RE: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

Interesting article in Physics Today.
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-10/p8.html

"Theory in particle physics: Theological speculation versus practical
knowledge" by Burton Richter

Moorad

________________________________

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Iain Strachan
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 11:31 AM
To: David Opderbeck
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

I can have a stab at one of your questions.

As regards "cosmological design", the problem is that the physical
constants are just "given" numbers tha happen to have the values we
observe, and those values appear to be very precisely chosen to make
anything interesting at all happen in the universe. There is nothing in
physics that attempts to explain how those numbers got to have those
values - they are just empirically observed parameters. With biology,
it is different, because evolution is an explanatory process that shows
how complex objects could have built up from something simpler by a
series of small steps. ID critics will say that it is incredibly
unlikely for all these elements (of an irreducibly complex system) to
come together at once. But an evolutionist would be able to counter
that we just haven't imagined the steps that were taken to reach the
final product. However the choosing of physical constants isn't a
stepwise process - they really did all come together at once and haven't
changed since the Big Bang.

The emergence of the moral law is on more tricky ground, and Collins
could perhaps be accused of God of the Gaps here. I guess one answer
could be that it doesn't actually give us any advantage naturalistically
because we all continually break it & our conscience tells us when we
obey and when we break. See Romans 2:14-15:

14(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things
required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do
not have the law, 15since they show that the requirements of the law are
written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and
their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)

Iain

On 10/4/06, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:

After reading Francis Collins' new book, and seeing some of the reviews
of it, I'm trying to understand the distinction he apparently makes
between cosmological/moral and biological design argments. On the one
hand, he says the appearance of fine tuning, the emergence of mind and
reason in humans, and the human moral sense are not explainable only by
naturalistic causes, and support belief in a creator-God. On the other
hand, he says that arguments from the appearance in design in biology
are merely worthless God-of-the-gaps arguments.

I can't see the principled distinction here. In fact, the argument from
human mind, reason and the moral sense is a type of biological gap
argument.

I suppose the cosmological/moral arguments can be seen as teleological.
The point is not so much that there are gaps in our understanding of how
naturalistic processes alone could result in the finely-tuned
cosmological constant or in the emergence of human mind and morality,
but that, even if we were to understand all those naturalistic processes
completely, the extraordinarily low probability of how they played out
suggests an intelligent purpose beyond mere chance. But the same could
be said of biological design arguments such as the argument from
irreducible complexity. And even the probabilistic-teleological
argument itself is a sort of gap argument -- we can't conceive of how
something of such a low probability could have occurred in nature, so we
fill in our inability to grasp that happenstance with God.

I also don't understand Collins' criticism of some ID / design / OEC
arguments on the basis that they present an inept designer who was
forced to repeatedly intervene in the creation. The same can be said of
any TE view that retains any concept of God as a sovereign creator. If
God sovereignly superintended ordinary evolution, then he repeatedly and
constantly "intervened" (and still "intervenes") in the creation, making
myriad trial-and-error adjustments, arguably at great cost in terms of
"wasted" organisms.

  
The answer to this criticism of TE, of course, is that God is perfectly
good, wise and knowing as well as perfectly sovereign, that his
direction of evolution was fully in accordance with His goodness,
wisdom, and foreknowledge, and that it accomplished exactly the purposes
He intended, even if we as humans don't always fully understand them.
But that same answer applies to Collins' criticism of the "meddling" ID
God. There's no reason to assume God was "fixing" some kind of
"mistake" if He intervened in the creation apart from the working of
natural laws. His intevention is equally consistent with a perfectly
good, wise, previously known and established plan by a sovereign
creator-God. (Likewise, the same criticism and answer applies to
criticisms of the Atonement -- why did God have to "fix" human sin by
becoming incarnate and dying on a cross?) (The other answer to this
criticism is open theism, which Collins doesn't seem to espouse. But
again, that would equally be an answer in the case of an ID / OEC
paradigm).

So what am I missing?

-- 
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