Pigliucci Challenges Randomness (Religion)

by dhw, Thursday, January 21, 2010, 15:37 (5418 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt has explained Pigliucci's line of thought, and there are two areas of this that bother me, though once again of course I can only discuss the ideas as you present them to me:-"...any person who takes an 'intelligent designer' argument is some form of creationist and for convenience he uses creationist throughout the book to refer to anything on the continuum that is NOT scientific materialism."-I'm glad you've explained this, but it seems to me a risky and even unfair line to follow. Is there anyone these days who doesn't associate Creationism with literal belief in the Bible, and hence with radical opposition to evolution? It would surely have been better to use "design" for anything that is not scientific materialism. Even though ID has been tainted with Creationism (sometimes deliberately by those with an agenda, but also by its own advocates), at least as a theory, design can be separated from the Bible and from any specific concept of God, and is not per se anti-evolution.-The second problem for me is the "Natural Selection equivocation", which is used over and over again by materialists seeking to pour scorn on the design theory. You say Pigliucci points out that "evolutionary theory as it stands makes no sense except in the light of natural selection." Quite true. But evolutionary theory as it stands also makes no sense except in the light of heredity, adaptation, innovation. And natural selection makes no sense unless there is something to select from! However, for materialists the great advantage of equating evolution with natural selection is that it's the only area of the theory that does not depend at one level or another on randomness. It's a totally logical principle, demonstrable in many spheres ... not just biological ... and you don't have to ask how the creative physical mechanism was originally formed because there IS no creative physical mechanism. Natural selection doesn't create anything. It only begins when the mechanisms of heredity, adaptation and innovation have done their work, after which logically whatever is advantageous in a particular environment will survive and be passed on. But it's precisely the origin of the creative mechanisms that remains unknown and therefore wide open to the interpretations of the faithful, whether theist or materialist. That's why in my view Pigliucci's so-called fallacy, as you've presented it (the erroneous argument that "evolution cannot be true because it purports to explain complexity in the biological world by means of random accidents") is based on an unfairly selective view both of evolution and of design.-As for the absurd claim that all theistic evolutionists reject natural selection, what on earth does he base that on? Let me yet again quote Darwin himself: "It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist." (Letter written May 7, 1879). I don't think he intended to exclude natural selection from that statement. And incidentally, the biology teacher who first introduced me to evolution long, long ago was a lay preacher.-*** Thanks for the piece about language. Fascinating subject, which I'll respond to next time round.