Ken Miller the Closet ID Supporter Backpedals and Dissembles
| July 8, 2006 | Posted by Dave S. under Intelligent Design |
Thanks to Reed Cartwright at Panda’s Thumb for pointing out Miller’s lame response.
The question and answer as Bill Dembski was given by someone in the audience recalling it wasn’t an unfair paraphrase. The verbage was different but the points were essentially the same.
And whether Ken Miller wants to admit it or not a unverse that was designed so that the evolution of life was inevitable fits just fine into the big ID tent. Miller’s claim that ID supporters all think that constant meddling by a creator is required to make evolution happen is just a big, bold lie made up so that Ken can exclude himself from the tent. Shame on you Ken. Even though you lie about us we welcome you to the tent anyhow.
Bill Dembski’s blogczar for one (me) doesn’t think the creator meddled. Obviously Bill Dembski, the go-to guy for all things ID, must respect my viewpoint if he saw fit to let me moderate his weblog and use it for a soapbox for my front-loaded corner of the big tent. I happen to think the best explanation is that the life that appeared on the earth billions of years ago was placed here by an intelligent agency (whose character is unknown to me) and that first life was preprogrammed to evolve and diversify along a more or less set path from single undifferentiated cell to everything today, much as a hen’s egg is preprogrammed to evolve and diversify from a single cell into a chicken. No meddling required. So there. Now be a man and take back your lie about what all ID proponents believe about constant meddling.
35 Responses to Ken Miller the Closet ID Supporter Backpedals and Dissembles
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Tina Brewer (my friend from earlier commentary):
You have asked how God could be involved in a process that is supposedly random. My answer simply is that it is not random. Having said that, you know what I need to add next: the non-randomness may not be measurable and may not even be scientifically detectable (sorry you must be getting tired of me saying that) as a supernatural presence influencing the course of natural selection. Key mutations might occur, for example, because of God’s supernatural presence. Key events (a meteorite, perhaps) might occur under the influence of God’s supernatural intervention. (Is that why the dinosaurs went extinct allowing the mammalian line to flourish???) Despite what you read on this blog the data in support of natural selection giving rise to macro-evolution is over-powering (I’ve recommended key books previously.) However, it is occurring in the context of God’s Presence.
The best analogy for me to explain what I mean is the Holy Spirit working in your own life as a believer. Can you measure that? Can you prove, for example, that a Christian relationship which matures into marriage does so because of God’s Presence in the life of each person? To the outside observer, it might well be consistent with random events…each “just happened†to attend the same function…and each just happened to sit next to each other…etc. Some would look at the events and describe them as pure chance…but to the Christian it occurred under the guidance of the ever-present Holy Spirit.
Just as God works in our lives, just as God worked in the nation of Israel during Old Testament days, so also I believe that God works in the natural history of life on earth. Today, all these years later we can’t prove scientifically that Israel survived as it did because of God’s Presence and leadership. But now as we look at the finished product and, by faith, accept the biblical account, we shake our head in amazement at the way God worked things out for those descendents of Abraham and Sarah. So it is with life’s history. Biology makes it very clear (see Ernest Mayr’s, “One Long Argument,â€Â) that natural selection occurred. What Mayr wasn’t able to see was that God was influencing the process whenever and however God chose to do so…just like God did for Israel and just like God does in your life as a believer.
Thanks for giving me one more chance to try to clarify my view.
Mung,
You’ve asked how I could say that natural selection was creative, and you’ve said (in another thread) that since it involves such tiny steps, doesn’t this mean that there is nothing creative about it at all.
Actually, I have had a little difficulty understanding your point, since you made it in the other discussion thread. Here’s why: when an artist makes a stroke with the paint brush, we would be able to analyze it and say “Nothing creative about that….looks like a streak of paint to me.†It is only when we look at the finished product, that we stand back and say—how amazingly creative those brush strokes turned out to be.
Natural selection is just “brush-strokes.†Almost all biologists believe that the magnificent “painting†that is this planet’s 30,000,000 species is a result of individual strokes carried out by natural selection. Many of us who are Christian biologists believe that God was intricately involved in this “natural†process and we wish that non-believers would come to see that it happened because of God’s guidance and Presence. But still there is no denying that it is the most magnificent “painting†imaginable. That’s also why I think the word “tremendous†is a great word to use for the power of natural selection. Whether materialists are right about absence of God’s supervision of this process, or people like me are right, the point is still the same, the result is tremendous.
Hi Dr. Falk,
I’m wondering if you could please tell me what you think the extent of our ability to detect design in nature is. That is to say, do you think that there is any aspect of nature that could be best explained as the result of intelligence? Furthermore, do you think that we are even capable of inferring design in nature, or are you a strict epistemic materialist (at least insofar as ID is concerned)? If this is the case, then why do you think it is so? I apologize if you’ve already answered these questions; just refer me to your answers if you have. Thank you for chatting with us here.
Darrell Falk: I understand your view of evolution, and having held it once myself, I also understand that as a theist, it is of course necessary to add the caveat “…it is not random.” While this works from the viewpoint of one’s religious worldview (I personally have no theoretical problem with the idea of a God who works in this way) it doesn’t address the question of the information content of natural systems. No one on this blog that I know of doubts that mutational events occur, nor do they doubt that depending upon the particular environmental context in which those mutations occur, advantageous mutations will be preserved. This is all standard stuff. The project of ID is not about denying that mutations and selection occur. It is about their relative importance, and the ability of them to do what they claim to be able to do without intelligent input at some point. Since you clearly don’t believe the “random and unguided” part about the modern theory, I guess I could get further clarification about your view by asking the following question: As a thought experiment, imagine that you found out today that there is no God. Would the evidence that purely unguided and purposeless processes lead to the complexity of life seem as overwhelming to you?
An interesting choice for an analogy
. Thought provoking.
So I would have to say that in the absence of a finished product we lack any reason to believe that natural selection is creative or has any creative power whatsoever. And yet, isn’t the idea of a finished product inherently teleological? In evolutionary theory there is no such thing as a finished product, it’s all a work-in-progress.
Does the fact that we can look at something and see it as a finished product speak at all to the failure of evolutionary theory to conform with reality?
It seems to me that the view that Darrel has regarding natural selection is that it is teleological. That God uses natural selection to bring about finished products. It is purposeful, and not blind. Mutations are not random and unguided. If I am wrong, Darrel, please adjust my thinking.
To return to the analogy which Darrel offered, let’s say our aspiring artist is blind. We provide her with a number of canvasses upon which she places a brush stroke. So now then, what can we do that is analogous to natural selection? CAn we have another blind person select out some of these canvases and discarding others, and then use the selected canvasses to repeat the process? Return them to our artist, have our blind artist place another brush stroke, repeat, etc. (Isn’t each one, in reality, a finished product?)
I wonder what our expectation would be that we would ever actually see anything that we would think was designed. Could we distinguish paintings made by an artist who was not blind, which were not selected by a blind man, from the paintings that were the result of this blind, chance process? Could we, perhaps, detect design? If so, HOW?
My guess is that we could and that it would have something to do with complexity and specification.
IOW, our brush strokes by different artists and different forms of selecting the survivors is a revealing analogy for how random mutation and natural selection can be shown to be powerless and how design detection is empirically possible.