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 .

Sometimes there is debate within Christianity on what may or may not be adiaphora.

True. But it seems to me such debates ought not to divide Christian brethren who are in good faith; that is, the Body of Christ ought not to quarrel with itself.

The Lord's great commandment is: To love Him with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength; and as corollary, to love our neighbor as we love our own self.

An amazingly difficult and challenging commandment — at least in the second part, the corollary. Compared to that, the first part is easy....

God's Great Commandment says NOTHING about judging one's neighbor; it only places the duty of loving one's neighbor, on each man personally. And I gather that "neighbor" is defined as the person standing right next to you, literally or figuratively....

If Christians actually took God's Great Commandment seriously, there would be no division among Christians; and, by extension, between any Christian and any other human being under God. (And ALL human beings are "under" God, whether they "like it" or not.)

Who lives in love lives in God and God in him.

From which I conclude: What is not of love, is not of God.

We are made for love, through love. But the Judgment is His alone.

It's late, I've been up too long. Watched the SOTU tonight. Had a great time with my hubby jeering at and correcting every lie he told. (You know who I mean.)

Then — being too jazzed to go to sleep from all the excitement (including the post-mortems) — watched a wonderful film my hubby stored for me on DVR, "Gifted Hands." It's a story about an extraordinarily gifted (and inspirational) pediatric neurosurgeon by the name of Benjamin Carson.

Deeply moving. Highly recommended.

I go to sleep tonight thinking of his wonderful story....

Good night, dear ones!!!

"In Christianity, adiaphora means that something is debatable, spiritually neutral. There are essentials of the Christian faith such as the deity of Christ, monotheism, Christ's physical resurrection, etc. But there are also topics that deal with issues that are non-essentials. So in a general sense, adiaphora means those Christian teachings which are neutral, things that are neither commanded nor forbidden in Scripture..."

Spirited: In other words, the color of rugs is debatable but teachings, systems, etc. that are antithetical to the essentials are absolutely not debatable.

The biblical mandate where false teachings are concerned is twofold:

1. Do not to hold to any erroneous doctrine or concept. Because faithful Christians cannot protect themselves from false teachings unless the evils surrounding them are exposed we are to actively contend for the faith once given and by way of apologetics/analysis protect the faithful from contagion by vigorously exposing the substratum of meaning, i.e., origins, logical fallacies, deceptions, delusions, errors, consequences and so forth.

2. We are to have compassion and charity for those who are enmeshed in false teachings with the primary objective of winning souls for whom Jesus Christ died.

Archbishop Sheen summarized the meaning of the biblical mandate when he argued that just as faithful Christians cannot protect themselves from false teachings unless they are exposed, neither can those who are enmeshed in them be saved unless their disease is made known to them. Only when their disease is made known to them can they finally be converted to Jesus Christ. (Religion without God, 1928; Old Errors and New Labels, 1931; Moods and Truths, 1932)

So in obedience to our Lord faithful Christians are not to tolerate but make known the errors inherent within false teachings.

In our own time, the antithesis of the essentials remains virtually unchanged from what it was in Paul's time.

"Paul was reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles, and in the market place every day with those who happened to be present. And also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him. Some were saying, "What would this idle babbler wish to say?" Others, "He seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities,"-- because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. 19And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, "May we know what this new teaching is which you are proclaiming?… "(Acts 17:18)

The Stoics and Epicureans were the two most prominent schools of nature philosophy/nature science of that time. Theirs was a scientific worldview predicated on animated matter (animism). They were the physicists of their age.

The principal tenet of the Epicureans held that the world was not made by any deity, or with any design, but came into its being and form, through a fortuitous concourse of atoms of various sizes and magnitude that cemented together and so formed the world. The world and everything in it--life, being, mind--were not created but spontaneously generated by a great cosmic event (Big Bang) that gave rise to matter. In this way of thinking, the human mind is an active principle of matter.

The Stoics were a celebrated school of severe and lofty pantheists. Like the Epicureans, they were animists. Their main principle was that the universe of matter was under the law of an iron necessity, the spirit of which was what they called the Deity or World Soul.

The pagan way of thinking represented by these two schools are the two principle enemies of the Biblical worldview. Thus in obedience to our Lord, and as an act of agape love for the faithful and all who are open to truth, we are to actively contend against these pagan teachings.

Ezekiel 33: 7-9:

“So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me.

“If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die; and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.
“But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your soul.”

* * * * * * *

I understand, dear sister in Christ. You wrote:

One of the massive failures of our time is lack of discernment. Those who lack discernment lack vision, thus cannot perceive coming consequences.

Agreed. But it seems even worse than that. Not only can they not foresee consequences; but they cannot understand how the contemporary chaotic sociocultural situation in which they stand right now, which is deeply distressing to many, came to be the way it is. The more sensitive individuals are aware they are living in a sort of poisonous Kultursmog — a sort of "collective consciousness" that, among other things, generally rejects God and is thus blind to good and evil, right and wrong....

It's really hard to "stand and fight" when all you've got to stand on is mush. Or quicksand....

IMHO, you, dear spirited, truly put your finger on the source of the Kultursmog problem: gnostic/monist systems of thinking which are of ancient origin. In modernity, these systems have found new life as "scientific systems" and/or as what Eric Voegelin calls the political religions. Our sitting president is a Magus of such a political religion; this one is called radical Left (i.e., socialistic/communistic) Progressivism, of the Alinsky/Cloward/Pivins model — which ultimately is anarchist. Its goal IMHO is to extinguish human individuality and liberty in favor of creating a Massman by the route of divvying up humanity into "groups" that can be pitted against each other and thus manipulated in a transitional phase that ultimately "progresses" to that end.

So, how did we get from there (gnostic thought systems of the ancient world) to here (gnostic thought systems of contemporary American society)?

It might be useful to isolate common features of gnostic systems, ancient and modern. The following is my "little list." Please, dear sister, do feel free to comment, and to add any relevant items that I might have missed.

My hypothesis is ALL gnostic systems

(1) are rebellions against the transcendent Creator God and the world of His making.
(2) are rejections of the human condition/human nature as such.
(3) in response to (2), seek the divinization of man, or (in many cases), the divinization of a man (e.g., Joachin de Fiore, Nietzsche, Hegel, Obama).
(4) believe the creation itself was badly made; man, by the light of his reason and technical abilities, can correct what was originally a botched job.
(5) given (4), it is possible to realize a "perfect society" — a utopia — within space and time and human history by means of human "reason" and expertise.
(6) assume that the world as it is can be changed by the way we think and speak about it ("magic words"). That is, rhetoric trumps reality, and can actually realize what are purely mental abstractions as materially tangible, workable "second realities." That is, the world "is" what "'we' SAY it is."
Or as Mao put it: Tell a lie 100 times and people will believe it is true.

I'm generalizing from several primary and secondary sources here. I suspect you are already familiar with many of them. The above is just a sketch. But you gotta start somewhere!

Anyhoot, items (1) – (6) above constitute the complete inversion of First Reality. In both classical philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology, "first reality" traditionally has been envisioned and understood in terms of the Great Hierarchy of Being. This hierarchy consists of four "partners": God–Man–World–Society. I used the en-dash ("–") to call attention to the dynamic relations thought to exist between/among the partners. The principle relation is that between God and Man; but all the four partners relate and interact with one another. E.g., societies are comprised of men; as Plato said, society was "man writ large"; man affects the world (physical nature) and is, in turn, affected by the world, et al. For 2,000 years, the Great Hierarchy of Being has been at the root (consciously or unconsciously) of man's understanding of God, of himself, of human society, of the world and man's place in it.

Please note, dear spirited: The Great Hierarchy of Being does not regard the eternal, infinite, transcendent God as "within" the material world; but on the basis of His relations with the other partners "in" that world of Creation, He expresses His eternal "immanence" within that world.

The gnostic thinker rejects all this in principle; and in all likelihood, always has. Hence, the Death of God movement initiated by Friedrich Nietzsche, in which this cosmic antipathy for God and His works finally reached critical mass.

Hey, if you "bump off God," you get extra dividends. Kill God, and you have to cover up the crime. To do that, you have to erase Him from human history. But if you do that, you end up erasing man, too. Human history, it seems to me, has been little more than the working out of the divine–human relation in evolutionary time....

I have run on very long with these speculations, dear spirited; time to sign off for now. (Even though I'd love to chat up Baruch Spinoza with you sometime. Will just say for now that some people find Spinoza a "Christlike, saintly" figure. Also that many contemporary physicists are drawn to his ideas. Go figure....

Thank you, dear sister in Christ, for sharing your thoughts with me!

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