Dealing with design [Evolution vs. Creationism]

Nature Magazine ^ | 28 April 2005 | Editorial staff

[Atheist_Canadian_Conservative]

While I was still a Catholic (yeah, I've been on a loooong vacation), I never saw a disconnect between evolution and the bible.

Is it not possible that a creator "designed" the laws of physics themselves such that His will would be done? So the mechanism of evolution (via natural selection and understood in terms of genetics) is simply a result of how God tweaked the parameters? Change the mass of the electron, alter the "2" in Coulomb's law to be "1", increase the range of the strong force, etc. Change the initial constituents of the primordial soup.

Evolution can still be God's doing. It can all still be part of His plan. God made "rules" that He knew would lead to a certain class of outcomes.

There is still plenty of room for God and faith in science, for those who want these things in their lives. I wish I still had faith in something greater, and I sort of envy those who do.

[Right Wing Professor]

What about the evos bad habit of dismissing everything ID out of hand - in spite of the wealth of good info (and arguments) put forth by IDers?

I haven't seen the good info and arguments. I've seen a whole mess of false info. and spurious arguments.

No doubt you'll accuse me of dismissing ID out of hand. I haven't. I looked at it quite seriously, and convinced myself there was very little to it, and what little there was, was wrong.

Even though the ID - evo debate is more than just a logical exercise, just from logic alone, the IDers win hands down.

Not from where I'm standing.

[LauraleeBraswell]

Intelligent Design is GOD.

[LauraleeBraswell]

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
--Galileo Galilei

[TexasKamaAina]

intelligent design is not a part of Catholic doctrine

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 290: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth": three things are affirmed in these first words of Scripture: the eternal God gave a beginning to all that exists outside of himself; he alone is the Creator...the totality of what exists...depends on the One who gives it being.

[wideawake]

This cartoonist is the same guy who consistently bashes President Bush, Vice president Cheney, the US military, the Republican Party, the Second Amendment, mocked Reagan's death, etc.

While it's not surprising that he also twists ID into unrecognizability for a laugh, it's pathetic that a conservative would describe this moron's work as "classic."

[PatrickHenry]

Another letter Nature received in response to the editorial:

Sir:

The visual shock of last week's 'intelligent design' cover was matched by the perceptiveness of your News Feature (Nature 434, 1062−1065; 2005) on the seepage of this slyly religious ideology into science curricula. This stuff should certainly be kept out of high schools, but I am ambivalent about its presence in our universities, where free discussion is of greater value than correctness — political, scientific or otherwise.

On the other hand, I'd be properly rebuked and sanctioned for incompetence if I were to assert in my undergraduate physical-chemistry course that the intricate, precisely exponential distribution of velocities observed in a collection of gas molecules is simply too perfect and beautiful to have arisen from random collisions, but that we should instead consider a mechanism by which intelligent designers — let's call them "Maxwell's angels" — individually push on each molecule, while keeping in intelligent communication with each other to maintain this distribution.

One reason that scientists famously fail in rebutting ID is that we use the wrong analogies. Evolution is not a blind watchmaker or any other kind of engineer, but rather a short-order cook, and — looking at the phenomenally complicated structures — one who is less like Isaac Newton than Rube Goldberg or W. Heath Robinson.

A terrific argument against ID came to me recently after two consecutive talks, one on the Wnt signalling pathway, the next on G-protein crosstalk in control of cellular calcium. Just look at the details, and you'll immediately abandon all thoughts that biological systems were designed with any intelligence whatsoever.

Chris Miller, HHMI, Department of Biochemistry, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02454, USA

[DemWatch]

just from logic alone, the IDers win hands down

Almost all of the creationist arguments I've read are based in religious faith.

[wideawake]

Galilei never said that. That "quote" is from a play about him.

[LauraleeBraswell]

"" The Greatest Scientists in the world adhere to ID because they truly understand the complexity.

How many Nobel Prize winners, exactly?""


Jimmy Carter won a Nobel Prize.


I personally don't adhere to any organized religion, and I don't think I ever ever will because I'm just not capable of it.

[Right Wing Professor]

A terrific argument against ID came to me recently after two consecutive talks, one on the Wnt signalling pathway, the next on G-protein crosstalk in control of cellular calcium. Just look at the details, and you'll immediately abandon all thoughts that biological systems were designed with any intelligence whatsoever.

...a point several of us have made in various ways here. I still like my 'Inebriated Design' counter theory.

[cryptical]

Tom Tomorrow is a DU & MoveOn style leftist nutcase:

Can't argue the substance, so you go for ad hominem. Capitulation noted.

[Idisarthur]

I have a question. Did morals evolve?

If morals did not evolve then I feel they may be given by a Moral Lawgiver, or God. If morals did evolve, then why can't I kill and rape freely?

If you are thinking Enlightened Self-Interest, stop right there.

My problem with Enlightened Self-Interest is it uses Morality to explain how morals evolved. This is silly.

any ideas?

[wideawake]

He gave you substance - a link.

And it's plain to someone who reflects for a second that the facile analogy fails.

[Right Wing Professor]

Did morals evolve?

In a sense.

If morals did evolve, then why can't I kill and rape freely?

Because if you carried genetic tendencies to kill and rape freely, the chances are your ancestors would have, too. And their contemporaries, noticing they were murdering rapists, would have put them to death before they could reproduce.

Humans are social beings. Humans who carried genes that made them unfit to live in society did not survive.

Otherwise similar societies with lower levels of religiosity than the United States are less violent than we are, rather than more violent.

[bethelgrad]

I don't see how your argument excludes the possibility of a designer. If the designer had a designer--then the designer had a designer. The possiblity of the designer being designed does not negate the possiblity that the universe was designed by an intelligent being. Just offering that possiblity, IMO, doesn't bolster your point.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Firstly, examine your premise. It quite often interferes with the conclusion.

But to cut to the chase, the mistake that evos make is that they automatically assume that because evolutionary data do exist, ID cannot. Firstly, this is making an assumption that either evo or ID is true (not a good assumption, considering the evidence). Secondly, they are making the assumption that no ID is evident based on the data. Problem is, the data don't directly tell us whether ID is involved or not.

This is a little like making the assumption that since 1 + 1 = 2, all redheads originated from Ireland. The data simply does not support the conclusion.

Also, the inherent ID bias in any observation or experimentation makes it logically fallacious to state categorically that ID doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, all such experimentation and observation have ID origins themselves.

So to deny (from a logical standpoint) ID is also to invalidate much of the current data. In order to prove otherwise, evos are going to have to be able to step out of their current domain. Unfortunately, the only way I can think of stepping outside of the current domain is by entering death's realm. Of course, if there is an afterlife (as evos pretty much deny), then that destroys the evos arguments. If there isn't an afterlife, we won't be able to logically prove the evos points.

[PatrickHenry]

One more letter Nature received in response to the editorial (the last I'm going to post):

Sir:

Your Editorial about the promotion of ID in schools and universities (Nature 434, 1053; 2005) asks us to persuade our students that science and faith do not compete, but for Christians this should always have been clear. In the Bible (John 20: 25−29), Thomas doubts that the man speaking to him is the resurrected Christ until Jesus reveals his wounds. Thomas then believes, but Jesus says: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed".

The Bible throughout teaches that faith is more valuable when expressed in the absence of evidence. For a Christian, when science is allowed to be neutral on the subject of God, science can only bolster faith. In contrast, and I imagine without realizing it, ID proponents have become professional Doubting Thomases, funded by Doubting Thomas Institutes. When advocates of ID use the vocabulary of science to argue for God's presence in cellular machinery or in the fossil record, they too poke their fingers through Jesus' hands. In so doing, ID vitiates faith.

Not realizing this, many Christians now believe they are making a stand against evil by supporting religion-infused alternatives to evolution. For them, the fundamental debate is not over which is wrong and which is right, but over which is good and which is bad, and the majority opinion is clear. So if we want to ensure the continued learning of evolution in our schools, we cannot only argue that science and faith can be reconciled; we also have to show that ID actively undermines the basis of Christianity.

Douglas W. Yu, Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

[puroresu]

#####Can't argue the substance, so you go for ad hominem. Capitulation noted.#####


Just noting that you won't be able to find a sneering anti-ID cartoon like that on any respectable conservative site.

I'm willing to believe that there are conservatives who believe in evolution. However, many of them succumb to the Andrew Sullivan syndrome. Sullivan's a generally conservative guy who holds left-wing views on gay issues. He's allowed those issues to completely take over, to the point that they fully dominate his thinking. When someone opposes him on one of those items, he becomes as hysterical and abusive as any leftist. Ditto for many of the otherwise conservative evos here at FreeRepublic.

BTW, the cartoon in question **IS** an ad hominem. You don't seriously consider that to be substantive, do you?

[GarySpFc]

On April 11, 1823, in a letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson remarked:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. … It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an Ultimate Cause, a Fabricator of all things from matter to motion, their Preserver and Regulator, while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their Regenerator into new and other forms.

We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a Superintending Power to maintain the Universe in its course and order. …
So irresistible are these evidences of an Intelligent and Powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro’ all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a Creator, rather than in that of self-existent Universe … 1245

1245 Jefferson, Thomas. April 11, 1823, in a letter to John Adams. Norman Cousins, In God We Trust—The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 290. Dickenson Adams, ed., Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 410–411. John Eidsmoe, Christianity and The Constitution—The Faith of Our Founding Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1987), p. 223–234.
Federer, W. J. (2001). Great Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Quotations Influencing Early and Modern World History Referenced according to their Sources in Literature, Memoirs, Letters, Governmental Documents, Speeches, Charters, Court Decisions and Constitutions. St. Louis, MO: AmeriSearch.