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Agahnim -> RE: Microraptor: We have to admit it, folks (3/24/2008 2:19:19 PM)
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I’m back from my trip now, so I’m ready to continue this discussion. I actually got back a few days ago, but I was busy with other things before now; I hope you don’t mind.
Jordan Mallon, a theistic evolutionist I know who’s probably even more knowledgeable about dinosaurs than I am, has an interesting thread here about the idea of these similarities being due to a “common designer”. If two structures being designed by the same individual really does cause them to share these sorts of patterns, it should be possible to identify the same thing for human inventions also. Nobody who replied to Mallon’s thread was able to come up with anything like this for things created by human designers, though.
I actually am aware of a type of similarity that can exist between two works as a result of them having the same designer, but it’s very different from the sort of similarity that exists between these animals. What I’m thinking of is something I’ve experienced as a gamer, after having played games whose lead designer was Shigeru Miyamoto ever since I received the original Super Mario Bros. along with an NES for Christmas in 1988. After playing Miyamoto’s games for more than 19 years, I’m familiar enough with his design style that in most cases I can tell whether he was in charge of designing a game just by playing it, without having to look at the credits. But the way I can tell that he designed a game isn’t because of any sort of similarity in structure; it’s something much more subtle than that. After playing Miyamoto’s games for most of my life, I think I’m able to identify the fundamental design philosophy that underlies them.
The reason I think this point is relevant is because I’ve never seen Shigeru Miyamoto re-use a specific design element that he had also used in one of his earlier games, unless it was an obvious reference for nostalgia’s sake. If this were something he did, I wouldn’t respect him nearly as much as I do, since in most areas of design re-using ideas like this is considered a type of laziness. Among humans, the only reason why anyone does this is because they don’t feel like taking the time to design something completely new, and most of the time the old design isn’t optimal for the place where it’s being re-used. The same principle would definitely be true if God was doing this while designing animals, since in a lot of cases the “re-used” structures in animals also aren’t optimal for them design-wise. One example of this I’ve already mentioned is the shoulder joint of Archaeopteryx, in which its similarity to the shoulders of theropod dinosaurs is a disadvantage—the lack of a triosseal canal would have made it very difficult for Archaeopteryx to take off from the ground.
In addition to the objections raised by Jordan Mallon in the thread I linked to, about how in most cases a common designer can’t be identified on the basis of these sorts of similarities, I think the idea of the similarities existing for this reason does God almost as much of a disservice as claiming that he created this evidence with the intention to deceive us. If God was re-using certain design elements in areas where they were less than optimal, such as Archaeopteryx’s shoulder joint, he was showing a type of laziness that’s absent in the most skilled human designers. In other words, if that’s the reason why these similarities exist, it means there are areas in which human designers such as Shigeru Miyamoto are superior to God.
When I was a creationist (which I was until around 1996), my attitude about how people can learn things from God was that he teaches us things in two ways: via what we can see of his words in the Bible, and via what we can see of his actions in the physical world. I think most people would probably agree with this idea, so the only real question is what to do in areas such as paleontology where the two appear to contradict one another. Multiple interpretations obviously exist for both the physical evidence and for the Bible, but I always found that interpreting the physical evidence in ways that lined up with a literal reading of Genesis always led to unsatisfactory conclusions like the two I’ve mentioned in this thread. Interpreting Genesis in a way that’s consistent with evolution seemed to be less of a problem, though. You might be aware of this already, but this is the point of view promoted by Benjamin B. Warfield, who’s widely considered the greatest Christian theologian of the past 150 years and the founder of the modern understanding of Biblical inerrancy.
Objectively speaking, I don’t think there’s really much choice about which can be considered a more reliable authority in situations like this. Not only is the Bible subject to interpretation, but that interpretation often needs to consider literary trends that aren’t necessarily going to be remembered after over a thousand years. For example, the three genealogies from the Bible compared here have several differences between them—the most common explanation for this seems to be that in at least one of them, the author was intentionally altering it in order to make a literary point with a specific audience, but nobody knows for sure. Then there’s also the question of whether this information has been accurately re-recorded and translated during all of the time since then. And for that matter, what guarantee do we have that the Bible is the word of God, when there are at least a dozen other religious texts that claim this? The only way we can answer any of these questions is based on physical evidence, because physical evidence doesn’t involve any of these uncertainties.
I think the question that needs to be considered here isn’t so much whether it’s possible to interpret the physical evidence in a way that’s consistent with a literal reading of Genesis, since as you’ve sort of acknowledged yourself, it’s always possible to come up with ad-hoc explanations just for the sake of maintaining consistency. The real question is which presents more problems: interpreting the physical evidence in a way that’s consistent with creationism, or interpreting the Bible in a way that’s consistent with evolution? And either way, can we trust our interpretation of the Bible more than we can trust what this evidence seems to suggest?
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