The basic problem in any intellectual effort is to demonstrate both unity and diversity. Darwin demonstrated how there can be diversity and change in biology through genetic variation. Logically and in life it is Natural Selection that accounts for continuity of life. The problem is that the genetic Variation aspect of evolution has been well researched, but the Natural Selection remains a deep mystery and Black Hole.
What Dennis is doing in this essay is refuting a challenge by a Creationist who tries to explain to use similarities and differences in genetics are not evidence of common ancestry. Dennis points out that it is. There is no difference between them that there is design in nature and God is the Designer. The only question is how God designs through evolution, which God clearly does.
To say that God does not create the diversity and unity in nature would have to prove that Nature created itself or evolution created itself. It is not a leap of faith, because things and organisms do not create themselves or do they?
Simply wrong. Read those quotes again. Inflation proceeds in different parts of the universe which causes new universes to pop out from the current one. Every new universe in turn pops out more universes ad infinitum. And you get a multiverse. This was not invoked to explain fine-tuning. Get over that misconception.
Well, they do, that’s what the data shows. There’s absolutely no evidence that the whole saga was scripted & directed by someone. If Venema really wants to follow the evidence wherever it leads, he should accept facts as they are and not make leaps of faith. In fact, it baffles me how he can talk in astute empirical fashion for most of the article, then abandon all that in one instant and resort to special pleading. It’s a failed attempt to reconcile science with faith.
The multi universe is really best seen as trying to hold on to a logic of being forced, for phenomenon that are really better explained in terms of freedom.
Explaining in terms of freedom: the photon has a position (space) parameter consisting of 2 potentials which are in the future (anticipative) part of the photon object.
Explaining in terms of multi-universe: One photon is in universe 1, and the other photon is in universe two. Now we can draw lines of cause and effect from one universe to another.
Creationists can explain the facts of how the earth is created, and then say subjectively that the earth is beautiful.
Your idea that faith is not scientific, therefore faith is anti-science, is saying equally that beauty is not scientific therefore beauty is anti-science. These dangerous beautians are threatening science with saying the earth is beautiful, while we can measure no beauty parameters of the earth what so ever.
You have still not accepted the validity of subjectivity, besides accpeting the validity of objectivity. Which is because, only creationism validates both objectivity and subjectivity in 1 single conceptual scheme. The spiritual domain chooses which way the material domain turns out. Subjectivity is relevant to the spirit, and objectivity is relevant to the material.
Obviously a decision can turn out several different ways. So it means NEW information is introduced in the universe, namely the information which way the decision turns out. Science cannot investigate the agency of a decision, it is categorically, as by logic, a matter of opinion. As Ockham already explained in the late middle ages…
You just keep claiming to have shown things you have not even come close to showing. I read Dennis’s posts on this site regularly. Your quotation from his article should have been another clue that the two are compatible. That’s because it is simply not the case that “POSITIVE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE” is necessary to consider God rationally (though there is a sense in which testimonial evidence can be considered empirical… the fact that others have claimed or are claiming to have had certain experiences is knowable through our physical senses, but of course the truth of what they are saying is still in question).
@Wayne
First of all philosophy and theology do not rely on common sense and intuition so you are on the wrong foot from the beginning. They rely on verifiable facts and logical thinking, much as the way science does. The primary difference is what these disciplines consider verifiable facts.
Second philosophy and theology have no business doing the work of science, and science is not really able to do the work of philosophy and science.
Third my criticism of Darwinian evolution is that it has not applied the scientific method to Darwinian Natural Selection. Can you show me where Natural Selection has been verified by empirical evidence? I really do not want to hear again the common sense view of the death of a Tommy gazelle.
Natural History is moving. That is what evolution is all about. The earth looks much different today than it did a billion years ago.
The earth is changing. Flora is changing. Fauna is changing. As a materialist you should agree that changes in the environment causes changes in flora and fauna, however biology does not agree. The problem with this for materialists is that God created and structured the physical earth so God determines the forms of the earth and the forms of plants and animals indirectly through God’s Laws.
The proof is in the pudding. That is what empirical evidence means. The script is the rational natural laws of a rational God necessary to create a rational home or environmental niche for humanity and other species.
The thing is the facts do not speak for themselves. Humans go to school for about 20 years to know what the “facts” are saying. The facts say that the universe emerged from nothing. The facts say that the universe is rationally structured. The facts indicate that only God is able to do this. That is empirical evidence.
I just want to mention that this dichotomy that you are always insisting on between subjectivity and objectivity, between forcing and choosing, does not play well in a postmodern worldview.
In a postmodern, pluralistic world, very few “facts” are considered truly objective. Once you get beyond things that can be reduced to math or formal logical notation, you are dealing in subjectivity to some degree since all “objective observations” are fundamentally perspectival.
Our ability to ascertain the “objective truth” about our reality is conditioned in myriad subconscious ways by our language, our culture, and our personal experiences. These subjective factors in many ways “force” our objectivity and limit our “free will.” Most assertions we call facts (beyond purely mathematical statements) involve a degree of subjective interpretation that is the inevitable result of being bound by our worldviews.
All that to say, I don’t find this artificial division of everything into choosing/subjectivity to be helpful for anyone who comes at things from a postmodern perspective.
Your argument has already collapsed and this adds the cherry on the cake. You don’t understand the difference between subjective and objective evaluation. The former is a personal experience which can be influenced by one’s mind and psychology and, as such, prone to bias and errors. The latter, on the other hand, is independent of one person’s mind because it can be tested and verified by anybody anywhere on the planet. Therefore, objective evaluation is a much more fool-proof and trustworthy method than relying on somebody’s personal testimony.
Your Sophisticated Theology is of no use if it cannot produce HARD EVIDENCE for God. Simple as that. No amount of rhetoric is going to serve as a substitute for evidence.
Freshmen or not, you got to address the issue. Can you disprove the existence of Santa Claus? You cannot. Does that mean the existence of Santa Claus is a possibility worth considering? No. Why? Because hard evidence is lacking. Ditto for God. It essentially boils down to a lack of evidence. That’s it.
I’ll leave you with one last word: A good thinker will try to falsify their own beliefs and uphold them only if they survive that challenge.
That’s not right. The whole idea of objective evaluation is to cut across personal experiences. An objective truth can be observed by any typical person anywhere in the world following the right procedure. In other words, it can be replicated by independent people.
You are talking in terms of complicated intellectual ideas, but you are omitting common discourse. Common discourse has creationist logic. “the painting is beautiful”, “there are 5 sheep in the meadow”. These statements have an inherent creationist logic.
One could emphasize perspective but still the fundaments can only be creationist, and not perspective. That’s because creation is about origins, you cannot get more fundamental than origins. Perspective requires creation, creation does not require perspective.
Objectivity is copying, making a model, 1 to 1, rather mindlessly. There are 5 sheep in the meadow.
You say the word subjective, but you mean something different than creationist subjectivity, where the conclusion is chosen. And you talk as though to get rid of subjectivity, as if it were a bad thing. (it is inevitable that there is some subjectivity, we cannot get rid of it completely) We do not want to get rid of subjectivity, it is perfectly valid, the painting is beautiful.
Subjectivity is to choose about what it is that chooses, which results in an opinion. How does that procedure figure in postmodernism? It does not figure.
My impression is, the popularity of post-modernism is a reaction to scientism. First people come to regard everything as a factual issue, scientism. Then they find out that they have a problem that they left no room for opinion. I know what we will do, we will say subjectivity is inherent in fact, as a matter of perspective, fudge, fudge, and than there was some room for emotions.
That only shows that faith & belief arise from culture. If there was a culture of worshipping teapots and spaghettis you would have accepted them too. But well-understood mundane objects like teapots are not popular candidates for worship. That privilege is reserved for the unknown, for things beyond human knowledge. This is why every religion attributes creation to a supremely powerful creator worthy of service & worship, even in the absence of verifiable evidence for it. The best case faith has for God is that it’s unknown.
I called it old & tired because it was not just Aquinas who tried to place God at the foundation of creation, other theologians and religions have done the very same thing since time immemorial. If you don’t know what reality is or how to understand it, the safest bet is to claim that a supreme being or God forms the basis of reality, the First Cause. Appealing to a “higher authority” is a highly appealing prospect for humans not only to seek solace & salvation, but also to demystify and explain their world. If that authority is the “highest possible” then it’s easy to attribute everything to him and conclude one’s inquiry - which is pretty much what Thomas Aquinas also did. After all, imagination has no bounds.
If you accept the fact that freedom is real, that things can turn out several ways in the universe, then there is the question, what made it turn out this way in stead of the other.
You cannot then refer to “laws” of nature forcing the result, because it was not forced, it could have turned out differently.
You cannot answer the question, because you don’t do subjectivity.
You wrote to Christy: "An objective truth can be observed by any typical person anywhere in the world following the right procedure. In other words, it can be replicated by independent people. "
Sort of like … “the earth does not move” was an objective truth, then, at the time. Somebody (maybe you) had referred earlier to Galileo’s disputes. Galileo provides a good example of somebody who got something right, but with really bad science. His “evidence” that the earth moves was totally wrong (and in fact, it was the venerable Saint Bede who made the correct association about the tides with the moon about a thousand years before Galileo managed to get the same question wrong). Anyway, back to Galileo’s time, the science was solidly on the Catholic church’s side and Bellarmine knew it, hence his refusal to adopt new views that were questionable at best. There was no stellar parallax observed (one of those ‘universally objective facts’ you venerate), So the science was in. Galileo, on the other hand, was busy ignoring troublesome empirical evidence, and insisted that his “one-high tide per day” was evidence for the moving earth.
I bring all this up just to show how even your appeal to “universally accessible” objectivity still does not make something objective. The entire culture (and yes, that would include scientific cultures) can all be subjectively committed to something together. In the late 1800s, Newton’s and Maxwell’s laws reigned supreme. People like Planck were encouraged to take their brilliant minds elsewhere since Physics was pretty much ‘settled’ with just a bit of clean up and more fine-tuning of existing measurements to be done. “Move along, nothing more to see here folks …” And we know how that worked out as well.
While I agree that there is objective truth out there (both at spiritual levels, and within that at material levels too) universally agreed upon science of our day or any day does not mean subjectivity is absent. In fact, what the world seems to “reveal” to us seems to be surprisingly determined by the questions we (individually or culturally) choose to ask of it. Heisenberg said something to that effect.
Regarding your last reply to me, about many theologians “placing God somewhere”, this only demonstrates the continued appeal to a bad definition that we’ve already been over. Nobody “places” God anywhere because anything that we or anybody can place somewhere isn’t God; just like any notion that humans have ‘invented God’ shows the same categorical confusion. Anything we invent cannot, of course, be God. So atheists very properly reject something that Christian Theists never believed in anyway: the god spawned by the human mind.
I don’t want to get rid of subjectivity, I want to acknowledge its presence everywhere.
Obviously new generations react to the inconsistencies and perceived inadequacies of the worldviews of the generations that went before them and some amount of pendulum swinging results.
But you talk as if people choose a worldview based on what’s popular. That’s not really how it works. A postmodern worldview is the result of living in a postmodern environment. No one picks a worldview, the worldview they already have is challenged and reshaped by their ongoing experience in the world.
