Re: [asa] ID/Miracles/Design (Behe vs. Behe)

"It's vague because there's no way to get at it scientifically. One can speculate in different ways, but how do you get at any definitive way? You can figure out what makes sense to you, and then you can get in people's faces if you want and make assertions, but then they can do the same to you taking a different view. So how do you settle the thing in a definitive way? I don't see how it's possible to settle it."

Agreed. Someone wrote the other day of the injunction not to go beyond what is written in scripture, this is another similar injunction not to go beyond what is written in nature.

I think at the heart of this ID/TE debate is the insatiable desire of the strong ID proponents to have proof which God is denying them because He hides Himself. Their issue is not with TE, it is with God. TE's just accept the fact that we can't prove this and are ok with that.

Thanks

John

--- On Sat, 4/25/09, Preston Garrison <pngarrison@att.net> wrote:

> From: Preston Garrison <pngarrison@att.net>
> Subject: Re: [asa] ID/Miracles/Design (Behe vs. Behe)
> To: "Cameron Wybrow" <wybrowc@sympatico.ca>, "ASA list" <asa@calvin.edu>
> Date: Saturday, April 25, 2009, 1:06 AM
> Cameron,
>
> Welcome to the fray. This is my first leap here since you
> came on board. I try to fill two roles on this group,
> occassionally - court jester and gadfly (asker of
> questions). Socrates got hemlock for the latter, so, when I
> see that coming, I switch to the former role. I also quote
> Dante on occassion, but that mostly just raises the question
> "if a medieval Florentine poet falls in the woods and
> no one hears it, has anything happened at all?" You may
> file this one under the first category above.
>
> > Your objection regarding the term
> "Darwinian" is a verbal technicality, Dave; my
> point remains the same if you change it to
> "neo-Darwinian means", or if you add in any number
> of newer "mechanisms" which are currently mooted
> around (drift, etc.), and call it "neo-neo-Darwinian
> means". All of them are chance mechanisms, ultimately,
> when all the fancy language is stripped away. The task of
> neo-neo-Darwinism, then, is to prove that chance can produce
> integrated complex systems. Behe's argument is that it
> can't. He may be right, or he may be wrong, but there
> is no point in obfuscating the issue. The choice is, and
> always has been (since the days of the ancient Greeks)
> "by design or by chance".
>
> Can someone tell me precisely what "chance" is?
> Not from a metaphysical perspective, but from a scientific
> perspective? What does chance look like at the level of
> observation and experiment? What exactly do the physicists
> and other mathematical savants mean by it?
>
> I suspect that functionally, "chance" is simply
> the fact that we observe that certain measurable variables
> fit certain statistical distributions when we do the
> measurement repeatedly on a series of events that meet
> certain criteria by which we consider them to belong to a
> certain class of event - to be the same kind of event. But a
> mutation (a point mutation, a transposon insertion, a
> rearrangement, a segment duplication, whatever you want)
> occurring in a particular cell in a particular environment
> from a genetic standpoint is often a unique event. It just
> isn't possible to determine by scientific means if it
> was directed or not, and hence whether it occurred by
> "chance."
>
> If it turns out to be the event that made modern humans
> much smarter than Neandertals, we might want to believe it
> was directed by God, and I would, but I don't see any
> way to make that more than a statement of faith.
>
>
> >
> > The problem with TE (at least in most of its
> formulations) is that it is simply unclear about the extent
> of the complexity-building powers it allows to chance. To
> read TE writers, the cause of mutations etc. is sort of
> chance, and sort of God's action, and sort of neither,
> and sort of both -- that's what TE sounds like, to an
> outsider seeking theoretical clarity. It sounds vague.
>
> It's vague because there's no way to get at it
> scientifically. One can speculate in different ways, but how
> do you get at any definitive way? You can figure out what
> makes sense to you, and then you can get in people's
> faces if you want and make assertions, but then they can do
> the same to you taking a different view. So how do you
> settle the thing in a definitive way? I don't see how
> it's possible to settle it.
>
>
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Received on Sat Apr 25 06:23:53 2009