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

Charles:

You have indeed partly anticipated my response, but allow me to put it in my
own words and expand upon it, and in doing so, to deal with your prepared
rejoinder.

Embryonic processes are observed every day. And they are rightly regarded
as natural, and as law-bound processes, because they regularly produce the
same results. If they were the result of either chance or arbitrary divine
interventions, their results would vary from day to day. So we rightly look
for purely natural causes to explain embryonic processes, i.e., the
formation of living bodies. We do not as yet know all the causes operating
in embryonic processes, but we are steadily making progress, as is to be
expected when (a) the processes are known to exist; (b) the processes are
known to be natural; (c) the processes are directly accessible to our
observational and experimental apparatus.

Macroevolutionary processes are (a) never observed, but only inferred. Nor
are they (c) directly accessible to our observational and experimental
apparatus. Further, what we can safely infer takes us nowhere near the
certain conclusion that (b) macroevolutionary processes are due entirely to
natural causes. Why do I say this? For the following reason. Our normal
notion of whether or not a process is "natural" is connected with
repetition: eggs hatch into chickens the same way all the time, the sun
rises and sets in the same way every day, etc. Things that happen always in
the same way we deem "natural". Macroevolution, however, is by definition a
unique set of particular historical events. In order for us to be
completely confident that the events of macroevolution indicate the sort of
law-bound, entirely natural process that embryonic development is, we would
have to have access to the macroevolutionary process on several worlds. If
we observed regularities, e.g., a molecules-to-man sequence, on every
earthlike planet known to us, then there would be a strong analogy between
the embryonic process and macroevolution. But we have no evidence that
macroevolution has ever occurred anywhere else in the universe, and
therefore have no way of generalizing safely that it is an entirely natural
process.

Of course, one might argue that there is a second way that we could
establish that macroevolution is an entirely natural process, without having
to observe it on several worlds. We might be able to show that a set of
known natural mechanisms can infallibly produce macroevolutionary results,
or at least, we might be able to provide a set of hypothetical genetic
changes which, based on our current knowledge of biology, would be
sufficient to generate macroevolutionary results. I grant this as a
possibility. But this has not been done, for there are no 500-page books of
the sort I mentioned in any science library anywhere.

Is it possible that the origin of life and the origin of major new organs
and body plans came about entirely due to natural processes? Imaginatively
possible, yes. But to turn "imaginatively possible" into "scientifically
likely", more details are needed. I don't blame evolutionary biologists for
not being able to provide the details. I only blame them for boasting and
bluffing and intimating that they know far more than they know about how the
evolutionary process took place. Certainly, at this point, they do *not*
know enough to rule out the possibility of intelligent design of some kind,
yet they publically mock and belittle that possibility every time they can
get hold of a microphone or a TV camera crew. A rhetorical pulling-back on
the part of evolutionary biologists would be very much in order.

It is also important to distinguish between different ways of viewing
"intelligent design". It might be the case (and I expect that it is) that
in the embryonic process the "intelligent design" is immanent, and does not
require any active tinkering by any intelligent mind. It does not follow,
however, that intelligent design is always of this immanent kind. If we
look at the overall evolutionary process, the analogue to the "immanent"
intelligence of the embryonic process would be Dentonian evolution, which I
grant as an interesting possibility worthy of scientific exploration. But
there are other possibilities. For example, there is the
Davis-Murphy-Russell model in which there is subtle, invisible steering of
the process, intelligent decisions input into the process, either
sporadically or constantly. In such a model, there would be an interaction
of intelligent and non-intelligent causes, and the evolutionary process as a
whole would not be entirely naturalistic (though the extra-natural input
might not be scientifically detectable).

Another way of putting my own view is this: The actual operation of
embryonic processes may be nothing more than blind matter being re-arranged
according to a set of mechanical chemical instructions, but the fact that
the processes exist at all is due to intelligent design. Similarly, if
macroevolution is a totally naturalistic process, then all species can be
produced according to a set of genetic modifications that requires no will,
consciousness or direction on the part of any intelligent being, but the
fact that genomes are set up for this activity is due to the intelligent
design of the entire process. Alternately, if macroevolution is not a
totally naturalistic process, then intelligence is input directly, as the
process rolls along. Either way, I think that macroevolution is
inconceivable without design.

As for the Psalm that people here keep mentioning in connection with
embryology, it plays no part in my thinking. I have never suggested that
God stitches together individuals in the womb without regard for natural
processes. And in any case I don't think an ancient piece of Hebrew poetry,
written to express a religious feeling, not a scientific theory, should
guide our theoretical understanding of nature. Nor do I know of any ID
proponent who denies that embryological processes are fully natural. I am
not even sure that any YEC people deny that embryological processes are
fully natural. So I wish people would stop bringing up that Psalm. To
attack anti-Darwinists for appealing to it is to attack a strawman.

Cameron.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Austerberry, Charles" <cfauster@creighton.edu>
To: <asa@lists.calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 5:36 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] TE/EC Response - ideology according to Terry

> Even if the fundamental forces, constants, and energy/matter of the
> universe were all intelligently designed for life, I understand ID
> theory to suggest that such fine-tuning would only be necessary, not
> sufficient, for life because life requires additional intelligent
> design, more information input, more irreducible/specified complexity.
>
> I'm not the first person to note that such criticisms of neo-Darwinian
> evolutionary theory might be equally applicable to many theories in
> biology. For example, I wonder whether Cameron's recent criticisms of
> Darwinian evolution apply to embryology (developmental biology). No
> stages or outcomes in embryonic development are attributed to an
> intelligent agent, yet we can't explain how most of them develop.
>
> Even if genes and gametes and wombs were all intelligently designed for
> embryonic development, might not additional information input be
> necessary once sperm and egg meet? As an experiment, I've altered part
> of Cameron's recent post so that it would apply to embryology rather
> than Darwinian theory. Please note that I'm trying here to separate
> developmental from evolutionary biology, something I consider quite
> difficult, but others must not since they claim that evolution is
> unimportant to biology in general. Nonetheless, in order to accomplish
> this separation we need to leave aside the question of where the
> information in DNA and gametes and wombs originally comes from. Those
> questions are central to evolution and ID theory, but not to embryology
> itself for the purpose of this exercise.
>
> On what basis could biologists conclude that intelligently guided action
> by one or more conscious beings is unnecessary for the successful
> development of an individual embryo? How could one counter the
> following criticisms?
>
> "Developmental biology (embryology) is weak science. There's almost no
> evidence for it. There's evidence for mechanisms behind a few discrete
> events such as fertilization, morphogenic gradient formation, and
> segment determination via Hox genes, but they are merely the preamble to
> embryology, not the real thing. The real thing is the claim that the
> random and non-random factors that bring about a zygote through
> fertilization can then go on to change that zygote into a
> fully-developed embryo. Think of everything that happens in embryonic
> development: establishment of symmetries and asymmetries, poles and
> axes, different cell and tissue types, organs and integrated organ
> systems, programmed cell death, stem cells and terminally differentiated
> cells - all conveniently and simultaneously developing in just the
> right ways to be compatible with each other and progress toward the goal
> of a viable new whole organism. Developmental biology (embryology)
> theory *presumes* that certain genes in certain contexts will
> automatically be expressed at the right times and in the right places to
> bring all this about, and then, having assumed the conclusion that it
> prefers, goes out after the fact, trying to find out how it all
> happened. Developmental biology (embryology) is a doctrine in search of
> a detailed mechanism. That's not how science is supposed to work.
> Science is supposed to work out theories in the light of a careful study
> of the actual working of detailed mechanisms. The Big Bang theory was
> worked out by people who had a great deal of detailed knowledge of
> nuclear physics, Newtonian celestial mechanics, relativity, wavelengths,
> the Doppler effect, etc. But developmental biology (embryology) cannot
> proceed in this normal scientific manner, because it does not know any
> of the detailed mechanisms. It knows only microdevelopmental
> mechanisms, the ones you find in a developmental biology or embryology
> text, but those explain only tiny modifications of already existing
> structures, not the emergence of those structures from the zygote.
> Developmental biology thus has to make a more extensive use of *a
> priori* reasoning than any science has done since the Scholastic science
> of the Middle Ages."
>
> Well, I can anticipate one response: "Embryology is valid science
> because we can observe multiple embryos develop and can experimentally
> manipulate them. We don't need to first know how it happens, because we
> can see it happen. If we could not watch organisms develop from
> zygotes, then we would need detailed mechanisms before embryology would
> be a science. But since we can see it happen, the detailed mechanisms
> can come later."
>
> My response to such a response: The fact that embryonic development of
> individuals is rapid, commonplace, and observable in real time does not
> fundamentally distinguish the mysteries of embryology from those of
> phylogeny.
>
> What really made people think that embryos can develop naturally and not
> necessarily miraculously? Perhaps in the 1740s, when the Swiss amateur
> scientist Abraham Trembley (1701-1784) discovered the ability of pieces
> of the polyp Hydra to regenerate entire organisms, this and other
> similar embryological observations suggested that matter was not
> necessarily dependent upon miraculous interventions for each and every
> individual. If an early (or contemporary!) embryologist was going to
> share the psalmist's faith that God knits each of us together in our
> mothers' wombs and knows each of us individually as our Creator, no
> longer could such faith be supported by the absence of embryological
> explanations, or threatened by progress in embryology.
>
> I think we are now living in a similar time, when evolutionary
> observations are suggesting that matter is not
> necessarily dependent upon miraculous interventions for each and every
> species or group of species, and maybe not even for the first living
> cells.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Charles (Chuck) F. Austerberry, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor of Biology
> Hixson-Lied Room 438
> Creighton University
> 2500 California Plaza
> Omaha, NE 68178
> Phone: 402-280-2154
> Fax: 402-280-5595
> e-mail: cfauster@creighton.edu
> http://groups.creighton.edu/premedsociety/
>
> Nebraska Religious Coalition for Science Education
> http://nrcse.creighton.edu
>
>
>
>
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Received on Wed Jul 22 00:40:29 2009