I’ve just watched it myself, and it matches my expectations based on what I had read. See my comments from yesterday. It comes down to this: theistic evolutionist Karl Giberson is very superficial, skimming over one side of the argument — “Beware the sound of one hand clapping,” Stephen Meyer wryly warns — while Meyer shows you what’s under the hood of the Darwin debate.
You’ll remember that the topic of their debate was “Should Christians Embrace Darwin?” Giberson is satisfied with theological appeals to how God as supposed designer should have done things if his thoughts were more along the lines of Dr. Giberson’s. In contrast, Dr. Meyer reveals to his listeners what goes on behind closed doors in evolutionary biology.
“Many, many evolutionary theorists are now questioning the creative power of the mutation-selection mechanism,” Steve observes. Since that’s so, there is no reason for Christians, Jews or other theists to rush to throw their arms around Darwinism, being careful to avoid running into the scientists who are meanwhile backing away from the theory.
How the new coding, the new information arises that’s needed to build new animals is, says Meyer,
the central question in modern biology. You’ll notice, for all the interesting points that Karl made in his defense of natural selection, he did not explain how it actually built anything. And this is the critical question that is coming to the very surface of modern biology today, modern evolutionary theory….
There’s a huge disparity between the public spokesman for evolutionary theory, what they say about the status of evolutionary theory, and the actual status of evolutionary theory as you find it in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. And one of the troubling questions that come up over and over again in the scientific literature is precisely about the origin of new biological form, and what we know is that to generate new biological form requires new information.
This is a revealing discussion that every proponent of theistic evolution should watch. If that’s you, drop me an email and let me know your thoughts, if you get a chance. Atheistic evolutionists would also profit from it.
Speaking of the latter, Jerry Coyne of Why Evolution Is True fame told his readers he would listen to the Meyer-Marshall debate, as an alternative to actually reading Darwin’s Doubt, and promised that he would let them know what he thought of it (“I haven’t yet listened to the hour-long debate, but I will, and readers interested in ID and paleontology should as well”).
That check is still in the mail. Now he can redeem himself by watching and responding to Meyer-Giberson. What do you say, Dr. Coyne?
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