JimSEA, I gather from the context above that by “we,” you mean scientists who, deploying scientific presuppositions and methods exclusively, will eventually be able to figure out everything going on in the universe, given sufficient time, by means of such methods. I have reason to suspect that this expectation will prove unlikely to be the case.
At the same time, I am not a person who believes that when science fails to explain something this is somehow “proof” of the existence of God. That is total nonsense: God is not subject to “proof.”
What worries me about the practice of biological science in particular nowadays is that it seems so constrained by Cartesian and Newtonian principles that it is hampering its ability to understand living systems in nature at the very outset. This practice entails a whole bunch of unexamined presuppositions, such as:
• The expectation that everything in the natural world is reducible to “matter in its motions” governed by causal relations obtaining between material states and the forces impinging on them — or as it has been stated, “everything supervenes on the physical.” [Newton’s legacy.] Also involved is the presupposition that biological systems are physical “mechanisms.” [Descartes’ legacy.]
Yet as the great mathematician and theoretical biophysicist Robert Rosen has pointed out,
The universe described by these laws is an extremely impoverished, nongeneric one, and one in which life cannot exist. In short, far from being a special case of [the physical] laws, and reducible to them, biology provides the most spectacular examples of their inadequacy…. To this day, today, the formidable powers of theoretical physics find nothing to say about the biosphere, nor does any physicist contemplating the mysteries of life speak of them qua physicist. This, I would argue, is because biology remains today, as it has always been, a repository of conceptual enigmas for contemporary physics, and not technical problems to be dealt with through mere ingenuity or the application of familiar algorithms. Somehow, the life gets irretrievably lost whenever this is attempted.A mechanism is something that can be productively studied by disassembling it down to its parts. Then the expectation is, if you understand the parts, just sum them all up, and you can completely recapture the whole of which they are the parts. This happens to be impossible in biological systems. When one disassembles a biological system, one instantly loses information about that system — preeminently its organizational information. One also happens to lose its life….
This parts-to-whole expectation reflects what is known as “context independence,” which is one central feature of scientific objectivity. Yet it appears that the “parts” of living systems are not context independent. For they are both “parts” and “participants” in the Whole — the Whole being the very context that is being rigorously ignored, for the sake of “scientific objectivity”….
I have an analogy that suggests somewhat the loss of information that is involved in the sort of paradigmatic reductionism that I am trying to describe here: the “reduction” of an analog to a digital signal. Ask: “What is lost in this transformation?”
I am not a “water carrier” for either Jeffrey Tomkins Ph.D. or ICR. I’m pretty skeptical in general these days. But I did like the article. If anybody has a specific objection to Tomkins’ methods and/or conclusions, I would very much like to hear the details.
Thanks so much for writing, JimSEA!
By “we” I simpily mean humans. Dr. Jeffrey Tomkins Ph.D. has the ICR habit of misstating evolutionary theory.
Supposition: Proving God!... what a concept..
Either God exists -OR- he/she/it does not....
If the universe is not proof of God or something we choose to call god..
Then something else originated “it”..
Decoding what that something “IS” a matter of perception..
There’s a plethora of designer gods on this planet..
From an invisible friend to a Roman Emperor.. to the savage “id”.. (self)..
What a drama it is to observe people resorting to primitive perceptions and
others very sophisticated perceptions trying to fathom this/these issue(s)..
Could be thats what we’re here FOR!... is to make those “choices”..
Making us all guilty of low expectations or higher expectations..
Water seeks it’s own level, as “they” say..
AND it’s changes day to day from youth to old age..
It’s not who you are that counts, it’s who you are becoming.. I think..
Theme song: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lb16ez0s9ja68gd/TakemeThere.avi?dl=0
How many of those would you estimate there are, as opposed to scientists who don't believe the scientific method can solve every riddle of the Universe, but do believe it will work on the tiny little bit of it they're working on right now?
Thank you so much for sharing your insights!