Tag Archives: Naturalism

Commentary

James Shapiro: an honest naturalist admired by ID supporters

Leave a comment

As a pro-ID person, I am naturally suspicious of naturalistic scientists. They always say that material forces and chance can explain every single thing in nature, and there are no effects in nature that are best explained by an intelligence. Well, some in nature are best explained by unintelligent causes alone. But I think there are some effects in nature that are more like meaningful sentences or meaningful computer code – and that those are best explained as a result of an intelligence.

One effect in nature where that is clearly analogous to language/code is the biological information in proteins and in DNA. ID people keep telling naturalists that functional information in the first living cell cannot be generated by blind forces in the time available in Earth’s history. But naturalists always seem to diminish the problem and say that blind forces can create information. Well, most naturalists do.

Here’s one who doesn’t, though: James Shapiro. Dr. Shapiro is a microbiologist and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. His undergraduate is from Harvard University.

He is very frank about how much naturalistic mechanisms can explain when it comes to the origin of life.

Excerpt: (links removed)

Around here we have a lot of respect for microbiologist James Shapiro, who had the guts and integrity to come over to ENV recently and spar over evolution with William Dembski, Doug Axe and Ann Gauger. Besides having a new book out that details his own dissatisfactions with conventional Darwinian evolutionary theory and that champions a provocative alternative view, Shapiro also blogs at the Huffington Post.

He continues to win our admiration, while evoking some poignancy as well.

In one post that got a fair amount of attention he had some sensible things to say to fellow evolutionists. Rather than hide behind “absolutist statements like ‘all the facts are on my side,'” as his University of Chicago colleague Jerry Coyne does, Shapiro advocates “active engagement” with Darwin critics. Enter into the controversy over evolution, he says, rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps even teach about it? Shapiro doesn’t go that far, but the permissibility of admitting the truth even to young people would seem to follow from his premise:

We need to demonstrate that evolution science is alive and well, as well as show how it is making remarkable progress through the application of molecular technologies — even though it does not have all the answers.

To the thoughtful scientist whose job is to uncover natural processes, this is surely a better way of advocating the scientific method than dogmatically asserting that we found all the scientific principles we need in centuries past.

Evolution supporters, he counsels, should admit they don’t have all the answers, including on a key question like the origin of life. In a remarkably candid statement, he writes:

In order to be truthful, we must acknowledge that certain questions, like the origins of the first living cells, currently have no credible scientific answer. However, given the historical record of science and technology in achieving the “impossible” (e.g., space flight, telecommunications, electronic computation and robotics), there is no reason to believe that unsolved problems will remain without naturalistic explanations indefinitely.

I don’t mind a naturalist who is honest about what we do and do not know.

More:

Surely there’s room to question Shapiro on why our ability to fly to the moon gives grounds for certainty that a purely “naturalistic” explanation of life’s origin will be forthcoming. Space flight is an accomplishment enacted in a material world but, more to the point, it’s a triumph of engineering — aka, intelligent design. It could not be accomplished at all without the direction of purposeful designers.

But note the implicit agreement with Stephen Meyer (Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design): materialist explanations for “the origins of the first living cells” have, to date, indeed all miserably failed. In his book, Meyer shows how the evidence points persuasively to the action of some source of intelligent agency. Under the circumstances, if Shapiro is right, that would make intelligent design by default the lone viable theory of life’s origin.

Apart from gesturing to the advance of technology as a reason for keeping faith in naturalism, it would be interesting to know how Shapiro responds to Meyer’s case.

James Shapiro has debated with pro-ID people before. I have a set of audio cassettes from WAY WAY BACK which contains a debate between Robert Shapiro and Walter Bradley, whose lectures on the evidence for design in nature I have featured before. Although some naturalists like Richard Dawkins run away from debates, some, like Shapiro do not. And that’s good for science.

If you want to read a great book on what intelligent design is really about, you really need to read Signature in the Cell. This is the best on the argument for intelligent design in nature from the evidence of proteins and DNA. We are still waiting for a really great pro-ID book on the Cambrian explosion, the sudden origin of all major body plans 540 million years ago – but maybe Dr. Meyer is already working on that now, since he published a peer-reviewed paper on it in a science journal, a while back.

Podcasts

Brian Auten interviews philosopher R. Scott Smith

Leave a comment

UPDATE: I have changed the podcast in this post because the original one I linked to had some errors in it. I’m sorry!

Here’s an interview from Apologetics 315 in two parts:

Part 1: (MP3 file)

Today’s interview is (part one of two) with R. Scott Smith, Associate Professor of Ethics and Christian Apologetics at Biola University. He talks about his background and influences in ethics (J.P. Moreland,Dallas Willard), his opinion on the moral argument, the idea of naturalism grounding morality, the benefits of understanding ethical theory, and his recommended books on morality: Moral Choices by Scott Rae and Relativism by Koukl and Beckwith. Scott’s own published works include Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge: Philosophy of Language after MacIntyre and Hauerwas andT ruth and the New Kind of Christian: The Emerging Effects of Postmodernism in the Church. Scott also mentions the article “Knowledge & Naturalism” by Dallas Willard as well as J.P. Moreland’s book Scaling the Secular City.

Part 2: (MP3 file)

Today’s interview is (part two of two) with R. Scott Smith, Associate Professor of Ethics and Christian Apologetics at Biola University. He talks about postmodernism, what it is, and how it is affecting the Church. He shares his thoughts on the good and the bad in the emerging church movement and the works of Brian McClaren. (See the first interview with Scott on ethical issues here.)

Sorry about this confusion.

Polemics

Ed Feser takes on Lawrence Krauss and Victor Stenger

3 Comments

From Ed Feser’s blog. (H/T Chris R.)

Excerpt:

I recently linked to philosopher of physics David Albert’s take down of Lawrence Krauss’s bookA Universe From Nothing.  (My own review of Krauss will soon appear in First Things.)  A reader calls my attention to this blog post in which Victor Stenger — Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, and author of several atheist tomes — rides to the rescue of Krauss against Albert.  (If only the other philosophically incompetent New Atheists had such a knight in shining armor!  O Dawkins, where is your Stenger?  O Coyne, where is your Victor?)

Unfortunately for Krauss, the intrepid Stenger shoots only blanks.  And misses.  Krauss, as you may know, argues that the laws of quantum mechanics (QM) show how a universe can arise from nothing.  Albert demurs, and Stenger responds:

[Albert] asks, “Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?”  Krauss admits he does not know, but suggests they may arise randomly, in which case some universe like ours would have arisen without a prescribed cause.  In my 2006 book The Comprehensible Cosmos, I attempt to show that the laws of physics arise naturally from the symmetries of the void.

Later Stenger tells us that the “void” or “nothing” in question “can be described mathematically,” “has an explicit wave function,” and “is the quantum gravity equivalent of the quantum vacuum in quantum field theory.”

Of course, the problem with all of this is the same as the problem with the original suggestion that the laws of QM show that a universe can come from nothing.  The laws of QM are not nothing, and neither are “the symmetries of the void” nor anything that “can be described mathematically,” “has an explicit wave function,” etc.  In general, if you can characterize it in terms of physical law — which Krauss, Stenger, and like-minded atheists all want to do vis-à-vis “nothing” — then it isn’t nothing.  It’s something physical, and thussomething rather than nothing.  Obviously.

Obviously, that is, unless you are a New Atheist dogmatically attached to the utterly groundless proposition that all genuine questions simply must be susceptible of a scientific answer.  At this juncture Stenger does what an increasing number of atheists do when it is pointed out to them that their “explanations” of how the universe arose from nothing merely change the subject — they feign ignorance of English.  Writes Stenger:

Clearly, no academic consensus exists on how to define “nothing.”  It may be impossible.  To define “nothing” you have to give it some defining property, but, then, if it has a property it is not nothing!

But this is the muddleheaded stuff of a freshman philosophy paper — treating “nothing” as if it were an especially unusual, ethereal kind of substance whose nature it would require tremendous intellectual effort to fathom.  Which, as everyone knows until he finds he has a motive for suggesting otherwise, it is not.  Nothing is nothing so fancy as that.  It is just the absence of anything, that’s all.  Consider all the true existential claims that there are: “Stones exist,” “”Trees exist,” “Quarks exist,” etc.  To ask why there is something rather than nothing is just to ask why it isn’t the case that all of these statements are false.  Pretty straightforward.

To admit the obvious, though, would be to admit that there are questions that physics cannot answer, such as where the laws of physics themselves came from — or more precisely, since “laws” are just abstractions from a concrete physical reality that behaves in accordance with the laws, where this concrete physical reality itself comes from.  That nothing in physics answers this question was Albert’s point, and Stenger says absolutely nothing to answer it.

Read the rest. It’s really good! and there’s a lot more goodness there. 176 comments at the time I am writing this.

UPDATE: Peter Sean Bradley note that Krauss is now walking back his rhetoric in response to criticisms from people like atheist John Horgan.

I have been writing about Stenger and Krauss a lot lately, so here are the links in case you missed anything: