Ignorance of the gaps

[Charlemagne_III]

cfauster

I read the article you cited on ID. It has much to commend it. While Thomism regards the world as a creation of order and beauty by the Creator, I don’t see why ID cannot fit into Thomism. All ID says is that, abiogenesis (the creation of the first living being) was such a complex event that it had to be designed, as opposed to an accident of nature. Whether that required divine intervention on the day of its creation, or whether the Creator programmed its emergence on the first day of Creation in Genesis, seems to me to produce the same result … an Intelligent Creator at work. Some evolutionists (like Dawkins) have made much ado about using evolution to dismiss the Intelligent Designer of the world and all the creatures in it. They have occupied the scientific field and claimed it for a triumph of atheism. All the Dominicans and other misguided Catholics are doing is capitulating to the evolutionists, who have already dismissed Thomism as a rational explanation for much of anything. I sympathize with the professor of philosophy mentioned in the article who was angry about the lack of will among the religious orders to combat atheistic evolutionism wherever they see it. I happen to believe in evolution, but I certainly agree with Behe that there is nothing in the science of biology to defend the proposition that abiogenesis was the result of blind chance. That has never even been proven scientifically. The reasonable view that it would have taken an intelligent designer to build a mousetrap is dwarfed by the recognition that it would take a Supremely Intelligent Designer to build a far more complex entity … the first living creature on earth.

 

[balto]

I read the article you cited on ID. It has much to commend it. While Thomism regards the world as a creation of order and beauty by the Creator, I don’t see why ID cannot fit into Thomism.

As far as I know intelligent design theory is not compatible with classical theism as proposed by Aquinas. I say this as someone who used to be sympathetic to the ID movement. The problem with ID is its supposition that the universe is some kind of gigantic machine which functions according to some fixed set of rules. It then goes on to say that it is probable that “irreducibly complex” organisms/structures are not going to arise randomly, therefore a designer must exist. Both the ID theorists and the Darwinists have discarded Aristotle’s formal and final causes which are extremely important.

Contrast this with Aquinas’ view of purpose/design in nature as proposed in his Fifth Way. The fact that anything tends towards a particular outcome over other outcomes is as significant as any other. So the fact that life evolved to the complexity it has is as remarkable as the fact that striking a match leads to fire. Therefore, there are final causes in nature that can be known through reason. We can obviously look at organisms and see their bodily organs and conclude that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood to give oxygen to various parts of the body. The purpose of eyes is for seeing, lungs for breathing in oxygen, sexuality for reproduction, etc. Not only that but the purpose of condensation is to lead to precipitation. The purpose of the ozone layer is to absorb UV rays and incubate the planet to a life-sustaining temperature. The purpose of photosynthesis is to create sugar from light and carbon dioxide. Purpose permeates all of creation, not just irreducibly complex systems.

Since purpose is the result of final causality which is held in being through a mind, God must hold everything in being and direct it to its final causes because this meaning exists independent of whether any human discovers it via his intellect. Thomists are not willing to concede the loss of final causes to the materialists and ID theorists grant them that victory. Darwinists have little to say in defense of the obvious purposes and intentionality inherent in biology. All they can say is that there is no purpose and we just assign purpose to things ex post facto, which is obviously false because it does not depend on our understanding the purpose for the purpose to exist.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

balto

I agree with everything you say. I just don’t see why ID is exempt from the law of purpose. Yes, everything has a purpose or it would not have been created. The question is whether it was likely that random elements came together without purpose to produce abiognesis. The secular evolutionists claim yes. But the likelihood of this happening is virtual zero. So the only alternative is that these elements were directed to come together for a purpose. Why that is not consistent with teleology, and in this case a particular kind of teleology, escapes me.

The main objection to ID I have heard is that it assumes abiogenesis is a kind of special intervention of God at a moment in history, God nudging inanimate matter into animation. But that’s not surprising from a theological point of view, is it? After all, God “nudged” the universe into existence with the Big Bang. This presupposes divinity at work. Science and religion are not supposed to overlap. For example, the Incarnation was a moment in which God intervened in human history and nudged us toward salvation. But science can say nothing on the matter, and most scientists would deny it could happen because it implies special intervention of a divinity, which is not the subject of science. But I don’t think Behe, for example, is mixing religion and science. Rather, he is drawing a conclusion that reasonable men draw. If the odds are that a thing was intelligently designed, why not concede that the odds are in favor of that conclusion.

It’s that the evolutionists cannot stand the idea of deliberate design anywhere in the universe except in their scientific labs. Well then, let them design an experiment in which life randomly comes together. But that is an absurd tautology. You cannot intelligently design “random.” So where is the “proof” that scientists are supposed to cherish as a requirement for any scientific hypothesis?

“True science to an ever-increasing degree discovers God as though God were waiting behind each closed door opened by science.” Pope Pius XII

 

[balto]

I agree with everything you say. I just don’t see why ID is exempt from the law of purpose. Yes, everything has a purpose or it would not have been created. The question is whether it was likely that random elements came together without purpose to produce abiognesis. The secular evolutionists claim yes. But the likelihood of this happening is virtual zero. So the only alternative is that these elements were directed to come together for a purpose. Why that is not consistent with teleology, and in this case a particular kind of teleology, escapes me.

I understand what you are thinking (because the same questions were going through my head about a month ago), but the difference is subtle but yet highly significant. The difference is whether one adheres to final causality or not. I think ID implicitly denies final causality and attempts to say that the universe is a designed machine whereas the secularists claim it is an undesigned machine. The problem is that it is not a machine at all.
Charlemange III:

The main objection to ID I have heard is that it assumes abiogenesis is a kind of special intervention of God at a moment in history, God nudging inanimate matter into animation. But that’s not surprising from a theological point of view, is it? After all, God “nudged” the universe into existence with the Big Bang.

This is the issue though. It’s not the case that God created some kind of matter and then organized it into the universe. Everything that He created tends to a final cause. This is different than saying that the universe is like a complex stopwatch as Paley described. A stopwatch in the Scholastic tradition would be described as an artifact because none of the parts composing the stopwatch have any inherent tendency towards forming stopwatches. ID seems to presuppose that the universe has no tendency for life and God kind of has to force things to come together when they wouldn’t otherwise come together. Secularists claim that life evolves naturally but then deny that there is any meaning or purpose involved. We can see the purpose of things all around us. To claim that the purpose is a human construct is problematic because these phenomena have tendencies to ends regardless of whether a scientist recognizes it or not.
Charlemange III:

It’s that the evolutionists cannot stand the idea of deliberate design anywhere in the universe except in their scientific labs. Well then, let them design an experiment in which life randomly comes together. But that is an absurd tautology. You cannot intelligently design “random.” So where is the “proof” that scientists are supposed to cherish as a requirement for any scientific hypothesis?

I agree with you here, which is why I stop listening when secular scientists claim that evolution proves that there is no design in nature. It would be impossible to set up an experiment to test for non-design because you’d have to have no idea of what you want to see but somehow know whether you got what you were expecting to see at the end of the experiment. ID is certainly more reasonable than materialism IMO but it can be taken much farther.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I think ID implicitly denies final causality and attempts to say that the universe is a designed machine whereas the secularists claim it is an undesigned machine. The problem is that it is not a machine at all.

I don’t see intelligent design denying final causality, nor do I hear it saying that the universe is a machine. The ID scientist would view the universe simply as intelligently designed (when the laws were set down at the time of the Big Bang), without reference to whether it qualifies as a machine. I don’t think the evolutionist sees it as a machine either, because machines are not randomly operated, and evolution provides for random selection. I agree that the universe is not a machine, but it does operate according to intelligently designed natural laws, much as a machine operates according to the laws intelligently designed for its operation.

“This most beautiful system [the solar system] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Isaac Newton

 

[oldcelt]

It’s that the evolutionists cannot stand the idea of deliberate design anywhere in the universe except in their scientific labs. Well then, let them design an experiment in which life randomly comes together. But that is an absurd tautology. You cannot intelligently design “random.” So where is the “proof” that scientists are supposed to cherish as a requirement for any scientific hypothesis?

“True science to an ever-increasing degree discovers God as though God were waiting behind each closed door opened by science.” Pope Pius XII

Actually, scientists are attempting to combine elements and matter of various types (they have ideas on what has the greatest potential) to see if elemental life will spontaneously begin. When or whether they will succeed, is anybody’s guess.
Some of the greatest strides in my opinion are being made via astronomy.Through Hubble we have seen “solar nurseries” where stars are literally being born. Other devices have proved that the universe is expanding (and possibly contracting on occasion) away from (and toward) a central area, that the universe is remarkably large, and that other planetary bodies exist outside of our solar system.

The problem with ID, evolution and creation is that none of them answer all the questions. Further, there are multiple versions of each. All this is very confusing to anyone who doesn’t spend every waking hour on the question. Like the OP says, We are ignorant of the gaps.

 

[cfauster]

Excellent dialogue! I’m learning much. Thanks.

Re. chance and randomness, first I’ll give my simple perspective, and then I’ll give a link to a more thorough treatment by another scientist (and Christian).

One may have reasons from beyond science to believe, for example, that the sex of one’s next child will be predictable (or even designed) from God’s perspective, while still accepting that from a scientific perspective such individual events are non-designed and random, predictable only in the aggregate by the laws of probability.

A pretty comprehensive essay on what scientists properly call random chance, and how it can be compatible with purpose from a Christian theological and philosophical perspective, is at
inters.org/files/Barr-Chance-Design.pdf

As has been noted by many people in this discussion, some atheistic scientists (and some theists too) seem to draw metaphysical implications of purposelessness from nature’s impersonal mechanisms that are discoverable and describable by science. But in my opinion, that’s a mistake made when the limitations and constraints of science, as well as the different meanings of chance and randomness, are not recognized and distinguished.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Actually, scientists are attempting to combine elements and matter of various types (they have ideas on what has the greatest potential) to see if elemental life will spontaneously begin. When or whether they will succeed, is anybody’s guess.

This will prove nothing. You cannot intelligently design an experiment and then claim it was spontaneous without admitting to intelligent design first.

 

[Aloysium]

I’m looking over Genesis and see no mention of a final cause.
God created heaven and earth, all plants and all creatures and man.
He did so at a point in time and they became fruitful and multiplied.
Intelligent design does not imply a machine from my understanding.
Final cause may explain why creation: that God would become flesh, but it disregards some of the what and how it all came to be.

 

[balto]

The ID scientist would view the universe simply as intelligently designed (when the laws were set down at the time of the Big Bang), without reference to whether it qualifies as a machine.

But this is precisely the problem. If we’re going to say that God sat down and set laws for the universe then the implication is that the universe could conceivably continue to function even if God went away. That’s what I mean when I say that ID assumes that the universe is a machine. Under classical theism, God cannot “go away” because everything’s existence depends on His continued creative act. So it’s not that God set laws, pushed a start button with the Big Bang, let the universe run, and then steps in to direct things. Everything has meaning and purpose built into in, not imposed artificially by an entity outside the universe.

It seems that some ID theorists assume a mechanistic conception of the universe for the intention of demonstrating that Darwinism is false even under its own assumptions. That is fine, but the problem is that you cannot then propose ID as a viable alternative because it suffers from the same assumptions. It cannot be billed as a new form of science to detect design in nature. The point should be to establish definitively that final causation is inherent in nature and this points to God as understood by Scholastics. This is what Aquinas attempted to do I believe.

 

[balto]

Final cause may explain why creation: that God would become flesh, but it disregards some of the what and how it all came to be.

Efficient causes (i.e. how something works or came to be) cannot be understood without reference to its final cause. If there were no purpose behind something, then it would not function the way it functions or even come to be at all. We humans, since we don’t assign purpose to everything, only assign purpose to certain aspects of creation. So we take things together that are useful and organize them into artifacts and assign meaning to the artifacts and leave out anything that is meaningless to us. But that is only an analogy to what God does. God doesn’t take certain distinct objects and recombine them in new useful ways leaving useless things alone. Absolutely everything He creates has purpose and hence has a final cause.

The tendency seems to be to take very difficult problems in efficient causation (what science can study) and say that it is most likely due to a direct action of God. That is to say if left to its own devices the universe probably wouldn’t be evolving life as we know it. But the universe is never left to its own devices (all of the devices are God’s). On the other hand, the materialist side is to take the final causation and throw their hands in the air and say that purpose is either an illusion or unknowable, which is erroneous (hence the OP’s thread title of “ignorance of the gaps”).

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The point should be to establish definitively that final causation is inherent in nature and this points to God as understood by Scholastics. This is what Aquinas attempted to do I believe.

Good luck to the Thomists trying to explain that to the evolutionists who see no final cause anywhere.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The tendency seems to be to take very difficult problems in efficient causation (what science can study) and say that it is most likely due to a direct action of God. That is to say if left to its own devices the universe probably wouldn’t be evolving life as we know it. **But the universe is never left to its own devices (all of the devices are God’s). ** On the other hand, the materialist side is to take the final causation and throw their hands in the air and say that purpose is either an illusion or unknowable, which is erroneous (hence the OP’s thread title of “ignorance of the gaps”).

So why don’t we just allow that Intelligent Design is covered as one of the devices?

And you still haven’t shown how the Thomist can prove final cause to the evolutionist.

Why isn’t ID via abiogenesis one of the ways to prove it?

 

[balto]

So why don’t we just allow that Intelligent Design is covered as one of the devices?

And you still haven’t shown how the Thomist can prove final cause to the evolutionist.

Why isn’t ID via abiogenesis one of the ways to prove it?

I don’t know how you can rationally deny final causes. If an evolutionist is determined to reject final causes, then there should be no talk of DNA being “information” or genes being “encoded” or nature “selecting the best fit” or that such-and-such a gene evolved because it provided some kind of function for an organism that made it more fit. There seems to be this misunderstanding that in order for final causes to exist the object needs to be consciously seeking a goal. Although consciousness can be involved in final causation, it is not required. The evolutionist will just assert that humans evolved to “make sense” of the world but that completely presupposes that meaning and purpose are in the world for us to discover, which doesn’t answer the question of how final causes are not real.

Getting back to ID, I’m not sure what your position on ID is because I think we may be arguing over terminology. I don’t know what the ID theorist’s explanation is for how an irreducibly complex structure came into being other than saying “God did it.” Does God violate the laws of nature to do it? It’s not that different from saying “random chance did it” or “nature did it.” It’s completely subject to future overthrow by scientific advances that will inevitably discover how they evolved naturally. Then the materialists will say “see, we told you it happened naturally” and dismiss God even though the God they are dismissing is a strawman. The conception of God I get from ID theory is that of an engineer building a machine, whereas the classical conception of God is more like a minstrel playing a musical score. Every aspect of the musical score is dependent on the minstrel continuing to play it. The engineer could go out of existence and yet the machine would still function.

 

[cfauster]

Abiogenesis (the first emergence of life from non-living matter) has been suggested as an example of a scientific problem that could only have a solution involving an intelligent designer, because no natural explanation could possibly be found.

Indeed no reasonably probable and also complete natural explanation has yet been found. I’m not sure how anyone can predict with any certainty whether or not a reasonably probable and complete natural explanation will be found in the future. All a scientist can say is that the question is open, I think.

I reject “ignorance/materialism/naturalism-of-the-gaps” that would say: “Just wait - eventually a natural explanation will be found, or if not, abiogenesis still certainly occurred naturally even if we never have enough evidence and/or imagination to figure out how.”

I also reject “designer/God-of-the-gaps” that would say: “Give up - the currently available natural explanations are so incredibly improbable, not only can we reject them, we can also be confident that no reasonably probable natural explanations will ever be found in the future.”

 

[cfauster]

In the Feb. 2003 issue (Vol. 3, No. 6, p. 18) of Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology (later called Science and Theology News) William Dembski defended intelligent design theory as being different from a silly claim such as “ancient technologies could not have built the pyramids, so goblins must have done it.” Dr. Dembski stated the difference as follows: “We can show how, with the technological resources at hand, the ancient Egyptians could have produced the pyramids. By contrast, the material mechanisms known to date offer no such insight into biological complexity.”

Here are my problems with that logic.

First, Dr. Dembski’s assessment of known evolutionary mechanisms was too pessimistic. For a readable summary of work in the field (by a scientist who is also a Christian), see
reports.ncse.com/index.php/rncse/article/download/4/5

More problematic to me, however, is the logic of Dr. Dembski’s argument. What if we were not yet able to show how the pyramids were built by the Egyptians? What if we were not yet able to even imagine how they built them? Would such ignorance really increase the status of any alternative (e.g. goblin) theories?

Please note: I am not saying that I somehow know that life arose naturally “without God” or even that God must have used natural/ordinary means rather than special/direct/extraordinary means to get the job done. All I’m saying is that the question is still open, scientifically.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

*I don’t know what the ID theorist’s explanation is for how an irreducibly complex structure came into being other than saying “God did it.” *Does God violate the laws of nature to do it? It’s not that different from saying “random chance did it” or “nature did it.” It’s completely subject to future overthrow by scientific advances that will inevitably discover how they evolved naturally. Then the materialists will say “see, we told you it happened naturally” and dismiss God even though the God they are dismissing is a strawman. The conception of God I get from ID theory is that of an engineer building a machine, whereas the classical conception of God is more like a minstrel playing a musical score. Every aspect of the musical score is dependent on the minstrel continuing to play it. The engineer could go out of existence and yet the machine would still function.

That is not my recollection of what Behe said. What he said is that it is virtually impossible to imagine abiogenesis as a random event, and abiogenesis, because of its complexity, has from all available evidence the appearance of being an intelligently designed event. (This is what Isaac Newton said about our solar system.) If Behe uses terminology like “God” in his thesis, I would be sirprised. Anybody is free to supply his own interpretation of what the source of the Intelligent Design is. But if as thing appears to be intelligently designd, there should be no real objection to asserting that. After all, scientists know a good deal about intelligently designing their own experiments and their own theories without necessarily giving credit to God for their achievements.

I’m a little perplexed by the notion that the final cause argument can be applied to all of creation without being applied to abiogenesis as well. If all of Creation was intelligently designed, why is abiogenesis not also intelligently designed. I can’t imagine a Catholic theologian (not even a Jesuit) supposing that the universe can be seen as something that just popped into existence with all its laws programmed to unroll without being intelligently designed. Do Catholic theologians seriously believe that evolution has to apply to the history of the universe at large, and that every unfolding law of the universe from day one has been just a random event chosen by natural selection with no intelligent design behind the whole of Creation?

 

[Aloysium]

:twocents:
If you read pop-science interpretations of how life came to be and where it is going, they involve a belief in a force driving to greater complexity, intelligence and self awareness:
Artificial intelligence, Vulcans, etc (I grew up with these myths)
View attachment 19137
It could be ultimately said that there is a biological force, like gravity or the expansion of the universe, bringing matter to awareness. Some will say that this is evidence for God, materialist will say the opposite, that it demonstrates that all could happen without Him.

 

[oldcelt]

This will prove nothing. You cannot intelligently design an experiment and then claim it was spontaneous without admitting to intelligent design first.

It will prove that if these elements are present in open space and come together they could initiate life with no need for intelligence, or intentional design. The only intelligence here would lie with the design of the experiment…not the results.

 

[oldcelt]

:twocents:
If you read pop-science interpretations of how life came to be and where it is going, they involve a belief in a force driving to greater complexity, intelligence and self awareness:
Artificial intelligence, Vulcans, etc (I grew up with these myths)
View attachment 19137
It could be ultimately said that there is a biological force, like gravity or the expansion of the universe, bringing matter to awareness. Some will say that this is evidence for God, materialist will say the opposite, that it demonstrates that all could happen without Him.

I too grew up on these stories and find them fascinating. Her I have seen people rail against the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. That I do not understand. Other life-forms could mean that God is a more diverse creator than indicated in the bible.
Or it could be used to demonstrate that no God is necessary.

As with most things, the members of the audience will make up their own minds.