Irreducible complexity and Behe's work became central in my conversion from evolutionist to ID-man. Having rebuilt and modified engines for my wife's racing car, I immediately understood the concept of IC whcih in the world of engineering is the bleed'n obvious. Only in a mind game can evolution work, - in the real world it´s pure insanity to assume you can build complex functional systems gradually. But Darwin's moronic theory is still mainstream and it's frustrating to fight it.
Hi Dr. Dembski. I made this comment in another thread a couple days ago, but I think it's more apt for this one, so I'll copy it here:
One thing I've come to notice is that not only have Darwinists/materialists never given a coherent answer to the challenge of irreducible complexity, they've never given an answer that even really *addresses* the actual issue at hand. Their responses are always a change of subject that address a different issue.
All Darwinist answers to irreducibly complex systems boil down to the claim that the system and/or its parts had precursors that were performing different functions or no function, and got coopted somehow into the new system.
But that's not an explanation, it's just a truism. It goes without saying that if a given system with a given function is composed of multiple parts that have to all be present and working together in the right way to play their roles to realize that function, then prior to that system's existence any precursors to the system or its parts couldn't have been performing that same function, and so would've had to be performing a different function if any.
To the extent that such cooption/exaptation can be considered an answer to a challenge, it's an answer to "It's impossible for irreducibly complex systems to come into existence." But that's not the challenge that irreducible complexity poses. Obviously it's possible for irreducibly complex systems to come into existence, or else they wouldn't exist. Nobody disputes that. The problem that irreducible complexity poses is that it's not possible for irreducibly complex systems to come into existence *unintentionally*, and that's the part that Darwinists never address, or really even try to.
You can see that in, for instance, Ken Miller's "reverse mousetrap" illustration, where he has a stripped-down mousetrap serving as a tie clip. Of course, that's a result of him intentionally thinking "What could I possibly use a stripped-down mousetrap for?" until he came up with something. In reality a stripped-down mousetrap is wildly impractical as a tie clip, and more to the point, no normally-occurring tie clip would be useful as a mousetrap just by adding some parts to it, much less by *accidentally* adding some parts to it, precisely because it wasn't made for that.
Now, it is true that the evolution of human technology often works by a "cooption" of sorts. For instance, after the rotary motor was invented, it was eventually coopted and modified to make automobiles. But this is a *conceptual* evolution. It was the *idea* of a rotary motor that was coopted to make the automobile. A human being saw some rotary motors and thought "I could use something conceptually similar to that, appropriately modified and combined with wheels and other parts, to build a convenient self-propelled transportation device that could replace horse and buggies."
The actual original rotary motor invented by humans would've been quite useless in an automobile, and no amount of modification would've changed that enough to make it cooptable for that purpose. Now, it is true that nowadays we do have off-the-shelf parts (screws, nails, sheet metal in standardized sizes, various types of motors, etc) that are reusable in a variety of applications as they are, but that too is a result of *conceptual* evolution. In fact, these are an example of modular design, an especially forward-thinking type of conceptual thought that designs components specifically to be physically useful in a wide variety of *future* applications. Of course, actually using them in any such application requires further conceptual cooption along with the physical cooption.
Naturalistic evolution could never in principle work like that, because naturalistic "evolution" is supposed to be nothing more than the acting out of blind and mechanistic causes, and blind and mechanistic causes by definition do not have concepts (that's what "blind" and "mechanistic" mean).
Darwinists argue this way because, as I've pointed out before, all Darwinian explanation implicitly depends on reifying "natural selection" or "evolution" as a literal intelligent agent with a mind, purposes, and goals. Every Darwinian explanation falls apart when you take away that assumption, and in fact their entire mode of explanation is rendered incoherent if "natural selection" is consistently taken to be the mindless physical processes they claim it is rather than the intelligent designer their explanations actually invoke it as. One might say that they are ID theorists in cheap tuxedos.
As such, when challenged to explain something like irreducible complexity, they don't really fully comprehend that their challenge is to explain it in purely blind and naturalistic terms completely devoid of mind with all that entails. They subconsciously swap it out for the much less obviously impossible challenge of answering how "natural selection" conceived as an intelligent agent with lots of time on his hands could go about it.
The reason they do this is the same reason why if I ask you to visualize a square circle, you will necessarily visualize *either* a square *or* a circle instead: Their position is actually incoherent, and when the mind tries to visualize or conceive of something incoherent, it must by necessity swap it out for something coherent that can actually be conceived. This process that can cause a philosophically unreflective person to simply conflate the incoherent idea they were trying to conceive with the coherent idea they conceived in its place instead of realizing that it's incoherent.
With that in mind, some commentary on this post specifically:
****"Just to be clear, if proteins are highly isolated, it makes it that much harder to evolve among them because protein evolution, on Darwinian principles, must traverse continuous paths and thus cannot simply materialize from one place in the space to another."****
Indeed. I think Douglas Axe's research is some of the most important in ID. ANY meaningful sort of evolution of any new biological system is going to require multiple new proteins, combined and working together in the cell in new kinds of ways, as the *bare minimum* first step. Indeed, dozens of proteins (at least) would've been needed for the simplest conceivable life to exist in the first place. Yet Axe's research shows that individual proteins are irreducibly complex, and so exceedingly rare in "search space" that not a single one should ever have arisen by accident in the entire history of life. And every bit of evidence we have on the matter confirms this.
But of course no protein is functional by itself, only *potentially* functional. Any new protein needs to interact with and connect to other proteins in just the right way to perform any new function. But a new system is also only *potentially* functional. A bacterial flagellum that a bacterium didn't actually "know" how to use wouldn't be useful just sitting there inert, after all. Hence there need to be control and regulatory systems in place too. If we're talking about significant new features in a *multi-cellular* organism, then not only do you need new proteins and new systems at the cellular level, but these also need to somehow cause billions of whole cells to divide and differentiate and work together in just the right way to form the multi-cellular feature with the necessary multi-cellular integration and control systems in the adult organism.
And whether you're talking about a single-celled feature or a multi-cellular one, it's not sufficient for a protein or multiple proteins to just sort of fortuitously "float in" to the right place at the right time to do something new. What actually needs to be explained is a whole new *program* by which the new system is consistently and repeatedly built, integrated into the whole, and activated each time the organism reproduces. In the case of multicellular organisms, this means the building of new proteins nested inside the building and integration of new micro-systems nested inside the building and integration of new macro-systems, and evidence increasingly indicates that at least the development programs of multi-cellular organisms transcends what is possible via computational algorithm altogether.
But again, before one can even begin to try to explain all the big stuff, one must account for new proteins, and Doug Axe and others have shown that it's just impossible for that most minimal first step to happen unintentionally.
****"I didn’t at first adequately address this co-option criticism of Behe because I couldn’t believe that anyone could take it seriously. But Darwinists did. Thus, they were not just saying that the T3SS is a precursor to the flagellum, but also that there is a whole series of gradual steps in which a new part gets added and the function changes, then another part gets added and the function changes again, and so on until evolution takes us to a full-fledged flagellum."****
This is a reflection of what I pointed out above. These sorts of scenarios seem reasonable to Darwinists because the Darwinist is never really even addressing the actual challenge at hand in the first place, namely how could some functional feature like the flagellum be produced by blind and mechanistic causes completely devoid of intent.
The very idea is unintelligible to Darwinists (and to everyone for that matter), especially once you follow out the full radically nominalist implications of it: that all the function that defines any biological feature like the bacterial flagellum is imposed by the human mind rather than being something objectively real that needs to be explained, hence all biological features are essentially figments of our imaginations (including our imaginations) and there's nothing for natural selection to even do in the first place.
So the Darwinist is always mentally substituting the actual challenge for a more intelligible one by conceptually reifying "natural selection" as a literal intelligent designer. When you ask "How could purely blind and mechanistic forces result in an integrated, irreducibly complex system like the bacterial flagellum?" that question gets translated in the Darwinist's mind to "How could an intelligent designer create something like the bacterial flagellum over time by *conceptually* building step by step on what he had made before?"
Seen in that light, a scenario like the bacterial flagellum being built from the T3SS suddenly seems sensible. Why, Mr. Natural Selection, Esq. probably had the idea in mind when he built the T3SS to transport molecules that he was going to use the concepts of rotary spinning and transportation to make something that would transport the entire bacterium, so he made sure to build the T3SS in such a way that it would be amenable to such future modification. And where did all the new proteins come from? No matter. Mr. Natural Selection, Esq. is really good at building proteins for whatever task he has in mind when he needs them. He's already ahead of you!
The primary difficulty when trying to persuade Darwinists is the same difficulty you encounter when trying to persuade materialists of every stripe on every topic. Namely, they take materialism as an unquestionable and unexamined axiom, and when you point out the absurd implications of their position when taken to its logical conclusion, they almost never see it as a reduction ad absurdum of the axioms that led to those implications. Instead they see it as "proof" that their axioms don't always have the logical implications they thought they did after all, and then appeal to all sorts of teleological concepts they themselves previously denied to try to bail materialism out without acknowledging it.
To give an example, I recently saw a materialist argue that there is no objective moral law, because materialism shows that there can be no objectively real, universal, normative laws that apply to us and that we can have access to. I pointed out to him that if that's the case, then there can be no objective laws of logic nor any objective truth, because these are universal normative laws that apply to us just as much as the moral law, and that therefore the very logical rules he used to construct his argument were invalidated.
His response, of course, was not to recognize that materialism is incoherent based on the very implications he ascribed to it. Rather, his response was that it's logically absurd to deny that the laws of logic and truth are objective, normative, and universal, so *therefore materialism must not entail that after all*, since obviously it *can't* just be that materialism is nonsense. He went on to twist himself into knots trying to explain that materialism only logically implies that there are no objectively real normative universals when it's convenient for materialism to do so, and not when it isn't, without really even attempting to show how the same logic could apply sometimes but not others. Eventually he ended up claiming that the laws of logic are "epistemically objective" (a contradiction in terms) but not "ontologically objective."
The same with Darwinists. The challenge isn't really to show them the absurdity of crediting blind mechanisms for creating all the functional systems of biology. They kind of already know that. The challenge is getting them to recognize this as a reduction ad absurdum of Darwinism itself, rather than as "proof" that "natural selection" is a literal intelligent designer with literal plans whenever they need it to be, but without acknowledging that this is how they're invoking it.
To support your comment that evolutionists must eventually argue that evolution has a purpose, see my article in Salvo Magazine online, "Evolutionary Jeopardy." In 9 hours of focused study on Peterson Academy, two eminent evolutionists mentioned the neo-Darwinian processes once. The rest of the time the spoke of purpose.
Btw, I checked out your article in Salvo, and I thought it was quite good. It's pretty funny that Heying and Weinstein act like they're presenting some fresh new approach when they're doing exactly what every Darwinian of every stripe has always done, starting with Darwin himself. If there's anything different about them at all, it's that they're even more egregious than usual about invoking teleological concepts that cannot possibly refer to anything objectively real given their naturalism. The claim that living organisms have a "purpose" to "project their genes as far into the future as possible" really is somewhat novel as far as I am aware, probably because it's a completely gratuitous invocation of purpose even from a Darwinian standpoint.
Everything you describe there is a perfect example of what we've been discussing. As you pointed out, they didn't give one single physical detail in any of their explanations of how anything came about. All "explanation" is in terms of what a personified "natural selection" or "evolution" was motivated by, what "problem" he may have been "trying" to "solve" and so forth. This is because the phenomena they're trying to explain, such as leafcutter ant behavior, can only be understood and coherently defined in terms of purpose, so they wouldn't be able to "cash it out" in physical terms even if they did know the physical details. But given their naturalism, nothing purposeful can possibly be objectively real, so the whole thing collapses into self-contradiction, and statements about what "problem" was being "solved" and so forth do not have any intelligible content.
Of course, this conception of "natural selection" as an intelligent agent with "purposes" and "problems" that he's trying to "solve" does more than just provide the Darwinist a way of appealing to the objectively real purpose that is needed to avoid deconstructing all of biology. It also serves to make it seem subjectively more plausible to the Darwinist that such purposeful systems would come about by "natural selection" in the first place.
There is nothing whatsoever in the process of organisms undergoing random mutations, and the occasional "beneficial" mutation spreading, that suggests that this should ever lead to new integrated functional systems. It's perfectly compatible with nothing ever coming to exist but moderate variations on single-celled organisms, with no functional advancement. In fact, given that situations where some existing function becomes an unnecessary liability for an organism are much more likely than a new functional system coming to exist by chance (pretending for a moment that the latter is possible at all), we should expect that organisms would tend to *lose* function over time through the course of naturalistic evolution, which Dr. Behe has shown to in fact be the case. The opposite happening only seems reasonable to Darwinists because of how they conceptualize "natural selection" as a literal person with goals.
Really, if there's one big criticism I have of most Intelligent Design proponents, it's that they tend to argue for the "limits" of natural selection, when in fact the whole *idea* of "natural selection" as defined by Darwin and conceived by Darwinists is just flat-out incoherent and doesn't refer to anything real or intelligible. There's no question about the "limits" of what "natural selection" (or "evolution" conceived as an active agent) can do because there's no such thing in the first place. It's better to erase it from our conceptual framework entirely so that we can think more clearly about the issues.
Your sentence, referring to how the professors smuggle in a sense of purpose and vision: "It also serves to make it seem subjectively more plausible to the Darwinist that such purposeful systems would come about by 'natural selection' in the first place." Exactly right!!
I used to have to argue with my own mother about "evolution" because she thought that "evolution" could have a purpose -- I had to show her, chapter and verse, how standard evolutionists expressly decry any "purpose" or "goal." It was so hard for her to grasp, she thought I was unfairly straw-manning them.
I'm of two minds about your excellent point: "big criticism I have of most Intelligent Design proponents, it's that they tend to argue for the 'limits' of natural selection, when in fact the whole *idea* of 'natural selection' as defined by Darwin and conceived by Darwinists is just flat-out incoherent and doesn't refer to anything real or intelligible."
On the one hand, I totally agree with you. Every time we grant that Neo-D evolution has a lot of merit but with importantly limits, we keep conceding the rhetorical point. In an argument, I've found that whoever controls the definitions and sound bites has a vastly better chance of persuading and prevailing. Our side gives up the definitions and soundbites too readily sometimes.
On the other hand, as a lawyer, I'm accustomed to granting that the "other side" has a point but they go too far and thus are wrong because of their extension error. And I grasp that within the sciences, the players tend to want to hew to orthodoxy as much as possible while pointing out errors or offering new / changed perspectives. Because of these thoughts, I don't stress out too much on the modest approach to criticizing neo-D.
Incidentally, this brings me to some fundamental differences between artifacts designed by humans and creatures designed by God that we should also talk about, and that make things even harder for the Darwinist.
Consider any human creation, such as the mechanical pocket watch from Paley's well-known thought experiment, for instance. Like the eye, a pocket watch is defined by its purpose. That is, what makes the various bits of metal and plastic that comprise a pocket watch a single object that we call a "pocket watch" is that they work together for the *purpose* of keeping time while fitting conveniently in a man's pocket.
But where does this time-telling purpose that defines a pocket watch reside? The numbers written on the pocket watch's face don't have any *objective* meaning. They only refer to numbers as a matter of human convention. Without humans to recognize the printed symbol "12" as referring to the number 12 by convention, the printed symbol would just be a splotch of ink that doesn't refer to anything, much less the number 12, much less to midday and midnight.
Likewise, there is nothing about the long hand or short hand that physically entails that their positions refer to minutes and hours. They carry this meaning only by human convention as well.
The same point can be made about every other aspect of the pocket watch. There's nothing about it being physically small that entails that it has the purpose of fitting in a man's pocket. There's nothing about the glass face covering it that physically entails that the glass face has the purpose of protecting the machinery underneath while providing an unimpeded view of it, and so forth.
What this all means is that in a very real sense, a pocket watch is NOT objectively real. Objectively speaking, a pocket watch isn't really even a single object at all. It's a bunch of different objects stuck together.
The purpose that makes a pocket watch a pocket watch is subjective, or rather INTER-subjective. It exists only by human convention. Now, it's an objective fact about a pocket watch that the matter comprising it was deliberately arranged in that manner by a human being for the purposes of telling time, and its an objective fact that it is used for that purpose by its users. But there is nothing about the pocket watch *itself* that objectively defines it as such. The purpose that makes a pocket watch a pocket watch exists purely externally, in the minds of its creators and users who made and use it for that purpose.
Now, let's contrast this with a functional biological feature like the eye. Like a pocket watch, an eye can only be defined AS an eye by its purpose, namely that of allowing an organism to see, as I explained in my previous comment (https://billdembski.substack.com/p/darwins-black-box-30-years-on/comment/312700493). But there is a fundamental difference here. An eye does NOT have its defining purpose merely virtue of being externally intended and used for that purpose. While an eye is only defining by its purpose like a human artifact, it's also the case that as I pointed out in that comment, "it's simply an objective fact that I really do see with my eyes when they are working properly."
Or consider the case of human reason, which I also examined in that comment. As I pointed out, human reason can only be defined in terms of its purpose, but at the same time, as I also pointed out, "It can scarcely be denied that reason finds truth when properly used, as do so would be to invalidate ones own reasoning."
In other words, while a pocket watch only performs its purpose of keeping time as a matter of subjective external convention by its its creator and users, eyes provide vision and reason finds truth *as a matter of objective fact* that is intrinsic to them when working correctly, regardless of what anyone thinks they are for or wants them to do.
This makes the Darwinist's explanatory task go from impossible to a whole secoond magnitude of super-impossible. Even if so-called "natural selection" were real and coherent and had all the powers of a human designer, it STILL would not be able to create the sort of intrinsic purpose that biological systems like the eye and human reason have, because the ability to create this intrinsic sort of purpose eludes as well. Everything we build is like the pocket watch, existing and having purpose only by virtue of our intentions for it.
Now, what we might call the "extrinsic" or "conventional" purpose of human artifacts comes from human minds, particularly from human reason, which has "intrinsic" purpose as just described. So extrinsic purpose is derivative from intrinsic purpose. Furthermore, while objects with intrinsic and extrinsic purpose have in common that they are defined by their purpose, they are *distinguished* by what extrinsic purpose *lacks*, namely the objectively real intrinsic power of intrinsic purpose.
That means that any sort of cause that is insufficient to create extrinsic purpose (such as mindless physical forces) is even LESS capable of creating intrinsic purpose.
Let's return to the example of the pocket watch. It's technically impossible for blind physical forces to form a pocket watch, because a pocket watch is defined by its subjective purpose and blind physical forces do not have minds and so cannot subjectively confer purposes on anything in principle. HOWEVER, it's at least logically conceivable, albeit fantastically unlikely, that matter could end up in an arrangement PHYSICALLY IDENTICAL TO a pocket watch through purely blind physical causes. It just wouldn't "count" as a pocket watch until a human found it and started using it as one.
But this is not true of intrinsic purpose. For all the ingenuity of human beings, we are NOT capable of making anything with intrinsic purpose. We aren't able to build anything that *objectively* sees as a matter of fact the way we see when our eyes are working correctly. We aren't able to buld anything that *objectively* finds truth the way our reason does. The purpose of all the things we make exists only subjectively in our minds by virtue of the conventions we assign to them.
And this means that blind physical causes that lack our intrinsically purposeful minds is even less capabable of generating intrinsic purpose than we are.
So what is causally sufficient to create intrinsic purpose? Well, since intrinsic purpose is differentiated from the extrinsic purpose we create by virtue of what it has that extrinsic purpose lacks, whatever is sufficient to create it must have a mind like we do, but on a higher order than our minds that has powers that our minds lack. In short, intrinsic purpose, including the intrinsic purpose that defines our own minds, must come from a SUPER-natural mind, a divine Mind of a higher order than ours, from which our minds are causally derived.
Since coming to realize that natural selection is incoherent as a concept, I've come to believe that Darwinism should be attacked with a "hit them with everything" approach.
That is, we should point out that natural selection is incoherent and so can't possibly explain anything, that Darwinism is self-defeating and entails that biology is an illusion even as it purports to explain it, AND also that every single step of the Darwinian story all the way down to the origin of even the simplest functional protein is far too wildly improbable to have ever happened unintentionally.
When the issue is purely framed as one of probabilities, it's easier for the Darwinist to appeal to his own authority, to insinuate that he simply knows about contributing factors that make it more probable and that non-experts just wouldn't understand, and so forth. Of course he doesn't, but arguments about probability (and hence plausibility) are more easily derailed into he-said/she-said rhetorical fights.
If you can explain why the Darwinist's claims are logically incoherent and self-defeating, and so CAN'T possibly be true, that's not something the Darwinist can easily defend against, especially if the audience understands your point. And doing so then creates a backdrop that makes all your probabilistic arguments stronger. It's little wonder that empirical data conflicts so badly with Darwinism, after all, given that it's not even an intelligible idea.
I've also concluded that it's best to avoid using the language of "natural selection" even when discussing so-called "microevolution," because it's superfluous and just causes confusion.
What's nowadays called "microevolution" was pretty clearly understood long before Darwin. That understanding, after all, is pretty obviously what lay behind the invention of plant and animal breeding. Early breeders noticed that organisms would pass on variations in their traits, that certain organisms with certain variations would do better at surviving and reproducing in certain environments, and so concluded that they could bring out variations they wanted by controlling the breeding environments of organisms themselves.
What's different is that generations prior to Darwin were not tempted to conceptualize the environmental factors that caused some variations to do better in various scenarios as a sort of pseudo-designing mind with goals. And they were right not to think of things that way, because it's superfluous and simply a hindrance to understanding.
Really there's no eventually to it. Darwinian "explanation" always begins and ends with purpose. The "blind and unguided" part only ever serves as a sort of disclaimer. It plays no explanatory role at all. Literally all of the explanatory content of Darwinian theory depends on purpose being objectively real and "natural selection" or "evolution" being a literal intelligent designer.
There's a reason they have to talk like this. Take any biological feature that we wish to explain - any feature at all - and what you will find upon analysis is that the feature doesn't just *appear* to have a purpose, but that the purpose is actually the feature's *defining quality*, so that to deny the purpose is to deny the objective reality of the feature itself.
Take the vertebrate eye for example. What is an eye? How would you define it? What makes the molecules comprising an eye an eye, and not just a bunch of molecules or a bunch of cells that we're just subjectively projecting a label to?
One might be tempted to say something like "An eye is an organ that sees." But this can't be exactly right. If you remove my eye and put it in some sort of nutrient solution to keep its cells alive, it won't see anything. It is I, the organism that *has* eyes, that sees with them. So we must define eyes as something that organisms see *with*, thereby introducing the concept of an organism into the definition of what an eye is.
But we must go further, because organisms with eyes don't *always* see with them. An unconscious organism has eyes but doesn't see. The same is true of organisms that are blind due to an optical or neural defect. So we must refine our definition to say that eyes are an organ *for* seeing in organisms that normally have them, when they are functioning *properly*. So now we can see that the concept of *purpose* within an organism as a whole is core to the very definition of what an eye *is*.
To deny that the eye's *purpose* is objectively real is thus to deny that the eye *itself* is objectively real. Some materialists might be willing to make this concession and take the position that the eye is a subjective construct (as many of them presently do with biological sex, for instance), but logically that's a nonstarter, because it's simply an objective fact that I really do see with my eyes when they are working properly. I experience seeing with them directly, so it can scarcely be denied that my eyes are objectively real, and hence their defining purpose as well.
This is even more obvious in the case of human reason, which is also irreducibly definable only in terms of its purpose. There are objectively *right* and *wrong* ways for us to reason as delineated by the laws of logic, which implies that reason has a purpose. It can scarcely be denied that reason finds truth when properly used, as do so would be to invalidate ones own reasoning. But it likewise cannot be coherently claimed that reason always finds truth, because that would imply that the misuse of reason (such as when engaged in sophistry or rationalization) also leads to truth. Reason can only be defined as that faculty that is *for* finding truth, and that only finds truth when functioning and used *properly*, meaning that like the eye, it can only be defined in terms of its purpose, and the objective reality of reason and its purpose cannot be coherently denied.
Similar analysis can be done of every other biological feature. Every biological feature that we seek to explain is defined irreducibly by its purpose, and therefore you cannot deny the objective reality of its purpose without denying the objective reality of the feature itself. Explaining how the feature came to be thus requires explaining how the purpose that defines it came to be, and the purpose cannot be a mere metaphor as Darwinists often insist. It must be quite literal.
THAT is why Darwinists always reify "natural selection" or "evolution" as a quite literal intelligent designer in all of their explanations. They *have* to do this, because consistently taking it as blind mechanistic causes would imply that all of the biological features they're trying to explain actually exist only as subjective impressions in the human mind, not as objective realities in the external world, which would deconstruct all of biology as a sort of illusion.
It's not just that Darwinists have failed as of this date to "cash out" their teleological language in physicalist terms. It's that they can never do so even in principle, because the moment they give up their teleological terms, they give up the objective reality of biology itself.
The way Darwinists invoke "natural selection" or "evolution" to explain things in biology is exactly the same way that I invoke Gustave Eiffel to explain the Eiffel Tower. I'm not an architect and I have done no research into the matter, so I personally have no clue how the Eiffel Tower was built in terms of physical details. Physically speaking, I just have no idea what happened. So what information is being supplied when I explain it by appealing to Gustave Eiffel? I'm supplying the source of the *purpose* or *intent* behind the Eiffel Tower, of course. Since the Eiffel Tower is a human artifact that was built on purpose, the *source* of that purpose is the primary thing about it that needs to be accounted for in explaining it coherently. The physical implementation details are secondary.
By crediting Gustave Eiffel, I am saying that he's the main guy who supplied the *concept* for the Eiffel Tower that he developed in his mind along with the *intent* to physically realize it, and that he then acted to make it real by setting in motion whatever physical implementation details were actually employed to achieve his purpose. And note that I can't possibly "cash out" Gustave's essential role in physicalist terms. Even if I knew the complete physical implementation details of the Eiffel Tower, I would still need to appeal to Gustave Eiffel's mind to coherently explain the primary thing about it that needs to be explained.
Likewise, in Darwinian explanation, "natural selection" / "evolution" is never invoked to provide the physical details of how some biological feature came about, despite its pretentions to being a physicalist theory. Rather it is always called upon to provide the source of purpose and intent *behind* the physical details, which as we've seen must be literally objectively real. But "natural selection" is supposed to be mere shorthand for undirected mindless processes, and undirected mindless processes cannot possibly have literal intentions or concepts, so this is a logical contradiction.
And as with the Gustave Eiffel illustration, there is no possibility of "cashing out" Darwinism's teleological explanations in physical terms. Even if we learned about all of the physical implementation details of some biological feature, Darwinists would still need "natural selection" reified at a literally intelligent designing agent to supply the purpose and intent behind the feature.
Indeed, the mere fact that Darwinists make a logical distinction between the physical implementation details and "natural selection" in the first place, which is necessary for them to pontificate about what a trait is "selected for" despite not knowing the physical details, means that one can never be "cashed out" in terms of the other, and this is fatal to Darwinism's status as a logically coherent naturalistic theory regardless of whatever physical details come to be known.
I agree with your points here. As we are both interested in clear and precise communication of our ideas, may I offer something?
In your passage it says:
"Likewise, in Darwinian explanation, 'natural selection' / 'evolution' is never invoked to provide the physical details of how some biological feature came about, despite its pretentions to being a physicalist theory. Rather it is always called upon to provide the source of purpose and intent *behind* the physical details..."
I understand what you mean, but I would suggest adjusting the language so that other people less in-tune will grasp what you mean. Reading the English words, one might readily object that nat-sel and evo are frequently invoked to provide the physical details about how a feature came to be.
The problem I think is using the term "physical details." I believe you and I mean that "nat-sel and evo explanations always fail to show the step-by-step sequence of actions that physically create or modify a biological feature."
An easy example is the dinosaur to bird evolution theory. Nobody ever sits down and shows how the physical actions start with no-wing and begin building a wing, step by tiny step for the bones, cartilage, circulation, muscles, nerves, feathers ... and after umpteen steps in sequence, voila you have a wing. Those are the "physical details" you're mentioning -- and I think it is clearer to others if we refer to "step by step sequence of actions that physically create or modify a structure, feature, operation, or behavior."
****"Reading the English words, one might readily object that nat-sel and evo are frequently invoked to provide the physical details about how a feature came to be.
The problem I think is using the term "physical details." I believe you and I mean that "nat-sel and evo explanations always fail to show the step-by-step sequence of actions that physically create or modify a biological feature."****
Yes, I think that's fair, but in my opinion it's actually overly generous to Darwinism. While it's certainly true that Darwinian explanations don't provide step-by-step accounts of the physical causes by which functional systems come to be, I'm trying to make the stronger point that this is because they don't provide ANY explanation in terms physical causes whatsoever, much less detailed step-by-step ones, because they CAN'T. That is, my whole point is that the frequent objection you mention is actually superficial and wrong.
The primary point I'm trying to get across is that "natural selection" (or "evolution" when cited as an active agent that does things, which in that context is shorthand for "natural selection") is NOT a physical cause, and that while it is presented as being one, that presentation is actually all just smoke and mirrors, and that in reality explanation in terms of "natural selection" provides *zero* physical details and the only thing it actually attempts to explain is the *purpose* behind biology that it simultaneously denies, rendering it a self-contradictory concept that can't possibly explain anything.
To the extent that Darwinists SEEM to provide any physical details to their just-so stories, these are invariably just restatements of the problem presented as if they were a solution.
To give an example, consider the way Darwinists typically try to account for the vertebrate camera eye. The physical "history" they will give will go something this: "First signaling proteins evolved, then some of them evolved into light-signaling proteins that became a light-sensitive spot, then the spot gradually became more concave until eventually a lens appeared over it along with focal muscles and the other parts of the modern eye, and it took on a spherical shape such that it could be turned in different directions.
This *sounds* superficially like a physical explanation because it makes reference to physical things (some of which may or may not have ever existed), but this is an illusion. If you look closely, all this account is doing is making a list of some of the more obvious ways in which camera eyes differ from signaling proteins, and then arranging those differences in a putative temporal sequence. It's just a presentation of some of the things you would need to change to turn a signaling protein into a camera eye, restated as if it were an explanation of how those changes happened.
There's no actual physical explanation of how any of this happened in the account I just gave. In particular, it lacks any sort of physical CAUSALITY, so it can't explain anything physically in principle, because EXPLANATIONS require CAUSES.
Now, Darwinian explanations DO typically invoke causes, which I didn't include in the account I just gave. Specifically, they implicitly or explicitly invoke "natural selection" as the causal factor - this is what makes them Darwinian, after all. But "natural selection" is never invoked as a PHYSICAL cause, but always as a MENTAL one.
For instance, the Darwinian account will typically say that signaling proteins evolved into a light sensitive spot "in order to" detect the direction of sunlight or somesuch. And they will say that the light-sensitive spot became concave because it was "selected for the purposes of" having better directionality or of forming a rudimentary image. And the lens forms "to allow" a sharp image, and so forth.
But these aren't physical causes. They are TELEOLOGICAL causes. These are causal MOTIVATIONS or PURPOSES being ascribed to Mr. Natural Selection, Esq. that allegedly led him to create the eye. ALL of the causal "explanation" in Darwinian accounts takes the form of ascribing goals or motivations to "natural selection"/"evolution" - invoking him as a literal intelligent agent. This is illustrated in spades in the description you gave of that Peterson Academy course administered by Weinstein and Heyer, where all causal explanation is in terms of what "problem" natural selection was "trying" to "solve."
And to the extent that there is ever any attempt to "cash out" these sorts of explanations in physical terms, they always end up being circular. For instance, the Darwinist may try to "cash out" the parts about the light-sensitive spot beign "selected for" a more concave shape and for having a lens by saying that the organisms lived in an environment where a sharper or more directional image would have been advantageous. But what sort of environment could this have been? After all, there are organisms today with light-sensitive spots that are not becoming more concave or developing lenses. Why, it must the sort of environment where they would have been advantageous, of course! But this is another circular example of restating the problem as if it were a solution. It goes without saying that for any trait to have been preserved to future generations, it would have had to be advantageous enough in whatever environment it existed for those organisms that had it to survive and reproduce it in future generations. Nevermind that giving a scenario in which a trait might be useful isn't the same thing as giving a physical CAUSE of that trait to begin with.
But the issue isn't just that Darwinists heretofore FAILED to "cash out" these teleological causes in physicalist terms. The deeper issue is that they CAN'T ever do so even in principle. Even if there were a complete causal, physical, step-by-step account of eye evolution that Darwinists learned about somehow, they would STILL need to invoke "natural selection" separately from those physical causes to account for the eye, just as I would still need to invoke Gustave Eiffel to explain the Eiffel Tower even if I knew all the physical details of how it was constructed. That's because a list of purely physical causes, no matter how detailed, could never possibly tell you the PURPOSE of the eye, yet the eye's purpose is what defines the eye AS an eye and as something that needs to be explained out of all the other possible forms the molecules comprising an eye could have taken in the first place. It's that defining *purpose* that "natural selection" is meant to explain, and to explain that it logically needs to be a literal intelligent designing agent with a mind.
This distinction was implicit in Darwinism from the start, and even in Darwin's own bumbling attempt to account for the eye in Darwinian terms. As you probably recall, he gave an extremely vague history where optical nerves came to exist in a light-sensitive spot somehow, and then professed that while he had no idea HOW natural selection did the rest physically, and that it is "insuperable by our imagination" (which of course means he was conveniently absolved of imagining it), "natural selection" nevertheless figured it out because "there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration of the transparent layers; and carefully selecting each alteration which, under varied circumstances, may in any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter image."
In brief, what Darwin was asserting here is that even though we can't know HOW natural selection created the eye in terms of physical causes, we can still know THAT natural selection created the eye. But if that's the case, the inescapable logical implication is that "natural selection" is distinct from any set of physical causes, which logically implies that natural selection *itself* cannot possibly be a physical cause.
Yet at the same time, Darwin and Darwinists after him have insisted that natural selection was a purely physical cause, and defined it as such. But being a physical cause is just an "informed attribute" of natural selection, an informed attribute being when an author of a work of fiction will tell you some trait of a character in his story that isn't actually reflected in the story itself (eg. when an author introduces a character as being a "ruthless cutthroat" but then the character behaves in a merciful and gentlemanly way throughout the actual story).
In actual Darwinian explanation, "natural selection" always plays the role of an intelligent designer instead of a blind physical cause, and as we've seen, it MUST be a literal intelligent designer in order to explain objectively real purpose, which is the defining trait of everything in biology and so cannot be denied on pain of denying all of biology as a subjective illusion. Natural selection's explanatory role cannot possibly be "cashed out" in terms of physical causation, and this is in direct logical contradiction with its "official" definition as a purely physical cause.
Thus, the root issue is not that Darwinists don't cash out Darwinian explanations in terms of detailed, step-by-step physical causes (though of course they don't), but that they CAN'T cash it out in terms of physical causes, detailed or otherwise, even in principle. The root of the issue isn't that it's improbable for natural selection to produce functional biological systems (though of course it is wildly improbable for the physical structures associated with these systems so come about via unguided physical causes), but that it's IMPOSSIBLE, because "natural selection" isn't even a logically coherent concept in the first place.
I read your several posts. There are several points developed, so I want to verify that I have your thesis correctly stated here:
The overall argument is that Darwinian explanations depend on purpose and teleology even while Darwinism officially denies that nature is guided by purpose.
The basic claim is that biological structures such as the eye cannot be defined merely by their physical components. An eye is an eye *because it is for seeing*; similarly, human reason is a faculty for discovering truth. Thus, purpose is not merely something observers project onto biological systems but rather is essential to what those systems objectively are.
The argument goes further than saying evolutionary biology currently lacks sufficient mechanistic detail. It maintains that no amount of physical detail could ever replace teleology, because a physical history alone would not explain *why an eye is for seeing.* Consider the Eiffel Tower: Even complete knowledge of the construction process would not eliminate the need to discuss the intentions of its designers.
Intelligent Design arguments too often focus only on the limits or improbabilities of natural selection. The deeper problem is conceptual: Natural selection, as commonly invoked, is incoherent because it is officially *mindless* while functioning within evolutionary explanations as though it possesses *goals.*
Probability arguments remain useful, particularly arguments that complex functional systems are fantastically unlikely to arise unintentionally. The logical argument is stronger, however, because it shows that Darwinian explanation is internally contradictory rather than merely improbable.
In sum: Biological organisms contain objectively real functions or purposes. Darwinian explanations depend upon those purposes to identify what needs explaining and to construct evolutionary narratives. Yet Darwinism officially maintains that evolution is produced by blind, purposeless physical processes. Consequently, Darwinian explanations covertly turn “natural selection” into a purposeful intelligent agent. That creates an internal contradiction that cannot be repaired merely by adding more physical details to the description of the biological element.
The key overarching observation is: Intrinsic *biological purpose,* as evolutionists detect in so many plant and animal features, requires a genuinely purposive cause rather than an unguided physical process. When evolutionists detect and celebrate purpose, they are unmooring the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution of species.
Thank you, Dr. Dembski, for recalling the history and enduring substance of Dr. Behe's "irreducible complexity" arguments in his book, Darwin's Black Box! Certainly, the bacterial flagellum was and remains a powerful demonstration of neo-Darwinism's inadequacy as an explanation of everything in every species.
People forget, however, that Behe's book also showed how blood clotting is irreducibly complex. Personally, and as a matter of effective advocacy, I prefer the blood clotting example. Nobody knows a bacterium with a flagellum. Everybody knows what it is like to bleed, and everybody relies upon "the body process to clot and stop the bleeding." Everybody recoils at the idea of bleeding to death. I offer that we in the ID world use the blood clotting example more often.
Your article includes this sentence: " [Kenneth] Miller claimed they were not irreducibly complex because all these systems could lose parts and then still serve some other function.” I'll never forget Miller on the PBS special about the Kitzmiller case, where he showed that a mousetrap without a spring could still be used as a tie clasp. A proof against ID? Talk about embarrassing. You're so right. The attempted critique of ID via the Miller kind of arguments would be rejected by everyone except that they must defend neo-D at all costs.
The article in online Salvo Magazine, “Kenneth Miller's Epic Failure of Evolutionary Guesswork,” exposes some of the tissue-flimsy arguments for the evolution from non-minds to sophisticated minds that Kenneth Miller advances in his book, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will (2018). Miller’s book intended to smack a homerun for undirected evolution of the human intellect. Not even close, and the arguments were silly. Chiefly, the arguments utterly failed to show a plausible sequence of events leading from non-mind to mind.
If Dr. Behe were proposing that an ancient tribe carved dwellings into the mountain at Montezuma Castle in Arizona, the mainstreamers would cheer the deduction of intelligent design. It’s when biological systems reveal unmistakable evidence of design that the same people get stupid. Your piece nicely documents some of that history -- thank you!
I wasn't part of the original philosophers and scientists who advanced ID, but I have followed it since the beginning. I have defended it in courses at Denver Seminary and other schools and have debated it a few times. My book, Christian Apologetics, has two chapters on ID, one critiquing Darwinism and one advancing ID in molecular machines and DNA. The ID community has always been very helpful to me in vetting my work on this material, including Mike Behe. Thanks to you, Bill, for being there from the beginning and presenting the case so clearly.
Ty for the article. Dr. Behe is an inspiration. It is true that materialists won't engage his work on its merits. I have encountered this numerous times. It just shows how we are closing the gap.
Excellent. You have an axe to grind on this issue. I like that. You went straight to Gish Galloping in response to my providing Behe’s correct claim instead of being a gracious Christian, showing an interest in detente.
I’m shocked that you’d find James Tour, who crashed out in his debate with Dave Farina, compelling. Let’s talk about him. I’d like that.
BTW, you did get creamed at Dover, contrary to your conspiratorial view of the defeat, and that’s why you haven’t pushed for your hypothesis being introduced into classrooms since then. Deal with it or try that push again. Let’s see how that goes for you.
If you wanna do an online vidchat discussion on Tour’s campaign to reform origin of life research, just tell me. I have my own podcast.
Behe argued that peer-reviewed research concurs with his conclusion that irreducible complexity can’t produce the cascade:
Q. “How many peer reviewed articles are there explaining the blood clotting — why the blood clotting cascade cannot evolve because it is irreducibly complex in the way you describe?”
BEHE: “I will agree that there certainly are no arguments … directly to that point.”
Q. “So these are all those other articles based on the research of other scientists that you interpret differently than those scientists do?”
BEHE: “That’s right. I was proposing a newer idea.”
That concession is important because Behe had previously confidently asserted that the literature contained no ev9lutionary explanation and therefore “nobody else in the world knows how that could have been done.”
Under cross-examination he choked, acknowledging that researchers published extensively on blood-clotting evolution, while there were ZERO peer-reviewed papers arguing that the cascade was irreducibly complex or appeared intelligently designed. Judge Jones specifically highlighted this concession in his decision.
So, to correct myself, Behe wasn’t saying blood clotting hadn’t been studied. He just admitted that the literature he cited didn’t agree with his conclusion. It was a sneak.
Your initial claim was: “Michael Behe. He was thoroughly humiliated at the Dover trial when he claimed there was no scientific literature on the blood clotting cascade.” You retracted it when pressed to support it. The “thoroughly” was a false and needless snipe from the get-go.
The purported quotations in your post taken from trial testimony are not part of the published (non-precedential) Dover decision. Perhaps you can supply a link to your source for those.
The present claim is: “Under cross-examination [Behe] choked, acknowledging that researchers published extensively on blood-clotting evolution, while there were ZERO peer-reviewed papers arguing that the cascade was irreducibly complex or appeared intelligently designed.”
Your comment does not support any “choke.” The purported quotations show Dr. Behe testifying that his position was new and thus not found in the prior “peer-reviewed” publications. For the record, Ignaz Semmelweis’s world-changing observations and hypotheses were not found in any prior publications at all. Louis Pasteur’s discoveries were not the “peer-reviewed” consensus either. Neither were Albert Einstein’s theories and equations.
Dr. Behe demonstrated something new that obviously annoyed the status quo.
Your comment went on: “Judge Jones specifically highlighted this concession in his decision.”
Let’s be accurate. On page 88 of the non-precedential decision, Jones wrote: “On cross-examination, Professor Behe admitted that: ‘There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred’ [and] conceded that there are no peer-reviewed papers supporting his claims that complex molecular systems, like the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade, and the immune system, were intelligently designed.”
Right. Likewise would Semmelweis, Pasteur, and Einstein have to testify when they brought forth their new concepts and observations. Those men did not “choke.”
I can supply the full quote if requested, but p. 75 of the decision recites the NAS then-opinion that “complex molecular systems” can evolve “in several ways” and “natural selection can bring together parts of a system for one function at one time and then at a later time recombine those parts with other systems” to produce another function.
In fact, no, and Jones was clueless. After Dover, Dr. James Tour has shown that “complex molecular systems,” using those terms with their correct meanings, cannot and do not occur by accidents of mutation or natural environment. They do not self assemble to create functions.
Last year I watched and reported on an 8-hour course at Peterson Academy put on by Drs. Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein. Their course promised to “explore the fundamentals of the biology of evolution, providing tools to interpret the natural world through the lens of evolutionary inference.” Not one word about the mechanics of evolving complex molecular systems. Instead, their talk focused upon the "purposes" of biological adaptations.
The attempt to re-characterize Dr. Behe’s 2004 trial testimony despite the context and his actual words rather highlights the lack of anything new or conclusive on the neo-Darwinian front. Citing a non-existent "humiliation" – is that the best neo-D supporters have?
Prof. Gerd Muller’s opening remarks and paper presented to the 2016 Royal Society conceded far more about the categorical weaknesses of neo-D evolution theory than anything Dr. Behe said on cross-examination 22 year ago.
Can you quote where Dr. Behe said: "there is no scientific literature on the blood clotting cascade"? I'm somewhat familiar with the case and with Dr. Behe's book and approaches, and I don't recall his saying that.
Provide the quote or source of the quote, I'll read it.
One of the knocks against ID is that it makes God a tinkerer of His creation. It makes Him look like He had to intervene at various times to improve on His creation. But the God I believe in wouldn’t have to do this.
I’m not saying He didn’t but He wouldn’t have too. If He did tinker, it was by design. Certainly Darwin’s ideas had nothing to do with it. But couldn’t the initial conditions of the universe had within it the paths to life and evolution that have long since disappeared from view?
ID has to do with whether the features of living species and the preconditions of the world/universe necessary for their existence can be accounted for without intelligent intent. Whether this involved "tinkering" is a secondary question.
Somewhere in the past, I had two scenarios that might’ve happened in the distant past but have long since disappeared. This is not to say that either one happened but they could have. Evolution is not my main concern now so I do not know where they are at the moment but the theme of the essay was God is quite capable of finding a way if He wants to do it without any direct intervention.
The basic question is always where did the proteins come from and why they should accumulate and the right combination come together at various times to produce a living entity and then more complicated entitles. I will look for what I wrote but it may take awhile.
What you're describing seems to fall pretty clearly under the umbrella of intelligent design.
You're suggesting that God set things up in such a way that specific complex proteins would come to exist at specific times in specific places in just the right way to produce a living entity, and then further come together just right in specific ways to produce more advanced living entities.
The implication is that our simple and constant laws don't have the power in and of themselves to affect that outcome (I agree) and so had to be intentionally set up just right to do it, possibly with the help of specific life-creating laws or "paths" that no longer exist.
Regardless, you're still talking about an intelligent intervention of sorts. You're appealing to God's deliberate act to explain why material causes did things that material causes cannot do without being intentionally made to do them.
Besides that, the question of "when" God acted is really immaterial. As you acknowledge, what exactly happened physically speaking is lost to time. Whether God directly suspended the operation of natural laws to make life or set things up just right would look the same from our perspective. We can only say that deliberate intent was required to bring it about. Also, God is outside of time, so the question of "when" he acted is sort of a misnomer. The question for us is when the purposeful intent becomes physically manifested.
This concept raises a question: "God is quite capable of finding a way if He wants to do it without any direct intervention." From the point of view of the Creator of the Universe, what exactly is "indirect intervention?"
The theistic evolutionist view, as I understand it, contends God started everything including a system that would support evolution. Starting that system was direct intervention, right?
Setting up the system was direct. If I set up an ice-maker to churn out ice in my house, I am the direct initial cause of the consequences of it operating in my house to make ice. Similarly, Babe Ruth was the direct cause of his homeruns -- the bat was an instrumentality of the direct cause.
If God set up evolution, then God caused the results of evolution. Nothing else caused them except God. The mutations resulted from God's designed plan, the "natural selection" via the environment that God created, would be His design.
The vast majority of atheists I know fall into the category of your final sentence.
Funny, when shown the tsunami of evidence and reasoning, some of them retreat to the "everything you think is an illusion" position that atheist Sam Harris purveys.
Irreducible complexity and Behe's work became central in my conversion from evolutionist to ID-man. Having rebuilt and modified engines for my wife's racing car, I immediately understood the concept of IC whcih in the world of engineering is the bleed'n obvious. Only in a mind game can evolution work, - in the real world it´s pure insanity to assume you can build complex functional systems gradually. But Darwin's moronic theory is still mainstream and it's frustrating to fight it.
Hi Dr. Dembski. I made this comment in another thread a couple days ago, but I think it's more apt for this one, so I'll copy it here:
One thing I've come to notice is that not only have Darwinists/materialists never given a coherent answer to the challenge of irreducible complexity, they've never given an answer that even really *addresses* the actual issue at hand. Their responses are always a change of subject that address a different issue.
All Darwinist answers to irreducibly complex systems boil down to the claim that the system and/or its parts had precursors that were performing different functions or no function, and got coopted somehow into the new system.
But that's not an explanation, it's just a truism. It goes without saying that if a given system with a given function is composed of multiple parts that have to all be present and working together in the right way to play their roles to realize that function, then prior to that system's existence any precursors to the system or its parts couldn't have been performing that same function, and so would've had to be performing a different function if any.
To the extent that such cooption/exaptation can be considered an answer to a challenge, it's an answer to "It's impossible for irreducibly complex systems to come into existence." But that's not the challenge that irreducible complexity poses. Obviously it's possible for irreducibly complex systems to come into existence, or else they wouldn't exist. Nobody disputes that. The problem that irreducible complexity poses is that it's not possible for irreducibly complex systems to come into existence *unintentionally*, and that's the part that Darwinists never address, or really even try to.
You can see that in, for instance, Ken Miller's "reverse mousetrap" illustration, where he has a stripped-down mousetrap serving as a tie clip. Of course, that's a result of him intentionally thinking "What could I possibly use a stripped-down mousetrap for?" until he came up with something. In reality a stripped-down mousetrap is wildly impractical as a tie clip, and more to the point, no normally-occurring tie clip would be useful as a mousetrap just by adding some parts to it, much less by *accidentally* adding some parts to it, precisely because it wasn't made for that.
Now, it is true that the evolution of human technology often works by a "cooption" of sorts. For instance, after the rotary motor was invented, it was eventually coopted and modified to make automobiles. But this is a *conceptual* evolution. It was the *idea* of a rotary motor that was coopted to make the automobile. A human being saw some rotary motors and thought "I could use something conceptually similar to that, appropriately modified and combined with wheels and other parts, to build a convenient self-propelled transportation device that could replace horse and buggies."
The actual original rotary motor invented by humans would've been quite useless in an automobile, and no amount of modification would've changed that enough to make it cooptable for that purpose. Now, it is true that nowadays we do have off-the-shelf parts (screws, nails, sheet metal in standardized sizes, various types of motors, etc) that are reusable in a variety of applications as they are, but that too is a result of *conceptual* evolution. In fact, these are an example of modular design, an especially forward-thinking type of conceptual thought that designs components specifically to be physically useful in a wide variety of *future* applications. Of course, actually using them in any such application requires further conceptual cooption along with the physical cooption.
Naturalistic evolution could never in principle work like that, because naturalistic "evolution" is supposed to be nothing more than the acting out of blind and mechanistic causes, and blind and mechanistic causes by definition do not have concepts (that's what "blind" and "mechanistic" mean).
Darwinists argue this way because, as I've pointed out before, all Darwinian explanation implicitly depends on reifying "natural selection" or "evolution" as a literal intelligent agent with a mind, purposes, and goals. Every Darwinian explanation falls apart when you take away that assumption, and in fact their entire mode of explanation is rendered incoherent if "natural selection" is consistently taken to be the mindless physical processes they claim it is rather than the intelligent designer their explanations actually invoke it as. One might say that they are ID theorists in cheap tuxedos.
As such, when challenged to explain something like irreducible complexity, they don't really fully comprehend that their challenge is to explain it in purely blind and naturalistic terms completely devoid of mind with all that entails. They subconsciously swap it out for the much less obviously impossible challenge of answering how "natural selection" conceived as an intelligent agent with lots of time on his hands could go about it.
The reason they do this is the same reason why if I ask you to visualize a square circle, you will necessarily visualize *either* a square *or* a circle instead: Their position is actually incoherent, and when the mind tries to visualize or conceive of something incoherent, it must by necessity swap it out for something coherent that can actually be conceived. This process that can cause a philosophically unreflective person to simply conflate the incoherent idea they were trying to conceive with the coherent idea they conceived in its place instead of realizing that it's incoherent.
With that in mind, some commentary on this post specifically:
****"Just to be clear, if proteins are highly isolated, it makes it that much harder to evolve among them because protein evolution, on Darwinian principles, must traverse continuous paths and thus cannot simply materialize from one place in the space to another."****
Indeed. I think Douglas Axe's research is some of the most important in ID. ANY meaningful sort of evolution of any new biological system is going to require multiple new proteins, combined and working together in the cell in new kinds of ways, as the *bare minimum* first step. Indeed, dozens of proteins (at least) would've been needed for the simplest conceivable life to exist in the first place. Yet Axe's research shows that individual proteins are irreducibly complex, and so exceedingly rare in "search space" that not a single one should ever have arisen by accident in the entire history of life. And every bit of evidence we have on the matter confirms this.
But of course no protein is functional by itself, only *potentially* functional. Any new protein needs to interact with and connect to other proteins in just the right way to perform any new function. But a new system is also only *potentially* functional. A bacterial flagellum that a bacterium didn't actually "know" how to use wouldn't be useful just sitting there inert, after all. Hence there need to be control and regulatory systems in place too. If we're talking about significant new features in a *multi-cellular* organism, then not only do you need new proteins and new systems at the cellular level, but these also need to somehow cause billions of whole cells to divide and differentiate and work together in just the right way to form the multi-cellular feature with the necessary multi-cellular integration and control systems in the adult organism.
And whether you're talking about a single-celled feature or a multi-cellular one, it's not sufficient for a protein or multiple proteins to just sort of fortuitously "float in" to the right place at the right time to do something new. What actually needs to be explained is a whole new *program* by which the new system is consistently and repeatedly built, integrated into the whole, and activated each time the organism reproduces. In the case of multicellular organisms, this means the building of new proteins nested inside the building and integration of new micro-systems nested inside the building and integration of new macro-systems, and evidence increasingly indicates that at least the development programs of multi-cellular organisms transcends what is possible via computational algorithm altogether.
But again, before one can even begin to try to explain all the big stuff, one must account for new proteins, and Doug Axe and others have shown that it's just impossible for that most minimal first step to happen unintentionally.
****"I didn’t at first adequately address this co-option criticism of Behe because I couldn’t believe that anyone could take it seriously. But Darwinists did. Thus, they were not just saying that the T3SS is a precursor to the flagellum, but also that there is a whole series of gradual steps in which a new part gets added and the function changes, then another part gets added and the function changes again, and so on until evolution takes us to a full-fledged flagellum."****
This is a reflection of what I pointed out above. These sorts of scenarios seem reasonable to Darwinists because the Darwinist is never really even addressing the actual challenge at hand in the first place, namely how could some functional feature like the flagellum be produced by blind and mechanistic causes completely devoid of intent.
The very idea is unintelligible to Darwinists (and to everyone for that matter), especially once you follow out the full radically nominalist implications of it: that all the function that defines any biological feature like the bacterial flagellum is imposed by the human mind rather than being something objectively real that needs to be explained, hence all biological features are essentially figments of our imaginations (including our imaginations) and there's nothing for natural selection to even do in the first place.
So the Darwinist is always mentally substituting the actual challenge for a more intelligible one by conceptually reifying "natural selection" as a literal intelligent designer. When you ask "How could purely blind and mechanistic forces result in an integrated, irreducibly complex system like the bacterial flagellum?" that question gets translated in the Darwinist's mind to "How could an intelligent designer create something like the bacterial flagellum over time by *conceptually* building step by step on what he had made before?"
Seen in that light, a scenario like the bacterial flagellum being built from the T3SS suddenly seems sensible. Why, Mr. Natural Selection, Esq. probably had the idea in mind when he built the T3SS to transport molecules that he was going to use the concepts of rotary spinning and transportation to make something that would transport the entire bacterium, so he made sure to build the T3SS in such a way that it would be amenable to such future modification. And where did all the new proteins come from? No matter. Mr. Natural Selection, Esq. is really good at building proteins for whatever task he has in mind when he needs them. He's already ahead of you!
The primary difficulty when trying to persuade Darwinists is the same difficulty you encounter when trying to persuade materialists of every stripe on every topic. Namely, they take materialism as an unquestionable and unexamined axiom, and when you point out the absurd implications of their position when taken to its logical conclusion, they almost never see it as a reduction ad absurdum of the axioms that led to those implications. Instead they see it as "proof" that their axioms don't always have the logical implications they thought they did after all, and then appeal to all sorts of teleological concepts they themselves previously denied to try to bail materialism out without acknowledging it.
To give an example, I recently saw a materialist argue that there is no objective moral law, because materialism shows that there can be no objectively real, universal, normative laws that apply to us and that we can have access to. I pointed out to him that if that's the case, then there can be no objective laws of logic nor any objective truth, because these are universal normative laws that apply to us just as much as the moral law, and that therefore the very logical rules he used to construct his argument were invalidated.
His response, of course, was not to recognize that materialism is incoherent based on the very implications he ascribed to it. Rather, his response was that it's logically absurd to deny that the laws of logic and truth are objective, normative, and universal, so *therefore materialism must not entail that after all*, since obviously it *can't* just be that materialism is nonsense. He went on to twist himself into knots trying to explain that materialism only logically implies that there are no objectively real normative universals when it's convenient for materialism to do so, and not when it isn't, without really even attempting to show how the same logic could apply sometimes but not others. Eventually he ended up claiming that the laws of logic are "epistemically objective" (a contradiction in terms) but not "ontologically objective."
The same with Darwinists. The challenge isn't really to show them the absurdity of crediting blind mechanisms for creating all the functional systems of biology. They kind of already know that. The challenge is getting them to recognize this as a reduction ad absurdum of Darwinism itself, rather than as "proof" that "natural selection" is a literal intelligent designer with literal plans whenever they need it to be, but without acknowledging that this is how they're invoking it.
To support your comment that evolutionists must eventually argue that evolution has a purpose, see my article in Salvo Magazine online, "Evolutionary Jeopardy." In 9 hours of focused study on Peterson Academy, two eminent evolutionists mentioned the neo-Darwinian processes once. The rest of the time the spoke of purpose.
Btw, I checked out your article in Salvo, and I thought it was quite good. It's pretty funny that Heying and Weinstein act like they're presenting some fresh new approach when they're doing exactly what every Darwinian of every stripe has always done, starting with Darwin himself. If there's anything different about them at all, it's that they're even more egregious than usual about invoking teleological concepts that cannot possibly refer to anything objectively real given their naturalism. The claim that living organisms have a "purpose" to "project their genes as far into the future as possible" really is somewhat novel as far as I am aware, probably because it's a completely gratuitous invocation of purpose even from a Darwinian standpoint.
Everything you describe there is a perfect example of what we've been discussing. As you pointed out, they didn't give one single physical detail in any of their explanations of how anything came about. All "explanation" is in terms of what a personified "natural selection" or "evolution" was motivated by, what "problem" he may have been "trying" to "solve" and so forth. This is because the phenomena they're trying to explain, such as leafcutter ant behavior, can only be understood and coherently defined in terms of purpose, so they wouldn't be able to "cash it out" in physical terms even if they did know the physical details. But given their naturalism, nothing purposeful can possibly be objectively real, so the whole thing collapses into self-contradiction, and statements about what "problem" was being "solved" and so forth do not have any intelligible content.
Of course, this conception of "natural selection" as an intelligent agent with "purposes" and "problems" that he's trying to "solve" does more than just provide the Darwinist a way of appealing to the objectively real purpose that is needed to avoid deconstructing all of biology. It also serves to make it seem subjectively more plausible to the Darwinist that such purposeful systems would come about by "natural selection" in the first place.
There is nothing whatsoever in the process of organisms undergoing random mutations, and the occasional "beneficial" mutation spreading, that suggests that this should ever lead to new integrated functional systems. It's perfectly compatible with nothing ever coming to exist but moderate variations on single-celled organisms, with no functional advancement. In fact, given that situations where some existing function becomes an unnecessary liability for an organism are much more likely than a new functional system coming to exist by chance (pretending for a moment that the latter is possible at all), we should expect that organisms would tend to *lose* function over time through the course of naturalistic evolution, which Dr. Behe has shown to in fact be the case. The opposite happening only seems reasonable to Darwinists because of how they conceptualize "natural selection" as a literal person with goals.
Really, if there's one big criticism I have of most Intelligent Design proponents, it's that they tend to argue for the "limits" of natural selection, when in fact the whole *idea* of "natural selection" as defined by Darwin and conceived by Darwinists is just flat-out incoherent and doesn't refer to anything real or intelligible. There's no question about the "limits" of what "natural selection" (or "evolution" conceived as an active agent) can do because there's no such thing in the first place. It's better to erase it from our conceptual framework entirely so that we can think more clearly about the issues.
You and I so totally agree that it scares me. :-)
Your sentence, referring to how the professors smuggle in a sense of purpose and vision: "It also serves to make it seem subjectively more plausible to the Darwinist that such purposeful systems would come about by 'natural selection' in the first place." Exactly right!!
I used to have to argue with my own mother about "evolution" because she thought that "evolution" could have a purpose -- I had to show her, chapter and verse, how standard evolutionists expressly decry any "purpose" or "goal." It was so hard for her to grasp, she thought I was unfairly straw-manning them.
I'm of two minds about your excellent point: "big criticism I have of most Intelligent Design proponents, it's that they tend to argue for the 'limits' of natural selection, when in fact the whole *idea* of 'natural selection' as defined by Darwin and conceived by Darwinists is just flat-out incoherent and doesn't refer to anything real or intelligible."
On the one hand, I totally agree with you. Every time we grant that Neo-D evolution has a lot of merit but with importantly limits, we keep conceding the rhetorical point. In an argument, I've found that whoever controls the definitions and sound bites has a vastly better chance of persuading and prevailing. Our side gives up the definitions and soundbites too readily sometimes.
On the other hand, as a lawyer, I'm accustomed to granting that the "other side" has a point but they go too far and thus are wrong because of their extension error. And I grasp that within the sciences, the players tend to want to hew to orthodoxy as much as possible while pointing out errors or offering new / changed perspectives. Because of these thoughts, I don't stress out too much on the modest approach to criticizing neo-D.
Incidentally, this brings me to some fundamental differences between artifacts designed by humans and creatures designed by God that we should also talk about, and that make things even harder for the Darwinist.
Consider any human creation, such as the mechanical pocket watch from Paley's well-known thought experiment, for instance. Like the eye, a pocket watch is defined by its purpose. That is, what makes the various bits of metal and plastic that comprise a pocket watch a single object that we call a "pocket watch" is that they work together for the *purpose* of keeping time while fitting conveniently in a man's pocket.
But where does this time-telling purpose that defines a pocket watch reside? The numbers written on the pocket watch's face don't have any *objective* meaning. They only refer to numbers as a matter of human convention. Without humans to recognize the printed symbol "12" as referring to the number 12 by convention, the printed symbol would just be a splotch of ink that doesn't refer to anything, much less the number 12, much less to midday and midnight.
Likewise, there is nothing about the long hand or short hand that physically entails that their positions refer to minutes and hours. They carry this meaning only by human convention as well.
The same point can be made about every other aspect of the pocket watch. There's nothing about it being physically small that entails that it has the purpose of fitting in a man's pocket. There's nothing about the glass face covering it that physically entails that the glass face has the purpose of protecting the machinery underneath while providing an unimpeded view of it, and so forth.
What this all means is that in a very real sense, a pocket watch is NOT objectively real. Objectively speaking, a pocket watch isn't really even a single object at all. It's a bunch of different objects stuck together.
The purpose that makes a pocket watch a pocket watch is subjective, or rather INTER-subjective. It exists only by human convention. Now, it's an objective fact about a pocket watch that the matter comprising it was deliberately arranged in that manner by a human being for the purposes of telling time, and its an objective fact that it is used for that purpose by its users. But there is nothing about the pocket watch *itself* that objectively defines it as such. The purpose that makes a pocket watch a pocket watch exists purely externally, in the minds of its creators and users who made and use it for that purpose.
Now, let's contrast this with a functional biological feature like the eye. Like a pocket watch, an eye can only be defined AS an eye by its purpose, namely that of allowing an organism to see, as I explained in my previous comment (https://billdembski.substack.com/p/darwins-black-box-30-years-on/comment/312700493). But there is a fundamental difference here. An eye does NOT have its defining purpose merely virtue of being externally intended and used for that purpose. While an eye is only defining by its purpose like a human artifact, it's also the case that as I pointed out in that comment, "it's simply an objective fact that I really do see with my eyes when they are working properly."
Or consider the case of human reason, which I also examined in that comment. As I pointed out, human reason can only be defined in terms of its purpose, but at the same time, as I also pointed out, "It can scarcely be denied that reason finds truth when properly used, as do so would be to invalidate ones own reasoning."
In other words, while a pocket watch only performs its purpose of keeping time as a matter of subjective external convention by its its creator and users, eyes provide vision and reason finds truth *as a matter of objective fact* that is intrinsic to them when working correctly, regardless of what anyone thinks they are for or wants them to do.
This makes the Darwinist's explanatory task go from impossible to a whole secoond magnitude of super-impossible. Even if so-called "natural selection" were real and coherent and had all the powers of a human designer, it STILL would not be able to create the sort of intrinsic purpose that biological systems like the eye and human reason have, because the ability to create this intrinsic sort of purpose eludes as well. Everything we build is like the pocket watch, existing and having purpose only by virtue of our intentions for it.
Now, what we might call the "extrinsic" or "conventional" purpose of human artifacts comes from human minds, particularly from human reason, which has "intrinsic" purpose as just described. So extrinsic purpose is derivative from intrinsic purpose. Furthermore, while objects with intrinsic and extrinsic purpose have in common that they are defined by their purpose, they are *distinguished* by what extrinsic purpose *lacks*, namely the objectively real intrinsic power of intrinsic purpose.
That means that any sort of cause that is insufficient to create extrinsic purpose (such as mindless physical forces) is even LESS capable of creating intrinsic purpose.
Let's return to the example of the pocket watch. It's technically impossible for blind physical forces to form a pocket watch, because a pocket watch is defined by its subjective purpose and blind physical forces do not have minds and so cannot subjectively confer purposes on anything in principle. HOWEVER, it's at least logically conceivable, albeit fantastically unlikely, that matter could end up in an arrangement PHYSICALLY IDENTICAL TO a pocket watch through purely blind physical causes. It just wouldn't "count" as a pocket watch until a human found it and started using it as one.
But this is not true of intrinsic purpose. For all the ingenuity of human beings, we are NOT capable of making anything with intrinsic purpose. We aren't able to build anything that *objectively* sees as a matter of fact the way we see when our eyes are working correctly. We aren't able to buld anything that *objectively* finds truth the way our reason does. The purpose of all the things we make exists only subjectively in our minds by virtue of the conventions we assign to them.
And this means that blind physical causes that lack our intrinsically purposeful minds is even less capabable of generating intrinsic purpose than we are.
So what is causally sufficient to create intrinsic purpose? Well, since intrinsic purpose is differentiated from the extrinsic purpose we create by virtue of what it has that extrinsic purpose lacks, whatever is sufficient to create it must have a mind like we do, but on a higher order than our minds that has powers that our minds lack. In short, intrinsic purpose, including the intrinsic purpose that defines our own minds, must come from a SUPER-natural mind, a divine Mind of a higher order than ours, from which our minds are causally derived.
Since coming to realize that natural selection is incoherent as a concept, I've come to believe that Darwinism should be attacked with a "hit them with everything" approach.
That is, we should point out that natural selection is incoherent and so can't possibly explain anything, that Darwinism is self-defeating and entails that biology is an illusion even as it purports to explain it, AND also that every single step of the Darwinian story all the way down to the origin of even the simplest functional protein is far too wildly improbable to have ever happened unintentionally.
When the issue is purely framed as one of probabilities, it's easier for the Darwinist to appeal to his own authority, to insinuate that he simply knows about contributing factors that make it more probable and that non-experts just wouldn't understand, and so forth. Of course he doesn't, but arguments about probability (and hence plausibility) are more easily derailed into he-said/she-said rhetorical fights.
If you can explain why the Darwinist's claims are logically incoherent and self-defeating, and so CAN'T possibly be true, that's not something the Darwinist can easily defend against, especially if the audience understands your point. And doing so then creates a backdrop that makes all your probabilistic arguments stronger. It's little wonder that empirical data conflicts so badly with Darwinism, after all, given that it's not even an intelligible idea.
I've also concluded that it's best to avoid using the language of "natural selection" even when discussing so-called "microevolution," because it's superfluous and just causes confusion.
What's nowadays called "microevolution" was pretty clearly understood long before Darwin. That understanding, after all, is pretty obviously what lay behind the invention of plant and animal breeding. Early breeders noticed that organisms would pass on variations in their traits, that certain organisms with certain variations would do better at surviving and reproducing in certain environments, and so concluded that they could bring out variations they wanted by controlling the breeding environments of organisms themselves.
What's different is that generations prior to Darwin were not tempted to conceptualize the environmental factors that caused some variations to do better in various scenarios as a sort of pseudo-designing mind with goals. And they were right not to think of things that way, because it's superfluous and simply a hindrance to understanding.
Really there's no eventually to it. Darwinian "explanation" always begins and ends with purpose. The "blind and unguided" part only ever serves as a sort of disclaimer. It plays no explanatory role at all. Literally all of the explanatory content of Darwinian theory depends on purpose being objectively real and "natural selection" or "evolution" being a literal intelligent designer.
There's a reason they have to talk like this. Take any biological feature that we wish to explain - any feature at all - and what you will find upon analysis is that the feature doesn't just *appear* to have a purpose, but that the purpose is actually the feature's *defining quality*, so that to deny the purpose is to deny the objective reality of the feature itself.
Take the vertebrate eye for example. What is an eye? How would you define it? What makes the molecules comprising an eye an eye, and not just a bunch of molecules or a bunch of cells that we're just subjectively projecting a label to?
One might be tempted to say something like "An eye is an organ that sees." But this can't be exactly right. If you remove my eye and put it in some sort of nutrient solution to keep its cells alive, it won't see anything. It is I, the organism that *has* eyes, that sees with them. So we must define eyes as something that organisms see *with*, thereby introducing the concept of an organism into the definition of what an eye is.
But we must go further, because organisms with eyes don't *always* see with them. An unconscious organism has eyes but doesn't see. The same is true of organisms that are blind due to an optical or neural defect. So we must refine our definition to say that eyes are an organ *for* seeing in organisms that normally have them, when they are functioning *properly*. So now we can see that the concept of *purpose* within an organism as a whole is core to the very definition of what an eye *is*.
To deny that the eye's *purpose* is objectively real is thus to deny that the eye *itself* is objectively real. Some materialists might be willing to make this concession and take the position that the eye is a subjective construct (as many of them presently do with biological sex, for instance), but logically that's a nonstarter, because it's simply an objective fact that I really do see with my eyes when they are working properly. I experience seeing with them directly, so it can scarcely be denied that my eyes are objectively real, and hence their defining purpose as well.
This is even more obvious in the case of human reason, which is also irreducibly definable only in terms of its purpose. There are objectively *right* and *wrong* ways for us to reason as delineated by the laws of logic, which implies that reason has a purpose. It can scarcely be denied that reason finds truth when properly used, as do so would be to invalidate ones own reasoning. But it likewise cannot be coherently claimed that reason always finds truth, because that would imply that the misuse of reason (such as when engaged in sophistry or rationalization) also leads to truth. Reason can only be defined as that faculty that is *for* finding truth, and that only finds truth when functioning and used *properly*, meaning that like the eye, it can only be defined in terms of its purpose, and the objective reality of reason and its purpose cannot be coherently denied.
Similar analysis can be done of every other biological feature. Every biological feature that we seek to explain is defined irreducibly by its purpose, and therefore you cannot deny the objective reality of its purpose without denying the objective reality of the feature itself. Explaining how the feature came to be thus requires explaining how the purpose that defines it came to be, and the purpose cannot be a mere metaphor as Darwinists often insist. It must be quite literal.
THAT is why Darwinists always reify "natural selection" or "evolution" as a quite literal intelligent designer in all of their explanations. They *have* to do this, because consistently taking it as blind mechanistic causes would imply that all of the biological features they're trying to explain actually exist only as subjective impressions in the human mind, not as objective realities in the external world, which would deconstruct all of biology as a sort of illusion.
It's not just that Darwinists have failed as of this date to "cash out" their teleological language in physicalist terms. It's that they can never do so even in principle, because the moment they give up their teleological terms, they give up the objective reality of biology itself.
The way Darwinists invoke "natural selection" or "evolution" to explain things in biology is exactly the same way that I invoke Gustave Eiffel to explain the Eiffel Tower. I'm not an architect and I have done no research into the matter, so I personally have no clue how the Eiffel Tower was built in terms of physical details. Physically speaking, I just have no idea what happened. So what information is being supplied when I explain it by appealing to Gustave Eiffel? I'm supplying the source of the *purpose* or *intent* behind the Eiffel Tower, of course. Since the Eiffel Tower is a human artifact that was built on purpose, the *source* of that purpose is the primary thing about it that needs to be accounted for in explaining it coherently. The physical implementation details are secondary.
By crediting Gustave Eiffel, I am saying that he's the main guy who supplied the *concept* for the Eiffel Tower that he developed in his mind along with the *intent* to physically realize it, and that he then acted to make it real by setting in motion whatever physical implementation details were actually employed to achieve his purpose. And note that I can't possibly "cash out" Gustave's essential role in physicalist terms. Even if I knew the complete physical implementation details of the Eiffel Tower, I would still need to appeal to Gustave Eiffel's mind to coherently explain the primary thing about it that needs to be explained.
Likewise, in Darwinian explanation, "natural selection" / "evolution" is never invoked to provide the physical details of how some biological feature came about, despite its pretentions to being a physicalist theory. Rather it is always called upon to provide the source of purpose and intent *behind* the physical details, which as we've seen must be literally objectively real. But "natural selection" is supposed to be mere shorthand for undirected mindless processes, and undirected mindless processes cannot possibly have literal intentions or concepts, so this is a logical contradiction.
And as with the Gustave Eiffel illustration, there is no possibility of "cashing out" Darwinism's teleological explanations in physical terms. Even if we learned about all of the physical implementation details of some biological feature, Darwinists would still need "natural selection" reified at a literally intelligent designing agent to supply the purpose and intent behind the feature.
Indeed, the mere fact that Darwinists make a logical distinction between the physical implementation details and "natural selection" in the first place, which is necessary for them to pontificate about what a trait is "selected for" despite not knowing the physical details, means that one can never be "cashed out" in terms of the other, and this is fatal to Darwinism's status as a logically coherent naturalistic theory regardless of whatever physical details come to be known.
I agree with your points here. As we are both interested in clear and precise communication of our ideas, may I offer something?
In your passage it says:
"Likewise, in Darwinian explanation, 'natural selection' / 'evolution' is never invoked to provide the physical details of how some biological feature came about, despite its pretentions to being a physicalist theory. Rather it is always called upon to provide the source of purpose and intent *behind* the physical details..."
I understand what you mean, but I would suggest adjusting the language so that other people less in-tune will grasp what you mean. Reading the English words, one might readily object that nat-sel and evo are frequently invoked to provide the physical details about how a feature came to be.
The problem I think is using the term "physical details." I believe you and I mean that "nat-sel and evo explanations always fail to show the step-by-step sequence of actions that physically create or modify a biological feature."
An easy example is the dinosaur to bird evolution theory. Nobody ever sits down and shows how the physical actions start with no-wing and begin building a wing, step by tiny step for the bones, cartilage, circulation, muscles, nerves, feathers ... and after umpteen steps in sequence, voila you have a wing. Those are the "physical details" you're mentioning -- and I think it is clearer to others if we refer to "step by step sequence of actions that physically create or modify a structure, feature, operation, or behavior."
Does this approach work for you?
****"Reading the English words, one might readily object that nat-sel and evo are frequently invoked to provide the physical details about how a feature came to be.
The problem I think is using the term "physical details." I believe you and I mean that "nat-sel and evo explanations always fail to show the step-by-step sequence of actions that physically create or modify a biological feature."****
Yes, I think that's fair, but in my opinion it's actually overly generous to Darwinism. While it's certainly true that Darwinian explanations don't provide step-by-step accounts of the physical causes by which functional systems come to be, I'm trying to make the stronger point that this is because they don't provide ANY explanation in terms physical causes whatsoever, much less detailed step-by-step ones, because they CAN'T. That is, my whole point is that the frequent objection you mention is actually superficial and wrong.
The primary point I'm trying to get across is that "natural selection" (or "evolution" when cited as an active agent that does things, which in that context is shorthand for "natural selection") is NOT a physical cause, and that while it is presented as being one, that presentation is actually all just smoke and mirrors, and that in reality explanation in terms of "natural selection" provides *zero* physical details and the only thing it actually attempts to explain is the *purpose* behind biology that it simultaneously denies, rendering it a self-contradictory concept that can't possibly explain anything.
To the extent that Darwinists SEEM to provide any physical details to their just-so stories, these are invariably just restatements of the problem presented as if they were a solution.
To give an example, consider the way Darwinists typically try to account for the vertebrate camera eye. The physical "history" they will give will go something this: "First signaling proteins evolved, then some of them evolved into light-signaling proteins that became a light-sensitive spot, then the spot gradually became more concave until eventually a lens appeared over it along with focal muscles and the other parts of the modern eye, and it took on a spherical shape such that it could be turned in different directions.
This *sounds* superficially like a physical explanation because it makes reference to physical things (some of which may or may not have ever existed), but this is an illusion. If you look closely, all this account is doing is making a list of some of the more obvious ways in which camera eyes differ from signaling proteins, and then arranging those differences in a putative temporal sequence. It's just a presentation of some of the things you would need to change to turn a signaling protein into a camera eye, restated as if it were an explanation of how those changes happened.
There's no actual physical explanation of how any of this happened in the account I just gave. In particular, it lacks any sort of physical CAUSALITY, so it can't explain anything physically in principle, because EXPLANATIONS require CAUSES.
Now, Darwinian explanations DO typically invoke causes, which I didn't include in the account I just gave. Specifically, they implicitly or explicitly invoke "natural selection" as the causal factor - this is what makes them Darwinian, after all. But "natural selection" is never invoked as a PHYSICAL cause, but always as a MENTAL one.
For instance, the Darwinian account will typically say that signaling proteins evolved into a light sensitive spot "in order to" detect the direction of sunlight or somesuch. And they will say that the light-sensitive spot became concave because it was "selected for the purposes of" having better directionality or of forming a rudimentary image. And the lens forms "to allow" a sharp image, and so forth.
But these aren't physical causes. They are TELEOLOGICAL causes. These are causal MOTIVATIONS or PURPOSES being ascribed to Mr. Natural Selection, Esq. that allegedly led him to create the eye. ALL of the causal "explanation" in Darwinian accounts takes the form of ascribing goals or motivations to "natural selection"/"evolution" - invoking him as a literal intelligent agent. This is illustrated in spades in the description you gave of that Peterson Academy course administered by Weinstein and Heyer, where all causal explanation is in terms of what "problem" natural selection was "trying" to "solve."
And to the extent that there is ever any attempt to "cash out" these sorts of explanations in physical terms, they always end up being circular. For instance, the Darwinist may try to "cash out" the parts about the light-sensitive spot beign "selected for" a more concave shape and for having a lens by saying that the organisms lived in an environment where a sharper or more directional image would have been advantageous. But what sort of environment could this have been? After all, there are organisms today with light-sensitive spots that are not becoming more concave or developing lenses. Why, it must the sort of environment where they would have been advantageous, of course! But this is another circular example of restating the problem as if it were a solution. It goes without saying that for any trait to have been preserved to future generations, it would have had to be advantageous enough in whatever environment it existed for those organisms that had it to survive and reproduce it in future generations. Nevermind that giving a scenario in which a trait might be useful isn't the same thing as giving a physical CAUSE of that trait to begin with.
But the issue isn't just that Darwinists heretofore FAILED to "cash out" these teleological causes in physicalist terms. The deeper issue is that they CAN'T ever do so even in principle. Even if there were a complete causal, physical, step-by-step account of eye evolution that Darwinists learned about somehow, they would STILL need to invoke "natural selection" separately from those physical causes to account for the eye, just as I would still need to invoke Gustave Eiffel to explain the Eiffel Tower even if I knew all the physical details of how it was constructed. That's because a list of purely physical causes, no matter how detailed, could never possibly tell you the PURPOSE of the eye, yet the eye's purpose is what defines the eye AS an eye and as something that needs to be explained out of all the other possible forms the molecules comprising an eye could have taken in the first place. It's that defining *purpose* that "natural selection" is meant to explain, and to explain that it logically needs to be a literal intelligent designing agent with a mind.
This distinction was implicit in Darwinism from the start, and even in Darwin's own bumbling attempt to account for the eye in Darwinian terms. As you probably recall, he gave an extremely vague history where optical nerves came to exist in a light-sensitive spot somehow, and then professed that while he had no idea HOW natural selection did the rest physically, and that it is "insuperable by our imagination" (which of course means he was conveniently absolved of imagining it), "natural selection" nevertheless figured it out because "there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration of the transparent layers; and carefully selecting each alteration which, under varied circumstances, may in any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter image."
In brief, what Darwin was asserting here is that even though we can't know HOW natural selection created the eye in terms of physical causes, we can still know THAT natural selection created the eye. But if that's the case, the inescapable logical implication is that "natural selection" is distinct from any set of physical causes, which logically implies that natural selection *itself* cannot possibly be a physical cause.
Yet at the same time, Darwin and Darwinists after him have insisted that natural selection was a purely physical cause, and defined it as such. But being a physical cause is just an "informed attribute" of natural selection, an informed attribute being when an author of a work of fiction will tell you some trait of a character in his story that isn't actually reflected in the story itself (eg. when an author introduces a character as being a "ruthless cutthroat" but then the character behaves in a merciful and gentlemanly way throughout the actual story).
In actual Darwinian explanation, "natural selection" always plays the role of an intelligent designer instead of a blind physical cause, and as we've seen, it MUST be a literal intelligent designer in order to explain objectively real purpose, which is the defining trait of everything in biology and so cannot be denied on pain of denying all of biology as a subjective illusion. Natural selection's explanatory role cannot possibly be "cashed out" in terms of physical causation, and this is in direct logical contradiction with its "official" definition as a purely physical cause.
Thus, the root issue is not that Darwinists don't cash out Darwinian explanations in terms of detailed, step-by-step physical causes (though of course they don't), but that they CAN'T cash it out in terms of physical causes, detailed or otherwise, even in principle. The root of the issue isn't that it's improbable for natural selection to produce functional biological systems (though of course it is wildly improbable for the physical structures associated with these systems so come about via unguided physical causes), but that it's IMPOSSIBLE, because "natural selection" isn't even a logically coherent concept in the first place.
I read your several posts. There are several points developed, so I want to verify that I have your thesis correctly stated here:
The overall argument is that Darwinian explanations depend on purpose and teleology even while Darwinism officially denies that nature is guided by purpose.
The basic claim is that biological structures such as the eye cannot be defined merely by their physical components. An eye is an eye *because it is for seeing*; similarly, human reason is a faculty for discovering truth. Thus, purpose is not merely something observers project onto biological systems but rather is essential to what those systems objectively are.
The argument goes further than saying evolutionary biology currently lacks sufficient mechanistic detail. It maintains that no amount of physical detail could ever replace teleology, because a physical history alone would not explain *why an eye is for seeing.* Consider the Eiffel Tower: Even complete knowledge of the construction process would not eliminate the need to discuss the intentions of its designers.
Intelligent Design arguments too often focus only on the limits or improbabilities of natural selection. The deeper problem is conceptual: Natural selection, as commonly invoked, is incoherent because it is officially *mindless* while functioning within evolutionary explanations as though it possesses *goals.*
Probability arguments remain useful, particularly arguments that complex functional systems are fantastically unlikely to arise unintentionally. The logical argument is stronger, however, because it shows that Darwinian explanation is internally contradictory rather than merely improbable.
In sum: Biological organisms contain objectively real functions or purposes. Darwinian explanations depend upon those purposes to identify what needs explaining and to construct evolutionary narratives. Yet Darwinism officially maintains that evolution is produced by blind, purposeless physical processes. Consequently, Darwinian explanations covertly turn “natural selection” into a purposeful intelligent agent. That creates an internal contradiction that cannot be repaired merely by adding more physical details to the description of the biological element.
The key overarching observation is: Intrinsic *biological purpose,* as evolutionists detect in so many plant and animal features, requires a genuinely purposive cause rather than an unguided physical process. When evolutionists detect and celebrate purpose, they are unmooring the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution of species.
Right? :-)
Totally agree -- you state it how I, too, have been observing for years. Well done!
Thank you, Dr. Dembski, for recalling the history and enduring substance of Dr. Behe's "irreducible complexity" arguments in his book, Darwin's Black Box! Certainly, the bacterial flagellum was and remains a powerful demonstration of neo-Darwinism's inadequacy as an explanation of everything in every species.
People forget, however, that Behe's book also showed how blood clotting is irreducibly complex. Personally, and as a matter of effective advocacy, I prefer the blood clotting example. Nobody knows a bacterium with a flagellum. Everybody knows what it is like to bleed, and everybody relies upon "the body process to clot and stop the bleeding." Everybody recoils at the idea of bleeding to death. I offer that we in the ID world use the blood clotting example more often.
Your article includes this sentence: " [Kenneth] Miller claimed they were not irreducibly complex because all these systems could lose parts and then still serve some other function.” I'll never forget Miller on the PBS special about the Kitzmiller case, where he showed that a mousetrap without a spring could still be used as a tie clasp. A proof against ID? Talk about embarrassing. You're so right. The attempted critique of ID via the Miller kind of arguments would be rejected by everyone except that they must defend neo-D at all costs.
The article in online Salvo Magazine, “Kenneth Miller's Epic Failure of Evolutionary Guesswork,” exposes some of the tissue-flimsy arguments for the evolution from non-minds to sophisticated minds that Kenneth Miller advances in his book, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will (2018). Miller’s book intended to smack a homerun for undirected evolution of the human intellect. Not even close, and the arguments were silly. Chiefly, the arguments utterly failed to show a plausible sequence of events leading from non-mind to mind.
If Dr. Behe were proposing that an ancient tribe carved dwellings into the mountain at Montezuma Castle in Arizona, the mainstreamers would cheer the deduction of intelligent design. It’s when biological systems reveal unmistakable evidence of design that the same people get stupid. Your piece nicely documents some of that history -- thank you!
I wasn't part of the original philosophers and scientists who advanced ID, but I have followed it since the beginning. I have defended it in courses at Denver Seminary and other schools and have debated it a few times. My book, Christian Apologetics, has two chapters on ID, one critiquing Darwinism and one advancing ID in molecular machines and DNA. The ID community has always been very helpful to me in vetting my work on this material, including Mike Behe. Thanks to you, Bill, for being there from the beginning and presenting the case so clearly.
30 years on, ID is weaker than ever.
Granting IR completely (for the sake of argument), ID’s thesis amounts to pure theistic evolution:
God bypasses the natural limitations of nature to force molecules together.
God bypasses the natural limitations of nature to create new species.
Ty for the article. Dr. Behe is an inspiration. It is true that materialists won't engage his work on its merits. I have encountered this numerous times. It just shows how we are closing the gap.
Was this the guy who got humiliated at Dover?
Excellent. You have an axe to grind on this issue. I like that. You went straight to Gish Galloping in response to my providing Behe’s correct claim instead of being a gracious Christian, showing an interest in detente.
I’m shocked that you’d find James Tour, who crashed out in his debate with Dave Farina, compelling. Let’s talk about him. I’d like that.
BTW, you did get creamed at Dover, contrary to your conspiratorial view of the defeat, and that’s why you haven’t pushed for your hypothesis being introduced into classrooms since then. Deal with it or try that push again. Let’s see how that goes for you.
If you wanna do an online vidchat discussion on Tour’s campaign to reform origin of life research, just tell me. I have my own podcast.
Actually, I was wrong. It was worse.
Behe argued that peer-reviewed research concurs with his conclusion that irreducible complexity can’t produce the cascade:
Q. “How many peer reviewed articles are there explaining the blood clotting — why the blood clotting cascade cannot evolve because it is irreducibly complex in the way you describe?”
BEHE: “I will agree that there certainly are no arguments … directly to that point.”
Q. “So these are all those other articles based on the research of other scientists that you interpret differently than those scientists do?”
BEHE: “That’s right. I was proposing a newer idea.”
That concession is important because Behe had previously confidently asserted that the literature contained no ev9lutionary explanation and therefore “nobody else in the world knows how that could have been done.”
Under cross-examination he choked, acknowledging that researchers published extensively on blood-clotting evolution, while there were ZERO peer-reviewed papers arguing that the cascade was irreducibly complex or appeared intelligently designed. Judge Jones specifically highlighted this concession in his decision.
So, to correct myself, Behe wasn’t saying blood clotting hadn’t been studied. He just admitted that the literature he cited didn’t agree with his conclusion. It was a sneak.
Your initial claim was: “Michael Behe. He was thoroughly humiliated at the Dover trial when he claimed there was no scientific literature on the blood clotting cascade.” You retracted it when pressed to support it. The “thoroughly” was a false and needless snipe from the get-go.
The purported quotations in your post taken from trial testimony are not part of the published (non-precedential) Dover decision. Perhaps you can supply a link to your source for those.
The present claim is: “Under cross-examination [Behe] choked, acknowledging that researchers published extensively on blood-clotting evolution, while there were ZERO peer-reviewed papers arguing that the cascade was irreducibly complex or appeared intelligently designed.”
Your comment does not support any “choke.” The purported quotations show Dr. Behe testifying that his position was new and thus not found in the prior “peer-reviewed” publications. For the record, Ignaz Semmelweis’s world-changing observations and hypotheses were not found in any prior publications at all. Louis Pasteur’s discoveries were not the “peer-reviewed” consensus either. Neither were Albert Einstein’s theories and equations.
Dr. Behe demonstrated something new that obviously annoyed the status quo.
Your comment went on: “Judge Jones specifically highlighted this concession in his decision.”
Let’s be accurate. On page 88 of the non-precedential decision, Jones wrote: “On cross-examination, Professor Behe admitted that: ‘There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred’ [and] conceded that there are no peer-reviewed papers supporting his claims that complex molecular systems, like the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade, and the immune system, were intelligently designed.”
Right. Likewise would Semmelweis, Pasteur, and Einstein have to testify when they brought forth their new concepts and observations. Those men did not “choke.”
I can supply the full quote if requested, but p. 75 of the decision recites the NAS then-opinion that “complex molecular systems” can evolve “in several ways” and “natural selection can bring together parts of a system for one function at one time and then at a later time recombine those parts with other systems” to produce another function.
In fact, no, and Jones was clueless. After Dover, Dr. James Tour has shown that “complex molecular systems,” using those terms with their correct meanings, cannot and do not occur by accidents of mutation or natural environment. They do not self assemble to create functions.
Last year I watched and reported on an 8-hour course at Peterson Academy put on by Drs. Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein. Their course promised to “explore the fundamentals of the biology of evolution, providing tools to interpret the natural world through the lens of evolutionary inference.” Not one word about the mechanics of evolving complex molecular systems. Instead, their talk focused upon the "purposes" of biological adaptations.
The attempt to re-characterize Dr. Behe’s 2004 trial testimony despite the context and his actual words rather highlights the lack of anything new or conclusive on the neo-Darwinian front. Citing a non-existent "humiliation" – is that the best neo-D supporters have?
Prof. Gerd Muller’s opening remarks and paper presented to the 2016 Royal Society conceded far more about the categorical weaknesses of neo-D evolution theory than anything Dr. Behe said on cross-examination 22 year ago.
Michael Behe. He was thoroughly humiliated at the Dover trial when he claimed there was no scientific literature on the blood clotting cascade.
Rick Beato produced and co-wrote songs with FOZZY. He was in a band called “Billionaire.”
I watch Rick Beato often, he's great.
Can you quote where Dr. Behe said: "there is no scientific literature on the blood clotting cascade"? I'm somewhat familiar with the case and with Dr. Behe's book and approaches, and I don't recall his saying that.
Provide the quote or source of the quote, I'll read it.
Which "guy"? And how "humiliated"?
Rick Beato is a great communicator and music theorist.
How did God do it?
One of the knocks against ID is that it makes God a tinkerer of His creation. It makes Him look like He had to intervene at various times to improve on His creation. But the God I believe in wouldn’t have to do this.
I’m not saying He didn’t but He wouldn’t have too. If He did tinker, it was by design. Certainly Darwin’s ideas had nothing to do with it. But couldn’t the initial conditions of the universe had within it the paths to life and evolution that have long since disappeared from view?
ID has to do with whether the features of living species and the preconditions of the world/universe necessary for their existence can be accounted for without intelligent intent. Whether this involved "tinkering" is a secondary question.
Ever consider The "Tinkering" was part of Gods Plan? ie God Chose to do it this way.
"But couldn’t the initial conditions of the universe had within it the paths to life and evolution that have long since disappeared from view?"
Expand Please.
Somewhere in the past, I had two scenarios that might’ve happened in the distant past but have long since disappeared. This is not to say that either one happened but they could have. Evolution is not my main concern now so I do not know where they are at the moment but the theme of the essay was God is quite capable of finding a way if He wants to do it without any direct intervention.
The basic question is always where did the proteins come from and why they should accumulate and the right combination come together at various times to produce a living entity and then more complicated entitles. I will look for what I wrote but it may take awhile.
What you're describing seems to fall pretty clearly under the umbrella of intelligent design.
You're suggesting that God set things up in such a way that specific complex proteins would come to exist at specific times in specific places in just the right way to produce a living entity, and then further come together just right in specific ways to produce more advanced living entities.
The implication is that our simple and constant laws don't have the power in and of themselves to affect that outcome (I agree) and so had to be intentionally set up just right to do it, possibly with the help of specific life-creating laws or "paths" that no longer exist.
Regardless, you're still talking about an intelligent intervention of sorts. You're appealing to God's deliberate act to explain why material causes did things that material causes cannot do without being intentionally made to do them.
Besides that, the question of "when" God acted is really immaterial. As you acknowledge, what exactly happened physically speaking is lost to time. Whether God directly suspended the operation of natural laws to make life or set things up just right would look the same from our perspective. We can only say that deliberate intent was required to bring it about. Also, God is outside of time, so the question of "when" he acted is sort of a misnomer. The question for us is when the purposeful intent becomes physically manifested.
This concept raises a question: "God is quite capable of finding a way if He wants to do it without any direct intervention." From the point of view of the Creator of the Universe, what exactly is "indirect intervention?"
The theistic evolutionist view, as I understand it, contends God started everything including a system that would support evolution. Starting that system was direct intervention, right?
theistic evolution, that would be indirect.
Setting up the system was direct. If I set up an ice-maker to churn out ice in my house, I am the direct initial cause of the consequences of it operating in my house to make ice. Similarly, Babe Ruth was the direct cause of his homeruns -- the bat was an instrumentality of the direct cause.
If God set up evolution, then God caused the results of evolution. Nothing else caused them except God. The mutations resulted from God's designed plan, the "natural selection" via the environment that God created, would be His design.
I'm just saying God could have done it that way.
The vast majority of atheists I know fall into the category of your final sentence.
Funny, when shown the tsunami of evidence and reasoning, some of them retreat to the "everything you think is an illusion" position that atheist Sam Harris purveys.