Burden of proof

Darwin wrote:

…If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.

He's got it round the wrong way. What he, and evolutionists in general, have to demonstrate is that it could plausibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications. That might be the hypothesis; it only needs a counter to undo it, but lack of a biochemically plausible pathway renders it a work of literature, not science; and fiction at that.

And all we have is stories such as Dawkins concocts pointing to all sorts of creatures with all sorts of eyes. But that tells us nothing and is certainly not science.

Theological Death

It can be remarkable, the lengths that some theologians will go to avoid a theological impasse.
Here's a good one: when God foretold that sin would lead to death, he was talking, not about a literal death (because in this theologian's view, death had always been a part of the world), or even a 'spirital' death, but a 'theological' death.
That takes the cake! It is the last refuge of the theological scoundrel.
We don't know what a theological death is...unless its not getting published, of course...but to retreat to this distance from the real world, you are not making a study of God, but a study of make-believe.
But even to think that the impact of death could be restricted as 'spiritual' death, to save theistic evolutionary ideas, it fails to deal with the depth of death in the Bible.
The Bible understands death as being completely other than good: the 'last enemy'
And this is the clue to the irrationality of claiming that 'a bit of death is OK' but 'more is not'. That is, God would make a very good creation with 'a bit of death' just sufficient to enable evolution to operate, it would seem; without impairing the 'very goodness' he'd declared early on.
So, on this premise, God could give headway to the last enemy in his very good creation.
Irrational, to say the least, and a misunderstanding of death itself. Death is the end of relationship. It is anti-love and a dis-representation of God. To include it in a creation in harmony with God is to fracture God, at best; in fact it makes the Bible, and not just the creation account, incoherent. Death an integral part of life? No; death, by any definition, is not a part of life; but its end and its undoing. Nor is it part of God. Death represents the very antithesis of God. To think that it could exist in a non-fallen world is to think in 'crazy talk'.

Religious vision

‘Darwin’s vision of nature was, I believe, fundamentally a religious vision.’

James Moore (Darwin's biographer)

Truth, but not as you know it!

Dr. Craig Stanford, Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at USC, said,

“What Darwin showed in his work on evolution and natural selection is that we don’t need to invoke any supernatural force or power to account for the development of life through time on earth.”

At an Alpha meeting question time I recently attended, one of the course members asked about Adam and Eve...clearly wanting to know if we believed that they had existed, or how we took them.
One of our Bible teachers, a learned and godly man whom I'll call Joe, gave a multi-pronged reply that I'll summarise and comment on here.

I'll aim to be brief, as its all been well rehearsed before, for example, in my posts on Pahl's similar comments.

At the risk of over-simplifying, Joe told us:

1. I believe that God is creator
2. Genesis is picture language, like the picture language of other ANE origins accounts but tells us truth
3. When you compare Genesis 1 to other texts in the Bible, you can see that it is picture language
4. Science tells us 'how' but not 'why'. Genesis tells us 'why'.
5. The Bible is not a book of science
6. The order of events is wrong: light comes before the sun.

 Comments

1. If the content of the only direct reference to God being creator is denied, then I wonder how Joe sustains his belief that God is creator. All the biblical references to God's chief credential as creator rely on Genesis 1, and can only work coherently if Genesis 1 is grounded and shares the same event frame with those references and our own experience of the world. The alternative is that it is a story disconnected from the real and throws into question what the real is...not much different from paganism with identical epistemological challenges.

It strains credibility that God can not or would not describe his creation in terms that authenticate it in the world that resulted. There seems to be a disconnect that God created the world, but the terms of the creation account have no real connection with that very world. Absurd is the word.

2. 'Picture language' means 'imagery', I suppose, but I wonder if the authors of the pagan tripe such as Enuma Elish regarded their work as imagery. Even a rough comparison of EE and G1 shows a huge divergence; the main one that EE is a theogony, it presupposes a cosmos, and not creation out of nothing. We have to wonder what sort of world it is about, then. Moreover, it has evil as a part of the world in the 'creation phase'. This would line up with evolutionary dogma, but not the creation in G1. The difference is vast, and unbridgable. A more plausible relation between the two is that EE is a corrupted derivation of G1, rather than the other way. But then, if G1 is merely a competing story, how would an account of what did not happen persuade anyone? 'Your story...my story'; both just stories. It's like trying to stop a tank with a picture of a rocket!

3. The claim of G1 being imagery fares poorly with other passages in the Bible. It is nothing like the imagery in Ezekiel and Revelation, for example. The ordered, sequenced and delimited event segments in G1 are more like the lists that occur in other passages; Numbers 7 springs to mind.

4. The why only emerges from the how, and in this case the asserted 'how' is at odds with the 'why'. Any attempt to sever the two relies on a pagan ontology and not a biblical one, and stems more from an external philosophical idealism than the concrete-realism of the Bible and its unified approach to reality. Indeed, the flowering of modern science was brought by the approach to the Bible, and indeed the world, that the 'how' and the 'why' are intimately connected; as is sensible. To split them apart means that you reference an alternative real world to the one you are in where different aspects of the unified world we live in can only be explicated by their locus in different 'fields' of being. In fact, can't be done!

5. The Bible is the account of relations between God and his creation, specifically man, and God's work to restore us to fellowship with him. The creation is the essential and definitive starting point and it shows who God is, as loving author of creation, who we are, in this created world, and that relations are grounded in what really happened, not in some disconnected fantasy that attaches to nothing. It also teaches that the material world is ontologically continuous with God's effecting word.
But, where the Bible touches the physical world it is relevantly accurate, because it is about what really happened!

6. Light is produced by the sun, not created by it. Energy is basic to the material world and it is unsurprising that it was created early. Perhaps the order that G1 is relating is that first a basic 'stuff' was created, then it was energised. So, I read the creation of light as the formation of the general energy field: perhaps including the known forces: the strong and the weak atomic forces, gravity and electromagnetic forces; all of which must have prior existence for production of light by a particular body.

Mousetrap yanking

A friend's response to McDonald's mousetraps, kindly e-mailed to me:

Didn’t think much of the mouse traps but, probably, 25 years ago, would have really enjoyed the pot you smoked in order to dream up such nonsense.

But, I suppose, I shouldn’t be so prematurely critical. Maybe if you could intelligently CREATE one of those mechanical devices and let me see how it actually works I might be impressed.

In the mean time, inhale some more mate.

Mousetrap stories

On his otherwise wonderful website, John McDonald says:

To poke fun at creationist Michael Behe's claim that a mousetrap is a good analogy for an "irreducibly complex" biochemical system, I have drawn mousetraps in several stages of reduced complexity.

Trouble is, the mousetraps are not Behe's mousetrap and therefore have nothing to say to his analogy; they are also unworkable in the real world, as far as I can see. They thus give the evolutionary game away in that evolution works well as a story, but that's about it! Its relation to the real world is yet to be established.
McDonald has to establish how Behe's mousetrap can be reduced and remain workable, not propose completely other mousetraps...designed, of course.
To continue Behe's line, what McDonald has to do is establish how complex biological sub-systems can come about incrementally as working systems incomplete compared to the final system.
This has to be established biochemically, not story-wise in Darwinian fashion. That is, Darwin, and his followers are great story tellers (Dawkins and his 'eye' story is typical, and as easily rebutted). Their fiction is wonderful. But they establish nothing.
So, McDonald has to give us, firstly, a plausible biochemical explanation of the incremental development of a complex subsystem. Then he has to plausibly place this within a functional organism. Of course, at step two he can only fail. The putative organisms aren't around.
But even if he could do this, he's only established what could happen; not what did happen. We're still in story-land.
Then, to give evolution any legs at all, he's got to show that it did happen. I can tell that he'll point to the geological record. But for this to work as an explanation, he's got to do more than the gross morphology hoodwinking that we're used to and talk biochemistry! There's more, though. He's also got to step outside the circular non-logic of proving evolution by assuming it, and prove that the geological record is more than a sorted collection of dead creatures.

Too many problems, John, and finally we only have the superficial flippancy we've become used to from doctrinaire physicalists.

Nevertheless, thanks for the Stats text. Its great.

How do I know who you are?

Quote from von Foerster's 1995 article Ethics and Second-order Cybernetics
(emphasis mine):

However, we do not need to go to Russell, Whitehead, Godel, or to other giants, to learn about in principle undecidable questions, we can easily find them all around.

 For instance, the question about the origin of the universe is one of those in principle undecidable questions: nobody was there to watch it. Moreover, this becomes apparent by the many different answers that are given to this question. Some say it was a single act of creation some 4 or 5,000 years ago; others say there was never a beginning and there will be never an end, because the universe is a system in perpetual dynamic equilibrium; then there are those who claim that approximately 10 or 20 billion years ago the universe came into being with a "Big Bang," whose faint remnants one is able to hear over large radio antennas; but I am inclined to trust most Chuang Tse's report, because he is the oldest and was therefore the closest to this event. He says:

Heaven does nothing; this nothing-doing is dignity;
Earth does nothing; this nothing-doing is rest;
From the union of these two nothing-doings arise all
action
And all things are brought forth.

I could go on and on with other examples, because I have not told you yet what the Burmese, the Australians, the Eskimos, the Bushmen, the Ibos, etc., would tell us about their origins. In other words, tell me how the universe came about, and I will tell you who you are.

Darwin blooper

A suprising place to find a Darwin quote:

On the Herding Cats project management blog.

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone - well Darwin wasn't connected with the reality of the times was he?

Trinity

During a discussion at a recent Alpha course session, someone gave an illustration of the Trinity using aspects of computing:

Using a typical business computer requires that three units of software work together: the application (e.g. word processor), the operating system (e.g. MacOS) and the bottom layer of code: firmware or microcode.

To use the word processor all three levels of software are involved: they all cooperate intimately; none works without the other; all three are completely unified in achieving a system outcome. All are totally 'software'; they all have 'software nature', but each has an independent identity, yet all work in harmony.

For the user, the work between the layers is invisible: they cannot tell which layer is doing what; but all work for the outcome.

Seemed pretty good to me. Software is a 'three in one' deal.

Father Brown

The Father Brown detective series has just started on ABC-TV (21 Saturday evenings), based on the character by G. K. Chesterton.
In the first episode a character, evidently an entomologist, says words to the effect: "...evolution makes God superfluous..." To which Brown replies with some twaddle about the unfolding understanding of God's work, or something similar.
The character has it right, of course, and, of course, evolution is but a pack of pooh tickets, but the great irony is that Chesterton would be unlikely to have given such words to Brown, as Chesterton himself was decidedly averse to the idea of evolution!

Collider

In an interview on the Megastructures episode on the CERN Large Hadron Collider, Dr Dave Barney, the CMS Outreach coordinator, said:

...what we are doing is just...trying to find out what we are made of, where we come from and what the universe is like...

Or, to decode:

1. "what we are made of": science
2. "where we come from": not in the domain of science: so, religion (probably the religion of materialism in this case)
3. "what the universe is like": both science and religion. To enquire about the universe requires axioms of departure for the enquiry. These are not established by science, but by a basic ontology and the epistemology that derives from it; thus religion, broadly defined.

Theologians who bend in the wind of evolutionary speculation misunderstand point 2 and act as though they hadn't thought of point 3 and the significance of Genesis 1 as the basis of our 'first philosophy'. But that is Gen 1 as grounded event sequence; not as ungrounded idealism.

It doesn't matter...

God created; we know that. It just doesn't matter when (or how, or over how long...).
This is a common enough view amongst Anglican clergy persons. I was going to write 'position' but I don't think that the notion is well enough thought out to be elevated to a 'position'.

No, its just a view, fairly ill-formed, if not completely uninformed, at that. And, I don't mean with respect to current debates, but I mean with respect to the 'biblical data' as theologians like to say, as if the Bible is a mere theological data mine to sustain their occupations (humph!).

The trouble with this view is that it does matter when and how and over how long that God created, because all these are elements of how God's creation is communicated and defined in the Bible, and are therefore part of what God's creation means: they establish its ontology and its historical placement with respect to us. They delimit creation in the Bible, showing its attachment to the world we are in. Indeed, the world that is created, and we as a part of it.

And the time references themselves are significant. Time's constraints are universal and order our experience, giving a trans-cultural and meta-historical system of coordination of our knowledge of events and relationships, everything has a time denotation that is part of the things characterisation in respect of all other things. It makes the disparate inseparable!

However, theology that it rooted in philosophical idealism, rather than the 'concrete-realism' of the Bible will engineer the pretense of separability between what the Bible 'says' and what we take it to mean as soon as a desire emerges to blend the Bible with paganism.

The common or garden variety of modern Anglican clergy person does this all the time, and here most particularly, betraying a view of Christian faith that has nothing to do with God's created world,  or thus the world we inhabit and find the coordinates of our meaning in, but resigns the real world over to materialism and the fantasies of evolution, just to appease the intellectual power-brokers of today.

It's a pity, really, because the Biblical tradition scorns the intellectual power-brokers of any day, and maintains a prophetic witness against them!

Evolution: don't take it literally

In my previous blog post, quoting Darwin we have Darwin giving the game away: similar language is used today about evolution: I don't take it literally, of course, but literarily; because its not science, but a 'just suppose' fantasy.

Just time: enough of it and...can anything happen?

In his interesting paper “How not to reconcile evolution and creation” (2006) Alex Pruss helpfully (that is, I don’t have to look it up) provides a quote from Darwin on the eye’s (supposed) evolution. Its a completely farcical story, but will serve to allow me to make a point.
The quote:

We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better one is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

Richard Dawkin’s gross morphology stories don’t get much better than his level of fantasy (note the language: 'suppose', 'may we not believe', 'might'), I might add, but more to my point is Darwin’s reliance on vast time periods, as well as the number of creatures involved, to do this transformative magic, sans an actual mechanism.
Simply put; if the process is mindless, time is the necessary ingredient. Time is a marker then, of no designer. Pruss’ paper elaborates on this in terms of stochastic explanations.
So the lack of this time in the Bible’s creation account, conversely, is indicative of a designer. Darwin et al have to remove the designer, and the means they use, to hide their overall implausibility, is extended time, in the vain hope that time will allow stochastic processes to achieve what otherwise would need a designer.

Evolution vs? Christianity

Nicely put piece on Evolution vs Christianity, by an atheist or agnostic! Better put than I've heard most Sydney Anglicans able to say!

Mississippi

Mark Twain:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi  River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower  Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

And so with the puffery of evolution!

How dead is dead?

Every so often some theistic-evolutionist bright spark will attempt to contradict the Bible and tell us  no death before A&E's sin doesn't refer to animal death. This great big exegetical secret lets them off the hook and thus the supposed evidence of ancient death (pre-dating A&E) in the fossil record is not a problem for theistic-evolution. and let us in on the great big exegetical secret that this does not include animal death!

For most Anglicans that I've discussed this with, their thinking seems to be dominated by an excessively, and I think, misplaced forensic understanding of death.

They seem to hold who God is and what happens in his creation as being in two different thought worlds. If they are theistic evolutionists, this makes sense, because their theism is usually a conceptual bolt-on to their core world concept of naturalistic evolution.

Unwittingly, thought, they betray their misunderstanding of death, and fail to see it as a breach in both the fabric of the creation, and in God's relationship with his creation as a totality.

The creation per se is the representation of God's nature extended beyond himself. This has to be consistent with who God is (and that is love, if we are to follow the scriptures); God is also thoroughly alive and in relationship within the god-head.

For God, with such a nature to have the very opposite of relationship, life and love anywhere in the creation, would be to undo the representation of himself. He would demonstrate flaws a mile wide in a creation where basic anti-godness (death) was both the 'last enemy' and 'very good'.

It is simply incoherent to maintain death as some sort of inconvenience in the creation, affecting only animals, as though creation has multiple 'departments'. Some have death, others do not. But death in one department is death in all of the creation

And death is the negation, antithesis and reversal of God: it is maximally 'not-god'. It denies him, undoes creation and terminates relationship: love ceases to operate.

In Time

I drove a truck loaded with musical instruments and related hardware from our school's band camp back to the school today.

Our job in unloading the truck was simplified as we were told that the band leader would organise for everything to be put away properly the next day, by band members.

I idly thought to myself: we could just leave everything in the band room and let chance random events sort everything into its proper place.

Ah, but no! If we left it to random events, that is to the 'principle of evolution' it would be likely that we'd have to wait for an enormous amount of time to elapse before the instruments and equipment was in the correct place. Not helpful.

We would also have to rely on energy being converted to meaningful work; and the meaning would have to come from somewhere to achieve the organisation required; where, I wondered? Thus, not just energy: unstructured randomly directed energy is better known as an explosion; also not helpful; we would need structured energy, delivered to achieve an intention. From where?

What we'd have to rely upon is the directed, intelligent activity of people committed to the band's best interests (that is, intelligence motivated, at some level, by love) to achieve in a day what the universe, left to itself would not be able to achieve in a convenient, or even a practical time, or maybe any time at all.

This relates to a theme that I've heard discussed that one of the marks of the application of loving intelligence to the creation is that it proceeds rapidly: to wit, in 6 days. To extend the time to the meaningless durations stipulated in evolutionary writings merges purposeful intelligence with unpurposed randomness: hard to understand, then, how the event sequence of this type of creation bears the mark of a creator: of a loving intelligence.

What counts as a mark of intelligence is the time density of events along an outcome vector: events that in sequence lead to a specific time-space outcome, represented probably as a material change in the configuration of an element in an environment that achieves something meaningful (of course, all this needs greater definitional clarity); but that's the nub of it: the time density an event set along an outcome vector marks one event set as resulting from intelligence, and another set; with a very sparse density, as random; one tells of an author, the other of no author.

Survival

Anaximander makes a clever guess as to the origin of man. "...he further says that in the beginning man was born from animals of another species, for while other animals quickly find nourishment for themselves, man alone needs a lengthy period of suckling, so that had he been originally as he is now, he could never have survived." He does not explain--a perennial difficulty for evolutionists--how man survived in the transition stage.

Coppleston's History of Philosophy, v. 1, p. 25
(the Contiuum edition, 2003; first published 1946)

Dasein

From an essay by Roy Hornsby on Heidegger's thought:

By using the expression Dasein, Heidegger called attention to the fact that a human being cannot be taken into account except as being an existent in the middle of a world amongst other things (Warnock, 1970), that Dasein is 'to be there' and 'there' is the world. To be human is to be fixed, embedded and immersed in the physical, literal, tangible day to day world (Steiner, 1978).

I believe that H was on to something of profound importance in this concept: the significance of the concrete real world as the frame of our being (the world where you bump your nose if you attempt to walk through a wall and not a doorway). The creation account links that frame to God, the creator, in the account which must therefore also be denominated in the 'physical, literal, tangible day to day world' in its references, categories and relations. Once the creation account is un-linked from the world we are in, it is reduced to mere story (myth, fiction, or fantasy, it all amounts to the same thing); it breaks the link between God, his creation and us; and re-defines us as discontinuous with the creative will of God: no longer are we 'in God's image' linked by the chain of creative outcomes, but are linked to nothing and the materialist are right, in the grimness of the dust to which materialism reduces us all.