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The eager faced "theist-in-the-Street", |
Like so many other pundits in the NAID community whom I have criticized over the years Casey assumes from the start that he can impose on the subject a natural forces vs intelligent design dichotomy. Well, that dichotomy does work reasonably if one is trying to detect the activity of intelligent beings who are part of the created order such as human beings, aliens sending SETI signals, little gray men from Zeti Reticuli or even intelligent earth animals. But as I have said so often in this blog this dichotomy falls over badly when it is applied to Christian theism where omniscient divine intelligence not only transcends the world it has created but is so totalizing that it somehow also permeates every part of it (See Acts 17:28). Moreover, the Christian God is an omnipotent and omniscient sovereign which means that nothing happens in the cosmos without His permission; that is, everything is subject to His power of veto. In someways God's relationship with His creation has parallels with that of an author who sustains and maintains the content of his story inside his/her mind.
Christian theism throws a huge spanner into works of the simplistic "natural forces vs Intelligent design" dichotomy taken for granted by many IDists. After criticizing NAID dualism for so many years on this blog it is amusing to see them still perpetuating their old, hackneyed thought forms. The source of much of their grief, if not all of it, traces back to their so-called "explanatory filter" (See here where I criticised this simplistic epistemic). The result is that Casey's arguments, along with that of his colleagues are incoherent. This doesn't mean to say that standard evolutionary theory holds good, but I don't have confidence in the NAID's critique of it.
Anyway, let's go through Casey's article....
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CASEY: In his book The Compatibility of Evolution and Design, [Theologian Rope Kojonen, at the University of Helsinki] offers a model in which evolution succeeds because it is intelligently designed......Kojonen argues that evolutionary mechanisms produced the complexity of life. But there’s an intriguing assumption implicit in this: on its own, blind evolution is very unlikely to produce the complex features we see in living organisms. Thus, Kojonen envisions that the evolutionary process receives help from above in the form of the fine-tuning of the initial conditions and natural laws that allow evolution to get the job done.
MY COMMENT: We can see that Casey is starting to go off in the wrong direction already: Exactly what Casey means by "blind evolution on its own" is unclear: Perhaps he's thinking of a process that is unconditionally random? (which of course has no chance of generating the high organization of organic forms even in the lifetime of our immense universe) Or is he thinking of those philosophers who do not believe there is a Christian God but are able to live with the idea that the cosmos with all it's wonderful complex order can be accepted on the basis that "it just is" (See for example Galen Strawson whom I quote here). But at this juncture I am assuming the validity of a Christian theological context and therefore the question of how atheists come to terms with the enigmatic givenness of "natural" organized complexity is not part of my brief. That leaves us with the conundrum of just what Casey means by an independent blind evolution; that seems an impossible conception in a Christian theological context where God is the totalising Sovereign minder of His own creation. Given that the Christian God is the omniscient omnipotent immanent creator Casey's last statement above, which seems to demote God to the level of an assistant, in fact almost a helpful side kick of evolution, would be better written without the phrase "the evolutionary process receives help from above". For example:
Thus, Kojonen envisions that the evolutionary process has been created with sufficient fine-tuning of the initial conditions and natural law to ensure that evolution would get the job done.
In the context of Christian theism it is difficult to coherently imagine a created process working by itself with the occasional nudge from God who is otherwise an absentee landlord; that kind of thinking is the road to deism..... and ultimately even atheism.
Casey goes onto quote just what Kojonen is trying to tell us (I've retained Casey's emphases):
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KOJONEN: According to this view, then, the possibility of evolution
depends on the features of the space of possible forms, where all the forms
must be arranged in a way that makes an evolutionary search through it
possible. This argument shows how the preconditions for the working of the
“blind watchmaker” of natural selection can indeed be satisfied by nature in
the case of protein evolution, despite an extreme rarity of functional forms.
According to this view, then, the possibility of evolution depends on the features
of the space of possible forms, where all the forms must be arranged in a way
that makes an evolutionary search through it possible. This argument shows how
the preconditions for the working of the “blind watchmaker” of natural
selection can indeed be satisfied by nature in the case of protein evolution,
despite an extreme rarity of functional forms. Behe (2019, 112) argues that
Wagner does not yet solve the puzzle of evolving irreducible complexity,
arguing that “it doesn’t even try to account for the cellular machinery that is
catalysing the chemical reactions to make the needed components. ” However,
suppose that, in the case of the bacterial flagellum, though the vast majority
of possible arrangements of biological proteins are non-functional, there
nevertheless exists a series of possible functional forms, little “machines”
that happen to contain increasing numbers of the flagellum’s vital parts while
still serving some other function. This then would allow for the seamless
transition from no flagellum to a flagellum over time, through small successive
steps. In this manner, by moving through such a suitable library of forms, the
blind process of evolution would have the ability to produce even the most
complex structures without the intervention of a designer. This is the kind of
fine-tuning of the landscape of forms that seems to be required to evolve the
kind of biological order described by Behe.
MY COMMENT: Now, unlike Casey what Kojonen is trying to say here is at least intelligible and makes sense. He is simply telling us that a condition of a working evolutionary system is what I referred to several years ago as the "spongeam". That is, that functional forms (i.e. self-maintaining, self-perpetuating organic structures) must constitute a connected-set in configuration space to allow the evolutionary diffusion process to diffuse throughout that space. The post below contains links to other posts where I introduced this idea mathematically:
Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution by (Naked) Chance? (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)
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CASEY: There’s a great irony here in the structure of Kojonen’s
argument: He implicitly concedes that evolution is very unlikely to work in
your average universe that isn’t finely tuned. He says if evolution is going to
work, that’s only because natural laws and initial conditions are specially
“fine-tuned.”
MY COMMENT: That's right Casey I think I can agree. It seems fairly intuitively compelling that any old randomly chosen physical regime is unlikely to set up the right conditions (i.e. the spongeam) facilitating the kind of evolution as currently understood; it looks as though a physical regime capable of generating lifeforms in a paltry few billion years has to be carefully chosen!
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CASEY: Thus, the universe has some pretty lucky properties.
MY COMMENT: Yes, I largely agree Casey, but I would have thought that "a great deal of fine tuning" is exactly the job description of the Great Omniscient, Omnipotent Creator and therefore I wouldn't talk of "pretty lucky properties"! If we are in a universe designed for evolution then in the context of Christian theism it wouldn't be a lucky property, would it? I didn't think that Christians believed in luck when it comes to the creation. Nevertheless, good question Casey: Are we in a “universe designed to allow for evolution” in this manner? Or are we in a universe where evolutionary mechanisms don’t seem capable of producing the complexity of life?
All we can be sure of is that over millions, if not billions of years, life forms have emerged, changed and adapted. In that trivial sense of mere natural history, evolution has occurred whatever the precise nature of the engine/mechanism driving it that the Good Lord has provisioned it with.
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CASEY: As my colleagues and I have shown both in a review of Kojonen’s book and in an occasional series of posts here, from protein evolution to the origin of irreducibly complex molecular machines like the flagellum (here and here), the universe we live in does not seem to allow evolutionary mechanisms to produce the complexity of life. We live in the wrong universe for Kojonen’s proposal. But there’s a problem with the structure of Kojonen’s argument that goes even deeper.
MY COMMENT: The NAIDs' believe that functional forms don't constitute a connected-set in configuration space; that is, they believe that most functional forms are irreducibly complex. They may be right on this count. I personally feel that this claim is at least plausible but proving it is notoriously difficult and sometimes ingenious evolutionists will fill in the gaps between the "islands" of functionality with proposed functional "missing links" that start to give a possible gradualist path through configuration space. Really, the NAID case should stop here and focus on assembling the necessary logic and evidence for the case that organic forms are truly irreducibly complex structures. Irreducible complexity, if it can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, would certainly falsify bog-standard evolution. But no! sensing they're on a very debatable wicket here Casey and colleagues, in their search for a clincher, stick their necks out too far into that "deeper problem" Casey mentions, the land of NAID smoke and mirrors.
For more on the question of irreducible complexity see here:
CASEY: Kojonen differs with me. He seeks to preserve and defend the
theist on the street’s intuition that life was designed. But in his mind this
is not because natural processes are incapable of producing life. In fact, he
thinks they are capable of that. That is, while evolutionary processes are
inadequate on their own, natural processes in general are capable of producing
life. Kojonen thinks this reflects the fact that the laws of nature and the
initial conditions of the universe themselves are fine-tuned and designed to
make the origin and evolution of life possible — by natural processes.
MY COMMENT: How paradoxical and confusing: On the one hand Casey talks of evolutionary processes [which are presumably viewed as "natural"] that are inadequate on their own and then juxtaposes that with Kojonen's view that "natural processes in general are capable of producing life."
But for Christians there really is no such thing as fundamentally natural processes, unless we trivially define them as simply the workings of the physical regime; but fundamentally all such processes are highly unnatural in the sense that they have no necessary existence that we can comprehend (i.e they have no Aseity. See here for more). But thinking in terms of fundamentals rather than superficial definitions we find that:
a) The cosmic physical regime is highly contingent and unless we have the kind of mentality which allows us to be intellectually satiated with Bertrand Russell's "it just is", the organized complexity of the cosmos remains profoundly puzzling and prompts curiosity to push for deeper meanings. Moreover, as I've said here science, being ultimately a descriptive discipline can never attain to explanatory completeness in sense of Asiety. Hence there will always remain a deeply intuitive unnaturalness about the cosmos.
b) But even on its own terms our current physics is clearly descriptively incomplete: We still don't have a complete descriptive understanding of our physical regime in terms of succinct laws. So, who knows just how The Good Lord has provisioned this regime to work. Perhaps it has inherited its creator's ability to work miracles? And above all who knows if it has a subtle declarative teleology that's difficult to detect?
In the context of Christian theism Casey's statement that evolutionary processes are inadequate on their own, is unintelligible: If the spongeam has a mathematical existence and has been reified by the Good Lord (and I'm not claiming it has) then evolution, by definition, would be adequate to produce life, and depending on one's definitions it would have done it "naturally".
And who is this so-called "theist on the street" that we are hearing about? Well, as it turns out it's Casey's alter ego.....
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CASEY: But if natural processes are capable of producing the
complexity of life, then isn’t the “theist on the street” wrong to conclude
that life was designed in the first place? On what basis can this theist know
that the natural laws are “fine-tuned” to allow life to evolve? The theist must
have some background knowledge that natural laws can’t produce living systems.
But if Kojonen’s thesis is correct, then in our universe the theist ought not
to have such background knowledge. After all, natural laws are capable of
producing such complex systems!
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