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Glark
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Sorry to be a party-pooper, but I quite enjoy buffalo’s posts. Many of the links he provides make for excellent reading.
Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true
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Delphinus
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I think you are going to find most Catholics, or at least many, agree with your premise which seems to be evolution. I personally see evolution as an extreme sign of God’s grace for us. He set in motion, billions of years ago, the natural systems that would eventually produce mankind, and even me. If he had US in mind 4.5 BILLION years ago, then why worry about tomorrow? He’s clearly got it covered! 
Besides, the 7 day creation was clearly a spoof to stick it to the Babylonians during the Jewish exile while proving the sovereignty of our awesome God!..hah!
Besides, the 7 day creation was clearly a spoof to stick it to the Babylonians during the Jewish exile while proving the sovereignty of our awesome God!..hah!
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edwest211
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“natural systems”? Nothing exists outside of God. I follow what the Church teaches, which cannot be condensed into a few sentences.
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Aloysium
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You are a new creation, an expression of what is one mankind, fallen in Adam, and reconciled with God in Jesus Christ. That God created the physical universe as He has created you is clear, as it is that the material basis of who we are as person must be present before we can be, ontologically and, we have been told, temporally. But that which defines us, which shapes the structure of the person and makes us different than a cadaver is our living spirit. Natural systems are merely that, physical realities interacting - chaos in contrast with the order that constitutes our being here, seeing and reading these words, thinking and acting, as one person in the world. The events that comprise the natural order, which we conceptualize as laws have not in themselves brought us into being; they cannot. The Ground of all being is God.
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Glark
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You could have fooled me.
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Hugh_Farey
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Oh, I see. I find no such evidence in the paper. But more particularly, none of its observations, let alone its conclusions, fit, in any way, a hypothesis that a few dozen species were created spontaneously, from which all subsequent species have evolved.
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buffalo
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Read again.
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Hugh_Farey
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Done that. Could you be a little more precise? Nothing about abrupt appearance that I can find.
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buffalo
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Anything about abrupt complexity?
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Hugh_Farey
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Nope. The word abrupt does not appear at all, and nor do any of its synonyms. Are you referring to the paragraph suggesting a “popcorn” stage? If so, what do you think it means? Do you think it supports a hypothesis that a few dozen species were created spontaneously, from which all subsequent species have evolved?
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HarryStotle
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Standard Darwinian evolution theory would hold to the idea that if the process of evolution were rewound to the beginning and rebooted, the results would be completely different given that the mutations powering genomic changes have supposedly been largely random. That would imply that God isn’t merely omnipotent but also outrageously fortuitous. Omnifortuitous?Glark:
So, you are telling us that your God is not omnipotent. Your God is incapable of setting up the universe in such a way that man would evolve. That makes your God non-omnipotent.
rossum
So, do you subscribe to a God who has gambled the entire house of human history on evolution fortuitously ending in a being with free moral agency, the capacity to love, and be intelligence capable, or are you merely making rhetorical points?
A theist evolutionist (Darwinian) has to convincingly explain how mere random mutations as the principle engine behind adaptive change can be coupled with omnipotence to bring about a designed universe and a highly intelligent being with free moral agency, with all that entails. You can’t merely point to an omnipotent God as if that is all that a theist needs to propose to assent to “descent with modification filtered through natural selection.” It isn’t sufficient to merely assert “Omnipotence!” as if the entire case is made and no further explanation is required.
In fact, many atheist evolutionists are moving towards structuralism precisely because they do not accept that mere random mutations can explain convergence – the phenomenon where very similar morphological features consistently appear in diverged genetic lines. For example: wings on insects, birds, fish, and mammals.
Certainly, structuralism is a far better fit for theist evolutionists than Standard Evolution Theory ever could be.
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Hugh_Farey
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Not at all. One must be very careful with specific meanings here. Randomness is invariably constrained by circumstances (one cannot throw a seven with a dice). It is not unlikely that, given appropriate initial conditions, the origin of life was largely inevitable, and its evolution, by way of ‘fitting’ its initially aquatic, then terrestrial environment, predictably likely to follow, at least broadly, the lines that it did. It is not randomness that has led to large terrestrial animals having limbs rather than slithering on their bellies, for example.
Within those constraints, however, I agree that if evolution were “rewound to the beginning and rebooted”, you and I would probably not be here. In fact, if time were turned back only a few years, you and I would probably not be here, given the uncertainty of exactly which gametes unite to make a zygote in any fertilisation process, and which zygotes successfully come to term as a baby.
But we are here. That’s the point.
Exactly. Why not? You are not, of course, claiming that God could not have worked his universe that way, are you? I think omnifortuitous is a very good word!
This would be attributing very limited human perceptions to God. Anyone who could clearly see the outcome of every random throw of a dice would soon be ejected from a gambling salon, even if he had no control over any of them. A gambler does not know the outcome of a series of random events. God does, and he sees that it is good. Before the universe, or even the laws that run it, were even created, God could see the outcome of every possible random event. And he seems to have chosen the one that resulted in you and me. I say seems, because he may have chosen others as well, but of which we can know nothing.
I think I just did.
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Hugh_Farey
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Why not? Omnipotence is a good deal more ‘potent’ than many people think. Still, I have elucidated a little, I hope.
Actually all evolutionists, theistic or atheist, have had this ‘constrained randomness’ as a fundamental part of their theory from Darwin onwards. Organisms develop to occupy environmental niches, whose very environment requires certain adaptations before it can be exploited.
Err… I have not watched all the video, but from what I have watched, the ‘Structuralism’ described so far is an integral part of ‘Standard Evolution Theory’, not in any sense an alternative to it. Perhaps it gets more peculiar later on.
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rossum
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Mutations are random; chemistry and natural selection are not. Hence some things would be the same if rewound, other things would be different. Chemistry dictates that life would start in the sea, not on land. Initially life would be adapted to an anoxic environment, only later changing to an oxygenated environment; chemistry and thermodynamics point the way for natural selection there.
If the important part of a human is the soul, which is made directly by God, then the shape of the physical body is much less important, and it is the physical shape which is determined by evolution. If humans had cephalopod-type eyes rather than tetrapod-type eyes, would that render us ineligible for salvation?
As I said above, there are non-random elements to evolution. One of the (name removed by moderator)uts is random while other (name removed by moderator)uts are not. Since evolution adapts organisms to their environment, God could change organisms by changing the environment they live in. Alternatively God could intervene directly by causing a cosmic ray to zig rather than zag, so causing a specific non-random mutation in a particular individual. I do not see a real problem for a TE here.
Natural selection is not random, it adapts a population to its environment, hence the similar shapes of Dolphins and Ichthyosaurs. If there are only a few possible solutions to a particular problem, then evolution will converge on those few solutions from multiple different starting points. For example, the physics of light constrain what will work in the development of a light-detecting organ.
Wings are constrained by the physics of air and of gravity. Powered flight has evolved four times: insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats. All four use different wing structures. Insects use a solid non-limb extension of the body. Pterosaurs used a one-fingered forelimb and skin. Birds use a two-fingered forelimb and feathers. Bats use a five-fingered forelimb and skin.
Flying Fish glide, they do not fly despite their name.
ETA: I agree with Hugh, omnifortuitous is an excellent word.
rossum
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Hugh_Farey
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I have now watched the entire presentation and find very little in it that contradicts Standard Evolution Theory. There is an implication that the narrator thinks that his structuralist arguments are in opposition to Evolution, but apart from a difference in emphasis, there is little that either theist or atheist evolutionists could object to. I think I did find one contentious statement, to the effect that the universe necessarily has a purpose, and a throwaway remark about the universe having a “goal”, but apart from that, it’s all pretty mainstream.
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HarryStotle
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You seem to be misusing or at least blurring the distinction between omniscience and omnipotence, as if knowing somehow magically becomes causal. A gambler who foresees the outcome of a very complex series of random events to the point of knowing with certainty what will come about isn’t merely playing with chance, he has loaded the dice.
This is where you surreptitiously bring omnipotence into the mix. You rely on God’s omnipotence to have arranged things to bring about a proper outcome. That stipulation no longer makes the events random, but designed. In actuality, you are promoting design without invoking the name, likely for some ideologically correct reason or other.
This is where structuralism outdoes your reliance on the ineffability of God to hide the fact that you haven’t actually explained anything. Structuralism proposes that matter itself has built into it certain complexities which would result in a diversity of life forms and morphological structures given a proper opportunity for an “unfolding” of those complexities. It would not be the operation of chance that brought these about, but a kind of integral causal ordering through sufficient time.
No, actually, what you did was explain away the problem. You haven’t actually explained how it is possible.
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HarryStotle
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So you have no objection to the intervention of God in nature, just a problem with God intervening from the get-go?
Sounds like you are trying to hold onto the “randomness” element of evolution so as to maintain some kind of legitimacy with Darwinian evolutionists.
I would say that is precisely where the Darwinian view of evolution is most vulnerable to critique. And it is where atheistic evolutionists work hardest to try to keep God out of the entire enterprise.
It is the notion that is least defensible precisely because random changes to information bearing code will inevitably degrade the information being carried and not improve it.
Natural selection doesn’t explain the frequency of successful adaptive improvements, it merely hides the problem behind the facade of survival. Organisms have survived, therefore adaptive benefits must have occurred frequently. Clearly adaptive improvements have occurred but they weren’t necessarily random, and Darwinists haven’t shown that they could have occurred through a predominantly random process. That is just assumed by the fact that the genesis of the complex genetic code that exists today is inexplicable and science assumes a no designer scenario within its very methodology.
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Curious11
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Science does not assume no designer. Intelligent design is a hypothesis, but that’s all it is. Until compelling proof is provided, it will remain a hypothesis like panspermia, for example. In any case, it’s not important when discussing evolution. We know genetic changes occur and are inherited, since we can’t predict them, we take them to be random: whether you want to attribute them to an intelligent designer or not is not relevant, since it changes nothing, we don’t know the designer’s goals here, if there is one, so to us it’s still random.
Natural selection certainly does not hide the problem behind a façade. Science has proven time and again the mechanism of natural selection and artificial selection for that matter. If you’re a soccer team on a championship and you get to the final, it’s reasonable to assume you have something others don’t that helped you get there, either skills (natural selection) or helpful referees (intelligent designer), if you can’t find evidence of biased refereeing, it’s logical to assume skill played a good part of it.
Natural selection certainly does not hide the problem behind a façade. Science has proven time and again the mechanism of natural selection and artificial selection for that matter. If you’re a soccer team on a championship and you get to the final, it’s reasonable to assume you have something others don’t that helped you get there, either skills (natural selection) or helpful referees (intelligent designer), if you can’t find evidence of biased refereeing, it’s logical to assume skill played a good part of it.
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HarryStotle
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That would be one way of interpreting “random” (i.e., simply as “we don’t know”), but that isn’t how many atheistic evolutionists use the word. They will push beyond “we don’t know” to “but we do know it wasn’t God.”
In any case, your use of the word “random” as “we don’t know” still begs the further question of “What then was the cause or sufficient explanation?” It is the fact that science appears to completely lose its motivation to know at that point that is troubling, no?
The structuralists, at least, have opened the question to further inquiry. I say good on them. Darwinists seem to have a dogmatic resistance to seriously broaching the question. Perhaps from fear of what will come out of that can of worms?
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HarryStotle
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Well, okay, but any soccer coach will tell you that merely making some random change or other is not going to improve your chances of winning. In fact, it will seriously degrade those chances.
So proposing random change as the major driving force behind adaptive improvement as a long term strategy just is bizarre. Apparently, Darwinians have little or no experience with real life, just theoretical biology.
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