Posted on 02/15/2003 4:18:25 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Scientists thought it was settled. The universe, they had decided, is about 20 billion years old, and Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old. Simple forms of life came into being more than three billion years ago, having formed spontaneously from nonliving matter. They grew more complex through slow evolutionary processes and the first hominid ancestors of humanity appeared more than four million years ago. Homo sapians itself—the present human species, people like you and me—has walked the earth for at least 50,000 years.
But apparently it isn't settled. There are Americans who believe that the earth is only about 6,000 years old; that human beings and all other species were brought into existence by a divine Creator as eternally separate variations of beings; and that there has been no evolutionary process.
They are creationists—they call themselves "scientific" creationists—and they are a growing power in the land, demanding that schools be forced to teach their views. State legislatures, mindful of the votes, are beginning to succumb to the pressure. In perhaps 15 states, bills have been introduced, putting forth the creationist point of view, and in others, strong movements are gaining momentum. In Arkansas, a law requiring that the teaching of creationism receive equal time was passed this spring and is scheduled to go into effect in September 1982, though the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit on behalf of a group of clergymen, teachers, and parents to overturn it. And a California father named Kelly Segraves, the director of the Creation-Science Research Center, sued to have public-school science classes taught that there are other theories of creation besides evolution, and that one of them was the Biblical version. The suit came to trial in March, and the judge ruled that educators must distribute a policy statement to schools and textbook publishers explaining that the theory of evolution should not be seen as "the ultimate cause of origins." Even in New York, the Board of Education has delayed since January in making a final decision, expected this month [June 1981], on whether schools will be required to include the teaching of creationism in their curriculums.
The Rev. Jerry Fallwell, the head of the Moral Majority, who supports the creationist view from his television pulpit, claims that he has 17 million to 25 million viewers (though Arbitron places the figure at a much more modest 1.6 million). But there are 66 electronic ministries which have a total audience of about 20 million. And in parts of the country where the Fundamentalists predominate—the so called Bible Belt— creationists are in the majority.
They make up a fervid and dedicated group, convinced beyond argument of both their rightness and their righteousness. Faced with an apathetic and falsely secure majority, smaller groups have used intense pressure and forceful campaigning—as the creationists do—and have succeeded in disrupting and taking over whole societies.
Yet, though creationists seem to accept the literal truth of the Biblical story of creation, this does not mean that all religious people are creationists. There are millions of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews who think of the Bible as a source of spiritual truth and accept much of it as symbolically rather than literally true. They do not consider the Bible to be a textbook of science, even in intent, and have no problem teaching evolution in their secular institutions.
To those who are trained in science, creationism seems like a bad dream, a sudden reveling of a nightmare, a renewed march of an army of the night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.
The scientific evidence for the age of the earth and for the evolutionary development of life seems overwhelming to scientists. How can anyone question it? What are the arguments the creationists use? What is the "science" that makes their views "scientific"? Here are some of them:
• The argument from analogy.
A watch implies a watchmaker, say the creationists. If you were to find a beautifully intricate watch in the desert, from habitation, you would be sure that it had been fashioned by human hands and somehow left it there. It would pass the bounds of credibility that it had simply formed, spontaneously, from the sands of the desert.
By analogy, then, if you consider humanity, life, Earth, and the universe, all infinitely more intricate than a watch, you can believe far less easily that it "just happened." It, too, like the watch, must have been fashioned, but by more-than-human hands—in short by a divine Creator.
This argument seems unanswerable, and it has been used (even though not often explicitly expressed) ever since the dawn of consciousness. To have explained to prescientific human beings that the wind and the rain and the sun follow the laws of nature and do so blindly and without a guiding would have been utterly unconvincing to them. In fact, it might have well gotten you stoned to death as a blasphemer.
There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
In short, the complexity of the universe—and one's inability to explain it in full—is not in itself an argument for a Creator.
• The argument from general consent.
Some creationists point at that belief in a Creator is general among all peoples and all cultures. Surly this unanimous craving hints at a greater truth. There would be no unanimous belief in a lie.
General belief, however, is not really surprising. Nearly every people on earth that considers the existence of the world assumes it to have been created by a god or gods. And each group invents full details for the story. No two creation tales are alike. The Greeks, the Norsemen, the Japanese, the Hindus, the American Indians, and so on and so on all have their own creation myths, and all of these are recognized by Americans of Judeo-Christian heritage as "just myths."
The ancient Hebrews also had a creation tale—two of them, in fact. There is a primitive Adam-and-Eve-in-Paradise story, with man created first, then animals, then women. There is also a poetic tale of God fashioning the universe in six days, with animals preceding man, and man and woman created together.
These Hebrew myths are not inherently more credible than any of the others, but they are our myths. General consent, of course, proves nothing: There can be a unanimous belief in something that isn't so. The universal opinion over thousands of years that the earth was flat never flattened its spherical shape by one inch.
• The argument of belittlement.
Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is "only a theory," giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist, one gathers, arising one morning with nothing particular to do, decided that perhaps the moon is made of Roquefort cheese and instantly advances the Roquefort-cheese theory.
A theory (as the word is used by scientists) is a detailed description of some facet of the universe's workings that is based on long observation and, where possible, experiment. It is the result of careful reasoning from these observations and experiments that has survived the critical study of scientists generally.
For example, we have the description of the cellular nature of living organisms (the "cell theory"); of objects attracting each other according to fixed rule (the "theory of gravitation"); of energy behaving in discrete bits (the "quantum theory"); of light traveling through a vacuum at a fixed measurable velocity (the "theory of relativity"), and so on.
All are theories; all are firmly founded; all are accepted as valid descriptions of this or that aspect of the universe. They are neither guesses nor speculations. And no theory is better founded, more closely examined, more critically argued and more thoroughly accepted, than the theory of evolution. If it is "only" a theory, that is all it has to be.
Creationism, on the other hand, is not a theory. There is no evidence, in the scientific sense, that supports it. Creationism, or at least the particular variety accepted by many Americans, is an expression of early Middle Eastern legend. It is fairly described as "only a myth."
• The argument of imperfection.
Creationists, in recent years, have stressed the "scientific" background of their beliefs. They point out that there are scientists who base their creationists beliefs on a careful study of geology, paleontology, and biology and produce "textbooks" that embody those beliefs.
Virtually the whole scientific corpus of creationism, however, consists of the pointing out of imperfections in the evolutionary view. The creationists insists, for example, that evolutionists cannot true transition states between species in the fossil evidence; that age determinations through radioactive breakdown are uncertain; that alternative interpretations of this or that piece of evidence are possible and so on.
Because the evolutionary view is not perfect and is not agreed upon by all scientists, creationists argue that evolution is false and that scientists, in supporting evolution, are basing their views on blind faith and dogmatism.
To an extent, the creationists are right here: The details of evolution are not perfectly known. Scientists have been adjusting and modifying Charles Darwin's suggestions since he advanced his theory of the origin of species through natural selection back in 1859. After all, much has been learned about the fossil record and physiology, microbiology, biochemistry, ethology, and various other branches of life science in the last 125 years, and it was to be expected that we can improve on Darwin. In fact, we have improved on him. Nor is the process finished. it can never be, as long as human beings continue to question and to strive for better answers.
The details of evolutionary theory are in dispute precisely because scientists are not devotees of blind faith and dogmatism. They do not accept even as great thinker as Darwin without question, nor do they accept any idea, new or old, without thorough argument. Even after accepting an idea, they stand ready to overrule it, if appropriate new evidence arrives. If, however, we grant that a theory is imperfect and details remain in dispute, does that disprove the theory as a whole?
Consider. I drive a car, and you drive a car. I do not know exactly how an engine works. Perhaps you do not either. And it may be that our hazy and approximate ideas of the workings of an automobile are in conflict. Must we then conclude from this disagreement that an automobile does not run, or that it does not exist? Or, if our senses force us to conclude that an automobile does exist and run, does that mean it is pulled by an invisible horses, since our engine theory is imperfect?
However much scientists argue their differing beliefs in details of evolutionary theory, or in the interpretation of the necessarily imperfect fossil record, they firmly accept the evolutionary process itself.
• The argument from distorted science.
Creationists have learned enough scientific terminology to use it in their attempts to disprove evolution. They do this in numerous ways, but the most common example, at least in the mail I receive is the repeated assertion that the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates the evolutionary process to be impossible.
In kindergarten terms, the second law of thermodynamics says that all spontaneous change is in the direction of increasing disorder—that is, in a "downhill" direction. There can be no spontaneous buildup of the complex from the simple, therefore, because that would be moving "uphill." According to the creationists argument, since, by the evolutionary process, complex forms of life evolve from simple forms, that process defies the second law, so creationism must be true.
Such an argument implies that this clearly visible fallacy is somehow invisible to scientists, who must therefore be flying in the face of the second law through sheer perversity. Scientists, however, do know about the second law and they are not blind. It's just that an argument based on kindergarten terms is suitable only for kindergartens.
To lift the argument a notch above the kindergarten level, the second law of thermodynamics applies to a "closed system"—that is, to a system that does not gain energy from without, or lose energy to the outside. The only truly closed system we know of is the universe as a whole.
Within a closed system, there are subsystems that can gain complexity spontaneously, provided there is a greater loss of complexity in another interlocking subsystem. The overall change then is a complexity loss in a line with the dictates of the second law.
Evolution can proceed and build up the complex from the simple, thus moving uphill, without violating the second law, as long as another interlocking part of the system — the sun, which delivers energy to the earth continually — moves downhill (as it does) at a much faster rate than evolution moves uphill. If the sun were to cease shining, evolution would stop and so, eventually, would life.
Unfortunately, the second law is a subtle concept which most people are not accustomed to dealing with, and it is not easy to see the fallacy in the creationists distortion.
There are many other "scientific" arguments used by creationists, some taking quite cleaver advantage of present areas of dispute in evolutionary theory, but every one of then is as disingenuous as the second-law argument.
The "scientific" arguments are organized into special creationist textbooks, which have all the surface appearance of the real thing, and which school systems are being heavily pressured to accept. They are written by people who have not made any mark as scientists, and, while they discuss geology, paleontology and biology with correct scientific terminology, they are devoted almost entirely to raising doubts over the legitimacy of the evidence and reasoning underlying evolutionary thinking on the assumption that this leaves creationism as the only possible alternative.
Evidence actually in favor of creationism is not presented, of course, because none exist other than the word of the Bible, which it is current creationist strategy not to use.
• The argument from irrelevance.
Some creationists putt all matters of scientific evidence to one side and consider all such things irrelevant. The Creator, they say, brought life and the earth and the entire universe into being 6,000 years ago or so, complete with all the evidence for eons-long evolutionary development. The fossil record, the decaying radio activity, the receding galaxies were all created as they are, and the evidence they present is an illusion.
Of course, this argument is itself irrelevant, for it can be neither proved nor disproved. it is not an argument, actually, but a statement. I can say that the entire universe was created two minutes age, complete with all its history books describing a nonexistent past in detail, and with every living person equipped with a full memory; you, for instance, in the process of reading this article in midstream with a memory of what you had read in the beginning—which you had not really read.
What kind of Creator would produce a universe containing so intricate an illusion? It would mean that the Creator formed a universe that contained human beings whom He had endowed with the faculty of curiosity and the ability to reason. He supplied those human beings with an enormous amount of subtle and cleverly consistent evidence designed to mislead them and cause them to be convinced that the universe was created 20 billion years ago and developed by evolutionary processes that include the creation and the development of life on Earth. Why?
Does the Creator take pleasure in fooling us? Does it amuse Him to watch us go wrong? Is it part of a test to see if human beings will deny their senses and their reason in order to cling to myth? Can it be that the Creator is a cruel and malicious prankster, with a vicious and adolescent sense of humor?
• The argument from authority.
The Bible says that God created the world in six days, and the Bible is the inspired word of God. To the average creationist this is all that counts. All other arguments are merely a tedious way of countering the propaganda of all those wicked humanists, agnostics, an atheists who are not satisfied with the clear word of the Lord.
The creationist leaders do not actually use that argument because that would make their argument a religious one, and they would not be able to use it in fighting a secular school system. They have to borrow the clothing of science, no matter how badly it fits, and call themselves "scientific" creationists. They also speak only of the "Creator," and never mentioned that this Creator is the God of the Bible.
We cannot, however, take this sheep's clothing seriously. However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at in their "scientific" and "philosophical" points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had.
It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for or even against evolution, march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.
Even if I am right and the evolutionists' case is very strong, have not creationists, whatever the emptiness of their case, a right to be heard? if their case is empty, isn't it perfectly safe to discuss it since the emptiness would then be apparent? Why, then are evolutionists so reluctant to have creationism taught in the public schools on an equal basis with evolutionary theory? can it be that the evolutionists are not as confident of their case as they pretend. Are they afraid to allow youngsters a clear choice?
First, the creationists are somewhat less than honest in their demand for equal time. It is not their views that are repressed: schools are by no means the only place in which the dispute between creationism and evolutionary theory is played out. There are churches, for instance, which are a much more serious influence on most Americans than the schools are. To be sure, many churches are quite liberal, have made their peace with science and find it easy to live with scientific advance — even with evolution. But many of the less modish and citified churches are bastions of creationism.
The influence of the church is naturally felt in the home, in the newspapers, and in all of surrounding society. It makes itself felt in the nation as a whole, even in religiously liberal areas, in thousands of subtle ways: in the nature of holiday observance, in expressions of patriotic fervor, even in total irrelevancies. In 1968, for example, a team of astronomers circling the moon were instructed to read the first few verses of Genesis as though NASA felt it had to placate the public lest they rage against the violation of the firmament. At the present time, even the current President of the United States has expressed his creationist sympathies.
It is only in school that American youngsters in general are ever likely to hear any reasoned exposition of the evolutionary viewpiont. They might find such a viewpoint in books, magazines, newspapers, or even, on occasion, on television. But church and family can easily censor printed matter or television. Only the school is beyond their control.
But only just barely beyond. Even though schools are now allowed to teach evolution, teachers are beginning to be apologetic about it, knowing full well their jobs are at the mercy of school boards upon which creationists are a stronger and stronger influence.
Then, too, in schools, students are not required to believe what they learn about evolution—merely to parrot it back on test. If they fail to do so, their punishment is nothing more than the loss of a few points on a test or two.
In the creationist churches, however, the congregation is required to believe. Impressionable youngsters, taught that they will go to hell if they listen to the evolutionary doctrine, are not likely to listen in comfort or to believe if they do. Therefore, creationists, who control the church and the society they live in and to face the public-school as the only place where evolution is even briefly mentioned in a possible favorable way, find they cannot stand even so minuscule a competition and demand "equal time."
Do you suppose their devotion to "fairness" is such that they will give equal time to evolution in their churches?
Second, the real danger is the manner in which creationists want threir "equal time." In the scientific world, there is free and open competition of ideas, and even a scientist whose suggestions are not accepted is nevertheless free to continue to argue his case. In this free and open competition of ideas, creationism has clearly lost. It has been losing, in fact, since the time of Copernicus four and a half centuries ago. But creationism, placing myth above reason, refused to accept the decision and are now calling on the government to force their views on the schools in lieu of the free expression of ideas. Teachers must be forced to present creationism as though it had equal intellectual respectability with evolutionary doctrine.
What a precedent this sets.
If the government can mobilize its policemen and its prisons to make certain that teachers give creationism equal time, they can next use force to make sure that teachers declare creationism the victor so that evolution will be evicted from the classroom altogether. We will have established ground work, in other words, for legally enforced ignorance and for totalitarian thought control. And what if the creationists win? They might, you know, for there are millions who, faced with a choice between science and their interpretation of the Bible, will choose the Bible and reject science, regardless of the evidence.
This is not entirely because of the traditional and unthinking reverence for the literal words of the Bible; there is also a pervasive uneasiness—even an actual fear—of science that will drive even those who care little for fundamentalism into the arms of the creationists. For one thing, science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel among themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.
Second, science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary—an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal and immediate care; a world in which you are his particular concern and where He will not consign you to hell if you are careful to follow every word of the Bible as interpreted for you by your television preacher.
Third, science is dangerous. There is no question but that poison gas, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons and power stations are terrifying. It may be that civilization is falling apart and the world we know is coming to an end. In that case, why not turn to religion and look forward to the Day of Judgment, in which you and your fellow believers will be lifted into eternal bliss and have the added joy of watching the scoffers and disbelievers writhe forever in torment.
So why might they not win?
There are numerous cases of societies in which the armies of the night have ridden triumphantly over minorities in order to establish a powerful orthodoxy which dictates official thought. Invariably, the triumphant ride is toward long-range disaster. Spain dominated Europe and the world in the 16th century, but in Spain orthodoxy came first, and all divergence of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed. The result was that Spain settled back into blankness and did not share in the scientific, technological and commercial ferment that bubbled up in other nations of Western Europe. Spain remained an intellectual backwater for centuries. In the late 17th century, France in the name of orthodoxy revoked the Edict of Nantes and drove out many thousands of Huguenots, who added their intellectual vigor to lands of refuge such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Prussia, while France was permanently weakened.
In more recent times, Germany hounded out the Jewish scientists of Europe. They arrived in the United States and contributed immeasurably to scientific advancement here, while Germany lost so heavily that there is no telling how long it will take it to regain its former scientific eminence. The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists, and set back its biological sciences for decades. China, during the Cultural Revolution, turned against Western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted.
As we now, with all these examples before us, to ride backward into the past under the same tattered banner of orthodoxy? With creationism in the saddle, American science will wither. We will raise a generation of ignoramuses ill-equipped to run the industry of tomorrow, much less to generate the new advances of the days after tomorrow.
We will inevitably recede into the backwater of civilization, and those nations that retain opened scientific thought will take over the leadership of the world and the cutting edge of human advancement. I don't suppose that the creationists really plan the decline of the United States, but their loudly expressed patriotism is as simpleminded as their "science." If they succeed, they will, in their folly, achieve the opposite of what they say they wish.
( Isaac Asimov, "The 'Threat' of Creationism," New York Times Magazine, June 14, 1981; from Science and Creationism, Ashley Montagu, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 182-193. )
A couple comments re: monism vs. dualism and what it is that science can study of purely “private,” internal states of consciousness. js1138, you said in your opinion materialism can incorporate any phenomenon that can be studied, and also that internal conscious states will be found to be entirely material in origin: those 400+ identified subatomic particles in their various forms and interactions will eventually be found to account for all the movements of consciousness, including mind. That is to say, there is fundamentally no distinction to be made between what is “material” and what is “spiritual.” This would be the monist position.
Though I earlier wrote that I believed that all of reality ultimately constitutes a unity, a One, I am not a monist. At least, not in the sense of identifying the material and the spiritual. In my mind, these are quite distinct phenomena – yet the two distinct things interact, for they were “designed” to interact. So I guess that makes me a dualist on one level; yet ultimately, since the two phenomena in their mutual participation and interpenetration constitute all of Reality – the One – I guess that makes me some kind of “closet monist” as well.
I came across these lines in Walker the other day that I thought dealt with these ideas excellently:
“Physicists deal with physical quantities, by which they mean those things that are measurable. Consciousness is not measurable in the way physicists use that term. You cannot make a measurement on an ice cube and by that measurement determine directly and incontrovertibly that the ice cube feels pain when it melts. We certainly believe that it does not, but that is nothing more than an anthropocentric bias.”
That is, you can neither validate nor falsify whether a melting ice cube feels pain. Of course, this is hardly a pressing problem for science. I merely mean to suggest that some things are beyond the ability of science to measure. Such as pain, something that happens only in consciousness. Continuing,
“The classic philosophical controversy between dualists and monists when put in a scientific context, especially into the context of the new physics, takes on a totally transformed significance. Monism and dualism are not antagonistic concepts in the development of an understanding of reality. It is true that all physical models in the past have been framed by their creators with the clear intent of explaining reality in objective or materialistic terms. But while that must now give way to some new, larger conception of nature that embraces consciousness, the ways in which physics has gone about the business of formulating its pictures of reality have served us too well for us now to regress to the imprecise devices of philosophy. In physics, philosophies become embodied into one single equation that describes, precisely and numerically, the whole universe – ultimately, it is hoped, all that exists.
“In its purest realization, physics becomes one equation. That equation is the word that immaculately posits all reality, and that word becomes the perfect monism. But this monism would be meaningless without the parts of the equation whose equivalence form the perfect dualism: balanced, counterpoised, symmetrical. There is no way to describe reality, whatever it is, that does not at once demand and satisfy such a relationship of parts and wholeness. If philosophy could have surrendered mind, physics still could not have structured reality out of matter alone. Such a conception is an error of eighteenth-century thinking, a thinking in which the fundamental nature of energy, space, and time had not yet been recognized as constructs, as pieces of reality as basic to what reality is as is matter….
“All things in science – all physical things, including all the constructs we use in physics – are measurable, or constituted of measurable things. Space (distance relationships) is quantifiable. Time is measurable. Speed is constructed from distance and time measurements. Mass, force, energy, numbers of stars, and the existence (yes-no measurement) of a galaxy at specified celestial coordinates can all be measured….
“And yet this is something we cannot do for consciousness. We can ask the meaningful question, ‘Does an ice cube feel pain when it melts?’ We know what the question means, and yet we cannot answer this question in any physical way….
“All the phrases we might use to refer to internal states are communicated entirely in terms of externally defined words…. We have the word consciousness, but it is difficult to communicate just what even this means to another person unless that person has experienced on his own the same questions about his inner nature. And if that person has not, you might as well try to communicate with a tree stump….
“Characteristics of conscious existence, such as pain or redness, cannot be measured directly by the use of any measuring device known to science. Even using an electroencephalograph to measure brain wave activity does not tell us anything about the actual presence of pain or any other characteristic of consciousness. Only if one measures his own brain waves, might he find that an experience of pain always accompanies a particular set of brain wave patterns in his own brain and, further, if he finds that in other people when inflicted with pain in a similar way that these same patterns occur, only then is he ready to make the logical leap of assuming that because that person is somewhat like himself, then that person feels pain just as he does. But he has no more measured pain when he does this than he measures pain by looking at an anguished face. What electric measurement would tell us that the ice cube feels pain? No scientific measurement can tell us; no tool of physics can probe that deeply.
“And yet it is the ability to use physical tools to make direct measurements on objects that defines physicality. If it is real and physical, we can measure it – gauge some characteristic of it directly. We cannot do this with consciousness, so it is nonphysical. Yet no one can deny that his own pain is real. Thus we reach a basic postulate about consciousness:
“Consciousness is real and nonphysical.…
“To understand consciousness, we must first understand that this something has its own existence that cannot be reexpressed as a combination of other factors or objects. Consciousness is not so many atoms. It does not consist of photons and quarks. Neither is it molecules spinning about in the brain. Consciousness is something that exists in its own right.”
How does one measure a real yet nonphysical thing? There are people today who seem to think that the answer to this question has two parts: (1) “You can’t.” (2) “Therefore it does not exist.” These are the “materialists” to which Phaedrus perjoratively refers. (And quite rightly in this instance, IMO – especially if they’re scientists.)
In other words, there are many people who will prefer to have “certainty,” “proof” in a thoroughly reductionist and heavily-edited “reality” (edited, because it only admits things that can be measured), than to live with the uncertainty of a wide-open world constituted by things that are not always within the range of what science can conclusively validate or falsify, or fall within the sphere of complete human control.
Cornelis wrote a beautiful essay yesterday that perceptively treated of just this kind of “syndrome.” I called it “alienation” in my reply to him. And I think a case can be made for that; for when God is “gone,” of course a man’s going to feel alienated – from himself, and from a universe so vast that he recognizes himself within it as nothing more than just a tiny speck of dust, naked and alone, here today and gone tomorrow, blown about by things he cannot control. "If this is the truth of things," perhaps he reasons, "then maybe I'm better off living the lie."
JMHO FWIW. js1138, Phaedrus, cornelis – fascinating exchanges here. Thank you all.
As for genetic engineering being in its infancy -- if you had asked me in 1970 whether people in 2003 would be fighting over organism patents, I'd have said you were a hundred years premature. Even Aldus Huxley placed Brave New World 600 years in the future, and he was thought to be a radical optimist about technology.
Not so fast, guys. this is an old argument. From 1994:
"The purpose of this chapter is to examine the case against the possibility of a scientific theory of intelligent design or creation. Several of the criteria said to distinguish the scientific status of naturalistic evolutionary theories (hereafter "descent") from admittedly nonnaturalistic theories of creation or design (hereafter "design") will be examined. It will be argued that a priori attempts to make distinctions of scientific status on methodological grounds inevitably fail and, instead, that a general equivalence of method exists between these two competing approaches to origins. In short, I will argue that intelligent design and naturalistic descent are methodologically equivalent--that is, that design and descent prove equally scientific or equally unscientific depending upon the criteria used to adjudicate their scientific status and provided metaphysically neutral criteria are selected to make such assessments. In the process of making this argument, I will also discuss whether a scientific theory of creation or design could be formulated or whether methodological objections, forever and in principle, make the assertion of a scientific theory of creation an "oxymoron" or "self-contradictory nonsense," as Ruse, Stent, Gould and others have claimed."
The Methodological Equivalence of Design & Descent: Can There Be a Scientific "Theory of Creation"?
Cordially,
But I am quite clear in my mind that if something interacts with matter, then that something is matter and the phenomenon can be studied. My academic qualifications are in psychology and special education. I have not pursued these as a career. but I have enough background to know that thought cannot coour without a brain. If you have seen as many malfunctioning brains as I have you would not be quite as adamant about the "radio receiver" analogy. Brain disfunction is seldom manifested as a weak signal. There are forms of retardation where this might be a tempting analogy, but brain damage and psychotic disorders affect personality in a very deep way.
On a slightly different tact, I think it is quite obvious that many mammal species, including cats and dogs, have an immediate sense of "Iness". Their consciousness is transient and doesn't lead to much complex learning, but it is there, just as certainly as is the consciousness of anyone outside myself.
If you absolutely deny animal consciousness, as some FReepers do, you have an easier time asserting that consciousness is a non-physical thing, because it is a property of the soul (which animals don't have). But if you believe consciousness exists on a continuium, then it becomes synonomous with brain function.
Hmmm... So, God must have a belly button because we have belly buttons? God must have DNA because we have DNA? God must be material because we are material?
Of course not. That's primitive thinking. God must be greater and more perfect than we are, in order for us to be what we are. What he cannot be is something less than we are.
Jenny doesn't like to think anything could be greater than man, Authur. Everything she believes depends on that.
No, you're reading my words too defensively. I'm claiming there's no fundamental principle why something can only come from something "greater" than itself. I'm also claiming that the very statement is hopelessly vague until you can tell me how to measure this "greatness". It sounds like Arthur is saying "greatness" or "perfection" are substances that can only be divided but not created. So it's like God has a big tank full of "greatness", and he doles out a little bit into each human being.
So, if you can get beyond the defensive emotion & consider what's being claimed, can you tell me how you'd verify this categorical claim that the "greatness" of an entity must always be less than the "greatness" of that which it came from?
Which is why, paradoxically, in post #334 she even mocks the very suprahuman insights that allow science to progress, pretending instead, one must suppose, that the flights of imagination and fantasy that define genius are at base mere syllogism, and that man has never slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.
Post 334 said this:
My point is that you apparently refused to consider anything or anyone existing outside of the time/space/material universe.
Ah, well, I'll consider anything. Imagining things is fun. Fantasy is fun. But reality depends on what we see & what hangs together logically from that. Darn reality.
I love imagination. I depend on it daily. But if you examine all the flights of fancy, daydreams, insights, inspirations, & analogies that you come up with every day, you'd have to realize that the vast majority of them are junk. It is a good thing that these ideas went extinct inside your brain before you tried to put them into practice. Inspiration, flights of fancy, analogical thoughts, etc. are the raw materials - memetic mutations, if you will. But knowledge of how the real world hangs together, and the understanding that in the end it's only the real world that exists, forces us to filter out the inspirations that don't work & select only the ones that do.
This is how we progress in our mundane, day-to-day lives, and it's also how we progress when we're philosophizing. You seem to resent the fact that we have to filter out the fantasies that don't jibe with the real world. Fine. Let us mourn for all the inspirations & ideas we've ever had that turned out to be foolish. But please understand that this is one of Life's Big Lessons: Not every idea or inspiration we have deserves to be taken as seriously as it feels like when we first think of it.
memetic evolution placeholder.
Maybe I should clarify. KJV refers to the "King James Version" of the Bible, in English, albeit archaic. Paine, of course, was the American Revolutionary War writer, again in English.
Paine was vigorously and continually attacked after writing The Age of Reason. It made a lot of people very angry. Jefferson, and several others, advised him not to publish.
One of the few high school reading assignments I actually enjoyed.
Of course.
I haven't seen one put forward. Creationism, the one with the 6,000 year old universe, seems obviously falsified on its face.
But that surely doesn't preclude other scientific theories including God.
Your last paragraph is very intuitive. If our alientation is recognized as the truth of things to us human types, one hopes we would see the futility in "going quietly into the night" of that and so believing the lie is also hideous. But in acceding to the terrible problem of alilenation, it becomes "natural" to see whether a solution exists. One hopes that we would begin to examine what consciousness is out there. Sigh.... but "little children, keep yourselves from idols" (or life's Ouija Boards). Reader please be reasonable in the quest for connectedness of the conscious. If the physical world is reasonable (and dangerous) and we must be reasonable with it, that is true too, for the "numinous."
C.S. Lewis came from atheist to Christian, but gladly he was also saved from his trampings into the occult in transit. Instructive I suppose, but dangerous.
I'm not talking to you, of course here, Ms. b. (And it's o-k, if I'm not talking to anyone.)
Dude, is it so hard to click a link and learn something? I guess so. Just for the lurkers, here's the accepted definition
Turing testA criterion proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 for deciding whether a computer is intelligent. Turing called it "the Imitation Game" and offered it as a replacement for the question, "Can machines think?"
A human holds a written conversation on any topic with an unseen correspondent (nowadays it might be by electronic mail or chat). If the human believes he is talking to another human when he is really talking to a computer then the computer has passed the Turing test and is deemed to be intelligent.
As everyone but you will see, my characterization is accurate and yours isn't. The Turing Test is only about machine intelligence.
...especially in a biological discussion
Yes, it is bizarre. Why then did you bring it up in #697? Oh, that's right, you didn't know what it was.
You've admitted that the cellular system processes genetic instructions, rather than merely expresses them.
I have no #@%$&* idea what you mean. I don't think you do either.
How? A "theory" that doesn't exclude any possibility is not scientific.
I’m always willing to reconsider analogies when I have new information that tends to disconfirm them. That problem has moved into the background, at least temporarily, while I digest Walker. He did point out in his book that the human brain is bombarded 24/7 by all species of electromagnetic radiation coming from the outside environment. There must be something in the way the mind works that filters out all this noise; for surely if we had to be conscious of it all, at all times, we would no longer be able to think: We’d be on “system overload.”
I do not absolutely deny animal consciousness. I have known and loved too many animals in my life not to recognize that at least some of them could be quite “full of themselves” – particularly dogs, cats, and horses. But I’m not “ready” to consider questions of animal consciousness here except to note that where human beings have free will, animals largely seem to operate according to an “instruction set” – what we call instinct.
I’m more interested in the problem of human consciousness. You don’t have to be a philosopher to be interested in this. Walker, a physicist, clearly is interested.
js1138, you wrote: “But if you believe consciousness exists on a continuum, then it becomes synonymous with brain function.” But I doubt that consciousness exists as a continuum; for there are times when consciousness does not function – during profound sleep, for instance. Yet while I am unconscious, the brain is still merrily chugging away, maintaining the homeostasis of the body while I sleep.
Let’s do a little thought experiment here. Let’s say that I’m hooked up to an EEG machine that is recording my brain waves during different types of unconscious and conscious states. During sleep – when consciousness is not present – the device reads out a steady pattern of brain activity stabilized at the low end of the range: This is the brain doing its bodily-maintenance routines – what I would like to called the “base state.”
Now let’s say I start to dream – presumed to be a form of consciousness. Instantly the trace from the EEG would show an increase in the level of brain activity, perhaps fitful yet at a higher level than that established by brain function during unconsciousness. This would continue as long as I’m dreaming; then fall back and stabilize at the “base level” when the dream ceases, and I fall back into the unconsciousness of the sleep mode.
Then I awake: Full consciousness has returned. Immediately the EEG trace would show (presumably!) a dramatic increase of brain activity, as the “internal dialog” starts up again, and I start to interact with the world about me. The EEG readout would likely show a median level of activity appreciably higher on the scale than that of the “base state” of brain activity during sleep. It would be spiking all around, as thoughts and feelings kicked in and passed away, to be succeeded by others in turn.
So far, we’ve pictured the brain activity of sleep mode, dreaming mode, and normal waking consciousness. We said that the sleep mode represents a kind of “base state” for brain activity that somehow becomes elevated when a form of consciousness is present, be it a dream or a conscious thought.
I’d expect that the EEG would read out different patterns, depending on whether I was watching TV, or just sitting on the beach, taking in the day, or reading, or struggling to resolve some analytical problem, and so forth. With the latter two, I am dealing with words. Words seem to be the “stuff” of ordinary wakeful consciousness; for the internal dialog – me “talking to myself” – is conducted mainly in words.
But there is a conscious state that can be achieved where all thoughts are stilled, where all words “go away.” This is the goal of a certain form of meditation. In this meditation, if successful, the mind is cleared of all thoughts; and all that is then left is a palpable state of awareness that has zero content. What would the EEG read out look like?
I suspect it would show all kinds of jiggles and spikes as I try to settle into the state of sheer thoughtlessness; but then, once “the zone” has been found, it would level out and hold steady – at a rate higher on the scale than that of the “base state” of brain activity.
All this just goes to show that the superimposition of consciousness on the base brain state substantially increases brain activity. But where is consciousness to be found, e.g., during sleep? Is it holed up in some region of the brain? Is it somewhere else?
We don’t know. And the EEG tape can’t tell us. It can register changes in brain function. But it cannot capture any of the conscious experiences that I have had – in dream mode, wake mode, or stilled mode. It also can't tell us "where" consciousness "goes" when the mind is unconscious.
The conscious experience is perfectly ineffable, and cannot be translated from one mind to another. It can be imperfectly described by the use of words, but that is all.
And when you boil it all down, that’s all the EEG read out is –a description. It cannot penetrate the conscious experience itself, nor give us any guidance as to the quality of the experience or even how it arises in the first place.
Do we really have a warrant to suppose that brain and consciousness really are the same thing, when one (brain, whose functioning is captured on the EEG tape) cannot even “explain” the other – which is said to be identical to it?
These are the problems. I’ve tried to demonstrate that consciousness is not a “continuum,” that it is something that is qualitatively different from the physical brain – that it is, in fact, a “thing in itself.” That it has a kind of autonomy (as the process of silencing the thought stream shows). This kind of autonomy is not something the brain has. For if the brain were to cease its activity, we would simply be dead, real soon.
Just a note in passing, I read the essay that PatrickHenry directed me to. I’m running over long here, so just a quick note: Somehow, the author moved blithely from his subtitle, which said “IF,” to the body of his argument, which turned “IF” into “IS.” “IF” was a proposition that had not been validated; yet the discussion assumed it had – a pre-analytical notion has, in this case, been turned into the major premise of the following argument. (There’s a certain dishonesty in such operations, IMO.) What we ended up with were the “qualia” – descriptions of conscious states of thinking and feeling that human beings are said to typically have.
May I note here that these “qualia” – descriptions of experiences consisting of words -- are directly analogous to the EEG tape recording the hypothetical brain activity of the above thought experiment? For they can tell us nothing about what consciousness is, or what my conscious experience was like for me. “Qualia” just look to me like yet another attempt to grind down the authority of human subjective experience, to “reduce it” to the level where it can be handled in terms of symbols that must forever remain distinct from actual experience itself. They represent a retreat from Reality, not an explanation of real things. JMHO FWIW
BB, you're right. That essay was more of a manifesto than an even-handed exploration. I only linked it because it was on the point you were discussing, and it was in the current issue of SA, so you can see where the "mainstream" is trending. It's obviously very far from the final word.
Y'all might be interested in keeping tabs on the Meridian Institute which actively investigates the spirit-mind-body connection. Here's an article relevant to your above analysis:
Neurological Correlates of Transformational Experiences
Abstract: A variety of experiences – visions, near-death experiences, mystical and numinous experiences - may lead to transformation of the personality, resulting in greater compassion, altruism, and universal love. Cognitive science has explored the reasoning capacities of the human mind/brain, but has heretofore paid little attention to these higher functions. There has been previous work on the role of the temporal lobe of the brain in such experiences (e.g., that of Michael Persinger), as well as some neuroimaging on the areas of the brain involved in meditation (e.g., that of Andrew Newberg). My approach here is to extend this work in several ways to explore the neurological correlates of transformational experiences: (1) better quantitative assessment of experiences, going beyond descriptive phenomenology, (2) more diversity of experiences, comparing spontaneous experiences to induced experiences, and particularly exploring the factors involved in positive vs. negative experiences (3) focusing specifically on neuroimaging, with near-death experiences as a model, and (4) using the results of neuroimaging to design experiments to induce experiences for controlled study. This approach has the potential to show coherent mechanisms for these experiences (as opposed to pathology caused by biological deterioration), encouraging further exploration to gain an understanding of their role in human existence.
PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness
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