Posted on 09/20/2013 4:29:03 AM PDT by spirited irish
Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son (1 John 2:22).
And the fifth angel sounded the trumpet, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and there was given to him the key of the bottomless pit." (Rev. 9:1)
In his Concise Commentary Matthew Henry identifies falling stars as tepid, indecisive, weak or apostate clergy who,
"Having ceased to be a minister of Christ, he who is represented by this star becomes the minister of the devil; and lets loose the powers of hell against the churches of Christ."
John identifies antichrists, in this case clergy who serve the devil rather than Christ, sequentially. First, like Bultmann, Teilhard de Chardin, Robert Funk, Paul Tillich, and John Shelby Spong, they specifically deny the living, personal Holy Trinity in favor of Gnostic pagan, immanent or Eastern pantheist conceptions. Though God the Father Almighty in three Persons upholds the souls of men and maintains life and creation, His substance is not within nature (space-time dimension) as pantheism maintains, but outside of it. Sinful men live within nature and are burdened by time and mortality; God is not.
Second, the specific denial of the Father logically negates Jesus the Christ, the Word who was in the beginning (John 1), was with God, and is God from the creation of all things (1 John 1). In a pre-incarnate theophany, Jesus is the Angel who spoke mouth to mouth to Moses (Num. 12:6-9; John 9:20) and at sundry times and in many ways spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all (Hebrews 1:1) Jesus the Christ is the incarnate Son of God who is the life and light of men, who by His shed blood on the Cross died for the remission of all sins and bestowed the privilege of adoption on all who put their faith in Him.
Therefore, to deny the Holy Father is to logically deny the deity of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, hence,
every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist . . . and even now already is it in the world (1 John 4:3).
According to Peter (2 Peter 2:1), falling stars will work among the faithful, teaching damnable heresies that deny the Lord, cause the fall of men into unbelief, and bring destruction upon themselves:
The natural parents of modern unbelief turn out to have been the guardians of belief. Many thinking people came at last to realize that it was religion, not science or social change that gave birth to unbelief. Having made God more and more like man---intellectually, morally, emotionally---the shapers of religion made it feasible to abandon God, to believe simply in man. (James Turner of the University of Michigan in American Babylon, Richard John Neuhaus, p. 95)
Falling Stars and Damnable Heresy
Almost thirty years ago, two well-respected social science scholars, William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark found themselves alarmed by what they saw as a rising tide of irrationalism, superstition and occultism---channeling cults, spirit familiars, necromancers, Wiccans, Satanists, Luciferians, goddess worshippers, 'gay' shamans, Hermetic magicians and other occult madness at every level of society, particularly within the most influential--- Hollywood, academia and the highest corridors of political power.
Like many scientists, they were equally concerned by Christian opposition to naturalistic evolution. As is common in the science community, they assumed the cause of these social pathologies was somehow due to fundamentalism, their term for authentic Christian theism as opposed to liberalized Christianity. Yet to their credit, the research they undertook to discover the cause was conducted both scientifically and with great integrity. What they found was so startling it caused them to re-evaluate their attitude toward authentic Christian theism. Their findings led them to say:
"It would be a mistake to conclude that fundamentalists oppose all science (when in reality they but oppose) a single theory (that) directly contradicts the bible. But it would be an equally great mistake to conclude that religious liberals and the irreligious possess superior minds of great rationality, to see them as modern personalities who have no need of the supernatural or any propensity to believe unscientific superstitions. On the contrary...they are much more likely to accept the new superstitions. It is the fundamentalists who appear most virtuous according to scientific standards when we examine the cults and pseudo-sciences proliferating in our society today." ("Superstitions, Old and New," The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. IV, No. 4; summer, 1980)
In more detail they observed that authentic born again Christians are far less likely to accept cults and pseudoscientific beliefs while the irreligious and liberalized Christians (i.e., progressive Catholics, Protestant emergent, NAR, word faith, prosperity gospel) are open to unscientific notions. In fact, these two groups are most disposed toward occultism.
As Bainbridge and Stark admitted, evolution directly contradicts the Bible, beginning with the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo. This means that evolution is the antithesis of the Genesis account. For this reason, discerning Christians refuse to submit to the evolutionary thinking that has swept Western and American society. Nor do they accept the evolutionary theism brought into the whole body of the Church by weak, tepid, indecisive, or apostate clergy.
Over eighty years ago, Rev. C. Leopold Clarke wrote that priests who embrace evolution (evolutionary theists) are apostates from the Truth as it is in Jesus. (1 John2:2) Rev. Clarke, a lecturer at a London Bible college, discerned that evolution is the antithesis to the Revelation of God in the Deity of Jesus Christ, thus it is the greatest and most active agent of moral and spiritual disintegration:
It is a battering-ram of unbelief---a sapping and mining operation that intends to blow Religion sky-high. The one thing which the human mind demands in its conception of God, is that, being Almighty, He works sovereignly and miraculously---and this is the thing with which Evolution dispenses .Already a tremendous effect, on a wide scale has been produced by the impact of this teaching---an effect which can only be likened to the collapse of foundations (Evolution and the Break-Up of Christendom, Philip Bell, creation.com, Nov. 27, 2012)
The faith of the Christian Church and of the average Christian has had, and still has, its foundation as much in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis, the book of beginnings revealed mouth to mouth by the Angel to Moses, as in that of the person and deity of Jesus Christ. But how horrible a travesty of the sacred office of the Christian Ministry to see church leaders more eager to be abreast of the times, than earnestly contending for the Faith once delivered unto the saints (Jude 1:3). It is high time, said Rev. Clarke, that the Church,
. separated herself from the humiliating entanglement attending her desire to be thought up to date What, after all, have custodians of Divine Revelation to do making terms with speculative Biology, which has .no message of comfort or help to the soul? (ibid)
The primary tactic employed by priests eager to accommodate themselves and the Church to modern science and evolutionary thinking is predictable. It is the argument that evolution is entirely compatible with the Bible when we see Genesis, especially the first three chapters, in a non-literal, non-historical context. This is the argument embraced and advanced by mega-church pastor Timothy J. Keller.
With a position paper Keller published with the theistic evolutionary organization Bio Logos he joined the ranks of falling stars (Catholic and Protestant priests) stretching back to the Renaissance. Their slippery-slide into apostasy began when they gave into the temptation to embrace a non-literal, non-historical view of Genesis. (A response to Timothy Kellers Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople, Lita Cosner, Sept. 9, 2010, creation.com)
This is not a heresy unique to modern times. The early Church Fathers dealt with this damnable heresy as well, counting it among the heretical tendencies of the Origenists. Fourth-century Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Basil the Great and Ephraim the Syrian, all of whom wrote commentaries on Genesis, specifically warned against treating Genesis as an unhistorical myth or allegory. John Chrysostom strongly warned against paying heed to these heretics,
let us stop up our hearing against them, and let us believe the Divine Scripture, and following what is written in it, let us strive to preserve in our souls sound dogmas. (Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 31)
As St. Cyril of Alexandria wrote, higher theological, spiritual meaning is founded upon humble, simple faith in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis and one cannot apprehend rightly the Scriptures without believing in the historical reality of the events and people they describe. (ibid, Seraphim Rose, p. 40)
In the integral worldview teachings of the Fathers, neither the literal nor historical meaning of the Revelations of the pre-incarnate Jesus, the Angel who spoke to Moses, can be regarded as expendable. There are at least four critically important reasons why. First, to reduce the Revelation of God to allegory and myth is to contradict and usurp the authority of God, ultimately deny the deity of Jesus Christ; twist, distort, add to and subtract from the entire Bible and finally, to imperil the salvation of believers.
Scenarios commonly proposed by modern Origenists posit a cleverly disguised pantheist/immanent nature deity subject to the space-time dimension and forces of evolution. But as noted previously, it is sinful man who carries the burden of time, not God. This is a crucial point, for when evolutionary theists add millions and billions of zeros (time) to God they have transferred their own limitations onto Him. They have limited God and made Him over in their own image. This is not only idolatrous but satanic.
Additionally, evolution inverts creation. In place of Gods good creation from which men fell there is an evolutionary escalator starting at the bottom with matter, then progressing upward toward life, then up and through the life and death of millions of evolved creatures that preceded humans by millions of years until at long last an apish humanoid emerges into which a deity that is always in a state of becoming (evolving) places a soul.
Evolution amputates the entire historical precedent from the Gospel and makes Jesus Christ unnecessary as the atheist Frank Zindler enthusiastically points out:
The most devastating thing that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a saviour. And I submit that puts Jesus into the ranks of the unemployed. I think evolution absolutely is the death knell of Christianity. (Atheism vs. Christianity, 1996, Lita Cosner, creation.com, June 13, 2013)
None of this was lost on Darwins bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1985). Huxley was thoroughly familiar with the Bible, thus he understood that if Genesis is not the authoritative Word of God, is not historical and literal despite its symbolic and poetic elements, then the entirety of Scripture becomes a collection of fairytales resulting in tragic downward spiraling consequences as the Catholic Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation makes clear in part:
By denying the historical truth of the first chapters of Genesis, theistic evolutionism has fostered a preoccupation with natural causes almost to the exclusion of supernatural ones. By denying the several supernatural creative acts of God in Genesis, and by downplaying the importance of the supernatural activity of Satan, theistic evolutionists slip into a naturalistic mentality which seeks to explain everything in terms of natural causes. Once this mentality takes hold, it is easy for men to regard the concept of spiritual warfare as a holdover from the days of primitive superstition. Diabolical activity is reduced to material or psychological causes. The devil and his demons come to be seen as irrelevant. Soon hell joins the devil and his demons in the category of antiquated concepts. And the theistic evolutionist easily makes the fatal mistake of thinking that he has nothing more to fear from the devil and his angels. According to Fr. Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist of Rome, there is a tremendous increase in diabolical activity and influence in the formerly Christian world. And yet most of the bishops of Europe no longer believe in the existence of evil spirits .To the Fathers of the Church who believed in the truth of Genesis, this would be incredible. But in view of the almost universal acceptance of theistic evolution, it is hardly surprising. (The Difference it makes: The Importance of the Traditional Doctrine of Creation, Hugh Owen, kolbecenter.org)
Huxley had zero respect for modern Origenists and received enormous pleasure from heaping piles of hot coals and burning contempt upon them, thereby exposing their shallow-reasoning, hypocrisy, timidity, fear of non-acceptance, and unfaithfulness. With sarcasm dripping from his words he quipped,
I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian theology must stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah, or Christ, is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history; the identification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon the interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have no evidential value unless they possess the historical character assigned to them. If the covenant with Abraham was not made; if circumcision and sacrifices were not ordained by Jahveh; if the ten words were not written by Gods hand on the stone tables; if Abraham is more or less a mythical hero, such as Theseus; the story of the Deluge a fiction; that of the Fall a legend; and that of the creation the dream of a seer; if all these definite and detailed narratives of apparently real events have no more value as history than have the stories of the regal period of Romewhat is to be said about the Messianic doctrine, which is so much less clearly enunciated? And what about the authority of the writers of the books of the New Testament, who, on this theory, have not merely accepted flimsy fictions for solid truths, but have built the very foundations of Christian dogma upon legendary quicksands? (Darwins Bulldog---Thomas Huxley, Russell Grigg, creation.com, Oct. 14, 2008)
Pouring more contempt on them he asked,
When Jesus spoke, as of a matter of fact, that "the Flood came and destroyed them all," did he believe that the Deluge really took place, or not? It seems to me that, as the narrative mentions Noahs wife, and his sons wives, there is good scriptural warranty for the statement that the antediluvians married and were given in marriage; and I should have thought that their eating and drinking might be assumed by the firmest believer in the literal truth of the story. Moreover, I venture to ask what sort of value, as an illustration of Gods methods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened? If no Flood swept the careless people away, how is the warning of more worth than the cry of Wolf when there is no wolf? If Jonahs three days residence in the whale is not an admitted reality, how could it warrant belief in the coming resurrection? Suppose that a Conservative orator warns his hearers to beware of great political and social changes, lest they end, as in France, in the domination of a Robespierre; what becomes, not only of his argument, but of his veracity, if he, personally, does not believe that Robespierre existed and did the deeds attributed to him? (ibid)
Concerning Matthew 19:5:
If divine authority is not here claimed for the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis, what is the value of language? And again, I ask, if one may play fast and loose with the story of the Fall as a type or allegory, what becomes of the foundation of Pauline theology? (ibid)
And concerning Cor. 15:21-22:
If Adam may be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive type, comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, what value has Pauls dialectic? (ibid)
After much thought, C.S. Lewis concluded that evolution is the central, most radical lie at the center of a vast network of lies within which modern Westerners are entangled while Rev. Clarke identifies the central lie as the Gospel of another Spirit. The fiendish aim of this Spirit is to help men lose God, not find Him, and by contradicting the Divine Redeemer, compromising Priests are serving this Spirit and its diabolical purposes. To contradict the Divine Redeemer is the very essence of unfaithfulness, and that it should be done while reverence is professed,
. is an illustration of the intellectual and moral topsy-turvydom of Modernism He whom God hath sent speaketh the Words of God, claimed Christ of Himself (John 3:34), and no assumption of error can hold water in the face of that declaration, without blasphemy. Evolutionary theists are serving the devil, therefore no considerations of Christian charity, of tolerance, of policy, can exonerate Christian leaders or Churches who fail to condemn and to sever themselves from compromising, cowardly, shilly-shallying priests---the falling stars who challenge the Divine Authority of Jesus Christ. (ibid)
The rebuttals, warnings and counsels of the Fathers against listening to Origenists (and their modern evolutionary counterparts) indicates that the spirit of antichrist operating through modern rationalistic criticism of the Revelation of God is not a heresy unique to our times but was inveighed against by early Church Fathers.
From the scholarly writings of the Eastern Orthodox priest, Fr. Seraphim Rose, to the incisive analysis, rebuttals and warnings of the Catholic Kolbe Center, creation.com, Creation Research Institute, Rev. Clarke, and many other stalwart defenders of the faith once delivered, all are a clear, compelling call to the whole body of the Church to hold fast to the traditional doctrine of creation as it was handed down from the Apostles, for as God spoke and Jesus is the Living Word incarnate, it is incumbent upon the faithful to submit their wills to the Divine Will and Authority of God rather than to the damnable heresy proffered by falling stars eager to embrace naturalistic science and the devil's antithesis--- evolution. But if it seem evil to you to serve the Lord,
you have your choice: choose this day that which pleases you, whom you would rather serve
.but as for me and my house we will serve the Lord. Joshua 24:15
Your "point" amounts to a litany of personal attacks.
“Your “point” amounts to a litany of personal attacks.”
Spirited: Evil always wears a mask. Anyone who dares rip off the mask to reveal the horror beneath is immediately accused of hate and “personal attacks” which amounts to, “you only did or said that because you hate me.”
Did you post this in News and Activism instead of Religion because you can get away with it here?
Faith in what?
In something that’s reasonable..
It’s a personal attack, and there’s no excuse for it.
Spirited: Your narrow-minded ‘reasoning,’ such as it is, is of a kind with America’s progressive liberals and their incessant fear-inducing accusations of ‘homophobia’ ‘racism’ ‘hate’ etc.(all of them species of faux personal attack) against Tea Partiers and other defenders of our nearly dead Constitutional Republic.
Anyone who rips the mask off of evil-intentioned progressives and their privileged lapdogs is immediately accused of “personal attack” as the means of thought and speech control, domination and punishment which usually takes the form of public self-accusation/confession.
To expose con men is not itself an evil, though they will have it be seen as one if they can get away with it.
How will you know what's reasonable if you don't have any faith in reason?
Did you post this in News and Activism instead of Religion because they don’t let you get away with that crap over there?
How will you know what’s reasonable if you don’t have any faith in reason?
I see........ went over your head...
mostly I’m not too reasonable either..
When I was 20 I was a genius.. but have grown progressively dumber over the years..
Currently I’m no smarter than you..
You can only do so much with platitudes.
I am unaware that I have been making "standard" Creationist arguments. (Actually, I have been relying very heavily on Socrates/Plato and certain pre-Socratic philosophers for the development of my main argument.) I gather by "standard Creationist arguments" you mean the sorts of arguments that are made on the basis of a literal reading of Genesis 1. Jeepers, BroJoeK, if you want to argue with a "Creationist," go find a "Creationist" to argue with. Don't just impute "standard Creationist arguments" to me, and start quarreling with me as if they were my own arguments.
Do you mean Young Earth Creationist, or some other species of Creationist? Or is one a Creationist just because one believes in God?
You wrote, "... anti-evolution arguments are irrelevant to science." WHY are they irrelevant to science? How can a supposedly scientific theory be tested, if it is prohibited to ask a pertinent question on grounds that particular question has been pre-determined to be "irrelevant?" Talk about having an "epistemically prior commitment!"
But science cannot have epistemically prior commitments and retain its character as science!!! That is my main concern about the kind of "science" we are getting from the Richard Dawkins and Richard Lewontins (et al.) of this world. The former found Darwin's theory completely justified his atheism. The latter said we have to stick to materialism "in order to keep the divine Foot outside the door."
If, as you claim, science is just about finding natural explanations for natural processes what if not all causes in Nature are "natural causes?" If they aren't, then the "utility" of science would be limited to the scope of the (false) presupposition that all causes in nature are "natural causes." For any other type of cause is ruled out in principle from the get-go.
But if the world does really ultimately consist from an extra-natural cause, science, under the burden of its current methods, would fail to detect it, every single time. And why would this be so? Science cannot look for what it presupposes does not exist in the first place. In effect, its viewpoint is reduced to the "size" of its tools....
You wrote this about Nietzsche:
Nietzsche was just one insane individual, but his ravings helped drive an entire nation into an insanity which eventually killed tens of millions. What it shows is that throughout history insane politicians will grasp onto whatever tools they can reach to justify their own wickednesses.Once again, I feel an urge to say something good about this poor, troubled, bedeviled man. There are two things about Nietzsche that I find entirely admirable: (1) He held anti-Semites in utter contempt, as the worst of the worst of human types. (2) He worried about the rise of German political and cultural power, and feared it would sooner or later result in war. He was a prophet of what was to come in Europe in the Twentieth Century, not an agitator or advocate of World War. He saw the chaos descending on Europe.... And I imagine he was astute enough to understand this chaos as the inevitable result of the so-called "Death of God."
Dear BroJoeK, I asked you, ""What would be the 'standard' to which both of us could agree, on the basis of which our 'dispute' could be 'resolved,' on the basis of logic and reason?"
And you wrote back: "You'll have to be more specific here what standard & dispute are you referring to?"
Well, I'd say the "standard" is Truth, and the "dispute" seems to be about the source of Truth in nature. Evidently, there are many people nowadays who believe that Truth is a sui-generis, natural product of nature itself.
It simply emerges from the evolutionary process; in other words, that on which we base our own cognitive functions is more or less an accidental development of material nature over the course of time. Further, this development has no purpose or goal.
I'd turn that around and say that Nature is the consequence, not the source, of Truth. I challenge the understanding of Truth as emergent from Nature by asking a deeper question, which I illustrated about half-way back on this thread, at Post 490, the question of Natural Law and its uncanny specification of relation and correspondence between the Natural World and the World of the Self.
There is nothing in modern biology that can defend the claim that the World of the Self is a product of natural causation. And nothing to explain how the two Worlds Nature and Mind can be bought into fruitful, mutual correspondence by means of "accidental," natural causes.
You "asserted a theological dimension which goes well beyond mere science, and on which our scientific understandings ultimately depend." Indeed, dear BroJoeK, I couldn't agree with you more on that score.
This is what I mean by Truth; science rests on Truth; it is not the other way around. You call this source of Truth "theology." I'd just call it the Word of God, Logos in the Beginning, foundation of Nature, Truth, and Life.
There are many different theologies; but only one Truth.
Thank you so much, dear BroJoeK, for sharing your thoughts with me!
You can only do so much with platitudes.
True....... a truer snark has never been snarked.
Really?!
Darwinian belief has existed since the first day of the publishing of Darwins reworking of an old idea. There is nothing new or emergent about it. But oh how Liberals admire new terms for old scams. It is their opportunity to resurrect all the old arguments, and to tout their (nonexistent) superior intelligence, breadth of knowledge, and depth of knowledge.
Please do not even attempt to dazzle me with your "razzle-dazzle," dear BroJoeK....
But he will betty, as you, of course, well know. Trolls have nothing else. They dare not understand your arguments, or those of Alamo-Girl, or of spirited irish, or of anyone else. To do so would destroy their vain pretensions. It is a stinging revelation of their intellectual poverty, this being the, always, greatest fear of the insincere.
I will defer to your experience in matters of snark.
No. I am speaking of readily observable phenomena of Natural Selection and of the many who have projected it into the religion of Darwinism; with Evolution as its most holy of sacraments.
Typical of the ardent propagandist, you seem to feel the compulsion to perpetually alter what people say to expressions which you can more comfortably shape and bend to your own purposes. It is one of the more salient characteristics that betray your game.
Darwin was simply looking for *natural explanations for natural processes.*
Its more than a little problematic what Darwin was simply looking for. In letters to his sister Darwin reveals what appears to be a growing agnosticism resulting from his observations and theories, and an awareness of the consequent atheistic or even openly anti-Christian hostility they aroused in others. Whatever the eventual state of Darwins mind on the subject, his theory has aroused one of the more virulent atheistic cults to thrive on the earth.
Yes; I noticed that.
If the manipulation succeeds, meaning in this instance that betty accepts the manufactured guilt, then the scape-goater feels empowered to crucify the scapegoat for the very evils he refuses to accept personal accountability for.
I noticed that also. However, I am not about to accept guilt for what I did not say, will not accept mischaracterizations of my arguments.
Sigh.
Thank you ever so much, dear spirited, for your perceptive analysis!
wise choice...
Maybe. We’ll see.
Sorry, I’ve been tied up.
Sounds like we may have some simple musunderstandings to set aside.
Will respond in detail later, when I can devote the time your comments deserve...
Then maybe we need to start with a precise definition of "emergence":
emergence, noun: 1 the process of becoming visible after being concealed....The way we have been using this word in our prior discussions is as a synonym for "evolution."2 the process of coming into existence or prominence....
evolution, noun: 1 the process by which different kinds of living organism are believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the earth.As usual, I rely on the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language as my source here.2 the gradual development of something....
I would argue that these terms are not synonymous. Emergence carries ontological weight in a way that evolution does not; you might say that it deals with the revelation of being, or as the OED definition puts it, of "something coming to light that was formerly concealed." Evolution starts after "being" is already presumed to be there. IOW, Darwinian evolution isn't interested in ontological questions, the biggest ones being, "What is life?" And "where did Life come from?" It just assumes life forms already exist, and tries to show how they change speciate over time.
IOW, emergence comprehends the idea of origin; evolution omits it.
Dear BroJoeK, you mentioned you "don't know" "whether [the word emergence] is also appropriately applied to such biological questions as the 'emergence' of life from chemistry, or the 'emergence' of consciousness from neurobiology."
Do you think it possible that Life could have "emerged" from chemistry? I.e., that Life has a purely naturalistic source? If you do, then please explain to me according to what "production rules" is chemistry able to do this? It seems to me that the chemistry must be "informed" in some way, to produce such an outcome. To say otherwise pretty much leaves you with the task of explaining how a virtually infinite series of accidents can possibly have led to the ordered, structured natural world the biota that we see all around us today, of which we are living parts and participants. And yet the great theoretical biologist and Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod insists that what we see is simply the culmination of "pure, blind chance."
Likewise, the hypothesis of "the 'emergence' of consciousness from neurobiology" is problematical. It is to assert that neurobiology is not only the measure of consciousness, but the source of consciousness. (But I feel pretty sure you weren't suggesting that sort of thing, BroJoeK.)
I gather by "emergence of consciousness from neurobiology, " we are dealing with the proposal that, once a physical brain becomes sufficiently developed (i.e., has "evolved" enough), consciousness just spontaneously erupts.
Yet there is accumulating evidence that even single-celled organisms e.g., amoebae, bacteria possess a form of "consciousness." Compared to humans, this is a very low-level consciousness better described as sensitive awareness, which is revealed in the behaviors of these creatures behaviors that include learning from trial-and-error, choosing from alternatives, and social interactions. Now such critturs do not have brains!!! So if consciousness (or different grades of awareness, up to and through human self-consciousness) is seen as a spontaneous development once a certain brain size and configuration has been achieved, how does science explain the observed sensitive behavior of amoebae and bacteria?
As far as the "Life is spontaneously 'emergent' from chemical activity" supposition is concerned, it flies in the face of Francis Crick's Central Dogma of biology. According to Hubert Yockey, "The Central Dogma states that informaton can be transferred from DNA to DNA, DNA to mRNA and mRNA to protein. Three transfers that the Central Dogma states never occur are protein to protein, protein to DNA, and protein to mRNA."
Yockey concludes: "No code exists to send information from protein sequences to mRNA or DNA.... Therefore, it is impossible that the origin of life was 'proteins first"....
"Nevertheless, 'proteins first' is widely taught in university classroom...and perhaps at the Grand Academy of Lagado as well....It seems evident (to me anyway) that biology cannot be reduced simply to physics ("matter in its motions" as described by the physicochemical laws, given initial and boundary conditions), leading to "random" mutations whose fitness value will be "rewarded" or punished by the environment since the genetic, algorithmic, and symbolic information content of living organisms is much greater than the information content of the physical laws.
"A good experiment is always a good experiment. Unfortunately, the interpretation of the corpus of publications on the origin of life is false. Those experiments are based on a belief that life is just complicated chemistry and that the pathway to the origin of life, if it could be found, is emergent from organic chemistry." Hubert Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, 2005
Gregory Chaitin (1985) pointed out that the laws of physics have very low information content, since their algorithmic complexity can be characterized by a computer program fewer than a thousand characters in length. In 2004, in a private communication to a colleague, Chaitin wrote:
My paper on physics was never published, only as an IBM report. In it I took: Newtons laws, Maxwells laws, the Schrödinger equation, and Einsteins field equations for curved spacetime near a black hole, and solved them numerically, giving motion-picture solutions. The programs, which were written in an obsolete computer programming language APL2 at roughly the level of Mathematica, were all about half a page long, which is amazingly simple.Astrophysicist and theoretical biologist Attila Grandpierre wonders:
How does the complexity of living organisms increase if its main driver is the physicochemical laws, estimated to have an algorithmic complexity of only 103 bits? Certainly, the observed flow of environmental information is enormous, and tellingly, it is morphological information. But what is the source of the enormous environmental information flow?Just tell me, how did nature become, not only purposive, but informed such that it can be purposive? What is the information source, if (as Ashby, Kahre, and Cameron seem to suggest) it cannot be explained on the basis of an evolution strictly according to the physicochemical laws?
Did the Big Bang's initial conditions have an algorithmic complexity greater than the algorithmic complexity of physical laws themselves? If not, then how did environmental and biological information increase in the evolution of the Universe?
Now Ashbys Law (Ashby, 1962) states that The variety of outputs of any deterministic physical system cannot be greater than the variety of inputs; the information of output cannot exceed the information already present in the input.
In accordance, Kahres Law of Diminishing Information reads: Compared to direct reception, an intermediary can only decrease the amount of information (Kahre, 2002, 14). Moreover, it is a widely held view nowadays that the chain of physical causes forms a closed circle. The hypothesis of the causal closure of the physical (Cameron, 2000, 244) maintains (roughly) that for any event E that has a cause we can cite a physical cause, P, for its happening, and that citing P explains why E happened. Therefore, not only Ashbys and Kahres laws but the causal closure thesis is in conflict with the complexity measures found in physics and in biology. Now if the algorithmic complexity of one human brain is already around I1 ~10151017 bits, the information paradox consists in the fact that the information content of physics is I(physics)~103 bits while that of the whole living kingdom is ... I(biology)~10151017 bits. Taking into account also that physics is hopelessly far from being able to cope with the task to govern even one human persons biological activity ~2*1021 bits per second, it becomes clear that at present, modern cosmological models algorithmic complexity is much less than the above obtained complexity measures characterizing life. A. Grandpierre, "Complexity Measures and Lifes Algorithmic Complexity," 2005.
To me, this is the great question....
Ultimately such questions boil down to information. Information presupposes intelligence, which is not a "material" phenomenon. It has been noted that no "natural" or "material" source of this sort of biological information has yet been detected.
Must leave it there for now, dear BroJoeK. Thank you so much for writing!
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