But there isn't a lack of evidence for God. The evidence for God is all around us.
The typical atheist retort at this point is
"the plural of anecdotes is not data".
Which is a philosophically loaded question.
What they are *trying* to say (should they spell it out) is this:
If you give me loosely organized information, not only is the signal-to-noise ratio too low, but the information is not systematic enough, to enable to to "falsify" any claims made on the basis of that information.
The unspoken theme here is that "falsification is necessary."
OK, falsification is necessary...for what?
The less informed, less intelligent, more smug atheists will either take their marbles and go home "I *knew* it was over your head, cretard!" or say "Well, you don't know science".
The more informed will say "Well, you can't do science without it!"
OK, so why do we have to do science in the first place?
Again, the less intelligent will merely result to ad hominem; the more important will painstakingly paint a stereotypical picture presented (without *scientific* evidence, ironically) of how people used to blame gods or demons for things, since they didn't know how the world worked, but now that we have science, we know better. And falsification is necessary for science, and makes it better than superstition. And besides, science *works* and religion doesn't. QED).
The problem is, they fail to remember the philosophical presuppositions which are necessary for science to have gotten a firm grounding, and, as well, the care taken by science to make sure these conditions inhere in any system under study, in order that scientific techniques become useful.
These can be summarize by the following brief quip:
Uniformity of causes in a closed system.
A minutes' reflection on this enables one to see, given this, why chemistry, physics, and mechanical engineering are sciences, but sociology, and medicine are NOT.
But the problem with philosophy is a little deeper than that.
First, as to the question of God...the question under consideration is, quite literally, whether they system *is* closed. "Is there a God" means "is there something or someone outside of nature?"
So using an ansatz which proceeds from the assumption "there is nothing else" is not going to be a marvelously efficient tool for resolving this question.
The atheist may then revert to the second line of defense, which is, "Well, we can use science, so that proves it's true!"
Philosophically, this can be expressed as "correlation does not imply causation." The fact that predictions of science are borne out is not sufficient to prove (logical proof, tautology) that the claims are accurate.
The rules of science are given by Feynman's famous quip that "If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." In other words, tomorrow may happen to have an experiment in which relativity is refuted, or conservation laws broken, or a living Tyrannosaur captured. And if that happens, it's the theories which must give way.
And the third, is the complimentarity principle. Newtonian physics fails in both the relativistic and quantum regime. Therefore Newtonian physics cannot be "true" but only act as a useful predictive model.
The larger philosophical issue is that neither "root cause" questions nor moral questions can be resolved by science: the very categories considered are different. To borrow from my earlier post, one might analyze the paint samples on a canvas to see if the work is genuinely by Seurat, and eliminate the possibility if it shown that (say) the pigment on the paint was only invented last year, or the paint is still wet(!); but this kind of disproof does not serve to solve the question of whether Seurat really lived, or whether supposed historical accounts of his favorite food for lunch are accurate.
Atheists pretend that it does.
As far as morality, C.S. Lewis came up with the most concise explanation in The Abolition of Man:
From propositions of fact no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premises in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible..
There is a certain analogy here to the "efficacy" of evolution, of the blather about survival value: often one reads of "such and such being favored, because it has 'survival value' " (think The Selfish Gene and the like).
The problem is this: IF a particular adapatation, change, or mutation, *if spread throughout the species*, will result in increased survival probability (as I.A. Richards was quoted by C.S. Lewis elsewhere, "a concept as unemotional as a definite integral"), this in no way guarantees either that
a) that mutation is likely to occur in the first place
b) that adaptation will result in greatly increased survival odds for the first few individuals (the first brood, clutch, or whatever) to possess it.
Two "philosophical, general" examples, and then a concrete one.
If you have a system which allows you a 2% greater chance of picking a winning lottery ticket, then yes, it is true, over the long term, your winnings will be MUCH greater than someone else who doesn't have the advantages of your system.
And it is on this basis that evolution claims to work, it is a statistical happening.
The problem is, in the short term, those odds aren't going to be enough to guarantee that the first possessors of a gene live long enough to make it to breed. And if they don't live long enough to breed, the mutation is wasted and cannot accumulate.
(Think of having a "bad run of luck" or a "hot streak" at the casino. You can do significantly better or worse than that predicted by gross statistics, for a short period of time. And evolution is always held true for *populations* : but when a gene is first expressed, at least for macroscopic, multicellular creatures, you're not dealing with a statistical ensemble. You've got a single generation or two from a single nest or clutch, or whatever. And if they get eaten while in the egg, or still in diapers, you're hosed. The overall improved statistics for a whole population don't get to kick in.)
The second example is from chemical kinetics, the difference between a set of products being thermodynamically favored over the reactants, and the reaction rate as observed.
Thermodynamic equilibrium constants characterize the final proportions of reactants and products within a chemical system, based on energetic and entropic considerations. For example, the relative concentration of water molecules, over the concentration of hydrogen and oxygen, at equilibrium, is for all practical purposes, infinite.
And yet, throughout the universe there are vast quantities of oxygen and hydrogen which just hang around, unreacted.
The fact that there is a certain "energy barrier" to reaction: the hydrogen and oxygen molecules must actually run into each other in order to react; and, the rate the reaction occurs at depends not only on the number of collisions, but the relative velocity of the hydrogen and oxygen upon impact, and the internal quantum states of the molecules.
If there are too few collisions occurring, or the molecules are colliding at too low of an energy, or are in the wrong quantum states, the reaction simply will never happen.
No matter how thermodynamically favored the products are.
The analogy to evolution is this: "fitness" is akin to thermodynamic favorability of a configuration of atoms. But a system cannot (in general) "automatically" go from reactants to products; there is generally a certain amount of energy required for the reaction to proceed. And so it is with evolution: no matter how much of a survival advantage inheres to the species by an adaptation, that adaptation alone cannot indemnify or protect the individuals against *all* sources of death, prior to subsequent breeding and propagation of the gene.
And without that, the mutation, even should it occur, is not guaranteed to be efficacious.
The point here is not "Look, I've disproved evolution!": but rather, the common description of evolution is too facile: since the putative mechanism of accumulation of beneficient mutations is less robust than commonly presented, (average probability for many trials ^= repeated constant probability for each individual trial in the ensemble), an observation of a trait throughout a population CANNOT be taken as "proof" that "a favorable change to a gene" propagated throughout the population.
That's not to say it CAN'T happen: but the delivery of the scientific popularizers is "it MUST happen".
A real resolution would require much more detailed information than is available now -- including a detailed mapping of the death of all causes within each evolutionary microniche for the organism in question, the relative importance of the form of death affected by the beneficial mutation, and how much of an improvement in survival is affected with respect to that particular form of death by that particular mutation.
Because, after all, survival pressure is the name of the game.
Trivial counterexample: why didn't the Dodo adapt to the dogs and pigs by suddenly mutating to fly, or lay its eggs in trees, or adapting new neural connections to allow it to kick at predators and drive them off?
"These things take time." Right.
So we conclude that if a particular environmental change takes place more quickly than the organism can adapt, the organism will go extinct.
And we conclude secondly, that a detailed understanding of sensitivity analysis is necessary to do any accurate, detailed predictions in the wild.
But I never see or hear any biologists or evolutionists discussing these things on forums.
Full Disclosure: another interesting pair of topics would be
"how close to fully adapted to its niche is each species today, and what is the "shape" of the fitness function (think 'frequency of small oscillations in a potential minimum from classical physics) --> to determine the expected "rate" of observed evolution today"
"can we induce bulk macroscopic changes *today* in controlled populations (e.g. the evolution or disappearance of a tail, creation of limbs or wings) as is held to have occurred in the past? can the environments which heavily favor such mutations be selectively engineered, and then, a large enough population bred -- by anaology to the ergodic theorem turned inside out -- that we can *observe*, measure, and characterize these mutations as they appear in real time?"
Cheers!
That’s a keeper of a post. Thank you.
Ping to post 339 for those interested.
Happy New Year.
Very nice post, covering lots of ground in an orderly manner.
Placemark to read.