Faith Interface

This is the sort of thinking that causes well-intentioned creationists to miss the boat. If they dealt with biology rather than obsessing over the philosophical or religious implications of it, they would figure out that they are tilting at windmills to deny the science.

By way of response, let me just quote from a Christian candidate for a Texas district school board who I just read about yesterday (link). I stress that he is Christian and conservative to point out that his philosophical foundation is non-naturalistic and as different from my own as it is possible to get… yet he is absolutely correct when he says:
The older and deeper places of the Earth hold the remains of primitive creatures which increase in variety and complexity as the hand of geological time winds forward. The DNA of our very bodies tells the history (within mutations of long silenced genes and the remnants of ancient viral intrusions) of our separation by degrees from other creatures of the Earth in a common descent. Imposing a false ambiguity on these facts makes mockery of the precious drops of knowledge which mankind has slowly wrung out of the natural world. It is pure scientific retreat, not progress.

In other words, yes – there are philosophical reasons for searching to avoid the otherwise unavoidable conclusion of universal common descent, but that doesn’t mean that assent to them is necessarily only philosophical. Some philosophy of science is inescapable if we are to do it, but the same philosophy of science that supports the laws of motion, whether classically derived or more accurately through quantum mechanics and relativity, leads inexorably to acceptance of universal common descent.

Put yet another way, the creation / evolution debate is a matter of philosophy of religion against the brute facts of science per se.

First and most vehemently, I must disagree with your assessment of Dr. Walker’s positions. I do not know him personally, but he is a regular denizen of a socially conservative web-site, professes Christianity and social conservatism – not a mixture many people would call “nominal” Christianity (nor is that of Francis Collins or Karl Giberson). His clear, concise, and eloquent statement of his beliefs mark them as his own, arrived at through honest scientific investigation – they do not bear the hallmarks of having been borrowed under “peer pressure”, but rather those of strong conviction. Perhaps his worldview is inconsistent, syncretistic, and irrational. He would be the rare human being if he possessed a wholly consistent and homogeneous worldview. That is neither here nor there. The question is whether a rational epistemology of nature, whether or not it is paired with an epistemology of revealed truth, is consistent with the empirical methods of discovery and the deductive and inductive methods of interpretation that yield the modern edifice of evolutionary thought.

Certainly his summary of the lines of evidence is incomplete and doesn’t lead necessarily to the greater conclusions of which we are certain – he is writing an eloquent exposition on his position, not a textbook on 150 years of research in a variety of fields of biology and paleontology.

Smijer, it could be argued that you have just as strong philosophical motivations for searching to avoid the necessary metaphysical implications of considering the possibility that naturalism and physicalism is not the only explanation for what is observed in biology and cosmology.

Perhaps it could be… but it isn’t about me, and my philosophical motivations. I do hold some philosphical positions that make a program rooted in spiritualistic assumptions problematic, but I won’t bore you with them. The philosophical underpinnings of science are the same whether discussing evolution, relativity, the age of the earh, or the germ theory of disease. It is these philosophical underpinnings, and not grand “world views” which are essential. To avoid evolution, you must discount them.

You say that this is a ‘quantum’ leap on my part… A friendly riposte – I don’t think ‘quantum’ is used correctly there. In fact it is not. The only “interpretations” that are consistent with *all* the evidence are those of common descent on the one hand, and that a designer created life in order to fulfill the empirical demands of common descent on every level at which we are capable of looking at the evidence. In other words, our interpretive options, if we are to deal with all of the evidence, are the predictive and falsifiable option of common descent by evolution or the Omphalos Hypothesis that God designed life to fool us into thinking it was involved.

Sure, we can invoke “common design” to explain common DNA, but this hypothesis suffers from flaws:
1) it is post-hoc. We find that cytochrome c, for instance can be replaced across distantly related species. There is no reason to *expect* that the cytochrome c sequence will follow a phylogenetic pattern matching the phylogenetic tree known from the fossil record, modern morphology, biogeography, paleobiogeography, and all the rest. We might just as reasonably expect that God would use cytochrome C more similar between yeast and bacterium as between yeast and human. To explain the similarities as common design is simply an after the fact plea. Evolution, on the other hand predicts and demands that yeast and humans share a more similar molecular sequence.
2) It requires further post-hoc explanations, often more tenuous ones, to explain certain of the data. While God might have designed human and chimpanzee DNA similarly for similar purposes, it does not stand to reason that God would design a GULO pseudogene similar to all non-simian mammals active GULO gene (essential for synthesizing ascorbic acid), and design it to be held in common by only simian primates, with deviations falling along the otherwise established phylogenetic relationships between those simian primates. Common descent predicts the genetic data with little need for recourse to post-hoc explanations.
3) Each independent line of evidence points to common descent by evolution. Whether we are looking at molecular or DNA evidence, the bone structure of a whale’s fin compared to a terrestrial mammal’s hand and a bat’s wing, the fossil record that finds remains of organisms with the skeletal features of modern whales and limbs for walking terrestrially, the distribution of Koalas and Kangaroos that could thrive in similar habits worldwide only in Australia, patterns of antibiotic resistance in parasitic bacteria, or any of a host of other data points, we find predictions of common descent satisfied by the data, and we find that we are able to explain numerous and disparate pieces of data economically and elegantly under a single theory.

The Design hypothesis, on the other hand, struggles to catch up – having to conform data to fit the best you are able with across as many categories as you are able, when the fit already proceeds organically and naturally from evolution.

In other words – I cannot put it more succinctly than Dr. Walker: “Imposing a false ambiguity on these facts makes mockery of the precious drops of knowledge which mankind has slowly wrung out of the natural world.”