Advice for Christians who discuss their faith with atheists… from an atheist

I spotted this post by Jeffery Jay Lowder on The Secular Outpost, and I think it’s good advice.

There are times where two people speak the same language, use the same words, and mean very different things by the same words. In conversations between Christians and atheists, “faith” is one such word. For many atheists, the word “faith” means, by default, belief without evidence or even belief against the evidence. In contrast, I doubt many Christians would accept that definition. For example, according to the NIV translation, Hebrews 11:1 states, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

Victor Reppert, at Dangerous Idea, writes this about the word “faith.”

Every time you use the word “faith” in a discussion with an atheist, they are going to declare victory. They will presume that you are believing for no reason, and that you are are admitting that the evidence is against you.

I think he is probably right. If Christians want to dialogue with atheists, I think Christians would be well served to speak the ‘language’ of atheists. The word “faith” simply has too much baggage associated with it; inserting that word into the conversation is likely to become a distraction from whatever point the Christian was probably trying to make. So if you’re a Christian talking with atheists, my advice is to temporarily delete the word “faith” from your vocabulary. Find some other way to make your point.

A better word to use is “trust”, and here’s Christian apologist Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason to make the same point:

Christian apologist Jonathan Morrow had a similar post on Think Christianly. (Mark well the part he put in bold)

Excerpt:

In today’s post I want to share a conversation I had with some of the sharp young men during lunch. It had to do with how we talk about Christianity with our friends, family, and coworkers. Most of the time, well meaning Christians talk about Christianity in the context of religion…not reality. Is that a problem? Yes, and here’s why. Religion is understood as a personal and private feeling that is not accessible by everyone else. You can’t question, challenge, or investigate it; you must simply be tolerant of it (and by tolerant, I am using the modern misunderstanding of tolerance which believes that all religious views are equally valid simply because a person sincerely believes them). That’s why having a conversation about Christianity as a religion is a dead end. It’s a non-starter.

That’s why I encouraged these students to talk about Christianity in the context of reality where terms like truth, knowledge, reason, and evidence apply. Any claim about reality is either true or false (it can’t be both). If Christianity is not the kind of thing that can be true or false…the battle has already been lost and the Gospel cannot be seriously considered. We need to talk about Christianity in the same way we talk about having a prescription filled at the pharmacy or receiving instruction from a Doctor.

In today’s society, religion is a fuzzy (i.e., socially constructed or psychologically projected) category that makes little difference in everyday life. But if Christianity is true, then it speaks to ALL of life. It makes a comprehensive claim on reality. Jesus didn’t intend to merely address two hours of our week. As Christians we need to have more conversations about reality and less about religion.

I’ve even written a post about the concept of faith that is presented in the Bible and the word faith has nothing to do with blind belief in the Bible – it’s always based on evidence, so that people can know for certain what the truth is. I highly recommend it for anyone who disagrees with Jeffery,Greg or Jonathan. When you’re talking about Christianity, you’re talking about what you know. You’re talking about the way the world is, for everyone. When you talk about your belief in God, you should say “trust”. You should not say “faith”.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation
• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason
• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason
• William Lane Craig’s moral argument

Filed under: Mentoring, Apologetics, Atheism, Epistemology, Richard Dawkins, Laws of Logic, The Bible, Fideism, Emergent Church, Faith and Reason, Faith, Reason, Biblical Faith, Evidence, Logic, Blind Faith, New Atheism, Justified True Belief, Plato, Theaetetus, Knowledge

The psychological profile of atheists

Triablogue has a fascinating quote posted from “The Cambridge Companion to Atheism“. (H/T J. Warner Wallace)

Take a look:

Findings regarding those who come from religious homes and then give up religion show that they have had more distant relations with their parents (Hunsberger 1980, 1983; Hunsberger and Brown 1984). Caplovitz and Sherrow (1977) found that the quality of relations with parents was a crucial variable, as well as a commitment to intellectualism. Hunsberger and Brown (1984) found that lesser emphasis placed on religion in home, especially by the mother, and self-reported intellectual orientation had a positive impact on rejecting the family’s religiosity as a young adult. Dudley (1987) found that alienation from religion in Seventh-Day Adventist adolescents was correlated (0.72) with the quality of their relationship with their parents and other authority figures. Alienation was tied to authoritarianism and harshness on the part of the parents. But parents may also have a more consonant effect on their children’s religiosity. Sherkat (1991), analyzing large-scale U.S. surveys in 1988, found that parents’ religious exogamy and lapses in practice led to their children’s apostasy. Thus, children may be following in their parents’ footsteps or acting out their parents’ unexpressed wishes.

Attachment theory (Kirkpatrick 2005) assumes that interpersonal styles in adults, the ways of dealing with attachment, separation, and loss in close personal relationships, stem directly from the mental models of oneself and others that were developed during infancy and childhood. Attachment styles can be characterized as secure, avoidant, or anxious/ambivalent. Secure adults find it relatively easy to get close to others. Avoidant adults are somewhat uncomfortable being close to others. Anxious/ambivalent adults find that others are reluctant to get as close as they would like. Kirkpatrick (2005) reports that in a study of 400adults in the United States, those having an avoidant attachment style were most likely to identify themselves as either atheist or agnostic.

Does losing a parent early in life lead one to atheism? Vetter and Green (1932–33) surveyed 350 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, 325 of whom were men. Among those who became atheists before age twenty, half lost one or both parents before that age. A large number in the group reported unhappy childhood and adolescence experiences. (The twenty-five women reported “traumatic experiences” with male ministers. We can only wonder about those today.) Vitz (1999) presents biographical information from the lives of more than fifty prominent atheists and theists as evidence for his theory that atheism is a reaction to losing one’s father.

This is why Christians need to do more than quote the Bible to people. We need to be concerned with politics. We need to support policies that promote and strengthen marriage and parenting. We need to oppose policies that undermine the stability of the marriage commitment. Not only should Christians be informed and outspoken about same-sex marriage, but we should also be informed and outspoken on other laws that weaken marriage, such as no-fault divorce laws. Not everything we need to know is in the Bible. The Bible does say that divorce is wrong, and homosexuality is wrong, but we need to look outside the Bible at research in order to influence the society as a whole. Most of the people who need influencing in public policy discussions will not accept Bible verses alone – they need arguments and evidence.

If we really care about bringing people to Christ, then we need to understand that public policy plays a role. Christians need to stop being pious about being apolitical.

Related posts

• Why do famous atheists believe that God does not exist?
• Why do people become atheists?
• Why do young Christians become atheists in college?

Filed under: Commentary, Atheism, Authority, Autonomy, Belief, Blind Faith, Children, Christianity, Faith, Family, Father, Fatherless, Fatherlessness, God, Hoping, Marriage, Paul Vitz, Psychology, Rebellion, Relifion, Religion, Sin, Unbelief, Wish Fulfillment, Wishing

Richard Dawkins defends the moral goodness of infanticide and adultery

Richard Dawkins’ recent tweet (see below) caused me to re-post this old post about how atheists struggle with morality. And not just Stalin, but run-of-the-mill atheists, too.

Richard Dawkins explains morality on atheism

Here’s the latest moral wisdom from atheist Richard Dawkins, courtesy of Uncommon Descent.

Excerpt:

I want to raise another question that interests me. Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity in the first place?

[...]The underlying presumption — that a human being has some kind of property rights over another human being’s body — is unspoken because it is assumed to be obvious. But with what justification?

In one of the most disgusting stories to hit the British newspapers last year, the wife of a well-known television personality, Chris Tarrant, hired a private detective to spy on him. The detective reported evidence of adultery and Tarrant’s wife divorced him, in unusually vicious style. But what shocked me was the way public opinion sided with Tarrant’s horrible wife. Far from despising, as I do, anybody who would stoop so low as to hire a detective for such a purpose, large numbers of people, including even Mr. Tarrant himself, seemed to think she was fully justified. Far from concluding, as I would, that he was well rid of her, he was covered with contrition and his unfortunate mistress was ejected, covered with odium. The explanation of all these anomalous behavior patterns is the ingrained assumption of the deep rightness and appropriateness of sexual jealousy. It is manifest all the way from Othello to the French “crime passionnel” law, down to the “love rat” language of tabloid newspapers.

[...]Why should you deny your loved one the pleasure of sexual encounters with others, if he or she is that way inclined?

I, for one, feel drawn to the idea that there is something noble and virtuous in rising above nature in this way.

[...]And why don’t we all admire — as I increasingly do — those rare free spirits confident enough to rise above jealousy, stop fretting about who is “cheating on” whom,

Here’s a little snippet about Richard Dawkins’ ability to stay married:

In 1984, Dawkins divorced his wife of 17 years, Marian Stamp; later that same year, he married Eve Barham. Dawkins also divorced Barham, though the precise circumstances of this divorce are unclear. He married science fiction actress Lalla Ward in 1992; at present, the two are still married.

I have been advised that the full article featuring Dawkins’ views is far, far worse that what was excerpted by UD.

What does atheist morality amount to, in practice? It amounts to the strong acting selfishly and allowing the weak to suffer for it. That’s why atheists are almost entirely for abortion and sexual permissiveness – the children are the first to be screwed by the moral relativism of the adults. That’s where abortion, no-fault divorce, fatherlessness, etc. come from – they are crimes committed by selfish adults against vulnerable children – because they can. It’s the strong abusing the weak, exactly as Darwinism would have them do. There are no human rights on atheism, and there is no reason for self-sacrificial moral behavior, either. Do what you want, and don’t get caught. Get them, before they can get you. Don’t let anyone diminish your happiness with their moral rules. That’s “atheist morality”.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve caught a glimpse of Dawkins’ atheist perspective on morality, either.

Morality according to atheist Richard Dawkins

Rev. George Pitcher writes about an interview of Christopher Hitchens conducted by Richard Dawkins. (H/T Thinking Christian)

Excerpt:

But the centrepiece of this Christmas edition is the main coup for the New Statesman – an interview by Prof. Dawkins with Christopher Hitchens, the great polymath who today lost his fight against cancer. It’s a fascinating read over three double-page spreads. Not least because Prof. Dawkins reveals a charming humility, allowing Hitchens to show his intellectual superiority at his own expense. Hitchens is thoughtful about CS Lewis and Christianity and rather leaves Prof. Dawkins floundering in his wake, occasionally interjecting little assents to show that he’s still there, as he struggles to keep up.

But one of these interjections is most revealing. About half-way through, the Prof gets this in edgeways: ‘Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?’

So, ‘if we win…and destroy Christianity’. True, there’s a ‘so to speak’ in there, but it doesn’t do much. Try ‘If we win and, so to speak, kill all the Jews’ as an alternative. Doesn’t really work, does it? And Prof Dawkins can hardly claim that he was misquoted or taken out of context. He was editing the magazine, after all – there’s even a picture of him doing so, pen poised masterfully over page proofs.

Now you might think that Dawkins intends to destroy Christianity in debates, and not in the wars and purges of atheism that occurred last century in North Korea, Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union, and so on. Those atheist regimes caused the deaths of 100 million people, according to Harvard University Press. But Dawkins has refused to debate William Lane Craig on more than one occasion. So whatever he means by “destroy Christianity”, he doesn’t mean “defeat them in rational debate, using superior arguments and evidence”. He had his chance to do that, and he passed on it. So, he must mean something else by “destroying Christianity” other than persuasion.

Let’s find out what Richard Dawkins thinks about morality. Dawkins has previously written this:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

(“God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)

Dawkins’ view is that nothing is really good or bad objectively. Cultures just evolve certain conventions, and those conventions vary arbitrarily by time and place. I think we need to interpret his goal of destroying Christianity against the backdrop of his nihilism. 50 million unborn children have been killed in the United States since 1973 alone. That’s 50 million people with distinct genetic codes different from their mothers or their fathers, who will never grow up to achieve their potential.

Dawkins himself is in favor of infanticide:

So what might destroying Christianity look like to an atheist?

Here it what destroying Christianity means in North Korea, the most atheistic country on the planet.

Excerpt:

A Christian woman accused of distributing the Bible, a book banned in communist North Korea, was publicly executed last month for the crime, South Korean activists said Friday.

The 33-year-old mother of three, Ri Hyon Ok, also was accused of spying for South Korea and the United States, and of organizing dissidents, a rights group said in Seoul, citing documents obtained from the North.

The Investigative Commission on Crime Against Humanity report included a copy of Ri’s government-issued photo ID and said her husband, children and parents were sent to a political prison the day after her June 16 execution.

That’s what Kim Jong Il means by “destroy Christianity”. What does Dawkins mean by it?

FLASHBACK: American Atheists calls for the eradication of Christianity.

Filed under: News, Agnosticism, Apologetics, Atheism, Atheist, Belief, Bible, Blind Faith, Christian, Christian Apologetics, Christianity, Communism, Coward, Cowardice, Debate, Destroy Christianity, Ethics, Evidence, Faith, Genocide, Guardian, History, Logic, Mass Murder, Morality, Oxford, Reason, Relativism, Religion, Religious Belief, Religious Pluralism, Richard Dawkins, Science, Secular Humanism, Secularism, Theology

Michael Behe and Keith Fox debate theistic evolution vs intelligent design

Michael Behe and Keith Fox debate evolution and intelligent design. (See below for link to MP3 file)

Details:

Michael Behe is professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania and the founder of the modern Intelligent Design movement. His book “Darwin’s Black Box” ignited the controversy 14 years ago when it claimed that certain molecular machines and biological processes are “irreducibly complex” and cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution.

His new book “The Edge of Evolution” takes his conclusions further, arguing that the Darwinian processes of random mutation and natural selection are incapable of producing the variation and complexity we see in most of life.

So can we conclude that life was intelligently designed by a creator?

Keith Fox is Professor of biochemistry at the University of Southampton and chairman of Christians in Science. As a theistic evolutionist he believes that Evolution is the best explanation going for the complexity we see and that ID is a blind scientific alley and theologically unappealing to boot.

They debate whether micromachines in the cell such as the “bacterial flagellum” could have evolved by a Darwinian process of evolution. When inference to design is and isn’t acceptable in science. Whether random mutation can mathematically stack up to complex life, and whether God is reduced to a divine “tinkerer” by ID.

I get the impression that Fox learned everything he knows about ID by reading Darwinists.

The MP3 file is here.

The summary below is rated VERY SNARKY.

Summary

Michael Behe:

• ID is not Biblical creationism
• ID is not religion
• ID is a scientific research program
• People refuse to discuss ID because of personal philosophical assumptions
• ID is like the Big Bang – it is based on evidence, but it has broad religious implications

Keith Fox:

• ID is not Biblical creationism, but it isn’t science

Michael Behe:

• ID is compatible with common descent
• ID is only opposed to unplanned, unguided evolution (Darwinism)
• ID is not necessarily opposed to long periods of time

Behe’s first book – the bacterial flagellum

Keith Fox:

• Here are a couple of papers that show how parts of the flagellum evolved
• They are possible pathways

Michael Behe

• No, those are studies that show that there are similarities between bacterial flagella in multiple organisms
• Similarities of proteins between different organisms do not necessarily imply a developmental pathway
• The problem of having the instructions to BUILD the flagellum still remains

Keith Fox:

• Maybe parts of the flagellum had other functions before they were used in the flagellum
• Maybe you can use the parts of the flagellum for other purposes
• Maybe, one can imagine, it’s possible that!

Michael Behe:

• No, parts have to be modified and re-purposed in order to be used for other functions

Keith Fox:

• But maybe the proteins can be used in other systems for other things
• I re-purpose parts from of designed things to other purposes in my house when I do maintenance

Michael Behe

• Uh, yeah – but aren’t you an intelligent designer? What does your home maintenance have to do with Darwinian evolution?

Is ID another God-of-the-gaps argument?

Michael Behe:

• Well consider the Big Bang… there was a build-up of scientific evidence for that theory
• Just because a theory has religious implications, doesn’t mean that it isn’t true
• You really have to look at the specific evidence for a theory, and not decide in advance

Keith Fox: (I’m paraphrasing/inventing/mocking from now on)

• But the Big Bang is based on discoveries, and intelligent design is based on gaps in our scientific knowledge
• What if I did have evidence of a step by step pathway (which I don’t right now)? Then I would win the argument – what would you do then?

Michael Behe:

• Well, if tomorrow you do manage to find expiremental evidence of a pathway, which you don’t have today, then I would be wrong
• ID is falsifiable by experimental evidence
• But what about your your view? Is that falsifiable by experimental evidence?
• What if someone goes into a lab (someone like Scott Minnich?) and performs gene knockout experiments, and publishes the results
• You knock out a gene from the bacterial flagellum, you wait for a large number of generations, and it never develops the missing gene
• You repeat this with every one of the 50 genes in the bacterial flagellum and it never recovers for any of the 50 genes
• There is no pathway to build up even one of the 50 genes – according to actual experiments
• What do Darwinists do with experimental evidence that falsifies Darwinism?

Keith Fox:

• No, I would not accept that experimental evidence could falsify Darwinism
• Just because known published experimental evidence that we have today falsifies Darwinism, it doesn’t mean Darwinism is false because it’s not falsifiable
• We don’t know how Darwinism even works – it happened so long ago, and it’s not repeatable or testable, so how could lab ,experiments falsify it?
• Darwinism is science and intelligent design is faith, though

Which side has the experimental evidence?

Michael Behe:

• Consider the largest longest-running lab experiment of evolution, Richard Lenski’s experiments on e. coli
• Lenski has presided over 50,000 generations, (millions of years of evolution)
• The bacterium did evolve and they did get better but not by evolving features, but by disabling features

Keith Fox:

• But those are just LAB EXPERIMENTS! What do lab experiments prove?
• What if? What if? What if? You don’t know, it happened so long ago, and you weren’t there! You weren’t there!
• (clutches Flying Spaghetti Monster idol tighter and sobs pitifully)

Michael Behe:

• See, the thing is that I have actual experiements, and here’s some more evidence that just got published last week
• So I’ve got evidence and then some more evidence and them some other evidence – experimental evidence
• And all the evidence shows that adaptation is done losing traits not by gaining traits
• And the published observations are what we see in nature as well

Keith Fox:

• But doesn’t Darwinism explain some things that we observe?

Michael Behe:

• Well, I am not saying that micro-evolution doesn’t explain some things – it explains bacterial resistance, and other micro-evolution
• it just doesn’t explain macro-evolution, and that’s what the experiments show

Keith Fox:

• But ID is a science stopper! It stops science! You can’t produce experimental evidence to falsify Darwinism – that would stop science!

Michael Behe:

• Well, you have to understand that the Big Bang postulated a non-material cause to the entire physical universe and yet the experimental evidence was allowed to stand because it was testable and verifiable evidence, even if the theory does have religious implications
• All explanations in science are design to settle a question and it stops rival explanations that are not as good at explaining the observations
• Finding the best explanation stops further study because it is better than rival explanations

Keith Fox:

• Well you have to come up with a materialist explanation because that’s the only kind that a functional atheist like me will allow

Michael Behe:

• Well, what if the best explanation for an observed effect in nature is non-material, as with the Big Bang?

Keith Fox:

• But I have to have a material explanation because I am a functional atheist! (i.e. – a theistic evolutionist = functional atheist)

Michael Behe:

• Well what about the cosmic fine-tuning argument? Do you accept that?
• That’s an inference to design based on the latest scientific discoveries

Keith Fox:

• Well I do accept that argument, but I don’t accept design in biology
• When you apply it to biology, somehow it’s bad and you can’t do that or you losing research money and get fired
• Anyway, your argument is based on a gap in our current knowledge

Michael Behe:

• No, back in Darwin’s time we had a gap in our knowledge – we didn’t know what the cell was – we thought it was jello
• Now, we know what the cell is really like, it’s irreducibly complex, and you can’t build up those molecular machines in a step-wise manner
• The inference to design is based on the progress of science revealing the increasing levels of complexity
• In experiments, Darwinian mechanisms cannot build anything useful, instead genes are disabled or dropped
• You guys don’t have the evidence to prove your view that naturalistic mechanisms can do the creating
• You keep issuing promissory notes

Keith Fox:

• Well, you’re just seeing design subjectively, because you are a non-scientist
• I’m being objective when I tell you that we will discover a materialist explanation later on – really really soon now, maybe even tomorrow, yeah
• You won’t accept my speculations and you insist on these published experiments
• You’re subjective and I’m objective
• Just give me more research money so I can hide the decline better

Michael Behe:

• Uh, you’re the one who is subjective – I cited evidence, and you are the one who is speculating
• You have arguments from credulity, and I’ve got the lab experiments
• You refuse to be skeptical, I am the one who is being skeptical

Keith Fox:

• Maybe, maybe, maybe! Maybe tomorrow! Maybe in a parallel universe! Maybe aliens from Planet X!
• Who knows! I certainly don’t know! And that somehow means you don’t know either! See?

Michael Behe:

• Well, to prove me wrong, go into the lab, and run experiments and evolve some new genes (using Darwinian mechanisms) that have new useful functionality

Are there limits to what evolution can do?

Michael Behe:

• You need multiple changes in the genome to get a new helpful feature (let’s say two specific mutations)
• One specific change is possible
• the odds are against getting multiple beneficial changes are really really small – you need two SPECIFIC changes to occur in order

Keith Fox:

• Well, lots of things are really unlikely – any permutation of dice rolls is as unlikely as any other

Michael Behe:

• Well, we are talking about TWO SPECIFIC mutations that are needed to get a beneficial function – lots of other mutations are possible, but we are looking for a specific outcome that requires two SPECIFIC mutations out of the whole genome
• You aren’t going to get useful outcomes unless you direct the mutations

Keith Fox:

• But then why does God allow evil!!!!1!1!!one!!!

Filed under: Podcasts, Big Bang, Atheism, Theism, Fine Tuning, Evolution, Darwinism, Naturalism, Theistic Evolution, Faith, Evidence, Blind Faith, Freethought, Materialism, Pre-Supposition, Speculation, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Michael Behe, Irreducible COmplexity, Bacterial Flagellum, Richard Lenski, Keith Fox, Wishing, Hoping, Tomorrow

Stephen C. Meyer and Keith Fox debate intelligent design and evolution

From Justin Brierley’s “Unbelievable” podcast.

Details:

Stephen Meyer is a leading proponent of Intelligent Design who directs the Centre for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. His most recent book “Signature in the Cell” claims to show that the DNA code is the product of intelligent mind, not naturalistic processes. Keith Fox is Professor of Biochemistry at Southampton University. He chairs the UK Christians in Science network but disagrees strongly with ID. They debate how life could have originated and whether design is allowed as an explanation in science.

The MP3 file is here.

Summary: (stuff in italics is my snarky paraphrase)

Meyer:

• background and how he got interested in intelligent design
• his research focus is on the origin of life – the first replicator
• summarizes the history of origin of life studies
• authored the book “Signature in the Cell”
• the DNA enigma: where did the information in DNA come from?
• naturalistic explanations of the DNA information have failed
• but intelligent agents are known to be able to produce information
• the best explanation of the information in DNA is that an intelligent agent authored it
• Meyer’s book was named by atheist philosopher of science Thomas Nagel as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2010
• why is design so controversial? Many people think that Darwin explained why nature appears design
• the Darwinian view is that nature can create the appearance of design using mutation and selection
• however, Darwinian mechanisms cannot explain the origin of the first living cell, it assumes replication, and the origin of life is about where the first replicator comes from

Fox:

• Meyer’s argument is not about the evolution of life after the first cell
• Meyer’s case for design is about the origin of life
• naturalists do not know a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life
• there are a number of naturalistic hypotheses for the origin of life, like the RNA-first hypothesis
• maybe in a few years one of them will turn out to be correct
• what intelligent design is arguing from a gap in our current naturalistic knowledge to infer that God intervened in nature

Meyer:

• that’s not what intelligent design is at all
• the approach ID theorists use is the inference to best explanation
• you evaluate all explanations, non-intelligent causes and intelligent causes
• you prefer the best possible explanation
• we know that minds are capable of producing information just like the information we find in DNA

Fox:

• living cells replicate, so they have the ability to introduce mutations as they replicate and then some of those mutations can be selected
• so maybe the process of replicating that living cells do created the first living cell
• maybe the first living cell created itself, X brought X into being, self-creation, what’s irrational about that?

Meyer:

• the issue is the origin of life – where did the first living cell come from?
• you cannot appeal to the operations that a living cell can perform to explain the origin of the first living cell
• there was no first living cell operating before the first living cell
• there was no replication, mutation or selection before the first living cell
• in fact, in my book I show that there is no known naturalistic mechanism that is able to produce the information needed for the first living cell
• nothing can create itself, that is self-contradictory

Fox:

• Well, you are just saying that because something is complex that God did it

Meyer:

• Sadly, no. What I actually said needed to be explained was the information, not complexity
• And we know from software engineering that the process of adding information to code is performed by programmers
• in the absence of any adequate naturalistic explanation for information, we are justified in taking the explanation that we are familiar with – namely, intelligent agency – based on our uniform, universal experience of what causes information

Fox:

• well, maybe we can appeal to the mutation and selection in existing living cells to explain the origin of the first living cell
• maybe there were living cells before the first living cell, and then these other living cells created the first living cell

Meyer:

• we can’t keep invoking mutation and selection when those processes are not operating prior to the origin of the first living cell

Fox:

• well maybe some bare-bones self-replication molecule was a precursor to the first living cell

Meyer:

• even to generate very limited replicator would require a large amount of information
• the argument I am making is – where does the evolution come from?

Fox:

• well, maybe we will think of an explanation for information that is naturalistic in 20 years
• we’ve thought of explanations to things that were NOT information before
• so maybe we will be able to think of something to explain information based on our ability to explain NOT information before

Moderator: Change topics: the Dover decision

Meyer:

• the Discovery Institute opposed the policy that causes the trial
• the wording of the statute was poor
• the judge was completely wrong in his decision
• young earth creationists used the phrase “intelligent design” to cover their agenda
• intelligent design is an inference using the normal methods of science

Fox:

• intelligent design is a science stopper because it stops looking for a naturalistic explanation
• everything in nature must have a naturalistic explanation
• everything has to be explained using matter and time and chance
• it just has to be that way!!!!

Meyer:

• well, what luck would you have explaining an effect like Mt. Rushmore?
• can you explain that using matter,time and chance?
• Mt. Rushmore was the product of intelligence, not wind and erosion
• similarly, there is information in the cell, and we know that intelligence causes information

Fox:

• So you are saying that we don’t understand and therefore an intelligence is necessary?

Meyer:

• no I am saying we DO understand and we are making an inference based on that understanding
• you are the one who is insisting on a material explanation because you pre-suppose materialism
• we know that minds have causal powers, and we can infer mind as an explanation from information

Fox:

• well nature is a seamless chain of material causes and effects

Meyer:

• agents can act without violating the laws of nature
• even humans can act as intelligent agents to create information in books, and they don’t violate the laws of nature
• intelligent causes are real, and they explain effects in nature

Fox:

• you’re trying to impose on science something to do with meaning and purpose

Meyer:

• no that’s not what we’re doing, we’re inferring from from the fact that we ourselves are known causes of information to the fact that an intelligence cause is the best explanation for information in the cell

Fox:

• but I am a materialist, I need a materialist explanation

Meyer:

• mind IS an answer to the how question
• we infer to mind in many other scientific disciplines, like cryptography, archaeology, etc.
• a materialist might accuse an archaeologist of engaging in a “scribe-of-the-gaps” argument, but the best explanation of an artifact with information is a scribe
• we are inferring that mind is the cause from the nature of the effect: information

Moderator: is it appropriate to call DNA “information”

Fox:

• well DNA is just a molecular polymer, any reference to information is just by analogy

Meyer:

• DNA is a molecular polymer, but it also exhibits the property of specified complexity
• the arrangement of bases, which function as machine instructions in a software program, for performings task in the cell
• we have observed that the property of specified complexity always comes from an intelligence

Fox:

• well, maybe there are other sequences that would work, so maybe it’s really not uncommon to develop functioning sequences by chance alone, without an intelligence

Meyer:

• you can measure how precise the functional specificity is in DNA and proteins

Moderator: is Shannon information the same as functional information

Meyer:

• Shannon information refers to the sequences of digits or symbols that do not necessarily have any function, i.e. – a four character string QSZX has as much Shannon information as WORD. However, only the latter is functional against the pattern of the English language. There are arrangements of DNA bases and amino acids that have the same number of symbols/characters as a functional sequence would have, but they have no biological function – they do not exhibit specified complexity

Fox:

• Well, maybe there are lots and lots of sequences of DNA and proteins so that it is fairly easy to get a functional one by chance

Meyer:

• DNA sequences that are functional are extremely rare, protein sequences are even more rare
• this is not my opinion, this is what the research shows – functional protein sequences are rare

Fox:

• well maybe there are other functional sequences that are occur before the first functional sequence that are precursors to the first functional sequence
• maybe there are billions of years of replication, mutation and selection before the first replication, mutation and selection

Meyer:

• you can’t get to the first selectable functional sequence by appealing to precursor selectable functional sequences – there are no selectable functional sequences before the FIRST one
• you have to get the first selectable functional sequence by chance alone, because there is nothing to mutate or select before the first replicator
• the chance hypothesis has been rejected because the minimal amount of information for the simplest replicator is too high to get by chance alone, given the resources, including time, that are available

Moderator: Keith are you confident that naturalism will be able to substantiate these naturalism-of-the-gap speculations that you offer in response to Meyer’s actual science that we have today? 

Fox:

• well, it is hard to know for sure because it was just a fluke event
• but there’s nothing irrational or unscientific or miraculous about it – the fluke would have a material explanation
• there is nothing that we can detect that would implicate God, my speculations about a fluke which I cannot observe or measure or test would all be compatible with an atheistic worldview that omits God as a causal entity

Meyer:

• where are those material processes that could account for this fluke then?
• the whole point of this argument is that the information in DNA transcends the material components in the sequence
• it’s the arrangement of the material parts/letters/characters/symbols/instructions that needs to be explained

Fox:

• Well, I just have a different philosophy of science that rules out intelligent causation a priori

Meyer:

• Yes, that’s the difference between us – you pre-suppose that all explanations of natural phenomena must exclude intelligent causes

There is a bit more where Meyer talks about how parts of the cell are implementations of various design patterns (Gang of Four design patterns) that are used by software architects who design software.

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