Posted on 10/28/2006 3:22:14 PM PDT by betty boop
That's well said.
"Interested in any of the following? 1. Witnessing 9. Promoting ID/creationism If so, don't get comfortable. You won't be staying long."
This is precisely how natural science regards it. It explains the sensations of various colours by the various lengths of light-waves existing outside the human retina, outside man and independently of him. This is materialism: matter acting upon our sense-organs produces sensation. Sensation depends on the brain, nerves, retina, etc., i.e., on matter organised in a definite way. The existence of matter does not depend on sensation. Matter is primary. Sensation, thought, consciousness are the supreme product of matter organised in a particular way. Such are the views of materialism in general, and of Marx and Engels in particular.
As long as we remember that evolution as religion belongs to the atheists. For Christians, or members of other faiths, who work in biology, evolutionary biology is a collection of facts and ideas that are used to guide and track research.
Interesting... I think that ill-defined meaning of the word of evolution contributes to the confusion. Natural selection as a selective breeder is an established scientific principle. The effects of mutations are easily observable as well [often destructive or harmful]. However, translating those concepts into historical reconstruction from common descent is faith in the improbable.
Or its simply a description of the fossil record. We've played the "what is it" game on crevo threads dozens of times.
Even in their own literature, creationists are all over the map when it comes to identifying members of the human family. Some say the australopithicines are human, some say they're not.
The argument for evolutionary biology really rests on the fossil record. While the genomic record continues its growth, it has overwhelmingly supported the morphological relations already identified, but its barely started. So it's hard to say much more than, so far so good.
A single billion-year mammal fossil would create enormous problems for evolution as a theory, but so far, none have been found.
You do have a martyr complex.
You went over there to witness, and most knew that you would cry martyred for the cause when they banned you as a troll.
THe arguments you put out here, will not fly at DC, if you have actual scientific evidence, you would have been fine, but when you started flipping out the same garbage about evolution, as is done here, and claimed from the very start that they were your enemies, you were banned as a troll.
Just as you should have been.
Cry Martyr all you want DLR, but you were banned for good cause.
Evolution is science, it has nothing to do with morality, it has nothing to do with religion, it has nothing to do with Philosophy. It is the best Scientific theory to explain the evidence and diversity of life on this planet.
It is a scientific theory, nothing more, nothing less.
You creationists are the ones claiming otherwise, and guess what, you are still wrong.
BTW DLR, DC is not an antifreeper site, and never has been.
They got tired of the luddites on this site trying to claim something that was not true.
Mainly that evolution is not science, nor scientific, and that it goes against religion, and that those that understand it, are somehow antireligious, marxist leftists, or atheists.
It's science Dave, nothing more then that, and nothing less then that.
Evolution is scientific, it does not go against religion, and has nothing to do with your religious faith or lack thereof.
Amen.
Broadly speaking, analogies are made when our faculty of conceptualization holds two things in some kind of relation. This was the ancient Greek analogia that described proportionality in mathematics and music.
More specifically, analogies are representative relations that can be used to illustrate a correspondence not entirely one to one. The representative identity must exclude univocation.
Modern biology makes use of this kind of mental activity, both in the general and specific sense. When you speak of a diminished view of analogy, it certainly can't be a diminished view of our most characteristic manner of mental activity. Actually, all human conceptualization is analogical, holding in relation our concepts with the objects of our attention.
The diminished view comes into play when certain kinds of relations are preferred. Hayek notes that the natural sciences has developed a diminished view of the relations of sense.
This is ironic because there is much to be gained politically in the propagation of popular perceptions of science. Such perceptions, will often take advantage of the relations of sense (e.g. Coyoteman's pictorial postings and the biology textbooks' sina qua non illustrations).
The problem in scientific thinking (or any other kind of thinking) is when practicioners are no longer epistemologically aware and abuse the analogical for an identity. The concept is not merely illustrative, it is the thing itself. It loses what betty boop posted earlier from Bohr, "that natural science is not nature itself but a part of the relation between man and nature."
This identity is a prejudice that denies the relations of things other than what is termed scientific.
Anybody can prefer a particular order of relations; so there is prejudice in religious dogma. But there is a far more potent pscyhological feature: some discussions are chiefly motivated by the perceived social and sexual relations that are formed. The relation of knowledge relation to truth in such environments becomes superfluous and is easily overwhelmed by these other prior interests.
Magnificent, cornelis! Thank you!
I'll add a second in the form of a question. Our noetic ability to acknowledge disparate relations as being simultaneous--can that faculty be mistaken as the principle of complementariness? I think an answer to that is important, especially when we have had Logos to be a running candidate.
It seems we need to drill down to what the complementarity principle actually states. I think of it as a kind of rebuke to Aristotle’s third law — the law of the excluded middle, as defended most cogently by Einstein, in a rebuke or refutation of his friend Bohr, who first dreamed up complementarity in the first place.
Einstein said,
…if two descriptions of a phenomenon are mutually exclusive, then at least one of them must be wrong. His friend Niels Bohr — the “father” of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics (which Einstein never would accept) — saw things differently. Bohr said you need both of these seemingly mutually exclusive entities in order to make a complete description of the system to which both refer, each in its way, but each only partially.In short, the law of the excluded middle produces a kind of digital, or “either-or” style of thinking that ill comports with the way human beings actually live their lives. It lives in an artificial world of "true-false," “yes-no,” “black-white,” “0-1.” Though this “style of thinking” works perfectly well for computers, human experience actually demands that we acknowledge that life cannot be sorted into such clean, distinct categories, with the understanding that “at least one of the terms must be wrong”; that both terms are valid in some way, and both necessary to give us the “complete” picture of man’s relations to himself, to the world, and to other men.
I don’t see the complementarity principle as necessarily related to “compatibility.” Indeed, the point seems to be that what the principle states is seemingly “incompatible” things find resolution at a higher state of reality, according to (forgive me) a Logos, or ultimate standard of logic and reason, that pervades our universe, from its beginning, and which ever points to a “beyond” of material existence.
To give an example of what I mean:
Let’s say I’m at the Met listening to a performance of the aria “Un bel Di” from Puccini’s magnificent Madama Butterfly —which I experience as a sound waveform and (more subtly) as a pressure wave that affects my visceral body. An analog recording could be made of the aria, and later digitized (i.e., “quantized”) so it can be played on state-of-the-art audio equipment.
But which of these is most authoritative, most “real”: the performance of the soprano and orchestra directed to and actually experienced by me and the other members of the audience? Or the analog recording, or the digital recording?
It seems according to modern-day science, the analogue and digital descriptions are perfectly respectable, and even superior to the actual event that led rise to them (because they are allegedly more “universal” in terms of descriptive power.) In short, some modern scientists seem to want to “reduce” the world to its description. But what they seem to forget is the description is not, nor cannot be, the same exact thing as what it describes. It is a "reduction" of the actual situation that provoked the making of a description in the first place.
But to the extent that people forget this distinction, we get the sad example of a John Derbyshire. To see the world through the filter of the scientific description exclusively — as John Derbyshire seemingly has sunk to on another thread running here (“God and Me”) — is to miss the point of life altogether. (And I so admire Derbyshire; been reading him for years in National Review; would hope for a better take on life by and for him than he produces in the “God and Me” essay. Poor man!)
It seems to me that what science intends to do is to “take man out of the picture” altogether. Which is a ridiculous expectation! Jeepers, Bohr had it exactly right when he said [paraphrasing here] that science is not the natural world itself. Science is a description of man’s relations to that world, which is entirely dependent on man. So how can man ever become irrelevant???
What has “killed” Derbyshire is his willingness to accept a reduced (I would even say a defaced) description of the world, and then to go “live there.” This is the very description of a “second reality.” No man prospers by living in a second reality. No wonder Derbyshire seems so grim, so sad, despite his manifest talent and genius.
Oh, I have so much more on this difficult subject. But this will have to do for now. Thank you ever so much for writing, cornelis!
Thank you ever so much for including me in this discussion.
p.s.: Hayek seems to me to have exactly the right take on our problems....
Your talk about the problem with Aristotle's excluded middle reminds me of another literary term popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: paradox. I wrote my undergraduate honors dissertation on paradox in the poetry of John Donne, and my tutor put me onto Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" in connection with the project.
I still recall Chesterton's image of orthodoxy not as something staid and stable, but as a chariot wildly reeling its way down through history, spilling heretics out left and right, while the truth managed to stay on board.
Thus, for instance (to suggest a few examples on my own in Chesterton's spirit, since I don't have the book by me), Jesus is not either God or Man, but both. Innumerable heresies tried to make Him one or the other, and failed. Human beings are not just bodies or souls, but both. We are neither "the soul in the machine" nor are we compounded only of matter. Hegel was a wild man, but he was on to something with his pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Why was paradox so popular among the religious poets? Perhaps because it can shadow forth what a literal statement finds it difficult or impossible to say.
But as for Bohr and Einstein, didn't Einstein (I forget his exact words) say that he didn't think God approved of quantum mechanics?
Oh, yes, now I recall. "God doesn't play dice with the Universe."
I think Darwin has a lot more credibility than Marx or Freud.
Darwin himself was not an atheist by any means.It disturbed him greatly that some branded his theories as "proof" refuting the existence of God.
He saw no contradiction between natural selection and the presence of God.
Great job, as usual. Thanks.
Darwin's career reminds me of Samuel Butler's later nineteenth-century autobiographical novel, "The Way of All Flesh." Butler's parents were somewhat early Evangelicals who appear to have subscribed to the Rapture, an idea that first appeared among English Evangelicals during the nineteenth century. I've read some of their letters, and they were obsessed with the idea that the end of the world was imminent. Oddly, and familiarly today, they watched events in the Middle East closely, and took various events there as evidence that Armageddon was at hand.
Anyway, when Butler grew older, he rebelled from his parents, and wrote a novel in which the hero rebels from his parents.
Darwin's situation was somewhat similar: a religious father against whom he appears to have rebelled, in good Oedipal fashion, or perhaps Enlightenment fashion. I agree with you that the evidence is not so clear in Darwin's case as in Butler's, although of course Darwin was one of the influences on Butler's revolt. Darwin has been made out to be both a Christian and an enemy of Christianity, and there's enough ambiguity in his life and writings to have allowed biographers to make both cases.
But I don't think we can be confident that he was a believing Christian in the years when he was writing and publishing his theories.
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