We’ve been discussing Falk and Ayala’s theological support for evolution. However, while reading Falk’s arguments, I came to the realization that the only way Falk’s arguments about evolution freeing God from responsibility for the created world make sense is if they assume Intelligent Design is true.
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The NOVA documentary The Incredible Journey Of The Butterflies, which aired on public television earlier this year, details a phenomenon that in recent years has captivated biologists worldwide- the North American Monarch butterfly’s 2500 mile long migration to the Mexican Sierra Madre mountains. Both the sheer scale of the journey and the paucity of models in the scientific literature that adequately explain its evolutionary origins are plainly evident (1).
The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould took a rather nebulous stab at explicating the origins of another migratory feat- that of the green turtle’s trans-Atlantic breeding trek from Brazil to the ‘pinpoint of land’ we now call Ascension Island (2). Having soundly carved up biologist Archie Carr’s migratory drift hypothesis (which would have us believe that the migratory distance used to be much shorter and extended gradually as continents moved apart), Gould treated us to his own momentary reliance on obscurity. In Gould’s words “the mechanism of turtle migration is so mysterious, that I see no barrier to supposing that turtles can be imprinted to remember the place of their birth without prior genetic information transmitted from previous generations” (2). It seems that for Gould at least, the bigger the evolutionary mystery, the more scope one would have for assuming what one wished to assume. Read More ›
As noted by Dr. Dembski in a previous blog, Darrel Falk has written a theological blog about what God would and would not design: So while we may love to think about the Intelligent Designer as being the great engineer in the sky drawing up magnificent plans to make things like the mammalian eye, the blood complement system, the immune system, or even the bacterial flagellum, it is not that simple. Countless millions of these structures and processes are designed to make people very sick and even to kill them. The Creator described in the Bible is not a sinister God who is off in a great machine shop “intelligently designing” machinery to make people very sick. Some will say Read More ›
Darrell Falk, one of the key people at Francis Collins’s BioLogos Foundation, has a remarkable piece arguing that Darwinian evolution is the only way to preserve Christian orthodoxy in the face of intelligent design (go here). His line is that a micro-managing designer would be responsible for all the nasty designs we find in biology, so natural selection must have done all the creative work in producing biological complexity and diversity. I’ve seen this line increasingly taken by Christian Darwinists. Until this piece by Falk, Francisco Ayala’s DARWIN’S GIFT TO SCIENCE AND RELIGION was the most extreme form of it. But Falk has taken it to a new level:
Some of the by-products of natural selection are intricate structures that can fashion cellular machines that are able to harm us, just like the machines that we humans make. It happens in the context of freedom–God-granted freedom. However, the notion that irreducibly complex structures are built and put in place by a meticulous detail-driven intelligent designer is not consistent with Christian theology and should not have been embraced by Christians. With all due respect to my friends who hold this view, I would venture to say it borders on the heretical–certainly it is scientifically heretical, but I wonder if it is not theologically so as well. God is not the engineer that built these intricate little terror machines. And the Satan that we know from Christian theology is not a designer of life’s machinery. Those who wish to believe this are free to do so, but they have moved onto an island of scientific fantasy and perhaps even theological heterodoxy. The greatest beauty in the universe emerges through processes that arise through God-ordained freedom. Let us celebrate that beauty, even as we, in the presence of God’s Spirit, grit our teeth, and endure the hardships that come as a by-product.
For Falk and fellow Christian Darwinists ID is bad science and bad theology and Darwinian evolution is the key to reforming the faith. As an antidote to Christian Darwinism, let me suggest reading my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY: FINDING A GOOD GOD IN AN EVIL WORLD. 
Here is a relevant passage from ch. 20 (titled “What about Evolution?” — substitute “Falk” for “Ayala” when reading it):
I want next to turn to the charge made by some theistic evolutionists that Christian theism requires God to create indirectly by evolution rather than directly by intervention (as in special creation). Theistic evolutionists worry that a God who creates by direct intervention renders the problem of evil insoluble. Such a God would be responsible for all the botched and malevolent designs we find in nature. By letting Darwinian natural selection serve as a designer substitute, theistic evolutionists can refer all those botched and malevolent designs to evolution. This, in their view, is supposed to resolve the problem of natural evil and thereby help validate Christian theism. Read More ›
Have a look at this story, going the rounds, and act with reasonable caution on its claims:
This grief about atheists being disliked or feared is the first stage in a program, very active just now in the United States, from which we, here in Canada, are now emerging into the light.
But some nations may still be descending further into the abyss. I name no names. You know who you are.
You an American? Why does this matter to you? Please listen: The US government has just put in “hate crime” legislation, explicitly enabling people who kvetch about hate.
That is why atheists need to portray themselves as victims of wrongdoing, even if no wrongdoing ever really occurred. Or else, it didn’t really matter. Studies like this help the atheists build a “victim” case. It would certainly help them protect Darwinism.
Can’t think of anything else that would protect Darwinism right now, actually.
Why do I say Canada is emerging from this? Traditional free Canadians of all stripes finally won a round when we got a government pooh-bah to acknowledge that outrages against citizens actually contravene our Constitution.
Wow! An outrage perpetrated by the government against a citizen contravenes our Constitution? So … we have a Constitution? Well yes, we do, … and it actually turns out to be higher class paper than the stuff we relegate to the john.
I had almost forgotten. I helped draft our Constitution in 1981. But no one minds that kind of thing any more. Unless … could there now be hope? Read More ›
Just so we are clear, I am certain that everyone who posts at this site believes evolution is a fact (or fact! fact! fact! as some of our more breathless opponents prefer).
Whoa Barry! Are you telling us that Uncommon Descent does not oppose the concept of evolution? Yes, I am telling you exactly that.
Then what is all the fuss and disagreement about? I’m glad you asked. But before I answer that question, let me begin with what the fuss and disagreement are NOT about.
The fuss and the disagreement are not about whether evolution occurred. Obviously evolution occurred if by “evolution” one means, “things are different now than they were in the past.” I don’t know anyone who disagrees with that. That bare fact is uninteresting, even trivial.
The important question is not WHETHER things are different now than they were in the past. They obviously are. The important question is “WHY are things different now than they were in the past?” As Phil Johnson has pointed out, the Darwinist starts with the following proposition: “Given materialist premises, Darwinian evolution or something very much like it simply must be true.” Therefore, since the Darwinist already “knows” that Darwinian evolution exhausts all of the options open to investigation, he interprets all of the data to – big surprise here – confirm Darwinian evolution. It is almost literally the case that a Darwinist is incapable of seeing data that does not confirm or tends to disconfirm his theory. Read More ›
Yes, I know. It’s almost unbelievable, but …
Ontario’s premier, Dalton McGuinty did get it, recently. Ontario is a province of Canada that runs a lottery, one that has become a swamp of corruption problems.
Basically, if the lottery winners comprise a grossly disproportionate number of people who sell tickets, the “random” stats don’t work any more.
If the numbers don’t work, something is wrong. And why did it take so many years to figure this out?
And why does this remind me so much of Darwinism?
McGuinty wants to ban lottery retailers from buying tickets from themselves. Well, that would be a good start. It would prevent them giving a needy pensioner a losing ticket in exchange for a winning one, for example ….
Anyway, he has Read More ›
This thread inspired the following observations. The bottom line is that none of Dawkins’ computer programs have any relevance to biological evolution, because of this in WEASEL1: Target:Text=’METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL’; and this in WEASEL2: WRITELN(’Type target phrase in capital letters’); READLN(TARGET); which allows the user to enter the “target” phrase. No search is required, because the solution has been provided in advance. These programs are just hideously inefficient means of printing out what could have been printed out when the program launched. The information for the solution was explicitly supplied by the programmer. Once this is recognized, further conversation about the relevance of the programs to biological evolution is no more illuminating than conjecture about the number Read More ›
On August 26th last month, Denyse O’Leary posted a contest here at UD asking for the original WEASEL program(s) that Richard Dawkins was using back in the late 1980s to show how Darwinian evolution works. Although Denyse’s post generated 377 comments (thus far), none of the entries could reasonably be thought to be Dawkins’s originals.
It seems that Dawkins used two programs, one in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, and one for a video that he did for the BBC (here’s the video-run of the program; fast forward to 6:15). After much beating the bushes, we finally heard from someone named “Oxfordensis,” who provided the two PASCAL programs below, which we refer to as WEASEL1 (corresponding to Dawkins’s book) and WEASEL2 (corresponding to Dawkins’s BBC video). These are by far the best candidates we have received to date.
Unless Richard Dawkins and his associates can show conclusively that these are not the originals (either by providing originals in their possession that differ, or by demonstrating that these programs in some way fail to perform as required), we shall regard the contest as closed, offer Oxfordensis his/her prize, and henceforward treat the programs below as the originals.
For WEASEL1 and WEASEL2 click here: Read More ›
We are often told that bunnies in the pre-Cambrian would be evidence against evolution, but that is just posturing. But what of real known anomalies? The Chinese fossil layers are throwing up all sorts of out of place evidence. It would be nice if we were told more about such fossils. But slowly word is getting out. We find now for instance a Tiny T Rex Raptorex kriegsteini in the early Cretaceous of China (or is that the late Jurassic?).
Tiny ancestor is T. rex blueprint – BBC
Although the Jehol Group of China is now thought to be of Early Cretaceous age, many taxa are from the ‘Late Jurassic, or older.’ It is suggested that perhaps East Asia was a ‘refugium for some of these more typically ‘Jurassic’ taxa in the Lower Cretaceous.’
I know both Robert Wright and George Johnson. I invited Wright to the NATURE OF NATURE conference at Baylor back in 2000, where he debated Michael Shermer. And I met Johnson at a Templeton event in Santa Fe back in 1999. Go here for their Bloggingheads discussion, which really amounts to a confessional in which Wright is the penitent and Johnson the confessor. Wright can’t fall enough over himself for giving ID too much place at his Bloggingheads forum. Discourse in our culture has become truly pathetic. Johnson, when he’s not intoning “yeah” and “umh,” comes across as a condescending prig. He dismisses Michael Behe’s views on design because they “conveniently dovetail with his religious belief.” These atheists and agnostics Read More ›
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor Jonathan Weiner will be giving the second lecture of the Darwin Celebratory Lectures on the topic of variation. Weiner’s award winning book, The Beak of the Finch, documents the adaptive variations observed in the finches on the Galapagos islands. Such adaptive change is both rapid and intelligent. For instance, the beaks of the finches adapted to changes brought about by drought years. It is another piece of evidence that species have incredible adaptive abilities, not that reptiles changed into birds. Read more
Animal minds are a big topic now.
Always fascinating for me, but I was all the more intrigued when a local panhandler sold me the “homeless” Outreach paper on the street – always a source of news that should be approached with caution – and guess what?
The lead article informs me that “Wolves are more logical than dogs.”
My first reaction was, “Try telling that to the police van driver whose back door features the notice ‘Police Dog’.”
Would the notice “Police Wolf” convince anyone that the creature in back of the van was more “logical”?
I have seen Mounted Police (= Mountie) dogs at work. I was impressed by their ability to disable a human by a simple method: One dog blocks his way forward and – on either side – two dogs grab his jacket wrists. If their captive gets really cold, they lie down on him to keep him warm until officers arrive. But, of course, the dogs have been trained to do all this. If they had flunked, they would not be on the force.
So, nonetheless, wolves are more logical than dogs? That means that wolves are more logical than the people who train working dogs. Well, that could be right, could be wrong. Best look into it.
The story got started at LiveScience: “Wolves Beat Dogs on Logic Test” by staff writer Clara Moskowitz, (03 September 2009 02:11 pm ET). Well, it turns out,
The differences reflect an emphasis on different learning styles, scientists say.
“I wouldn’t say one species is smarter,” said Adam Miklosi of Eötvös University in Hungary, co-author of a paper describing the results in the Sept. 4 issue of the journal Science. “If you assume an animal has to survive without human presence, then wolves are smarter. But if you are thinking that dogs have to survive in a human environment where it’s very important to follow the communications of humans, then in this aspect, dogs are smarter.”
The article is replete with stuff about how this is supposed to help us understand human evolution. Not the key questions, no.
The skinny: You want a dog? Excellent dogs wait at animal shelters. I am glad if they do not know they are near the euthanasia room.
Don’t get a wolf. Get an animal that is completely happy with human society.
Also just up at The Mindful Hack: Read More ›
The following two books are complete and will be out early next year: The first is coming out with InterVarsity, the second with Baker. They’ll serve as a nice counterblast to the theistic evolutionism promoted by Denis Alexander, Karl Giberson, Francis Collins, and others. P.S. Barbara Forrest in her book against ID complains that I publish too many books. Deal with it Barbara — they sell well and they get read, especially in the Christian community. In any case, Barbara, please make sure to cite these two in your next edition.
Interesting slide show at Discover Magazine titled “Intelligent Design’s 8 Biggest Fails,” the guiding intelligence behind it being Ken Miller (go here). I receive a mention next to one of the slides — apparently the emergence of nylonase is supposed to provide empirical disconfirmation of my theoretical work on specified complexity (Miller has been taking this line for years). For my response about nylonase, which the critics never cite, go here. As you look at these slides, ask yourself for all of the systems in question just how Darwinian evolution explains them. Why wasn’t this slide show called “Darwinian Evolution’s 8 Biggest Successes”?