Posted by There is an interesting exchange going on in the comments after my post on ID and Creationism. I want to move part of that conversation up to the top so it doesn’t get lost. In particular, I want to focus on an argument made by Jeremy Pierce, author of the Parableman blog. I want to focus on that argument because I think it cuts to the heart of several important questions involving ID and evolution. First, I want to establish what Jeremy is arguing by quoting him. In essence, he is arguing that ID is synonymous with theistic evolution. I first began to detect that this might be his position when he said:
Behe’s view is perfectly consistent with a closed universe. All he says is that a designer is somehow behind it, which is consistent with thinking the designer set up all the laws so that these unlikely events would all occur at once.
Then a bit later he followed that up by saying:
Behe’s way of conceiving of the design is not that these features were created by an act of special creation. He conceives of them coming to be by natural forces, just ones that you wouldn’t expect to come together in exactly the way they did unless some designer was guiding the natural forces in exactly the way theological determinists believe God to be guiding every natural process.
So in essence he is arguing that Behe’s position is that God set up the natural laws that govern the universe in such a way as to insure that, some time much later, they would come together to create life. I was a bit taken aback by this argument so I tried to make sure that I was reading him right and I replied by giving two possible ways to interpret his remarks and asking him which one he meant. I wrote:
1. God set up the natural forces originally in such a way to bring about unlikely events later at a particular time and place.
But this would be arguing that the way the universe was set up made the origin and evolution of life on earth inevitable and all simply a result of the interaction of purely natural forces. And this is wholly contrary to the ID argument that biochemical systems could not have evolved merely by the interaction of natural forces. Remember, the second step of Dembski’s explanatory filter is evaluating whether an event could take place by the interaction of law and chance. You seem to have Behe arguing that such systems did evolve due to the interaction of natural forces, but God set up those forces from the very beginning to make sure that would happen. And that’s actually much closer to Van Till’s position of the “fully gifted creation” than it is to the ID position.
Unless you really mean:
2. God set up the natural forces, but then intervened to violate them and bend them when necessary to make sure that these systems would come together, either by directly inserting code into the DNA that could not have evolved on its own or by making sure that improbable collections of amino acids or proteins came together when they otherwise would not have to form the complex biochemical systems that, allegedly, could not have formed through natural processes.
You don’t make clear which of these you are endorsing, or which of them you think Behe is endorsing. I think his position is #2, not #1. If it’s #1, then it’s really the same as Van Till’s “fully gifted creation” perspective, which is decidely anti-ID. If you mean the first option, this is indistinguishable from theistic evolution and it renders all of the anti-evolution arguments from Behe and the other IDers completely irrelevant.1. God set up the natural forces originally in such a way to bring about unlikely events later at a particular time and place.
But this would be arguing that the way the universe was set up made the origin and evolution of life on earth inevitable and all simply a result of the interaction of purely natural forces. And this is wholly contrary to the ID argument that biochemical systems could not have evolved merely by the interaction of natural forces. Remember, the second step of Dembski’s explanatory filter is evaluating whether an event could take place by the interaction of law and chance. You seem to have Behe arguing that such systems did evolve due to the interaction of natural forces, but God set up those forces from the very beginning to make sure that would happen. And that’s actually much closer to Van Till’s position of the “fully gifted creation” than it is to the ID position.
And his reply confirmed that it is option #1 that he is arguing for:
As for Behe, I don’t think frontloading requires bending the laws of nature if the frontloading isn’t in the genes themselves but in the laws of nature and how the laws would determine everything else to come out…My point isn’t about Behe’s actual postulation of what the mechanism is. It’s that the general view he presents (whose details are to some degree left open) is perfectly consistent with saying that the efficient causes of evolutionary development were exactly what contemporary evolutionary theory says but that that’s not enough to explain the unlikelihood of those efficient causes coming together in the way they did unless the natural laws from the beginning of the universe were chosen so that exactly this result would occur. That view can accept everything Behe says, as far as I know, and it can also accept everything Ken Miller, for example, would say about the efficient causes of evolutionary processes…
It (ID) doesn’t say that these things couldn’t have evolved, just that it’s very unlikely without having been designed to evolve. This is true of Behe and Dembski. It’s an inductive argument, not a deductive argument, and inductive arguments cannot have a conclusion that something is impossible, just that it’s very unlikely. I agree with you that this position is close to Van Till’s, but that just shows that his opposition to ID misunderstands the argument, because the argument is perfectly consistent with his own view.
(Your second version is not what I’m saying. The ID arguments are consistent with that view, but that’s not the one important to me. Everyone can see that that’s consistent with ID. Most ID people do seem to endorse that if they endorse either view. What people seem to have problems seeing is that the first view also is consistent with the ID argument.)…
What ID arguments claim is that the way things are is unlikely given mere naturalism but much more likely (indeed, on the view I was discussing inevitable) given a very particular plan of God’s providence ensuring certain outcomes. But that doesn’t mean they’re inevitable given naturalism, just inevitable given that things were set up initially the way they were.
Okay, I think we’ve got a good handle on Jeremy’s position here, and I’m glad that he is honest enough to say that Behe does not, in fact, take this position. The only specific postulation that Behe gave of how front-loading might be done, if I recall correctly (it has been some time since I read his book), is that God might have front-loaded the genes for future adaptations and innovations into the first cell. And as I noted in a previous comment, this is an untenable claim because, as any geneticist can tell you, unexpressed genes will mutate without constraint and all function will be lost in a very short period of time. But that’s not terribly relevant at this point.
What Jeremy is arguing for here is not ID, as defined by every prominent ID advocate, but is theistic evolution. In particular, he is arguing for a version of the strong anthropic principle, the idea that the universe was created with the physical laws necessary for life to begin and evolve. And while I personally have no problem whatsoever with this argument – as a deist, it’s fine by me – I think it is entirely contrary to ID for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that virtually all of the people whose work defines ID bluntly deny that theistic evolution is compatible with ID. But we don’t even need to make that argument because it can easily be demonstrated that if Jeremy’s position was compatible with ID, it would render virtually all of the ID arguments moot.
He admits that his position is close to my friend Howard Van Till’s position, which he calls the fully gifted creation position, but that position is clearly in favor of theistic evolution, not ID. That position says what Jeremy is saying, that God set up the physical laws of the universe in such a way as to bring about life, perhaps even intelligent life, at some point. But Howard rejects ID completely and has said repeatedly that ID advocates are taking the odd position that God created the world with all of the necessary attributes to sustain life (what Howard refers to as the robust formational economy), but did so poor a job of it that he had to continually intervene to make sure it worked.
Jeremy claims that this is because Howard misunderstands the true ID position, but that is clearly false. If in fact the true ID position was essentially the same as Howard’s theistic evolutionist position, then why have none of the ID advocates pointed out that Howard is arguing against a fasle conception of ID? He has had long exchanges back and forth with Dembski and many others, and at no time did any of them say, “Howard, you’ve got it all wrong. Your position is the same as ours. ID only says that God set up the initial conditions, not that he had to do anything at all later on to make sure life came about.” No, they argued with Howard and took the contrary position. Indeed, Dembski makes it very plain that not only is ID not consistent with Howard’s theistic evolution position, but that it is ID’s biggest challenge:
Howard Van Till’s review of my book No Free Lunch exemplifies perfectly why theistic evolution remains intelligent design’s most implacable foe. Not only does theistic evolution sign off on the naturalism that pervades so much of contemporary science, but it justifies that naturalism theologically — as though it were unworthy of God to create by any means other than an evolutionary process that carefully conceals God’s tracks.
None of the major ID arguments can be made compatible with this type of theistic evolution, even Behe’s argument from irreducible complexity. Remember, his argument relies upon it being incredibly improbable for so many components to come together all at once through natural processes. But natural processes can only mean under current natural laws, and if one is going to argue that those laws were designed in order to make such events inevitable, or even probable, as Jeremy does above, then it renders the premise of Behe’s argument completely false. The source of those natural laws and processes is a separate question. Behe says that under the natural laws as they exist now, it’s impossible for a complex biochemical system to form; Jeremy (and Van Till) say that those natural laws were designed intentionally to allow or even to guarantee that such systems could form. Behe’s argument clearly requires intervention in the natural processes from outside, while their position only requires that the processes be set up initially so that no such intervention is needed.
Likewise, Dembski’s explanatory filter is also incompatible with this conception (and Dembski himself has said so). In order to make the design inference, one must first rule out chance, necessity (which means natural law) or the interaction of the two. But if those natural laws were set up initially in order to allow, or mandate, the origin and evolution of life, then no such inference is possible. You cannot say that a given outcome is too improbable to have come about as a result of the interaction of chance and natural law and argue that natural law was designed in order to facilitate that outcome. This is clearly a contradiction because if the latter is true, then any conclusion of improbability would be false.
In addition, Jeremy’s position renders all of the anti-evolution arguments within ID utterly pointless. Their argument is that it is impossible for evolution to explain (fill in the blank) through the interaction of the natural laws and chance, but the theistic evolution position that Jeremy is arguing for would take the opposite position – of course evolution can account for those things because God designed the natural laws to facilitate the evolution of life in all its forms. Either way, this position is clearly contrary to ID as defined by every single ID advocate in existence. Jeremy is not advocating ID, he is advocating theistic evolution. Which is fine by me, I’ll even agree with him. But it renders the entire ID movement, every argument and the position of every ID advocate, superfluous. And that’s fine by me too.
April 26, 2006
April 26, 2006
April 26, 2006
April 26, 2006
April 26, 2006
April 27, 2006