Steven wrote: “This view is challenging to “intelligent design” advocates, who say some creatures are so extraordinarily complex that only God’s intervention can explain them.”
Actually most (but not all) intelligent design creationism advocates would still say “…only an intelligent designer’s intervention can explain them.” The official party line since the concept of intelligent design creationism was re-vivified (after a 1987 US Supreme Court forbade the teaching of its bogus predecessor “creation science”) was to not mention God or Genesis or Noah or Adam or Eve – just refer to an anonymous invisible supernatural “intelligent designer” while winking and nodding when right-wing fundamentalists were in the room.
Unfortunately, lots of fundamentalists didn’t get the memo from the Dishonesty Institute and keep confusing the “intelligent designer” with the God of Genesis. Which is actually okay, because they actually are one and the same. And what’s really funny is that the good old-fashioned creationists are beginning to use the stealth tactics of the intelligent design creationists – witness the recent hooraw in Texas, where the state school board recently adopted some weasel-worded standards officially doubting not only evolution but the age of the earth and the universe.

With any hypothesis you have to ask yourself is this within the realm of science or not. The key test is having a way to prove the claim false. If one exists then your doing science, if not then you’re not.
So what experiment could be disproves this statement:
“The tree of life is there from the beginning. All evolution does is fill in the gaps. It’s painting by numbers.”
I don’t think your could disprove this, so it’s metaphysics.
It strikes me as similar to the foundation problem of mathematics. Does math exist outside humans or is it merely in our heads?
It’s an interesting question, but likely unsolvable,

“The tree of life is there from the beginning. All evolution does is fill in the gaps. It’s painting by numbers.”
I have to agree with MH. The statement is made a priori and as such is outside the realm of science.

Mh is correct. No falsifiable hypothesis=philosophy, not science.

Steven,
Templeton is a great foundation and their scholars are first rate in provoking fresh thoughts. Enjoy the conference. Post lots of stuff. I’m interested in the latest goings on. Safe journey!

Galileo got it right – if you can not design a means of disproving the hypothesis, either you aren’t (yet) capable of submitting the stated theorem to scientific analysis or, it is not science. It may be sociology or psychology or marketing or a statement suitable for the endless discussions which make metaphysics both enjoyable and of no practical value.
There is, however, absolutely no conflict between my demanding rigid appearance to scientific method from my students and delighting in the rare but genuine spark which causes them to ask “why thus and not so?”
It is this creativity which separates scientists from technicians.
Sadly, too many Christians reject faith in God and try to impose a rigid system of “God said it, the Bible wrote it, and I believe it” to both their relationship with God and their demands on the rest of us. That isn’t faith and it isn’t science.
It is a good example of arguing post hoc ergo proctor hoc…
I am personally looking forward to Steven’s comments this coming week, I have several fundamentalist Christians in my freshman course again this semester and if I hear one more squirrel-cage argument for creationism, I shall go mad and set them to actually reading Galilei. Then, base the final exam on his reasoning.
If that don’t whup ‘um, I may just be forced to hold Occam’s straight razor to their throats…

rigid adherence.
Too early in the day to write in a foreign language.

If you are going to bring in courtly love, at least take the trouble to look up its definition:
“Courtly love was a medieval European conception of nobly and chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between husband and wife.”
Nobody is saying that people did not love each other before 1800. Amo amas amat etcetera. But very rarely did it have anything to do with marriage. Courtly love in particular was about a nobleman secretly flirting – with a *married* woman.

MH:”So what experiment could be disproves this statement:”The tree of life is there from the beginning. All evolution does is fill in the gaps. It’s painting by numbers.” I don’t think your could disprove this, so it’s metaphysics.”
Well, not all of science is experimental. A lot is inferential, drawing conclusions from observation. Sometimes this is just because an experiment wiould be impractical or unethical – in astronomy, for example, we observe existing stars to figure out the normal sequence of event’s in a star’s life. In principle, one could gather a whole lot of hydrogen in an empty space and observe it for the next twelve billion years. In practice, not so much.
But there are also disciplines in which experiments are not possible even in principle, and which we still dignify with the term “science”. Paleontology (lit. “the study of very old things”) happens to be one of these. Everything it studies happened in the past and is immune to our experimental tinkering.
It is actually a good thing thatpeople like Morris put forward alternative ideas; it shakes things up a little, lets us see data in a new way. Even if they are wrong.
The real problem with Morris is that his theory can be completely demolished by a single counter-example. For example, I give you the human being. Never before AFAWK has any organism evolved such an insane degree of encephelisation (big-brainedness). So there must be something wrong with the idea that every possible pattern pre-exists (hmm, very Platonic, when you come to think of it) and has been filled several times. This is a new pattern.
There are two possible responses to this objection. First, the pattern exists and always has but we happen to be the first to fill it. Somebody has to be first. But then you implicitly admit that there may be other, not-yet-filled niches and the whole argument that “There are only a few particular ways in which they can possibly work” is weakened because there might be other ways that could work, but which haven’t been tried yet.
Second, you could say that we are an anomaly, a minor disturbance that does not upset the general pattern. That is OK if we have just the one counter-example. Only mathematicians demand proof; the rest of us are happy with a high probability. But once you start piling up the counter-examples, the whole thing becomes more than a little shaky.
For example, every multicellular organism known today is built around a design based on internal tubes. Every one. But in the precambrian, there was a much greater variety of body plans and for a while it looked like the “quilted-pneu” type might win out. Where do the non-tubal body plans fit on the tree? Were they really inferior or was it just the luck of the draw that made our ancestors survive and take over the planet?
Or you could duck the issue and appeal to not-yet-found brainy dinosaurs or brainy aliens on Mars, of course, but this is still a science conference!
PS. Phew, just caught CAPTCHA pasting in a comment from a different blog altogether!

Please ignore the first post under my name (re: courtly love). That was CAPTCHA acting up.

LOVE this convo – can we expand the conversation to include as many points of view as possible? I for one consider science a constantly evolving map, and “evidence” relative–only because I believe that what we think we know now will be revealed to be limited understanding as time goes by. This is no endorsement of belief in the fantasy stories from the Bible,or other books, but just a point of view that says all we have is the science of today, which is the better understanding of tomorrow.
Have fun in Cambridge!

clasqm, an interesting post.
I’m not sure I accept your claim that observational sciences are that different from experimental ones. They still need to describe observations which can disprove the hypothesis. An example from paleontology would be finding human and dinosaur bones in the same layer of rock and dated to either great age, or extremely young age.
I suppose they differ in that they require you to accept that the past existed and that the universe wasn’t created last Tuesday with a set of initial conditions. But that’s a can of worms which degenerates into the universe getting created five minutes ago.

Good Morning Panthera,
Good to see you here. I’ve been occupied with ill relatives of late, and have missed our conversations. How was your Easter?
“Sadly, too many Christians reject faith in God and try to impose a rigid system of ‘God said it, the Bible wrote it, and I believe it’ to both their relationship with God and their demands on the rest of us. That isn’t faith and it isn’t science.”
Amen Sir.
Frightening statistic a month ago. Less than 35% of Americans accept Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Six years ago the number of Americans accepting Evolution was 55% Quite frankly, I don’t care what people’s religious beliefs are. I think God understands that we see through a glass darkly, as Paul said.
However, I foresee BAD, BAD consequences if the nation keeps trending in this direction. Will we soon have legislation that prohibits NIH and NSF funding for research that utilizes an evolutionary perspective (which is really most of it)?
It’s gotten well past the point where we can blame this on party affiliation. We’re not a 65% conservative or Republican nation. What are you seeing in Europe in the population at large?

Hey Georg,
I am sorry to hear that your family has gone through some rough times. Illness is one of those “stop everything, this has priority” aspects of life which shows us very quickly just how important family and friends are.
I do hope everyone is on the mend by now and you aren’t, yourself, exhausted.
My Easter was quite pleasant. It meant not seeing my husband for a few more weeks, but we both decided after the last weeks of Christmas that it was better for me to stay in Europe and take a break from the drama. Just as well – one of the rednex relations ended up in the hoosegow. On the positive side, one of my grand-nieces brought both her biological mommy, her step-mommy and her biological daddy and his parole officer to Easter Sunday services and dinner at my parents’ home. When my spouse got in his car to drive back to our house, I understand two cats, both hounds and the wolf-hybrid tried to pile into the back of the truck to leave with him. One cat managed to sneak into the cab and is firmly refusing to leave, I guess we just adopted her. Don’t know why the animals were upset, wouldn’t you just love to have five people under the age of three pulling your tail and putting lipstick on you (the wolf).
Still, nobody got shot, the cops didn’t get called and I daresay a fine time was had by all. Me? I spent the day in the hospital visiting an elderly friend who has since died, thank goodness (Hodgkin’s, and I wouldn’t even wish it on the white supremist who is now posting over on Rod’s blog).
You asked about Europe. Well, I can’t speak to the situation East of Germany or the Czech Republic. From the Eastern borders of those two countries up to the North and roughly on down to the South, then on back to the Hibernian peninsula, I think it is fair to say that we have a similar split to the US pre-Bush#41. The difference here is that religious conservatives and uneducated ignoramouses are not permitted to make decisions as to school curricula. The Jesuits in the most conservative part of Western Europe (where I live) would collectively breech birth cows if they had to deal with what passes for Christian doctrine in the US. One may be a devout Christian here and have no problem with the concept of the natural sciences.
Weird, huh? Or, maybe not. Reading the responses of the Christian right in the US today to the release of the torture memos, I increasingly understand why my European instructors taught us in grammar school days that the US was a pre-enlightenment country.
I wasn’t aware that randomness is a pre-requisite to either evolution. It was my understanding – which is not at the depth of a scientist such as yourself, merely that of a man who has had a standard University education – that natural selection within a given gene pool would tend towards convergence and any appearance of “sports”, tho’ per definitionem random, would not necessarily contradict the second law of thermodynamics. And that is what we are talking about here, no? The simplest solution which fulfills the design requirements such that offspring will successfully survive to sexual maturity is going to be granted preference. Which is why 10% homosexuality is a good thing in high order mammals, male-pattern baldness irrelevant and my sun-burn in the middle of April is, in mother nature’s eyes a perfectly acceptable tradeoff for making adult me lactose tolerant.
Or something like that.
Personally, I think the argument can be made that God knew precisely what he was doing when he created this universe and fail to understand why people persist in confusing causual and stochastic events. Guess I is am jus’ too D-U-M dumb to see it.
Speaking of which, I just learned something. A student’s term-paper informs me that we now have firm evidence that Bismuth is not stable. Kinda relevant, not to mention neat, huh? If true, their English was awfully good, hope it wasn’t another Wikipedia special…

I don’t see how convergence or the near inevitability of some functional solutions given certain initial conditions contradicts Neo-Darwinism. Given the dominance of mammals and a wide-open ecosystem, maybe “dogs” were inevitable, but we don’t really have any evidence that “dogs” were inevitable given multi-cellular life.
In other words, given some initial conditions in which the emergence of “dogs” is likely, then something like dogs may emerge, but they will not be genetically or chemically compatible with the mammals we call dogs [and the developmental path they follow to build a "dog" body will not be the same].
The fact that we can see the chemical, genetic, and developmental incompatibility between convergent solutions is how we know that they are convergent solutions rather than signs of common ancestry or “component reuse” by a designer.
And if we rewind the tape further back, the actual functional solution is likely to be different. Is four major limbs really better than six? Wouldn’t birds and bats be better off if they could have arms, legs, AND wings [or four legs and wings]? There may be another good reason for it, but the best unbiased explanation seems to be historical contingency.
I believe that there is good reason to believe that what we call “intelligence” may be inevitable, but that inevitable design does not specifically include my messed up right shoulder.

Oran
I am minded of the ancient joke – the proof that there is intelligent life in the universe maybe found in the fact that they stay away from Sol III.
You raise some good points. Of course, now that we are finding what very much looks like the human concept of morality in other mammals, I wonder just how much good design is the only possible answer and these many 100s of millions of years we reference are not really that long a span of time?
I seriously am going to have to do some reading this weekend. You and Georg have succeeded in making me feel my inadequacies. Thanks!

I think that you guys are going to evolve yourselves batty trying to disprove the obvious. “In the Beginning GOD created the Heavens and the Earth” P.S. I thought that Beliefnet was a god-fearing place but now that I see your Editor-in-Chief I’m not sure that it is.

A Believer,
There is not conflict whatsoever between acknowledging God as our Creator and the natural sciences.
Unless, of course, one is incapable of faith and, thus, demands God be exactly that (and not one bit more) which our mortal imaginations can grasp.
God-Fearing? Do, please, define “God-Fearing”.
Obviously, the term does not mean the same thing to me, a gay Christian that it does to you. I’ll go first, to demonstrate my good faith.
Fear of God means, to me, absolute terror that I, through my actions, am separating myself from God’s love. I already have his eternal forgiveness for my sins, this forgiveness is by God’s grace, extended through Jesus Christ.
But I am still quite capable of, and frequently do, separate myself from the expression of charity which God desires of me. Here’s the Bible on the subject, from the many passages on the topic, I chose a verse from Paul as he has preeminence for American conservative Christians:
AD CORINTHIOS EPISTULA I:
13 Nunc autem manet fides, spes, caritas, tria haec; maior autem ex his est caritas.
(Just the 13th verse, you might want to read the rest of the chapter, just saving electrons, here.)
That “maior autem” is rather worth noting, no?
Fine and good. That’s my God-Fearing for you. What, precisely is yours?
Once I know how you define the term, then, mayhap, we can discuss why (and it is a conceit, my computer occasionally puts the fear of lost files in me, but not of God) beliefnet.com is to be God-Fearing.

Panthera
The bible says to fear the Lord thy God.
When a child is young they depend on their parents to guide them through life. It is the job of the parent to love this child and to do their best to lead him/her through life. Unfortunately this means that, at times, a child needs to be disciplined. A child does not look any further than the end of their nose and when they do something wrong they may try lying as a way to avoid punishment. As the adult in this situation I know that lying leads to trust and credibility issues. The child does not know this though. It is the responsibility of the parents to engrain the importance of integrity into their children. The same goes for smoking for example. The child may think that it is cool. Big deal. In a few years the people they are trying to impress no longer really matter yet the child may be left with a lifetime of health problems. If talking to the child is not enough to encourage them to quit smoking then a more strict approach must be taken, for the sake of the child. There are simply hundreds of examples that can be given but I think you know what I am getting at.
The Bible says that the Lord loves you and I the same way a parent loves a child. So, the same way that a child needs leadership ,so do Gods children. The bible says that the Lord hates sin. Sin being that thing in your heart telling you the thing that you are doing is wrong. It also says that the wages of sin is Death. Those are pretty strong words. He must really HATE sin to say that. The good news though is that he sent (now I know you’ve heard this before but maybe you need to hear it again)his ONLY begotten Son that none should perish but have ever-lasting life.
Ever-lasting life with our Lord is a gift and no one is a child of the Father until they receive this gift. Now stop and think for a moment about gift-giving. What is it that happens. One person gives the gift and one person receives the gift There is a giver and a receiver. Jesus has given us a gift but the process is not complete until we reach out to him and receive it. The Bible says “Behold I stand at the door and knock, whoever hears me and lets me in, I WILL COME IN and dine with him and him with me. This simply is saying that sometimes the Lord will be there, extending his hand in forgiveness and when you feel him knocking at your heart there it is time to stop for a minute and listen. Get down on your knees and ask him to come into your heart and ask for His forgiveness. You may not get another chance. That was just a little something that the Lord laid on my heart to share.
Anyway, back to the question at hand. The same way a parent punishes a child, the Lord will chastise His Children. That is why ,even though I am a person with my own will, I do not want to make the Lord mad at me. I fear what the punishment may be. Don’t get me wrong though, I am far from perfect and am still a work in progress. That is OK now though because at least I’ve received His gift and just as a parent forgives the child the Lord has forgiven me.

a believer,Thank you, um, did you actually read my posting?
Perhaps you overlooked it, I did mention my salvation through grace, extended by God through Jesus.
Mayhap you find the fact of my being “gay” and “Christian” impossible, many conservative American Christians seem to demand the two qualities be mutually exclusive. Apart from the fact they are not, there is also the difficulty presented by demanding one’s salvation is not determined by God, rather, by the judgment on the conservative American Christian on the matter, him or herself.
I think I’ll rely on God’s forgiveness for my many sins.
We do certainly seem to understand the state of being God fearing differently, don’t we.
If I understand you correctly, you try to be good because you fear God’s punishment. Well, OK, nothing wrong with that. I am not afraid that God will punish me, He keeps his word and salvation is eternal. I am afraid of failing him.
I can separate myself from God very easily by doing wrong. And that is what I fear. Standing before him after my mortal death and being told he forgives me for the extraordinarily long list of sins I committed both through commission and omission is inevitable.
If I can shorten that list, it would be wise. There, we have a moment of agreement. The most effective punishment my parents had, the most effective training aid I have with dogs is: ‘I am disappointed in you. You can do better than that.’
Is this difference between us relevant? Or must we leave any discussion because, for you, the concept of being gay and Christian is untenable?

Back to the topic, I rather like Morris approach, his “all bets are off” willingness to not play the game of either science or “God said it, the Bible wrote it, I believe it” religion.
Just because I do not understand (nor, without a computer can I perform) the forbidden equations, does not change the observed existence of in-elastic scattering. If you are reading this on a screen which is fluorescent-lamp back lit, then you are observing scattering. No point saying it doesn’t exist, just because it is hard to understand (at least for me).
What would be interesting, would be to set up a simulation. The natural laws are immutable, so we would have to work with one need to be met but varying environments. Set up mechanisms which could lead to a situation and let the simulation apply them all until the best combination is found…then do the same again, but this time only provide the simulating engine with the environmental factors, rigid natural laws (a computer doesn’t “know” natural laws are immutable, you have to account for that) and let test for solutions, with sufficiently small granularity to mimic the time element.
Are am I missing something?

Panthera
Your sexual preference has no bearing on your eternal salvation. That depends on whether or not there has been one particular time in your life that you recieved the gift that the Lord gave his life for. I am not the Judge He is. I definitely hope for your sake that that gift has actually been recieved. Christ, don’t leave this world without Him. From my own experience I know that there was a time in my life before the Lord lived in my heart. I got down on my knees and LITERALLY confessed (from my mouth)to Him that I was a sinner and begged his forgiveness and asked him to come and live in my heart. From that day forward my life was no longer mine. I haven’t a shadow of a doubt that he lives in my heart. He is not just some mystical being far far away he’s alive and everything (through faith) I believe that he said from the beginning of time is true.
Just out of curiosity have you an experience similar to this?
yeah, I did read your post.
I also just would like to say that even though I haven’t seen the Creator, or the act of creation. I do recognize the kind of order that comes from an intelligent being.
?correct are am I right
I cannot bring myself to believe that the natural forces that make a snowflake can account for the structure of LIVING things.

maybe I am just too simple minded or is it that i’m just not evolved enough yet.

Genealogy of all life began when the earth cooled. Time,evolution [mother nature] brought us to this day, billions of years later. We homo sapiens are still part of beginning. Ancient atoms, now sophisticated in life , only to return to simple atomic forms at death. God’s creation was very small and clever atoms. Our souls find an infant body from which a spiritual gain can be made in life.

Believer,
Well, yes, of course. If one does not make a conscious acknowledgment of one’s sins and one’s inability to atone for them, how else may one ask God’s forgiveness? Why else need Jesus have died for my sins?
A long winded yes, but you must understand, I am not American and we do not have the same context of “saved through grace=no longer need to worry about my soul=can now be horrible to the flavor of the week on the hatred list”: Negroes, interracial couples, now gays.
In my Christian culture, salvation is seen as the basis requiring that we strive to manifest the fruits of the spirit. We just don’t waste our time fighting chimera when there are so many truly suffering in this world.
I hope I don’t sound unjust here, you’re willingness to maintain a discourse would get you kicked out of most conservative Christian groupings around my parent’s home in the US.
Frankly, I have an enormous struggle intellectually to even begin to grasp the smallest part of what Gerard Nadel and some others here discuss. Comes from having been educated far beyond my intelligence.
Anyway, I feel the natural sciences can, at best, help us to see the mechanisms of God’s creation in the same way that my ability to read music means I can play a Bach preludium adequately. But that essential spark of genius which led to his creating the music, no, of that I am incapable, regardless of how well I should strike the keys and how tempered the Klavier might be…

This is like asking if Tuedays have always followed Mondays, or was that a convenient happenstance. Evolution was not a matter of a dropped petri dish of cells messing with some divine perfect creation. Evolution happens – neither as an accident nor an intent. It simply is, and we are just starting to grasp it. It is not tidy or simple – it is complex and disorderly. Our human need to compell order where there is chaos or entropy is our own railing against the storm. Instead ride the waves, enjoy the changes, and watch in joyous wonder.

With all of this information floatimg around here somebody Must be able to answer this simple question. Which came first The male wolf or the female wolf? My Bible says that they were created simutaneously in one Literal day. According to the rules of faith I can choose to believe this or I can try to explain the complexity of life another way. If a hurricane blew through a Junkyard somewhere on this Earth there would be a better chance of this hurricane creating a fully functional Boeing 747 than of life simply Just Happening. This is just to goofy for my ?simple? mind to comprehend. I find that believing that Jesus created all of this wonder and glory in one day being easier to believe. One point of interest says that less than one billionth of a change in the DNA of any species would be catastrophic to the existence of this species. Human DNA is 1.6% different of our nearest ?cousins? the ape. If our all of the DNA in our body was changed stretched from end to end it would reach the moon over 5000 times.So for our DNA to ?mutate? 1 trillionth of a percentage point at a time it would be infinity before we were transformed into the beings that live on the earth today.

Panthera
You never did answer the question. Have you verbally asked God into your heart? What were the exact words? (Im trying to nail you down to a specific answer.)
As for “Christian Churches kicking me out” I dont care. I don’t seek their approval. I was trying to be nice when I said that your chosen lifestyle was between you and the Lord and ultimately it is however ,(since you have chosen to back me into a corner) IF men were meant to be with men would we not be able to procreate? Your chosen lifestyle contradicts both evolution and Gods word. However this does give rise to the fact that you are helping the Lord fulfill prophecy. “In the End Days men will be lovers of men…” Thank you for helping to prove the Bible true once again.