Darwinism and Materialism

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Personally, I am on the fence regarding intelligent design (ID) theory. ID vs. Darwinism is probably a false dichotomy. Nevertheless, this is an interesting discussion of a couple books and the vehement reactions to them from materialism fundamentalists:
Darwin’s Doubt has also been subjected to a barrage of what can only be called hate. “Mendacious intellectual pornography” is among the more inventive descriptions. Hundreds of negative comments appeared on Amazon review page within hours of the 498-page book’s publication.
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Donald Prothero, a geologist and research associate at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, typified many when he said that Meyer is a “fool,” “incompetent,” guilty of “ignorance,” in “way over his head,” with a “completely false understanding of the subject.” Further, Meyer argues “dishonestly,” promotes a “fundamental lie,” promotes a “fairy tale,” and so on.
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In Britain, the Guardian newspaper called Mind and Cosmos “the most despised science book of 2012.” Maybe Meyer will win that honor in 2013.
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spectator.org/archives/2013/09/18/darwinism-and-materialism-they/

The books:

amazon.com/Darwins-Doubt-Explosive-Origin-Intelligent

amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755
 
The amazon link to Darwin’s Doubt doesn’t work. In any case, considering the comments from professionals in various fields about the book, this will be fought against precisely because intelligent design must not gain any acceptability in the scientific world.

Peace,
Ed
 
edwest2 said:
The amazon link to Darwin’s Doubt doesn’t work. In any case, considering the comments from professionals in various fields about the book, this will be fought against precisely because intelligent design must not gain any acceptability in the scientific world.
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What is interesting to me about this is the fight at the deeper philosophical level: materialism vs., er, spiritualism I suppose?

The Darwinists are not simply fighting to defend Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection, they are taking a stand for a severly constricted concept of science, one in which only material explanations are allowed. This is much broader fight than evolution vs. intelligent design. It also involves free will vs. determinism and simlar debates.

They must do this because the IDers have largely abandoned creationism and any explicit connection to God. Of course, it’s understood by all that if ID is right then the God of Abraham and Moses is the most obvious candidate.

At this level, the Darwinists are on very unsound footing.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
Personally, I am on the fence regarding intelligent design (ID) theory. ID vs. Darwinism is probably a false dichotomy. Nevertheless, this is an interesting discussion of a couple books and the vehement reactions to them from materialism fundamentalists:

spectator.org/archives/2013/09/18/darwinism-and-materialism-they/

The books:

amazon.com/Darwins-Doubt-Explosive-Origin-Intelligent

amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755
Click to expand...
Here’s what a good Pope had to say about that false dichotomy:

*Currently, I see in Germany, but also in the United States, a somewhat fierce debate raging between so-called “creationism” and evolutionism, presented as though they were mutually exclusive alternatives: those who believe in the Creator would not be able to conceive of evolution, and those who instead support evolution would have to exclude God.

This antithesis is absurd because, on the one hand, there are so many scientific proofs in favour of evolution which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such.

But on the other, the doctrine of evolution does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how did everything start which ultimately led to man? I believe this is of the utmost importance.
*

Unfortunately, many on both sides of this issue have succumbed to believing that an acceptance of evolution=acceptance of naturalism. Pretty disappointing :-/
 
CrossofChrist said:
Here’s what a good Pope had to say about that false dichotomy:

*Currently, I see in Germany, but also in the United States, a somewhat fierce debate raging between so-called “creationism” and evolutionism, presented as though they were mutually exclusive alternatives: those who believe in the Creator would not be able to conceive of evolution, and those who instead support evolution would have to exclude God.

This antithesis is absurd because, on the one hand, there are so many scientific proofs in favour of evolution which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such.

But on the other, the doctrine of evolution does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how did everything start which ultimately led to man? I believe this is of the utmost importance.
*

Unfortunately, many on both sides of this issue have succumbed to believing that an acceptance of evolution=acceptance of naturalism. Pretty disappointing :-/
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Why is it disappointing? The scientific dogma cannot allow anything other than chance material causes. And those people are missing the rest of the story, or using the mountains of data to attack Christianity. That is sad.

Peace,
Ed
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
ID vs. Darwinism is probably a false dichotomy.
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It is. In science there is always at least a trichotomy: Evolution, ID or “we don’t know”. Science is very aware that it does not have complete information about the world, so it is always open to the possibility of something new being discovered.

rossum
 
edwest2 said:
The amazon link to Darwin’s Doubt doesn’t work.
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This one works for me: Darwin’s Doubt.
In any case, considering the comments from professionals in various fields about the book, this will be fought against precisely because intelligent design must not gain any acceptability in the scientific world.
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Science has no problem with intelligent design. There are whole fields of science devoted to intelligent design, engineering for example.

The specific claims of the Discovery Institute form of ID are something else entirely. Dr Meyer’s book has too many errors to be taken seriously. Professor Behe is far better, and his books have generated a lot of useful scientific work. Basically, Behe does science, while Meyer is more of a propagandist. There are better books available on ID than Meyer’s latest.

rossum
 
edwest2 said:
Why is it disappointing? The scientific dogma cannot allow anything other than chance material causes.
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You are incorrect here. Even Dr. Dembski disagrees with you. Both chance and law are covered by science. It is not “chance” that exactly two hydrogen atoms combine with exactly one oxygen atom to give water. We do not see “chance” giving us H[sub]3[/sub]O, H[sub]4[/sub]O etc.

rossum
 
rossum said:
It is. In science there is always at least a trichotomy: Evolution, ID or “we don’t know”. Science is very aware that it does not have complete information about the world, so it is always open to the possibility of something new being discovered.
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Do you believe science will explain any aspect of spiritual development? 🙂
 
What we are mostly seeing here is two broad and competing ideologies that have their dogmas and preconceptions, both of which are admittedly not good for rational inquiry as they can blind us to reality. Each has at least some merit and basis in the facts.

Although I love Aristoteliansim generally and prefer it to other philosophical systems along with Thomism as a sort of default (and in the latter also theology, next only to the Magisterium’s own documents and pronouncements) I don’t actually have any problems with a Catholic who believes in even a rather exagerated evolutionary world where evolution is perhaps even the norm rather than a rare and generally -from a strictly naturalistic perspective- accidental occurence. As rossum says, though, it’s not and can’t be chance when the male and female of a species mate and normally a normal specimen of that species results: that’s ordinary and the norm and nature is directed to that. That’s my rationalistic critique of a sort of mythological evolutionism; regardless, so long as the Christian believes that God Himself is ultimately the Lord of (in this case specifically natural) History and guides His Creation according to His will and providential plan - and that the human race is really descended from one original couple - I don’t see any problems with evolution and religious belief. Modern science might try to make final causes as unimportant as it can, though it can never do away with them entirely and hope to produce a sensical and rational account of things; the Christian, however, has to believe that God does guide His creation and -in that sense- that everything happens in accordance with His will or simply just providence. In other words we especially aren’t just a freak or chance accident of nature.
 
I would say that the terms Darwinism and Intelligent Design are not as dichotomous as they seem (or, at least, they don’t have to be).

Neo-Darwinism alleges that every fact about human beings can be explained by natural selection (or other, similar processes). In that respect, neo-Darwinism is antithetical to Catholic faith. But that does not mean that a Christian is committed to denying evolution. He can hold that the human animal, insofar as it is material, is the product of biological evolution, but man’s intellectual nature owes to God. This isn’t really an arbitrary distinction, since it is man’s rational nature that is not settled by the theory (there is not a coherent materialistic philosophy of mind, and there are good reasons to suppose that such a philosophy is in principle impossible to establish).

What a Catholic might also deny is materialism itself. For instance, an account of final causality is not inconsistent with evolution, but it arguably explains evolution at a deeper level and is incompatible with neo-Darwinism.

I’d say it’s probably wrong to lump Nagel in with ID theorists. I admittedly have not read Nagel or Meyer. But it is my impression that they are arguing different things. Nagel is disputing neo-Darwinism, not evolution. He is noting that, since there is not a materialist explanation of mind, there is not really any reason to suppose that it arose through materialistic evolution. It seems like a lot of people are taking him to say that there is some problem with evolution as a theory, but he’s (as far as I can tell) not: evolution could only explain material aspects of man, so if an aspect is not settled to be material, evolution would not explain it.

Edward Feser wrote a series of blog posts on Nagel’s book.
 
polytropos said:
It seems like a lot of people are taking him to say that there is some problem with evolution as a theory, but he’s (as far as I can tell) not: evolution could only explain material aspects of man, so if an aspect is not settled to be material, evolution would not explain it.
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I have enjoyed and appreciated the discussion so far but I wanted to nip this in the bud. As it happens, evolution is verboten in this forum. But, in fact, none of the authors we are discussing here is denying evolution or the deep age of the earth; none is advocating protestant stle creationism. Evolution is a red herring and irrelevant to this subject.

Everyone agrees that evolution is an incomplete explanation. Where the dispute lies is in what is added to evolution to make it complete. The debate is between the materialists who insist on limiting the explanation to a combination of random variation and natural selection and an abstract concept of intelligent design where evolution is guided, partially or wholy with an end in mind.

Behind that, we have the more fundamental debate about whether any explanation that is not limited to materialism can be scientific. IDers may be right or wrong in their theory but the hard core materialist scientific community seeks to eject them from scientific debate merely for advancing non-materialistic theories.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
But, in fact, none of the authors we are discussing here is denying evolution or the deep age of the earth; none is advocating protestant stle creationism. Evolution is a red herring and irrelevant to this subject.
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Right, and I don’t mean to imply that Meyer is a young earth creationist, but I think his position is distinct from Nagel’s.
Bubba_Switzler said:
IDers may be right or wrong in their theory but the hard core materialist scientific community seeks to eject them from scientific debate merely for advancing non-materialistic theories.
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This is true, although much of the materialist scientific community does not really understand that the arguments are against philosophical materialism rather than evolution (which is why Nagel’s book was so controversial).
 
"It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist." Charles Darwin

That is, you don’t have to be a materialist to be an evolutionist. Straight from the horse’s mouth. 👍
 
How does a materialist/evolutionist:confused: explain the ongoing appeal of religion to our human nature?
 
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