It is a curious position of YECs that atheists are reliable expositors of the Bible. If they say the Bible is incompatible with evolution, then that must be true!
2 Likes
Yes, even Ken Ham loves to quote Richard Dawkins when saying that an acceptance of the Theory of Evolution requires rejection of the existence of God. Ham and Dawkins hold a great many beliefs in common.
3 Likes
I wonder if that means Dawkins is inside the Big Tent?
Iâm fine with the Big Tent----but not when the goats are in there.
1 Like
No, I didnât insist. I asked. I believe evidence is necessary for faith to exist. But not necessarily empirical evidence. Faith is not âblind.â That is a false Enlightenment construct. So I was specifically asking about empirical evidence.
But in further response, if evidence is not necessary, then of what benefit is it for âChristian[s] who champion front loaded evolutionâ being âwilling to stand with the ID proponent in championing the clear evidence for the necessity of a Creatorâ? In what way would that be âprogressâ?
And you said that there is evidence for the necessity of a Creator.
Thus, my question: âempirical evidenceâ?
2 Likes
Richard
On front-loaded evolution (understood as producing specific outcomes such as mankind, rather than the deistic âanything will doâ way you and Eddie seem to have agreed to reject), this paper seems significant.
The final conclusion - that neither design nor chance can be ascertained by science because the first is unfalsifiable and the second unverifiable - is interesting but perhaps nothing surprising given many remarks on this thread and elsewhere. But itâs good to see the principled demonstration of that, which silences Lewontin and Behe in the same breath. Many of us are not surprised that neither ID nor materialism belong within science - but of course, being persuasive to human beings made in Godâs image is another matter entirely.
What is more interesting, though, in the context of the âfrontloadingâ question is the earlier discussion of the effects of quantum indeterminacy on chaotic systems. The example is that the eccentric orbit of Hyperion is such that PoincarĂ© non-linear dynamics intersect with Heisenbergâs Uncertainty Principle within about 20 years - in other words, quantum effects can affect macroscopic chaotic systems (which are ubiquitous, and essential to evolution) very significantly over time, contrary to the older idea that QM doesnât affect macroscopic systems.
It follows that, as Eddie said, for even God himself to set up a set of initial conditions which, governed only by natural laws, would reliably produce the world we have is impossible. He would be falling foul of the principle of insufficient means, just as much as if he appointed a mushroom to govern the world.
The universe we have, then, is simply not deterministic enough for a frontloaded evolution like that: the future is, in scientific terms, significantly open, since the information to determine the future did not even exist within the initial state.
One could, like R J Russell, suggest that God makes decisions behind the scenes on quantum events and so restores determinism - but it would be an unscientific determinism, because quantum events are now pretty well shown to have no hidden variables. And if the natural world is no longer a closed system, because it is fed with quantum information by God in real time supernaturally, then itâs hard to see what advantage, or what evidence, a frontloaded system would have. It simply appears to be a last-ditch attempt to save a vestige of the Enlightenmentâs deistic God who, in Leibnizâs phrase, sets it up by âa perpetual motionâ.
In contrast, as one philosopher said not too long ago, the biblical view of nature is âwhat God doesâ. âNatural causesâ, as studied by science, simply means âthe regular background God enactsâ (whether that means directly or through secondary causes is immaterial to this discussion - science cannot have a view on such a theological question). Irregularities not reducible to science (ie âchanceâ - which would necessarily include the kind of PoincarĂ©-Heisenberg events in the article) are then changes to the universe in real time - just as the Bible describes of Godâs actions in nature, albeit that metaphysically one might understand him as decreeing one act of creation from beginning to end in eternity, whilst its effects are manifested in due order here.
Godâs actions cannot be proven to be Godâs actions - but the alternative is unverifiable uncaused randomness leading to the appearance of order. There seems no reason why that should appear attractive to Christians - even if it made sense that God should be the cause of something uncaused, or that it would be wise for him to do so.
1 Like
Jon,
Thanks for this remarkable post! Very thought-provoking.
I wonder how well accepted in the physics community Zurekâs conclusions about the rotation of Hyperion are? Since Sols cites the paper, surely the conclusion of scaling from macro to quantum is plausible. However, I also recall Polkinghorne denying that this scaling is supported by physics, and Polkinghorne was not long ago one of the leading physicists in the world.
Cheers,
Chris Falter
How would you reconcile your statement that âquantum events are now pretty well shown to have no hidden variablesâ with the undecidability of randomness described in the paper you linked to? If quantum events are unpredictable without there being any hidden variables then wouldnât that be a foundation for a mathematical proof of randomness that the paper says cannot exist?
You may well be right Chris - couldnât find specific backup for the result (though I did find some citations). But I would nevertheless suspect that even infinitesimal macro fluctuations would make determining specific evolutionary outcomes here from 12.5 billion years of particle interactions in the whole universe a problematic concept. Not only is there no evidence that the universe is such a precisely deterministic mechanism, but who would want it to be?
A clever trick for God to pull off, no doubt, to impress Leibniz and his crew, but why privilege divine activity to one instant in time when his character in the Bible is one of intimate interaction with the world?
Nuno
Iâm no quantum physicist, but I suggest that to demonstrate that there are no hidden variables in the material world is not to prove Q events to be random: they could be, for example, determined by God as per Russell.
In any case (separate argument), though individual Q events are unpredictable, they have a tightly predictable probability distribution (which one can, and does, set clocks by), which in my thinking demonstrates they cannot be truly random, any more than coin tosses are (for they have a very specific, carefully designed, mechanism to produce a close to 50/50 ratio between only 2 possible outcomes).
Of course, many of us believe that the YEC position has tragic implications which do exact âconsiderable damage to many foundational doctrines.â Among the most serious are the self-contradictions and illogical statements YECism imposes on the Biblical text and the outright blasphemous implications of a Creator who would fill his creation with false histories and deceptive evidence for things which never happened. Iâm among the many who are old enough to remember when some YEC pastors told their people that God âput dinosaur bones in the ground to fool the atheist scientists and to test the faith of the faithful.â The Omphalos Hypothesis (claiming that God deceptively created much of the universe with an appearance of great age and made real science impossibly unreliable) is just as destructive today as when Pastor Gosse first promoted it.
OI course it is----when the fact in question is what people are capable of believing simultaneously. Thus, an opinion poll is a perfectly reasonable means for determining the truth of a thing, as long as that âthingâ is collecting data as to what people happen to think.
Iâve wondered if you have confused this evidence for scientific evidence.
For example, in my case I have lots of good evidence for the existence of God, but I donât claim that I have scientific evidence, the kind which can be used under the Scientific Method to publish a peer-reviewed scientific journal article asserting my âComprehensive Scientific Theory for the Existence and Identification of the Creator of the Universe.â
I will assume that you understand the methodological naturalism of science and thereby understand why a scientific theory of God remains untenable. (And if you understand the nature of proofs, you should also understands why a proof of God is yet another matter.)
You canât be serious. (If you were serious in such a statement, youâd appear to be guilty of blatant dishonesty.) Are you actually going to pretend that millions of Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox Christians who âhave looked into these thingsâ have looked into the Theory of Evolution and concluded that it is offering âa narrative that is mutually exclusive of the proclamations of Scripturesâ? Seriously?
Iâve spent a lifetime (much of it spent as an evolution-hating Young Earth Creationist) studying the Hebrew and Greek scriptures as well as evolutionary biology, yet Iâve been unable to find any such âmutual exclusivity.â What I have been able to find is a lot of evolution-hating YECs who havenât a clue what evolution is nor what vast volumes of evidence from Godâs creation supports the Theory of Evolution.
By all means, if you have found some compelling conflict with the Theory of Evolution which somehow is âmutually exclusiveâ of the proclamations of scripture âand not just your favorite man-made traditions about the scripturesâI do hope you will publish it for my examination and for the edification of the entire Body of Christ world-wide.
I can speak for my own experience as faculty advisor to a great many undergraduate students, as well as a professor who has been sought out by students not my own who were desperate to find someone who could understand their frustration over the conflict between evidence and their YECism (not the scriptures per se.)
OKâŠbut then you go on to blatantly contradict yourself and agree with me! Your words follow:
There you have it! According to you, a rejection of YECism leads to âDarwinismâ which leads to atheism! So, ex-YECs become atheists, according to you. Yes, âquite a few atheists!â
Thatâs my point exactly. The problem is not that belief in God or the Bible leads to atheism. The problem (exactly as I stated) is that YECism eventually crumbles in the minds of young YECists when theyâve been confronted by the overwhelming evidenceâand that eventually leads them to atheism.
OK, then. Instead of a mutual pity-party about whether we are talking about you as an individual, letâs engage in dialogue about the overwhelming evidence for evolutionary processes and dialogue about how YECism often leads to atheism, as we both have concluded.
I find that the more someone has faith and trust in the Bibleârather than the man-made edifice of relatively recent YECist traditions of the âcreation scienceâ movement in America in the last sixty-something yearsâthe less likely they are to fall into that all-too-easy route to atheism.
I canât recall even one student raised in a Old Earth Creationist church who came to me in conflict and frustration that he was headed for atheism. (Iâm sure that there are such people out there. Iâm just saying that Iâve not personally dealt with such a student.) But I had many students from Young Earth Creationist backgrounds who were all torn up inside at the conflict of trust and disillusionment over what they had been taught at church and what they knew from studying the evidence. They were very upset (and even very angry in many cases) that people they looked to as heroes of faith, including parents, Sunday School teachers, and youth ministers, had flagrantly lied to them and/or failed to do simple responsible research into the topics upon which they were so dogmatic.
Wherever this dialogue may or may not go, I am absolutely delighted that we now agree that âthe rejection of YECâ has created âquite a few atheists.â I thought it was obvious and so Iâm relieved that we donât have to debate that point.
P.S. Can we also agree then that when people have all of their life been taught a false dichotomy between evolution and God, they are primed and ready to go from YECism to atheism? When a young person realizes that trusted adults in their church lied to them about science, will they not also assume that those same adults lied to them about the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ? And if theyâve been taught to believe a lot of the laughable nonsense of people like Ken Ham [e.g., âPeople used to ride dinosaursâ, âthere was 200 years of hyper-evolution after the flood which produces all of the species we observe todayâ, and âThere was a single Ice Age from the Flood just 4000+ years agoâ, and yet it didnât leave any evidence of either the Flood or that single Ice Age], ⊠then OF COURSE they are going to have a crisis of faith in Jesus Christ and a crisis of trust in the people they held dear!
2 Likes
Maybe thereâs some ambiguity here in the how the term âhidden variablesâ is being used here. I presumed you were referring to hidden variables as a mathematical concept in physics theories of quantum mechanics but those would necessarily require the underlying assumption of a âmaterial worldâ correlate. If this is not the case then I guess I still donât understand how you see an âunscientificâ problem with Russelâs claim:
I donât necessarily endorse Russelâs view (maybe itâs true, maybe it isnât) but I donât see how we can use current observations to reject it as âunscientificâ.
I agree that these regularities do seem to point towards the possibility of there being currently-umeasurable causes for the distributions that are observed - this is why it would be surprising for there to be a proof that there are no hidden variables (such as those hypothetical undetermined causes).
I think it is funny when a human decides what God can and canât do ⊠even when it comes to something as basic as the natural order and cosmic lawfulness.
Jon, we do NOT know if there are limits to natural order from the vantage point of God.
And even if there WERE limits to natural order, we do not know if Godâs omniscience is still adequate to the task of planning for sequences of non-lawful behavior.
1 Like
George
You misunderstand me, I think. The whole point of proposing frontloading is, as far as I can see, to retain that sense of âwhat a wonderful God to set up such a cleverly unfolding system without interfering subsequently!â - used by Leibniz against Newton, by some of the earliest TEs (like Kingsley) in praise of Darwinâs theory (which appeared like a lawlike process in its first inception) and by a good number of ECs today. That enthusiasm stemmed not from theology or reason, but from what was thought to be the empirical evidence of science that the universe was like a clockwork mechanism.
Frontloading depends on a deterministic universe which will run like clockwork, or have such precise corrective factors in, say, convergent evolution that the Big Bang will inevitably produce mankind (and, presumably, everything else that God creates unless one restricts his creative will to mankind alone and leaves the rest to chance).
My point is that we now have good empirical evidence that the universe is not that precise, and there is no sign that evolutionary mechanisms have the means to produce specific outcomes, rather than, say, surviving outcomes (which is still a good trick, but not a precision instrument). In other words, God could perhaps have done it that way, but it doesnât look as if he did - except in that version of EC that sees âan intelligent speciesâ or âsuccessful lifeâ as a sufficiently precise goal of creation.
That suggests that, in fact, God used a more hands on combination of lawlike processes and real-time providential choices. I contend that since that is the kind of picture of God given in the biblical sources, and fits the empirical evidence, itâs more plausible than an entirely frontloaded system.
Thatâs not to say that everything from the cosmic constants to the chemistry of DNA and Dentonâs suggested laws of form donât have their place. But âfrontloadedâ by definition means âphysically deterministicâ, and that concept seems to belong to 17th-19th century science, not current knowledge.
2 Likes
Nuno
My suggestion that Russellâs proposal is âunscientificâ uses that word non-pejoratively, to mean that that was the whole intention of Russellâs proposal.
Since he held, following the opinion of most quantum scientists of the time, that the possibility of hidden quantum variables âwithin natureâ had been disproved by Bell, he suggested that God could from outside nature direct quantum events without âinterfering with natureâ (such interference being a shibboleth to many working in the field of divine action, for some reason I canât comprehend).
In other words, Russellâs proposal was intended to bypass methodological naturalism, keep âscienceâ as a fully explanatory system for the natural world, and still allow God to act through a âlegal loopholeâ so that he wasnât a âGod of the Gapsâ. To me it seems a little hubristic to expect God to conduct his creation to match the expectations of Enlightenment science that the universe must be a closed causal system, but Russell seemed to think those scientists must be appeased.
I leave it to you to work out if the proof of Colbeck and Renner that quantum theory is complete is valid, or whether Girardi and Romanoâs disputing of it is valid - because I donât understand either.
1 Like
I do not agree, @Jon_Garvey. Frontloading is SIMPLIFIED by a deterministic universe. But a âFrontloadedâ Universe is only possible if God has sufficient omniscience⊠including what the human reaction will be to an event that occurs at the end of a chain of NON-DETERMINISTIC causation.
If you believe that Godâs foreknowledge INCLUDES this ability ⊠Frontloading is still on the stove, all burners runningâŠ
1 Like
George
If God creates all things, then his foreknowledge is ultimately knowledge of what he will do⊠which must include the eccentric and rather incoherent idea of creating a process which is indeterminate (has no fixed outcome) but of which he foreknows the outcome.
If, somehow, his foreknowledge were less than that, ie he only knows what will happen by ontological chance, then he has to accept whatever that turns up, not determine what will turn up.
UNLESS in Molinist fashion he sees in advance all the indeterminate possible universes and determines to create only the one that infallibly unwinds with clockwork precision in the manner he foresees ⊠which is a longwinded way of saying he creates a deterministic universe.
That leaves open what it actually means to determine in advance to create something indeterminate that infallibly works out as you determined it would. Iâm not a fan of dictating how God can work, but Iâm left asking:
(a) How God might determine to create indeterminacy - humans create random number machines by using algorithms that only mimic random numbers. Are you saying that God can do better than that, and cause things to happen without a cause?
(b) Why God might determine to create indeterminacy - and then undo all his work and determine its outcomes by designing the universe so that indeterminacy produces the fixed result he had in mind anyway.
Thereâs a more parsimonious way of doing things - which is to design the universe in the one specific way, amongst all others, that will produce the particular result you desire. Itâs called âDesignâ - oh, that seems to be what I described before under âMolinismâ!
Hereâs another illustration: you slave away to design a random number generator which will produce a random number to start some particular game.
You decide that to in order to win the game, you need a â6â, so you run the generator as many times as it takes to generate a â6â, and then use that number.
You might just as well have saved all the effort of building or running the machine if you were going to start with 6 anyway.
You are confusing Godâs ability to design the perfect response to non-lawful sequences with God creating an entirely lawful universe.
Ironically, youâll ultimately never know which kind of Universe we are in.