Let's study ID: clearly answering Darwin (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, February 12, 2022, 08:15 (804 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: “Whether presented centuries ago by Darwin or earlier naturalists, or by today’s evolutionists, the evidence and arguments for a strictly naturalistic origin of species is powerful and compelling. But the power of the arguments does not come from an objective empirical analysis. It comes from the underlying religious premises.”

I must confess I’ve read this whole article through twice, and I still have difficulty in understanding what all the fuss is about. It’s perfectly obvious that Darwin’s theory ran counter to established religious belief in separate creation, which by definition entails God as the Creator. How does that come to mean that the theory was based on religious premises? His theory was based fairly and squarely on empirical analysis, but inevitably his conclusions can be called subjective since ultimately there is no way anyone can provide the objective truth about how species (or indeed life itself) originated. Scientists can examine the same empirical information and draw diametrically opposite conclusions, but that doesn’t mean the power of the arguments comes from religious premises. On the contrary, the power of the empirical analysis may even LEAD to religious premises, as is the case with a friend of mine named David Turell.
The rest of the article goes on and on about theological implications, which seems to be a euphemism for atheistic interpretations of the theory, and of course these are no more and no less unscientific than the claim that God guided evolution or God created every species separately. As for webbed feet:

QUOTE: As Darwin argued, “we can hardly believe that the webbed feet of the upland goose or of the frigate-bird are of special use to these birds … We may safely attribute these structures to inheritance.” Inheritance was the right conclusion because no Creator worth his salt would have created such a utilitarian failure.
Of course, this is a religious argument. Remove the theological claim about what a Creator would and would not do, and the argument collapses. There is no scientific evidence here for evolution.

First of all, although I don’t know the context, I am 99.99% certain that Darwin would never have said anything like “No Creator worth his salt” etc., and would never have speculated on what a Creator would and wouldn’t do. He tries to find an explanation for vestigial structures and concludes that they are hereditary. Of course it’s not evidence for evolution: he is simply trying to explain those facts that might be seen as damaging to his theory: If natural selection gets rid of useless things, why do such useless things survive? He might have added the possibility that if a feature does not cause actual harm, it might survive through heredity.

QUOTE: “The theological claim that divine intent is strictly utilitarian is uniquely evolutionary. It makes for powerful arguments for evolution, but the power derives from the theology. Mark this: the stronger the argument for evolution, the stronger its theological commitment. Absent theology, there is little reason to believe the entire biological world arose spontaneously, as evolutionists heroically claim.”

This is the last straw. The theory of evolution does not purport to explain the origin of life! It seeks to explain Chapter 2 of life, i.e. the origin of species. When Darwin wrote: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one”, he may have been trying to appease his religious opponents, but he described himself as an agnostic and emphasized that he did not feel his theory should offend anyone’s religious feelings. The power of Darwin’s argument lies in his observations of the similarities between organisms, with variations that develop into separate species, suggesting common ancestry. Millions of scientists, faced with the same empirical data, draw the same conclusion, and they include vast numbers of religious people, who acknowledge that the theory does NOT exclude God as creator of the whole process. We do not have to accept all the details of the theory (I for one support common descent wholeheartedly but reject the concept of random mutations as the creative force behind innovation), but that does not in any way invalidate the empirical observations on which the theory is based, and it certainly doesn’t mean that support of the theory draws its power from theology.