[extropy-chat] intelligent design homework

[Robert Lindauer]

Adrian Tymes wrote:

>
>
>Not really.  "Evolutionary advantage" has to be useful in some manner.
>(Granted, there can be and are all manner of odd uses, but they are
>uses; this excludes some paths of development.)  "God's will" is a
>looser requirement (it does not get across the concept of "can" versus
>"can't": absolutely anything can be justified as "God's will",
>including things that are provably useless - which then extends to
>non-evolutionary things, for instance "kill the heathens" can be
>justified as "God's will" when, if viewed without a supernatural lens,
>it would be clear that it's just murder which is going to make a bunch
>of people angry).
>

Obviously this is an inappropriate place for a complete discussion of 
the important issues you raise, but briefly:

1)  "useful" is always purpose relative and consequently important only 
in terms of the context being discussed.  One says "the jackal's toes 
are useful for digging...and this gives them a competetive advantage 
over other animals that might have taken its ecological niche 
and/or...." where the counterfactuals of what might have been and what 
makes the jackal better suited than the infinitely many other 
possibilities takes the place of the metaphysics of God.  The other says 
"God wanted the jackal to be able to dig" - the difference is one of 
metaphysics, not biology.
2)  What is a valid interpretation of God's will is as loose a 
requirement as "evolutionarily beneficial".  Obviously, whatever is 
current is better than what may have been 'evolutionarily' since what 
could have been but isn't obviously didn't survive whereas what is 
current did.  At the same time, one could say, that whatever God's will 
is is obviously current (actual).  Both are vaccuous and unfriendly 
interpretations of the other.  But what's good for the goose is good for 
the gander.  Unless one has a substantive theory of God's will and a 
substantive theory of evolution (e.g. something more than "whatever is 
fit survives, what has survived has survived because it is fit), both 
sound vacuous.  Obviously both theology and evolution have a lot of work 
to do in both regards.  It's worth thinking about it, of the infinite 
possibilities for jackal toes (even given its ancestry), on has to 
wonder how exactly that configuration of toes was the one that brought 
it today rather than the, again infinite, other possibilities which 
could have been more efficient for any given purpose (again, 
context-relative purposes, of course).  I think you can see this is a 
bigger job than is commonly undertaken by actual biologists or 
histo-biologists.
3)  The justification of "it's god's will to kill the heathens" has a 
long history and is directly contradicted in Christianity ("love your 
enemy and bless those that curse you") and Buddhism.  So any substantive 
theory of God's will that says that God wants people to kill the 
heathens must obviously rule out Christianity and Buddhism at least. 

Best wishes,

Robbie Lindauer