"Without a doubt, the ultimate Black Swan is whatever it was that permitted merely genetic human beings to emerge into full humanness just yesterday (cosmically speaking), some 50,000 years ago.
Prior to this there was existence, but so what? There was life, but who cares? With no one to consciously experience it, what was the point? Without self-conscious observers, the whole cosmos could bang into being and contract into nothingness, and it would be no different than the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it.
One of the reasons why this is such a lonely and unpopular blog is that it takes both science and religion seriously. Most science and religion are unserious, but especially -- one might say intrinsically -- when they exclude each other.
A religion that cannot encompass science is not worthy the name, while a science that cannot be reconciled with religion is not fit for human beings. And I mean this literally, in that it will be a science that applies to a different species, not the one that is made to know love, truth, beauty, existence, and the Absolute. Science must begin and end in this principle -- which is to say, the Principle -- or it is just a diversion. ...."
Anyway, at least Ridley is honest in acknowledging the problem, although he doesn't exactly name it or draw out its full implications. But the problem is this: that there is a literally infinite gap between man and animal (even though there is an obvious continuity as well), just as there is an infinite gap between nothing and existence or matter and life.
One can say that this gap is infinite because man intuits the Absolute, or one can say that man intuits the Absolute because of this infinite gap. Either way, once man consciously enters the sensorium of time and space, he is implicitly aware of both Absolute and Infinite, and therefore Love, Truth, Justice, Beauty, Virtue, and Eternity. These are the things that define man, not his genome.
Just so. Thus I agree with John Paul II's observation: "Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter — are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person. ...” [Italics added]
To me, this statement draws attention to the fact that, at the root of Darwin's theory, there lies an undisclosed and unanalyzed initial presupposition: That all natural phenomena "supervene on the physical, or the material." That is, everything that exists reduces to "matter in its motions." This is hard-core materialism — a philosophical doctrine. Everything in Darwin's theory is premised on the idea that this doctrine is a valid, fully comprehensive model of universal reality.
Darwin's theory is wedded profoundly to the Newtonian view of the Universe: That all natural things ultimately "reduce" to "particles" and "mechanics." There is nothing "more" to be taken into account. This can give you a good description of a machine — but arguably not of a living organism, let alone a human being.
Of course, this begs the question of how life and intelligence can arise from inanimate matter. In fact, Darwin's theory not only has no plausible answers to questions of life and intelligence, but lacks a method by which they can be understood — "they" having been ruled out "from the beginning," in effect, precisely because they are "immaterial things" and therefore not "matter."
And they call Darwinism "biological science!" The very word "biology" means the study of life. Darwinism does not in any sense study "life" (or consciousness), only the historical transformations that already-existent life forms have undergone in the past. As supported by a very recalcitrant and spotty fossil record.
In short, Darwinism is only about how species change, not about what caused them to be living (and intelligent) creatures in the first place. Moreover, as the eminent biologist Stephen Jay Gould has suggested, what is truly remarkable about biological organisms/species is not that they undergo change; rather that there is so much "stasis" in their developed forms over hundreds of thousands of years (in many cases). There is no continuous "evolving" going on here, as Darwin's theory predicts....
Regarding this "remarkable stasis [which] has generally been ignored as no data," Gould quipped, "If they don't change, it's not evolution so you don't talk about it." Which just goes to show how the doctrinal tail wags the scientific dog....
I could go on.... The epistemological critique of Darwin's theory can easily be extended to include its resistance to the assimilation of new ideas from other parts of science, such as complex system theory and causal non-locality (e.g., there are no non-local causes in Newton) and centrality of the observer in quantum theory, etc. Darwin's theory is essentially "rigid" when it comes to assimilating new, breakthrough ideas from other disciplines of science....
But I've run on long enough for now.
In the end, to me, Darwin's theory looks more like a religious dogma than bona-fide science....
JMHO, FWIW.
Thanks ever so much, dear Matchett-PI, for your outstanding essay/post!
p.s.: And thanks ever so much for the outstanding link! (To the inimitable Gagdad Bob....)
Prior to this there was existence, but so what? There was life, but who cares? With no one to consciously experience it, what was the point? Without self-conscious observers, the whole cosmos could bang into being and contract into nothingness, and it would be no different than the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it.
One of the reasons why this is such a lonely and unpopular blog is that it takes both science and religion seriously. Most science and religion are unserious, but especially -- one might say intrinsically -- when they exclude each other.
A religion that cannot encompass science is not worthy the name, while a science that cannot be reconciled with religion is not fit for human beings. And I mean this literally, in that it will be a science that applies to a different species, not the one that is made to know love, truth, beauty, existence, and the Absolute. Science must begin and end in this principle -- which is to say, the Principle -- or it is just a diversion. ...."
Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely? (pick one)(a) Sagan is lonely because, as a true devotee of science, a noble and reliable method of attaining knowledge, he feels increasingly isolated in a world in which, as Bronowski has said, there is a failure of nerve and men seem willing to undertake anything other than the rigors of science and believe anything at all: in Velikovski, von Daniken, even in Mr. and Mrs. Barney Hill, who reported being captured and taken aboard a spaceship in Vermont.
(b) Sagan is lonely because, after great expectations, he has not discovered ETIs in the Cosmos, because chimpanzees don't talk, dolphins don't talk, humpback whales sing only to other humpback whales, and he has heard nothing but random noise from the Cosmos, and because Vikings 1 and 2 failed to discover evidence of even the most rudimentary organic life in the soil of Mars.
(c) Sagan is lonely because, once everything in the Cosmos, including man, is reduced to the sphere of immanence, matter in interaction, there is no one left to talk to except other transcending intelligences from other worlds.-- from Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book