Darwin states that his involvement/enjoyment of poetry diminished and he regretted this - surely this qualifies as modification. As to a connection between our outlook and aesthetics, I would think this is inevitable.
There is a real truth in the adage: “The brain (and the Mind that it supports) is like a muscle in that it needs exercise to stay healthy.” That applies to each separate part–those dealing with nature (e.g. biology) and those dealing with the predominantly spiritual (Noosphere). Charles Darwin’s reputation as a great scientist (i.e. Nauralist) was not the result of his quick thought processes. On the contrary, he was exceptionally focused, doggedly seeking further evidence after most scientists would consider they had amassed enough. This is the main reason his name is associated with evolution rather than Wallace’s.
In early life Dawin considered a career in the ministry, but the Spiritual Life did not incite the focus that the study of Nature did. However, his observations while on the Beagle voyage did. That focus did not get in the way of the intense love he had for his oldest daughter, Annie. And after she died, to assuage his loss, he became even more engrossed, more narrowly focused, on his studies of nature. Whatever spiritual nature his mind had acquired in early life soon receded ‘for lack of exercise’. Regrettably, his appreciation of fine literature and music disappeared also.
My personal belief is that we give too little attention to the reality that we humans are creatures with one foot in the Biosphere and the other in the Noosphere. To lead a productive life, we must operate in both spheres but not neglect either one.
Al Leo
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True, if you simply mean his enjoyment of poetry diminished and he regretted it. It seems obvious that everyone’s tastes/enjoyment of particular arts will wax and wane over time. To say the quiet part out loud, the assumption that comes across to me is that an atheist/agnostic worldview leads to debased aesthetics, and a Christian worldview leads to greater appreciation of poetry, music, art, etc. One could make a case for this, as Francis Schaeffer did a generation ago, but I would suggest that experience proves it wrong. I know any number of people who’ve changed worldviews, many on this site, and we could ask them if it led to an appreciable difference in their tastes. (Other than a sudden taste/distaste for CCM. haha)
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This is untrue - I am saying a change would occur. Perhaps with Darwin circumstances may also have caused his changes.
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That’s what I was asking. I can agree with you on this. Tastes change over time for everyone, and when a person’s basic outlook changes, I would expect it to affect their general tastes over time. I just don’t think one should say that adopting an atheist/agnostic outlook means that a person’s appreciation of poetry or music is lost. Darwin’s experience, like any single individual experience, should not be taken as normative for everyone. Thanks for the clarification.
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Indeed. It may be described in different ways by different people, especially philosophers of science, but there it is just one way in practice by which scientist agree on the facts. Much of the confusion seems to come from demanding this method equal some kind of detailed procedure. It is certainly not that. I have learned to describe it as a set of procedural ideals, the most important of which are:
- honesty - Found in the classic statement of he scientific method in which we test an hypothesis rather than trying to prove it. For it is well known that you can find evidence for just about anything - such is the job of politicians, lawyers, and salesmen.
- objectivity - Found in the written procedures which are expected to give the same results no matter who follows them and no matter what they want or believe.
I am sure there are other ideals as well, such as the importance of observation from which hypotheses are derived. Some are also likely to point out the importance of peer review. I boil it down to these two above because I think it is these in particular which provide a reasonable expectation that other people should agree with the conclusions. To the degree which some scientist or group of scientists fails to live up to these ideals, it fails to be science and does not make a different scientific method – perhaps using such terms as “soft science,” “visualizations,” “interpretations,” or “speculation” to acknowledge its failure to attain the status of scientific fact.
Hogwash! I deny that there are multiple evolutionary theories. Thus I have demonstrated that it is not undeniable. The basics are quite the same and just because people differ somewhere in the details does change the identity of the basic theory. AND just because our knowledge of how things works increases with more scientific inquiry doesn’t change this either. It is all nice and metaphorical to describe a man as different persons because he changes in this growth and learning from infant to child to adolescent to adult, or to describe the different ways he is seen by different people, but there is only one person despite this poetry. Just as being a person encompasses such changes and viewpoints, so also does a scientific theory encompass the changes that come with more inquiry and evidence. This was Kuhn’s failure to understand the accumulative nature of hard science because nothing can change the evidence which has already been acquired.
I think many would say that nobody and nothing can tell us what we ought to do. There are however some basic premises where it stretches credulity to the breaking point if we suggest that we need not connect them with a notion of “ought,” for it would be hard to attach any meaning to “ought” if we do not. That which benefits the well being of many people without causing harm to others is something we ought to do, would be a good example and this is the kind of premise by which many see moral principles coming from the results of scientific studies.
YES! This is why creationists and other rhetoric pounders like the term “Darwinism” rather than “theory of evolution” because they want this treat like a philosophy or theology with the same tools of rhetoric and text quoting used there – means which are quite meaningless in the work of science.
Yes indeed! My usual response is to tell them good riddance to bad rubbish for it is time to rebuild their worldview on a more solid foundation. And that doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning Christianity altogether, for even if you must abandon it, you may find your children taking it up again in spite of what you have learned by incorporating what you have learned into the Christianity they come to believe in.
I agree. As a child, I loved reading, and could not understand how my dad, a surgeon, told me that his love for reading had dimmed with many hours poring over surgery texts. Now I’m a family doc, I understand better. Many of us have different talents–some are better at math and the natural sciences, others at humanities and languages. I’m not one of those who can add long lines of numbers together and get the same answer twice. Reading fantasy with my kids and mystery stories with my wife at night provides a welcome mix from science (as much as I like science).
The Victorian analogy observation is very interesting. In one way, I wonder if it resembles this poem by Wordsworth:
The World Is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
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“Scientific theories of evolution can not inform us about morality.”
Maybe so. In this case, I happen to agree.
Your above claim, however, hasn’t stopped and still doesn’t stop quite a few natural scientists from proclaiming that scientific theories of evolution can and do indeed inform us about morality. So what’s your solution to stop them from poisoning the punch bowl with their “scientific theories of moral evolution”? Those are the people pressing their ideological naturalism into natural science, philosophy and theology.
Do you see why theists rejecting ideological naturalism makes sense, @T_aquaticus, or are you instead of the view that theists should embrace ideological naturalism?
Here’s an article that will be known to some here (by an ex-Catholic who recently faced with allegations of sexual harassment, resigned from UC Irvine in 2018): https://www.pnas.org/content/107/Supplement_2/9015
A newer paper that confronts “evolutionary psychology” and raises the very interesting concept of “evolutionary rollback” The evolution of morality and its rollback - PMC
And then this, which raises a typically naturalistic view of human origins, including morality. This appears to be the view held by most “practising atheists & agnostics”, as well as by most “theistic evolutionists”, who often also self-label as, or sympathize with “theistic naturalists” (which sounds like a contradiction, except for the few professional naturalists who happen to be theists). Believing that the source of “good and evil” does not come from God but rather from the natural-only “evolution of morality”, so-called, is indeed part of the default “scientific worldview” of the vast majority of contemporary atheists and agnostics. Would you disagree?
In short, the attempt to “naturalize” humanity, including the suggestion to self-reference ourselves as “natural-only”, serves in practise to “de-divinize” humanity; to sever our connection with anything other than the natural world. You are a “natural-only” kinda guy, right @T_aquaticus; you don’t believe in the divine or supernatural?
I and most others who post here at this site (at least those who do not label as “naturalists”), are not “natural-only” people. We believe reality constitutes more than just nature-alone. This is understood by you sociologically, right?
Darwin’s statement “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind” serves to put (with certainty!) the kaibosh on ever reaching cordial relations between (doctrinally consistent) religious humanistic social scientists, on the one hand, and atheist naturalistic natural scientists, on the other. This Darwinian “degree-not-kind” idea to “reframe” humanity (the polar opposite of what the DI’s ID theory is trying to do) was indeed in hindsight a successfully vicious naturalistic hegemonic attack in the name of “Enlightenment-style” big-s Science on “what it means to be a human person”, as both traditionally and contemporarily understood in the Abrahamic monotheistic religions. To the atheist/agnostic this matters little, while to Abrahamic monotheists who have not capitulated their “science & faith” thinking to ideology, it is key, and valid reason to be careful and cautious with a naturalistic evolutionary paradigm applied to all areas of life, especially given what happened to people like Darwin.
“No, there isn’t.”
Again, I simply refer to this and stand by the sentence in the first paragraph of the paper, which reads: “most people generally hold that there is more than one science — that science is plural, not singular, that there are multiple scientific methods and not just a single, uniform scientific method.” How many ‘sciences’ are there? Gregory Sandstrom - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
Folks here can try to heap the sky and scorn on me as punishment for saying what is common knowledge among those involved in “science studies”; scientific methods are plural, not singular.
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Helpful, thanks! So, what was the name of that ideology that Darwin held? Just what is it called, since every ideology has a name. Thanks.
“By the way, when was the last time you read a poem?”
Yesterday. Is it a game?
This might help so you don’t have to always make up new theories for things that already have theories available about them. Mertonian norms - Wikipedia
“I deny that there are multiple evolutionary theories.”
Hmm, well, I guess the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Pope John Paul II must not have gotten that memo. What happens when one realizes that the proposed “mechanisms” for the process of change over time that is called “evolution” in psychology, anthropology, economics, and sociology, are different than in biological or ecological sciences? I’d call the “theories of evolution” in those human-social fields “different” evolutionary theories, on that basis. We have “choices” that bacteria and barnacles don’t. One could call the multiple processes of change the same and conflate “nature” with “society”, of course, but it would start looking more and more like “evolutionary universalism” the more one did so.
I find Pope’s essay on criticism refreshing;
Yet if we look more closely we shall find
Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind
Nature affords at least a glimmering light
The lines though touched but faintly are drawn right,
But as the slightest sketch if justly traced
Is by ill coloring but the more disgraced
So by false learning is good sense defaced
Some are bewildered in the maze of schools
And some made coxcombs nature meant but fools
In search of wit these lose their common sense
And then turn critics in their own defense
Each burns alike who can or cannot write
Or with a rival’s or an eunuch’s spite
All fools have still an itching to deride
And fain would be upon the laughing side
If Maevius scribble in Apollo’s spite
There are who judge still worse than he can write.
I almost forgot my favourite verse:
First follow nature and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same.
Unerring nature still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged and universal light,
Life force and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source and end and test of art
Art from that fund each just supply provides,
Works without show and without pomp presides
In some fair body thus the informing soul
With spirits feeds, with vigor fills the whole,
Each motion guides and every nerve sustains,
Itself unseen, but in the effects remains.
Some, to whom Heaven in wit has been profuse,
Want as much more, to turn it to its use;
For wit and judgment often are at strife,
Though meant each other’s aid, like man and wife.
'Tis more to guide, than spur the muse’s steed,
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed,
The winged courser, like a generous horse,
Shows most true mettle when you check his course.
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This is odd. The difference between a child and an adult is profound, so why make this different appear trivial? The difference between Darwin’s variety and natural selection semantics, with the current understanding of biology is also profound. To regard this as hogwash is odd indeed.
“Whence did the wond’rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?”
W.M. Massey (1763)
Quoted in McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage (1967)
You seem to have missed the point entirely unless you are trying to argue that the child and the adult are two completely different people. Shall we prosecute the adult for cannibalism having killed and eaten the child? Insanity. The point is that they are the same person despite the vast differences. In same way, it is the very nature of scientific theories that they also grow and change according to any new evidence which comes to light. It is growth not revolution because all the evidence we had before is still there as it was before. Indeed, just as that growth and change to the adult only happens because of the child, so also do we only have the new evidence because the theory enables it to be revealed.
Then you realize that the use of the word “evolution” in those cases is more of a metaphor, hijacking, or indulging in a TOE fallacy. You might prefer your beloved extension terminology over those to say they are parts of the same extension of evolution to human development.
No, I do not think so. Just because I refute the idea that animals have no morality, does not mean that I support this idea of naturalism that human morality simply evolved. And just because I denounce the moral argument for the existence of God, doesn’t mean I refute the idea that human morality has a divine origin. BUT can anybody prove such a thing? Certainly not.
rejected
P.S. TOE fallacy – what do you know… looks like I just made that one up so I had better define it. This is when a theory is over extended to things to which it does not apply as if the original theory were some kind of theory of everything.
The point of this discussion is the DIFFERENC(S) put forward under the term Darwinian biological evolution.
Most people are wrong. As in any Quixotic contrarian attempt to assert unscientifically that morality is unnatural even if Love pre-empts all.
I want to believe that infinite eternity exists in Love and am finding more reasons, feelings for doing so, but not by denying rationality, the rational fact that morality emerges in brains genetically pre-wired for experience. Nothing in any aspect of morality advanced here yet, overturns or pre-empts or filters the findings of science in any field.
You are definitely channelling Francis Schaeffer; as I’ve said before, I abandoned his complete works after the first page: Nothing in your patronizing belittling denigration of science, assuming some spurious superior moralizing aesthetic on no rational basis whatsoever, is necessary for believing Love encompasses creation. If this site stands for anything at all, it is that there is no conflict whatsoever between staring rationality in the face and believing Love. Because there isn’t. You have utterly, fallaciously failed to show that the evolution of morality negates Love.
No proof is necessary. As in atheists not having to prove that God does not exist. Science does not have to prove that morality evolved. All it has to do, which it is now beginning to address, is show how it evolved. That it evolved is a rational fact. Believing in God doesn’t affect that in the slightest, especially as nobody here [h]as adduced any morality that isn’t natural, because they cannot.
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more of a metaphor, hijacking, or indulging in a TOE fallacy.
Well, yeah, with the perhaps obvious caveat that: "All words, in every language, are metaphors.” There are sadly people who simply cannot bring themselves to believe in “a TOE fallacy”. I’m not one of those people, and thus share the concern in this regard with you.
“TOE fallacy – what do you know… looks like I just made that one up so I had better define it. This is when a theory is over extended to things to which it does not apply as if the original theory were some kind of theory of everything.”
Yes, I’d say that works well. Mary Midgley is an excellent read on this topic from a philosophical perspective. What are the limits of “evolutionary” thinking and when can “evolutionary” thinking become “over-extended”? I believe this question gets at what’s “between the lines” in Darwin’s regret, which maybe he didn’t really express fully or coherently himself in his autobiography (the following paragraph changes directions, after speaking about his approach to writing).
“You might prefer your beloved extension terminology over those to say they are parts of the same extension of evolution to human development.”
Correct. Beloved or not by most people, “extension” (from which “process” begins) plus “human development” is more dynamic, suitable, accurate, precise, (not merely secular) humanistic, and inclusive language than “evolution”, which by now is carrying suitcases of ideological “baggage", including racism, colonialism, and civilizational discrimination, at least in the British variety of the 18th & 19th centuries. The late 19th, early 20th century USAmerican version of “evolution” as a naturalizing of human culture into a “conflict” and “exploitation” model of (business) relationships doesn’t fair much better, wouldn’t you say?
With intention and not all that much effort, people can easily develop a habit of either avoiding or excluding “evolutionary” language when speaking about human persons and the artifacts of human making in the social sciences and humanities entirely. I can report that this linguistic shift can actually happen because I’ve done it. Indeed, teleological language is available to serve studies of purposeful change-over-time, allowing ateleological “evolutionary” thinking to retire from where it doesn’t belong: in cultural studies of humankind where choice, preference and aim predominate.
This is the language that Sy Garte has been trying in recent years to reach, but he hasn’t found a way to get there yet. Here is that language now available at BioLogos too. It takes the form of first comparing and contrasting the notions of “evolution” and “extension”, should people here wish to “try it on” and see if it fits. The teleological difference when speaking about human persons and the artifacts of our making and use seems to indicate what everyone realizes, but somehow seems to have a difficult time saying and articulating: there is a limit, there are limits to “evolutionary” thinking in natural sciences, such that it can be held short of falling into ideological evolutionism that swallows peoples’ conceptions of humanity.
Helping stop the over-extension of evolutionary theories outside of biology, as Sy Garte says is needed, could even become a BioLogos past-time, who knows? 
“nobody here [h]as adduced any morality that isn’t natural, because they cannot.”
That statement comes the closest so far in this thread to mirroring what I believe was the essence of Darwin’s regret. He committed the naturalization of morality. Embracing that would require a kind of “naturalist’s Christianity”, totally devoid of doctrine, dogma, and sacrament.
Morality is “natural”, and “good and evil” have nothing to do with God, is that the conclusion? That’s what the subfield of “evolutionary religious studies” teaches. It’s the naturalist’s god on display with atheists in the “religious studies” departments (kinda tragically ironic, no?). This is what you meant, is it?
Science can’t tell us which outcomes are preferred. Science can only tell us what the outcomes of our actions will be. For example, science can tell us how to build a nuclear bomb, but it can’t tell us if we should actually build them or use them.
Morality is a set of ideas of how we want the world to be. Science can tell us how to reach those goals, but it can’t tell us what those goals should be in the first place.
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