The Origins debate isn't really about creation or evolution so much as it's about theism vs materialism. One person who realizes this better than most is Philip Johnson. I want to comment on a few passages from his book.
Quotes and comments;
1. Speaking of Naturalism Johnson writes, "Under any of those names this philosophy assumes that in the beginning were the fundamental particles that compose matter, energy and the impersonal laws of physics. To put it negatively, there was no personal God who created the cosmos and governs it as an act of free will. It God exists at all, he acts only through inviolable laws of nature and adds nothing to them. In consequences, all the creating had to be done by the laws and the particles, which is to say by some combination of random chance and lawlike regularity." [1.]
- In his book he asks the reader to learn to ask good questions; so let's try a few. We need to ask what particles and physical laws can or do create. Can particles acting in terms of physical law actually create anything, or anything complex? We need to ask what we mean by create.
Create;
- late 14c., from L. creatus, pp. of creare "to make, bring forth, produce, beget," related to crescere "arise, grow"
- Can particles really 'bring forth' anything other than particles? I see no reason to believe they can beget life. (Create seems originally have been a word closely or even solely connected with birth. e.g. to create an infant)
1. 'To produce through artistic or imaginative effort
- I see no reason to believe particles are capable of artistic or imaginative effort. (Although a look at some modern art makes one wonder of human beings are capable of artistic effort :=}
2. 'To bring into being; cause to exist; specifically, to produce without the prior existence of the material used, or of other things like the thing produced; produce out of nothing.
3. 'To make or produce from crude or scattered materials; bring into form; embody: as, Peter the Great created the city of St. Petersburg; Palladio created a new style of architecture.
- To create a city is a banal accomplishment compared to the creation of a cell. E.s like to talk about some imagined 'primitive' cell; but it's our cities that are more legitimately called primitive, not cells. (If I look at a cell I don't see any neon advertising for 24 hr. a day sex shops, gambling casinos or hamburger joints.)
I see no evidence undirected chemical reactions can produce anything genuinely new; or to keep on producing genuinely new products. Chemicals beget chemicals not machines; physical laws cause cars to rust not to be manufactured.
(Compared to the riches of the biosphere, the 'begats' of chemistry produce a boring book indeed.)
4. 'To design, invest with a new form, shape, &c.
- Inert matter is unable to transcend itself; it takes intelligence and imagination to transcend the material realm, and it takes intentionality and purpose to want to do this. (A rock has no more desire to transcend or transform itself than a dictator does; rocks are the greatest couch potatoes on the planet... unlike teenagers they don't even dream of doing anything or of changing; they have less passion than the elderly on their death beds.)
The big problem for the materialist, as he tries to persuade people of his philosophy, is the task of explaining the genuinely new entity in the world. A cell is a million times more complex than a computer, but no one would even pretend to explain a computer without a reference to intelligence. He has an unsolvable puzzle on his hands, and it's one he's created for himself.
The main engine of progressive e. given in our textbooks has, for a long time, been mutations. This creates big problems for the e. theorist as mutations are negative in their actions. The question then is, 'how can mistakes create something new and of value?' To illustrate the conundrum I offer the following analogy;
Imagine we have a statue, and imagine we've grown tired of it and want a new one. We're cheap or we have no money so we say to a sculptor, turn this old block of stone (the statue) into a new one. If the sculptor agrees, the new statue he produces will of necessity be smaller than the old one. Each time we engage in this procedure the statue will be smaller. In the end we will end up with a grain of sand.
A few creationists have recently begun saying that mutations can indeed create new information. If this is so (and it might be) it's only because this possibility was designed into the genetic blueprint. i.e. if cosmic evolution were true, it wouldn't be possible for mutations to add anything new. It's only because organisms were created that such a possibility even exists. I see no way this could have happened by accident.
5. Creature;
- late 13c., "anything created," also "living being," from O.Fr. creature (Mod.Fr. créature), from L.L. creatura "thing created," from creatus, pp. of L. creare "create" (see create). Meaning "anything that ministers to man's comforts" (1610s), after I Tim. iv 4
- Create originally referred to either living organisms or to things made by living organisms; especially man himself.
The word create originally referred mainly to procreation. Since particles can't reproduce they can't procreate. If all you have are particles you have a dead world, an eternally dead world.
6. Creator;
- c.1300, "Supreme Being," from Anglo-Fr. creatour, O.Fr. creator (12c., academic and liturgical, alongside popular creere, Mod.Fr. créateur), from L. creator "creator, author, founder," from creatus (see create). Translated in O.E. as scieppend (from verb scieppan; see shape). Not generally capitalized until KJV. General meaning "one who creates" is from 1570s.
- It's my view that create originates in testimony of a creator God. ("In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,'' may have been the first words ever spoken (by an angel) to Adam; the first words he ever heard.) I find that giving to particles the divine power of creation is the most absurd notion man has ever spoken. Chemical evolution denies the necessity of intelligence, imagination and personhood. (A strange view to be championed by intelligent, imaginative, persons.)
I find the idea of a mindless, accidental creation both impossible and nauseating. I reject it with the disdain I would treat a mud pie. I find it loathsome that human beings will not honor their creator, or at the very least acknowledge his work. To deny the Creator is akin to claiming a troop of monkeys wrote the plays of Shakespeare.
Chemical evolution is a counterfeit creation story. It's so preposterous it's akin to claiming Arthur's sword was a natural product, a mere product of rock formation, as natural as the rock it was embedded in.
Chemical evolution requires that particles possess God's wisdom; that they possess the information needed to create all the original living forms. As far as I know we don't have microscopes powerful enough to detect this, but as Darwinists like to say, I'm sure it's only a matter of time until we do. (Skeptics will want to know where particles got this information content, but it's clear that it was produced with the big bang, when normal physical laws didn't exist and so this was possible. It's true that we don't yet know how this happened, but there's a general feeling among scientists that in a matter of 5-10 years we'll know.)
2. ‘Science’, in the strong sense, deals with repeatable events under precisely controlled conditions, and these testable results are to be valid across time, location and experimenter. Although all conclusions should still be treated as tentative descriptive models, even incomplete understanding can lead to advances in technology and medicine. Christians certainly approve of this form of knowledge acquisition, when applied in beneficial ways not contrary to God’s commandments. However, scientific methodologies available to interpret historical and geological events are, unfortunately, far less reliable. [2.]
- The game people like Sam Harris etc. play is to conflate real (hard) science with such philosophical speculations as neo-Darwinism. Darwinism is to science what plastic fruit is to a full course meal. It's little more than comical to say creationists are against science. This is like saying one is against food because one doesn't like Haggis. (Darwinism is to science what a carriage drawn to the moon by encapsulated dew drops is to a space ship. It's an imaginative story yes; but it won't get you anywhere.)
This is a far more important question than many realize. It's not just a philosophical 'game' as it were. Take a mouse; do its 'thoughts' reflect an external reality? How well do they reflect reality? how much of reality do they reflect? We can ask similar questions of human beings.
Is there any way for us to know if our thoughts reflect an external reality? Is there a way to know how well they do this? It's absurd to speak of facts if we can't answer these questions.
How well do the 'thoughts' (let's be liberal) of a goldfish reflect the reality of the ocean? Should we rely on it for information about the seas? Would it be a good guide for navigation? We might imagine that it thinks it knows all there is to know about water. It might even consider itself an
expert.
3. ‘By information I mean a message that conveys meaning, such as a book of instructions.’ [3.]
- We find no information in particles, but perhaps this is only because we haven't looked hard enough. We see no guidelines on how to construct a biological organism. (Perhaps someone forgot to write the manual, or forgot to enclose it.) We can say that particles were created by an intelligent agent, but they're not intelligent in and of themselves. They don't need intelligence and (thus?) don't have it. They're the blind leading the blind
Particles don't require these functions and so don't have them. It's important to stress that in the story of cosmic evolution these mechanisms at one time didn't exist. (For me this is all the data I need to reject Materialism.) The claim of chemical evolution is as believable to me as the claim one could safely drive across the country in a car without brakes or a steering wheel.
People who deny creation are like those who deny their own faces in a mirror. One hardly finds their protestations believable.
4. "When a mutation makes a bacterium resistant to antibiotics, for example, it does so by disabling its capacity to metabolize a certain chemical. There is a net loss of information and of fitness in a general sense, but there is a gain in fitness in specific toxin-filled environments.'' [4.]
- Human beings themselves provide far better evidence for a source of creation than do bacteria. Why do men look into bacteria when they should be looking into their own hearts? Is there something they're trying to escape?
Human society in our day (as I suppose it is in every day) is an especially toxin filled environment... and some people do indeed do well in it. e.g. Darwinists. We might think of Humanism as a loss of information.
5. ‘One convenient way of expressing this distinction is to say that the standard examples of micro-evolution are all of horizontal evolution, while the grand creative process should be called vertical evolution." [5.]
- The materialist is of all people the one with the least amount of hope for his position; he's literally climbing the walls in search of an answer. Chemical evolution is a riddle invented by the few to torture the many. A far more rational approach is agnosticism.
6. "Whereas the drafting committee had defined science as the human activity of seeking natural explanations, the board substituted that "science is the human activity of seeking logical explanations for what we observe in the world around us." [6.]
- The idea 'science' is about seeking natural' explanations is founded on the pretense that there's only one kind of explanation; that there's only way level of explanation. We need to stress that there are many ways of defining terms (especially important terms). This can be seen by a brief look at any dictionary. The attempt to define science in a single sentence (or entry) is a comical enterprise at best.
Modernists (especially of the atheist sort) have attempted to define science in a way it never was in the past. They've tried to narrow the definition until it becomes equal to materialism and reductionism. i.e. they've applied reductionism to the idea of science as they apply it to everything else. They want to make science a guild or closed shop; where only card carrying atheists may apply. (It's perhaps unnecessary to point out how undemocratic this agenda is.)
Science;
1. In a general sense, knowledge, or certain knowledge; the comprehension or understanding of truth or facts by the mind.
Webster 1828
2. Accumulated and established knowledge, which has been systematized and formulated with reference to the discovery of general truths or the operation of general laws; knowledge classified and made available in work, life, or the search for truth; comprehensive, profound, or philosophical knowledge. - W/1913
7. Johnson says that students should have the right to judge the merits of Neo-Darwinism;
‘Is the "evolution" that biologists observe merely a matter of variation within preexisting species or types, or is it a genuine creative process that over time can produce new complex organs and new kinds of organism?’ [7.] (p. 72).
* - I find it odd that students are encouraged to decide for themselves what is morally right and wrong, to decide whether or not to have sex or even an abortion, but they're not allowed to decide whether or not Darwinism can fully account for the life forms on the planet. This is akin to telling a small child what shoes he must wear but letting himself decide whether or not to cross the hiway. Again we see an anti-democratic spirit at work in the schools when it comes to the creation/evolution debate.
8. ‘For example, Scientific American editor-in-chief John Rennie urged scientists on university admissions committees to notify the Kansas governor and the state board of education that "in light of the newly lowered education standards in Kansas, the qualifications of any students applying from that state in the future will have to be considered very carefully"’ (p. 80).
- The worst bullies in the educational system are not students, but teachers, professors and outside agitators like Rennie. This is a vile and utterly uncivil threat levelled at students and their parents.
Why would anyone think Rennie is going to be honest about the Origins debate?
8. "Gould takes for granted that all such questions are within the magisterium of science." [8.]’ (p. 98).
- I find comical the idea science (i.e. scientists) will define what is and isn't religion. This is like a thief defining property rights, or a child telling his parents what his rights are and what their duties are.
9. "For example, Richard Dawkins commented that science is compatible with religion if the latter means only feelings of awe at the wonders of the universe or the fundamental laws of physics." [9.]
- I have to admit I rarely find myself in awe over the fundamental laws of physics; no doubt this is a personal failing. The atheist wants to restrict religion to feeling; but wouldn't that make his own feelings religious? What then of his feeling that there is no God; wouldn't that qualify as a religious feeling?
10. "They [the Darwinists] realise that it is safer to allow God a shadowy existence in human subjectivity than to run the risk that this very threatening presence will burst into objective reality. That is when we hear the standard vague reassurances that "many people believe in both God and evolution", or that "science does not say that God does not exist", or that "science and religion are separate realms."’ [10.]
- It's my view that science and religion are as separate as body and soul. I believe that as man is a single unit so is truth; as man has various aspects so has investigation into human experience. As man is in the universe, so is science within Revelation (or creation).
Realm;
1. A community or territory over which a sovereign rules; a kingdom.
- Ideally the sciences are provinces within the kingdom of God. In general terms we can say that 'science' and 'religion' are provinces within the same kingdom. To see a conflict between science and religion is taking an atomistic approach when a holistic approach is what's called for.
If Materialism is consistently applied it leads to the death of man, and how strange it is that men should construct philosophies that lead to their own extinction. What happened to the will to survive? Did it begin to die off with the advent of Darwinism? Maybe people on the whole aren't all that thrilled with being apes (in drag). That some few are is certainly true; but then again we do have some funny parades now days don't we? I wouldn't take seriously anything purple people eaters have to say about Origins.
Extremophile enthusiasm for Darwinism is something I don't understand; even though I accepted Evolution (M2M) when I was a teenager and maintained it all through my twenties. Why some people are so fanatic about it is beyond me, as it seems a horrid nightmare of an idea.
If there were no self how could there be facts? Aren't facts conclusions made by persons? ie. by selves. If there is no self who (what?) is it that believes x to be true? Do particles believe things? Don't you have to think to believe?
If we reduce everything down to the particle level how do we answer the question of reality; what then becomes of reality? What then is it? Is there any reality at the particle level? I can't imagine there is, but it would be a funny kind of reality if there were. If we reduce everything to the particle level we lose rationality, and words are only noise and thoughts only chemical reactions. To take everything to the particle level is to live beneath our station, it's to live without any awareness of who we are.
If we take things down (way, way down) to the particle level who is there to say what is reality. Reality is, after all, a pronouncement made by a person. If there are no selves there is therefore no reality. (The Biblical creationist of course believes that it is the Creator who makes the pronouncement of what reality is.)
If there are no selves who is going to compose the agreement (consensus) needed to create the facts of reality? If there is no self there is no reality and if there is no reality there are no facts. This unfortunately means for the materialist that nothing he says can be true.
11. "The irony is that eliminative materialism itself is fatal to science, since it implies that even the scientists are not really conscious and that their boasted rationality is really rationalization." [11.]
- The atheist claims he doesn't need a metaphysical basis for his opinions, but this is like a man saying he has no need of a place to stand, or a fish saying it has no need of water, or a bird saying it has no need of sky. It's true that the atheist is able to speak about morality and ethics (etc.) but his words have no necessary connection to reality. e.g. you might succeed in selling a gullible person a non-existent island, but the sale doesn't make the island appear.
The materialist is in the position of trying to live on a non-existent island. (The only way he can survive is to catch a ride from a creationist with a boat.)
Ideas not rooted in reality will necessarily disappear. The rejection of intelligent creation is an idea that cannot and will not stand the test of time. Materialism is a non-existent island floating in the void.
- Mike Johnson [frfarer at Gmail.com]
Notes;
1. The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism by Phillip E. Johnson; 2000 p.13
2. p. 37
3. p. 42
4. p.46
5. p.128
6. p.68
7. p.72
8. p.98
9. p.100
10. p.141
11. p.119
12. Note; Would it be correct to say that what the Materialist calls emergence the creationist calls transcendence?
Transcend;
1. To exist above and independent of (material experience or the universe):
- The Materialist claims that intelligence is an emergent quality, while the creationist claims it's a transcendent entity. i.e. it's independent of matter because it's not the produce of matter but of information (that is embedded in matter). I think that what we call 'life' is also a transcendent entity; that all life forms are not merely 'emergent' phenomenon but transcendent realities.
13. I need to note that I borrowed these quotations from a review by Royal Truman. I read the book some years ago but didn't make any notes. Since he's a writer I respect I read the review even though I'd read the book.
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