Of Baramins and Baloney 13

Mark,
I wrote my reply to your last emails and intended to send it the next morning. That was three days ago. My discomfort in mailing it was due to length and something else I couldn’t put my finger on. Initially we were back and forth to each other with a couple hundred words. Now we are averaging closer to a thousand. I knew that if I sent it, as satisfied as I am with all my responses, you would retort with equal logic from your perspective. This is distracting from the main issue. If you will allow me, without assuming I am ignoring difficult questions, to pair down to what I see as the essence of this debate. Within your last email I see two key thoughts that to me hit home: Your challenge of Nylonase in bacteria, and Bill’s comments about God and naturalism.
With only a couple of decades since the invention of a non-degradable substance (nylon), a previously-known organism begins digesting it, using an enzyme never before known in nature and not later found in other organisms. Any scientist who will sit back and say that this enzyme just happened by change, end of story, is not worth their salt. They are going to keep at it to find a mechanism. That’s because chance is just not good enough for such a complex molecule to occur. And so they haven’t. One idea is that stress (hunger) induces the organism to experiment with new enzyme structures. If true, this would suggest that more, possibly all, organisms have mechanisms that induce focused change experiments in the presence of environmental change. This is what Darwin was looking for when he reached back to Lamarckianism, and it could truly be the “missing link” in Darwin’s theory. So what? It still doesn’t happen by just chance. It can’t happen by chance plus natural selection. Perhaps it happens by chance plus natural selection plus some other mechanism or group of mechanisms. I wouldn’t mind if evolutionists find ways for all of evolution to be caused. I wouldn’t mind if they find ways that it could be materially explained in 6 days. Would you? Or would evolutionists put on the breaks as they do when it’s pointed out that coal is forming at the bottom of Spirit Lake since the eruption of Mt Saint Helen? The real issue is not evolution and it is not time. It is not that science would stop with “God did it,” any more than evolutionists will stop with “chance did it.”
“Frames of reference that permit supernatural action” do NOT “result in inherently non-testable hypotheses.” ID hypotheses are testable, but testability is irrelevant, if the frame of reference is irrelevant. You say this position “doesn’t render belief in God invalid – but it does render such belief *useless* in a scientific context.” This was Des Cartes’ idea, trying to make one field of study irrelevant to another. Restated by Gould as NOMA, even Dawkins doesn’t buy it. There can not be two realities. We are either trying to understand THE reality or we are pretending.
It is important to Creationists, because if “such belief” renders God useless in a scientific context, then God is useless in all contexts. If God has never intervened into the affairs of this universe in a detectable way, then prayer is useless; there is no such thing as Scripture, and God has never sent a prophet, much less come to earth in the form of a man. To them it obviously matters.
But why do many evolutionists get so hot about this? If it’s “useless,” then just ignore it. As explained above, this “useless” idea won’t stop science, and has even challenged the status quo in ways that has advanced science. But many evolutionists fight like somebody is standing on their air hose. The real issue is the same one that launched Epicurus’ search for, not just materialistic explanations, but exclusively materialist explanations: If nature cannot be completely explained without a supernatural factor, then I am not just accountable to myself and society. I have a Maker, and his opinion of me matters.
If this seems absurd to you, then explain why the strong reaction to something that isn’t there, that doesn’t matter. It is never said; it may not even be conscious. But I’ve seen it in the forceful efforts in state house chambers to stop legislation that would only protect freedom of scientific dialog, not outlaw other theories of science. They’ve stood and argued that this protection for teachers and students isn’t needed, because they already have that right. People don’t organize and drive three hours to testify that something just isn’t needed. People don’t write books and hotly debate things that don’t matter to them. They desperately don’t want it to matter.
Don Mc

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