The standard criticism of mature creation is that it implicates God in a web of deception. Mind you, I don’t think the natural record even appears to show macroevolution, so it’s not as if I’d invoke mature creation to save appearances. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Darwinian has appearances on his side.
I’ve already addressed the argument from deception from other angles, but now I want to address the argument from another angle.
As a matter of personal experience, I’m taken in by deceptive appearances every day of my life. And this isn’t some isolated phenomenon, like an optical illusion. No, this is a systematic, indetectible illusion.
For you see, I dream every night. And except for lucid dreams, which are rare, most of the time I have no inkling that I’m only dreaming. No awareness that what I perceive isn’t altogether real. Is, in fact, a massive illusion.
While I’m dreaming, the dreamscape is utterly convincing. The people I meet in my dream seem to be real enough. As long as I’m dreaming, I don’t suspect their existence. Everything in the dream reinforces the illusion, for the dream is a self-contained experience. In that altered state of consciousness, I have nothing to compare it too. The dream itself is the only frame of reference.
As long as I’m asleep, the outside world doesn’t impinge on my misperception of reality. The experience is inescapable from within the experience. Inside the dream there is no “outside.” No clue pointing to an external world. If I never awoke, I could never tell. I’d go right on thinking that this is all there is. That things are just the way they appear to be, in all the surreal weirdness of a dream.
No, I don't think the analogy works to absolve the mature creation view of deception here. For one thing, I don't know what dreams you have, but I have rarely if ever confused the dream world with the real world. In my experience dreams are jumbled, mostly nonsensical impressions, images and feelings. They are nothing like the lucid, ordered sequence of events I experience in the waking state. They are also never as 'solid' or as 'vivid' or as complete as the real world. I have sometimes dreamed that I was flying, but I never experienced the full force of the wind blowing in my hair, the smell of the breeze, the thrill of the vertigo.
ReplyDeleteAnd I have often been alerted to the fact that I am dreaming due to something in the dream itself. Something inside just says, "Wait a minute, this can't be happening." Or sometimes in a bad dream, I will somehow know that to escape it I have to wake myself up, and then somehow I do.
A dream is not a self-contained illusion, but most often exhibits numerous features that point to its being ontologically secondary.
JD Walters said...
ReplyDelete"No, I don't think the analogy works to absolve the mature creation view of deception here. For one thing, I don't know what dreams you have, but I have rarely if ever confused the dream world with the real world."
You're not paying attention to what I actually wrote. Yes, when you're awake you can tell the difference. When you're awake you can use the real world as your frame of reference.
But in my post I explicitly distinguish our perception of reality in a dream from our waking state. It's natural for a dreamer to "confuse" the dreamscape with the real world. For that's all he's conscious of at the time.
"They are nothing like the lucid, ordered sequence of events I experience in the waking state. They are also never as 'solid' or as 'vivid' or as complete as the real world. I have sometimes dreamed that I was flying, but I never experienced the full force of the wind blowing in my hair, the smell of the breeze, the thrill of the vertigo."
That's irrelevant to whether they feel real at the time you're dreaming. You're comparing that to the real world, but as long as you're dreaming you lack conscious access to that standard of comparison.
"And I have often been alerted to the fact that I am dreaming due to something in the dream itself."
That's a feature of lucid dreams. In my post I made explicit exception for lucid dreams. Once again you're not paying attention to what I actually wrote.
And lucid dreams are not the norm.
You're so hostile to the post that it disarms your critical detachment. That's not an epistemic virtue.
JD Walters said...
ReplyDelete"They are also never as 'solid' or as 'vivid' or as complete as the real world."
Some dreams can be more vivid than reality. More intense.
"A dream is not a self-contained illusion, but most often exhibits numerous features that point to its being ontologically secondary."
Everything in the dream is part of the dream.
This is an interesting post, seeing as how I just watched "Inception" :-)
ReplyDeleteBy the way, JD, the same point Steve's saying here was made in that movie too. Specifically, there's a line delivered by DiCaprio: "Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange."
Oh, BTW, I only bring that quote up to show that this isn't some random theory that Steve's got, but it's actually something that is quite common.
ReplyDeleteYes, JD's reaction is pretty idiosyncratic. To say that dreams seem real to the dreamer ought to be uncontroversial.
ReplyDeleteSteve,
ReplyDeleteI was not referring to lucid dreams, in which the dreamer is fully aware that he is dreaming and can actually stay in the dream state even after that awareness. I'm talking about regular dreams where something in the dream itself tips you off that it's a dream and then you usually wake up right after that.
Yes, for most of the dream the subject may lack awareness that he is dreaming, but I wouldn't put that down to the convincingness of the dream, but rather to the fact that his faculties of awareness, concentration, reasoning, etc. are operating at very low levels. In the process of waking these faculties start to return to 'full speed ahead' mode and we begin to realize that things about the dream just aren't right.
This also applies to Inception, which I won't comment on too much because I haven't seen it. DiCaprio seems to be saying that the state of dreaming is such that even a person in complete possession and control of his faculties would find the dream convincing, no matter how illogical. I disagree. The illusion can only be kept up as long as the dreamer's awareness and reasoning is kept down, subdued, confused.
In order for the dreaming analogy to work in defense of the 'mature creation' thesis, there would have to be cases where a dream can be fully convincing (a "systematic, indetectible illusion") even when a person's faculties are just as active and coordinated as they are in the waking state, and still find the reality of the dream completely convincing. Then indeed there would be cause to wonder how anything we experience could be taken as veridical.
But the only time that happens is during lucid dreaming, but which does not support your case because then the person is aware that they are dreaming and can control the dream state, which presupposes their awareness of the difference between the dream state and the waking state.
But even if your description of the phenomenology of dreams was accurate, how would that make it OK for God to create a world which has every appearance of being old and developed (I'm going along with your 'for the sake of argument' concession here), and in which species originated via macro-evolution, and then reveal in His word that no, actually everything was created in six days in fast forward, like those nature documentaries.
And please, stop psychologizing me. I wasn't so 'hostile' to the post that my 'critical detachment' was disarmed (unless you think that anyone who disagrees with you has their critical detachment disarmed). I was genuinely interested to see if this approach could diffuse the argument from deception, at least from this angle. But I don't find it very convincing. That conclusion is a result of perceived faults with your analogy, not some burning hostility to the view in question.
JD WALTERS SAID:
ReplyDelete“I was not referring to lucid dreams, in which the dreamer is fully aware that he is dreaming and can actually stay in the dream state even after that awareness. I'm talking about regular dreams where something in the dream itself tips you off that it's a dream and then you usually wake up right after that.”
If, when you’re dreaming, something tips you off that it’s just a dream, then at that point the dream becomes a lucid dream. That’s the definition of a lucid dream. The dreamer suddenly knows he’s dreaming.
“Yes, for most of the dream the subject may lack awareness that he is dreaming, but I wouldn't put that down to the convincingness of the dream, but rather to the fact that his faculties of awareness, concentration, reasoning, etc. are operating at very low levels.”
It doesn’t matter what you put it down to. You find the dream convincing. And that’s “deceptive.”
“In order for the dreaming analogy to work in defense of the 'mature creation' thesis, there would have to be cases where a dream can be fully convincing (a "systematic, indetectible illusion") even when a person's faculties are just as active and coordinated as they are in the waking state, and still find the reality of the dream completely convincing.”
That’s special pleading on your part. All I need for the dream analogy to work is for the dreamer to be taken in by the illusion.
And this is a normal, natural experience. It’s not as if our faculties are defective. That’s the way we’re supposed to perceive reality when we sleep.
“But the only time that happens is during lucid dreaming, but which does not support your case because then the person is aware that they are dreaming and can control the dream state, which presupposes their awareness of the difference between the dream state and the waking state.”
The exceptional case of lucid dreaming is irrelevant, for the issue at hand is not situations in which we correctly perceive reality, but situations in which we cannot avoid misperceiving reality. In a dream state, we were designed to misperceive reality.
“But even if your description of the phenomenology of dreams was accurate, how would that make it OK for God to create a world which has every appearance of being old and developed…”
If it’s okay for God to deceive us when we dream, why is it not okay for God to deceive us when we’re awake? That’s the argument.
“And please, stop psychologizing me. I wasn't so 'hostile' to the post that my 'critical detachment' was disarmed (unless you think that anyone who disagrees with you has their critical detachment disarmed).”
You’ve fallen into a habit of late of misrepresenting what I say, then proceeding to burn the straw man you impute to me. So, yes, I chalk that up to hostility.
When you stop misrepresenting me, I'll stop psychoanalizing you.
"As a matter of personal experience, I’m taken in by deceptive appearances every day of my life."
ReplyDeleteThat's just how da guvment likes it.
I haven't seen Inception yet, but since it was mentioned I'll observe that movies, plays, books, etc. that are works of fiction require a momentary suspension of disbelief in order to apprehend the plot. I watched Avatar with my oldest son (age 14) the other day and watched him get into the plot. Just as he was getting worked up over the "evil" military and industry people and the "good" natives and liberal scientists I paused the movie and had him think through the intent of the authors. Once he realized what they were trying to do his perception of the world I started the movie and let him continue with the revelation of the deceptive worldview written into the elements of the movie. I was pleased to hear his comments change to correctly analyze the rest of the movie.
ReplyDeleteGod doesn't deceive us where he has clearly revealed the truth to us, even if his actions seems deceptive. We could say he was being deceptive when he told Moses that he wouldn't go with the Hebrews up to Israel. But we know that God knows all things and knew that since he ended up going with the Hebrews to Canaan that his purpose with Moses was to strengthen Moses as his leader among the people by shaping his character.
Likewise, God does not deceive us but gives us opportunity to trust what he told us over and against the false appearances of this world.
"Just as he was getting worked up over the "evil" military and industry people and the "good" natives and liberal scientists I paused the movie and had him think through the intent of the authors."
ReplyDeleteHi Jim,
My eldest is 8 years-old, a daughter. Do you think it's too early to try what you did with her? (I'm not speaking about Avatar. I'm speaking about any movie or tv show.)
Do you think your 14 year-old son could have done what he did recently with you when he was only 8?
Steve,
ReplyDeleteYou could perhaps avoid misunderstanding by making your arguments a bit clearer from the outset. I only just now fully realized, though I think I suspected, what your overall argumentative strategy has been on this issue:
"If it’s okay for God to deceive us when we dream, why is it not okay for God to deceive us when we’re awake? That’s the argument."
If I'm reading you correctly, both the dreaming example and the 'mountains appear small at a distance' example have tried to establish that we experience certain benign misperceptions-most seemingly due to our limited, anthropocentric perspective-that are 'natural' and do not count as deception on God's part.
I agree with you that these misperceptions are benign, and examples could be multiplied: our seeing a straight object as bent when seen through a glass of water, our seeing bands in what is really a continuous spectrum of rainbow light, etc. Even if in the latter case it took people a long time to figure it out (that the rainbow spectrum really is continuous), it wasn't deceptive because God did not make us perceive it a certain way, when we were really supposed to see it another way all along.
I would also include the model of the world as a flat disk with a hemispherical dome of sky above it that the biblical authors take for granted. Obviously it wasn't important that the biblical authors describe the Earth and its cosmic neighborhood with complete scientific accuracy to convey their message, which is primarily about the character of God and his relationship with his people.
But a crucially important difference between these cases and the apparent age and development problem, is that in all the above we do have a context from which we can recognize them as misperceptions and our own perspective as limited. It did not take people long to realize that mountains are actually freakin' big, or that a straight stick stays straight even when it seems bent in a glass of water. It is the same with dreams. Even in the case of dreams, even if the dreamer does take the world of the dream as fully real (although I'm just granting this for the sake of argument, I still don't fully buy it), dreams do end, they are recognized for what they are and the phrase 'ah, it was all a dream' is ubiquitous. This broader perspective does not eliminate the misperceptions, because we cannot escape our finite anthropocentric perspective, but it does make them benign consequences of that perspective.
If nature however, after careful study and the work of scientists who actively endeavor to neutralize those natural misperceptions (a vital component of science), does present the appearance of a long development through time, in continuity with our other experiences of change through time (as the corrosion of pipes for example indicates), when it is really only a few thousand years old and the apparent development didn't actually happen or happened at an accelerated rate, that I would not count as a benign misperception. It is not something we can plausibly account for due to the unavoidable limitations of our current perspective, and it would count as deception in my book.
JD, what's your view on the new earth? Do you think it either will not be "new," i.e., the numerically same earth just gets a "makeover", or do you think the new earth will "appear" new?
ReplyDeleteTUAD,
ReplyDeleteGiven the permiation of mass media in today's culture, particularly the influence of fiction drama on popular philosophy and the formation of worldviews, I've been giving my kids lessons in discernment and the media since they were old enough to be mesmerized by a TV program for more than a few minutes.
My wife and I have always monitored their media diet and reviewed everything with them.
Early on, I would pretend that the program were real and I would react to it humorously as though it were real. They would laugh, roll their eyes and say, "Dad. It's not real." As long as I did that often enough I knew they would grow up always with that in the back of their mind.
As they got older I have asked them questions about what they are watching with the goal of making them think about authorial intent. I knew they wouldn't have the beans in pre-adolescence to fully apprehend philosophical contitioning, but I wanted them to learn to always ask.
Now that my oldest is of the age to appreciate these things, I'm casually teaching him philosophy from a Christian perspective to go along with the basic theology they are getting through our nightly Bible reading. But I'm also watching a controlled set of movies for the purpose of teaching to think critically about them as well as have a cultural frame of reference for engaging the kids he comes in contact with in his involvement in the local Child Evangelism Fellowship chapter.
So, it's never really too early to teach kids discernment, but you have to think about how what we do today impacts the normalization of critical thought tomorrow.
Steve,
I apologize if this is a little off-topic, but it's at least tangential to the discussion.
Thanks very much for your help, Jim. It's really, really helpful for a dad like me who's trying to figure out what and where the minefields are and how to step around them.
ReplyDeletePaul,
ReplyDeleteI tend toward the view that it will be the same earth and the same universe, only transformed so that it is no longer a place of suffering and death, but only of life and flourishing and joy. Granted, the transformation will be pretty drastic, so much so that the NT authors seem to teeter totter between using language of the complete destruction of the old and replacement with the new, and the language of transformation of the same thing. But ultimately I lean towards transformation of the same universe for several reasons, one of which is that God is committed to his creation: all the times in the Bible where God is tempted to completely start over (the Flood, the people of Israel in the wilderness, etc.) he ends up working with and through what he has already created.
But regardless of what language we use for this change, I do not think the new heavens and the new earth will involve a blank state experience-wise. I think the history of the struggle for redemption will remain in memory, and will leave its traces in our new home. These traces and this memory will no longer be traumatic, certainly, and will not constitute a blemish on it, on the contrary, they will be ornaments of our understanding of God's wonderful purposes. But we will certainly recognize that 'the former things are passed away'.
JD, I asume you don't think you have the "same [physical] body" as the one you see in your baby pictures, so what do you mean by the "same [physical] universe?"
ReplyDeleteJD,
ReplyDeleteAlso, you say that this "same" universe will continue on everlasting, but science tells us that it will not. The appearances are that the sun will destroy us before it goes out, and the universe will eventually collapse. Earth will not survive entropy. Are these appearances deceptive? Is the universal testimony of science wrong?
Paul,
ReplyDelete"JD, I asume you don't think you have the "same [physical] body" as the one you see in your baby pictures, so what do you mean by the "same [physical] universe?""
I assume something about me will make me still be the same person when I have my resurrection body. I therefore assume there's something about the universe as a whole that will make it the same universe when it becomes new heavens and new earth. If we take Paul's reference to the believer as a 'new creation' too far, it becomes problematic to say that God 'saved' me, instead of destroying me and creating something new that is justified before him. Similarly, if the new heavens and new earth is something entirely new and the old universe is destroyed, there is little sense in Paul's saying that the whole creation is groaning, waiting for the revelation of the sons of God, if it won't be around to 'see' that revelation.
"Also, you say that this "same" universe will continue on everlasting, but science tells us that it will not. The appearances are that the sun will destroy us before it goes out, and the universe will eventually collapse. Earth will not survive entropy. Are these appearances deceptive? Is the universal testimony of science wrong?"
Science is not deceptive because it tells us what will happen to the universe if left to run its course. The Universe will wind down, unless something happens to radically change its character so that it is no longer subject to entropy and decay. BUT-and this is most important for our discussion-it will be evident that this has happened. The event will not seamlessly erase everything that went before. There will be-as Revelation acknowledges by having the saints remember their past torments and praise God for his just punishment of their tormenters-traces of the event in the new reality.
Going backwards in time, however, the scientist is examining precisely those traces of past events that have survived into the present. If conditions were different in the past, including things like the speed of light, scientists would be able to detect traces of those different conditions (some galaxies would exhibit a different redshift, for example). But so far as we can tell, with the exception of very local anomalies due to miracles and perhaps paranormal phenomena, the laws of nature that pertained at the beginning of the Universe were precisely the same as they are now.
JD,
ReplyDelete"I assume something about me will make me still be the same person when I have my resurrection body. I therefore assume there's something about the universe as a whole that will make it the same universe when it becomes new heavens and new earth."
I didn't ask whether you'd be the same *person*. I asked whether your *physical* body that you have now is numerically identical to the *physical* body in your baby pictures. I assume you don't believe that it is.
So, yes, we will be the same person even if our resurrected body were metal---though I don't think it will be. And this objection doesn't assume substance dualism. Even materialists like Corcoran deny body/person idenity.
However, I *do* agree with you that there will be "something" that accounts for ascriptions of sameness. For example, many Reformers, as well as other theologians, held to something like a "body template" that each of us has, and though our *physical* (material) body will be different, it will still be the "same body" since the new body is constructed according to the same body template.
But this isn't what I'm asking. My question was whether you meant the "same *physical* universe" by the claim "same universe." I think that view will get you into absurdities (of the same sort as body-identity theorists run into, and of the same sort brought out by the Ship of Theseus). But then if there's a *different* physical universe (yet it is the same in some sense other than numerically the same physical universe), I am wondering how you think this physical stuff will appear to you, or to scientists.
"Science is not deceptive because it tells us what will happen to the universe if left to run its course. The Universe will wind down, unless something happens to radically change its character so that it is no longer subject to entropy and decay."
I didn't say that science was deceptive, I said *creation* was. Things appear to have an expiration date, yet you claim that this appearance is misleading. Why can't this be donw, with similar modifications, when it comes to origins?
Jim,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that "deception" is not the best term. But since that's how the objection to YEC is commonly cast, I retain the favorite term of the critics, then construct an argument from analogy.
JD WALTERS SAID:
ReplyDelete“But a crucially important difference between these cases and the apparent age and development problem, is that in all the above we do have a context from which we can recognize them as misperceptions and our own perspective as limited. It did not take people long to realize that mountains are actually freakin' big, or that a straight stick stays straight even when it seems bent in a glass of water. It is the same with dreams. Even in the case of dreams, even if the dreamer does take the world of the dream as fully real (although I'm just granting this for the sake of argument, I still don't fully buy it), dreams do end, they are recognized for what they are and the phrase 'ah, it was all a dream' is ubiquitous. This broader perspective does not eliminate the misperceptions, because we cannot escape our finite anthropocentric perspective, but it does make them benign consequences of that perspective.”
So your “crucially important” distinction apparently boils down to the claim that a misperception (“deception”?) is benign in case it’s temporary and/or detectible/correctible.
Of course, that’s really, and merely, a difference in degree.
So it’s okay for primitive, prescientific observers to be permanently deceived by appearances. They have no way of knowing that apparently solid, colored objects are really colorless fields of energy.
In their case, the misperception is ineluctable. I’m not clear on how that’s benign rather than malign (by your calculus).
“If nature however, after careful study and the work of scientists who actively endeavor to neutralize those natural misperceptions (a vital component of science), does present the appearance of a long development through time, in continuity with our other experiences of change through time (as the corrosion of pipes for example indicates), when it is really only a few thousand years old and the apparent development didn't actually happen or happened at an accelerated rate, that I would not count as a benign misperception. It is not something we can plausibly account for due to the unavoidable limitations of our current perspective, and it would count as deception in my book.”
You seem to be insinuating that our natural sensory relays are defective, like a design-flaw, and it’s the duty of science to compensate for these innate deficiencies. But since, according to you, God designed these sensory relays, your position seems to impugn the wisdom and/or character of God. Does science correct God’s faulty craftsmanship?
"So your “crucially important” distinction apparently boils down to the claim that a misperception (“deception”?) is benign in case it’s temporary and/or detectible/correctible."
ReplyDeleteNope. First of all, misperception is not (necessarily) deception. Children have all kinds of mistaken folk physical and biological concepts that they eventually grow out of, but we don't think their parents are deceiving them when they don't correct them until they have the intellectual apparatus to appreciate the true concepts (my job as a teacher!).
Second, I did not say misperception was benign only in case it is temporary and/or detectible/correctible. A husband may have an affair kept hidden from his wife, who thus has a misperception that is all three, at least potentially (temporary, detectible, correctible) but it is certainly not benign in this case.
I was very clear: benign misperceptions are those that arise due to the inherent limitations of our anthropomorphic perspective, AND which are easily detectable/correctable, AND which do not involve God making us perceive things a certain way when we're really supposed to perceive them another way (for example when God gives rebellious people over to a delusion in order to damn them through it).
A creature with our kind of visual system will inevitably use some kind of depth perspective to order objects in its environment, just because of the amount of light, and the range of degrees of incidence, that can actually reach our eyes. And even though the appearance that faraway objects are smaller is not accurate, nevertheless it is a useful misperception because it does order objects in terms of those that are nearest, farther, and farthest away.
The same limitations on the amount of light that can reach our eyes and from which directions also creates the appearance that the Earth is a flat disc covered by a hemispherical dome.
Neither are these misperceptions design flaws, unless God's design was to create creatures who could perceive the world exactly as it is in its essence, a prerogative explicitly denied in many parts of the Bible, for example the book of Job.
But I honestly cannot for the life of me fathom where you are going with this. What do you make of the fact that we see distant objects as smaller than they really are, that we see a straight stick as bent in a glass of water, that we see rainbow light in bands rather than a continuous spectrum?
And is there any room in your worldview for a distinction between benign and malign misperceptions?
"So it’s okay for primitive, prescientific observers to be permanently deceived by appearances. They have no way of knowing that apparently solid, colored objects are really colorless fields of energy."
ReplyDeleteApparently God meant for there to be a progression in our understanding in at least some fields. We today enjoy all kinds of technologies and medicines that primitive, prescientific people had no access to. Was it a design flaw that God created human beings initially with no or very little technical knowledge? Even if you postulate that we had such knowledge but it was lost to the Fall, we still have God allowing that knowledge to be lost and for human beings to slowly, laboriously gain it back.
"You seem to be insinuating that our natural sensory relays are defective, like a design-flaw, and it’s the duty of science to compensate for these innate deficiencies."
I wouldn't call them defective, because that implies they were originally designed to process information in a quantity and/or mode that they cannot today. But they certainly are limited and misleading in many ways, and yes I would say that the duty of science is to compensate for those limitations, just like we use technology to compensate for the limitations in our bodily strength, or clothing for the limitations in our bodies' ability to regulate inner temperature.
"But since, according to you, God designed these sensory relays, your position seems to impugn the wisdom and/or character of God. Does science correct God’s faulty craftsmanship?"
Like I noted in my previous reply, God's craftsmanship would only be faulty if God designed human beings to function in a certain way, but which design failed to work as it was supposed to. This is independent of considerations of the Fall. For example, even if we hadn't fallen I think we would probably still have depth perception, but perhaps augmented by other faculties which would more than compensate for the limits of our eyesight.
But in any case, I certainly believe that God created the world incomplete and with work for humans to do to 'tame' and 'subdue' it, as you Steve have argued on more than one occasion. Was this incompleteness a design flaw?
I also think that God created us, not with perfect knowledge of creation, but with the capacity to obtain that knowledge. Was our initial ignorance of all physics, chemistry, etc. a design flaw?
On this whole concept of deception, isn't it true that our senses never stop deceiving us? I mean, I look at the computer screen in front of me and see a computer screen, but science tells me what I really see is my brain interpreting electrical signals caused by photon receptors in my eyes reacting to photons either reflected by the screen or emitted by the screen, depending on which portion of the screen I view. I see the screen as some type of physical object that has a certain physical properties, yet the reality is that the screen is actually mostly empty space and what seems to be hard plastic is really just the sum of many small atomic forces acting together.
ReplyDeleteGoing further than that, isn't it also the case that the vast majority of what I see I actually do not see, but rather my brain invents it as it takes certain key bits of information and ignores everything else, but presents me what appears to be a universal picture anyway? Perhaps you've seen the experiment when people are told they need to fill out a specific form at a desk, and when they ask for the form, the guy at the desk bends down to "get the form" and a completely different person--sometimes a different race and sex--gets up to hand over the form, and virtually *no one* notices the difference? Or the video when people show how you can change cards right in front of people during a trick and they won't notice the change...and then at the end of the film they show how during the filming, the clothes each person was wearing are changed, the color of the table the cards were set on changed, and the background picture behind them was changed. Is this deception when it's done right in plain sight, where there is nothing keeping you from seeing it except for your own brain ignoring the data?
JD WALTERS SAID:
ReplyDelete“But I honestly cannot for the life of me fathom where you are going with this.”
I don’t know what you find so mysterious. Critics of YEC say mature creation is “deceptive.” So I’ve come up with some trivially easy counterexamples.
“What do you make of the fact that we see distant objects as smaller than they really are, that we see a straight stick as bent in a glass of water, that we see rainbow light in bands rather than a continuous spectrum?”
What I make of it is that the argument from deception dies the death of a 1000 qualifications.
“And is there any room in your worldview for a distinction between benign and malign misperceptions?”
That depends on how you define your terms:
i) By “misperception,” do you mean something like a sensory impairment?
ii) Or do you use “misperception” as a shorthand expression for the misinterpretation of sensory input?
Likewise, by “malign,” do you mean:
i) ”Malign” in the pragmatic sense that certain types of misperception are hazardous to the percipient?
ii) Or to you mean “malign” in the moralistic sense that it would be unethical of God to allow and/or engineer certain types of misperception?
"Critics of YEC say mature creation is “deceptive.” So I’ve come up with some trivially easy counterexamples."
ReplyDeleteExcept your 'trivially easy counterexamples' are nowhere near in the same league as what the mature creationist proposes that God has done with the whole world. All your other examples of the mismatch between appearance and reality are an artifact of our perceptual (objects far away appear smaller, etc.) or imaginative (the brain throws up confused images synthesized on the basis of previous sensory experience during sleep) faculties. We are well aware of these limitations. They give us no reason for global skepticism, as they are both taken account of in a broader context in which they make sense as models or reflections of reality, not reality itself. Again, nobody thinks that faraway objects really are that small. From the waking standpoint, it is obvious that dreams are a product of a particular psycho-physiological state.
The mature creation view cannot be absolved as a reasonable extrapolation of these instances. The claim is that the processes upon which we rely to reconstruct the real past in any other context (such as erosion, sedimentation, meteor craters) arbitrarily break down at a certain point in the past (however many thousand years old YECers claim the Earth and the universe is) when all the evidence suggests that the same processes were also at work for much longer than that.
And the stopping point at which the ordinary processes of development break down really is arbitrary. The mature creationist has no argument against the idea that 'real' history started five minutes ago, complete with technological society, the decay of past civilizations, and even an implanted history of God's revelation through the Bible. Does the Bible say that God created the world six thousand years ago? It's all just a part of the background to the real story God wants to 'tell', which actually started five minutes ago.
Take Don Draper from Mad Men as an example (my details may be off, so the example is essentially my own). He bursts onto the New York advertising scene 'fully formed', complete with a past he stole from the real Don Draper, who fought in the Korean war and received a purple heart. Don Draper is actually Dick Whitman, a poor farm boy who escaped and reinvented himself as Don Draper. But you wouldn't know he wasn't Don Draper, and never fought in the war by asking him about it or looking into his employment records, or asking his wife (who only knew him as an adult), or browsing through any of his personal belongings, which were all carefully chosen to reflect his new persona.
This is a clear case of deception. He deliberately leads people to think that he is Don Draper when he is not, and his relationships with others are also deceptive because as Don Draper he allows others to think that he feels a certain way about them, when in actuality he thinks very differently, often diametrically opposite what they think he feels about them.
This is the real face of mature creation. Just as archeological and other remains from the past 100 years tell a certain story, which historians have largely been able to reconstruct, so the remains from the past 13.4 billion years of cosmic history tell a story, including a past state when the solar system was nothing but a disc of heavy elements whirling rapidly around the sun, before planets formed, and a past state when the Earth had no life on it whatsoever, a completely lifeless rock (and no water on it yet either), etc. But unlike the past 100 years of history, we are supposed to believe that past a certain arbitrary number of years, history breaks down and everything that we assumed happened before that point on the basis of the evidence actually took place very differently.
"What I make of it is that the argument from deception dies the death of a 1000 qualifications."
ReplyDeleteThat's not what I meant. I meant how do you explain those phenomena in your worldview? What is their significance? Why is our perception such that we are subject to those misperceptions?
In response to your other question about how I define misperception, I am not referring to sensory impairment, for example blindness, which is a condition in which a creature who was formed to see cannot for one reason or another, or even a case where one's vision is dimmed.
I'm referring to the various ways in which our perception is limited and categorical or 'artificial', due to our anthropocentric perspective. Examples could be multiplied. For example, the image we have of continuously taking in a line of text from left to right is an illusion, because our eyes are actually making discrete, abrupt 'leaps' from one orientation to another (called 'saccades'). But our brain 'fills in' these gaps to make our visual field seamless. There is also a blind spot on our retina which the brain also fills in.
Again, though, these don't count as deception. It's just the way we perceive our surroundings, which way is shaped more by our own needs as a social, mammalian species than by the directive to see the world as it really is.
JD said:
ReplyDelete---
The claim is that the processes upon which we rely to reconstruct the real past in any other context (such as erosion, sedimentation, meteor craters) arbitrarily break down at a certain point in the past (however many thousand years old YECers claim the Earth and the universe is) when all the evidence suggests that the same processes were also at work for much longer than that.
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If I may, there's no "evidence" to suggest that at all. What there is, is an assumption that the past is like the present, and that if that assumption is true then processes we see today would have been identical back before anyone was around to observe them functioning.
Peter,
ReplyDeleteI find it hard to take such an extreme paradigmatic/Kuhnian view very seriously, that all evidence is only evidence for something on certain assumptions, which assumptions cannot themselves be constrained by the evidence (at least that is what I think you have in mind, if not then forgive the misinterpretation). Observation may be theory-laden, and paradigms themselves may define what counts as data and what the meaningful questions are, but paradigm change is not arbitrary, and for several hundred years in the sciences it has been cumulative, trending towards knowledge that allows us to make predictions with ever greater accuracy, and introducing concepts which do not entirely overturn previous ones, but rather include them as limiting cases of the new ones.
Human reason does have traction on reality, despite the limitations of our anthropocentric perspective.
If it is mere assumption that the past resembled the present, then it is a darn good assumption and makes the most sense both of our own experience of history and of the record of the more distant past. Apart from local situations such as the Gospel miracles and perhaps paranormal events, the only place/time at which we have good reason to think that the natural processes we observe today were not operative in exactly the same form is at the Big Bang singularity.
I think Troeltsch was right that the principle of analogy is an indispensable precondition of historical investigation, although of course when I say that the past resembled the present, I include the possibility of miraculous events in that present, and therefore by extension to the past.
But I distinguish between those events and God's creation of the primordial raw material ex nihilo, which he then shaped into the world we see today. I follow Augustine in holding that miracles are not contrary to nature as such, but only nature as we know it and/or can influence.
JD said:
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If it is mere assumption that the past resembled the present, then it is a darn good assumption and makes the most sense both of our own experience of history and of the record of the more distant past.
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Except if the question of what happened in the more distant past is the question under discussion, the assumption is question begging.
For the record, I am not YEC. I don't believe Genesis 1 is talking about literal days. In fact, my opinion is that time was created on Day 4, since that's when the sun and stars and the moon were created specifically to differentiate time.
However, none of that convinces me of the veracity of scientific claims for the age of the universe. I've studied what scientists use to determine how large the universe is (in order to determine how long it's been expanding). Did you know that stellar parallaxes are not even accurate beyond the Milky Way? Did you know that we examine the relative brightness of certain Cepheid stars to determine how far away they are, and that that determination is based on the assumption that the brightness of the star is relative to the rate at which the star pulsates, and thus the combination of the apparent magnitude with the size of the star tells us how far away the star is--yet, Polaris is a Cepheid star and it's apparent brightness has *increased* visibly just in the last century alone? How certain are we that these stars can yield accurate distances after all? And if they can't yield accurate distances, then we can't know how long the universe has been expanding (even assuming we have an accurate expansion rate that never varied throughout time).
Indeed, do you not find it disturbing that based on current calculations, more than 90% of the matter in the universe is dark matter or dark energy, which by definition cannot be observed yet? If I had a model that said what we see is only 6% of reality, then I think I would question the model as being an accurate depiction of reality. I mean, essentially right now the only proof for dark matter is that it's necessary for the math to work, which is hardly convincing proof to those who believe models should, you know, model reality and not the other way around.
Finally, without an observer, time is meaningless. Let's move it to the Earth. All you can say is that the Earth moved around the Sun 5 billion times before people were on it. But with no observer there, in what sense can you say it took 5 billion years? Besides which, relativity shows us that there is no objective observer of time anyway. To a photon released at the Big Bang, the universe is aged 0. Given that, is it even meaningful to say the Earth is any specific age? Indeed, given that, is it meaningful to say that any time frame *is true* while the other time frames are *deceptive*?