Understanding God

[Iolaus]

Diebert

It doesn't matter what knowledge of nature God has or not. That would be like discussing the amount of angels partying on a pinhead. If God doesn't operate outside natural laws toward us then the only way we can examine his influence is by assuming natural law-abiding causes for everything we see. Which is exactly what methodological naturalism is about and why it has to exclude metaphysical positions.

As usual, you misunderstand me to the point your replies hardly seem related to what I said. We are discussing God's actions in the world, and whether to call them supernatural. Supernatural means above and outside nature. I don't view God as outside of or separate to nature. I don't see how this relates to angels on a pin.

Now suppose you go to the woods with a saw and fell some trees, shape them into logs and build a house. Have you acted outside the laws of nature? But would nature have accomplished the house on its own, without intentional interference of a mind? And mightn't the squirrels and foxes who watch you be amazed at your godlike powers?
Suppose you went to an aboriginee with a pile of metal shavings, and mixed them up with the sand, and asked him could he separate the sand from the metal? A daunting task. Then suppose you pulled out a magnet, and drew all the metal shavings out of the sand? Mightn't the aboriginee think it a magic wand?

I am merely pointing out that God does not break the laws of nature because nature cannot be broken. Naure's laws are the actions of all things based upon their nature, which comes from their constituents.

I am not sure what you mean by assuming a natural, law abiding cause to everything we see. What do you mean by it? By supernatural, do you simply mean God doing something like cutting a tree?
There is no need for science to assume naturalism. They do not need to close their minds to metaphysical possibilities. They just need to study things and draw conclusions.

It's like you're saying God is the mover and blaming science for limiting itself to study movement only. What I'm saying is that science is exactly that - the study of movement, effects and the laws that govern them. It's rather presumptuous to claim these movements are better understood by assuming an intention behind it. This might be so in a human world but science attempts to be less anthropocentric.

Anthropocentric isn't the right word. Humans are just a housing for a mind. Rather, the view that we can posit an intention is simply one mind detecting the presence of another mind. It takes one to know one. And so far as science is the study of movement only, to that degree it has shackled itself, and will need to break free. Why praise deliberate blindness?

By the way, there is only one world.

There are not so many physicists around any more who are thinking of matter as 'bedrock of reality'. That's so ... 19th century.

What country did you say you live in?

These days it's all about energy which might very well be always a form of movement, as wave or probability, potential or kinetic.

Oh, big deal. Energy and matter are nondifferent.

The movement of a thought, the movement of the Earth or the movements of God - what is there to deny?

You could deny the existence of God, for example, or ignore God - the foundation and source of existence - and attempt to explain existence without God, which is a softer form of denial.

The moment some meaningful truth will be found here, it will become naturalistic, as the set of causes and effects will be incorporated into what is understood to be nature. Methodological naturalism is capable of handling something like "natural rhythms' of a cosmos if enough evidence arises to found such assumption.

Yes, it will be part of the natural course of events, because I think of the evolution of a galaxy, a solar system, and life forms as part of a huge process in which the awareness and being of God are manifesting, but the difference is that it can be seen not to be a random or mindless process. There are clues in the complexity and planning that is the hallmark of intention and intelligence.

The natural rhythms of the cosmos that I mentioned is just a supposition about how evolutionary leaps might occur, but it does not suggest a mindless system. It suggests something immense and grand. Indeed, the more we look into all these things, the further that idea retreats.

[brokenhead]

It seems we all reached an impasse over the idea that there is nothing wrong with the fossil record. I just haven't had time to put forth an explanation, but hope to soon.

Iolaus:

But do you get the point I am making in my post above?

Quite simply, the fossil record would have to look as it does - discrete. That is, no matter which side of the ID debate were correct.

The point is, I agree with you on what happened. I just do not think the fossil record can possibly prove it - or prove it incorrect, either.

What you are saying, it seems, is that if the materialist evolutionists were correct, the fossil record would be different. I am arguing, that it might have been different, but it does not logically follow that it would have to be different. For no matter how gradual evolutionary changes were, evolution is necessarily discrete, because the smallest unit of evolution is the complete, reproducing organism, and organisms themselves are discrete.

You are then speaking of a matter of degree. Your argument then must become - if materialist evolution is indeed what happened, the fossil record would appear more granular, with more intermediate morphologies of each line of speciation represented. But this argument is fallacious. There is no logical reason to suppose that any fossil record is perfect in any way, that it contains fossils or "snapshots" of every stage of evolution, that every single type of organism that has ever existed has to be represented in it.

Therefore, since we are debating the issue, it is because we think we know what happened, but in reality no one truly does. We are both left to rely on the evidence, which consists of the fossil record. Since there is no reason to assume it is a perfect record, both sides of any ID debate could use it to back up their claims with just as much validity as the other side.

Conclusion - the fossil record alone cannot logically be claimed to prove either side of any ID debate.

[Iolaus]

BH,

Well, my plan was to lift some text that explains the problem. I would not argue that the fossil record alone is sufficient, but it is a fairly big problem. Look, the famous proponent of punctuated equilibrium, Gould, saw the problem.

You are right that the animals are necessarily discreet - but if animal a slowly morphed into animal b, and if we are talking the occasional mutation here and there, then there are long periods in which the little bitty change takes over the genome - there should be a vast number of intermediates between one type of animal and the next. Yet there isn't.

What I'm saying is that a huge number of changes is required to go from one body plan to the next and we don't see the record of it. Indicating it didn't happen like that.

If the new animals appear with a huge amount of difference between them, then we are no longer talking about the slow accumulation of advantageous mutations. That would be saltation, which was anathema to Darwin, but seems to be the only real option.

The fossil record is incomplete, sure, and Darwin 150 years ago leaned on that hoping time would improve it, but after all these years it's about the same. there are some lines, simple ocean critters I believe, which are extremely well represeneted, in the millions of specimens, yet they show only those distinct jumps. If the fossil record were incomplete, then we should nonetheless see a random sampling of at least some lines with intermediates to account for the change from species to species, but we don't.

[brokenhead]

Well, Anna, all I can say is the fossil record is what it is - a record of death and extinction. It has little to do with how I view or live life.

Those ID references I checked out of my local library were overdue so I had to return them. I have to admit that I learned very little from them.

Actually, it is not so much of an admission as it is a complaint. So many of the papers the ID "debaters" publish or exchange are maddeningly empty of facts. They seem to be full of recriminations and accusations against each others ideas that I have a hard time even understanding who thinks what. The M.O. of typical paper from an ID proponent is to summarize the ideas of an ID opponent at length in an unconvincing manner, thereby hoping to show it false. The same is true with articles by evolutionists. So the overall effect is that I did a great deal of reading about ideas that were deliberately misstated and obfuscated, so I came away with less of a clear grasp of the essential points than I went in with. That effect, plus the undue space devoted in the sources to personal attacks, made my entire endeavor to familiarize myself with the issue fairly distasteful and not very enlightening.

Neither side of the debate seemed to answer the questions that come first to mind.

I'd be curious to speak with a committed material evolutionist to pose some of my questions and see what the party line is.

[deathnotewithurname]

Understanding God...seriously?!

The finite cannot hold the infinite.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

I am merely pointing out that God does not break the laws of nature because nature cannot be broken. Naure's laws are the actions of all things based upon their nature, which comes from their constituents.

Then science, when claiming to examine nature's laws, is preempting the question of God - him being subject to those laws. If your God cannot or will not break them, the examination of these laws is from a higher order and naturalism is therefore the best philosophy to base science on.

Again, it's sufficient to examine movements, without having to introduce a mover in that context. Because any shred of mover existence, any actual whimper, would only result in more movement, as is as such captured by the tenets of methodological naturalism. The need to define a mover behind movement disappears, only laws and principles remain to be defined. If someone wants to bundle the Law and put a Name on it: feel free.

Remember that for science also the human mind, free will and intentions are a result of laws, cause and effect. They are just a handy name for processes we observe to happen. It doesn't mean it isn't more than 'cause and effect'. But the more will be part of something else, not science.

Why praise deliberate blindness?

It's a self-imposed blindness to fern seeds far away when the aim is the elephant in front of us. Naturalism encompasses all research of intelligent beings and cosmic rhythms. The beef the ID movement seems to have is that it doesn't see its particular conclusions confirmed or more credit being given than they believe it should have. It's my belief their research is just often not good enough and I've presented possible underlying causes why that might be so.

There are clues in the complexity and planning that is the hallmark of intention and intelligence.

There's no way yet to discern between the above and its opposite: that intention and intelligence are possible qualities of a certain degree of complexity, self-organizing attributes that might just as well be universal. It's really without comparison and as such impossible to gauge its meaning in a scientific context.

[brokenhead]

Remember that for science also the human mind, free will and intentions are a result of laws, cause and effect. They are just a handy name for processes we observe to happen. It doesn't mean it isn't more than 'cause and effect'. But the more will be part of something else, not science.

This is a good way to look at it while the work is still in progress, which it of course is. You almost have to look at it this way in order for the work to proceed, in my view. Evolution is after all a huge process, and it includes science as much as the other way around. Our state of knowledge is evolving. It never is possible to see precisely where leading-edge research will take us, to anticipate all of the discoveries mankind will make. In order for people to keep making them, a certain degree of compartmentalization is helpful, if not necessary. Students need to be taught that in order for science to be good science, it is necessary to adhere as closely as possible to the scientific method, which after all was introduced by Muslims in the Islamic world while the Christian Church wallowed in the Dark Ages. Muslims - arguably the most religious people on earth.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

.... the scientific method, which after all was introduced by Muslims in the Islamic world while the Christian Church wallowed in the Dark Ages. Muslims - arguably the most religious people on earth.

It's possible this was because of the more abstract view the Islam has of God or any depiction of the divine. Only when Christianity absorbed more of this spirit, causing the reformation and overall decline of superstition, they also became more like a womb of scientific thought. It was already compatible enough with the idea of an ordered consistent material [naturalistic] creation and a scriptural validation of scientific types of questioning. Combined with the continuous exposure to foreign ideas, like Chinese, Indian, the Enlightenment age was born.

Why did the Islamic glory decline though? This might have been because ongoing militarization and moronic (Mongolic) rulers causing a geopolitical decline which emboldened the more fundamentalist, superstitious, literalist views. Hmmm.