[asa] Rejoinder 10A from Timaeus: To Schwarzwald and Matheson

We're probably nearing the end of our exchanges with Timaeus. One comment to fill in a blank below, where Timaeus says, "I don’t know whether it was before or after Darwin’s death that Lord Kelvin’s numbers [for the earth's age] were rejected and the older earth accepted..." The answer is, that Kelvin's numbers and those like them (in the ballpark of 100 MY) were generally accepted until the early 20th century. Around 1900, e.g., the earth was generally thought to be about 100 MY old, while the universe had no clues of a finite age. After the discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s, it gradually became clear that this had implications for the age of the earth, and by ca. 1950 it was possible to put fairly precise numbers on a much larger value.

Ted

Now, Timaeus:

********

I won’t be able to engage in lengthy debate any longer, but I will reply briefly to a few recent comments on my posts:

A. To Schwarzwald:

Thanks for your comments of Nov. 14. You understand my position, and your comments are pertinent. I’ll respond to some of them.

With regard to your first comment: I agree with you when you say that one could explain the operation and even physical manufacture of the calculator in completely mechanistic terms, but that such an explanation would not rule out the possibility that the calculator was designed. And I think you are applying this to the case of Darwinian theory, and asking how the Darwinians can be sure, even given a successful explanation of evolution in terms of their mechanism, that there isn’t also a design. From your point of view, they have made a reasoning error in supposing that mechanical explanations and design explanations are mutually exclusive. And I agree with you about the non-exclusivity of the two modes of explanation, but in order to understand why the Darwinians never come to that realization, we have to look at the genesis of the theory.

It’s not as if the Darwinians began their study of nature open to the possibility of design, but then, as they (in their minds) came closer and closer to a complete mechanistic explanation for evolution, ruled out design. In fact, they have never been open to design, but have excluded it as a possibility from the outset. The whole purpose of Darwinian explanation is to explain all species, including man, as the products of chance and natural selection, not design. To ask, “How do they know there isn’t design, in addition to chance and natural selection?”, is like asking: “Why can’t soccer players use their hands as well as their feet on the ball?” The answer is not that it’s impossible to manipulate the ball with one’s hands, or that the game would be inferior if players could use their hands; the answer is that soccer is defined as a game in which you can’t use your hands on the ball. One could invent a game with similar rules, but add in the use!
  of hands. The point is that such a game wouldn’t be soccer. And Darwinian evolution, with design added to it as an additional cause, wouldn’t be “Darwinian” evolution. It would be some other kind of evolution. And just as most soccer players don’t want to play a version of soccer where hands may be used, so most evolutionary biologists of the last 80 years or more haven’t been willing to accept any version of evolution that admits any kind of design.
 
So yes, it may be that in addition to chance and natural selection, there is design involved in evolution, whether imposed miraculously or by front-loading. Gould, Dawkins, etc. don’t ever disprove that. But if there is design, then Darwinism is a false description of how nature works. Not false in every detail (there may still be natural selection operating, for example), but false in the sense that Darwin himself deemed most crucial. And my contention throughout this debate has been that TEs are only able to combine Christianity with Darwin to the extent that they have unconsciously relaxed the stipulation – the exclusion of design – that Darwin himself (and all his major interpreters up to Dawkins) considered to be central to the theory.

As for Gould, I agree with you that he makes an additional metaphysical assumption, beyond the “no-design” assumption that all Darwinists make. That metaphysical assumption is that evolution is not deterministic. If evolution is deterministic, then the tape would replay in exactly the same way, no matter how many times it was re-run, just as a recorded jazz solo sounds the same every time you play it; whereas if evolution is non-deterministic in the sense that there is radical, arbitrary freedom, then the tape could replay differently every time, just as a live jazz artist will play the same song differently every time. Gould’s statement, taken literally (as I assume he meant it to be taken) means that if exactly the same cosmic ray struck exactly the same part of the DNA of exactly the same animal at exactly the same time in exactly the same environment, evolution would take a different path the second time around. How does he know that? What experiment could pos!
 sibly prove that? Has he taken identical twins, and put them in the same environment, and mutated their genes with x-rays, and observed their mating and survival behaviour afterwards, to see if they do exactly the same thing, or different things? I would guess that he hasn’t. And even identical twins wouldn’t be a reliable test case. The only way the claim could be tested is with a time machine; if we could go back in time and alter a number of mutations in controlled ways, and observe the evolutionary results, then we would know. But we can’t, so Gould’s claim is utterly untestable.

On the age of the earth, Darwin was originally faced with the young age calculated by the physicist, Lord Kelvin (a few hundred million years, I believe), which caused Darwin great difficulties, since his theory of gradual, chance-driven evolution required immense stretches of time in order to plausibly explain the origin of an eye or a lung. He knew that if the young age stuck, his theory was toast. I don’t know whether it was before or after Darwin’s death that Lord Kelvin’s numbers were rejected and the older earth accepted, but if not Darwin, later Darwinists were certainly relieved. This just emphasizes how much the Darwinian theory depends on chance. If Darwin had put forward a front-loaded design theory, where all evolutionary change was programmed in advance, he would have had no need for billions of years; a few hundred million, maybe even much less, would be sufficient. Lord Kelvin’s calculation wouldn’t have bothered him at all. But when you have t!
 o wait on Lady Luck for a workable series of graded steps leading to complex integrated organic systems, you are going to have to wait a long time.

About your book query: I don’t know the work of Fr. Wallace, or the book you mention, so I cannot say whether or not it is worth reading. I can tell you that the book sounds very interesting to me. However, though I’m an admirer of Aristotle, I have to admit that it is very hard to put together Aristotelean with modern science, except possibly in the realm of biology. The difficulty is that Aristotle said things that we now know to be simply wrong, and that, at least in physics and astronomy, these were not mere errors of detail, but were fundamental missteps. However, even Darwin thought that Aristotle was a fine biologist, and I think that in the future, once life scientists get over their materialistic phase, which has been largely driven by 19th-century “physics envy”, and reconceive biology (as Aristotle did) as an enterprise different in important ways from physics, and in which teleological reasoning is not out of place, it may be that some of Aristotle�!
 �s biological thoughts will prove of continuing interest.

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Received on Mon Nov 17 09:23:22 2008