Re: [asa] TE/EC Response - ideology according to Terry

David:

1. I'm not downplaying the importance of the primary cause. I am saying
that it is not a "local" cause in the sense that static electricity is. At
least, not an *additional* local cause. I can accept God as the "local"
cause of the lightning bolt in the sense that he wills static electricity in
general, hence lightning in general, hence all particular lightning bolts.
Therefore, I can accept that God is the ultimate cause of any particular
lightning bolt. If that is what you mean by God acting "locally", I could
go for that. Alternately, if are thinking of God as "powering" the laws of
nature at every moment, a sort of continuous creation, so that God "powers"
the lightning bolt locally, I could go for that, too. God is, as it were,
within the lightning bolt, within the laws of nature, manifesting his power
at all times through particular natural events. This is no problem for me.
But it sounds very much to me as if you and Terry are saying that in
addition to all such ways that God can be construed as acting "locally", he
performs some *extra* action of some kind to make *that particular lightning
bolt* fall, an action that he does not perform in the case of any other
lightning bolt. And I don't see how you can say that without stepping
outside of the rigorous naturalism that you and Terry seem to be endorsing.
Further, if God must do that in the case of lightning bolts, then he must do
it in the case of evolutionary changes, and then neo-Darwinism is false.
Neo-Darwinism says that God doesn't have to do anything extra, because
nature already has the capacity for macroevolutionary change.

2. I've known about lungfish since I was five years old, when I read my
first book on dinosaurs (my favourite subject as a child). The difficulty
with lungfish, and all your other examples, is that they use the same method
that Darwin and Dawkins use. You line up a bunch of existing features of
animals -- animals with different levels of complexity in their eyes, or
animals with gills, gills plus lungs, then just lungs, etc. -- and then you
infer from this functional sequence an actual historical process of
development. You ask me to imagine a historical process by which the forms
shade into each other.

Of course, I can *imagine* such a process. I can imagine such a process by
which a centaur and horse, or centaur and man, are related as well. I could
even dream up a "natural selection" explanation of how centaurs could, in
certain environments, have a survival advantage over horses (or men, take
your pick). But I have absolutely no evidence that the genome of any
horselike or anthropoid creature is capable of such a transformation.
Admittedly, the centaur example is extreme, and I admit that a
fish-amphibian transition is inherently more plausible than a man-centaur or
horse-centaur transition. Nonetheless, what evidence do I have that the
genome is capable of such transformations? Transitional forms such as
Tiktaalik give me no clue about the mechanism. Am I to imagine that chance
mutations, without any co-ordination, happened to produce viable
intermediate forms? Then I need a proposed genetic pathway, or I can't test
the assertion. Or am I to imagine that evolution was subtly front-loaded,
so that viable intermediate forms weren't a matter of freak luck, but were
in effect planned? Then I still need a proposed genetic pathway, or I can't
test the assertion. Or am I to imagine that naturalistic causes only did
part of the job, and that God did some tweaking along the way? If so, I
still need to know which parts of the process nature did by itself, and
where God made the big jumps over the chasms nature couldn't cross. So
again, I need proposed genetic pathways, or I can't test the assertion.

The difficulty with macroevolutionary theory at this point is that it is
still premature. Until we know the workings of the genome and of
developmental processes the way a mechanic knows the workings of a car, all
proposed genetic pathways are largely guesswork. If evolutionary biologists
want to play a guessing game -- may have, coulda, mighta (note that the
conclusion of the article Preston Garrison cited is filled with
subjunctives) -- that's their own in-house academic business, but they
shouldn't leave the public with the impression that they know how evolution
works, when they are almost completely in the dark about how it works when
it comes to the hard-nosed details.

By the way, since you've said the mutations aren't simultaneous, what is the
current Darwinian narrative explaining how being able to walk on crude
foot-fins would give a selective advantage, if the fish couldn't breathe out
of water yet? (Let me guess: tidal pools on the ocean shore, where fish
with gills and legs could perhaps survive for a few seconds out of the
water, snatch some snails and worms from the mud, and quickly waddle back to
a deeper stretch of water to plunge under for some air?) Or perhaps you are
insisting that the fish already had lungs, in addition to their gills,
before they developed the feet? In that case, remind me how, in the absence
of surviving soft tissues, palaeontologists can be certain that fish with
both lungs and gills existed, before feet (or lobe-fins) were developed?

And even if fish did have both lungs and gills before developing lobe-fins,
what *Darwinian* reason can be given for the simultaneous existence of lungs
and gills -- two different and redundant oxygenation systems? That uses a
lot of bodily resources for a something that isn't needed -- fish don't need
lungs. The simultaneous existence of lungs and gills makes much more sense
on Dentonian than Darwinian lines. If Denton is right, the lungs may have
evolved before they were put to use because the genome, as it were, "thinks
ahead". So once again, design comes out on top and neo-Darwinism comes out
on the bottom.

Cameron.

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Campbell" <pleuronaia@gmail.com>
To: "ASA" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 5:26 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] TE/EC Response - ideology according to Terry

> >"The primary cause of the lightning bolt is God's will to kill the wicked
> >man, and the secondary cause of the lightning bolt is the laws of
> >electrostatics. The laws of electrostatics were designed by God and
> >their continued operation is empowered by God. The primary and secondary
> >causes operate simultaneously and with reference to exactly the same
> >event. **But in addition, God acts directly in a third, extra, special,
> >mysterious way, which is not merely as the sustainer of the laws of
> >nature (which laws are the secondary causes of the lightning bolt) and
> >not merely as the guiding will behind the action (i.e., as the primary
> >cause of the lightning bolt), but by doing something locally (above and
> >beyond what the sum total of the laws of nature could ever do) in order
> >to produce *this specific lightning bolt*, and if he did not do this
> >mysterious extra thing, there would be no lightning bolt. Further, this
> >mysterious extra action cannot be incorporated into any scientific !
>
> equation, and the result it produces in nature is indistinguishable from
> what the science of electrostatics would predict if its practitioners had
> never heard of this type of divine action.**"<
>
> I would say, rather, that the primary cause is fundamental to anything
> happening. The design and empowerment are necessary for whatever
> events transpire. From my perspective, you seem to be downplaying the
> importance of the primary cause.
>
>> The reason we need to keep dragging the science into these debates is
>> that
>> Darwinian theory is weak science. Not just weak metaphysics, but weak
>> science. There's almost no evidence for it. There's evidence for
>> microevolution, but microevolution is merely the preamble to Darwinian
>> theory, not the real thing. The real thing is the claim that the
>> mutational
>> and selective factors that lengthen finch beaks can annihilate gills and
>> replace them with lungs, while conveniently and simulteously replacing
>> fins
>> with feet, and conveniently and simulteously altering almost every bodily
>> system in just the right way to be compatible with these changes. No one
>> has ever established this claim. Macroevolution *presumes* that is true,
>> and then, having assumed the conclusion that it prefers, goes out after
>> the
>> fact, trying to find out how it all happened. Darwinian evolution is a
>> doctrine in search of a detailed mechanism.
>
> No, it's the criticism that is weak on the science. Gills were not
> annhilated and replaced with lungs in vertebrates (they probably were
> in snails, though there's not much relevant anatomy determinable by
> the fossils). The actual sequence is gills then gills and lungs and
> then loss of gills. Probably most standard fish lost lungs, given the
> air-breathing capacities of many more basal taxa. Many larval
> amphibians still have gills, as do a number of adult amphibians. Some
> amphibians actually have neither gills nor lungs and just get oxygen
> through the skin and the mouth.
>
> Someone seriously looking at this (as far as I know, you're relying on
> ID sources, but those ought to have done their work) ought to be aware
> of lungfish. Conversely, the earliest amphibians seem to have been
> entirely aquatic, using lungs just to supplement gills.
>
> The development of different systems (at least the fossilizable ones)
> can be traced. They're not all simultaneous. Lobe finnned fish have
> leg bones in their fins; the closest fish relatives of amphibians have
> development of fingers and a start on a neck.
>
> --
> Dr. David Campbell
> 425 Scientific Collections
> University of Alabama
> "I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
>
>
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Received on Tue Jul 21 20:57:22 2009