Are there Non-Religious Skeptics of Darwinian Evolution and Proponents of ID

I like the one which says that the wave function is collapsed by an observation (by a conscious observer).

Well think of the DI as too organisations. One pushes a brand of Christianity, the other proves over and over that RM+NS just doesn't work as an explanation of life.

The proof that life did not get here by RM+NS is pretty much done and dusted as far as I can see.

David

My point was that I probably have the highest post count on Christian Apologetics and posts from Christian philosophers generally. Thus it would be unfair to claim some anti-Christian bias is why I am unconvinced by the kind of ID evidence Discovery Institute / Evolution News / Uncommon Descent argue for.

IMO a non-Christian like myself can be perfectly comfortable with Christianity but still find the argument from ID involving Cambrian fossils and/or Complex Specified Information unconvincing...especially since a variety of Christians have issues with said ID evidence.

It is important to point out that some Christians object because they think it makes God too small, and the idea that God would show Himself in such a way is quite bizarre - Feser makes this point excellently in this post re: Signature in the Cell.

However, setting aside the question of God revealing His hand in such ways --> I do think the Proponent Stance - that there are cases where mind acts casually beyond just manipulation of its associated body - is asking less of ID than those seeking to show the presence of the Omni-God (All Good/Knowing/Powerful). I have little issue with people accepting ID arguments as suggestive of some kind of intellect interfering with evolution in some way though we should keep in mind Dembski saying there may just be an impersonal force which accounts for said evidence.

For me personally I am unconvinced there's anything much to DI Style ID arguments, and it's certainly less convincing than Cosmic Fine Tuning or Psycho-Physical Harmony design arguments.

As to whether the materialist conception of RM + NS is missing something, I would definitely agree.

.....................................

Here's the opinion of a med school professor:

Intelligent design? No smart engineer designed our bodies, Sherman tells premeds in class on Darwinian medicine

By Krishna Ramanujan


See also -> Top 10 Design Flaws in the Human Body (Chip Rowe)

I guess one can argue that some of the design is good and some of it is bad, but also the good design was constrained by manipulating probabilities that occur in RM + NS across millennia? Again, not sure how a layperson can make any judgement other than saying ID is a live possibility. Even more so [of a live possibility] for what I'd call the Proponent Stance, where an Omni-God may exist but what's important is showing consciousness acting beyond the usual confines of our skulls.

......................................

In the first place, only a benevolent omnipotent omniscient God would presumably make absolutely no mistakes. Many ID advocates (such as myself) don't believe that an omnipotent creator Being such as the Christian God was the designer, so claiming that ID is false because the body has a raft of supposed design errors is at least in part a straw man argument - the designer in ID doesn't have to be the God of Christianity. The designer agent(s) could well have been advanced, intelligent and powerful spiritual beings or advanced aliens, that were nevertheless not totally infallible.

Secondly, most of the claims that the body is full of bad designs, and has a number of vestigial organs with no function, ignore the medical, anatomical and other insights of recent years that have shown that most of these so-called "design errors" are in reality clever features not mistakes, and most of the presumably useless vestigial organs in reality have important functions. Some of the cases not so explained can probably be ascribed to inevitable design trade-offs not errors (in the physical world design constraints are inevitable, so also there must be design tradeoffs), or to genetic deterioration during a long period following the original design event. That would leave some residual cases that could validly be ascribed to design error, but after all the designer(s) may have been and I think almost certainly were ultimately fallible and limited though extremely intelligent and powerful beings of some sort.

Just three examples in detail of the many such claims that have been debunked - just the tip of the iceberg:

- There is the famous bad body design claim that the eye is mis-designed because the photoreceptor rod and cone cells are located on the back of the retina and therefore supposedly have the incoming light partly occluded and vision obscured by the dense blood capillary network and other tissues in the front part of the retina. This would seem to be reversed over the correct arrangement.

Unfortunately for the Darwinists, research has shown that this is a positive and clever feature of an optimal design, not a blunder. The high metabolic requirements of the retina (actually the highest metabolic rate of any tissue in the human body) are provided by the dense network of capillaries, which does the necessary work of supplying the receptors with oxygen and food and carrying away carbon dioxide, waste products and heat.  These functional requirements are much more efficiently met by the existing reversed positioning arrangement, and organic cellular "fiber optic" light-pipes leading from the front to the back of the retina correct for light and resolution loss, to make up overall a more sophisticated and effective design.

For a report in Phys Org describing this, see https://phys.org/news/2014-07-fiber-opti...e.html#jCp . The title is "Fiber optic light pipes in the retina do much more than simple image transfer". The opening words: "Having the photoreceptors at the back of the retina is not a design constraint, it is a design feature. The idea that the vertebrate eye, like a traditional front-illuminated camera, might have been improved somehow if it had only been able to orient its wiring behind the photoreceptor layer, like a cephalopod, is folly."

- And there is Nathan Lents' assertion that the human sinus drainage system is a seriously faulty design, in his book "Human Errors - from broken bones to pointless genes". Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out the actual physiological facts of the matter (from https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/human-...n-sinuses/ ) :

"Lents misunderstands the physiology of sinus drainage. The visible opening (ostium) in the maxillary sinus is not the only, or even the main, route of drainage. There is a complex system of interconnection, often at the microscopic level, between the paranasal sinuses, and Lents betrays an ignorance of sinus physiology in asserting that the large visible opening out of the sinus, which is indeed located at the upper wall of the sinus, is the primary physiological route of drainage.
…
In reality, the paranasal sinuses drain by very complex pathways, with many accessory ostia and via several (rather ingenious) interdependent pathways. Furthermore, they don’t drain primarily by “gravity,” as Lents naïvely asserts. Ciliary action moves secretions along to a network of drainage channels. It is perhaps best to think of the large ostium on the upper wall of the sinus as an “overflow” channel, analogous to the overflow opening in your sink. It is not meant to conduct the main flow of fluid in the sinus. In fact, it can’t be the main outflow path, because it is high in the sinus yet the sinus is not often filled with fluid.

From design considerations, it can be inferred that a drainage ostium in the floor of the sinus would drain at too high a rate, drying out the sinus mucosa and predisposing to plugging of the ostium by thick debris."

- And last of these examples, there is the supposed bad design of the human pharynx, debunked at https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/the-su...n-pharynx/ .

My point was that I probably have the highest post count on Christian Apologetics and posts from Christian philosophers generally. Thus it would be unfair to claim some anti-Christian bias is why I am unconvinced by the kind of ID evidence Discovery Institute / Evolution News / Uncommon Descent argue for.

IMO a non-Christian like myself can be perfectly comfortable with Christianity but still find the argument from ID involving Cambrian fossils and/or Complex Specified Information unconvincing...especially since a variety of Christians have issues with said ID evidence.

It is important to point out that some Christians object because they think it makes God too small, and the idea that God would show Himself in such a way is quite bizarre - Feser makes this point excellently in this post re: Signature in the Cell.

However, setting aside the question of God revealing His hand in such ways --> I do think the Proponent Stance - that there are cases where mind acts casually beyond just manipulation of its associated body - is asking less of ID than those seeking to show the presence of the Omni-God (All Good/Knowing/Powerful). I have little issue with people accepting ID arguments as suggestive of some kind of intellect interfering with evolution in some way though we should keep in mind Dembski saying there may just be an impersonal force which accounts for said evidence.

For me personally I am unconvinced there's anything much to DI Style ID arguments, and it's certainly less convincing than Cosmic Fine Tuning or Psycho-Physical Harmony design arguments.

As to whether the materialist conception of RM + NS is missing something, I would definitely agree.

Sci, I'm intrigued to know how you might describe the nature of what it is you think might be missing. Would it, for example, involve some form of intelligence at all or are you somewhat inclined to the view that random processes shaped by natural selection can account for the vast variety and complexity of life? The post above with the links to engineers saying that the proposed designer wasn't too impressive is the kind of thing that, in turn, tends to annoy me. Let those engineers build a biological system to rival those they criticise and revisit the design after a couple of million years of survival and progress despite all manner of hostile conditions and then I might be a little more impressed.

Again, I'll return to the example of the feather. For all its undoubted ingenuity, humankind has only managed to build a clunky flying machine which falls pathetically short of the sheer elegance of any feathered bird.

https://youtu.be/Y2yeNoDCcBg

As with most of us here, I am no biologist nor have I studied evolution, Darwinian or otherwise, so I am one of the laymen you talk about who needs convincing evidence. What else can I do but expose my enquiring mind to both Darwinian and Design oriented theories? I was exposed to Darwinism from childhood but something didn't sit right with my gut feel. I read a couple of books by Stephen Meyer and watched a few debates involving DI members and, as I mentioned above, was somewhat uncomfortable with them having the funding and resources provided by overtly Christian organisations. But watching those debates was a frustrating experience because these DI scientists were aggressively attacked, less for their research methods but more for their religious beliefs. That, apparently is a unidirectional line of attack because Richard Dawkins doesn't need to justify the obvious influence of his fundamentalist atheism on his neo-darwinist perspective.

Stephen Meyer, by the way, does impress me by the way he stands up for the scientific method over and above any personal belief system he is committed to. I think this also impressed Thomas Nagel (atheist philosopher) when he recommended Meyer's book for TLS book of the year.

My feeling is that, as in a number of areas of science, the traditional opposition to ID is often presented in a fundamentally dishonest way in debates for a general audience. Usually orthodox scientists refuse to debate their science with those who oppose them. Here is one striking exception where two ID proponents (one of which was Stephen Meyer) actually got to debate the science with Michael Scherma and an orthodox biologist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-KPfFPIaVU

It happened a few years back but it is striking in the way point after point seemed to be won by Meyer's side. On several occasions it seems as though Scherma's side withheld the truth to make their point seem more plausible than it really was.

You don't really need to know the subject to get a feeling for which side won.

David

My feeling is that, as in a number of areas of science, the traditional opposition to ID is often presented in a fundamentally dishonest way in debates for a general audience. Usually orthodox scientists refuse to debate their science with those who oppose them. Here is one striking exception where two ID proponents (one of which was Stephen Meyer) actually got to debate the science with Michael Scherma and an orthodox biologist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-KPfFPIaVU
It happened a few years back but it is striking in the way point after point seemed to be won by Meyer's side. On several occasions it seems as though  Scherma's side withheld the truth to make their point seem more plausible than it really was.
You don't really need to know the subject to get a feeling for which side won.
David

christianforums.com/threads/evolution-goes-retro-viral.8275732/
What you think of this argument?

Did ID proponents ever respond to it? arguments for evolution tend to be very diverse, and "bad design" is not the strongest case for it.

Not very scientific but my gut feel tells  me that NS+RM is, at best, a contributing factor rather than a complete explanation for evolution.

Actually, I think that some real scientists could usefully listen to their guts too!

David

Shermer seems to have matured over the years and is not so polemical (is that the right word?) in his debating style. Here is a later discussion with Stephen Meyer and I've also seen similarly congenial conversations between him and Sheldrake and also Chopra (I believe Chopra and Shermer are actually good friends).

https://youtu.be/On-4lOWuWQQ

Actually, I think that some real scientists could usefully listen to their guts too!

David

Yes. For example most evolutionary biologists know the math and the theory, but have never actually designed and built a complicated machine. Therefore they don't really appreciate the meaning and import of terms like "irreducible complexity", don't have a strong or gut feeling (which should be derived from experience) for the true difficulty and creativity and mental effort by a focused conscious agent that it takes. Accordingly, they also don't have a feel for the truly great difficulty of an undirected semi-random walk process such as RM + NS creating an intricate irreducibly complex machine of many parts. The most enlightening thing Darwinist biologists could do would be to take a class in the principles of engineering design, and then actually design and build some sort of machine. Oh well, dream away.

Did ID proponents ever respond to it? arguments for evolution tend to be very diverse, and "bad design" is not the strongest case for it.

As Nbtruthman pointed out, some 'bad design' is simply a sign that the designer wasn't infinitely clever, or that the person raising the issue hadn't fully understood the design constraints.

The essence of ID (at least if you don't tie the idea to Yahweh) is that a great deal of intellectual work was required to make a particular feature possible.

David

As Nbtruthman pointed out, some 'bad design' is simply a sign that the designer wasn't infinitely clever, or that the person raising the issue hadn't fully understood the design constraints.

The essence of ID (at least if you don't tie the idea to Yahweh) is that a great deal of intellectual work was required to make a particular feature possible.

David

A interesting idea. but what about things such as ERV's? (as covered in my link) and other things that imply a common ancestry