(Picture from http://www.faradayschools.com/re-topics/re-year-10-11/god-of-the-gaps/ )
In this post I will complete my series showcasing Intelligent Design guru V J. Torley’s implicit God of the Gaps dualism as it appears in a post on Uncommon Descent. In his post Torley is reacting to Orthodox theologian David Hart’s objection that de-facto ID theology entails a “divine tinkerer”.
In this post I will complete my series showcasing Intelligent Design guru V J. Torley’s implicit God of the Gaps dualism as it appears in a post on Uncommon Descent. In his post Torley is reacting to Orthodox theologian David Hart’s objection that de-facto ID theology entails a “divine tinkerer”.
Now I’d like to ask Dr. Hart two questions. First, does he think
that God could, if He wanted, give pieces of wood the power to assemble
themselves into a ship? Second, does he think that an affirmative answer to the
first question entails that the highly specified complexity which we find in
living things could (in principle) have arisen from particles of non-living
matter that initially lacked this specificity, via a series of law-governed
natural processes?
Regarding the first question: one could perhaps imagine embedding
the various pieces of wood with homing devices and identity tags, and even some
switches to guarantee that they assembled in the right sequence. But it would
be a fool’s enterprise: designing a ship that could assemble itself would be
even more work than the task of assembling it oneself. With living things, the
problem is much, much worse. ……..Now try to imagine designing a program for
bringing all of the chemical building blocks for this bacterium together,
assembling these building blocks in the right way and in the right order, and
dealing with all the unplanned contingencies that might conceivably upset the
assembly process. Dr. Hart says he doesn’t like a tinkering Deity. Methinks his
Deity will have to do a lot more tinkering than mine.
My Comment: Here Torley continues with
his caricature of the alternative to the divine tinkerer – that of a universe whose parts have been
contrived to come together in a preordained way, where the solution to the problem
of generating life is effectively front loaded into the cosmos and is then set
going. This concept of an imperative algorithmic
system unwinding to reveal an implicit front loaded solution very much
contrasts with my declarative programming paradigm where the generation of life
is the subject of a proactive teleological search for a solution (See my Melencolia
I series)
In other words, what Aquinas is doing here is sketching an
Intelligent Design argument: the complexity of perfect animals’ body parts and
the high degree of specificity required to produce them preclude them from
having a non-biological origin. The only way in which their forms can be
naturally generated is from the father’s “seed,” according to Aquinas. (We now
know that both parents contribute genetic information that helps build the form
of the embryo, but that doesn’t alter Aquinas’ key point.) From this it follows
that the first “perfect animals” must have been produced by God alone.
Rather, what Aquinas taught was that some changes – in particular,
the generation of complex organisms – require so many conditions to be
satisfied in order to occur, that they are beyond the power of Nature alone to bring
about: they require a special act on God’s part.
My Comment: Ibid: “….preclude them from having a non-biological
origin”, “….the first 'perfect
animals' must have been produced by God alone.” What Torley identifies as an Intelligent Design perspective derived
from Aquinas has a very “God of the Gaps” flavor about it. It is difficult to
know whether Torley supports a similar view, but it has a good fit with
the North American explanatory filter epistemic, an epistemic which makes a sharp distinction
between natural forces and input from intelligent agency. It also has a good fit with Dembski’s
ideas about the conservation of information; as I hope to eventually show the
concept of conservation of information is best suited to imperative parallel computing
but not the declarative computational paradigm.
While Aquinas might well have admired the ingenuity of the
Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, he would also have pointed out that our
modern understanding of genetics has exacerbated the problem of accounting for
complexity to the n-th degree: living things are far, far more complex than he
imagined them to be, in the thirteenth century. In other words, the number of
conditions required to make a complex organism – or a lowly bacterium, for that
matter – is orders of magnitude greater than what Aquinas supposed it was, in
his day. In order to account for this complexity, then, we need a theory of
evolution that is orders of magnitude more efficient than former theories. And
it is precisely here that evolution’s Achilles heel becomes apparent. In my
post, At last, a Darwinist mathematician tells the truth about evolution, I
explain why according to Professor Gregory Chaitin’s calculations, Darwinian
evolution should take quintillions of years, rather than billions of years, to
generate the life-forms we see on Earth today. And that assumes that you have a
living thing, in the first place. Professor John Walton, a Research Professor
of Chemistry at St. Andrews University who holds not one but two doctorates,
has explained why he believes Intelligent Design is the only adequate
explanation of the origin of life, in an interesting online talk.
My Comment: Chaitin is probably right! But
what if you have available a processing power that is the equivalent to quintillions of years of computation?
But as we have seen, that’s not what Aquinas holds: for him, each
and every species of organism “generated from seed” requires an act of God to
account for its origin. What’s more, for Aquinas, gaps of this sort are good
gaps, since God’s power and voluntary agency “can be manifested in no better
way … than by the fact that He sometimes does something outside the order of
nature.” I can only conclude that Aquinas’ thinking is very much at odds with
Dr. Hart’s, on the subject of Intelligent Design.
My Comment: More God of the Gaps from Aquinas… sorry, I should have said God of the good Gaps. Of course we can’t blame the medieval theologian for
this kind of concept, but his ideas are no model for the post industrial revolution 21st century, nearly 800 years later.
Aquinas responds that some material changes are beyond the power of
Nature to produce. In this passage, Aquinas even likens the production of
Adam’s body from slime to the miracle of raising the dead to life, showing that
he regarded it as clearly beyond the power of Nature:
My Comment: If Torley is right then we
see in Aquinas a fine example of what is so easy to read as “this is the bit that God did!” theology.
I use
the term “act of God” here, because it is not my intention to argue in this
essay that biological Intelligent Design requires a supernatural miracle
(although Aquinas apparently thought it did). We can suppose – as I do – that
living things share a common descent, without committing ourselves to the
assumption that natural processes lacking foresight (e.g. random variation
culled by natural selection) are sufficient to generate life in all its
diversity. Exactly how God guides these processes to generate creatures is none
of my concern. What matters to me is that an Infusion of Intelligence is
required, in order to generate the life-forms we find on Earth today. The
question of whether God used a miracle to generate life is a secondary one.
My Comment: Presumably a “supernatural
miracle” is something that overtly transcends the normal operation of the
cosmos, so I guess that Torley is allowing for the possibility that God does his
stuff in a more covert way than the occasional mega intervention. This is a
step in the right direction but even so Torley still doesn't escape from
thinking in dichotomies: He contrasts “natural
processes lacking foresight” against “an
infusion of intelligence”. It is ironic that it is precisely because those
processes lack foresight that a declarative search is the way the operation of an immanent intelligence manifests itself.
Torley may or may not rule out mega interventions, but the theological damage
has been done. Torley promotes a view of creation that emasculates the potency
of natural forces and so everyone now reads “Intelligent Design” as a de-facto
God of the Gaps creation paradigm. Nothing
Torley has said heads off this bad theology and his promotion of Aquinas doesn't help.*
To sum up: the use of the word “program” to describe the workings of
the cell is scientifically respectable. It is not just a figure of speech. It
is literal. Additionally, the various programs running within the cell
constitute a paradigm of excellent programming: no human engineer is currently
capable of designing programs for building and maintaining an organism that
work with anything like the same degree of efficiency as the programs running
an E. coli cell, let alone a cell in the body of a human being.
My Comment: To sum up: It is ironic that
in spite of his observation of what the imperative cellular program is capable
of Torley has no vision of how “natural
forces” might be capable of finding and maintaining life.
***
The de-facto ID community continues
to implicitly promote God of the Gaps
thinking. It is paradigm that is also very clear among fundamentalists like, say, Stuart Burgess who in his book “He Made the Stars Also” tells us that the Bible
describes God as “master craftsmen” and
then concludes:
The description of God as a great craftsman measuring out the
dimensions of the foundations of the Earth supports the conclusion that God did
not use evolution because a craftsman carries out instantaneous and deliberate actions whereas evolution
involves a long random process. (Page 31).
Burgess doesn’t see that the
Biblical metaphor fails to support his case. Real craftsmen are not magicians
bringing about instantaneous actions of creation, but they are workman seeking
answers to technological problems; this involves experimental searching and much thinking round possibilities. Real craftsmen seek solutions and build bit by bit. In contrast the God of this kind of fundamentalism is a magician and not a workmen , a magician
who "speaks" stuff into existence “Hey presto”, just like that!
The other parts of this series:
Relevant Links:
Footnote:
* As an illustration of the ease with which V J Torley is interpreted as a God of the Gaps theologian see the following post by atheist biochemist Larry Moran:
http://sandwalk.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/an-intelligent-design-creationist.html
* As an illustration of the ease with which V J Torley is interpreted as a God of the Gaps theologian see the following post by atheist biochemist Larry Moran:
http://sandwalk.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/an-intelligent-design-creationist.html
