Richard Dawkins and the appearance of design

Quotes and commants;

1.  Richard Dawkins likes to respond to creationist claims of design by saying they are merely the appearance of design. (We'll leave aside for the moment how it is an entity can see the appearance of design if all is matter in motion.) We remind him that the appearance of design can in fact be the reality of design. e.g. For over a millenia people were sure that heiroglyphics had the appearance of code, but were unable to understand it. Then finally in the 1800s the Rosetta stone was decoded and it became a reality that this was not merely the appearance of design but in fact was truly design.

2.  Appearance
a. apparent likeness; external show; how something appears to others.
- seen from a great distance two boats may appear to be of the same type; on closer inspection one might be a fishing boat and one might be a yacht; or both may be fishing boats. ie. to say some x appears to be a y might be correct or incorrect.

- Dawkins of course claims that this appearance of design is mistaken... and I of course claim it is he who is mistaken. Our ability to detect design (ID) is still primitive; but I believe progress is being made in this area, as various tools are being developed. (e.g. W. Gitt's rules for Universal Information) [1.]

3. Why is it people see evidence for Design in living organisms (etc.) if we humans are but accidental congregates of matter in motion? e.g. a rock can't see design; chemicals can't detect design... I see no way mere matter could see beyond the material (or even mistakenly do so). Seeing design is evidence for the argument human beings transcend the merely material. If matter were all there was there would be nothing to see beyond matter. (This wouldn't even make sense would it?) Materialism gives us the odd (if not comical) picture of matter claiming to see something that transcends matter.

- Dawkins has studied rhetoric quite extensively and is a master of the logical fallacy. His book the 'God Delusion' might have (more accurately) been titled the 'Fallacy Delusion'
He shows us what can be done by deceiving people with fallacies of one sort or another.
or; A critical examination of his work might well be called 'The fallacy delusion.'

- His use of the 'appearance' claim isn't actually an example of a fallacy but an example of rhetoric. In this stratagem (used by Darwin to great effect) you appear to make a concession to your opponent (thus showing yourself to be a reasonable fellow, amenable to argument) but then you pull the rug out from under him by taking it back. e.g. "Yes, I admit that we see design in nature,  but... (wait for it) .... it's merely the appearance of design."


Notes;
1. Without Excuse - Werner Gitt

You are not your brain

The good news is that your are not your brain; even if a christian professor says you are. The Naturalism that tells us 'you are just your brain' means the death of psychology as we know it and replacing it with neuro-reductionism. A biblical conception of man is replaced with a mechanical model of matter in motion.

Quotes and comments;

1. 'But, eminent neuroscientist Professor Joseph LeDoux (1997), who adheres to this view, admitted that he and his fellow neuroscientists are unable to explain this fact: “We have no idea how our brains make us who we are.” (Horgan 1999).  [1.]

- This reductionist view is radically simplistic. e.g. it ignores the fact the human brain is largely fashioned by human behavior. If a human being led a completely inhuman life (e.g. with no contact with human beings) this person would end up a thing, a radically non-human entity, and its brain would show the effects of this.

We can agree with the statement a brain is necessary to be fully human; but this doesn't mean it is the brain that makes us human. This is akin to saying it's a piano that makes music, or it's a piano that produces the Moonlight Sonata; and this ignores the fact an intelligent agent sat down and worked on the composition for years, and that a score was written down and that a musician read the score and hit the keys. To borrow the analogy; is it the piano that makes us human? is it the composer? is it the score? or is it the musician?

2. ''But why did such a large brain evolve in a group of small, primitive, tree-dwelling mammals, more similar to rats and shrews than to mammals conventionally judged as more advanced? And with this provocative query I end, for we simply do not know the answer to one of the most important questions we can ask (Gould 1977, p. 191).  [1.]

- We should ask whether this is a scientific question or not; and how we would knows. (If we assume that biblical creation is true, is this question scientific? i.e. can it be scientific if it has nothing to do with reality?) Are why questions scientific? (I'm sure I've read people who claim that they're not.) Aren't why questions metaphysical or theological?
To know whether a question is 'scientific' or not one would have to know the nature of reality and the truth about the past. Neither or these can be known empirically or through observational science.

3. 'Despite this total lack of understanding we are told to continue to study the brain in order to learn what makes us human.

- People might be better off studying the big toe in order to learn what makes us human. At least In this case we could have the hope they'd make a lot fewer mistakes. This is akin to studying the fingers to find out what music is.

Neuroscientists should ask themselves (on a daily basis) who it is that is studying the brain... as they seem to forget or ignore this seemingly crucial factor. A strict adherence to theory would necessitate the claim that it is the brain that is studying the brain. i.e. electrical impulses are 'studying' electrical impulses. In that case why should we (whoever we is in this scenario) place any trust in the 'conclusions' made by these electrical impulses?

4. 'This is the view of Christian psychiatrist and evolutionist Dr. Curt Thompson. For him the brain and its so-called reptilian, paleomammalian and paleocortex also serve as evidence for the “similarities between humans and animals . . . that we are deeply connected to the rest of creation” (Thompson 2010, p. 41).

- The idea of a reptile part of the human brain reminds me of David Icke and his idea that our political elite are really intelligent alien reptiles that have taken on human form. I really don't know what idea is sillier.

Evolutionists look in the brain and see 'similarities' to reptiles; but are these similarities or only the appearance of similarity? Is there any necessary connection between similarity and identity? Does similarity prove an e. heritage? Does the fact the piano and the guitar both have strings mean that one evolved from the other? They sure look similar, and doesn't that prove an evolutionary ancestry?

Mankind and animals are indeed deeply connected but the reason isn't evolution but creation. i.e. the fact all of the passengers on this planet has the same creator (and have the same Lord).

- it's not the human brain that is reptilian, it's mad claims such as this. It's especially sad that such ideas have crept (and snaked) their way into the church.  (If everything can be blamed on the reptilian brain then what happens to the doctrine of sin?)

5. 'One thing seems fairly certain; the “magnifying glass” enabled evolutionists—secular and Christian—to see that the human soul does not exist.

- This assumes that the soul can be seen; but the 'soul' can't be seen any more than information can be seen. (When you talk to someone over the phone do you see the words coming down the wire or coming down from space? When you copy your novel onto a CD do you see the words when you look at the disc?)
The soul (that which the term refers to) is very real, but it's not a thing that can be seen.

6. "Bit by experimental bit, neuroscience is morphing our conception of what we are. The weight of evidence now implies that it is the brain, rather than some nonphysical stuff, that feels, thinks, and decides . . . It means there is no soul to spend its postmortem eternity blissful in Heaven or miserable in Hell (Churchland 2002, p. 1).

- I note that she writes of 'what' we are, rather than who we are. Under reductionism the personal disappears (in the model) and is replaced with the impersonal. (Seeming odd behavior for personal agents to be engaged in wouldn't you think?

Is the phrase 'the weight of evidence' scientific? are scientists now weighing evidence :=} C. here confuses evidence with data. What is commonly called 'evidence' refers not to data but to interpretations about data; in other words it refers to arguments given to persuade people that a particular 'reading' of the data is correct.

6a. "...it is the brain, rather than some nonphysical stuff, that feels, thinks, and decides . . . ''
- this is classic reductionism, and shows us the person disappearing beneath the swamp of theory. C. is required thus to say that a brain wrote the words we quoted; that it wasn't a person but a chunk of meat. (We might wonder what meat could know about world, let alone these philosophical issues.) One wonders how a chunk of meat decides things.

Without a theory or model of information what scholars give us is drivel like this. Their materialism has rendered them incapable of understanding.

7. ''[N]euroscience is now completing the Darwinian revolution, bringing the mind into the purview of biology. My claim, in short, is this: all of the human capacities once attributed to the immaterial mind or soul are now yielding to the insights of neurobiology . . . . [W]e have to accept the fact that God has to do with brains—crude though this may sound (Murphy 2006b, pp. 88, 96).

- This is a shocking statement.... but this is the 'revenge' materialism takes on people; it renders them devoid of understanding.
Never mind what the Bible says... right? The idea is that since the bible says nothing about science it can be ignored in dealing with 'scientific' questions. (Never mind that it protects people from faddish ideas like brainology.)

So; God desires relationships with brains? is that the idea? Why create a planetary world in that case? Brains in a vat would work just as well if brains were all God was dealing with.

It's comical to me how easily our intellectuals are willing to give up mind and soul. I guess we have a right in this case to call them mindless commentators... or mindless commentators on the mind. You'd have thought that intellectuals would be the last to surrender the mind, but apparently the desire for respectability with scientists is too much for them to resist.

What we call the mind results from the interaction of brain and information. Just as a piano without a musician produces no music, so matter without information cannot produce mind. The ability to think, feel and decide (etc.) depends upon the programming of the brain. The only source for such programming is an intelligent and personal agent. The materialist goes wrong when he or she imagines that the brain 'evolved' by some natural process, that it's the result of matter plus time plus chance. (As a crude analogy we can say that as chickens only come from chickens so mind only comes from mind.)
What we call mind can be equated with the software that programs hardware; in no way is it the same as hardware.

What we call mind is a capacity human beings have. I think it's better to think of it as a verb rather than a noun. What we call a person (or personhood) is also a capacity of human beings (that has been programmed into us). (As birds have migratory instincts, so human beings possess the ability to be a person.)

To be a person means human beings have various capacities; these include the capacity to see oneself as single unit over time; the ability hold or live out different roles (e.g. daughter, friend, wife, mother, etc.) the capacity to decide; to see oneself as responsible and having duties; to envision the future; to think in moral terms; to have a relationship to God; to have relationships with other persons; to make sacrifices; to be courageous; to be creative; to see oneself as a person living in history; the capacity to see oneself as both unique and similar; and so on.

To say a brain is capable of all this is akin to saying a piano is capable of composing a concerto. Brains don't have relationships anymore than pianos do.

8. 'Elsewhere Murphy said that a “massive amount of evidence” suggests that we no longer “need to postulate the existence of a soul or mind in order to explain life and consciousness” (Brown, Murphy, and Malony 1998, p. 17)

- This amounts to saying ''materialists claim there is no need to postulate the existence of a soul or mind...'' Well; I guess that's true isn't it?  (What's at stake here is not the felt needs of various individuals but the truth of things.)
Evidence doesn't suggest anything... what they call evidence are arguments made defending materialism.
- any data set can be 'explained' in many different ways. Explanations are cheap and philosophers should know this. To fall down in front of this explanation of the human is mere capitulation to the spirit of the age. (An explanation is basically just a story someone is telling.)

- Michael Johnson

Notes;
1. What Makes Us Human, and Why It Is Not the Brain: A Creationist Defense of the Soul - by Callie Joubert
2. 'According to the official primer of the Society for Neuroscience (Carey 2006), the “world’s largest organization of scientists and physicians dedicated to understanding the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system,” entitled Brain Facts. A primer on the brain and nervous system, “the brain is what makes us human” (Carey 2006, p. 4).
- since most creatures have brains this statement cannot be strictly true. It can only be true if we say ''it's the human brain that makes us human.'' (The trouble with this definition is that doesn't tell us what 'human' is.)
3. 'According to this “triune” theory, the reptilian brain is not only the most innermost portion of the brain, but also the oldest and most primitive portion of the brain, and the so-called rational section (the paleocortex or neocortex) is what makes people human. To debate the theory would take us beyond the scope of this paper. What is significant is that evolutionist and professor of physics, James Trefil at George Mason University described the theory as “simple, elegant, clear, and completely wrong” (Trefil 1997, p. 75).
- so why doesn't Thompson take Trefil's word for it? i.e. he's a fellow evolutionist and has great credentials.
4. 'Thompson, however, compares neuroscience with a magnifying glass because it helps us to see things about ourselves we are not otherwise able to see.
- His idea seems to be that the more you reduce something the more understandable it becomes. I wonder if this would work on a painting or on a poem :=} To look at a painting on a sub-atomic scale would make it impossible to comprehend... and the more one increased magnification the more incomprehensible it would become. People like Thompson doesn't understand the relevance of information theory, and they don't understand that you can't study information the way you study the physical. They don't understand that a radically new method is required.
- if we look at human beings through a microscope the person disappears and is replaced by meat which is replaced by electrical impulses. Reductionism is the death of the person. (Did Jesus come to earth to save electrical impulses or brain cells?) Materialism means replacing the church with the laboratory.
5. '[T]his perspective is monistic to the core; it conceives of human behavior as resulting from the nervous system—including the brain—which was, according to this perspective (and to most modern scientists who studied psychological phenomena), shaped by evolutionary processes such as natural selection.(Geher 2006, p. 185)
- G. doesn't seem to recognize the difference between 'resulting from the nervous system' and 'mediated through' the nervous system.
- this reductionist approach is grossly inadequate as it ignores a person's interaction with the world. ie. I could easily claim that human behavior results from a person interacting with their environment. To limit consciousness to the brain is to reduce it to electricity.
- I deny that there is a process (i.e. mechanism) called natural selection. i.e. I deny natural selection is a process or mechanism. Darwinists have reified this abstract concept and turned it into a real entity.
- In the physicalist model human beings are purely accidental products; brain bound entities within the 'prison' of their skull. I see no way any god or God should have a right to judge such a being.
- The physicalist can give us no reason to believe an impersonal universe can produce a personal being. (He apparently prefers to accept this impossibility rather than the 'impossibility' of believing in a creator God.)
6. '...a physicalist account of human nature does not conflict with the biblical view on bodies and souls, because “the Bible has no clear teachings here” (Murphy 2006a, pp. ix, 4).
- This isn't all that surprising a claim (though it should be) as liberals don't think the bible has any clear teachings on anything. (Or so they claim.) Percival Lowell used to claim Mars was replete with a global canal system. I leave it to you to decide which of these two claims is more accurate.
- Liberals use the bible as a kind of peep stone... with which to pull theological rabbits out of a hat. e.g. ''Oh look, there is no soul after all. Guess the bible is wrong again!"
7. ''The present epidemic of such neuroprefixed pseudo-disciplines as neuroaesthetics, neuroeconomics, neuro-sociology, neuropolitics, neurotheology, neurophilosophy, and so on” is built on the idea not that a “human life requires having a brain in some kind of working order,” but “that to live a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order (Tallis 2010, p. 3).
- and these are but a few of the new neuro sciences.
- The theistic evolutionist tells the christian he must accept the edicts of science; but he doesn't tell him which one. All of them perhaps? Can 'science' tell us which of the above are true sciences and which are not? (Maybe I should ask my brain.
- Confusing the brain and the person is akin to confusing a book and its author. This is like inviting a book out for lunch, and ignoring the author.

The patterns of creation; or, the Pattern maker

The god of theistic evolution is very much a return to Deism, with its empty speculation about the cosmos.

Quotes and comments;
1. "See that you make them after the pattern for them, which was shown to you on the mountain. - Ex. 25:40

- God gave precise instructions on how the tabernacle was to be built, and how things like the ephod and the breastplate were to be constructed; but yet the theistic evolutionist tells us that God took no part in designing this planet or the life forms that inhabit it. Do they have an explanation for this contradictory behavior? I see in these activities confirmation of special creation and the particular care with which God created all things.

We see that God takes an interest in details, that He himself is possessed of a creative imagination. (I think we see that God has pleasure not only in creation but in the particulars of creation.) Why would a God who cares about the design of clothes for the high priest not care about the design of the eagle or the bear? The theistic evolutionist gives us a God who has no interest in anything... and I find this very strange indeed. Surely the more intelligent a person is the more interested they are in being creative and the more they enjoy the details of things.

The god of theistic evolution is not the God of the Bible, as he's merely a passive spectator and not an active creator. Instead of a God whose works man finds awesome and wondrous theistic e. gives us a god who is amazed by what has happened during evolution. ("How is all this possible?" he must ask himself. "I wish I had someone to tell me.")

To replace creation with e. requires a person to adopt a new god as well.

We might add that the same people who find passages like the above embarassing also find special creation embarassing. For one reason or another they don't want a 'hands on' God, they don't want a God who is interested in particulars and in small things. They want a god content to stand far off and to beam at them like a parent watching his child perform on stage. (The theistic evolutionist wants more credit for 'discovering' some thing than he wants to give God for creating it; and since God didn't actually create anything all the credit goes to man for having understood the uncreated world. An uncreated world makes man the wisest being in the universe.) Charles Darwin called evolution a grand view of life, and it certainly is if your objective is to glorify man.

The theistic evolutionist believes in a schema that has no empirical warrant; no one has ever seen such a thing as life emerge spontaneously from non-life and no one has the slightest idea of how such a thing could even be possible. (One wonders where all his critical powers have disappeared to.) The study of the world has devolved into an attempt to save naturalism from its critics.

2. "Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. - Luke 12:7

- Jesus told people that their hairs were all numbered. Since the t.e. doesn't believe god was involved in creation they give us the odd picture of a God who didn't create the human hair but merely numbers
them.

We also read in the bible that God wrote the  ten commandments with his own hand on stone tablets. How does the T.E. understand this in terms of his distant god who had no part in creation? We might wonder what right God has to give laws to creatures he never created. (Special creation speaks of a God who both created man and gave him the law; and both man and the law are the 'image' of the same God.)

Summary; 
The idea of a purely naturalistic evolution being responsible for all life on earth (and not all OECs go this far) involves a radical 'rewriting' of the entire bible.
- Michael Johnson
Notes;
1. How do we explain the hands off approach of 'naturalistic' evolution with the very hands on example of writing the Law? Again there's a contradiction here. Genesis tells us of a God who created man out of the dust (or the ground) and Exodus tells us of a God who wrote His law on the 'dust' (i.e. stone) of the ground. We see real participation in the physical world. (We might think of Jesus writing in the dust of the ground as well... perhaps some verse from the Law? e.g. perhaps ''both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.'' Perhaps just the word both?)

Living on a star; or, a world of miracles

Quotes and comments;

1. 'If we once realize all this earth as it is, we should find ourselves in a land of miracles: we shall discover a new planet at the moment that we discover our own. Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on a star.  [1.]

- Most people have a false idea of a miracle; they seem to think that it's an impossible event made possible only by the direct violation of natural law by God... whereas the biblical meaning is a sign; ie. a sign or indicator of God's presence. I think we see miracles more clearly if we see them as expressions of God's wisdom rather than (merely) God's power. e.g. they don't violate 'natural law' so much as they utilize it in ways unknown (at least as yet) to mankind.

As an example; vision isn't a violation of 'natural law' but a brilliantly designed utilization of it. e.g. a cell phone would seem miraculous to primitive men and a violation of all they know about the world, but it of course isn't a violation of natural law but a utlilization of it.

We do indeed live in a land of miracles (as Chesterton refers to it) and the main reason we don't think so is because we've been told so by our teachers. e.g. the only reason we don't see the flight of a bird as a miracle is because we've been told that it's not. We've been told that it's the product of blind chance when in fact it's a sign of an omniscient mind.

 Let's step into the shoes of our forefathers for a moment and assume that a person invented and created the eagle or the sparrow. What kind of person would that have to be? What kind of mind would be sufficient for such a wonder? We know that it would require an intelligence so far beyond our own that we can't even imagine it.

- Michael Johnson

Notes;
1. The Defendant - G. K. Chesterton p. 100  [A defense of planets]
- by star he means a planetary body in motion.
1a. I'm reminded of another passage from GKC;
''Thou hast hanged the world upon nothing,' said the author of the Book of Job, and in that sentence wrote the whole appalling poetry of modern astronomy. -  Chesterton - The Defendant p.98
- this is what I think he is referring to when he says men have forgotten that they live upon a star.
2. Materialism has blinded men to the miracles all around them. It's akin to wearing sunglasses in church.
3. Reductionism is akin to standing on your head in an effort to get closer to reality.