Re: Evolutionary creationism

On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 15:04:09 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:

On 2025-03-20 11:25 a.m., Martin Harran wrote:

[snip for focus]

Similar apologies. I've started a reply in my head many times but they
always led to long, convoluted arguments with digressions and other
sidebars that indicated that it would go on for pages. So I quit.  So
instead I will just make a few quick comments with little exposition.

 
Apologies for a somewhat elongated response to this but there isn't a
simple answer. For that reason, I'm generally hesitant of getting too
deeply into this kind of stuff in a Usenet post along with my general
experience that the people who least understand religious belief and
theology are those most likely to dismiss any attempt to rationalise
it - not applying that to you specifically, just my general
experience. That also of course applies to evolution, those who
question it most are often those who understand it least.

>
I admit I have little understanding of formal religious belief and
Theology but I do not dismiss attempts to rationalize such beliefs out
of hand. Rather I have found all such attempts that I have come across
to be utterly unconvincing.

Can I ask how in-depth those attempts were? I feel I can with
confidence challenge the views of Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne as I
have taken the time to read both their books on religion; the same
with ID as I have read Stephen Meyer's book [1]

Can I ask how much effort you have put into actually understanding the
beliefs you find so unconvincing?

------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] I did a detailed critique of these books with links still
available on Google Groups; I give those links here simply for the
record, not because I expect you to read them as they are all long
posts

God Delusion (Dawkins):
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/hO1KU8PMK7g/m/jZWqII_vcrAJ

Faith vs Fact (Coyne):
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/sHb33H-Yucw/m/gSZR-KO7CAAJ

The God Hypothesis( Meyer)
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/z8Yq7lvkAfU/m/um8mt8MDAgAJ

------------------------------------------------------------------

,

>
>
 Religious

belief is in its own way, as complex and wide-ranging as evolution and
trying to explain it to someone who has never studied it is a bit like
trying to explain the roles of natural selection and genetic drift to
someone who doesn't have a basic understanding of genetics.

>
The lack of any concrete evidence means I cannot take the comparison to
the theory of evolution seriously.

You seem to have completely missed my point there. I was not trying to
compare religion and ToE - I was simply making the point that it is
extremely difficult to explain *any* complex subject to a person who
doesn't even grasp the fundamental principles.

 
Anyway, with that proviso in place, I will try to cover some of the
key aspects of what you are asking about.
 
First of all, the basic mistake made by both IDers and RonO, is that
they focus in on the *biological* evolution of the human body but the
relationship with God is a *spiritual* one, not a biological one. The
human body is important in Christian belief but only of secondary
importance as a container for the Soul - that's why the body is often
referred to as a "temple". How it developed biologically is
interesting in its own right, just as the construction of a church or
cathedral may be of architectural or cultural interest. Arguing about
the development of DNA and cells and so on, however, is a bit like
trying to argue that the value of Mass in a church or cathedral ios
dependent on how much stone or marble was used in the construction.
'Tweaking'  of the human body (or that of any lifeform) has nothing to
do with the relationship between our Soul and God and I see no need
for God to take part in it.

>
So you are a dualist. I found dualism suspect as a youngster and as I
grew older it just became completely untenable to my worldview. So any
arguments using it is a non-starter.

You agree that it is a worldview i.e. something based on opinion, not
evidence, but you regard alternative views as non-starters. That comes
across as a closed mind.

 
The second thing that has to be borne in mind is that Christian belief
is based on the principle that full understanding of God is beyond
human understanding; we can get glimpses of him but never fully
understand him as he is wrapped in mystery and the deeper we study it,
the deeper that mystery can become.  Frank Sheed summed tis up in his
book 'Theology and Sanity':
 
"Thus a Mystery is not to be thought of as simply darkness: it is a
tiny circle of light surrounded by darkness. It is for us so to use
our own powers and God's grace that the circle of light will grow. It
means using the mind upon what reality may be made to tell us about
God, and upon what God, through His Church, has told us about Himself;
it means praying for more knowledge, and using the knowledge one gains
to enrich one's prayer. Thus the circle of light grows; but it is
always ringed round with darkness: for however our capacity may
increase, it remains finite, and God remains infinite. Indeed the more
the light grows, the more we realize what His Infinity means, what
Immensity is. The theologian sees far more problems about the Blessed
Trinity than the ordinary Catholic. But this is an ordinary
accompaniment of knowledge. The man who knows nothing about a subject
has no difficulties either, sees no problems, can ask no questions."

>
So God is a 'mystery beyond understanding' but some people occasionally
do get to understand bits and pieces? Just how does one determine that
they are correct about these bits and pieced?

It is obviously impossible to "determine" correctness in a scientific
way but what one can doe is examine that understanding in the context
of everything else that we know and experience. I have done that. My
interest in ToE and later ID began twenty odd years ago when I was
told by someone I respected that my religious bleifes were God of the
Gaps. I knew nothing about evolution at that stage - I had never even
studied Biology at school - so I took the time and trouble to educate
myself in evolution and other subjects and am totally comfortable that
my religious beliefs have developed in a way that is totally
compatible with everything science has to offer.

This, again is where I think ID'ers go wrong. They struggle with
matching science to their religious beliefs and, instead of opening
their minds a bit to figure out the conflicts they see, they try to
discredit the science which is a futile exercise.

>

 
Science is like this too; every time a question is answered, it opens
up new questions. Take abiogenesis, another example of a word for
something we don't really understand. Around a hundred years or so
ago, we knew virtually nothing about the origin of life; we now know a
heck of a lot about it. We have figured out the ins and outs of the
Big Bang and that it happened just under 14 billion years ago. We have
figured out that the earth came along about 9 billion years later and
bacteria, the first recognisable life forms, bacteria, came along
about a billion years after that. We are still, however, trying to
figure out how that bacteria came into being. At some points,
scientists just have to say "We don't know" and that admission does
not undermine or denigrate science; it certainly does not mean, as
some IDers seem to think, that because we don't know *all* the
answers, we don't know any of them so everything else can be thrown
out! The same principle applies to religious belief and understanding
- there are limits to our understanding and we should never be afraid
to say "don't know". Again I see this as a shortcoming in ID and
Creationism - whether it is science or religious belief, they regard
"don't know" as some sort admission of failure.

>
I think your analogy fails. In science the the bits that move from
unknown to probably known is due to objective evidence. How does that
work in the religious sphere?

Firstly, I think that you are missing out an important bit in regard
to science which is that the greatest steps forward are not always a
simple result of direct evidence, they are often sheer inspiration.
One of the best examples of that, in my opinion, is Darwin's
identification of the role of Natural Selection which was not directly
shown by the evidence, it was inspirational insight on Dawkins. That
does not dismiss the value of the prior research that Dawkins had
done, it was that prior work that prepared Dawkins mind to encourage
him to spot what nobody else had sotted, leading to Huxley's
exclamation "How incredibly stupid not to have thought of that."

In the same way, I think people who have spent a lifetime thinking
about and studying religious belief can develop inspirational insights
- inspiration and revelation are synonyms in my mind. As a side note,
I think this whole concept of where inspiration or revelation comes
from is a good example of an area where science has nothing really to
offer in explanation, at least at this stage.

Where there is a difference is, of course, in what happens after that
inspiration/revelation occurs. Science can carry out physical tests
and research to test out the inspiration but religious belief (or
philosophy in general) cannot do that and we have to rely on the the
sort of r4easoning and comparison with things that I mentioned above.
To take one example of that, I have mentioned previously that I am
heavily influenced by the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. He had made a
lifelong study of both science and religion which prepared his mind
for the inspirational/revelational idea that physical development from
the Big Bang to where we are today could be related to a journey back
to God. We can examine the reasoning he used and see does it stand up
to scrutiny against what science tells us but we have no way of
practically testing his ideas. As I said earlier, that is where we
move from science to faith but, whilst that can be argued as a
shortcoming in areligious belief, it does not in my view undermine
those beliefs.

 
Another aspect of that mystery is that as humans, we are constrained
by human language in trying to describe something that is beyond
human. That's why I think we should not get overly hung up on a word
like "omniscient" or its partners "omnipresent" and "omnipotent". They
are simply shorthand for the mystery where neither time nor place
exist for God, everything is happening at once and all the time. It's
a bit like scientists using "singularity" for just prior to the Big
Bang; nobody can say exactly what the word means but everyone has a
general idea of what it is trying to describe. The same also applies
to the word "create"; it refers to everything having its source in God
but we don't understand exactly how that happened. As Pope Francis
declared, however, God was not "a magician, with a magic wand."

>
The "magician, with a magic wand." is fictitious. A real magician is a
trickster (greatly admired for their skills). The fictitious "magician,
with a magic wand" is preforming miracles, just like God.

I don't quite agree but have no appetited for debating analogies.
(Bear in mind what I said about the limitations of human language in
describing things that are essentially beyond human description.)

>

 
Again, the same principle applies to "miracle"; RonO and others try to
make it out as a denial of science but it is a word used to describe
something that science cannot explain so by definition, it cannot be a
contradiction.  I've asked Ron to identify even one miracle that
contradicts any specific science and needless to say, he hasn't been
able to do so.

>
IMHO a true miracle is something that cannot *in principle* be explained
by science not just something that currently cannot be explained by science.

Can you give an example of something that cannot *in principle* be
explained by science?

>

 
In regard to miracles, it's worth pointing out that there are two
broad categories of miracles - those that as a Christian I must
believe and those that are optional for belief. The first category is
primarily the things covered in the Gospel relating to Jesus,
particularly the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection - both these are
specified in the Nicene Creed and denial of them is a denial of basic
tenets of Christianity. [1]
 
The second 'optional' category is miracles that have happened to
individuals outside the Gospels, things like miracles at Lourdes or
used as part of the canonisation process [2]. In declaring these
miracles, the Catholic Church does not definitively declare them to be
supernatural; what they declare is that they are things that have been
fully investigated by appropriate experts (typically medical as well
as religious and often involving non-Catholics and all possible
natural causes have been ruled out [3] so Catholics are free as
individuals to treat these as supernatural but that belief is not
obligatory.
 
To sum up, God by definition is beyond natural forces or human
language, so we are always going to be limited in trying to understand
let alone explain him. That is where Faith ultimately comes into it
and that, to me, is very much a personal experience. As someone once
said, falling in love with God is like falling in love with another
person, you can't really explain it but it just becomes part of your
life.
 

>
okay, I am also a determinist with an allowance for continuous random
(quantum level) variations.

 
Sorry, that come s across as something of an oxymoron to me - like a
woman being 'a little bit pregnant' :)  I would think that things are
either deterministic or not, no halfway house available.

So an instantaneous determination but
increasing probabilistic predictions as time to prediction increases.
Free will is right out. Consider what I must think of what you are
saying above.

Fair enough as long as we both recognise that we are talking world
views, not something we can back up with real evidence.

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