Re: [asa] Neo-Darwinism and God's action

Ted,

I believe your analysis here is spot on, as usual. But I wonder a bit
about Asa Gray. In my reading of Darwiniana (don't have it handy so
can't point to page numbers), I recall him exuding much the same
confidence in revelation and science, and their ultimate consilience,
as in the review you quote here. Yet, especially in regard to his
response to Hodge, his confidence with respect to evolution sounded
sometimes as though he thought they would be harmonized through very
much the sort of evidence that Behe claims. Can we read anything into
his qualifier "with respect to cosmogony", such that he might have ID
sympathies at the level of biology or anthropology? Or have I simply
misread him?

Chris

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 11:31 AM, Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
> >>> "David Opderbeck" <dopderbeck@gmail.com> 2/14/2008 10:34 PM >>> writes, among other things, this:
>
>
>
> Gage almost gets to the point of saying what he really needs to say: on the
> question of causation and God's providence, *there is essentially nothing
> separating TE's such as Collins and McGrath (and Randy I think) from most
> non-YEC ID folks such as Behe.* It seems to me that the real difference is
> that "hard" ID folks insist there are "patterns" in the "information" of
> life that empircally demonstrate design, while most Christian TEs argue that
> design is not empirically demonstrable.
>
> ***
>
> Ted comments: Exactly so, David. In several of my courses I do a unit (which I will be doing as a pre-meeting workshop at our annual meeting this year) in which I make the precise point you make in your final sentence above. What is the difference, at bottom, between ID as expressed by Behe and TE as expressed by Collins and McGrath? It is simply the issue of scientific detectability. This was hammered home to me in exchanges I had with many IDs on a list I was part of for a couple of years. If you can't "see" it with the tools of science, the IDs kept telling me, then it doesn't really count as "design." I hope my reading of this is not inaccurate, for this is a crucial point. I hope if I am mistaken in my analysis, that James Mahaffy or someone else will quickly correct me. But I'll continue with it. Thus, for the IDs, *there must in principle be "gaps" in scientific explanations, at the level of science itself and not simply at the metaphysical level, in order!
  fo!
> r someone to say that a particular artifact has been "designed."* For many TEs, on the other hand, it is more helpful to talk about "purpose" in the universe, since "design" has recently acquired this more specific meaning. Collins and McGrath would be in this category, and probably Polkinghorne also. They all believe (as do most of the IDs I have talked with) that the universe is in fact "designed," but they do not see "gaps" at the level of science pointing to this. Rather they see "gaps" at a higher level, if I may put it that way. Thus, there are no "gaps" in the nuclear physics of carbon and oxygen, but both the presence of carbon and oxygen and their relative scarcity in the universe suggest that "the universe knew we were coming," as Dyson has put it. Why nuclear physics should paint the picture that it paints is not a scientific question for them; there is no "gap" there where the scientific mechanisms have broken down and need to have "design" inserted as !
 a c!
> ompeting explanation. Rather, it is that the science, complet!
> e at its
> own level, when taken as a whole, quite strongly suggests that something more may be going on, that the whole shebbang needs a deeper explanation at a higher level.
>
> But, no one is forced to draw such a conclusion, and lots of scientists don't, so (IMO) most IDs do not see this as sufficient. It won't carry the weight of cultural transformation, which is their ultimate (perhaps not so ultimate) goal. They need the authority of science to give momentum to their religious and cultural goals, and therefore they need to find real "gaps" within mechanistic explanations, not simply limits or boundaries to the scope of those explanations that might suggest that reality is bigger than what is contained within our equations.
>
> If this analysis is correct, then IDs and TEs generally (there will be individual exceptions that are not unimportant) have different overall religious attitudes. I can capture them partly, I think, by quoting Asa Gray's anonymous 1863 review of the first edition of Dana's Manual of Geology, which contained a short section on cosmogony. Dana's cosmogony, Gray noted,
> is merely a summary of the views of [Princeton geologist Arnold] Guyot, looking to a harmony of the Mosaic cosmogony with modern science, –views which Professor Dana has adopted and maintained elsewhere more in detail, and which, under the circumstances, are naturally enough here reproduced. We regard them with curious interest, but without much sympathy for the anxious feeling which demands such harmonies. We have faith in revelation, and faith in science, in each after its kind; but, as respects cosmogony, we are not called upon to yield an implicit assent to any proposed reconciliation of the two.
>
> Now, Gray was obviously talking about Dana's concordist version of OEC, not about ID (which formally speaking did not exist at the time). But, he was pointing IMO directly at the same religious attitude which tends to be dominant within ID. IDs for the most part really want a classical kind of "harmony" between science and Christianity, in which science (as done by IDs) gives strong support to biblical theism. TEs are content with more of a complementarity, in which science and its conclusions are seen as fitting pretty naturally within a larger theological/metaphysical framework that does not arise directly out of science itself, but which (they believe) makes sense of science more than other worldviews are able to do. That's a very different conception, reflecting a quite different overall religious attitude.
>
> Ted
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Fri Feb 15 11:05:42 2008