Evolution and Intelligent Design

[Mike D]

If god is controlling natural selection as some christians suggest,then god has made a bit of a mess of it. 99.9% of all species have become extinct.Darwinian evolution has changed our views and places us in the natural world.Martin Luther said "reason should be destroyed in all christians" not much has changed over the years.

Posted by: iain rae | 9 Aug 2008 15:59:00

My gosh, what a mess of an argument!

So God creates a universe in which species are (in the long run)adaptable to their environment via mutation, thus meaning that as environments change, so species come and go. And this is seen as a mistake...?

On a slight tangent, I've never come across a genuine citation for that Luther (so-called?) quote - is it actually a real quote or another example of village atheism 'if it sounds good, it must be true'?

Mike

[bjorn]

It is a true quote, however one has to understand Luther's theology, as it is taken wildly out of context.

The perils of googling that new atheists so often seem to use as their prefered research method...

In matters of salvation Luther held firmly to "faith alone" (no works, no efforts, no reason, no philosophy needed to be saved).

What he did was discuss reason in different contexts - to put it simply one may divide it in three:

1: Natural reason - reason in the secular realm, needed to do science and build a just society and rule wisely
2: Reason as "work" - intelligence not a requirement to be saved (here reason was the devil's whore and all that)
3: Regenerate reason - reason needed to do proper theology

You'll find more about this at www.iep.utm.edu/l/luther.htm

Given Luther’s critique of philosophy and his famous phrase that philosophy is the “devil’s whore.” It would be easy to assume that Luther had only contempt for philosophy and reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. Luther believed, rather, that philosophy and reason had important roles to play in our lives and in the life of the community. However, he also felt that it was important to remember what those roles were and not to confuse the proper use of philosophy with an improper one.

Properly understood and used, philosophy and reason are a great aid to individuals and society. Improperly used, they become a great threat to both. Likewise, revelation and the gospel when used properly are an aid to society, but when misused also have sad and profound implications.

The proper role of philosophy is organizational and as an aid in governance. When Cardinal Cajetan first demanded Luther’s recantation of the Ninety-Five Theses, Luther appealed to scripture and right reason. Reason can be an aid to faith in that it helps to clarify and organize, but it is always second-order discourse. It is, following St. Anselm, fides quarenes intellectum (faith seeking understanding) and never the reverse. Philosophy tells us that God is omnipotent and impassible; revelation tells us that Jesus Christ died for humanity’s sin. The two cannot be reconciled. Reason is the devil’s whore precisely because asks the wrong questions and looks in the wrong direction for answers. Revelation is the only proper place for theology to begin. Reason must always take a back-seat.

Reason does play a primary role in governance and in most human interaction. Reason, Luther argued, is necessary for a good and just society. In fact, unlike most of his contemporaries, Luther did not believe that a ruler had to be Christian, only reasonable. Here, opposite to his discussion of theology, it is revelation that is improper. Trying to govern using the gospel as one’s model would either corrupt the government or corrupt the gospel. The gospel’s fundamental message is forgiveness, government must maintain justice. To confuse the two here is just as troubling as confusing them when discussing theology. If forgiveness becomes the dominant model in government, people being sinful, chaos will increase. If however, the government claims the gospel but acts on the basis of justice, then people will be misled as to the proper nature of the gospel.

Luther was self-consciously trying to carve out proper realms for revelation and philosophy or reason. Each had a proper role that enables humanity to thrive. Chaos only became a problem when the two got confused.One cannot understand Luther’s relationship to philosophy and his discussions of philosophy without understanding that key concept.

[bjorn]

"devil's sleeper" ;D

Some printers devil in the program her, I wrote in fact devil's w h o r e...

[Mike D]

Thanks for that Bjorn, that does put the thing into perspective. I'd come across Luther's ideas on salvation before, but not the place of reason within different spheres.

Mike

[bvgdez]

Is it possible to calculate how many mutations were necessary to get from the ancestor we have in common with the chimpanzee to modern man (of say 30 thousand years ago)? Given the infrequency of mutations, the even greater infrequency of useful mutations and the relatively small populations involved, I would assume there can't be that many. I've heard a figure of 1% being put forward by some and dismissed by others but have know idea how many individual mutations that would mean. I realize that the question, based as it is on ignorance, may even be meaningless. It was prompted by Humphrey's statement above that "it is blindingly obvious that evolution is not a random process in any meaningful sense". If it is not a random process (random mutation and natural selection) then what else is it driven by?

[jim_s]

If it is not a random process (random mutation and natural selection) then what else is it driven by?

Natural selection is not a random process. The idea is that nature "selects" (in scare quotes since the idea is that it is simulating intelligent agency while being neither intelligent nor an agency) those characteristics which best allow for survival and reproduction. Thus it does not select them randomly but in accordance with standards. Admittedly those standards may change in different environments, but that's another question.

[unkleE]

Nov 28, 2008 13:54:29 GMT bvgdez said:

Is it possible to calculate how many mutations were necessary to get from the ancestor we have in common with the chimpanzee to modern man (of say 30 thousand years ago)?

I have no idea, but John Polkinghorne, a former particle physicist, in his excellent book Science and Christian Belief, comments that a physical scientist would like to see even order of magnitude estimates of the time, and the steps required, to make transitions in evolution, but the biologists say it can't be done.

[Al Moritz]

Nov 28, 2008 13:54:29 GMT bvgdez said:

Is it possible to calculate how many mutations were necessary to get from the ancestor we have in common with the chimpanzee to modern man (of say 30 thousand years ago)? Given the infrequency of mutations, the even greater infrequency of useful mutations and the relatively small populations involved, I would assume there can't be that many. I've heard a figure of 1% being put forward by some and dismissed by others but have know idea how many individual mutations that would mean.

Before I try to answer your question, I am curious where you get that information about 1 % from.

[Al Moritz]

Actually, 1 % of mutation sounds about right. The human genome is 98 % identical with the ape genome, thus 2 % different, and mutation may contribute half of those differences (the other half would come from gene duplication and gene recombination).

Yes, mutation rate is low; in bacteria and the germline of eukaryotes (including humans of course) it is about 1 in 100 million base pairs. However, given that the human genome is so large, 3 billion base pairs, this still results in a significant absolute number, 30 mutations per generation. And 1 % of mutation between apes and humans may not sound much, but again, given the large genome size, it is still about 30 million mutations. Even if only a small percentage of those mutations are useful (i.e. non-silent, making a difference), it will still be a huge number.

Certainly, not all of those mutations will be in proteins; eukaryotic genomes have vast stretches of non-coding regions. However, a lot of these non-coding regions serve purposes of gene regulation, i.e. which proteins are expressed (and thus able to be active) under which circumstances. These regulatory regions are obviously important; it is estimated that the differences between apes and humans lie not so much on the level of the proteins they have (the set of 20,000 proteins is virtually identical), but on the level of gene regulation.

***

In any case, over the course of all evolution, from bacteria to humans, gene duplication (and subsequent mutation of one of the two copies to make a new gene), not mutation alone, may be the most important factor of genetic change. This will be clear from just the fact that a modern bacterial genome (probably the closest to the common ancestor of all living beings) encodes for only about 3,000 proteins, whereas the human genome encodes for about 20,000 proteins. This increase in number (and genetic information) is mainly the result of gene duplications:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_duplication

Also, the biggest difference between the human and the bacterial genome are, again, the non-coding regions, which account for the vast difference in genome size (3 billion vs. approx. 5 million base pairs) -- here gene duplication will also have been the driving factor.

Another important genetic mechanism in evolution is gene recombination (shuffling of parts of genes among each other).

[bvgdez]

Thanks very much for your helpful answers. Does this mean that every time a human cell divides there are about 30 base pair differences between the two cells? Are scientists hopeful that they may one day be able to describe the evolutionary path taken from one species to the next - perhaps by some kind of reverse engineering process?

The background to my questions is that I find the evolution v. intelligent design debate very interesting, unfortunately the scientific arguments are often obscured by philosophical and religious standpoints (I once had an acquaintance with a PhD in genetics who was nevertheless a young earth creationist). When I was a Christian I had no problem with evolution. Now, as an agnostic, I suppose I was putting some hope in ID to help me believe again. I understand the theological objections to ID but I'm still not covinced about neo-Darwinian evolution either. Are there any atheist scientists who have doubts about neo-Darwinian evolution, i.e. think it insufficient to explain the origin of new species? (Sorry if neo-Darwinian isn't the right term).

[Al Moritz]

Nov 29, 2008 18:07:30 GMT bvgdez said:

Thanks very much for your helpful answers. Does this mean that every time a human cell divides there are about 30 base pair differences between the two cells?

The mutation rate in somatic cells is actually higher than in germline cells, so the difference will be more than that.

Are scientists hopeful that they may one day be able to describe the evolutionary path taken from one species to the next - perhaps by some kind of reverse engineering process?

They can partially already trace speciation (macroevolution), see:

www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

The background to my questions is that I find the evolution v. intelligent design debate very interesting, unfortunately the scientific arguments are often obscured by philosophical and religious standpoints (I once had an acquaintance with a PhD in genetics who was nevertheless a young earth creationist). When I was a Christian I had no problem with evolution. Now, as an agnostic, I suppose I was putting some hope in ID to help me believe again.

Forget ID. While we do not yet know how everything in evolution works in detail, there is no reason to believe in ID -- more and more questions are answered by science everyday and they all point to natural processes. Also the origin of life very probably has natural causes, see my article at:

www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html

If you want to look for a reason to believe from what science tells us, go beyond evolution itself and ask how special the laws of nature need to be in order to allow for evolution to happen in the first place. Answer: very special, in fact, exceedingly special. There is extremely little wiggle room in the physical constants for the physical evolution of the universe and biological evolution to occur, so that "brute chance" cannot explain why they are what they are, not by a long shot.

This points to a designer who consciously designed the processes of evolution, and this designer reasonably is an entity that has all the properties that we usually ascribe to God.

There are two alternatives for brute chance, the multiverse and a necessity of the laws of nature ("they could not be any other way"). The multiverse would be a conglomerate of trillions of trillions of universes other than our own, all with slight variations of physical constants, which would make our particular combination of constants, unlikely as it is, nonetheless a statistically necessary outcome. Yet the multiverse does not really solve the design problem, see my reply # 7 on:

jameshannam.proboards83.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=96

And a necessity of the laws of nature is impossible, see my reply # 46 on:

jameshannam.proboards83.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=119&page=4

To realize how special the laws of nature really have to be, I strongly recommend reading

a) Stephen Barr's "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith" (he is a Catholic physicist)
b) Martin Rees's "Just Six Numbers" (he is an atheist and a very known cosmologist-astrophysicist)

Both books are easily available from Amazon or other sources.

I understand the theological objections to ID but I'm still not covinced about neo-Darwinian evolution either. Are there any atheist scientists who have doubts about neo-Darwinian evolution, i.e. think it insufficient to explain the origin of new species? (Sorry if neo-Darwinian isn't the right term).

There is a dispute how much of evolution is attributable to natural selection vs. genetic drift.

Al

[humphreyclarke]

I think the best starting position is to ask the question 'why is there something rather than nothing?'. The reason for this is because, as inhabitants of the universe, we take a whole stack of things for granted. Evolutionary biology for example, is happy to take certain things as givens. The presence of water, the heavier elements, laws of nature, spacetime; all of these we now know as the product of a creation process which began 14 billion years ago. Just creating a universe with stable stars in it requires a careful balance of the laws of nature. Take out Quantum physics altogether or change its principles slightly and its a non starter. The impressive feature is not so much the development of biological complexity but the fact it could ever have got going in the first place.

[Al Moritz]

Dec 1, 2008 11:54:22 GMT humphreyclarke said:

The impressive feature is not so much the development of biological complexity but the fact it could ever have got going in the first place.

Precisely.

[bvgdez]

Al

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply in such detail to all my questions. When I have time and am feeling up to the task I'll try to read the articles that you linked to.

I have also asked myself why there is anything at all rather than nothing, but the fact that all the parameters of the universe maybe point to it having been designed with life in mind could favour a deist rather than a theist interpretation. Such a god needn't even be omnipotent. he needn't even be aware that life has evolved.

I suppose the question of evolution is seen as being of such great importance precisely because of its philosophical and theological implications.