Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true

[Bradskii]

Metis1:

Everything we see seems to be changing over time as material objects are not static entities.

Which law of science says that?

One of the most basic, if the the most basic, of scientific laws.

If this were a properly regulated discussion on scientific matters then you would be shortly receiving a message that says you do not show even the most basic understanding of scientific principles to be allowed to continue and so are precluded from further (name removed by moderator)ut.

But forums being forums, you can keep on keeping on…

 

[Edgar]

One of the most basic, if the the most basic, of scientific laws.

Which law?

 

[Aloysium]

I’ve used the web site myself in uncharitable ways. Quite a seperendipitous peace of random “wisdom” came up when I just tried it now:

“Evolution is the foundation of universal morality.”

So who’s Deepak Chopra now?

 

[PetraG]

The Quantum model is a series of equations. Most attempts like Shrodinger’s cat, to explain the actual physics in day to day terms is an absurdity. From my understanding electrons are said to have both kinetic and potential energies which change depending on the distance from the nucleus. The electron spinning around the nucleus is still believed to cause the magnetism we find in iron as the atoms line up, in how we derive power from hydro plants, and in how many electric motors work. But, the idea that the electron and nucleus behave in the manner of chunks of stuff like planetary systems is where things do not to coincide with reality. Electrons are thought of as existing as a probability cloud, the most dense near the nucleus having discrete energies, their position and motion represented by a particular sphere, an electron does not have a single location in space. So, what I would say in terms of what we experience, the closest analogy would be that the electron, protons and neutrons are forms of information, relationships that can be understood as mathematical equations like Shrodinger’s equation.

What we have is this reality right here and now, the experience being the tip of an existential iceberg. How it is put together, it’s structure is determined by specific relationships that are defined by its building blocks, material and psychological, ultimately spiritual. This conversation, these words, might be said to be analogous to the rendering of an underlying program. This isn’t to say that the program - electrons and/or the relationships that define them are more real than this here; they merely represent part of the fundamental material structure that is brought together in the unity that is the person, here reading, thinking feeling as one being relating to what is other to the self.

And, that takes us to how we got here temporally. We each began at conception as a person, a manifestation of humankind. We had a beginning in one man, formed as the template from whom all of us are derived. The physical universe with its plants and animals, found on this world were brought into existence in a step-wise fashion until the environment was suitably established for us. Much of the information necessary for life and found in various life forms was utilized in our creation. There was a fall and we are on a journey bringing all of creation into communion within the Trinity through Jesus Christ.

We’re talking about protons and electrons and photons and so on, which are the basis of every concrete thing we know, and we cannot even imagine the reality that accounts for the behaviors we see.

 

[PetraG]

Anybody who discounts some area of science as being primarily imaginary cannot possibly have done much science. You imagine when you start studying science that the knowledge in that area is all concrete and nailed down and knowable or it isn’t “really” science. When you begin to really do it, to actually do the work that furthers science rather than just using what others tell you is so, when you actually study the fits and starts in the history of how scientific understanding has advanced, and you realize that it is impossible to do science without a very good imagination and a very good capacity for abstract reasoning.

To say: “The imagination is the only driving force sustaining ‘evolution’ in the present,” which was (I assume) a rather tongue-in-cheek assessment by @edwest, does not sound at all like something someone who actually works in any area of science would ever say.

 

[PetraG]

In the examples given, the life form cannot be imagined to be living in the wild but on a movie set. The trees and vegetation are real and the area is cordoned off so that other factors never come into play. In reality, a real environment is dynamic. Too little rain, too much rain, a pack of predators discovers this perfect little scene and begins eating the inhabitants. Some days are abnormally cold or hot. There is a fire and the animals flee.

It’s all random. The purpose of mindless evolution is to spit out new organisms that may or may not survive in the environment they end up in. Say there’s been several years of extra snowfall. Somehow, the organism that is white wins the lottery, then snowfall returns to normal levels or drops, making whitey more obvious on the ground.

There are many known examples of one-gene natural selection: that is, examples where the prevalence of a certain gene in a population changed over time due to changes in environmental pressures that made one particular expression of some gene more or less advantageous than other forms of the same gene.

I don’t see how that is random, however. How can we believe that God sends the rain and yet think changes that come about due to annual rainfall have nothing to do with divine creation? That is not any different than thinking that God knew what you were going to be before you were ever born.

As far as I know, there is not an identified mechanism by which a population whose genome has one number of chromosomes can give rise to a different population with a different genome that is reliably capable of reproduction. I cannot think of a single known example of this happening–usually, fusing or splitting a chromosome is a fatal transcription error.

As far as I’m concerned, that is the big black box with “A Miracle Occurs Here” marked on it in the theory of evolution. For instance, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, whereas the other apes have 24. The number for monkeys is all over the map. Is there something like a virus that an entire population can “catch” that would lead to high numbers of individuals with the same HUGE chromosomal change happening at the same time to produce a new breeding population?

That difficulty, however, does NOT imply that the theory that all species originated from a creative act that all happened in a very short time frame 6,000 years ago is supported by better evidence. That is absolutely not so. Recorded history began about 5,000 years ago. The idea that all biological history must predate that by only 1,000 years does not follow from a plain reading of the physical evidence. It just doesn’t.

 

[Aloysium]

However bad it feels doing a faceplant on the concrete, concreteness is a mental phenomenon. And, the best way to think of the physical world is as a set of relationships, pretty much information.

 

[Bradskii]

Bradskii:

One of the most basic, if the the most basic, of scientific laws.

Which law?

You couldn’t even Google it? Dear me…

 

[PetraG]

However bad it feels doing a faceplant on the concrete, concreteness is a mental phenomenon. And, the best way to think of the physical world is as a set of relationships, pretty much information.

If you look at a cloud and see a bunny, that is recognition of a “relationship.” It is possible, actually, that there are physical factors that could allow you to draw a parallel between why the cloud and the bunny have similar gross shapes.
A really bunny, however, is different than an imaginary relationship we see to make sense of a gathering of mist. If we measure or observe the bunny, that yields information about the bunny, but the bunny is what the bunny is whether we understand it or model it correctly or not.
The physical world isn’t just a set of relationships. We may have to reduce it to as much in order to understand it and take stewardship of it–humans are inveterate relationship-identifiers–but we shouldn’t confuse the means we use to understand something with the thing itself, which exists independently of whether we understand it or model it or not.

 

[edwest]

Albert Einstein quote. " Imagination is more important than knowledge"

I can’t tell you how many discoveries and breakthroughs have been made purely on the basis of imagination, around the world. This sort of limited thinking slows down research. In Japan, the employee of a certain company asked his boss if he could have the funds to solve a certain problem. He did it, with a device discarded by others as unworkable. How did he do it? “If I had a hundred ideas, I tried all hundred.”

 

[PetraG]

Albert Einstein quote. " Imagination is more important than knowledge

I can’t tell you how many discoveries and breakthroughs have been made purely on the basis of imagination, around the world. This sort of limited thinking slows down research. In Japan, the employee of a certain company asked his boss if he could have the funds to solve a certain problem. He did it, with a device discarded by others as unworkable. How did he do it? “If I had a hundred ideas, I tried all hundred.”

I don’t know how many are ever made without it, from the kitchen to the laboratory.

The thing is, I don’t think of evolution of “true” in the same sense that I think of revelation as being true. Science is an imaginary recreation of observations in a way that makes the physical world predictable or something we can explain. The physical world is “true,” there is an actual sequence of actions that are “real history.” Our science and our history are always going to be limited approximations of those.

We really can’t know when our theories are, in the sense of the way God would tell the story, the “real story” and when they are what I would call “mnemonics for the truth”–that is, explanations that reliably help us to remember a relationship without actually being the correct explanation. The history of science says we can’t know that. In that sense, natural evolution does not need to be thought of as “true” in the sense that revealed truth is. (Even in the case of revealed truth, we have to know that the truth must be reduced to what we are capable of understanding. This we understand from trying to explain the truths of life to a child or someone who doesn’t have the capacity to understand the full answer to the questions they ask. In that sense, we have to accept that all truth is known by us in only a limited and undoubtedly a somewhat distorted way.)

 

[Aloysium]

Anybody who discounts some area of science as being primarily imaginary

It feels almost impossible to communicate at times.

Let’s try though.

Many people do not hold to the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter. It’s a all one thing as all this is an intricate complex pattern of neuronal communication involving various structures of the cell and its physiology and how they communicate with one another. That’s what forms this capacity we have as we who can know are able to know what is other in the knowing.

The science is not imaginary although it makes use of the imagination in knowing anything.

So, I’m actually saying the opposite. What people call science is merely a collection of impressions, translating the structure of reality into things they know in day to day life. It’s simpler and more complex than that.

 

[Edgar]

You couldn’t even Google it? Dear me…

Oh, so you make a claim and I have to google it? I don’t think so. The onus is on you to back up your claim.
And more specifically, which scientific law says “material objects are not static entiities”, when the “material object” is a living organism?

 

[Bradskii]

You couldn’t even Google it? Dear me…

Oh, so you make a claim and I have to google it? I don’t think so. The onus is on you to back up your claim.
And more specifically, which scientific law says “material objects are not static entiities”, when the “material object” is a living organism?

Oh no. You made the claim. And are you now going to double down and say that living organisms don’t change?

You really need to think before you post…

 

[Aloysium]

we shouldn’t confuse the means we use to understand something with the thing itself, which exists independently of whether we understand it or model it or not.

When one speaks of things being concrete, the above is exactly what I hear them doing, projecting onto reality an analogy of what it is. I think in this new age of data sciences, emerging from the electronic age, the new metaphor will be information. It too will fail, but it opens up new ways to think about things.

If we think of the genome as information in action, evolution as it has been described sounds like so much nonsense. Creation works best but pantheistic naturalism may be the next phase in our shared human understanding.

 

[PetraG]

So, I’m actually saying the opposite. What people call science is merely a collection of impressions, translating the structure of reality into things they know in day to day life. It’s simpler and more complex than that.

Yes! What we called science must be, to some extent, what I call a “mnemonic for the truth.”

Let us say I was going to scientifically describe you. My description, even if it were more insightful in every respect about you than any awareness you were capable of having about yourself, is not you. If I were to take some matter and energy and re-create a being like you in every respect, it would not be you. Why? Because God created you and infused you with a soul in particular relation to God, and that creation is beyond getting atoms and electrons in a particular relationship to each other.

Natural selection could be an accounting of the physical means by which God created the biological world. It cannot account fully for human beings, however, because that would leave out the relationship between each human and the Creator of the Universe that the Creator infuses directly and personally.

 

[Aloysium]

If I were to take some matter and energy and re-create a being like you in every respect, it would not be you. Why? Because God created you and infused you with a soul in particular relation to God, and that creation is beyond getting atoms and electrons in a particular relationship to each other.

You and I are persons. We exist as a unity that is in relation to everything that is not us. That oneness and relational nature is fundamental to what we are. There exists a psychophysical structure that constitutes our being. The information that is the atom, and on a more complex hierarchical level is the cell, and then the body which includes the brain, might be described in modern terms as a totality of sub programs that constitute the application.

This all has to be imagined by an eternal Divine Mind, here and now and at the beginning of time.

The spirit I would say is primary and utilizes physical events such as the atom organized into molecules to develop and grow, incorporating matter external to the being it is the person and forming the body through the information that are cellular operations utilizing the memory that is DNA.

I may be getting not-picky here. The idea that we are each individually created and then infused with a spirit is not how I see our creation. It is not that matter is infused but rather that matter is brought together in such a way that we are each capable of expressing our human nature.

Scripture states that we were formed by God from the dust of the earth and that we were given life when He breathed into our nostrils. Some people might interpret it literalistically, but what I hear is that God formed us as He wished us to look, that He did so directly and that we possess a free will and the capacity to know, which enables us to love, to give ourselves for the good of the other, and thereby know God.

 

[Edgar]

Oh no. You made the claim

Er, no; I didn’t. This is how the conversation went:

Metis1: Everything we see seeems to be changing over time as material objects are not static entities.

Edgar: Which law of science says that?

Bradskii: One of the most basic, if the the most basic, of scientific laws.

Edgar: Which law?

As you can see, I didn’t make a claim at all; I merely asked a question. It was you who made the claim that “One of the most basic, if (not) the most basic, of scientific laws” says what Metis1 claims, that “material objects are not static entities”.
So I’ll ask you again, which scientific law are you talking about? (I won’t hold my breath waiting for an answer - your evasive replies suggest you don’t have one.)

 

[Bradskii]

Bradskii:

Oh no. You made the claim

Er, no; I didn’t. This is how the conversation went:

Metis1: Everything we see seeems to be changing over time as material objects are not static entities.

Edgar: Which law of science says that?

Bradskii: One of the most basic, if the the most basic, of scientific laws.

Edgar: Which law?

As you can see, I didn’t make a claim at all; I merely asked a question. It was you who made the claim that “One of the most basic, if (not) the most basic, of scientific laws” says what Metis1 claims, that “material objects are not static entities”.
So I’ll ask you again, which scientific law are you talking about? (I won’t hold my breath waiting for an answer - your evasive replies suggest you don’t have one.)

Your question was not a question. It was a challenge. You don’t know what law determines that all things change. It was a comment born from a lack of education in basic science.

I’m not here to correct that situation. I’m here to highlight it.

 

[Edgar]

Your question was not a question. It was a challenge. You don’t know what law determines that all things change. It was a comment born from a lack of education in basic science. I’m not here to correct that situation. I’m here to highlight it

In other words, you claimed to know a scientific law that says “material objects are not static entities” (esp one that applies to living organisms) but you actually don’t. Now you’re trying to hide the embarrassment of your gaffe with stupid, evasive replies. What odd behaviour.