Posted on 05/05/2004 11:31:33 PM PDT by tpaine
In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature
By NICHOLAS WADE
Who should define human nature? When the biologist Edward O. Wilson set out to do so in his 1975 book "Sociobiology," he was assailed by left-wing colleagues who portrayed his description of genetically shaped human behaviors as a threat to the political principles of equal rights and a just society.
Since then, a storm has threatened anyone who prominently asserts that politically sensitive aspects of human nature might be molded by the genes. So biologists, despite their increasing knowledge from the decoding of the human genome and other advances, are still distinctly reluctant to challenge the notion that human behavior is largely shaped by environment and culture. The role of genes in shaping differences between individuals or sexes or races has become a matter of touchiness, even taboo. A determined effort to break this silence and make it safer for biologists to discuss what they know about the genetics of human nature has now been begun by Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist of language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a book being published by Viking at the end of this month, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature," he seeks to create greater political elbow room for those engaged in the study of the ways genes shape human behavior. "If I am an advocate, it is for discoveries about human nature that have been ignored or suppressed in modern discussions of human affairs," he writes.
A principal theme of Dr. Pinker's argument is that the blank slaters — the critics of sociobiology and their many adherents in the social sciences — have sought to base the political ideals of equal rights and equal opportunity on a false biological premise: that all human minds are equal because they are equally blank, equally free of innate, genetically shaped, abilities and behaviors.
The politics and the science must be disentangled, Dr. Pinker argues. Equal rights and equal opportunities are moral principles, he says, not empirical hypotheses about human nature, and they do not require a biological justification, especially not a false one. Moreover, the blank slate doctrine has political consequences that have been far from benign, in Dr. Pinker's view. It encourages totalitarian regimes to excesses of social engineering. It perverts education and child-rearing, loading unmerited guilt on parents for their children's failures.
In his book he reproaches those who in his view have politicized the study of human nature from both the left and the right, though in practice more of his fire is directed against the left, particularly the critics of sociobiology. They have created a climate in which "discoveries about human nature were greeted with fear and loathing because they were thought to threaten progressive ideals," he writes.
He accuses two of them — Dr. Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist at Harvard, and the late Dr. Stephen J. Gould, a historian of science — of "25 years of pointless attacks" on Dr. Wilson and on Dr. Richard Dawkins, author of "The Selfish Gene," for allegedly saying certain aspects of behavior are genetically determined.
And he chides the sociobiology critics for turning a scholarly debate "into harassment, slurs, misrepresentation, doctored quotations, and, most recently, blood libel." In a recent case, two anthropologists accused Dr. James Neel, a founder of modern human genetics, and Dr. Napoleon Chagnon, a social anthropologist, of killing the Yanomamö people of Brazil to test genetic theories of human behavior, a charge Dr. Pinker analyzes as without basis in fact.
With this preemptive strike in place, Dr. Pinker sets out his view of what science can now say about human nature. This includes many of the ideas laid out by Dr. Wilson in "Sociobiology" and "On Human Nature," updated by recent work in evolutionary psychology and other fields.
Dr. Pinker argues that significant innate behavioral differences exist between individuals and between men and women. Discussing child-rearing, he says that children's characters are shaped by their genes, by their peer group and by chance experiences; parents cannot mold their children's nature, nor should they wish to, any more than they can redesign that of their spouses. Those little slates are not as blank as they may seem.
Dr. Pinker has little time for two other doctrines often allied with the Blank Slate. One is "the Ghost in the Machine," the assumption of an immaterial soul that lies beyond the reach of neuroscience, and he criticizes the religious right for thwarting research with embryonic stem cells on the ground that a soul is lurking within. The third member of Dr. Pinker's unholy trinity is "the Noble Savage," the idea that the default state of human nature is mild, pacific and unacquisitive. Dr. Pinker believes, to the contrary, that dominance and violence are universal; that human societies are more given to an ethos of reciprocity than to communal sharing; that intelligence and character are in part inherited, meaning that "some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems," and that all societies are ethnocentric and easily roused to racial hatred. Following in part the economist Thomas Sowell, he distinguishes between a leftist utopian vision of human nature (the mind is a blank slate, man is a Noble Savage, traditional institutions are the problem) and the tragic vision preferred by the right (man is the problem; family, creed and Adam Smith's Invisible Hand are the solutions).
"My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the tragic vision and undermine the utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life," he writes.
With "The Blank Slate," Dr. Pinker has left the safe territory of irregular verbs. But during a conversation in his quiet Victorian house a few blocks from the bustle of Harvard Square, he seemed confident of dodging the explosions that have rocked his predecessors. "Wilson didn't know what he was getting into and had no idea it would cause such a ruckus," he said. "This book is about the ruckus; it's about why people are so upset." "It's conceivable that if you say anything is innate, people will say you are racist, but the climate has changed," he says. "I don't actually believe that the I.Q. gap is genetic, so I didn't say anything nearly as inflammatory as Herrnstein and Murray," the authors of the 1994 book "The Bell Curve," who argued that inborn differences in intelligence explain much of the economic inequality in American society.
Despite his confidence, Dr. Pinker is explicitly trying to set off an avalanche. He compares the overthrow of the blank slate view to another scientific revolution with fraught moral consequences, that of Galileo's rejection of the church's ideas about astronomy. "We are now living, I think, through a similar transition," he writes, because the blank slate, like the medieval church's tidy hierarchy of the cosmos, is "a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day."
Dr. Pinker is not the fire-breathing kind of revolutionary. He has a thick mop of curly brown hair, edged respectably with gray, and a mild, almost diffident manner. A writer for the Canadian magazine Macleans described Dr. Pinker, who was born in Montreal, as "endearingly Canadian: polite, soft-spoken, attentive to what others say." Teased about this description, he notes that Canadians also gave the world ice hockey. Born in 1954, he grew up in the city's Jewish community, in the neighborhood described in Mordecai Richler's novel "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz." He was caught up in the debates of the 60's and 70's about social organization and human nature, but found his teenage anarchist views of the nobility of human nature dealt a sharp empirical refutation by the Montreal police strike of 1969; in the absence of authority, Montrealers turned immediately to lawlessness, robbing 6 banks and looting 100 stores before the Mounties restored order. Trained as an experimental psychologist at Harvard, Dr. Pinker took up the study of language and became convinced that the brain's linguistic ability must rest on built-in circuitry. This made him think other faculties and behaviors could be innate, despite the unpopularity of the idea. "People think the worst environmental explanation is preferable to the best innatist explanation," he says.
Dr. Pinker first became known outside his specialty through his 1994 book "The Language Instinct," an approachable account of how the brain is constructed to learn language. He followed up that success with "How the Mind Works," in which he shared his enthusiasm for the ideas of evolutionary psychology. "The Blank Slate" further broadens his ambit from neuroscience to political and social theory.
Like Edward O. Wilson, who began as a specialist in ants and mastered ever larger swaths of biology, Dr. Pinker has a gift of summarizing other specialists' works into themes that are larger than their parts. Synthesisers are rare animals in the academic zoo because they risk being savaged by those whose territory they invade. "Everything in the study of human behavior is controversial, and if you try to sum it up you will ride roughshod over specialists, so you've got to have a strong stomach," Dr. Pinker said.
The critics of sociobiology caricatured their opponents as "determinists," even though few, if any, people believe human nature is fully determined by the genes. Could Dr. Pinker's description of the Blank Slate similarly overstate their views? He says he shows at length how critics like Dr. Lewontin have made statements that "are really not too far from the collection of positions that I call the Blank Slate," with Dr. Lewontin and others having even written a book called "Not in Our Genes."
Though Dr. Pinker believes the politics and science of human nature should be disentangled, that does not mean political arrangements should ignore or ride roughshod over human nature. To the contrary, a good political system "should mobilize some parts of human nature to rein in other parts." The framers of the Constitution took great interest in human nature and "by almost any measure of human well-being, Western democracies are better," he says.
Dr. Pinker believes that human nature "will increasingly be explained by the sciences of mind, brain, genes and evolution." But if political and social systems should be designed around human nature, won't that give enormous power to the psychologists, neuroscientists, and geneticists are in a position to say what human nature is?
"It's a game anyone should be able to play if they do their homework," he says, "so I hope it wouldn't become the exclusive province of a scientific priesthood."
I have to admit that you've sort of lost me here. Care to rephrase?
I'll rephrase what I wrote for clarity. There are certain classes of algorithms whose scalability is essentially bound by memory latency (or more accurately reference rate). As it turns out, our silicon processors don't scale particularly well in this regard AND the computational model that is normally ascribed to the human mind in theory just so happens to be a latency bound algorithm class.
Our silicon typically has only a couple extremely fast memory channels. The human brain has very slow channels, but it has many billions of them operating simultaneously such that massive improvement in channel speed of silicon cannot compensate for the immensely parallel referencing architecture of the brain. Silicon will get there eventually, but it is a couple orders of magnitude off currently, and that is being generous.
Memory can be used to loosely define the Kolmogorov complexity of a computer. A brain has gobs of it, and it can resolve an insane number of references per second. In terms of effective Kolmogorov complexity, the brain is vastly larger due to its superior ability to reference other neurons, even though there is arguably genuine parity in processing power. For better or worse, intelligence is a function of the ability to express Kolmogorov complexity. The number of FLOPS and IPS silicon can churn through is actually irrelevant to the question of intelligence for all practical purposes because the baseline is so low that silicon has long met this mark even though it can only express relatively small Kolmogorov complexity for most intents and purposes. And in practice we rarely exploit the capabilities silicon has.
Congratulations! You have just entered the realm of non-axiomatic systems.
They are new to computer science at large, novel, very powerful as a model of computation, and extremely compelling theoretically. The questions you are asking have little or no meaning in the context of these systems, and these models are the gold standard for theoretical research in this area, though very new. The entirety of computer science has concerned itself with axiomatic systems and models for the vast majority of its history.
Importantly: It has been proven mathematically that all expressions of universal intelligence are only expressible in non-axiomatic systems (c.f. Hutter et al). It is worth noting that many of these theoretical arguments took place in the 1999-2000 time frame, when unified non-axiomatic models were first proposed, but the theoretical argument was so compelling that it has become a de facto assumption -- the mathematics and the model is nigh unassailable in any obvious fashion -- and there is substantial strong evidence that the brain fits this model.
The information is spotty on the web, and it is an area of very active work, but you will find the answers you are looking for in this area of mathematics.
tortoise, thank you so much for the heads-up to non-axiomatic systems. It appears to be an exciting development in understanding how brains process information, one that may well bear fruit.
Still, your helpful and informative posts really don't shed light on the issue that I'm looking at, which is not so much how brain processing works, but what triggers the processing. As I see it, putting it very crudely, my brain does not think me; I think through my brain.
I don't know whether you've ever studied your own mental functions, tortoise. But certain things I've noticed about how my mind "works" cannot entirely be explained at the level of functional processing. Functional processing is way "downstream" of some of the phenomena I've noticed.
I'll try to explain. I see there are different types or modalities of thinking. The brain model you suggest seems like it would work pretty well at the lowest level of "mental processing." That would be the interpretation of input data from our sense organs. This strikes me as being a fairly "low-level" type of information processing, and we are mostly completely unconscious of it, just as we are unconscious of certain automatic processing carried out by the brain in support of integrating and coordinating the life functions of the body and keeping them "optimal."
Higher-level processing, however, is fully conscious; and one is conscious that one is directing it. There seem to be two main modes: intentionalist consciousness -- where we choose the things or ideas we want to think about; and luminous consciousness, which seems to be the "highest," most complex type of thought -- which is self-reflective in the sense that the "incoming data" for this type of thought processing is being generated internally, in the mind itself.
Intentionalist consciousness is probably where most of us spend most of our time. It covers such things as identifying objects, observing their relations to one another, and general problem solving. Luminosity, however, is special -- reserved for intense problem solving, meditation, and contemplation (in order of ascending "complexity").
Even in intentionalist mode, I choose the subject matter I wish to think about, and can choose to go on to some other subject at will. In luminous mode, when I meditate, I know I'm meditating because I want to, not because my brain is telling me to. Or that contemplation is just something my brain starts doing , and then eventually I notice it. I strongly doubt my brain could benefit from the insights of meditation in the first place, and therefore has no motive to undertake it. Yet it's valuable for me.
Anyhoot, I get the clearest sense that in meditation and contemplation, the brain is the tool of consciousness.
Yet even at the "ordinary" intentionalist level of consciousness, I do not see that the brain is "selecting" objects of cognition for itself. There must be a conscious thinker to make such a selection; and the brain is a physical organ, not a conscious thinker. Kolgomorov complexity and non-axiomatic mathematics notwithstanding.
Do you see what my concern is?
I do. I too feel that although I am using my brain and body, I am more than they are. I suspect that almost everyone has that feeling. But how can we ever know, and objectively demonstrate, that it's more than an illusion?
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Sorry Betty, but I just can't swallow your "intentionalist mode, luminous mode" differentiation.
Sounds like a great example of what Pinker calls the "Ghost within" school.
But then, maybe I'm just not 'special' enough to have experienced any luminous thought. - To me the brain is both a physical organ, AND a conscious thinker.
Dear Patrick, if objective demonstration is the only criterion of reality, then probably more than 90% of what you do, experience, and are, are illusions. (Same could be said of me or any other human person, too.)
We could "shrivel" you and your experience down to virtually nothing that way. Reduce you to a total abstraction! I wouldn't be able to stand that!!!
But you are irreducible to an abstraction, my friend. You are a real, live, thinking, breathing, experiencing human being, a PERSON. Just because we can't reduce you to a theory or a doctrine does not make you any less alive, any less vividly REAL....
And important and dear to many.... JMHO, FWIW.
How can one put all his faith in a theory or a doctrine, and have virtually zero faith in one's own "facticity?"
Well, don't worry. There's not much doubt that I'm here. I could objectively demonstrate that to anyone who doubts it. What I don't think I could demonstrate -- even to myself -- is that I'm more than my organic parts. I think I am. But I can't give anyone any evidence of that. Even I don't have any evidence, and I'm rather close to the situation. If I were to go brain dead -- as some think I already have -- I'd like to think that something else -- me -- would still exist. But I can't really know that. Not until it happens. And if it does happen, then like all the other brain-dead people, I couldn't demonstrate my non-corporeal existence to others. So here we are, without evidence. That's how it is.
Anyone who would ask you for evidence of that would have to be a total fool.
I suppose you could turn the situation around and say to said fool, "Well, by your own rule, unless you can furnish such 'evidence' to me, then you must be a total fiction. So I don't hear you."
Of course, a situation like this would be a complete absurdity....
A more rational way to look at the problem, it seems to me, is simply to acknowledge our own self-reflected experience: What we know and believe; our growing awareness of the world as we move through it in time; the pain and joys, the triumphs and defeats, of existence. Then you have only to ask, "Is it true that I have experienced such things?" If it is, then so are you; for you were the one the experiences "happened to." You are the one who knows these things, intimately. You are the one who became even more yourself in the acts of experiencing your world, and learning from your experience.
Honestly, I really do think "self-reflected experience" is the best proof. Even though we don't really need one.
Fact is, I have yet to find a system of empirical proof on the planet "big enough," comprehensive enough, to "explain" what you are. Or what I am, all the rest of us humans likewise, or living beings generally.
What is the point of demonstrating an obvious fact anyway? Facts can speak for themselves, and always do. One can try to "smother them" or "eclipse them." But facts are very stubborn things.
Anyhoot, the "self-reflected experience" proof can be backed up, supported by further evidence as desired, to anyone who finds the proof unpersuasive.
Just as you suggested, Patrick: "There's not much doubt that I'm here. I could objectively demonstrate that to anyone who doubts it." :^)
LOL, Patrick! I bet you could! And perhaps would, if very sorely provoked.
What I really want to know is why any sane person would require proof for something that's so obvious, so tangibly real, in the sense of being readily accessible to direct observation by anyone with eyes?
Aha! the skeptic might say: "bb has put her foot in a snare. For no one can see the 'self-reflected experience' of another person.'
This is absolutely true. Yet it is also true that humans tend to reason from analogy to their own situation. If they have such experiences themselves, then they expect you do, too.
The main point is that man engages in self-reflected, aware experience of his existence as a defining part of his nature (as a rational being exercising free will). Here we touch upon universal truth.
The other point I could make is the "outer man" is formed and shaped by his "inner experiences" in a far greater degree than people today typically realize. The "inner man" is not available to our direct perception. But the "outer man" most assuredly is.
Funny thing, Patrick, you and I have never met face to face, though we've been hanging out together from time to time at FR for some six years now. And by golly, guy, I would stake my life on the fact that you exist. And not only that, but I'd swear an oath that you are ever so much than the physical system that carries you around....
Certainly I don't require proof of my own inner experiences; nor do you for yours; nor does anyone for his own. We experience them directly, and privately. And yes, I assume that you too have the same kind of inner experiences that I do (but I get the idea that yours are in some way more intense and therefore more meaningful to you than mine are for me). But what remains as a little bit of doubt, deep in my rational (and very Aristotelian) being, is whether we are all experiencing the same kind of delusion that we are more than our physical parts. For all our agreement that we all have these feelings, we are a long way from having objective evidence of what's going on.
Let me give you an analogy. Consider the color blue. You see it; I see it. But do we see anything that's going on in the objective world? And do we see the same thing? Yes, and we can demonstrate this with lights, and with prisms, etc., and we can clearly demonstrate that there is an objective something that you sense and you call it blue; and when I see it I too sense what I call blue. And this objective stimulus exists because we can capture it on film and record its spectrum. (I'm doing this very hurridly, but you get the picture.) "Blue" is something we can objectify. What literally goes on in your mind when you see blue is something experienced only by you, but it can be demonstrated that you're reacting to a very real something. And this kind of objectification is lacking when we are experiencing only the functioning of our own minds.
Another analogy: Joan of Arc. She heard "voices." Not much doubt that she was sincere. Her inner experience was, we assume, genuine. But were the voices real? Or were they some kind of delusion? We cannot know. And this is the fundamental distinction between subjective experience (like Joan's) and objectively verifiable experience (like reacting to blue light).
And so we come down to the issue of whether there's really a "me" in here which is more than the functioning of my organic parts. I feel that there is. We all have that feeling about ourselves. But it can't go beyond that, because we won't ever really know. Not in this life.
Dear Patrick, I have a glimmer of an idea that I might be able to propose in answer to your "condundrum." But the hour is late, I have to work tomorrow, and so I have to go to bed.
But I will sleep on it. Hope to talk to you again tomorrow.
Good night, Patrick!
In my opinion, one of the basic conceptual flaws in human thinking is that we treat a great many things as deterministic and axiomatic in practice when absolutely nothing is perceivable as such in our universe. Knowing that something is deterministic is qualitatively different than being able to perceive the determinism.
IMHO, causality will “rule” for the moment only because many of the disciplines cannot cope with that particular consequence of extra spatial and temporal dimensions in their research. However, dimensionality offers the best explanation for a myriad of bizarre observations – from the relative size of gravity to the other fields, superposition, non-locality and its seemingly superluminal flow of information in 4 dimensions.
It is always a delight to discuss such things with you. Thanks again!
It is one thing to say an instance of superposition is not be significant in studying neurotransmitters, but it is quite another to say that the cascade of motion of calcium ions (etc.) allows a thought to take hold.
The question is this: how can a person who highly values rational thought be convinced of the truth of a naturalistic (no God) worldview --or even entertain the idea that it could be correct???
The reason I ask this question is because naturalism is obviously Pinker's starting point, and everything else he dishes out seems to have naturalism as it's premise. If the naturalistic starting point is rational, then perhaps we need to pay close attention to Pinker (and Gould, and Hawking, etc...) But if it's not, then why take anything else he says, other than those things that are objectively verifiable, as being worthwhile?
It seems to me that the underlying objective truth of all naturalism is math. In other words, ultimately everything can be reduced to some sort of mathematical formula. Where a formula does not currently exist to explain observed phenomena, there are scientists working to fill in the gaps, whether it concerns brain function (Pinker) or the universe (Hawking).
However, there are at least three areas of concern that are necessary to explain the existence of man, that naturalists cannot explain by scientific method, nor will they ever be able to do so. Those three things are the following:
1) What happened before the Big Bang? Or, if we assume Hawking's view is true that the universe expands and contracts upon itself like a giant beating heart, then what caused the "heart" to start beating?
2) How did life originate? Where are the formulas and observations that prove that life must originate from inorganic matter (under specific conditions of course...) without some sort of creator?
3) How did man become a rational being, able to understand that he is a rational being? Where are the formulas and observations that prove that a series of non-rational causes will end up producing a perfectly rational man?
All three of these origin questions must be answered in order for the naturalist worldview to be correct. And yet all three are absolutely impossible to explain using the tools that naturalism provides: science, math, observation, etc... And by "explain" I mean an explanation that is objectively verifiable.
In contrast, for Christian/Jewish theists, these three problems of origin are taken care of in the first three chapter of Genesis. (Also a succinct answer the "problem" of evil is provided as a bonus...) Yes, God is ultimately responsible for the entire universe and all the mysteries it contains. Is this explanation objectively verifiable? It depends upon what you are willing to accept for evidence. (There are a series of logical proofs for the existence of God that have been put forth by various theologians and philosophers.)
To believe naturalism as a correct worldview, you must embrace three logical absurdities:
1) The universe created itself out of nothing.
2) Organic matter created itself out of inorganic matter.
3) A rational being, man, was created from of a series of non-rational causes.
Which is which is the worldview that is truly rational?
A) The universe and everything we know about it was created from nothing. (Naturalism)
B) The universe and everything we know about it was created by a benign creator. (Jewish/Christian Theism)
I have yet to see anything in the realm of science that disproves the existence of God, or even the existence of a soul. There is nothing that even makes them superfluous.
Of course it does. Socialists and communists are wrong. We knew that.
Nothing? You're begging the question to claim that.
B) The universe and everything we know about it was created by a benign creator. (Jewish/Christian Theism)
I'd say it is ~not~ rational to insist that your religious outlook [the 'B' view], is the only possible rational scenario, and to use that premise to attempt to control our political life.
I have yet to see anything in the realm of science that disproves the existence of God, or even the existence of a soul.
There is nothing that even makes them superfluous.
It's fine with me that you find your soul/God essential.
But I have yet to see anything in the realm of your brand of theism that proves the existence of God, or even the existence of a soul.
And I fail to see why you should insist that I do so.
-- That insistence, imo, is truly irrational.
2) Organic matter created itself out of inorganic matter.
3) A rational being, man, was created from of a series of non-rational causes.
IMHO, Western science has narrowed down its worldview to the point that it will fall behind for the same reason all applications of "political correctness" create a false sense of "reality" and stunt knowledge or understanding.
For instance, rewriting American history to give proportionate ethnic representation to current population distribution belies what actually happened. The pivotal events of history become diluted in the political interest of inclusion.
"Political correctness" in science today means describing the world without appealing to anything supernatural. The goal may be noble - to avoid another Galileo scenario or to be inclusive. Nevertheless it necessarily means that Western science begins with a prejudice, an answer, into which it must shoehorn the evidence. Worse, it makes it acceptable to present “just so” stories out of the forensic sciences as if they were fact. And it happens all the time! How the eye got its brain
How many times on the science channels do we see dinosaur stories presented with sociological conclusions drawn from scant evidence? A program ran this weekend showing herds of dinosaurs laying eggs like turtles, with the little ones, upon hatching, chasing after the herd and being taken in and protected by the whole herd. Moreover, when they depict a dinosaur visually, they presume the outward appearance – some they have given stripes - but why not spots, two tones or monotone? Why the choice of color? Why no explanation of the choices?
In sum, these are forensic science “just so” stories made to appear quite real with state of the art special effects. But the actual evidence is much, much, much less and there are alternative explanations for the evidence. For instance, finding fossils in a particular mix does not necessarily mean that the herd worked together to take care of one another’s offspring or that they were not coincidentally fossiled as a result of a environmental calamity.
As an example, although penguin chicks are left together when the adults go to sea, upon return, the parents find their own chick to feed. But with the dinosaurs, the forensic scientists leap to ‘fill in the blanks’ without explanation of the actual evidence or the alternatives. The result is the viewer has a false sense of “reality” and doors slam shut on creative musings of many.
In the larger sense, Western science avoids all supernatural explanations like the plague – even by default, such as in the fact of a beginning applicable across the board in cosmology. Thus, by not making a statement (or by appealing to the anthropic principle) science actually is making a statement – in this case, a statement for metaphysical naturalism and thus, a statement against a Creator God.
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