Re: West Virginia creationism

On Mon, 13 May 2024 19:47:30 +0000, b.schafer@ed.ac.uk (Burkhard)
wrote:

Ron Dean wrote:
>

Vincent Maycock wrote:

On Fri, 10 May 2024 14:43:42 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
 

Vincent Maycock wrote:

On Thu, 9 May 2024 18:51:52 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
>

Vincent Haycock wrote:

<snip>

I was a young-earth creationist, so my reading of geology and
paleontology led me to the conclusion that flood geology is a cartoon
version of science with nothing to support it.

Around the same time,

I became an atheist since Christianity didn't seem to make any sense.>

>

So, you turned to atheism and evolution, not because you first found
positive evidence for evolution and atheism, but rather because of
negative mind-set concerning the flood and Christianity.

>
No, that's backward.
>

That's the way you put it. Your first mind-set, as you stated it. You
became disillusioned with the flood and Christianity.

 
I said "because of my reading of geology and paleontology."

 >
Ok, thanks for clearing that up.

 

  I developed a negative mind-set concerning the

Flood and Christianity because of positive evidence for evolution and
non-Christianity (which, in the United States is a huge first stepping
stone to atheism per se).  And of course, as I said, I found negative
evidence against the Flood to be voluminous, which is why I said it
was cartoon-like.
>

The fact of the matter is, intelligent design says nothing about

either the flood story nor Christianity or any religion or God for that
matter.

>
Yes, like I said I was a YEC, but the way you phrased it allowed for
me to focus on that and not old-earth-creationism or Intelligent
Design or any of those other "compromise" viewpoints that I never
subscribed to.
>

ID stands on it's own, it's not a compromise between anything.

 
Right, but that's how we were taught when I was growing up.  My
comment was supposed to be historical, not normative.

 >
There is a difference between Creationism and intelligent design, in
that ID does not subscribe to the Genesis narrative, Both YEC  Old Earth
creationism does. However, both creationism and ID both point to the
same apparent flaws in Evolution and observe the same empirical evidence.

 

ID observe essentially the same empirical evidence as
evolutionist do, but they attribute what they see to intelligent design
rather than to evolution. Both the evolutionist and the ID est
interprets the same evidence to _fit_ into his own paradigm.

>
How does your paradigm explain the nested hierarchies that turn up in
phylogenetic studies of living things?
>

This is an example of interpretation to fit into a paradigm.

 
So fit it in to your paradigm, then.  Why would the Designer create
such an over-arching and ubiquitous phenomenon that is precisely what
we would expect from evolution?

 >
This is a excellent example of the point I've been making nested
hierarchies have been mutually seen as  strong empirical evidence for
either Evolution or ID. The concept was was first conceived by a
Christian who thought that an intelligent God would arrange animals and
plants etc in an orderly   harmonic, systematic, logical and rational
manor: and this he set out to find. This man was a Swedish scientist,
Carolus Linnaeus. He organized organisms into groups which was known at
the time and he characterized organisms into boxes within boxes within
boxes IE groups. His nested hierarchies are incomplete by today
standard, But the concept was his,  which he saw as evidence of  his God.
So, it appears the concept was appropriated by evolutionist from a
creation concept.

>
again, pretty much wrong in every respect. Let's start with the last
sentence:
>
yes, all science is cumulative, that is new theories are always built
on old theories, and incorporate those parts that stood the test
of time. Which is why eg. Newtonian mechanics is now a proper part of
the theory of relativity. And the same held true for Linnaeus, who did
not invent the concept of nested hierarchy, he merely applied it with
particular rigour, and more data than anyone before him. The concept
goes back to Aristotle's categories and traveled to Linneaus via
the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry. Who, funnily enough, was also the
author of a book titled "Against the Christians". So you could say he
appropriated a pagan and/or atheist concept.
>
Linnaeus did not just apply the schema to biology and living things, but
also to minerals, rocks, mountain formations and planets. But there it
didn't work and now is all but forgotten.
>
And there we have the next problem for you and
your use of Linneaus. Linneaus believed of course that God had created
everything, not just living things. Yet the nested hierarchies that we
find in biology don't work for minerals. From an evolution perspective,
that is of course no surprise: descent with modification will always
create natural nested hierarchies, and few other things will. But if
nested hierarchies were also what we should expect from creation by God,
then the absence of natural nested hierarchies in the rest of the world
should indicate that they are not the result of design, so Christianity
would be disproven.
>
Generally, Linnaeus SO doesn't work for you, on pretty much every level.
First, he grouped humans among the apes,these among quadrupeds, and these
in animalia. Yes, that worried him from a theological perspective, but
when attacked for it, he was adamant that that was just what the data
showed. He challenged his critics to find one objective fact that would
allow them to distinguish humans from other apes (Carl Linnaeus to Johann
Georg Gmelin, letter 25 February 1747) So going back
to your nonsense about the alleged moral implications of nesting humans
among other animal groups, Linneaus did this long before Darwin.
>
Oh, and as we are at it, unlike Darwin he also introduced subcategories
(albeit as variations, not species) for humans, and not only that,
he ranked them. So Black africans according to his schema were:
from their temperament phlegmatic and lazy, biologically having dark hair,
with many twisting braids; silky skin; flat nose; swollen lips; Women
with elongated labia; breasts lactating profusely and from their
character Sly, sluggish, and neglectful. White people by contrast were by
temperament sanguine and  strong, biologically with plenty of yellow hair;
blue eyes, and from their character light, wise, and  inventors etc.
Modern scientific racism has its origins here rather than in Darwin.
>
Now, did he as you claim consider the nested hierarchies as evidence for
God? Not quite, though that is an easy mistake to make for modern
readers, who look at him through Paleyan lenses. But he didn't, and the
reasons are interesting. He was not a natural theologian in the Paleyan
mold, and the inference does not run from: "we observe nested hierarchies,
these are what we should expect from God's design, therefore God" The
problem with this inference was always that it is inconsistent with
God's omnipotence - God could have created differently had he so chosen,
which means we can't use His contingent choice as evidence for anything.
What Linnaeus does is reasoning in the other direction. He takes God's
existence and the fact that he is the Creator as a given - no further
evidence is needed or wanted. But by seeing order in his creation, we are
seeing beauty, it lifts us up and also makes the world intelligible to
us. So we should be grateful for, and maybe moved by the way he created, but
that is very different from "believing more" - it is an aesthetic, not
an epistemological response. For the ToE this is very different. We know
that descent with modification will always create nested hierarchies, we
can model this on computers, and observe it also in e.g. printing
errors in book printing. So unlike God, evolution HAS to create nested
hierarchies, which then makes the observation of them suitable evidence.
Or with other words, the concept of "God" has no explanatory function in
Linneaus theory, and that is part of the reason why it was so easy to simply
adapt it to evolutionary thinking, it only needed a new coat of paint
>
OK, and now let's move on to this theory. He did indeed, at least initially,
fully embrace species fixism. However, and rather counterintuitively, he
also embraced gradualism. In fact, the often-cited Latin form of the principle,
"Natura non facit saltus" comes from him - though the idea is older, and was
an Axiom e.g. in Leibniz' work. Ultimalty, it too goes back to Aristotle, and
there we find the reason why Linneaus also extended his schema to rocks and
minerals:
>
"Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life
in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of
demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie.
Thus, next after lifeless things in the upward scale comes the plant,
and of plants one will differ from another as to its amount of apparent
vitality; and, in a word, the whole genus of plants, whilst it is devoid
of life as compared with an animal, is endowed with life as compared with
other corporeal entities. Indeed, as we just remarked, there is observed
in plants a continuous scale of ascent towards the animal."
>
So, God created all species at once, and in a fixed state, AND in a
finaley gradiated way so that we can trace their "ancestry" (scare
quote, they are not earlier in time, only in God's thought - from
his perspective they are "one", in the way a lake is one: just with
different depth, getting gradually deeper as one gets to the centre).
>
Now what are the implications of this? Well, according to Linnaeus
we SHOULD indeed find rabbits in the Cambrian, and not just rabbits,
but elephants, whales and indeed humans. So a bit of a problem right
there. But there is one thing we MUST NOT find in his model, and that
is "sudden appearances". A) because everything happened at the same
time, so no one species appears before the other, and B) because
nature makes no leaps, so for each animal we should be able
to trace its "ancestry" back, gradually and wihtout inerruption, to
rocks. Now, according to your mangled version of Gould, what we in
fact "observee is just the opposite: sudden appearances, and no
gradual progression. With ohter words if your "theory" , i.e. your
disfigured Gouldian punktuated equilibrium, were true, then
linneaus would definitly be false, his theory is much , much more
incompatible with sudden appearances than Darwin's. So you'll have to
make up your mind which nonsense you want to peddle, your
misunderstanding of Gould or your misunderstanding of Linneaus.
>
One final point, and that is another big problem for you. Linnaeus
did indeed START as a species fixist. However, he also found more and
more evidence that that picture was irreconcilable with the facts.
A watershed moment was for him was the discovery of a variant of
the common toad-flax (Linaria vulgaris L.). The plant, had four
more spurs than the common toad-flax, and yet was clearly produced by these.
That violated his idea that genera and species hwere the result of
one single act of original creation,  unchanged ever since. He was
so shocked by the finding that he called the newly found plant
'Peloria', i.e. 'monster'.
>
Quite a bot of his late work was dedicated to come up with new theoories
that explained Peloria, and all the other examples that kept popping
up. He wasn't happy with either of them, and while he continued
to write about this, he dropped any reference to species fixism
from his book on taxonomy, realising, correctly, that his taxonomy
was independent from his theory of creation. Another reason why using
the system was straightforward also for Darwin and his followers,
Linnaeus himself had realised that a) the data did not suport fixism
and b) his classification did not depend on it. (for details see eg.
Gustafsson, Åke. "Linnaeus' peloria: the history of a monster."
Theoretical and Applied Genetics 54 (1979): 241-248)

I have learned a lot from this post that I didn't know before and I'm
sure others have too. The post shows that there really can be value in
counteracting Creationist/ID bullshit no matter how often it is
regurgitated or how much they simply ignore inconvenient truth. They
may not learn from this sort of detailed account but others certainly
can.

[...]