Replies

Darwinism holds that Nature uses natural selection to (blindly as it were) produce "better" or fitter species: Species change; they "progress." But absent an absolute standard or criterion of judgment, how can we speak of progress at all? It seems all we really can speak about is directionless change in directionless Nature....

But if Nature is directionless, then where do all its observable regularities come from?

SO very true, dearest sister in Christ!

Order does not arise from chaos in an unguided physical system. Period.

But as if required as Lewontin says to disallow a "Divine foot in the door" - some would have us believe that life emerged by random happenstance.

But the math does not support it. Self-organizing complexity and cellular automata have guides to the system. Even in chaos theory, there are initial conditions.

And the word "random" - a mathematical term - does not accurately apply to physical systems because the system is unknown and unknowable. Which is to say we cannot know the full number and types of dimensions or fields/particles which have no direct or indirect measurable effect.

For instance, a series of numbers extracted from the extension of pi may appear random if the observer cannot see the calculation even though those numbers are in fact, highly determined by calculating the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

But as if required as Lewontin says to disallow a "Divine foot in the door" — some would have us believe that life emerged by random happenstance.

But if life emerged by means of random happenstance, then what can Life possibly mean? Or put yet another way, what value can it have?

Plus there seems to be another difficulty: If everything that exists (including the human mind) is the product of random happenstance, then how can the world be knowable by means of the human mind in the first place? If everything that is, is the result of a random cause, then what is there to know? And by what means can it be known?

It seems to me that Darwinist theory is up to its eyeballs in epistemic difficulties of this nature.

Darwinists seem quite calculating and deliberate in tossing Natural Law theory — which principally holds that there is a deep correspondence between the world of Nature and its comprehensibility by the human mind — out the window. Or to put it another way, NLT proposes that the logic of the world is the same logic utilized by the human mind seeking to understand the world. Without that correspondence, there is nothing to know and no way to know it.

But this problem rarely seems to catch the attention of Darwinists — and other professional atheists. Matter is king; random processes somehow cause matter to create "order" — but it's an order that cannot even be thought about really, since in Darwin's theory there is no (non-random) criterion by which the resulting order itself can be evaluated.

As you say, dearest sister in Christ:

... some [e.g., Lewontin, Dawkins, Pinker, Monod, et al] would have us believe that life emerged by random happenstance.

But the math does not support it. Self-organizing complexity and cellular automata have guides to the system. Even in chaos theory, there are initial conditions.
And the word "random" — a mathematical term — does not accurately apply to physical systems because the system is unknown and unknowable. Which is to say we cannot know the full number and types of dimensions or fields/particles which have no direct or indirect measurable effect.

Amazingly well-said, indeed! I so agree....

Thank you ever so much, dearest sister, for your deeply insightful essay/post!