Darwin Bicentenary Part 12: Is Evolution a History or a Mechanism?

In this post on Uncommon Descent DaveScot makes it clear that he is inclined to accept the likelihood of common descent. Hence Dave doesn’t have problems with evolution in the sense of being a history of an apparently branching pattern of descent. Dave’s problem is with the view that a blend of physical law and randomness (what ID theorists habitually call “chance and necessity”) is sufficient to explain this history. Using Dembski’s explanatory filter Dave would then conclude that intelligent design needs to be invoked. A regular contributor to UD’s commentary threads, called Jerry, seems to agree:

Evolution is the change in the frequency of genetic elements in the population gene pool from one generation to the next. How it happens is the issue and if it has an intelligent assist by some process then it is still evolution whether you call it genetic engineering or something else.

According to Dave and Jerry the real question is not so much over evolution as a history, but evolution as a mechanism. In some ways this distinction really expresses my own terms of reference as to what I am investigating: the mechanism of evolution.

However, having said that my guess is that many YECs are forming a tense alliance with people like Dembski, Behe and DaveScot. YECs would certainly not agree with evolution even as a history. I also notice that on the post I have linked to comment number 14 has been left by an author of a book called “The Evolution Conspiracy”. This suggests to me that ID is attracting people responsible for some rather off the wall socio-political stuff. This may be down to the attraction of the kudos the ID movement has acquired, otherwise denied YECs, through the stature of figures like Dembski and Behe. What unites this disparate community is an anti-evolution ethos shared by all parties that identify with it. But many within its broad church may not be aware that DaveScot’s position is a relatively nuanced one involving quite technical and philosophical questions over whether the two classes of conceptual objects of physical law and randomness can describe our universe in its entirety. I’m left wondering just what are the anti-evolutionists calling a cruel and evil process; the mechanism or the history?

In any case what is it motivating DaveScot’s belief that a third class of conceptual object must be invoked to describe evolution’s mechanism? If it were possible to show that physical law and randomness are sufficient explanation for life’s history would Dave conclude that intelligence is obviated, throw in the towel and join Richard Dawkins? As I once commented on Uncommon Decent here:

Let’s say for the sake of argument that evolution has actually happened. Are you then telling me that if that is the case then Divine creative and sustaining providence is logically obviated? Does evolution really equate to a logically self sufficient cosmos? Creation ex-nihilo, in my opinion, is about reifying the platonic and not about configuration changes that occur within one reified contingent story taken from the platonic. Just because our contingent cosmos has been chosen for a particular history of configuration changes there is then no logical warrant to dispense with God’s Aseity and Creativity. If evolution should prove true, do you then stop believing in God? Is your faith based on a counter factual (That is, evolution => no God) and a conditional? (That is, no evolution => God). ‘Materialism’ is less about a commitment to a particular cosmic story, than it is about what constitutes the primary ontology of our cosmos.