“evolution may have wired us”
If it’s an agent. Yet if “evolution” doesn’t have “agency” as “mindful beings” like people do, then it can’t “wire” in the way that we mean by “engineers wire things”. Thus, HADD is violated with this claim, since “evolution” isn’t an agent.
If you disagree, then please say how “evolution” has agency. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market” might help. Does a “market” have agency itself, or is it just made up of agents who (people) have agency?
The scientific position is that there is only the physical and nothing else. I have been boo hooed by scientists, especially physicists, for suggesting that there is a non-physical reality, let’s call it a mental reality and that this reality is the source of information that underpins the physical reality. Indeed is the basis of the physical.
You have people like Dr. Leonardo Susskind, a prominent physicist, who acknowledges that information is the basis of the physical… ah but, that information he is saying is… wait for it… physical! He suggests that this reality is a hologram and that the information is right on the event horizon.
Is prenatal development simply the development of the body due to genetics and stem cell actions? IMO there is a soul that is involved and I would say heavily involved. The soul’s reactions to the mental and emotional status of the mother can affect the developing body in the womb. I have seen several cases where a child is born with some medical problem after the mother has been stressed during pregnancy. There is no way the mother’s stress can affect the developing child in her womb, if genetics is all that it is about.
By “The incarnation”, I take it you mean Jesus Christ. I am a Muslim but I still love Jesus. Jesus can only have significance, if the soul is the driver of the body and thus the instigator of all the actions done in the physical realm, both mental and physical.
No it isn’t.
That is only the position of some practicing scientists. That no more establishes materialism as a “scientific” fact than the fact that since some scientists like Snickers bars, therefore chocolate must be healthy.
I think you are just misunderstanding what I meant because my wording was not clear or you may have understood it and are simply nitpicking my imprecise language. Either way, I’ll elaborate. I simply mean the mechanism by which evolution and natural selection occurred and how we evolved and adapted in that chain as a social species that,m, environmentally speaking, has a better survival rate when cooperating together. The nature of our situation and environment in which we evolved has all but forced humans to work together. Out of this system I believe people like Shermer would argue the golden rule or reciprocal altruism developed. Which, at least this one thing, seems to make sense from a theistic standpoint. I fully admit biology is not my area of expertise though.
Vinnie
I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Should be be committed to science as it stands as “the truth”? I don’t think so. Science has no proofs of anything. It stands on evidence and the interpretation of the data. If new evidence comes to light the old is discarded like a dirty rag.
ERS is the study of religion from an evolutionary point of view, so from what I see, they are trying to say "yeah, God created everything but chose evolution to do it. Roll the die and play a game of chance and see what pans out. So people, who go for this are going to try and explain everything as evolution. Anti-evolutionism, is really about theistic evolution and much the same thing. God chose to do it by random mutations and natural selection.
I don’t understand why Biologos would become irrelevant if they can’t stand against ERS and anti-evolutionism. I would have thought that a website is relevant to people when they can engage in real debate, air their views and hear the opposite views of others.
Is there an agenda to de-convert YECists? I have gone from old earth creationism to young earth creationism is possible. If it is a creation, which is really a simulation, then anything can be created as desired. I don’t agree with the 6,000 years but it could be 20,000 years or 100,000 years or a few millions of years as against billions of years.
There is an argument that all of biology stands on evolutionary theory. I don’t agree with this at all. No, Christians are not to avoid biology. They should be free to consider biology in the light of their beliefs. Why accept the atheists worldview and try to explain everything in their terms.
What I was taught at university “if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist”.
Do they believe in the paranormal? Hey, we’re scientists, we don’t believe in spirits and ghosts etc. Telepathy is denied or considered would have to be brain to brain communication and that’s impossible of course.
What about consciousness, the so-called “hard problem”. All scientific efforts that are treated seriously. like neuroscientist, Dr… Susan Greenfield PhD, try to explain it as an emergent property of the brain’s activity.
Even a gut feeling or intuition is taboo. If you cite a gut feeling as evidence that someone else in your environment is messing with you, then you are treated as delusional or paranoid because there is nothing more than the brain and brain chemistry to account for your experiences.
How about you give me some examples of scientists that have put forth and even given the benefit of the doubt, any theories that don’t rest solely on materialism.
Nonsensical statement. That is a philosophical metaphysical position (called physicalism) and science is not about such things – science is about following some methodological ideals in which beliefs like this are irrelevant. Also this general metaphysical position closely related to naturalism and materialism should be distinguished from the more more specific position on the mind-body problem.
For example, I am a physicalist with respect to the mind-body problem but I am not a physicalist in general. I deny that the physical is all that there is – I believe in a spiritual aspect to reality. I only insist that the mind is no less physical than the body is. Science does strongly support this position on the mind but does not provide any evidence whatsoever for the wider metaphysical claim. Nevertheless neither of these are scientific positions – they are philosophical positions.
First of all, “boo hoo” is the wrong term – it refers to crying. And you can claim such preposterous philosophical ideas all you want, until you claim that science implies or requires any such thing. Science does no such thing. Science does not require physicalism, materialism, or naturalism – limiting reality to the physical, to matter, or to the what science describes. It is not about making such philosophical claims about reality. So it certainly doesn’t provide any support for your solipsism either. It does provide evidence which seems contradict this, but then most life experiences provides plenty of evidence to contradict this also.
Yes, the point here is that all the things which science and physics are talking about are physical things which are measurable and part of the mathematical space-time structure of the universe. Of course it is. Because that is what physics studies and talks about. Your attempt to use science to prop up your religious and philosophical notions is not science – obviously.
That is the scientific finding. But science is an activity of increasingly accurate descriptions of processes and certainly the evidence shows that a high proportion of that development is indeed genetics, and by including stem cell actions you basically cover everything else by definition. But this is does not in any way exclude the involvement of a non-physical existence - it just finds no evidence for such a thing. I don’t think that is even possible.
That is your belief and it is not my belief. I don’t believe in this notion of a soul at all – coming largely from religions which believe in a pre-existence. And that is the thing about science, we can do science and get the same results no matter what believe. For example we can study the effects of emotional status of the mother on prenatal development. And regardless of the results, a belief in a soul is not required.
Your limitations in seeing significance to Jesus are not my limitations. I certainly believe in the existence after death which Jesus speaks about on numerous occasions in the Bible but I don’t see any support for the notion of the soul of the Gnostics and other religions. This is not even something which Muslims agree upon either.
Let’s just consider the basics here because we have plenty of differences of opinion or belief.
Can you cite me any scientific paper, scientific research that is not limited to the physical?
Can you cite me any scientific paper, scientific research which claims that reality is limited to the physical?
No you cannot.
Your observation is irrelevant. And your argument is like claiming that baseball describes reality as a field surrounding a diamond shaped structure of four bases. Just because science is about physical phenomenon does not mean that science claims reality is limited to the physical. Science does not discuss the question of what is reality any more than does baseball. That is a discussion of philosophy under the subject of metaphysics.
Ultimately this is about the limitations of those methodological ideals upon which science is based. What it studies is limited to what is measurable because otherwise its methodological ideals are inapplicable and it couldn’t be called science anymore. The same can be said for baseball – if you leave the field surrounding the baseball diamond then you simply are not playing the game of baseball anymore.
As well as many outside of science but who worship scientism.
Indeed… although I would rephrase that… as well as those who buy into scientism or worship science. And I think there are many more of these than actual scientists. Frankly, I would expect scientists to be a little more understanding about what science actually consists of and its limitations. But I fear this is overly optimistic. Of course, science is very compatible with this worldview (scientism) as it is with most other worldviews, but if one has such a high opinion of science, one is more likely to devote oneself to such an activity and occupation.
This has led me on another chase after the meaning of the word “scientism.” Previous explorations of this (thought or expression regarded as characteristic of scientists… or promotion of science as the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values) left me somewhat puzzled as to why this is a bad thing. So this time I am digging deeper and I found the following…
Comments…
That could have been hyperbole! Somebody was driving home a point to you that science is about observations and measurements. I wasn’t there to hear the statement and so don’t know the mindset of the person who said it in your case (and I’m sure there are lots of scientists who would happily press that to its literal extreme), but insisting that such a statement must always be translated as a literal universal claim, would be like taking my statement: “My friend knows everybody” and thinking that can only be translated as a claim that my friend literally knows 7+ billion people! There are such things as figures of speech!
And sometimes, in a world of the deaf, you have to shout. That’s what hyperbole is for too.
Yep, we probably all have that innocent take on the meaning of the word at first. But what you found is what I see, especially strong in atheist circles where I’ve often heard it suggested that science would eventually answer all questions. Yes even those involving religion and literature. It is often accompanied by the belief that consciousness can best be understood as a kind of information processing.
What, by scientists? I’ve never heard a scientist make that claim. No one on a Ted Talk. Never seen it written by a contemporary scientist. Or philosopher. It’s scientifically impossible after all, rationality can take us a bit further, to the eternal multiverse, which is just more of the same. And that’s before we raise the question of transcendence warranted by Jesus.
No scientists have said that in my experience but plenty of atheists have faith in science like you wouldn’t believe.
Oh I do Mark, just like believers in general, they believe in a very… h(H)um(e)an manner.
Atheism is nonetheless the rational default, science is rational.
I have debated, on the net, with some physicists, trying to make the case that there is a non-physical reality of information, we could call it The Mind or The Mind of God. And that this can help solve the problem of entanglement.
I put it to them that entanglement may be explained by considering that two particles share a common information set. When we observe/ measure one particle we have effectively made changes to the information set that is fundamental to both particles in entanglement. Thus both particle from that moment on have their own information set in the non-physical realm of existence. And that furthermore if we choose to see a particular property in the one we measure, then the other will take on the opposite property as is seen in experimentation. They claimed I didn’t know what I was about. I didn’t know what science was. And that I didn’t understand physics. They basically laughed, decried, which is what we mean by boo hooed in Australia, at least that I have heard.
I have tried to put forward a hypothesis to some biologists that the mind body problem takes in the conscious being, which is non-physical. And I said that the reactions we see in the body, which of course includes the brain, is the result of the conscious being reacting. I got a similar response from the biologists.
All we scio is material. It needs no explanation. We do as Pan narrans, Terry Pratchett’s story telling monkey; need an explanation, one of evolution’s great mistakes. There is knowing beyond science of course, and not just in rationality, in the Thomist and Jungian senses, in our hearts. But there is no parity between a sufficient natural ‘explanation’, account and a supernatural one. There is no warrant for going beyond what we know but One. Without Jesus there is no point whatsoever in saying just because we can’t measure transcendence doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s all about the credibility of Jesus. Can we measure that? Know that?
This could be likened to chiding a group of carpenters because they haven’t been using at least some mix of “spiritual nails” to build their houses. They seem to have this dogged insistence on everywhere using ordinary physical nails purchased from the hardware store.
Does that mean our carpenters are all atheists? or that “spiritual nails” don’t exist? Not at all. It just means they’re using the tools at hand that do a good job holding the physical house together.
You also need to consider the possibility that they might be right about you: It seems likely you don’t know their trade nearly so well as they do.
Can you cite me any scientific paper, scientific research which claims that reality is not limited to the physical? That assumes in any instance that it is not? That there is any scientific and further rational basis for assuming, even positing that it is not?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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