Jim Stump: “I almost felt sorry for design advocates”

F6 Thinking

In his recent review of Benjamin Jantzen’s Introduction to Design Arguments (Cambridge University Press, 2014), evolutionist Jim Stump finds much to agree with because, as Stump argues, design arguments are both bad science and bad religion. For example, Michael Behe argues that evolution is challenged by the irreducible complexity of biological structures, but “almost all” biologists think Behe’s examples don’t hold water. The problem is Behe is implicitly appealing to a caricature of how evolution works that views complexity arising all at once. “In reality,” the ex Bethel professor explains, “natural selection operates on combinations of traits, not merely on isolated structures. Half-developed wings won’t help an insect fly, but they might help it do other things that contribute to its survival, like skim across the surface of water. Contrary to the ID claim about irreducible complexity, you don’t have to get the whole thing at once.”

Furthermore, even if Behe is right, he can merely conclude that design is the best explanation available. The history of science is full of best explanations that were later rejected because a previously unconceived explanation arose. Therefore Behe’s claim is considerably weakened. Stump finds Jantzen’s analyses to be cogent and by the end “almost felt sorry for design advocates as the soft underbelly of their arguments was exposed.”

Unfortunately what the philosopher demonstrates here is not a helpful and insightful commentary on design arguments but rather the usual sequence of evolutionary misrepresentations.

It begins with Stump's appeal to authority. This is a common evolutionary argument, but the fact that a majority of scientists accept an idea means very little. Certainly expert opinion is an important factor and needs to be considered, but the reasons for that consensus also need to be understood. The history of science is full of examples of new ideas that accurately described and explained natural phenomena, yet were summarily rejected by experts. Scientists are people with a range of nonscientific, as well as scientific influences. Social, career, and funding influences are easy to underestimate. There can be tremendous pressures on a scientist that have little to do with the evidence at hand. This certainly is true in evolutionary circles, where the pressure to conform is intense.

Next, Behe does not appeal to a caricature of how evolution works as Stump describes. In his development of the problem of irreducible complexity, Behe specifically addresses the adaptation of pre existing structures. Indeed, Stump’s representation of ID as claiming that with evolution you must “get the whole thing at once” is itself a caricature.

Furthermore Stump’s view that “natural selection operates on combinations of traits” is nothing more than the usual Aristotelianism dressed up in Darwinian language. Natural selection doesn’t “operate” on anything. And Stump’s credulous explanation of how “Half-developed wings won’t help an insect fly, but they might help it do other things that contribute to its survival, like skim across the surface of water” is simply a just-so story. There is no scientific evidence that this ever actually occurred in history, and it adds enormous serendipity to evolutionary theory. Does that make it impossible? Of course not. But that’s not the point.

The final critique of Behe is that he can only present design as the best explanation and is therefore vulnerable to the problem of unconceived explanations. Is not Behe’s claim considerably weakened?

This coming from an evolutionist is hypocritical for contrastive thinking is foundational to evolutionary thought. If Behe’s claim is considerably weakened then evolution is demolished.

Stump concludes with the usual Leibnizian / Kantian appeal to naturalism. Reminiscent of the final scene in Inherit the Wind which has the victorious Spencer Tracy clutching a Bible, we are told that the divine hand is evident in the created order, not in the failures of nature:

We see God’s hand throughout the created order not because science can’t explain nature, but because it can. The Designer’s mark is not in systems that don’t work quite right and need tinkering; those are signs of imperfection.

If naturalism fails, then nature fails. And if nature fails, then the Creator has failed. It’s the seventeenth century all over again.

Just Because I’m Metaphysical Doesn’t Mean I’m Wrong

The ancient Greeks believed that the planets and stars, like musical notes, were separated by harmonic intervals. This notion suggested that the cosmic cycles produced harmonious music, an idea that persisted into medieval astronomy as well as the early years of modern science. Johannes Kepler held such idealism and found intriguing correspondences between the elliptical orbits of the planets and musical scales. Obviously such idealism goes well with the idea that God designed and created the world. But nature was not always so pleasing. Was not the world full of “errors and bungles,” as the seventeenth century Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and later the great botanist John Ray pointed out? Cudworth and Ray argued for a “Plastic Nature” which, simply put, was a way to insert natural laws between God and the world. Nicolas Malebranche and Thomas Burnet were other seventeenth century thinkers who produced their own versions of creation by natural law. These various ideas had their differences but the common theme was that God would not have intended for the less pleasing aspects of this world so it must have arisen via some simpler, indirect creation mechanisms. Leibniz, Kant, Hume and Darwin are just a few influential thinkers who followed with their own powerful arguments for why the world must have arisen according to the constraints of simple laws, not divine intent. These metaphysical mandates continue to drive science to this day and are most obvious in the writings of evolutionists. And so in one sense nothing has really changed—theology is still queen of the sciences. But in another sense things have changed dramatically simply because there is so much more scientific knowledge. One of these metaphysical mandates, the so-called greater god theology, has held up rather well and it is worth revisiting its origins and current status. Recent scientific findings have tended to confirm greater god theology, but in new and surprising ways.

Early in the eighteenth century, in the last few years of his life, the great philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz exchanged a series of letters with Isaac Newton supporter Samuel Clarke in which they debated a range of topics. One topic was, for lack of a better term, error correction in the natural world. The brilliant Newton had discovered that the solar system was unstable. Newton trusted his findings and concluded that perhaps the solar system is occasionally adjusted by special divine action. That is, a divine finger intervened to nudge a planet in its orbit and avoid an incipient instability.

For Leibniz this was practically heresy. As with Burnet, the idea that God would not design a world capable of self-sustained, perpetual operation was terrible theology. As Burnet made an analogy with a clockmaker. Clearly, the greater clockmaker is the one who makes a clock that is not in need of adjustment. We don’t admire the clockmaker who must nudge the hands of the clock occasionally to set things right, or otherwise makes a clock that doesn’t work:

We think him a better Artist that makes a Clock that strikes regularly at every hour from the Springs and Wheels which he puts in the work, than he that hath so made his Clock that he must put his finger to it every hour to make it strike; And if one should contrive a piece of clock-work so that it should beat all the hours and make all its motions regularly for such a time, and that time being come, upon a signal given, or a Spring toucht, it should of its own accord fall all to pieces; would not this be look’d upon as a piece of greater Art, than if the Workman came to that time prefixt, and with a great hammer beat it into pieces?

Is it not the same for the Creator? The greater god designs a world that has no need of adjustment. So for evolutionary thinkers such as Burnet and Leibniz, there was a need for a naturalistic explanation for why the solar system had not disintegrated. And just such an explanation was provided. It came later in the eighteenth century from the great French mathematician and scientist Pierre Laplace who solved the stability problem when he figured out that Newton’s bothersome instabilities would iron themselves out over the long run. Leibniz’s prophecy seemed confirmed as the solar system was inherently stable after all, with no need of divine adjustment.

This story is a classic example in the history of science of an apparent success of greater god theology (interestingly today’s science guarantees no such stability but suggests a remote chance that the solar system could become unstable).

In recent years, however, a plethora of new scientific evidence, from the burgeoning field of molecular and cellular biology, has been discovered that bears directly on this issue of error correction in nature and greater god theology. Even this week new papers are continue to elucidate this issue.

Consider, for example, DNA repair. The delicate double helix macromolecule can be compromised for a number of reasons and for this problem the cell has an astonishing built-in repair capability. Worst of all is the so-called double-stranded break where both threads of the DNA double helix are broken. But even here the cell is able to mend the damage. As one researcher put it, “it’s almost as if cells have something akin to a computer program that becomes activated by DNA damage, and that program enables the cells to respond very quickly.”

One such cause of DNA damage is the accidental insertion of ribonucleotides (RNA) into the DNA molecule. These errant ribonucleotides can accumulate by the millions in a single cell and, as a new paper explains, are edited out in mice, for example, by a crucial enzyme.

The presence of ribonucleotides in DNA can also cause copying errors when the DNA is replicated, as part of the cell division process. And as with DNA damage, DNA replication also has an amazing error correction process. Amazingly, the copied DNA is checked for accuracy and corrected to dramatically reduce the error rate.

Not surprisingly DNA copying is more error prone when there is DNA damage. When such damage is detected the normal copying machines are paused and a special “sloppier copier” is ushered in to do the job. This backup copying machine is able to replicate a damaged section of DNA by not reading it so precisely. This means that there are more copying errors, but a copy with more errors is better than no copy at all.

In fact the cell division process involves various mechanisms that are, as the author of another new paper put it, “very complex.” For instance, in the more advanced eukaryotic cells the DNA is arranged in chromosomes. The chromosomes are replicated in the cell division process, and these chromosome pairs are attached in something like an “X” pattern. The two copies are later separated and destined for the respective daughter cells produced by the cell division.

This process too can incur many problems and again the cell has incredible error correction mechanisms to make things right. Here is how one report explained new findings on this process:

During cell division, the cell's DNA is consolidated into X-shaped chromosome pairs that align along the middle of the cell. Where the arms of the X cross, each chromosome has two kinetochores--protein complexes that facilitate microtubule attachment to the chromosome. As cell division progresses, these microtubules pull the right or left half of each chromosome towards the spindle poles to separate them to opposite ends of the cell.

Problems can frequently arise during this process. As a microtubule extends from a spindle pole, it may attach incorrectly to a kinetochore. When this happens, the cell needs a way to detect the mistake, detach the problematic microtubule, and reattach it correctly. If the issue is not addressed and cell division proceeds, the chromosomes typically fail to divide evenly, resulting in cells with the wrong number of chromosomes. This aberrant distribution of chromosomes can lead to cancer or premature cell death.

To correct attachment problems, cells rely on a system of phosphorylation -- the addition of a phosphate group to certain proteins -- to control whether or not microtubules stay bound to the kinetochore.

According to the Molecular Cell paper, the enzyme Aurora B resides within the inner kinetochore and adds phosphates to a key player in the kinetochore, called the KMN network, that attaches to the microtubule. […]

"This is a very sensitive system that allows the cell to dynamically respond to different attachment problems," says Julie Welburn, first author of the Molecular Cell paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the Cheeseman lab.

DNA repair, DNA replication and chromosome dynamics are just a few examples where we find incredible error correction mechanisms in the cell. These various molecular correction mechanisms are, of course, extremely improbable given evolution. We would have to believe that evolution constructed fundamental cellular processes which were literally disastrous. Stable populations would not have been possible. But then, somehow, evolution rapidly rectified the calamity with astonishing error correction mechanisms. This narrative is simply untenable from a scientific perspective.

Equally unlikely would be the notion that the error correction mechanisms were already available, more or less in place and ready for use when the newly constructed, error-prone, processes originated.

But this is not merely a story of yet another evolutionary failure. What is interesting here is how these new findings reflect on the age-old greater god theology. To be sure, the operations of the cell are fantastic and should please the most idealistic observer. See this animation, as just one example of the splendor. Is it not like harmonious music?

But as we have seen above, clearly the world of molecular biology is error prone. This, it may seem, would present an immediate problem for the traditional idealistic view of creation. It hardly seems aesthetically pleasing for key cellular processes to be regularly producing errors at a high rate. Would the ancient Greeks not have been troubled by such findings?

Perhaps not. Recall that Leibniz’s concern was with an intervening Creator who adjusted and fixed His creation. The clockmaker should not “put his finger to [his clock] every hour to make it strike” as Burnet explained. What if the clock came with fantastic, built-in, devices to perform every correction and adjustment automatically?

It is not that the clock itself works on its own, but it does with these additional devices. Leibniz probably would have been delighted with this narrative. After all, elsewhere the German polymath argued that creation cannot be perfect but rather necessarily must entail evils and inefficiencies, for otherwise it could not be distinguished from the perfect Creator.

And so our new knowledge of nature provides profound insights far beyond the mere materialistic molecular actions. We now know things that wise men and sages from ages past could only have dreamed of. And these things reveal fundamental aspects of the creation. We leave such contemplations to the reader, but two messages are obvious.

First, the evolutionary view, that the world is a byproduct of a combination of chance events and the necessary action of law, is obviously challenged.

Second, the idealistic view, that the world is always a symmetric, harmonious, beautiful arrangement, according to our sentiment, is also challenged.

Yes creation does operate according to natural law, and it is certainly harmonious and incredible in many instances. But these two views do not extrapolate well.

The greater god theology, however, has held up rather well. It seems to derive from the idealistic view, and it motivated the evolutionary view, but taken in isolation from its lineage, the notion that God would not create a world in need of sporadic divine intervention continues to be serviceable.

Here is a Centuries Old Religious Reason for Evolution—On Video

What do Thomas Burnet, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Erasmus Darwin and … Joel Hunter all have in common? They all made the argument that the evolution narrative is theologically superior because it is a sign of a more magnificent, more marvelous, greater god. You can see Joel Hunter’s version of this at the [0.30] mark in this video where he approvingly explains how thinking Christians think:

Probably, I would say, the vast majority of our people sitting in those pews, who are very uncomfortable with: “Look, it was six 24-hour days, and if you think anything else, then you don’t believe in Scripture.” These are science teachers; these are scientists; these are bright businessmen and businesswomen, and people who have been thinking. And they just say: “Wait a minute, God is God. God could choose any way He wants to create the world. And it doesn’t make it any less marvelous, as a matter of fact, it makes it more marvelous. Because He would be so intricate in its creation.

I doubt these thinking Christians are up on their Burnett or Leibniz or Kant or E. Darwin. This argument is common, but not because it is passed on but because it reflects a deep tendency in our religious thought.

When you hear people repeating religious doctrines that have been issued for centuries, you know there is a common bond. And that common bond is not Anglicanism, or Lutheranism, or Roman Catholicism. This common bond transcends denominations and parochial religious traditions. I call it theological naturalism because it, ultimately, is a theological mandate for a naturalistic creation narrative.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Of Gaps, Fine-Tuning and Newton’s Solar System

New research is providing a fascinating new perspective on fine-tuning and a three hundred year old debate. First for the context. When Isaac Newton figured out how the solar system worked he also detected a stability problem. Could the smooth-running machine go unstable, with planets smashing into each other? This is what the math indicated. But on the other hand, we’re still here. How could that be?

According to the Whig historians, Newton, a theist, solved the problem by invoking a divine finger. God must occasionally tweak the controls to keep things from getting out of control. It explained why the solar system hasn’t come to ruin, and it provided a role for divine providence which, otherwise, might not be needed for the cosmic machine that ran on its own.

About a century later, Whig history tells us, the French mathematician and scientist Pierre Laplace solved the stability problem when he figured out that Newton’s bothersome instabilities would iron themselves out over the long run. The solar system was inherently stable after all, with no need of divine adjustment, thank you.

Newton’s sin was to use god to plug a gap in our knowledge. What a terrible idea. First, using god to plug gaps is a science-stopper. Why investigate further if god fixes the tough problems? And second, it damages our faith when science eventually solves the problem and the divine role is further diminished. The key to avoiding this problem is to sequester religious thinking to its proper role. Science and religion must be separated lest both be damaged.

That’s the Whig history. Now for what actually happened. Instead of Newton being wrong and Laplace being right it was, as usual, the exact opposite. Newton was right and Laplace was wrong, though the problem is far more complex than either man understood.

And Newton was not the doctrinaire and Laplace was not the savior as the Whigs describe. Again, the truth would be closer to the exact opposite. Newton was more circumspect than is told, and Laplace didn’t actually solve the problem. True, he thought he had solved the problem, but his claim may indicate more about evolutionary thinking than anything to do with science.

And Newton’s allowing for divine creation and providence never shut down scientific inquiry. If that were the case he never would have written the greatest scientific treatise in history.

After Newton, the brightest minds were all over the problem of solar system stability (though it is a difficult problem and would take many years to even get the wrong answer). And no one’s faith was shattered when Laplace produced his incredibly complicated calculus solution because they were banking on some Newtonian interventionism.

But what did raise tempers was the very thought of God not only creating a system in need of repair, but then stooping so low as to adjust the controls of the errant machine. The early evolutionary thinker and Newton rival, Gottfried Leibniz found the idea more than disgraceful. The Lutheran intellectual accused Newton of disrespect for God in proposing the idea the God was not sufficiently skilled to create a self-sufficient clockwork universe.

The problem with Newton’s notion of divine providence was not that it is a science stopper (if anything such thinking spurs on scientific curiosity) or a faith killer when solutions are found. The problem is that it violates our deeply held gnosticism, which is at the foundation of evolutionary thought.

Darwin and later evolutionists have echoed Leibniz’ religious sentiment time and again. Everyone knew what the “right answer” was, and this was the cultural-religious context in which Laplace worked.

Indeed, Laplace’s “proof” for his Nebular Hypothesis of how the solar system evolved came right out of this context and was, not surprisingly, metaphysical to the core. You can read more about that here.

Today the question of the solar system’s stability remains a difficult problem. It does appear, however, that its stability is a consequence of some rather fine-tuning. Fascinating new research seems to add to this story. The new results indicate that the solar system could become unstable if diminutive Mercury, the inner most planet, enters into a dance with Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest of all. The resulting upheaval could leave several planets in rubble, including our own.

Using Newton’s model of gravity, the chances of such a catastrophe were estimated to be greater than 50/50 over the next 5 billion years. But interestingly, accounting for Albert Einstein’s minor adjustments (according to his theory of relativity), reduces the chances to just 1%.

Like so much of evolutionary theory, this is an intriguing story because not only is the science interesting, but it is part of a larger confluence involving history, philosophy and theology.