Posted on 09/16/2011 1:37:45 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Professor of Atheism Richard Dawkins grows increasingly shrill. His outbursts include the following, not very recent, but typical:
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It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).
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You can, of course, make any point you like providing you don't care about first premises. One thing which evidently fails to enter Professor Dawkins' mental universe is the idea -- accepted by many scientists -- that the theory of evolution is broadly correct, but as an explanation of life and the human condition it is incomplete.
We know life exists. We also know it had to be created by some process. Biology tells us that that process was evolution. It tells us nothing about what set that process in notion, created the Earth we stand on, or created the universe from some unimaginable pre-Creation state without space or time. The idea that the Universe created itself out of nothing seems somehow unsatisfactory.
Whether the Heaven and the Earth, and human life, was created over 13.2 billion years following the Big Bang, or over six days as a literal reading of Genesis is interpreted as saying, actually does not matter.
Of course I accept evolution. I find the Biblical literalists who claim the Earth was created in six days, and who believe that we are all descended from a couple called Adam and Eve Fell who because they were tempted by a walking, talking snake, tiresome. I am more-or-less aware of the historical reasons why these fundamentalist beliefs took root and persist in some communities.
But this does not mean that evolution explains everything, or that it ought to explain everything.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
I agree! Sooner or later reality asserts itself.
As I said, or intended to, it is so easy to just accept reality and live by it. It makes life so simple and rewarding. Yet, for a variety of reasons, usually centered on egotistical fear, many reject it.
For the record, I consider reality to be God's creation in all its forms. That includes everything. His is an ever-present energy that eternally supports, and invites our participation in, His plan. God is the Verb of the Universe. What we see are the Nouns.
Oh so brilliantly said!
I so agree dear brother in Christ!
Thank you for this astonishing insight! I'm thrilled your fides quaerens intellectum is going so well!
Thanks. Are my fides bono? :-)
Seems so to me, dear brother!
Would you like additional details re: fides quaerens intellectum?
Sure! I did a quick search and got a general idea but I would learn more from your explanation.
I am about to take a break but I do remember your saying something about this in the past. Along that line, before I post on these threads I always seek guidance that I may say something meaningful and helpful to others. I take no credit for what may come out. Sometimes, as I read it myself, I see even more depth behind what I said than originally. Sometimes things I intend to say get left behind.
It is an adventure, although a joyous one. The big thing is that it inspires responses from you and others. From those I learn a lot!
I am still trying to get my mind around this and of course much of it is related to causality and purpose.
I study life (as an amateur!!) mostly because I think until we know what life is and have a proper definition, we cannot say what is the difference between the living and the non-living.
If we find a difference, then we can look at it and ask “Is this explainable by terms and reasons that the hard sciences can show?”
In other words, are the four fundamental forces and the laws of matter and energy able to explain this “thing”?
If they cannot explain it using these basics, the the hard sciences are DEFICIENT in explaining the universe. It might even be said that they are TOTALLY INSUFFICIENT.
Science does not have the luxury of explaining what it wants to and ignoring what it does not understand.
I studied some psychology in college and one of the first things they talk about is Stimulus-Response. Someone sticks a pin in your rear, you yell OUCH and turn around and smack them.
Now I personally do not believe that SR is enough to explain the totality of life, but when you examine cellular activity and things like that, you find SR is important.
But one very interesting thing about SR is that you can look at all the sciences, the hard sciences and the softer ones, and theories about SR don’t start showing up until you get into the realm of biology and psychology.
The hard sciences ignore it because they don’t see it, they don’t need it, so they use terms like “random”...
It’s not enough for science to simply talk about biochemistry and ecology and then say they have explained it all. If science is legitimate, I should be able to ask a scientist “Why is the sky blue? Will it rain tomorrow? Why does my mother-in-law hate me?”
Because of this very important thing I believe to be a fact:
Because once it is proven that the four forces and the laws of matter and energy cannot explain life then THERE MUST BE SOMETHING MORE!!!
Let me repeat that: THERE MUST BE SOMETHING MORE!
And it would not be just our imaginations. It would be something outside the material universe.
Can SR be explained in simple terms? Can purpose be explained that way?
It may very well be that matter has a tendency to merge in complex forms that we don’t have any kind of proof or evidence for.
If that is the case, then what is the end? Are we supposed to do something?
I hope no one thinks that I am trying to be too agnostic here, or anything like that. Because if we find these forces and purposes and forms then we have found a (small) part of Him!!
That is excellent.
I'll definitely have to remember that one for future use.
Looks like you have RGB in hexadecimal all figured out. #FF 00 00 - 255 000 000 = 650 nm = red
If you would like to expand the metaphor, prayer is the language.
I was thinking that Since God speaks and what HE says IS, that what we see is the nouns.
Again, it’s a matter sometimes of getting out of the Western mindset that the physical world we can see and touch is the whole of reality and has any validity.
There is nothing wrong with being agnostic. It is the bridge between belief and non-belief.
Approximately 43 years ago I was pursuing the same line of reasoning as you, trying to get to the essence of things. I had satisfied myself with most things but couldn't get past what I describe as a tiny bright light which seemed to be located in my chest. I could "see" it and feel it but I could not dissect it. I concluded that it was God within, as it is with all of us, and that that was the essence I was seeking.
Keep in mind that God, by definition, is boundless. Any attempt to bind Him, even a small part of Him, with scientific proof is futile for that would violate the premise of boundless. Everything we do is "inside" God as He envelopes everything. You can't reach outside Him. Content yourself with just accepting it and you will have progressed.
Within those limitations, we can occasionally learn what He did but never how He did it.
Each time God reveals Himself to us we learn how much more there is to reveal. I am in a continual state of anticipation waiting for the next revaluation and hoping that I recognize it when it comes.
Keep in mind Alamo Girl's reminder, God said I AM. That is all you need to know and the other things will be revealed.
To make it more dizzying, stay aware that what we see and touch and those things with which we see and touch are simply space and energy on the subatomic level. Basically we are exchanging energy with our environment. That is the same energy that binds it all together - God.
To me, that indicates a divine system and grand plan. Or Universal Illusion.
Thanks.
That’s very reassuring.
I do this from what I call an agnostic stance because I think it’s important to go into an inquiry like this with NO PRECONCEPTIONS.
Ultimately, it has to do with the nature of knowledge and consciousness itself.
No matter how I look at it, it seems to me that science cannot adequately explain life. And as I said above, that means there is something else.
I have had discussions with BB and AG and others on other threads about the limits of knowledge. Because of Godel, we know there are things in the universe that are unknowable. They exist, but they are unknowable.
What if part of that unknowable universe is alive?
A kind of scary logical conclusion is that just because we can’t see or know about them, that does not mean that they cannot see or know about us!!
One of the problems with these kinds of lines of thought is that they are VERY BIG!!!
One of the conclusions of my essay above is that if life is made of patterns (USUALLY patterns made of matter), then nothing could stop those patterns being patters of light or patterns of sound, maybe even patterns of looped space-time.
Years ago, I stood on a mountain near Yosemite and put my hands on the bare rock and had an overwhelming feeling the rock was alive.
About a week later, I spoke with a gal I hadn’t talked with for about twenty years, who was very into climbing, and she just out of the blue, talking about her climbing experiences, said the exact same thing!
So whatever it is, it’s way, way, way bigger than us. But we ARE a small part!
One of the things I wonder about is the anthropomorphizing of God. Nobody said God has to be like man. Nobody said God has to be good or kind or loving.
I think that if the theories go to their final conclusion, it will be concluded that he IS all the things I mentioned, but maybe that’s just my belief that good triumphs over evil.
One of the things I think about life is that it is very anti-entropic in a way. So a belief in good over evil might mean a belief that the universe is somehow getting more organized over time.
That is one thing I have come to believe. That all is not yet set, that all is not predetermined. That there might be laws of nature and man and laws of the spirit that are yet to be revealed, in fact YET TO EVEN COME INTO EXISTENCE.
I don’t think physics or the hard sciences can rule out that scenario.
Anyways, feel free to be as critical as you can! It works for me because it makes me go back and review what I did/wrote and see if I missed something! (which, of course, is very likely!)
Regards,
djf
“Evolution” is an impossibly broad term.
Even Six-Day Creationists believe in “Evolution.”
For example, every Six-Dayer I’ve ever met believes that the distinctive races of man evolved and differentiated from a single individual, over a relatively short period of time.
So when a person says “Do you believe in ‘Evolution’,” the next thing that is required is a DEFINITION.
Or, which one, Darwin's or the Bible's? An excellent point!
FWIW, that seems doubtful to me. One of the more interesting observations regarding the question "What is Life?" I've encountered recently was Robert Rosen's, from his book Life Itself:
,,,[T]he idea that life requires an explanation is a relatively new one. To the ancients, life simply was; it was a given; a first principle, in terms of which other things were to be explained. Life vanished as an explanatory principle with the rise of mechanics, when Newton showed that the mysteries of the stars and planets yielded to a few simple rules in which life played no part, when LaPlace could proudly say "Je n'ai pas besoin de cet hypothèse" ["I have no need of that (God) hypothesis"]; when the successive mysteries of nature seemed to yield to understanding based on inanimate nature alone; only then was it clear that life itself was something that had to be explained....Anyhoot, it seems that Rosen was of the mind that biology indeed is the "general case," and the laws of physics the "special case." Which is tantamount to saying that ours is a living universe. And he is not alone in that speculation. It also implies that biological beings are not wholly "reducible" to physics. There is something "more" there that both physicists and biologists do not or cannot recognize — very likely because their methods cannot reach to that "more": It simply cannot exist for a mechanist (or a materialist), by definition. So let's not talk about it.
One of the few physicists to recognize that the profound silence of contemporary physics on matters biological was something peculiar was Walter Elsasser. To him, this silence was itself a physical fact and one that required a physical explanation. He found one by carrying to the limit the tacit physical presupposition that, because organisms seem numerically rare in the physical universe, they must therefore be too special to be of interest as material systems....
[Yet] Why could it not be that the "universals" of physics are only so on a small and special (if inordinately prominent) class of material systems, a class to which organisms are too general to belong? What if physics is the particular, and biology the general, instead of the other way around? ...
...[A] rather strange and dreary consensus has emerged in biology over the past three or four decades. On the one hand, biologists have convinced themselves that the processes of life do not violate any known physical principles; thus they call themselves "mechanists" rather than "vitalists." Further, biologists believe that life is somehow the inevitable consequence of underlying physical (inanimate) processes; this is one of the wellsprings of reductionism. But on the other hand, modern biologists are also, most fervently, evolutionists; they believe wholeheartedly that everything about organisms is shaped by essentially historical, accidental factors, which are inherently unpredictable and to which no universal principles can apply. That is, they believe that everything important about life is not necessary but contingent. The unperceived ironies and contradictions in these beliefs are encapsulated in the recent boast by a molecular biologist: "Molecular biologists do not believe in equations." What is relinquished so glibly here is nothing less than any shred of logical necessity in biology, and with it, any capacity to actually understand. In place of understanding, we are allowed only standing — and watching. Thus if the physicist stands mute, the biologist actually negates, while pretending not to.
djf, you wrote: "... one very interesting thing about [Stimulus-Response] is that you can look at all the sciences, the hard sciences and the softer ones, and theories about SR don’t start showing up until you get into the realm[s] of biology and psychology." Very astutely noted! In other words, into the realms of life and consciousness (neither of which have been defined by the physical sciences by virtue of their total inability to make such things tractable in terms of their presuppositions and methods).
You don't have to be a genius to recognize that you can "stimulate" a rock all day long but it will never manifest a "response." A rock is an inorganic system.
But even the simplest organic (living) systems — say amoebae or bacteria — readily exhibit responsiveness to stimulation. And more — they appear to possess some form of consciousness, albeit a comparatively low-level one. For example, Slavoj Hontela, a Czech MD who "dabbles" in experimental biology, conducted an experiment that showed the following:
Let us to observe the behavior of an Amoeba in the microscope’s visual field. We can see there an Amoeba, of Proteus species, slowly moving by stretching out its pseudopodia, looking probably for food. We place now with a glass pipette close to her few powdered pigments of a dried Chinese Ink. The amoeba stretches one of her pseudopodia to a pigment grain closest to her (evidence of a chemotaxic reaction or ability !) and involves the grain into her pushing it down to the nucleus where the digestive vacuoles are present. It is certainly interesting that the pigment transported through the pseudopodia towards the nucleus, doesn't yet touch the nucleus capsule when obviously the Amoeba recognized the undigestibility of the Chinese Ink pigment, the further transportation in the direction to the nucleus stops and the foreign body is quickly pushed back and finally eliminated from the Ameoba's body.Researchers working with bacteria have found similar results:
...From this observation it is possible to make already several conclusions:
1) The amoeba was able to recognize and approach the foreign body which might be its potential food,...The second phase of the observation experiment was even more interesting because it brought to the evidence the proof of the presence of memory. We have removed the pigment from the underlying microscopic glass dip, we put there a new drop of clear water and again placed there another pigment grain of Chinese Ink. The Amoeba stretched the pseudopodium to the closest pigment but did not touch it and, in contrary pulled back from the pigment grain. Obviously it preserved the memory for the identification of the indigestible pigment!
2) A. was able to mobilize her pseudopodia giving them the appropriate message to approach this pigment and engulf it.
3) With a certain delay which was obviously necessary to process the information related to the characteristic of the foreign body and the realization that it is indigestible follows another set of messages and the pigment was eliminated.
Recently, it has become clear that simple bacteria can exhibit rich behavior, have internal degrees of freedom, informational capabilities, and freedom to respond by altering itself and others via emission of signals in a self-regulated manner.... Each bacterium is, by itself, a biotic autonomous system, having a certain freedom to select its response to the biochemical messages it receives, including self-alteration, self-plasticity, and decision making, permitting purposeful alteration of its behavior.... Bacteria are able to reverse the spontaneous course of entropy increase and convert high-entropy inorganic substances into low-entropy life-sustaining molecules. Similarly, di Primio, Müller, and Lengeler ... have demonstrated that bacteria and other unicellular organisms are autonomous and social beings showing cognition in the forms of association, remembering, forgetting, learning, etc., activities that are found in all living organisms.The passage immediately above is from "Fundamental Complexity Measures of Life," by Attila Grandpierre, which appeared in Sechbach & Gordon's Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith and Evolution. Dr. Grandpierre is an astrophysicist with the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest, with a profound interest in theoretical biology.
Have run on long by now, so must close. But one final point: It seems very clear to me that life and consciousness go hand-in-hand. If the "hard sciences" — or even the squishy soft ones, like Darwin's evolutionary theory — cannot deal with that, then clearly, they are, as you say djf, "TOTALLY INSUFFICIENT."
Thank you ever so much for your outstanding insights!
Fides quaerens intellectum — "Faith seeking understanding" — was the motto of Anselm, Archbishop of Cantebury (1033-1109), the outstanding philosopher and theologian of the eleventh century who is regarded as a Saint and Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church.
Anselm opens his Monologion with these words:
If anyone does not know, either because he has not heard or because he does not believe, that there is one nature, supreme among all existing things, who alone is self-sufficient in his eternal happiness, who through his omnipotent goodness grants and brings it about that all other things exist or have any sort of well-being, and a great many other things that we must believe about God or his creation, I think he could at least convince himself of most of these things by reason alone, if he is even moderately intelligent.Thus Anselm hopes to convince “the fool,” that is, the person who “has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’ ” (Psalm 14:1; 53:1) that there is, indeed, a God; and that this fact can be established by reason.
It has been pointed out that there are at least two ways to misunderstand what Anselm meant by "faith seeking understanding."
First, Anselm isn't at all interested in replacing faith with understanding:
If one takes ‘faith’ to mean roughly ‘belief on the basis of testimony’ and ‘understanding’ to mean ‘belief on the basis of philosophical insight’ [or arguably, on the preferred method of science, on the basis of direct observation and "falsification"], one is likely to regard faith as an epistemically substandard position; any self-respecting philosopher [or scientist] would surely want to leave faith behind as quickly as possible.... But ... Anselm is not hoping to replace faith with understanding. Faith for Anselm is more a volitional state than an epistemic state: it is love for God and a drive to act as God wills. In fact, Anselm describes the sort of faith that “merely believes what it ought to believe” as “dead” (Monologion 78).... So “faith seeking understanding” means something like “an active love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of God.”Or in other words, faith seeking understanding is seeking active relationship with and to God. By knowing Him, our understanding is increased — our understanding not only of Him, but also of the nature of His works.
The second common misunderstanding of fides quaerens intellectum is that because it begins with “faith,” not with doubt or suspension of belief, it must be an inferior method of acquiring true knowledge of the world. This is the sort of approach roundly rejected by the scientific method — at least supposedly. It seems to me everything that science does is based on faith of some kind — just not faith in God.
To put it another way, the minimal faith of the scientist is that the world is intelligible, and therefore, can be understood by an intelligent being. Of course, the scientist does not/cannot ask what is the cause of, or the reason for, the intelligibility of the world? Such a question is never asked: It is utterly beyond the scope of the physical sciences.
To me, the two most profound statements from Anselm are:
From the Prologium: "Speak to my desirous soul what you are, other than what it has seen, that it may clearly see what it desires"; and "O Lord, you are not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are also greater than what can be conceived." In these two statements, it seems to me, is Anselm's entire "method" and fundamental "presupposition."
As Eric Voegelin has written,
...[T]he true source of the Anselmian effort [is] the living desire of the soul to move toward the divine light. The divine reality lets the light of its perfection fall into the soul; the illumination of the soul arouses the awareness of man's existence as a state of imperfection; and this awareness provokes the human movement in response to the divine appeal. The illumination, as St. Augustine names this experience, has for Anselm indeed the character of an appeal, and even of a counsel and a promise.... The praying quest responds to the appeal of reason in the fides; the Proslogion is the fides in action, in pursuit of its own reason.Just some "stuff" to think about! I suspect you're already "onto" this somehow, dear Mind-numbed Robot, as if by instinct....
Moreover they believe in it at a pace and power well beyond that ever suggested by any competent evolutionary biologist.
Yet they will tell you with a straight face that they don't believe in evolution. Someone is obviously confused. And it ain't me!
Yes. What you posted speaks directly to me! I could have written the same in first person and it would be equally true.
As I said in an earlier post, often times what I write in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way, upon rereading what I wrote, it seems to contain some wisdom I was not necessarily aware of when I wrote it. I learn from myself.
However, being blessed with historical ignorance, it is always enlightening in these exchanges to see that much wiser men than I have reached the same conclusions. It satisfies my faith that God is responding to my seeking.
As I said earlier, the more God reveals, the more we realize how much is yet to be revealed. Some are further down the path than others.
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