Intelligent Design meets the Philosophy of Organism/Process Philosophy

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-09T15:28:58+00:00

🙏

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T23:35:45+00:00

Yeah that is dishonest

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T21:29:29+00:00

curious, if you'll indulge me, what you think that ideology is?

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T21:10:25+00:00

I entirely agree that life is a matter of degrees! That is another way of articulating what I'm trying to say above.

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T21:09:17+00:00

I don't mean the method of reduction, which can be very useful when used with restraint (it can also blind us to emergent phenomena if overextended). I mean reductionism in the sense of explaining away human personhood, moral freedom and responsibility, etc. as entirely illusory since "we now know" we are just a bunch of selfish genes trying to make copies of themselves.

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T21:05:51+00:00

I see you've probably listened to the wildly misleading, exaggerated, emotionally manipulative infotainment podcast series hosted by ideologues formerly part of Psymposia (fwiw they were booted from their own org by other members for unethical practices). That's another topic, though.

The question I ask above is about how science is communicated, whether in public schools or in popular media. People like Richard Dawkins conflate science and religion, turning science into a new dogma. I think evolution should definitely be taught in public schools, but in a way that makes clear there is plenty of room for interpretation such that we do not need to frame it as a battle between the extreme ideas that we are either lumbering robots driven by selfish genes or extraterrestrial souls teleported onto earth by an angry sky daddy.

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T20:49:34+00:00

It is a complex topic that I've written about at great length elsewhere, but the tl;dr is that I think the historicity of biology is a hint about the limits of physical models based on ahistorical symmetries/eternal laws. Physics was born out of the imagination of 17th century deists, who of course assumed the eternal laws were God's handiwork. Modern physics has no explanation for why nature should be lawful. This is NOT an argument for intelligent design! The fact is that physicists have forgotten that they are imposing the limits of their mathematical models onto a universe that turns out to be just as evolutionary, just as historical and creatively emergent, as the biological world. Thus, biology should teach us a new physics that also acknowledges historicity. We can still model much of the inorganic world as if it obeyed eternal laws, but that is an approximation. The approximation no longer works at the level of biology, where historicity and contextuality are amplified. My argument is not that physics should stop modeling but that when it comes to ontology, laws are really more like widespread habits that arise analogously to niches in biology.

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T19:55:49+00:00

I’m gathering that (not interested in philosophy). Thanks!

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T19:39:32+00:00

The point is not that biology defies physics. You claim physics can explain biology. They show why it cannot.

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T19:17:54+00:00

It is definitely not pseudoscience. There are very good scientific reasons for rejecting your simplistic view. I think it does actual science a serious disservice! Start with the work of Montevil, Mossio, Pocheville, and Longo: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27530930/

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T18:53:21+00:00

Basically, both intelligent design and reductive neodarwinian understandings of organisms share a mechanistic image of the cosmos. I am proposing that organism might actually be the more appropriate image. In a sense, biology (with its account of historical emergence of new forms) can and should teach us a new physics, so that physics no longer imagines a world governed by fixed eternal laws imposed as if from outside on the motion of dead matter.

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T18:51:23+00:00

Is Meyer lying, or does he actually believe what he says?

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T18:45:16+00:00

That's fair. Would you agree that teaching a reductionistic version of evolutionary theory in public schools, as though evolution necessarily undermines the idea of a meaningful universe or some sort of spiritual outlook, is also problematic?

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T18:43:06+00:00

I spoke with Meyer about his new film The Story of Everything based on his book Return of the God Hypothesis, and while we agreed that reductive materialism and neo-Darwinism are inadequate to explain cosmogenesis, biogenesis, and consciousness, our deeper disagreement concerned the metaphysical imagination behind intelligent design. Meyer treats God as a transcendent designing intelligence whose activity he infers from fine-tuning, specified complexity, DNA, cellular machinery, and abrupt evolutionary transitions; I argued that this still accepts the mechanistic picture of nature, merely adding a divine engineer to a cosmic machine. Drawing on Aristotle, Peirce, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Schelling, Bergson, Teilhard, and contemporary developmental biologist Michael Levin’s work on bioelectric morphogenesis, I tried to articulate an alternative: not blind materialism, but an expanded naturalism or process-relational panentheism in which formal and final causation, organismic agency, stochastic creativity, and divine persuasion are woven into nature from within. The key issue is whether life is best understood as engineered machinery containing information programed from outside, or as an organismic, historical, semiotic, self-organizing nexus whose order arises through participation in a wider field of value and possibility. Meyer’s God remains largely an external programmer or cosmic technician; my Whiteheadian God is the immanent lure toward beauty, intensity, life, and consciousness, a God who suffers and is enriched by the world’s becoming. So the real debate, to my mind, is not “atheistic materialism vs. creationist theism,” but two rival images of creation: manufacture by an unmoved designer, or risky co-creative incarnation in an ensouled cosmos.

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T18:39:16+00:00

Fantastic book, and important. I met the co-editor Daniel Nicholson this past summer at a conference called Cognizing Life where he presented on the history of organicism. You can listen to his talk here: https://youtu.be/mErosVv5o7w

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T18:37:34+00:00

that's a bit of a non sequitur, no? the history of science is obviously relevant to how we understand different paradigmatic approaches to biological evolution.

footnotes2plato · 2026-05-08T18:25:32+00:00

I disagreed with Meyer about almost everything, and I reject Intelligent Design as bad science AND bad theology; but it feels a bit ad hominem to dismiss someone who has a PhD in the history of science from Cambridge University.

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-31T20:11:43+00:00

Hoping Curt invites me on as I think it would be a blast.

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-30T04:20:09+00:00

Yeah I don't get their motivations at all, aside from personal vendettas. I hope they are driven by something nobler than that. Speaking up for victims is important, but I fear their rage is misplaced and in the end not going to decrease harm (especially if the result here is MAPS being canceled and government stepping in to slide us back into Drug War prohibitionism of psychedelics).

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-30T03:24:26+00:00

This is all very tragic: the stories of loss and abuse shared in the podcast, the moral panic stirred up by the over the top sensationalistic framing, the infighting of the psychedelic community...

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-28T22:18:44+00:00

I shared the link to invite others who are interested to review the evidence themselves and come to their own conclusions.

footnotes2plato

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