Category Archives: Politics and sociology

In an exchange I’ve had with Hornspiel on BioLogos, he suggested that “design” was an unnecessary and unwelcome new addition to science as it has been practised for the last 400 years. His implication is that teleology has been rightly excluded, citing the usual arguments for methodological naturalism. I want to leave methodological naturalism aside for a moment, and look at the actual place of design in science, historically.

 I posted a piece about my old edition of The Cambridge Natural History a week or two ago, including a reference to the section on man. Yesterday I was browsing through a very nice collection of quotes on evolution on bevets.com (quite a labour involved there), and noticed some familiar words and concepts. See what you think of this series.

My last post showed the prevalent, and crippling, metaphysical bias of those who assess the evidence for evolution with a materialistic prior commitment. Richard Lewontin makes the case eloquently. Despite the popular rhetoric, though, theism as such has very much less at stake in the matter. Not to put too fine a point on it, God could have created using evolution, or in pretty much any other way. In practice things are not that simple, if we look at specific examples.

In some e-mail correspondence over the weekend I mentioned the unwillingness of biologists to engage seriously with mathematical challenges to random mutation in protein synthesis. My correspondent replied that he didn’t share a theist’s need to prove the biologists wrong. I answered that the issue might equally involve materialist biologists’ need to prove the mathematics wrong. The exchange got me to thinking about prior commitments in relation to evolution, especially as I happened to turn up the original source  for Richard Lewontin’s much-quoted statement on the matter. Indeed, only today it is cited in an excellent article by David Berlinski .

The quote in the previous post is actually by zoologist and leader in the field of population genetics, Richard Lewontin. It comes from Testing the Theory of Natural Selection  published in Nature on  March 24, 1972,  p.181. Lewontin’s other famous quotation about science’s prior commitment to materialism comes from a book review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, which is posted in full  at http://www.drjbloom.com/Public%20files/Lewontin_Review.htm. It says quite a lot about Neodarwinism, quite a lot about Lewontin, a fair bit about Sagan and even a little about Richard Dawkins. I’ll return to it in a future post.

Here’s my last comment (for now at least) on Gordon & Dembski’s The Nature of Nature. The last chapter is by William Lane Craig, who starts uncontroversially enough by noting the decline of scientific naturalism in philosophy. He catalogues the ascendancy of positivism and verificationism in the field throughout the middle of the twentieth century, and particularly notes the influence of A J Ayer’s book, Language, Truth and Logic. In this Ayer developed (though he didn’t invent) the concept that any sentence not subject to empirical verification is simply meaningless. Thus any statement dealing with “God” is not simply untrue, but devoid of any significance. Craig indicates, and there seems … Continue reading →