The meaning of the universe

I've commented earlier about the Gifford lectures given by Alister McGrath. Today I want to make some comments about the last in the series.

Lecture 6: Conclusion – Clues to the Meaning of the Universe?

Quotes and comments;

p/2. William Paley advocated an approach to natural theology based on intelligible and beautiful outcomes; the approach I adopted find a new sense of wonder in the vast, complex processes which brought them about, adding to – not diminishing from – the sense of awe and amazement that arises from encountering and
engaging nature.' [1.]

- I don't see any awe in the random motions of chance. That people feel awe in their experience of nature I don't doubt; what I do doubt is that people feel any awe in the 'processes' of random chance. I don't believe that blind chance created the vast reservoir of complex information that we see expressed in the world. I find it impossible to believe such a notion, as the evidence against it is massive and profound. This debate isn't about the experience of nature, but rather it's about accounting for the living world. (M. seems disingenuous here.)

2. Dawkins appears to believe that the case for a natural theology is weakenedthrough recognizing the forces within nature that have led to the world aswe know it. Far from it; we now have an additional source of wonder in thoseprocesses themselves, and the “cosmic coincidences” that enabled them to
operate in this manner.

- The key word here is forces. Surely it's obvious that no force is capable of producing complex, specified information. To claim physical law can create the information required to build cells is naive, and the idea belongs in the past. (McGrath wants to bury Paley, but for some reason he doesn't want to bury Darwin... despite the fact Paley was a lot closer to the truth than Charles Darwin.)
- theistic evolutionists are always telling us how wonderful and marvelous the processes of random chance are. I find this mystifying. (Do they also find rust a source of awe?)

2. Where some have argued that the existence and at least some of the characteristics of God can be deduced from the natural world, I argue for a more modest and realistic approach, based on the idea of resonance or “empirical fit” between the Christian worldview and what is actually observed.

- Find me someone who doesn't claim a 'resonance' between their view and the world. This seems awfully weak. Richard Dawkins himself tells us he's now an intellectually fulfilled atheist. I imagine this means he feels this resonance M. is talking about between his views and the world.
- How do you argue with someone who tells you they feel a resonance in their heart?

6. An appeal is thus made to the notion that the explanatory power
of an explanation is itself seen as evidence of its correctness, an assumption
that is found in most forms of “inference to the best explanation.”
- the E. complains that the idea of creation explains too much (i.e. everything)
- the C. complains that E. explains not only everything... but its opposite as well.
- So where does that leave us? Can explanations explain too much? How would we know?

7. The hypothesis of natural selection seemed to offer an intellectual vantage point from which the biological landscape could be understood in a more profound manner than before, allowing surprising or puzzling phenomena – such as the continued existence of rudimentary organs – to be accommodated with
relative ease.

- Rudimentary organs? I assume he's talking about the so called vestigial organs so popular with Victorian evolutionists like darwin and Haeckel. I thought most people (even theistic e.s) had abandoned this notion as fallacious, but apparently M. still believes it. (He doesn't tell us what organs he thinks 'rudimentary' - no doubt a prudent course of action.)

- The list of vestigial organs has shrunk (in the popular sci mags) form over a hundred to maybe a half dozen or less.

- E. theory in no way explains these organs. It predicted them, but their functionality is strong evidence against the theory. M. is such a staunch defender of evolution that he portrays vestigial organs as evidence for the theory. This is amazing. (One can understand why Dawkins seems to be so fond of him.)

- there may be a couple of non-functional organs (I tend to doubt it) but this in my opinion wouldn't be evidence for e. theory but evidence of a created organ that has suffered mutation and loss of function.


12. Augustine exploits this notion in his interpretation of Genesis 1: 12, which he holds to mean that the earth has received the power or capacity to produce things by itself:
Scripture has stated that the earth brought forth the crops and the trees causally (causaliter), in the sense that it received the power of bringing them forth. God created what was to be in times to come in the earth from the beginning, in what I might call the “roots of time”.

- If one plants a seed in the earth and an apple tree comes up, this does Not mean the earth was given the power to produce that tree. The capacity to produce the tree was in the seed, not in the earth. The earth didn't produce the seed, it only gave it nutrients. The whole point of the information critique of Darwinism is that matter cannot produce the seed; cannot produce the information in the seed. (M. apparently feels that it can. I find this implausible. I don't personally know of any rocks that can write computer code.)

12. The image of a seed provided Augustine with a suitable analogy on which he could draw to support his more general thesis about the role of potential existing entities within the earth prior to their appearance in mature form when the conditions were right: “There is, indeed, in seeds some likeness to
what I am describing because of the future developments stored up in them.”

- and what would these 'entitities' be? (I guess they're information 'packets' or they're not... but it seems his analogy has no actual referent.) I get the impression that A. was being influenced by old Greek ideas of evolution here.

12. The notion of the seed is heuristic, providing an inexact, though helpful, means of visualization for the theologically difficult notion of a hidden force within nature through which latent things are enacted.

- Hidden force? What might that be? Did God create this 'force' or not? This appears to be an analogy for ignorance. (I think he'd have been better off to stick with the seeds, and not try and make an analogy out of it.) A seed contains information, a force (as I think of it) contains no information. What we need here is information (i.e. specified complexity created by an intelligent agent) and not merely some force. (i.e. some physical law)

13. Augustine’s basic argument is that God created the world complete with a series of dormant multiple potencies, which were actualized in the future through divine providence. Where some might think of creation in terms of God’s insertion of new kinds of plants and animals ready-made, as it were,
into an already existing world, Augustine rejects this as inconsistent with the overall witness of Scripture. Rather, God must be thought of as creating in that very first moment the potencies for all the kinds of living things that would come later, including humanity.

- With all due respect, this sounds like mysticism to me. (I consider theistic evolution to be mysticism. It speaks of forces and potencies and similar abstractions instead of physical realities. It never gets down to business and tells you what happened when and where; how things happened. It tells you that somehow some apes became ape men and that somewhere along the line they acquired a soul... but there's no details... it's all a painting done on water with a brush made of water.)

- McGrath wants us to believe that man somehow evolved by random chance; that somehow a rock turned into an Einstein. I find this notion impossible to believe. Such a fanciful idea undervalues the complexity of humankind by orders of magnitude too great to be counted.

- I have no idea how a plain reading of Genesis can be inconsistent with the overall witness of scripture. If that statement means anything it escapes me.

- I notice that liberals don't like the idea of Providence in general (especially in terms of salvation) but that they use the idea when they speak of creation. Their use of it tends to be so vague I have little idea what they're talking about.
- I've used the term liberal, but with no desire to offend anyone. I know that Keith Ward proudly announces himself to be a liberal. [I say this after having listened to a couple dozen of his online lectures. see Gresham college]

13. This process of development, Augustine declares, is governed by fundamental laws, which reflect the will of their creator: “God has established fixed laws governing the production of kinds and qualities of beings, and bringing them out of concealment into full view.”

- McGrath tells us he chose A. as an example for his portrait of natural theology because a. hadn't been influenced by Darwin. This ignores the fact that A. was heavily influenced by Greek and other ideas of evolution. A. doesn't draw up his idea of creation out of an empty bag. (There's little difference between ancient ideas of E. and those of Darwin and Lamarck.)

13. Unsurprisingly, we find Augustine is firmly committed to what we would now term the “fixity of species”.

- M. thinks A. is wrong to believe in the fixity of species.
- Whether or not the fixity of species is true or not depends on how you define species. There seems to be a fixity at work; but at what level it's not easy to say. We can say there's a fixity of kinds; but this involves us in defining kinds. (Even E.s admit that various animals don't 'evolve' or change for as much as a hundred million years.) There's considerable evidence that programming is in place that works to maintain stasis and discourage change; that aspects of the genetic code work to preserve the identity of living organisms. The problem the e. has is to invent a way for 'evolution' to circumvent these guards. I've seen no evidence any theorist has come up with anything believable in this regard. The genetic code seems deliberately designed to prevent what is called evolution. (How the e. process could have 'evolved' such mechanisms is also a seemingly insurmountable problem.)

14. Augustine approached his text with the culturally prevalent presupposition of the fixity of species, and found nothing in the text to challenge him on this point.

- Really? Genesis says the world started with an original couple. How could anyone look around the world and think there was fixity? A. lived in the biggest cities of his time, he was aware of all the different 'races' of human beings. Wasn't this a refutation of fixity? What about accounts in the bible of giants? What of the account in the book of Job of huge creatures that seem to be the 'terrible lizards' once called dragons, and now called dinosaurs?

14. Yet the ways in which he interacts with his scientific authorities and personal experience, suggests that, on this point at least, his views would be open to correction in the light of prevailing scientific opinion.

- I read this kind of statement repeatedly, but I'm still at a loss to know how it is the liberal decides whether scientific opinion is true or false. (He usually just accepts the scientific orthodoxy of his day; and ends up a few years or decades later to have been wrong.) I'd like to know how it is scientific opinion (the opinion of scientists) can correct our views of scripture. It's not enough just to throw the idea out there; if there's no useable methodology the advice is meaningless. (It wasn't long ago that liberals were insisting everyone accept the eternal universe idea.)

Let's take an example. Various authorities deny the idea of a mind. Okay; should I as a C. accept this new knowledge or not? How am I to judge it? These same authorities deny miracles and special revelation (etc. etc.) am I supposed to accept these scientific ideas? How am I to judge them? All this stuff about allowing science to correct theology sounds nice in theory, but in practice it amounts to driving in a thick fog. (I notice that theology is never allowed to correct science; and so we know who's going to win the fight don't we?)
The trouble with all this is that materialism has been equated with (or conflated with) science. Far too often, theistic evolutionists have accepted as science what is really just materialism.

14. M. tells us A. believed that; Part of that created order takes the form of embedded causalities which emerge or evolve at a later stage.
- embedded causalities eh? Does that really mean anything? (I'm just asking; but it seems like more mysticism to me.)

14. As Augustine himself constantly and consistently emphasised, there is a danger of making biblical interpretation dependent on contemporary scientific opinion, leaving its outcome vulnerable when today’s provisional scientific consensus is replaced with tomorrow’s.

- I'm not sure what M. means by this, as this is precisely what I see c. liberals doing in our day. I see them rewriting the bible to make it match up with the scientific (i.e. materialist) dogma of the day.

15. The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) created new intellectual space for Augustine’s approach, not least in that Darwin himself explicitly created space for divine action through secondary
causes in his account of natural selection.

- I wonder how random chance (mutations) can be seen as divine action. (Maybe I need to go to Oxbridge for a few years.)

- Well; it was nice of Charles to create space for God to act in any event. (And some people think Darwin was all bad.)

15. In his original discussion of how, and to what extent, biological evolution might be accommodated theologically, Mivart appealed to the arguments of Augustine, as set out in the major work we have been considering in the present lecture:
“St. Augustine insists in a very remarkable manner on the merely derivative sense in which God’s creation of organic forms is to be understood; that is, that God created them by conferring on the material world the power to evolve them under suitable conditions.”

- Theological liberalism depends upon dismissing the early chapters of Genesis as myth, and dumping them in the rubbish heap. (Some people are willing to do that. I'm not.)

15. Augustine, we must again emphasize, neither accepted nor anticipated Darwinian evolutionary paradigms; he shared the common human condition of being limited in his intellectual options on account of his historical
location.

- McGrath keeps pretending Augustine didn't know about evolution! (If he doesn't he sure seems to.)

16. A classic doctrine of creation resonates strongly with both the notion of a “big bang” and biological evolution.

- And what if both these theories turn out to be wrong. (I'm certain M2M evolution is wrong, and I have grave doubts as to the veracity of the big bang. The singularity that it supposedly arose from, seems an impossible construct.) [2.]

17. I have sought to avoid the excesses of those theist enthusiasts who fix upon fine-tuning as certain evidence for the existence of God...'

- Certain evidence. I haven't come across any ID proponents who offer certain evidence; evidence yes, but certain evidence no. (Maybe some do; but M. gives no examples.)In fact most ID writers that I'm familiar with (e.g. Stephen Meyers)speak about the evidence for a designer, not evidence of God.

- Everyone who doesn't adopt McGrath's wishy, washy approach is some kind of enthusiast apparently. (If you know your liberals, you know that's about the worst thing you can call someone.)

18. Note; it tells you a lot about who McGrath is that he's quite willing to quote every atheist out there (including the creationist basher Ayala) but can't bring himself to quote a single ID proponent or creationist. (If you don't proclaim a belief in Darwinism you're persona non grata; you've been expelled from the dialogue; excommunicated.)

Notes;
1. The 2009 Gifford Lectures; University of Aberdeen - Alister McGrath
Lecture 6: Conclusion – Clues to the Meaning of the Universe?
2. The big bang isn't a subject I've studied, so my comments don't amount to much.
- I recently watched a documentary on the big bang by astronomers (e.g. Eric Lerner) who oppose the BB model. I think it's worth a look; The Cosmology Quest