This is something that has to be put simply and firmly: There is no design option in the theory of evolution by natural selection. The words ‘natural selection’ rule it out, and for someone like Plantinga to say that this is not settled is simply farfetched nonsense. In his Gifford Lectures, Where the Conflict Really Lies, which I forbear to buy, based on the Kindle sampler, Plantinga argues the improbable theory that Christianity and science are compatible whilst naturalism and science are not. Of course, once again he depends upon the hopelessly quixotic argument that naturalism, dependent as it is on the merely chance occurrence of the existence of intelligent organisms, cannot make good its claim to knowledge, for there is no reason to suppose that the deliverances of such an organism might be true. As he says (in the Kindle sampler of his book):
I argue that it is improbable, given naturalism and evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It is improbable that they provide us with a suitable preponderance of true belief over false.
I find it truly hard to believe that Plantinga can repeat, without blushing, such vacuousness. The point is that our cognitive faculties are not reliable, as he says, and that they do not provide us with a suitable preponderance of true belief over false, and this is precisely why science is so necessary, and why religion is almost sure to be simply wrong. Science depends upon the cooperation of many minds. It is a self-correcting methodology, that corrects for the lack of reliability of our cognitive faculties. As Plantinga must know, this is the earliest of philosophical problems: the conflict between appearance and reality. This conflict was recognised very early. Indeed, the whole of early Greek philosophy may be seen as a way of dealing with the disagreement and dialectic that this conflict produces. The Sophists, after all, prided themselves on their rhetorical ability to make the weaker reason appear the stronger.
Plantinga continues from the above in the following way:
But then a naturalist who accepts current evolutionary theory has a defeater for the proposition that our faculties are reliable. Furthermore, if she has a defeater [for this] …, she has a defeater for any belief she takes to be produced by her faculties.
Well, yes indeed, so she does, and that is why she must submit that belief to the rigorous testing and retesting of her peers, and, after that rigorous testing she has every reason rationally to accept that the belief is true, or, if it fails the test, that it is false. Plantinga seems to think that origin of our cognitive faculties makes a difference. If our cognition is the result of divine planning, so that there is some coordination between how things really are and our beliefs, then we can have greater trust in them. But why should this be so? If Plantinga’s proposal is true, would we not have to check to make sure? Could we then simply claim that our beliefs are true simply because we have them? Of course not. Even Plantinga, one supposes, knows better than this. But it is on this supposed reliability that his religious beliefs depend absolutely, since there is no other evidence than the beliefs that people hold that they are true. And so right here, at the foundation of his attempt to show “where the conflict really lies”, we see the weakness of the foundations of his thought.
I have mentioned before, I think, how it was that I came, so late in life, to read Darwin’s masterpiece, On the Origin of Species. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to repeat the story here in a bit more detail. The biographical details may be inaccurate, but that will not matter, since it happened very much like this. One summer, as we were getting ready for holiday, a little propaganda piece from a local fundamentalist church was left in the Rectory doorway. It’s main purpose was to declare that evolutionary biology conflicted with the inspiration of God’s word and was thus to be rejected by faithful Christians. I think it also added something to the effect that some churches accepted evolution and were, thus, unfaithful to God’s word, and therefore could not guarantee — as the sect in question could do — redemption and eternal reward. But that item, of course, may be just my faulty memory, and a settled disposition to distrust fundamentalists.
In any event, since this piece of fundamentalist propaganda had been widely distributed in the town, door to door, I thought I ought to respond to it. Knowing nothing at all about evolution, but knowing that it was the accepted theory of how life on earth came to be, I set about on its defence. I started by reading Darwin — a very good place to start, I thought, though, in the event, it didn’t solve all the problems alleged by my doughty fundamentalist neighbours. Needless to say, however, I was completely bowled over by Darwin. The Origin, I found, to my delight, is a masterpiece of English prose, not only a scientific tour de force. By the time I had finished, our holiday was upon us, so I had to manage some very quick, and much less classic, prose, than Darwin’s, if I were to leave behind something to help the faithful ponder helpfully on issues which, even then, I did not know had become such a sensation south of the border. I quickly jotted down some notes, but then realised I did not have enough to go on, so I dashed off some questions to a professor of biology at Dalhousie University, who answered very quickly and graciously indeed, even though I do not now remember his name. The outcome was a short essay which I left behind in the parish newsletter for parishioners to read in my absence.
But reading Darwin was more epochal than that, at least for me. I realised, as I read, that a whole world of which I had remained completely ignorant, beckoned, and that it raised challenges for faith that I could not then answer. I had three years yet to serve in the parish, and during those three years, as I faced, not only Darwin and other writings on evolution — I chanced upon Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea shortly after having read Darwin — but also the fact that my beloved wife Elizabeth had been so obviously selected out — the fact that all that had seemed so stable and reliable until then started simply to slip and slide and become an unstable mass of doubts and questions, which, during that last three years, I began to explore, quite openly, with the people I then served. I had already joined forces, as it were, with Don Cupitt, but was not prepared to go all the way with him; but now, it seemed, I was being driven further, much further, indeed, and faith itself became, not a sham, but something near allied. I used to say in those years to Elizabeth that I could no longer find positive things to say about the lections appointed for the day, or about the beliefs that more and more were overshadowed by grief and doubt.
In the end, as most of you will know, faith could no longer stand, and it was brought crashingly to earth with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech to the House of Lords opposing Lord Joffe’s assisted dying bill. That was, for me, the watershed moment, but the flow was all in that direction already, and it only took that speech to make the slope precipitous. Darwin was at the centre of it. It seemed clear – how could it not have been? — that there was no larger point or purpose to my life, and that all my frenzied attempts to find a larger framework in which to place it was simply a delusion. I should have seen it much sooner. I remember during those last years in ministry someone who was doing a Doctorate in Ministry at Acadia University Divinity School, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, who used me as one of his test cases for the effect of personal experience on styles of ministry. He did a detailed interview with me of my experiences and how I thought that impinged upon my practice. Later, he sent me a copy of his dissertation, of which I saved at least his conclusions regarding me. When I read it now, I am surprised that Elizabeth does not figure in the story at all, and yet hers was the decisive influence upon my life and on my ministry. Without her, my life would have taken an entirely different course. Without her, Darwin, I suspect, would have been left unread, and certainly, without her, and without her suffering, the problem of pain would probably have remained, as it clearly is for most theologians, simply an academic puzzle.
Does that mean, as Plantinga seems to suggest, that I should doubt the conclusions to which I have come? After all, I was led on this intellectual journey largely by a series of chance events. It was only by sheer chance that Elizabeth and I should have met, and even more a chance that we should have fallen so in love, and by chance too, that we should have married, and despite our very different ages (27 years in the difference!), that our marriage should have been so full of good things. A further chance it was that fundamentalists should have chosen that moment to propagandise the neighbourhood, and just by chance that I should have taken the challenge so personally, and read Darwin, and followed that up with further exploration of the theory of evolution — all, I freely acknowledge, at a very shallow level — and chance that the potent combination of Elizabeth’s debilitating illness and Darwin’s theory should have led me, as it led Darwin himself, to realise that natural selection is so casually brutal to those we love, and therefore that the idea of the goodness of a god should be so improbable and unbelievable. But none of those chances lead me to say that the theory of evolution is untrue or doubtful, because it is so solidly backed up by repeated confirmation, and by its consistency with what Darwin simply did not know, about genes and DNA, and the molecular structure of inheritance, and the purely natural character of selection. We can explain why certain things have been selected, because we can show, in at least some cases, what led those characteristics to have survival value in the environments in which they were selected. But there is simply no evidence at all that this process is the result of design, and every reason to think that it was not. And the main reason for believing that it was not designed by a gracious and loving creator is that it is so desperately cruel.
That is the journey I set out on that summer’s day, trying to think of a holiday that Elizabeth and I could have, where Elizabeth’s growing disabilities would not be an obstacle and where her love of travel could be enjoyed. And so we set out, that August day in 2002, on a journey across this great country that we shared, and that she had, in a special way, made my own, which was also and intellectual journey that would lead me, five years later, to declare my unbelief, but not even now to sever myself from the church that, in a sense, brought us, completely by chance, together, and made us so wonderfully one for the few years that she had left to live. And when people say how cruelly Christopher Hitchens was cut off from life at 62, I remember now that Elizabeth was even more cruelly cut off from all that she loved and held dear at the young age of 38, still full of life till the very end, though it was one she chose, instead of letting the sands of life run out through even more cruel suffering yet to come. But it was that choice that determined for me finally, and without any question, that life is not designed by someone else. We can decide, and need not sit idly by, watching it happen to us. Hitchens was, I think, terribly wrong in this, to believe, as he puts it, in what may be his final essay, that there is a something “that properly belongs to a life span.” We get to choose, if we want, what we are prepared to endure, and what our span of life properly will be; and just because there is suffering yet to come, does not mean that it properly belongs to your life span unless you choose to endure it. And that is one reason why we need to say firmly, but politely, to Plantinga, that he is simply wrong. There is no design, and the gods have nothing to do with it. They are delusions, and to enforce belief in them, as so many do to their children, is not only to perpetuate delusion; it is also unkind, as any imagined god must be, given that we live in such a world at this.
And intelligent and thoughtful piece. Quite moving too. Thank you.
It’s discouraging that Plantinga is considered a serious philosopher. At least, it doesn’t say much for philosophy. Perhaps it is precisely because of his ability to make the weaker reason appear the stronger?(Nice Paradise Lost allusion, by the way!) But he has, in the past, made the mistake of trying to put numbers to his sophistry. (A mistake for him because it really shows just how erroneous his reasoning is.) I recall Plantinga writing how under naturalism the probability of a belief being true was 0.5. A number plucked out of nowhere but his own innumeracy. PZ Myers did a wonderful critique of this argument from a while back.
Thank you, again, for sharing your stories and your philosophical journeys. While I’ve not lost anyone so close to me, two people I deeply care about also suffer from MS. And I count you, along with UU ministers Bob Schaibly and Bruce Bode, as having tutored me most profoundly about what great humanity remains once we’ve pushed dogma out of the way.
Bruce was the first who encapsulated it so clearly to me, describing his own faith crisis and transition from Christianity to humanism: he had learned to take great personal comfort that no divine intellect dictates his suffering for the sake of some higher purpose. That he need not rejoice in his suffering for those mysterious ends. Terrible things happen, and we are not resigned, we just hold on to what meaning and love remain.
Plantinga is profoundly confused. Variation and natural selection is not a process for enabling the discovery of true beliefs. It is a consequence of that process that organisms that behave more appropriately will, on average, leave more descendants. It doesn’t matter in evolutionary terms if I am right or wrong to believe the long twisty thing is a snake (or a god, or a nature spirit), as long as I behave appropriately.
I’m always angrily disturbed by these kinds of arguments, which to me are expressing the following:
“Science doesn’t know everything, therefore Jesus was totally real.”
Sophistry, indeed.
Eric,
Excellent essay, as always. Somewhat parenthetically, one thing that leaped out at me was your first quote of Plantinga. Curious – and indicative of that natural tendency to fool ourselves – that he would assert that “our cognitive faculties are unreliable” yet be unwilling, apparently, to consider that his beliefs in Christianity are likewise.
But more important, I think, is your somewhat problematic assertion that “there is no design option in the theory of evolution by natural selection”. While you no doubt have in mind some “personal theistic” overarching designer – aka the Judaic-Christian “Gawd” about which I have no quibbles, and your “natural selection” forestalls some counter-arguments, I still think there are some important aspects that are being swept under the rug.
Specifically, even Darwin himself acknowledged the phenomenon of artificial selection – i.e. goal directed selection – which seems to raise the question as to what extent conscious choice has played a role in the general evolution of life. For instance, Stuart Hameroff and Lyn Margulis, among others, have suggested that consciousness is a rather ubiquitous phenomenon and may have contributed substantially to the “Cambrian Evolutionary Explosion”:
Now it might be an unwarranted stretch or an invalid metaphor to characterize that process as a pantheistic or panentheistic deity, but that consciousness seems to be an important aspect of at least some interpretations of quantum mechanics would at least seem to suggest otherwise.
Steersman, let’s start at the end. I’m not sure how you’re getting to even a quasi-pantheistic or panentheistic deity from the fact that evolved organisms may contribute to the process of evolution by conscious or semi-conscious choice. After all, cognitive abilities are products of evolution, so “choices” that are made by such organisms and are adaptive are naturally selected. To jump from this to “as least some interpretations of quantum mechanics” in which consciousness plays a role is surely a jump too far. Besides, I’m not buying quantum mechanics and consciousness without a lot of evidence. I know there are all sorts of people doing the circuit talking about qm and spirituality, etc., but it’s all hokum, so far as I can tell. I don’t see any reason to go there. However, as usual, I’m always open to the evidence showing where I’ve gone wrong.
@Steersman: I invite you to head over to WEIT or Pharyngula and float that argument to either of those two biologists.
You will get your head handed to you in about 2 seconds time.
You’re promoting a Lamarckian view of evolution. It has been disproved. Proven wrong. It is falsifiable and has been proven false.
Sorry to be so blunt, but I don’t want you to think there’s any comfort to be had in continuing to think you’re correct.
You’re wrong.
This heartfelt and well written response does Plantinga far too much credit. Fancy vocabulary aside, he more or less implies that since nothing can have absolute certainty every belief can be valid. This is beyond ludicrous for very, very, obvious reasons.
Kevin:
I wasn’t thinking about this in terms of Lamarckianism, and that’s why I put “choices” in quotes. Cognitive abilities are certainly selected for. That’s evident. Bats that respond more quickly and accurately to echoes clearly steal a march over those that do not, and so on. But how you get from that to pantheism or panentheism, or some kind of cosmic consciousness, is beyond me. As for qm and consciousness, I’m not aware of any competent scientific interpretation of qm that would deliver anything of the sort.
Kevin said (#7),
You’re promoting a Lamarckian view of evolution. It has been disproved. Proven wrong. It is falsifiable and has been proven false.
I admit that the original formulation is improbable, but it seems that there is more than a small amount of evidence for what appears very much like it, specifically epigenetic inheritance – about which I am also admittedly not all that knowledgeable. However, you might want to take a look at a chapter in a book edited by Pigliucci and Muller – Evolution: The Extended Synthesis – titled Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance by Jablonka and Lamb which has these salient comments:
Now I find that particular chapter, along with the rest of the book, somewhat of a tough slog – fascinating though – but it seems that perspective has more than a small amount of credibility – I think even Dr. Coyne indicated some support for the idea, although I think he was less keen about the idea that that perspective – along with the similar or related ones encompassed by that book of Pigliucci and Muller – constituted a revolution.
While the process and consequences of those “environmental effects” seems somewhat obscure, it also seems quite plausible, based on no small amount of tangible evidence, that they could have been part and parcel of the development and evolution of consciousness, not just in humans but in other species.
I know nothing about epigenesis. However, if what I have read over at Why Evolution is True is anywhere near correct, this is not the remarkable revolution in evolutionary theory that seems to be being claimed by Jablonka and Lamb. I quote from one of several posts that Jerry Coyne has done on the subject:
I do wonder why a big deal is made over the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. First, it seems completely absurd to think that a matter of largely empirical description can be settled a priori. Reflected upon? Yes. Even proposing ways to investigate the issue.
Second, that evolution happened and happened unguided is overwhelming so what evolution can and can’t do would be better served by measuring our species. Where are the studies of our genome showing patterns of design? If we had a guiding hand in the process then it is in theory detectable. Why aren’t proponents looking?
Thirdly, there’s a good evolutionary account of why we can rely on our coinition to an extent: there’s survival value in getting it right and getting it wrong can be fatal. There’s as much advantage in being able to fashion a cutting tool as it is for a predator to evolve sharp claws. Our ancestors have been fashioning tools for millions of years, harnessing fire for over a million, getting better and better at modifying the environment for our own benefit…
Eric (#6),
I’m not really “buying” quantum mechanics and consciousness either – only that in dutifully following the precepts of the “hypothetico-deductive method” and the philosophy of science I think it a plausible hypothesis that warrants being evaluated on its merits and not discarded before then.
And I am likewise skeptical about “qm and spirituality”, about “quantum mysticism” which one well-known scientist [Gell-Mann, I think] called “quantum flapdoodle”.
And finally, consistent with the above, I certainly wouldn’t argue that you’re wrong about the link between quantum mechanics and consciousness because it doesn’t appear that there is any solid evidence for it. However, this Wikipedia article on the interpretations of the science indicates that of the some 18 to 20 different ones over one third of them assert that the wavefunction is real and several of those argue further that it is consciousness that causes the collapse of that wavefunction. Although I notice that one of the references in a related article claims “… that the existing empirical evidence can be used to falsify the predictions derived from the collapse-by-consciousness hypothesis”. Now most of all of that is quite a bit outside my salary range, but to me it still looks very much like an open question – definitely a horse-race.
As to whether that justifies any “quasi-pantheistic or panentheistic deity” – assuming that there’s a fundamental link between consciousness and the salient features of quantum mechanics or whatever else might eventually replace or extend it – that still seems to depend heavily what is the key element or process that leads to consciousness. If it is just a case of adding a bunch of “stuff” – building blocks of one sort or another – until some threshold is crossed – the way consciousness showed up on the scene with our distant relatives, a la “Space Odyssey 2001” – then that would appear to preclude such deities. But if the salient features of consciousness – and Hameroff and Margulis would appear to argue that the phenomenon of choice is key – happen to appear at very much lower levels of evolution then the argument seems a little more plausible.
And I would argue, as suggested by this article from Discover, since quantum processing and computations – “quantum random walks” – appear to be at the heart of the photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria, that that process of choice is something that goes “all the way down” – which would seem to lend even more credibility to the “panentheistic deity”.
Although, in passing and as a preliminary relative to several recent comments, I should emphasize that that conception seems to be entirely different from, if not antithetical to, the anthropomorphic version that seems to be the one in the minds of most theists and atheists. It is not that “God” is conscious and is a culpable entity that can be blamed for the existence of evil, but that consciousness is god – something along the line of what Stuart Kauffman apparently has in mind with his discussion and book on “Reinventing the Sacred”. But I’m really not sure that that perspective has a lot of value, but, again, I still think it a hypothesis worthwhile to at least consider.
Eric (#11),
Yes, I quite agree with your summary, that “there is simply no room in natural selection for the introduction of the kind of design that Plantinga is seeking to impose on the data”. And that’s largely because he, along with William Lane Craig and his ilk, seems to be a “personal theist” – in Feser’s terminology at least – which he seems to think will guarantee him a place at the table with a literal Jesus in “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”.
But what I had in mind was probably something more along the line of what the sci-fi writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. called “The Universal Will to Become”; not some sky-daddy with its finger in every pie, but simply the keystone that supports the overarching phenomenon of consciousness yet one that “goes all the way down”.
As for whether the epigenetic inheritance mechanisms that Jablonka and Lamb described, along with the other aspects by the other authors in that book, qualify as a revolution seems to be somewhat debatable – something about which “honest men may disagree”. While some in the journalism industry seem to have tried to promote the idea that it is, probably for the sake of sensationalism, from the limited amount that I have read so far in it I don’t think that any of the authors are actually claiming that the extensions qualify as a revolution. Although the changes suggested certainly seem to me to be rather extensive.
But thanks for the link to Coyne’s post on the topic – certainly quite a different picture.
Kel said (#12),
Second, that evolution happened and happened unguided is overwhelming … If we had a guiding hand in the process then it is in theory detectable. Why aren’t proponents looking?
Depends on what you mean by unguided. If the idea is one of Jehovah fiddling things at every step of the way then that of course is simply unbelievable. But the idea I was suggesting was one in which virtually all of the actions of humanity from square one were part of the guiding process – a case of artificial selection writ large.
Seems rather strange to me at times that we can recognize that mankind has basically transformed the wolf into thousands of breeds of dogs over a span of some 10,000 to 30,000 years, basically through artificial selection, yet we seem to have some trouble considering that we’ve done the same thing to ourselves over an even greater span.
Maybe part of the problem is that many of us still insist on seeing ourselves as separate from the other species – still just slightly below the angels. Maybe this comment from the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson in the book Evolution: The Extended Synthesis is reflective of that:
Steersman, I think in this circumstance we can limit the discussion to the animal that’s capable of coming up with naturalism given that’s the topic at hand.
As interesting as theories of design in nature are – GM crops can’t be explained without conscious designers – it’s simply not relevant to the question of evolution’s capacity to build reliable cognition. That humans intervention has been responsible for particular cat breeds is an important point to make in regard to Intelligent Design in nature, but nothing to do with the evolutionary argument against naturalism.
The point I was making in #12 was to do with arguments about our cognitive capacities and how that should correlate with what’s observable in our genome. Saying that a designer must have played a part in our cognition should correlate to some observable evidence. That it doesn’t leaves the EAAN severely wanting…
Kel (#16),
Learn something new everyday:
But while one might argue that your “GM crops can’t be explained without conscious designers” is entirely relevant to the question as that seems a pretty significant example of “reliable cognition” in itself, it seems to me that, in general and from the indicated article, Plantinga is having a bit of an uphill battle in trying to sell that snake oil – apparently several philosophers have pointed out any number of logical flaws in his argument.
And while I can’t say that I fully understand all of the pros and cons in it and am certainly not able to provide any detailed critique of them, my impression is that he starts off badly on the wrong foot to begin with – no doubt because he’s trying to shoe-horn some rather ugly Christian dogma into the glass slipper of science and reason – so to speak.
But more specifically it seems to me that, for starters, his whole argument is predicated on a denial that there is in fact any “reliable cognition” in “man’s mind”. And if that were true then that seems “self-defeating” – entirely pointless then as a matter of fact for him to be engaging in all of his subsequent “logic-chopping”. But since he apparently doesn’t think it pointless one must infer that he thinks, presumably on some evidence, that we are generally capable of such “reliable cognitions”. The question then becomes one of assessing which facts suggest which results of what cognitions are reasonably accurate – for which, of course, science appears to have the most credible method.
In addition, it seems that he has a rather flawed conception of science and evolution – probably not surprisingly – which appears to be predicated on a logical fallacy, i.e. reification, a common manifestation of which is the “confusion of a model with reality”: the theory of evolution is a very good model for the explanation and prediction of various phenomena and subject to continual revision (if not revolution), but it is still not what he apparently thinks it is as perceived by the scientists who use it, i.e. some sort of prescriptive law presumably from Jehovah Himself that permits no exceptions.
Hence I would say that that EAAN doesn’t hold any water at all and is only a further example of self-delusion on the part of theologians.
But your suggestion that if “a designer … played a part in our cognition [then that] should correlate to some observable evidence” seems a little questionable. You have probably heard of the parody religion “Last Thursdayism” which posits that “God” created the entire universe last Thursday but made it look like it’s been around much longer – such a kidder that Jehovah. But the point, discussed at some length by Massimo Pigliucci here, is that that “hypothesis” and those types of hypotheses [“elaborate and fanciful admissions of ignorance” in Pigliucci’s phrasing] are not at all disprovable. One might make some assertions about improbability but those still rest on some questionable assumptions and conjectures, not certainty.
And all of that seems only to highlight the difference between, on the one hand, the religious “sensibility” which seems far too willing to “rest satisfied” with “Philosophick romances” that explain everything and nothing, and, on the other, the methodology of science which insists on tangible evidence and predictable consequences.
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Exactly, which is what Eric was arguing earlier.
To give an alternate point of view, Antony Flew’s Theology and Falsification. If you take the word designer to not have any marks of design, then in what sense is there to call it a designer? The whole point of design arguments is the observation of markers of design. Even with the argument that we can’t detect that there’s supernatural intervention, what matters is the effect not the cause. If homoeopathy worked, then it doesn’t matter if the cause is material or not. Because even if science cannot detect the mechanism by which homoeopathy works, it can detect whether it works or not.
The point being that what Massimo is saying about the supernatural is tangential to the point I’m making. I agree with him that being able to correctly identify a supernatural cause is impossible (his chapter in Nonsense On Stilts about ID illustrated this well enough), but it doesn’t apply in this case because whether or not the cause is supernatural we are talking about a supposed natural effect. If we can’t detect any intervention, then on what grounds can we say there’s any intervention at all? It would come down to wishful thinking on the part of our proponent of intervention.
@ Steersman…again, I invite you to head over to either Pharyngula or WEIT, where that particular bit of nonsense of Pigluicci and Muller has been thoroughly and completely fisked. You’re only about a year behind. Search their archives first, otherwise you might embarrass yourself.
You’re invited to take up the challenge with real biologists. Who really and truly will tell you that the notion is pure bunkum.
With regard to epigenetics, it’s a much misused word, so much so that even those who study the phenomenon disagree on its definition. And you’ll hardly find Coyne a fan of it as a phenomenon that teaches much about evolutionary theory. And in the end, traits that may possibly be passed on in a non-standard fashion in a very small group of organisms (that group not being inclusive of humans) don’t survive to become part of the species’ overall characteristics – they’re lost after one or so generations. So, in the end, using that definition of epigenetics, it’s a non-starter. And certainly doesn’t come close to providing support for cosmic woo.
Kel (#18) said,
To give an alternate point of view, Antony Flew’s “Theology and Falsification”. If you take the word designer to not have any marks of design, then … what sense is there to call it a designer?
It’s a hypothesis with a number of different features and attributes depending on those who advance it – next to nothing to justify it and more along Pigliucci’s “elaborate and fanciful admissions of ignorance”, but still a hypothesis. Not much less, one might argue, at least in some cases, than those of string theory which, according to Lee Smolin in his The Trouble with Physics, are believed by its proponents “with a certainty that seems emotional rather than rational”.
Even with the argument that we can’t detect that there’s supernatural intervention, what matters is the effect not the cause.
I think you’re not reading what I’m saying very closely or simply want to argue for the sake of arguing. I’ve repeated several times now in several different ways that I’m not at all arguing for any supernatural causation. My argument, here and elsewhere, has generally been that anything that is is natural, even if science can’t – or, even, can’t ever – explain or even detect it. Not differentiating between those two classes seems to me to qualify as scientism – at least to the extent that it “refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the systematic methods and approach of science”.
If we can’t detect any intervention, then on what grounds can we say there’s any intervention at all?
Have I been arguing for any supernatural intervention?
Kevin said (#19),
Thanks for the suggestion about the archives which certainly have some interesting articles in them, although I haven’t read them all. But I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to there with your “nonsense of Pigliucci and Muller …. completely fisked” [?] – if by that you mean “epigenetics completely rejected and disproven” – as that seems a bit of an exaggeration. For example, this from a letter to the Guardian’s editor provided in one of Dr. Coyne’s posts:
If epigenetically caused differences are transmitted from parents to offspring their effects are thus tiny and cannot account for much of what happens in evolution. [Charlesworth & Charlesworth; Guardian; September 3, 2011]
But one of the arguments of evolution seems to be that small causative factors acting over a long period of time can have far reaching effects.
And even Coyne acknowledges that it is an important factor, although he argues, rather convincingly, that it is not a major one:
[I was] arguing that while epigenetics was a novel and important new phenomenon in genetics and development, it wasn’t poised to completely revise our view of evolution for three reasons.
But neither Jablonka and Lamb nor the articles collected by Pigliucci & Muller are claiming that any one or any group of the ideas discussed constitute a revolution about to “completely revise” the theory of evolution. Although one might argue that if even half of them have any credibility or significant range of action the result is likely to be a picture quite a bit different from what is provided by the current Modern Synthesis.
As for “cosmic woo”, I am again at a loss as to exactly what you are referring to except maybe your previous “You’re promoting a Lamarckian view of evolution”. But, apart from the fact that I wasn’t referring to anything remotely equivalent to Lamarckism – specifically only the artificial selection that Darwin himself acknowledged and which is entirely genetic, it still seems the general idea has some merit and range of applicability. As Coyne says in another post:
In other words, neo-Lamarckism: the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Well, in one way that’s true: stuff like methylation is an “acquired” characteristic that can be passed on for one or a few generations. But it’s acquired via genetic instructions in the DNA, and it’s inherited for only a handful of generations. So, while important, it’s not a dramatic new paradigm of genetics.