Since you can obviously "do" some philosophy, perhaps you can help with this question?
IF evolution is geared towards survival, that is, if species evolve and adapt, over time, hanging on to that which is useful for survival, discarding that which is not...and assuming that human beings are at the end of that process....THEN doesn't it also follow that a brain geared for survival is not capable of doing cosmology?
Or to put it another way, why should we believe the speculative arguments of brains which are produced from an evolutionary process?
Or to get to the heart of the matter: aren't evolutionary biological arguments ultimately self-destructive?
(Note: That is just one of the philosophical problems I have with evolution. There are plenty more but I have never really been able to dialogue philosophically with scientists. They either dismiss philosophy, or are simply incapable of it).
Exactly the opposite. Abstract reasoning and general intelligence are very useful for survival, and also allow us to examine the world scientifically.
Makes complete sense to me, ConservativeDude! Unless a case can be made that cosmological speculation has survival (fitness) value. You could go into the caves at Lascaux in the French Pyrrannes and find amazing paintings that suggest that the people who lived there, apparently in communities, (dated roughly 25 centuries B.C.) were already dealing with cosmological issues. But that would depend on how you chose to interpret the "evidence" -- the exact same situation that applies to the reading of the fossil record.... I.e., we tend to find what we're looking for: Our presuppositions can and do skew outcomes.
Anyhoot, to me it is senseless to say that "the brain" is "doing" cosmology. I don't think it is the brain that thinks, but the mind. It appears to me that consciousness, like life itself, cannot be reduced to purely material causes. And Darwinism has no clue about the origin of either.
Though people will speculate on such issues in ways consistent with their materialist presuppositions -- and really get no where. An excellent case in point is the abiogenetic origin of life hypothesis, that life spontaneously arises from chemistry under favorable conditions. Darwin never included such speculations in his published work; but in a personal letter to a friend that became public in 1954, he did enthuse about a "warm little pond" scenario....
But Nobelist Francis Crick basically drove a silver stake through the heart of such foolishness when he demonstrated that the progression amino acids -> proteins -> RNA -> DNA simply doesn't happen in nature. This key insight, which arose from information theory, has come to be known as the "Central Dogma" of biology.
In the end, it seems to me that focusing only on material and efficient causes puts Neo-Darwinism in a situation where it's letting the tail [of its desire] wag the dog [of its science]: its methodological materialism precludes it from recognizing that formal and final causes actually do operate in nature. I think science -- especially physics and mathematics -- is increasingly aware that an absolutist materalist reductionism may be creating a false picture of reality.
The "first scientist," Aristotle, thought you needed to consider four causes -- formal, material, efficient, final -- to explain existents in nature, not just two (material and efficient). Problem is the formal and final causes seem to be "non-corporeals." So it's difficult to say just how they operate in nature. Still, to me, this is the million-dollar question....
Thanks so much for your astute and thought-provoking essay/post, ConservativeDude!