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highlyeccentricIn 2009, when the champagne is uncorked in celebration of Darwin's legacy, we might pause to consider the presuppositions we bring to the question of what his theory tells us about God. There are essentially only two options. Either the wonder of human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a creator. It remains a mystery to me why some people claim it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.
OK, OK, I'll be the first to say I don't understand evolutionary theory. I like my intellectual puzzles nicely preserved in manuscript form, thank you.
HOWEVER, all this binary stuff really shits me. "Do you think intelligence came out of nowhere" is the kind of question the creationists used to ask at school, and it made sort of sense coming from them, given that a) a fair treatment of evolutionary theory wasn't exactly available at my school and b) there aren't exactly a lot of cunning monkeys running around my home town. But this dude's a Proffessor of Mathematics, presumably he knows that evolutionary theory doesn't say intellgence popped into being with Homo Sapiens (despite the fact that you might think so from the species designation). There's such a thing as a SCALE. DEVELOPMENT. IT HAPPENS, people.
As a subset to this: this kind of mindset is all homocentricism. People can't seem to shake the idea that human intelligence is something vastly different to any cognition shown by animals, instead of a matter of scale. *Grumbles* Mind you, non-homocentric approaches to Christianity are pretty hard to find.
FURTHERMORE. The other thing that shits me when intelligent people dumb things down to create a binary- either because they think the general public won't understand it, or because they're being rhetorically devious- is that it presupposes that evolutionary theory and theistic belief are incompatible. *Stabs things* Like there aren't plenty of mostly-sane Christians out there of varing degrees of intelligence and education who can cope with the idea of God bringing life and intelligence out of mindless matter over a space of time considerably longer than seven days. *stabby stabby*
(*Grumble* As a subsidiary rant: and here was me thinkin' that losing faith would mean I didn't get angry about this sort of thing. GAH.)
(Subsidiary note # 2: Hi Dad. Mum doesn't know about that last set of brackets. Kindly don't mention it just yet.)
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 08:49 am (UTC)Also: "The other thing that shits me when intelligent people dumb things down to create a binary- either because they think the general public won't understand it, or because they're being rhetorically devious...". Does that mean you think we won't understand or are you being rhetorically devious? :P
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Date: 2008-08-19 10:19 am (UTC)Also: i have class until 4 tomorrow but you wanna take refuge with K and I after that? K might possibly be around before that, not sure.
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Date: 2008-08-19 01:09 pm (UTC)I'll try and remember to give you the CD, too! (I suspect this is the real reason you are inviting me anyways :P)
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Date: 2008-08-19 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 02:40 pm (UTC)That sentence hurts my head.
Oh, also, I'm still not sure what G an K are. The friends of E that Lucas takes to the Rave. Have you any idea?
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Date: 2008-08-19 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 11:36 pm (UTC)OH! I think the other one may be Special K, the stuff Placebo wrote a song about (ish). I just can't think what its real name is... unless that's it. ?
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Date: 2008-08-19 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 11:34 pm (UTC)By the way, I didn't make it, so don't blame me.
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Date: 2008-08-20 02:31 am (UTC)Although it puts a new meaning on that 'unfunny' face, heh.
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Date: 2008-08-20 01:03 pm (UTC)I'm sorry, are you trying to say the joke is not funny?
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Date: 2008-08-19 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 02:52 pm (UTC)Yeah. You can see why I wanted to go.
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Date: 2008-08-20 01:08 pm (UTC)What is tomorrow's, do you know?
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Date: 2008-08-21 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 09:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 10:20 am (UTC)It's a special loathing, not just my generalised anti-conservative bias.
As for your actual point: yes, EXACTLY.
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Date: 2008-08-19 10:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 02:29 pm (UTC)Point 2--the more sophisticated version of the argument is that the universe is so complicated that it's more reasonable to think an outside entity created it. It's rather like coming across a book. While there is an outside chance that the book was assembled by a serious of strange events in which human intervention was completely lacking, most people assume that people were responsible. Humanr responsibility becomes even more probable if one opens the book and discovers the text to be written in a coherent and understandble language, and not merely a very long string of letters apparently chosen at random.
Of course, the Dawkins version of this would claim the text is nothing more than a very long string of letters apparently chosen at random, and furthermore, the glue is coming undone rapidly so the book doesn't really look like a book. The religious version would not only assert high quality in the manufacture of the book, but depict the text as being Shakespeare or Caedmon or something high value like that.
Point 3: The text of the Bible leaves ample room for allowing evolution and not taking the "six days" as a literal time period. In fact, the actual physical process of creation is described in one sentence, and that occurs in the second chapter of Genesis. The first chapter is decidely symbolic. The key to the first chapter lies in the literal meaning of the first verse: In-the-Beginning created God by means of the heavens and the earth, In-the-Beginning being God in God's highest and most inscrutable state. By creating the universe God revealed Itself as God, and the rest of the chapter gives details of that process in symbolic form.
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Date: 2008-08-19 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-20 04:24 am (UTC)Nothing in the theory of evolution by natural selection is inconsistent with looking at your book and asserting the high quality in its manufacture, and depicting it as being Shakespeare or something high value like that. I recommend either Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow" or "The Extended Phenotype" which goes into a lot of detail on this same point.
H.
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Date: 2008-08-21 02:49 am (UTC)I do "get" that evolution is an ordered process. In my eyes, the fact that such order exists is firm evidence that the universe was created.
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Date: 2008-08-21 04:28 am (UTC)If you are arguing for creation, then it is necessary to specify whether you mean just the creation of the universe initially, creation of the universe including the initial creation of self-replication (i.e. "life"), or creation of both those things and life as it currently is.
It seems that you are now focusing only on the argument that the universe initially was created. That creation (which you say is a non-random event) then set up a series of rules allowing for the universe as created to change or develop into the universe as it is now (evolution by natural selection being part of those rules and therefore not random; likewise the origins of matter as it currently exists can be explained as a non-random result of the created rules of physics).
In that case, I'm interested in your answer to the following two questions:
(1) If it is necessary that the universe has a beginning, then how do you explain the existence of a creator and his/her/its own beginning? Does that existence also have to be non-random?
(2) Why can't the origins of the universe be random?
H.