To accept evolution you must adopt an atheistic worldview

Faith & Science Conversation
42

@glipsnort said everything I could’ve said much better. If the point being made by the above citations was what you were trying to express, you didn’t say it originally.

To address the idea that there are a bunch of unseen mildly deleterious mutations building up in humanity, I’d point out that it has a corollary: even a few documented beneficial mutations mean that there must therefore be a whole host of unrecognized mildly beneficial mutations. Especially when you consider there is a lot less money being put into medical research on things that don’t kill people.

In case you were wondering if beneficial mutations exist, here’s a sample of those in humans:

43

I thought you were indulging in some sort of joke.

These matters are discussed widely, but to be helpful, I have provided a quote from Wikipedia, and quotes from a paper titled “Eliminativism without tears” by Rosenberg, as indicators of this area. A humorous comment would be, “Natural selection has created an illusion of intentionality and purpose because it confers some survival aspects to us (humans)”. Stuff that is way out and not scientifically based, but more an article of faith (or such)!!!

“Eliminativism about a class of entities is the view that that class of entities does not exist. For example, materialism tends to be eliminativist about the soul; modern chemists are eliminativist about phlogiston; and modern physicists are eliminativist about the existence of luminiferous aether. Eliminative materialism is the relatively new (1960s–1970s) idea that certain classes of mental entities that common sense takes for granted, such as beliefs, desires, and the subjective sensation of pain, do not exist. The most common versions are eliminativism about propositional attitudes, as expressed by Paul and Patricia Churchland, and eliminativism about qualia (subjective interpretations about particular instances of subjective experience), as expressed by Daniel Dennett and Georges Rey. These philosophers often appeal to an introspection illusion.”

and

The most powerful philosophical argument for eliminativism that has emerged
over the last few decades is due to Darwin, and has been most visibly developed by Jerry
Fodor [1990, 2009], though not with an eliminativist agenda. Physicalist antireductionism needs an account of how a clump of matter, the brain
as a whole or more probably a “population” of thousands of neurons wired together into a
circuit, has unique propositional content. To do this it needs to show how a clump of
matter—a token neural circuit–can be about some other thing in the universe.
The best resource, perhaps physicalism’s only resource, for explaining how
intentionality emerges and what it consists in has to be Darwin’s theory of natural
selection. There is one huge reason for supposing so. Behavior, including verbal
behavior, that is putatively guided by intentional states is purposive, goal directed, it is
quintessentially a matter of means aimed at ends. Such purposive behavior inherits its
purposiveness from the brain states that drive it. It is why the intentionality of the noises
and the marks we make is derived from the original intentionality of neural circuits. But
there is only one physically possible process that builds and operates purposive systems
in nature: natural selection. That is why natural selection must have built and must
continually shape the intentional causes of purposive behavior. Accordingly, we should
look to Darwinian processes to provide a causal account of intentional content. That
makes teleosemantics an inevitable research program.

Any naturalistic, purely causal, non-semantic account of content will have to rely
on Darwinian natural selection to build neural states cable of having content. This is what
teleosemantics seeks to do. But that is exactly what a Darwinian process cannot do.
The whole point of Darwin’s theory is that in the creation of adaptations, nature is
not active, it’s passive.

And of course natural selection has
disposed organisms, in this case humans, to behave in ways very finely adapted to
exploiting the particular structural identity between components of the neural circuitry
and what it bears an informational relation to.

44

What you wrote was “for atheists it is an ideology that is argued with some intellectual honesty only by eliminaist materialists (and the contradictions therein).” I took that to mean that you were making a comment about atheists in general. I guess I misunderstood, since the stuff you posted isn’t relevant to atheism at all.

Maybe I’m the only one who reads your comments about atheists and thinks they are comments about atheists as a group. My bad.

45

Don’t punish yourself unnecessarily - I often assume that atheists + Darwin is the category that is termed eliminativism materialists (EM) are the group that uses ToE against theists. However atheists that I know personally (a few) would not fall into that group.

.[quote=“sfmatheson, post:44, topic:37567”]
the stuff you posted isn’t relevant to atheism at all
[/quote]

I do not understand this - EM is about as atheistic as it gets.

46

Au contraire, Mervin, mon ami.

From various bibles:

  1. New International Version (NIV) “But as for you who forsake the Lord and forget my holy mountain, who spread a table for Fortune and fill bowls of mixed wine for Destiny”
  2. American Standard Version (ASV) “But ye that forsake Jehovah, that forget my holy mountain, that prepare a table for Fortune, and that fill up mingled wine unto Destiny”
  3. Complete Jewish Bible (CJB) “But as for you who abandon Adonai, who forget my holy mountain, who prepare a table for a Gad, a god of luck, and fill bowls of mixed wine for Meni, a god of destiny”
  4. The Voice (VOICE) “But those of you who ignore Me, the Eternal One—who turn away from My sanctuaries And reject My holy mountain to chase Lady Luck and cater to Destiny”

The two words used in Isaiah were ‘Gad’ and ‘Meni’.

From Wikipedia:

  1. “Gad was the name of the pan-Semitic god of fortune…Gad apparently differed from the god of destiny, who was known as Meni.”
  2. “Fortuna was the goddess of fortune and the personification of luck in Roman religion. She might bring good or bad luck…and came to represent life’s capriciousness. Fortuna’s identity [w]as [as a] personification of chance events.”

From the Shorter Oxford Dictionary:

  1. “Fortune, from L. fortuna chance as a divinity…Chance or luck as a power in human affairs.”
  2. “Destiny…the predetermined course of events”

From ‘McClintock and Strong Biblical Cyclopedia’:
Meni (Hebrews Meni’, מנַי, from מָנָה, to distribute; Sept. τύχη, Vulg, i.e .fortuna, just mentioned, SEE GAD; Auth. Vers. “that number,” marg. “Meni”), apparently an idol which the captive Israelites worshipped by libations (lectisternia), after the custom of the Babylonians (Isa 66:11), and probably symbolical of destiny (a sense indicated by the first clause of the next verse), like the Arabic mananfate (from the same root), and the Greek μοῖρα.”

‘Chance’ and ‘determinism’ are merely synonyms for ‘luck’ and ‘destiny’. Evolution is just another pagan myth, passing itself off as science, based on the ancient religio-philosophy (i.e. gods) that chance and determinism can create and control reality. Christians who have swallowed the Big Lie, have been deceived. They have pushed God to the background and revivified pagan gods to prominence. This is clearly seen in the title of Jacques Monod’s seminal work ‘Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology’.

47

@Ron and/or @r_speir: Have you ever tried to get to know anyone that loves Jesus Christ and accepts evolution? You both seem determined to clutch at the position that a view that differs from yours regarding God’s creation requires one to be completely antagonistic to true Christianity. How would you know unless you see for yourself? I can assure you that one can be a devoted follower of Christ, and an effective emissary for Him, and still accept that God created through evolution.

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49

Curtis: Have you ever tried to get to know anyone that loves Jesus Christ and accepts a Young Earth Creation? You seem determined to clutch at the position that a view that differs from yours regarding God’s creation requires one to be completely antagonistic to true Christianity. How would you know unless you see for yourself? I can assure you that one can be a devoted follower of Christ, and an effective emissary for Him, and still accept that God created through how God told Moses in Exodus 31 i.e. “Adonai said to Moshe, “Tell the people of Isra’el, ‘You are to observe my Shabbats; for this is a sign between me and you through all your generations; so that you will know that I am Adonai, who sets you apart for me. Therefore you are to keep my Shabbat, because it is set apart for you. Everyone who treats it as ordinary must be put to death; for whoever does any work on it is to be cut off from his people. On six days work will get done; but the seventh day is Shabbat, for complete rest, set apart for Adonai. Whoever does any work on the day of Shabbat must be put to death. The people of Isra’el are to keep the Shabbat, to observe Shabbat through all their generations as a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me and the people of Isra’el forever; for in six days Adonai made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day he stopped working and rested.’”
When he had finished speaking with Moshe on Mount Sinai, Adonai gave him the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God.”

Curtis, exactly how many peer-reviewed papers and books have you read written by creationist scientists? A simple question requires a simple answer.

It’s all about truth. Your very words above assume that yours is the default position. And that’s a very, very odd epistemic. If you want to fiddle with Exodus 31 and make it fit with your materialist views of evolution and long ages, that’s your choice…but I love God way too much to attempt to Procrusteanly squeeze God’s Word into the pagan bed of materialism.

50

Really? So, the God who stated that “Blessed are the meek” is the same Creator who brought in a principle that says “Blessed are the fittest for they shall inherit the earth”?

The following passages are from The Rationalist News. Richard Kilty first asks if evolution and religion are reconcilable, complementary or both. He answers by expressing that, “[W]e are not dealing on this amorphous level, instead we want to know about the antithesis of man in evolution and man in Christianity. And we do have an anti-thesis: Acceptance of evolution precludes the fundamentals of Christianity, to wit, Garden, Adam and Eve, Fall, Redeemer, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. Acceptance of evolution requires the concatenation: fish-amphibians-reptiles-mammals-apeman-man with all transformations occurring naturally. This dichotomy is irreconcilable.”

Kilty goes on to ruminate with acute insight that the two are not reconcilable; that a child taught evolutionary concepts (including long ages), will have his belief in God disturbed: “How subversive is evolutionary theory to Church dogma.”

In another section of the newsletter one writer looks at the long ages supposedly expressed in the fossil record, and concludes, quite logically, that as this indicates death on a high order, a loving God cannot exist: “we astute rationalists have no qualms regards the predation of primeval organisms as having commenced as dire necessity well over one billion years ago or more under the most inhospitable of prevailing conditions…The fossil record bares no record of lenity throughout the bulk of an estimated 70 kilometres(sic) deep accumulation of sediments in the whole of the visible fossils geological sequence…benevolence has no place in the realms of reality or survival of the fittest.”

Evolution: pagan to the core…and every non-believer knows it. As Dawkins once remarked to Phillip Adams, “Yes, in its most naive form you will get people who say that the story of Genesis, that the creation took 6 days to accomplish, you simply have to read each of those days as, whatever it is, 100 million years or a thousand million years, you get the right answer. I mean that’s very, very naive, of course. You are absolutely right that there is this tendency to resort to metaphor. Which maddens me because I suspect that the original authors of, for example, the book of Genesis, in no sense thought of it as a metaphor. I suggest that they thought that they were probably writing down folk-tales that had been handed down by word of mouth. But they believed them to be factually true, and the vast majority of people in history have believed them to be factually true. So I think that to reinterpret them as metaphor is a kind of evasion.”

51

Yes, absolutely! I know and love quite a few!

What are you basing this on? I have never addressed you before. This assertion is completely without basis or sincerity.[quote=“Ron, post:49, topic:37567”]
I can assure you that one can be a devoted follower of Christ, and an effective emissary for Him, and still accept that God created through how God told Moses in Exodus 31
[/quote]

I completely agree.

Mark 2:23-27 reads:

23 One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. 24 The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”
25 He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? 26 In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” 27 Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28 So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

I admit that I don’t have an exact count, but I’ve read maybe roughly two dozen articles and several books.

Do you have other assumptions you’d like me to address?

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52

Do you think the Beatitudes were addressed to all living organisms, or to humans?

As for the rest of your post, frankly, I’m not going to address your quote-mining.

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53

I’ll take your word on the synonym natures of those words … and your right to appropriate that passage to your present agenda. Pulling scriptures into present contexts is a good and proper tradition to be encouraged.

Regarding your take on Evolutionary Myth, you have it partially right. There is a materialistic philosophy that has donned Evolutionism as its banner, so to speak. You are right to reject that, as I believe many here also reject the same. Unlike you, however, many Christians here recognize the mere scientific evolution which at present provides the best physical explanation for what God’s creation reveals to us about how the history of existing life almost certainly unfolded in God’s providence. I know you reject that and lump it all in with atheism, but you are preaching falsehood when you do that. You may have convinced yourself, but you won’t convince others who are attentive to God’s works and God’s Word. You have a problem: it’s called reality. You can kick and shout against it all you want, but even if you succeeded in silencing all who disagree with you, the rocks and fossils – even the stars themselves still cry out in worship of their Creator. You can’t silence them.

54

Lynn,

You should acquaint yourself with the creationist case (because obviously you haven’t read a single creationist peer-reviewed paper or book) before you actually straw man us! We don’t say there aren’t beneficial mutations, because there obviously are, but that they practically always come at a cost. What is more important , however, is that they provide NO support for evolutionists’ faith that fish became philosophers and molecules became man, the go to you myth!

  1. From the original article: “Cardiovascular disease (CVD)1 is the number one cause of death in Western societies, and its prevalence is increasing worldwide. One of the strongest predictors of risk is the plasma concentration of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), which exhibits an inverse relationship (1, 2). Despite the strong epidemiological data relating increased plasma HDL to protection against CVD, a number of rare inheritable traits have been described which result in low plasma HDL concentrations but no increase in CVD. These inheritable traits are, in part, attributed to mutations in apolipoprotein A-I, the major protein component of HDL”

Not quite sure how this REAL science supports the evolutionary myth! In any case, it’s not all plain sailing: "“Lipid-free apolipoproteins can stimulate cholesterol efflux from cells via the recently described ABCA1 transport protein associated with cellular membranes (26-28). A number of studies, including our own, indicate that lipidfree apoA-IMilano and apoA-IParis are just as effective as apoAIWT in mediating the efflux of cellular cholesterol via the ABCA1 efflux pathway (28, 29). The only difference that we observed was at the very lowest concentration examined (i.e., 1 µg/mL) where the apoA-I cysteine variants were less effective than apoA-IWT in mediating cholesterol efflux from J774 macrophages. Previous studies using Chinese hamster ovary cells transfected with the genes for either apoA-IMilano or apoA-IWT suggested that the former had reduced capacity to recruit membrane cholesterol for nascent HDL assembly”.

It would seem - but correct me if I’m wrong - that there is a slight loss of function in the mutant apoA-IMilano.

  1. Not quite sure how this “One of the genes that governs bone density in human beings is called low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 5, or LRP5 for short. Mutations which impair the function of LRP5 are known to cause osteoporosis. But a different kind of mutation can amplify its function, causing one of the most unusual human mutations known” demonstrates the fish-to-philosopher fairy tale.

  2. Not quite sure how not getting malaria but getting anemia has ANYTHING to do with the fish-to-philosopher myth.

  3. How does a mutation providing an extra colour discriminating ability got anything to do with the fish-to-philosopher dream? Maybe, as the article stated, it made the human mutant “like birds and turtles”. That would mean it was de-evolution, wouldn’t it Lynn?!!

This is so much fun. You theistic evolutionists are taking a hiding.

55

You then quote Mark 2. And of course you’ve entirely missed the point of my quoting Exodus 31. Note Moses said that God said that He, God, took six days to make heaven and earth. Now, of course, you take issue with Moses and God here because it’s obvious that you don’t believe that Moses and God were straight shooters and meant what they said and said what they meant about propositional information whose misunderstanding and/or disobedience meant the death penalty. Not being under the Mosaic Law all this capital crime stuff is irrelevant for me as a Christian but I can’t be so maverick about the FACT that the Law said at Exodus 20 that God took a mere 6 days to do everything. That’s quite a scary epistemic for me. Be careful - you might end up in a place you really don’t want to be in.

56

Curtis,

I usually find that when pushed for titles TEers usually mention books 40+years old or ones written by TEers/atheists about creation arguments. Would you like to list a few so I can see that you are up-to-speed?

58

Phil,

Wright says diddley squat about how God used evolution.

In any case, Jesus using horrible genetic mutations and death to, somehow, bring fish to philosophers makes ZERO theological and SCIENTIFIC sense. Wright has no right to pass off piffle as knowledge. It’s unadulterated paganism!

59

You do realise your comment is not an argument…it’s just misdirection through silence. You actually don’t attack the science but prefer to issue a thought bubble which is supposed to be some sort of evidence based killer-blow to us YECS.

61

You’ve accused me of deliberate dishonest motive. Care to back that up with evidence?

62

Mervin,

I don’t have an “agenda”. As a trained philosopher and a Christian I seek Truth. To that point I am free of an agenda.

63

So, Steve, photosynthesis, biochemical optical activity etc etc have nothing to do with evolution???

So please explain how these arose without evolution.