Dr. Joshua Swamidass, a theistic evolutionist, joined us recently at TSZ. I think the following comment of his will lead to some interesting and contentious discussion and is worthy of its own thread:
Third, if we drop “Darwinian” to just refer to the current modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, you are right that the scientific account does not find any evidence of direction or planning. I agree with you here and do not dispute this.
So the question becomes, really, is it possible that God could have created a process (like evolution) with a purposeful intent that science could not detect? I think the answer here is obvious. Of course He could. In fact, I would say, unless He wanted us to discern His purpose, we could not.
In my view, then, evolution has a purpose in creating us. Science itself cannot uncover its purpose. I find that out by other means.
phoodoo,
No. Now run along and play with Mung.
These are great questions. And I’m not going to attempt to fully answer them. That would take to long. I’ll just make a few comments. Maybe we can pick up the conversation later in more details.
1. Only one goal (not all goals) of evolution is to create humans. There are certainly other goals, and I do not not claim to know all or even most of them. I would say that this is very consistent with my understanding of a Christian God that frequently uses natural processes to do His work. It is also means that His purpose in creation would not be to disprove evolution (as perhaps Walter ReMine might argue). I’m fine with that. Of course others might speculate on other reasons. In particular, I like what my Lutheran Friend writes…http://peacefulscience.org/lutherans-artistic-tree/
Of note, I would say that because God clearly reveals Himself in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, He is no reason to reveal Himself elsewhere. Not only would science still miss it (because of MN), but that would distract from His intended focus on Jesus.
2. I do not think that God when to great lengths to hide Himself in nature, rather this is not where He choses to clearly reveal Himself. His scientific “hiddenness” is just the logical consequences of working through a natural process over a long period of time in the distant past. Moreover, even if the evidence for God in nature was clear, obvious, and strong, science would rule that hypothesis out without ever considering it (because of methodological naturalism). Now, I do think that we experience God’s transcendence in nature, and this point us to Him, but this is not scientific proof. So He does reveal Himself, but not in the way a scientist might insist He does.
3. I guess do not think that nature tells us there is no God. Nothing in nature speaks against him, and certainly a lot seems to suggest him. Most importantly, I think science tells us nothing about this, because it doesn’t ask the question. Disbelieve in God if you must, but it seems circular (because of methodological naturalism) to be a non-theist because of what science tells us about nature.
4. Much ink has been spilt on the problem of suffering. I will not attempt to explain my take here except to say that this is not a problem unique to evolution, and there are logical solutions that philosophers find compelling. From an evolutionary point of view, this publically avaible book chapter 9 might be helpful: http://potiphar.jongarvey.co.uk/gods-good-earth-pdf-book/. I would also point to the fact that suffering is at the core of the Christian faith. We believe that the purpose of life is not avoidance of suffering, but to willfully enter into suffering for the benefit of others.
Any how, that is enough for now. These are good questions, and I certainly do not pretend to have answered them fully. But hopefully that gives you a thumbnail sketch of how I would work out a more complete answer.
Unfortunately, ID is. And if Trump nominates the next two or three Supreme Court justices, a fancy legal argument very well may trump science.
I have recently been reading Stephen Goulds thing call structures of evolutionary theory etc.
its hilarious and sad to see how he documents the destruction of evolution.
His PE just ruins everything Darwin said and its a absurd defence of evolution based on geology deposition events.
I could go on and on.
There is NO BIOLOGICAL SCIENTIFIC evidence for evolution. No intelligent thoughtful person, looking over the claims, should conclude evolutionism is true or almost true or has a chance to be true.
its not if gOD used evolution.
God told how he created things In the bible.
its human error etc that says evolution created biology.
That is alright. Please remember that feeling when you blanketly challenge the scientific credibility of those you disagree with.
peace
swamidass,
I too apologize if I have crossed a line. My intent was just to cause you to think about how your attacks a little bit.
As phoodoo has pointed out I really can’t see much difference in our positions at all except your strange claim that science can detect intention in animals but not in God. Or your claim that intention can’t be detected in evolution but can be in physics or cosmology
To me that seems like incoherent nonsense.
IMO
Either “science” can’t detect intention at all and therefore needs a tweak or “science” can in principle detect intention. Period
peace
I’d need a lot better evidence than a desire for a story I like to be true to agree to that, certainly. First, you’d need to demonstrate that teleology is an ineliminable factor of the discrepancies you think you’re finding.. That isn’t accomplished by showing that there are still things we don’t understand about evolutionary mechanisms—if, indeed, you can even show that.
You are simply blinded by your desire for your religious beliefs to have scientific support, phoodoo. Discussing this stuff with you is like trying to get a heroin addict to talk sensibly about the deranging effects of his habit.
It’s a good thing for you that hypocrisy isn’t physically painful.
Will this finally be the thread where you explain exactly what you mean when you claim “truth exists”?
Oho!
I hope you don’t mind if I also give some short answers to these interesting questions. (The answers I give are just my opinion, I don’t ask anyone to take them as facts.)
Appearances can be deceptive. A living organism is always in balance between constructive and destructive forces. There is a distinction to be made between mutations caused by external influences and changes to the genome which come from within the organism. Generally, it is notoriously dificult to judge whether or not a change is going to benefit the organism. Eyes develop in a growing foetus. If only its present prenatal condition is taken into account then the possession of eyes has no influence on the fitness of the fetus. These organs will only come into their own in the future.
What I am saying is don’t prejudge all changes as random with respect to fitness and as accidental.
The natural world reveals an evolution of consciousness. And if scientists agree that nature reveals an evolution of consciousness then this evolution does not have to stop at human consciousness. Life appears to be evolving towards higher consciousness. We cannot judge reality by what is hidden from human consciousness at this moment in time. Would we judge in the same way reality imagined from the perspective of the consciousness of a Cambrian trilobite.
That all depends on how one interprets the bible and its various parts.
And not everyone is alike in their receptivity to nature. A couple of quotes from Goethe.
and
Goethe maintained that you cannot force Nature to give up her secrets. His “gentle empiricism” was the method he used in his studies.
How do you interpret suffering. Can you say that spiders suffer in the same or similar ways to humans? What if suffering is the only way to progress?
Thomas, à Kempis
CharlieM,
Their whole suffering argument goes all haywire as soon as you ask them how much suffering they are willing to tolerate in their ideal world.
They can give no coherent answer to this.
The difference is that Swamidass has scientific credibility.
You just don’t like when the truth is stated about you.
Glen Davidson
Have you spent much time reading the Bible or talking to Christians. This is certainly false. Many report exactly this experience that you say never happens.
This doesn’t mean your whole argument is faulty. But this part is certainly false.
This kneejerk denial is certainly false (let’s call it “Christian honesty”). There are tens of thousands of Christian sects, each of whom disagrees with all the others about some theological point, because (presumably the SAME) god has told them so in their sincere prayers. Even members of the same Christian church disagree, often violently, and there can be no compromise because their opinion comes straight from their version of god, and must be infallible.
So while I understand that children blame invisible playmates for their accidents, I don’t regard it as “surely false” to DOUBT this excuse, simply because the kids SAY so.
I asked my devout neighbors why they opposed same sex marriage. Don’t they believe equal rights matter? And they piously assured me that THEY believe in equal rights, but their GOD told them, in their sincere prayers, that queers are sinful. It’s not THEIR opinion, see? And you swallow this?
Sorry, your denial might convince a similarly self-deluded Christian, but you’ll have to do better outside that echo chamber.
How can a process like evolution, dominated by random genetic drift, have the purpose of creating anything in particular? I understand that science can’t detect purposefulness, but it seems to me that some purposes can be ruled out. And if one of the purposes was to create humans as the peak of evolution, does that mean that evolution must have come to a grinding halt at the human lineage?
Is it?
That’s what I hear from most experts, Prof. Swamidass included
That (the idea that evolution is dominted by random genetic drift) does not see right. I’m more inclined to see it as dominated by niche change.
Well, I’m certainly no expert; and I could just be having a “personal incredulity” moment in failing to see how drift contributes to evolutionary change. In a sense that, say in humans, 90% or so of the genome is not under selective pressure and can and does drift, yes it’s a significant process. But how is it a “contribution”, I wonder.
And if I were a theistic evolutionist, I would (though I find hypothetical questions impossible to consider seriously), I imagine, suggest that God forms the world of niches and niches form the diversity of life.
Well, I don’t think it matters if drift is or isn’t evolution’s main mechanism of change, provided that the random component makes it virtually impossible to have the same outcome in a hypothetical “replay the tape of life” as Gould put it. For all I know the scientific consensus is that we would get a completely different result every time, and if that’s the case it seems to me that such a process couldn’t have been created with the purpose of creating anything in particular, and that this conclusion is firmly grounded on purely scientific facts. Of course that doesn’t mean evolution couldn’t have an undetectable purpose, but humans can’t be it
I think you (and Gould) are right to say that it is not possible to “replay the tape” as I don’t think we live in a deterministic universe such that a sufficiently detailed snapshot of all events in the present records the complete past or predicts the future.
Not sure that is not a bit of an over-reach. Maybe the purpose is hidden in the randomness. How can we tell? I don’t think scientific facts empower us to either reject or accept deities; we can either believe in them or reject them. Of course, if someone wants to claim specific powers for some deity, we can examine those entailments.
*puts on theist hat* Why not?
I’m already here on behalf of other parties (who prefer to remain anonymous), myself. But nobody else gets to take the credit! X>{
Random processes produce random results. Picking a random process to produce a particular, almost impossibly improbable result, makes no sense to me whatsoever.
I would say no.
How can something be empirically detectable when it is not an inherent property of the thing you are looking at? Intent only exists in the mind of the doer or designer, not in the thing he does or designs.
While it cannot be detected, it can be inferred, but only by matching with patterns of things that you know were designed. For living organisms, in the case of intelligent design creationism, we do not have this kind of cultural knowledge to support such an inference.
Fair Witness,
Welcome to TSZ, Fair Witness.
*Still wearing theist hat* but say if though God is omnipotent, his creation has to behave as ordained in the properties of that universe. Once you create randomness, you can’t go back. Hence the multiverse and our universe, when the random result was the right result.
Nope, makes no sense! Perhaps I should let theists speak for themselves 🙂
IMO random genetic drift leads nowhere and niches are evolutionary dead ends, side branches off the main line of evolution.
dazz,
It gets back to the issue of God’s knowledge.
If God timelessly knows the trajectory of every potential world (including any random events that occur in it), he can choose to instantiate a world that leads to a desired outcome.
Noted. Though your opinion is wrong. Drift produces variations. Niche environments can speed the fixation of multiple traits which together can allow that subpopulation to radiate outward again.
Doesn’t that assume determinism? If he can set the initial conditions so that this is the only possible outcome, then there’s no actual randomness
Welcome, Argon!
Can you give examples of this?
Interesting
Is there no other way even in principle to infer intent?
Often I infer my wife’s intent just by the look on her face.
peace
Well, you had better actually talk to her, or else you are likely to get it wrong.
If you are being funny, ha ha.
My assumption in my previous post was that we were talking about inferring intent when we did not have access to, and ways of communicating with the intender. If you can communicate with the intender, you do not have to rely solely on inferences.
But it helps if the person you are communicating with speaks plainly and does not engage in equivocating and moving of goalposts.
Do you think we don’t have access to and ways of communicating with God?
What else can we rely on in that case?
Listen I’m not being funny.
I’m looking for a method and what the boundaries are for detecting intent.
peace
Unrepentant adaptationalist seconds this request! 🙂
Do you think Neale Donald Walsch made up his “conversations” with God or did they really happen as he described?
I don’t know him but I would say I generally take a skeptical stand when anyone claims to have had a conversation with God.
A quick search cast doubts on the idea that it was an actual conversation
quote:
He says his books are not channelled – although Walsch insists that he could hear God talking to him, as if God stood right beside Walsch – but rather that they are inspired by God and that they can help a person relate to God from a modern perspective.
end quote:
from here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neale_Donald_Walsch
Do you think that verbal conversation is the only way to communicate?
peace
fifth,
I generally take a skeptical stand when anyone claims to be receiving revelations from God.
Particularly when he cannot explain how it is possible to tell the difference between a genuine revelation and an imaginary one.
Do you take a generally skeptical stand when anyone claims that another human has revealed something to them?
peace
It’s a good thing that situation does not apply to me.
peace
here is an interesting “first step” attempt at detecting intent empirically
http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-detect-emotions-remotely-with-wireless-signals
peace
keiths:
fifth:
It doesn’t? Do explain how you can tell the difference, then.
Depends who is doing the communicating. If we are talking about gods, then there is that immaterial/material interface to cross. Walsch claims (in chapter 1 of the first volume) he hears/heard God’s voice “coming into his mind” and then wrote it down.
Interesting question — How do we accurately infer intent from something that we observe in the world, when we cannot talk to the intender?
When you use the word “detect”, I assume you just want to know if some intent existed, regardless of the details of what that intent was.
In other words, you just want to know that some mind was involved in the origin of something.
Since both human minds and natural processes originate both simple and complex things all the time, complexity is not a reliable indicator of intent.
As far as I know, it all comes down to pattern matching. Does phenomenon X look a lot like something that I know, from experience, was intended?
Is that car sitting in the desert the result of intent? It looks a lot like other cars I have seen, and I have seen video of similar things being assembled in factories. So I feel reasonably confident in inferring intent.
Does that komodo dragon look like anything that I know was built by someone? Not so much.
If anyone thinks this is too much off-topic, please speak up.
Ever hear of the incarnation?
It sounds like he is a little fuzzy about where the content of his writings are coming from
quote:
Walsch explained that he found the anecdote in old computer files from years earlier, saw his son’s name in the copy, and was fully convinced that the history had really happened to him and that he had just forgotten it, but “remembered” when he saw the anecdote in his file. He cited it as a classic case of false memory and said that he had been repeating the anecdote as his own in many speeches over the years, adding that he was “chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me”
end quote:
peace
Is this the only possible way to infer intent. Even in principle?
Is it even possible however unlikely that there might be another way?
peace
exactly!!! That seems to be something worth exploring don’t you think?
peace
keiths:
dazz:
It isn’t the only possible outcome. All of the other possibilities are live possibilities, but God timelessly knows which one will actually obtain. Events can be truly random even if God timelessly knows their outcomes.
The key is to recognize that all of time is visible to a timeless God, including events that are in our future. To say that God timelessly knows the outcome of an event that is in our future does not mean that he knows it before it happens. He’s outside of time, so “before” and “after” don’t apply to him.