Evolution News has announced the publication of a new book by David Berlinski entitled Human Nature.
In Human Nature, Berlinski takes aim at the standard narrative of history in our secular culture, the fatuous Whig view that sees human life and human nature on an upward-inclining plane, evolving toward ever greater, even god-like enlightenment. In this telling, represented by the likes of Steven Pinker and Yuval Harari, an accomplishment like the Cathedral of Notre Dame is just part of the dark, regrettable past, which modern, secular men are in the process of transcending. What is medieval, they would have us believe, is embarrassing, whereas modernity, with its keystone of Darwinian materialism, means peace, contentment, true understanding. Berlinski’s wiser perspective sees things differently. He offers respect to the distant past, touches its walls, listens to its music, and confronts the Pinkers and Hararis with the ultimate rebuke: the squalid 20th century.
Berlinski is the consummate intellectual. His perspective is not one to be taken lightly, but ought to be carefully considered.
From a website called science and religion:
OK Derek. All that shows is that Dr. Gould did not adhere to the fatuous Whig view that sees human life and human nature on an upward-inclining plane, evolving toward ever greater, even god-like enlightenment.
And guess what? Berlinski doesn’t say otherwise.
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Judging from that quote, Berlinski, a bit like a modern Don Quixote, appears to be tilting at obsolete windmills.
That perspective was not taken lightly, however. It was considered and dismissed many years back. For example, we have this excerpt from a discussion of the topic – Evolution and Philosophy Is There Progress and Direction in Evolution? – by philosopher of science John S Wilkins at the Talk Origins Archive website:
@Seversky Gould made a simple graph to illustrate that if complexity can’t go to zero or below in an organism, and you start at a point of very low complexity like a small self-replicating RNA strand, a random walk will take you to regions of higher complexity over time for basic math reasons.
This is not a “Darwinian” view of progress.
DerekDiMarco falsely claims that,
And yet, despite what DerekDiMarco falsely believes, there are no ‘basic math reasons’ for evolution to occur, In fact, math consistently shows us that Darwinian evolution does not work:
In fact, apparently completely unbeknownst to Derek, Darwinian evolution and the world of mathematics are completely incompatible with each other.
The main reason why Darwinian Evolution and Mathematics are completely incompatible with each other is that Darwinian evolution is based on a Reductive Materialistic worldview in which it is held that only matter is real, that the world is just physical and that there is no supernatural (or metaphysical) existence, or that if there is, it has no impact on our physical world.,,,
That is to say that Darwinian evolution is based on a reductive materialistic view of reality which holds that all possible scientific explanations for reality in general, and for biology in particular, must ultimately be exhausted by, and/or reducible to, purely materialistic explanations.
And yet, Mathematics itself, (which provides the backbone for all of science, engineering and technology in the first place), Mathematics itself exists in a transcendent, beyond space and time realm, a realm which is not reducible any possible material explanation. This transcendent mathematical realm has been referred to as a Platonic mathematical world.
As David Berlinski states in the following article, “There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time…. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces. But these are precisely the claims that theologians have always made as well – that human beings are capable by an exercise of their devotional abilities to come to some understanding of the deity; and the deity, although beyond space and time, is capable of interacting with material objects.”
And as M. Anthony Mills states, “In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics. Why? Although a committed materialist might be perfectly willing to accept that you do not really exist, he will have a harder time accepting that numbers do not exist. The trouble is that numbers — along with other mathematical entities such as classes, sets, and functions — are indispensable for modern science. And yet — here’s the rub — these “abstract objects” are not material. Thus, one cannot take science as the only sure guide to reality and at the same time discount disbelief in all immaterial realities.”
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, i.e. beyond space and time, world of mathematics in order for their theory to even be considered scientific in the first place. The predicament that Darwinists find themselves in regards to denying the objective reality of this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics, and yet needing validation from this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics in order for their theory to even be considered scientific in the first place, should be the very definition of a scientifically self-refuting worldview.
Moreover, as should be obvious by now, the fact that man himself can use this transcendent, beyond space and time, world of mathematics, offers proof that man must also have a transcendent, beyond space and time, soul. As Charles Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace himself stated, “Nothing in evolution can account for the soul of man. The difference between man and the other animals is unbridgeable. Mathematics is alone sufficient to prove in man the possession of a faculty unexistent in other creatures. Then you have music and the artistic faculty. No, the soul was a separate creation.”
Thus, when we look at the bigger picture, we see that the use of ‘immaterial’ mathematics itself by Darwinists, in order for them to try to prove that their reductive materialistic worldview of Darwinian evolution is true, instead turns around and refutes their entire reductive materialistic worldview instead and, in actuality, proves the existence of a immortal soul in man instead.