Howard Van Till's Robust Formational Economy Principle. It's likely not identical, if only because Walter Thorson seems to find more common ground with Stephen Meyer's views than I recall Howard Van Till finding.

I find such attempts at mediation appealing, and yet I am puzzled. For example, Walter Thorson criticizes Kenneth Miller's rebuttal of ID, because Walter Thorson sees Kenneth Miller and some other theistic evolutionist critics of ID as being too confident about the ability of reductionistic physical science to explain biology. Walter Thorson seems to want biology to be more accepting of teleological explanations, what he calls "the logic of function," as still within the realm of naturalism. He draws much from Michael Polanyi's point that while a functional machine consists of atoms that obey physical laws, the functional organization of that material cannot be explained by physics. The question I have is this: do Walter Thorson's points really accommodate anything significant coming from ID theory? Does the recognition of multiple irreducible levels (physical, chemical, biological, etc.) really suggest anything like ID?

Similarly, Walter Thorson notes that "The claim that mutations occur entirely at random has not been proved." Of course it has not. Certain mutations are much more likely than others, for purely mechanistic reasons. Moreover, no fluctuation tests or other experiment could ever prove that an intelligent agent never directed at least some critically important mutations over the course of evolution. In fact, I would hope that most biologists wouldn't even make such an unsupportable claim. I admit, however, that unless a teacher is very careful and clear, students might interpret legitimate statements about the unpredictability of individual mutations as some sort of metaphysical statement that "no one is in charge." I would hope that words like "unsupervised," "undirected," etc. are disappearing from biology textbooks. Unpredictable is good enough; and again, some *probabilities* of mutations are predictable.

So, while I would welcome any real mediation between ID and theistic evolution, and while I regard them as potentially very close theologically and metaphysically (but also potentially very different theologically and metaphysically - it all depends on assumptions that people too often hold close to their vests), I don't quite understand what Walter Thorson means by his "modified naturalism" that includes a "logic of function paradigm." I certainly don't see anything appropriate for high school science classes, other than a healthy reminder that the naturalism appropriate to science in no way requires a materialistic, non-theistic metaphysics.

Cheers,

Chuck

-- 
Charles (Chuck) F. Austerberry, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Biology
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