A conversation....

Clayton Cramer likes to take scientists to task for their arrogance in continuing to advocate evolutionary theory. This is an e-mail conversation that took place a couple of months ago, and which I've been meaning to format into a blog posting.

The inspiration for the conversation was this post:

My wife and I are leading a Bible study right now concerning evolution, creation, Intelligent Design, and related issues. We are trying to give everyone enough of a grounding in these subjects to understand how evolutionary theory ended up in the driver's seat; the limitations of scientific theory; that there are a variety of different Christian perspectives (theistic evolutionists, such as Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute), Old Earth Creationists (such as astrophysicist turned evangelist Dr. Hugh Ross), Young Earth Creationists, and biologists and biochemists who are Intelligent Design advocates.
We are also trying to get everyone to understand that when scientists reject supernatural explanations, it doesn't mean that they are denying the existence of God--they are arguing that you can't construct scientific theories (which are, after all, suppose to enable prediction of events) with an "M" for "miracle" in a formula.

I replied with the following e-mail, which I'll present with Cramer's responses inserted. I sent a reply to his responses, which I'll present as commentary after each block of e-mails.

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I think that’s a good idea.

I’d like to suggest a topic for discussion, and I’d be interested to hear what comes of it, if you do discuss it.

One of the arguments I’ve seen brought to bear against “evolution” is an argument from incredulity. It is simply unbelievable that “all this”, for different values of “all” and “this”, could have happened “by chance”. Equivalently, it’s unbelievable that “all this” could have happened “by itself”.

I’ve decided this is a red herring.

I would agree. The Intelligent Design advocates, however, don't make that argument. They argue that it is not simply the complexity of some components to life that make it unlikely to have happen by operation of natural law and random chance.

[Interrupting for a moment] Actually, they tend to make two different types of argument.

One is that there are some components that are so complex they cannot have arisen by the operation of naturalistic processes.

This is, of course, beyond disproof, because no matter how many times natural processes are shown to suffice for this or that component, ID-ists can always say, "Well, those aren't the ones we're talking about."

They also point to certain existing systems such as the flagellum or the blood clotting cascade. These systems, they will claim, are so complex that they cannot have arisen through naturalistic processes.

Interestingly enough, the blood clotting cascade has fallen out of favor with the ID crowd, since biologists have managed to come up with a plausible step-by-step history of its development.

Each step in the process takes us from a digestive enzyme (very useful, just not for clotting) to the modern cascade. Each step is an improvement in an existing system, and one which works well enough for its current owner.

So where ID makes its prediction about specific systems, it keeps being proven false. Where it makes its prediction about "some" systems, it steps outside the realm of scientific proof.

The traditional argument that with enough time, almost any random process will eventually lead to something improbable, is still valid. The ID argument about flagellum complexity points out that this is not simply one amazing coincidence, but several dozen amazing and completely independent coincidences--that they aren't like a snowball rolling down hill. Each of the flagellum components is pretty well useless without nearly all of the others--and so you really don't get any advantage of gathering one component onto your evolutionary snowball.

Actually "the traditional argument" is only one argument. One of the arguments used in biological evolution is that evolution has become notorious for taking a system that does one thing and adapting it to some other function. The starting point in the blood clotting cascade was, recall, a digestive enzyme.

I’ve yet to meet a scientist who believes anything, with the possible exception of certain quantum-mechanical events, happens “by chance”. Indeed, the whole basis of science is the attempt to discover regularities – “rules” or “laws” governing events. Indeed, back in Newton’s time, science was called “Natural Philosophy”, and was pretty explicitly devoted to discovering the laws God wrote when he crafted the universe.

Yup. That's part of why Newton was so certain that he could determine what those laws were, that would be logical, and that they would apply almost everywhere. For example, gravity, light, and magnetism vary inversely with the square of the distance--not some terribly complex equation, or dependent on some other factor. Imagine if gravity varied based not only distance but also on illumination, with weird minimum factors!

Terribly complex equations are allowed. Time-dependent relativistic Schroedinger equation, anyone?

And I could imagine a universe where gravity varied with illumination, or the phase of the moon, or some other factor. As long as it varies consistently with those factors, we can do science. We cease to be able to do science when gravity varies according to the whim of some capricious agent. For example, if the planets really had been gods or angels moving through the heavens, there'd be no reason to expect them to stay in any particular course.

All the “evolutionists” I know, therefore, believe that “evolution” occurred as the result of the operation of known, or at least discoverable, natural laws.

(I put “evolution” in quotes, because creationists have a habit of lumping under “evolution” a number of things that are not, strictly speaking, evolution. The question of the origin of life is, strictly speaking, abiogenesis, not evolution. Likewise, the Big Bang and other theories about the origin of the universe are matters of cosmology. But all deal with origins, and how there came to be something rather than nothing.)

It isn't just creationists who lump origin of life under evolution. So do evolutionists (at least, the ones teaching it badly at the lower grades).

[Interrupting, again] If you want to complain about inept teachers, go for it.

Thomas Sowell has written books about the education establishment. Among his damning points is that education majors have among the lowest average SAT scores of all declared majors. Presumably they can't do, so they opt to teach.

But just because a teacher is incapable of presenting (or learning) some subject, don't commit the fallacy of presuming the subject itself is as incoherent as the teacher's presentation of it.

The origins of the universe problem is pretty substantial! How does something come from nothing, or alternatively, how does something always exist? These start to sound suspiciously like modern, cleaned up versions of Creation myths. "You don't understand it--it's turtles all the way down!"

The problem of the origin of the universe is indeed substantial. But it's not evolution. It's cosmology. That's outside evolution's jurisdiction.

As for the underlying science, "maybe it is turtles all the way down":

First and foremost (since this is about how we know what we know):

Until we have some idea what the rules are, we have no idea what is, or is not surprising.

For all we know, the default is for something to come from nothing, and our universe where something has to come from something else is the oddball case. (Maybe the Designer has suppressed all of the instances where something would have come from nothing. How would we know?

Or, why shouldn't something always exist? We observe as data that something does exist, and if we assume something can't come from nothing, then what else is it going to have done?

And for completeness, I should mention the possibility that nothing exists, and we're imagining the whole thing. (though isn't imagination something?)

Maybe it *is* "turtles all the way down", if by "turtles" we mean the rules that govern the universe(s).

So back to the question I left with in my opening salvo, how do we tell the difference between rules that have always been (it's rules all the way down), and rules that were designed and implemented by a creator?

It may well turn out that some phenomenon exists which can never be explained in terms of general rules or laws. Maybe there is some unbridgeable gap between nonlife and life, or animal consciousness and human consciousness. Trying to prove this, though, is trying to prove an existential negative, which is very difficult at best. At best, we can look at the track record of those who insist that phenomenon X demands a non-material explanation.

It stinks.

But a good scientist should try to keep an open mind to the possibility that a non-material cause will be required to explain some phenomenon, even while he searches heaven and earth (!) for some material law that will account for it.

Agreed. I would be happy if evolution were taught in the lower grades with a bit more humility, and recognition that there are a lot of serious questions that have been raised.

If you want to rail against bad teachers, be my guest.

If you want to take bad scientists (those who insist in speaking "ex lab-coat", making pronouncements not supported by science), go ahead.

But if you want to rail against science, rail against it for what it actually does.

Let’s stipulate, though, that everything can be explained by the operation of materialistic laws of nature. Everything. We might as well – it’s the underlying assumption of science. Where did the laws come from?

Everything in a science class MUST be explained through operation of materialistic laws of nature--otherwise, it isn't predictable, and then it isn't science. But recognizing this as an assumption is a good start towards that humility of which I speak. At least by the time I reached college, I was being taught by real scientists, who knew that there are limits to what science can do.

Natural Philosophers assumed the laws came from God. Modern scientists may or may not make the same assumption. Practically speaking, though, they probably don’t think it matters. The laws of motion work the way they do whether they were crafted by God, by Allah, by Athena, by Wakan Tanka – or are themselves eternal and uncreated.

It doesn't matter--if you are doing science. If you are asking deeper questions, it may matter. But a scientist needs to acknowledge that what he is doing makes assumptions. Science teachers seldom get this across to their students.

If you want to rail against bad teachers.....

Can the laws of nature be eternal?

In response to the assertion that God created everything, people will ask “who created God?” The response to this is, essentially, that God transcends creation and is eternal. God did not need to be created because he has always existed.

An atheist scientist might argue that the rules science uncovers are eternal and did not need to be created. Alternatively, they might have come about through the operation of some more encompassing rule, a form of the “Theory of Everything” which physicists have been searching for.

Now, here’s the discussion question:

How do you tell the difference – experimentally – between universe-governing rules that were created by God and universe-governing rules that have existed eternally without the need for a creator?

Experimentally, you can't. That inability to put the M variable into scientific equations is a serious obstacle! But I have experienced a miraculous healing--once. I know other people who have had ONE such experience. I know many others who have not. This tends to make us skeptical of claims that the M variable can be ignored!

Can it even be meaured? I don't want to get in to miraculous healing, but if you like, I'll send you a link to Dennis Prager's recent show where he interviews a doctor on the topic of luck in medicine. How do you distinguish between the "M variable" and luck?

And while I have my own ideas about the existence of a Creator, I am also a scientist. As a scientist, I can’t justify teaching in any science class that the above question has been answered one way or the other until it actually is.

How about teaching in a classroom that the lack of a supernatural is an assumption of science that makes prediction possible, and that a scientist who asserts that there CANNOT be anything outside that possibility is being a bit arrogant?

Believe it or not, I have no problem with that. I've had a number of teachers whose position on the supernatural is "I can't fault you for your faith". They may then point out the problems they see in terms of the lack of a known mechanism to accomplish some particular supernatural effect. Is that arrogant?

Some of the ID questions are legitimate science: how did we get irreducibly complex mechanisms?

At least some of them are plausibly explained by the co-opting of pieces that were already doing somethin else.

For example, here's another paper on the possible development of the flagellum from a secretory structure.

If this recent paper claiming an oxygen atmosphere at 3.8 billion years ago is correct, then we went from hot rocks to photosynthesis (a VERY complex system) in less than 600 million years. That sure isn't sounding very random or blind.

I can see a few possible outcomes for this:

1: Photosynthesis is not that hard to invent. The modern system, being the result of billions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning, may be quite complex, but as can be seen with the proposed development of the clotting system, the first steps need not be super-efficient, highly-developed systems. They need only work "well enough to do the job".

2: Before photosynthesis as we know it took over, there was a different system that generated oxygen at a low efficiency. This may have been too inefficient to generate amounts of oxygen useful to any one life form, or even to generate deoxygenated molecules in amounts useful for any other metabolic process. The oxygen resulting may have been a side-effect of some whole 'nother reaction. (Which may explain why all our ancestors weren't completely wiped out by the sudden production of all this highly reactive and poisonous oxygen.)

3: Good old panspermia -- the first life forms arrived on interstellar dust from somewhere else. This postpones the problem of origins, but a lot more time becomes available. (I'm all in favor of "pre-loading" work when I'm dealing with projects, but that's going a bit far, don't you think?)

4: ET landed and either seeded the planet with bacteria, or cobbled together the first bacteria in his workshop.

5: Some unknown, and possibly miraculous, process caused oxygen to appear in the early atmosphere.

6: Some unknown, and possibly miraculous, process caused a photosynthesizing organism to spring together in violation of all the laws of probability.

7: (In the interests of the humility science has, and we all wish more scientists would display) "Other".

But the assumption that there is no materialistic explanaton for any phenomenon X is an assumption, just as much as the assumption that there is one. I don't feel like trying to do a Bayesian calculation on the track record of each assumption, but I have a feeling the assumption that phenomenon X will remain forever inexplicable will turn out to be quite improbable.

Finally, on the question of things happening by the operation of natural law, I can see a number of possibilities, based on whether you affirm or deny each piece in the chain.

Given the statement:

I: Some phenomenon happens because of the operation of natural laws designed by a creator.

We have three entities to deal with:

1) A phenomenon that happens

2) Natural laws

3) A creator

These three entites can be affirmed or denied, giving rise to eight logical possibilities.

I: Some phenomenon happens because of the operation of natural laws designed by a creator.

II: Some phenomenon happens because of the operation of natural laws which did not require a creator.

III: Some phenomenon happens, not because of any natural laws, but purely because of the will of the creator. (Any laws we think exist are pure coincidence.)

IV: Some phenomenon happens, but not as the result of any natural laws or any action taken by a creator. (It's all an incredible coincidence.)

The other four involve the denial of the first entity -- that a phenomenon has taken place. I'll leave their formation and exploration as an exercise for the reader.

How do we know what we know?

We know phenomena happen because of their effects on the universe around us.

We don't really know laws exist, but we surmise them from the regularities we observe around us.

How do we know there's an entity who created either phenomena or the laws? WE have to take that on faith.