Now, that is binary thinking, and to a greater or lesser extent scientific arrogance. It is precisely what my post was supposed to address… The original laws that caused the trial are clearly undemocratic and bias, but the current situation is biased in the opposite direction. It should not be either Biblical or Evolution, but to just palm off the scientific view is as wrong as to deny it altogether.
I see no benefit to Christianity at all. All it does is criticise extreme Biblical Christianity, it does not promote liberal Christianity. It promotes science under the guise of democracy.
Whereas to me this looks both insincere and circular. At least for me it would be.
And I see no testament to Christianity in this, for it is no different than those in any religion. Yes it works for you. But when you make your faith the filter and organizing principle for everything, then of course it works for you. How can anything fail to fit when you simply don’t see anything which doesn’t?
To be sure I make no pretention to objectivity in my Christianity. So I guess you can say I once again seek a balanced approach. And it is natural for me since Christianity is not my starting point. And I certainly make Christianity my organizing principle for the necessarily subjective aspects of life. But it is certainly not my filter for reality itself. Christianity is an answer to certain questions but it is not the whole of my reality or the answer to everything. And I see no value in wearing blinders like a horse to protect me from other things.
I fail to see how there can be blinkers. Christianity is a way of life. It guides my ideals and conscience and morality. As for reality? That is more difficult to isolate or identify, however I do not shy away from anything that might contradict a scientific view. For instance, I am convinced here is a connection within Nature that is beyond human access or scientific view. I also think there is an unseen battle between Good (God) and evil (Devil) that I would imagine you would not wish to exist, let alone accept. I may not go as far as Scripture, but I accept the existence of Demons and Angels, and might even be prepared to accept the existence of some creatures deemed mythological or Folk Lore.
IOW my view of reality does not stop at what I can see, perceive or quantify.
(science) In fact I might even claim that science gives you blinkers.
It’s a manifestation of “efficiency”: when teachers want to point out weaknesses – and I’ve seen it tried – they are told there isn’t enough class time for that and covering the core material. That’s not just in junior high and high school, either, it applies to college courses.
I always frankly admit that science is my filter in considering whether Christianity has any value. But since religions are so many, that is not blinders but a noise filter. To be sure it can be blinders, when you take the approach of naturalism where science dictates the limits of reality. But clearly that does not apply to me. For me science does not dictate the limits of reality but it certainly does cut down on the noise by showing what is reasonable. That is simply a matter of keeping your eyes, ears, and mind open to what a living God shows you.
Do you disagree just to disagree? How is me stating it is my opinion that evolution gets the science correct binary thinking or arrogance? It’s a very general statement. It nowhere says all of life can be reduced to evolution or that I believe evolution can fully explain the mind, human value, morality or even how life ultimately started. I think you read way too much into a simple statement that is only meant to say I think the evidence favors that the theory of biological evolution is true. This does not mean I accept the thoughts of every evolutionary biologist, every interpretation of evolutionary biologists and so on.
As I said, I don’t want the government telling me what to think, read or believe. Whether evolution is true or false, in my opinion, this holds true. In a democratic society people should be allowed to elect officials based on their beliefs and they should be able to influence topics taught in schools etc. I believe in freedom and that means local communities and local policies to me— even if I disagree with them.
Final causality provides a resolution to the problem of induction. I don’t think there really is any other legitimate way to be honest.
Sounds like a delusion that induction can ever be a kind of proof. I think the real answer to the problem of induction is simply accepting that it is not proof. The result of an argument by induction is simply a reasonable conclusion not a proven one. It is the way we live our lives. The sun rises every day so we believe it will rise again tomorrow. It is not proof. It is simply reasonable.
I don’t see how teleology has anything to do with it. There is absolutely NOTHING to do with any decision to MAKE the sun rise tomorrow. Whether we want it to rise or not will always be irrelevant. The sun will never care one way or another about what we want. Of course we are not limited to inductive arguments which are that simple. But the principle still applies.
I think it’s the interpretation of science that is the problem. Since guys like Descartes and Newton, skewed philosophical thinking and a mechanistic model of God has been ingrained and this has led to the false distinction between natural and supernatural. God is relegated to spectator which is scripturally and metaphysically unsound. People like Hume didn’t help things either.
Yes, and that is the problem. Without final causality there is no reason to presume anything will or will not continue to do what it has always done or that our “casual” links will remain consistent or are actually real. It doesn’t matter if the sun has “risen” 3 times or 30 trillion. There is nothing necessitating what it will or will not do tomorrow. Yes, we live our lives connecting the dots of induction but it is a glaring logical problem and logical fallacies or fallacious thinking is the exact opposite of what is reasonable. This is very basic Hume. So while it may be reasonable within the context of the scientific method, the problem of induction remains logically present without final causality–which resolves that problem while allowing science to carry on as normal. I am okay with someone making the inductive leap for pragmatic purposes but I think pretending that fallacious reasoning is reasonable is a bridge built too far for me.
That is not how teleology or final causes work. Maybe the Paley watchmaker version does but not the Aquinas’s version or how Aristotelians see final causes. I would say its more to do with the nature of things by virtue of their being. I don’t want to retype this so this short quote helps explains final causality:
To me this sounds like the kind of delusions indulged in by Israel in rejecting the prophet of Jeremiah. God has an end fixed for the Israelites and so a conquest by Babylon cannot happen. Wrong!
NO! A religious insertion of teleology does not change the scientific process of induction into proof. On the contrary, we have to remain aware that induction is not proof and that there always might be conditions where the reasonable assumptions from induction may be wrong. So we found there are conditions where Newtonian gravity doesn’t work opening the way to discover general relativity does work in those conditions.
Yes the match is designed to generate heat under the right conditions. But intention has nothing to do with it as demonstrated when the match doesn’t work. The intention in making the match is irrelevant. There is only the question of chemicals in the match responding to friction. And no I am not buying into some absurd animism to put the intention (or final cause) into the match itself.
Yes when it moves towards scientism which is self defeating and pretty much a religion in its own right. The issue is in the interpretation of science as “all-providing” and not realizing its limitations or that without a proper metaphysical basis, it can’t even deal with the problem of induction. I think this is where things like final causality shine and why the modern outlook on science leads to nihilism and moral relativism. Not to mention the blind faith in thinking science will explain everything (might as well double down on our fallacious thinking) and that anything else is superstitious “God of the gaps.” Science, as currently done, generally offers a limited portrait of the world using efficient causes. It is quite wonderful in that regard but that is only what it does. When you confuse your methodological net with the totality of reality, when you start thinking of things only as only collections of value-less particles that operate solely under the influence of impersonal forces, I mean, you are removing everything good from the world. It reminds me of this scene from the Return of the King:
People can define or believe in ends that are correct or incorrect. That has nothing to do with whether formal causes exist.
I appreciate the example and yes, of course induction is not proof. It is actually fallacious reasoning without final causality to me. Newtonian gravity is just a mathematical model of reality based on incomplete observations to me. I think of general relativity as the same. I think of equations themselves as imperfect models of how reality behaves under specific conditions. Formulas allow us to calculate and predict the behavior of objects but they remain incomplete descriptions of reality. General relativity more accurately models reality and a broader range of things than Newtonian. Whether or not “quantum gravity” will come along and yield even greater accuracy than general relativity is unknown.
We are discussing whether formal causes are real. The segment I put in bold simply asserts they are are not. Animism seems to be a red herring of sorts. The problem of induction and inability of us to connect causes and effects, as so famously outlined by Hume is one of the repercussions of only dealing with efficient causes. When you strike the match against the side of a box it does not produce a chicken playing a trumpet. It produces fire, not some arbitrary effect because the chemicals in the match as it exists are ordered towards fire. Final causality is how we bridge this gap and discussions of final causes quickly finds some overlap with act and potency. A match has the potential to produce fire when it strikes the side of a box, not a dancing watermelon. This is how Aristotelians defend the obvious reality of change as a real feature of the world. Things have potentials limited by virtue of their being of some nature.
Recall first that for the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition, the fundamental sort of final causality that exists in nature is the “directedness” of an efficient cause toward the generation of its typical effect or range of effects. It is similar to what contemporary writers on dispositions and causal powers like C. B. Martin, John Heil, Brian Ellis, Nancy Cartwright, and George Molnar have in mind when they speak, for example, of the way dispositions are “directed toward” or “point to” their characteristic “manifestations,” or the way causal powers are “directed toward” their characteristic effects. Hence the directedness of brittle objects toward shattering, of soluble objects toward dissolving, of the phosphorus in a match head toward generating flame and heat, are instances of finality as that is understood in the A-T tradition. The A-T view is that unless we regard such “directedness” or “pointing” as immanent or inherent to the natural phenomena that exhibit such dispositions and causal powers, we have no way of making it intelligible why they have the manifestations and effects that they typically do. Causes and effects, dispositions and manifestations would become inherently “loose and separate,” so that any effect or none might follow upon any cause. Such Humean fantasies are for A-T an inevitable result of the abandonment of immanent final causes. – Feser
When we live only in the realm of efficient causes, we end up needing the highest order of blind faith imaginable ands it’s not due to religion. We can thank Hume for that.
What an understatement! My fingers are tripping over each other typing this I’m laughing so hard.
In a philosophy course about Descartes and a few others we invented our own philosopher, one Gerhard DeHoors, who denounced that artificial distinction – and we told our professor that he was guilty of putting Descartes before DeHoors.
We held a debate on that very thing in one philosophy course. I got assigned to defend the proposition; the other side invented their own version, “intrinsic causality”, the principle that things will continue to behave according to their natures.
The third of the class who’d drawn positions as judges decided it was a draw. A minority of the judges felt we were just playing games with semantics.
Admitting? Not much. But then there will be student questions, and those can really burn class time.
As a student teacher I had my own approach: additional reading assignments, with the warning that such material qualified to be on exams.
I don’t think intention has a place in teleology in the sense that any material thing has any goal it is aiming for, it is just things doing what they were made to do – and how they were made is not relevant, whether by some supernatural agent or not.
Sounds like indoctrination not teaching. The education system has always been about exams, so there is a bias towards right and wrong answers. lateral thinking is encouraged but it is not taught. It is only those who take an interest and therefore invest in extracurricular time and study that successfully overcome this bias.
In terms of a more wider view, people will tend to accept what they are told by “authorities”, even if those authorities are self appointed. I doubt vet much that a casual visitor to a Zoo would question Evolutionary material that is presented alongside the creatures.
And it is clear, that those authorities are so self contained and exclusive that no one outside can argue with them anyway. (To argue against science you need to be a scientist!) 1984 in real life, in terms of control rather than watching. They do not need to enforce the indoctrination, it is part of the system.
Try arguing against a chef in baking without at least knowing baking thoroughly, or against an auto mechanic without at least knowing that area of expertise. Every area of knowledge with specialized subject matter requires you to know what you’re talking about or they’ll ignore you.
There are people who oppose the claim that the Earth is round. Just the existence of opposition does not make it legitimate opposition, nor does it make it worthy of teaching in any introductory class on any subject.
