Arandur – I appreciate your views here.
I’m sorry I can’t make my points any clearer than I’ve done thus far.
I’ve observed the arguments you made thus far. and I think I know where you stand.
You don’t seem to, since you fairly often misrepresent what I’ve said.
I’ve read your counterpoints also and I will give consideration to those ideas you raised.
Thank you. Please do a little research into science, philosophy, and the philosophy of science. It may change your perspective.
No, since the so-called evolution of human beings affects all other species on earth. The free-will choices of human beings affect the environment in which other species live and have to survive.
Again, what about before there were ensouled human beings? Unless you want to question all the other disciplines of science and how they, using theories and laws intrinsic to them, recognize an old earth and universe, you’d have to admit that humans haven’t arrived on the scene until fairly recently. If that is the case, then your “free will exception” didn’t exist prior to us, so why do you still say evolution is false for things prior to humans? And if your exception does not exist to supposedly make it false, then how does it suddenly make all of evolution false when just that little factor is thrown in?
I did also address this long before. Human free will choices factor in to other species
just as another environmental factor. Artificial selection is an example of this. Humans choose breeding pairs to try to get more of a particular trait. This effect is measurable and follows evolutionary patterns. Free will actually here lends more evidence in favor of evolutionary processes.
You can’t win with this line of reasoning. It’s just not logical, nor supported by the evidence. You continue to discount all the evidence suggesting evolutionary processes as if it did not exist, as if the mere existence of free will makes all that other evidence, all the other factors go away.
There are many books that outline the problems with evolutionary theory, if you’re interested. I didn’t make up the critique but I just accept the critique because it appeals to my sense of reason, logic and understanding of the world.
I’ve read many critiques and found nearly all of them lacking in basic understanding of what evolution actually describes. Those that have a better understanding tend to freely admit micro-evolution (evolutionary processes) and the age of the earth, just questioning philosophical points and, sometimes, speciation.
Since we supposely cannot identify the source of the effect, we have to deny the observable evidence of the effects also. That is a deliberate blindness to observed evidence.
Reggie, I’ll give you another analogy, even though you seem to be deliberately blind to them and ignore almost every one I provide.
Your footprints in the sand. We can’t identify the source of them. The person isn’t around to see, nor were the various possible effects that could have wiped away the footprints. You know, one of the possible effects is that a ghost or an angel made them. Science will discount those supernatural effects because it really can’t possibly isolate them and detect the ghost or the angel. It will instead try to explain those footprints based on physical factors, things observable by the senses. We can identify that they seem quite likely to come from a human person. We can hypothesize many ways for there to be just one set of footprints. We set about attempting to falsify those hypotheses. We can’t falsify the angel or ghost, and we can’t be sure of what caused the single set without being able to identify the source (whether the person was one-legged or two-legged, or covered their tracks). Does our inability to identify the source make us deliberately blind to the evidence? Does it even make us have to deny the evidence? No. We determine what hypotheses are possible in the realm of nature, and the likelihood of each.
Another analogy. Before man knew the sun was a star, or that the stars were stars, he had evidence that they gave light. He had no means by which to identify the sources, so he tried to explain them in various ways, none of which were as balls of plasma way out in space. He did not deny evidence, however, that they gave off light, and did still chart their path through the heavens. He did use the effects of the sunlight. No evidence was blindly disregarded.
I think the effort to separate the influence of the soul on the body is a major problem. It breaks the unity of the human person.