What evolution is about

Darwin's god hits the mark:

Evolution is not about science. It’s about God.

Much as Darwin's biographer thought.

It's just a list

It is always both amusing and perplexing when commentators claim, against common knowledge of Hebrew poetic conventions, that Genesis 1 is 'poetry'; it is clearly not (see also Kugel's work and Barrick's review).

Most evidently, it is a delimited list, more akin to a modern computer database structure than anything else: it has repeated segments, we would call them fields: each record has marker fields, end of record fields and a count field surrounding the data field.

Nothing to do with poetry.

Indeed, it is much like the counted list in Numbers 7, and nothing like symbolic language at all

Not that fundamentalist 6 day nonsense!

One of the fascinating things about Alpha course discussions is that they so frequently end up at the question of origins; no surprise, after all, as this is the dominating question: its answer tells us who we are.

In a recent Alpha course that I attended we spent our final meeting with, yet again, someone making reference to origins: "Did God create, or did we evolve?"

The sub-text was: "Whose explanation of who we are really counts?" That is: do we listen to the naturalists, or do we listen to the Bible? People normally don't see a common ground, because unreflective common sense is a good guide on this; there is no ground between doctrinaire naturalist fairy tales and the revelation of God. Paul reminds us quite pointedly of this and it is a modern day theologically ignorant conceit to think otherwise.

In the answer though, this question is usually interpreted as being: "Do we have to accept the Bible's fairy story?" But this misses the point; it is really a question of basic ontology: who we are is set by where we came from, "So tell me where we came from."

The credibility of any answer is measured by another implied question: "Is your basic ontology grounded: does it refer meaningfully to the world we are in, or does it float off in some deracinated fictive talk-fest?" Or, in other words: "Is your spirituality meaningfully connected with the life that I confront, or is it meaninglessly off in a different world to the one that constrains my life?"

That much is obvious, I would have thought, but the answer that comes back is usually obfuscating fluff as both being right (how can two things equally explain a concretely delineated origin when they are ontologically contradictory, and without overlapping explanatory connections?)

At my most recent Alpha group, we got into a tangle straight away when one person asked about the basis for belief in God. The answer was to be found for another person in contemplating the creation. And this is where it unravelled. Someone batted that back with "what about evolution?" Then we got into the old half-baked tail spin of what the Bible is and is not, and how we can, do and/or should read Genesis 1, etc. Certainly not as a credible account of events because...well...it's 'poetry' or 'picture language' or because of 'its genre', or it depends on 'how you read it' (of course). All reader response gunk. No one suggested that one might seek what the author's intent might have been, or what the literary signals were as to how to read it...nothing so objective was entertained, or how it is referenced throughout the Bible...why do scholarship, when you can play Prejudice? that great game that grown-ups love.

And so we are left with Christianity being rooted, not in love-acts of the creator that are brought to us in real-world terms, terms that we can make sense of and have meaning in the real world we live and move in; no, we have an image of what we don't know, that is subservient to naturalist dogma which itself serves to unseat the notion of a personal creator; furthermore, one that has a basic ontology that is incoherently materialist (or spooky spiritualist); not one to which person-hood, relationship and love are basic!

Wittgenstein's egg

Speaking at the dConstruct 2012 conference in Brighton, UK, science historian James Burke told the following story:

“Apparently, somebody once went up to [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and remarked what a bunch of morons we Europeans must have been 900 years ago before Copernicus told us how the solar system worked... and to have thought what we were seeing up there was the sun going round the earth, when as anybody knows, the earth goes round the sun, and you don’t have to be Einstein to get that. To which Wittgenstein is said to have replied, as philosophers often will, ‘Yeah, yeah. But I wonder what it would’ve looked like up there if the sun had been going round the earth.’ The point being, of course, it would’ve looked exactly the same. What he was saying was that, in any given circumstance, you see what your version of things at the time tells you you’re seeing. If you’re an astronomer, and the contemporary paradigm says the universe is made of omelets, you build instruments to search for traces of intergalactic egg. And if you don’t find any: no problem. Instrument failure.”

And that's why evolutionists think its all sown up according to them!

How to read theories.

Some interesting remarks in Roberts and Pashler 2000 "How Persuasive is a Good Fit? A Comment on Theory Testing" in Psychological Review 107(2) 358-367.

The theory of evolution "appears to have successfully captured many of the patterns in the...data. This success [is] the main support for the theory"

[I've inserted the 'ToE' reference, and they go on to write]:

Why the Use of Good Fits as Evidence Is Wrong

This type of argument has three serious problems. First, what the theory predicts—how much it constrains the fitted data—is unclear. Theorists who use good fits as evidence seem to reason as follows: If our theory is correct, it will be able to fit the data; our theory fits the data; therefore it is more likely that our theory is correct. However, if a theory does not constrain possible outcomes, the fit is meaningless. [emp mine]

A prediction is a statement of what a theory does and does not allow. When a theory has adjustable parameters, a particular fit is only one example of what it allows. To know what a theory predicts for a particular measurement, one needs to know all of what it allows (what else it can fit) and all of what it does not allow (what it cannot fit). For example, suppose two measures are positively correlated, and it is shown that a certain theory can produce such a relation—that is, can fit the data. This does not show that the theory predicts the correlation. A theory predicts such a relation only if it cannot fit other possible relations between the two measures (zero correlation or negative correlation), and this is not shown by fitting a positive correlation.

When a theory does constrain possible outcomes, it is necessary to know by how much. The more constraint—the narrower the prediction—the more impressive a confirmation of the constraint (e.g., Meehl 1997). Without knowing how much a theory constrains possible outcomes, you cannot know how impressed to be when observation and theory are consistent.

...

That a theory fits data does not show how firmly the data rule out outcomes inconsistent with the theory; without this information, you cannot know how impressed to be that theory and observation are consistent.

Well, from this, I have a fair reason to be not very impressed at all with the theory of evolution!


Incidentally, the Meehl reference is a good read:

Meehl, P. E. (1997). The problem is epistemology, not statistics: Replace significance tests by confidence intervals and quantify accuracy of risky numerical predictions. In L. L. Harlow, S. A. Mulaik and J. H. Steiger (Eds.), What if there were no significance tests? (pp. 393-425). Mahwah, NK: Erlbuam.