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MindOverMatter2
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I was getting all excited until you said this.
When has “science” ever explained away purpose?
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When has “science” ever explained away purpose?
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tonyrey
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I agree. We have so many loose ends we need to tie them up before the thread runs out! At least we agree that there is incontrovertible evidence for Design in every direction - as even that archsceptic David Hume admitted. I never thought his scepticism could be surpassed - and certainly not by Christians who go to the extent of denying the frequency of miracles for the sake of consistency… :ehh:
I can’t help thinking it’s the thin edge of the wedge towards “modernism”.
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tonyrey
Guest
How about neuroscience?I was getting all excited until you said this.
When has “science” ever explained away purpose?
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reggieM
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“[E]volution works without either plan or purpose — Evolution is random and undirected.”
(Biology, by Kenneth R. Miller & Joseph S. Levine (1st ed., Prentice Hall, 1991), pg. 658; (3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 1995), pg. 658; (4th ed., Prentice Hall, 1998), pg. 658; emphasis in original.)
“By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”
(Evolutionary Biology, by Douglas J. Futuyma (3rd ed., Sinauer Associates Inc., 1998), p. 5.)
“Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless–a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit. Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.”
(Biology: Discovering Life by Joseph S. Levine & Kenneth R. Miller (1st ed., D.C. Heath and Co., 1992), pg. 152; (2nd ed… D.C. Heath and Co., 1994), p. 161; emphases in original.)
“Adopting this view of the world means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that the living world is constantly evolving, and that evolutionary change occurs without any goals.’ The idea that evolution is not directed towards a final goal state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.”
(Life: The Science of Biology by William K. Purves, David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, & H. Craig Keller, (6th ed., Sinauer; W.H. Freeman and Co., 2001), pg. 3.)
“It is difficult to avoid the speculation that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront. “The real difficulty in accepting Darwins theory has always been that it seems to diminish our significance. Earlier, astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the solar universe, or even of our own solar system. Now the new biology asked us to accept the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are the products of a random process that, as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design.”
(Invitation to Biology, by Helena Curtis & N. Sue Barnes(3rd ed., Worth, 1981), pgs. 474-475.)
“The advent of Darwinism posted even greater threats to religion by suggesting that biological relationship, including the origin of humans and of all species, could be explained by natural selection without the intervention of a god. Many felt that evolutionary randomness and uncertainty had replaced a deity having conscious, purposeful, human characteristics. The Darwinian view that evolution is a historical process and present-type organisms were not created spontaneously but formed in a succession of selective events that occurred in the past, contradicted the common religious view that there could be no design, biological or otherwise, without an intelligent designer. “The variability by which selection depends may be random, but adaptions are not; they arise because selection chooses and perfects only what is adaptive. **In this scheme a god of design and purpose is not necessary **…“Nevertheless, faith in religious dogma has been eroded by natural explanations of its mysteries, by a deep understanding of the sources of human emotional needs, and by the recognition that ethics and morality can change among different societies and that acceptance of such values need not depend on religion.”
(Evolution by Monroe, W. Strickberger (3rd ed., Jones & Bartlett, 2000), pg. 70-71)
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reggieM
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Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4)** no ultimate meaning in life exists**; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.
How can we have meaning in life? When we die we are really dead; nothing of us survives.
Dr. William Provine
Professor of History of Biology Cornell University
And, indeed, this is what I teach—that natural selection, and evolution in general, are material processes, blind, mindless, and **purposeless **…
In my classes, however, I still characterize evolution and selection as processes lacking mind, purpose, or supervision. Why? Because, as far as we can see, that’s the truth. Evolution and selection operate precisely as you’d expect them to if they were not designed by, or steered by, a deity—especially one who is omnipotent and benevolent. And, more important, the completely material nature of selection is of great historical and intellectual importance. After all, Darwin’s greatest achievement was the explanation of organismal “design” by a completely naturalistic process, replacing the mindful, purposeful, and god-directed theory that preceded it. That was a revolution in human thought, and students should know about it. (This achievement is also why Dawkins claimed, in The Blind Watchmaker, that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Perhaps Darwin did not mandate that evolution ineluctably proves the absence of God, but he kicked out the last prop supporting the action of a deity in nature.)
Jerry Coyne
Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago
Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates
rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/278/1707/930.short
Until the advent of modern neuroscience, free will used to be a theological and a metaphysical concept, debated with little reference to brain function. Today, with ever increasing understanding of neurons, circuits and cognition, this concept has become outdated and any metaphysical account of free will is rightfully rejected. The consequence is not, however, that we become mindless automata responding predictably to external stimuli. On the contrary,** accumulating evidence also from brains much smaller than ours points towards a general organization of brain function that incorporates flexible decision-making on the basis of complex computations negotiating internal and external processing.** The adaptive value of such an organization consists of being unpredictable for competitors, prey or predators, as well as being able to explore the hidden resource deterministic automats would never find. At the same time, this organization allows all animals to respond efficiently with tried-and-tested behaviours to predictable and reliable stimuli. As has been the case so many times in the history of neuroscience, invertebrate model systems are spearheading these research efforts. This comparatively recent evidence indicates that one common ability of most if not all brains is to choose among different behavioural options even in the absence of differences in the environment and perform genuinely novel acts. Therefore, it seems a reasonable effort for **any neurobiologist to join and support a rather illustrious list of scholars who are trying to wrestle the term ‘free will’ from its metaphysical ancestry. The goal is to arrive at a scientific concept of free will, starting from these recently discovered processes with a strong emphasis on the neurobiological mechanisms underlying them. **
Column: Why you don’t really have free will
By Jerry A. Coyne
The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they’re finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.
The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain – the organ that does the “choosing.” **
Psychologists and neuroscientists are also showing that the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us to connect our thoughts, which stem from unconscious processes, and our actions, which also stem from unconscious process. We think this because our sense of “willing” an act can be changed, created, or even eliminated through brain stimulation, mental illness, or psychological experiments. The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.
True “free will,” then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works. Science hasn’t shown any way we can do this because “we” are simply constructs of our brain. We can’t impose a nebulous “will” on the (name removed by moderator)uts to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.**
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reggieM
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That is amazing but true. The great champion of atheism, who supposedly destroyed the Argument from Design, has Christian-disciples who deny God’s intervention in nature and claim that miracles stopped in the apostolic age (if they even occurred then). :hypno::frighten:
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tonyrey
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Reggie, a superb selection which demonstrates the results of denying Design. All those who oppose the slightest mention of that term in schools and colleges are playing right into the hands of the sceptics and are unwitting accomplices in the destruction of religious belief. 
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inocente
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You might be picking up another poster’s bad habit of making superficial, patronizing remarks.
Strange question, although admittedly there is a Catholic on CAF who seems to believe that God, and therefore grace, is a product of nature.
Strange question, since if grace didn’t affect us then we wouldn’t be aware of it.
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inocente
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In exactly the way that Newton didn’t, Einstein didn’t, Darwin didn’t, etc.
You seem determined to confuse math with Dumski’s pseudo-math.
Another poster also employs asymmetric ad hominem.
Dumbski’s probabilities are after the fact and so irrelevant.
And another poster’s bad habit is when the going gets tough, either fail to reply or else contrive to lose the original point.
The thread seems to be running out of steam, and unless you strongly want to reply I can’t really get excited about continuing trying to out-do each other with superficialities, so maybe we stop here? See you around.
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reggieM
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Your view is that grace is not a product of nature. We call those kinds of things either metaphysical realities or supernatural realities. If grace comes from God, then grace is supernatural. So, you haven’t clarified your own views on this.
What we do have, with a very sparse response is that you believe that grace “affect us”. This means that supernatural grace affects human nature.
It seems that I characterized your position correctly.
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reggieM
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If this thread is running out of steam it’s because any opposition offered to the argument from design was incoherent and quickly faded away. Opponents could not refute the argument and have left the discussion.The thread seems to be running out of steam, and unless you strongly want to reply I can’t really get excited about continuing trying to out-do each other with superficialities, so maybe we stop here? See you around.
I asked you to explain your own theological views – I don’t think that is the pursuit superficialities.
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reggieM
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Thanks, Tony.
We have Christians on this thread who cannot even admit that Design exists at all anywhere. They are so frightened about looking bad in the eyes of atheists, that they’ll deny the ontological structure of reality. They’ll deny their own faith in order to gain approval from academia.
When the Design argument is posed in its many aspects, Christians join with atheists to fight against it. Even when they reluctantly agree that design exists (in the cosmos, for example), they persist in ridiculing other aspects of the design argument instead of giving a forceful defense of their own views. Others go so far as to virtually deny that miracles have occurred at all. When questioned how frequently miracles occur, this is met with silence and confusion.
Others simply twist their own Christian beliefs into incoherent nonsense – they’re driven mostly to attack Design and not even explain their own Christian Faith with clarity.
I agree also that they’re **unwitting **accomplices in this destructive path. When I see these supposed attempts to argue against Design, it’s clear that our Christian friends have not thought about it enough.
Before this thread closes, we should summarize what the opposition to Design has really looked like and how weak and inconsequential those arguments have been.
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Al_Moritz
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Nonsense. Opponents have left the discussion because their views were constantly and incessantly twisted and deformed by you and Tonyrey, and they simply have given up, realizing that rational discourse has become impossible. Also, arguments against biological ID are coherent, but you and Tonyrey have deliberately chosen to ignore them,
Declaring ‘victory’ under such circumstances is all too easy for you guys. But it is a hollow, fake ‘victory’, and everyone who has followed the thread as a neutral observer knows that.
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Al_Moritz
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See, this is a prime example of twisting and deforming the views of your opponents.Thanks, Tony.
We have Christians on this thread who cannot even admit that Design exists at all anywhere. They are so frightened about looking bad in the eyes of atheists, that they’ll deny the ontological structure of reality. They’ll deny their own faith in order to gain approval from academia.
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Al_Moritz
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As typical, even though this has been explained to you numerous times, you refuse to see and admit that these are not views of science, but metaphysical statements of individual scientists that go beyond what science itself has to say.
If you search Pubmed, a prominent database of primary scientific literature, including biological literature,
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?DB=pubmed
for the term “purposeless”, you will find just 139 entries out of millions that use the term, mostly in the context of psychology and forensics. Science itself does not say that evolution is purposeless.
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tonyrey
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The facts speak for themselves. The writing was really on the wall when the frequency of God’s direct intervention came into the foreground because then it was a question of rejecting not only the teaching of Jesus that His followers would work miracles in His name but also the evidence provided for the canonisation of saints throughout the history of the Church and the testimony of medical specialists and pilgrims to shrines throughout the world as well as the detailed accounts of scientifically inexplicable cures of members of other religions.
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MindOverMatter2
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MindOverMatter2
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Al_Moritz
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Delusional.
Miracles and the frequency thereof have nothing to do with interventionist biological ID or the lack of such intervention, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you, and you never could provide a satisfactory and non-selfcontradictory answer as to the relation between the frequency of God’s intervention and the Japanese tsunami.
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ricmat
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So when science textbooks say that evolution is purposeless, and the authors of those textbooks say it’s purposeless, that’s NOT science saying it is purposeless?
What belief are the authors trying to instill in the readers?
I can’t speak for the others here, but I don’t really care if “science” says it or not. Science doesn’t have a voice. But the authors do. And most people would say that they’re speaking “for” science. That’s why it’s a science textbook.
BTW - I’ve only speed read this thread lately, so this point has probably been made already. If so…sorry!
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