Posted on 10/28/2010 10:49:08 AM PDT by betty boop
An Open Letter to My Physicist Friend RE: Darwinism and the Problem of Free Will
By Jean F. Drew
Dear A —
Regarding the discussion of “free will” at www.naturalism.org, you wrote: “I am surprised to find a ‘scientific naturalism’ so similar to the utmost banality, shallowness and false superficiality of the ‘scientific materialism’ that I [had] to learn in … school [during] the communist regime.”
I think this is a very striking statement; and I understand what you mean. I read in your Book of the Living Universe long ago that you were aware of the problem of “tampering” with human consciousness, by people and institutions with social and/or political agendas to be carried out, usually without consideration of what is good and true in the real world of human experience.
Once upon a time, the natural sciences were understood to be above all else engaged in the search for the truth of reality. Nowadays, it seems people don’t want to do such searches anymore, they just want to protect and defend their personal investments in this or that ideological orthodoxy….
Speaking of a powerful orthodoxy, it seems pretty clear to me that Darwin’s theory, as it has come to be widely understood and accepted, is entirely premised on the doctrine of “scientific materialism.” As such, I regard it as an epistemological and ontological nightmare!!!
Moreover, the account of “free will” at naturalism.org can be true only if Darwin’s theory is true. But I believe it is not. For it holds that everything in biology “supervenes on the physical”; everything that happens is “determined” on the basis of Newtonian mechanics. There is only matter in the universe, nothing else; only that which is directly observed/measured is real. [Already such a view casts doubt on the reality of the universal laws of nature, which are never directly observed: They are “non-phenomenal,” intangible, immaterial. Not to mention that so is all of mathematics, logic, reasoning.] And this non-living, dumb matter, via an evolutionary process driven by random mutation and natural selection, somehow manages to become alive and — more — to develop some form of psyche.
But HOW does one get to this result by means of a random process??? In only ~14 or so billion years?
How does low algorithmic complexity (i.e., of the physical laws) generate the astonishing complexity of living systems, not to mention of the universe at large? My “trial” answer: It doesn’t; and can’t.
Darwinism, moreover, doesn’t even have an explanation of what life IS. All of it is, to me, a “just-so” story, a myth. It is riddled with self-contradictions. Not a word of its fundamental tenets can be tested by means of real-world investigations/experiments, let alone “proved.” It is an “historical” science, like archeology, not a “hard” science, like physics. It seeks to tell us what life does, but cannot tell us what life is.
But how can we be sure that our impressions of what life does are truthful, if we don’t know what life is? Don’t we have to understand what life is, first — before we can produce a reliable understanding of the how and why of its behavior? It’s like saying, “Birds fly” without bothering to elucidate what a bird is….
But the “Cartesian split” is manifestly being defended by most Darwinists nowadays. To them, the “purity” of science somehow depends on its sticking to the “objective” physical, material, phenomenal. Thus they prohibit any discussion of, for instance, final causes in nature — even though the very term “survival of the fittest” necessarily implies a final cause: “fitness” for survival! (As do all biological functions, by the way.) Yet the Darwinist says “survival of the fittest” is the very goal and purpose of evolution! But you cannot “call a spade a spade” and say that this is a final cause; it’s just an illusion…. It only “looks like” a final cause, but it isn’t really one. Such equivocation is, to me, indefensible.
But let’s look at what the article at naturalism.org has to say. “As strictly physical beings, we don’t exist as immaterial selves, either mental or spiritual, that control behavior. Thought, desires, intentions, feelings, and actions all arise on their own without the benefit of a supervisory self, and they are all the products of a physical system, the brain and the body. The self is constituted by more or less consistent sets of personal characteristics, beliefs, and actions; it doesn’t exist apart from those complex physical processes that make up the individual. It may strongly seem as if there is a self sitting behind experience, witnessing it, and behind behavior, controlling it, but this impression is strongly disconfirmed by a scientific understanding of human behavior.”
What “scientific understanding of human behavior???” I don’t see any understanding here at all! Just the deliberate elimination of certain kinds of intractable, non-conforming evidence….
If “science can’t address the problem, then there is no problem” seems to be the motto of the day.
In short, the “self” must be a fiction; it is really only an epiphenomenon of physical processes proceeding more or less in a random, linear, irreversible (past to present to future) manner that itself has no “objective” reality (or purpose of goal) and thus cannot serve as a cause of anything in the physical world. That is, the self has zero ontological status: It is simply defined away as not really existing.
Instead, we find that the cause of human willing is simply what “arises out of the interaction between individuals and their environment, not from a freely willing self that produces behavior independently of causal connections…. Therefore individuals don’t bear ultimate originative responsibility for their actions, in the sense of being their first cause. Given the circumstances both inside and outside the body, they couldn’t have done other than what they did.” [So human beings just can’t help what they do; their behavior is utterly determined. I.e., they are programmable robots and nothing more.]
So it seems rather cruel (and unjust) that under this set of circumstances, “Nevertheless, we must still hold individuals responsible, in the sense of applying rewards and sanctions, so that their behavior stays more or less within the range of what we deem acceptable. This is, partially, how people learn to act ethically.”
Question: Who is this “we” in the above statement?
Another question: If individuals don’t bear “ultimate originative responsibility for their actions,” then what is the cause of suicide? Does brain function and/or the “environment” cause this ultimate act of self-destruction? If so, then why aren’t there more suicides? Or how about acts of heroism, where a person puts his own physical survival at risk to come to the aid of another person in danger? What is the “naturalist” explanation of a man who throws his body onto a live grenade, so to spare his fellow soldiers from being blown to smithereens, well knowing that his own death would be the likely price of his decision? Did not his self-sacrifice “cause” (or at least permit) his mates to continue living, when otherwise they may likely all have been killed?
Then there is this pièce de résistence [with my comments in brackets]:
The source of value: Because naturalism doubts the existence of ultimate purposes either inherent in nature or imposed by a creator [final causes either way], values derive from human needs and desires [oh, for instance the desire to kill one’s self, which desire must arise in nature/environment according to Darwinist theory, as in the above?], not supernatural absolutes. Basic human values are widely shared by virtue of being rooted in our common evolved nature. [That wipes out all individuality right there.] We need not appeal to a supernatural standard of ethical conduct to know that in general it’s wrong to lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, torture, or otherwise treat people in ways we’d rather not be treated [Oh? HOW do we know this? As I said earlier, Darwinist orthodoxy is an epistemological nightmare!]. Our naturally endowed empathetic concern for others [as alleged —in face of the fact that people frequently choose to conduct themselves evilly towards others — and if that is not “naturally endowed,” then where did that come from?] and our hard-wired penchant for cooperation and reciprocity [how did that get to be “hard-wired???”] get us what we most want as social creatures: to flourish as individuals within a community. [Tell that to the person who intends to commit suicide! He could care less for “flourishing as an individual,” let alone in a community]. Naturalism may show the ultimate contingency of some values, in that human nature might have evolved differently and human societies and political arrangements might have turned out otherwise. [Well they might have; but what’s the point? Reality is what we have. All else is pure speculation.] But, given who and what we are as natural creatures [please define “natural creatures” — the statement seems oxymoronic to me], we necessarily [???] find ourselves with shared basic values [??? — which ones? And tell me how did they become “shared” when Darwinist theory itself is premised on conflict and competition for the available finite environmental resources necessary for survival?] which serve as the criteria for assessing moral dilemmas, even if these assessments are sometimes fiercely contested and in some cases never quite resolved. [The very fact that there can be conflict, contestation, suggests that the uniformity of “natural creatures” that we would expect to see on Darwin’s theory is a total fiction, something simply not borne out by the facts on the ground of real experience, as contrasted with the reductionist abstractions of naturalistic evolution theory.]
It seems to me that Darwinist orthodoxy really doesn’t explain very much. The problem seems to be its utter rejection, in principle, of any immaterial component of reality. Although might I point out that a “principle” is itself “immaterial?” Even the concept of Reality is immaterial. These people routinely, blithely shoot themselves in the foot; and then blithely pretend that it didn’t happen.
In any case, we’re NOT supposed to notice this. Indeed, to notice this is “forbidden.”
Shades of Karl Marx here — and also I imagine your school experience back in the day of Soviet domination of your country. Marx absolutely forbade all questions about his “system.” You either bought it whole cloth, or you didn’t. What you couldn’t do was question it in any way. But if you didn’t buy it, then you were probably some kind of “enemy”….
Is seems to me the biological sciences need a restoration of sanity! Today, all the truly interesting work on life problems is being done by physicists (like you, dear friend!) and mathematicians….
The other day I came across some highly interesting passages in The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library [by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, David Fideler, editor; 1987, Phanes Press] that go straight to the point of what I believe is needed for science to renew itself, to rededicate itself to its ancient mission, the quest for Truth. What is principally involved is the “healing” of the artificial and unnatural “Cartesian split”:
Pythagoras, no doubt, would have disapproved of the radical split which occurred between the sciences and philosophy during the 17th century “enlightenment” and which haunts the intellectual and social fabric of Western civilization to this day. In retrospect perhaps we can see that man is most happily at home in the universe as long as he can relate his experiences to both the universal and the particular, the eternal and temporal levels of being.
Natural science takes an Aristotelian approach to the universe, delighting in the multiplicity of the phenomenal web. It is concerned with the individual parts as opposed to the whole, and its method is one of particularizing the universal. Natural science attempts to quantify the universal, through the reduction of living form and qualitative relations to mathematical and statistical formulations based on the classification of material artifacts.
By contrast, natural philosophy is primarily Platonic in that it is concerned with the whole as opposed to the part. Realizing that all things are essentially related to certain eternal forms and principles, the approach of the natural philosopher strives to understand the relation that the particular has with the universal. Through the language of natural philosophy, and through the Pythagorean approach to whole systems, it is possible to relate the temporal with the eternal and to know the organic relation between multiplicity and unity.
If the scientific spirit is seen as a desire to study the universe in its totality, it will be seen that both approaches are complementary and necessary in scientific inquiry, for an inclusive cosmology must be equally at home in dealing with the part or the whole. The great scientists of Western civilization — Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and those before and after — were able to combine both approaches in a valuable and fruitful way.
It is interesting that the split between science and philosophy coincides roughly with the industrial revolution — for once freed from the philosophical element, which anchors scientific inquiry to the whole of life and human values, science ceases to be science in a traditional sense, and is transformed into a servile nursemaid of technology, the development and employment of mechanization. Now machines are quite useful as long as they are subservient to human good, in all the ramifications of that word — but as it turned out, the industrial revolution also coincided with a mechanistic conceptualization of the natural order, which sought to increase material profit at the expense of the human spirit….
Today, in many circles, to a large part fueled by the desire for economic reward, science has nearly become confused with and subservient to technology, and from this perspective it might be said that the ideal of a universal or inclusive science has been lost…. [p. 43f]
Still I know that you have not lost this ideal! Yours is an “integrative science” approach, integrating not only the natural sciences themselves, but also integrating them with the natural philosophy approach; i.e., of whole systems.
You wrote:
“I realized the importance of our mail exchange about God and the Universe. Indeed, … free will is not explained by present day science, not by physics, of course. As far as I understand it, it is not explained by the mechanical application of the biological principle. It requires more: a deeper understanding of the biological principle, and even more, a deeper understanding of the Universe as a whole. I wrote you that even the laws and principles of Nature can have a ‘soul-like’, animate aspect. Ultimately, our free will dwells in ‘the Universe as a whole’, and as such, [is] omnipresent, as far as I understand it. If so, the question of free will is a deep question, going beyond the present conceptual framework of science. Free will is rooted in the animate and animating biological principle, in [the] eternal Life of the Universe.”
Oh, A — I so agree!!!
And I’m so looking forward to reading your new article, “The Logic of Reality: a model-independent approach towards the self-contained logic of the Universe”!
May God ever bless you, dear friend, and your labors!
©2010 by Jean F. Drew.
If that truly is the position of contemporary science, it's rather uncomfortably reminiscent of the folks in the late 19th century, who felt that science had reached its perfection, and that the rest was just a compilation of results.... (I can't recall which big-name scientist made the claim.)
Absolutely astonishing article, Diamond! Thank you ever so much for the link!
It looks to me like the mathematics and evolution of DNA can be neither random nor accidental.... This must be unsettling for orthodox Darwinists.
What effect would duplications such as genome duplications or chromosome duplications have on the cited ratios?
Thanks, Diamond and Betty. I’m showing this link to my husband. He loves to study the perfect geometry of God’s creation.
Right. And then along came the great physicists Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, et al., who blew that assumption to smithereens....
Not to mention the work of the great mathematician, Kurt Gödel....
It's been said that biology is the youngest science. (Astronomy being the oldest.) If that's true, it may yet have a good deal of growing up to do....
Thanks so much for writing, r9etb!
I didn't say the HGP has been suspended, OldNavyVet. Of course the research continues.
What I was referencing with my remark about "crash and burn" was simply that the expectations for the Project were so high, that many researchers were disappointed with the results achieved at the time they were publicly announced.
IOW, they had confidence that their methods would be highly fruitful, but it seems their results did not meet expectations. Of course they're going to keep trying to explicate the genome! What I wonder is whether any researcher is explicitly aware of the possibility that the genome may ultimately be a mathematical, not a material object....
That's my speculation anyway.... FWIW
Thank you for writing, OldNavyVet!
Betty ... The word "change" applies to everything in the universe, at every moment in time. And that which is happening in each next moment is a randomly predictable change from that in the prior moment -- with high confidence results given good understanding of the process.
Of course I agree with you that change applies to everything in the phenomenal or material universe. Things are constantly changing all the time. But what on earth is a "randomly predictable change?" Your argument appears to be strictly, relentlessly deterministic.
Whatever. What Marshall wants to know is —
Is the formulaThis is Darwin's formula for biological evolution. But does it hold water?Random Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Design
Mathematically true, or false? ...
DNA is a blueprint for life. It’s a code and a language. It has an alphabet (A = Adenine, G = Guanine, T = Thymine, C = Cytosine) and that alphabet spells out the instructions for everything. So the question is:To analyze this question, Marshall invokes Claude Shannon's information theory. And he finds that "random mutation" is "noise" with respect to DNA. Noise in a communication system degrades the message being communicated. That is, it doesn't add new, useful information, it just degrades the information being communicated. In short, mutations are deleterious, not the source of a "new and improved" biological individual/species.Can Random Mutation add information to DNA?
[Alamo-Girl, you are going to love this article!]
Marshall asks, "has any advocate of Darwinian evolution ever proven that random mutation can increase information?" The answer evidently is: No.
It’s interesting to note that the fanatical atheist Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous living proponent of Evolutionary theory, has never answered this question either — in fact he has studiously avoided it. There’s an article [http://trueorigins.org/dawkinfo.asp] where this question was posed to Dawkins, and even though six years have gone by, he never answers it. The answer he does give is a smoke-and-mirrors example at best.Somehow, I don't find that surprising at all. But what it all boils down to is this:
But there’s one kind of design that does not occur naturally, so far as anyone knows:Just a little food for thought!What does NOT occur naturally is CODES. [DNA is a CODE.]
Symbolic codes of any kind — things that contain language, a message, or information, any arrangement of symbols that represent something other than itself — do not happen naturally. Blueprints, languages, ciphers, encoding / decoding mechanisms all come from a mind.
Just as there are no exceptions to the law of gravity, or the laws of entropy, there are no exceptions to this.
There is vast difference, in fact an infinite chasm, between a pattern and a code. Patterns occur naturally [e.g., "Snowflakes, Tornados and Hurricanes, Weather, Stalagmites and Stalactites, Rivers, Sand Dunes, And much more"], codes do not. All codes contain patterns, but not all patterns contain codes. Codes can only come from a mind. There are no known exceptions to this.
Thanks so much for writing, OldNavyVet!
Oh, you're so welcome, dear sister in Christ! But thanks go to Diamond for finding this amazing piece, and providing the link....
You and your hubby might also enjoy this: "Darwin: Brilliantly Half-Right; Tragically Half-Wrong".
What “random system”?
I forgot to mention tbat random mutation happenings should be factored into probabilistic genetic studies — mutations happen frequently.
From Steve Jones (pg 170) we have:”DNA’s inability to copy itself without mistakes - mutation - means that evolution is inevitable. Natural selection does nothing more than capitalize on that fact.”
I didn't say anything about a "random system." All I said was we don't know what is random in any system if we don't know what the system is.
"Random system" is an oxymoron — a contradiction in terms.
Random Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Design
Mathematically true, or false? ...
Mathematictally close ..
My evaluation, considering Darwin's total avoidance of the word "evolution" in "Origin of the Species" (Jones, page 298), would be
Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Evolution
Well maybe they should. But the statement "mutations happen frequently" does not address the problem of whether they add any new information to DNA such that "natural selection" can capitalize on them in positive, "creative" ways; e.g., improvement in survival fitness. Usually mutations are deleterious to the organism.
So if you're going to factor random mutations into probabilistic genetic studies, can this tell you anything about evolution per se, or only give you readings on likely morbidity/mortality outcomes respecting various types of genetic inheritance?
What does Steve Jones expect to find?
Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Evolution
But — evolution of WHAT?
Evolution theory is the counter argument to design theory. That is, it purports to explain how the evident richness and diversity of living beings came to be. It says these are in effect "designed" [apparent design only] by random mutation and natural selection. IOW, the "designer" is random mutation + natural selection + time.
To say that random mutation + natural selection + time is what produces the vast diversity of living beings may well be an "evolution"; but it fails to explain convincingly HOW this happens, or WHY. This failure is especially glaring in light of recent important achievements in genetics, system theory, and information theory.
It makes for a lovely "intuitive" story; but is Darwin's theory really science?
I'll answer that question myself: Yes. But — 19th century science.
Oh so very true, dearest sister in Christ!
Control the speech, control the argument....
But in science, this strikes me as "cheating!"
Thank you so very much for your outstanding observations — and for your kind words of support!
Betty, EVERY mutation adds new information to DNA that is then subject to the Natural Selection process: If "bad," for any of multiple ways, holders of "bad" DNA will die off. If "good," the DNA sequence will probably pass on to subsequent generations.
This section of Jone's book is good reading on pages 111 to 115.
The first time a humans unique DNA structure was formed was when their parents DNA was randomly shuffled together.
Radio-atomic decay is calculated as a chance that an atom will randomly spit out some radiation.
Our immune system antibodies can bind to any foreign 3-D structure because they randomly shuffled the DNA that codes for their variable regions to “explore” almost all possible combinations (self binding ones are eliminated).
Obviously what we see as “random” is everywhere we care to look in the universe and part and parcel of the reality that God created.
Prov 16:33 “The dice are cast into the lap, but every result is from the Lord”
I think it's correct to say that "any extremely unusual or extraordinary thing or occurence" is a random phenomenon.
Could be the source of dark energy/matter is emitted from black holes.. designated matter falls in to it and UN-designated matter comes out.. closing the "loop"..
Could also be some structure "in" the dark energy/matter "fields" that we cannot presently "see" (like a black hole) that does the reverse.. Meaning making/creating(transforming) dark energy/matter from UN-designated energy/matter into designated..
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