Gaps in Evolution

  • Thread starter Thread starter SoulBeaver
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Charles_Darwin said:
What on earth has revelation done for mankind?

youtube.com/watch?v=Gzdv2dsPPKw
Click to expand...
Here is what the Pope says:

Pope Warns of Danger of Godless Society

As for an additional point on your video - for just about everyone of the scientific achievements they can be applied in an evil manner.

Our Pope:

“A humanism which excludes God is an inhuman humanism. Only a humanism open to the absolute can guide us in the promotion and building of forms of social and civic life — structures, institutions, culture and ethos — without exposing us to the risk of becoming ensnared by the fashions of the moment.”

Are you enslaved by science?
 
Mersenne said:
Absolutely true science has a priori exclusions. It, a priori, excludes non-science.
Click to expand...
Which one of these are non-science? theology, **Mariology, ****ontology, ****patrology, ****pisteology, ****alethiology and ****archelogy **
 
tjm190 said:
Archeologists dig stuff up and analyze it. Science has to have a connection to the “real” world.
Click to expand...
Correct - the entire real world not just the natural world. You should really check the base definition for science.
 
tjm190 said:
Archeologists dig stuff up and analyze it. Science has to have a connection to the “real” world.
Click to expand...
Science is definded as “a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study”. So, tjm, Philosophy is science, so is Theology and all of the other sciences buffalo mentioned.
 
buffalo said:
Correct - the entire real world not just the natural world. You should really check the base definition for science.
Click to expand...
If what you’re studying has no connection to the natural world, it’s either religion or philosophy
 
zach_dunn said:
Science is definded as “a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study”. So, tjm, Philosophy is science, so is Theology and all of the other sciences buffalo mentioned.
Click to expand...
Wonderful- then students can take a philosophy or theology class
And how exactly does one use the scientific method with respect to theology?
 
buffalo said:
Which one of these are non-science? theology, **Mariology, ****ontology, ****patrology, ****pisteology, ****alethiology and ****archelogy **
Click to expand...
*None *of these areas of study are science in the modern meaning of the discipline. (They are all branches of philosophy or theology - and no - these are not science either). It’s of no use in this discussion to attempt to use the old and now anachronistic sense of science meaning any knowledge at all, because that is not what is meant by the term today - and you know it. If someone says, “I am studying science in college”, no-one thinks they are studying patrology (if *you *think it, then you are bizarrely out of line with modern English usage). Science journal does not report philosophical musings on the nature of truth. If someone says they are a scientist, say on their job application, you’d have to be demented to think that they are claiming to be a theologian or a philosopher. The philosophy of science as a discipline is not about the philosophy of philosophy (heavens, what a dire subject that would be) or the philosophy of theology (even worse) - it is about the philosophy of those subjects that are meant by the term science today.

The term as used today means the study of phenomena in the natural world using the scientific method - observation, hypothesis, testing and systematising natural phenomena using natural explanations - physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and so on - to claim otherwise is simple obfuscation. And the scientific method excludes supernatural explanations - ie those that involve God, gods, angels, wights, fairies, dragons, obeahs, ancestor spirits and so on.

Alec
evolutionpages.com
 
I’d like to make a few comments here about your claims regarding the mind
PaulF2 said:
As a teaser, though, here is some of the very strong evidence that the Mind cannot be strictly physical:
Click to expand...
I assume you mean “the Mind cannot arise from a strictly physical ground, ie the brain”. It is obvious that the mind itself is not physical (almost by definition, otherwise we wouldn’t have the mind-body problem), just as pain is not a physical entity itself although it arises from physical or material processes - the question is whether the mind is grounded in the physical world - is it an epiphenomenon of physical processes? My view is that the mind, and consciousness are grounded in the physical brain and I’ll explain why I think that in a minute - but first I need to correct a couple of errors you make below:
  • The eminent theoretical physicist Roger Penrose used Godel’s Theorem (a logic theorem) to demonstrate exactly this - that the mind cannot be analogous to a physical computer of any kind.
Click to expand...
In “The Emperor’s New Mind”, Penrose used arguments based on part of one of Goedel’s theorems (that in any formal mathematical system, there are propositions which are true that cannot be proven within the system) along with other arguments to support his opinion that the mind cannot be represented by an algorithm running on a Turing machine. In no way did he imply (nor does he apparently believe) that the mind is not grounded in the physical brain (indeed the whole point of the book is to find a non-algorithmic but physical process to account for mind), nor that the mind did not evolve in a purely naturalistic way.
  • The classical (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum mechanics asserts that the mind - an observer - cannot be a physical thing! The entire theory of quantum mechanics cannot work unless this is the case.
Click to expand...
This is wrong. What you are describing here is not the Copenhagen interpretation but an interpretation of quantum mechanics called “consciousness causes collapse”. It has a number of fundamental flaws (such as the consequence of the unrealised behaviour of the universe before the emergence of minds: see Bohm and Hiley - The Undivided Universe). It has been widely rejected on ontological and scientific grounds, and the development of the concept of decoherence has been the nail in its coffin. Your claim that the cause of the collapse of the wave function in the Copenhagen interpretation cannot be a physical thing and that QM cannot otherwise work is completely wrong.
The only counters to this have been alternative interpretations that involve postulates far more wild, numerous, and unobservable than the simple tenet that the Mind is not physical.
Click to expand...
Not so, as what you have described is not the Copenhagen interpretation, but some other discredited thing, although all credible interpretations have some unpalatable philosophical and scientific aspects.

So let us move on to the reasons why I hold that the mind is grounded in the physical brain - and it’s very simple. First of all it is clear that that the brain is necessary for the operation of the mind. No demonstration of a mind working independently of a physical brain has even been made. Furthermore, things that affect the brain - trauma, drugs, hormones, disease, etc, fundamentally affect the operation of the mind (and everything that makes us what we are - personality, intelligence, consciousness, discernment, free will). Secondly, there is absolutely no reason to think that the brain is not sufficient for the operation of the mind. Your examples of arguments to show that the mind must have an non-physical basis are wrong, and I know of no other good arguments in support of the notion that the brain is an insufficient basis for the mind.

To summarise: the brain is indisputably necessary for the existence of the mind; and there is no reason to think that it is not sufficient.
If your mind is nothing but a collection of neurons and their interactions - physical, particular things - then no two brains are obviously alike.
Click to expand...
Any two healthy human brains are indeed alike, having as they do, the same structure, the same centres etc; but they are not identical.
There is no basis at all to assert that two such disparate brains could represent an abstract concept identically
Click to expand...
Well, two brains represent physical entities similarly - we agree on what is red, what is hot, what is cold, what is bigger or further away than what. It is, after all, the function of brains (and minds) to represent reality with some degree of accuracy - if they didn’t we’d all be dead the first time we tried to cross the street.) Why are abstract concepts different, especially since there is good evidence that abstract thinking is an extension of concrete thinking conducted in a similar mode (see, for example, Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought)?
  • as a matter of fact, there’s no evidence or reason to believe that a single such brain could understand any abstract concept.
Click to expand...
Why on earth do you say that? What is of course, certain, is that no representation of an abstract concept can occur in the absence of a brain.
I did assert that it is illogical for you to claim both that your mind is nothing but a physical thing that evolved via natural selection and that it is capable of discerning truth from error with certainty.
Click to expand...
This is the bare bones of Alvin Plantinga’s argument against naturalism - he claims that naturalism is self-defeating for more or less the reason you propose (his argument of course uses more ink than you do, and much bigger words). But Plantinga’s argument is fatally flawed. Although, it is impossible to *prove *that any proposition about reality is true if the mind is grounded in the brain and has evolved, that is no reason to abandon the pragmatic assertion that the brain has evolved to make representations of reality that are true. That is, after all, its function.
Now, do you think perhaps you could answer our very basic question: If you believe your Mind, your entire ‘you’, is nothing but a blob of matter that evolved via natural selection, why do you have ANY confidence in anything it tells you? Why?
Click to expand...
Let me try to answer the question: I am confident that my mind, which is an epiphenomenon of my physical brain which has evolved, can discern truth about reality because that is the function that it has evolved to have - a brain that did not reasonably accurately represent reality - that acted randomly or capriciously or totally inaccurately would not allow its possessor to survive long enough to reproduce. In other words, I have confidence that my brain/mind represents and interprets reality reasonably accurately, not because it is some sort of magical Platonic entity with supernatural powers, but because my experience is that it works.

Alec
evolutionpages.com
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top