Posted: Jan 21, 2019 9:05 am
Jayjay4547 wrote:zoon wrote:
Again, I don't see why you consider that the process of evolution by natural selection, as I've very roughly outlined it above, would be incompatible with your version of theism, since you say that you do not expect God to make any purposes he may have apparent to us mortals. There's no apparent guiding purpose behind the functionality which evolution by natural selection produces, and you don't expect to see any apparent guiding purpose in God's creation, so why do you go to the trouble of arguing with the consensus of scientific opinion?
I can’t stand it that so many people can be wrong in the stories they tell about the creation of mankind.
Since no-one's been able to demonstrate that mankind was created in the first place, people cannot be wrong in their telling of it, beyond the claim of creation itself.
Jayjay4547 wrote:
And there’s something interesting about the way they are wrong; it’s organic. And that organic structure seems to be explorable in an open-ended way. That's why I don't want to limit exploration by agreeing e.g. that "evolution is true"
The creation is described in terms of evolution through more than just a consensus of scientific opinion, it is authoritative, also in an organic way. Take the concepts of punctuated equilibrium and exaptation; both central to the human creation. Both are associated with Stephen Jay Gould and with also somewhat lesser known (though surely well respected) figures; Niles Eldredge and Elisabeth Vrba. Gould can be seen as having appropriated these potentially dangerous terms to scientific authority and so removed their sting. His later concept of spandrels diverts attention away from the deep functionality of living things. It claims that some changes just happen because something has to happen and it doesn’t matter what that is.
Punctuated equilibrium was immediately recognised as potentially dangerous because it could give comfort to the enemy: it looks a bit like special creation. And its sting was pulled by just categorising it along with phyletic gradualism as one way that evolution can work. Exaptation replaced the politically incorrect term preadaptation. Basically both terms speak to new functionality appearing through structured processes and one can get as spooky or as un-spooky about that, as one likes. The point is that one CAN get spooky.
Darwin can also be seen as a fixer for scientific authority. If Darwin had died prematurely then the theory of natural selection might well have been associated only with AR Wallace. What Darwin added was gravitas plus the auxiliary theory of sexual selection, which grated deeply on Wallace. Greatly to his credit, Darwin did what he could to protect Wallace from the likes of TH Huxley.
QED point 3 and 4.
And this post once again demonstrates points 1 and 2.
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