If ID Theorists Are Right, How Should We Study Nature?

One can at least point a direction by now. I began this series by asking, what has materialism (naturalism) done for science? It made a virtue of preferring theory to evidence, if the theory supports naturalism and the evidence doesn't. Well-supported evidence that undermines naturalism (the Big Bang and fine tuning of the universe, for example) attracted increasingly speculative attempts at disconfirmation. Discouraging results from the search for life on Mars cause us to put our faith in life on exoplanets -- lest Earth be seen as unusual (the Copernican Principle).

All this might be just the beginning of a great adventure. World-changing discoveries, after all, have originated in the oddest circumstances. Who would have expected the Americas to be discovered by people who mainly wanted peppercorns, cinnamon, sugar, and such? But disturbingly, unlike the early modern adventurers who encountered advanced civilizations, we merely imagine them. We tell ourselves they must exist; in the absence of evidence, we make faith in them a virtue. So while Bigfoot was never science, the space alien must always be so, even if he is forever a discipline without a subject.

But the evidence is still there, all along the road to reality. It is still saying what the new cosmologies do not want to hear. And the cost of ignoring it is the decline of real-world programs like NASA in favor of endlessly creative speculation. It turns out that, far from being the anchor of science, materialism has become its millstone.

But now, what if the ID theorists are right, that information rather than matter is the basic stuff of the universe? It is then reasonable to think that meaning underlies the universe. Meaning cannot then be explained away. It is the irreducible core. That is why reductive efforts to explain away evidence that supports meaning (Big Bang, fine-tuning, physical laws) have led to contradictory, unresearchable, and unintelligible outcomes.

The irreducible core of meaning is controversial principally because it provides support for theism. But the alternative has provided support for unintelligibility. Finally, one must choose. If we choose what intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski calls "information realism," the way we think about cosmology changes.

First, we live with what the evidence suggests. Not simply because it suits our beliefs but because research in a meaningful universe should gradually reveal a comprehensible reality, as scientists have traditionally assumed. If information, not matter, is the substrate of the universe, key stumbling blocks of current materialist science such as origin of life, of human beings, and of human consciousness can be approached in a different way. An information approach does not attempt to reduce these phenomena to a level of complexity below which they don't actually exist.

Materialist origin of life research, for example, has been an unmitigated failure principally because it seeks a high and replicable level of order that just somehow randomly happened at one point. The search for the origin of the human race has been similarly vitiated by the search for a not-quite-human subject, the small, shuffling fellow behind the man carrying the spear. In this case, it would have been well if researchers had simply never found their subject. Unfortunately, they have attempted at times to cast various human groups in the shuffler's role. Then gotten mired in controversy, and largely got the story wrong and missed its point.

One would have thought that materialists would know better than to even try addressing human consciousness. But materialism is a totalistic creed or else it is nothing. Current theories range from physicist Max Tegmark's claim that human consciousness is a material substance through to philosopher Daniel Dennett's notion that it is best treated somewhat like "figments of imagination" (don't ask whose) through philosopher Alex Rosenberg's idea that consciousness is a problem that will have to be dissolved by neuroscience. All these theories share two characteristics: They reduce consciousness to something that it isn't. And they get nowhere with understanding what it is. The only achievement that materialist thought can claim in the area of consciousness studies is to make them sound as fundamentally unserious as many current cosmologies. And that is no mean feat.

Suppose we look at the origin of life from an information perspective. Life forms show a much higher level of information, however that state of affairs came about, than non-living matter does. From our perspective, we break no rule if we assume, for the sake of investigation, that the reason we cannot find evidence for an accidental origin of life is that life did not originate in that way. For us, nothing depends one way or the other on demonstrating that life was an accident. We do not earn the right to study life's origin by declaring that "science" means assuming that such a proposition is true and proceeding from there irrespective of consequences. So, with this in mind, what are we to make of the current state of origin-of-life research?

Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips .

Dear spirited, you wrote:

"They were united by a joint effort: a search for a different 'human' race, both super-intelligent and empowered with the powers of a new kind of magic, 'scientific' or mythical:

"...(the) new supermagic, despite being called scientific, is no less aimed at a fantastic reorientation of our condition, in the spirit of a Gnostic dissociation from the created world. (The Pagan Temptation [Molnar], p. 146)

"At the root of the rejection of the living God is the defiant narcissistic assertion that man has not been created by Him, that he is not dependent upon Him for his own life, thus he is not created in His spiritual image.
"Calling themselves 'liberated' spirits, free-spirits, free-thinkers, antitheists (i.e., Marx) and revolutionaries, they saw themselves as not dependent upon the living God because they were man-gods, the creators of God, the masters of time, being, and the world who through their own powers would save themselves.
"Believing they were superior to Him, they said, 'you are not my father'...."

Yep. Powerfully said, dear spirited, my sister in Christ!

I'll just open by saying that, according to my understanding at this point, gnostic systems of thinking, ancient in origin (so well documented by you) are at the very root of the disorder of our own present age. They start out by being inversions of Reality. IOW, their constructors are some species of nut-case right out of the gate. To me, the constructors of such "second realities" are suffering from some sort of pneumopathological or psychopathological disorder. And I wouldn't be the first person in history to notice this: Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, et al., all described this symptomology over 2,000 years ago.

I suspect that there is only the tiniest number of FReepers who regard this subject matter as relevant to what is directly happening in their own lives, though perhaps some are beginning to suspect that the profound disturbances we are currently experiencing in our society might have something to do with attacks on the culture that sustains the society to which they belong and so to which they have become accustomed as individuals over long history, not to mention their families and local communities.

I'd say the very culture itself is under attack, and few people seem to notice this, or care about it. But you do, dear spirited. So we'll just start out as a "group of two" and see what happens. LOL!

I would like to introduce "evidence" that might help us understand the issues involved. That would be Baruch Spinoza and the system he constructed whole cloth out of the contents of his own mind.

My source is Spinoza's The Ethics. In this work, the "Christlike, saintly" Spinoza (as characterized by some people) starts out by "killing God" — in his case, the God of Abraham, Moses, the Patriarchs and the Prophets.

So far, from what I gather from historical sources, for Spinoza [an excommunicated Jew, to whatever extent that may matter in our present concerns], the preeminent value, the sine qua non of human life, was total intellectual freedom. This led him to reject any source of "authority" beyond his own mind whatsoever. [To me, already this is the definition of "insanity."]

But if you're going to build an abstract "god" whole cloth out of the contents of your own abstract imagination, the first thing you need to do is "clear the field" of its current Owner.... Which Spinoza does, seemingly with great relish and aplomb.

I gather Spinoza desired to conceive of "god" on purely abstract, rationalistic principles (which rather begs the question to me; but that is beyond the scope of the present discussion).

Anyhoot, first off, if you "kill" God, this entails you are killing off the Creation He made. So you really are starting off from scratch, on a razed ground.

But how can you erase the very ground you stand on, as an ineluctable part and participant in it?

But not to worry — Spinoza's concepts will enable you to feel like "an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

Spinoza's entire concept of the God he "rationally" constructs consists of two parts: (1) Spinoza's God is logically necessary (Descartes said the same thing.) (2) There is nothing to prevent His existence. Thus, He exists "by default" — on Spinoza's abstract reductionist terms — which therefore necessarily precludes any consideration having to do with love, grace, or justice.

Seemingly Spinoza's method does not distinguish between existence and being. Both are reduced to Spinoza's method, and thus are found not to be "different" thereby, i.e., not mutually indistinguishable, let alone mutually interdependent — as the great historical, cross-cultural model of the Great Hierarchy of Being so very strongly suggest the partners of "Being" need to be.

I could provide details from The Ethics in support of my argument, and probably bore most readers to tears. If they would even bother to read "my stuff."

Instead, I'll just conclude with this:

At the behest of my great teacher, last Spring I took a little "mini-tutorial" in the twentieth-century German novel, focusing on three authors: Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities), Heimito von Doderer (The Demons), and Elias Canetti (Auto-da-Fé — this last winner of the Prix International book award).

All three novels deal with the constructions of "second realities"; all deal with how these second realities actually played out in the horrific experiences of twentieth-century European history. Musil will chill you down to your bones. Von Doderer will enchant you, and make you cry. Canetti will scare you out of your wits.

Anyhoot, when I was reading Canetti, I started to get this unshakeable, chilling feeling that his protagonist, Peter Wien, was modeled on Baruch Spinoza. The two share some telling biographical details: Both Spinoza and "Peter Wien" rejected highly prestigious academic chairs when offered to them, because they thought to accept such a position would instantly compromise their intellectual liberty, their "academic freedom."

Peter Wien insisted on being an "authority unto himself," period. End of discussion.

I suspect that was Baruch Spinoza's main project, too.

Auto-da-Fé details the horrifying, inexorable consequences of such a presupposition. In this work, we watch a first-rate mind decompose under our very eyes, hardly because he was stupid or ignorant — he was regarded as a first-rate scholar in his field. Rather because he was thoroughly self-blinded to any idea of existent reality outside of his own mind.

Must leave it for there for now, dear sister spirited. Thank you for your splendid essay/post!!!

"My source is Spinoza's The Ethics. In this work, the "Christlike, saintly" Spinoza (as characterized by some people) starts out by "killing God" — in his case, the God of Abraham, Moses, the Patriarchs and the Prophets"

Spirited: According to Spinoza, his theology was in keeping with the kabbalistic mysticism of writers such as Rabbi Moses Cordovero. What this means is that Spinoza's pantheist 'god' was, if not the same thing as, then akin to the universal energy known as Ein Sof.

The Renaissance witnessed a great abandonment of the Revealed Word in favor of spiritism, ancient Egyptian Hermetic science, Kabbalah, Buddhism, reincarnation/karma, the Mysteries, and other ancient wisdom teachings sweeping into Christendom at that time.

In the classic work, "Earth's Earliest Ages" English theologian G.H. Pember (1837-1910) observed in his own time that the ancient occult traditions were no longer veiled in mystery but boldly presented as the fruit of science and evolutionary philosophy, all of which had been known to,

“…the initiates of the Hermetic, Orphic, Eleusinian, and Cabbalistic mysteries, and were familiar to Chaldean Magi, Egyptian Priests, Hindu Occultists, Essenes, Therapeutae Gnostics, and Theurgic Neo-Platonists.” (Pember, pp.243-244)

In the impeccably researched “Scientific Analysis of the Writings of Alice A. Bailey and their Applications,” Robert A. Hermann Ph.D. affirms Pembers' claim with respect to the occult origins of the evolutionary science so widespread in our time.

Herrmann traces modern evolutionary thinking--which has infiltrated the whole body of the Church--back to 1750 and the Spanish-French occultist the Martine’s de Pasqually (1715?-1779) whose biological conception predates Darwin’s theory and held that an adept spiritually evolves into higher and higher forms on various evolutionary levels. (raherrmann.com)

In affirmation, Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson, the politically influential co-authors of “Spiritual Politics: Changing the World from the Inside Out,” admit that their book is based on the Ageless Wisdom teachings preserved by occultists since the Egyptian pantheon (27th-30th centuries B.C) and handed down over the ages to modern occultists in the time of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and on into our own time:

"For centuries, the Ageless Wisdom in the West was shielded from an unprepared public… The unveiled truths were handed down only orally by individual teachers to tested disciples or by certain religious groups and secret societies, such as the Cabbalists, Druids, Essenes, Sufis, Knights Templar, Rosicrucian’s, Freemasons, and others who carefully guarded the teachings down through the centuries. A study of these secret societies would reveal powerful influences on the history of nations….” (Spiritual Politics, McLaughlin, Davidson from “Reinventing Jesus Christ: The New Gospel,” Warren Smith, crossroad.to)

C.S. Lewis admired modern science but warned against its perverted twin, amoral scientism, or magic science and evolution. In his book, “Miracles,” C.S. Lewis argues that the birth of modern science depended on the Biblical view of Jehovah God as Creator:

“Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.” (The Magician’s Twin, edited by John G. West, p. 21)

In an article titled "On Science and Culture" in Encounter, Oct. 1962, J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of Advanced Study at Princeton (1947) affirms Lewis's argument. Modern science, said Oppenheimer, was born out of the Christian worldview. (How Should We Then Live? Francis A. Schaeffer, p. 132)

Philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), agrees. In the Harvard University Lowell Lectures entitled "Science and the Modern World" (1925) Whitehead said that Christianity is the mother of modern science because of "the medieval insistence in the rationality of God." With complete confidence "in the intelligible rationality of a personal being," continued Whitehead, early scientists had an "inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its' antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labors of scientists would be without hope." (ibid, pp. 132, 133)

The key words here are 'rational, personal Being' as opposed to the sophistry of today's science counterfeit: magic science.

"Christianity," summarized Francis Schaeffer, "is the mother of modern science because it insists that the God who created the universe has revealed himself in the Bible to be the kind of God he is. Consequently, there is a sufficient basis for science to study the universe." (ibid, p. 134)

"Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." (Ro 13: 1)

Christianity de-divinized nature, thereby putting an end to pagan conceptions of universal substances and animated matter. There is no power but that of the supernatural, living, personal God, meaning that the impersonal, mystical 'powers' ascribed by pagans to the Void, World Souls, Ein Sof, Divine One Substance, matter, sparks, the Force, evolution, dialectical matter, chance, Dawkins' memes, zoe, karma, prakriti matter and so forth are superstitions resurrected by spellbinding pagan magic science.

In the foreword to “The Magician’s Twin,” Phillip E. Johnson describes Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud as early 20th century wizards whose neo-pagan concepts were so spellbinding,

“….that they set the intellectual agenda for the entire twentieth century.”

Johnson adds to the list of scientific magicians the “DNA is everything’ biologists such as Richard Dawkins and the physicalist neuroscientists who assure us that our thoughts and decisions (including the thoughts of neuroscientists?) are no more than the effects of electro-chemical events in the brain.” (The Magician’s Twin, pp.9-10)

Shortly after C.S. Lewis had become a Christian he wrote “The Pilgrim’s Regress” (1933), an autobiographical allegory of his intellectual and spiritual journey toward Jesus Christ. Sigmund Freud appears in the book as Sigismund Enlightenment who shares a dungeon cell with Lewis’s main character John after he has been arrested.

The dungeon is overseen by a Giant known as the Spirit of the Age who makes people transparent just by looking at them. As a result, wherever John looks he sees through his fellow prisoners into their insides. And when John looks at himself he is horrified to observe the inner workings of his own body. After days of such torment John cries out in despair,

“I am mad. I am dead. I am in hell forever.” (ibid, pp. 25-26)

Hellish Kultursmog:

The Giant is the evil spirit of nihilism (nothingness) working through devilish pagan magicians and the dungeon is the hell of animistic reductionism that in the name of magic science has isolated the Holy God in the supernatural realm and uncreated Imago Dei by reducing soul to body (DNA) , spirit (mind) to grey matter, and abilities of mind (thought, will, conscience) to movement of chemicals and firing of neurons. The dungeon then, is the hermetically sealed hell into which God’s image-bearers have been flung and conditioned by the devil's human tools to believe they have no soul/spirit because it cannot be weighed, measured, tested, seen or touched. Thus in despair, Herman Melville wrote:

“Man disennobled---brutalized; By popular science---atheitized; Into a smatterer…” (The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, p. 32)

Instead of Adam, lamented Disraeli,

“…our ancestry is traced to the most grotesque of creatures; thought is phosphorous, the soul complex nerves, and our moral sense a secretion of sugar.” (ibid, p 33)

According to Lewis, Darwinism is another example of credulous thinking fostered by scientism. He lamented that scientism wizards have conditioned the modern mind (including theologians)to accept as a scientific formula for the universe in general the principle,

“Almost nothing may be expected to turn into almost everything without noticing that the parts of the universe under our direct observation tell a quite different story.” (The Magician’ Twin, p. 27)

This sort of credulity conditions people to accept without question an inverted view of creation wherein,

“…the oak coming from the acorn, the man from the spermatozoon, the modern steamship from the primitive coracle. The supplementary truth that every acorn was dropped by an oak, every spermatozoon derived from a man, and the first boat by something so much more complex than itself as a man of genius, is simply ignored.” (ibid, pp. 26-27)

Lewis also saw that with its inverted account of origins, evolutionism, like Freudianism, promotes a “fatal self-contradiction” regarding the human mind. Although modern science is to be based on logic, evidence and critical intellectual inquiry, according to the magic view, life emerged from spontaneously generated non-living matter (chemicals), thus reason is “simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming.”

Lewis points to the fatal self-contradiction of this claim:

“If my own mind is a product of the irrational---if what seem my clearest reasoning’s are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel---how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution?” (ibid)

Lewis concluded that the fact that zealous adherents of the magic science and evolution viewpoint cannot by any effort be taught to see the fatal self-contradictions and other fallacies of their viewpoint confirmed his suspicion that,

“…we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought.” (ibid, p. 27)

One final remark:

"So we'll just start out as a "group of two" and see what happens. LOL!"

Sounds good to me sister in Christ!

This is my war — it's not against science — it is ultimately against atheism and its new unfounded claim to science.

It's my war too, dear Heartlander. And it's NOT "against" science. Science itself, as well as Christians, is being corrupted by the insane insistence at the heart of atheistic methodological naturalism; to wit, the only valid explanations for natural phenomena MUST BE natural (i.e., material) causes.

But this view is not exclusive to atheists. There are theists who purport to believe this, too. In professional circles today, Neo-Darwinist orthodoxy is more or less enforced against all dissenters. Whether it be a theoretical or a working scientist, it is prudent to keep one's mouth shut or risk damage to one's career. To me this evidences a profound dishonesty and corruption within science itself.

Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at NYU and a self-professed atheist, found this out back in 2007, when he had the temerity to name Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell as a top-book-of-the-year of the Times Literary Supplement. Meyer's work deals with design theory. An amazing "food fight" with the practitioners of Neo-Darwinist orthodoxy ensued, littered with ad hominum attacks against Meyer and even Nagel. (See the link below for the gory details).

In the course of which, Stephen Meyer critiques his critics:

The central argument of my book is that intelligent design—the activity of a conscious and rational deliberative agent—best explains the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell. I argue this because of two things that we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which following Charles Darwin I take to be the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. First, intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information (especially in a digital form). Second, no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power. Hence, intelligent design provides the best—most causally adequate—explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life from simpler non-living chemicals. In other words, intelligent design is the only explanation that cites a cause known to have the capacity to produce the key effect in question.

Nowhere in his review does [Darrel] Falk [professor of biology, Point Loma Nazarene University] refute this claim or provide another explanation for the origin of biological information. In order to do so, Falk would need to show that some undirected material cause has demonstrated the power to produce functional biological information apart from the guidance or activity of a designing mind. Neither Falk, nor anyone working in origin-of-life biology, has succeeded in doing this. ...[Yet] Falk [insists] that it is “premature” to draw any negative conclusions about the adequacy of undirected chemical processes.
To support his claim that I rushed to judgment, Falk first cites a scientific study published last spring after my book was in press. The paper, authored by University of Manchester chemist John Sutherland and two colleagues, does partially address one of the many outstanding difficulties associated with the RNA world, the most popular current theory about the origin of the first life.
Starting with a 3-carbon sugar (D-gylceraldehyde), and another molecule called 2-aminooxazole, Sutherland successfully synthesized a 5-carbon sugar in association with a base and a phosphate group. In other words, he produced a ribonucleotide. The scientific press justifiably heralded this as a breakthrough in pre-biotic chemistry because previously chemists had thought ... that the conditions under which ribose and bases could be synthesized were starkly incompatible with each other.
Nevertheless, Sutherland’s work does not refute the central argument of my book, nor does it support the claim that it is premature to conclude that only intelligent agents have demonstrated the power to produce functionally specified information. If anything, it illustrates the reverse.
In Chapter 14 of my book I describe and critique the RNA world scenario. There I describe five major problems associated with the theory. Sutherland’s work only partially addresses the first and least severe of these difficulties: the problem of generating the constituent building blocks or monomers in plausible pre-biotic conditions. It does not address the more severe problem of explaining how the bases in nucleic acids (either DNA or RNA) acquired their specific information-rich arrangements. In other words, Sutherland’s experiment helps explain the origin of the “letters” in the genetic text, but not their specific arrangement into functional “words” or “sentences.”
Even so, Sutherland’s work lacks pre-biotic plausibility and does so in three ways that actually underscore my argument.
First, Sutherland chose to begin his reaction with only the right-handed isomer of the 3-carbon sugars he needed to initiate his reaction sequence. Why? Because he knew that otherwise the likely result would have had little biological significance. Had Sutherland chosen to use a far more plausible racemic mixture of both right- and left-handed sugar isomers, his reaction would have generated undesirable mixtures of stereoisomers—mixtures that would seriously complicate any subsequent biologically relevant polymerization. Thus, he himself solved the so-called chirality problem in origin-of-life chemistry by intelligently selecting a single enantiomer, i.e., only the right-handed sugars that life itself requires. Yet there is no demonstrated source for such non-racemic mixture of sugars in any plausible pre-biotic environment.
Second, the reaction that Sutherland used to produce ribonucleotides involved numerous separate chemical steps. At each intermediate stage in his multi-step reaction sequence, Sutherland himself intervened to purify the chemical by-products of the previous step by removing undesirable side products. In so doing, he prevented—by his own will, intellect and experimental technique—the occurrence of interfering cross-reactions, the scourge of the pre-biotic chemist.
Third, in order to produce the desired chemical product—ribonucleotides—Sutherland followed a very precise “recipe” or procedure in which he carefully selected the reagents and choreographed the order in which they were introduced into the reaction series, just as he also selected which side products to be removed and when. Such recipes, and the actions of chemists who follow them, represent what the late Hungarian physical chemist Michael Polanyi called “profoundly informative intervention[s].” Information is being added to the chemical system as the result of the deliberative actions— the intelligent design—of the chemist himself.
In sum, not only did Sutherland’s experiment not address the more fundamental problem of getting the nucleotide bases to arrange themselves into functionally specified sequences; the extent to which it did succeed in producing more life-friendly chemical constituents actually illustrates the indispensable role of intelligence in generating such chemistry. — Stephen Meyer, in "Signature of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell", David Klinghoffer, ed. [emphasis added]

Now I'm no expert; but I do believe I have common sense enough to realize that Sutherland meticulously designed an experiment that could not fail to produce the outcome he wanted to reach.

Is this even science??? Or is this abuse of science?

I have always thought that science is about discovering the laws of nature. What Sutherland seems to have done is to try to "force nature" to give up only the "answers" he wants to hear. In short, the content of his designing mind trumps the natural world outside of his head.

JMHO FWIW.

Thank you ever so much for writing, Heartlander!

“If my own mind is a product of the irrational — if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel — how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution?” ... Lewis concluded that the fact that zealous adherents of the magic science and evolution viewpoint cannot by any effort be taught to see the fatal self-contradictions and other fallacies of their viewpoint confirmed his suspicion that, “…we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought.” ...

Indeed. A radical disease — a pneumopathological disorder. Heraclitus diagnosed its sufferers as "the many" who, although the Logos is one and common — i.e., it applies equally to all men, just as Einstein said the laws of nature are the same for all observers regardless of their respective inertial frame — are like sleepers, falling into their own separate dream worlds....

The dream worlds and Reality are mutually opposed and mutually exclusive. But the dreamers really don't care about that. They refuse to even look at the problem.

Philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), agrees. In the Harvard University Lowell Lectures entitled "Science and the Modern World" (1925) Whitehead said that Christianity is the mother of modern science because of "the medieval insistence in the rationality of God." With complete confidence "in the intelligible rationality of a personal being," continued Whitehead, early scientists had an "inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labors of scientists would be without hope."

The dreamers seem not to realize that what they do as scientists absolutely depends on Nature being rational. The fact that they can't demonstrate that rationality is a property of undirected material evolution doesn't stop them from believing, nay, demanding, that pre-biotic chemical evolution is the explanation of everything that exists in the world, including life and mind (e.g., rationality).

Thank you so very much for your excellent essay/post, dear sister in Christ!

It appears that logic is a second reality.. To wit: you got yer good logic and you got yer bad logic..

Don't even go there, dearest!!! Or you are going to find yourself in the same boat as the colleague being criticized by an enormously influential mathematical physicist (who shall be nameless here): "That answer is so bad that it isn't even wrong."

Jeepers I LOVE that one! LOLOL!!!

Beware, dear one, of the "snare" of Aristotle's Third Law of the Excluded Middle. Not to say the law is "always" a "snare." The point is, the Third Law is perfectly appropriate when dealing with questions that are answerable in True/False terms. No other option available.

But not all questions fall into the range of phenomena susceptible to valid true/false answers.

A. N. Whitehead drew attention to the limit implicit in the Third Law by articulating a Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness:

The main form of the fallacy entails “taking the abstractions about some actuality that are focused on by some particular science (or science in general) due to its limited interests or methods, to be a complete description of the actuality in its concreteness”.

An example would be to mistake the notion of time found in physical formulas and mathematical representations of reality for “time” as “experienced” and found in reality itself. — Philosophy Forums.

Perhaps the above might seem a huge pile of whatever to you. But my dearest 'pipe, you were the one who told me about "The Donkey–Rider Scenario." I was able to confirm it from my own experience, though in different terms — "robot" and "me." Pretty crude.... But what do you expect from a 13-year-old???

WHY would you want to put the donkey and the rider "on the same plane,"such that they equally could be made subject to "true/false" arguments?

HUGS!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you so much, dear brother, for writing!

More HUGS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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