Here’s another new vid, for the John 10:10 project, from Illustra Media:
Charles Darwin once wrote that the sight of a male peacock’s tail made him physically ill. Why? Because he knew that the gratuitous beauty so prevalent throughout the living world points unmistakably to intelligent design, foresight and plan. Explore the artistry and stunning implications of natural colors, patterns, and ornamentation in the animal and plant kingdoms that exist for a purpose beyond mere survival.
Note: Darwin went on to develop his theory of sexual selection, to explain such phenomena as the peacock’s tail. While it became dogma that sexual selection explains the peacock’s tail, it’s not clear that the peahen actually cares as much about it as the Darwinist does.
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
See also: Can sex explain evolution?
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What’s also interesting is whether or not the peacock can discern the value of the symmetry and geometric proportionality. How can a creature without the ability to think abstractly enjoy its own beauty? How could a random process create symmetry and ratios. It’s as if someone created nature and filled it symmetry, the Golden ratio, geometric beauty, and created an observer to enjoy it all.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. How can it be evidence of design?
Darwinian evolution is based on the philosophy of reductive materialism. i.e. “that only the material world (matter) is truly real,”
There are a few problems with the Darwinist’s reductive materialistic belief that “that only the material world (matter) is truly real”. Number one science itself, specifically advances in quantum mechanics, have now falsified reductive materialism as being true. Specifically, advances in quantum mechanics have now falsified hidden variables and have now also falsified ‘realism’ itself. (‘Realism’ is the belief that a material reality exists separate from our conscious observation of it.
Aside from all these technical empirical falsifications of the Darwinist’s reductive materialistic worldview, the main reason why reductive materialism must be false is fairly easy to understand. For something, anything, to be ‘truly real’ for us in the first place we must first and foremost be conscious of it. There is simply no way to circumvent the primary prerequisite of consciousness in any definition of reality that we may put forth. Here are a few quotes from the main founders of quantum mechanics that drives this ‘simple’ point home:
Besides the fact that the Darwinist’s entire reductive materialistic worldview has now been empirically falsified by advances in quantum mechanics, there is another insurmountable difficulty with the Darwinian claim that only his reductive materialistic worldview is truly scientific.
All of science, engineering, and technology, is based upon mathematics.
And yet, although all of science, engineering, and technology, is based upon mathematics,
mathematics itself exists in a transcendent, beyond space and time, realm which is not reducible any possible material explanation. This transcendent mathematical realm has been referred to as a Platonic mathematical world.
Simply put, Mathematics itself, contrary to the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, does not need the physical world in order to exist. And yet Darwinists, although they deny that anything beyond nature exists, need this transcendent world of mathematics in order for their theory to be considered scientific in the first place. The predicament that Darwinists find themselves in regards to denying the reality of this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics, and yet needing validation from this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics in order to be considered scientific, should be the very definition of a scientifically self-refuting worldview.
To make this predicament with mathematics even more problematic for Darwinists, it is said that the best mathematical theories, that are later confirmed empirically to be true, were born out of the mathematicians ‘sense of beauty’. Paul Dirac is said to have mathematically discovered the ‘anti-electron’, before it was empirically confirmed, through his mathematical ‘sense of beauty’. Paul Dirac was rather adamant that beauty was integral to his being able to find truth through math:
Albert Einstein was also a big fan of beauty in math. Einstein stated:
Alex Vilenkin, who mathematically proved that all hypothetical inflationary universes must also have had a beginning, commenting on Euler’s Identity, stated,,,
As well, Richard Feynman called Euler’s Identity a ‘jewel’:
‘Mathematical beauty’ even had a guiding hand in the fairly recent discovery of the Amplituhedron:
Paul Dirac, when pressed for a definition of mathematical beauty, reacted as such:
And indeed, just as Dirac held, it is found when mathematicians are shown equations such as Euler’s identity or the Pythagorean identity the same area of the brain used to appreciate fine art or music lights up:
For any math geeks who may be reading this, here is some fine art for you guys to appreciate:
What is astonishing, in this seemingly deep connection between math and beauty, is the fact that the ‘argument from beauty’ is a Theistic argument.
Beauty is certainly not an atheistic argument. In fact Darwin himself stated if anything were created for beauty in the eyes of man it “would be absolutely fatal to my theory.”
Besides mathematics and beauty, there are endless litany of other abstract immaterial objects, immaterial objects that everybody, including Darwinists, take for granted as being real, that become illusory and therefore ‘non-real’ within the Darwinian worldview. As Dr. Egnor states in the following article, “Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts.”,,,
And as M. Anthony Mills states in the following article, even ‘persons’ become ‘unreal’ in the Darwinist’s materialistic worldview. In fact he goes on to state, “Not just you, but tables, chairs, countries, countrymen, symphonies, jokes, legal contracts, moral judgments, and acts of courage or cowardice — all of these must be fully explicable in terms of those more fundamental, material constituents.
In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics.”
Even the concept of species itself becomes abstract and therefore ‘unreal’ on a Darwinian view of things:
As should be needless to say, any theory that denies to very existence of ‘species’ cannot possibly be the true theory that purportedly explains the “Origin of Species”
One final note, besides mathematics and beauty, ‘truth’ itself is also an abstract immaterial entity which is not reducible to some materialistic explanation:
Therefore since the reality of ‘abstract’ truth itself is denied in the Darwinist’s reductive materialistic worldview, then it necessarily follows that the Darwinian worldview cannot ever possibly be true.
Verses:
‘A new experiment by an international team led by Heriot-Watt’s Dr Alessandro Fedrizzi has now found that the universe is even weirder than that: entangled objects do not cause each other to behave the way they do.
http://phys.org/news/2016-08-q…..ation.html’
– BA #3
Ha ha You hapless materialist twits ! God dunnit !!!!!!!! as I posited some time ago. It just seemed the obvious alternative to causation by regular means within space-time.
And moral beauty is as high above sensual beauty as the heavens are above the earth, which is why such a small, seemingly footling precept in the Mosaic Law, as to refrain from seeething a kid in its mother’s milk has such enormous implications.
Great film and it highlights a huge problem for Darwin that rarely gets noticed.
Why is it that only humans have the ability to appreciate beauty? It’s not necessary for survival.
Why does unnecessary beauty exist in nature? Evolution should not be able to produce unnecessary beauty.
Could it be that humans were created to experience and appreciate beauty so that we can better know, love, worship, and appreciate God? Animals have no need for this. But David said this in Ps. 27:4 “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.”
We were made to worship and love God and the ability to appreciate beauty is necessary in order to be able to do that. There is the added side benefit of enjoying sunsets, starry skies, symphonies, and art masterpieces as well.
Sev,
Quite the assumption there in that first sentence.
Oh, I’ll give you that some beauty is subjective. But that doesn’t mean that it all is.
Before you get mired in subjectivism or basing your worldview on an aphorism consider rethinking that first sentence.
I have yet to find someone that thinks the orchids blooming in my north facing window to be ugly. The uniform response is awe. If everyone sees the same thing maybe it’s because it’s objectively there. Sounds suspiciously like science where from the same input (orchid) I reliably get the same result (awe) time and time again.
If the first sentence is not true now what might the answer to the question be?
@Latemarch #9
Just because humans have similar reactions to things like orchids, doesn’t make it any less subjective.
Beauty is not an inherent quality of any thing.
It’s like the color red, it only exists as a concept in the mind. To think otherwise is to make a category error.
I am frequently amazed at how some people seem to have a poor grasp of where their brains stop and where the rest of the universe begins. Thinking that beauty is objective is an unwarranted blurring of that dividing line, also known as the Mind Projection Fallacy.
Pater said it that settles it! Take note all you IDiots. Pater Kimbridge’s opinions are true because… Well, I don’t know why they would be true… Because he thinks they are true? Who the hell Pater Kimbridge and why should we give any credence to what he believes and thinks?
I am frequently amazed at how some people seem to have a poor grasp of basic logic.
PK,
Indeed. Not to be out done by the hubris of assuming that you know where the dividing line is.
You’ve assumed materialism which if you’ve been paying attention to BA77 is not a good place to be.
PK,
It’s not just that humans consistently call the same things in nature beautiful, but that the things in nature that humans call beautiful often posses similar attributes. They often posses a high degree of information in their structure. As a thought experiment imagine the Mona Lisa, then assume that we break the painting into a grid consisting of thousands of cubes, each representing a fraction of the original image, and then randomly move the cubes around in the grid. How likely are you to get a group of people to consider the randomized more beautiful than the original? In most cases it is far more likely that the original is considered more beautiful than the randomized painting. The argument here isn’t that beauty means design, but that most of the things that the human being perceives as beautiful often posses a high degree of information in their structure.
When it comes to the big questions, atheistic naturalism/materialism offers absolutely no basis for any kind of truth in the area of knowledge, meaning or values. Rather all you have are mindless opinions based on personal prejudice and herd like group think…
@John_a_designer #11
Oh, please, enlighten us with a demonstration of basic logic with respect to beauty.
@Jcfrk101 #13
I hate to break it to you, but the randomized Mona Lisa actually has more information in it than the original, if you adhere to Algorithmic Information Theory.
PK,
The Algorithmic information theory is primarily useful when trying to detect information in encoded data, where the raw bites do not constitute any useful information without a key. The key could be as simple as a type, or a data format that requires an algorithm to decode. In such a case higher degrees of randomness do correlate to higher degrees of information, the theorem is useful for detecting information in encoded data, the example I presented was not encoded. As an example, language would be a good candidate for detecting higher degrees of randomness via the Algorithmic information theory, more unique sounding words, will usually mean more is being said, this is useful when trying to detect the degree of information if one does not have a mechanism for decoding the actual data. Though Japanese sounds like gibberish to me, I could determine the amount of unique information within a phrase by detecting how many unique non-repetitive sounds are made. But a painting is not encoded, so the theorem does not apply.
I don’t find the Mona Lisa beautiful. I lined up, like everyone else does, to see it and was totally unimpressed. What I found amazing was that the Mona Lisa was protected behind bullet proof glass whereas hundreds of more beautiful and interesting paintings are only protected by a shin-high wire run a foot and a half in front of the walls.
2Jcfrk101
“…where the raw bites do not constitute any useful information without a key…”
Who determines usefulness? Aren’t we right back to “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”?
BA77
I think that this is the correct second link.
The Reason Why God Is the Beauty We All Seek
Thanks for that.
PK, I don’t know you tell me, you seem to believe that the words you posted carry objective meaning apart from me as the beholder. Your post is quite a contradiction.
Thanks for the corrected link LateMarch.
Of related note. A common description of heaven in Near Death Experiences is ‘indescribably beautiful’:
And whereas, atheists have no compelling evidence for all the various extra dimensions, parallel universe and/or multiverse scenarios that they have put forth to try to ‘explain away’ the creation and fine-tuning of the universe, Christians, on the other hand, (as is shown in the following video), can appeal directly to the higher dimensional mathematics behind Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity and General Relativity to support their belief that God upholds this universe in its continual existence, as well as to support their belief in a heavenly dimension and in a hellish dimension.
As well Christians can appeal to advances in quantum biology to support their belief in the reality of our immortal souls:
Verse
Deleted.
@Jcfrk101 #22
Likewise, the Mona Lisa only has meaning, and potentially beauty, for someone able to recognize it as a human face, and for whom that particular face is appealing. Beauty cannot be an inherent, objective property of an object or entity, when the beholder must be considered.
PK@26
Plenty of examples @5 and @6 as well as logical arguments for objective beauty. And your response continues to be proof by assertion.
Philosophers have argued about this for centuries. There are actual arguments (not particularly compelling in my view) for only subjective beauty. Come on PK you’re not even trying.
PK states,
Actually, in that statement PK is more truthful than he realizes or, as an atheist, he intends to be.
Whilst objects can certainly contain beauty, beauty is, like information, an immaterial property that is transcendent of any particular material object that may contain the property of being beautiful, and therefore it necessarily follow that beauty can only be truly appreciated by an immaterial mind. In fact, PK has stated that ‘the beholder must be considered’ and also stated that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, which is just another way of saying that beauty must be appreciated by the subjective experience of the immaterial mind of a beholder.
From which it necessarily follows, since the property of beauty is transcendent of any particular material medium, and that beauty can only be truly appreciated by an immaterial mind, that beauty must find its origin in the immaterial Mind of God. Specifically, “Beauty,,, can be appreciated only by the mind. This would be impossible, if this `idea’ of beauty were not found in the mind in a more perfect form.”
Again, PK was far more truthful than he realized when he stated that “the beholder must be considered.”
Where PK, and Darwinists in general, go off the rails is, unsurprisingly, when they try to explain where the subjective experience of the ‘beholder’ comes from in the first place.
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework simply have no clue how it is possibly for the material brain to generate the inner subjective experience of qualia:
The specific mental attribute of qualia is simply forever be beyond the scope of any possible materialistic explanation and/or any possible physical examination.
As Frank Jackson made clear in his philosophical argument ‘Mary’s Room’, no amount of scientific and physical examination on Mary’s part will ever reveal to Mary exactly what the inner subjective conscious experience of the color blue actually is until Mary actually experiences what the color blue is for herself.
As David Chalmers has pointed out in ‘the hard problem of consciouness’ with the philosophical zombie argument, for all we know, the person we are talking to, or even the person that we are examining with all our scientific instruments, could hypothetically be a philosophical zombie who has no inner subjective conscious experience whatsoever and that the philosophical zombie we are examining may just robotically be giving us correct answers that seem appropriate to any situation that we may be asking the philosophical zombie about.
Again, materialists simply do not have any realistic clue how anything material could ever generate the inner subjective consciousness experience of qualia. Here are a few quotes that make that point clear.
As Professor of Psychology David Barash states in the following article, an article which happens to be entitled “the hardest problem in science?”, “But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.”
In fact, the hard problem of consciousness, i.e. qualia, is such a hard problem for reductive materialists to try to explain that many leading materialistic scientists (and philosophers), will often end up claiming that ‘consciousness is just an illusion’ and that it does not really even exist at all.
But the claim from many leading materialistic scientists and philosophers that ‘consciousness is just an illusion’ is a blatantly self-refuting claim. It is the denial of the very thing that enables anything else to be real for us in the first place. As David Bentley Hart states, “Simply enough, you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. This is so incandescently obvious that it is almost embarrassing to have to state it.”
Thus PK, and Darwinists in general, in their sheer inability to explain where subjective experience comes from in the first place, find themselves in quite the conundrum in their claim that beauty is purely subjective and is merely ‘in the eye of the beholder.’
Unwittingly, PK, in his claim that beauty is purely ‘subjective’, has inadvertently conceded the necessity of immaterial mind, particularly qualia, for any coherent definition of beauty, and/or reality, to we may try to put forth.
None of this should be surprising, the immaterial conscious mind itself is the necessary prerequisite, of all possible prerequisites, for any coherent definition of reality that we may try to put forth. Here are few quotes from the main founders of quantum mechanics that drives this point home:
In conclusion, beauty must necessarily find its origin in God:
Bible verse
BA77,
Beautiful take down…..can I say that? “;^)
I wonder if he’ll understand.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZTRiSNmeGQK8AkdN2/mind-projection-fallacy
PK links to a site which states:
A yet, as was pointed out in posts 28 and 29, beauty being a property of the immaterial mind is exactly what the Christian’s claim is. To repeat,, ” Beauty,,, can be appreciated only by the mind. This would be impossible, if this `idea’ of beauty were not found in the mind in a more perfect form.”
@BA77 #32
So it’s all in your head. I agree completely.
Pater Kimbridge states:
What Pater Kimbridge is trying to say, although he does not say it explicitly, is that he believes beauty to be illusory.
Which, given that we all experience beauty, is quite an extraordinary claim for him to make. Add beauty to the growing list of things that most people consider to be real and yet Darwinian atheists, i.e. reductive materialists, are forced to consider them to be illusory.
As I have pointed out several times now, assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.
Thus, although the Darwinist may firmly believe that he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
To make this dilemma of pure illusion all the more devastating for the reductive materialist, i.e. for the Darwinist, due to advances in science, especially due to advances in quantum mechanics, it turns out that atoms themselves are found not to be the solid indivisible concrete particles, as they were originally envisioned to be by materialists, but it turns out that the descriptions we now use to describe atoms themselves, the further down we go, dissolve into “abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.,,,”
In fact, according to quantum theory, the most fundamental ‘stuff’ of the world is not even matter or energy, (as Darwinian materialists originally presupposed) but is ‘abstract’ immaterial information itself
Thus, in irony of ironies, not even the material particles themselves turn to be are ‘real’ and concrete, (on the materialistic definition of what is suppose to be ‘real’ and concrete), but the material particles themselves turn out to be, at the very bottom, “abstract” immaterial information.
This puts the die-hard materialist in quite the dilemma because, as Bernardo Kastrup further explains in his article, to make sense of this conundrum of a non-material world of pure abstractions we must ultimately appeal to an immaterial mind. i.e. we must ultimately appeal to the Mind of God!
Or to put it much more simply, as Physics professor Richard Conn Henry put it at the end of the following article, “The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy.”
Verse:
Final note, this world of pure illusion that the materialist finds himself in reminds me very much of this poem from Poe
@BA77 said “What Pater Kimbridge is trying to say, although he does not say it explicitly, is that he believes beauty to be illusory.”
Not exactly. An illusion is something wrongly perceived. I am not saying it is rightly or wrongly perceived. Qualia cannot be judged as right or wrong. I am just saying it is a perception, and only a perception.
BA77
No, he is saying that it is subjective. Not the same thing.
I like liver, my wife doesn’t. Those are subjective opinions, neither are illusory. If you can provide an example of something that is objectively beautiful, in fewer than 10,000 words, I would love to discuss it.
“I am just saying it is a perception, and only a perception”
So you are not saying that beauty is not illusory, you are just saying that it has no real existence beyond my own subjective personal perception of it?
UH HUH!
But that would render beauty illusory, i.e. not objectively real.
You can’t have it both ways. Beauty is either objectively real or else it is not, i.e. it is illusory.
Bottom line, per post 34, your atheistic worldview is completely insane!
Is a perfect game in baseball something we perceived in our heads? What about a crystal-clear double rainbow?
Both. Objectively. Beautiful.
ba77 @ 37 –
I guess you can think your thoughts are illusions if you want, but
Hang on, WHY AM I DISCUSSING THIS WITH AN ILLUSION?
ET – if a team of clones of me were batting in baseball, it would definitely be a perfect game, and definitely wouldn’t be beautiful.
MLB, Bob.
Bob (and weave) states
HUH??? WHAT??? For crying out loud, it is your very own atheistic worldview that, if true, would render the entire concept of you being a real person illusory.
For instance, Jerry Coyne, via his Darwinian worldview, has publicly stated that he believes he is a ‘meat robot’ and also stated that his sense of self is a ‘neuronal illusion’:
In what I consider a shining example of poetic justice, in their claim that God does not really exist as a real person but is merely an illusion, the Atheist himself also ends up claiming that he himself does not really exist as a real person but that he is merely a neuronal illusion.
Here are a few more references that drive this point home,,,
Besides he himself becoming an illusion, the atheist’s entire worldview, as was pointed out in post 34, also dissolves into pure illusion.
Thus, although the Darwinist may firmly believe that he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
Bottom line, atheistic materialism is a completely insane worldview!
ET – I’m sure ther a re a few MLB teams for which the same argument could be made. The most likely way to have a perfect game is for one side to be performing poorly, which is hardly beautiful. Hilarious, maybe, but not objectively beautiful.
As has already been pointed out by several others, those who believe that our experience of beauty is just a subjective perception are making a self-refuting argument. They are arguing that there is no true and “objective” basis for our universally shared experience. Okay, but the premise our shared human experience of beauty is only a subjective perception is a universal truth claim about our perception of beauty. But how can subjective opinions and beliefs about anything be universal? Frankly, I don’t see how they can. Universal truth claims need to be grounded in facts which are irrefutably or objectively true. Personal beliefs and opinions are not sufficient grounds for making such a claims. Doubling down by being argumentative doesn’t do anything to advance the so-called argument.
By the way, I am not arguing that this makes the ID’ist case. Personally I don’t think that they necessarily the have a strong argument here. I am only arguing the atheist-materialist argument undermines itself, so it’s a nonstarter that’s DOA. Dogmatically doubling down on such arguments is not only irrational, it’s absolutely foolish.
Let me see if a logical argument helps PK et. al.:
Assumptions:
1) Beauty is a subjective opinion
2) The amount of “beauty” an object has is determined by the observer
3) The only currently known for a fact observers that comprehend and apply the concept of “beauty” are humans.
4) A consensus view of the overwhelming majority of humans is that “beauty” exists in the natural world, in great abundance (i.e. on the balance, there are far more “beautiful” plants and animals and natural features in the world than “ugly” ones).
Hopefully both sides of the argument can agree with the above 4 assumptions (mostly – in any statement of opinion, there will be quibbles regarding edge cases and semantics).
Whether the 4 truths above provide a case for ID and against evolution depends on your answer to the following assertions:
1) Unguided evolution is not as likely to evolve plants/animals that humans would consider “beautiful” as it is to evolve plants/animals that are “ugly”.
2) The overwhelming presence of plants/animals possessing the (human-defined) base characteristics of beauty thus indicate purposeful design by an entity possessing similar concepts of beauty.
As stated above, while beauty itself is subjective. there are definable characteristics (color palette, symmetry, organization, etc.) that are common for objects deemed beautiful. The fact that this is true is self-evident – after all, artists, web designers, movie makers, modeling agencies, marketing agencies, etc. make their living by creating beautiful designs/art/etc.
Furthermore, common sense and empirical experimentation also tells us that random processes do NOT generate beauty. Again, simple experimentation such as writing a computer program to randomly fill a screen, or randomly pick colors for a web page, or random mixing of paint colors, effects of natural phenomena such as wind, rain, flooding, etc., provide ample evidence for the non-beautification by random processes.
The ID case is then, simply this – random processes are known from empirical evidence and experimentation not to produce effects that have the basic elements of “beauty” as perceived by the only known evaluators of beauty – humans. Therefore, one would not expect that the Darwinian Synthesis version of evolution would generate plants/animals having those elements. Therefore, Darwinist expectations do not match reality, and the significant presence of subjective beauty in nature signifies intelligent design.
At the end of the day, this is really just another probability argument. Of all the possible arrangements of physical attributes such as color, pattern, symmetry, size, etc. that plants and animal could take, how large is the subset that humans would deem “beautiful”? What are the chances that random mutation would produce such an overwhelming number of animals possessing those characteristics, given all the possible (ugly) alternatives?
(P.S. The inability of random mutation to produce beauty is empirically evident from the known instances of genetic mutation in living animals. Inbreeding that results in mutated genes, for one example, invariably produces animal mutations that are “less beautiful” in terms of the common characteristics of beauty, such as symmetry/color. And before someone shrieks “dog-breeding produces beautiful dogs!”, that kind of in-breeding selects for subsets of good, un-mutated genes already existing in the DNA, and is not an example of evolutionary mutation)
@John_a_designer said
“They are arguing that there is no true and “objective” basis for our universally shared experience.”
I am not arguing anything of the sort. There IS a true and objective basis for our shared experience of beauty – it’s our shared DNA, brain structure, development, and culture that leads us to have similar experiences.
This is the reason that all beavers like to build dams.
The reason most cats like to have their jaws scratched.
The reason most dogs wag their tails.
“Universal truth claims need to be grounded in facts which are irrefutably or objectively true”
Do you have theological beliefs that have passed that stringent test?
@Drc466 #45
I am still amazed every time someone refers to evolution as a random process.
My understanding is that evolution is a natural process caused by a complex interplay of natural causes, with some elements random in respect to the consequences they have on the outcomes of those processes. My understanding is that all historical processes are like that, from the biggest views of human history to each of our daily lives.
For a mundane example, the people that I saw at the grocery store today are random: their presence at the store had no causal connection with my presence there. However, it could be (it’s too soon to tell) that running into this one guy that I don’t see very often, or in a social context, and discussing some mutual interests, might lead to some important developments in my life that otherwise wouldn’t happen.
In this sense, every day of our lives contains random elements that at least at times significantly change the course of future events.
This is, I think, the sense in which evolution has random elements in the context of larger causally connected natural chains of events.
Pater K:
Right, it is just blind, mindless and without purpose. Every genetic change is said to be an accident, error or mistake. These then get culled with some getting passed down. The issue is getting the right changes to accumulate. But first they need to happen and get past the proof-reading and error-correction processes.
Natural selection is a process of elimination and non-random only in a trivial manner- not every individual has the same chance of being eliminated. It is still just contingent serendipity. That is unless you consider evolution by means of intelligent design…
hazel:
And for ID, evolution is an artificial process caused by intelligently designed mechanisms such as “built-in responses to environmental cues”, with some genetic accidents, errors and mistakes creeping through to muck things up a bit.
That said, mainstream evolution is all about evolution by means of blind and mindless processes. That is what ID opposes.
Bob O’H:
What? Perhaps if the game is also a blowout. But even then it is a beautiful thing watching one team with a mastery of all aspects of the game, if only for one game.
Drc466 at 45
LOL, you are dealing with atheistic materialists. Logic and/or reason are of no help. The very lives that that they themselves lead is a testament to the fact that the law of non-contradiction is of no importance to atheistic materialists. Nobody, especially including atheists, live their lives as if atheistic materialism were actually true.
Here are several leading atheistic materialists admitting that it would be impossible for them to live their lives as if their atheistic materialism were actually true:
Richard Dawkins himself admitted that it would be ‘intolerable’ for him to live his life as if his atheistic materialism were actually true
Thus, the very lives that atheists lead, i.e. proclaiming that atheistic materialism is true and yet living their lives as if Theism were true, is a violation of logic. Specifically, it is a violation of the law of non-contradiction:
Simply put, if it is impossible for you to live your life consistently as if your atheistic worldview were actually true then your atheistic worldview cannot possibly reflect reality as it really is but your worldview must instead be based on a delusion.
Thus Drc466, although I admire you for reaching out to atheists with logic, since atheists apparently see no problem living their very lives in direct violation of the law of non-contradiction, I’m afraid logic is simply of no use for atheistic materialists.
To give an example of just how bad the problem of logic and reason is for atheists, this atheistic professor of philosophy used reason itself to try to argue against the very existence of reason:
Such self contradictory antics by atheists would be comical if the consequences for their eternal souls, in their rejection God (and therefore in their rejection of reason itself), were not so drastic.
Verse and quotes:
Supplemental note,