Reconstructed discussion whether belief in literal Adam & Eve is warranted

[hecd2]

The term “cats” traditionally refers to the common domestic animals which interbreed,not to tigers,lions,leopards and jaguars. It was only in modern times that scientists began to popularize the idea that the other animals were cats. Since cats do not interbreed with the other species,and have never been known to do so,I have no reason to doubt that they originated separately.

Well, then you are left with the original problem that there are tens of millions of living populations that do not interbreed (“general species” in your definition) and you want us to believe that they each came into existence separately when you have proposed no process for species each to appear fully formed? Where are these “species of species” that you are talking about?

You attempted to refute my point that there are tens of millions of living species and perhaps a billion extinct ones by saying “I didn’t say all species came into being separately – many are species of species.” But since every scientist would accept that domestic cats form a species, and no scientist would claim that varieties of domestic cat are species, your definition, as far as cats go, is the same as theirs, so what’s your point?

Because the shared syntenic non-functional sequences in the genomes such as broken genes, pseudogenes, tandem repeats, retroviral insertions, LINEs and SINEs have not been explained in any natural way other than common descent. When are you going to try to explain them?

You’re looking at these shared traits as if they are a problem that needs to be solved,as if the similarities were amazing. I don’t see it that way.

That’s because you don’t begin to understand them.

You can’t demonstrate that there was a vertical reproductive connection thousands of years ago between different species by pointing out lateral genetic similarities.

Of course you can, if the genetic similarities, as you call them, are such that they can only have come about by shared ancestry. And that is the case.

There is no law of nature which would prevent different species with similar genetic characteristics from originating separately from one another.

Yes, but these are not just “similar genetic similarities” but overwhelming and very specific evidence for a common genetic heritage. I am not just saying that human and chimp genomes are similar (which they are), but that they share many very telling DNA sequences which arise by various errors such as viral insertion and retrotranscription - they have little to do with functionality or similarity of anatomy or ecology, and everything to do with common ancestry. You obviously have no idea how these non-coding sequences arise in the genome, and the extremely low probability that hundreds would appear in exactly the same location in the genomes of two unrelated species (insertion homoplasy). The fact is that the evidence for common ancestry is overwhelming, and whilst you can always claim that God created the species individually by miracle and planted the evidence so that it looks as though they shared an ancestor, the denial of evidence on the grounds that God made it look that way is omphalism.

See for example:
Salem et al, Alu Elements and Hominid Phylogenetics, PNAS 100, 12787 - 12791 (2003)
Sawada et al, *Evolution of alu family repeats since the divergence of human and chimpanzee, *Journal of Molecular Evolution22, 1432

It stands to reason that if one species can originate at all,other species with similar genetic material can originate separately from the one.

Does it really? And how does that one species “originate”?

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

To hecd2 re post 120 (partially):

Excuse me if I think that your attempts to justify the First Way smack of moving the goalposts, but might I remind you of a sequence of claims that you have made. In reply to my statement that we can only know that which we can sense, you said
Dr. Bonnette:

When metaphysicians construct proofs for God’s existence, they follow the same type of inference. They argue from something we do see, such as motion, to the existence of an Unmoved First Mover, which we do not see, as the sole adequate explanation for motion in the physical world.

To which, I replied: “When you say metaphysicians use this argument, you are generalising in an unjustified way, for there are many metaphysicians or at any rate, philosophers, who think it is a terrible argument. It is a terrible argument - because it rests on conceptions of space, time, relative and absolute motion which are pre-Galilean, pre-Newtonian and pre-Einsteinian.”.

You rejoined:
Dr. Bonnette:

…you confuse the antequarian cosmological concepts of Aristotle with his legitimate metaphysical insights. Aristotle defines motion as “the act of a being in potency insofar as it is in potency?” Note this has nothing to do with ancient notions of time and space, but is expressed in terms of states of being itself – a properly metaphysical perspective.

But I pointed out:
"The foundations of Aristotle’s notions of motion are to be found in his Physics, and his definition of motion in Book III. In that book, he clearly defines one form of motion as being what he calls locomotion (others are, as you know, substance, quality and quantity). The whole of Book IV is given over to a discussion of the framework for motion focused on what we call motion and what he calls locomotion (change of place). He defines place, “void” and time as foundational concepts for motion in ways that we now know to be mistaken. As the Thomistic proof for God that relies on a Prime Mover, also relies on the Aristotlean concepts of motion, and since that proof relies on a universal claim that all motion requires a mover, then it also relies on the claim that all sorts of motion require a mover that is not itself. So I only have to show that the claim relies on mistaken notions about one sort of motion to undermine Thomas’s whole argument. But, as I have said, Aristotle’s notions of space and time (in Book IV, which he begins by saying: “The physicist must have a knowledge of Place…whether there is such a thing or not, and the manner of its existence and what it is - both because all suppose that things which exist are somewhere … and because motion in its most general and primary sense is change of place, which we call locomotion.), and relative and absolute motion (using the term to mean locomotion as he describes it in Books V and VII) are mistaken, and the conclusions that he draws about them, specifically about natural motions and the need for a mover, are also mistaken, so that Aquinas builds his house on sand. And don’t think that locomotion is the only one of the kinds of motion with these problems. The others also have problems which we can investigate (Aristotle’s notion of motion towards whiteness, for example, is hopelessly in error), and there are also examples of motions (in the Aristotlean sense) that Aristotle never dreamed of, such as quantum changes of state, say spin, or atomic energy levels which change in the absence of a mover.”

You now say:
Dr. Bonnette:

Whatever the merits of Aristotle’s concepts about physical nature (and I am not conceding that they are as outmoded as you claim), the arguments for God’s existence taken from motion by St. Thomas are not based on those physical categories. His primary argument in the Prima Via is based on the Bk III definition I gave earlier: the act of a being in motion insofar as it is in motion. (See St. Thomas Aquinas, In III Physics, 2, n. 3.) He is talking in terms of act and potency, terms proper both to the philosophy of nature (physics in Aristotelian terms) and, especially, metaphysics. The principle that “whatever is in motion is here and now being moved by another” must also be understood in terms of the actualization of being, not some specific species of motion. If you can find it in a library, take a look at my Aquinas’ Proofs for God’s Existence (Martinus-Nijhoff, 1972), esp, pp. 80-84. See also, the very existential development of this proof in my “A Variation on the First Way of St. Thomas Aquinas,” Faith & Reason, 8:1 (Spring, 1982).

So you begin by saying “When metaphysicians construct proofs for God’s existence, they …argue from something we do see, such as motion, to the existence of an Unmoved First Mover” and you end by saying “the arguments for God’s existence taken from motion by St. Thomas are not based on those physical categories”.

Thus, you are trying to have your cake and eat it. You are the philosopher, not I, but in all my reading on this subject, commentators point out that the argument starts with a posteriori observations about change in the universe (from potentiality to actuality in the jargon), and this includes *all *the categories of motion defined by Aristotle. If you claim otherwise, that Aquinas is starting from a different definition of motion from that provided by Aristotle in Book III, which, for example, excludes changes of state related to position or other physical attributes, then you have to begin by justifying Aquinas’s assumed premise that nothing can be moved from a state of potentiality to actuality except by something in a state of actuality, and you have to do this by observations of the natural world. Good luck.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[grannymh]

And how does that one species “originate”?

Alec
evolutionpages.com

Wouldn’t all the species ultimately originate from “Primordial Soup” ?

 

[RobbyS]

Well, this sort of argument is a kind of free universal trump, and worthless in reasoned debate. In effect you are saying that any philosophical, theological or moral problems associated with an act of a putative God can be swept away, because God has his good reasons for doing things that appear to us to be unjust/deceptive/cruel/arbitrary. But these issues cannot be swept away, because a God who is prepared occasionally to intervene in the normal course of nature to procure the healing of an individual is clearly capable of intervening to moderate the unspeakable suffering of tens of millions from disease, famine, drought and genocide, but does not do so. If the concept of justice means anything at all, this is clearly unjust.
No - Ernst Mayr proposed, or rather formally defined, THE biological species concept (the BSC), which is one concept for defining species in biology.
Well, that might be so, but what point are you making? Mayr defended the BSC against alternatives all his life, and laid out very clearly in “What Evolution Is” (his final book published in 2002), his reasons for claiming that the BSC is the most helpful concept for defining species.
Perhaps you are referring to the Aristotlean notion of species representing natural kinds that possess essences (if so, why refer to it by a handle that no-one else uses?). As I have pointed out before, the essentialist approach to species definition has had to be completely abandoned in the light of modern biology, (no credible species concepts remain that rely on essentialist concepts). Mayr himself was very clear about the biological facts that invalidate the essentialist approach, but, in truth, essentialism as a foundation for defining species died with Darwin.

Whoa! - steady on there. The foundations of Aristotle’s notions of motion are to be found in his Physics, and his definition of motion in Book III. In that book, he clearly defines one form of motion as being what he calls locomotion (others are, as you know, substance, quality and quantity). The whole of Book IV is given over to a discussion of the framework for motion focused on what we call motion and what he calls locomotion (change of place). He defines place, “void” and time as foundational concepts for motion in ways that we now know to be mistaken. As the Thomistic proof for God that relies on a Prime Mover, also relies on the Aristotlean concepts of motion, and since that proof relies on a universal claim that all motion requires a mover, then it also relies on the claim that all sorts of motion require a mover that is not itself. So I only have to show that the claim relies on mistaken notions about one sort of motion to undermine Thomas’s whole argument. But, as I have said, Aristotle’s notions of space and time (in Book IV, which he begins by saying: "The physicist must have a knowledge of Place…whether there is such a thing or not, and the manner of its existence and what it is - both because all suppose that things which exist are somewhere … and because motion in its most general and primary sense is change of place, which we call locomotion.), and relative and absolute motion (using the term to mean locomotion as he describes it in Books V and VII) are mistaken, and the conclusions that he draws about them, specifically about natural motions and the need for a mover, are also mistaken, so that Aquinas builds his house on sand. And don’t think that locomotion is the only one of the kinds of motion with these problems. The others also have problems which we can investigate (Aristotle’s notion of motion towards whiteness, for example, is hopelessly in error), and there are also examples of motions (in the Aristotlean sense) that Aristotle never dreamed of, such as quantum changes of state, say spin, or atomic energy levels which change in the absence of a mover.

I am not denigrating Aristotle - clearly we owe a huge debt to his thinking - as Newton so eloquently put it, we stand on the shoulders of giants. But that does not mean that we should treat his ideas as some sort of sacred text. It is clear to anyone who knows anything about physics that he makes many very fundamental errors in his understanding of nature, because of his early place in the history of science, but also because he makes statements that he claims to be true without ever testing them and which have since been empirically falsified, and that these in turn feed through to and undermine the truth of large areas of his metaphysics.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

You confuse matters by talking about “quantum states.” Newton saw the world in pretty much the same terms as Aristotle, or as Aristotle might if he had been a mathematician rather than a naturalist, Newton was a geometician, and it was only after geometry feed itself from Euclid, that we get relativity. So Einstein also starts from “places,” and the inventors of quantum mechanics from a notion of simultanously existing places. And let’s not idolize Darwin. His notion of heredity was wrong and wrong precisely because we cannot deduce genetics from his theory. As for “essence”, like it ot not there is one “essence” that we cannot get rid of, the one we most certainly know, and that is “man.” The irony of the Darwinists is that
they used his theory to get rid of “man” and replace him with themselves, a subset of man, gnostics --pace Huxley–who professed to be agmostic not only about God but also aboout man. A case can be made that with Darwin we banish humanity. Yet here we are.

 

[hecd2]

hecd2:

…the essentialist approach to species definition has had to be completely abandoned in the light of modern biology, (no credible species concepts remain that rely on essentialist concepts)…essentialism as a foundation for defining species died with Darwin."

I have no problem with that. You are writing about modern biology. I am writing as a philosopher. Yes, classical philosophers ARE essentialistic in their thinking because things are intelligible in terms of their natures or essences. Without natures, what would even natural scientists be investigating as they study Nature? You reject the natural philosophical species concept because it does not conform to the biological species concept.

No, I reject the philosophical species concept ( as you call it) because it is hopelessly vague, and because it fails to do what a species concept should do, which is to provide some sort of consistent method for deciding whether individuals fall within or outside a species. The philosophical species concept might be a useful but elementary introduction to the problem of categorising individuals, rather in the way that counting beads is a useful but elementary introduction to the vast world of mathematics, but science looks deeper into things and goes way beyond your method for discerning essences as exemplified by you in a later post, which is to see them once.

It is proper to biology to try to determine possible relationships between living things. If biologists wish to use biological species concepts based on various accidental characteristics, such as population isolation, that is quite proper to them.

Of course it is proper to scientists to define species. And as I have pointed out before, there is only one Biological Species Concept (although there are other concepts for defining species in biology.)

But you are wrong in saying that philosophers cannot have their own species concept based on essentialistic principles of presence or absence of various powers. They have and they do.

You talk about philosophers as though they speak with a single voice that agrees with yours, when it is very likely that the majority of professional philosophers will agree with me that essentialist species concepts have been shown to be useless and have thus been abandoned. If you disagree, let us put this concept of yours to the test. Choose an essential taxon, say rabbits (you used the example in a later post), and tell us what is the essence of a rabbit (ie what attributes do all rabbits have that no other organisms share).

Moreover, philosophers are within their proper role when they challenge metaphysical assumptions inherent in claims about purely materialistic explanations of how living species can “evolve” from one natural philosophical species to another more perfect one.

Scientists rightly ignore the discredited scala naturae concept inherent in your talk of species that are more “perfect” than others. You have not responded to my explanation of how your ladder of being is fatally flawed by both commission and omission.

In short your philosophical species concept is an outmoded and falsified idea, and represents a minority view among thinkers, even amongst philosophers.

…the population in the lineage leading to extant humans cannot have been as few as two breeding individuals at least since the divergence of human and chimpanzee lineages."

I am not a biologist. And I have said before that theological and philosophical reasons support my acceptance of Adam’s actual existence. You are a good scientist, and perhaps you can help me with the following citation I have encountered:

“Unlike genetic data derived from living humans, fossils can be used to test predictions of theories about the past without relying on a long list of assumptions about the neutrality of genetic markers, mutational rates, or other requirements necessary to retrodict the past from current genetic variation … genetic information, at best, provides a theory of how modern human origins might have happened if the assumptions used in interpreting the genetic data are correct.” (Frayer, David W., Wolpoff, Milford H., Thorne, Alan G., Smith, Fred H. and Pope, Geofrrey G. (1993) Theories of Modern Human Origins: The Paleontological Test. American Anthropologist, 95 (1):14-50. p. 19.)

I wonder whether you read this paper, or whether you are quoting something you found on an anti-evolutionist website? I only say this because I have only ever seen the quotation on the internet in the exact form that you have quoted it, ellipsis and all. On the other hand, I have the paper in front of me.

To explain further, you must know that in the 90s there was a fierce debate between proponents of the multi-regional hypothesis of human origins and the out-of-Africa hypothesis. Frayer et al were, at the time, multiregionalists (and Wolpoff and Thorne remain the most vocal multiregionalists), and the thrust of this paper is against the out-of-Africa hypothesis which got its strongest empirical support from molecular data. This explains the paper’s sceptical approach to molecular data. You have to understand that this paper predates the first whole genome sequencing by more than ten years, and that the out-of-Africa hypothesis is now, thanks to overwhelming genetic data, the consensus view.

I think the passage that you quote makes exaggerated claims in support of the case that the authors wished to make - a case that is now all but lost.

A modern textbook on human evolution (Cela-Conde and Ayala, Human Evolution, Oxford University Press, 2007 - chapter 9) lists these four issues in human evolution which can be resolved by molecular data, now that many of the “assumptions” have been tested and uncertainties resolved:

• phylogeny of extant species and the reconstruction of genetic evolutionary history: confirmation that chimps are the closest sister species to humans
• time of origin of species: when did modern humans evolve?
• place of origin of species: where did modern humans evolve?
• demography: how large has the population of humans been?

It is this last that is relevant to the discussion. When are you going to engage with the overwhelming scientific evidence that the lineage leading to modern humans has not passed through a bottleneck of two since the human-chimpanzee divergence?

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

You confuse matters by talking about “quantum states.”

Why? They exist, their behaviour is fundamentally different from what we normally observe, so any a posteriori development of metaphysical premises should take them into account.

Newton saw the world in pretty much the same terms as Aristotle, or as Aristotle might if he had been a mathematician rather than a naturalist,

Do you really want me to list the many ways in which Newton saw the world differently from Aristotle?

Newton was a geometician, and it was only after geometry feed itself from Euclid, that we get relativity. So Einstein also starts from “places,” and the inventors of quantum mechanics from a notion of simultanously existing places

Newton was much more than a geometrician. Would you like to know what else he was? And what on earth does it mean to suggest that quantum mechanics starts from a notion of simultaneously existing places? The idea of simultaneously existing places underlies ALL of physics.

. And let’s not idolize Darwin.

Who’s idolising Darwin? - I merely said that essentialist species concepts died with Darwin because essentialist concepts cannot survive the notion of gradually mutable species and common descent.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

Wouldn’t all the species ultimately originate from “Primordial Soup” ?

Well, all species originate with one common ancestor or a few tangled common ancestors living primordially, but our friend Antony would have us believe that tens of millions of living species and a billion or so extinct species all popped into existence independently and at just the right time in the fossil record: so I am asking him to provide a mechanism for species to appear fully-formed out of nothing.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[anthony022071]

Well, then you are left with the original problem that there are tens of millions of living populations that do not interbreed (“general species” in your definition) and you want us to believe that they each came into existence separately when you have proposed no process for species each to appear fully formed?

That’s like asking me for my own theory of evolution. You’re assuming that species come about through a process. I don’t propose one because I don’t believe there is one that produces new species. Populations are composed of individual creatures,and individual creatures are concieved,not evolved.

Where are these “species of species” that you are talking about?

Sub-species.

You attempted to refute my point that there are tens of millions of living species and perhaps a billion extinct ones by saying “I didn’t say all species came into being separately – many are species of species.” But since every scientist would accept that domestic cats form a species, and no scientist would claim that varieties of domestic cat are species, your definition, as far as cats go, is the same as theirs, so what’s your point?

Sub-species of domestic cats are capable of interbreeding with other varieties of domestic cats. But they are not capable of breeding with lions and tigers,and they have never been known to do so. Scientists ignore the obvious reproductive boundaries between general species and assume that there was a common ancestry thousands or millions of years

 

[hecd2]

While I cannot adjudge the merits of his claims, it is interesting to note that physicist and astronomer Milo Wolff maintains that the “wave structure of matter” can explain wave-particle duality. He claims that spherical waves necessarily form a ‘particle’ effect at their wave-center, thus solving the 90 year old paradox of the particle-wave duality of matter. See Wolff’s Schroedinger’s Universe and the Origin of the Natural Laws (Outskirts Press, 2008).

I’ll get to the rest of your comments on contradictions in physics tomorrow, but for the moment I thought I’d just comment on this.

I hope you are not seriously suggesting this guy’s ideas as a way out of the fundamental contradictions in QM. I am afraid that he shows every sign of being a physics crank of which quite a few exist - for some reason, GR and QM attract crackpots like flies. How can I tell? All the classical symptoms of crankery are there: no publications of his on this topic in any scientific journal - not even unrefereed in ArXiv, working in isolation, publishes books through self-publication or vanity publishers, claims to revolutionise the whole of physics - don’t they all?, failure to show how his “theory” fits empirical data; ignoring contrary data, hand-waving pontification rather than well formulated mathematical arguments, no maths at all beyond elementary wave equations, misuse of scientific terms and concepts and so on and so on.

In a book that claims to resolve quantum contradictions there is no mention of Bell’s inequality, or Young’s experiment or the hydrogen disaster or superpositiion of states or non-locality or tunnelling or entanglement; that’s astonishing and tells us what we can make of it.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Dr.Bonnette]

To hecd2:

Alec,

Concerning proofs for God’s existence:

You cite yourself previously:* “When you say metaphysicians use this argument, you are generalising in an unjustified way, for there are many metaphysicians or at any rate, philosophers, who think it is a terrible argument. It is a terrible argument - because it rests on conceptions of space, time, relative and absolute motion which are pre-Galilean, pre-Newtonian and pre-Einsteinian.”
*
I think we need note that most philosophers in North America are in the positivistic tradition in one form or another. Of course, they think Aquinas’ proofs for God’s existence, and his philosophy in general are outmoded and wrong. This is hardly news, since positivists universally are atheists or agnostics and materialists. The Catholic Church has a long history of major philosophers whose work is supportive of and complementary to Catholic teaching, preeminently among them, the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. When I say metaphysicians do something, you have already rejected anything I may say, since your brand of philosophy considers metaphysics a “pseudo-science.” So when I talk about metaphysicians, you cannot simply substitute “philosophers,” and then tell me most philosophers (meaning materialists and positivists) think what I am saying is rubbish. When the Catholic Church dogmatically defines that God’s existence can be known by the light of unaided reason (Denzinger 1806), she specifically refers to reasoning from the things that God has made, back to Him as First Cause. The argument thereto has nothing to apologize for.

All I am saying is that Aquinas’ arguments to God’s existence, particularly his Five Ways, are not tied to any definitions of the species of motion Aristotle talks about in his Physics. Classical physics simply is not metaphysics, and the metaphysical arguments which have been developed out of a study of the Five Ways by Thomists are not dependent on Aristotelian physical concepts. You would love to reduce them merely to Aristotelian physical notions so that you can then claim that these notions are outmoded in modern physics, and thus, the Thomistic proofs based on them are outmoded as well. But the essence of the arguments are well understood by Thomistic philosophers to entail concepts rich in the metaphysics of being, and not dependent upon any modern science of physics. Demanding that metaphysical proofs play by the rules of modern science is reductionism of the purest form.

In any event, if you think I am refusing to defend the proofs for God’s existence here, you are correct. I know too well the complexities of the arguments, and this thread is about a literal Adam and Eve, not the proofs for God’s existence. Since I wrote a book on these proofs, and since that book was favorably reviewed in some 8 or so refereed journals at time of publication, I am not entirely unaware of what is entailed here. But I don’t want the moderator to close down this thread for getting so far off topic.

You defend vigorously and ably the merits of your “pragmatic verificationism” and how it excludes the entire realm of the supernatural. I abandoned an initial fascination with reductionist philosophy many years ago because I found it could not adequately explain (1) substantial unities above the atomic level, (2) the unity of sensitive apprehension, (3) the formation of universal concepts, (4) freedom of the will, and (5) physical nature without God – among other things. All these are interesting topics as well, but not the subject matter of this thread.

Moreover, if we are to discuss Adam and Eve, it is not sufficient to decide the matter completely on the basis of your reading of molecular biology, since both revealed theology and Thomistic philosophy do have something to contribute to the discussion. You insist that harmony between the revealed Christian teaching and modern scientific findings is impossible. Whatever the apparent difficulties you presently raise may be, from the Catholic perspective, the dogma of Original Sin is not in doubt for the same reasons that the Catholic faith is not in doubt. The only question is how exactly to harmonize what is taught clearly and with certainty by revelation with what is actually true about the physical world in which we live. In so doing, we must be careful not to “canonize” natural science to the point that its findings become the new dogma, especially given the number of interesting twists and turns that have occurred in the history of natural science itself.

 

[hecd2]

hecd2:

*"Contradictions do exist on the quantum scale, but we also know that those contradictions are hidden at the normally observable macro scale by the stochastic properties of large ensembles of phenomena…

Other than experience, what else have we got to base our insights on? Your so called universal metaphysical insights are merely intuitive claims about reality, founded in experience and extrapolated without warrant to a claim about the universal nature of being."*

…the world is ordinarily non-contradictory at our scale, and thus we base our principle on the intuitive data that we ordinarily have access to; but the non-contradiction is underpinned by an Alice in Wonderland world of contradiction and weirdness that seethes below our normal perception, but which we have recently learned to observe. Stochastically, it normally adds up to provide non-contradictory data, but we know that the contradictions exist at the quantum scale."

You here point to a most radical difference in the way we look at reality. Yes, metaphysical insights are founded in experience, but they are not limited to experience, because once the intellect encounters being, it understands its universal applicability. If someone encountered a rabbit for the first time, he would immediately grasp something about the rabbit’s nature. Now, if I told that person that there is something in the next room, but told him nothing of its nature, then he would doubtless say he knew nothing about it. But were I to assure him that it is a rabbit, he could then say, “Yes, I know something about it because I have already encountered a rabbit.” That is to say, to paraphrase Kant, his knowledge of “rabbitness” now holds good for all possible rabbits – provided he is assured that what he is to encounter is a rabbit, and not something else.

And I deny that there is anything essential about the set of rabbits that is universal and unchanging. Any grouping of things into sets, for example rabbits, is a categorisation that we use to talk about these as sets and that allows us to generalise about that set. We can group things according to different criteria - all green things form a set (which excludes rabbits) for example, and all furry things form another set (which includes rabbits). All things with 2n=44 chromosomes form a set (which includes Oryctolagus cuniculus but not many other of the fifty odd species of rabbit). When we say rabbit, do we mean just O cuniculus, or do we include Sylvilagus, Poelagus etc. I guess we’ll exclude hares (ie all the subfamilies of Lepus), but what about Caprolagus? Is it a hare or a rabbit? Or something else? Rabbits don’t even form a family all on their own, sharing the family Leporidae with Lepus and Pronolagus. What about the pikas? Are rabbits rodents? Why or why not?

The sort of folk categorisation that you rely on here is no different from the partial blindness that sees whales as fish (because whales and fish both happen to swim in the sea), or all worms as being essentially the same (some kinds of worm are far more distant from a genetic point of view than we are from starfish).

Let’s set aside this short foray into systematics for now, and return to my challenge: you claim that there is a universal and absolute thing that you call rabbitness: so what is it? What is it that all rabbits (alive now or that were ever alive) possess from birth to death that is never possessed by any other organism? (And if you reply that it is not one attribute, but a unique set of attributes that define a rabbit, then you are back to scientific systematics, and you are left with the problematic issues that I outlined above).

So we see that there is no such thing as rabbitness except insofar as we choose a definition based on a set of attributes, and it is the ambiguities and difficulties inherent in such a definition that has prompted philosophers and scientists alike to abandon essentialist definitions of species, at least for extant sexually reproducing organisms.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

But the other aspect of even the most primitive experiential encounter is the mind’s awareness of the “being, existence, reality” of what is encountered. Even you concede that at the level of immediate human experience, the laws of being are known – but you deny their transcendental value. What we know in the “concept of being” is simply “something there.” Again, the intelligibility of perception itself requires that the content obey the rules of being: Something there is not not-there. That is what we immediately know when we form the concept of being – not the essential nature of the object known – but its very “being there” at all. That is to say, we know what being or existence is. It is not “what” is known, but the very act by which what is known is present in our knowledge at all. And that is the basis for us forming the first principles of being.

I am not going to argue against what you say about the certainty that if something is there it is not not-there, certainly at our usually experienced macro-scale that is true. (I will, peropherally make the point that there are fundamental paradoxes of existence in quantum mechanics such as the fact that quantum particles are only localised when you detect them and that they can be not-there when unobserved). However, when you say that something there is not not-there, and declare it as a principle that apples to all contradictions we might ever experience, you show that you have failed to grasp the full import of the quantum scale phenomena that I’ve described. You are not uncommon in failing to fully engage with the significance of what we see in the quantum world, insisting that the intuition that we derive about reality from day to day experience must apply in all circumstances - that is what I mean by an unwarranted extrapolation from intuition to what you claim to be transcendental truths.

Now, when people are told that something just might exist on the other side of the cosmos, but that is all they will be told about it, most of them will think initially that they know nothing at all about it. But if prompted, they immediately realize that there is a lot they can truly say about this hypothetical entity. For they know with certitude that either that entity is there or not; that if it is there, it is what it is; that it cannot both be there and not be there, and so forth.

If the entity is a quantum particle, then they cannot say with certitude that it *is or is-not *or that it is there or not-there, nor can they say anything about its quantum state (which is to say that they cannot say anything about it at all, because its quantum state defines all that there is to define about it).

What is possibly there might not be anything of a nature previously encountered…because the mind immediately forms a concept of being (of being’s “nature,” if you will) the moment we encounter anything at all in experience. Henceforth, we are absolutely certain that the principle of non-contradiction applies to anything at all.

Hang on there - this is precisely the point at which you leap from something which is possibly warranted (that by experiencing the existence of just one thing, you can assert that if a thing exists there then it cannot not-exist there) to a claim that is wholly unwarranted (that this entails the impossibility of all contradiction in reality, such as the abandonment of locality or counterfactual definiteness inherent in EPR type experiments)

You say that this universality is “extrapolated without warrant to a claim about the universal nature of being.” But the “warrant” is precisely this, that in the very first encounter with any being in any form, we henceforth know the “nature” of being itself.

I have shown , with examples of experiments that any competent person can do, that that is precisely what we cannot say - our intuition is not merely inadequate safely to allow this extrapolation, but it actually misleads us in interpretations of the nature of certain entities.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

That is why the human mind is so scandalized by phenomena which appear to violate the non-contradiction principle, and why physicists have for 90 years sought to overcome the paradoxes you describe. For if true contradictions can occur at that level, they can then occur at even the macroscopic level – even though we do not experience them because of the “stochastic properties of large ensembles of phenomena.”

Indeed they can exist at the macroscopic scale, but for any sufficiently large ensemble of incoherent entities, they are vanishingly unlikely to occur in a way that is detectable. And since what we normally observe of reality is large ensembles of incoherent entities, our intuition has evolved to attach universal beliefs to the appearance of reality on the macro scale, beliefs which turn out to be erroneous and unwarranted when we look closer at things on the quantum scale. If you persist in proposing that things behave in the same way at the macro and the quantum scales then you are doing no more than revealing your unwillingness to properly engage with the reality of what happens in the latter case

What you and others are saying is that contradictions do not appear to occur at the macroscopic level, when theoretical physics visits the submicroscopic level, they do occur. But, in so saying, you also to affirm that (1) a certain physical phenomena really does occur at the micro level (that is, it is not the case that it does not), for example, light energy really does take the form of waves, (2) a certain physical phenomena which excludes the first really does exist at the micro level (that is, it is not the case that it does not), for example light energy really does take the form of particles, not waves, and (3), contradictions really do exist at the micro level (that is, you deny that they do not exist), In all three instances, you are implicitly applying the principle of non-contradiction, and doing so at the submicroscopic level where you say that contradictions can and do exist.

That is precisely what I am saying. I have been very clear to point out that things do not happen in a capricious way - nevertheless, we can reliably show with quite simple experiments that certain contradictions do occur; and that they do so repeatedly and consistently.

Rather, either modern physicists ought to come to the realization that the phenomena is not really contradictory if you look at it from precisely the same respect simultaneously, or else, that theoretical physics needs to make yet another progressive leap as it did in moving beyond the Newtonian worldview.

It is not for you to say what physicists ought or ought not to do. This is not a matter of theoretical physics but a matter of observation (and quite simple observation at that).

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Dr.Bonnette]

To hecd2 re post 151:

Alec,

It appears we ARE headed down the rabbit hole!

You write: "Let’s set aside this short foray into systematics for now, and return to my challenge: you claim that there is a universal and absolute thing that you call rabbitness: so what is it? What is it that all rabbits (alive now or that were ever alive) possess from birth to death that is never possessed by any other organism? (And if you reply that it is not one attribute, but a unique set of attributes that define a rabbit, then you are back to scientific systematics, and you are left with the problematic issues that I outlined above)."

Once again, you are trying to force all discussion into your system of empirical biology. You miss my point. I am simply saying that immediate experience of a given nature enables the intellect to immediately universalize that content so that all future encounters of the same sort are understood.

What I had written was: "If someone encountered a rabbit for the first time, he would immediately grasp something about the rabbit’s nature." Note that I did NOT say “the whole nature.” “Rabbitness,” might tell me something of the natural philosophical species of the rabbit as a sentient organism with all five external senses. This does not define the biological species of rabbit, but rather enables understanding of what all members of the same natural philosophical species have in common, namely, the same sensitive powers. This is not what common sense or biologists want to hear, since it precisely does not seek to define what rabbits “possess from birth to death that is never possessed by any other organism,” because the natural species concept includes “other organisms” with the same set of powers. As a biologist, this may be of no interest to you, but I never said it should interest biologists – only that philosophers can explain how we form universal concepts from a single experience with any given nature. Instead of the powers of a rabbit, this same initial encounter might allow us to understand the universal meaning of “hopping,” and that thus any other thing we encounter guaranteed to be “hopping” would be something we now know about.

I realize that, as a nominalist, you deny all universal natures anyway – so that you tend to view “species” as linguistic fictions, describing arbitrary mid-ranges of ever evolving populations. But that is beside the point. My concern in the text cited above had to do with how the mind works, and how we form universal knowledge, and – most importantly – how we form a concept of being which is transcendentally valid.

Your effort to define “rabbitness” is not mine.

 

[hecd2]

“whilst this reasoning can lead to hypotheses about entities for which we currently have no sensory evidence, those hypotheses cannot be confirmed or become knowledge without further sensory evidence.”

On the contrary, what you say applies in the field of natural science, but does not apply to philosophical reasoning – any more than it would apply to a formal demonstration in mathematics for which we have no corresponding physical evidence.

Your comparison is not apposite. It is true that formal mathematical demonstrations need no physical evidence (which follows from the nature of formal mathematics as a strict syntactical but arbitrary set of languages), because formal mathematical systems make no claim about reality. On the other hand both science and philosophy claim to be methods of revealing the truth about reality. I see no reason at all, why, if it is proper for science to limit its claims of knowledge to entities for which we have sensory knowledge, then it is not also proper to demand the same of all hypotheses about reality. This is a point which is valid to all epistemology - in uncovering truth the same limitations and need for confirmation apply to all entities, whether or not the method at work is physics or metaphysics. I do not see how one can have any more confidence about the existence or nature of an entity which one claims is outside sensory perception than one has about the existence or nature of an entity which is sensible but has not yet been sensed. In both cases, the best that you can have is a reasonable unconfirmed hypothesis, in the one case not yet raised, and in the other case unable to be raised, to the status of knowledge.

…I quite agree with reasoning from observable effects to causes, even ones we might not be able to observe. Most of the physical phenomena which theoretical physics deals with (subatomic entities) are known through this process of reasoning.

The existence of specific hypothetical particles are never accepted until they have been observed. That is one of reasons billions of dollars are being spent on the LHC. Theoretical physicists produce models of reality that contain hypothetical particles, some of which are confirmed by experiment to exist (all six quarks, six types of lepton, four bosons - but not Higgs or the graviton), some of which have not been confirmed, like Higgs and the graviton, the entire zoo of supersymmetry partners, the candidates for dark matter like neutralinos and axions, plus dozens of other bizarre things that are justified by one theoretical model or another. Other suggestions such as preons have already been falsified. The entities that philosophy proposes outside the realm of the senses, occupy the same epistemological status as saxions and dilatinos, ie, reasonable hypotheses under some set of premises, but unlike saxions and dilatinos, they are destined forever to remain hypotheses, outside the canon of knowledge.

Regarding impossiblity of infinite regress in the premises of a demonstration, you write: *"(Note that the constraint not to have unlimited regression is a practical, not an in-principle one)."
*
Partly right. The obvious problem is that you don’t have enough time to regress infinitely through prior premises. Still, Aristotle and St. Thomas point out in the On Interpretation, that to form a conclusion of a scientific syllogism you have to join the subject and predicate taken from the major and minor terms. If the number of middle terms were infinite, the subject and predicate could never be joined, and thus, no conclusion could be reached.

True if we are talking about whether we can demonstrate something on the one hand, where the impossibility of following an infinite regress of premises means that we have to accept at least one first premise without formal proof; but not true if we are talking about whether, in principle, an infinite regress in the sense of the set of premises leading to a conclusion can have a transfinite cardinality, which it can.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[DanteAlighieri]

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

– Hamlet, Act I Scene V

Peace,
Dante

 

[Dr.Bonnette]

To hecd2:

Alec,

In post 137, you write: “Turning now to this question of non-contradiction, it is a first premise that is based, as most are, on reality as it appears to us at our scale. What does it actually mean? It means, for example, that entities cannot have properties that are mutually exclusive, that they cannot occupy two contradictory states at once (such as dead and alive), that finite entities cannot be in two or more places at once, that a well evidenced physical principle about the upper limit of speed of transmitting information cannot be true and not true at the same time, that the world is local, that measuring one thing doesn’t affect some other unconnected thing on the other side of the galaxy and that things don’t occupy an indeterminate state until they are observed.”

Just a point of clarification: The classical statement of the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction is this: A being cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. That is all it says. Some of the examples you give above pertain to the physical universe and may entail properties that are not actually contradictory, but rather express paradoxical conditions dependent upon our present interpretation of physical laws. In point of inconvenient fact, some of the saints have been reliably reported to be in two places at the same time. (No, I don’t expect you to believe it.)

In post 152, you write: “(I will, peropherally make the point that there are fundamental paradoxes of existence in quantum mechanics such as the fact that quantum particles are only localised when you detect them and that they can be not-there when unobserved).” While normal observation does not affect the thing observed, in subatomic physics, the act of “detecting” or “measuring” actually affects the thing observed, and therefore cannot be compared as identical to the “act” of not observing.

In post 153, you first quote me and then make comment yourself:

Quote: [from me]
“What you and others are saying is that contradictions do not appear to occur at the macroscopic level, when theoretical physics visits the submicroscopic level, they do occur. But, in so saying, you also do affirm that (1) a certain physical phenomena really does occur at the micro level (that is, it is not the case that it does not), for example, light energy really does take the form of waves, (2) a certain physical phenomena which excludes the first really does exist at the micro level (that is, it is not the case that it does not), for example light energy really does take the form of particles, not waves, and (3), contradictions really do exist at the micro level (that is, you deny that they do not exist), In all three instances, you are implicitly applying the principle of non-contradiction, and doing so at the submicroscopic level where you say that contradictions can and do exist.”

You then comment: “That is precisely what I am saying. I have been very clear to point out that things do not happen in a capricious way - nevertheless, we can reliably show with quite simple experiments that certain contradictions do occur; and that they do so repeatedly and consistently.”

You miss my point about the fact that in making these judgments about what is going on at the micro level, “you are implicitly applying the principle of non-contradiction.” This is critical. The problem you have is that to make these observations and judgments about what is going on at the subatomic level – even to make the judgments that real contradictions are occurring – you have to presuppose and make use of the very principle you wish to infer is not true, namely, non-contradiction. You cannot say anything about what is occurring at the micro level without simultaneously implicitly denying the opposite condition, and hence, implicitly affirming the very principle you seek to deny. That is the same problem one has at the macro level, namely, that any attempt to deny the principle of non-contradiction simultaneously affirms it – or simply renders judgment, speech, and all thought meaningless and unintelligible. In a nutshell, you cannot use non-contradiction to prove that contradictions occur.

That is why, I – tongue-in-cheek – made the following argument in post 139: “For if true contradictions can occur at that level, they can then occur at even the macroscopic level – even though we do not experience them because of the “stochastic properties of large ensembles of phenomena.” If the principle of non-contradiction is genuinely not universal in nature, then perhaps the molecular biological evidence studied in the Human Genome Project, from which inferences are made that exclude a literal Adam and Eve, simultaneously do not exclude Adam and Eve (since being can be self-contradictory), and thus Adam and Eve can exist in literal history!” Nor is this entirely unreasonable from your perspective, since someplace earlier you allow that macro contradictions might occur “rarely!” Of course, I cannot make use of this argument myself, since I do not allow any exceptions to the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction, which expresses the natural metaphysics of human intelligence instantly grasping that being cannot both be and not be (at the same time and in the same exact respect).

You are right that it is not my place to tell physicists what to do to extricate themselves from their apparent paradoxes. But that does not mean that I must accept their irrational inferences.

 

[grannymh]

Four questions to ponder.

At first glance, there seems to be a dichotomy to Adam and Eve because they are part of nature’s processes and yet separate because of their uniqueness. I do understand that we are related to chickens and chimps because I see a unity to creation. And I have known some males who have had the brain of a chimp. - - -CAF posters and moderators are excluded from that observation. Question 1.) What are the things which truly separate us from our shirttail cousins?

On another thread, I read a comment that the conclusion from Descartes’ writings was that real knowledge was geometric in character. A rebuttal was that the human mind is intuitive as well as rational. Question 2.) Does “intuitive as well as rational” distinguish humans to the point that they would be different in “kind” rather than different in degree from smart chimps.

Earlier, I posed the question --“ Wouldn’t all the species ultimately originate from “Primordial Soup”? Alec responded (post 147) “Well, all species originate with one common ancestor or a few tangled common ancestors living primordially,” If humans are really unique, here is Question 3.) How far back in history does human uniqueness go?

Another reply of Alec’s referred to major domains of life (archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes). Wandering around the net, I found Dr. Carl Woese, Professor of Microbiology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (Note to Alec: I put Woese in your search box and am a bit confused; however, I did find some very interesting reading.)

Dr. Woese (see alphabetical list of faculty)
www.mcb.illinois.edu/faculty/alpha_list

describes himself as a molecular biologist turned evolutionist. He writes about the discovery of the archaea which are unique organisms. The study of the archaea is also central to an understanding of the nature of the ancestor common to all life.
My last question is rather general calling for different answers. 4) If the nature of the ancestor common to all life is being studied, i.e., the “nature” apparently is not set in stone, then would there be the possibility that the lineage of Homo sapiens going back to the first common ancestor may be both unique and related.

Please note — I am not asking anyone to change their position on evolution. I am asking for creative non-binding answers.

Blessings,
granny

All human life deserves understanding.

 

[anthony022071]

Of course you can, if the genetic similarities, as you call them, are such that they can only have come about by shared ancestry. And that is the case.

How do you know that is the case when,as you admit,there is no law of nature to prevent two different species with very similar genetic material from originating separately? and when there is no way to see first hand if there was a reproductive link thousands or millions of years ago?

Yes, but these are not just “similar genetic similarities” but overwhelming and very specific evidence for a common genetic heritage.

The genetic “evidence” does not demonstrate what needs to be demonstrated – reproductive compatibility or linkage thousands or millions of years ago. Shared genetic material between species and reproductive acts or compatibility between species are two different things,and the former does not demonstrate that the latter occurred.

See post 148.

 

[anthony022071]

Well, all species originate with one common ancestor or a few tangled common ancestors living primordially, but our friend Antony would have us believe that tens of millions of living species and a billion or so extinct species all popped into existence independently and at just the right time in the fossil record:

If there’s no proof of reproductive compatibility or linkage ever having existed between different species,then there’s no reason to believe that they have a common ancestry.
On the other hand,if one species could come into existence independently,there is nothing to prevent other species with like genetic material from coming into existence independently. There is no reason to suppose,no law of nature which determines,that all creatures must have originated (in the sense of descended by reproduction) from one genetic source. It’s like saying that all gold coins must have originated from the same mint,or that all gold must have originated from the same lump sum of a certain region.

so I am asking him to provide a mechanism for species to appear fully-formed out of nothing.

Species don’t originate because of mechanisms. They originate because the Spirit of God animates earthly materials like proteins and amino acids,and forms them with intelligence into intelligence (information),so that they become genetic material,which the Spirit causes to function and reproduce.