A Sermon by Jerry Coyne on Biogeography

As Sober explains, the important evolutionary point here is not that the probability of the evidence on evolution is high, but rather that the probability of the evidence on creation is low—real low. I think not. I suspect the point that Sober is making is the comparative likeihood of common descent over creation is mcuh higher. Both likelihoods need to be taken into account. Your theme in this and other posts seems to be that the likelihood of what we observe (whether it be cladistics or biogeography) given creation depends on your religious assumptions. In a sense this is true. With carefully chosen religious assumptions you can make the likelihood of any observed outcome as high as you wish. You can assume that God made it look like common descent (just as you can assume that God made it look like there is genetic code based on DNA). But under almost any other assumption about God's intentions and abilities then the likelihood compared to common descent drops like a stone. You then turn on those that dismiss the idea that God fiddled the data and accuse them of the religious assumption that "God did not fiddle the data to look like Common Descent". This is a religious assumption to the same extent that every time we look for a natural explanation of a observed pattern we assume that God didn't purposely fix the data. Maybe there is a genetic code based on DNA or mabe God caused the X-ray diffraction results and other data to make it look that way. Maybe plate tectonics is true. Or maybe God just made it look like plate tectonics is true. In each case is it a religious assumption to ignore the second possibility?Mark Frank

July 14, 2009

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