Tag Archives: Intelligent Design

Podcasts

Philip E. Johnson lectures on science, evolution and religion

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I found this fun lecture by the grandfather of the big-tent intelligent design movement, Berkeley law professor Philip E. Johnson.

I’ll bet you guys have all heard of him, but you’ve never heard him speak, right? Well, I was a young man, I used to listen to Phil’s lectures and his debates with Eugenie Scott quite a bit. This is one of my favorite lectures. Very easy to understand, and boilerplate for anything else in the origins debate. This is a great lecture – funny, engaging and useful. You will definitely listen to this lecture several times if you listen to it once.

The MP3 is here. (91 minutes, 62 megabytes)

The Inherit the Wind stereotype

  • Many people get their understanding of origins by watching movies like “Inherit the Wind” (or reading science fiction)
  • The actual events of the Scopes trial are nothing like what the movie portrays
  • The law forbidding the teaching of evolution was symbolic, not meant to be enforced
  • The actual Scopes trial was a publicity stunt to attract attention to Dayton, TN to bring business to the town
  • The ACLU advertised for a teacher who would be willing to be sued
  • They found a substitute physical education teacher who would be willing to “break” the law
  • The movie is nothing like the actual events the movie is a morality play
  • The religious people are evil and stupid and ignorant and bigoted
  • The scientists and lawyers are all intelligent, romantic, and honest seekers of the truth
  • The religious people think that the Bible trumps science and science is not as reliable as the Bible
  • The movie argues that the reason why there is ANY dissent to evolution is because of Biblical fundamentalism
  • The movie presents the idea that there are no scientific problems with evolution
  • The movie says that ONLY Biblical fundamentalists who believe in 6 day, 24-hour creation doubt evolution
  • The movie says that Biblical fundamentalism are close-minded, and not open to scientific truth
  • The movie says that people who read the Bible as making factual claims are misinterpreting the Bible
  • The movie says that smart people read the Bible for comfort and feelings and arbitrary values, not for truth

Guided evolution and methodological naturalism

  • What scientists mean by evolution is that fully naturalistic, unguided, materialistic mechanisms caused the diversity of life
  • Scientists do not allow that God had any real objective effect on how life was created
  • Scientists think that nature did all the creating, and any mention of God is unnecessary opinion – God didn’t DO ANYTHING
  • Scientists operate with one overriding rule – you can only explain the physical world with physical and material causes
  • Scientists DO NOT allow that God could have done anything detectable by the sciences
  • Scientists WILL NOT consider the idea that natural, material processes might be INSUFFICIENT for explaining everything in nature
  • You cannot even ask the question about whether natural laws, matter and chance can explain something in nature
  • Intelligent causes can NEVER be the explanation for anything in nature, and you can’t even test experimentally to check that
  • Scientists ASSUME that everything can be explained with natural laws, matter and chance – no questioning of natural causes is allowed
  • Where no natural explanation of a natural phenomenon is available, scientists SPECULATE about undiscovered natural explanations
  • The assumption of naturalistic sufficiency is called “methodological naturalism”
  • To question the assumptions that natural is all there is, and that nature has to do its own creating, makes you an “enemy of science”
  • But Johnson says that naturalists are the enemies of science, because they are like the Biblical fundamentalists
  • Naturalists have a presumption that prevents them from being willing to follow the evidence where it is leading
  • Experiments are not even needed, because the presumption of naturalism overrides any experimental finding that falsifies the sufficiency of natural causes to explain some natural phenomenon

What can natural selection and mutation actually do?

  • what evolution has actually been observed to do is explain changing populations of moths and finches
  • finches with smaller or larger beaks are observed to have differential survival rates when there are droughts or floods
  • no new body plan or new organ type has been observed to emerge from these environmental pressures
  • the only kind of evolution that has been observed is evolution within types – no new genetic instructions are created
  • in textbooks, only confirming examples are presented – but what is required is a broad pattern of gradual development of species
  • if you look at the fossil record, what you see in most cases is variation within types based on changing environments
  • the real question is: can natural law and chance be observed to be doing any creating of body plans and organ types?

What kind of effect requires an intelligent cause?

  • the thing to be explained in the history of life is the functional information sequences
  • you need to have a sequence of symbols or characters that is sufficiently long
  • your long sequence of characters has to be sequenced in the right order to have biological function
  • the only thing that can create long sequences of functional information is an intelligent cause
  • intelligent design people accept micro-evolution – changes within types – because that’s been observed
  • the real thing to be explained is the first living cell’s functional information, and the creation of new function information

Critical response

The next 15 minutes of the lecture contain a critical response from a philosophy professor who thinks that there have been no developments in design arguments since Aquinas and Paley. He basically confirms the stereotypes that Johnson outlined in the first part of the lecture. I recommend listening to this, because it shows how weak the counter arguments are, and how these pseudo-intellectuals mislead unprepared students to question their Christian faith – especially dangerous since they have the power of the grading pen. Notice especially how he never mentions any arguments that Christians actually use, nor does he mention any actual science. Everything is “words, words, words” as Hamlet might say – no talking about experiments.

Here’s what he says:

1) Don’t take the Bible literally, even if the genre is literal.

  • all opposition to evolution is based on an ignorant, fundamentalist, literal reading of the Bible
  • Christians need to reinterpret the Bible so that it is basically relaying personal preferences, and not factual information, regardless of the genre intended
  • the Bible really doesn’t communicate anything about the way the world really is
  • the Bible is just meant to suggest certain opinions and experiences which you may find fetching, or not, depending on your feelings and community
  • if Christians would just interpret the Bible as myths and opinions on par with other personal preferences, then evolution is no threat to religious belief

2) As long as you treat the design argument as divorced from evidence, it’s not very effective

  • the latest and best version of the design argument is Paley’s argument which involves no experimental data, so I’ll critique that
  • this 200-year old argument which doesn’t rely on science has serious problems, and unnamed Christians agree with me!
  • Christians should NOT try to prove God’s existence using evidence from the natural world (as Romans 1 says), and in fact it’s “Pelagianism” to even try
  • Christians should divorce their faith from logic and evidence even though the Bible says that Jesus performed miracles to supply evidence for his claims
  • Christians should not tie their faith to the best science available today, because science is always changing – what happens if we discover that the universe is eternal tomorrow?
  • What if! What if! Just because you guys have the facts on your side today, tomorrow science might prove that the universe is eternal! What would you do then?
  • It’s a good idea for me to critique the arguments of 1000-year old people who did not know anything about the cosmic fine-tuning argument – that’s fair!
  • I find it very useful to tell people that the argument from design is false without mentioning any scientific evidence of design from things like DNA and fine-tuning
  • We need to assume that the natural world is explainable using only natural causes
  • We should assume that natural causes create all life, and then rule out all experimental evidence for intelligent causes that we have today
  • As long as you accept that God is a personal opinion that has nothing to do with reality, then you can do science
  • The non-Christian process theologian Teilhard de Chardin is actually a Christian, and he accepts evolution, so quit complaining you ignorant fundies!
  • Remember when theists said God caused thunder because he was bowling in the clouds and then we found out he didn’t? Yeah well – maybe tomorrow we’ll find out that functional sequences of amino acids and proteins have natural causes! What would you do then?

3) What the Bible really says is that you should be a political liberal

Q&A time

The lecture concludes with 13 minutes of questions.

Polemics

What conditions support the minimum requirements for complex life?

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The Circumstellar Habitable Zone (CHZ)

What do you need in order to have a planet that supports complex life? First, you need liquid water at the surface of the planet. But there is only a narrow range of temperatures that can support liquid water. It turns out that the size of the star that your planet orbits around has a lot to do with whether you get liquid water or not. A heavy, metal-rich star allows you to have a habitable planet far enough from the star so  the planet can support liquid water on the planet’s surface while still being able to spin on its axis. The zone where a planet can have liquid water at the surface is called the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ). A metal-rich star like our Sun is very massive, which moves the habitable zone out further away from the star. If our star were smaller, we would have to orbit much closer to the star in order to have liquid water at the surface. Unfortunately, if you go too close to the star, then your planet becomes tidally locked, like the moon is tidally locked to Earth. Tidally locked planets are inhospitable to life.

Circumstellar Habitable Zone
Circumstellar Habitable Zone

Here, watch a clip from The Privileged Planet: (Clip 4 of 12, full playlist here)

But there’s more.

The Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ)

So, where do you get the heavy elements you need for your heavy metal-rich star?

You have to get the heavy elements for your star from supernova explosions – explosions that occur when certain types of stars die. That’s where heavy elements come from. But you can’t be TOO CLOSE to the dying stars, because you will get hit by nasty radiation and explosions. So to get the heavy elements from the dying stars, your solar system needs to be in the galactic habitable zone (GHZ) – the zone where you can pickup the heavy elements you need but not get hit by radiation and explosions. The GHZ lies between the spiral arms of a spiral galaxy. Not only do you have to be in between the arms of the spiral galaxy, but you also cannot be too close to the center of the galaxy. The center of the galaxy is too dense and you will get hit with massive radiation that will break down your life chemistry. But you also can’t be too far from the center, because you won’t get enough heavy elements because there are fewer dying stars the further out you go. You need to be in between the spiral arms, a medium distance from the center of the galaxy.

Like this:

Galactic Habitable Zone
Galactic Habitable Zone and Solar Habitable Zone

Here, watch a clip from The Privileged Planet: (Clip 10 of 12, full playlist here)

The GHZ is based on a discovery made by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, which made the front cover of Scientific American in 2001. That’s right, the cover of Scientific American. I actually stole the image above of the GHZ and CHZ (aka solar habitable zone) from his Scientific American article (linked above).

These are just a few of the things you need in order to get a planet that supports life.

Here are a few of the more well-known ones:

  • a solar system with a single massive Sun than can serve as a long-lived, stable source of energy
  • a terrestrial planet (non-gaseous)
  • the planet must be the right distance from the sun in order to preserve liquid water at the surface – if it’s too close, the water is burnt off in a runaway greenhouse effect, if it’s too far, the water is permanently frozen in a runaway glaciation
  • the solar system must be placed at the right place in the galaxy – not too near dangerous radiation, but close enough to other stars to be able to absorb heavy elements after neighboring stars die
  • a moon of sufficient mass to stabilize the tilt of the planet’s rotation
  • plate tectonics
  • an oxygen-rich atmosphere
  • a sweeper planet to deflect comets, etc.
  • planetary neighbors must have non-eccentric orbits

By the way, you can watch a lecture with Guillermo Gonzalez explaining his ideas further. This lecture was delivered at UC Davis in 2007. That link has a link to the playlist of the lecture, a bio of the speaker, and a summary of all the topics he discussed in the lecture. An excellent place to learn the requirements for a suitable habitat for life.

News

Hard and soft transitional forms in the fossil record

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Casey Luskin writes about it at Evolution News. (I removed all his links from the excerpts)

Excerpt:

Another good example is what the principal blogger covering human origins at BioLogos, Dr. James Kidder, did last year did in a series on human origins. His series is a good read and quite a competent presentation of the standard Darwinian evolutionary view of human origins — which no doubt reflects Dr. Kidder’s extensive training and experience with this issue. But it accedes 100% to the standard Darwinian story of human origins with essentially no critical analysis whatsoever. But how solid is the evidence behind Dr. Kidder’s view, and are there credible paleoanthropologists who doubt key parts of the orthodox story?

Here’s ONE of the problems that Luskin writes about:

Dr. Kidder’s BioLogos post tried to argue that I misunderstand the meaning of “transitional fossil.” This is a common and characteristically unfounded charge from Darwinian evolutionary biologists. They make the accusation because it takes the focus off the problems the fossil evidence poses for Darwinian evolution, and puts it on Darwin-critics. Advocates of Darwinian evolution also redefine what counts as “transitional,” so that the term becomes nearly meaningless. Here’s what’s going on:

We see that the phrase “transitional form” is used in two different ways. The “soft” definition of “transitional” implies that an organism merely needs to bear features that are representative of a potential intermediate — even if the fossil itself was not a direct transitional form. Under the hard definition of “transitional form,” a stronger claim is made that this organism actually was a real-life lineal intermediate between two taxa, a direct transitional form.

As evidence that this soft/hard distinction is used, for example, when some early tetrapod tracks were first reported in early 2010, Nature‘s Editor’s Summary said: “The finds suggests that the elpistostegids that we know were late-surviving relics rather than direct transitional forms, and they highlight just how little we know of the earliest history of land vertebrates” (emphasis added). The qualified term “direct transitional form” is a nod to the writer’s understanding that there is in fact a “hard” definition of a transitional form, and a “soft” definition, and that some fossils don’t meet the hard definition. What some people call a “transitional form” isn’t necessarily a “direct transitional form.”

So are there direct transitional forms in the hominid fossil record?

If you define “transitional form” in a soft enough way, so that neither temporal placement nor phylogenetic relationship matters any more, then it becomes very difficult to disprove claims that a fossil was “transitional.” It’s a wily rhetorical tactic, designed to make Darwin-skeptics look ignorant while simultaneously taking the focus off the lack of actual (e.g. hard) transitional forms in the fossil record. Dr. Kidder complains that ID proponents define such forms “in such a way that none could ever be found,” when in reality it’s Darwinian evolutionists who define transitional fossils so that they must, by definition, be found in abundance–even if they weren’t necessarily part of an evolutionary transition. Thus we see the Nature blogger quoted above saying absurd things like “every newly discovered fossil of a creature we didn’t know of before IS a missing link.” Or, we see Dr. Kidder making the less-absurd (though similarly inspired) claim that “[t]he human fossil record, in fact, is replete with transitional forms” as well as:

Transitional fossils in the human fossil record are distinguished at both the genus and species level. This group includes the extinct genera Ardipithecus andAustralopithecus and the current genus Homo.

Kidder would have no troubling finding some authorities who agree with him. But there are also credible authorities who disagree — especially with regard to those specific fossils. For example, in my series we’ve seen there are credible authorities who believe that “one of the most critical” areas of the human fossil record lacks transitional forms–specifically, “the transition fromAustralopithecus to Homo.”

Likewise, my series has also cited authorities who would disagree with Dr. Kidder’s claim that Ardi “was advanced in the human direction,” in the sense of developing bipedal locomotion, and who would sharply dispute his assertion that Ardi represents “a phenomenal example of a transitional form in the human fossil record.” Other experts would dispute the claim advanced by Kidder that the australopithecines show clearly “transitional characteristics.” In particular, many doubt theclaim that Lucy’s morphology was “perfectly intermediate between the ape position and the human position.”

Indeed, even Kidder admits: “Unfortunately, the path from Australopithecus to early Homo is shrouded in mystery, with no clear hominin form considered decisively to be the progenitor.” True! But then why does Kidder feel the need to so completely capitulate to the view that humans evolved from Australopithecus? He claims that ID proponents take it as an “article of faith” that transitional forms don’t exist, but it seems that some Darwinian evolutionary scientists take it as an “article of faith” that they do exist, and that the standard Darwinian story of human origins is true.

My point is not that Dr. Kidder is unequivocally wrong or that he’s uninformed. Hardly. He’s welcome to hold and express his opinion, and his series is a highly competent presentation of the standard Darwinian evolutionary account of human origins. Rather, I want to note that the standard story of human evolution — to which BioLogos’s principle blogger on this topic fully capitulates — is not the only scientifically credible position out there. When you dig into the technical literature, many parts of the standard story turn out to be based upon very weak evidence. In short, there are strong scientific reasons to dispute the claim that humans evolved from ape-like precursors. Is it acceptable to point this out?

It seems to me that whoever makes a claim about how we got here has the burden of proof. Both sides are making claims, so both sides have to shoulder the burden of proof. Our side had made claims about what would be found in the human genome for years, and we were vindicated recently with research published in Nature. Can the other side do that?

I recommend reading the whole article. There are good links in there to other things that Luskin has written on this topic, and links to the research he uses in his arguments as well. There’s also a new book out now on human origins that presents more evidence on both sides of this debate.