In the
combox of my
recent post comparing the New Atheism and ID theory to different players in
a game of Where’s Waldo?, a reader wrote:
One can run a reductio against the
claim that we cannot detect design or infer transcendent intelligence through
natural processes. Were we to find,
imprinted in every human cell, the phrase "Made by Yahweh" there is
only one thing we can reasonably conclude.
I like this
example, because it is simple, clear, and illustrative of confusions of the
sort that are rife in discussions of ID.
Presumably we are all supposed to regard it as obvious that if this
weird event were to occur, the “one thing we can reasonably conclude” is that a
“transcendent intelligence,” indeed Yahweh himself, had put his “signature in
the cell” (with apologies to Stephen Meyer -- whose own views I am not addressing here, by the way).
I. Context is everything
Well, it
just isn’t the case that that is the “one thing we can reasonably conclude.” In fact, by
itself such a weird event wouldn’t give us reason at all to affirm the
existence of any “transcendent intelligence,” much less Yahweh. To see why not, compare the following
parallel examples. Suppose we found, imprinted
in every human cell, a phrase like “Made by Quetzalcoatl,” or “Simulated by the
Matrix,” or “Made by Steve Jobs," or “Round squares exist,” or “Kilroy was
here.” Would there be “only one thing we
could reasonably conclude”? Well, sure
there would, and it would be this: Something
really weird is going on, but who the hell knows what.
Here's what
a scenario of this sort would not be, though: a good reason to believe
that Quetzalcoatl exists, or that we are part of the Matrix, or that Steve Jobs
is our creator, or that round squares are possible after all, or that Kilroy had
somehow found his way into each cell.
(And who would “Kilroy” be anyway?
Some WWII-era graffiti artist? The
robot guy from the Styx
album?)
Our
background knowledge just doesn’t make any of these conclusions plausible. For example, we just know, with greater
certainty than we could know any of these conclusions, that round squares are
impossible. We know that “Kilroy is
here” is a stereotypical graffito, that the Matrix is a stereotypical mind-blowing
science fiction scenario, and that Steve Jobs is a stereotypical tech biz
whiz. If we found in every human cell a
phrase referring to Kilroy, round squares, the Matrix, or Steve Jobs, we would
judge it far more likely that someone, somehow, is playing a massive joke on us
than that the Matrix or round squares exist, or that Kilroy or Steve Jobs is
responsible. Nor would we judge that a
“transcendent intelligence” -- if by that we mean a strictly divine one (i.e.
an intellect that was infinite, purely actual, perfectly good, etc.) -- was
responsible. (Indeed, I would say that
when we understand what it would be to be the divine intellect, we can see that
such a frivolous action would be ruled out.)
And we might not even attribute the scenario to intelligence at all; on
the contrary, you might judge that everyone’s cognitive faculties -- or maybe
just your own (including your perceptions of what other people were reporting
about what they’d seen in the cell) -- were massively malfunctioning and
producing pop-culture-influenced hallucinations.
Now, it
doesn’t take much thought to see that we’d think the same thing about finding
“Made by Quetzalcoatl” imprinted in every cell.
I doubt that any Christian ID theorist would propose that “there is only
one thing we could reasonably conclude” from this, viz. that we should renounce
Christianity and take up Aztec religion.
More likely such an ID theorist would conclude that someone, somehow --
a New Atheist biotech cabal, maybe, or the devil -- was trying to shake
everyone’s faith in Christianity. Or he
might just conclude that no intelligence at all was responsible for it, and
that his cognitive faculties were massively malfunctioning. Whatever he would conclude, though, the occurrence
in human cells of the phrase “Made by Quetzalcoatl” would not by itself be doing the main work.
But the same thing is true in the
“Made by Yahweh” scenario. The reason the reader I was
quoting thinks (like many other people no doubt think) that the “one thing we
can reasonably conclude” in such a case is that Yahweh put the message there,
is that he already believes on
independent grounds that God exists, that he is the cause of living things,
that he revealed himself to the ancient Israelites as Yahweh, etc. And those independent reasons are what's really
doing the heavy lifting in the thought experiment, not the “Made by Yahweh”
stuff. Some secularist who thought he
had good independent reasons to think that Yahweh does not exist might conclude
instead that the whole thing was a gag foisted upon us by Erich von Däniken’s
extraterrestrials, or by a cabal of Christian biotech whizzes -- or maybe that
it is just a massive cognitive malfunction on his part, caused by his excessive
fear of the Religious Right.
“But those
wouldn’t be reasonable interpretations of such an event!” you say. Well, maybe, and maybe not. The point, though, is that you’re not going
to know from the event itself, considered in isolation. If we’re to judge that Yahweh, rather than
extraterrestrial pranksters, hallucination, or some other cause, was behind
such an event, it is considerations other than the event itself that will
justify us in doing so. In short, we could take “Made by Yahweh” to
be a sign from Yahweh only if we already have, on other grounds, good reason to
think Yahweh exists and is likely to send us messages by leaving them in
cells. And in that case the occurrence
of the phrase in the cell would not be giving us independent reason to think
Yahweh exists.
Of course,
the “Made by Yahweh” scenario is pure fiction.
The “messages” or “information” that ID theorists actually identify in
the cell is, needless to say, far less dramatic than that. It has nothing specifically to do with Yahweh
at all, or with anyone else for that matter.
Indeed, whether regarding it as “information” in any literal sense is even appropriate in the
first place is a matter of controversy in the philosophy of biology. How much more, then, is the real work in ID
arguments being done by considerations apart
from what we actually find in the cell?
If even “Made by Yahweh” wouldn’t by itself do much to get you to
Yahweh, how much less does the presence of genetic information per se do so?
II. You keep using that word
“natural”; I don’t think it means what you think it means
That brings
us to a second confusion in the reader’s remark quoted above. He speaks of “detect[ing] design or infer[ring]
transcendent intelligence through natural processes.” But the example he gives is of finding the
phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell.
And the problem is that the occurrence of the phrase “Made by Yahweh”
simply wouldn’t be a “natural” process,
certainly not from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view (so that the
example simply begs the question against A-T objections to ID). Even if this occurrence happened repeatedly
in every cell over the course of millennia, it wouldn’t be “natural” in the
relevant sense.
The reason
is the obvious one that it is purely a matter of convention that the string of
shapes “Made by Yahweh” counts as a sentence in the English language, and
purely a matter of convention that the sentence has the specific meaning that
it has. For an arrangement of physical
marks to count as the English sentence “Made by Yahweh” is thus for it to have
what Aristotelians call an “accidental form.”
But a “natural” object is one that has a “substantial form” rather than
an accidental form. And objects with
accidental forms are metaphysically less fundamental than those with
substantial forms. Accidental forms presuppose
substantial forms, insofar as it is only an object or collection of objects
that have substantial forms that can come to have an accidental form. The stock examples of objects with accidental
forms are artifacts (watches, beds, coats, computers, etc.), and the stock
examples of objects with substantial forms are those that occur in the wild
(animals, plants, stones, water, etc.), though the “accidental form/substantial
form” distinction doesn’t match up precisely to the “human artifact/thing-that-occurs-in-the-wild”
distinction. There are man-made things
that have substantial forms (human babies, new breeds of dog, water synthesized
in a lab) and things that occur in the wild that have only accidental forms (a
pile of stones that randomly forms at the bottom of a hill).
This
distinction is closely related to another one, viz. the distinction between immanent teleology and extrinsic teleology. An acorn’s “pointing to” or being “directed
at” the end or outcome of becoming an oak would be an example of immanent
teleology, since this “pointing” or “directedness” is grounded in the very nature
of an acorn insofar as it follows from an acorn’s having the substantial form
it does. A watch’s “pointing to” of
being “directed toward” time-telling is an example of extrinsic teleology,
because its having that function follows from the watch’s parts having a
certain accidental form imposed on them from outside.
These are
distinctions I have discussed and defended in many places -- and by far at
greatest length, and in the most systematic detail, in Scholastic
Metaphysics. (If you want to
criticize what I have to say on the grounds that you reject these distinctions,
fine, but you really have no business doing so unless you read and can answer
the arguments I develop in that book.) Suffice
it to say here that from an A-T point of view, what is “natural” is what has a
substantial form and immanent teleology, and it simply makes no sense to
describe what has an accidental form and extrinsic teleology as “natural.”
Now a
problem A-T writers have with Paley’s “design argument” and with ID theory is
that they relentlessly blur these distinctions.
In particular, in comparing organisms and other natural phenomena to
human artifacts they treat them as if they had accidental forms and extrinsic
teleology, and from the A-T point of view this is just a complete muddle. It simply makes no sense. It gets the metaphysics of natural objects
just fundamentally wrong, and it also has a tendency to lead us into getting
the “designer” and his relationship to the world fundamentally wrong. In particular, it tends to lead us into an
anthropomorphic conception of the designer that is incompatible with classical
theism, and a conception of his relationship to the world that is
implicitly either deist or occasionalist.
(I’ve developed and defended these claims too in many places -- and by
far at greatest length, and in the most systematic detail, in my Nova et Vetera article “Between
Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way.” See also my many
posts on Paley and ID theory. Again,
there really is no point to criticizing what I say about the implications of
Paley’s argument and ID theory unless you’ve read and have an answer to these
arguments, though I know from long experience that that won’t stop many readers
from doing it anyway.)
Now suppose
someone said: “Fine, suppose we go along with all these A-T scruples. Suppose we characterize natural phenomena in
terms of substantial forms and immanent teleology, and suppose we put aside any
examples the evaluation of which would be highly sensitive to context, e.g.
cases like ‘Made by Yahweh’ being written in the cell. Would you still deny that we can infer
transcendent intelligence from natural processes?”
The answer
is No, I would absolutely not deny it. Those
who suppose, like the reader quoted above and like so many other ID sympathizers,
that we A-T philosophers “claim that we cannot detect design or infer
transcendent intelligence through natural processes” simply haven’t been
reading very carefully. Neither I nor
any other A-T writer I know of would make such a claim. On the contrary, Aquinas’s Fifth Way is
devoted precisely to a demonstration of the existence of the divine intellect
on the basis of the existence of immanent teleology in nature. But this argument has nothing to do with
modeling natural objects on watches, outboard motors, or other artifacts; nothing
to do with explaining rare or strange phenomena; nothing to do with “gaps” in
current scientific explanations; nothing to do with “specified complexity” or
any other kind of complexity; nothing to do with weighing probabilities; nothing
to do with biological phenomena per se;
and nothing to do even with “information” as such either.
It has
instead to do with there being irreducible immanent teleology of at least some sort in nature, at the very least
at the level of the most primitive patterns of efficient causality. Even if you could reduce or eliminate every
other apparent instance of teleology in nature -- everything at the “macro”
level from human beings down to complex inorganic chemical phenomena -- the
barest efficient-causal relations at the “micro” level would still be
intelligible only in teleological terms.
For as the A-T philosopher argues, there is no way for an efficient
cause A regularly to generate a
particular characteristic effect or range of effects B unless generating B is
the “end” or outcome toward which A
“points” or is “directed,” as to a final cause.
(Again, see Scholastic Metaphysics
for detailed defense of this line of argument.)
For the Fifth Way, it’s not that there is in nature “directedness” of a complex sort (as in bodily organs), or
of a semantic sort (as in
“information” in the ordinary sense), that requires a transcendent divine
intellect; it’s the fact that there’s any
“directedness” at all that requires it, and it requires it as a matter of
metaphysical necessity, not mere probability.
(Compare: A painting requires a painter not by virtue of having this or that unusual or complex element
in it, but just by virtue of being a
painting at all.)
But couldn’t
there also be irreducible immanent teleology at the biological level, or at some other “macro” level -- even irreducible
teleology whose direct cause could only have been God himself? Of course there could be; indeed, there is at
least one example -- the human intellect, which (the Thomist argues) cannot in
principle have arisen from material processes and has to be specially created
every time a new human being comes into existence. But if and wherever else there are such
irreducible levels of immanent teleology, that will be by virtue of things at
the “macro” level having substantial forms rather than being mere aggregates of
lower level phenomena (and thus having merely accidental forms). And if a divine cause alone could account for
them, that will be by virtue of there being nothing in any natural
efficient-causal precursors that contains what is in the effect either
“formally,” “virtually,” or “eminently” (as the Scholastic “principle of
proportionate causality” requires). (I
discussed the relevance of the latter point to disputes over the origin of life
in a
post from a few years ago.)
In other
words, it is in terms of the A-T metaphysical categories alone that various
proposed naturalistic explanations of biological and other phenomena can
adequately be evaluated. “Complex
specified information” and other such theoretical tools get the conceptual
territory wrong and otherwise lack the conceptual nuance of the Scholastic
metaphysical apparatus. From an A-T point
of view, investigating the metaphysics of the natural world using these tools
rather than the A-T ones is like investigating combustion and the like using
phlogiston theory rather than modern chemistry, or studying human behavior
using phrenology. You might accidentally
hit upon some insights, but it will be mixed in with a ton of serious errors,
and even what you do get right you’ll describe in seriously misleading
ways. The enterprise will be a waste of
time and energy at best and at worst seriously distort our understanding of the
phenomena studied.
This is why
the stock responses of ID sympathizers to A-T criticisms miss the point. “We’re not claiming in the first place that our
arguments get you all the way to God; other work would be needed to do
that.” That’s like saying: “Sure,
phrenology doesn’t give us a complete psychology; other work would be needed to
do that” or “We never claimed phlogiston theory tells us everything about the phenomena
it studies; other approaches are needed too.”
In both cases, the “other
work” is (from an A-T point of view) doing all
the real work.
Here’s
another stock response: “How can you object to seeing the world as a product of
divine design, or as God’s artifact?”
The answer is that I don’t object to that. What I object to is blurring the distinctions between substantial form and accidental form,
immanent teleology and extrinsic teleology.
Then there’s
my favorite stock response: “Why are you giving a blank check to evolutionary
naturalism? How much are your Darwinist
buddies paying you?” To which I answer: Search the text above. I
didn’t say anything about evolution. Get
off this Darwin fixation, wouldja Captain Ahab?
III. If the facts are not on your
side, pound the table; if the table’s not on your side, thump the Bible.
OK, that’s
not really my favorite response. My
favorite response is this: “You demmed Thomists, letting your Aristotelianism
trump scripture! Where do you get off telling
God what sorts of things he can do to reveal himself? The Bible describes God causing all sorts of
things you would characterize as having ‘accidental forms’ rather than
‘substantial forms.’ For example, it
describes him miraculously speaking to us through sentences in man-made
languages. You’re letting your
metaphysics determine how you read scripture rather than the other way around!”
‘Cause, you
know, the really biblical thing to do
would be to let Bill Dembski’s doctoral dissertation determine how we read
scripture.
But
seriously. I have never said that God
cannot reveal himself through sentences, artifacts, and other things having
accidental rather than substantial forms, nor does anything I have said imply
that. Of course God can cause artifacts to exist miraculously, he can
cause a voice to be heard from the sky or from a burning bush, and for that
matter he could also cause “Made by Yahweh” to appear in every human cell. And of course he can, and has, revealed
himself via miraculous actions like some of these. I don’t think it has ever occurred to any
Thomist to dispute any of that. It
simply isn’t what is at issue.
What is at
issue is the context in which such
events could be known to be divine revelations
-- and, in particular, whether such events could by themselves constitute
evidence for the existence of God for someone who didn’t already know that God
exists. For there are different sorts of
miracles, and different sorts of context in which they might be interpreted. Suppose God miraculously caused the English
words “I, God, exist” to be written in the dust on a certain car’s windshield
-- but that the car was parked on a small side street in a neighborhood where
most people spoke Mandarin, nobody was particularly religious, and the words
appeared in the middle of the night when no one was around to see them. This would, needless to say, be a pretty
ineffective way of revealing himself.
There would be nothing about the evidence that those who come across it
would be at all likely to see as miraculous.
It would just seem to be a silly prank, unworthy of a moment’s attention. And pointing this out has nothing to do with
arrogantly imposing idiosyncratic Aristotelian metaphysical limits on what God
might do to reveal himself.
Consider
something more dramatic, such as God miraculously causing a voice from the sky
shouting “God loves you!” above a crowd all of whom spoke English -- but where
this happened at Universal Studios or Disneyland in the course of a typically
busy day there. Almost certainly, no one
would think that God was acting in a special way to reassure these people of his
love. Even if they were churchgoers, they’d
think it was just some goofy prank by an employee with access to the requisite equipment. Even if the context was a more unlikely one
for such an event-- a quiet neighborhood, or the desert -- these days they might
just as well wonder if the CIA or extraterrestrials were responsible.
Contrast the
sorts of contexts we find with biblical miracles like the burning bush or the
voice from the sky at Christ’s baptism. The
audiences in these cases were people who had no doubt that God exists --
indeed, that the God of Israel, specifically, exists -- and that he reveals
himself via unusual events of this sort.
Nor, given their cultural context, would it have occurred to them to
wonder whether extraterrestrials or a CIA-type organization might be
responsible instead. It is, as it were,
as if they were already “waiting by the phone” for God to “call” in one of
these ways, and all he needed to do was to make it happen. Even in the case of Elijah and the priests of
Baal, where some of the people involved worshipped Baal rather than the God of
Israel, they were already convinced that one
or the other existed. What the
miracle was intended to accomplish in this case was merely to make it clear, to
people who were already willing to concede that
much, which of the two was in fact the
true God. If it had been instead (say) a
contemporary audience of X-Files-watching
atheists who’d read Chariots of the Gods
and were familiar with Hollywood special effects and CIA-controlled drones
raining death from above, an Elijah-and-the-priests-of-Baal type miracle might
not be so effective in sending a divine message. Again, the question isn’t whether God can
cause these sorts of things. The
question is what sort of context they
must occur in for them to be effective.
And that depends in part on what the specific point of the miracle is.
This is a
question I addressed in my recent post “Pre-Christian
apologetics.” As I there argued, if the specific purpose of a miracle is
the “general apologetics” one of establishing, for those not already inclined to
believe that divine revelations occur, that such a revelation really has in
fact occurred, then this cannot be accomplished via an event that is merely
unusual and could in principle occur via a non-divine cause. It has to be an event that no one other than God -- that is to say,
God as classical theism conceives of him -- could in principle have caused. Christ’s
resurrection from the dead would be a paradigm case of such a miracle. But establishing such a miracle in turn
requires a lot of philosophical stage-setting.
It requires establishing God’s existence and nature, divine providence, the
possibility in principle of miracles, the possibility in principle of a resurrection,
and so forth. All this groundwork has to
be established before the occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection can be
defended. (Again, see the post just linked to for discussion of this subject.)
Someone
might object: “But in the biblical stories, no one first sets out a fancy
philosophical argument for classical theism before God causes a miracle!” Well no, of course, not, but our context is
simply not at all like the one in which the people of biblical times found
themselves. The existence of the God of
Israel and the possibility of divine revelations backed by miraculous
interventions was in general simply not an issue. The people involved generally took all that
for granted, so that there was no need for philosophical argument. Also, unlike the resurrection -- part of the
point of which was to provide unmistakable divine confirmation of Christ’s authority
and teaching, which was necessary for the foundation of the Church -- many
other biblical miracles did not have such an absolutely fundamental and “general
purpose” character, and thus did not need to be so dramatic. Given a context in which it was already
widely accepted that God had established a covenant with Moses, and that he sometimes
spoke through prophets via special events, an unusual event which could in
principle have been brought about by some agency other than God (an angel, say,
or an extraterrestrial) -- but where no one in that context would have entertained
such alternative explanations -- could suffice.
With this subject
as with so many others, Aquinas and other Scholastic writers draw a number of careful
distinctions which contemporary writers ignore at their peril. “Miracles” in the strictest sense (a) have a publicly observable character, (b) are
beyond the power of any created thing to produce, and (c) are outside the
ordinary course of the created order. These
three conditions are best understood by way of contrast. The operation of grace in the soul is not miraculous,
because while only God can produce it, it is not publicly observable. Alleged poltergeist phenomena and other purported
weird occurrences often mislabeled “supernatural” would not count as miracles, because
finite spirits could produce them and thus they are not beyond the power of
created things. The creation and
conservation of the world is beyond the power of anything other than God to
produce, but since it just is the
causing of the created order it is not outside
the ordinary course of the created order.
(This is one reason it would, from an A-T point of view, just be a muddle
to assimilate the divine causation of some ordinary biological phenomenon to
the “miraculous.” That just doesn’t reflect
a precise enough understanding of the various ways God acts vis-à-vis the world. Bacterial flagella, for example, are --
unlike resurrections from the dead -- just ordinary everyday parts of the created
order rather than something outside the usual course of the created order, and are
thus not “miraculous,” whatever else one wants to say about how they came into
being.)
“Miracles”
in the strict sense are thus to be distinguished from mere “wonders.” The strictly “supernatural” must be
distinguished from the merely “preternatural.”
And so forth. But we needn’t
pursue the issue further here. Suffice
it to note that although some
have tried to make pro-ID hay out of a comparison of ID’s favorite examples
on the one hand and biblical miracles on the other, the two topics have nothing
to do with one another. (Unless you
count the nearly miraculous multiplication of red herrings which ID sympathizers
have produced, including this one!)
@Bilbo:
ReplyDelete"But if the 'some events' turns out to be thousands of events, would that be a problem for A-T philosophy?"
Again, why would it be? A-T philosophy already holds that the very universe itself not only was created, but is sustained moment by moment, by a supernatural act.
"…ID proponents conclude that evolution could not [have] occurred by natural processes."
And yet you said earlier, "But ID doesn't say that such changes couldn't happen without an intelligent designer."
Bilbo: ...according to Ed, some A-T philosophers conclude from the empirical evidence "that the first living things could not have arisen out of inorganic processes in any way,"
ReplyDeleteYou must be referring to this sentence http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/04/id-theory-aquinas-and-origin-of-life.html
"Hence, some A-T thinkers conclude that the first living things could not have arisen out of inorganic processes in any way and must have been specially created by God in an extraordinary intervention in the natural order."
Where does it say that the A-T thinkers conclude this from empirical evidence? Doesn't the context make it clear that the interpretation depends on the specific way one construes metaphysics rather than directly on the empirical evidence without any interpretation? The evidence is always natural, even when intelligently designed (this incidentally applies to all nature, not just to one empirical fact compared to another empirical fact). Interpretation of empirical facts, such as inferring God or attributing everything to purely mechanical naturalistic causes, depends, lacking further context, on the metaphysical framework of the interpreter.
Look at the funny thing that is going on in this exchange of ours. We are all (you, I, Vincent, etc.) reading the same quotes by Ed. Obviously the text is intelligently designed, no doubt of that, but we cannot agree on what it entails, not always even on the literal meaning of it. Why? Behold the power of background metaphysics in the mind of the interpreters :) This is the whole point. The background metaphysics is at play in our (mis)interpretations of Ed, and will be even more crucial when interpreting findings whose context is not apparent.
Hi E. Seigner,
ReplyDeleteI think the only one not agreeing on the interpretation of Ed's remarks that I quoted twice are you.
Scott:
ReplyDeleteAnd yet you said earlier, "But ID doesn't say that such changes couldn't happen without an intelligent designer."
Right, non A-T thinkers are limited to talking about the probability of something happening. Thus, ID proponents can say that a certain event is too improbable to happen in the known finite universe, but if the universe is infinite, or there is a multiverse, it may not be too improbable.
However, apparently the A-T thinker isn't limited to talking about probabilities, otherwise it is not clear how some A-T thinkers can conclude that the origin of life was specially created by God, while A-T thinkers still think there may be a natural process for the origin of life.
I suspect that the cause of this difference of opinion among them is that some A-T thinkers see the immense difficulties of finding a natural explanation for the origin of life and think it reasonable to conclude that it was specially created. Others think that God would have put the intrinsic teleology of life into nature in some way, even though we cannot presently find it.
So I think that if some A-T thinkers were persuaded of the immense difficulties of finding a natural explanation for the evolution of life, they would consider the possibility of God specially creating the evolutionary events in natural history.
If God causing thousands of special acts of creation in natural history is okay with A-T thinkers, then who am I to object? I'm just wondering if God had a simpler way that wasn't natural, but didn't require so many acts of creation.
Bilbo: it is not clear how some A-T thinkers can conclude that the origin of life was specially created by God, while A-T thinkers still think there may be a natural process for the origin of life.
ReplyDeleteThis difference is not as sharp as you assume, but all attempts to convey this to you fail.
Bilbo: If God causing thousands of special acts of creation in natural history is okay with A-T thinkers, then who am I to object? I'm just wondering if God had a simpler way that wasn't natural, but didn't require so many acts of creation.
The explanation is in the fact that God incessantly sustains everything from the tiniest atom to the entirety of the universe in existence. From some point of view this may be viewed as constant creation, as if "thousands of special acts of creation", some more like it, some less, while in reality all facts of existence are subject to God's continuous sustaining power. From another point of view, all this universe looks natural to us, nothing special at all.
We can never agree as long as you keep the mechanistic idea of "natural" at that back of your mind. From A-T point of view, natural is non-different from what God has created, because God created everything, particularly everything that we call natural.
Thanks Dr. Feser, Mr. Green, E. Seigner & Scott for trying to explain to Bilbo why IDism is incompatible with A-T philosophy of nature. It's refreshing to re-read many of the same explanations that have been given to IDists already. That these explanations don't 'stick' to IDists is not a surprise, however.
ReplyDeleteThis clarification from a previous thread might help also: “what I mean by a ‘mechanistic’ view of nature is, specifically, any view which rejects immanent formal and final causes, even if only in a ‘for the sake of argument’ [a la Dembski] manner.” – Feser
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/03/heads-id-wins-tails-you-lose.html
Similarly, since it does not appear that Bilbo is a Catholic Christian, this gets right to the contextual nub (of IDism's ideology) too:
“It is worth noting that in all of the major court challenges to creationism, Roman Catholic scholars—biblical specialists, theologians and scientists—have been witnesses against creationism and the fundamentalist understanding of intelligent design.” – Michael D. Guinan
From a sociological perspective, it's largely 'fundamentalists' and evangelical right-wing neo-(con)creationists who are the main 'proponents' of IDism. Dembski acknowledged this in 2003 and things haven't changed much on that front since then. YECists in the USA are still a major problem, yet IDists welcome them into their 'tent' letting their 'bad science' go unchallenged because their 'theory' isn't really mainly about natural science, but about worldview or religion.
The number of convincing, insightful and difficult challenges that non-fundamentalist religious scholars and scientists have regularly made against IDism, only to be conveniently ignored, misunderstood or willfully distorted by IDists, is indeed a fascinating sociological phenomenon (particularly, but not entirely in the USA)!
Is Bilbo at all aware of this? Iac, I do hope Bilbo puts in the time for re-reading Feser, as others here have suggested.
“‘ID’ is a greased pig - it means anything the ID theorist needs it to mean in order to escape from whatever objection he's [sic - though, yes it is disproportionately a boy's club] facing at the moment.” – Feser (http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2014/05/miracles-id-and-classical-theism.html)