11 Responses to “God, Evolution, and Time”

1. WedgeHead Says:
   August 7th, 2007 at 10:34 am

   Please don't take this to mean that I'm throwing in with ID theorists. The phrase "intelligent design" would be an excellent description of a robust system of thought like that of Teilhard de Chardin (or Sarah Coakley), but as it stands the term describes a mess of bad science and bad theology.

   I see, the difference between Sarah Coakley and Mike Gene is Sarah has good science and good theology.:smile:

   My point is rather that the idea that both ID theorists and scientific atheists want to sell us"”that God's existence can be either proved or disproved based solely on the evidence of biology"”share a fatal flaw.

   Do some ID theorists believe the existence of God can be proved by biology? Does the A Team think God can be disproved?

Comment by WedgeHead — August 7, 2007 @ 10:34 am

2. Aagcobb Says:
   August 7th, 2007 at 4:40 pm

   Having read Coakley's essay, I would say my views are very similar to hers.

Comment by Aagcobb — August 7, 2007 @ 4:40 pm

3. Pez Says:
   August 7th, 2007 at 5:19 pm

   So are mine - although I think she relies overly much on RM and NS just as the scientific community is distancing itself from the explanatory resilience of these.
   If she didn't make the following metaphysical (as well as logical) error against ID I'd be even more solidly with her:

   Intelligent Design, or ID, in inverse contrast, tends to assume a God who only occasionally bestirs himself to action; even if this were not already unacceptable theistically, its "solutions" prove deeply problematic and vulnerable scientifically as well.

   As critics never tire of making us repeat, the fact that our design-detection techniques are limited to particular cases does not mean that the designer's activities were likewise limited.
   This is the same old confusion of epistemology and ontology.

Comment by Pez — August 7, 2007 @ 5:19 pm

4. rachelrachel Says:
   August 7th, 2007 at 6:52 pm

   Wedgehead,

   Does the A Team think God can be disproved?

   From The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, p. 158 in my Houghton Mifflin hardcover edition:

   If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion — the God Hypothesis — is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist.

   If you read the chapter, you see that by "hypothesis" he really does mean a scientific hypothesis, one that can be falsified with the methods of science. The chapter is filled with all kinds of scientific-sounding verbiage, and apparently there are people who buy into this.

   More explicit is the title of a book by Victor Stenger, to which Dr. Dawkins gives his endorsement: God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist . The book also sports a laudatory blurb by Sam Harris.

   So, yes, members of the A-Team do believe — or want you to believe that they believe — that science has disproved the existence of God.

Comment by rachelrachel — August 7, 2007 @ 6:52 pm

5. stunney Says:
   August 8th, 2007 at 12:49 am

   Coakley writes:

   The definition of God as eternal requires creation to occur outside of time rather than at its beginning, and thus the creation of the universe and its moment-to-moment sustaining are the same thing.

   I posted a number of thoughts relevant to the issue of God and time earlier today on a different thread.

   I agree with Coakley that viewing God as a temporal agent among other temporal agents is conceptually unsound. However, I'm much less sure what substantive conclusion should be drawn from this as regards making ID inferences.

   A standard, if tired, worn, and false claim made by atheists is that "there is no evidence for the existence of God". If that were literally true, it would be really weird that it was, given the fact that billions of sane people for millenia have been theists of one sort or another. Compare that with the number of people who've had a lifelong belief that there are brothels on the Moon (which is why it's a cheesy place). In other words, the widespread existence of a belief that p is to a large degree a function of the evidence that people think they have for p. As Chesterton put it, people have reasons for belief even if they can't always give you their reasons.

   What the atheist means, of course, is simply that there is nothing which they would count as evidence for the existence of God. But people have plenty of evidence for God's existence all the same. There are lots of phenomena, including publicly available phenomena, which are decent reasons for holding that the universe has a theistic creator. The trouble with Coakley's argument is that it does not face squarely the fact that lots of individual tokens and types of phenomena are much more indicative of the conclusion that we live in a theistic creation than are other phenomena. People don't reason their way to a theistic conclusion by surveying in one giant sweep all of our reality and then exclaiming, "Aha! God exists." It may be true, indeed I think it is true, that God's is an eternal, infinite omnipresence, and not a particular phenomenon. But surely the existence of life, rational minds, moral value, and religious experience is more a signifier of God as far as we're concerned than, say, the existence of McDonald's?

   There is a danger in letting naturalism reign by default. Roughly, this is the mistake that allows naturalism to declare:

   When it comes to public knowledge of what the world is like and explaining how it got that way, science is the only game in town. All the other games are fine pastimes, and can be played in private.

   Huw Price, a moderate naturalist, explains this idea:

   Like coastal cities in the third millennium, important areas of human discourse seem threatened by the rise of modern science. The problem isn't new, of course, or wholly unwelcome. The tide of naturalism has been rising since the seventeenth century, and the rise owes more to clarity than to pollution in the intellectual atmosphere. All the same, the regions under threat are some of the most central in human life–the four Ms, for example: Morality, Modality, Meaning and the Mental. Some of the key issues in contemporary metaphysics concern the place and fate of such concepts in a naturalistic world view.[1]

   True, some philosophers hold that at least some of these topics are not worth saving, and that the tide of science does us a favour by sweeping them away. Others hold that they do not need saving, being already out of reach of the waters of science–no part of scientific landscape, in effect, but no less respectable for that. To many contemporary philosophers, however, neither view seems appealing. The first–`eliminativism'–seems to underestimate the value of what would be lost. The second–`nonnaturalism'–sometimes seems to rely on a Canute-like faith in the limits of science, and to offer no satisfactory account of how there could be a region of the world both out of reach of science, and yet of relevance in human life.[2] While affirming the vulnerability of the M-concepts, then, most philosophical naturalists look for some sort of rescue strategy–some legitimate place for the M-concepts, within a naturalistic framework.

   In my view, however, contemporary naturalists have overlooked the most promising rescue strategy. The two main strategies currently on offer are noncognitivism and reductionism. I want to argue that the contemporary debate is incomplete, at the very least, in failing to recognise a third approach. As I'll explain, this third strategy rests on two main premises, each of which, while controversial, is of some plausibility in its own terms. I won't try to defend these premises in any detail here: I simply want to show that if both are granted, there is an attractive alternative to noncognitivism and reductionism.

   The new approach has much in common with noncognitivism, however, so I'll begin below with noncognitivism, and explain how the new strategy differs. I'll then contrast it briefly to Frank Jackson's reductionist program. I'll also show that although it is naturalist in spirit, the new strategy offers an olive branch to nonnaturalists. In effect, it explains in the naturalists' own terms how topics such as morality and meaning might remain high and dry, untouched and unthreatened by the rise of the scientific tide–it offers the benefits of nonnaturalism, without the metaphysical down side…..

   …..Won't any view which focuses on the role of (apparently) descriptive language in different areas of discourse want to say that science is special, or primary, in some way? Indeed, what would commitment to naturalism amount to, within this picture, if not something like this? And it is easy to take this as the thought that science (or perhaps some subset of it, such as its observational part) involves genuine descriptions, in contrast to the quasi-description of the other discourses. If we say this, we are committed to a form of noncognitivism, at the expense of functional pluralism. So a functional pluralist needs to resist this move, and yet to deal with the intuition that there is something primary about science.

   In this post I trace the philosophical roots of this kind of division of discourse into substantive fact-describing discourse, which is deemed the sole preserve of science, and non-substantive, non-fact, non-describing discourse to Hume's enormous and on the whole pernicious influence on Anglophone intellectual life. I go on to talk about the revolutionary and effective challenge to the Humean hegemony wrought by Saul Kripke's modal semantics, as presented in his celebrated 1970 lectures at Princeton, published later as Naming and Necessity. The key idea of Kripke is that the implicit theory of reference used in naturalistic discourse is fundamentally mistaken. Kripke argued persuasively that the way language, and hence thought refers to reality transcends natural world descriptive categories in a number of important and essential ways, which I discuss at the post linked to above.

   I think, therefore, that it is neither wise nor necessary for theists to concede the whole world to the naturalist and not treat particular places in it, such as minds, meanings, intentions, free will, morality, aesthetic value, the anthropic cosmological fine-tuning data, the mathematical intelligibility of the physical order, religious experience, etc, as being especially amenable to a theistic inference, and indeed as being more plausibly explained by theism than by evolutionary naturalism. I see, therefore, no reason why biology should be ruled out in advance or in principle as being one of these 'special places and things' where the hand of God seems particularly manifest. How can it be, indeed, given that the universe is finely tuned for our biology, and that our biology is capable of thinking about the Big Bang, quantum gravity theories, and Godel's incompleteness theorems, not to mention morality and Trinitarian theology.

   For make no mistake about the naturalists' program. It is to naturalize everything from the process by which the universe's anthropic fine-tuning is selected, to minds, moral obligations, the meaning of theological statements, and reason itself. It's comforting to think that we can all agree to a Treaty banning Philosophical Naturalism from Intruding Into Science, and all live in a nicely demarcated intellectual village called Methodological Naturalism. But it is an illusion. We see time and time again the attempt to engage in imperialism, whereby morality, religious belief, thought, love, altruism etc is 'just' the evolved product of our genetic history, and the special nature of our universe is simply due to a natural observer selection effect.

   It's not about insisting on methodological naturalism as an appropriate heuristic procedure in science. It's about hijacking the warrant science rightly enjoys on behalf of philosophical naturalism and its materialist metaphysics. If we on this side don't say no, naturalism simply does not work or is not persuasive at some particular bits of the world, then we'll be conceding implicitly that the intellectual hegemony which naturalism enjoys is deserved. And the truth of the matter is, it isn't.

Comment by stunney — August 8, 2007 @ 12:49 am

6. Ben Z Says:
   August 8th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

   "The definition of God as eternal requires creation to occur outside of time rather than at its beginning, and thus the creation of the universe and its moment-to-moment sustaining are the same thing."

   James Moreland and William Craig deal with this subject in Phil Foundations for a Christian Worldview (2003). It's not the same thing when the thing first has to be created, and then just sustained, or else sustaining would equal constant destroying/creating.

Comment by Ben Z — August 8, 2007 @ 12:15 pm

7. mtraven Says:
   August 8th, 2007 at 9:50 pm

   For make no mistake about the naturalists' program. It is to naturalize everything from the process by which the universe's anthropic fine-tuning is selected, to minds, moral obligations, the meaning of theological statements, and reason itself.

   Curses, he's on to us!

   Doesn't matter though: You will be assimilated - into nature! Resistance is futile.

Comment by mtraven — August 8, 2007 @ 9:50 pm

8. Thought Provoker Says:
   August 8th, 2007 at 11:16 pm

   From the link in the opening thread…

   I've long thought the concept of "randomness" in evolutionary biology to be a little presumptuous"”after all, physics points to determinism, not chance, as the universal standard, at least above the quantum level. In assuming randomness as a fundamentally unassailable aspect of reality, classical scientific atheism commits its own "God of the gaps" fallacy.

   Hmmm… this idea sounds like something I have heard before.

   Does anyone else remember someone talking about the inherent dependency of "randomness" which occurs at the quantum level?

   I also remember something about there being no such thing as randomness only non-deterministic quantum effects.

   I also think it might have had something to do with the Third Choice.

   I understand Coakley's lack of desire to be associated with the ID Movement. But I think the terms like "teleological" and "design" could still be used to describe her general thoughts.

Comment by Thought Provoker — August 8, 2007 @ 11:16 pm

9. stunney Says:
   August 9th, 2007 at 6:51 pm

   mtraven wrote:

   Curses, he's on to us!

   I'm onto you lot alright. I expose how devoid the A team is of intellectual integrity by showing that

   a) naturalistic scientism isn't and never has been science, making your criticisms of ID on that account all the more despicably hypocritical

   and

   b) how dreadfully, how ludicrously flimsy, and hence how fraudulent, is the case for naturalism in the first place

   Yours is an entirely ideological stance, and we're going to clean your clocks just like we cleaned those of your commie co-religionists and co-shitfaces in the materialist paradises of Bulgaria, etc.

   Doesn't matter though: You will be assimilated - into nature! Resistance is futile.

   As we say in Glasgow: come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

   The Bad Ship Dawkins is going down. Splice the friggin mainbrace!

Comment by stunney — August 9, 2007 @ 6:51 pm

10. mtraven Says:
    August 9th, 2007 at 8:40 pm

    As we say in Glasgow: come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

    Stunney is cute when he's belligerent. Issuing challenges on the net is certainly a low-risk way of releasing some aggression.

    naturalistic scientism isn't and never has been science

    That is sort of true, but so what? Science cannot prove that we aren't living inside a computer simulation, that God didn't create the universe and our memories of it 10 minutes ago, or that there isn't a Pachinko parlor on the dark side of the moon. Nonetheless, my callow scientism leads me to probabilistically reject these ideas. Your mileage may vary.

    how dreadfully, how ludicrously flimsy, and hence how fraudulent, is the case for naturalism in the first place

    Well, your choices are naturalism or supernaturalism, science or magic fairies, reality or wishful thinking. The case for naturalism may be flimsy, but the case for magic sky person is nonexistent.

    I already know your standard replies to this, which are contradictory:
    - "people have always believed in magic sky person, so there must be something to it."
    - "I don't really believe in magic sky person, but in something much more respectable ("transcendential reason" or somesuch) that just happens to go by the same name as what most people call magic sky person."
    - "some phenomenon that I don't understand (morality, fine-tuning) proves that magic sky person is behind everything"

    Just saving you the trouble of repeating yourself…:twisted:

Comment by mtraven — August 9, 2007 @ 8:40 pm

11. stunney Says:
    August 10th, 2007 at 2:49 am

    mtraven wrote:

    Stunney is cute when he's belligerent.

    I'm always cute.

    Issuing challenges on the net is certainly a low-risk way of releasing some aggression.

    It's a no risk way in this instance.

    Nonetheless, my callow scientism leads me to probabilistically reject these ideas.

    As I said, yours is an ideological stance, not a scientific one. Your scientism is not merely callow. It's hollow.

    Well, your choices are naturalism or supernaturalism, science or magic fairies, reality or wishful thinking.

    Hark at Mr Binary Brain!

    The case for naturalism may be flimsy, but the case for magic sky person is nonexistent.

    True. That's why I don't believe in naturalism or magic sky persons.

    I already know your standard replies to this, which are contradictory:
    - "people have always believed in magic sky person, so there must be something to it."
    - "I don't really believe in magic sky person, but in something much more respectable ("transcendential reason" or somesuch) that just happens to go by the same name as what most people call magic sky person."
    - "some phenomenon that I don't understand (morality, fine-tuning) proves that magic sky person is behind everything"

    Your a sad wee 12-year-old who can't get past your ridiculously childish ideas. Probably due to some unfortunate puberty-related event.

Comment by stunney — August 10, 2007 @ 2:49 am

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