Ah, Leibniz eh? How does God - a thing - help?
He’d be wrong if he did as God is immutable from eternity.
Hi Klax,
Just so I don’t misunderstand you. Are you saying that believing that abiogenesis and evolution are the means that God used to create life and living things, is the only rational alternative?
To say that cause must be more complex than effect is just plain dumber. Order does not necessitate meaning and the hierarchy of being is toward greater as well as cumulative complexity. A frog is more complex than a star, as Christian Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees said. A frog is stardust and no less dependent on the natural, independent, immutable, autonomous, self tuning laws of physics. A star knows little of chemistry and nothing of biology.
Ay up Marc, God or no, the only rational conclusion is that abiogenesis and evolution are the only means to create life and living things. If God exists then they are in His provision as the ground of all infinite, eternal physical and transcendent being that would not otherwise exist. Null would. There is no choice in how the physical can exist, no need for any further intervention; God instantiates the prevenient laws of physics. If He doesn’t exist, then the cause of the only material present, now, is the immediate material past. Forever.
It isn’t an “answer” of course (how could anything at all be?) - but I think the classic Christian conception of God as not just a prime mover or some initial cause of everything, but rather as the ‘ground of all being’ is the only ‘answer’ to be had. On this conception, there is no prior to God - no cause. Because if there were, then that (whatever it was) would be more eternal or more ‘grounding’ than God - and it would be God then. So it’s more of a defining thing than an explanation. Those who want to avoid it by appealing to an infinite regression still fail to avoid the question of “where did the infinite regression come from?” So nobody really escapes the need for some primary and unexplainable source of all. But the main error that is so hard to avoid is to think of God as still some being within all this order (even if the first one). Our minds can hardly help but “go there” (or “stay here”, rather) because it’s where we live. Hence the incarnation.
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Er, infinity and beyond? Eternity. There is no beginning of beginnings God or no God.
The cosmos could not care less about our desires.
Well said. I’ve never understood the critique of Christianity in particular, because we claim there is “something” self-existent, that itself requires no explanation, it is itself the cause of all other things. Atheists believe essentially the same thing. they call their “unmoved mover,” their uncreated necessary thing, their first cause “matter” (or matter/energy)… But everyone posits some uncreated first thing, that “just had” the properties it has, and by definition of it being uncreated, there simply is no explanation for it.
Even if that “first thing” is the dynamic, eternal, infinite regress without a discreet beginning or final ground (turtles all the way down), that process is then the unexplained, inexplicable ground from which all things came, itself without a cause or explanation.
So i agree with @Marty that God doesn’t “answer” the question of existence, of first thing. why there is anything… God, matter, an infinite regress of contingent causes, is and probably will always be a mystery. Everyone who gives the question a moments thought will realize that there is something that exists in and of itself. Critiquing one philosophy for positing an eternal, unpaused first cause, when every philosophy must posit some such entity or process, is a bit odd to me.
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Yes, I agree. Whenever I’m feeling like my head is going to explode thinking about God, I have to remind myself that my head is going to eventually explode with any alternative. So the only question we can really wrestle with is whether the properties of this universe and of humans indicate a prior intentionality and intelligence.
Exactly. The issue is utterly out of our league and everyone has to face it.
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Well that’s half way Marty!
But your only question was already answered from the Enlightenment despite your desire otherwise.
The only question is how should we behave.
It’s not odd at all. It’s an unnecessary, superfluous, imparsimonious first cause when there already is one.
And who’s your ‘significant’ ‘professor’ again?
May I offer an alternative. The question was answered in Genesis 1v1: In the beginning God
Agreed
But as most of you will be aware there are other differences:
- Insertions & deletions ~ 3.2% (Nature 437:69-87, 2005)
- Segmental duplications ~ 2.7% (Nature 437:88-93, 2005)
- Genome length ~ 7% (Human: 3.27Gb, chimp: 3.05Gb)
- Gene Complement ~ 6% (PLoS One 2006)
If one sums all these then the difference is nearly 20%, but it would probably be a mistake just to add them together. Even so it seems that the real difference is much more than the often quoted figure of 1 or 2%, and that is ignoring even larger differences in the Y chromosome (30%).
So the question from a Darwin skeptic might be, could this happen by the process of evolution?
I would take this evidence to be consistent with discontinuity (i.e. no common ancestor) and consistent with separate creation of chimps and humans.
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This makes sense to me from a software developer perspective. If two engineers independently created two different word processors from scratch, the finished word processors will share many common design patterns, data structures and algorirhms. However, that would not imply one word processor was generated by tweaking the code base of the other.
Yes, the definition of random variation in evolution is difficult to pin down. What I’ve been able to gather is randomness means variations occur without any correlation to the fitness function. This is what Dawkins says in TBW, that random variation has no foresight. He contrasts the Darwinian view with ‘mutationists’ who believe there is something that makes mutations target whatever will make the animal fitter.
Dawkins’ view I think is derived from the ‘central dogma’ that the flow of information from DNA > RNA > protein cannot be reversed.
Looks like Once Upon A Time to me. Rationally there is no beginning of beginnings, no end of beginnings.
I agree with Daniel that it is odd. And I have no idea what you are trying to say with that second sentence.
Why are you asking about someone who is not on the thread? Just stick with the issues.
Because someone on this thread started the this thread talking about a third rate professor at some fourth rate university which made someone skeptikal of Darwin.
So it couldn’t be more of an issue.
And it’s even odder when you have a first cause to propose a first cause of the first cause.
To take the opposite view but using your example to support it, if you compare MS Word with the old MS Works word processor, one has a much smaller program, fewer features, and so forth, but it is obvious they came from the same source, sharing a common format. While not a programmer, I suspect that similarity goes down to the code level. They probably even share some of the same errors and coding problems, perhaps analogous to ERV scars and non- functioning genes like that for vitamin C production in humans and chimps.
You can argue that similar body plans require similar genes in animals with independent creation, but it is hard to see why they would have the same scars without common descent.
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Well, this is a Christian web site, so someone turning to scripture is not surprising. And even if we’re going to stick to philosophy, it is an option for discussion. What is surprising is that until just recently, no scientist agreed with Gen 1:1 that there was a beginning and Genesis has been saying so for about three millenia.
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