What Darwin Never Knew, a PBS Nova Program
Nova produced this program first aired in December 2009. I watched it last night. It's wonderful. How many Christians understand evolution and the evidence for it? I doubt many do. While I watched it I thought to myself Christianity has been debunked a long time ago, that what I do is superfluous. And yet, here I am doing the dirty work with a lot of ignorant people who rail against me for simply telling them the truth. Watch it when you get the chance.
81 comments:
I remember growing up how my Mom always had an aversion to NOVA because they had a an "evolution bias". I'm glad that near about 30 I have broken free from the dogma of my childhood. I Still have a really hard time understanding many of the intricacies of evolution as a result, but I am learning and it is making a lot more sense.
How many people in general understand the intricacies of evolution? Do you read the journal articles and go to the conferences? Seriously, John, you've just traded authorities. This really strikes me as arrogant. Most people aren't "smart" because they just don't care. We who discuss these things are the aberrations, and not somehow above others. That type of thinking really bothers me.
/rant
About a year ago, we had a creationist on Pharyngula who had kind of/sort of watched a similar program called "What Darwin Didn't Know" and then ran with the title as if Darwin didn't know anything. But that person missed the point of the title, I thought (here is the link to the discussion starting with the creationist's view if you are interested). The point there and with this PBS production was that Darwin didn't know how successful his theory would be. He didn't know it would be solidly confirmed in many ways by future scientists and that it would be the foundation of some of the biggest breakthroughs in human knowledge.
As PBS writes in their blurb about the movie you mention, "The results are confirming the brilliance of Darwin's insights while revealing clues to life's breathtaking diversity in ways the great naturalist could scarcely have imagined."
Thanks Aratina for the clarification just in case it's not clear from what I wrote. You are absolutely correct. I hope this was not missed on anyone.
Man, that was some impressive trolling from DM that showed up in my inbox while I was at lunch.
Good luck with that, John.
I've always thought the idea of someone who understands evolution, but disagrees with it was kind of a contradiction in terms. It would be like a person understanding math, but disagreeing with it, I'm not sure it's a position it's possible to hold for long.
Brad, I have to disagree about the "changing authorities" bit. Science works from a consensus built through harsh criticism and refinement of ideas, not dogma handed down from on high. They are neither analogous nor equivalent. The only deference to authority in science should be a deference to the authority of the process.
I watched this a few nights ago. An excellent program that traces the development of the theory as more and more information from fossils, DNA, etc. have been found out over the years.
Brad Haggard,
How many people in general understand the intricacies of evolution?
Only a few million people in the world understand the intricacies of modern evolutionary theory, while many times that have an understanding of evolution sufficient to know that religious accounts of human origins, Christian or other, are not true. That, in part, explains why religious belief is falling off in the developed world.
Here in the US a sizable fraction of the population admit to hating evolution while saying they love the Bible and Christianity. Yet, most of them know almost nothing about either. We can hardly be surprised that people who hate evolution don't actively seek to understand it, but I find it quite surprising that so many are so ignorant of something they claim to cherish and will say they know has everlasting consequences. Their behavior suggests they just don't care. US Christians cumulatively spend more time surfing porn sites than they cumulatively spend in religious activities.
I don't mean this as tu quoque. Just pointing out that it's reasonable that people won't try to understand what they say they don't like when they put no more effort into the things they say they do.
You said,
Do you read the journal articles and go to the conferences?
Yes, I do, on both accounts, though I don't make the conferences as much now as I did thirty years ago. It's fortunate that I live in Lansing, MI, just a few minute's drive from Michigan State University where groundbreaking research is always under way. Many of their conferences and colloquia are open to the public. Lucky me.
If you mean to discredit someone's understanding of evolution by pointing to their not staying up to date on every advancement, you're doomed to fail. No one needs to keep current. Knowing the basics, even as basic as Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" explication, is enough for a person to understand how the diversity of the biosphere arose and Homo sapiens right along with it. Most people are fully capable of understanding their own evolutionary origins, when religion's taboos against learning and understanding haven't screwed with their minds.
You said,
Seriously, John, you've just traded authorities.
Acknowledging evolution as the means whereby living things have diversified into the magnificent array of life we see today is not like trading Islam for Christianity. Acknowledging evolution is trading up. If John has indeed traded authorities, he has definitely gotten a good deal with this one.
Evolution is nice in that it's 100 percent supernatural-free and it doesn't suffer the bizarre arbitrariness of religion's complete subjectivity. Nature itself serves as a fine standard for keeping the science on track. Evolution seamlessly integrates with other results from science: the age of the earth; the age of the solar system; the age of the universe; cosmology; chemistry and biochemistry; physics; and, the living world of biology. If evolution fails it will fail for the science, not due to authority given to auditory hallucinations involving middle eastern shrubberies.
Brad Haggard,
You said,
This really strikes me as arrogant. Most people aren't "smart" because they just don't care.
Why don't most people care? They don't have to. Why don't they have to? Science has prepared a place for them, that's why. The sciences of agriculture - including the controlled evolution of highly productive cultivars and livestock, medicine, forestry, petrochemicals and cable television gives most people all they need or want to stay safe, warm, dry, fed, procreative and entertained, all while they give thanks to Vishnu, Allah, John Frum, Xenu, Yahweh, Shiva and a thousand other gods.
We who discuss these things are the aberrations, and not somehow above others. That type of thinking really bothers me.
Sad, but true, that most people don't want to do the work needed to discuss things. They want to collect their pay and purchase the fruits of other's labor, including other's religious opinions. It is not arrogant for a sports med specialist to claim he has a better understanding of exercise physiology than his clients. It's a simple statement of fact.
It is arrogant for the religious to call themselves "saved" or "chosen" or otherwise elevate themselves above those who think differently based on outrageous and unwarranted claims they have decided upon themselves.
It's not arrogant to recognize that your knowledge base is better than someone else's. It is arrogant to look down on the majority of mankind based on nothing other than you and your buddies agreeing among yourselves that you are better than everyone else.
Brad,
Jerry Coyne wrote a very good and easy to comprehend book entitled, "Why Evolution is True". Why don't you share it with your youth group.
Russ (and Rhaco),
I'm not trying to discredit Loftus' knowledge of evolution, because I don't think he ever claimed to be an expert on it. But I think you'd have to agree, Russ, that the current evolutionary story, while accepted on broad terms, still has a lot of contention in the particulars. This makes the theory more robust, but most "science educators" want to bemoan the state of evolution in America when it is no less known than general relativity, quantum mechanics, structural engineering, or even internal combustion engines. I get tired of all of the hand-wringing and pontificating, and I also don't think that there is an inherent distinction between evolution and religious belief. It's become a false wedge issue, and surprisingly a shibboleth for the science community.
You may say that I cannot reconcile biblical faith with evolution, but then I suppose I could claim a better theological knowledge base because of my seminary education. In which case, either claim would be a conversation stopper.
I was also intrigued, Russ, by your claim that someone can be knowledgeable on evolution by mastering the basic evolutionary history and mechanisms. I suppose I could claim that for much of the U.S. church in relation to theology. They know enough for salvation, and many of the issues brought up on this blog are at best side issues and really only have any bearing on the doctrine of inerrancy.
Also, about your claim that evolution is "seamless", I don't think that can be sustained. There are enough issues with abiogenesis, various speciation events, convergence, and fossil anomalies (even taking into account an incomplete record), that in order for it to be seamless there need to be at least some ad-hoc speculations. I don't say that the door is closed to exploring those issues, but it sounds like a little bit of spin.
Which is why I accuse John of simply trading authorities, because he proudly proclaims that science is all he needs and that it uniformly supports his brand of agnostic atheism. A little bit of primary source reading in any of the areas he cites (e.g. evolutionary biology, cosmology, neuropsychology, sociology, philosophy, all of them vast and varied fields) would show much more nuance and controversy than he can allow (which, again, is why it is healthy, and why it will not succumb to blanket generalizing). He takes science reporting as his authority, not actual science, and I think this is paradigmatic for atheists/secularists/humanists in general.
Finally, I don't know any Christian friends who think they are better than others in the world. In fact, I find the converse to be true. We must have had different religious experiences.
Chuck,
I see your point, but I guess I also have to understand where people are. Also, if I made science education my main focus, then I wouldn't be a minister. What I do do (middle school chuckle) is encourage student thinking and never drive a wedge between science and faith.
Then, whatever theory of biological origins has the most merit will win out.
Brad,
Also, about your claim that evolution is "seamless", I don't think that can be sustained. There are enough issues with abiogenesis, various speciation events, convergence, and fossil anomalies (even taking into account an incomplete record), that in order for it to be seamless there need to be at least some ad-hoc speculations. I don't say that the door is closed to exploring those issues, but it sounds like a little bit of spin.
The seamless claim is sustainable because not a single one of these issues are raising questions to the point of where anyone is seriously questioning the veracity of evolutionary theory as a whole. A lot of these supposed problems that you are raising are details, and not serious challenges even though there are large groups of religious people that try to spin these issues in this way, via quote mining and other disingenuous misrepresentations.
Let me put it this way. In physics, gravitational theory is by far the least understood force. In fact, within the scientific community evolutionary theory is considered to be on firmer ground than gravitational theory. Now, are you seriously going to question that gravity is a physical force on the grounds that it is less understood than evolutionary theory? By your reasoning, we should be doing exactly that, but that is just silly, and you know it.
The fact is, the only reason the religious have any interest in science at all is precisely because science puts the assertions of religion to the test, and those assertions routinely fail those tests every time. If gravitational theory threatened religious dogma the way evolution does, you can bet your ass you would be talking more about gravity than evolution right now.
A little bit of primary source reading in any of the areas he cites (e.g. evolutionary biology, cosmology, neuropsychology, sociology, philosophy, all of them vast and varied fields) would show much more nuance and controversy than he can allow (which, again, is why it is healthy, and why it will not succumb to blanket generalizing).
Uh, no. The Daran O'Briain quote comes to mind, "If science knew everything, it would #*$&*# stop!" This sort of thing is not a problem for agnostic-atheism at all, in fact, it is expected. The controversy and nuance in scientific debate has provided far more measurably beneficial improvements to the human condition, and verifiable expansion of our knowledge than the millions of attempts of divination from holy scripture by literally millions of people for thousands of years. That there are big unanswered questions in science, even fundamental ones doesn't mean that religion automatically has any standing in answering those questions at all. Religion's repeated attempts to inject itself in these issues only reveals the degree to which the religious will stoop to sophistry to protect their turf.
Note: None of the above implies that science will always be right. However, it does strongly imply that paying careful attention to the world around us is far more likely to be able to tell us where we came from (and where we're going) than anything ever dreamed up in any religion that has ever been practiced by any person that has ever lived on this planet. If you want to talk about authorities, Brad, go ahead, I'll put the scientific process up against yours any day of the week. At best, you're going to wag your tongue at the under-determinism of science to try to find a loophole for religious belief, which , unfortunately for you, will never be a viable justification for religious belief.
Brad: But I think you'd have to agree, Russ, that the current evolutionary story, while accepted on broad terms, still has a lot of contention in the particulars. This makes the theory more robust,
Contention regarding the particulars does not make a theory more robust. Do you understand the definition of theory? Scientific method in general? I have to think not, when you say things like I also don't think that there is an inherent distinction between evolution and religious belief.
You continue with: Also, about your claim that evolution is "seamless", I don't think that can be sustained. There are enough issues with abiogenesis, various speciation events, convergence, and fossil anomalies (even taking into account an incomplete record), that in order for it to be seamless there need to be at least some ad-hoc speculations.
Oopsie, for someone who doesn't read the journal articles or attends the conferences, it sounds like you've formed an opinion about evolutionary theory.. what is the source of your information? It seems lacking; for one, abiogenesis has to do with how life formed from inanimate matter, not evolution.
Brad,
I am a fellow believer, but I agree with the atheists here: evolution explains life very well, and in fact the convergence of data from completely unrelated disciplines, paleontology, comparative biology and genetics is what makes evolution one of the best tested theories in all of science. Also the origin of life has now been shown with great probability to have natural causes, see my article for the leading evolution website talkorigins.org:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html
Steven,
The fact is, the only reason the religious have any interest in science at all is precisely because science puts the assertions of religion to the test, and those assertions routinely fail those tests every time.
False. I am religious but a scientist myself. I am professionally interested in how the world, God's creation, works.
And the problem for naturalism is that evolution can only work since the laws of nature are so exceedingly special. All points to the laws of nature -- allowing for physical and biological evolution -- being God's design. All naturalistic explanations fail, see:
http://home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/cosmological-arguments-god.htm
So in fact the very existence of evolution is an argument for God.
For anyone interested my spam filter just caught 6 comments of DM's and deleted them without me lifting a finger. It's working.
False. I am religious but a scientist myself. I am professionally interested in how the world, God's creation, works.
Alright, Al, I admit I was painting with a little too broad a brush there, but you can't really deny that there is not a significant majority of religious people in the states whose interest in science stems more from being threatened by it than in having a genuine interest in the process or its findings. Brad certainly seems to fall somewhere within that continuum.
As for your argument, I read over it a couple of weeks ago when Luke Muehlhauser considered it on his blog. In short, I just don't find fine tuning arguments compelling. And the reason is because, they are sort of like the reverse of the Drake equation. You assign a bunch of probabilities for various constants coming out the way they do, and then say, wow, look at how wildly improbable this is!
There's certainly been a lot of ink spilled on this subject in the literature and I don't think we're anywhere near the end of it. I've read a fair amount of it, especially from the cosmologists, and I just find it all way too speculative to be able to accept any arguments that are based on it. In short, I think your line of argument has merit to it, and it is falsifiable, but I think there are number of very fundamental things about the universe that we just don't understand yet, and therefore, I don't think we can really affirm or outright deny arguments such as yours. If we can ever reach an understanding of just exactly what the big bang really was, then I think we might be able to begin to adequately address fine tuning arguments. Until then, they are curiosities to me, but I don't find them very interesting. Sorry to be dismissive, but that's what I think of fine tuning arguments.
John,
Francis Collins, a Christian, is a geneticist and believes in evolution. He even wrote a book about how evolution does not contradict Christianity. This belief that evolution contradicts Christianity is just atheist propaganda.
Now evolution does debunk creationism. Further more, there are a lot of evolutionary biologists that say evolution does not debunk Christianity. Check out the web site Biologos.
-Harold
Harold said,
"This belief that evolution contradicts Christianity is just atheist propaganda."
Then why are the most anti-evolution screeds out there all coming from the Christian camp?
Have you heard of the Creation Museum and the Discovery institute?
Yeah, those are atheist argments...
Al Moritz said: I am a fellow believer, but I agree with the atheists here: evolution explains life very well, and in fact the convergence of data from completely unrelated disciplines, paleontology, comparative biology and genetics is what makes evolution one of the best tested theories in all of science. Also the origin of life has now been shown with great probability to have natural causes, see my article for the leading evolution website talkorigins.org
Ok, so how do you envision the soul fitting in? (I'm assuming you believe in an eternal incorporeal spirit that is the essence of a person.) At what point did humans evolve enough to get souls, or do all animate beings have souls?
John, I just wish the filter would keep them from coming to my inbox...
Al, et. al.
I think the point I was trying to make was too nuanced. I'm not trying to discredit evolution on the whole. In fact, I think that that fact that the scientific discussion is so robust, and many areas of contention have been identified through it, shows just how powerful it is as an organizing theory. Not knowing how certain branches go out in the tree doesn't discredit the whole thing. That has been my position.
What I did want to say was that science is not a monolith. Articles are published and critiqued (and I'm not a professional, but I have read some of the relevant primary literature), and to say that definitively science sides with anyone's metaphysical and ontological assertions is taking it beyond what it can answer. In other words, the strength of science is its limited scope.
I'm saying that when John says "science shows us that God did not create the universe" or "the universe tunneled in from another universe" or "science has shown that we are all completely conditioned" that he is misrepresenting the actual science. Stenger and Hawking and Myers and Spong are his new authorities, not the more fluid and diverse scientific community.
That is why I pointed out that the evolutionary history of life is a lot murkier than what NOVA would present, because it's purpose is summary. Which, as I tried to explain earlier, is how it should be, because these nagging questions and debates are what moves science forward.
I think I'm representing the general movement of the scientific community and not operating out of fear (I am listening, Steven, and I hope you haven't already labeled me).
So, Al, I agree with you, actually, in general. I hope this makes my argument clear now.
Brad Haggard,
You said,
But I think you'd have to agree, Russ, that the current evolutionary story, while accepted on broad terms, still has a lot of contention in the particulars.
Please translate. If you seek to condemn the mountain of evidence supporting modern evolutionary theory by considering the discipline-specific ironing out of the details to be "a lot of contention in the particulars" then you need to seek out some other avenue of denigration. "Contention in the particulars" is the means of advancement in any scientific endeavor, especially so in the infant discipline evolutionary theory where lines of cause and effect are blurred by numerous highly complex intermediary steps.
Automated sequencing equipment might be able to tell us that a specific nucleotide has changed, and we might be able to discern a morphological change in the organism, but establishing the mechanism of action for how that single-nucleotide mutation induced that morphological change is far from trivial. Was it a DNA change for a protein-coding gene or a regulatory change? If it was protein-coding, was the protein physiology-mediating, like an enzyme, or structural-building, like for making collagen? We could ask similar questions for a lifetime and each one could take a lifetime to answer?
You're right that evolution is "no less known than general relativity, quantum mechanics, structural engineering, or even internal combustion engines." Today you might have a class in high school about internal combustion engines, but those are rare. The other fields you mentioned require so many prerequisite classes that none is appropriate for high school. In college few elect to take them. But evolutionary theory is appropriate for high school and easily understood, and unlike quantum mechanics or general relativity, has important consequences for people's lives. Scare quoted "science educators" are right to bemoan the state of evolution in America. It's an important scientific discipline showing how all of life is connected and interdependent, while the only resistance to its being taught is religious. Evolution is a fact, fully supported by the science, but scare quoted "science educators" are being hampered and derailed by a very tiny fraction of the religious.
You said,
You may say that I cannot reconcile biblical faith with evolution, but then I suppose I could claim a better theological knowledge base because of my seminary education. In which case, either claim would be a conversation stopper.
It's unfortunate for you that you can't claim better theological knowledge, Brad. Theology isn't knowledge in the sense of being true. Evolution is. Brama believers don't have truth even though they have boatloads of Brama theologists concurring. As I've mentioned to you before, you can take years and years of theology training and spend lots and lots of money, and when you're all done, I can hang out my religious shingle, call myself Christian even, and instantaneously have every bit the religious legitimacy you would have. Since it's not real; it's not knowledge, and, it's not true; anyone can do it with the same level of authenticity.
Theology is not true no matter the number agreeing with a specific tenet. You can't know you're right or that others are wrong, and you can't possibly investigate the truth value of all the conflicting claims, inside or outside your own preferred religion. It's just a functional impossibility.
Russ,
I think I already addressed your first point, which I would pretty much concede anyway.
But irregardless of whether or not you think theology qualifies as knowledge, my point was to show how it isn't inconsistent to accept both evolution and biblical faith. If you want to show an inconsistency, then I could either engage you in your charge, or retreat back to my credentials and not engage because of my "better knowledge base" in biblical studies. (I feel like I'm repeating myself a little)
I think of the clergyman who was expelled from the Royal Society for suggesting that in science education the educators engage in an irenic manner with the students' worldviews so as to make them more receptive to the science. If they are not afraid because evolution is no longer a secularist polemic, then they will more readily accept.
But he was kicked out for offering his wisdom. I feel like that's where John's line of argument leads.
Russ, I hate working with those size limits, too.
Brad,
You said,
I suppose I could claim that for much of the U.S. church in relation to theology. They know enough for salvation, and many of the issues brought up on this blog are at best side issues and really only have any bearing on the doctrine of inerrancy.
But, Brad, in addition to theology not being knowledge, which I know you sidestep using faith propositions, all you can claim about religious belief is what is inside your own head. A church's formal doctrine is only words on paper, which most of religion's participants ostensibly don't care about. No matter how nicely you've ironed out the bumps and inconsistencies of your beliefs formulated from the your starting assumptions, you cannot say what is going on with others, not even the person sharing a pew with you in church. If mere words are all it takes then we could make a claim that US school children have sworn their primary allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. But if behavior must reflect belief then US Christian's behaviors don't reflect belief.
Those "side issues" you mention are irrelevant next to the obvious fact that none of your Christianity appears to be true and none of your Christianity appears to have any force beyond a curious mythology. It's even necessary for differing Christians to apologize away their varied ideas about "inerrancy."
If the Vikings had been as effectively imperialistic as the newly-Christianized Romans your seminary training might be preparing you to apologize for Thor, Odin and Asgard. You would embrace it just as heartily and you would not lament or yearn for Yahweh. Hindus don't and Muslims don't and there's no reason to think you would buck the prevailing social construct.
You said,
There are enough issues with abiogenesis, various speciation events, convergence, and fossil anomalies (even taking into account an incomplete record), that in order for it to be seamless there need to be at least some ad-hoc speculations.
Abiogenesis is not a part of biological evolution. Biological evolution requires cellular life. Enough useful work has been done in pre-biotic molecular evolution for an informed person to conclude it to be far more probable that cellular life arose from non-cellular self-replicating molecular structures rather than there having been some special creation event.
Remember, Brad, that the natural world offers a bedrock of consistency from which to formulate natural explanations. Why assume the natural? For precisely the same reason you can't know what the guy next to you in church really believes, and for the same reason that as an atheist I have as much Christian legitimacy as you do: religion is unreliable. (It's funny, but my family members regularly ask me religious questions since I know more about their Christianity than most of them.) Your god is not unchanging, so Christianity, along with the thousands of other religions, are sufficiently distinct and diverse to qualify religion generally to be equivalent to culturally "ad-hoc speculations." Religion has proven itself useless as a means of acquiring knowledge. Nature has proven itself indispensible for the same. So, nature is the reliable backdrop for science, specifically the science of evolution. You can call it having an anti-supernatural bias, but the various supernaturalisms give us nothing to build on.
Against the reliable backdrop of nature, the evolutionary "ad-hoc speculations" you spoke of are more reliable than the soundest of theological conjectures about how the world works. Recall that until science showed them to be wrong, theology's ad hoc speculations in lots of different religions cost lots and lots of lives and lots of lost time chasing after theological spooks.
You can always play the contrarian, Brad, niggling about the semantics of "seamlessly," but as I said modern evolutionary theory seamlessly integrates with the findings of the rest of science.
Brad,
It all fits together as one would expect it to if it were true, like gravity or atomic theory. Sure, it would be nice, at least conceptually, if every fossil came with unique model and serial numbers with lineages clearly indicated, but even as imperfect as the fossil record is, all by itself, it demonstrates that evolution is a fact. So does molecular genetics, independent of the fossil record.
When we find something puzzling about these ideas should we ask Vishnu how to resolve it? No? Is that because we agree that Vishnu isn't real and insights attributed to it are unreliable? Well, the same holds true for all of mankinds other gods, past and present. Vishnu is a social construct just as Yahweh and beelzebub are social constructs.
Brad, if "nuance and controversy" were sufficient to reject claims then all religion would be gone, indeed, all human endeavors would go. What you appear to be doing is looking for reasons not to accept scientific outcomes so your non-acceptance allows you to construe your religious ideas in a more favorable light. You're not alone in that regard. You go the other way in your religious pursuits, right? You accept your religion and apologize for it as though it were true, even though you have nothing more than the same social construct the Hindus have to support it. You would completely reject applying the same "nuance and controversy" standard to your religion.
I can't speak for John, Brad, but for me I'll go for what has shown itself to be capable of saving your child's life every time over some religion's "ad hoc speculations." You would do the same, but, then, as dictated by your social group you would attribute the outcome to something otherworldly. Like all of us humans, John is trying to make sense of things. You seem to fault him, and the rest of us atheists, for doing it our way and for rejecting your religion just as most of the rest of humanity rejects it. Many among them are thoughtful religious scholars who take these things seriously, but do not find the arguments or evidence for Christianity any more convincing than we do. I don't speak for John, but I'll throw in with the proven record of science. Different religions say different things and none give valuable insight to the natural world. They say differing things about the supernatural as well, so there's no reason to assume they've got that unverifiable stuff any more correct than their error-riddled takes on the natural world.
I'm sure you're right that you and I have had different religious experiences. I see the religious arrogance everywhere in the religious world. I saw it as a kid and it hasn't lessened one iota.
Brad, you said to Chuck,
Then, whatever theory of biological origins has the most merit will win out.
This is not true. Given a choice between the consistent reliability of science or a parent's affection, support and protection - and, yes, those are the stakes many young people are made to play for - most must opt to remain in their parent's good graces. Merit in the child eyes is the merit of coercive social tactics. One is "better" only in the short term sense of losing less.
Evolution has proven itself to be a reliable scientific theory, in the sense of being so well supported by the evidence that it can be accepted as fact. An explanatory model deserving to be esteemed with the moniker "theory" in science is unlikely to be overturned by new evidence under the same conditions. Religion is nothing like that. Religion is a theory only in the colloquial sense of hunch or guess or conjecture. Nature is the standard for science, but religion has no standard for correctness, and living life out as a Muslim or Hindu has no disadvantages relative to living life out as a Christian.
Russ said,
"...religion has no standard for correctness, and living life out as a Muslim or Hindu has no disadvantages relative to living life out as a Christian."
Unless, as in some religions, you must wear a burka depending on which glands are between your legs...
Ildi:
Ok, so how do you envision the soul fitting in? (I'm assuming you believe in an eternal incorporeal spirit that is the essence of a person.) At what point did humans evolve enough to get souls, or do all animate beings have souls?
Animals are biochemical machines. No vitalistic force needed. An immaterial component of the mind is needed to explain human rationality.
See, for example,
Victor Reppert, The argument from reason:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/victor_reppert/reason.html
C.S. Lewis, The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism:
http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/Intro/csl3.html
Al Moritz said: Animals are biochemical machines. No vitalistic force needed. An immaterial component of the mind is needed to explain human rationality.
That doesn't really answer my question. When do humans evolve from being biochemical machines to developing this immaterial component of the mind? What triggers the development of this immaterial component? Why is it even necessary to postulate an immaterial component (C.S Lewis notwithstanding) when neuroscientists are going with the working hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent property of an increasingly complex brain?
Brad,
I'm saying that when John says "science shows us that God did not create the universe" or "the universe tunneled in from another universe" or "science has shown that we are all completely conditioned" that he is misrepresenting the actual science. Stenger and Hawking and Myers and Spong are his new authorities, not the more fluid and diverse scientific community.
I don't think John has said that God did not create the universe though, and neither have Stenger, Myers, Spong, or Hawking. Even in Hawking's case, if you look past the recent headlines that misrepresent him, he says that the universe didn't need God to create it. And that's a position that I agree with. At most, I would say that the science we have right now does not give us any reason to think that the universe needed a supernatural being to get things going. That's a subtle difference maybe, but a significant one in my opinion.
As for the "psychological conditioning" bit, I think the evidence for that is much stronger, highly plausible, and good enough to raise serious questions about the origins of religions, and probably falsifies religion in general. Even in this case though, I don't think the issue of the role that human psychology plays is completely settled.
I will say though, that even if we really can falsify religion from our understanding of psychology, it doesn't eliminate cosmological arguments such as Al's from consideration.
As for labels, Brad. I don't really believe in them, but I do think you've kind of shown yourself to be out of your league when it comes to interpreting what science is telling us. You recognize, correctly, that it is usually a lot more subtle than it appears, but you don't seem to recognize that the positions that we atheists hold are equally nuanced and complex as a result of the subtleties of the science and philosophy that we use to draw our conclusions from. Your comment about John trading one authority for another is a case in point... I don't think that's really what is going on there, certainly not as simplistically as you make it out to be.
Ildi:
That doesn't really answer my question. When do humans evolve from being biochemical machines to developing this immaterial component of the mind? What triggers the development of this immaterial component?
Something non-physical cannot evolve. The immaterial component of the mind (the 'soul') is a special creation by God. There is nothing to 'trigger' it. Certainly, evolution needed to provide a material substrate (the brain) suitable enough for a soul to be effective.
Why is it even necessary to postulate an immaterial component (C.S Lewis notwithstanding) when neuroscientists are going with the working hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent property of an increasingly complex brain?
I don't care that much about what consciousness is. It might as well be explained by a non-reductive physicalism, for what it's worth, and I would not be surprised if one day it will.
The argument from reason stands apart from the issue of consciousness. It says that rationality is not possible under physical determinism (quantum randomness on the local level does not help here either). You should study the sources I gave you to see what it is about.
As the philosopher Schopenhauer put it nicely:
"Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself."
Al Moritz: Something non-physical cannot evolve. The immaterial component of the mind (the 'soul') is a special creation by God. There is nothing to 'trigger' it. Certainly, evolution needed to provide a material substrate (the brain) suitable enough for a soul to be effective.
Okay... so you're saying any animal with a brain has a soul? If not all animals, when did the brain evolve enough to be suitable? Neanderthals? When humans formed tribes? Tamed fire? Developed writing? As a scientist, why do you think that there is an immaterial component to the human mind, given that you have no problem accepting the naturalistic explanation for abiogenesis and evolution?
You should study the sources I gave you to see what it [argument from reason] is about.
I did, and I also read Carrier's review. In particular, these comments stood out:
Likewise, cognitive science has produced many findings that lead to many plausible solutions to the problems he presents, yet Reppert's discourse often betrays no awareness of this data—for example, the fact that brains compute virtual simulations of their environment, that the experience of a unified consciousness is a post hoc event, that many forms of ordinary computation are employed in the brains even of lower animals (for example, the way visual data is computed into a visual field) and that these systems are evolutionarily related to those computational systems associated now with language and reason, and so on.
and
All such arguments stem from a complete ignorance of the scientific literature on the evolution of logical and mathematical thinking in living systems, which explains, with ample proof, how and why we think like we do, and why we are able to correct ourselves when our brain makes a mistake. Indeed, I have never seen any proponent of any form of the Argument from Reason ever cite, mention, address, or even show an awareness of this literature.[4] Nash is no exception. He thinks that a fifty-year-old Christian apologist (C.S. Lewis) can be used to the complete exclusion of all scientific literature on the subject since. It is so very typical of apologists to act as if antiquated Christian rhetoric can be substituted for solid, current, scientific research, on what is clearly a scientific question.
If computers are eventually constructed with sufficiently sophisticated 'brains' to develop a human-like self-awareness and rationality, does that mean that computers, also, will have souls, or is does this substrate have to be organic? If so, why?
Al Moritz: Something non-physical cannot evolve. The immaterial component of the mind (the 'soul') is a special creation by God. There is nothing to 'trigger' it. Certainly, evolution needed to provide a material substrate (the brain) suitable enough for a soul to be effective.
Okay... so you're saying any animal with a brain has a soul? If not all animals, when did the brain evolve enough to be suitable? Neanderthals? When humans formed tribes? Tamed fire? Developed writing? As a scientist, why do you think that there is an immaterial component to the human mind, given that you have no problem accepting the naturalistic explanation for abiogenesis and evolution?
(cont)
You should study the sources I gave you to see what it [argument from reason] is about.
I did, and I also read Carrier's review. In particular, these stood out:
Likewise, cognitive science has produced many findings that lead to many plausible solutions to the problems he presents, yet Reppert's discourse often betrays no awareness of this data—for example, the fact that brains compute virtual simulations of their environment, that the experience of a unified consciousness is a post hoc event, that many forms of ordinary computation are employed in the brains even of lower animals (for example, the way visual data is computed into a visual field) and that these systems are evolutionarily related to those computational systems associated now with language and reason, and so on.
and
All such arguments stem from a complete ignorance of the scientific literature on the evolution of logical and mathematical thinking in living systems, which explains, with ample proof, how and why we think like we do, and why we are able to correct ourselves when our brain makes a mistake. Indeed, I have never seen any proponent of any form of the Argument from Reason ever cite, mention, address, or even show an awareness of this literature.[4] Nash is no exception. He thinks that a fifty-year-old Christian apologist (C.S. Lewis) can be used to the complete exclusion of all scientific literature on the subject since. It is so very typical of apologists to act as if antiquated Christian rhetoric can be substituted for solid, current, scientific research, on what is clearly a scientific question.
If computers are eventually constructed with sufficiently sophisticated 'brains' to develop a human-like self-awareness and rationality, does that mean that computers, also, will have souls, or is does this substrate have to be organic? If so, why?
Hi Al,
I think I may have known Victor Reppert longer than Carrier. Vic read my book Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists (originally published 1995, and contacted me a few years after that). He even sent me an advance copy of his Argument from Reason, and some lecture notes on theistic arguments to obtain comments from me. And I've been reading his blog for years.
Vic also acknowledges that not all Christians are dualists like himself. In fact there's several Christian physicalists when it comes to the brain-mind question. On the other hand, Vic also mentioned to me an atheist who was a dualist. So does philosophy really succeed in proving all that it sets out to prove? Apparently no universal proofs exist, and multiple viewpoints continue to be argued.
My own contra-AFR argument can be found here:
C. S. Lewis and the Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism
C. S. LEWIS’S “Argument From Reason,” vs. Christians Who Reject Mind-Body Dualism and Accept the Possibility of Artificial Intelligence, Even “Born Again” Machines!
Hi Al Moritz,
Lewis' argument concerning the "cardinal difficulty of naturalism" is this:
"A strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given by Professor Haldane: 'If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.'" (from chapter three of MIRACLES)
Such an argument appears coherent, but is faulty. It concentrates only on atoms and human thought and leaves out every category in between about which we know so little!
For instance, what if mental processes are _not_ determined "wholly" by the motion of individual "atoms" in our brains? Would that leave supernaturalism as the only alternative? What if the brain's overall dynamics naturally "took control" of the motions of individual "atoms" within a larger dynamic flow? Or consider the way all the atoms in our bodies are configured very differently than those same atoms in rocks or air and water, and hence, the body's overall dynamic functioning is very different from that of inanimate matter. But that doesn't mean our livers, kidneys and hearts function "supernaturally."
According to Roger Sperry, psychobiologist and well known philosopher of brain science, "Recall that a molecule in many respects is the master of its inner atoms and electrons. The latter are hauled and forced about in chemical interactions by the over-all configurational properties of the whole molecule. At the same time, if our given molecule is itself part of a single-celled organism such as a paramecium, it in turn is obliged, with all its parts and its partners, to follow along a trail of events in time and space determined largely by the extrinsic over-all dynamics of that paramecium. When it comes to brains, remember that the simpler electric,atomic, molecular, and cellular forces and laws, though still present and operating, have been superseded by the configurational forces of higher-level mechanisms. At the top, in the human brain, these include the powers of perception, cognition, reason, judgment, and the like, the operational, causal effects and forces of which are equally or more potent in brain dynamics than are the outclassed inner chemical forces...
"We deal instead with a sequence of conscious or subconscious processes that have their own higher laws and dynamics...that move their neuronal details in much the way different program images on a TV receiver determine the pattern of electron flow on the screen...
"And the molecules of higher living things are... flown... galloped... swung... propelled... mostly by specific holistic, and also mental properties--aims, wants, needs--possessed by the organisms in question. Once evolved, the higher laws and forces exert a downward control over the lower.
"This does not mean these (higher forces) are supernatural. Those who conceived of vital forces in supernatural terms were just as wrong as those who denied the existence of such forces. In any living of nonliving thing, the spacing and timing of the material elements of which it is composed make all the difference in determining what a thing is.
"As an example, take a population of copper molecules. You can shape them into a sphere, a pyramid, a long wire, a statue, whatever. All these very different things still reduce to the same material elements, the same identical population of copper molecules. Science has specific laws for the molecules by no such laws for all the differential spacing and timing factors, the nonmaterial pattern or form factors that are crucial in determining what things are and what laws they obey. These nonmaterial space-time components tend to be thrown out and lost in the reduction process as science aims toward ever more elementary levels of explanation."
CONTINUE FROM ABOVE
One might add that taking simple elements found in rocks and arranging them into just the right configurations can lead to the production of not just another rock, but a computer (perhaps even a "quantum computer" one day).
Hence, Sperry's naturalism does not appear to pose any "cardinal difficulties" for itself.
Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of computer science, notes in a similar vein, "Even if we understood how each of our billions of brain cells work separately, this would not tell us how the brain works as an agency. The 'laws of thought' depend not only upon the properties of those brain cells, but also on how they are connected. And these connections are established not by the basic, 'general' laws of physics, but by the particular arrangements of the millions of bits of information in our inherited genes. To be sure, 'general' laws apply to everything. But, for that very reason, they can rarely explain anything in particular...
"It is not a matter of _different_ laws, but of _additional_ kinds of theories and principles that operate at higher levels of organization... Each higher level of description must _add_ to our knowledge about lower levels, rather than replace it."
And contrary to Lewis' claim that "[Naturalism] leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking depends," cognitive scientists have clearly demonstrated the validity of positing a level of mental representation. They study "perceptual apparatus, mechanisms of learning, problem solving, classification, memory, and rationality... The conjecture about the various vehicles of knowledge: what is a form, an image, a concept, a word; and how do these 'modes of representation' relate to one another... They reflect on language, noting the power and traps entailed in the use of words... Proceeding well beyond armchair speculation, cognitive scientists are fully wedded to the use of empirical methods for testing their theories and hypotheses... Their guiding questions are not just a rehash of the Greek philosophical agenda: new disciplines have arisen; and new questions, like the potential of man-made devices to think, stimulate research.
"Given the most optimistic scenario for the future of cognitive science, we still cannot reasonably expect an explanation of mind which lays to rest all extant scientific and epistemological problems. Still, I believe that distinct progress has been made on the age-old issues that exercised... Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Darwin." After all, "If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."
For more see
C. S. Lewis and the Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism
C. S. LEWIS’S “Argument From Reason,” vs. Christians Who Reject Mind-Body Dualism and Accept the Possibility of Artificial Intelligence, Even “Born Again” Machines!
Ildi,
Okay... so you're saying any animal with a brain has a soul?
Apparently you haven't read my posts carefully. I clearly said "animals are biochemical machines", and I contrasted this with human rationality. From this you can answer yourself if I think that any animal with a brain has a soul.
As a scientist, why do you think that there is an immaterial component to the human mind, given that you have no problem accepting the naturalistic explanation for abiogenesis and evolution?
Because, as I clearly said, the argument from reason states that rationality is not possible under physical determinism.
(And if that is correct, any findings in neuroscience cannot shed light on the issue; Carriers facile dismissal of Lewis as fifty-year old apologist is irrelevant.)
I did, and I also read Carrier's review.
If you think that Carrier refutes the argument, you haven't read Lewis very carefully.
Here is a good response to Carrier:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/darek_barefoot/dangerous.html
If computers are eventually constructed with sufficiently sophisticated 'brains' to develop a human-like self-awareness and rationality, does that mean that computers, also, will have souls,
Of course not. Computers cannot develop rationality if the argument from reason is correct. Again it states: rationality is not possible under physical determinism.
Referring to computers as an example of matter capable of exhibiting ‘objective thought’ is not a valid argument. The functioning of computers is dependent on human rationality –- even if they are induced to 'learn' and in the process to create output 'on their own' –- since they are programmed by humans according to the rules of logic and reason that these apply. Instead of being programmed to calculate 9 x 7 = 63, a computer could just as easily be programmed to calculate 9 x 7 = 126 –- also obeying the laws of physics.
Edward, I will carefully read your arguments.
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE
Al,
Think of it this way, there are all sorts of amazing behaviors in nature, even slime molds seem to learn and exhibit patterns of behavior based on past experience (I am thinking of one experiment in particular, mentioned over on a blog titled, The Loom, by an editor of Discover Mag.) And amoeba can detect swimming prey, and even corner it via pseudopodia spread out to trap it. How does it "know" what it "knows?" It has no brain nor specific sense organs. But multi-cellular animals have both a brain, and sense organs, and longer memories, and can apparently juggle thoughts of different sorts, from fish to amphibians, reptiles, mammals, primates, and finally humans. We store tons of information in our brains and constantly compare that information with previous information. This information is in the form of sensory input. So we are not speaking about atoms but complex patterns of sensations stored in the brain-mind system. None of this seems supernatural. In fact, if you cut off the feedback loop of any such system via putting it in a state of sensory deprivation, the brain will start hallucinating, forming its own reality, and eventually even madness will set in. So it's a natural feedback system.
Al, Citing what I said about above amoeba, consider that the amoeba can do all that sensing and trapping without a brain nor complex sensory organs, and it's just a single cell. While the human brain contains 100 billion cells (neurons) with 1000 trillion synaptic connections between them all, not to mention non-neuronal cells that they are discovering also play a role. If a single-celled amoeba can do some of the amazing things it does, it doesn't surprise me that the human brain can do as much as it does.
But on the other hand, even if the mind is physically dependent, that doesn't necessarily mean naturalism has to be true, as physicalist theistic philosophers point out.
And as an agnostic I'd add that I simply don't know what's going on. There's so many weird experiences that I've heard from people first hand, or read about, experiences that people of all religions or none have had, that all I can say for sure is that taken together, they don't point unerringly in the direction of "Christianity" being the one true religion. I also know of the clinical evidence concerning the frequency of such things as audio hallucinations, visual hallucinations, visions, scientific explanations for Out of Body and Near Death Experiences, such that again, I tend toward the naturalistic side of things since I have studied it, and since I have not experienced any of the things others claim to have experienced, and since such experiences seem quite varied and mixed up. Unless of course you ONLY heard about or read about "Evangelical Christian" experiences, in which case I would suggest reading further, because there are Catholic miracles galore one could read about, and miracles in odd small sects, and miracles in the Hindu and Islamic worlds, and even the most outrageous coincidences in life and history in general.
I think it's interesting, Al, that you are comfortable with saying evolution explains life very well, and in fact the convergence of data from completely unrelated disciplines, paleontology, comparative biology and genetics is what makes evolution one of the best tested theories in all of science but uncomfortable with all the developments in the cognitive and neurosciences that make an immaterial mind, well, immaterial, and instead turn to a half-baked philosophical argument for support. Human brains are analogous to highly sophisticated computers that have been programmed by evolutionary processes. These processes are 'rational' because they were successful maintaining the survival of our species.
I read your answers very carefully, and you were just as careful not to pin-point that magic moment in the evolutionary process when the non-interventionist deity who fine-tuned the universe decided to get involved again and switched primates from 'biochemical machines' to 'rational humans with immaterial minds'.
@ ildi:
I noticed Al's equivocation, too...
Steven,
I recognize that Hawking is merely putting forth his model (along with some, well, interesting philosophy), and that the headlines are more sensationalistic. I imagine you are more guarded in your scientific conclusions, too.
However, just to show that I'm not spouting off, I wanted to show that John really does say the things I attributed to him. He accepts Stenger's speculation that the universe tunneled in from another universe as "brute fact" late in his debate with David Wood here. He takes Spong as a theological authority without much scrutiny, as evidenced here. He generalizes findings from neuro-science to support his OTF here. And this is all part of his strategy.
Also, Stenger thinks that two prayer studies are enough to prove that God doesn't exist, look up his show on the Unbelievable? podcast.
I'm not accusing you of this, but I see this over and over here.
ldi:
I think it's interesting, Al, that you are comfortable with saying evolution explains life very well, and in fact the convergence of data from completely unrelated disciplines, paleontology, comparative biology and genetics is what makes evolution one of the best tested theories in all of science, but uncomfortable with all the developments in the cognitive and neurosciences that make an immaterial mind, well, immaterial, and instead turn to a half-baked philosophical argument for support.
I am not uncomfortable at all with the developments in the cognitive and neurosciences. They simply have no bearing on the issues at hand.
Human brains are analogous to highly sophisticated computers that have been programmed by evolutionary processes. These processes are 'rational' because they were successful maintaining the survival of our species.
Your argument sounds plausible on the surface, but it is riddled with difficulties.
Let's suppose you want to defend the position that naturalism is true. Evolution is of no help here to arrive at the truth. Evolution selects only for behavior, not for correctness of beliefs. When evolutionary scientists claim that religion was selected for its behavioral survival advantage, they in fact concede, if they adhere to a naturalistic worldview, that evolution can indirectly select for an allegedly false belief. So there is no use saying that evolution probably has reliably endowed us with the ability that we ought to see that naturalism — an exceedingly abstract concept far beyond everyday sensory experiences — is true, and therefore we ‘ought’ to see the truth of naturalism even under determinism.
Certainly you might still claim that evolution has endowed the human brain with basic and universal logical circuitry that reliably can decide “if we just give the issues some thought”. However, even if evolution could accomplish that (which is highly debatable), the evidence for or against naturalism is not a matter of simple logic, but that of careful weighing of (giving weight to) arguments pro and con, and this has nothing to do with basic circuitry that might have been induced by evolution. So there cannot be an evolutionary ‘ought’ on this issue after all.
So how then can you reliably claim that naturalism is true and its acceptance rational? You considered the evidence, you will reply. Fine. But under naturalism the brain determines how to interpret the evidence -- you have no say in that. So your brain determined that naturalism is true, and mine determined, considering the evidence as well, that naturalism is not true. So which brain is right? Under naturalism you cannot decide that, so *under naturalism* the claim that naturalism is true becomes self-contradictory. Naturalism defeats itself.
You can only claim to reliably know that something is true if you can freely accept that it is true, thus if you are not completely at the mercy of the firing of neurons in your brain. But this requires abandonment of determinism, which is not possible under naturalism.
***
Certainly, in many cases evolution has selected for survival behavior that is 'rational'. However, the above example shows the difficulties with a general evolutionary explanation.
Also, what in particular does the inherent capacity for abstract and objective reasoning in mathematics and science, which deals with the deeper, non-obvious layers of how things are, have to do with survival in the wild? To claim that evolution has selected for that is preposterous. Even an atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel, writes in his excellent book The Last Word, a convincing defense of objectivity of rational thought, that an evolutionary explanation of the human mind is "laughably inadequate" (his words, not mine) and he points out that the existence of rationality provides a vexing challenge to naturalism.
I am not uncomfortable at all with the developments in the cognitive and neurosciences. They simply have no bearing on the issues at hand.
Really? You might find this recent opinion piece called Divided Minds, Specious Souls from September 21 in Seed Magazine enlightening: (I tried to put in a linky, but the evil html-god tells me I can't start with http:)
There is a common idea: because the mind seems unified, it really is. Many go only a bit further and call that unified mind a “soul.” This step, from self to soul, is an ancient assumption which now forms a bedrock in many religions: a basis for life after death, for religious morality, and a little god within us, a support for a bigger God outside us.
For the believers in the soul, let’s call them soulists, the soul assumption appears to be only the smallest of steps from the existence of a unified mind. Yet the soul is a claim for which there isn’t any evidence. Today, there isn’t even evidence for that place soulists step off from, the unified mind. Neurology and neuroscience, working unseen over the past century, have eroded these ideas, the soul and the unified mind, down to nothing. Experiences certainly do feel unified, but to accept these feelings as reality is a mistake. Often, the way things feel has nothing to do with how they are.
(cont.)
You say: Also, what in particular does the inherent capacity for abstract and objective reasoning in mathematics and science, which deals with the deeper, non-obvious layers of how things are, have to do with survival in the wild?
For one, it gives the species the ability to control its environment rather than being at the mercy of it, which allows you to inhabit a wider range of ecological niches.
I notice you keep citing philosophers' opinions on this topic; I hate to break it to you, but I don't find philosophical navel-gazing to have any bearing on the issues at hand. (oooh, snap!)
Still waiting for you to explain at what moment primates go from animal to divine...
Neuroscience
ok, this link worked; I'm not sure why I can't link to the Seed Magazine article...
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/from_divided_minds_a_specious_soul/
Here's a link to the article in Seed Magazine:
Divided Minds, Specious Souls
@ Al:
Read this if you think Plantinga's EAAN has any merit.
Al,
You said,
So in fact the very existence of evolution is an argument for God.
Let be guess. The very existence of evolution is an argument for the god you like. Am I right? The very existence of evolution is an argument for the god that is favored by your supportive social group. More than a thousand gods are worshipped by people today and the things you claim for big G, God, can be said for the others with the same sound theo-philosophical justifications. The same claims could be made for the god I just invented called Toby. Your preferred god is not more real than Toby. I can attribute anything to Toby including her having created the cosmos and all within it. Your god is no more real than Toby; it simply has lots of people pouring lots of money into sustaining it as a social construct. Toby has not yet acheived the Bingo, Vegas Night, Potluck and All-You-Can-Eat Fish dinner critical mass, but she does all the things your god does and more: Toby created your god and all the others. Since Toby is not real and not accountable in any way, but the ways that confirm my Toby-believing biases, like you with your big G, God, I can ascribe any claim to her I wish.
Silly that, eh? So are all the Christian and other versions and variations on the god concept.
You might want to reason that since most people over recorded human history have had their version of a god, Toby, that that means humanity merrily evolved along completely naturalistic lines, even to the point of having only a few genetic variations from our great apes cousins, until your god, my Toby, grafted in a suite of genes for detecting messages, like revelations, from the supernatural. If that's the case you would be neglecting the fact that gods, especially your god, but not my Toby, tell their various believers conflicting things. You would be overlooking that the common denominator is not something otherworldly, but the mind of man itself. Thereby, you would miss the simple explanation for why the gods contradict themselves and each other: gods are products of the human creative propensity for assigning minds and intentionality to almost everything around them.
It's plainly silly for one to think there to be one particular god, Yahweh, communicating so many tragically different messages among the Judaisms, Islams and Christianities. But, it makes perfect sense when gods are seen in the proper context of emanating from the human attempts to creatively make sense of their place in the world and the cosmos. Different minds with different information, understandings and contexts, invent different gods to embroider some coherency into an otherwise chaotic tapestry. Your version of a god makes sense in the same way in this context.
In terms of accruing followers, any advantages your version of a Christian god might have over other gods have always been the result of power, not truth. They can't all be true; they can all be wrong. Nothing in Christian mythology shows itself to be anything more than a human invention. Christian mythology is funny and Christian mythology is bizarre because useful and plausible natural explanations don't stick in the marketplace of easily remembered images, while hilarious, outrageous, and freakish are often nearly unforgettable.
Al,
When you try to justify your version of a god - your Christianity's variant of one - by suggesting that your god's necessity can be seen where the capabilities of naturalism run out, you run into problems. For one thing, you are claiming our current lack of understanding in certain areas allows you to define the limits of naturalism, but the extant ignorance of the day has never been an unsurpassable boundary for naturalism. In another sense you are telling us that you know everything naturalism can do, so you think yourself to be equipped to know specific things, like consciousness and reason, that are impossible through naturalistic processes.
Al, your version of religion is in no way privileged over others and is no more true. Other religions, including Christianities other than yours, see naturalism as quite different from how you would wish it to be. Some see naturalism as all there is, no interventionist god at all. Some see naturalism as having no role in the affairs of man or cosmos at all, their version of a god guides every quark, neutrino, proton, atom, molecule, biomacromolecule and neuron as it sees fit. There is no reason for us to esteem your particular religious contortion above any others, including those giving gods no part in the play.
I noticed you sail for the deep murky waters of philosophy where you can kick naturalism overboard then hold it under until it stops struggling. You afford philosophy more power than it inherently posesses. Philosophy, accompanied by it's severely mentally handicapped child, theology, can't possibly resolve the contradictions between humankind's religious assertions, and toghether, Phil and Theo, are even worse off when they weigh in on the natural world. A single empircal result can wipe out centuries of philosophy informed by gods and perpetuated by the divinely inspired clergy. Sorry, but planetary orbits are not circles no matter how theologically or philosophically sound round orbits are. The world's not flat. Demons do not cause disease despite the full backing of the idea by the ignorance of the Roman Catholic edifice. William Paley's Watchmaker argument is a good read, but it's still wrong. Philosophy doesn't answer our questions. Philosophy as discussion and debate can help us to clarify the questions we want to ask, the directions we might choose to take. Philosophy can show us how to deductively reason from premises to logically valid conclusions, but can that same philosophy convince you, as it does Hindu philosophers and theologians, that your Christianity starts out with the wrong premises? I truly doubt that you would afford philosophy the power or even the right to convince you that the version of Christianity practiced amongst you and your religious peers is in error.
You weaponize philosophy, Al. You train all the latest destructive technology philosophy can muster on your despised target then fire it off. You arm it with the power to unjustifiably destroy naturalism, and the power to unjustifiably tell every child having parents from other traditions, religious or not, that their mother and father are wrong. You are right. Philosophy tells you so. Everyone else is wrong. Philosophy tells you that, too. Your addled theology gives you conclusions that you are free to defend with the armaments of philosophy, but you carefully avoid having the same big guns turned on you.
Al,
Your willingness to abuse philosophy to your own ends becomes obvious when you quote-mine Nagel and when you try to disingenuously set him up as a powerful authority figure by calling him "an atheist philosopher." Here you want his atheism to make him worthy of a false respect. In your quote-mining, you set up your desired context, which the general reader here cannot easily verify, then you stick in a quoted descriptor from Nagel which denigrates evolution to your satisfaction. Nagel is not saying that evolutionary mechanisms are known to be insufficient to explain the human mind. If he actually thought that gods were needed to explain human minds then he'd not be an atheist, would he. You use is as such but Nagel wasn't adding to your ammunition stockpile. Nagel is, of course, right about evolutionary explanations. Given the complexity of the evolutionary pathway from single-celled life around 4 billion years ago to the advent of the self-awareness and human cognitive abilities we have today, our current evolutionary explanations are "laughably inadequate." He could have said the same thing concerning evolutionary explanations of photosynthesis or any of the metabolic pathways we share with the rest of the living world. Evolutionary explanations of those, too, are "laughably inadequate." We do not know exactly how photosynthesis arose and any evolutionary explanation coming this late in the game is bound to be "laughably inadequate" if knowing it to be correct is the standard. You like his "laughably inadequate" descriptor for your purposes here, but you would likely rearm your philosophy brigade and slap Nagel with the "laughably inadequate" label, just as Kenneth Miller does, for his view that intelligent design creationism is science.
Apologetics is apologetics, Al. For those of us who've been in the slaughterhouses where it's made one version of it is usually no more appetizing than another. Some of it is seasoned to taste less bad than others. Some of it is prepared under cleaner, less filthy conditions. But, inside it's all made of the same stuff. Sadly, where apologetics is made, reality is the first thing to take a bullet, the first thing sacrificed.
GearHedEd: What propitiatory offering did you have to make to the html-god?
I said:
I am not uncomfortable at all with the developments in the cognitive and neurosciences. They simply have no bearing on the issues at hand.
Ildi replied:
Really? You might find this recent opinion piece called Divided Minds, Specious Souls from September 21 in Seed Magazine enlightening: (I tried to put in a linky, but the evil html-god tells me I can't start with http:)
I have read it and it contains nothing in principle new to me. Of course the human mind is dependent on the brain as an instrument (no serious and informed dualist would tell you otherwise). If the brain is impaired in its function, then the mind is impaired as well. As for the "self", I already said that I would have no problem if consciousness would be explained by some non-reductive physicalism, and perhaps it will.
Science is just describing in detail what had been known for a long time. Already in the 13th(!) century Thomas Aquinas had known that the mind is dependent on the brain, and that mental activity correlates with brain activity. And he came to that conclusion from, guess what, observing people with brain damage. Nothing shocking here.
I notice you keep citing philosophers' opinions on this topic; I hate to break it to you, but I don't find philosophical navel-gazing to have any bearing on the issues at hand. (oooh, snap!)
So please answer my challenge above, how you can rationally hold that naturalism is true. Hint: please don't answer me with evolutionary arguments that I have already refuted.
Still waiting for you to explain at what moment primates go from animal to divine...
I don't think you seriously can expect me to answer that, given that our knowledge of human evolutionary history is still rudimentary.
Al,
Your willingness to abuse philosophy to your own ends becomes obvious when you quote-mine Nagel
Russ, how can you claim that I have quote-mined Nagel? Have you read the book?
In your quote-mining, you set up your desired context, which the general reader here cannot easily verify, then you stick in a quoted descriptor from Nagel which denigrates evolution to your satisfaction. Nagel is not saying that evolutionary mechanisms are known to be insufficient to explain the human mind.
Have you read the book? And have you read his other book "The View from Nowhere" where he expands on his ideas?
If he actually thought that gods were needed to explain human minds then he'd not be an atheist, would he.
He says that the religious explanation is a rational one, but that he does not want to believe in a God and there must be some other explanation.
Nagel is, of course, right about evolutionary explanations. Given the complexity of the evolutionary pathway from single-celled life around 4 billion years ago to the advent of the self-awareness and human cognitive abilities we have today, our current evolutionary explanations are "laughably inadequate." He could have said the same thing concerning evolutionary explanations of photosynthesis or any of the metabolic pathways we share with the rest of the living world. Evolutionary explanations of those, too, are "laughably inadequate." We do not know exactly how photosynthesis arose and any evolutionary explanation coming this late in the game is bound to be "laughably inadequate" if knowing it to be correct is the standard.
This is clearly not the way Nagel meant what he said. Have you read the book? Why don't you read the book instead of theorizing about Nagel's opinions which you know nothing about?
Not sure, ildi...
I tried the 'un-linked' link you posted, and it took me to a defective page; then I tried another tack, found the article and linked it in the usual manner.
Who knew?
Al,
If you have the quote before you and yet choose only two words from it to fill in a blank of your own making, that is quote-mining.
I have read it, both versions, but no one would need to read it to see that you are using the man's words in a way he never intended to lend plausibility to your supernaturalism. Can you tell me where Nagel says that the explanation for mind will be supernatural? I've never seen it. You're suggesting that since he criticizes the explanatory power of evolutionary mechanisms that he makes your supernatural claims more likely. That's hogwash.
Evolution is not evidence for a god as you claim and Nagel does not support that premise. You're quote-mining and abusing philosophy.
Saying that a religious explanation is a rational one does not mean it's correct. The religious explanation for mind has no content. One could attribute human mind to you, Al, and have more content. Saying a god did it is not an explanation. Stating your religious opinion is not an explanation. If you could tell us how your god did it in a way that we could reproduce it, then we'd be on to something.
Al, think through what you said here:
He says that the religious explanation is a rational one, but that he does not want to believe in a God and there must be some other explanation.
Rational does not mean correct. Video games are rationally constructed, as are novels, movies, and stage plays. Their rationality does not make them "correct." Do you think from what you've said here that he's telling you the answer lies in a realm that is neither natural nor supernatural? If rationality was all it took to make things "true," then Islam is true; Star Trek is true; Ice Nine is true; and, Zeus and Thor truly existed. "True" and "correct" require more than mere rationality.
I agreed with Nagel's "laughably inadequate," but I gave my reason it was "laughably inadequate," not Nagel's. I did not attribute that reason to him like you abuse his words in service to your religious intentions. There are many religious types who latch onto "The Last Word" for the same reason you do: it's authored by a non-believer who you can construe to be supporting your theism. If he thought that theism is where his arguments took him, he'd have said so. You are dealing with his material unfairly.
Again, Al, your religion is nothing special and that is underscored in part by your willingness or need to defend it with arguments which would support other contradictory forms of thiesm including my Tobyism. Your religious views are not supported by Nagel's opinions. If it were the case that we could see that "The Last Word" was the last word on the issue, that is, that it carried weight other than Nagel's credentials, and that it could lead us to a strategy for research, then maybe we could afford it more respect. As it stands it is simply an esteemed man's thoughts to which you give too much respect, but then the religious give more respect still to old fairy tales.
Al,
Nagel is a philosopher largely detached from the mechanics of the world. You have far more scientific expertise than he has and if you read enough of his work you realize that in his Philosophy of Science, he's long on the philosophy part and quite short on the science. Philosophy is not science and philosophy of science is not science. Just as religion is divorced from the real world and not accountable, so too is philosophy. Their tools are premises which are not required to correspond to the world. Philosophers of religion crank out lots of new gods simply by adjusting premises. That doesn't mean any gods are real. Philosophers and theologians just knew that the materials composing living organisms was different from that in non-living matter. It was philosophically sweet and nice and pretty, and it said all the things they wanted to hear themselves say. But it was wrong. It was all rational and well-reasoned, but it was wrong. Bloodletting made a lot of sense based on its premises, but it was wrong.
I respect Nagel enough to give his arguments due consideration, but I also respect him enough not to misread and misquote him to make a point. Nagel doesn't believe there is a god or that he is one or that his arguments lead one away from the natural world.
You said,
So in fact the very existence of evolution is an argument for God.
You are wrong. Greasing up your arguments with philosophy to make them nice and slippery does not make them true. If your religion or any of the other thousands of today's religions were true we all be able to tell. Your religion isn't true. You just have a lot of people backing each other up in a bad idea.
Russ,
If you have the quote before you and yet choose only two words from it to fill in a blank of your own making, that is quote-mining.
Wrong, that is not what I did. Those two words accurately reflect Nagel's opinion -- and in context. Quote-mining means taking snippets deliberately out of context.
Wikipedia:
Quote-mining is the practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.
Russ said,
"... If rationality was all it took to make things "true," then Islam is true; Star Trek is true; Ice Nine is true; and, Zeus and Thor truly existed. "True" and "correct" require more than mere rationality."
If I ever had any doubts, they are gone forever:
No one who is a fan of Vonnegut is or can be "bad" in my humble opinion.
Hey GearHedEd,
My wife has been looking over some of the threads and she thought your list of things you have to stretch to accept right on the money. I don't recall which thread it was on. As she sat reading them she kept muttering under her breath, "Yep. Uh, huh." She really enjoyed it.
When I was at Dow in the 70's, a friend of mine had a house on Torch Lake. The neighboring vacation home belonged to the creator of ice-nine and Montana Wildhack, and Kilgore Trout - Kurt Vonnegut himself.
Russ,
It wasn't originally my list; it was Johnny P's, from this thread.
I didn't know Vonnegut had a house on Torch Lake. That's so cool.
I'm going up there tomorrow morning to stake out a house for a client of mine.
Al,
I pointed out how poor your approach to philosophy is and your response is to trifle over the semantics of an irrelevant characterization. You excised a two-word snippet and used it in a context suggesting it supported your position of theism. It doesn't. And, yes, your use of it in that way fulfills the Wiki definition of quote-mining you provided. A snippet can be one word, two words or lots more, and you definitely were using it to distort the good philosopher's intentions. But, if you don't want to have it called quote-mining, POOF! I withdraw the claim.
Still, your claim,
So in fact the very existence of evolution is an argument for God
is not true and Nagel still does not support your claim.
Here at DebunkingChristianity, Al, when you claim, implicitly or explicitly, that you know everything that naturalistic processes can do, you will not be given a pass. You will be called to account for it. Bullshit rhetoric and unsubstantiated assertions won't fly with us like it does with your fellow religionists. If you really know all that naturalism can do, exactly where it stops and thus all it can't do, you need to prove it. I truly doubt that you know the limits of naturalism. I doubt you know all of biochemistry for that matter and that's just an infinitesimal fraction of what naturalism can do.
If philosophers have such great intellectual powers that they can know the limits of naturalism without knowing any of the science, why do they not apply those powers to actual practical problems? I have lots of questions I'd love to have answered concerning DNA repair in humans, protein folding, and active site substrate bonding via conformation changes. Since they can see the ends of the universe from inside their heads and they know so much about the natural world that they know where nature stops and gods have to take over, my questions should be a piece of cake for them.
Could it be that they don't actually know? I'll tell you this, Al: if you set your high-powered philosophers to work on a practical problem with good standards for measuring success, it won't take long for you to wonder where all that intellectual wherewithal disappeared to. In the philosopher's native habitat everything is open-ended, nothing need ever be resolved and, too often, no one would be able to tell if it were.
Al,
You waved Nagel in our faces as a philosophical authority figure we should trust since you think him to be one of them who has it right. But, the standard you appear to be using for Nagel's correctness is only that you imagine that some portion of what he says supports a position you hold. You accept evolution based on the naturalism's vast evidence supporting it, but you reject some of its gnarlier implications based on the musings from philosophers you have hand picked using confirmation bias as the selection criteria. Most philosophers do not agree with you. There are millions of them from your own religion, other religions and from no religion who don't say what you want to hear. So you select the few who align with your position and try to focus our attention on them. "Look! Here! This one has it right and he agrees with me! Pay no attention to all those other philosophical miscreants. They don't agree with me. They are all wrong." This is an abuse of philosophy.
You also abuse it with your fine-tuning arguments which are really nothing more than the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Strangely, you will admit that you do not know why any of the universal fundamental physical constants have the values they do, but because you want to use them to confirm your bias, you draw a target around them, ex post facto, and say, "Voila! My god did that!." We don't know why the values are what they are and we should be honest enough to admit it.
You even pick your philosophers using the Texas sharpshooter fallacy as the criterion. Out of millions of them you draw your bullseye around the few who most closely agree with you.
Philosophy and theology share the unfortunate trait of thinking that having a reason for an idea makes that idea correct. Too often they think that if you can justify your thoughts, those thoughts must be correct. They overlook the need for the reasons and justifications to be correct. Science works because ideas and thoughts as well as the reasons and justifications for them are rigorously and critically assessed for correctness. Science gives us something reliable. Philosophy and religion have no need for correctness and it shows. That religions can contradict one another and still be said to be "true" by their followers tells us that "true" or "correct" are meaningless in a religious context. That you, Al, pick out the few philosophers who agree with you while you ignore the millions who don't tells us that "true" or "correct" are meaningless in the context of philosophy. That your faith is pieced together from the tiniest fractions of each of them tells us that "true" or "correct" are meaningless in the context of Al Moritz.
You excised a two-word snippet and used it in a context suggesting it supported your position of theism. It doesn't. And, yes, your use of it in that way fulfills the Wiki definition of quote-mining you provided. A snippet can be one word, two words or lots more, and you definitely were using it to distort the good philosopher's intentions.
This is pathetic, Russ. I only used it in the context of saying that an evolutionary explanation is unsatisfactory:
"Also, what in particular does the inherent capacity for abstract and objective reasoning in mathematics and science, which deals with the deeper, non-obvious layers of how things are, have to do with survival in the wild? To claim that evolution has selected for that is preposterous."
Nagel agrees with me, and I quoted him in that context. That I further deduce from this an argument in favor of theism is independent of that. Anyone applying clear analytical thinking should see that.
Al,
Anyone applying clear analytical thinking - more to the point, if Al Moritz applied clear analytical thinking - would not conclude that one religion is better than another. They are merely different social clubs. You are not better than Muslims. You are different.
I made many cogent points and your sad tactical response it to piss and moan about something I withdrew to keep you from crying about it.
Here you repeat things you cannot back up with anything other than wishful thinking:
Also, what in particular does the inherent capacity for abstract and objective reasoning in mathematics and science, which deals with the deeper, non-obvious layers of how things are, have to do with survival in the wild? To claim that evolution has selected for that is preposterous.
Do you think you know these things? Well, you don't. You have not better insights only different. We do not understand the exact mechanisms that give rise to self-awareness and consciousness. We do not know how the functional units of brains in mammalia operate or communicate. We do not know what the elemental data storage mechanisms. We do not know what mental tools of abstraction and reasoning developed on the African continent, were disseminated worldwide, and gave rise to our place in the world. The capacity to hit a target with a throwing spear requires a huge amount of mental capacity. Tool-making of all sorts requires the capacity for intuitive abstraction and mathematics. Use of symbolic language demands a large brain tooled up for abstraction.
Your claim, To claim that evolution has selected for that is preposterous is just stupid. You make a distinction between humans, other apes and other animals and yet our capacities for abstraction, mathematics and reason exist throughout the animal kingdom to varying degrees with the functionality being closer to ours with non-humans closer to us on the evolutionary tree. All evidence points to the functionalities of abstraction, mathematics, language, and reason being evolved capacities. Not divinely instilled. Bigger brain to body size ratio leads to bigger mental processing power. Humans with microcephaly have lower brain to body size ratio and reduced mental function. Humans having brains with damaged functionaly units show diminished capacities. Neither your god or anyone else's offer any insight into the process and naturalism is plenty for science to work with.
I suggest that if you are so convinced by the power of your philosophy that you actually think, All points to the laws of nature -- allowing for physical and biological evolution -- being God's design, are you not morally bound to take this idea to professional conferences to advocate for the abandonment of research into the impossible? If your version of a god used magic spells we can never know to make reason and consciousness happen then we are wasting huge resources as we research them. If there is no way to get there from here, are you not morally obligated to explain that to your professional colleagues?
You're a pissy, moany mewler, Al. Now you can get back to your bitching about quote-mining.
I had said:
"Also, what in particular does the inherent capacity for abstract and objective reasoning in mathematics and science, which deals with the deeper, non-obvious layers of how things are, have to do with survival in the wild? To claim that evolution has selected for that is preposterous."
Russ criticizised in particular the last sentence. I concede that I may have gone too far with that. I will amend the statement to:
"To claim that evolution has selected for that is difficult to justify."
I am still waiting for an answer to my challenge how you can rationally hold that naturalism is true, given what I said in my post from Sept. 23, 10:29 pm.
@ Al:
Read the paper I linked in my post from September 24, 2010 11:05 AM.
Also, Plantinga's math regarding how to determine reliability of beliefs is utterly absurd in his Bayesian framework.
He makes assertions, calls them "objective" but offers no method for how he came to this objectivity), hires another guy to do the math (because he freely admits that he can't do it himself!), and proceeds happily to spew results that have no basis in fact.
The EAAN as formulated by Plantinga is null and void, and has been recognized as such for nearly 15 years.
I'll explain the math thing, too.
Having seen both Plantinga's argument, and worked through the math in it, the conversation went like this:
AP: "Hey Fred, I've got a problem that has a mathematical component that I'm not equipped to deal with. Can you give me a hand?"
Fred: "Sure. What is it?"
AP: "OK, if I flip a coin once, I know the odds are 50/50 that it'll come up heads; but if I flip a coin 1,000 times, what's the chance that it will come up heads 750 times?"
Fred: "That's easy..."
-------------------------
And thus we have Plantinga's claim of reliability in formulating belief.
But beliefs aren't sides of a coin. They are much more complex, and they have other things informing them how they should be received, whereas a coin doesn't.
Furthermore, Plantinga's assertion that a person holds (for example, and exactly the number he used in his example) 1,000 beliefs is a number pulled out of a hat. While it may be demonstrated that a person may hold a large number of beliefs, to do so would require that everything a person does falls into this category ("I believe that person is a girl", I believe that the mailman has been here already", etc...), but most of those beliefs are trivial, or informed by substantial evidence, even though they may be wrong (The "girl" may be a transvestite, and the wind may have knocked a loose delivery flag down on the mailbox).
In short, Plantinga didn't demonstrate that naturalism fails due to evoulutionary arguments.
Al,
The comments you've made here and your complete unwillingness to fairly read other's comments shows you to be doing nothing other than the dance of the apologist. You want to obligate readers on this thread to carefully consider arguments you've copied from thinkers other than yourself while you ignore all but select bits from their responses. You really are dishonorable. Then, when you think you have steered clear of the problems your interlocutors have raised, you want to leap frog back over the problem areas and put yourself and your snitched snippets of arguments back in the center of attention. You put the lie to all you have to say here by what you say and what you don't; what you do and don't respond to; who you select as authority figures(only those who agree with you) and the similarly-credentialed ones you ignore; your insistence that everything must confirm your biases; and, your unwillingness to see how your arguments support many positions not just your own. You're another egocentric religionist envisioning yourself to be the center of the universe.
If you think there to be things supernaturally otherworldly, say it outright and give the hard evidence for it. Stop screwing around with inane anti-naturalism argumentation. Be honest enough to say what you think. Say that you think supernaturalism is real and present the evidence for it. Don't play your dumb assed games giving us your imagined evidence for non-supernaturalism; give us the evidence for supernaturalism. Until you can demonstrate, with observables that are coherent and are more than your special pleading opinion, that influences outside the natural world exist at all, the smoke you're blowing is not different than that rising off the pyres of thousands of other gods.
Al,
If the philosophical conclusions concerning supernaturalism hold up let us see them. Get this through your head, Al: humans have evolved brains that imagine spooks. Sometimes some people call the spooks gods.
I'm perfectly justified in accepting naturalism as provisionally true. I'll change my mind when the evidence warrants it. As I've said here several times here but you have chosen to ignore, if your god existed we would see it. The concrete claims made for it could not be overlooked. But, you have provided no evidence, and you abuse philosophy in claiming that you have.
You and I share a path in decrying the theologies and philosophies that support all religions but your own. There we part ways. Clearly, you do not think philosophy or theology to be infallible. In fact, you must agree that, for the most part, philosophy is not about truth since most of it that makes truth claims that are simply wrong. As our paths diverge(in a yellow wood, and, sorry I could not travel both and be one traveller, long I stood) you and I no longer look at philosophy the same way. You see your new path as lined with what you accept as "truth." I look across at you from the path we once walked together and see you making the same errors you earlier agreed all those other religionists and philosophers were making. Like all religionists you demand that what you hold dear be spared from the logic and reasoning you use to reject other's religious claims of "truth." I'm simply being consistent with what you concur with the vast majority of the time. Your special pleading deserves the same assessment as all the other special pleadings. Your special pleading earns its rejection just as the others earn theirs.
Al,
Let me indulge your "still waiting for an answer to my challenge" comment a bit.
In your comment from September 23, 2010 10:29 PM, you said,
Let's suppose you want to defend the position that naturalism is true.
Here you're already on shaky ground. You use the word "true" but you don't know what it means. You reject other religions and philosophies for their not being "true," but your religion and philosophy suffers the same defects you find in the others.
You said,
Evolution is of no help here to arrive at the truth.
You use "truth," again, here in a mindless assertion.
You said,
Evolution selects only for behavior, not for correctness of beliefs.
Woebegone, Al. Bizarre, Al. Off the rails, Al. Out to lunch, Al. You're a biochemist, right? A biochemist? Were you laughing as you typed these words? I laughed when I read them, but they are so wrong I just dismissed them. This statement is so wrong, it's incomprehensible to one who has a basic understanding of evolutionary theory and the molecular basis for it. Here, your conscious word selection discloses your pernicious intent to misinform. Trying to find some favorable interpretation for this sentence is impossible. A trained biochemist writing this can only have malicious intent.
It's true that evolutionary selection mechanisms can operate on heritable behaviors (or even merely stupid acquired behaviors). For instance, a newborn who cannot suckle and is not propped up by technology is doomed. Its behavioral peculiarity hacked out of the gene pool early on.
But, the same newborn's time in the human gene pool could also be short-lived for having any number of heritable mutations unrelated to behavior, but having tragic physiological consequences. Natural selection weeds out heritable metabolic defects as well as heritable behavioral flaws.
Your science understanding holds up no better than your religion or your philosophy. Even in your science you allow what you wish to be true to taint what is.
GearHedEd,
that's all nice and fine, but nothing what you said addresses the fundamental problem.
Hamermas and Moreland formulate it simply as:
"[Under determinism] it is self-refuting to argue that one ought to choose physicalism. . . on the basis of the fact that one should see that the evidence is good for physicalism."
My post then additionally explains why there cannot be an evolutionary 'ought' that might serve to close the logical gap in the naturalist's argumentation.
False dichotomy.
You say there ought to be an "ought", but only if God decrees it.
Russ:
Me:
Let's suppose you want to defend the position that naturalism is true.
Your answer:
Here you're already on shaky ground. You use the word "true" but you don't know what it means. You reject other religions and philosophies for their not being "true," but your religion and philosophy suffers the same defects you find in the others.
Beside the point. This has nothing to do with the argument proper. Don't divert from the fact that you do not answer the argument.
Me:
Evolution is of no help here to arrive at the truth.
Your answer:
You use "truth," again, here in a mindless assertion.
A comment beside the point. It does not address the argument proper. Don't divert from the fact that you do not answer the argument.
Evolution selects only for behavior, not for correctness of beliefs.
Woebegone, Al. Bizarre, Al. Off the rails, Al. Out to lunch, Al. You're a biochemist, right?
O.k., the argument was imprecisely, or incompletely, formulated. However, the point is that, between the two alternatives, evolution selects for behavior as opposed to belief, and your criticism does not refute this point.
But, the same newborn's time in the human gene pool could also be short-lived for having any number of heritable mutations unrelated to behavior, but having tragic physiological consequences. Natural selection weeds out heritable metabolic defects as well as heritable behavioral flaws.
Actually, while my formulation could have been more precise, it is not incorrect in that context. Evolution selects for survival behavior, and a part of the population with tragic heritable metabolic defects simply cannot, or only insufficiently, participate in the reproductive behavior that leads to successful survival (which is due to the fact that it is too short-lived, as you say). So it is about behavior after all.
That it is about survival through reproductive behavior is clear from the example of sickle cell disease. Certainly, the disease is crippling, but the genetic abnormality confers resistance to malaria. And that resistance does lead to an advantage in reproductive behavior (since more people that are affected reach the reproductive age) that lets the disease survive in the population despite its crippling effects.
From Wikipedia:
Sickle-cell disease (SCD), or sickle-cell anaemia (or anemia; SCA) or drepanocytosis, is an autosomal recessive genetic blood disorder characterized by red blood cells that assume an abnormal, rigid, sickle shape. Sickling decreases the cells' flexibility and results in a risk of various complications. The sickling occurs because of a mutation in the Hemoglobin gene. Life expectancy is shortened, with studies reporting an average life expectancy of 42 in males and 48 in females.
Sickle-cell disease, usually presenting in childhood, occurs more commonly in people (or their descendants) from parts of tropical and sub-tropical regions where malaria is or was common. One-third of all indigenous inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa carry the gene, because in areas where malaria is common, there is a survival value in carrying only a single sickle-cell gene (sickle cell trait). Those with only one of the two alleles of the sickle-cell disease are more resistant to malaria, since the infestation of the malaria plasmodium is halted by the sickling of the cells which it infests.
GearHedEd:
False dichotomy.
You say there ought to be an "ought", but only if God decrees it.
This has nothing to do with a decree from God, and you still ignore the argument.
Al,
I said,
Here you're already on shaky ground. You use the word "true" but you don't know what it means. You reject other religions and philosophies for their not being "true," but your religion and philosophy suffers the same defects you find in the others.
to which you responded,
Beside the point. This has nothing to do with the argument proper. Don't divert from the fact that you do not answer the argument.
Make an argument then perhaps it can be addressed, Al. If "true" is beside the point then there is no point in my addressing it. You're required to respond to the points I've made in the interim.
How useless is your philosophy, Al, if you expect me to respond to what is "imprecisely, or incompletely, formulated." That it is ill-formed to start makes it a non-argument. You have not issued forth one of those imaginary divine revelations, Al. We can't guess what you think you wish you might have shoulda said.
Then, you make the completely dishonest step of taking the very distinct biological concepts of physiology and behavior and twisting them to your own inane intent. Heritable behaviors are distinct from heritable physiological changes. Still you drop the philosophical turd, "So it is about behavior after all." Just like your idiotic mantra, "So in fact the very existence of evolution is an argument for God."
Your philosophy has damaged you to the point of being unable to speak honestly, Al. For you, all things are to be bent and twisted in your philosophy mill until they look how it is you want them to look.
It's apparent you are accustomed to discussing these things with those whose ignorance of the topic you rely on. It's real apparent you like what you imagine to be your argument here. That you further imagine your "imprecisely, or incompletely, formulated" sequence of sentences to constitute an argument says a lot about you, but nothing about the coherency, consistency, or veracity of the sentences themselves.
Al, if you think you have proof of some god's existence take it to the philosophy journals. The Christian ones, I'm sure would be happy to accommodate you, while the Muslim ones might issue a fatwa. But you have nothing here. It's obvious that you do not know what makes up truth, so that is not your aim. You bring DebunkingChristianity dreck thinking none of us can see past your bullshit.
Naturalism stands tall for having disproven what are disprovable supernaturalistic claims. You believe in a god in part due to the Bible. The Bible is wrong: verifiably wrong in any way that actually matters to an honest thinking person, but, of course, not wrong as long as it bouyed up with philosophical life preservers.
All the best.
P. S.: When you write Hamermas, do you mean Habermas, as in Gary Habermas?
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