re: Impressive support for Intelligent Design

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Don't know why that marriage of religion and science is so hard for people to understand.

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Part of it is that there’s an entire cottage industry built around misrepresenting evolution. Conferences, lecture circuits, glossy books, videos, books-on-tape (might be showing my age here ) podcasts. There’s real money in telling people the scientific consensus is a house of cards.

I say that from experience. I was raised immersed in that culture and those arguments and believed them completely when I was younger. It led to several embarrassing instances of challenging teachers and professors with what I thought were airtight objections, only to discover that what I believed to be facts were recycled talking points built on distortions and half-truths.

So when people struggle to reconcile faith and science, I don’t always assume it’s stubbornness. Sometimes it’s the result of years of confident misinformation delivered by hucksters who sound authoritative. Untangling that takes time.

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Not really trying to do anything. I don’t need to concede anything because I’m not team evolution or creation, I can believe in God, infinity, and evolution all at the same time.

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Whether you’re “team” anything isn’t really the point here. The only question that matters in this context is whether you accept the evolutionary model as it’s actually defined. Your theological beliefs are another layer on top of that.

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Selection is random within the limits of the environment no? If evolution doesn’t claim randomness then they must claim some form of intervention? Who do the evolutionists claimed intervened with nature?

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What?

Selection is not random “within the limits of the environment.” The environment is the constraint. Given a particular environment, some traits consistently result in more survival and reproduction than others. That statistical bias is what we call natural selection.

Non-random does not mean “intervention.” It means consistent outcomes under consistent conditions.

Mutation introduces variation without regard to usefulness. Selection filters that variation in a predictable direction based on survival and reproduction. There’s no third category required.

So no, if evolution isn’t purely random, it doesn’t imply someone intervened. It implies differential reproduction under physical and environmental constraints.

Better?

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Given a particular environment, some traits consistently result in more survival and reproduction than others. That statistical bias is what we call natural selection.

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May need an example to understand what you mean by randomness. I thought I understood natural selection.

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Non-random does not mean “intervention.” It means consistent outcomes under consistent conditions.

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Well yea in under non random conditions evolution will take a predictable path. I think when we are talking about the scope of the cosmos and creation I’m assuming that the nature of the environment is also a random occurrence. Yes the evolution within the environment will to some degree take the path of least resistance (which is obviously observable and not random). But how does that prove the whole planet isn’t random.

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No, you stated safety measures that help mitigate the structure, not why our current structure is better than the structure I've proposed.

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Eating and breathing are more efficient for humans due to the muscles used for both being in the same area, like I said.

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And yet the back/spine is, by far, the most common structure to get injured. It's almost as if we evolved from quadruped.

Oh, but I'm sure in the garden of Eden, prior to the fall, our backs were somehow different? This is just Satan's way of corrupting God's creation. I wonder how Adam and Even did look, though? How were their spines designed differently?

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From what I found, hands, wrists, and arms are actually the most common parts injured, followed by legs, feet, and ankles.

Again, just because we can and do get injured doesn’t mean the design is flawed.

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May need an example to understand what you mean by randomness. I thought I understood natural selection.

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When biologists say mutations are “random,” they don’t mean everything is chaos. They mean mutations don’t happen because an organism needs them. They aren’t guided toward what would be helpful. They just occur.

But once those differences exist, the environment isn’t random. In a given setting, some traits help survival and reproduction more than others. Those traits become more common over time. That consistent filtering is natural selection.

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Well yea in under non random conditions evolution will take a predictable path. I think when we are talking about the scope of the cosmos and creation I’m assuming that the nature of the environment is also a random occurrence. Yes the evolution within the environment will to some degree take the path of least resistance (which is obviously observable and not random). But how does that prove the whole planet isn’t random.

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Evolutionary biology doesn’t try to answer that. It doesn’t need to. It just explains how populations change under whatever conditions exist.

Even if the environment came about through chance events, once it’s there, selection works in a predictable way within it. The big cosmic randomness question is separate from the biological mechanism.

This is why I said your personal religious beliefs are a separate layer.

Hope this answers your questions.

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I honestly have tried but nothing makes sense except magic and God.

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Signed, the God of the Gaps

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When biologists say mutations are “random,” they don’t mean everything is chaos. They mean mutations don’t happen because an organism needs them. They aren’t guided toward what would be helpful. They just occur.

But once those differences exist, the environment isn’t random. In a given setting, some traits help survival and reproduction more than others. Those traits become more common over time. That consistent filtering is natural selection.

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Exactly.

Understanding the beauty of the sound science you laid out does not at all necessitate rejection of a creative intervention setting it in motion. Quite the contrary IMO. The same is true of a singularity, and our subsequent universe.

However, while those things are certainly compatible with intelligent design, members of the ID community often stretch the premise and inject ID as an "alternative" to "Darwinism." Such evolutionary rejection is silly, and little more than faith-based denialism ... a sort of present-day geocentrism.

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Exactly.

Understanding the beauty of the sound science you laid out does not at all necessitate rejection of a creative intervention setting it in motion. Quite the contrary IMO. The same is true of a singularity, and our subsequent universe.

However, while those things are certainly compatible with intelligent design, members of the ID community often stretch the premise and inject ID as an "alternative" to "Darwinism." Such evolutionary rejection is silly, and little more than faith-based denialism ... a sort of present-day geocentrism.

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Well said.

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That’s a fair distinction, and I don’t disagree that if God exists and intervenes, that wouldn’t automatically be something science could detect or fully comprehend. Science operates within the natural world by design. That’s a methodological boundary, not necessarily a metaphysical claim.

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It lends itself to the metaphysical claim if the boundaries are not maintained. Many believe that science is the best possible way to know what has happened in the past, and that has led to the exclusion and rejection of truth claims that either cannot be verified empirically or that appear to be contradicted by scientific conclusions based on necessary assumptions like uniformitarianism.

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Where I’d gently push back is this: evolutionary biology doesn’t require philosophical materialism to function. It simply studies observable mechanisms of biological change. It doesn’t make a claim about whether God exists. It asks how populations change over time given the mechanisms we can measure.

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The underlying assumptions actually do interact with philosophy and certain epistemological and ontological claims. For instance, if one believes all knowledge that can be ascertained is so by scientific inquiry, then naturalism and empiricism become baked into one’s worldview, knowingly or unknowingly. There becomes a rejection of supernatural revelation, and super naturalism altogether, because such claims do not work with science. Materialism oftentimes closely follows.

Evolutionary biology from a scientific perspective is not entirely observable and testable and requires an application of what is observable to that which isn’t. In particular, the addition of genetic information to produce what is essentially another category of organism, not merely a very similar species, is not visible to us. We don’t see a fish giving birth to anything like an amphibian or a mammal. We assume that the changes are very gradual and additive over millions of years because we can observe small variations with species today. Assumptions matter, and they lead to different conclusions than what revelation may provide.

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If someone believes God ultimately grounds or sustains those processes, that’s a theological interpretation layered on top of the biology. It doesn’t negate the genetic evidence, fossil record, or observed mutation rates. It just assigns ultimate causation differently.

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Not just ultimate original causation, though, but potentially reasoning for why the evidence appears as it does today.

Again, science requires a fundamental assumption of uniformity in nature; what happens today is what has always happened. This assumption is critical for repeatability in our present time, but it also necessarily rejects the concept of God’s intervention in this world at a grand scale because such one-off interactions aren’t repeatable and testable, and therefore, aren’t scientific.

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So my point isn’t to rule out the supernatural. It’s to clarify that evolutionary theory, as a scientific model, explains biological change using testable mechanisms. Questions about divine intervention are philosophical or theological. They’re not refutations of the biological framework itself.

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If there are some trustworthy revelational claims from God about what happened in the past that contradict the conclusions of scientific inquiry based on naturalistic assumptions, there are good reasons to therefore reject the scientific consensus of evidentiary interpretation.

The problem is that such conclusions could possibly be aligned with the actual truth, but are unscientific. And since our modern world equates scientific epistemology as superior to alleged religious or supernatural epistemology, the truth may be rejected because of the nature of its source, as many here do. Not only is it rejected, but it is mocked outright, and those who adhere to it are condemned as stupid or ignorant.