I agree that understanding the extent to which natural selection generated things is easier nowadays than it was previously.
So this naive observation is actually not in contradiction with creationism.
I’m not concerned here with logical disproofs of creationism, moreso with something like arguing that time spent {worrying that evolution by natural selection is significantly overrated} is probably misallocated, or arguing that people are privileging the question of ‘Is evolution by natural selection a good explanation?’ (I’m not entirely sure what my motivation is, but it feels like it’s at least partly something along those lines.)
I also think that there’s a lot of hard-to-enumerate background information available to a person nowadays that should be enough for a naturalistic reductionist to intuit that evolution will not arise from bolted-on complex mechanisms like creation, but rather from mechanisms like natural selection that are inherent to populations with a few basic properties that we have actually observed (e.g. finite lifespans that vary according to characteristic-environment interaction, inheritance of characteristics, etc.). It’s possible you understand this and I’m misinterpreting the point at which you’re challenging my argument, but I would very strongly disexpect somebody thinking like me along the lines of ‘provable properties of populations under observed axioms’ (or the probabilistic/continuous generalisation thereof) to be talking about creationism; rather, I would expect challenges to come in the form of other equally basic, low-complexity processes that arise from what we already know.
I’m not sure DNA/the exact method of inheritance is relevant; I would still consider it to be a win for natural selection if we had, say, Lamarckism/inheritance of acquired characteristics/epigenetics as a significant force.
Well, we have tons of observation that nature can be understood, and that the useful explanations do not involve gods or magic. So yes, it would be a reasonable prior expectation for the origins of species, too.
I agree that understanding the extent to which natural selection generated things is easier nowadays than it was previously.
I’m not concerned here with logical disproofs of creationism, moreso with something like arguing that time spent {worrying that evolution by natural selection is significantly overrated} is probably misallocated, or arguing that people are privileging the question of ‘Is evolution by natural selection a good explanation?’ (I’m not entirely sure what my motivation is, but it feels like it’s at least partly something along those lines.)
I also think that there’s a lot of hard-to-enumerate background information available to a person nowadays that should be enough for a naturalistic reductionist to intuit that evolution will not arise from bolted-on complex mechanisms like creation, but rather from mechanisms like natural selection that are inherent to populations with a few basic properties that we have actually observed (e.g. finite lifespans that vary according to characteristic-environment interaction, inheritance of characteristics, etc.). It’s possible you understand this and I’m misinterpreting the point at which you’re challenging my argument, but I would very strongly disexpect somebody thinking like me along the lines of ‘provable properties of populations under observed axioms’ (or the probabilistic/continuous generalisation thereof) to be talking about creationism; rather, I would expect challenges to come in the form of other equally basic, low-complexity processes that arise from what we already know.
I’m not sure DNA/the exact method of inheritance is relevant; I would still consider it to be a win for natural selection if we had, say, Lamarckism/inheritance of acquired characteristics/epigenetics as a significant force.
Well, we have tons of observation that nature can be understood, and that the useful explanations do not involve gods or magic. So yes, it would be a reasonable prior expectation for the origins of species, too.