Posted on 09/18/2006 1:51:27 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared with 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics. Politically, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists, whereas only 11 percent accept evolution, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. A 2005 Harris Poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry. What these figures confirm for us is that there are religious and political reasons for rejecting evolution. Can one be a conservative Christian and a Darwinian? Yes. Here's how.
1. Evolution fits well with good theology. Christians believe in an omniscient and omnipotent God. What difference does it make when God created the universe--10,000 years ago or 10,000,000,000 years ago? The glory of the creation commands reverence regardless of how many zeroes in the date. And what difference does it make how God created life--spoken word or natural forces? The grandeur of life's complexity elicits awe regardless of what creative processes were employed. Christians (indeed, all faiths) should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divine in a depth and detail unmatched by ancient texts.
2. Creationism is bad theology. The watchmaker God of intelligent-design creationism is delimited to being a garage tinkerer piecing together life out of available parts. This God is just a genetic engineer slightly more advanced than we are. An omniscient and omnipotent God must be above such humanlike constraints. As Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey wrote, "The Christian idea, far from merely representing a primitive anthropomorphic projection of human art upon the cosmos, systematically repudiates all direct analogy from human art." Calling God a watchmaker is belittling.
3. Evolution explains original sin and the Christian model of human nature. As a social primate, we evolved within-group amity and between-group enmity. By nature, then, we are cooperative and competitive, altruistic and selfish, greedy and generous, peaceful and bellicose; in short, good and evil. Moral codes and a society based on the rule of law are necessary to accentuate the positive and attenuate the negative sides of our evolved nature.
4. Evolution explains family values. The following characteristics are the foundation of families and societies and are shared by humans and other social mammals: attachment and bonding, cooperation and reciprocity, sympathy and empathy, conflict resolution, community concern and reputation anxiety, and response to group social norms. As a social primate species, we evolved morality to enhance the survival of both family and community. Subsequently, religions designed moral codes based on our evolved moral natures.
5. Evolution accounts for specific Christian moral precepts. Much of Christian morality has to do with human relationships, most notably truth telling and marital fidelity, because the violation of these principles causes a severe breakdown in trust, which is the foundation of family and community. Evolution describes how we developed into pair-bonded primates and how adultery violates trust. Likewise, truth telling is vital for trust in our society, so lying is a sin.
6. Evolution explains conservative free-market economics. Charles Darwin's "natural selection" is precisely parallel to Adam Smith's "invisible hand." Darwin showed how complex design and ecological balance were unintended consequences of competition among individual organisms. Smith showed how national wealth and social harmony were unintended consequences of competition among individual people. Nature's economy mirrors society's economy. Both are designed from the bottom up, not the top down.
Because the theory of evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, it should be embraced. The senseless conflict between science and religion must end now, or else, as the Book of Proverbs (11:29) warned: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."
If you don't know all the ways a thing COULD HAVE happened... blah blah.
The actual probability of a thing has to be the sum of the probabilities of every individual possible way. It certainly isn't the result of picking the silliest as the sum.
You seem a bit conflicted here. Your free will is an illusion, meat-puppet. Your own words convict you.
LOLOL VadeRetro!!! I am LMAO here! You so funny!
Jeepers, if you really want to play, just bear in mind that I'm not a determinist! :^)
You evidently credited yourself with INDEPENDENTLY finding, as a teenager, that the world is "determined." Have you learned nothing since? Or did you just turn 21?
I really do hope to hear more from you, VadeRetro, on this subject!
Yep. Had trouble explaining it to my fellow teens, but I saw it. You could run the world forwards or backwards; see the past, see the future. All you have to know is everthing right now, and all the rules.
Have you learned nothing since?
Bell inequalities, the collapse of the wave function, the two-slit experiment, the importance of compressing the bladder after urination, fish oil, how to uncork a wine bottle...
Or did you just turn 21?
Nah. Just healthy.
Naturally, Brownian motion shows that even a classical system is completely non-predictable (even in principle) if molecules exist.
There exists an unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural world (Wigner) - which can also be seen in reverse, e.g. dualities, mirror symmetries, S-dualities (Vafa.) But fleshing out the math in the physics and vice versa is not the same as putting a hypothesis to empirical test.
Sometimes, as in Reimannian geometry, the mathematical theory precedes a physical application of it.
And in my very earnest opinion, the Shannon mathematical theory of communications is particularly applicable to molecular biology - and in the end, will have much to contribute to the abiogenesis investigation even though Shannon surely could not have anticipated such an application.
That is the beauty of mathematics.
Hi Alamo-Girl. It's been a while. Say, whatever happened to ASH???
He was one of the first persistent trolls - and I don't know what happened to him.
You have a soul mate, VadeRetro, in the great French mathematician Marquis Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827):
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis … to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.”And so, "all you have to know is everthing right now, and all the rules." Do you know "everything right now," and "all the rules?"
It really sounds to me like Laplace is divinizing man here (actually one supposes himself); for he is effectively placing him on the throne of God, who sees and knows all. But how could a man possibly know all the contingencies that bear on any given problem or circumstance? He doesn't stand outside the universe, so to view it entire and in detail, from some Archimedean point outside. He is part and participant in it. Even if you think you know ALL the physical laws (dubious; I imagine there may be some we don't even know about yet), you do not know and cannot know all the details of anything you observe.
I'd be a Bayesian, and so would be pleased if the abiogenesists "could make convincing cases for possible pathways." I think they will need to grapple with the problem of how intelligence arose in nature. For it seems you don't have life without some form of intelligence, be it simple awareness or responsive sensitivity, on through consciousness that we observe in the higher species, and self-consiousness which appears limited to humans.
You wrote: "I humbly invite you to believe in an extra-terrestrial origin of terrestrial life." Whoa, you infer too much. I believe in an extra-cosmic origin of the universe. The singularity had to have a "non-natural" cause for the simple reason that in the void there is no space or time, no matter, no nuthin' that could be the cause of anything.
Neither I nor Laplace claimed to be in possession of such omniscience, so to that extent it's theoretical. However, it also applies to the dreaded "closed systems" to the extent you can find one.
However, it has turned out that there are real limits to how deterministically the universe will behave. The archetypal illustration is a certain apocryphal half-dead German cat.
Supposedly the classical physics "arrow of time" is non-reversible, but I always wondered if this isn't still in principle deterministic. In a sealed vaccuum container, you introduce three sealed bottles. Two contain vaccuums themselves, the third is full of gas. You open all the bottles and the gas from one rapidly fills the bigger container. Tah-dah! You cannot tell which bottle the gas came from, so the arrow of time is irreversible, etc.
I tend to think that God or even a really jazzy supercomputer could unravel it. The information is always there at any given time (in the position and momentum of each gas particle) to unravel the previous state of the gas. Never mind how you know the position and momentum of every gas particle. If you do, you know what it last bounced off of and when.
So you can get to the state of the machine a millisecond ago. Then you can use that to go back a millisecond from there. There is no creeping uncertainty in this process since we're using theoretical knowledge rather than physical measurements with error bars. So the information is still there in theory, but it's very much in theory.
Happily, the classical physics of little balls clacking around into each other is dead, so we can stop torturing ourselves over it.
Try reading the labels. ;-)
Yes, but only in historical time. Maybe not so in "individual person time" (if I can put it that way). I mean, you had this epiphany when you were a teenager. Laplace didn't publish anything about whatever like epiphany he may have had until his fifties, in Mechaninque Celeste (in 5 volumes, appearing 1799-1805)....
Recently I came across an enormously engaging and surprising book, Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis et. al. [2004]. I was scandalized at first to discover the entire piece is laid out as a cartoon. But it really is a superb book in terms of explicating the subject matter of its title. IMHO, a wondrous book for bright high school students, and others who might delight and have an interest in the magnificent achievements of 20th century science.
Anyhoot, that's where I got the Laplace. I left out the rejoinder to his statement:
[Question:] This "intelligence" of yours, would it be the author of the universe, who I note you left out of your book Mechanique Celeste?Poor ol' Schroedinger's cat. On my reading, VR, the cat isn't "half alive/half dead." The cat is both simultaneously alive and dead. In the language of quantum theory, it is in a superposed state, an analogy to the superposition of particle/wave of what we have come to describe as "matter."[Laplace replies:] hmph...I know what you're driving at, sire, but I have no need of this ... "God" hypothesis.
[Questioner reply:] Mon Dieu! [p. 282]
The analogy says that we don't know whether the cat is alive or dead until we go look. Absent observation, the problem is undecideable.
Fun stuff to think about! :^)
Thank you so much for writing, VR!
I prefer the Bayesian approach also.
The pleasure is mine, VR. Thank you.
Got to thinking about your teenage epiphany, then took a trip down memory lane myself to recall what I was doing as a teenager. The habit of reading was inculcated in me early, and I was a great lover of books in those years and have been ever since. I recall at age 16 mainly I was reading Plato, and also Sigmund Freud. (I was hanging around the Boston Public Library pretty regularly in those days.) Soon thereafter, I discovered Dostoevsky.
Five years later — and ever since — I was still reading Plato and Dostoevsky. I read The Brothers Karamazov at least once a decade, whether I need to or not. :^)
I guess my tastes were formed pretty early: It seems my earliest memories were about my impressions (and wonder) regarding the sublime beauty and mystery of the world. Only later did I realize that Freud was one of the legion of intellectuals then and now who deforms and deracinates the world by his "theory," draining all of the truth, justice, and beauty out of it. And Dostoevsky wrote about the dreadful consequences of such a state of affairs....
I really must stop wool-gathering like this. :^)
Thanks so much for writing, VR!
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