Monday, 24 April 2023
The right question?
Tim Ingold’s Question For Andy Gardner Says It All
A Not So Hidden Agenda
Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s question for Andy Gardner at last week’s “New trends in evolutionary biology” Scientific meeting at The Royal Society should disabuse those who still don’t get it. Gardner had finished his talk, “Anthropomorphism in evolutionary biology,” in which he acknowledged the design in biology. But if Gardner's organisms are actually designed, an agitated Ingold demanded, then how would Gardner’s explanation for their origin be any different from William Paley’s natural theology which invoked design?
Anyone who has interacted with evolutionists knows this moment all too well. The metaphysics and religion are always there for evolutionists, crouching at the door and ready to strike at any moment. Whether in lecture, seminar, or writings, the agenda is painfully obvious. As Eva Jablonka put it, “Not God—we’re excluding God.”
Evolution isn’t about the science—it never was. It doesn’t matter what the science shows, evolution must be true.
Definitions re:the design inference.
Understanding Design Arguments: An Introduction for Catholics
Editor’s note: We are delighted to present this excerpt from the new book edited by biologist Ann Gauger, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. You can download a full chapter and purchase the book at God'sgrandeur.org.
In my experience, Catholics face many challenges when it comes to thinking about evolution and intelligent design. Many of us somewhere along the way had a priest or teacher tell us not to trouble ourselves about this issue; whatever “science” says is fine. In addition, there is even some confusion over the very meaning of the terms evolution and intelligent design.
In my introductory chapter to the new book God’s Grandeur, I aim to help readers think more carefully and critically about these ideas. Without worrying yet about whether design arguments are sound, we must first figure out what these arguments claim — and, just as importantly, what they do not claim. To this end, I provide some background, attempt to define our terms, discuss the form of such arguments, and consider common Catholic misconceptions. My hope is that we will then be in a better place to evaluate the success of such arguments in the chapters that follow.
An Ancient Dialectic
For many American Catholics, discussions of evolution and intelligent design dredge up images of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” or Fundamentalist Christians attempting to have literal six-day creationism taught in public schools. While most of us Catholics are uncomfortable with the aggressive evolutionary atheism of Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists, we don’t feel that we have much of a dog in such fights. Yet we can be too hasty in this regard. The fundamental debate is not of recent vintage. The West has long had two dominant narratives about where our world’s astonishing and beautiful creatures come from: accidental events or intelligent foresight. These narratives predate not only Fundamentalist Christianity but Christianity itself. This issue pushes all the way down to fundamental metaphysics: What is the self-existent ultimate reality — impersonal matter or a personal Creator?
As far back as Socrates in the fifth century BC, we see the father of Western philosophy making an explicit design argument. His student Xenophon records Socrates’s view that we have been most favored by the supreme deity. We are uniquely arranged in body and mind. All other things appear to be here for our benefit. And nature itself seems consistently arranged in the best or finest way. All of this, Socrates argues, bears witness to divine providence. Variations on this basic theme appear in his successors Plato and Aristotle and beyond.
The opposing narrative came from the Greek atomists like Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus. Humans, they claimed, are intelligent of course. But this intelligence is a late arrival on the scene. Ultimate reality isn’t intelligent. What fundamentally exists are atoms and empty space in which the atoms collide. Just as you hear many today saying silly things like, “Love is just a chemical reaction in the brain,” so too did the atomists believe that all phenomena really reduce down to the properties of material bodies. For the atomists, highly organized beings like ourselves self-organize by accident. There are an infinite number of worlds. So with an infinite amount of time, every combination of atoms must manifest itself somewhere! Sure, organisms look intelligently designed, but poor accidental designs disappeared while good accidental designs survived.
There is truly nothing new under the sun. There are differences, to be sure, but the atomist narrative clearly anticipates not only Darwin’s theory but multiverse scenarios as well. The fundamental issue, all the way back, is whether the apparently designed features of our world are truly intelligently designed or whether they can be accounted for by lucky accidents with no intelligence involved. As even Richard Dawkins recognizes, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Like the atomists before him, of course, he thinks this design is only apparent and not real.
What Intelligent Design Is
With this classical dialectic in view, intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
Design proponents have made arguments for real rather than apparent design at different levels. For instance, they’ve argued that the beginning of the universe requires an intelligent cause (William Lane Craig and James Sinclair), that the laws of physics are designed (Robin Collins), that our planet is uniquely designed (Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards), that chemistry as we know it is designed for life (Michael Denton; Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt), that the building blocks of living things cannot be found by blind searches but must be designed (Douglas Axe), that the first living creature and the fossil record give evidence of design (Stephen Meyer), and that both macro- and micro-features of living things give evidence of intelligent design (Michael Denton; Michael Behe).
Note three quick things about these arguments. First, contrary to stereotypes, these arguments are not “god-of-the-gaps” arguments. None of these arguments claims, “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” Rather, the standard mode of argumentation for design proponents is an inference to the best explanation — a common form of reasoning in general and in the historical sciences (like evolutionary biology) in particular. They argue that there are positive signs of intentional design in nature and that non-intentional explanations are weak by comparison. This is highly consonant with the Catholic faith. The Scriptures (e.g., Ps. 19 and Rom. 1), the Church Fathers (e.g., St. Gregory of Nazianzen), and the councils (e.g., Vatican I) all declare that God’s handiwork in nature is detectable by human reason and not just by faith.
Second, detecting design does not entail that we have detected divine “intervention” in nature. Design can be detected whether or not there was any direct action. One can tell that a field of corn was intentionally planted even if intermediate causes such as drones were used to plant the seeds. Similarly, design arguments need not imply unmediated divine action.
Third, these arguments have clear theological implications, but ID proponents attempt to stick to the publicly available scientific evidence and do not argue from religious texts. Most intelligent design proponents are Christians, but an argument that the designer is the Christian God would require more than just the scientific evidence. ID proponents are not being coy about their belief in God but being careful about their conclusions. Aquinas does the same thing.
What Intelligent Design Isn’t
Many Catholic intellectuals labor under the false impression that intelligent design theorists propose a false dilemma: either there is an intelligent designer or else natural laws are responsible for these designed looking features of our world — as though God cannot be responsible for the natural laws themselves or that natural causes cannot be instruments of God (i.e., secondary causes). This would indeed be an unfortunate dilemma. Fortunately, this is a misunderstanding. ID does not imply a zero-sum game where if God is responsible for something then He must act directly and nature cannot be a true cause as well. Rather, the minimal claim is only that some features of our world give very good evidence of having been intelligently designed somewhere in their origin story. What ID denies is that every feature of nature is the product of natural forces all the way down. Given that this commitment is necessarily shared by Catholics, Catholic hostility to ID on this point is surprising, to put it mildly.
The fossil record's bombardment of Darwinian gradualism continues apace.
Fossil Friday: The Explosive Origin of Complex Eyes in Trilobites
This Fossil Friday features a fossil from my own collection, a phacopid trilobite from the Devonian of Morocco. Note the remarkable preservation of the prominent compound eyes.
A recent work by Schoenemann (2021) provided a “comprehensive overview about what is known about trilobite eyes and their functioning after more than 120 years of intense research on this topic.” The author mentioned that trilobites “appeared close to the very beginning of the Cambrian Explosion” and “formed an important component of the Great Ordovician Diversification Event,” two events that have both been called ‘Big Bangs‘ of life. Schoenemann found that “the trilobite has no physical predecessor here” and “they are equipped from the very beginning of their appearance in the fossil record with elaborate compound eyes.” This confirms exactly what ID proponents like Stephen Meyer and myself have emphasized all the time. Schoenemann also describes how “the diversity of the morphology of trilobite eyes ‘explodes’ with the Ordovician”, which does not really sound like a gradual development in a Darwinian way. While some of the different types of trilobite eyes could at least theoretically be “achieved by modifications of the common principle of an original holochroal eyes,” the highly specialized schizochroal eyes of phacopids “show up as not being apposition eyes,” which requires a major re-engineering that certainly involved multiple coordinated mutations that imply a waiting time problem. Therefore, the abrupt origin of such biological innovations defies a Darwinian explanation, because the numbers do not add up. Another new study by Schoenemann et al. (2021) even reinforced this problem. They could show that phacopid eyes indeed represent a unique type of hyper compound eyes, where tens to hundreds of small compound eyes are each covered with a single lens. Nothing remotely similar is found among any of the other millions of arthropods or anywhere else in the animal realm.
A Phylogenetic Scenario
In a supplementary file the authors suggested a phylogenetic scenario for the origin of the different eyes in arthropods, but their figure rather emphasizes the anatomical gulf between the different constructions. The authors can offer no plausible explanation how such transitions could have been achieved, beyond embarrassingly superficial speculations that there could be genetic programs that “simply produced” these structures. It is a general pattern in evolutionary biology that so-called explanations follow the pattern ‘because evolution is true there may have been an imagined process X that made it happen’. That‘s hardly better than explaining the phenomenon that opium makes sleepy with an imagined dormitive power, which was already ridiculed by French playwright Molière (1673). Exercises in begging the question and fancy just-so storytelling dominate the field of evolutionary biology, while any rigorous hypotheses are conspicuously lacking, which is why I as a former evolutionary biologist have come to the conclusion that this discipline does not qualify as true science.
Another Interesting Fact
But there is another interesting fact that is worth mentioning: Even though there are gazillions of perfectly preserved trilobite fossils, which provide detailed information about their complete anatomy, including soft tissues and the intricate internal construction of their compound eyes, Schoenemann (2021) admitted that “still today the phylogenetic position is vigorously debated” with hardly any consensus beyond the trivial fact that they are (eu)arthropods. Darwinists should expect that with sufficient anatomical information any organism can be easily placed in the tree of life because homologous similarities should be a reliable guide to reconstruct common ancestry and phylogenetic relationship. The enormous controversies among biologists about conflicting phylogenetic evidence and incompatible tree reconstructions show that the Darwinian expectation commonly fails the litmus test of reality. Luckily the theory has been made immune to empirical falsification because it is simply assumed to be true by default as the only viable option for materialists. This kind of immunization against falsification combined with the demonization of any skeptics is another hallmark of pseudoscience.
When the abyss stares back?
NYT Pushes Suicide for the Mentally Ill
The phony argument that legalized assisted suicide will permanently be limited to the terminally ill took a big hit with a New York Times op-ed in which an oft-suicidal Canadian philosophy professor, Clancy Martin, argues that mentally ill people who are suicidal should receive help from doctors to die.
Martin’s first paragraph makes clear why his thesis should be rejected out of hand:
My first attempt to kill myself was when I was a child. I tried again as a teenager; as an adult, I’ve attempted suicide repeatedly and in a variety of ways. And yet, as a 55-year-old white man (a member of one of the groups at the highest risk for suicide in America) and the happily married father of five children, I am thankful that I am incompetent at killing myself.
If a doctor had helped Martin, he wouldn’t be alive today to be happily married, a father of five, and published in the “newspaper of record.” When a doctor helps a patient die, either by prescription or lethal injection, the job gets done.
The Gift of Life
Rather than appreciate the gift of life he received as a result of doctors’ being prohibited from helping him die, Martin wants mentally ill patients to qualify for lethal overdoses — an act that doctors foreswear in the Hippocratic Oath:
One might expect that as someone who has repeatedly attempted suicide and yet is happy to be alive, I am opposed to euthanasia on psychiatric grounds. But it is because of my intimacy with suicide that I believe people must have this right.
It’s true that policymakers, psychiatrists and medical ethicists must treat requests for euthanasia on psychiatric grounds with particular care, because we don’t understand mental illness as well as we do physical illness. However, the difficulty of understanding extreme psychological suffering is in fact a reason to endorse a prudent policy of assisted suicide for at least some psychiatric cases. When people are desperate for relief from torment that we do not understand well enough to effectively treat, giving them the right and the expert medical assistance to end that misery is caring for them.
Between the Patient and the Grave
But that’s precisely when a compassionate psychiatrist may be able to stand between the despairing patient and the grave. And, as he apparently did, these despairing people often rally and find the strength to go on.
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Martin does the “strict-guidelines-can-prevent-abuse” soft-shoe, but as we have seen over and over — in Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, and even the U.S. — guidelines offer a veneer of assurance and are liberalized and expanded as soon as the political paradigm allows. Indeed, in recent weeks, that is precisely what happened in Vermont, Oregon, Canada, and the Netherlands.
He concludes:
Suicidal people suffering from psychological torture should have the right to consult a medical expert about medical assistance in taking their own lives and be given that assistance if their need is justified. Having terrified or anguished people in acute mental suffering ending their pain by the many means available to them, often resulting not in death but terrible physical injury, is much worse, and it’s happening every day.
Who will be the “expert” to judge whether someone else has suffered enough? The patient’s doctor? If the doctor refuses, a suicidal person can go doctor-shopping with the help of euthanasia-advocacy organizations to find one who will say yes. Indeed, wherever euthanasia is legal, doctors participate in the assisted-suicide deaths of patients outside their own medical specialties.
Anything Else Is Abandonment
We should never make suicide easy — the West is experiencing a suicide crisis, after all — and we should always strive to engage in interventions, whether the patient is suicidal because of cancer, a mental illness, or a calamity such as the death of a child. To do anything else is abandonment.
The question is whether we still care enough about each other for that to matter. At least Martin’s advocacy has the virtue of being an honest recitation of what euthanasia advocacy is really about.
Ps. The difference between JEHOVAH'S approach to addressing these types of issues and the approaches preferred by the thought leaders of the present age, is that JEHOVAH is addressing the disease and thought leaders on both sides of this issue are dealing with the symptoms.
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