Interesting point. I suppose if we postulated that God intended his
works to be obvious then that might be a sound conclusion. I call
this the "Louisville Slugger" approach to faith (named after a brand
of baseball bat that is sometimes favored by the youths of New Jersey
who want to get a point across with their "uncooperative audiences").
However, if God did not intend to make faith compulsory or at least
allows uncertainty, then I think the question is up for grabs.
Depending on the nature of God, or at least, one's auxillary assumptions
about God's nature, different patterns or results could be expected.
I can see that this makes the development of creation theories extremely
difficult, and I highly respect those who do not attempt shortcuts
in the process.
On a completely different tangent about whether God's works should
resist naturalistic interpretations, I wonder if Walter ReMine's
theory is falsified, or at least in trouble because of the patterns
of extinction that have been observed. Let me explain further --
And please, feel free to comment on this reasoning; I don't know
if I have all the kinks worked out.
Basically, the Biotic Message suggests that; 1) Life was made to
look unlike anything except made by a single designer (or common plan).
and 2) That organisms are "reasonably" well designed for survival.
What about extinction? Walter ReMine postulates that a creator might
use a nested hierarchical pattern to send the message. However, unlike
the hierarchy proposed by evolution, where the nodes and connecting
lines should represent real organisms and physical lines of descent,
creation holds that the branches are simply patterns. Thus in creation
theory individual organism's or group's creation does not necessarily
depend on another's (eg. with creation, organisms are not related by
birth or common descent). In evolution -- common descent with
modification -- if a species dies out without having "spawned" another
species, it is gone forever. Extinction applies to larger groups as well.
However, if species or higher order groups are generated by individual
creation events, then extinction of one species or a group of similar
species cannot prohibit the creator from later introducing species
that belong to the same form as the extinct species (or group). These
actions would restore the pattern.
How does this stack up with observations? The fossil record shows
many significant extinction events with no replacements occuring in many
(most?) of these cases. There is no dispute that numerous major groups
have vanished over time. These disappearances can happen rapidly or
gradually. Common descent theories would suggest that these patterns
ended because the lines of descent were broken by extinction. I think
that these observations run counter to the axioms of the Message
hypothesis. Now, it's not a question of whether such extinctions are
possible with just any creator; they are. Instead, it is a question
of whether a creator bounded by the axioms of the message hypothesis
would have permitted group exinctions, considering; 1) that such
a pattern would definitely resemble or "look like" evolution; and
2) that such patterns could have been restored by subsequent creation
or "release" events. This hypothesis must be tested and judged against
the observed patterns, independently of whether evolution is certain.
Now, I certainly do not think that this line of reasoning rules out
TE, PC or even SC in general. All of those positions are basically
unaffected by extinction events and in some interpretations, mass
extinctions are even seen as support. However, I suspect that this
pattern of extinction does rule out the particular SC theory described
in _The Biotic Message_. Does this conclusion seem reasonable?
Regards, Tim Ikeda (timi@mendel.berkeley.edu)