Evolutionary creationism sticking point

Faith & Science Conversation
164

Well that would be an odd matter in which to invest faith. For me it a simple assumption that consciousness is an emergent property of the cognitive processing of sense data. But it doesn’t matter to me in a way that invokes a faith position from me. There are matters in which I do invest faith, but this isn’t one of them.

Perhaps for some, no, actually definitely for some that is definitely true. I’ve hung out on atheist forums enough to acknowledge that. But it certainly is not my position. That is scientism, a position I don’t at all hold. I have no faith that science will answer all questions. I also have no faith that all questions will ever be answered.

My faith lies in the depths of the consciousness which gives rise to my experience and sense of self. Unlike most, I do not make the egoistic assumption that my sense of self is all there is in consciousness. In part, that is because I know that when I pause in reflection insight can come which I have no hand in fashioning. It is simply a gift, like my sense of self, which I have to acknowledge as such. I believe that belief in gods/God has arisen based on something like this. So I think what gives rise to belief in God is real, I just doubt that any of the off the rack religions have gotten it exactly right, including Christianity in any of its forms. But interestingly I’m not sure that it matters because I also believe that what really matters in our lives is that we feel connected to the ground of being that supports us and Christianity has a long history of doing just that for many people. So it is as good a way as any in terms of what really matters. It simply doesn’t fit me and I don’t find I require it to feel that connection.

2 Likes
165

I find it interesting that it’s difficult to describe things like this without using terms like “gift”, which necessarily implies… some consciousness on the other end? This seems to be a common (foundational?) human instinct… To tie into the G. K. Chesterton thread, he mentions in his work the sense of gratitude he felt long before he came to believe in God. In his Autobiography (chapter 16) he says:

If [a man] can manage to be thankful when there is nobody to be thankful to, and no good intentions to be thankful for, then he is simply taking refuge in being thoughtless in order to avoid being thankless.

Interestingly, Bart Ehrman (a skeptic I genuinely like and enjoy reading) says in God’s Problem:

The problem is this: I have such a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it; I am fortunate beyond words. But I don’t have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a void deep inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don’t see any plausible way of filling it.

Now, it may well be that this sense of gratitude is a false signal… an evolutionary spandrel… misfiring agency detection… Or maybe it’s an intuition of something real. How would we know the difference? Is it rational to discount it? Maybe not every rustle in the bush is a predator; but the only reason we react at all is because predators in bushes are real.

Do you have thoughts on the nature of that ground of being? (Please note: I’m not sparring, nor evangelizing. You seem to be a thoughtful atheist, and I’ve generally benefited from listening to thoughtful people of whatever persuasion.)

1 Like
166

I do but if I get into it now (it is 10 at night here), I’ll wind myself to a point that makes sleep difficult. Let me sleep on it and I’ll look forward to giving you a better answer in the morning. That is one thing to appreciate about a pandemic, there certainly is a lot of time available with few of the useful options available as competition.

But I haven’t experienced you as being either oppositional or hell bent on converting the heathens. I would welcome the conversation.

167

Hah! I absolutely understand. Take your time, if you’d like to respond. If not, that’s quite all right also. Conversations of quality – conversations worth having – require considerable effort. And conversations over the internet seem often to be so… pointless… by the time it’s all said and done. I think that on our deathbeds, many of us will regret the amount of time we spent in internet discussion forums. I know I will. Then again, there are the occasional ones that really made an impact on me, so maybe it’s worth it after all. Who knows?

168

Thoughts on the ground of being which gives rise to God belief? So I think what this calls for is a way to make sense of how that fits with everything else in our lives. In ancient times there was the thought that God was way up high or in something a modern sci-fi writer might call a parallel dimension (which is how I understand the ‘supernatural’ as a concept). Some might imagine God as the primary being whose thoughts and intentions become everything we experience, something @mitchellmckain I think especially dislikes. In that vein I see consciousness generally as the ground of being which I believe gives rise to belief in gods or God.

I don’t think of consciousness itself as a field that somehow generates the world. Rather, I think the world has evolved creatures with such a rich capacity for cognitive interpretation of sense data that what we call consciousness has evolved. The naive view is that each person’s consciousness is the expression of his self in all its manifestations. I reject that idea. I think what I think of as my self is but one product of consciousness and in humans at least there can be much more as well.

What I’ve had to do is ask myself whether it is appropriate or even realistically possible to dissect consciousness from the inside and reduce it to my personal possession. I don’t think it is, but it possible to describe a little bit of what I think is going on and to speculate on why such a thing should have arisen without reducing it to a thing. One thing I feel sure of is that there is more understanding and wisdom available in the totality of each of our consciousness than what is available to our conscious minds. By conscious minds I mean that part with which we can brainstorm, consider hypothetical possibilities, make plans and so on. It is the sort of thing language has evolved to do. But I think it is limited in capacity, a rather small vessel which cannot hold at any one time very much of what available in consciousness. Maybe it is like Haidt’s analogy of the elephant and the rider where morality is concerned. Like the rider on the elephant, in our conscious minds we are only nominally in charge (or at least responsible) and a good deal of our energy goes into negotiating the acceptability of what our fast thinking elephants are going to do anyway with the rest of our community. Perhaps the mind of God can be found someplace in that elephant? By comparison, we are small but we exist and serve a purpose too.

So why religion? Why any particular religion? Functionally, it seems to me it is trying to reveal more of that elephant mind in order to help us in our individual efforts as riders to better fulfill our roles. That seems like something that is more than archaic superstition, certainly not something to be cast aside with nothing better to offer. Just this morning I got a message here from my friend Dillon which included this quote from the early American psychologist William James. It just seems to fit perfectly here.

We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come—a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God’s grace, the theologians say —is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste.

Probably rather than disparage every fruit of every religion, one like myself who has not been successfully brought up in any particular religion would do better to spend his time trying to wrap his mind around what is good and helpful in each parable, sutra or koan. And since I haven’t the first clue of how to pass on to the next generation an appreciation of that within which is more than I can ever hold in the paltry cup of my conscious mind why should I not respect cultural practices devoted to doing just that?

169

Question: Is it reasonable to think that God only does “good,” and therefore should not have created evolution with meat-eaters?

I suspect that your expectation of God’s nature is not biblical, according to the original Bible texts. One of the problems I have with modern Bibles is that publishers have eliminated the word “Evil” from many passages that refer to the nature of God. For example:
I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil. I am YHWH, that doeth all these things. (Is 45:7, ASV, FTVBIBLE.com, King JamesV)

Most, if not all, publishers of modern Bibles changed “evil” to either “woe” or “calamity.” However, they were not consistent with this substitution. They did not change the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil to tree of woe, or calamity.

Consider that preachers do not teach fear of God. Instead, they teach comfort to their congregations with description of a God that loves them unconditionally. Unhappy pew-warmers do not tithe. Bibles have been changed to support this view.

However, God chose Abraham, Job and Israel (Mal 3) because they feared God.

Adam and Eve listened to the serpent, who taught them not to fear God. Consequently they were banished from the Garden of Eden. Isn’t this the same story again?

170

My view by contrast is that instead of consciousness and intelligence being such a lofty things that they must be the end result of evolution, I think they are basic fundamental things with a quantitative aspect so that evolution only contributes to their increase rather than their invention. Intelligence at its root is only the ability to follow a set of rules and you find that in elementary particles. Consciousness at its root is just an awareness of self and the environment and you find that in the simplest of living organisms. To be sure the human versions of these have added a great deal to this, particularly the immense representational, information coding, and abstraction capabilities of human language. This is no small thing to be sure, but while I think this is the basis of a radically different form of life in the human mind, I don’t see it as justifying the treatment of consciousness and intelligence as something completely different than what we see in the rest of the universe.

I have had this view of consciousness for some time but only adopted a similar view of intelligence because of the new AI algorithms which are now beating humans at all our games of strategy and engineering design. It has prompted me to the conclusion that people have been greatly misguided in identifying God with intelligent design (this is not lofty or divine at all but rudimentary).

Despite the above, I certainly don’t think anything like that either. While I see the basis of intelligence in the elementary particles and the structure of the universe (logical/mathematical order and the ability to follow rules), consciousness is unique to living organisms and the particular self-organizing process of life which adapts to the environment with choices not determined by pre-existing conditions (the simplest example of which is known as bifurcation in chaotic dynamics, where no nervous system and its electrochemical signals are required).

(interesting coincidence of words in this…) I do think it is appropriate for science to dissect consciousness from the outside and philosophically I think it boils down to possession… namely taking ownership of actions and choices. I just now noticing the link to responsibility in this… fascinating!

I think language is a key ingredient, not for consciousness but for this living entity we call the human mind, which is conscious because all living things are conscious. Though… all living things are not equally conscious, because life itself is highly quantitative. And in the human mind we find life and consciousness reaching to greater heights of life, scope of awareness, speed of learning than we have seen in any other organism… so much so that we imagine that we have something else entirely. But our more does not make us other… all living things are part of the same continuum.

I don’t think so. God is found more in the order which the rider imposes on the world in order to see road beneath the elephant’s feet and the a destination in the distance… or to look back at the road behind him and see where he is coming from.

Some riders do find it better to cast God and religion aside because they don’t like the destination which they see that road leading to. The most can say is that without a road and destination the elephant can only drift and wander and there is no journey… and most feel they have lost something because of that.

I think identity is a big part of it but according to the analogy above it aids in making the road and destination more clear and most people seem to need that too.

Be careful! That is what I did, and I ended up a Christian because of it. LOL

1 Like
171

As far as a relative sort of good about what is convenient and comfortable to us, I quite agree. But that only points us to more absolute notion of good according to which we would not give our regard to a God who does evil.

Exodus 34:6 “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth.”

Psalm 25:8 “Good and upright is the Lord.”
Psalm 34:8 “O taste and see that the LORD is good; How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!”
Psalm 86:5 “For You, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive, And abundant in loving kindness to all who call upon You.”
Psalm 100:5 “For the LORD is good; His loving kindness is everlasting And His faithfulness to all generations.”
Psalm 107:1 “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.”
Psalm 135:3 “Praise the LORD, for the LORD is good; Sing praises to His name, for it is lovely.”
Psalm 145:7 “They shall eagerly utter the memory of Your abundant goodness And will shout joyfully of Your righteousness.”
Psalm 145:9 “The LORD is good to all, And His mercies are over all His works.”

1 Chronicles 16:34 “O give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; For His loving kindness is everlasting.”

Nahum 1:7 “The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and He knows those who trust in Him.”

James 1:17 “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.”

Romans 2:4 “Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and long suffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?”
Romans 8:28 “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
Romans 12:2 "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

It is most certainly entirely Biblical!!!

We can put this up against a single verse which in some translations…

Isaiah 45:7 “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil. I am Jehovah, that doeth all these things.”

This ONE verse among an overwhelming number of those contrary only suggests as I have done to be somewhat cautious about what we mean by “good” and “evil.” According to a completely relative notion of these things regarding our personal comfort and convenience God can indeed be a source of
“evil.” But that is only a measure of our own limited understanding and short-sightedness.

172

I completely agree. In one sense the cognitive function is no more or less lofty a thing than the digestive function. We need them both. I also agree that some degree of intelligence and consciousness is to be found all the way up and down the pecking order of complexity in creatures, and where we can’t detect or imagine it, the fault may lie in our own limitations. However it is by way of our cognitive function that we come to think about these things and form opinions and concepts of what is going on. So there is that.

I like that you see a significant role for the rider. More often I find Christians eager to abdicate all decision making and turn it all over to God. (To which I imagine ‘God’ thinking he’s got a boomerang kids problem.) But obviously we disagree about who is really in charge and should be:

Culturally I think we greatly overvalue the power of the rational mind. When it comes to weighing values, the rational mind is an intellectual pauper. I think there is still the bias that intellect separates man from beast, driver from elephant. I side with William Blake who said:

Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

Our life is borrowed in a way, it is as though we’ve parasitized the human species, except that we have the potential to be a valued symbiant if we don’t get too puffed up or forget who we really serve. But I don’t say that to persuade, but only to note a point of the difference. I wave to you from my side of the divide. :wink:

Not much chance of that since my elephant and I are tight. But I think i can be a good ally of Christians generally since I have to acknowledge that my brief and aborted brush with it early on probably has fed that relationship … along with many authors along the who have led me to improve my ridership and elephant husbandry.

1 Like
173

Interesting! That certainly agrees with my view of the human mind as a form of life in its own right. Though I have never thought of it as parasite. I suppose the jury is out on that since there is threat and benefit in equal measure not only to our species but to all on the planet. Certainly those who have gone extinct at our hands would not be a vote in our favor.

1 Like
174

Thanks for that reply, Mark.

As a general comment, I do think that Christianity has had trouble keeping up with and absorbing the incredible amount of knowledge we’ve gained of the physical and psychological universe over the past century or two. The tension over origins is one such example… Long held assumptions are brought into question by scientific discovery, but theological structures that have grown around those assumptions (to the extent that some believers come to consider them essential, even) mean that it can take a long while to metabolize new knowledge. Furthermore, I’m kind of with Nietzsche… In the face of the modern era, objective certainty is pretty much over and done with, despite our attempts at denial. Ironically, I don’t think atheists have had any easier time with that than Christians have (hence movements like logical positivism, scientism, transhumanism, etc.). With the 20th century in the rear-view mirror, I think we’re starting to realize now the enormity of what we’ve done, unlike in Herr Fred’s day. But I don’t think we’re much closer to finding our way through it.

I don’t at all have a problem with the idea that consciousnesses evolved. But that they should evolve and that they should work the way they do is… bizarre. There’s such a massive gap between us and anything else in the animal kingdom. We’re obsessed with our own mortality. We’re actually in a position to not only eradicate ourselves, but just about everything else on the planet (if that’s not an evolutionary disadvantage, I can’t imagine what is). Evolution certainly appears to have selected for conscious creatures that intuitively accept the existence of gods, higher consciousnesses, afterlife, etc. Either all those lies confer some sort of strange survival advantage (which we disregard possibly at our peril), or they point to realities of a sort (which we disregard possibly at our peril). Like I said above, not everything rustling in the bush is a predator, but the only reason we worry about it at all is because predators do indeed exist. When you start adding in things like synchronicity, mystical experience, the way mere thoughts can affect physiology… well, stuff gets pretty dang weird.

(As an aside, I don’t think I’ve ever run across a serious treatment of how critical to the development of civilization is the idea that one’s time horizon extends beyond one’s immediate mortal existence. Would we have had civilization at all if we truly believed that this was all there was and that death was The End? Can we sustain civiliation if we come to truly believe it? Why should anyone ever act for the benefit of future generations, if acting comes at sufficiently high a cost?)

This whole consciousness business is strange enough that I can’t help but think there’s something more going on here. Given the two possibilities – that a material universe naturally gave rise to consciousnesses, or that A Consciousness gave rise to a material universe that in turn gave rise to consciousnesses out of intent – the latter seems (to me at least) to account for the state of things more than the former. And, when you think about it, isn’t really that much more bizarre. Maybe less.

I don’t really understand what you mean here. Thinking of consciousness as a possession just… well… Maybe this is where language starts to trip us up.

Could you elaborate on this, please?

Yeah, and what’s interesting about this is the extent to which it’s been so successful. Well, depending on how you define success – but let’s just say it’s at least successfully produced a world where we can have a continent-spanning conversation about it.

Contra Dennett et al, it seems to me that religion is much more than just an evolutionary spandrel. To the contrary, I think it’s been essential to our arrival at our current level of development. The question now is how to proceed forward, given that we’ve “pulled back the curtain”. To use the analogy of a spacecraft: the first stage is essential for climbing out of the bottom of the gravity well, but once you jettison it you really need something else to take you on the next phase of the journey. If God really is dead (and our culture is increasingly coming to believe He is), how do we proceed? I’m not sure we’re much closer to answering that question than Nietzsche was. Now, I get that atheists have only had a century or two to cook on this problem, versus the millenia that most religions have had to craft their stories, values, and traditions… And I think we have to cut atheist thinkers some slack in that regard. But the clock ticks faster now than it used to, and we might be running out of time…

Obviously, I think Christianity is still the way through here, although we may have to seriously rethink some of what it’s grown into. But, to quote Chesterton yet again:

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave. – The Everlasting Man, pt. II, chap 6

I know what you mean, and it drives me crazy. My line is “Have you ever considered the possibility that God wants us to move out of His basement??” I think it’s a strange mindset, given that the New Testament invokes the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies like in Jeremiah 31 which says:

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Maybe God’s done the heavy lifting and now we have the capacity to take on more responsibility. But, growing up is haaaaaaard…

175

I’m going to try channeling some Chesterton here myself.

That’s an interesting metaphor, since the whole “journey” thing implies a defined destination and therefore the possibility of progress. But since all of that has been flushed down the post-modern toilet, it would seem then that we are merely meandering around - and in what sense does anything need to “keep up with us” any more than we should be “keeping up with it?” It isn’t a given that where we’re meandering toward at the moment is any good place we would want to be. And we could just as easily conclude that we aren’t keeping up with Christianity.

Here I’m more confident since I just now read Chesteron on this in “Heretics”. He would say that the “continent-spanning” communicator and traveler lives in a smaller, narrower world than the provincial local who’s never been more than fifty miles from home. The local has a wild world of different people and personalities he is obliged to know and get along with, whether they are “his preferred type” or not. The sophisticated cosmopolitan (one from the west anyway) may see Egyptians and Chinese but … does not really see any of them at all. They are not community members he is obliged to put up with or live with or get to know. He selects from among experiences congenial to himself and travels on - in fact running away from the larger and scarier world of his wild, real, and often much less pleasant neighbors back on his home street.

All this to say … I don’t think Chesteron would at all be impressed by our “continent spanning communications” when all that means is that we’ve conveniently shrunk our world of exposure down to a few “kin” of choice, and done so quite precisely because we’re afraid to face those whom circumstances would rudely thrust upon us.

Seeing tigers and riding elephants are small peanuts compared to venturing across that fence into a neighbor’s possibly forbidding domain to see how you might try to get on with that person.

1 Like
176

I prefer to think it is dumbfoundingly wondrous, but I suspect it is true anyhow. I’ve always been put off by the idea that while everything could not become what it is without help, it would be no problem for an intention agent with power beyond imagining to come about without help. So though I think there is a real basis for God belief I seriously doubt the assumed creative role.

As a practical matter that is probably true. And I have first hand knowledge of that one because that was one element of Christian believe that got into my head as a young child which played heavily in my imagination. It definitely affected my point of view and in a positive way. But I don’t think I lost what I’d gained when I no longer believed that. It was okay. For evolution to have brought us so many upgrades there needed to be many, many generations. So which should I prefer an eons long life as a single celled creature or what we enjoy as humans? I definitely would not wish to trade away my human existence, so the price is fair.

177

Well, I’m a Christian and therefore I believe in the possibility of progress. The inevitability of it, even! But by “trouble keeping up with”, I’m not trying to invoke the metaphor of a journey to a destination. I’m really just talking about expansion of scientific knowledge and how Christianity has “metabolized” it rather slowly at times. The Roman Church resisted the mounting evidence for heliocentrism because it conflicted with theological interpretations/assumptions of the day. For the most part, it’s not an issue anymore… but it was for a while. When geological evidence for an earth older than Ussher’s 6,000 years began to mount, there was resistance there as well. I think we’re in a similar position with respect to evolution.

This is very much a recurring Chestertonian point. I want to say he covers this also in What I Saw in America, but I could be mis-remembering.

However, all I meant by “continent-spanning communications” is a reference to technological capability. In context, I meant that religion (and specifically Christianity) could be seen as having successfully produced a society in which we can have conversations with people across vast distances and whom we would never be likely to meet. I do think this is a marvel, a good thing, and a form of success. Those who think religion is of little value at best and downright toxic at worst have to contend with that fact (because they no doubt also consider our technological achievements a “success”, whether they’re epistemologically justified or not).

I don’t think this is a point with which GKC would disagree, not least because he depended on technology for his livelihood and worldwide readership. However, I do think he’d be appalled at the way we waste it on vitriol and frivolity, and how so many of us have come to accept it as a replacement for meaningful relationships with the people in proximity to us.

I, for one, wouldn’t probably be having this discussion on an internet forum if I could have it with some friends at a pub or coffee shop or good barbecue restaurant. Alas, Hudge and Gudge have seen to it that there’s an increasing shortage of all of those, and furthermore that I mustn’t be allowed to go to them even if there weren’t…

178

?

Am I missing a cultural reference of some kind here?

179

Worse! You, sir, are missing a classic Chesterton reference! :wink:

In What’s Wrong with the World, Hudge and Gudge are Big State and Big Business (although I can never remember which is which). Jones (the common man) bears the brunt of the consequences of their actions. I want to say they get referenced occasionally elsewhere in his writings, but can’t recall specifically where. Maybe Outline of Sanity…?

1 Like
180

Of course, the “intention agent with power beyond imagining” doesn’t come about at all.

Look, either the universe spontaneously appears out of nothing, or it comes from something else. That something else has either always been there or itself appeared out of nothing or comes from something else, et cetera.

At the end of the day, either an agent is responsible for our universe or something without agency is responsible for our universe or our universe has always existed. Honestly, I have a hard time taking seriously any claims that one of these options is more “believable” than the other, not least because I have a hard time taking seriously any claims that anyone understands them.

I tend to go with “agent” because 1) I intuitively grasp the idea of an agent creating something more easily; and 2) I think it’s a more interesting and exciting story.

1 Like
181

I’m an atheist, and that’s not my position. Atheism simply means that you currently lack a belief in gods. That’s it.

Atheism and agnosticism are answers to different questions.

3 Likes
182

So “militant atheism” is possessing a really large lack vs. just a tiny lack of belief? :slight_smile:

183

Is it similar to being just a little bit pregnant?

1 Like