Evolution and the rationality of the world

@StephenMeyer

Thank you very much for your response and agreeing responding to respond to our comments.

My comments center around Materialistic Naturalism also. I chose to go to the source of this point of view and challenge its validity.

As far as I can determine by my research today’s MN is based on the thinking of Jacques Monod found in his book Chance and Necessity. Monod’s logic is quite simple and clear. Purpose from which meaning and design result requires thought. Objects or natural things cannot think, and therefore have no purpose. Also Nature or the universe cannot think, and therefore has no meaning or purpose.

Thus only humans who can think have meaning and purpose. A collorary to this is that any purpose or meaning or design found in nature must be a product of the human imagination and be false. Also this means that there is no difference between movement produced by the wind and by animals seeking food, since both are without purpose.

The biggest problem is this logic if accepted means that nature has no rational structure. This means that all of our rational scientific laws have no basis in reality, because nature is not rational. It means that the book by Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, is a work of imaginative fiction. The basis of MN is that nature is arational, because Nature cannot think.

On the other hand Monod acknowledges that human made things do have the purpose and meaning that humans design into them. This opens the possibility that the universe is rational because a rational God created it with rational structure for a rational purpose.

Why is not this possibility explored and rejected if the evidence does not support it? The answer is clear in that Dr. Monod fought in the French Communist Resistance who fought the Nazis during WW2. In the book he says he has changed Marxist views, but is still committed to an atheist world view. Thus he makes the case that the world is without purpose and meaning on the basis of ideology, rather than observable evidence.

The question is not whether nature is either physical or rational. We can see very clearly that nature is both physical and rational. Also Monod is right in saying that if nature is rational, then it must have purpose and meaning, which are spiritual. Thus using the reasoning of Monod we can see that nature is physical, rational, and spiritual. The only problem is that Monod cannot see or admit this because of his atheistic ideology.

Prof. Meyer, you say that your critics did not accept your answers to the problem of evolution. If I remember correctly they were based on how God works through genes. My perspective is different. Ecological evolution says that the ecology shaped and guides evolution and God has determined how the environment was formed and changes over the billions of years. Thus when form follows function in evolution, genes provide the physical forms required to provide the functions (purposes) needed to adapt to their environmental niches.

The world must be rational if it created rational human beings by giving them the ability to think as an evolutionary advantage. If the world were not rational, then humans would have dies out long ago. We will die out seen if we do not use our God and evolutionary ability to think and work together to solve our social and ecological problems.

If birds fly south to gain an evolutionary advantage, and bears hibernate for the same reason, and squirrels stock up on acorns for the same reason, etc. It soon becomes clear that this explanation is not an explanation, but circular reasoning which has become the basis of Darwinian natural selection.

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