Why is Seeing the Glaringly Obvious So Hard?

_{Barry Arrington

November 15, 2019

Intelligent Design}

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Yesterday I had an exchange with Seversky that illustrates something I have observed countless times over the years. Materialists have a blind spot regarding how their own arguments undermine, well, their own arguments. Here is the exchange:

Johnnyb wrote:

The reason for this is the precise theorem that Hoffman states – in evolutionary competition, fitness beats truth.

To which Sev responded:

Unless fitness is truth in which case there is no competition. How does Hoffman – or Plantinga – distinguish between “fitness” and “truth”? Are they comparing like with like?

I wrote:

But Sev, you know for a certain fact that according to your own premises fitness and truth are not the same. For 99% of human existence, 99% of humans have believed in a God or gods. Your premises compel you to say that evolutionary forces caused that state of affairs (for the simple reason that, under your premises, there are no other alternatives). You also say that a belief in a God or gods is a false belief. Therefore, simple logic applied to your own factual premises demands the conclusion that evolutionary forces selected for a false belief.

Sev:

I agree that evolution can select for false beliefs, religion being a possible example, but not that it mostly or always does. Human beings survive better in groups than on their own. Religious belief, even if false, can help to bind such groups together more tightly and make them more resilient in face of challenges. At that level, it is advantageous in terms of survival. On the other hand, believing that tigers are big, cuddly pets who just want to play is probably not going to be so advantageous and, over time, those holding such beliefs are less likely to survive and pass on that belief.

Barry

“I agree that evolution can select for false beliefs . . .” Then you have given away the store. If evolution can select for false beliefs, who is to say when it has selected for a false belief as opposed to a true one. You advance a candidate for what you believe to be a true belief (human beings survive better in groups). Yet, you admit that evolution may have caused you to believe that even though it is false.

It never ceases to astound me that seemingly intelligent people (and I count Sev among such), can’t seem to grasp the glaringly obvious end of the logic. If our beliefs are the product of blind material forces, we can NEVER know whether we believe them because they are actually true or because those blind material forces caused us to believe them even though they are false.

Comments

Once again, in case anyone missed my previous statements, by the correspondence theory, truth resides in the degree to which a claim about some aspect of objective reality is observed to correspond to what it describes. If I say that a ripe tomato is red, that claim is true to the extent that we see that ripe tomatoes are red. Fitness, in terms of evolutionary biology, broadly refers to an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. It can be the result of many different properties of the organism and how they interact with its immediate environment. Any property which improves the fitness of an organism compared with its competitors will tend, over time, to facilitate the proliferation of that organism. In other words, it will survive and flourish. An organism which is able to acquire data about its environment and has the capacity to use that data create a mental model of that environment which allows it to avoid dangers has a considerable advantage over less well-favored creatures. If that organism notices that others of its kind are killed and eaten by large cats with stripey coats and forms the view that they are to avoided at all costs if one prefers not to be eaten, that is a claim about the natural world. If it is true then the organism holding that view will have a better chance of surviving that one that thinks those cats are cuddly, playful pets. The same would be true for an organism which notices that eating certain berries make others sick or even kills them. In other words holding true beliefs can have considerable survival value. It shouldn't be necessary to have to labor this point. The fact that there are some beliefs which are not true according to observation but which can nonetheless enhance fitness does not invalidate the above in any way. We have agreed that religions generally have a survival or fitness value in terms of how they can strengthen the bonds which tie a society together. The problem for believers is that most if not all faiths have that effect to some degree. This suggests that the specific doctrines espoused by the different faiths are irrelevant to fitness. In other words, it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you all have the same belief. Granted the above exception, it remains true that having true beliefs tends to confer a fitness advantage. Observing that people get sick and even die after drinking water from a particular pump and forming the claim that the water from that pump is contaminated in some way can, if true, prevent people dying. Discovering that epileptic seizures are associated with abnormal electrical activity in a certain part of the brain rather than being a consequence of demonic possession can lead to a better understanding of the affliction and more effective treatments. Does this mean that our beliefs are 100% reliable? No, of course not. Our intelligence has a limited capacity. The data we acquire through our senses about the outside world is far from complete. Does this mean that the opposite holds true, that our beliefs are therefore totally unreliable or complete delusions? Again, no. This is not a black-and-white situation. There are beliefs in which we have a high degree of confidence, even approaching certainty. There are beliefs in which we are fairly confident but leave some room for doubt and there are those which we regard as speculative at best. It's better to think of it as a spectrum of confidence ranging from absolute, unquestioning certainty to complete skepticism or disbelief. The confidence we have in our various beliefs lies somewhere between the two extremes. One way we can discriminate between competing beliefs is, if they make testable claims, to test them. Claims about what ought to be can't be tested so they are not capable of being either true or false.Seversky_{November 15, 2019
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As to:
Hazel: “evolution selected for broad cognitive skills, including language, not for particular beliefs”,,, "I accept the conclusion that there has been a progression of creatures over the last some hundreds of thousands of years that slowly acquired what we now consider fully human capabilities.”
She accepts 'evolution selected for broad cognitive skills, including language,' on what evidential basis? It is a blatantly Darwinian claim, (though she claimed to not be a Darwinist). A evidence free claim that is begging the question for crying out loud. She has less than zero evidence for her claim and/or acceptance of her belief that "there has been a progression of creatures over the last some hundreds of thousands of years that slowly acquired what we now consider fully human capabilities.” Leading evolutionary researchers, Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, honestly confessed that they have “essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,,”
Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language – December 19, 2014 Excerpt: Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,, (Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, “The mystery of language evolution,” Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 5:401 (May 7, 2014).) Casey Luskin added: “It’s difficult to imagine much stronger words from a more prestigious collection of experts.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/leading_evoluti092141.html
Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT elaborates further and states that, "There is little evidence of anything like human language, or symbolic behavior altogether, before the emergence of modern humans.,,,"
The Galilean Challenge - Noam Chomsky – April 2017 Excerpt: The capacity for language is species specific, something shared by humans and unique to them. It is the most striking feature of this curious organism, and a foundation for its remarkable achievement,,, There has been considerable progress in understanding the nature of the internal language, but its free creative use remains a mystery. This should come as no surprise. In a recent review of far simpler cases of voluntary action, neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian remark, in the case of something so simple as raising one’s arm, that “the detail of this complicated process, which critically involves coordinate and variable transformations from spatial movement goals to muscle activations, needs to be elaborated further. Phrased more fancifully, we have some idea as to the intricate design of the puppet and the puppet strings, but we lack insight into the mind of the puppeteer.”8 The normal creative use of language is an even more dramatic example.,,, One fact appears to be well established. The faculty of language is a true species property, invariant among human groups, and unique to humans in its essential properties. It follows that there has been little or no evolution of the faculty since human groups separated from one another,,, There is little evidence of anything like human language, or symbolic behavior altogether, before the emergence of modern humans.,,, Our intricate knowledge of what even the simplest words mean is acquired virtually without experience. At peak periods of language acquisition, children acquire about a word an hour, often on one presentation.26 The rich meaning of even the most elementary words must be substantially innate. The evolutionary origin of such concepts is a complete mystery.,,, --- Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT. http://inference-review.com/article/the-galilean-challenge
And as Dr. Ian Tattersall, paleoanthropologist and emeritus curator of the American Museum of Natural History stated, "there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period, in either the physical or the intellectual sense."
"A number of hominid crania are known from sites in eastern and southern Africa in the 400- to 200-thousand-year range, but none of them looks like a close antecedent of the anatomically distinctive Homo sapiens…Even allowing for the poor record we have of our close extinct kin, Homo sapiens appears as distinctive and unprecedented…there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period, in either the physical or the intellectual sense." Dr. Ian Tattersall: - paleoanthropologist - emeritus curator of the American Museum of Natural History - (Masters of the Planet, 2012)
Her 'acceptance' has no foundational basis in evidence and/or reality and therefore 'begs the question' as to her false claim to Barry that she had raised a substantive point that should have been addressed.. Bottom line, Barry is right on point in his criticism, “your argument amounted to “evolution causes everything except when it does not, in which case some mysterious and unnamed material force causes it.” Further notes:
The Siege of Paris - Robert Berwick & Noam Chomsky - March 2019 Excerpt: Linguists told themselves many stories about the evolution of language, and so did evolutionary biologists; but stories, as Richard Lewontin rightly notes, are not hypotheses, a term that should be “reserved for assertions that can be tested.”4 The human language faculty is a species-specific property, with no known group differences and little variation. There are no significant analogues or homologues to the human language faculty in other species.5,,, How far back does language go? There is no evidence of significant symbolic activity before the appearance of anatomically modern humans 200 thousand years ago (kya).22,,, There is no evidence that great apes, however sophisticated, have any of the crucial distinguishing features of language and ample evidence that they do not.48 Claims made in favor of their semantic powers, we might observe, are wrong. Recent research reveals that the semantic properties of even the simplest words are radically different from anything in animal symbolic systems.49,,, Why only us?,,, We were not, of course, the first to ask them. We echo in modern terms the Cartesian philosophers Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, seventeenth-century authors of the Port-Royal Grammar, for whom language with its infinite combinatorial capacity wrought from a finite inventory of sounds was uniquely human and the very foundation of thought. It is subtle enough to express all that we can conceive, down to the innermost and “diverse movements of our souls.” https://inference-review.com/article/the-siege-of-paris Robert Berwick is a Professor in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT. Kept in Mind - Juan Uriagereka - March 2019 Review of: Language in Our Brain: The Origins of a Uniquely Human Capacity by Angela Friederici Excerpt: Which part of our brain carries information forward in time? No one knows. For that matter, no one knows what a symbol is, or where symbolic interactions take place. The formal structures of linguistics and neurophysiology are disjoint, a point emphasized by Poeppel and David Embick in a widely cited study.2,,, No one has distinguished one thought from another by dissecting brains. Neuroimaging tells us only when some areas of the brain light up selectively. Brain wave frequencies may suggest that different kinds of thinking are occurring, but a suggestion is not an inference—even if there is a connection between certain areas of the brain and seeing, hearing, or processing words. Connections of this sort are not nothing, of course, but neither are they very much.,,, Some considerable distance remains between the observation that the brain is doing something and the claim that it is manipulating various linguistic representations. Friederici notes the lapse. “How information content is encoded and decoded,” she remarks, “in the sending and receiving brain areas is still an open issue—not only with respect to language, but also with respect to the neurophysiology of information processing in general.”5,,, Cognitive scientists cannot say how the mass or energy of the brain is related to the information it carries. Everyone expects that more activity in a given area means more information processing. No one has a clue whether it is more information or more articulated information, or more interconnected information, or whether, for that matter, the increased neuro-connectivity signifies something else entirely.,,, ,,, present-day observational technology does not seem capable of teasing apart these different components of syntax at work,,,, https://inference-review.com/article/kept-in-mind Juan Uriagereka is a linguist at the University of Maryland.
Verse:
Genesis 2:19 And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
and:
“The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find’ over and over again’ not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.” Paleontologist, Derek V. Ager (Department of Geology & Oceanography, University College, Swansea, UK) “It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution…This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large.” G.G.Simpson – one of the most influential American Paleontologist of the 20th century “Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.” – Ernst Mayr - Professor Emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University “What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types.” Robert L Carroll (born 1938) – vertebrate paleontologist who specialises in Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians “In virtually all cases a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms.” Fossils and Evolution, TS Kemp – Curator of Zoological Collections, Oxford University, Oxford Uni Press, p246, 1999 Bechly: In the Fossil Record, “Abrupt Appearances Are the Rule” - February 20, 2018, Excerpt: , you might think that the Cambrian explosion some 530 million years is a singularity, a freak of nature: the sudden appearance of phyla, major categories of life,,,, Yet Dr. Bechly points out that the problem posed by the Cambrian event is not singular but in fact has been repeated numerous times in the long history of life — sudden explosions, abrupt appearances, followed by diversification. Each should multiply the distress of Darwin’s defenders, if they are honest with themselves about it. In a chapter co-authored with philosopher of science Stephen Meyer in the recent book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique (pg. 340-352), Bechly details 19 such “explosions.” As he observes, in the fossil record, “Abrupt appearances are the rule.” Each such event poses the same challenge to Darwinian thinking that the Cambrian explosion does. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/02/bechly-in-the-fossil-record-abrupt-appearances-are-the-rule/
bornagain77_{November 15, 2019
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In principal a belief, however arrived at, can be tested against reality and either confirmed or falsified.aarceng_{November 15, 2019
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“ I accept the conclusion that there has been a progression of creatures over the last some hundreds of thousands of years that slowly acquired what we now consider fully human capabilities.” I don’t see how this conflicts with Intelligent Design or Evolutionary theory, but it does with some Biblical interpretations like YEC.rhampton7_{November 15, 2019
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I find Barry's response to be directly on point. Contrary to Hazel's belief that she 'raised a point', the true state of the situation is exactly as Barry stated, , "your argument amounted to “evolution causes everything except when it does not, in which case some mysterious and unnamed material force causes it.” You were asked several times to provide evidence for your asserted mysterious and unnamed material force. You ignored those requests for obvious reasons." Hazel suggested that people read the exchange. I also suggest people read the exchange: Particularly where I addressed her main claim, i.e. "“evolution selected for broad cognitive skills, including language, not for particular beliefs”, in detail, https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/johnnyb-nail-head/#comment-687970 Please note her supposedly substantive response to my rebuttal of her claim:
" I am not a “Darwinist” and I’m not talking about how such things as language evolved. But I accept the conclusion that there has been a progression of creatures over the last some hundreds of thousands of years that slowly acquired what we now consider fully human capabilities." https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/johnnyb-nail-head/#comment-687981
And there you have it folks, question begging to the max and yet she apparently thinks she is the one who ‘raised a point’. As Eugene noted about these types of arguments from atheists, Pathetic!bornagain77_{November 15, 2019
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Barry, you're hopeless. Your statement following "your argument amounted to" is just a distorted, inaccurate description of what I said. I can't discuss things with people who can't do better than that.hazel_{November 15, 2019
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Hazel
the vast majority of the people who do respond to me here are merely dismissive and don’t actually engage my points
If you had actually raised a point, I probably would have engaged with it. Instead, your argument amounted to "evolution causes everything except when it does not, in which case some mysterious and unnamed material force causes it." You were asked several times to provide evidence for your asserted mysterious and unnamed material force. You ignored those requests for obvious reasons.Barry Arrington_{November 15, 2019
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This is true, Es58. However the vast majority of the people who do respond to me here are merely dismissive and don't actually engage my points, so it's hard for me to want to take the time. It is actually Barry's dismissal on the hammer, nail thread that I am referring to, so if you'd like to read my points over there and respond, I'd be glad to try and carry on.hazel_{November 15, 2019
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Hazel@4 as kf has pointed out so often in his notes to onlookers a discussion on line is rarely to convince the other person but for the sake of the other readers so unless you feel there's no one at all who would benefit from your response, including yourself, please proceed.es58_{November 15, 2019
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hazel:
My experience is that any attept to respond to Barry will be met with dismissal: “hand waving” and “special pleading”,
Given what you have posted, Barry isn't wrong.ET_{November 15, 2019
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Barry: “It never ceases to astound me that seemingly intelligent people (and I count Sev among such)…” Is Sev really intelligent? Of course he thinks he is but is it really intelligent to believe in irrational nonsense? All I can infer from his presence at UD is that he is biased and self-centered. Remember, he has proudly admitted many time here that he is a moral subjectivist. By definition for a moral subjectivist morality starts with himself which means he can never be in error because he is free to move the goal posts whenever he wishes. Personally I see no reason trust such people, but I digress. My only point is that by definition a moral subjectivist is self-centered (not just about morality but also epistemology) which means he believes what he believes because that is what he believes. That’s incorrigibility. How can you reason with someone who is completely incorrigible?john_a_designer_{November 15, 2019
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My experience is that any attept to respond to Barry will be met with dismissal: "hand waving" and "special pleading", so this "troll" won't bother.hazel_{November 15, 2019
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...and the trolls come out. Andrewasauber_{November 15, 2019
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The Devil must be deceiving them! The alternative is that one is wrong, but so wholly committed to the idea that they can't even entertain that it could be wrong. But nah, it's probably the Devil.DerekDiMarco_{November 15, 2019
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Seversky's position renders true or false meaningless. But like every good materialist, he holds his own position to be true. And the decades go by... Andrewasauber_{November 15, 2019
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