Posted on 12/09/2010 7:56:44 AM PST by spirited irish
THX for the ping.
Have a blessed weekend and Christmass and New Year!
Your own faith, that the Pope just wouldn't say such a thing, seems impervious to evidence to the contrary!
So acceptance of the evolution of man from pre living material is now just acceptance of “micro” evolution?
I mean a 2% genetic change between us and a chimpanzee is a pretty “micro” change, and I am sure there are greater genetic differences among animals you deem to be the same “kind” - but really.
Are you actually going with your assertion that when the Pope talks of the creation of man from pre living material, he is speaking of “micro” evolution?
Really?
The Pope isn't talking about "the creation of man from pre-living material."
Rather, see Genesis 2:7:
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground [your "pre-living material?], and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and [then] man became a living soul. [I.e., entered the world as a living being.]Looks like a "special creation" to me, using whatever materials the LORD God saw fit to use for this purpose. I.e., the "dust of the ground," purely stupid, non-living, inert matter....
Also consider the other "special creations" the LORD God made:
And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew....IOW, the LORD God created everything there is, before anything was materialized as a living creature. [See Genesis 1.] This means that creatures do not arise "from matter," but from the will and mind of God. After they were so created, then they were "embodied" as material, natural forms.
My point about macro- vs. micro-evolution is that there is evidence for the latter, based on observation and experiment, but not for the former. The former is merely an "intuitive" story that cannot, in principle, be tested by means of the scientific method (.e., direct observation, replicable experiments, leading to verification and prediction).
Well put.Thx for the ping.
You first denied they were talking about biological evolution at all, then when that position became untenable, you retreated to claiming that they were only accepting micro evolution. Now you are retreating even from that claim when you see how LUDICROUS it is to claim that the creation of man from pre-living material is merely “micro” evolution.
The common descent of species is a predictive theory. I predict that any ERV sequences found in common with orangutans and humans will ALSO be present in chimps and gorillas and will be more degraded from an original viral sequence than one found ONLY in humans and chimps.
What you don't see is that it does not necessarily follow therefrom that the viral sequences observed are the evolutionary products of a random development from "pre-living material" — a/k/a, "matter in its motions."
It is widely understood, even in science (especially among physicists working this problem), that "life comes only from life." So how does non-living — pre-existent — matter bootstrap itself into life, and subsequently into mind?
You simply take it for granted that this is what happened. And you are unwilling to consider any other explanation.
On your analysis, the difference between man and orangutans, chimps, and gorillas is merely a difference in some quantitative measure (comparative ERV sequences), not a difference of kind. But I would argue that the difference between humans and apes is qualitative: Humans and apes are two entirely different orders of being, regardless of their similarities or dissimilarities WRT ERV sequences.
But Darwinism evidently denies this — it sees man as simply part of a more or less isomorphic continuum — in the face of simple observation and common sense. That is to say, there is nothing particularly remarkable about man: He's just a more sophisticated kind of ape. And presumably a newer and better kind of ape will "evolve" from here....
If Darwinism predicts anything at all, it predicts THAT.
Interesting insight, r9etb!
If we need a definition of what faith is, then I think Hebrews 11:1 gives us the very best one:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.I'm not sure mathematics falls into the category of faith. For it seems not to be either of these things: We "believe" in it not because it deals with things hoped for, or evidences things not seen. Ever since Pythagoras (and surely further back than he), we "believe" in it because the world appears to be structured by mathematics. Or to put it another way, the order of the universe has a mathematical basis. Which probably explains "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" (as mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner puts it).
As Wigner points out, "the laws of nature must have been formulated in the language of mathematics to be an object for the use of applied mathematics"; i.e., of the natural sciences generally (possibly excluding biology, which shows little interest in mathematical formalization).
I'm not sure mathematics per se qualifies as an act of faith, for there is amazing empirical evidence that the universe has a mathematical foundation. Plus mathematics is "rigorous" in a way that faith expressions rarely are. It is reasonable and logical: It is the universal language of the natural sciences.
This is not to say that faith itself is necessarily unreasonable or illogical. It is just to suggest that matters of "faith" — including the meaning of "nonsensory modes of human experience [which address] dimensions of human existence superior in rank and worth" [Ellis Sandoz] than those to which sensory perception can give us access — are not reducible to mathematics. Little things like "experiences of the good, beautiful, and just, of love, friendship, and truth, of all human virtue and vice, and of divine reality." [ibid.]
On the other hand, there is a sense in which your statement that science takes mathematics on faith seems eminently correct to me. We trace this back to the great mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), whose insights so deeply affected Isaac Newton (1642–1727) that he carried them forward in his own theoretical work.
In effect, Descartes "bifurcates" the world (Alfred North Whitehead's term) into primary and secondary qualities: the primary qualities are those given "objectively" to sense perception. The secondary qualities are "private" or "subjective" apperceptions (e.g., "redness," or "hotness", or "qualia" in general) that have no real or "objective" existence, and therefore have no place within the physical universe that science describes.
As Wolfgang Smith notes (in Cosmos and Transcendence, 1984), the upshot is
Logically speaking, the bifurcation is tantamount to the identification of the so-called physical world (the world as conceived by the physicist) with the real world per se, through the device of relegating all else (all that does not fit this conception) to an ontological limbo, situated outside the world of objectively existent things. The postulate thus eliminates at one stroke precisely those aspects of the world which prove recalcitrant to mathematical description: all elements, that is, which cannot be reduced to extension and number. This leaves an inherently mathematical universe, the very thing which a science based on measurement and calculation could hope to master. In other words, it leaves what we have called the physical universe, not as a mere abstraction or a useful model, but as the objective reality itself. Right or wrong, let it be said at once that this reduction of the world to the categories of [mathematical] physics is not a scientific discovery (as many believe), but a metaphysical assumption that has been built into the theory from the outset. [emphasis added.](Thus let it not be said that science has "abolished" metaphysics!)
As my friend the astrophysicist puts it, "While scientific laws are tools of our mind, laws of Nature act in Nature. They are not to be confused. The difference is that of map and reality."
Having reduced the "real" universe to its mathematical description (by excluding its "secondary qualities"), and then identifying the former with the latter, the next upshot is, as Edmund A. Burtt has observed [as quoted by Smith, ibid.],
Wherever was taught as truth the universal formula of gravitation, there was also insinuated as a nimbus of surrounding belief that man is but a puny and local spectator, nay irrelevant product of an infinite self-moving engine, which existed eternally before him and will be eternally after him, enshrining the rigour of mathematical relationships while banishing into impotence all ideal imaginations; an engine which consists of raw masses wandering to no purpose in an undiscoverable time and space, and is in general wholly devoid of any qualities that might spell satisfaction for the major interests of human nature, save solely the central aim of the mathematical physicist.It is perhaps needless to say that this Cartesian/Newtonian "reduction" has been fully incorporated into Darwin's theory....
After all, Darwin's theory is nineteenth-century science and, thus "mechanistic" in its outlook and expectations....
To me, this is such a fascinating question, dear r9etb. I am so very grateful for your interest — and your insights!
Thank you!
Speak for yourself. And take care as to the breadth of the brush which you, in your ignorance, paint...
(See new tagline -- created in your honor...)
Thank you so very much, dear Dan, for the wonderful excerpt from Planck!
You have nothing to "apologize for" on that score!
I'm thinking through a response.... might be a while.
Oh please don't do that, r9etb! It's just that this very subject is something I've been working on for a while....
Thank you ever so much for your kind words. Truly I'm looking forward to your response, whenever it comes!
I tend not to think so. A thought proceeds from a thinker. It seems to me they cannot be the same thing. But then, on the other hand, the very idea of "proceeding" involves what you call linear time. But God is timeless. So in the end, all I can really say is: I don't know. God is not subject to "our" rules....
RE: "I would affirm the belief that a thought from God of something He wants to exist in spacetime is as guaranteed to come to pass as if it already exists" — the Holy Scriptures tell us that God uses His spoken WORD to effect His Will. So it seems to me it is the spoken WORD that carries the creative divine thought into efficacy, not the divine thought per se.
But then again, the Gospel of John tells us that in the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God. The key to solving our puzzle is to be found here.
You wrote, "... can we say that each species did not exist in some dimensional reality before becoming limited to our realm of spacetime?" On my reading of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, I would say that Genesis 1 refers to such a non-temporal (that is to say, "not yet in time") reality, wherein God created all things in heaven and on earth. But His earthly creatures are not instantiated as "physical" beings in the (dimensionally limited, from our point of view) "realm of our spacetime" until Genesis 2....
You wrote: "What if that which exists in our spacetime is actually less full in our spacetime than it would be in a more complex spacetime, or even a less complex spacetime?" This seems eminently possible to me.
The problem is, however, we do not know how many dimensions there are, particularly how many temporal dimensions.
I gather string theory takes a stab at ascertaining the number of dimensions there are. Last time I checked, string theorists were propounding something like 12 dimensions. But almost all of these "extra" dimensions are spatial, not temporal. And the extra spatial dimensions are seemingly rather bizarre, for they are thought to be "curled up" and of a size less than Planck length. So even if they can be "mathematically detected," it seems to me they would be utterly unobservable in principle; and so how to verify them experimentally is beyond me.
Personally, I think understanding the dimensionality of time may be more fruitful in solving the enigmas that bedevil science right now than positing more spatial dimensions.... But that's just a hunch.
And that's why, dear MHGinTN, I am so intrigued by your meditations regarding temporality: You posit time as having (at least) three dimensions — linear, planar, and volumetric. I believe you may be onto something here!
But again, that's just another hunch....
Just some thoughts, FWIW.
Thank you ever so much for your immensely thought-provocative essay/post!
ALL continuua are available to the Creator since His Spirit sustains them all as separate and balanced within the universe of His Creating.
That is not to say that God has used all dimensions to/woven into the universe of reality. But I am convinced that anything of a physical, soulish, or spiritual nature exists in a where/when, a realm of woven variables from at least dimensions Time and Space. I'm of the opinion that this agrees with soemthing profound taught by Rabbi Nahmanides, centuries before string theory was ever even imagined.
Details please!
I am struck by how often modern scientific developments have been anticipated/foreshadowed by ancient thinkers.
Your ideas are very interesting, dear MHGinTN. Are you writing?
Thank you so very much for your thought-provocative essay/post!
Nahmanides taught that although the days (the six days of creation) are 24 hours each, they contain "kol yemot ha-olam" - all the ages and all the secrets of the world. Nahmanides says that before the universe, there was nothing... but then suddenly the entire creation appeared as a minuscule speck. He gives a description for the speck: something very tiny, smaller than a grain of mustard. And he says that is the only physical creation. There was no other physical creation; all other creations were spiritual. The Nefesh (the soul of animal life, Genesis 1:21) and the Neshama (the soul of human life, Genesis 1:27) are spiritual creations.
. . .
Nahmanides further writes: "Misheyesh, yitfos bo zman" - from the moment that matter formed from this substance-less substance, time grabs hold. Time is created at the beginning. But time "grabs hold" when matter condenses from the substance-less substance of the big bang creation. When matter condenses, congeals, coalesces, out of this substance so thin it has no material substance, that's when the biblical clock starts.
It is my contention that every speck has a bit of time, a pinch of space and energy, woven to exist in continua expressions fabricated from variables of the dimensions, with some continua having more and some less variability. A photon travels the universe with a flick of present time (planar time) lacking a variable expression of space, so it travels a linear spatial pathway always in the present of it's emission. Time has taken hold of the photon only in so far as it is fixed in planar time.
With the addition of a spatial variable, the thing we call a photon takes on another characteristic of more substantial matter because it is then fixed in both time and space for its stability ... spacetime grabs hold of the energy packet. The quantum foam is the most fundamental form of the creation at least since the inflationary stage of creation.
Perhaps during the inflationary stage, realms of dimensional variables were created which have a very different manifestation of the fundamental dimensions. In fact, a dimension of spirit or a dimension of life may exist independent of volumetric space or linear time! We haven't a scientific clue --as yet-- for what combinatorics of dimensions exist right alongside our limits, which we cannot sense because of our more limited state of dimensional variables.
Of only this I am sure: God Created/Creates all that there is and all that ever will be. If beings exist in another realm of dimensional variables, it is God's Spirit Who holds these realms in balance alongside our own realm, all being taken together as 'the Universe of His Creation'.
If 'events' are occurring there, those realms have some variable of dimension time. And if 'things' exist there, those realms have some variable of dimension space.
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