Question about evolution

Faith & Science Conversation
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The book of Job is saying you’re supposed to trust God’s wisdom, even when you can’t figure out any of it
quote from podcast

@gavin_kemp, thank you for the information.

However I must caution you that the statement above is not true. The book is saying that we must trust in God’s Goodness, even if we do not always understand what God is doing…

The problem was that Job was being told by people, who should have known better, that God was being punished by sickness and disaster because of some sin or sins he had committed. We know from the book that this was not true. YHWH says that Job was a good person.

Thus Job was asked to believe a human lie about God, rather than to trust in God’s goodness. but YHWH answered Job’s cries and revealed to Job that YHWH cared for him. YHWH restored his health and wealth, and told his friends, “I am angry with you, …because you have not spoken the truth about Me, as my servant job has.” Job 42:7

Faith is not blind. Faith is in a good and caring God. That is the message of Job. I hope that you and others hear and understand.

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@SkovandOfMitaze @rsewell @ARus @knor @gavin_kemp

My friend, Jesus taught us not to divide the world into friends and enemies, but to love everyone as we love ourselves. I take that very seriously and I hope you do also.

This is very important because in the US we have become very much un-united because many treat those with whom they disagree as children of the devil instead of children of God, and many who are most vocal in this claim to be followers of Jesus.

There is one strategy and it is not self interest, it is the common good, it is love, because Nature is good and God is Good. That is the basic issue.

Matthew 6:25-26 (NIV2011)
25

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?
26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
Matthew 6:32-33 (NIV2011)
32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
33 But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Jesus taught us to trust in God’s goodness and not to get stressed out by fear of becoming “losers.” To share with others so we might receive. I take what Jesus says seriously. I hope you do too.

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63

I also make a distinction between Jesus teaching us to love our enemies versus claiming he taught us not to recognize some people as our enemies versus our friends.

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Jesus taught us to recognize and treat everyone as the unique person for whom they are, not to recognize and treat them as a stereotyped friend or enemy. The point here is that our friend assumed that we would treat or relate to our “friends” radical differently from our “enemies” which is NOT what Jesus told us and showed us what to do.

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The difference between mere evolution qua evolution and ourselves is that we are aware of God and know what is right, even though sometimes we recognize doing wrong benefits us significantly.

So, for example, as godly people, we can use evolution to achieve productive ends. For example, rather than “the only good roach is a dead one”, we can selectively punish the roaches that enter the home rather than universally kill them wherever they are (which is how we currently operate). Eventually, they will find a way to make a living outside the home.

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Only in a very myopic sense and we are letting ourselves be deceived with that perspective. A thief harms himself more than his victim.

Can you give us an instance?

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@wkdawson @SkovandOfMitaze @gavin_kemp @knor @jstump @beaglelady
Thank you, @knor Kai, for this information, which can put this discussion on a much needed factual basis.

You describe two different situations. The first is where there is a relatively low ratio of predator to prey. This is a stable situation. The population of the prey does not change. It seems because it is not stated that this must be the normal ecological situation, the the predators and prey are in symbiotic balance. and Everyone benefits.

The second is where there is a high ratio of predator to prey. It might be noted that there are safe guards to prevent this, but it could always happen. This is an unstable situation, and as far as I know quite unusual. Here the prey population crashes and then the predator population crashes because the symbiotic balance of nature has been somehow disrupted, most likely by humans.

Thus in the normal, natural situation predation is beneficial to both prey and predators based on the information you provided. Predation per se is not beneficial, but the symbiotic balance of nature is and God uses natural selection to maintain that balance, which makes it good.

The situation where the balance is disrupted and the predators kill off the prey, so they must die, is the exception that proves the rule. It does not show that there is no harmony in nature, but the contrary. Sadly, those who cite conflict as examples of “natural evil” are doing just this. They are using the exceptional conflicts caused by the atypical events, to “prove” that harmony does not exist.

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Confession? :grin: :sweat_smile: :laughing:

Probably one of the easiest sins we are at least prone to commit is gossip. It is probably especially easy when you can join a multitude to do evil – the Twitter mob, for example. Ann Applebaum recently published a very in-depth commentary on that. She has her expertise on the skullduggery of the former Soviet Union and the pall their strategies have left on many of the eastern bloc countries, but I think she nails it pretty well.

It is the sort of nonsense that we can, if we chose to, participate in that is plenty vailed enough that we can both benefit from it and largely hide our tracks in the flood. Of course, it is a double-edged sword. When you’re in the position you wanted so badly, don’t be surprised if people do that to you as well. Who hasn’t said or done something outrageously dumb at some point in their life?

I remember a work by Kai Nielson titled “Why should I be moral?”.
[Kai Nielson “Why Should I Be Moral?” Methodos, XV, NO 59-60, 1963] I cannot find an original copy of it. Anyway, one thing he poses is that if you do something immoral

… for limited patterns of behavior, no decisively good reason can be given to some individuals that would justify their doing the moral thing in such a context [i.e., doing something immoral]. (It would be another thing again if they repeatedly acted in that way. Here the case for morality would be much stronger.)

Of course, this presumes that there is only this life, and then it is done; that you won’t have to answer to God for your amoral egoism in the great beyond. All the “costs” are figured based upon knowable probabilities and consequences.

Another problem with this notion is that sin usually has a progressive quality about it. You don’t start out as an embezzler by stealing large swaths of cash. It starts with the pennies and moves progressively to nickels, dimes, quarters, dollars, $10s, etc. Eventually, you are very likely to become too confident and greedy.

So, even from a rationalist egoist’s standpoint (putting myself in those shoes), I am not sure that this is as valid an argument because of our general human nature. However, it is hard to argue that an unscrupulous person couldn’t get away with murder if it is done in an errrrr “well-thought-out” and calculating way and only on very rare occasions, especially if the person has no regard toward the things of heaven and considers this life the only one that is.

It does suggest to me why religion plays an important role in mitigating such behaviors. Even the nihilist or the egoist might back off if there is some inkling that some severe and indeterminant consequences might be meted out in the great beyond.

by Grace we proceed … indeed

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69

Your examples are good – we are definitely susceptible to them and they are easy to fall into, but I guess I cannot characterize them as “benefiting us significantly.”
 

Very much so and in no other way.

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OK, maybe what you mean by “us” is “humanity as a whole”. My examples might benefit an individual, but not necessarily humanity as a whole. In fact, I don’t think those examples actually benefit the human race in the long run.

The fact that some 80% or more believe that there is something more, even be that some sort of amorphous mechanism that sends you up or down the chain, would suggest that the fear of reprisals in some “after” confers a selective advantage. So for sentient beings who can plan and calculate, we have duties that animals don’t. Moreover, places in the world where people are reduced to dire penury (such that they behave close to animals), are not societies that are particularly successful.

I sincerely believe in some abstract way, God was somehow involved in the evolutionary process here on earth, though I cannot really say how. However, as far as I can tell, evolution qua evolution is largely amoral in its operation. Parasites like the coronavirus are, in terms of evolutionary mechanisms, simply trying to make a living. It is not a sentient organism that knows that it is doing evil, but I don’t like it.

For example, there are all sorts of awful parasites. There’s a wasp that lays eggs on a caterpillar. The caterpillar even gets some sort of signal to eat more in the service of raising the wasp’s young, Although neither organism is sentient, it’s kind of yucky. The thing that makes that parasite in “Aliens” seem particularly evil is that it is also somewhat sentient; though hard to take seriously as something that would actually happen.

Those aspects strike me as just a ruthlessly cold and pitiless machine, a powerful but amoral tool that depends on the “hands” that direct it.

What do I mean by “directing it”? Well, I talk of parasites being essentially evil. Yet, on the flip side, with viruses, perhaps eventually we will learn from viruses how to deliver payloads into cells so we can repair them. We may even end up “employing them” in that effort. It would be cool if we could do that. It is sort of like turning swords into plowshares.

… and maybe “parasites” in our society too. I was really impressed with that line in Kurosawa’s movie “The Hidden Fortress” where the general says “I trust their greed”. Those two peasants were pretty low on the totem pole of morality. I guess that is also embedded in the old Chinese children’s story “the journey west”. 西遊記 … maybe we need to think more cleverly about how we can redirect bad behavior in a good direction. After all, “pigheadedness” can become "persistence, “indolence” can become “innovation”.

Anyway, I see evolution as “a tool”; largely an amoral process that will go whatever direction is convenient at the time. However, we, as sentient beings, have the intellectual power and the duty to direct those tendencies in a good direction. Metaphorically speaking at least, we were given the job to tend the garden. … God, in some inexplicable way, also may have somehow done the same. At that level, I am still a stubborn creationist. :grin:

by His Grace

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Predator-prey systems don’t work that way in nature.

The latter case (high ratio of predator to prey) often lead to a situation that is sometimes called the ‘predator pit’. It is a situation where strong predation pressure prevents prey populations from increasing. This may lead to a prolonged phase, where both the numbers of prey and predators seem to remain relatively stable and low. Prey numbers because predation keeps the numbers low, predator numbers because there is not enough of food for more predators.

Sooner or later, the ‘predator pit’ turns into a ‘predator escape’. Maybe the number of predators drops too low or a rise in the amount of high-quality food allows a higher rate of offspring production in prey. As a consequence, the ratio of predators to prey drops below the level where predation can prevent population growth in prey. When that happens, prey numbers start to increase towards densities where food limitation or some other factor stops the population growth. For example, the mouse plagues are an example of a ‘predator escape’ situation.

The population fluctuations of small rodents are a drastic example of this kind of dynamics because small rodents can multiply in a short time period. In larger mammals, the offspring production is slower and the development of population peaks takes more time. Yet, if the increase rate of prey is higher than the increase rate of predators, similar kind of ‘predator pit’ - ‘predator escape’ dynamics will follow, unless someone interferes.

In nature, a stable balance between predators and prey is rather an exception than a norm. That, together with a continuous change in the environment, is a reason why there is no balance of nature.

Edit:
I’m not good in math but I guess the same could be said in a more accurate way by saying that the attractor of predator-prey dynamics is not a point and the location of the attractor in the phase space changes as the environment changes. In addition, the trajectories of population densities are not smooth due to more or less frequent disturbances. There is a published paper showing that regular (cyclic) population oscillations + stochastic disturbances lead to chaotic or semi-chaotic dynamics.

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72

Sometimes the line between competition and predation is fuzzy. Allelopathy is usually included within competition. A plant killing another with harmful chemicals is listed as competition, even if the dead plant will be decomposed and the killer gets nutrients after the decomposition process.
The release of antibiotics in the relationship between fungi and bacteria is an example of allelopathy. If part of the play is that fungi gain nutrients and energy by eating the remains of killed competitors, it could also be listed as a consumer-resource interaction (predation).

In that sense, you are correct, that could be called predation.

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73

Actually, I meant individually. How can sin ever be beneficial, near term or long? We are being deceived if we think there is any real gain. This comes to mind:

As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.
 
Matthew 13:22

 
With respect to evolution, God’s providential direction settles it for me. Just as he wondrously orchestrates events in his children’s lives without breaking any natural laws, he is sovereign over nano-detail and mutations as well as macroscopic events. Regulars here may yawn, but I will again cite Maggie’s testimony and my nephrectomy as empirical evidence.

We are called to be childlike in our faith and love for God and to trust him as our Father, and that his plan is good even amidst the horrific, including natural evil. This first creation was subjected to futility from the start, even before there was life.

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Depends on what we mean by sin. Acting against the will of God may bring short-term benefits, money, power or enjoyment. This kind of short-term gain has a terrible long-term cost. In that way it is deceiving.

In psalms, it’s not rare that the writer wonders why the righteous suffer and the ungodly seem to prosper. It’s the difference between short-term and long-term costs and benefits.

Edit:
We cannot see the inside of others. Individuals that seem to prosper and have an easy life may suffer within themselves. The money, power and pleasures gained by sin do not bring genuine and lasting happiness. Short-term benefits gained by sin have both short-term and long-term costs. Not worth it.

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Ain’t what David saw and we all see Kai. Truly ghastly people die peacefully in their sumptuous beds surrounded by their adoring, grieving grandchildren. We Westerners stand on the bowed shoulders of the innocent poor who were plagued with mental illness. We are brilliant at deceiving ourselves.

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@wkdawson @SkovandOfMitaze @gavin_kemp @knor @jstump @beaglelady

@knor, if there is a paper, and I am not doubting this, then please share that information with us. Why is everything so non-specific?

There is no explanation of how this situation comes about. You say there are two basic situations, high ratio predator and low ratio predator… The low is stable, the high is not. You cannot claim that predator-pray relationships are inherently unstable WHEN many (low ratio) are stable! There is none in between and no way to get from one to the other, so something must be missing.

If there is as you say a predictable connection between the predator’s pit and a predator’s escape, then there is a stable relationship between the predator and the prey, which you deny.

It seems that you confuse “stable” with “static.” Static does not change, while stable means dynamic, which does change within limits and is self correcting as is your example, which you say indicates there is no stable balance of nature, just chaos. Really?

A quick search of the web, which you should have done, reveals documentation of the predators’ pit in the American wilderness where the predators have outstripped prey such as the elk and moose. No such luck for predators’ escape. The example that you provide, the mouse plagues, are not appropriate, because they took place in Australia, the land of marsupials, where mammals, mice and rabbits, have no predators.

You have failed to show in nature that a stable, not a static, balance between predators and prey is the norm than the exception. Symbiosis is the reason why, despite continuous change in the environment, there is continuity as well as change in the balance of nature

That is not my claim.

No one said they were smooth.

The words sound authoritative, but really do not mean much. Math can describe, but cannot prescribe.

Math is necessary to science, but it cannot be the sole tool of science. That is the way to the crashing of the system as when prey and predator get out of balance, but without symbiosis to restore it.

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One psychiatrist once told me that depressed individuals have often a more realistic picture of their situation and surroundings than so called ‘healthy’ persons.

As believers, our state in Christ is probably better than we imagine - the opposite of ugly. The truth of us and our actions is a different story, something that may be too ugly to see in detail. Maybe our inability to see the whole truth is an adaptation that lets us act in a positive way. Facing the ugly truth might make many so distressed or depressed that it would affect our behavior in a negative way.

We want cheap gasoline, cheap flights, cheap clothes, cheap imported food, continue the lifestyle we are used to even if the world chances around us. The poor, nature and the future generations pay the price of our behavior. They suffer because we are selfish. This makes us bad housekeepers in front of God and humanity. The ‘good’ of our actions is often made from selfish reasons, rather than being acts of genuine love. We love our family and care of many who live around us but what have we done for the poor and suffering living in other parts of the globe?

Yet, letting the truth paralyze us is a wrong reaction. We can’t save the world but our actions may save someone and add to the joint effort to improve the future and reduce suffering.
Facing the truth may make us free.

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It’s not for nothing we are told to fix our eyes on Jesus and rejoice. We make a continuous moral choice as to what we pay attention to and what our minds are doing!

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Who is to say that we are believers? As Jesus said, “A tree is known by its fruit.” If we do not confess our selfishness and repent, we are still wallowing in it.

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I was thinking of the paper by Hanski et al. 1993 in Nature 364: 232-235.
A rapid literature search showed that there are many other papers showing that various things, even seasonality, can shift population fluctuations from regular to chaotic. Maybe I should clarify that chaotic fluctuations mean population oscillations that fulfill the mathematical definition of chaos, which is something else than the total chaos as used in everyday talk.

Anyway, it seems that the apparent disagreement between our viewpoints is largely due to the different way we use the words. Symbiosis and balance of nature seem to mean something else to you than to me. When you speak of symbiosis and balance of nature, I would say that species coexist in the same system. The fact that species have coexisted for centuries in the same system tells that the system has properties that make the long-term coexistence of these species possible. I would not call these properties symbiosis.

It also seems that we are focusing on different spatial scales. My focus is at relatively small scales. At small scales, it is evident that things change. Succession changes the environment, species are replaced by other species and species with wide population fluctuations often face local extinction. You seem to think of larger spatial scales. Even if species face extinction at a small scale, they may coexist in the region.

Did I get it right?