Dr. Joshua Swamidass, a theistic evolutionist, joined us recently at TSZ. I think the following comment of his will lead to some interesting and contentious discussion and is worthy of its own thread:
Third, if we drop “Darwinian” to just refer to the current modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, you are right that the scientific account does not find any evidence of direction or planning. I agree with you here and do not dispute this.
So the question becomes, really, is it possible that God could have created a process (like evolution) with a purposeful intent that science could not detect? I think the answer here is obvious. Of course He could. In fact, I would say, unless He wanted us to discern His purpose, we could not.
In my view, then, evolution has a purpose in creating us. Science itself cannot uncover its purpose. I find that out by other means.
Keiths quoting Swamidass:
Given that, the notion of “God created evolution with a purposeful intent” must remain scientifically empty. Science is not merely powerless to discern evolution’s purpose – it is powerless to discern whether or not it has purpose at all.
Not a view with relevance to evolutionary science, given the above.
By revelation. 😀
Is someone who replaces God as Creator with Evolution as Creator still a Creationist?
This has been debated endlessly at UD.
Can God create a purposeless process, such as Darwinian evolution, that has a purpose. Dr. Swamidass indicates the process is not a purposeless process. But then he puts himself at odds with modern science and squarely in the camp of the creationists.
But scientists who claim evolution has no purpose overstep the bounds of science, they don’t get to have a say in what modern science consists of, for that we need to consult real scientists doing real science, not scientists posing as [rather lousy] philosophers.
Must be nice to be able to be a part of mainstream science while rejecting mainstream science.
It’s not particularly interesting or contentious, in my view.
Basically, it allows one to accept all of the evidence for evolution, and to accept evolution itself, but with one minor quibble — there actually is a goal to which evolution is directed, even though there is no evidence for that goal.
One might say that it’s a minor change aimed at saving the theology.
I have a counter-question. Why would God want to create a world which gave no evidence of his existence or his attributes?
I suppose it might be possible to have a theistic theology of such a God, but it would hardly be a Christian theology.
Christian theology died with an old world.
It seems that Dr. Swamidass has a theological concept regarding “creation” that he doesn’t try to push into science.
Which is fine with me, as I’m not particularly interested in getting into theology.
Glen Davidson
But with theistic evolutionists it’s all about the theology.
Mung,
It does seem to put Swamidass at odds with Romans 1:20:
Perhaps he thinks that Paul got it wrong.
Scientifically, I think my observation is very helpful. It lets us learn what nature is telling us on its own, without looking for God in every Gap. Of course, if you do not believe God exists, you are already doing science this way, but this is a pretty solid reason for Christians to do science the same way too.
Societal, it is also helpful. Large portions of the population reject evolution reject evolution because they feel it contradicts their religious views. Explaining why this is false, really enables much more effective science education in religious communities. I speak from experience here, through my role at the AAAS Science for Seminaries program.
If your understanding of Christian theology is from ID advocates and apologists, I see why you might think that. Many theologians, however, have come to this position on their own, and their biggest critique of ID is that their theology is really bad. A great example of this is George Murphy: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2006/PSCF3-06Murphy.pdf
This Lutheran critique is pretty good (notably from a seminarian that rejects both evolution and the ID theology):
http://peacefulscience.org/lutherans-artistic-tree/
In my view, ID is not only scientifically flawed, it is also theologically flawed. It misunderstands and misteaches who God is.
I’d also add that I did not say there is “no evidence.” I just said there is no “scientific evidence.”
I did not say there is no evidence in the world of God’s existence or attributes. I said that science cannot detect God’s purpose in evolution. These are different statements entirely.
Pragmatically, this should be no surprise. It is very hard to discern the purpose of things that are (1) very complex, or (2) from the distant past or (3) done by minds very different than ours. The more complex, ancient, and foreign the harder to discern purpose. The null hypothesis is that we cannot detect purpose in things like this. Moroever, science does not consider God, so it cannot speak of when God does and does not act. So it should be no surprise that purpose is not apparent in evolution.
The theology here is not innovative. It is thoroughly Christian, echoing Reformed, Lutheran, Barthian, and Evangelical thought. I would point to Pascal, Luther, Calvin, Barth as examples of leading theologians that thought the same as me here.
In fact, my critique of ID is just as strongly rooted in theology as it is in science.
Well at least it didn’t die alone.
Thank you too all the non-Theists that take this position with me. I think you are understanding my position correctly here.
This is false on several levels.
1. The mainstream scientific position is that there is no scientifically discernible purpose in evolution. This is distinct from the bare claim “evolution is purposeless,” though frequently these statements are conflated.
2. The “creationist” position (speaking loosely), is that there is a scientifically discernible purpose. This distinct, again, from the bare claim “there is purpose in nature/evolution.”
What I am saying is entirely consistent with #1 and rejecting #2. I believe there is a purpose, but science does not see it. I would put it that there are two ways to hold to #1 (I am 1b).
1a. Science does not detect a purpose because there is none. (the roughly speaking non-theist position)
1b. There is a purpose, but science does not detect a purpose because it is hard to detect purpose in complex, ancient, and foreign things, and does not even consider the possibility of divine purpose.
Can science detect purpose? Doesn’t purpose entail intent?
what would the experment look like?
peace
I’d also support the idea that scientific practices cannot answer, either positively or negatively, questions like “is macro-evolution purposive?”
If one thinks that it is on non-scientific grounds — such as theology — that’s fine, up to the point — because then the question would be about whether theology has a legitimate role to play in metaphysics.
I myself think it does not, but that’s a much more contentious question then that of what the sciences taken on their own terms indicate about evolutionary processes.
Certainly it’s true that one cannot get from “the sciences provide no evidence of intentions and purposes directing evolutionary processes” to “there really are no such intentions and purposes” without doing some metaphysics, whether theological or otherwise.
I’m very tempted to say that science cannot detect purpose, but I imagine someone would find a boundary case in animal behavior or psychology that would prove me wrong. Because purpose does typically requires making a statement about intent, and therefore about a fundamentally unobservable reality, it is hard to imagine confident scientific claims here about the intent of beings we cannot interrogate to verify their intent.
Instead, I would say that it is very hard (impossible?) to imagine any experiment that could even in principle detect Divine purpose in evolution.
On a side note, purpose and intent are regularly discerned in legal courtrooms. Aside from the most obvious differences between law and science, purpose in evolution is totally different than trying to figure out of if the accused intended to kill the victim. Thankfully, science is not just a big legal argument.
So you are saying that Science can possibly detect purpose when it comes to animals but not when it comes to God.
What exactly is lacking in God that is present in animal life?
peace
ID does not teach who God is so it cannot “misteach” who God is. Perhaps your complaint is that ID ought to teach who God is, but does not.
Does theistic evolution teach us who God is? It does not. Therefore theistic evolution misunderstands and misteaches who God is. Oh, and theistic evolution is scientifically flawed. 🙂
I agree, you did not say that. I apologize if there was some insinuation on my part that you had.
Yes they are. And I asked a counter-question. Your response to my question seems to be that God did create a world which gives evidence of His existence and attributes. Welcome to the Creationist camp!
Apparently this evidence of God’s existence is to be found in physics, cosmology, chemistry, basically any field of science other than evolutionary biology, and I just think that’s an odd position to take.
Or perhaps it is your position that evidence for God in the creation can be found only outside the empirical sciences, which also seems to me to be an odd position to take.
But I’m listening.
I think it’s perfectly legitimate to talk about purposes, intents, and other psychological states when we’re describing and explaining the behavior of individual organisms. Strict behaviorism about animals kept cognitive science from moving forward for at least two generations. There’s no reason why we should be less reluctant to posit unobserved causes of animal behavior — e.g. its mental states — then we are to posit unobserved causes of magnetic attraction.
My point is, positing unobserved causes for observed effects is an indispensable tool of theory-building. The trick is to notice that we have to be able to verify the posits by performing experiments such that, if these posited causal powers were occurrent, then we would expect these correlated observable effects.
But once you’re talking an omnipotent deity, then — by definition — any observable effect is consistent with its existence. For an omnipotent deity can do anything. There’s no way to rule out any counterfactuals.
Likewise, since ID “officially” claims to not identity the designer, it cannot ascribe any abilities to the designer that would support testable counterfactuals. The posit is inferentially sterile, and inferentially sterile posits have no place in good science.
Yes, I would agree with this post. Thanks for putting it in a much more coherent case.
Though I would say the problem extends far beyond unfalsifiability. We can build models of animal minds because we think, in important, ways that there are parallels between how animals think and how we think. We have a good idea of how to test when this works and when it breaks down.
How good is the analogy between human minds and the mind of God? We really have no idea. We also have no experimental system by which we can test when the analogy works and when it breaks down. This, I think, is why science for the last 400 years or so has largely punted on these questions and moved on to understanding how the natural world works on its own. In fact, this may be the real genius of science. Instead of getting sucked into the quagmire of answering unanswerable questions, focus understanding the natural world.
Also, I would also say there are ways for us to “interrogate” animals to understand their intent (which is why I alluded to studies of animal behavior already). We can place animals in experiments designed to tease out different models of mental representation and intent. None of this seems to apply in discerning God’s purposes. Absent this (I am assuming we are leaving aside e.g. the Bible), I see no way to get any sort of scientific traction here.
How is it that Hoyle, an atheist, can see what the theistic evolutionist cannot see?
Surely that’s evidence for the existence of God. 😉
KN is exceptionally good at that.
We are on the same page here too. Of course, I see value in theology where you do not. This, however, is not a contentious disagreement. I’m not asking you to insert theology into science classrooms.
I will say one of the greatest things about science is its open embrace of people of a wide range of religious persuasions. In science, without contentious arguments, I can expect to work peacefully with atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, and a menagerie of Christians. Frequently, we like exchanging our views about things outside of science, but our science itself is in the same language with the same presuppositions and proces. I think that is truly amazing, especially in world as divided as we currently find it.
Mung,
Presumably it is because the theistic evolutionist, unlike Hoyle, sees that the question “why does our universe have the laws of physics that it has?”, however much it might exercise the imagination of a curious mind, does not have and cannot have any empirical answer.
What we can observe and measure is restricted to the universe itself, not to any possible cause of the universe. Hence no possible cause of the universe can be empirically tested. In fact I very much doubt that “the cause of the universe” is an idea that makes any sense at all.
And so while it seems like a “commonsensical interpretation” to Hoyle that the laws of physics are due to some super-intellect, such a claim is not itself a scientific one (nor did Hoyle believe that it was, from what I can tell).
Hoyle’s “commonsensical interpretation” is nicely refuted by Stenger, who objected that we can conceive of indefinitely many different universes, all of which have different fundamental physical parameters, and in many of those possible universes, different values to the constants would still be consistent with complex physical structures.
Whether anything we would be willing to call “life” or “intelligence” could exist in those alternative universes is an intriguing question, but here speculation outstrips data many times over.
We cannot expect cosmology to resolve the debate between Hoyle and Stenger; it’s just a matter of competing intuitions and temperaments.
Regardless, insofar as Hoyle would be willing to distinguish his ‘commonsensical interpretation of the facts’ (and one person’s common sense is another person’s flight of fancy) from the data collected by scientists and the models that explain the data, he is in just the same position as the theistic evolutionist who says that divine intentions are themselves not empirically detectable, hence no disagreement with non-theistic evolutionists about what is empirically detectable.
I would agree if God’s only attribute was omnipotence. It is not.
A being has any attributes other than omnipotence will have lots of observable effects that are inconsistent with it’s existence.
A being whose only attribute is omnipotence is incoherent and it’s certainly not the Christian God
peace
Will science embrace people of any religious persuasion or just religious persuasions that affirm that God’s purpose in evolution are undetectable?
peace
See, there is common ground between ID’ists and theistic evolutionists!
From the perspective of empiricist epistemology, what’s crucial is whether or not a model entails assertions that are inconsistent with observations and whether or not adherents of that model continue to defend it regardless of its inconsistency with observations, if it is inconsistent with them.
That’s why creationism belongs in the same box as phrenology and astrology. If a religion does not entail assertions that are inconsistent with observations, then scientists and scientific philosophers have nothing to say about it.
The theistic evolutionist, then, would perhaps not utterances about divine purposes to be assertions per se but rather metaphors — which is a pretty liberal stance to take on theology, but it’s been done — or to say that her claims about divine purposes do not entail any claims that are inconsistent with what we do actually observe.
At the same time, the theistic evolutionist would need to avoid taking her claims about divine purposes as amenable to the kinds of intersubjective verification that we find in normal scientific methods.
With those caveats in place, I really cannot see any scientific objection to theistic evolution.
Whether there are theological objections to it is not my department.
Is it impossible for a model positing purpose in biology to have entailments that are consistent with observations? Even in principle?
peace
Everything here depends on the relevant distinctions. There’s nothing problematic about talking about an animal’s goals, purposes, wants etc in the course of explaining why it does what it does. As long as there’s some way of testing the explanation, it’s all good.
But there’s no way of empirically testing the posit that there are divine intentions, since everything is consistent with them.
If — as has long been maintained — it is all of Creation that is sustained by divine power and grace, then there is nothing in particular within Creation that can count for or against that claim.
As I see it, the theistic evolutionist disagrees with the creationists on the following point. The theistic evolutionist holds that the question whether the observable regularities and irregularities of the world, together with whatever testable posits we invoke to explain its regularities and irregularities, should be in turn understood as self-sufficient Nature or as divine-dependent Creation, is not itself a question that any science can answer.
The creationist disagrees with that assessment — she thinks that science itself can tell us whether the world is self-sufficient Nature or divine-dependent Creation.
My point above was the non-theist should agree with the theistic evolutionist here: whether the world (observables + posits) is Nature or Creation is not itself a scientific question.
It is true that I do think that the world is Nature, and not Creation. But I think that because every attempt I know of to argue that the world is Creation depends on the presumption of cognitive privilege in the epistemology of theological metaphysics. And cognitive privilege is to be rejected on strictly philosophical grounds — because it involves rejecting the kind of epistemic holism and semantic holism that we have good reasons to accept.
So when I argue that the world is Nature, and not Creation, I’m not making a claim that can be sustained entirely on scientific grounds. It requires philosophical claims about the structure of meaning and knowledge which are (I allow) are somewhat contentious, but (I think) far more plausible than their alternatives.
I think science will just not give a shit about claims of purposes that are in-principle undetectable. It will go about its business.
What’s interesting to me on this thread is how the teams line up. You know, who will side with whom. Some people care about the bare theistic claims, and at some point might start pointing out apparent Biblical contraditions. Others don’t care if the theism keeps the hell out of the laboratory. I’d expect some to be happy so long as Christianity is affirmed (I think that was Gregory’s position, but I could be wrong, since he generally contented himself just with pissing in people’s food). But mostly I’m seeing the theists resist a simple statement of devotion to Jesus if it doesn’t affect lab work.
Me? In the words of Chance the Gardener, “I like to watch.”
Well, you’ve just taken me off the creationist rolls. Now i don’t know what I am.
🙂
Remarkable isn’t it? I’ve puzzled over this for a long time, probably since my views became public in 2012 from a WSJ article, and was attacked by the Discovery Institute for saying, “Historical Christianity has not focused on how God created the universe, but on how God saves humanity through Jesus’ death and resurrection…In the past, evolution rested on ambiguous fossil evidence, but now it rests on much clearer DNA evidence that increases exponentially every month…The evolution debate is not a scientific controversy, but a theological controversy about a non-central Christian doctrine.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324469304578141673721798486
I was honestly concerned how my non-theist colleagues would respond. My fears were misplaced. My colleagues have continued to accept me as an equal member of the scientific community. Many Christians have been livid. Go figure.
To this day (including even this week), the receive the most forceful pushback from ID proponents. The ENV blog has spilled much “ink” countering simple statements about the strength of evolutionary theory by me. I have to wonder why.
Science will embrace people of all persuasions, even young earth creationists (I’ve seen this first hand), as long as they play by the rules of mainstream science when they do their scientific work, and do not willfully misrepresent science to the public. Despite what you might have heard, science is not really into thought policing people’s personal beliefs.
Hey KN, in a lot of ways I see a great deal of common ground with you. If you can just convince the overconfident atheists and I can convince the overconfident creationists that science does not really answer the question of God’s existence, then we would have done great good for this world.
If I understand you correctly, I think you are largely right here about that vast majority of arguments for God. This is part of the reason I reject them too.
There is one class of arguments that might be different, and I was curious your thoughts. While I am sure you do not ultimately agree with this case, do you think it depends on the presumption of cognitive privilege? Specifically, I’m curious what you think of NT Wrights approach to reasoning about the Resurrection as a historical event. http://ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/christian-origins-and-the-resurrection-of-jesus-the-resurrection-of-jesus-as-a-historical-problem/ Even though I suspect you will be unconvined by the argument, does it really rely on cognitive priveledge?
That a MINOR change?? That evolution is directed, rather than meandering?
What that is saying is that there is teleology in evolution. Which is EXACTLY what creationists have been saying for decades! If you want to create an eye, you need to know you are creating an eye first. if you want to create a man, you need to know you are creating a man first, then everything logically can add up to a man.
If everyone (including Swamidass) just glosses over that MINOR difference its as if you haven’t been listening to the entire objection to evolutionary theory, since the start of evolutionary theory. You can’t get to the goal of man, without first having the teleology of the goal of getting to man. You all are absolutely nuts if you are going to call this a minor adjustment to the theory.
swamidass,
Swamidass,
In all due respect, are you going to get around to explaining how you believe this undirected process inevitably leads to man? Because if you are going to ignore that enormous elephant, you are really not talking science at all, now are you?
The entire evolution vs. creation debate hinges on the question of directedness. Does evolution have a direction or not. If we are going to ignore this point, then the entire discussion is totally folly. If God started a process that can go anywhere, then grey slime has just as much of a chance of becoming the divine creation, as we do.
I think it’s naive to think that nature on its own tells us anything at all. For example, Nature cannot tell us whether perceived gaps are real gaps or not. We can assume things about Nature, but that’s us talking, not Nature.
I would say we have an excellent idea. Note that those who pray to the god(s) of their choice, NEVER seem to be informed that their opinions are faulty in any way – not incorrect, not incomplete, not irrelevant. For me, at least, this is evidence that the “mind of god” is a construct manufactured and nurtured within the mind of the individual believer.
And if gods are NOT imaginary constructs, then assuming the existence of any god(s) in the very process of examining for any god(s) is begging the question. You are presuming the objective existence of what you are ostensibly looking to see if it exists in the first place.
I don’t think science and nature are the appropriate targets here. Psychological needs, preferences, and early training are where to look. Looking to science is like looking for your keys under the lamp post where there’s light, even though that’s not where you dropped them.
This is not the same thing as creationists have been saying.
They say (1) there is teleology, and (2) science detects this teleology. I dispute #2, and this is a non-starter for most creationists. This is a consequential difference too, because I am content to accept science as it is, and non-theists are content to accept me as I am. Creationists that hold ot #2, instead, will fight tooth and nail trying to get science to acknowledge teleology.
To me, this seems like a pretty big waste of time. It is just bad strategy. I clearly has not worked.
Have you spent much time reading the Bible or talking to Christians. This is certainly false. Many report exactly this experience that you say never happens.
This doesn’t mean your whole argument is faulty. But this part is certainly false.
Do those rules make any model that posits purpose in biology off limits even in principle?
peace
Another blow against my self-identification as a creationist! Oh, and even if ID is true it doesn’t follow that God exists. So yet more common ground between Dr. Swamidass and ID!
Except that you haven’t explained how this is false!
You have at least half of the entire population of the world believing that evolution says random mutations just purposelessly drift through organisms, and occasionally this leads to useful function, that just so happens to be better capable of making more of themselves. THAT is supposed to be the entire philosophical implications of the scientific theory. Now you want to throw in the oh so tiny caveat that, well, but it was always going to lead towards Man bit. And then say that doesn’t change the science at all.
Well, Holy Cow, that is saying something.
I do not know how God directed evolution, but there are several possible answers.
Perhaps (as Ken Miller muses), God tweeks mutations through manipulating quantum fields.
Perhaps (as Michael Behe argues), God encodes all the required information in the initial conditions of the Big Bang.
Perhaps (as Francis Collins hypothesizes), God sent an asteroid to kill of the dinosaurs to prepare the way for mammal, and then for us. Of course, there are an uncountable number of historical contingencies like this by which God could direct evolution, without ever leaving a signature in DNA for purpose.
Perhaps (as Owen Gingerich alludes), God miraculously inspires some mutations.
Perhaps (as the Molinist might explain), God accesses all possible realities and chooses to instantiate the one the produces us.
Perhaps (as the Reformed theologians might posit), God is does everything through predestination, there is no more conflict with evolution than there is in our perception of free will.
Which of these is it? Or some combination of multiple? Or something I haven’t listed? I do not know. Frankly, I do not really care. What is clear to me is that there are several logically and scientifically consistent ways of resolving the puzzle. Of course, none of these models appears to be detectable to science. So all of these models leaves me with my main claim:
Evolution is purposeful (in my view), but science cannot detect its purpose.
If science is unable to detect theology then science is useless when it comes to the most important feature in our experience IMO.
Can you imagine being unable to have any knowledge of the intent of other persons in our lives?
It sounds like an autistic nightmare to me?
peace
Yes, instead he is only asking that we don’t take the random mutation part seriously. I wonder if we should be allowed to mention that.
As Ive already said this is simply and obviously incorrect unless you posit an incoherent deity.
peace