Why Is Christianity Conservative? Shouldn’t it Be Leading the Charge for Change?

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Christianity is obviously conservative, but why? (By conservative, I mean “believing in the value of established and traditional practices in politics and society,” as defined by Merriam-Webster.)

On one hand, it’s obvious why a religion would be conservative. Religions preserve a particular social order. They’re like many other institutions or movements that want constancy in a particular area of society like the Freemasons or other fraternal organizations, the National Wildlife Federation or other nature conservation organizations, a constitution, proponents of a traditional language or culture, labor unions, and so on.

A religion like Christianity has a particular need to be conservative and reject new ideas since they already have the perfect plan given by a perfect source.

On the other hand, Christianity in many ways welcomes change. Many Christians feel free to declare other church leaders or traditions to be heretical. Christianity is the opposite of conservative when you consider its 45,000 denominations, which are expected to grow to 70,000 by 2050. But then every new denomination becomes a stake in the ground, a conservative position that must be defended, a hill to die on.

The fact is that social improvement comes from change. Slavery in the U.S. was allowed, and now it’s not. Polygamy was allowed, and now it’s not. Voting and other civil rights were not given to women and certain classes of people, and now they are. Western society is satisfied that these issues are now resolved for the better.

Where does social change come from?

I’ll grant that Christianity can’t embrace every crazy new social fad. But Christianity isn’t an ordinary institution. It’s supposed to be the one that comes from God. It should be perfect. So it should know what the correct moral response is. It should be leading the parade and giving us the bitter but necessary medicine to make society a better place on a dozen important issues.

But it doesn’t work that way. Why does the church make no moral commands that we moderns find shockingly advanced? The shocking thing is when their heel-dragging response is too backwards, making the Bible look no more divinely sourced than any another ancient book.

Imagine our descendants in a future society. They will probably have adopted additional social changes. For example, they might be horrified at the thought of our raising animals to kill and eat. Whatever these changes are, can you imagine Christianity driving the change? It never has in the past. Give me one example where Christianity led a reluctant society through a social change that is now almost universally accepted.

Take the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia. The court was way ahead of public opinion and ruled unanimously to strike down all laws against mixed-race marriage, even though at the time, 72 percent of the public disapproved of such marriages. Where is the equivalent leadership from Christianity?

I’m sure the institution of slavery will spring to mind for some readers (William Wilberforce and all that), but Old Testament slavery was the same as American slavery, and the Bible gives more support for the slave owner than the abolitionist. If any other counterexamples come to mind, I’ll also want to see that (1) Jesus unambiguously advocated for this position and (2) the early church advocated for this position. Rejection of slavery or polygamy? Prohibition? Civil rights for minorities, immigrants, and women? Education rather than work for children? Laws against mixed-race marriages? Why did society have to inform the church the correct path on these issues?

Rev. Martin Luther King complained about this problem in 1963 in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail-light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.

Christian response

I’ve heard several Christian responses.

1. Christians and Christian movements have been the drivers of change on many of these issues!

Christians and Christian movements have been on both sides of these issues, giving no clear Christian position. We don’t see clear guidance from Jesus, and these are modern concerns, not ones that the Christian church understood since its earliest days.

Take one specific example, the U.S. Equal Pay Act of 1963 that abolished pay differences based on sex. Even if there were radical Christians advocating for it primarily for biblical reasons, that’s not what we’re looking for. There was no unified voice pushing for this from Christians and their churches, raising the issue when the majority of society didn’t even know there was a problem. That’s what you’d need if you were to argue that Christianity did indeed have the one correct moral viewpoint.

The major social changes we’ve touched on—abolition, civil rights, and so on—happened more than a thousand years after the early church. The push for change often came from Christians, but these Christians weren’t simply pointing out truths that were plainly in the Bible all along. Christians advocating for change on these issues were not acting as students of the Bible; rather, they were products of the Enlightenment and modernity.

2. Perhaps Old Testament morality and modern morality are both right. God might simply be waiting for us to mature so that we can accept more demanding moral standards.

This argument is just an attempt to explain away the immorality we find in the Old Testament (here, here, here).

Yet again, I’m looking for evidence of the church on the cutting edge of social change. For example, imagine that the Baptist Church declared slavery immoral long before all Americans were ready for it, and then all other denominations quickly supported that position. (History records that the Quaker church was a vocal opponent to slavery in the late 1600s, but it was a voice in the wilderness. The Baptist church split over the issue of slavery, and the Southern Baptist Church apologized for its origin as the pro-slavery Baptists only in 1995.)

Same-sex marriage will be an interesting example to watch. Opponents of SSM say that their church’s rejection is justified, just like supporters of the Catholic Church will say that its stand against contraception is justified. But this isn’t social change, it’s just social conservativism.

I predict that in a couple of decades, SSM will be accepted and uncontroversial. Churches will point to the bold few Christian martyrs who supported it in the early days, trying to recast history to show their church as a pioneer. But we return to the question, why did the church not lead the charge? Why is the church conservative on social issues, not progressive?

Christianity tells us that it has the one correct worldview. This argument fails because Christianity is a fragmented battlefield with no unanimity on any social issue and because Christianity has never dragged a reluctant society into a new understanding on a social issue that is later accepted as correct. If it were the one correct religion, as Christianity claims to be, it would be leading the charge on every social issue.

See also: Is America the Greatest Country in the World? A Rant.

The American Jesus is more a pawn than a king,
pushed around in a complex game
of cultural (and countercultural) chess,
sacrificed here for this cause and there for another.
— Stephen Prothero, American Jesus

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/20/16.)

Image from zzclef (CC BY 2.0)

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Sifting Natural from Designed Is Harder than You Might Think (2 of 2)

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How do we separate natural from designed? The last post critiquing the Creationist project of Christian apologist Jim Wallace looked at some of the cases that make this sorting project so difficult. Now, let’s pull back and look at the bigger picture. This is just one of a number of similar challenges.

The first post in this series is here.

Other difficult category challenges

Separating things into natural vs. designed is just one of many similar problems. Here are a few more we’re all familiar with. Bang your head against a few of these to remind yourself that making these distinctions is often easy, but that’s only for things we already have an answer for. For each category, add your own ambiguous cases that should encourage humility in anyone who thinks this is easy.

I bring up these familiar questions only to remind you of that familiar feeling of not knowing which bin something belongs in. Wallace wants to imagine that these questions are easy, but read this list to remember that they are not.

Arthur C. Clarke observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is the challenge that we find in lots of areas—separating real from fake, life from nonlife, and designed from natural.

1. Real vs. hoax, lie, or fake. Is the Venezuelan poodle moth real? Yes and no. What about the Mpemba effect, which claims that hot water can freeze faster than an equal amount of cold? Or the Voynich manuscript, hundreds of illustrated, handwritten pages written 600 years ago. If it’s just a joke, it’s an extremely elaborate one, but if it’s not, then what the heck does it say? And what do we make of the Wenatchee child abuse panic of 1994—were there 29,726 incidents of child sex abuse, as officially charged . . . or were there actually zero?

2. Stage magic vs. real magic. We all know that magic shows are just illusions. But even knowing this, we still pay to see them because we still can’t conceive how the tricks were performed.

Imagine a team of stage magicians summarizing the audience experience for five of their most impressive tricks. Now they make another list. This time, it’s for five tricks with a similar wow factor that they don’t know how to do as illusions. They mix the two lists and give them to you to separate back into two piles, stage magic and impossible.

3. Right vs. wrong. Christians insist that objective moral truths exist, and yet they never get beyond the insisting part. They point to shared or strongly felt moral claims. Yes, those exist, but that doesn’t make them objective. More to the point, Christians can’t even agree among themselves which things are right and which wrong. Abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, same-sex marriage—you’ll find Christians on different sides of each of these. More.

4. Science vs. pseudoscience. It’s easy to dismiss flat earth claims, ESP, and even the popular horoscope as pseudoscience without much pushback, but what about claims about weight-loss diets? Does echinacea cure colds? Is apple cider vinegar a health panacea? Is homeopathy effective?

What about Creationism and ID, young earth, and the historicity of Jesus? What about the historicity of other figures from history (here, here, and here)?

There’s Bigfoot, Nessie, and other cryptids. There’s are the supposedly nefarious Illuminati, Bilderberg Group, and Trilateral Commission. There are conspiracy theories like chemtrails, Paul is dead, and the moon landing “hoax.” And there’s always the things that go bump in the night like haunted houses, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, and alien abductions. Skeptics will likely have the same opinions, but millions will disagree.

5. Life vs. nonlife. What is life? Bacteria are living, but what about viruses? What about prions? If a kind of life relied on an information storage technique other than DNA and RNA, could we detect it? We keep being surprised at extremophiles, microorganisms that live in environments with extreme temperature, pressure, salinity, radiation, and so on.

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission launched a few weeks ago. One goal is to bring samples back to earth to test for life. But if we don’t even understand the scope of life on earth, we risk missing clues to life on Mars.

6. Science consensus vs. speculation. On the topic of life on Mars, a five-pound meteorite from Mars found in Antarctica in 1984 might hold fossil evidence of life on Mars from the earliest days of the solar system. But so far this argument is scientific conjecture. The jury is out on this and many other important questions.

And there are more categories where debate continues—what is art?, coincidence vs. the hand of God, and so on.

Of course, these are different categories than the one brought up by Christian apologists, designed vs. natural, but I hope these other categories remind us how difficult it can be to reach an overwhelming consensus on sorting problems like these.

Continue: Final Thoughts on the Problem of Sifting Natural from Designed

I think I have now finally understood
what “irreducibly complex” really means:
a statement, fact or event so simple
it cannot be simplified any further,
but still too complex to be grasped by a creationist.
— biologist Björn Brembs
(h/t Ignorant Amos)

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Image from Senjuti Kundu (copyright free)
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Real Examples to Puzzle Over: the Natural vs. Designed Checklist

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The last few posts have poked holes in a checklist from Christian apologist Jim Wallace. His eight tests claimed to separate natural and designed things, and he wanted to use this list to label the bacterial flagellar motor as designed. (Hmm—I wonder who’s on the short list for being the Designer?)

The series begins here.

The underlying problem was that the checklist wasn’t the result of brainstorming from lots of science-minded people, sharpened by hundreds of tests, and made quantitative so that reasonably smart people would all get similar results. If that were its pedigree, Wallace would no doubt have made that clear.

We can help. We’ve gotten some of the vegetables out of the way with the previous posts, and now it’s time for dessert.

Test cases: let’s have some fun

Let’s move on to examples that you are less likely to know about. These should a bit more puzzle-ish. You’ll likely have additional examples, and you’re welcome to add them in the comments.

Remember that if the checklist is good for anything, it must teach us new things. If your response to every verdict of the checklist, whether it identifies something as natural or designed, is, “Oh, yeah—I knew that,” then the exercise is pointless. For example, this rules out an exhaustive list of every single thing we can think of. Such a list would be unable to fulfill its purpose, which is to correctly label something that’s completely new to us.

Some of the following items are tricky, and some are unknown (for example, maybe the cause is life or maybe it’s geology). Use the links to investigate ones that are new to you. As you read each one, consider whether it’s natural or made by some intelligence and think of the rules you’d need to put it in the correct bin.

  • Stones that move. A dry lakebed in Death Valley has heavy stones that leave tracks in dried mud. Apparently, they move after rain makes the ground slippery. What moves them? It can’t be gravity, because the lakebed is flat. Is it mundane natural action, or is some intelligence behind this? The mystery has been solved (here and here).
  • Mima mounds. There’s a prairie near Olympia, Washington covered in grassy mounds made of dirt and gravel. The biggest are two meters tall. What causes them? Natural causes like wind scouring or earthquakes? Or is it something intelligent like Native American burial monuments or thousands of years of gopher activity? More.
  • Other circular structures. Desert regions of Namibia and Australia have fairy circles and South Africa has heuweltjies (“little hills”). Arctic regions have frost heaves and pingos. Some of these might have the same cause as the Mima mounds. Are the actions of plants or animals a factor?
  • Solar system puzzles. The moon orbits the earth in a little over 27 days, and it also rotates once in the same amount of time. The result is that we always see the same side of the moon. Is this the hand of God or does it have a natural cause? Why do we see three of Jupiter’s Galilean moons orbit in lockstep, with Io making exactly two orbits for every one of Europa, and Europa making exactly two for every one of Ganymede? (More.) Have you wondered why earth has both lunar and solar eclipses? It’s because the sun is 400 times wider than the moon and the sun is 400 times farther from earth. Coincidence? Or not?
  • Carved faces. Rushmore looks designed, but so did New Hampshire’s Old Man in the Mountain. If you’d said that its stone face had been carved, I would have believed it.
  • Atlantis. The Yonaguni monument is a structure in shallow water off the coast of a small Japanese island. It’s a rock formation with square corners that appears to hold steps, terraces, and roads. Is it a natural sandstone formation, or is it an elaborate manmade structure covered by rising seas after the last ice age? More.
  • Potholes. Exposed bedrock is sometimes cut by a pothole. Sometimes there’s only one (photo), and sometimes they look like lunar craters (photo). What causes them?
  • Heart-shaped features. Humans are gifted with (or burdened with) pareidolia, which means that interesting shapes seen in nature (like hearts) will stand out. Here’s a list of ten reefs, lakes, meadows, forests, and islands shaped like hearts. Some are natural, and some are manmade. Once you’ve got those sorted, scan these and see if you can spot any manmade ones. And now that you’re primed for patterns, here is an odd-shaped cluster of islands (more), and here is a curious pattern of trees (more).
  • Ancient pyramid. The Visočica pyramid in Bosnia is claimed by some to be manmade, though others say it’s natural. (More.)
  • Carved by water. Scroll through this post and you’ll find two terrain maps. They both show large geological features carved by water, but why are they so different in appearance?
  • Nuclear reactor. In 1972, a French mining company found the fraction of U-235 in a uranium sample mined in Gabon to be significantly lower than expected. Only a nuclear reactor could have caused this. (More.)
  • Math in nature. Cicadas are insects that live underground and emerge to mate, and one genus remains underground for a prime number of years—either 13 or 17. Sequential Fibonacci numbers can be found in plants. Chaotic systems can be deterministic and yet inherently unpredictable. Some say that the fact that nature can be described by mathematics shows the hand of God (more).
  • Pile of rocks. Cairns are manmade piles of rocks, and they have meaning to cultures across the world. Some are just heaps, some are shaped into cones, and the inuksuk is a stone marker in Inuit culture, often roughly shaped like a person. Remember our goal: the checklist must differentiate manmade cairns from rocks collected naturally.
  • And a few more. What formed the stone spheres of Costa Rica? What moves glacier mice? How do moss piglets (tiny eight-legged animals) survive dehydration, extreme temperatures, and radiation? What caused this artistic undersea sand pattern (more)? What do you make of hexagonal convection cells in miso soup (video) or the surprising Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction (video)? A cloud is natural, unless it comes from a power plant, in which case it comes from intelligence. So then a cloud that forms naturally over a city that wouldn’t be there except for the city is . . . what? An ecosystem can be incredibly complex, like the workings of a cell, but does being made of living things make it living?

What additional puzzling examples can you add?

Wrapup

If someone wanted to make a serious attempt at a checklist, step 1 would be to make a list of rules that correctly separates test cases into natural or designed. The list must reliably put the things you’ve just considered (in the list above) into the correct category. It should distinguish natural crystals from fake ones, snowflakes from snow angels, nebulae from jewelry, and a rainbow made by a storm from a rainbow made by a prism.

Step 2 is to revisit these examples (and myriad more) with naive eyes, imagine you’ve never seen them before, and use the list of rules without bias to see where it puts them. (By “naive eyes,” I mean that you must avoid, “Oh, this one—I know where this one goes” but rather do what the list tells you.)

The resulting rules would be debatable. That means that if the best possible list of rules only makes an educated guess for the tough novel cases, Wallace’s checklist is imperfect as well.

Continue: Sifting Natural from Designed Is Harder than You Might Think (2 of 2)

Further reading: the Skeptoid blog and podcast are excellent resources for understanding weird claims.

This is no time to be making enemies.
— Voltaire on his deathbed
(in response to a priest asking him to renounce Satan)

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Image from Anne Nygård (license)
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Test Yourself: Sifting Natural from Designed Is Harder than You Might Think

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The last few posts have responded to a book chapter from Christian apologist Jim Wallace. With a list of tests that claims to separate natural things from designed things, he hoped to show that bacterial flagellar motor couldn’t be natural and thereby overturn evolution (part 1).

How dependable was that checklist? Did he exercise it with hundreds of test cases, some of which were obviously natural or designed, plus many in the gray area? By all indications, he didn’t. I suspect it was created backwards, starting with the interesting features of the flagellar motor to create a test that the motor couldn’t fail to pass.

Testing the very small

The first micro test case that this list tackles can’t be the flagellar motor, since that’s the punch line of Wallace’s argument. There are hundreds of cellular structures and mechanisms that could be tested—maybe the citric acid cycle (Krebs cycle), or the various steps in how DNA makes proteins, how DNA copying errors are repaired, or how enzymes work.

But there’s the problem: to me, any component within a cell is there because of evolution, and evolution is natural. But Wallace is just trying to illustrate what he already assumes is true, that evolution is crap. I’d label all these micro test cases as natural, and he’d label them all designed.

I rarely get into the evolution vs. Creationism/ID controversy because it’s easier and more reliable to point out that evolution is the overwhelming consensus of biologists. Evolution is our best theory for why life is the way it is. Case closed.

That means that it may be impossible to create an objective checklist that both sides will accept. But set that aside, and we still have an interesting project.

Revisiting those tests—are there more?

I’m not impressed with the eight tests in Wallace’s list, the giveaways that something is designed rather than natural. Maybe we need to add more rules like the following. The object in question may be designed if it:

  • has strict size tolerances on parts (for example, the dimensions of ball bearings must be precise to minimize wear)
  • has interchangeable parts such as screws
  • contains language (such as instructions or warnings) or a picture equivalent (an arrow to indicate “up”)
  • maintains time (such as a wristwatch or cell phone) or is otherwise adapted to the movement of heavenly bodies (such as the Antikythera mechanism or possibly Stonehenge).

I propose these rules only as idea fodder. Our goal should be an ageless list, and I’m probably reflecting my period in history. Traits like precision machining or interchangeable parts were important to the Industrial Revolution, but who knows if they’ll seem as fundamental in a thousand years. Or a million years.

Crowdsourcing would be the next step, where smart people would toss in their ideas, and these would be sharpened or discarded by the group.

Test cases

We need test cases to stress the rules. In particular, we need tricky ones in the gray area—crude or unskilled designed things and precise or elegant natural things.

  • Think of rules to reliably distinguish these stone objects as designed or natural: an ugly or uninteresting rock, a geode, a primitive stone mortar and pestle, rough-cut marble flagstone, a simple stone tool, a waste flake from the process of making a stone tool, and a shaped stone spearpoint. Then categorize natural diamond, synthetic diamond, and imitation diamond.
  • This gray area fools us, too. Pareidolia is when we see intelligence that isn’t there—faces in clouds, voices in static, or Mary’s face on a grilled cheese sandwich or as a 60 feet tall iridescent outline on the side of a building. How do you tell which ones are real? And how do you reliably distinguish undesigned pareidolia people from designed but abstract ones, like Pablo Picasso’s cubist painting Three Women?
  • How do we avoid calling delicate crystals (like the bismuth crystal we saw before) designed, and how do we avoid calling a hand-shaped clay lump or sand pile natural? How do we avoid calling weird clouds, sun dogs, or other atmospheric optics designed, and how do we avoid calling a tree moved to make a bridge or Jackson Pollock’s Number 30 natural?
  • How do you separate a striking Christo art project (examples: Valley Curtain, Wrapped Trees) from a striking natural site (examples: slot canyon, Zhangye badlands)? How do you separate sponge cake from fungi?

Again, you may have no problem separating natural from designed in these examples, but that’s cheating. You can’t override the process by saying, “Okay, I know the checklist scores this particular item as 6 out of 10 natural, but I happen to know it’s designed, so I’ll call it designed.”

You may already know these examples or things like them, but for this test to work, it must be brainless. It must guide a medieval scholar or an intelligent alien as reliably as it would an objective modern human.

We could make a long list if specific examples (“If it’s a painting, that’s designed; if it’s a crystal found in nature, that’s natural; . . .”) but now we’re cheating again. We might as well use an encyclopedia. The whole point of this exercise is to create a tool to determine natural vs. designed for things we honestly don’t know ourselves.

Continue: Real Examples to Puzzle Over: the Natural vs. Designed Checklist

There are no rules of architecture
for a castle in the clouds
— G. K. Chesterton

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Image from Julen Iturbe-Ormaetxe (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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How Useful is the Bacterial Flagellum for the Creationist?

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creationism intelligent design

How do we distinguish things that are here solely due to the action of natural laws from those designed by an intelligence? Christian apologist Jim Wallace has created a checklist for this purpose (the list is summarized in part 1 of this series and critiqued in part 2).

We left off considering the final test, irreducible complexity. Something is irreducibly complex if every component is essential. In other words, if the thing will break if you remove any piece. He proposes the bacterial flagellum motor (a motor made of protein that spins a long thin tail in some bacteria) as irreducibly complex. The idea is that if removing any piece of this motor resulted in a broken motor, none of these configurations could be a prior step for the evolution of the motor.

Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe said about this situation, “[The argument against flagella coming from evolution] is that such interactive systems resist explanation by the tiny steps that a Darwinian path would be expected to take.”

Consider, if you will, an arch . . .

But perhaps there are more precursors than he imagines.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine that I have a stone wall with a doorway, and I build a stone arch over the doorway. The arch is composed of ten voussoirs (the wedge-shaped stones), five on each side, with a keystone in the center at the top.

I show you the finished arch and ask you to guess how I built it. You think that maybe the keystone was the final piece installed. But, no, that’s not possible, because you know that I built it solo, and the remaining ten voussoirs would’ve been too heavy for me to hold in place as I dropped in the keystone. You mentally consider each of the other stones as the final one, but similar reasoning rules them out. You finally declare that all the stones must’ve been levitated into place.

Luckily, I recorded the project, and I play the video backwards. First you see the final arch, and then you see the last piece of scaffolding being put in place. Then the rest of the scaffolding installed so that it supported the stones, then the stones taken down one by one (keystone first), and then the scaffolding taken down until we’re back to the original stone wall with a doorway. In other words, the precursor to the finished arch was the finished arch with some random piece of scaffolding. It could’ve been any of a number of uninteresting pieces at the base of the scaffolding, far from the arch itself.

Returning to the flagellum, the precursor state to the working motor could’ve been the working motor with a random, unused protein that neither got in the way nor contributed anything. So, no, irreducible complexity is no problem for evolution because scaffolding could’ve transitioned the motor from something prior.

The checklist is finally used on what it was designed for

Wallace has been working up to this: testing the bacterial flagellum motor against his eight-test checklist.

For this list, I’ll give the title in italics and the argument for the motor in ordinary text, [and my comments will be in brackets]. Wallace thinks that each test in the checklist argues that the motor is designed.

1a. Unlikely from chance. “Chance alone seems an unlikely explanation” for the flagellum.

[Right—the flagellum was the result of evolution, and evolution is a lot more than chance.]

1b. Unexplainable naturally. “The limited laws of physics and chemistry might explain simpler relationships between molecules, but they fail to account for the complexity and purposeful relationships we see in molecular machines like the flagellum.”

[Or not. Biologists are satisfied that evolution is our best explanation. Evolution does the hard work of actually explaining things. Intelligent Design doesn’t explain anything with “It came from some intelligence” but simply invites more questions.

[Bacterial flagella evolved from the type III secretion system.]

2. Similar to known designed objects. “The bacterial flagellum we’ve been describing bears a striking resemblance to the rotary motors created by intelligent designers.”

[Somewhat. The flagellar motor is similar to manmade motors in function only. They’re very different in design. The flagellar motor uses a flow of protons (not electricity), is made of proteins (not metal), and uses no magnets or metal wires. Though scientists now understand this motor, there is no motivation to switch our electrical infrastructure to a superior design.

[And why the fascination with motors? We’ve known for centuries that the heart is a pump, and arteries and veins are pipes. Why, aside from a lack of novelty, is this comparison not just as compelling? Or the brain as a computer, with the nerves as wires. Or the stomach and intestines as a chemical factory. In fact, a century ago, when the chemical industry was young, this last comparison was made in a drawing. The human digestive system modeled as a chemical factory seems a mundane observation today, and perhaps in a century the flagellar motor will also seem ordinary.]

3. Sophisticated and intricate. “The intricacy and interactive complexity of a flagellum is mind boggling. Over forty different specifically shaped proteins are precisely employed to create the structure of the rotary motor.”

[Let me take a tangent and point out that there is no single bacteria flagellum motor. Remember this when someone refers to “the bacteria flagellum.” This paper gives microphotographs that show the different motor construction in eleven different bacteria species. This paper studied 41 species with flagella and attempted to explain their evolution. This paper speculates that there may be millions of varieties of bacterial flagella.

[And this is just within bacteria. Within archaea, a separate domain from bacteria, flagella exist, but these are thought to be the result of convergent evolution. That is, bacteria and archaea evolved flagella independently. Eukaryotes, the domain of animals, use flagella designs that are also quite different.

[Wallace understands that there is no single design, but it’s important that we’re all on the same page about this important point. This shows that there is a lot more flexibility here than one might imagine.]

4. Information based. DNA is information, and DNA defines how the motor is created; therefore the motor is information based.

[And yet when scientists look at DNA, they don’t conclude that it came from a cosmic Designer.]

5a. Goal directed. “The flagellum [was] crafted in an intentional, purposeful sequence.” The pieces of the motor are built and installed in a particular, specific order.

[A wing was built for flying and yet it was neither designed nor built stepwise over millions of years with flying as an ultimate goal. And don’t think “built for” means design—once gliding or flying was something that proto-wings could usefully do (even if only clumsily), natural selection could use “serves the purpose of flying” as a selection criterion.]

5b. A choice between alternatives. “The specific use of one kind of motor in a cellular organism, rather than another, is best explained by intelligent selection.”

[Nope. Natural selection is sufficient, and it doesn’t have the unevidenced baggage of a mysterious Designer.]

6. Irreducibly complex. Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe again: “Design is positively apprehended in the purposeful arrangement of parts. Looked at this way, irreducible complex systems such as flagella serve both as negative arguments against gradualistic explanation like Darwin’s and as positive arguments for design.”

[The arch example above shows that the previous evolutionary state of the motor doesn’t have to have one fewer parts. You could call it irreducibly complex, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have come from evolution.]

He gives the flagellum a score of 8 out of 8.

My turn

I give it 5 out of 8, and some of those need qualifiers:

  • ✓ Unlikely from chance. Agreed. Creationists often equate evolution with chance, but evolution is a lot more than chance.
  • ✗ Unexplainable naturally. Evolution explains it, and evolution is natural.
  • ✓ Similar to known designed objects. Agreed. It’s radically different from manmade motors, but that’s what you’d expect at this nanoscopic scale and as the result of evolution.
  • ✓ Sophisticated and intricate. Sounds right to me, but that means nothing until we have objective definitions for these words.
  • ✓ Information based. Yes, the motor is built with instructions in DNA, and let’s call DNA information (even though this must be defined as well). This test sounds contrived just to give the flagellum an easy win.
  • ✗ Goal directed. We don’t need to explain why “propel a bacteria” was a goal when it wasn’t. Evolution doesn’t do goals.
  • ✗ A choice between alternatives. No need to imagine an intelligent choice when evolution is sufficient.
  • ✓ Irreducibly complex. By this definition, yes, but so what? This isn’t the slam-dunk win for Creationism that they want.

No, the flagellum doesn’t look designed, but I’ll tell you what does: this list. It seems to me that a Christian apologist looked at the flagellum, listed its interesting characteristics, and made a list from that. It’s no wonder that Wallace scores it 8 out of 8; since that was by design.

Note that I’m simply using the list as given. In previous posts, I’ve pointed out that this checklist of 8 tests needs some work. To be reliable and free from charges of bias, it must come from an unbiased source, be objective (so that anyone would come to a similar conclusion), and be tested with many examples of designed and natural things.

Why focus on the flagellum?

The reason the flagellar motor is so attractive is that by focusing on a single fascinating element, it ignores the rest of nature. But in so doing, it highlights the parts of reality that don’t look particularly designed.

This was the problem in William Paley’s 1802 pocket watch argument. He imagined walking on a path and contrasting finding a stone in the path with finding a pocket watch. The watch stands out, especially when he opens it and sees the intricate mechanism. This complicated mechanism was clearly designed, and by analogy, so was all of nature.

But the argument fails. If the watch stands out as looking designed, that which it stands out from (nature) must not look designed! He can’t have the watch stand out from nature and yet put them both in the same category.

And that is the problem with highlighting the flagellar motor. Why highlight anything? Does nature look designed or not? If the motor does stand out, then what it stands out from—the vestigial pelvis in a whale that doesn’t have legs, say, or cancer—should presumably be in a different bin.

This is just the Argument from Incredulity (“Golly, but look how marvelously complex this thing is! That’s gotta be the hand of God.”).

We shouldn’t be looking for complexity from an omniscient Designer. What we should expect is elegance.

Continue with Test Yourself: Sifting Natural from Designed Is Harder than You Might Think

Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity
has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers
and has been rejected by the scientific community at large.
— from the ruling of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial

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Acknowledgements: thanks to the commenters who have added to the discussion and helped me understand the issues better. In particular, the insights and links of Ann Kah, WCB-2, and Jim Jones have been helpful.

Image from Wikipedia, public domain
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Critiquing the Christian Design Checklist

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design

Christian apologist Jim Wallace has created an eight-point checklist for sorting things in our world into natural things and designed things. With it, he hopes to show design all around us and thereby overturn evolution.

Part 1 summarized the list. Let’s investigate it in more detail. The first two tests are:

1a. Unlikely from chance + 1b. Unexplainable naturally

If we’re looking for designed things, we must eliminate those caused by nature such as ripples in the sand at the beach or a rainbow after a storm. Science has figured these out, but the problem is when we don’t already know. What do we do with something in the gray area that we encounter for the first time?

For example, the Giant’s Causeway is an area of huge, mostly hexagonal basalt columns on the coast of Northern Ireland. It was explained in legend as a road built by a giant determined to fight his rival across the North Channel in Scotland. Now, we have a much better explanation from geology.

Or take a more recent example. In 1967, flashes of radio waves about once every second were detected coming from one point in the sky. The period of the pulses was precise to thirteen digits. No known astronomical phenomena was known to cause such a thing, but now we know these as pulsars.

What can be explained naturally changes with time, which limits the authority of these two tests.

2. Similar to known designed objects

Tests 1a and 1b were the quick filter for known natural things. This test is the quick filter for known designed things.

We’ve spent our lives creating and perfecting bins labeled “hardback book,” “propeller-driven airplane,” “horror movie,” and countless more designed things. We also have bins for natural things—“green crystal,” “odd-shaped cloud,” or “pretty rock.” This is the principle of analogy, and if an object fits nicely into one of these bins, we can assume that it’s designed or natural according to how we’ve assigned the other members of the bin.

(Aside: it’s odd to see the principle of analogy in a list made by a Christian, when it devastates Christianity by showing how analogous it is to other manmade religions.)

But this is the easy part. The key to making this eight-point list a valuable tool would be for it to accurately differentiate things that fail both the “it looks natural” test (1a or 1b) and the “it looks designed” test (2).

In the previous post, Wallace used a garotte as an example, but this already gets an emphatic Yes on test 2. Later, he tossed out another example: a bird’s nest. Yet again, we know that nests are designed. The list must perform well on the hard cases—those things that look neither like a known natural thing or a known designed thing.

3. Sophisticated and intricate

What do these words mean, exactly? We need an objective definition so that any unbiased person can reach roughly the same conclusion.

Here’s a test. Below are two objects; one is designed (made by a human artist), and one is natural. Give a “sophisticated and intricate” score to each, and decide which one was designed.

Answer below.*

4. Information based

“Information” is a magic word within the Creationist community, because they say that information implies intelligence and DNA uses information, so therefore DNA comes from intelligence. As part of a general list created to separate designed from natural, however, it doesn’t really belong. The bird nest doesn’t use information, nor would a mortar and pestle or a mud sculpture.

As with the previous test, we need clear definitions. What counts as information? The CPU that runs your computer contains microcode, so that would presumably count. There is actual information in the CPU. But it’s not clear what other examples would count. Even if DNA counts as information based (or the bacteria flagellar motor, which is built using DNA), DNA is clearly not the product of a perfect Designer (about which, more later).

5a. Goal directed + 5b. A choice between alternatives

If the universe were designed by God, then everything we see came from a Designer (even if indirectly). But if these tests are to be useful at all, they must reject a reasonable number of candidates. So 5a is useless if it means, “It pleased God for X to exist, so therefore it does,” regardless of what X is.

Evolution doesn’t have goals, but we can still say that wings are for flying. Does that mean that wings are goal directed? The earth’s geology doesn’t have goals, but even here we can say that, from the standpoint of understanding plate tectonics, the role of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is to separate tectonic plates on the west from those in the east. Does that mean that this ridge is goal directed?

These two tests need a clearer definition.

6. Irreducibly complex

Creationists love, love, lu-u-uv this one. The punch line of Wallace’s overall argument is, “and that’s why the bacteria flagellar motor must be designed; therefore, evolution can’t explain it; therefore, evolution fails and Intelligent Design wins.” And why must the flagellar motor be designed? Because it’s irreducibly complex, which means that if you remove any single protein from it, it fails. In other words, since evolution makes progress through mutations that make small steps, there is no possible prior step for the motor since each of these potential precursors is broken.

Next time, we’ll continue our discussion of the flagellum and respond to the claim that it must’ve popped into existence fully formed.

Overall comments

I applaud the general goal. An unbiased tool that would be more reliable than just one’s gut feeling in separating natural from designed is an interesting project. But to do that, the checklist needs to be reliable. It needs to be road tested with long lists of things known to be natural and things known to be designed. It should be quantitative, with a numeric score for each attribute, and it must be objective, with each step unambiguous, so that different people will reach roughly the same conclusion. Most importantly, it must be tested with things in the gray area—things that are known to be designed but look rather natural and vice versa, and even things people can’t agree on. As far as I can tell, Wallace has done none of this. This is just a back-of-the-envelope list.

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* I lied—both of these examples are natural. In fact, they’re both crystals—pure bismuth on the left and staurolite (“fairy stone”) on the right.

I’d call the bismuth crystal highly sophisticated and intricate (I’d score it 7 out of 10) and the staurolite less so (4 out of 10), but feel free to argue for other scores. The point is that not only are these terms imprecisely defined, but natural and designed objects will overlap on this metric. For example, I’d give manmade (that is, designed) objects like a handmade mortar and pestle or a sculpture made from mud a much lower score than the bismuth or other intricate crystal.

Continue with: How Useful is the Bacterial Flagellum for the Creationist?

It takes a certain maturity of mind
to accept that nature works as steadily in rust
as in rose petals.
— Esther Warner Dendel

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Image from Wikimedia, (CC)
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