[quote=“Jay313, post:19, topic:35716”]@aleo
Jay, I could read the quote above as saying that human culture is intrinsically evil at its very roots.
Jay313
Not intrinsically evil, but flawed, warped by evil. Just like us. The culture reflects the people. For the present, good and evil coexist side-by-side, within society and within the individual.
[/quote]
Jay, any disagreement we may have on this topic may be just a matter of semantics and the borders between human cultures and human societies. The way I see it, evolution has favored the establishment of societies, because it confers power–much more power than what can be exerted by the same group of individuals acting separately (e.g. some insects or wolf packs). In the case of animals, much of that power is conferred upon the leader, often the alpha male. The desire to wield this power often can be the ‘Achilles Heel’ for some societies–especially human societies. I have always thought that, ideally, human culture puts a limit on this innate desire for power, or at least redirects it. So I look at the message in John’s gospel from a slightly different perspective than your quote
As it comes down to us in English, I readily admit that your interpretation seems more accurate than mine. Even so, I still have a ‘gut feeling’ that God loved his creation even before we appeared in it, but we humans are part of his plan to make the world a better place by overcoming the selfishness and lust for power that drove evolution through eons past. It is in this sense that we can become co-creators, and in some sense, imago Dei.
From your reply to @BDH I see that you too are a fan of Wittgenstein and Pascal.
regards,
Al Leo
I think that might be a bit of an overstatement, but I concur with the general point that science does not absolutely displace philosophy.
Pascal uses the word “heart” in two senses that are distinct, but perhaps not unrelated. He first says that the heart “experiences” and “feels” God, and that we know truth by it as well as reason. At the end of the first paragraph, he then relates the heart and “intuition”, and uses “intuition” exclusively in the second paragraph.
I consider emotion or experience to be different from intuition, so I will treat them separately.
Let’s first consider intuition. I will take “intuition” to mean a process of determining a proposition to be true or false via subconscious mechanisms, or a mechanism whose operation, formed through experience, cannot be precisely articulated. Intuition is the source of beliefs when a situation either has not or cannot be formally analyzed. Pascal seems to argue that intuition and reason operate parallel to one another, each accessing truth unreachable by the other.
However, placing intuition on equal footing with reason leads to error. To be sure, intuition is a valuable tool for discovering truth, but the hypotheses formulated by intuition must always be verified by reason. The process of verification takes as input an intuited hypothesis and acts back on intuition, refining it into a more powerful search tool. Intuition, then, has only indirect access to truth via reason, and reason and intuition act jointly with one another: intuition guides reason, and reason calibrates intuition.
That reliance on unchecked intuition leads to error is easily demonstrated. Consider, for example, the Monty Hall “paradox.” It is not paradoxical in the sense of being self-contradictory, but rather because it represents a truth that is deeply counterintuitive. On season 9, episode 21 of the show MythBusters, 20 contestants played a simulation of the game, and all 20 chose to keep their original choice of door rather than switching. One of the contestants stated that she didn’t switch because the probability of winning is 50-50 after one of the doors has been opened, an incorrect belief but one seductive to naive intuition.
Yet with training, the correct strategy seems obvious, and this illustrates the proper relation between intuition and reason: a “common sense” belief motivates analysis by reason, which then leads to the correct answer and calibration of intuition.
Another example of an unintuitive truth is the fact that some sets of infinite size are “larger,” in a well-defined sense, than other infinite sets. The intuition about infinity is that it simply means inexhaustibility or continuing forever, so it is meaningless to talk about different “sizes” of infinity. Indeed, I could present an intuitively appealing argument to someone untrained in mathematics that the notion of an infinite hierarchy of infinite sets, each larger than the previous, is nonsense. In this way, intuition can not only be wrong, but actively lead us astray if we are insufficiently skeptical. Nor is uncountable infinity merely an abstract notion of no practical importance; the existence of uncomputable functions is an almost immediate corollary, and the proof technique provides a path to demonstrating that particular functions of interest are uncomputable.
Other examples could be given, especially from modern physics, but these suffice to illustrate the point that intuition alone has no means of determining the correctness of propositions it puts forward. Apart from reason, it has no access to truth, and must always be subordinate to reason.
Let’s now turn to emotion. By “emotion,” I mean a state or quality of experience or consciousness. It has no component of knowledge: emotion simply is. By feeling happy or sad, I do not obtain directly any kind of truth other than the trivial fact that I am, at the moment, happy or sad. The question now is, “What can we infer based on our emotional experiences?”
The point to be made here is that our emotions have absolutely no correlation with what is true. Rather, our emotions are correlated with what we believe to be true.
Suppose that Alice and Bob are married. Alice loves Bob, and feels a sense of warmth and connection with him. If she discovers later that he has been engaging in a series of affairs throughout their entire marriage, she will presumably feel betrayed and devastated. Her earlier feelings did not spring from the truth, but what she falsely believed to be true.
It would be absurd for Alice to claim that her experiences of love and warmth in any way constituted evidence of Bob’s faithfulness, whether or not Bob is faithful. Her emotions follow from her beliefs; they are not evidence for the truth of her beliefs.
Emotional experiences of God are no different in this respect. Indeed, a Muslim might experience peace from Allah, and a Buddhist might experience tranquility and happiness at the thought of being reborn in the Pure Land at death. Clearly, however, these beliefs are mutually exclusive.
There is terrain I have not covered. Perhaps Pascal means something other than intuition and emotion? One might offer an argument from what might be described as an “internal experience,” something like a revelation or personal connection with the divine. These are similar to emotion, and at any rate are indistinguishable from imagination or hallucination without check from reason. I won’t further expound on that point unless someone is interested.
Hey, hey, hey! Stop right there! Are you asking me to think? I’ll see what I can do, but please lower your expectations. Haha
Back to Wittgenstein: “Even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.” I connected this to the idea that science has nothing to say about what is transcendental. This was Wittgenstein’s conclusion in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where he tried to solve the problems of philosophy by defining a proposition. “A proposition pictures a possible state of affairs.” If that possible state of affairs actually does obtain in the world, the proposition is true. (A fact.) If it does not obtain, the proposition is false. From this angle, it seems the only things that we may say with certainty to be “true” are those things we call “facts,” which is the realm of empirical science. Does this mean, as some took Wittgenstein to mean, that only science is capable of expressing truth? No, because for Wittgenstein, “There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”
In other words, there is a different category of truth that cannot be stated in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These lie outside the line drawn by the principle of verification. As he says previously in the Tractatus (parenthetical remarks are mine):
“6.41 The sense (the meaning, purpose) of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental (contingent). What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”
Put another way, all events and actions in the world (all facts) are contingent. Things might have happened this way, but they also might have happened another. All we can say is, “This is how things are.” But statements of value and meaning are not like that. Statements of value or meaning go beyond mere propositions of fact. All that the world supplies us with are facts. When we try to go beyond the facts of “what is” and make a statement that assigns value or meaning, we have gone beyond the realm of contingent and accidental facts. This is what Wittgenstein means when he immediately says:
“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”
He uses “transcendental” in a technical philosophical sense to mean that which is incapable of being experienced by the senses. Thus, what is transcendental is beyond the reach of science, which deals only in what can be observed and measured. As soon as I try to assign meaning to an event, or to judge the purpose or value of something, I have stepped out of the realm of binary True/False statements of verifiable facts and into the realm of meaning, values, purpose, beauty, art, love, justice, mercy, forgiveness, etc. In that realm science is silent, yet that is where most of my life is lived.
I enjoyed reading your take on Pascal, and I don’t disagree with most of your logic or conclusions. Intuition, as most people define it in their daily lives, is not a reliable guide to truth. Too often, it is just an excuse to do what we want despite any evidence to the contrary. And, as you say, emotion may lead us astray as often as it steers us rightly, although I would argue that love is more than an emotion, and that the analysis breaks down as soon as you say that her “feelings did not spring from the truth, but what she falsely believed to be true.” What did she falsely believe to be true? She did not falsely believe that she loved him. This belief was true. She did love him. Those feelings were not false. And unless Alice and Bob are completely different than most other couples, she would not base her belief that Bob would be faithful on her love for him. A belief in Bob’s faithfulness would be based on his professed love for her, as well as his statements or actions that would cause her to believe that he loved her, and would be faithful to her (as promised?). Just a quibble.
I’m not going to defend Pascal too vigorously here, because I partly am to blame by editing his comments for space. Suffice it to say that he does, as you noticed, use both “heart” and “intuition” in different ways, often in the same context. For the most part, he draws his use of “heart” from the biblical use, which (like “spirit” and “soul”) most often refers to the core of a person’s being, not some aspect or ability they possess. Most of the time, as here, he uses “intuition” to mean those first principles that we cannot prove by reason, but that reason must nevertheless use as a ground of thought. The part that I edited out was his use of some simple mathematical principles to bolster his point. Probably would’ve been helpful to your understanding and analysis, but too late to change now…
Your “gut feeling” is confirmed in Proverbs 8, where Wisdom is personified in a way that makes many people view it as a type of Christ. In verses 22-29 of the poem, Wisdom describes how he was there during God’s creative acts, and then in vv. 30-31 he says …
"Then I was beside Him, as a master workman;
And I was daily His delight,
Rejoicing always before Him,
Rejoicing in the world, His earth,
And having my delight in the sons of men.
The word translated “rejoicing” has the connotations of laughter, of play.
When mankind was in its infancy, the Lord laughed and played with us, as dearly loved children. When we rebelled, he withdrew and hid from us. Yet, he still loves us dearly, and one day he will no longer hide from us, but he will once more laugh and play among us and take delight in his children, as he intended from the beginning.
According to Christian theology, we are all born as sinners which interpret as having an unidentified combination of defective genes. Civilized people must work at being civilized. If children have no examples to follow . . . .
Sorry, I’m confused. Who is describing sociopaths?
Anyway, I don’t think it works to identify defective genes as the reason we are all born sinners. If that were the case, we could all hold out hope that science could identify and correct the defect, so that no one would be born a sinner again. If such a human solution to the “sin problem” were available (or even possible), then Christ’s sacrifice was unnecessary.
Touche!! I should have deleted the ‘a’ before ‘human’. With monozygotic twins, there is still a problem of assigning ‘ensoulment’ to an instant in time and and cell potentiality.
Al Leo
I’m not a Catholic, so am not committed doctrinally to the idea of a separately created eternal soul implanted into each individual. But I do have monozygotic twin daughters, who have always been both very alike and very different, so the subject is more than theoretical for me.
It seems to me the Catholic view only has problems if one tries to tie “ensoulment” strictly to a biological process rather than to the wisdom of the personal God. That is, the argument runs something like “ensoulment occurs at conception, and conception occurs when the ovum is fertilized.” That makes it look like one soul is split in two, or some such insoluble anomaly.
However, if instead one says that in the case of twins God foreknows and intends two individuals, and “ensouls” those individuals when he regards them as having been conceived, the link with biology is contingent on God, and not a necessary mechanistic connection.
As I suggested, I take a more hylemorphic and developmental view of the human soul, which is still non-materialistic but avoids the Cartesian dualism that seems to cause the apparent problem to arise. But it still seems to me worthwhile remembering that the making of a human being is an intelligent act of creation by a loving Father, as well as a biological process. And there’s no doubt that twins end up as individuals with the same souls, whatever they may be, as anyone else - they’re just prone to involuntary telepathy sometimes!
I was only baptized Catholic … but I have spent more than a modest amount of time studying comparative theologies.
I just don’t know any Catholic (or anyone) who thinks twins share a soul, or have one soul divided into two. I think it would make for a great sci fi movie, though!
A Catholic sage would simply say this:
“Ensoulment” occurs at conception;
Conception occurs when the ovum is fertilized;
If the ensuing embryo, as it develops, divides into 2 or more viable individuals, then additional “ensoulment” occurs as required.
As it stands, I don’t think this is a very burdensome schematic.
Where it gets interesting is in a hypothetical case I’ve been describing since 1974 … and which was dismissed by listeners for years - - until lately!
A) A skin cell is harvested;
B) It’s nucleus is prepped so that its genetic material has been re-set to a viable embryonic stage. Theoretically, it has been “ensouled” at this point.
C) When there are 16 embryonic cells, they are separated into 4 separate clumps; theoretically, 3 more ensoulments have been triggered.
D) The scientist working on the skin tissue sample discovers a genetic marker that makes the skin cell sample unsuitable for any further work. He disposes of 3 out of 4 embryonic masses. Has he killed 3 souls?
E) He then treats the remaining embryonic mass so that it specializes back into skin cells, and stores it in the lab refrigerator as inactive skin cells until he can find a use for it. The cells in this last group are still alive … but they have been returned to the status of skin cells.
Do we really think he has killed a soul when he converted the embryonic cells, which were created from skin cells, back into skin cells? Can we say something has been killed, when the cells are still living?
I have never encountered “the Catholic” assessment of this conundrum.
Both of your posts illustrate why I find this Forum so interesting! As children, our religious training must present theological issues as ‘black & white.’ Perhaps most of us are content to have it remain that way. (Doesn’t Scripture say that children have the surest path to Heaven?) However, as both of you point out, some of us want to see if God has more subtle things in mind, and modern biology clearly indicates that questions regarding our intrinsic Humanity CANNOT be answered with a simple YES OR NO.
Jon, your ‘identical’ twins gives you a special insight in how some epigenetic differences can result in two individuals resulting from identical DNA. After sharing our lives for 70 yrs, my wife and I also experienced ‘involuntary telepathy’ at times. Could that have had an epigenetic component? I don’t know the difference between ‘spirit’ and 'soul’, but something of her spirit stays with me after she has left this life.
@gbrooks9 It is spooky that it may be possible someday to reprogram a skin cell to become a viable potentially 'human’ embryo. I personally believe that its potential cannot be realized unless one or more humans take it under wing and introduce it into human society. But that idea raises a host of problems. That’s why I am open to suggestions. I am pretty sure of one thing: any satisfactory answer MUST have a spiritual as well as a material component, as you point out in your quote above, Jon.
Al Leo
The problems with ensoulment are pretty much the same as the problems you run into with original sin if you link those to physical biological processes. I think we should accept that there are spiritual things unexplained by material process. These are interesting topics to ponder, and sometimes pushing a topic to the extremes helps clarify things, so carry on.
I find max. agreement with your post if I take “epigenetic” to mean “all that is not genetic”, including social factors, choices and spiritual factors. As Phil says, we need to recognise the limitations of all biological answers.
That said my limited and informal twin study has shown some interesting confirmation of the quite recent discovery of inherited epigenetics, one example of which I wrote about here a couple of years ago.
Since that time (a) the YouTube link has unfortunately gone dead and (b) my prediction about the second granddaughter has proven correct. The database may increase a little bit, as two new granddaughters have arrived in the last year and we can run the experiment again, though I think it would be just too extraordinary if things worked out that neatly.
Twin “telepathy at a distance” is harder to account for: only unconscious in my two (and highly resented, when they’ve met up wearing the same dress or shoes to a family event), but I recorded a couple of interesting examples in my medical career. Needless to say they were only written up in the medical “gutter press” rather than the academic journals!
Discussing telepathy gets us dangerously close to Rupert Sheldrake territory, but your experience in marriage shows that the reporting of such things isn’t confined to genetically-linked individuals (condolences on your recent sad loss, by the way).
If ones metaphysics excludes such things they never happen. If it doesn’t exclude them, they seem surprisingly common in conversation when you’re listening out. My level-headed son-in-law reports getting a phone call when he was living alone, and thinking (before answering), “That’ll be my mother telling me my grandfather has died.” So it turned out to be, although as far as he knew his grandfather was quite well.
Just another tick in the “anomaly” box that warns one not to think we have the world sorted out!
[quote=“Jon_Garvey, post:34, topic:35716”]
I find max. agreement with your post if I take “epigenetic” to mean “all that is not genetic”, including social factors, choices and spiritual factors. As Phil says, we need to recognise the limitations of all biological answers.
[/quote]Yes, this is what makes the most sense to me. Dawkins appears to be amazed and non-plussed by the evidence that humans appeared in a Great Leap Forward, when the evidence is so good that all other life can be explained by neo-Darwinian theory. I’ll bet that his 'tongue-in-cheek explanation that Homo sapiens brain was “programmed” will eventually be clarified when more of epigenetic mechanism become ‘established science’. When this happens, I don’t think it will diminish one whit the idea that God plays a role it it. How can anyone be blind to the fact that Life has developed according to a Purpose. And we, as conscious creatures, are a part of that purpose.
Thanks for the link to your earlier work. Very interesting. You are fortunate in being able to enjoy your family in such a thoughtful way.
Al Leo
Greetings all (I’m a novice here so please extend some grace)…
I tried reading every subsequent comment from @Alli’s original post but my brain started to overload .
@Jay313, I’m not accusing you of being a proponent of abolishing notions of objective morality, but I, too, did infer you hinting to that in your previous statement:
Nonetheless, that’s precisely what I’m curious about. If one does embrace the evolutionary creationism framework, how does one account for morality? Is it inherently endowed by the Creator? or can the evolutionary process give rise to morals? If not endowed, doesn’t it then become necessarily relative and not objective?
I took a cursory glance at this open forum and was checking to see if anyone talked about this or raised this question. If anyone has any responses, comments, or even references to share with me concerning my question(s) I’d greatly appreciate it.
If you will permit me to offer my own 2 cents (which is frequently returned as way more valuable than my thoughts) …
Once you have God in the evolutionary process… he is the logical source of morality.
I don’t think it would make much sense to have God working on creating a moral human race … but to think God is indifferent enough to morality that he let’s “evolution decide on the biological basis of morality”. I’m quoting anyone in particular … I’m just imagining what some atheists might attribute to Evolution.
In my personal view, the story of Adam and Eve is the story of God identifying the first hominid to achieve “moral agency” … of knowing right from wrong, and doing the wrong anyway!
In the evolution of the human animal … there had to be a First. There is always a First … if you have the omniscience to look for it…
Hello, ikem_nachi, and welcome to the forum! You aren’t alone with these questions – nor are you the only one who can’t keep up with every discussion even just in a single thread. It’s like trying to drink from a fire-hose sometimes! So realizing (and not caring) that this has probably been addressed thousands of times before, I’ll chime in with my own (hopefully biblically-informed!) thoughts.
I don’t think we do “completely account for” morality. If it is 100% sourced from ourselves and our human cultures as materialists would claim, then it ceases to have any absolute or objective existence. But if it is transmitted through our culture, then that seems to me to be compatible with its also objective existence. So I don’t think the theist need feel threatened with explanations about how morals “came to be” insofar as there may be great explanations about how they are transmitted or even conceived in some earlier proto-civilization. God tells Israel to teach their children the laws – a fairly standard endorsement of moral education right there which wouldn’t make it any less objective. So the evolutionary creationist can accept a God-originated basis for objective morality while simultaneously accepting possible evolutionary explanations for things like altruism and moral development through history; just as we can thank God for our daily food while simultaneously accepting that there are also non-competing mechanical explanations for how food arrives at the dinner table.
Greetings and welcome! Grace is extended to all except the newly minted “Chief Wikipedia Quoter,” who is a scourge to the forums and a threat to all right-thinking Americans. Hi, @gbrooks9. Haha. When did you acquire the title?
A biological process, such as evolution, cannot account for morality. Consider a newborn infant. The evolutionary process has provided it with a body and a brain. (For the sake of our thought experiment, we’ll assume that both are “normal”.) Remove that child from all human contact until the age of 13. Will the child have any concept of morality? Will the child possess a conscience? The answer to both questions is “No,” so we can safely say that morality and conscience are learned behaviors, which is to say they are not the products of biology, nor are they implanted in us by God. This, of course, means that human notions of morality, as well as our individual consciences, are relative, changeable, and flawed. This does not mean that God’s notions of morality are any of those things.
Morality and conscience are universal, but the “rules” within individual consciences are not universal, even within the same moral culture. Paul himself speaks of strong and weak consciences, as well as a person’s conscience developing and often hardening. Since conscience is thus variable within individuals in a group, and variable even in one individual over his/her lifetime, conscience therefore could not be a feature of the Imago Dei implanted directly into man by God. If it were obtained in that manner, wouldn’t everyone’s conscience be identical, since it derived at birth from the same unchangeable source? Likewise, if conscience was implanted in us by God to function like an instinct, then our individual consciences would not change and develop, just as birds do not gradually decide to fly east rather than south. Conscience therefore is only human and imperfect, although God sovereignly uses it to restrain evil, just as he likewise uses governments, another flawed invention of human culture, for that same purpose.
An absolute, unchangeable, perfect moral standard does exist, but it resides in the mind of God, not the mind of man. It is a subject of special revelation, not general revelation. Christ revealed to us God’s final word on ethics and morality. All that came before him were mere shadows and figures.
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