Evolutionary creationism sticking point

Faith & Science Conversation
103

And let me add one further clarification… logically speaking again, God could indeed create human beings de novo in whatever state he wishes. There is no inherent logical restriction to this.

Now, I think you and I would agree that God is precluded from doing so because his nature would preclude him from creating a being with false memories, but we should be clear… this is something that God could not do due to his character, not due to limits of his power or the logical impossibility is the thing itself. A “being with a false memory” is certainly a conceivable thing, not in the category of a square circle.

After all, I imagine that something at least somewhat like this is essentially what God will do to accomplish the final resurrection… he will gather materials in order to de novo resurrect people to life… instantaneously creating them and restoring them right along with their previous experiences and memories.

Now, we don’t object to this, because we recognize that God would be instantaneously constructing a person “programmed” with fully formed true memories.

So sure, I would object to the idea of God instantly creating a fully formed and functional human with “programmed” false memories, but I see no difficulty whatsoever, logical, or in conflict with God’s character, if (or when?) he instantaneously (re) creates a fully formed and functional human with programmed true memories.

Thus I don’t see a basis for objecting to the idea that God can indeed create a fully formed human being. That is essentially what we all believe he will in fact do at some point, no?

104

For me a few things to consider is this.

In the beginning , according to genesis, the world was void and without form. The words used there actually means chaotic. So before God instilled order, the universe was already chaotic. Secondly God says it was good, not perfect. Thats not semantics either. After God created Adam, he noticed something was wrong. Adam was alone. That was not good. So there was already two cases of things not being perfect. A chaotic universe and a lonely man who needed a partner. Then the third thing comes in. There is a enemy. Talking snake who purposely deceived Eve. He decided Eve by convincing her to reject Gods teachings for her own. ( so before sin existed, she choose to do the fourth thing in this world that was not good and that’s to reject God. She did this by eating from the fifth thing that was not good. The tree of knowledge of Good and Bad. So before the first bite we can already see five things in the story that teaches the world that was not good.

Some other things to consider placed in the stories that are a bit weird honestly. God enjoyed the scent of burnt sacrifices. Sure later on it recanted that in a way but nonetheless at one point it says it. Now I don’t think God is evil at all. But one of Gods plans was to flood the earth and rain down fiery brimstone. If the death of animals killing one another to survive is tough then what about its equal. The need for animals to have been sacrificed so that their blood can cover us until Christ came? Essentially, we killed them so that we may have life and likewise, they killed each other so that they may have life.

So theologically I don’t think the death in evolution is that far off the mark of cruelty. Then there is the scientific aspect. For me the focus of evolution is not what all had to die but what all came to life. We see so many beautiful things in nature that at where because of what their ancestors sacrificed. “ I’m using that term loosely”. We have beautiful plants and butterflies and snakes that have gorgeous patterns and so on. All here because of this process. So theologically, and scientifically, we seems consistent message of death of another brings life for others.

105

I was raised in Christianity, and specifically in YECism. And, yeah, if you keep to your own bubble you might never think of such an objection on your own, mostly because you’re already a believer and just don’t go looking for objections.

I didn’t stay in my bubble. Or, rather, it got popped for me.

I think I mostly agree with how you respond to the challenge. But for the evolutionary creationist, the states are different than for someone who is positing a de novo creation of humans. For me, evolution seems to be the only way to get humans; so the only real choices are a physical world with humans grown through pain and suffering, or a physical world with no humans at all (or no physical world, period). If God can get humans some other way (which @Daniel_Fisher somehow knows that he can), then there would seem to be no purpose for the pain and suffering (unless God just wants the pain and suffering anyways, which poses serious problems for the Christian).

I see in Daniel’s responses later on that he’s going to now assume a limitation of sorts on God’s ability to create humans, thus making state B necessary to get to state C. But I think that’s a type of special pleading, which I’ll address anon…

106

Which is precisely why I keep explaining that I could not believe in Christianity without evolution. This makes discussions with creationists quite difficult for me, for they pull the rug out from any reason I might have to talk to them in the first place. It is like they are trying to convince me that Christianity is nothing but crazy nonsense.

107

I have an answer that satisfies me. As much as I know several will decry his Calvinism, John Piper has much else that is correct besides. A bit incorporating some of it that I think have posted here at PS before (senior memory is a real pain :woozy_face:) deals with the question directly…
 

108

Reminds me of Augustine’s distinction between man when innocent and in the final state: Originally, as created, man was able to choose to sin or not to sin. (Augustine’s posse peccare, posse non peccare). Because of his experience of salvation, redemption and resurrection to glorification, man in the final state will, unlike the original creation, be actually unable to sin (non posse peccare).

1 Like
109

And be thankful for it!

110

And be more truly free than we’ve ever conceived of.

1 Like
111

How can " Life is a self-organizing process" if all you are willing to concede to is the physical? How does the physical self organize.
And here: “brought the human mind to life”. How do you figure this if we are only considering the physical.
What is referred to as “the human mind” is conscious being, non-physical.

112

Humans are humans, from the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg. A human at that state has essentially nothing in the way of memories and experiences, but it also doesn’t have much in the way of capabilities.

Not the same thing. A person who had experiences and was formed by them might not remember them, but he had them nonetheless and that’s why he’s the way he is. An amnesiac is a person who cannot access memories of past experiences, not a person who never had past experiences.

And I submit you have no basis for that dispute. Clearly, there is knowledge that God wants us to have that we can only get through experience. My contention is that all knowledge can only be obtained through experience… knowledge of language, love, hate, evil, goodness, beauty, creativity… we only know these things because we have experienced them. In fact, I wonder if “knowledge” at all is just another class of experience. Your belief that a functional adult human can be created de novo with no past requires that knowledge (at least a great deal of it) be independent of experience. But knowledge without experience is pure conjecture at best, and at worst is as much of an oxymoron as a four-sided triangle or oxidizable H2O. If you want to assert that the knowledge necessary for a functional human being does not require experience but the knowledge necessary for a redeemed one does… well… I consider that special pleading (while fully recognizing that you of course do not), and have no reason to believe it is the case.

It is, however, the crux of our disagreement. And it’s always nice to agree on what the real point of disagreement is. :wink:

113

Noted. I jumped to a conclusion. Mea culpa.

114

Since I am now an ex-OEC ‘evolutionary providentialist’, I am not particularly concerned with abiogenesis. God, in his providence and sovereignty over timing and placing could have zapped the necessary precursors with cosmic radiation and then again the resultant intermediates and then whatever (I am certainly not pretending to have a clue about the sequence).

115

First of all, let me make clear that I not only do not concede that the physical is all there is, but in fact believe quite strongly that there is a non-physical or spiritual aspect to our existence.

But this has nothing to do with life as a self-organizing process. Self-organizing physical processes are numerous and well documented. They are a consequence of the nonlinearity of the mathematical equations governing physics. The result is that events depend not only on the equations but strongly on the previous conditions, and thus the reasons things do what they do is often no more than this is what they have been doing.

The laws of physics are fundamentally indeterminate and full of unstable states where they can progress in many different directions. Thus physical systems make choices not determined by pre-existing conditions. Then they involve cyclical processes which maintain themselves. A famous example is the red spot on Jupiter, which has no underlying cause. It is self-organizing and exists because it exists absorbing energy from its surroundings to maintain itself. It all a complex version of the physical phenomenon of feedback and amplification.

Life is such a self-maintaining dynamic system which also adapts to changing conditions, again with undetermined choices which is documented as “bifurcation” (I suggest a google search of this term) on the simplest levels.

Once you involve the mind you run into a problem with multiple definitions of the word “physical,” one of which has to do with the laws of nature and the other to do with bodily as opposed to mental. Thus we can distinguish the two by using the following: physical/bodily and physical/natural. You run into this with Paul’s explanation of resurrection in 1 Cor 15 who explains that the resurrection is physical/bodily but not physical/natural and to a spiritual body (physical in the sense of bodily but not physical in the sense of the laws of nature and the stuff of the Earth).

The human mind is entirely physical/natural even though it is not physical/bodily. Fortunately Dawkins coined the term meme in contrast to the gene, which facilitate an explanation of the human mind as an example of memetic life rather than genetic life. Human language has all the representative capabilities of DNA and more and thus can be the basis of a form of life which is not biological in nature even if it is dependent on our bodies for its existence.

116

?

It seems like you had just stated your essential agreement with me on that point…

Do I misunderstand you, or did you not agree with me that having “human nature”, (and/or being human) does not require any experience nor memory? That a fertilized egg is entirely human, and has a completely real and true human nature, simply by virtue of its having been created?

So concurring on the importance of being clear about the crux of our disagreement, hence may I ask to be perfectly clear:

Does human nature require some certain amount of experiences and associated memories? Or can a being possess human nature with exactly 0 experiences and memories?

117

I don’t, no. Resurrecting a human who has already had experiences and retains them is entirely different from creating a brand new functioning human who has had no experiences. I can conceive of what the former might look like. I simply can’t imagine the latter. (And I’m not talking about just “picturing” it. I can picture water on fire as well, but I can’t imagine a way that you could oxidize H2O.) I know what people who have no experience, no knowledge, no language are like. I’ve made three of them myself. They’re not terribly good for much. They get better, but it takes… time. :wink:

118

By “nature”, I just mean the essence of what you are, not your actuality at any specific point in time. Humans are experience-having things. A human zygote is a human. It hasn’t had much in the way of experience, but if nature takes its course it will. The more experience a human has, the more we see the human in terms of “the being who has had those experiences” rather than just their physical form.

Since we may after all still be disagreeing slightly on the crux of disagreement, let me try to phrase it another way. You hold that God could create a being that (at the very least) can communicate, reason, love, and sustain its own life all without any experience of any sort. I hold that such a being is as nonsensical as a three-legged cat with four legs, and that all of those capabilities are precisely lived experience over time. Furthermore, I hold that while we have literally billions of examples of the latter, we have no examples of the former. And still furthermore (and possibly gratuitously), I hold that when God wanted to create His own son, he did it the long way.

119

i genuinely understand why you would be dubious of that, since everything we know we gain by experience. we know how to communicate, how to speak and hear language through a process of learning it… we know how to walk through learning, etc.

But what makes it impossible for me to believe that this is the only way such skills could be received, or that God is incapable of immediately giving people gifts of communication, or walking, for instance, is that we have on record the son of God doing exactly that. When he healed the mute and deaf man, the man spoke clearly instantly, he didn’t have to work with a speech therapist and learn how to carefully make his words, after being deaf. Jesus healed him, and part of that was instantaneous knowledge of how to speak (Aramaic, presumably) properly.

Similarly the people Jesus healed that were lame and unable to walk… When a man has been lame or crippled from birth, and has never walked a day in his life, he has never had the experience of “learning” to walk. But when these people were healed, Jesus did not simply heal their injury or physical ailment, then send them off to a physical therapist who would have to teach them how to walk… Jesus’ healing of these individuals consisted of both giving them physical healing of their limbs, and giving them the instantaneous knowledge of how to walk, apparently just as capable as if they’d been doing it all their life.

121

It is an objection, but I don’t think a strong enough one.

The people Jesus healed did have experiences of walking, talking, etc… They just hadn’t experienced it themselves – they’d experienced it happening all around them their entire lives. (Although some probably had first-hand experience. While some people are explicitly identified as having had their condition since birth, I don’t think we can conclude that was true for everyone.) People are perfectly capable of acquiring language, even if they can’t hear or speak it. While the mute and deaf man may have suddenly acquired the ability to speak Aramaic, there was already an Aramaic for him to speak and he might have even already known some of it. That’s a far cry from de novo man appearing in a world where there’s never been language at all. As for non-cognitive skills like physical body control (i.e. walking)… I’m fine with those not requiring experience. Spiders don’t have to practice webspinning, or even watch another spider spin a web first… they can just do it. Some rare musical savants can reproduce entire concertos note-perfect after only one listen. But it’s no big deal for a golem to be able to walk, pick up stuff, or maybe even reproduce a work on piano. We can already build machines that do those things. It’s understanding the human-specific things like language, love, hate, evil, goodness, beauty, creativity that I’m talking about. These don’t just come to us by experience, but by experience in the context of human society.

122

In living things we see various processes that can’t be self-organizing as is suggested by science. I read things like “RNA polymerase recognizes the starting position of the gene and…” and as an industrial chemist I am amazed. I don’t buy this for one second. Intelligence is seen in living things, especially at the cellular and sub-cellular level and is treated as an anathema by the biomedical scientists because they want to explain everything by physical cause and effect. It can’t be explained by the physical alone.
Even in the non-living, physical nature we see that there are laws governing how things react and interact and we have recognized the laws but refuse to recognize that these laws can’t just arise out of nowhere. If everything was just a whole lot of matter that exploded, it can then become ordered and be governed by laws.
For there to be intelligence behind life’s processes and laws governing the physical, then there has to be more to the picture than the physical. You say that you accept that there is a non-physical / spiritual aspect to our existence, but how can you then say that it doesn’t have anything to do with life?
The physical was all brought into being/ created by God. The basis of everything physical is information. This is recognized by physicists, but they want to say that information is physical. That is rubbish. The laws of physics that we have discovered and represent mathematically are the meaning that God had attached to the information God has used to describe this physical realm and thus bring it into existence. There was a big bang but God dunnit.
At the cellular and subcellular level there are also laws that govern how everything behaves. We as embodied conscious being don’t control how the physical body works in its basic level. But we do have an influence in that how we react to ideas in the Mind affects the information at the basic level, which is why we see changes in the body, even at the cellular level. For instance we have seen in the early clinical trials that a person’s belief in there being damage in some area will ignite the immune system. And the inflammation, which is unnecessary if there is no damage in that area, will damage healthy cells.
Now about the human mind. This is a term that is very often used to really refer to the embodied conscious being. The many minds theory doesn’t have any good evidence to support it. We utilize information/ ideas in The Mind, which is the Mind of God, in which the physical is brought into being. The evidence that supports this is telepathy, which is also an anathema to most scientists. The experiments have not been done properly.
I don’t agree with anything that Paul said. I don’t think there was ever any bodily resurrection and I don’t believe that people will be selectively resurrected on earth and have bodies that defy the laws of the physical realm. Immortality is spiritual. Those that walk the Path of Righteousness will be granted eternal life. Those that walk the Path of Darkness have themselves committed themselves to eternal oblivion.

123

RNA IS an information storage system for living things. It carries patterns for numerous purposes including matching with protein sequences which is indeed for recognition. And it is a product of a learning process we call evolution. I think you have a prejudicial bias for the word “intelligence” which is only acknowledging it for some examples of life and not for others. With computer algorithms beating us at all of our own strategy games I put to you that intelligence doesn’t require anywhere near as much as was previous supposed. All it really consists of is the ability to follow a set of rules.

And I do not see any reason for such a bias with the word “consciousness” either for awareness of its environment and self-awareness of its own condition for self-maintenance are basic to the process of life in general. This is not to say that all forms of life are equally conscious, aware, intentional, and intelligent. Not hardly. All of this is not only highly quantitative but consists of a great number of different abilities which we are lumping together in a few words. And we can not only see different examples of these abilities in other organisms, but we can see an absence of various abilities in human beings who have suffered damage due to a number of different causes.

Explanation is both a rather subjective thing as well as bit complicated. People look for different kinds of explanations and thus what the scientist looks for to enable them to predict the results of experimental procedures is not the what other people look for in things like religion.

People can refuse this because we have concrete example of how this can indeed happen as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Thus I agree with your conclusions while I disagree with your arguments. Surely you must know that just because a claim is true doesn’t mean an argument for that claim is correct. My reasons for believe are different and a bit complicated and some of them strongly conflict with the reasons that other people have for belief. I see a necessity for choices of faith in life and suspect that in the arguments people make they end up replacing their faith in the things they argue for with a faith in the things they argue with.

Obviously I disagree with this argument. It seems to me in the light of our recent experiences with AI, that intelligence is nowhere near as special or as singular as has been supposed – and both of these suppositions have contributed to thinking of it in a magical way when in reality it can be broken down into a vast collection of much more simple things.

Because that is what the evidence shows, and I don’t need unsound arguments to prop up my belief in these things – for they make them weaker rather than stronger.

I certainly believe so.

I have heard this sort of nonsense before many many times… the basis of everything physical is matter… is energy… is mathematical or… the basis of human history is conflict… is economics… Give me a break already. All of these are simply ways of looking at these things and they may even be very very helpful in understanding them… but spare me the ideological rhetoric that tries to cram all of reality into these different shaped holes.

And I say rubbish to your rubbish which is fundamentally self-contradictory. Information is information and it can be represented in a variety of mediums. Just because we can intellectually abstract the information from particular examples doesn’t mean it exists in magical way apart from the particulars. Our intellectual abstraction is just another PHYSICAL medium for the information.

Well that is a fundamental disagreement with Christianity and there is no way to reconcile what you are saying here with the Bible. In this you wander in a direction which I see no purpose in going.

??? But that is exactly what Paul said (perhaps you need to read 1 Cor 15 again)… well except the word he uses is imperishable (this immortality stuff is more pagan Gnostic Greek philosophy… because of 1 Timothy 6:16 only God is immortal, this doesn’t really work with Christianity).

I put things in a bit different terms that these to say that the spiritual is product of its own nature and choices and not effected by external forces. Thus it can die from its own self-destructive choices and thus is not necessarily immortal, and thus requires a resurrection (renewal of life by shedding the self-destructive habits of sin) in order to be imperishable.

That is a rather empty threat which does nothing for me. I see more value in the atheist approach which sees righteousness as its own reward. Thus I would argue that righteousness is the essence of eternal life and the only oblivion is the “path of darkness” itself.