Sorry Evolution Again

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"Darwinism is a trivial idea that has been elevated to the status of the scientific theory that governs modern biology."Dr. Michael Egnor, Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook
 
dcdurel said:
"Darwinism is a trivial idea that has been elevated to the status of the scientific theory that governs modern biology."Dr. Michael Egnor, Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook
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If you’re determined to commit the fallacy of the argument from authority, at least quote an authority.

Alec
evolutionpages.com
 
Science has withdrawn itself from the supernatural.
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You might as well claim plumbing has withdrawn itself from the supernatural. It’s not an option. If the method is limited to things that senses can detect, then the supernatural is forever out of reach. You want way too much from science.
Perhaps science should return to positive claims.
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I encourage you do read some journals; it would be a revelation for you.
Humans are not capable of pure objectivity.
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Humans are perfect at nothing. But it’s foolish to therefore claim we can’t be objective, just because we can’t be perfectly objective. Remember, if we couldn’t be objective, there would be no evolutionary theory.
We do not have all the information.
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The beauty of science is that we can make useful inferences from partial information. And it works very, very well.
 
So Barbarian, how is natural selection different from chance?
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Chance would mean that all individuals had the same likelihood of surviving long enough to reproduce. Natural selection is the process of removing the unfit and preserving the fit in a population. Which is the antithesis of chance.
Doesn’t chance guide it?
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No.
Doesn’t natural selection depend on the chance of new favorable mutations?
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That’s like claiming a high-performing salesman was just lucky to encounter people who were ready to buy. A random process, plus a non-random process, is a non-random process.

Would you like some demonstrations you could do yourself to demonstrate this fact?
If not then please explain.
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Have you heard the saying “Chance favors the prepared mind?” That’s how it is with fitness. Think about penguins, sharks, dolphins, icthyosaurs. All of them came up with the same solution to getting around quickly in water, but none of them use the same tissues and structures in the same way. Chance mutation was taken by natural selection, and all the solutions converged on an optimal solution, which is functionally the same in all of them.
 
These are quotes from Miller’s book, when I posted them in the fall, many here (evolutionists) disagreed entirely.
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Maybe so. They are theological and philosophical issues, not biological ones. I would be very surprised to see all scientist on the same side of these issues.

Obviously, the notion that God makes everything happen just so, would remove personal responsibility from humans who would be nothing but elaborate automatons in such a universe.

On the other hand, a universe that even God can’t predict would leave little room for divine providence. The whole thing makes my head hurt. No one has answered this to my satisfaction, yet.
 
The_Barbarian said:
Maybe so. They are theological and philosophical issues, not biological ones. I would be very surprised to see all scientist on the same side of these issues.

Obviously, the notion that God makes everything happen just so, would remove personal responsibility from humans who would be nothing but elaborate automatons in such a universe.

On the other hand, a universe that even God can’t predict would leave little room for divine providence. The whole thing makes my head hurt. No one has answered this to my satisfaction, yet.
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They were all Catholics as well. And yes, that’s the point Miller makes, that if God rules everything, how free would we be? But then can we not say we feel abandoned? Ok, God didn’t make me this way, I just evolved, all the physical and psycological (due to chemical inbalances within the brain) deficientcies are simply due to my make up and the way I formed, or evolved after God began the universe. And yet He cares so much for me but expects me (us) to behave entirely, even though we come from a selfish background, where to survive before another is part of who we are, we are supposed to be Holy entirely or face hell?

That’s seems pretty uncaring, and makes me want to turn away, feeling as though God has barely anything to do with my life. I don’t buy this though, neither do I buy that He didn’t know the we were coming, or couldn’t predict us.

This is so difficult to understand especially when God formed Jerimiah in the womb.
 
[Have you heard the saying “Chance favors the prepared mind?” That’s how it is with fitness. Think about penguins, sharks, dolphins, icthyosaurs. All of them came up with the same solution to getting around quickly in water, but none of them use the same tissues and structures in the same way. Chance mutation was taken by natural selection, and all the solutions converged on an optimal solution, which is functionally the same in all of them.
[/QUOTE]

What do mean? I have been taught this: that by chance a mutation occurs within a creature, if those new genes make the creature more fit to survive in the enviorment, then they survive, if not, then they do not. But for those that did, the random chance of those mutations just “happened” to be the right ones for the enviorment the creature was living in. So “chance” played a part it seems. Because what else cause a mutation other than chance. Mutations happen all the time, favorable and unfavorable.
 
What do mean? I have been taught this: that by chance a mutation occurs within a creature, if those new genes make the creature more fit to survive in the enviorment, then they survive, if not, then they do not.
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Yep. So the resulting population is not a matter of chance. It is directed by natural selection.
But for those that did, the random chance of those mutations just “happened” to be the right ones for the enviorment the creature was living in. So “chance” played a part it seems.
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Provides raw material for natural selection. The result is not chance, even if the mutations are. Remember only the mutations that increase the likelihood of survival are kept.
 
They were all Catholics as well. And yes, that’s the point Miller makes, that if God rules everything, how free would we be? But then can we not say we feel abandoned? Ok, God didn’t make me this way, I just evolved, all the physical and psycological (due to chemical inbalances within the brain) deficientcies are simply due to my make up and the way I formed, or evolved after God began the universe. And yet He cares so much for me but expects me (us) to behave entirely, even though we come from a selfish background, where to survive before another is part of who we are, we are supposed to be Holy entirely or face hell?
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That’s seems pretty uncaring, and makes me want to turn away, feeling as though God has barely anything to do with my life. I don’t buy this though, neither do I buy that He didn’t know the we were coming, or couldn’t predict us.
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This is so difficult to understand especially when God formed Jerimiah in the womb.
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But it’s not a problem for biology, which can’t address such questions. It’s a religious/philosophical problem.
 
So what does God mean when he says “I formed you in the room?”
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That’s a religious question. And a difficult one, because we now know a great deal about how a fertilized develops into a human. All natural, so far as science can see. Of course, it can’t see the soul, which is given directly and immediately by God.
 
What’s astonishing, is many creationists actually think that’s what scientists say about it.

It’s a major failing of American Education, that evolution is so infrequently (and often, so poorly) explained to students. It’s an embarrassment.
 
bringyou.to/apologetics/p81.htm

Pope Benedict XVI

Monod nonetheless finds the possibility for evolution in the fact that in the very propagation of the project there can be mistakes in the act of transmission. Because nature is conservative, these mistakes, once having come into existence, are carried on. Such mistakes can add up, and from the adding up of mistakes something new can arise. Now an astonishing conclusion follows: It was in this way that the whole world of living creatures, and human beings themselves, came into existence. We are the product of “haphazard mistakes.”

What response shall we make to this view? It is the affair of the natural sciences to explain how the tree of life in particular continues to grow and how new branches shoot out from it. This is not a matter for faith. But we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error. Nor are they the products of a selective process to which divine predicates can be attributed in illogical, unscientific, and even mythic fashion. The great projects of the living creation point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before. Thus we can say today with a new certitude and joyousness that the human being is indeed a divine project, which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. Human beings are not a mistake but something willed; they are the fruit of love. They can disclose in themselves, in the bold project that they are, the language of the creating Intelligence that speaks to them and that moves them to say: Yes, Father, you have willed me.

Peace,
Ed
 
Here’s Pope Benedict XVI with a more detailed explaination of the way chance and necessity can be involved:

**Many neo-Darwinian scientists, as well as some of their critics, have concluded that, if evolution is a radically contingent materialistic process driven by natural selection and random genetic variation, then there can be no place in it for divine providential causality. A growing body of scientific critics of neo-Darwinism point to evidence of design (e.g., biological structures that exhibit specified complexity) that, in their view, cannot be explained in terms of a purely contingent process and that neo-Darwinians have ignored or misinterpreted. The nub of this
currently lively disagreement involves scientific observation and generalization concerning whether the available data support inferences of design or chance, and cannot be settled by theology. But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens
infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1).

In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent
because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles…It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence”
(Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).**
 
I thank Pope Benedict and others in the Catholic Church for explaining in great detail, how God is necessary to a process that is advertised as purely self-contained, without the need for any supernatural involvement whatsoever.

People, especially young people, are clearly believing that they are the result of an unintelligent mechanism fueled by mutation followed by ‘natural’ selection. The Church clearly teaches that this answer is totally inadequate. But evolutionary science does not stop there. Not only is man just another animal, but man’s mind is just an outgrowth of matter. Our ‘selfish genes’ do all of our choosing in life. They program us. We perform adaptive, or, in some cases, maladaptive, behaviors and reproduce, or not, and die. Literally without consequence. Some of us may be literally unaware of the Creating Reason with whom we can have a personal relationship. “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This is not just meant as a religious/spiritual message but as one for everyday life, real life.

Peace,
Ed
 
Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen you get more and more of it, Ed. I’m quite sincere in saying that.
 
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