Excerpt from Nancy Pearcey’s new book: “Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself”

_{Denyse O'Leary

March 11, 2015

Culture, Darwinism, Mind}

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ENV is pleased to share the following excerpt from Nancy Pearcey’s new book,Finding Truth: Five Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes. A Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, Pearcey is a professor and scholar-in-residence at Houston Baptist University and editor-at-large of The Pearcey Report. She is author of the 2005 ECPA Gold Medallion Award winner Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity and other books.

A major way to test a philosophy or worldview is to ask: Is it logically consistent? Internal contradictions are fatal to any worldview because contradictory statements are necessarily false. “This circle is square” is contradictory, so it has to be false. An especially damaging form of contradiction is self-referential absurdity — which means a theory sets up a definition of truth that it itself fails to meet. Therefore it refutes itself….

An example of self-referential absurdity is a theory called evolutionary epistemology, a naturalistic approach that applies evolution to the process of knowing. The theory proposes that the human mind is a product of natural selection. The implication is that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value.

But what if we apply that theory to itself? Then it, too, was selected for survival, not truth — which discredits its own claim to truth. Evolutionary epistemology commits suicide.

Astonishingly, many prominent thinkers have embraced the theory without detecting the logical contradiction. Philosopher John Gray writes, “If Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true,… the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.” What is the contradiction in that statement?

Gray has essentially said, if Darwin’s theory is true, then it “serves evolutionary success, not truth.” In other words, if Darwin’s theory is true, then it is not true.

Self-referential absurdity is akin to the well-known liar’s paradox: “This statement is a lie.” If the statement is true, then (as it says) it is not true, but a lie.

Another example comes from Francis Crick. More.

But, of course, no intellectual consideration matters once the naturalists can hear the giant maw of the school system sucking it down. After a while, everyone believes what doesn’t make sense, and no one knows why or cares.

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Comments

TJ, the deep coherence of the Judaeo-Christian worldview is indeed a powerful line of evidence. And, indeed the utter want of an IS capable of grounding OUGHT (which underlies even so much of debate towards credible truth) for evo mat is yet another sign of its utter incoherence. KFkairosfocus_{March 11, 2015
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GUN & Seversky: Kindly cf 50 above i/l/o 10 further above. KFkairosfocus_{March 11, 2015
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CHartsil, you have shown yourself to be a strawman caricature specialist. The real issue lies here as a first example, functional specificity of configs is real, and especially when tied to complexity beyond 500 - 1,000 bits, is highly relevant to the world of cell based life. So much so that to object insistently in the teeth of correction, you find yourself repeatedly setting up and knocking over a strawman caricature long after such blunders have been repeatedly corrected and pointed out to you with reasons and evidence given. When that happens, the import is, the strawman tactic is willfully manipulative and trollishly deceitful. It is high time to do better, but it seems we have to put up another illustration of why you have made yourself a poster child of what has gone wrong. KFkairosfocus_{March 11, 2015
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VS: Let's take on points: >> KF: a designer is purposeful and evidently skilled, VS: Seems reasonable,though what means do we know that purpose requires human thoughts and reasoning to be trustworthy? The assumption that our means of reasoning is trustworthy to make that reasoning that it is trustworthy?>> 1 --> Don't you see how this is riddled with necessarily accepting that we can perceive accurately, warrant, reason and know? On evo mat premises none of this is grounded. Which was my point -- incoherence. 2 --> At any rate, you here show just how you are forced to acknowledge or assume general trustworthiness of human faculties of cognition, even as you try to selectively project skepticism. (The underlying attitude of suspicion and/or hostility towards a small-c creator . . . echoing that towards a big-C Creator, is duly noted also.) 3 --> The canons of inference to best explanation then point to a need to ground that confidence. As was outlined and linked onwards in 10 above, evo mat fails here. >> KF: chem rxns etc are not purposeful or capable of debugging and troubleshooting of the scope required for what is needed, VS: You seem to know a lot about how this designer works,funny how its technological skills match modern humans. Advanced enough to travel vast distances but still debugging and troubleshooting. I wonder how the designer knows its mind is trustworthy?>> 4 --> You twisted the focus, setting up and knocking over a strawman. I spoke here to the evo mat frame of blind chance and mechanical necessity working through manipulating brain and wider CNS electrochemistry, also reflecting knowledge and experience of designing and building information processing and communication systems . . . trial and error even with a lot of the knowledge and skill blind chemistry does not have, has to do a LOT of debugging and troubleshooting. 5 --> Note Sir Francis Crick, cited at 10 above as the very first point, which you ignored . . . but it is a big part of my thought context; here, in his 1994 The Astonishing Hypothesis:
. . . that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.
6 --> Philip Johnson's apt response in his 1995 Reason in the Balance follows immediately in no 10:
Philip Johnson has replied that Sir Francis should have therefore been willing to preface his works thusly: “I, Francis Crick, my opinions and my science, and even the thoughts expressed in this book, consist of nothing more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Johnson then acidly commented: “[[t]he plausibility of materialistic determinism requires that an implicit exception be made for the theorist.” [[Reason in the Balance, 1995.] . . . .
7 --> VS, if you adhere to much the same view, the same stricture applies; your own argument is not a convenient exception, but you are forced to act as though Haldane the famed early Neo-Darwinian and OOL theorist, was right (and again as was cited in 10 above but ignored):
"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209 . . . ]
8 --> That is exactly what you just did, but on evo mat there is nothing but mass, energy, particles, space-time, blind chance and mechanical necessity to drive anything. In order to argue to support your apparent view you are forced to act on nthe premise that it is not. >> KF: and the blind mechanism proposed is utterly irrelevant to purpose, truth, accuracy, validity, truth, etc. VS: It is not blind,the brain has the ability to learn,accuracy is rewarded, linking observations is rewarded, communication is rewarded, logic is rewarded. If you anticipate where the animals will be by the locations of the constellations , you are rewarding reasoning. Each generation passing along the tribal knowledge, if it is wrong,no tribe.>> 9 --> I just showed by citation from a more extended argument why I have good grounds and you do not. There is just no grounds for giving chemistry plus chance generating trials plus culling by differential reproductive success giving elimination of errors -- which vastly outnumber possible successful configs [it takes a LOT of knowledge and skill to bring a system close enough to working that testing and troubleshooting can eliminate remaining faults] -- such wonderful, almost magical powers. >> KF: There is on the face of it far better reason to trust that we were designed to generally be capable of reasoning and thinking soundly, VS: What reliable instrument are you using to make that assement?>> 10 --> The same point from Haldane and Johnson vs Crick, again. >> KF: than that a concatenation of accidents and their consequences by massive luck got it right. VS: I prefer to believe that a brain capable of learning is capable of reasoned thinking, we need to teach logic, logical fallacies are the proof of the necessity of that. If truth was paramount to the designer,why the design of emotions which if anything promote unreasoned thinking?>> 11 --> The same basic ignored point, again; in effect the above as cited is a grand case of setting up and knocking over a strawman caricature. 12 --> Also, there is a misunderstanding of the emotional. 13 --> Our emotions are deeply cognitive and that cognition is often but not always right. That is, we feel a strong protective response to perceptions, evaluations and judgements, blended with purposes and values of the heart that embed goals and agendas. 14 --> The issue is not with feeling a surge of fear and hormonally released strength to jump out of the way of a car on the road, but whether that is appropriately responsive to an accurate assessment . . . though in such a case, there may be 1/2 s so response is almost instinctual. 15 --> Our challenge is to acquire the wisdom to perceive, judge and live aright, resisting the tempting pull to the wrong . . . which reveals itself by questionable motives, incoherence and the like. 16 --> That we are finite, fallible, often morally struggling or blinded by wrong motives etc, means that we have a spiritual growth challenge, it does not mean that we are crippled from learning, thinking and acting towards the right. (And the whole question of being under moral government is another hole in the evo mat view.) >> KF: But actually, there is no good obse4vational evidence that such blind chance and necessity can even surmount the barrier to get to the FSCO/I in a living cell much less the functional capacities we have. VS: Unless of course one doesn’t assume his conclusion and life is observational proof the there is no barrier >> 17 --> The challenge faced by blind chance and mechanical necessity in a Darwin's pond or the like to spontaneously get to FSCO/I rich cell based life -- cf. here as a start, onlookers -- is no mere "assumption," it is a major challenge to OOL studies. 18 --> A challenge that gets bigger by the year never mind overconfident headlines and repeated promissory notes on future progress of "Science." 19 --> The underlying point is, that to avoid dominance of science by ideologically rooted speculative ideas the Galilean principle that our key hyps must be subject to empirical tests must be adhered to -- science must at minimum be empirically testable and found empirically reliable. 20 --> On this, Newton championed that especially for things remote from us that are not accessible to direct inspection, we must address traces based on like causes like; i.e. explain by causes shown adequate to the effects -- vera causa. 21 --> In this case VS, you have substituted a circularity in argument dismissing a barrier that is manifestly there. (CHartsil, were he more than a trollish objectionist, would do well to heed this too.) 22 --> In a high contingency situation, where function emerges from many correctly arranged, coupled interacting parts there necessarily will be vastly more clumped or scattered non-functional configs than the ones that work . . . there is a whole planet or more to scatter the bits and pieces across. This even obtains in the ambit of a pond, just dice up into cells and count up ways to arrange parts (a classic stat thermo-d approach). 23 --> Thus, the FSCO/I blind needle in haystack challenge to find deeply isolated islands of function directly emerges. Dismissive rhetoric may paper it over, but it has not gone away. 24 --> And your response lets us see where the gap lies: circularity from matter-energy blindly groping must be all there is, to here we are, so the barrier cannot be real. 25 --> Oops. _____________ KFkairosfocus_{March 11, 2015
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A bit OT maybe, but another result of the evolutionary hypothesis - besides robbing us of our foundation for truth and reason - is that it robs us of our foundation for morality. Here is another insightful post from crev.info:
Darwinian Outrage: An Oxymoron The question brings up a deeper quandary: how could Darwin-soaked western intellectuals respond with moral outrage? Darwinian ideology views humans as mere animals, and societal actions as evolutionary strategies. Altruism is a biological thing; birds do it (Nature); monkeys do it (Nature); even altruistic bacteria share their food (Nature). For all science knows, global warming caused the Syrian terrorism (PNAS). Such beliefs undermine moral outrage; it’s not an ideology that is turning these radicals into murderers and destroyers of history, they would say. It’s just their evolutionary strategy. Religion, to Darwinians (who most often are also politically left-leaning), is a strategy as well. Science Magazine has a piece entitled, “To foster complex societies, tell people a god is watching.” Writer Lizzie Wade and her editorial bosses at the AAAS are not about to grant even white space to the notion that there might actually be a God (certainly not a moral Lawgiver). In the Darwinian mindset, if tribal leaders have been successful at keeping underlings behaving by telling them a moral and powerful “god” is watching, then that has been a useful evolutionary strategy. PhysOrg echoed this “research” that Australian Darwinians put out in a Royal Society paper. The abstract makes the Darwinian connection clear: “Supernatural belief presents an explanatory challenge to evolutionary theorists—it is both costly and prevalent,” they say, but then they proceed to explain it in Darwinian terms: “Our results show the power of phylogenetic methods to address long-standing debates about the origins and functions of religion in human society.” It’s all an evolutionary game (see BBC News); it occurs spontaneously among human populations as naturally as it does among bacterial colonies. Both sides are morally equivalent. Accordingly, who can oppose ISIS with courage and conviction? At best, the “cooperators” band together to oppose the “cheaters” – but those labels only apply to the majority and minority in the population. The ratio can change at any time. ISIS has, indeed become the majority against the Christians, Jews, and Yazidis in the region. As Christians who have lived in Syria and Iraq for two millennia are wiped out, the Darwinian can only watch dispassionately from the sidelines and remark, “natural selection in action.” Incidentally, Philip Ball says in Nature that complex societies have evolved without belief in an all-powerful deity. In the short article, he used the word “evolution” or its cognates 10 times. Since evolution yields opposite outcomes with equal facility, it shows itself to be, once again, a restatement of the Stuff Happens Law. We live in ominous times, with evil rising and few statesmen to oppose it (Netanyahu being an outstanding exception). We learned nothing from the 1930s, when appeasers let dictators get out of hand, costing tens of millions of lives in World War II. Atrocities on the level of the worst committed by the Nazis and communists in the last century are now, in our time, being committed by Islamic terrorists. But what is uglier: the torture and murder of innocents by ISIS, or the evolutionary ideology that robs the righteous of their moral foundation to oppose it? - See more at: http://crev.info/2015/03/isis-atrocities-does-outrage-evolve/#sthash.gbVbhPst.dpuf
tjguy_{March 11, 2015
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Velikovskys @37
tjguy: Can we trust our reasoning and our thoughts formed from the chemical secretions in either brain?
Why do you assume that we can trust our reasoning and thoughts if they are created by an unknown designer with unknown abilities for unknown reasons? We are all in the same boat.
It makes much more sense of reality to me. A Materialist has no foundation for reason whatsoever, but the Judeo Christian worldview does provide that foundation. To me, it is a better and more fulfilling and meaningful explanation of reality. The Bible reveals, as does nature, a God of order, design, and beauty(there are, of course, many exceptions due to human sin and the curse that sin incurred on humanity and on God's creation.) The Bible says that God created us for relationship with Him. If we humans all have a desire to know where we came from, why we are here, where we are going, etc., if the Designer made us with those desires, unless He is a capricious meanie, it makes total sense that He would reveal these answers to us. Reason, truth, morality, beauty, love, etc. These things make total sense within the Judeo Christian worldview, but they don't make sense in the Materialist worldview. You are free to believe in evolved monkey brains that make humans biological pawns of the chemical processes in those brains if you want, but for me, the God hypothesis is a far better explanation of reality. You'll have to forgive me. Evolution made my brain. I have no idea whether my thoughts are accurate or not, but I have no choice but to see things as I do. Right now, due to the evolved monkey brain that evolution blessed me with, that is what I think. It is how I evaluate the matter. It makes me happy and fulfilled and seems accurate to me, so I'm gonna stick with it! And personally, I'm happy that I was blessed with a religious brain, as you are probably happy that you were not.tjguy_{March 11, 2015
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Zachriel @ 27
tjguy: If my mind evolved in such a way as to make belief in God a good strategy for survival and yours evolved in such a way as to make belief in Materialism a good strategy for survival, how do we know whose mind is right?
People may have a propensity to ascribe spirit to things and events. This allows them to map between two complex phenomena, such as a chaotic sky god and chaotic weather patterns. Presumably this facility has substantial variation, and is tempered considerably by culture, especially modern scientific culture.
OK, so that’s how you see it. Great. I evaluate things a bit differently, thanks to the brain evolution gave me. Some think as you do, but I think that some people, thanks to the evolved monkey mind that evolution blessed them with, have a propensity NOT to believe in God and to ascribe miraculous powers to untestable natural processes. Abiogenesis would be the supreme example here. Presumably, believing in abiogenesis fits your mindset and the evolved monkey brain that makes you who you are. But using my evolved mind to evaluate the data leads me to conclude something totally different – namely that belief in God is the most reasonable explanation for life, mind, beauty, design, and the universe itself. Again, the bottom line is, how do we know which evolved monkey brain is trustworthy – if any! Science cannot answer this question because we do not have experimental evidence of abiogenesis or of the many mind blowing supposed evolutionary transitions. Given the mind evolution gave me, I guess I can’t help it if I can’t believe or evaluate things like your mind does. However, if I am merely an animal that can be conditioned to believe in anything, there is still hope for me. Perhaps a little more reprogramming will turn me into a Materialist too. So far though, it hasn’t worked. But you can keep hoping and propagating your ideas/thoughts/beliefs. Maybe one day my mind will finally be reconditioned and my transition to an evolutionary machine will be complete.
tjguy: Can we trust our reasoning and our thoughts formed from the chemical secretions in either brain?
Not completely. A simple example is an optical illusion. More generally, people have a great deal of difficulty understanding the scale of many scientific findings, whether the quantum scale, the cosmological scale, or the great age of the earth.
Exactly right. Another thing that is necessary to have accurate reasoning is accurate information on which to base that reasoning. We just don’t have all the information we need to make accurate conclusions about the past. How often do we find things that overturn previously held beliefs concerning the past. This happens all the time in evolution and the historical sciences especially. Just recently the tired old Darwinian canard about the backward wiring of the eye was put to rest by some Israeli scientists who found out why it is designed as it is. The point is that there are tons of anomalies that don’t fit with theory - which shows that we don’t have all the necessary information needed to claim that we “know” what happened. Of course, all scientific knowledge is tentative in this sense, but it doesn't give us much confidence when things that we "know" are constantly being shown to be wrong. that which is confirmed by experiment over and over again is MUCH MORE CERTAIN and TRUSTWORTHY than the stuff that is not and can not be. And, another thing that is helpful is a foundation for reason which Materialism cannot provide.
tjguy: If our brains and thoughts are not selected for truth value, but for survival value, can we really trust them? Why or why not?
Humans are pretty good at judging aspects of the world that relate to their original evolution.
Interesting! Are you thinking of the fact that most people believe in a Creator when you say that? Probably not, so I'm not tracking with you here. But apart from that, how do you know they are good at it? By what standard do you make that judgment? It would seem to me that you would have to know what is actually true in order to evaluate the ability of humans to judge this. Are you claiming to have such knowledge? Do you have access to the ultimate standard by which to measure people’s response so that you can make that black and white pronouncement? To be honest, Zachriel, you sound quite arrogant here and a bit condescending. You seem to be stating your opinion as fact here. (Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are trying to say?) Are there other ways to know things than the scientific method? Is that a corollary to what you are saying here? Are you admitting that there are other means to knowledge?
tjguy: The point is, that this undermines all reasoning and truth/knowledge claims.
It means that humans can’t completely trust their senses. That’s why it took science to overthrow many false beliefs. Philosophy wasn’t enough.
You are familiar I am sure with the philosophy of science. Science depends on philosophy to work. And the philosophy of science points out some of the limitations of science because it makes clear what assumptions must be taken to be true a priori. Philosophy is not enough, but neither is science enough – especially when we delve into the unreachable, unrepeatable, untestable, and only semi-observable past. Another great example of scientists making truth claims and being deceived because of lack of information is this on the national geographic website: "Astronomers Find a Dusty Galaxy That Shouldn't Exist" An object from the very early universe is bafflingly rich with dust that theory says shouldn't have formed yet. A subtitle in the article reads like this: "What Astronomers Think They Know" That is the way we should put it. We think this is true, based on the information we have now. Usually though, it is not stated like this, but rather we are told what scientists actually know these things. With anomalies such as this theory defying dusty galaxy, we realize that we really don't know what we think we know.
From crev.info Philosophers of science know that there is no one “scientific method,” nor are there any criteria to demarcate science from pseudoscience. Many science reporters (and cosmologists like George Ellis and Joe Silk) seem oblivious to that fact. C. S. Lewis even said there is no such thing as “scientific” thinking, only “logical” thinking. You cannot blindly crank a “scientific method” machine and crank out knowledge. There are inevitable assumptions about the nature of reality involved. There are numerous “unknown unknowns” involved. Great scientists often succeed through tacit knowledge (abductive inference), not just mechanical methods. And any method or procedure is useless without integrity. Science is distinct over other disciplines only in its subject matter (“nature,” whatever that refers to), not its need for honesty, discipline, and critique. Historians need these attributes. Theologians need these attributes. Everyone needs these attributes. We would do well to stop treating “science” as a sacred cow superior to other endeavors. Some try to exalt science because of its results: space flight, lasers, and the works. But it should be noted that ancient peoples achieved monumental results for their time—some of which cannot be duplicated today—without following a “scientific method.” Certain methods dubbed “scientific” are merely more refined ways to organize one’s thoughts so as not to be misled, and to build on accumulated knowledge from others. Any field—law, politics, journalism, art—can progress by doing similar things. Science has its share of false leads, backtracks, and misconceptions. Some of the worst are going on right now: e.g., materialism, Darwinism, and the idea that “consensus” trumps critical thinking. - See more at: http://crev.info/2015/03/scientific-method-evolves-2/#sthash.TIb9jWAV.dpuf
tjguy_{March 11, 2015
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An example of self-referential absurdity is a theory called evolutionary epistemology, a naturalistic approach that applies evolution to the process of knowing. The theory proposes that the human mind is a product of natural selection. The implication is that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value.
The last sentence is the flaw that fatally undermines the whole argument. Why should we assume that truth and survival are inconsistent? Your chances of survival in a dangerous world are greater the truer your understanding of that world is. I'm sure we're all familiar with various instances from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where certain indigenous people developed the conviction that if their faith were held with absolute certainty they would be immune to the white man's bullets. I think we all have a good idea of how those confrontations between religious truth and European military technology turned out. We all talk glibly about truth as if we are certain of what it is. But are we? What is truth? As I see it, there is an observable, objective world outside me in which I live and which I believe to be real. Statements, assertions, claims, explanations, hypotheses or theories we make about the nature of this world are true in the older meanings of the word (from Merriam-Webster):
: 2 the quality or state of being accurate (as in alignment or adjustment) —used in the phrases in true and out of true

: to make level, square, balanced, or concentric : bring or restore to a desired mechanical accuracy or form
In other words, this is a correspondence theory of truth. The degree of truth of a statement is the extent to which it aligns with - or corresponds to - observable reality. Models of observable reality which more closely correspond to the way that reality is give you a better chance of navigating through - and surviving in - that reality.Seversky_{March 11, 2015
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KF,
By what bootstrap do we pull ourselves out of the muck of the non-rational into the self aware, conscious, reasoning, knowing? With what reason to trust our cognitive capacities?
Good question, what is the bootstrap to pull ourselves out of the muck? To believe that an intelligent Creator designed our brains for truth? But you have to already trust your brain to believe that idea. And around we go.goodusername_{March 11, 2015
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KF: VS, a designer is purposeful and evidently skilled, Seems reasonable,though what means do we know that purpose requires human thoughts and reasoning to be trustworthy? The assumption that our means of reasoning is trustworthy to make that reasoning that it is trustworthy? chem rxns etc are not purposeful or capable of debugging and troubleshooting of the scope required for what is needed, You seem to know a lot about how this designer works,funny how its technological skills match modern humans. Advanced enough to travel vast distances but still debugging and troubleshooting. I wonder how the designer knows its mind is trustworthy? and the blind mechanism proposed is utterly irrelevant to purpose, truth, accuracy, validity, truth, etc. It is not blind,the brain has the ability to learn,accuracy is rewarded, linking observations is rewarded, communication is rewarded, logic is rewarded. If you anticipate where the animals will be by the locations of the constellations , you are rewarding reasoning. Each generation passing along the tribal knowledge, if it is wrong,no tribe. There is on the face of it far better reason to trust that we were designed to generally be capable of reasoning and thinking soundly, What reliable instrument are you using to make that assement? than that a concatenation of accidents and their consequences by massive luck got it right. I prefer to believe that a brain capable of learning is capable of reasoned thinking, we need to teach logic, logical fallacies are the proof of the necessity of that. If truth was paramount to the designer,why the design of emotions which if anything promote unreasoned thinking? But actually, there is no good obse4vational evidence that such blind chance and necessity can even surmount the barrier to get to the FSCO/I in a living cell much less the functional capacities we have. Unless of course one doesn't assume his conclusion and life is observational proof the there is no barriervelikovskys_{March 11, 2015
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"A mindless process that cares not a hoot on truth, that is even questionable to get to the FSCO/I involved in cell based life?" Question begging yet again. Just asserting that it's specified does not make it soCHartsil_{March 11, 2015
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Folks: We all know we can know, warrant and reason, with some measure of success. The question is what best grounds that? A mindless process that cares not a hoot on truth, that is even questionable to get to the FSCO/I involved in cell based life? Or a foundational mind? No contest. KF PS: And nope, inference to best empirically warranted explanation is not glorified guesswork or hunches. That trick being played by is it Z in another thread is an attempt to dismiss inductive reasoning; the foundation inter alia of science.kairosfocus_{March 11, 2015
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Box I know that :) so do you, but for the materialist to admit it would mean acknowledging how utterly false their position is.Andre_{March 11, 2015
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Andre: The question is simple… Do chemicals concern themselves with truth or do they obey the laws of nature? Not a single atheist have answered this question honestly, if they did, they would admit how stupid their belief system really is……
Chemicals obey the laws of nature and don't give a hoot about truth. Here is the disconnect: one cannot get from chemicals to the mental; one cannot get from the laws of nature to truth, meaning, overview, wisdom and logic. Indeed it is in fact unfathomable simple.Box_{March 11, 2015
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VS, a designer is purposeful and evidently skilled, chem rxns etc are not purposeful or capable of debugging and troubleshooting of the scope required for what is needed, and the blind mechanism proposed is utterly irrelevant to purpose, truth, accuracy, validity, truth, etc. There is on the face of it far better reason to trust that we were designed to generally be capable of reasoning and thinking soundly, than that a concatenation of accidents and their consequences by massive luck got it right. But actually, there is no good obse4vational evidence that such blind chance and necessity can even surmount the barrier to get to the FSCO/I in a living cell much less the functional capacities we have. Let's refresh our thoughts, starting with famed Evolutionist Haldane:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” ["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]
If you disagree with him why and on what evidence and on what grounds to trust the evaluation of claimed evidence? KFkairosfocus_{March 11, 2015
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CHartsil, there you go again. Let's see, a complex coded digital storage system, with transcription, transfer to serving as a prong height code template in a NC machine, then used to step by step control an assembly process, all dependent on specificity of code, specificity of fit, right arrangements and coupling across many many components, etc. Then the product folds into a complex form that defies computational analysis, to further carry out remote functions. DNA --> transcription --> mRNA --> Ribosome and tRNAs --> primary protein AA chain, folded to functional form, etc. Well known facts outlined, not mere assertions. Your problem is ideologically motivated denial, backed up by apparent Facebook fraud, accusations without proper merit, refusal to be corrected on cogent evidence and more. In due course you will have further opportunity to explain why you have become a poster child for the sort of trollish misbehaviour that too often characterises too many objectors to design thought. KF PS: Pardon this break in transmission, a troll needed to be put in his place.kairosfocus_{March 11, 2015
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tjguy: Can we trust our reasoning and our thoughts formed from the chemical secretions in either brain? Why do you assume that we can trust our reasoning and thoughts if they are created by an unknown designer with unknown abilities for unknown reasons? We are all in the same boat.velikovskys_{March 11, 2015
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Andre: What triggers lightning? An angry sky-god hurling bolts at the wicked in the Vale of Tempe below. Andre: So can we rely on our senses or not? You seem to have a binary view of the world. Human senses are imperfect, but not completely incapable.Zachriel_{March 11, 2015
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The environment was tribal and therefore we can reliably relate to our evolution but we can't really trust it? You make allot of sense...... Let me ask you.... How do you know that you can't know?Andre_{March 11, 2015
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Zachriel So can we rely on our senses or not? you seem to contradict yourself all the time.....Andre_{March 11, 2015
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Zachriel What triggers lightning?Andre_{March 11, 2015
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Andre: What triggers Lightning? An angry sky-god hurling lightning bolts at the wicked in the Vale of Tempe below. Andre: What does this mean? The original human environment was tribal and local. Humans are good at those sorts of interactions. They are good at recognizing dangerous animals, and forming cooperative attachments with closely related humans. They are not good at visualizing quantum interactions, and have to be trained to understand even Newtonian mechanics. Andre: Making a truth claim about something that knows nothing about truth Humans can reliably determine many things. A simple example is that holding your hand in the fire will result in injury. Andre: Science itself is always under correction That's right!Zachriel_{March 11, 2015
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Zachriel
It means that humans can’t completely trust their senses. That’s why it took science to overthrow many false beliefs. Philosophy wasn’t enough.
You are kidding right? Making a truth claim about something that knows nothing about truth... Science itself is always under correction, but not according to Zachriel who relates to his own evolution..... Whatever floats your boat Mr Smarty pants! What are those false beliefs? Stuff like Gods make lightning?Andre_{March 11, 2015
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Zachriel What does this mean?
Humans are pretty good at judging aspects of the world that relate to their original evolution.
Relate to their original evolution? From which orifice do you suck this stuff from?Andre_{March 11, 2015
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Zachriel I'm so tired of the atheist confidence that he thinks he can explain natural phenomena like lightning! Right Mr Smarty pants, easy question.... What triggers Lightning?Andre_{March 11, 2015
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The question is simple... Do chemicals concern themselves with truth or do they obey the laws of nature? Not a single atheist have answered this question honestly, if they did, they would admit how stupid their belief system really is......Andre_{March 11, 2015
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tjguy: If my mind evolved in such a way as to make belief in God a good strategy for survival and yours evolved in such a way as to make belief in Materialism a good strategy for survival, how do we know whose mind is right? People may have a propensity to ascribe spirit to things and events. This allows them to map between two complex phenomena, such as a chaotic sky god and chaotic weather patterns. Presumably this facility has substantial variation, and is tempered considerably by culture, especially modern scientific culture. tjguy: Can we trust our reasoning and our thoughts formed from the chemical secretions in either brain? Not completely. A simple example is an optical illusion. More generally, people have a great deal of difficulty understanding the scale of many scientific findings, whether the quantum scale, the cosmological scale, or the great age of the earth. tjguy: If our brains and thoughts are not selected for truth value, but for survival value, why or why not? Humans are pretty good at judging aspects of the world that relate to their original evolution. tjguy: The point is, that this undermines all reasoning and truth/knowledge claims. It means that humans can't completely trust their senses. That's why it took science to overthrow many false beliefs. Philosophy wasn't enough.Zachriel_{March 11, 2015
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Zachriel, If my mind evolved in such a way as to make belief in God a good strategy for survival and yours evolved in such a way as to make belief in Materialism a good strategy for survival, how do we know whose mind is right? Can we trust our reasoning and our thoughts formed from the chemical secretions in either brain? If our brains and thoughts are not selected for truth value, but for survival value, why or why not? The point is, that this undermines all reasoning and truth/knowledge claims. They may still be accurate, but we really have no way of knowing. All we can say is they have survival value and that can be said of theistic worldviews as well as of atheistic worldviews. There is no foundation for truth if Materialism is true, which ironically, we can never really know for sure. At least the Judeo Christian worldview provides a foundation for truth.tjguy_{March 11, 2015
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Box: But what is the chemicals opinion of the real world worth? After all it is confined in the brain. The claim concerns whether evolution is self-refuting. The theory posits that the human brain is the product of successful reproduction over millions of years. That is not self-refuting. Box: It just sits there trapped inside the brain “thinking” that it has a connection with the real world, which is ‘out there’ – on the other side of the skull. Well, you can descend into solipsism, but that has nothing to do with evolutionary theoryZachriel_{March 11, 2015
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Silver: Free will is an illusion, consciousness, sense of self, morality, religious insight … all illusions. But evolutionary speculations, of course, with evidence that is entirely imaginary, are supposedly not illusions at all.
There are always exceptions to the rule. :)Box_{March 11, 2015
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