Why evolutionary materialism leads to the unreality of your existence

Renew America ^ | July 27, 2013 | Linda Kimball

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for the insightful, informative essay, dear sister in Christ!

[MrB]

Good thing she’s not running for president as a buzz cut guy with big ears.

[tacticalogic]

Didn’t take long for it to get personal.

[Alamo-Girl]

Perhaps the analogy of fire will help -- when humans are in charge of it, fire (or science) is highly useful for heating and cooking, etc.

When fire takes charge, it can instantly kill us. That's the difference between methodological and philosophical naturalism.

That's a fascinating metaphor, dear BroJoeK, thank you for sharing it!

Problems arise when people "do" theology or philosophy under the color of science, e.g. Dawkins, Lewontin. And, no doubt, some would also say that intelligent design supporters - e.g. Meyers - are doing the same thing from the polar opposite position, i.e. pro-God v. anti-God.

In my view, it would be better for a scientist faced with an unanswerable question (e.g. origin of inertia, information [Shannon, successful communication], space/time) simply to say "it is unknowable by the scientific method" rather than to default to his theological/philosophical presupposition - whether "God did it" or "Nature did it." Both are statements of faith. And offering a statement of faith is fine, but it should not be called "science" because it was not derived by the scientific method and cannot be falsified (Popper et al.)

Science is not the enemy of Christianity, though some atheists claim that it is.

O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane [and] vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace [be] with thee. Amen. - I Tim 6:20-21

I would also put "randomness did it" in the same faith statement bucket since we cannot say something is random in the system when we don't know what the system "is." The total number and types of dimensions are both unknown and unknowable - so just like a string of numbers extracted from the extension of pi, something may have the appearance of randomness and yet truly be highly determined.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ, and thank you for the excerpt from "The Science of Wholeness."

It will be argued that it is not science's business to deal with the qualitative aspects of reality. But if one is trying to understand the Universe in toto, and man's place in it (not to mention the emergence of life and mind), one cannot leave them out. To attempt to do so is a kind of falsification of reality.

So very true. Science has hardly even begun to ask the most fundamental of questions, e.g. "what life 'is' rather than simply what it looks like or does" - "what is the origin of autonomy in biological life."

[MHGinTN]

"what is the origin of autonomy in biological life" ... the dimension of Life force which becomes mixed with dimension space and dimension time when a phase shift occurs due to a complexity level reached in the mix of space and time.

The Hebrew term 'bara' is used three times in Genesis, one of which is when single celled living things are transitioned by God intervention into organisms of multi-cellular cooperative functioning. The word is not used to differentiate the expression of life arising in the lifeless Universe, so we may conclude that the expression of life was 'built into the plans' for the Universe at the moment of the first use of bara for descriptor. The third use is when God breathed the Spirit into Adam. These moments described with the use of bara might be seen as interventions specifically by God for new creations not built into the original starting phenomenon. At the first moment of Creation, all the dimensions to be expressed came into being and will manifest as phase shifts reveal the growing complexity.

[betty boop]

...Science has hardly even begun to ask the most fundamental of questions, e.g. "what life 'is' rather than simply what it looks like or does" - "what is the origin of autonomy in biological life."

Evidently such questions are simply banned from, say, the Journal of Theoretical Biology, which is probably the field's flagship journal....

There seems to be an almost religious commitment to the doctrines of naturalism and materialism over there.

Nonetheless, I do believe that a paradigm shift is coming sooner or later — not motivated by biologists per se, but by physicists and mathematicians.

I'm all for "cross-disciplinary" investigation of the issues of life and mind.... We probably need to have philosophy weigh in, too. This will drive the Darwinists nutz!

Thank you so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ!

[Alamo-Girl]

Let’s be very clear: this Stephen Meyer is *NOT* a biologist. His PhD is in physics.

In my view, things will never be the same in Biology since the Physicists and Mathematicians were invited to the table. And that's a good thing because they approach the same issues from different aspects.

Many biologists consider physical laws, artificial life, robotics, and even theoretical biology as largely irrelevant for their research. In the 1970s, a prominent molecular geneticist asked me, "Why do we need theory when we have all the facts?" At the time I dismissed the question as silly, as most physicists would. However, it is not as silly as the converse question, Why do we need facts when we have all the theories? These are actually interesting philosophical questions that show why trying to relate biology to physics is seldom of interest to biologists, even though it is of great interest to physicists. Questioning the importance of theory sounds eccentric to physicists for whom general theories is what physics is all about. Consequently, physicists, like the skeptics I mentioned above, are concerned when they learn facts of life that their theories do not appear capable of addressing. On the other hand, biologists, when they have the facts, need not worry about physical theories that neither address nor alter their facts. Ernst Mayr (1997) believes this difference is severe enough to separate physical and biological models: "Yes, biology is, like physics and chemistry, a science. But biology is not a science like physics and chemistry; it is rather an autonomous science on a par with the equally autonomous physical sciences."

There are fundamental reasons why physics and biology require different levels of models, the most obvious one is that physical theory is described by rate-dependent dynamical laws that have no memory, while evolution depends, at least to some degree, on control of dynamics by rate-independent memory structures. A less obvious reason is that Pearson's "corpuscles" are now described by quantum theory while biological subjects require classical description in so far as they function as observers. This fact remains a fundamental problem for interpreting quantum measurement, and as I mention below, this may still turn out to be essential in distinguishing real life from macroscopic classical simulacra. I agree with Mayr that physics and biology require different models, but I do not agree that they are autonomous models. Physical systems require many levels of models, some formally irreducible to one another, but we must still understand how the levels are related. Evolution also produces hierarchies of organization from cells to societies, each level requiring different models, but the higher levels of the hierarchy must have emerged from lower levels. Life must have emerged from the physical world. This emergence must be understood if our knowledge is not to degenerate (more than it has already) into a collection of disjoint specialized disciplines.

The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut

Truly, there is a big difference between historical sciences (evolution theory, archeology, anthropology, Egyptology) and other disciplines of science (physics, chemistry, etc.)

To the observer, it is as if the historical sciences construct a blueprint based on quantized historical data (fossils, artifacts, etc.) and thereafter associate new findings into that blueprint. If the finding cannot be fit, then the blueprint must change.

The historical record is not continuous, e.g. not every living thing left a fossil in the geologic record. The bottom line is that historical sciences deal with quantizations of a presumed continuum (the theory.) Other disciplines of science, deal with the theory itself - which mostly can be recreated under laboratory conditions, i.e. put to an empirical test. Or in the alternative, continuing observations can accrue to the merit of the theory, e.g. quantum field theory.

Or more simply put, to the historical sciences the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence whereas to the "hard" sciences the reverse is true, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Biologists have always invited chemists to the table. But the dynamics of evolution theory has changed since the discovery of DNA and subsequently, the biologists inviting physicists and mathematicians (especially information theorists) to the table. That is the underlying theme of Pattee’s point about the physics of symbols, the epistemic cut.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ!

For Lurkers interested in Physics theory corresponding to your view:

We review the idea, due to Einstein, Eddington, Hoyle and Ballard, that time is a subjective label, whose primary purpose is to order events, perhaps in a higher-dimensional universe. In this approach, all moments in time exist simultaneously, but they are ordered to create the illusion of an unfolding experience by some physical mechanism. This, in the language of relativity, may be connected to a hypersurface in a world that extends beyond spacetime. Death in such a scenario may be merely a phase change.

Time as an Illusion

[Alamo-Girl]

Truly, many of the big thinkers of the last century would never have been published in today's world due to the enforced orthodoxy of today's peer reviewed journals:

Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?

Einsten is an example.

Nonetheless, I do believe that a paradigm shift is coming sooner or later — not motivated by biologists per se, but by physicists and mathematicians.

I very, very strongly agree, dearest sister in Christ - especially concerning the mathematicians (Rosen et al.)

[Texas Songwriter]

Let's be very clear: this Stephen Meyer is *NOT* a biologist. His PhD is in physics.

Clear? Have you even read his bio, much less his books? His PhD from the University of Cambridge is in Philosophy of Science....not Physics. His undergraduate degree is in Geophysics. Is that clear enough?

I guess.......Yes you did.

Whatever the hype about this book, I don't expect........

I see how you arrive at your conclusions. What is not clear is, 'Why the anger'.

[Texas Songwriter]

Let's be very clear: this Stephen Meyer is *NOT* a biologist. His PhD is in physics.

Clear? Have you even read his bio, much less his books? His PhD from the University of Cambridge is in Philosophy of Science....not Physics. His undergraduate degree is in Geophysics. Is that clear enough?

I guess.......Yes you did.

Whatever the hype about this book, I don't expect........

I see how you arrive at your conclusions. What is not clear is, 'Why the anger'.

[betty boop]

...many of the big thinkers of the last century would never have been published in today's world due to the enforced orthodoxy of today's peer reviewed journals:

Here's an article by Frank Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University, that explores this very question: "Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?

IIRC, your observation that Einstein's work largely did not see the light of day in the professionial journals of his day is correct. But then, according to his great biographer, Abraham Pais, Einstein didn't bother to read them anyway.

I gather that Einstein — unlike his close friend Niels Bohr — was a bit of a "loner." He followed his own ideas, and didn't bother much about what other people were doing — with the exception of Max Planck (and Bohr, of course), whom he greatly admired, and who motivated Einstein's discovery of the photon (1905).

Planck did get published in professional journals (and Bohr, too, of course). But this was before WWII, when (according to Tipler) new ideas could find a forum in such journals. (Tipler alleges that post-WWII, this doesn't happen much.)

Anyhoot, I encourage people to read the article at the link above, and draw their own conclusions.

I have a "funny story" to tell from real life, involving "my friend the astrophysicist." He submitted a paper describing how he derived algorithmic complexity measures of biological systems to the Journal of Theoretical Biology. It was straightaway rejected. (I saw the rejection letter. I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Basically, it just said "we don't do that sort of thing over here." )

But that is not the end of my story. The very person who signed the rejection letter, who shall be nameless here, found out that AG was contributing that article to an anthology edited by Joseph Seckbach & Richard Gordon (mentioned above in this thread). Since the rules of this excellent book permitted people to come and "rebut" any article included there, this same person showed up to "rebut" AG's article. Sheesh! This guy was following my friend around! A 25-page "dialogue" ensued between them, right after AG's article. Obviously, the motive was to "enforce orthodoxy."

But I think my friend whupped him big time. :^) The "gun-slinger" from JourTheolBiol seemed a littled "chasened" in the end....

Ha! I thought AG mopped the floor with him. But that's just my opinion, of course.

Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!

[Alamo-Girl]

Sheesh! This guy was following my friend around! A 25-page "dialogue" ensued between them, right after AG's article. Obviously, the motive was to "enforce orthodoxy."

But I think my friend whupped him big time. :^) The "gun-slinger" from JourTheolBiol seemed a littled "chasened" in the end....

Ha! I thought AG mopped the floor with him. But that's just my opinion, of course.

Good for AG! What a mess that he followed him around like that - childishness on his part.

Thank you so much for sharing that with us, dearest sister in Christ!

[BroJoeK]

fish hawk: "My problem with the religion of evolution is:"

Darwin's basic evolution idea -- descent with modifications and natural selection -- is not in any sense a "religion", but a scientific theory, since it meets the first rule of science: natural explanations for natural processes.

fish hawk: "they talk like there is fossil evidence when there isn’t,"

Of course, there are literal tons of fossils, which you can see yourself in most any large museum.
So why would you even attempt to deny what everyone can clearly see?

fish hawk: "...put down creationists because they have faith ( so that is religion and not science)"

If you feel insulted by evolutionists, you may be running with the wrong crowd... time to find some new friends?
In fact, science by definition cannot deal with religious questions.
Science has nothing, nothing to say about theology, spirituality or any metaphysical understandings.
Those are all outside the realms of science.

So, if some scientist does speak of those matters, then he/she is only speaking their own personal opinions.
Of course, such opinions do carry some weight, but only as much as you grant them.

fish hawk: "evos have absolutely no proof to lay out before us fossil or otherwise but they have faith that someday they will dig it up ( religion not science)."

"Proof" is not the proper word for a scientific hypothesis.
You never "prove" a hypothesis, you only confirm it by making valid predictions and running falsifiable tests.
Since the evolution hypothesis has been confirmed many times, it is classified as a theory -- until some new data turns up to potentially falsify it. And of course there are literal tons of fossils and mountains of other supporting evidence confirming evolution theory.

fish hawk: "The[y] play like the first and second laws of thermodynamics ( and entropy) does not exist. (which of course makes evolution impossible)..."

In no possible way does entropy make evolution impossible, since the earth is not now and never has been a closed system.
From Day One of Earth's existence it has been bathed in a steady source of new energy, from the son.
This steady new energy, in the sun's "Goldilocks zone" -- not to hot, not too cold -- makes it not just possible but inevitable that life will flourish and increase once established.

fish hawk: "...Mathematics which tells ;us that if life was by selection and time and chance, it would be a one with enough zeros behind it to fill enough book pages to reach to the moon if stacked up."

Such calculations are phony-to-the-max when you consider that Earth's oceans, land & air are chock full of just that many single-celled critters, all of them reproducing every few hours for the past four billion years, and each reproduction resulting in one or more mutations.
The more likely hypothesis is that when conditions are exactly right, there's no possible way that life could not arise.
But that idea is not yet confirmed, and so remains a scientific hypothesis.

fish hawk: "So how ‘bout YOU entering here your absolute proof of evolution, NOT Micro (changes in a species like dogs and bird beaks) but Macro, dogs to cats, lizards to birds chimps to man.)

Of course, nobody except anti-evolutionists make such claims.
What scientists talk about are common ancestors of various living species.
Fossil, DNA and radio-metric evidence suggests that the last common ancestors of humans and chimps may have lived circa 4 million years ago.
The last common ancestors of dogs and cats may have lived 70 million years ago, of lizards and birds maybe 200 million years ago, etc.
So evidence shows that one didn't evolve into the other, rather both evolved from something which lived long ago.

As for the alleged problem of "micro" versus "macro" evolution -- all evolution is "micro" evolution, a few small changes in every generation, accumulated over hundreds of thousands and millions of generations to produce new breeds, species, genera and families, etc.
It only appears to be "macro-evolution" when you compare species with last common ancestors many millions of years ago.

fish hawk: "If you can show us that, you have more proof than the leading Evo scientist alive today."

Again, science doesn't "prove" a theory, but confirms it by verified predictions and falsifiable tests -- both of which evolution theory has in redundant abundance.

fish hawk: "Question: what evidence proves that life evolved from nonliving molecules?
Evos answer: Don’t reject a scientific theory just because you have a religious prejudice.
This is because they can’t answer the question."

No, not "theory" -- there are now several scientific hypotheses dealing with the origin of life on Earth, ranging from various forms of abiogenesis to panspermia.
None of these hypotheses are strongly confirmed and therefore none qualify as "theory".

At this point, one scientific guess is as good as another, and the most likely answer is: contributions from each plausible hypothesis.

fish hawk: "Try reading... Read these and point out to us all the false info in them."

It's already been done, by people far more qualified than I am.
But, if you have summarized here some of their arguments, then I have summarized the responses.
And if you wish to discuss some points further, then feel free to raise your issues here.

[BroJoeK]

Alamo-Girl: "That's a fascinating metaphor, dear BroJoeK, thank you for sharing it!"

You're welcome. ;-)
Did you also like the metaphor of the tool box (post #19) -- which gains no value, and makes us idiots, if we put it up on some alter, and bow down to worship it?

Alamo-Girl: "Problems arise when people "do" theology or philosophy under the color of science..."

In posting and discussing these matters on Free Republic, it does seem to me that much, if not most, of the confusion arises from people's mis-understandings of distinctions between science on the one hand and philosophy, theology, religion and even politics on the other.
Science itself should have little or nothing to say about those subjects...

Alamo-Girl: " '...it is unknowable by the scientific method'... "

Bingo! We have a winner. :-)

Alamo-Girl: "I would also put "randomness did it" in the same faith statement bucket since we cannot say something is random in the system when we don't know what the system "is." "

Thank you. It's one of my favorite subjects, because it answers the famous question raised by Albert Einstein when he was puzzling over (iirc) issues of quantum mechanics, and remarked: "G*d does not play dice with the Universe".

No! Albert-baby, buddy, you got it all wrong!
The physical Universe is one giant casino, with "slot machines" everywhere you turn, and every single one of them is rigged, just like Vegas, to produce a profit for "the House", and who, in the Universe is "the House", if not it's Creator, G*d?

In the long run, G*d's purposes will not be denied, yes "machines" "randomly" produce winners and losers, but G*d's Will will be done.

And in the shorter runs?
Wouldn't you suppose that those who understand the "games" stand a better chance of coming out ahead?

;-)

[BroJoeK]

BJK: "new energy, from the son."

Ha! Now there's a Freudian slip I'll happily own up to. ;-)

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your encouragements, dear BroJoeK, and for sharing your insights! And I do like the toolbox metaphor - somehow I missed it on my first reading of the thread.

Science itself should have little or nothing to say about those subjects...

Alas, some scientists cannot resist stepping into areas requiring a different discipline and making observations without delineating the difference. Since science derived from philosophy in the first place, some of that is understandable.

Beginning of Modern Science and Modern Philosophy

The word "science" itself is simply the Latin word for knowledge: scientia. Until the 1840's what we now call science was "natural philosophy," so that even Isaac Newton's great book on motion and gravity, published in 1687, was The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis). Newton was, to himself and his contemporaries, a "philosopher." In a letter to the English chemist Joseph Priestley written in 1800, Thomas Jefferson lists the "sciences" that interest him as, "botany, chemistry, zoology, anatomy, surgery, medicine, natural philosophy [this probably means physics], agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, geography, politics, commerce, history, ethics, law, arts, fine arts." The list begins on familiar enough terms, but we hardly think of history, ethics, or the fine arts as "sciences" any more. Jefferson simply uses to the term to mean "disciplines of knowledge."

That, btw, is my peeve about the abuse of the word "random." Randomness originates as a Mathematics term. It has a specific meaning, to wit one cannot say something is random in the system when he doesn't know what the system "is."

Quantum mechanics relies on statistics and it works, but that does not mean ipso facto that the physical universe is random at the root since we do not know, indeed cannot know, the full number and types of dimensions.

Jeepers, we cannot deny the existence of particles or fields which do not have a direct or indirect measurable effect.

"Information" is yet another term misappropriated by the Sciences from the discipline of Mathematics. Information Theory is a branch of Mathematics originating from Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications.

In Shannon's theory information is the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver (or molecular machine as applied to biology) in moving from a before state to an after state. The math is so much like thermodynamics, it is called "Shannon entropy."

In common parlance, the term which refers to the action is falsely used to describe the content of the message being sent or received. For instance, the letter in your mailbox is not information, information happens when the letter is read.

Worse, in science the term has been misappropriated to mean determinism, i.e. physical cause/effect.

In my view, mathematics is a more elegant and certain discipline for knowing than any of the science disciplines. And misappropriating its terms results in a false sense of elegance and certainty in the sciences.

Indeed, I very strongly agree with Wigner (the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences) and go further to observe theologically that mathematics is God's copyright notice on the cosmos.

[TXnMA]

"Alas, some scientists cannot resist stepping into areas requiring a different discipline and making observations without delineating the difference."

Not scientists we know, I hope... '-)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That, btw, is my peeve about the abuse of the word "random." Randomness originates as a Mathematics term. It has a specific meaning, to wit one cannot say something is random in the system when he doesn't know what the system "is."

So -- we're back to "randomness" again. (Hope I don't get "shouted down" again...)

I agree the term has mathematical rigor -- but what term would you use to determine and describe the directions and energies of gas molecules in an "ideal gas" closed system?

How about an arbitrary, "open" system such as the room (part of a set of interconnected rooms) in which you find yourself? Describe the air molecule motion there...

Example: if the molecules in your room moved "non-'random'ly", (PChem term) and headed in a single direction , one wall (or more) would disappear explosively. (And, if we could create and direct that "non-'random'ness", we could make some extremely efficient internal combustion engines...)

Why can we expect a tire to remain uniformly inflated, if not due to "random" molecular motion? Chaos?

"PV=NkT" has mathematical (and physical meaning. Upon what assumption of molecular motion (other than elasticity and non-reactivity) does it depend?

IOW, what form of molecular motion makes the Ideal Gas 'Law' work -- every time it's tested? What about real-world gases & mixtures thereof in non-closed systems?

Or, to move closer to the "creation" aspects of this conversation, it would appear to me that, unlike the gases in which we are now immersed, the motion of "stuff" at (or shortly after) the instant of "creation" had something definitely "non-random" imposed upon it:

Please, Dear Sister, share your preferred term, so that we "mere" scientists don't profane your love of "random" mathematical perfection -- even within our own minds... AND, so that we can discuss the above (the closest we've yet come to examining the conditions at "time=zero" so far) without offending your "peeve"... '-)

[TXnMA]

The URL of the above image (with sketchy discussion):

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130325.html