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

I come in rather late on this thread to comment on 3 points. 1st, especially in view of the ambiguity of the term that Randy & David note, the question of whether or not Randy's (or anyone else's) view is "neo-Darwinian" is of very little importance. The critical questions have to do with our theological understandings of divine action, scientific (not philosophical) understandings of biological evolution, and the correlation between them.

2d, I question whether anyone can show scientifically (& not just assert) that the process that has gotten us to our present state as Homo sapiens from the time that our ancestral line diverged from that of apes has actually been "random" in any technical sense - e.g., that critical mutations have statistically quite unremarkable. The lack of detailed genomes of our ancestral species for the past few Myr would make that difficult, to say the least.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: Randy Isaac
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2008 11:00 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Neo-Darwinism and God's action

  Randy, I find myself agreeing with your explanation. I wonder if, as a strategic bridge building matter, something like this could be said:

   "Logan, if you define neo-Darwinism to mean metaphysically random, then yes, I reject neo-Darwinism. I disagree with how you are defining this term, and I disagree with you that scientists typically speak in terms of metaphysical chance, but that isn't terribly important. We agree that God is the designer of creation. We may disagree on the means by which He carried out His design. We may also disagree on the extent to which any aspect of God's design in creation results in a pattern of information that provides an empirical signature of design. But we agree on the fundamental point that life and the universe are the product of God's loving creative act rather than blind chance."

  Personally I would also go a little further, in a direction I think Greg always pushes: "The emergence of human mind is not reducible to any of the structures or processes from which mind may have emerged. Mind is qualitatively different than body and therefore mind cannot be fully accounted for by descriptions of how physical structures may have developed."

  On Feb 16, 2008 7:20 PM, Randy Isaac <randyisaac@comcast.net> wrote:

    From Gregory Arago:

    The crux of Gage's argument seems to be the following:
      ... The words random and natural are meant to exclude intelligence. If God guides which mutations happen, the mutations are not random; if God chooses which organisms survive so as to guide life's evolution, the selection is intelligent rather than natural."

      Gage's point is that 'neo-Darwinism' is not the same thing as 'guided evolution.' The bolded sentence is ID's lynchpin. 'Guided evolution' involves a theological reading that Darwin omitted in his works and that a vast majority of 'modern synthesis' contributors (exception Dobzhansky and Fisher, outside of their scientific publications) neglected or even ridiculed. Would anyone disagree with that? If so, the following point awaits:

      Gage's claim that Randy "had to abandon orthodox evolutionary theory to keep intelligent guidance" appears valid. If 'orthodox evolutionary theory' means 'no intelligent guidance,' which is what Darwin claimed and what J. Huxley cemented for the mainstream meaning of 'neo-Darwinism,' then Gage's claim that Isaac is an 'evolutionist' but not a 'neo-Darwinist' would be legitimate. Otherwise, are TE's trying to change the scientific definition of 'neo-Darwinism' to suit their particular theological position?

    It seems that there is a lot of confusion to be cleared up. We need to sort out a variety of ways in which terms are used. Careless use of terminology keeps us going in circles. It appears that "neo-Darwinism" is used in two (at least) different ways. One is simply the synthesis of Darwin's biological theory of evolution with genetic DNA mechanisms. This is the core biological theory of evolution. The term also is used as a parallel to "evolutionism" and refers specifically to Darwin's philosophical interpretation of his theory which is that, by definition, it has no divine guidance. Confusion ensues when we move back and forth between these two definitions without clarification. I did not use the term "neo-Darwinism" in my letter--only in the subject of this thread in order to pick up on Logan's response.

    Logan (and Greg) continue the confusion when saying that orthodox evolutionary theory must be abandoned to acknowledge divine guidance. This is true only in the mistaken assertion, usually by both atheistic evolutionists and ID's, that orthodox evolutionary theory is innately unguided at any level.

    Much more confusion is created by the use of the term random or non-random in natural processes. I risk creating even more confusioin but let me try to change the perspective a bit. Essentially there is no such thing as a random event or non-random event in nature. Everything in nature appears to be a bounded probabilistic event. The key possible exceptions so far are the force of gravity and the dark matter/energy since these forces have not been quantized. But most of what we see is the result of random effects in the bounds of a probability function. No random process is unconstrained.

    Hence it does not make sense to speak of evolution as being either random or not random any more than we would describe the burning of hydrogen in the presence of oxygen as random or not random. It's not the right way to think about it. All processes have randomness somewhere in the details but all processes also have bounds on that randomness.

    This afternoon I was able to attend the presentation of "Re: Design" at the MIT Museum. It was a dramatization of the correspondence between Darwin and Asa Gray. It was very well done and will be posted on the web in streaming video soon. We'll get the website for that when it's available. There wasn't much that was new in the differences between them but it was helpful to see the nature of their interaction. One thing that struck me was the basis on which Darwin held onto his view of lack of purpose. It wasn't the underlying randomness of the variability as much as the outcome itself. Why were there variations--features, functions, organisms, etc.--that were clearly useless or unsuitable for survival? There would be no such examples if there were purpose. He seemed driven by the lack of perception of purpose of the end product rather than the process.

    In the neo-whatever world, we like to focus on the atomic structure and mechanisms. So we like to think about the random cosmic ray that induced a point mutation, or the random inducement of gene duplication, or whatever. Darwin however looked at the macroscopic world. In one quote he cited a bird swooping in to eat a gnat. Was it God's purposeful action that caused that particular bird to snatch that particular gnat at that particular time? In this vein, we all have a problem, whether ID or not. We usually strain in some way to ensure that while God works his will in every process, we certainly don't want him to be seen as having willed sin and evil or to be too closely related to causing specific suffering.

    Finally, lest this post get far too long, let me suggest that, as far as we know, there is no unique physical law in biological systems. That is, the evolutionary process does not require any alteration or addition to the fundamental forces of nature. The very same electromagnetic force, strong force, and weak force, in a grand graviational field, that underlies all other processes are the same as those in evolution. No additional fundamental law is involved. If we trust God to be able to carry out his will in any other process, how could we ever insist that God can only carry out his purpose in evolution if he deviates from that model?

    Randy

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sun Feb 17 06:10:45 2008