Anti-Evolution RC Cardinal Issues Clarification

[AllanS]

[Genie]

[Air of Winter]

[AllanS]

[Air of Winter]

[AllanS]

[Air of Winter]

[hennessy61]

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And there's the nub.. there's no fossil evidence showing a gradual change from one species to another.. but EVOLUTION occurs right under our noses.
Take a bacterial infection.
Its treated with antibiotics.
What hapopens .. a new strain appears. The original bacteria mutates or evolves to be resistant.
Thats why theres a sort of counter-movement against the reflexive issuing of antibiotics by GP's
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It's not evolution that occurs right under our noses - its adaptation - or you can call it natural selection. Some call it micro-evolution, but that is a misnomer.

Evolution is all about one kind of living thing turning into another.

A bacteria that appears to become resistant is not gaining new information. The bacteria missing certain genetic sequences that make it resistant are not gaining anything! They simply are not affected by the attacking agent, and so are "resistant" - these continue to multiply while obviously those killed off don't. Hence the genetic information for the bacteria being killed off, is LOST. Nothing gained here.

A mutation is not a gain of new information - at that level all it takes is a shift of some genetic codes, NOT addition of genes, to cause the bacteria to become resistant, because it has LOST information, not gained it.

This is NOT evolution! Natural selection is real, and a wonderful adapting capability given to life thanks to our Creator.

As you correctly state - no fossils of things between one kind of living thing to another has been found.

For more details check out the awesome scientific insights found at www.answersingenesis.org - look up mutations. Mutations are the only possibility for evolution - and to think that complex life arose from random mutations is far-fetched beyond any wild verbiage I could state here!

[Karen]

[Kolbitar]

::I mean a machine that passes Turing's test, and declares itself to be self-aware. If we pull such a thing out of the hat, it would show that consciousness etc was not a function of spirit, but of matter. We'd then have to change our view of matter to allow for emergent consciousness, or conclude a ghost has possessed the machine.

Hi Allan.

You're asking me to accept an idealistic philosophy. Only then can I consider the possibility of a machine with no internal substantial unity to have an internal substantial unity in consciousness. I do not grant this basis.

Now, if a machine is programmed to say it is self-aware, does that make it self aware? What the machine does is going to be interpreted by the metaphysic we hold. The one I hold, a realist view, not an idealist view, does not allow for an artificially constructed entity -- held together from without -- to have the type of unity which could say "I" -- an internal unity. It may be programmed in such a way as to trick another person, but that does not mean it has the non-spatial unity required to organize experience and know about it. It would be much more likely that if a computer trully exhibited conceptual thought, that it would be some extra-terrestial or supernatural being tapping into a medium we haven't much knowledge about.

::Even if hope is explained by biochemistry etc, along with love and all the rest, I'd still hope that God exists, that he is good and that he loves us.

Of course the"I" that hopes is simply an awareness of the causal illusion that God exists. So you would have to hope he does while at the same time know he doesn't.

::I see it in terms of a modified Pascal's Wager. If God is non-existent, we lose nothing if we hope in him. If we hope he loves us and he doesn't, well, that's too bad. We thought better of him, and if that's a fault, so be it. He's not the sort of person we'd want to know anyway. But if we hope he loves us and he does, well praise be! Here is one worthy of love.

But apparently your Wager also has the unfortunate implication attached to it that God cannot exist. You hope in a God that cannot exist -- that appears to be the implications of your words.

Sincerely,

Jesse

[AllanS]

Hi Jesse,

"It would be much more likely that if a computer truly exhibited conceptual thought, that it would be some extra-terrestrial or supernatural being tapping into a medium we haven't much knowledge about."

I agree. Making AI would merely be begging the question rather than answering it.

"Of course the "I" that hopes is simply an awareness of the causal illusion that God exists. So you would have to hope he does while at the same time know he doesn't."

What I should have said was "even if biochemistry etc _appears_ to explain love etc". I can't see how any such explanation could ever be shown to be comprehensive, but it could certainly seem persuasive.

And speaking of the "I" that hopes, I can only hope I exist myself. I don't really know who or what I am. A good knock on the head and I could be someone quite different.

The "I" who hopes that God exists also hopes that God knows the "I" who hopes.

I think I need a stiff drink...

[Kolbitar]

::What I should have said was "even if biochemistry etc _appears_ to explain love etc". I can't see how any such explanation could ever be shown to be comprehensive, but it could certainly seem persuasive.

Well said my friend.

Good talking to you again.

God bless,

Jesse

[sutter]

With a little spin:

Or straight up: http://stephanscom.at/edw/katechesen/ar ... /14/a9347/

[Kolbitar]

::Aside from this stuff on the difference between methodological and metaphysical naturalism -- I think there is another problem with your questions. They seem to contain the implicit and unexamined assumption that if physical causation is in effect, divine intent cannot be. That is to say -- unless you assume that God cannot further his ends by means of the regular operation of Nature, does it make any sense to ask if physical causality is in effect, as if it were in contrast to the working of Providence? The theistic evolutionists of my acquainance generally think that God employed evolution as his method. If you are saying that God cannot use the regular operation of Nature, you'd seem to have a theology that's highly debatable.

Hello again Air. You've aligned your view, in opposition to me, with Larry's, so much of what I post to Larry is welcome for you to take as a response as well. I do want to deal with one thing specifically though, because I am the last one to "go around rejecting science because (I) think science is inherently atheistic." Therefore I'll give a quick and hopefully potent run down of my view in response to what you see as a problem in my questions.

In Miracles, Lewis argues what's been called the Argument from Reason. If I could put it in it's most simple form, I would say that it's the argument that the inside of knowledge-- the experienced fact of rationality--is governed by a different type of cause than is the outside world; that our picture of the outside world depends on this different type of causal law within; and that because of this fact any interpretation of outside experience cannot inherently contradict rational laws. Any other assertion puts the proverbial cart before the horse -or in my case, because we're talking about the mind, before the ass.

"I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of actual things that happened - dawn and death and so on - as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit… These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. …We have always in our fairy tales kept a sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions…" -Chesterton, from Orthodoxy

Chesterton goes on to say that this, Fairyland, is the sunny country of common sense: a philosophy learnt in the nursery, and, I might add with G.K.'s blessing, best preceded by the adjective 'Perennial.' Trained philosophers in the line of this succession call these properly the Orders of the Ideal (mental relations) and the Existential (physical facts).

Now, Science is simply refined common sense, and therefore will present us facts about reality both as mysterious as the physical objects which greet our unaided senses, and just as subject to the mental order "in which there really are laws." It is because this Ideal order exists, in fact, that the Existential order is so mysterious -- for the latter is known only through the former. This is precisely why Lewis says, numerous times, that our view of nature - our science even - depends on the validity of our reason, for once we leave direct experience we are knowing through inference, so that any hypothesis (composed of inferences to cover the facts) made cannot be one which interprets the experience of physical facts in a way which undermines itself by contradicting the Ideal Order, the integrity of which it assumes.

The motive of Science for scientists rests on two assumptions: the first is that things actually exist, that scientists are not describing the way their minds work, but an actual, extra-mental, intelligible reality. The second is that every mutable being has a cause. Without these implicit beliefs the Will would be, generally speaking, deadened and science as we know it would cease. In order to keep consistency with it's assumptions, and in the very interest and defense of Science, do I therefore stick to my common sense when examining scientific claims by appealing to (what Anthony Rizzi called) the Science before science, the Perennial Philosophy - the very lesson of Faerie.

In a nutshell that is why I cannot entertain various hypotheticals which inherently deny the reality of the situation and force me to accept an idealistic basis.

I'll leave you with a quote from Father Stanley Jaki which, if I were forced to choose at this very moment, would represent my view on evolution.

"Indeed, all the praises accorded by materialists to matter should pale beside the praises which Christians should accord to matter. Herein lies the reason why a Christian should be an all out materialist, provided the human mind is excepted. This is why a Christian should be an all out evolutionist, provided the human mind, and the human mind alone is considered a special creation of God."

Sincerely,

Jesse

[Kolbitar]

::Three strikes in 21 words. First, the "notion of 'evolution' as used by mainstream biologists" does not make any assumptions or claims whatsoever about man's "rational soul" or any other kind of soul: you will find no such assumptions or claims in the peer-reviewed, working scientific literature in which the "notion of evolution" is "used by mainstream biologists."

Hi Larry. I apologize for the tardy response.

I have absolutely no problem with the (biological) "notion" of evolution, my problem is with how it is "used by mainstream biologists". Perhaps you'd make a distinction between the popular notion, which is what I have in mind, and that of "working scientific literature," but in order to do that you'd have to tell me that no such phrase as "man has evolved from the lower forms of life" is ever used, for that is a metaphysical pronouncement no matter how you view it.

Let me put it this way, take the phrase "man has evolved from lower forms of life." Is there a mainstream biologist who would disagree with this? Is there one who doesn't use language similar to this? Is this not what is essentially taught in the biology classes of our public schools? On PBS, Discovery, etc.? Do you not agree with this?

Well, that IS a metaphysical statement. I've never heard the precise terms "man has evolved in his biological nature from..." used in reference to evolution. Is this hair splitting? Perhaps, but it will get us nowhere in the dialogue between religion and evolution till we are clear by our terms on what we mean.

There's a doorway here, a word through which the concept of evolution flows so naturally and forcefully to drown the hope of any perceptive religious person sensitive to it's implications, or on the other hand inflame with hope any anti-religious scientist insensitive to crushing true religious hope, which is the root of the problem. Without a doubt the loaded phrase beginning "man evolved…" lights up the eyes of the atheist, fills with lust the hedonist, provides the budding Nietschze with his logic, and justifies the Communist dictator. Equally as certain it repels many a religious person, in part for those very reasons, from whatever it truthfully may have to say concerning biology. You are correct to note that biology strictly deals with nothing metaphysical (assuming the "methodological naturalism" which is used is entirely separate from the user -- a pure hypothetical), so that an evolutionary biology is no threat whatsoever to the philosopher or the theologian. The dilemma here lies in the fact that evolutionists -- biologists among them -- promote a very ambiguous string of concepts which almost fatally results in evolutionism--what Lewis called the "myth of evolution." When someone says "man evolved," the average person thinks of man as man. The biologist does not ask us to distinguish the biological from moral, emotional or rational when he utters those words. Nay, when he says "man evolved," the force of his science and the weight of his presumed knowledge remove any implicit distinctions from our minds. Warranted or not, intentional or not, "man" becomes the unrestricted concept to which evolution is applied. Man is man: more than biology.

::Individual scientists make plenty of such assertions in their spare time, but those assertions are not science and never appear in the working technical literature of evolutionary biology or any other scientific field.

Many scientists do make those assertions, many of the most prominent scientists -- including Darwin in his Descent of Man, if I understand correctly. And it's the fact that the term "evolution" used in the same sentence with "man" so easily lends itself, by captivating the imagination (see Lewis' Funeral of a Great Myth), to these assertions that hang about it, like it or not, that you find many people (most of whom I have in mind are Catholic) reacting to it on philosophical grounds -- the philosophy we're reacting to is "in the air." Speaking of air, and of building my case, Our fellow Wardrobian Air of Winter finds natural selection to be favorable to his atheistic outlook. You deny the difference between man and animal is one of kind, and therefore flush down the drain a clear distinction which has existed in the mind of Western man since antiquity -- providing the very ethic by which man transcends nature, and therefore knows certain natural impulses are not natural to himself.

On the one hand I will grant you that certain people reject the biological science because it conflicts with their interpretation of Genesis - I do not. On the other, whether you grant it to me or not, the phrase beginning "man evolved..." has been the logical basis for the most horrific misunderstandings and outcomes.

::Science is methodologically naturalistic. That is, it looks for explanations of events in the observable world in terms of natural objects and forces, precisely as you or I try to explain where a lost sock has gone, or why the bread doesn't rise, or what's causing the engine to knock. No doctrinal or metaphysical claim is involved in this process: it is utterly pragmatic.

A "claim" is an assumption finding itself explicit, and perhaps science, as an instrument, doesn't examine it's own assumptions, but that doesn't mean metaphysical assumptions do not therein exist when related to the user. So long as you cast science, as an instrument, in terms which present it as separate from the scientist, then we can speak, artificially, of methodological naturalism. So long as you speak of the world as if you're speaking from within it, then we can conjure up hypothetical ideas and forever remain unable to say they have a correlative in reality. But this is reversing the true situation, ignoring the way in which we come to know the objects of science, and dismissing the "tacit exception" we make while employing our scientific method and speaking about a world, which must be done from outside of it. You want to say "if this then that," as if ideas determine our reality instead of reality determining our ideas. Yet "everything that is in the intellect has been in the senses." If I were to concede your hypotheticals I would be immediately rejecting the reality of this statement, and along with it the reality of science.

::When science finds a successful natural explanation for observable facts then it has found it, and metaphysical arguments about the limits of causality, reason, etc. are irrelevant to that success. If a theory works, it works, and metaphysics cannot make it not work. Whereas if it fails to account for the data, then it fails, and metaphysics can add nothing to its failure. (Except that simplistic, fallacious metaphysics, if taken seriously, might discourage us from looking for a better theory---like Intelligent Design maven Behe telling scientists that it's no use even looking for evolutionary precursors of the clotting cascade. Good thing they ignored him, because they've found a lot---references on request.)

Well, I want to make clear that the naturalistic methodology of science is perfectly fine by me; I understand it, I agree with you about it, and it works whether anyone agrees or not. As for Metaphysical arguments, they are indeed irrelevant to it's success, but not to it's ontological interpretations, which scientists almost by necessity insist on making -- which you make by claiming certain interpretations are "physical facts."

::Second, evolutionary biology does not "assume" that natural processes are responsible for everything that we feel, think, and are. Science assumes nothing at the metaphysical level at all. It works from the fact (not assumption) that natural explanations are the only ones that we can actually search for, the only explanations that actually explain when found, i.e., that reduce our ignorance about the how of things. The supernatural is by definition beyond our comprehension, cannot be experimented on, will not stand still and be photographed and weighed, will not dance the tune of any equation, will not obey quantitative predictions. If it did these things it wouldn't be the supernatural. If miraculous events occur, therefore, we cannot do science on them. That does not prove that they cannot occur, nor does science as such require or make any assumption that they cannot occur: science simply ignores the question as irrelevant because it is outside the terms of its workable project. Science does not assume anything at all about reason, the soul, the reasonable soul, the supernatural, miracles, God or any ultimate entity or quality: it simply goes to work to discern the best next move in the game of understanding whatever can be understood. That is methodological naturalism. In theory, the game could run up against limits: unexplainable events. But we should be extremely reluctant to believe that the failure of any particular effort at explanation proves that an event is ultimately unexplainable: this will only be true if the failed explanation and the miraculous are jointly exhaustive of all possible accounts, and joint exhaustion is very, very hard to prove in this very, very complicated world. And scientists have a very good track record of eventually coming up with explanations that do explain.

"Science has 'explained' nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness." -Aldous Huxley

In fact they only "explain" in a certain qualified sense, which is by efficient causality, or noting certain descriptive patterns, the nature of which is inherently "that" knowledge -- not "why" knowledge, as mathematics is.

"…the very nature of explanation makes it impossible that we should even explain why matter has the properties it has. For explanation, by its very nature, deals with a world of 'ifs and ands'…In order to explain any event you have to assume the universe as…a machine working in a particular way. Since this particular way of working is the basis of all explanation, it can never itself be explained. We can see no reason why it should not have worked a different way." --Lewis

::Third, your notion of causality is wildly inaccurate.

Oh dear!

::::Quote:
every event, and every object brought into existence by those events, is as present at the moment of the existence of the universe - big bang, or what have you - and throughout it's existence, as the oak in the acorn.
::Utterly wrong. Ever since the ascendence of the Cophenhagen interpretation of quantum theory some 80 years ago, absolute deterministic causality has been on the ropes.

Yikes, there goes your methodological naturalism...

For you mean sanity has been on the ropes. Seeing this, some scientists refuse to accept the Copenhagen interpretation. Correct me if I'm wrong, aren't theories postulating eleven total dimensions or more the result of denying the denial of causality? You certainly don't accept it when appealing to "natural methodology," for without the law that all things have a cause, what would be your basis for your evolutionary theory?

::The modern scientific picture does not resemble your preformationist picture at all. Causality is a complex and contentious subject in modern physics that I do not pretend to understand, but I do know that your representation of causality as absolute determinism is hopelessly crude.

So you hope, perhaps, but listen to what you're saying. There is a reality upon which all our complex theories are derived, which might not even be there! Or how about this one, reality could have just popped into existence this very moment, providing me memories which I never had upon which the reasoning I come to conclude it just popped into existence. Or better yet, from a religious perspective, how about the many worlds nonsense -- now, as a Christian, altruism takes on a totally different meaning, for if I am met with a choice then to make the correct decision is to determine my other self to make the wrong one, so out of altruism I should make all wrong decisions! I certainly hope it's not hopelessly crude, and this is why a sane metaphysics is needed to interpret the vastly less immediate inferences of the scientific endeavor.

Look, I understand I'm just a wee little mind in a world of minds much, much larger, so don't take it from me. Check out Stanley Jaki whom I've earlier quoted, and with whom you'd probably find much agreement. Listen to what Anthony Rizzi, a very qualified physicist who discovered the first definition of angular momentum in general relativity, and who also is schooled in philosophy, has to say. I'm certainly not a lonely voice in the desert -- thank God.

::Even if causality was deterministic, it would not follow that accurate cognitive representations of world-structure (i.e., knowledge of the phenomenal world) could not exist. A leaf can make a print of itself in mud and then dissolve away as the mud hardens leaving an accurate, lasting imprint of its shape: information about the world is thus preserved in the world, printed upon the world by itself, by everyday processes of mechanics and chemistry. The impress of more complex representations on a network of neurons by more elaborate causal chains seems to me to require no fundamental logical leap beyond the leaf-print. The whole "we can't be reasoning validly if we aren't reasoning supernaturally" argument, from Lewis on, seems to me to fall far short (though I think it points to a fascinating philosophical question). It is too pat. And it pronounces on matters of fact based on pure logic, always a losing game. Look, if the hard evidence shows a thousand ways from Sunday that we evolved (and it does), then we evolved, and the logicians will just have to figure out how it is that an evolved creature can know that it has evolved.

First, it's not based on pure logic.

Second, this is precisely what I mean about ignoring first things. You're asking me to forget that I must know the world first in order to entertain a hypothetical about it. As soon as I do so I am detached from the very process which assures me that I know about something, not just my own ideas and impressions. For positing "(t)he impress of more complex representations on a network of neurons by more elaborate causal chains" requires that I therefore know impressions, which traps me in my own mind unable to cross the bridge allowing me to say there's a reality which impresses my representations of it.

::Jesse, I don't know exactly what the natural world is

Yet you determine scientific "facts" by the "natural method?"

::and I don't think you do either--though you twice use the reductionistic word "merely" (once to refer to natural selection and once to refer to animals).

I'll stand by my reductionist use in the context I used it "mere (are animals) in comparison to the infinite worth of...a human being" as long as I live. Perhaps you see humans as essentially no different than animals, but that is surely a dangerous thing for society to see.

::I can't visualize how an electron manages to be a wave and a particle at the same time, or how its wave function manages to be present everywhere in the universe at once. I can't picture particle entanglement or how it is that virtual particles can flicker in and out of existence or how energy can be negative or space can be finite or how simultaneity is relative---although all these things are established physical facts.

Established physical facts?

::Much less do I understand what consciousness is, or what soul is, or what soul and consciousness have to do with each other (I am still a soul, presumably, when I am unconscious) or how consciousness or soul or spirit relate to the physical stuff of my brain (but they do, as a tap with a baseball bat will swiftly prove). How God relates to the universe, at large and in detail, is even more utterly beyond my comprehension and, I suspect, yours. I am sure only that psychological anthropomophism---thinking of God as an infinitely empowered Mega Me---is a dead end.

You'd rather think of Him as...an infinitely empowered particle of matter? which is certainly not a mere particle for "mere" is reductionist, so it must be that matter should be thought of in as non-reductive a way as mind, but that would be saying we should conceive of God as a particle charged with the grandeur of mind, which would be an empowered Mega-Me -- or, as Christians usually put it, a me made in the image of God.

::I am also sure that finalistic pronouncements from the high chair of philosophy about what facts scientists can or cannot actually be finding in the field are fruitless, uninformative, empty.

A common sense philosophy makes no such pronouncements, it only guards unphilosophical scientists from making absurd philosophical pronouncements.

::In response to my hypothetical Petri dish described completely in natural terms, you write,
Quote:
What meaning could the term God possibly add to this "whole" picture excluding Him?
::The idea of God adding meaning to Nature, like adding a vitamin to white bread, seems impossibly simplistic and anthropomorphic to me. God is the ultimate source of "all that is, seen and unseen." The natural world springs from its maker and returns to him in an intimacy that we do not even know how to conceptualize. God pronounces this natural world "good," which I take to mean profoundly, infinitely, unimaginably good: God cannot produce the trivial or the shallow, because that would imply that there is triviality or shallowness in God to express. Matter is not trivial or shallow. Natural processes are not "merely" anything, not trivial or shallow, and that goes for natural selection in spades. Nor does God add meaning to natural processes, whether by sprinkling miracles among them or any other way: they are absolutely meaningful at every level that we understand and throughout a perhaps infinite range of levels that we are not even aware of, throughout every moment of time and every point of space. Either that or we are not looking upon a serious doctrine of Creation. You seem to me to be sweeping aside vast realms of possibility that we cannot possibly really know anything about.

How so? By denying rocks or other types of matter the special status of infinite worth a human being has? By affirming the principle of contradiction? Or by saying there actually is a knowable universe the scientist attempts to learn more and more about?


::You also ask me a question or two, but I'll postpone answering till you answer the one in my previous: Is God present only when he's breaking his own laws? The question is meant to undermine the Cartesian mind-trap of trying to understand God as the (Holy) Ghost in the (Cosmic) Machine.

I don't know what you mean about breaking His own laws. However, I will say that He's present in a special way in creating the human soul directly, as the material world he creates to function "on it's own," so to speak, is a step removed from His direct presence in relation to us.

::Finally, relevant to the point that you seem to greatly overestimate how much obvious knowledge there is to be had about this world, you write,
Quote:
To state it as succinctly as I can, the result of scientifically - causally -- explaining the existence of man as man - as a rational animal - is to strip from him his rationality, leaving him but a mere animal (mere in comparison to the infinite worth of what was a human being)
::And exactly how do you know that no non-human animals reason? All that research on animal cognition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition)---pouf?

The research on animal cognition can be interpreted in more than one way. Let me quote from your article, "Self-awareness, by this criterion, has been reported for chimpanzees and also for some other great apes, and some cetaceans, but not for monkeys. However both the interpretation of such data, and the data themselves, remain controversial." As a fan of Chesterton, you may want to read the first third of his book the Everlasting Man, dedicated to the notion that man is infinitely more precious than, and distinct from, the mere animal.

I will say in passing that the failure to recognize the distinction between conceptual and perceptual knowledge will inevitably result in confusion on this most ethically critical issue. "In all experimental work done on animals, there is no instance where a sign that an animal uses gets its meaning from a collocation of other signs that purport to express its meaning. In every case, a new sign that is introduced into the animals vocabulary becomes meaningful through being attached to a perceptual object with which the animal has direct acquaintance." -Adler

Thanks,

Jesse