Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
LoL! YOUR position is so vague that it can’t be tested….
No, I’m pointing out the bias that was was agreed upon to construct the method. Science was conducted long before a governing methodological principle was generally agreed upon.
But, “bias” may not be the best word to use, since it has negative connotations. Perhaps “predisposition” would be a better term. Science is, as it is currently defined and governed by principle, predisposed to filter all facts into theories and explanations that are empirically repeatable via the governing principle of (insert either epistemological predisposition here, such as “methodological naturalism”, “metaphysical materialism”, etc.) Science (as it is currently governed by principle) also filters out that which doesn’t conform to it’s principled methodology.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, or that it doesn’t produce great results. I’m just saying that the scientific method is a particular kind of filtering process that organizes facts according to certain principles. This is not the only set of principles and not the only method that humans employ; it is not the default method, process and principle, nor is it even necessarily one that reveals any truths about existence and reality.
It is, however, definitely a particular systematic filtering process that, at the minimum, organizes data and facts according to principles that are predisposed towards sorting between that which is empirically repeatable for all observers and that which is not. In addition to that, many western scientists openly employ a metaphysical materialist predisposition, which shows through quite often in what they write.
Individual scientists bring all sorts of other predispositions to the table, which the methodological processes used by the scientific community are supposed to eventually filter out. Unfortunately, IMO, metaphysical materialism is a predisposition that has worked its way into widespread acceptance in the scientific community.
Some people do see sounds. Your system is predisposed (perhaps mechanically) not to see them. Theirs is predisposed to see them.
Why would you insert such a vague non-sequitur as “supernatural” in the discussion?
Well, nice to know, but still a non sequitur.
Already done. All we see are agencies giving rise to agencies.
Already done and to refute that all you have to do is step up and demonstrate matter, energy, necessity and chance can do it.
WJM, do you have any evidence that shows that “Darwinism” is wrong?
Do you have any evidence that shows that “Darwinism” will lead to the downfall of society?
Do you have any evidence that shows that the theory of evolution is fundamentally wrong?
And will you please define “Darwinism”?
Sorry Liz but you don’t get to say what science can and cannot do.
We have evidence for agency involvement. What we don’t have is any evidence that matter, energy, necessity and chance could do it.
With materialism, where did matter come from? Where did energy come from? Where did the laws that govern our universe come from? How can materialism be tested?
Creodont,
Do YOU have any evidence that shows “Darwinism” is correct? Any evidence at all?
Do you have any evidence that shows that the “theory” of evolution is correct?
Do you even know what “evidence” is?
I’m not sure that WJM deals in “evidence”. It seems to me that he has constructed, very carefully, a means to a worldview that allows him to believe that he is doing exactly that which he pleases, whilst invariably and inevitably contributing to a general “good”
Any “evidence” that might interfere with this is fatally “biased”, in his eyes.
He claims to be supported by logic, not rhetoric. Fair enough, but I don’t remember his ever laying out the logic for examination
I wish you would make up your mind. You say that you’re not saying that a bias or predisposition to methodological naturalism or metaphysical materialism (whatever that is) is a bad thing but then you turn around and say (or at least strongly imply) that they’re a bad thing when they’re accepted or practiced by the scientific community. Why do you think science produces the “great results” you mentioned? What exactly do you think science is for? To sanction or promote whatever anyone can imagine?
What is the “default method, process and principle”? What exactly are the “truths about existence and reality” and how are they revealed?
You appear not to like the word supernatural, but you also don’t like methodological naturalism. If something isn’t natural, and it isn’t supernatural, what is it then?
And how do people “see” sounds?
Alan Miller and Creodant:
Those are good, on-point questions, deserving of a thread in and of itself. However, a couple of days ago I tried to post a new thread, and got a screen that said “you do not have the authority to edit that”, or something like that. The thread is still in the draft section, but I cannot even get it to open up. Perhaps Elizabeth can look into it.
For now, I’d like to point out that in my view, Darwinism is not the same as Evolution. This distinction is very important going forward in such debates about it.
Darwinism, as I use the term, denotes an ontological premise much like materialism, in that organic life evolved solely as the result of brute (unguided by intelligence, or unintentional) material forces and interactions according to what we call physical laws, and that everything humans are and do, ultimately, is the function output of those brute physical interactions.
According to my view of Darwinism, it says that free will, thought, ideas, morality, ethics, and human intention themselves are simply sensations produced by brute force and material interactions as they move along. If we think, feel or propose X, under Darwinism, it is only because unintentional forces happened to have resulted in those sensations, thoughts, or deeds. If we think X, and do X, these forces are producing the sensation that we chose to do X in concert with the act; the thought itself didn’t cause the act, both the thought of X and the action X are sufficiently and wholly caused by unintentional brute force & material interactions.
Darwinism is essentially an atheistic, materialistic (or physicalist) ontological view of biological life and everything regarding it. It shows up in papers and textbooks and other media when a particular scientists employs ontological characterizations of evidence or facts, and what they purportedly “mean”, in addition to the epistemological, methodology-driven data results. When Darwin called selection “natural” (in contrast to “artificial”), it was an ontological designation. There was, and still is, simply no way to empirically validate such a characterization.
When evolution is called “purposeless”, that is a Darwinism inserting its ontological, ideological predisposition. There is simply no way to empirically determine that it is “purposeless”. I have many more examples of how Darwinistic (as I have defined it) ontology has been inserted to characterize what evolutionary facts and evidence and what they “mean”.
You are tilting at windmills. No one who engages for any length of time asserts that one can rule out ID or intervention or miracles or supernatural or whatever.
What can be objectively studied is whether events or processes require such hypotheses.
Science does not “choose” to infer unnecessary agents.
WJM
Darwinism, as I use the term,
According to my view of Darwinism
Darwinistic (as I have defined it)
Since you are using your own custom definition that has no connection to the scientifically accepted one, what is your point?
You can define your parakeet to be Jennifer Love Hewett too, but at the end of the day it will still be shedding feathers.
Be careful with your levels of analysis.
Serving the purpose of someone/thing else, is not the same as having a purpose of one’s own.
I have a purpose of my own. Several. That does not mean I serve someone else’s purpose.
Just because, as a biological entity with a brain I am capable of conceiving a purpose and acting to bring that purpose about does not mean that I, as a biological entity was designed to serve the purpose of some other purposeful entity whose action in designing me was to bring that purpose about.
Straw men come in all sizes. ID advocates accuse their critics of arguing against straw men, but it’s difficult not to, since they propose no theories and no specific history. Their most vocal advocates can’t even decide if the earth is 4 billion or 6000 years old.
heh. I do, in fact 🙂 I’m a synaesthete. Bad analogy on my part.
My point is that scientific methodology is a tool that can only solve some kinds of problem. To call it biased because of that is a misuse of the term “bias” IMO. No amount of unbiasing can alter the fact that its domain is limited.
They are hellishly CONVINCING sensations, though! :0)
It is possible to flip between an understanding of the energetic/material basis of one’s experience and heritage, and ‘being that being’, without undue strain. Gynaecologists can enjoy making love to their wives, pathologists don’t ‘mentally dissect’ everyone they encounter, and ‘Darwinists’ don’t think “purposeless walking fish” every time they encounter another human! One can observe and participate at the same time.
Darwin determined that artificial selection was a kind of ‘natural’ selection. Or rather, that selection is just selection: the kind that we do and the kind that … we don’t do. It is entirely possible that certain characteristics of organisms were selectively bred by an ID – that part of the selective ‘environment’ was the mind of the assumed breeder. Darwinism isn’t strictly the ontological removal of minds from the process, but understanding how the actions of minds might – in their apparent absence – be mimicked. It’s the wrong way round, of course – human breeders mimic the ‘natural’ process, not the other way around. The ‘natural’ process may or may not have been devised by a mind, or interfered with by a mind, but it is not (so far) evident that this is the case (and a major problem – a pretty valid reason for an ‘ideological’ preference if you like – is how such a mind may be manifest or interact with the material being manipulated). Whenever minds stop interfering, the process carries on unabated.
And I’m not sure how being intelligently designed makes one more ‘purposeful’. Scientists flush their ‘creations’ down the drain when they are finished. I’m not sure an Intelligent Designer per se should be any more concerned for individual instances.
I think the frequent emphasis on ‘purposelessness’ may be in order to counter an intuitive notion, rather than to promote a worldview. Typical student howlers include giraffes stretching their necks in order to reach higher boughs, and this is a mischaracterising of the process (selective retention of the more favourable fraction of a nondirectional mutation set). And teleological language is the norm in popular science writing. The authors’ own cautions against misinterpration of the intent of that language go unheeded, and are seen instead as something more than they really are – slightly sinister, anti-religious even. That these authors are frequently anti-religious is not disputed, but I think they are simply trying to be clear.
Cool. I saw it there, and was hoping you’d post it. Is it ready, or do you need to edit it some more? It probably fell foul of a limit I imposed for editing to prevent posters from deleting entire threads with all their comments.
If it’s ready, I’ll put it up.
Well, it is certainly important to define our terms as we intend them. But I would agree they are not synonymous in most common usages.
But William, if that is how you are using the word “Darwinism” then it is up to you to make sure that people who defend “Darwinism” are using it in the same way.
It is certainly not the way I use the term. In fact, it’s not even a term I use. I use the term “Darwinian” to describe the mechanism that Darwin proposed to account for the evolution of life from simple beginnings to the range of organisms we observe alive today and in the fossil record, namely self-replication with heritable variance in reproductive success in the current environment.
Accepting the (in my view overwhelming) likelihood that that mechanism is, in fact, the mechanism by which very a population of very simple self-replicators evolved into the vast variety of well-adapted populations we observe does not necessarily entail “an atheistic, materialistic (or physicalist) ontological view of biological life and everything regarding it”.
Some people who accept the Darwinian account of evolution may indeed have an “an atheistic, materialistic (or physicalist) ontological view of biological life and everything regarding it” but view that is not a necessary corollary of accepting Darwin’s theory.
For instance, let’s suppose that evidence emerges that a universe with the properties ours has will virtually certainly result, by means of Darwinian evolution, in the evolution of intelligent carbon-based life forms who live in social groups, use some kind of linguistic communication, and develop a system of social justice and morality in which members of the population have a concept of goodness that involves treating others as they would themselves.
Would that mean that this outcome was not intended by a benign creator? Not at all, that I can see. It would just mean that the creator was pretty smart, and picked out the starting parameters in such a way that her intended population of moral beings would necessarily come about.
Or even, given the stochastic universe that right now it appears we have, that she ensured that of all possible outcomes, given those starting parameters, the one that did come about was the one she desired. In other words, she also picked the random number seed.
Or, perhaps, she was merely benign, not quite so smart, but infinitely patient, and realised that if she let created stuff at random, one of the possible configurations of stuff, given eternity, would be a universe in which moral beings evolved.
In other words, there is no scientific explanation of the universe that rules out a benign creator, or even an interactive one. At best (or worst, depending on your PoV) science can render a creator an unnecessary postulate. But it cannot, that I can see, render the creator postulate false.
Elizabeth:
Do you also have perfect pitch? A mate claims that the F chord is a shade of light brown; he certainly gets it every time. …
On pitch, another friend simply tells me the notes I need in the chord I have been struggling all day to locate: “ah-ah-ah-ah”! I hate her! My relative pitch is good, absolute is horrendous. If I could see a light brown F, I would have a much easier time learning and playing!
That’s science in a nutshell. The finding of regular processes. The slow squeezing out of animistic explanations.
It is not the elimination of purpose. It is the elimination of the need for animistic spirits to explain phenomena.
Of all people, I think Kariosfocus nailed it when he said that a background of regularity is necessary in order to see irregularity (or miracles). The problem for ID is that science has a long history of expanding and extending the realm of regularity and eliminating the need to posit interventions.
I have no idea what argument you think you are addressing above, but in an attempt to continue with my actual train of thought:
What our observation of our selves acting with purpose and intent means, under “Darwinism” as described above, is that biology is capable of acting with intent and towards purpose. To claim that biological evolution occurs “without purpose” is a patent falsehood. Humans are biological entities, and under my “Darwinism” description, such intention and purpose are posited to have been generated not by some extant commodity, but by ultimately by the brute physical processes of biological mechanisms. When humans intentionally breed, select, and genetically modify, you are seeing intentional, purposeful evolution occur.
The concept that evolution is purposeless and without intention is falsified (under “Darwinism” by the simple observational fact that we can observe organisms deliberately manipulating evolutionary outcomes for a purpose.
So, we already know ID takes place in evolution, only under the “Darwinist” ontology ID must be just another physical mechanism.
If you agree that you act with intention and purpose, you cannot say that biology doesn’t, unless you additionally posit that there is something else at work when it comes to purpose and intention. Simple logic.
No, I don’t have perfect pitch, but there is some evidence that they are related. I do hear chords in colours (and textures) but only in unequal temperaments, where I use my colour synaesthesia to check the tuning.
Mine is the most common kind (apart from the chord thing): grapheme-colour. I see words, letters and numbers in colour.
My son and father are more extreme than I am. My son has taste effects too.
Apparently not, except clearly it has nothing whatsoever to do with observation, measurement, test, etc. From JoeG’s posts, I’m guessing that “evidence” is “whatever can be force-fit to a foregone conclusion.” Outright falsehoods and fabrications fully qualify as evidence if they serve the desired purposes. Observation doesn’t qualify.
No, I’ll let you know if I have any further trouble.
I appreciate the elucidation of what you hold “Darwinism” to mean, but I’m not making a case about what you hold Darwinism to mean. If people don’t want to use the term “Darwinism”, we can just call it X-view, and my point would be that “X-view” has inserted itself into the papers, textbooks, and classrooms. Other ID advocates refer to this “X-view” as “Evo-mat” (short for evolutionary materialism) or “atheistic materialism”. However, I think the term “Darwinism” is appropriate, since Darwin is the one that famously inserted an ontological characterization into biology (natural selection), and later on, “in his name”, that trend continued and doubled down with the ontological description of variation as “random” or “chance”.
Many just use “Darwinism in pretty much the same shorthand way I have described. I tend to use the term “Darwinism” when discussing evolution and biology, but I also think that X-view has inserted itself into other disciplines, such as cosmology and physics. X-view is an ontological overlay that is relatively easy to identify.
I’d like to see a specific example of X-View inserted into a peer reviewed paper (or even in a textbook). A Title and page number would be appreciated.
The characterization of variation as random with respect to fitness is the result of observation and experimentation.
How else could you have ID advocated asserting that evolution is a series of degenerational steps from an original ideal genome? How else to explain the concept of genetic entropy?
Of course, other ID advocates assert that the trend toward complexity is the result of a front loaded algorithm. Or perhaps fine tuning. Or intervention. And, of course, there are those who assert that the intervention is so subtle that it is indistinguishable from stochastic processes.
As with the age of the earth, it is difficult to pin down the ID movement to a coherent set of facts or hypotheses.
WJM:
I’m going to make one more plea for you to read Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man.
The problem I have with discussing evolution with ID advocates is that most seem to be unaware of the history of these debates. I once mentioned this on UD and got instantly banned.
But anyone who has not read Chardin is woefully ignorant of the history of teleological evolution. I’ve been following this debate since 1956, and read Chardin’s book in 1963. None of these philosophical topics are new to me, and finding people on the internet who think they have a new critique of evolution or science is a bit annoying. I would like to call it the Artimis Fowl complex. The precocious child’s delusion of a of having discovered a glaring but never before noticed hole in the fabric of conventional wisdom.
It’s a notch above the Time Cube and the Electric Universe, but still kind of sad.
It’s not that these issues are not worth discussing, but the outsider trying to break in needs to know what hes breaking in to. He needs to know the material at least as well as the people professional the conventional views. He needs to know the history of the debate.
But since we have seen conventional textbooks accused of propounding the X-View. I’d like to see WJM write a corrective paragraph or two that he would like to see inserted into science texts.
I would like to know in some detail, what ID proponents would teach if given the chance. I’d like to see the curriculum, or at least an outline.
William J Murray,
You are comparing different layers of a system here.
When an app on a computer needs to order a list, we can say it has a purpose.
The device driver that gets the data off the hard disk however, has no “purpose” except to follow the orders of an app that does have a “purpose”.
It accepts an “order” from the app and “mechanically” carries it out.
Biology has no purpose, but people do.
Our differences lie in “who’s” purpose are we carrying out?
Show me the “common purpose for all humans”.
Who gave us that purpose?
These questions have answers, IF and only IF you are right.
Why are you and other IDists afraid to answer these questions?
Becuz we’re a bunch of backwoods hicks afraid of everything that challenges our bible-clingin’ and gun-totin’ ways!!!
There’s no way to even correct that patently X-view ideological assertion.
What is “fortuitous” supposed to mean? It has no place in an ideologically-neutral statement of evidence.
Pure X-view ontology and preaching.
Blatant X-view ideology, and also please note that it supports my definition of “Darwinism”.
I’m sure that if you’re capable of getting the point, you’ve gotten it by now. Or, I can supply more if you wish.
The point is: these textbooks don’t just teach evolution; they impose on evolution an X-view overlay and interpretation of what the evidence and facts mean in an ontological sense.
William J Murray,
I accept that answer!! 🙂
So write a paragraph or two that you think provides the correct way of describing how evolution works. How would you describe a process that might be goal directed, but which is observed to try every possible combination to the metaphorical lock?
I’m attempting to address the argument I thought you were making. But clearly I’m still not comprehending it ….
Whether “under ‘Darwinism as described above” or not, clearly biological organisms are capable of acting with intent and towards a purpose (the same thing). That is not the same as saying that “biology” is capable of acting with intent and towards purpose.
Clearly, evolution can be directed by human beings to surve a purpose. That doesn’t mean that all biological evolution is directed by a being with a purpose.
Sure, human beings can purposefully cause a population to evolve in a specific way (to have shorter legs, cuter noses, bigger yield, whatever). But that doesn’t mean that “biology” acts with intent. It means that humans do.
This argument is trivial, William. We all agree (Darwin included) that human beings can direct the course of evolution of a specific population. Nobody is claiming otherwise. What Darwin claimed, correctly, is that the evolution of a population can equally well be directed by non-purposeful factors in the environment e.g. the resources it offers or the hazards it presents.
This is a man of the palest straw!
Are you saying that we are saying that intention is “just another physical mechanism” under “Darwinist ontology”? Well, putting aside the “Darwinist ontology” bit, sure, intention is accountable in terms of physical mechanisms. But that doesn’t mean that all physical mechanisms exhibit intentional behaviour! So just because human beings, who, by virtue of certain physical mechanisms (evolved physical mechanisms, I would say) are capable of acting with intention, and that those acts can include artificial breeding of, say, agricultural crops or animals, doesn’t mean that any physical mechanism that results in adaptive evolution of a population to its environment is an intentional agent!
An intentional agent is one that conceives a goal and selects its actions on the basis of whether they are likely to serve that goal. Humans are such agents. Passive evolutionary factors like resources and threats are not. However, both can result in adaptive evolution, as a result of certain traits maximising the probability of reproduction.
Of course there is something else at work.
Perhaps I need to start a thread on intention and action!
I think what you need to account for is the fact that biologist — including many who are sympathetic to teleology — have looked for over a century for any evidence that variation is biased toward function. Not just bias that might indicate a lurking designer, but bias that might indicate “evolvability” or Lamarkian processes.
If you look at the writing of Shapiro — someone who is described as ID friendly — he finds processes producing what he considers to be higher level variations. But he does not assert that the processes producing variation have any knowledge of where they are going or what kind of variant is needed.
If there is some sort of purposeful behavior in the production of variation, why is variation so wasteful? Why are most mutations unhelpful? Why dees detailed examination of variation — as in the Lenski experiment — show that every possible point mutation is being produced?
One more thing. I would like for you to describe — given the observed facts in detailed experiments — how a teleologically driven source of variation would make any difference in the outcome of evolution.
Describe a scenario that is compatible with known facts in which a purpose biased source of variation would produce different results from a process that tries every combination.
Simple and erroneous, I think. A non-defining quality of one of a class of entities being applied to every member of that class, unless one can cook up a reason not to. ‘Tis a fallacy.
It appears you have a logical error here. In your definition of “Darwinism” earlier in the thread, you stated that free will, thought, intentions, etc. are (in the “Darwinian view”) simply sensations, or illusions, resulting from physical processes, not truly free and purposeful activity. If we entertain (for the moment) the possibility that what you call “Darwinism” is in fact the correct view, then your claim that “Darwinism” is falsified by the fact that we observe organisms “deliberately manipulating evolutionary outcomes for a purpose” is a textbook logical fallacy, specifically, begging the question. That is, to claim that it is an observational fact that humans or other biological entities act purposefully is to implicitly assume that “Darwinism” (as you describe it) is false (otherwise, the question would be left open as to whether they are acting purposefully, or simply appearing to do so). Thus, your conclusion is assumed in your premises. Since you have stated you don’t hold beliefs that contradict logical principles, I recommend you rethink your argument.
This is another textbook logical fallacy, the fallacy of composition. Your argument is essentially that i) humans act with intent and purpose, ii) humans are part of “biology”, iii) therefore “biology” acts with intent and purpose. An argument of this form is logically invalid. There is no logical necessity that a whole possess the properties that its parts possess. Also, the fact that humans can purposefully monkey with biology, by selectively breeding or engineering genes, is completely irrelevant to the question.
The point is that in the quotes I have provided, the X-view is clearly wrong. If biological entities (humans) are capable of intentionally directing evolutionary patterns towards a purpose, then what they are doing is clearly (under Darwinism) purposeful and intentional evolution by biological entities acting via biological mechanisms. The claim that evolution (a term that implies all-inclusiveness – i.e., everything that evolves) is purposeless and unintentional is patently false in the case of humans, and requires the assumption that – overall – there is and has been no other such kinds of intentional manipulation of evolutionary mechanisms towards goals by biological entities.
Unless one is going to invoke some kind of privileged status for humans, there’s no reason why other biological entities cannot also act with purpose and intention when it comes to evolutionary mechanisms towards outcomes.
Furthermore, because we know that intentional and purposeful evolution takes place, it is factually erroneous to characterize evolution overall as purposeless and without intention, which those quotes clearly do.
To sum up, those textbook authors impute their X-view ideology upon evolutionary theory, and even so do so in denial of something that is obviously true. If humans (under Darwinism) can purposefully manipulate evolutionary mechanisms, and all humans are, are are biological mechanisms, then biological mechanisms can (and does) intentionally manipulate biological mechanisms towards deliberate goals.
There is absolutely no epistemological grounds for the quotes about evolution being purposeless and undirected or unintentional, and the empirical evidence and experiential facts directly contradict such an implication at least in the case of humans.
And again, unless humans are something special or unique in biology, there’s no reason to believe that no other cases of biological entities have ever manipulated evolutionary mechanisms towards goals.
What other biological entities?
Hoo boy. I don’t think even the most ardent of … ummm … ‘X-view propagandists’ felt it necessary to point out that, when they say ‘evolution is purposeless’, they mean the 4-billion-years of evolutionary history, rather than the last 6,000 years or so when a fortuitious ape discovered it could ‘design’ organisms in the same way it could whittle a twig to a point. It is also capable of monumental gaffes – the ‘Law’ of Unintended Consequences. Just because you act with intent does not mean you achieve it.
The fact that biological entities manipulate each other evolutionarily is not at issue, incidentally. Richard Dawkins is very big on this – though, obviously, he would deny any possibility that they act with intent (a reasonable assumption in the case of, for example, fungi).
Interesting, when googling these quotes, that every one hits the same few sites – ICR, UD, ENV … one doesn’t deny that what is said is said. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that the climate in which evolutionary writing operates is one in which there is a hugely vocal religious fraternity implacably oppposed to the entire venture. It is unsurprising that these critics are addressed, directly or indirectly – those same critics then gather up the quotes and say “look – evolution is ideology!”.
Humans are special in the sense that we exist. How are your other cases of biological entities distinguishable from invisible pink unicorns?
Except I didn’t claim Darwinism (as I have defined it) was falsified. I claimed that the ideological statements issued by those that wrote those textbooks were falsified. Nor did I refer to purpose and intent as “illusionary” under Darwinism. They are assumed to exist under Darwinism as I outlined – the product as sensations of brute physical interactions. Even if we assume that “intention and purpose” are manufactured by Darwinistic forces – which Darwinists do – they are the ones stating that there is no “intention and purpose” in evolution; yet there clearly is.
It is the Darwinist definition of what “intent and purpose” as commodities are that they are employing when they say “there is no intent or purpose” in evolution, yet there clearly and factually is – by their own definition, there must be. This points to the irrational nature of the Darwinist position, to deny that biological evolution involves intent and purpose which it clearly utilizes in the case of humans, and in everything humans purposefully manipulate through breeding, selection and genetic manipulation.
If anyone is making a categorical error, it is the Darwinists that claim on the one hand that intent and purpose are effects ultimately caused by brute biological mechanisms, then on the other hand claim that they play no role in evolution as a whole. What are they saying here? That “sensations” of free will, intent, and purpose” don’t exist, and don’t factor in to the process of evolution? That would be like saying that any particular feature of biological organisms “played no role” in evolution. It’s self-contradictory. Of course purpose and intent has played, and continues to play a role in evolution, and the idea that we cannot use it as an explanation for some evolutionary results is nothing but a poorly-thought-out ideological predisposition.
Perhaps an easier way to say this is: under Darwinism, whatever “intent and purpose” are, they are simply biological features. Under Darwinism, all biological features are part of the evolutionary process. Thus, the statements like those I quoted are false; intent and purpose, whatever they are, are as much a part of the evolutionary process as any other biological feature. Saying that there is no intent and purpose in biological evolution is like saying there is no winged flight or sharp teeth in evolution. It’s an inane and obviously false thing to say.
There’s a whole lot of equivocation going on.
As far as I can tell, you are arguing that because humans can manipulate genomes, it is false to say that biological variation is “random” with respect to function.
Can you correct me if I have failed to capture your intent?
This strikes me as one of those inane “gotcha” retorts used by some folks who think that cleverness is demonstrated through equivocation, but I’ll play along and ask since you didn’t just volunteer – do you have any evidence for your “some people do see sounds” claim? Before you answer, just so we avoid a lengthy digression, here’s the definition of sound:
If you wish to quibble about the definition of sound, try answering this: what point do you think you are making in claiming some people can see sound if by “sound” you do not mean the same term in the same context as the person you are responding to?
As an example, there’s a neurological condition called synesthesia wherein some people with said condition experience colors associated with certain musical notes*. However, if this were your example, the problem would be that such folk are not (and freely admit so and are also shown neurologically so) actually seeing any sound at all, but rather have a neurological connection between some specific sounds (or letters or numbers or even tactile sensations) and specific colors. So in fact, such an example would just be insisting on a different definition of sound rather than actually demonstrating that eyes can sense sound, which they can’t.
And that’s really what your response seems to indicate. Not you didn’t claim that some peoples eyes can detect sounds – which in fact is just not possible and never has been – but rather that some people do “see sounds”, without defining what you mean by “see” (perceive, experience, view, consider, understand, etc; in fact the word “see” can be so vague as to include “assume” depending on the dictionary).
So why digress from LIzzie’s actual statement? Are there any people you are aware of who can detect sound with their eyes? If not, in what way does your response rebut Lizzie’s point?
* That is just one of several manifestations of the condition; some folks see numbers or letters in shades of gray, others taste saltiness, sweetness, or bitterness depending on different tactile feelings, etc. It appears to be based on the close use of certain neurological pathways, but there are some genetic factors involved as well.
But you do??
You’re out of your depth.
Oh, I’m certain that science can tell us a lot about theology. After all, theology is a mental and social construct, and you neuroscientists ought to be able to get to the bottom of it sooner or later.
*honest* descriptive statements? as opposed to wicked explanatory models?
According to yourself, experience is only meaningful in the context of explanatory models. So please explain to me how the belief that you are looking at a monitor is NOT dependent on an interpretation of the input from your sensory system via an explanatory model?
And I imagine he STILL looks both ways before crossing the street. Evidence is an “entirely different thing” from observation (“experiential facts”) — except when it isn’t, which is all the time. Except when his religion is threatened, of course. Then, suddenly, he just can’t imagine any possible relationship between observation and evidence. He’s completely mystified!
And he speaks of honesty. I wonder what he might mean.
No. I said that because humans are part of biological evolution, and humans use intent and purpose (however those are defined or described) in manipulating evolutionary outcomes, the categorical statement or implication that evolution operates without intent or purpose is patently false.