Saturday, August 14, 2010

Keeping God on a leash

JD WALTERS SAID:

“There is nothing whatsoever sinister about God designing us that way.”

I didn’t say there was anything “sinister” about it. I’m simply addressing the argument from “deception,” so popular among opponents of YEC. God has designed us in such at way that, barring lucid dreams, we are fooled by dreams (to take one example). I don’t think that’s sinister either.

“There IS something sinister about leaving traces through the world and the universe of natural events that never happened.”

There’s nothing more sinister about that than certain nature miracles.

“If you don't see something wrong with Dick Whitman (from Mad Men) passing himself off to everyone else as Don Draper, complete with a purple heart from service in the Korean war (in which he never fought), a forged employment history, personal belongings carefully chosen to fit the new persona and insincere relationships, then I can't help you. You must have some different definition of deception than I do.”

All you’re doing is to stipulate an analogy. Since I don’t acknowledge the accuracy of your comparison, it’s beside the point.

“My objection was to the idea that there are different rules for evaluating physical evidence than there are for evaluating worldviews.”

Which is not the same thing as how to correctly interpret a story about the world.

“So how and for what reasons would you reject those views?”

I don’t see why I should head down that rabbit trail right now. I’ve blogged on both issues in the past.

“That's why I said, all three things, the Bible, Christian theological reflection, and science point to creation ex nihilo starting at the absolute beginning of the cycle. There is no indication from any of those sources that the world sprang into existence mature and fully formed. God started with some formless raw material, which he then progressively differentiated and developed into what we see today.”

i) On the traditional reading of Genesis, God doesn’t take the molecules-to-man approach. Instead, he creates cyclical, self-replicated processes. So he does, indeed, instantiate the cycle at a later phase in the cycle.

Of course, you can take issue with the traditional reading, but it’s not as if you can treat the Bible as prima facie evidence for your macroevolutionary position.

ii) ”Christian reflection” is not a source of information regarding what happened.

iii) For reasons I’ve already given, science can only deal with appearances, including the appearance of origins. But depending on where in the cycle the universe was instantiated (by fiat creation ex nihilo), that would incorporate the appearance of earlier stages in the cycle.

“I don't see what the big deal is. Who ever thought that because my watch shows 2010 as the current year means the watch has actually been ticking for that long?”

Because you’re operating from a principle of reverse linear extrapolation, taking the current readout (the present) as your frame of reference, then running everything backwards.

But you can’t tell from the current readout when I set my watch. Maybe it says 2PM. Maybe I set my watch at 12 PM. You can hypothetically extrapolate way past the time I set my watch. You could go back to 6AM, or whatever. But that abstract extrapolation doesn’t correspond to the real time-setting.

Same problem when you mentally run natural periodic processes in reverse. They don’t tell you when they were set. They just give you the “time” (figuratively speaking) from the moment they were set. But at what phase of the cycle was the cycle phased in? The cycle can’t tell you that. Your inference is naïve.

“…anymore than all the clocks in a city suddenly stopping for an hour and then starting again simultaneously means that an hour hadn't elapsed.”

But since all the clocks are synchronized, and all the clocks are off by an hour, you can’t tell what time it really is.

“I don't think the watch reading is a very good analogy to a universe created in medias res, precisely because we never use the watch reading to find out when it was set.”

Which is your problem. Natural “chronometers” are all you’ve got. So you’re using one natural process to time another natural process. Using one “clock” to calibrate another “clock.” But, of course, that’s circular.

Now that may be adequate for constructing a relative chronology, but it won’t get you an absolute chronology.

“Not on my definition. Before there is a regular course of nature with which we can contrast miracles, there is just an act of God.”

The act of God initiates the “regular course of nature.”

“In the example you gave, the parents were infertile. That would be reflected in their medical histories, and the fact that the mother had a baby anyway would be evidence that a miracle had occurred, just like in the case of Sarah in the OT.”

No, in the example I gave, the wife is prone to miscarriage. But let’s spend more time on this general issue:

i) Take a miracle of timing. Maybe I’m in a bind, and I can’t see anyway out. Maybe I don’t even pray about it. But “out of the blue,” something highly unlikely and totally unexpected happens that solves my problem.

Now, to an outsider, judging by appearances, there may be nothing special about the timing of the event. And that’s because the timing of the event is only meaningful to me, in my situation. The relevance of the timing is person-variable. What is opportune for one individual isn’t opportune for another.

ii) Or take answered prayer. If I offered the prayer, I may be in a position to recognize the significance of the outcome as an answer to prayer. That doesn’t mean a second party can also recognize this outcome as an answer to prayer.

If I told him in advance what I prayed about, he’d be privy to the same information. But he couldn’t know the contents of a silent prayer otherwise.

Now that answered prayer will impact events further down the line. But this doesn’t mean someone five generations later can reverse engineer the cause. That someone may be a long-range beneficiary of the prayer. But he doesn’t know that. There’s nothing miraculous in the immediate circumstances of his life. And he can’t retrace the process unless he has enough trace evidence to work with. Even if the answered prayer triggered a chain-reaction, he can’t go back through all the train of events if there are missing links. Without continuous evidence for the intervening events, the trail runs dry.

Yet if we believe that answered prayer is a factor in historical causation, then there are countless instances in which answered prayers impact the outcome even though it won’t be possible at this stage of the game to detect their contribution. Yet that isn’t reducible to a closed continuum of physical cause-and-effect.

“There's no problem with the admission that many outcomes involve supernatural influences, but in particular cases we should start with the presumption of natural causes because human beings are remarkably prone to false positives when it comes to the supernatural.”

Our assumptions shouldn’t exceed what we know. Since there are supernatural factors in history, like angelic/demonic activity, answered prayers, miracles of timing, &c., it would be a false assumption to presume that everything happens by physical cause and effect unless proven otherwise. Your artificial presumption is a recipe for false negatives rather than false positives. That’s no improvement. That’s no truer to the facts than the opposing extreme.

“Take a case for example when loved ones pray for someone's recovery from cancer, but it is not God's will to heal that person. A completely natural remission may then be interpreted as God's answering their prayers, only for the loved ones' joy to come crashing down when the remission is followed by a relapse and then death.”

i) I don’t know that spontaneous remission from cancer is “completely natural.” I tend to think “spontaneous remission” is just a euphemism for medical ignorance. And lots of doctors believe in the power of prayer.

ii) On the one hand, we need to be cautious when we attempt to discern God’s providence, for it’s always possible to misinterpret God’s providence. An apparent answer to prayer may not be an answer to prayer.

iii) On the other hand, we shouldn’t be so cautious, on that account, that we never thank God for apparent answers to prayer or other blessings which befall us. Gratitude is the hallmark of the Christian pilgrimage.

“Finding the truth involves the twin tasks of being open to possible truth, but also avoiding error. The presumption of natural causes is a method that contributes to the latter task.”

Since, according to Christian theism, both natural and supernatural factors shape history, and do so on a regular basis, your naturalistic bias is a recipe for misinterpreting the world.

“I'm not at all threatened by that idea. A presumption of natural causes does not mean that I will always conclude that an event had natural causes (that would be naturalism). The presumption is the starting point, not the ending point.”

Actually, I think you’re overreacting to your religious upbringing. To overcompensate for your cultic charismatic background, you’ve gone to the opposite extreme. That’s how you play it safe.

“Is there the danger that that presumption, which is designed to protect against false positives, will also result in some false negatives? Sure. But that's the balancing act we all have to perform in our efforts to find the truth and avoid error.”

You’re not “balancing” the two. By definition, your one-sided presumption artificially tips the scales.

“Which implies that you do think there is a meaningful distinction between the two.”

i) My belief about the Virgin Birth isn’t based on a general presumption one way or the other. Rather, that is based on specific information.

ii) And I didn’t say there was no meaningful distinction between natural and supernatural factors, although that’s often a difference of degree rather than kind, since every event is ultimately an act of God.

But to draw a distinction is not to create a presumption. It certainly doesn’t mean we should treat physical factors as the default assumption, which can only be overridden by evidence to the contrary.

“The problem is with God creating a world with lots of evidence of events that never happened. Let's keep our eyes on the target here.”

I don’t see that as a problem. God didn’t run through the usual process of conception, gestation, and maturation to make Adam and Eve. He created them as full-grown adults. Same thing with the miracle at Cana, and the feeding of the multitude. These are paradigm-cases of God doing what you find so unbearable.

Of course, you interpret Gen 2 parabolically. I don’t.

“This is not about some physical effects being due to natural and some to supernatural causes. This is about part of the road we can see going off into the horizon being real, and the rest being merely an illusion on a convincing matte painting.”

You don’t base your position on divine precedent. Rather, you begin with your preconceived idea of what God should or shouldn’t do.

Yes, you’ve tried to justify your position exegetically (God’s “commitment to creation”), but since you treat your prooftexts parabolically, that doesn’t tell us what God really did.

“And I find it hard to deny that it does help weed out false positives.”

It weeds out some false positives to clear the ground for planting some false negatives.

“There is already enough of that in the form of belief in astrology, homeopathy, astral projection, fake mediums, etc. which I'm sure you reject at least prima facie as well.”

The occult is rife with charlatans. But the occult also has a basis in reality.

Conversely, I don’t see that methodological atheism is any improvement over superstition.

“I will accept as many miracles as there is good evidence for. No more, no less”

The question at issue is not what you believe in any particular case. As I’ve been arguing, we frequently need to suspend judgment because we know, in the abstract, that both natural and supernatural factors shape history, but we generally don’t know how that pans out in any particular case.

You, however, don’t want to withhold judgment. You want to begin with an artificially and frankly unchristian presumption which is hostile to supernatural factors. By contrast, I reserve judgment unless I have evidence that points in one direction or another.

“Like I've said, there are two dangers in our search for truth: false positives and false negatives. We should try to avoid both errors equally.”

But your naturalistic presumption is inherently inequitable. You have your thumb on the scales to tilt it against the supernatural dynamic. You put a 100 lb. weight on one side of the scales, then defy the Christian to counterbalance that starting-point.

“And all these actions presuppose the stable operation of natural processes. Do you hoist yourself from a rope when you go down the stairs on the way to the hospital because you don't know whether God plans to keep the stairs in existence or make them disappear into nothing?”

The longer you talk, the more you sound like a closet atheist. You act as if divine intervention is equivalent to parlor tricks. Weird, capricious anomalies.

That’s how unbelievers attack Biblical miracles. They come up with absurd counterexamples to ridicule Biblical miracles, as if Biblical miracles are analogous to silly, whimsical events–depicting God as a two-year-old with omnipotent powers.

“There are cases where it is reasonable to focus on wondering just how God intends to work, usually salient events like a sickness, or perhaps a missionary in jail for distributing Bibles.”

Which misses the point. I didn’t suggest that we should focus on how God “intends” to work. I said we shouldn’t prejudge his methods.

“But by and large we all take for granted the stable operation of natural processes.”

How do you pray, exactly? Or do you still pray? Do you pray like this:

“Lord, I take for granted that prayer is normally futile, given the closed causal continuum, so with that disclaimer in mind, I pray that…”

Moving along:

“And speaking of quantification, I think most people can attest to the fact that in most cases of illness God does not supernaturally heal. Such miracles are comparatively rare. That is certainly not grounds for excluding the possibility that in any given case God will work a miracle, but it does properly provide a clue of God's normal mode of operation.”

i) Which is irrelevant to what I said. Since you don’t know in advance what mode of operation God will use, you both pray for your friend and take him to the doctor. But maybe I’m assuming too much about you. Maybe you’re at the point where you don’t bother to pray.

ii) On a related note, I don’t know how you quantify the results. How would you know what percentage of patients are healed as a result of prayer? After all, if a patient is the recipient of prayer and medical invention alike, and if he’s cured, how can you tell which factor was the differential factor? (Or maybe both in conjunction).

You seem to be assuming that a miraculous healing would be spectacular. Why?

“No, because presumably there have been enough cases of terminal cancer that have been allowed to run their course for doctors to have a good understanding of its evolution. If God's supernatural healing is comparatively rare, and if by implication God intends most healing to be natural with the aid of doctors, then it would be churlish of God not to provide medical researchers with a sufficient number of cases in which the diseases are allowed to take their course in order for researchers to develop effective medicines and treatments.”

So do you think Christians should have a prayer quota? If my father and my brother both come down with cancer, should I pray for one but not the other? “Sorry, I won’t pray for both of you because if God answered my prayer, that might mess up cancer research. And, after all, cancer patients exist for the sake of cancer research, not vice versa. So I’ll flip a coin.”

“What matters are not the events leading up to the experiment, but whether, under the same initial conditions, we get the same outcomes.”

Just because you want to arbitrarily limit your illustration to the actual lab conditions rather than historical factors leading up to that situation doesn’t mean I should feel constrained by your example. I don’t isolate the present from the past.

“The worry is whether the same initial conditions will lead to different outcomes in a substantial majority of cases due to supernatural influence.”

Yes, that worrisome divine-foot-in-the-door. If God comes knocking, we better make sure we have the door locked and the security system armed. Maybe have a guard dog on the premises just in case the double bolt gives way and God breaks in. Come to think of it, we should also keep some sawed-off shotguns at the ready.

“In which case, there are no regularities of nature to speak of, and there is no science to be learned.”

Science is not an end in itself. And, of course, you’re setting up a false antithesis.

“Of course, we should distinguish between operational science, which aims to discover natural regularities, and origin or reconstructive science, which aims to reconstruct past events from present evidence. The legitimacy of both is threatened if natural regularities are interrupted too frequently and too arbitrarily, but the danger is somewhat different in each case.”

At the very least, God should submit a schedule. We can’t have him show up unannounced just any time he pleases. All visitations must be prearranged with the social secretary. If she approves, then we will give him an hour of our time. But God needs to learn how to act like a proper houseguest. He can’t just barge in day or night.

“My citing of Genesis 1:14 was not disingenuous. Remember, even though I don't read these chapters as history, I still aim to derive theological truth from it. I think it's clear that one of the truths the author meant to convey with that verse is that God was concerned that certain natural processes would allow people to keep time.”

While solar and lunar calendars may be adequate for religious festivals, they are hardly exacting. That’s why various gimmicks (e.g. intercalation) must be used to keep them from falling in arrears.

“While the world endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and warm, day and night do not cease.”

While church history endures, answers to prayer do not cease.

9 comments:

  1. OK, it looks like we're talking past each other at this point. You still think mature creation is analogous to the limitations of our perception and the phenomenon of dreaming and just as benign, while I think there is a big difference between the two.

    "On the traditional reading of Genesis, God doesn’t take the molecules-to-man approach. Instead, he creates cyclical, self-replicated processes. So he does, indeed, instantiate the cycle at a later phase in the cycle."

    Even on the traditional reading I don't see any evidence that he started any of the cycles at a later point. When God commands the Earth to put forth vegetation, it doesn't say whether you would have seen fully mature plants spring into existence out of nowhere, or whether they would have sprouted from the ground, going through their full developmental process. The same goes for when God commands the waters to 'swarm' with living creatures. All it says is that "it was so."

    But I do see clear evidence even on the traditional view for God starting with a primordial raw material in its most shapeless form, which he then proceeds to differentiate and structure. I'm not sure what your point is about 'self-replicating cycles'.

    "For reasons I’ve already given, science can only deal with appearances, including the appearance of origins. But depending on where in the cycle the universe was instantiated (by fiat creation ex nihilo), that would incorporate the appearance of earlier stages in the cycle."

    I think the evidence is clear that the cycle started from the beginning, in which the earth was formless and empty, the same words Jeremiah uses for the chaos associated with God's judgment.

    Unless you think that the state of the universe in which it was formless and empty is just an appearance of an earlier stage in the cycle.

    "But you can’t tell from the current readout when I set my watch. Maybe it says 2PM. Maybe I set my watch at 12 PM. You can hypothetically extrapolate way past the time I set my watch. You could go back to 6AM, or whatever. But that abstract extrapolation doesn’t correspond to the real time-setting."

    In which case there is no defense against the idea that the world really did start five minutes ago, with all appearances to the contrary being merely an appearance of earlier phases in the cycle.

    I don't know about you, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that yesterday was a real day for me. And the day before that. And the past hundred years. And the past thousand. And...unless you can justify that process completely stopping at some arbitrary point, no matter what supernatural influences may be at work in nature, I'm going to say that the appearance that cosmic history goes back at least as far as the Big Bang is real.

    And I really don't see why the two are in opposition. Let's say history really did start only 6,000 years ago. For however long there has been real history, there have been supernatural influences. That doesn't mean the history wasn't real. On the contrary, real history forms the stable backdrop against which natural and supernatural factors combine to tell God's story.

    Accepting the influence of supernatural influences in history does not require us to believe that history past a certain arbitrary point is only apparent.

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  2. "Which is your problem. Natural “chronometers” are all you’ve got. So you’re using one natural process to time another natural process. Using one “clock” to calibrate another “clock.” But, of course, that’s circular."

    Actually, we can do better than compare rates with rates. We can determine the distance between the Earth and faraway stellar objects (using methods like parallax, standard candles, etc.), and then use the fact that in special relativity the speed of light is a cosmological invariant to calculate how long it would take for light from those objects to reach the Earth. The time interval established for the farthest away object we can observe sets a minimum value on the age of the Universe.

    If you want to dispute this dating scheme you have two choices: posit that the earlier stages of the light traveling to Earth are only apparent, or posit that the speed of light was a whole lot different only a few thousand years ago. Needless to say, I think both options are pretty desperate and clumsy.

    "Since, according to Christian theism, both natural and supernatural factors shape history, and do so on a regular basis, your naturalistic bias is a recipe for misinterpreting the world."

    And I think in practice people default to the 'naturalistic' bias all the time. In any case, I think your attempt to find an Archimedean point between each of the two possible ultimate causes, trying neither to lean a priori toward one direction or the other, is precarious and unstable.

    "Actually, I think you’re overreacting to your religious upbringing. To overcompensate for your cultic charismatic background, you’ve gone to the opposite extreme. That’s how you play it safe."

    I saw lots of people, including my parents, get very badly hurt by promiscuous claims to miracles and revelation. God revealed to middle-aged men that underage girls should have sex with them 'out of love'. He also revealed that it was his will for my younger brother to be tied to a chair with tape over his mouth for hours at a time for 'correctional' purposes, my parents not being allowed to see him at all (he was SEVEN YEARS OLD). He also revealed that the cult leader's teenage daughter, who refused to have sex with her father and other men in the 'royal' household, was possessed and should be subject to a brutal exorcism involving beatings and abuse.

    And you have the nerve to casually dismiss my resulting caution in the face of supernatural claims as 'overcompensating'.

    In some of your reviews of universalists you attribute their (mistaken, in your view) sentimentalism to them having grown up within the safe haven of the Church, and taking its coziness and warmth for granted.

    Well I don't know what your background has been, but something insulating has definitely made you callous to the experience of others.

    If 'playing it safe' means I don't fall prey to those kinds of abusive, demonic claims (which I bought hook, line and sinker, because hey who was I to go against the Endtime prophet?), then I consider a few false negatives a worthy trade-off.

    Instead of insinuating that I might be a closet atheist, maybe you should be praising God that I emerged with my confidence in the essentials of the faith still intact. Unless your zeal for meticulously correct doctrine outweighs your desire that none of God's sheep be lost. It is only by the grace of God that I am still a Christian. Many, many people who left the same cult became hard-core atheists, or because they were raised in isolation from the world and never learned a real vocation were forced into prostitution and stripping to make ends meet, and many just committed suicide.

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  3. P.S. about your accusatory title. What you call keeping God on a leash, I call keeping human gullibility and manipulativeness on a leash. Perhaps you're lucky and in your experience you haven't had to make a trade-off between false positives and false negatives in the supernatural. I do. I have to bear that cross.

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  4. “Even on the traditional reading I don't see any evidence that he started any of the cycles at a later point. When God commands the Earth to put forth vegetation, it doesn't say whether you would have seen fully mature plants spring into existence out of nowhere, or whether they would have sprouted from the ground, going through their full developmental process. The same goes for when God commands the waters to 'swarm' with living creatures. All it says is that ‘it was so.’"

    i) You’re confusing what I said with the notion of instantaneous creation, as if God did everything in a split second. But on the traditional reading it took 6 calendar days. However, what he did in each case is to create natural kinds–along with their ecological zones. He made a fully functioning universe. He didn’t run through the usual reproductive cycles to attain the result.

    ii) Since plants are rooted in the earth, a creation account of plants will logically mention plants in conjunction with their natural habitant.

    iii) What’s the point of your reference to the creation of aquatic life? Do you think salt water produces marine animals?

    iv) Yes, it’s possible to have a staircase process, where a higher stair builds on a lower stair, such as the creation of Adam from the earth, and the creation of Eve from the man. But the account doesn’t have God first making one ovum and one sperm, then fertilizing the ovum with the sperm in a Petri dish, then placing the fertilized ovum in a Borg incubation chamber to gestate, &c.

    “But I do see clear evidence even on the traditional view for God starting with a primordial raw material in its most shapeless form, which he then proceeds to differentiate and structure.”

    That depends on how you construe the syntax of 1:1. Did God begin with preexisting material, or did he create the preexisting material in 1:1. There is also a difference between the notion that God created places (heaven & earth), which he later furnished, and the notion that God created later things “from” the preexisting stuff.

    “I'm not sure what your point is about 'self-replicating cycles'.”

    He didn’t create a tree from a seed. Rather, he created a seed-bearing tree.

    “I think the evidence is clear that the cycle started from the beginning, in which the earth was formless and empty, the same words Jeremiah uses for the chaos associated with God's judgment. Unless you think that the state of the universe in which it was formless and empty is just an appearance of an earlier stage in the cycle.”

    You’re equivocating. Is a house unfinished because a house is unfurnished? That depends on what you mean. An empty room can be a finished room. It’s like the creation of the tabernacle. First make the tabernacle, then make the furnishings. First make the inner sanctum, then make the sanctuary. Each element is complete on its own terms, but incomplete in relation to the whole.

    “In which case there is no defense against the idea that the world really did start five minutes ago, with all appearances to the contrary being merely an appearance of earlier phases in the cycle.”

    There would be a defense against that idea if we have record of what really happened (i.e. Gen 1-2), for in that case we’re not reliant on appearances alone.

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  5. Cont. “I don't know about you, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that yesterday was a real day for me. And the day before that. And the past hundred years. And the past thousand. And...unless you can justify that process completely stopping at some arbitrary point, no matter what supernatural influences may be at work in nature, I'm going to say that the appearance that cosmic history goes back at least as far as the Big Bang is real.”

    Well, coming right on the heels of your allusion to Last Thursdayism, I’m not sure what that chest-thumping pronouncement is supposed to prove. Remember that Russell floated that thought-experiment precisely because it was unfalsifiable. His hypothetical is empirically adequate and empirically equivalent. Therefore, your appeal does nothing to disprove it. It’s not as if young-earth creationism is vulnerable to that thought-experiment while theistic evolution is exempt.

    “And I really don't see why the two are in opposition. Let's say history really did start only 6,000 years ago. For however long there has been real history, there have been supernatural influences. That doesn't mean the history wasn't real. On the contrary, real history forms the stable backdrop against which natural and supernatural factors combine to tell God's story.”

    i) On YEC, history has been real for as long as there has been real history–commencing with Day One.

    ii) Also, for somebody who’s so captivated by modern science, you have an oddly quaint notion of “real history.” What about the alternate histories in quantum mechanics? Are those “real” histories? “Real” in relation to what? Our history?

    “Accepting the influence of supernatural influences in history does not require us to believe that history past a certain arbitrary point is only apparent.”

    One of the problems with this exchange is that you hop back and forth between one issue and another, then act as if, by trying to prove or disprove one thing, you automatically prove or disprove another. Even if we grant you your evolutionary biology, historical geology, and conventional cosmology, that doesn’t create any negative presumption in human history regarding the role of supernatural factors. Indeed, we’d expect the supernatural factors to increase over time, for Christians can pray, unlike Trilobites.

    “Actually, we can do better than compare rates with rates. We can determine the distance between the Earth and faraway stellar objects (using methods like parallax, standard candles, etc.), and then use the fact that in special relativity the speed of light is a cosmological invariant to calculate how long it would take for light from those objects to reach the Earth. The time interval established for the farthest away object we can observe sets a minimum value on the age of the Universe.”

    And by what non-circular method do you establish the rate of light speed, or the rate of cosmic expansion?

    “If you want to dispute this dating scheme you have two choices: posit that the earlier stages of the light traveling to Earth are only apparent, or posit that the speed of light was a whole lot different only a few thousand years ago. Needless to say, I think both options are pretty desperate and clumsy.”

    Actually, I could simply dispute temporal metrical objectivism.

    “And I think in practice people default to the 'naturalistic' bias all the time.”

    Reflexive atheism.

    “In any case, I think your attempt to find an Archimedean point between each of the two possible ultimate causes, trying neither to lean a priori toward one direction or the other, is precarious and unstable.”

    How is it “precarious and unstable” to consider each event on a case-by-case basis, and admit ignorance when we’re ignorant of all the causes?

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  6. "You’re confusing what I said with the notion of instantaneous creation, as if God did everything in a split second. But on the traditional reading it took 6 calendar days. However, what he did in each case is to create natural kinds–along with their ecological zones. He made a fully functioning universe. He didn’t run through the usual reproductive cycles to attain the result."

    I think the passage doesn't say either way. It doesn't say what it means for the earth to 'put forth' vegetation, as in knowledge of what that process of putting forth involves.

    Obviously the first plants and animals weren't born reproductively, but then again neither were they born reproductively in an evolutionary sequence either.

    But to look to Genesis for evidence of the emergence of biological and geological processes is anachronistic. Ancient people simply didn't have that knowledge. Even when YECers deny evolution they still have modern biology in mind when they speculate whether Adam had a navel, or whether Eve had more ribs than Adam.

    To my mind what is important is what the narrative as a whole suggests about how God creates. Things emerge from the primordial raw material, from formlessness to form. There is no indication that what God created would come fully formed with a previous biological or geological history that never happened. We're reading too much into these narratives if we speculate like that.

    You seem to be arguing exclusively from an a priori philosophical concept of creation ex nihilo when you infer that it wouldn't allow us to say at what point in the 'cycle' creation came into being. There is no such speculation in the Bible.

    Even ex nihilo creations that might have been involved in the nature miracles, like the multiplication of loaves and fishes, do not give warrant for assuming that that's what happened in the original creation. The miracles take place against the backdrop of an already existing creation, and obviously God wasn't going to wait billions of years to bring the fish Jesus needed into being for the hungry crowds. This was a special case, which does have some affinity with God's original creation to be sure, as they are both of the same author, but the two scenarios are not completely analogous.

    "What’s the point of your reference to the creation of aquatic life? Do you think salt water produces marine animals?"

    No, my point was that, as I said above, we should not read any kind of modern biology into these narratives. When God says, let the waters swarm with living creatures, we have knowledge of what 'swarm' entailed. We can't read into it that fish popped into existence (whether instantaneously or gradually) with a previous developmental history that never happened. It's a word picture.

    All the propositional knowledge we get from Genesis about creation is that God created and ordered the universe to make it a place that reflected his glory (see the 'cosmic temple' exegesis of Walton, Beale, Alexander and others). Any other inferences about what the biology of the first created things was like, etc. is unwarranted.

    Like I said, your philosophical speculation about the point at which creation ex nihilo instantiated a cycle is just that, speculation. There is biblical warrant for it.

    And in the absence for such warrant, I think it's best to infer that real history goes back as far as we have physical evidence for it, which is 13.4 billion years.

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  7. "Yes, it’s possible to have a staircase process, where a higher stair builds on a lower stair, such as the creation of Adam from the earth, and the creation of Eve from the man. But the account doesn’t have God first making one ovum and one sperm, then fertilizing the ovum with the sperm in a Petri dish, then placing the fertilized ovum in a Borg incubation chamber to gestate, &c."

    No, the account doesn't have that, and it wouldn't. This is precisely the anachronistic reading that is inappropriate to Genesis, as I explained in the previous comment. Both inferences about cultivation of fertilized ovums, and inferences about the emergence of fully formed organisms are unwarranted.

    "That depends on how you construe the syntax of 1:1. Did God begin with preexisting material, or did he create the preexisting material in 1:1."

    God did create the preexisting material, but as formless and chaotic. It was not 'mature', and its description is precisely meant to convey that it wouldn't have had any prior development. Development starts with God's process of differentiation and sequencing.

    "There would be a defense against that idea if we have record of what really happened (i.e. Gen 1-2), for in that case we’re not reliant on appearances alone."

    No, we would still be reliant upon appearances, because the biblical record itself might be part of the cycle prior to when God actually created.

    "Well, coming right on the heels of your allusion to Last Thursdayism, I’m not sure what that chest-thumping pronouncement is supposed to prove. Remember that Russell floated that thought-experiment precisely because it was unfalsifiable. His hypothetical is empirically adequate and empirically equivalent. Therefore, your appeal does nothing to disprove it. It’s not as if young-earth creationism is vulnerable to that thought-experiment while theistic evolution is exempt."

    Except I take the point of such global skepticism exercises as proving that it's really quite silly to worry about them. Merely postulating that it's conceivable that the universe popped into existence fully formed five minutes ago gives us absolutely no reason to think that might be true.

    In the absence of such a reason, when theistic evolutionists look at the Earth's developmental record they will properly assume that it was part of real history. They see no reason to think that God started the cycle in medias res (and the biblical creation account is not a reason for them to do so either, because as I said above it doesn't give us that kind of information).

    But if the YEC account is true, and the biblical God would do something like that (start the cycle in medias res), then we would have reason to worry about exactly when in the cycle God started. And the biblical account doesn't help for the reason I gave above: the account itself could be part of the appearances.

    And since you're trying to absolve the YEC God of deception for creating at least some appearances of things that never happened, you can't protest that it would deceptive for part of the biblical framework of real history to also be apparent.

    Either God is justified in creating a cycle in medias res, with appearances of events that never happened, and we cannot give any reasons for thinking that real history starts at any particular point on the cycle, or we (rightly, I think) assume that empirical experience is continuous, and when we see traces of events that happened in the distant past we infer that they actually happened, and we follow those traces as far as there is evidence for: presently the Big Bang, 13.4 billion years ago.

    Note that this is an entirely different issue (as you rightly point out) from whether there are supernatural factors at work in real history. Even with the contribution of supernatural influences, appearances are that, whether due to natural or supernatural influences, real history extends back at least 13.4 billion years.

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  8. "Also, for somebody who’s so captivated by modern science, you have an oddly quaint notion of “real history.” What about the alternate histories in quantum mechanics? Are those “real” histories? “Real” in relation to what? Our history?"

    I'm not 'captivated' by modern science. I'm captivated by what there's good evidence for. And the Wheeler-Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is just that, an interpretation, and to my mind a not very convincing one. QM is a formal apparatus that is consistent with several metaphysical pictures. As there seem to be severe logical problems with Wheeler-Everett, some of which you point out, I go with the Copenhagen or decoherence pictures.

    And I've requested more than once that you stop psychologizing and stereotyping me. Phrases like having a 'fanatical need to compartmentalize' or being 'captivated by modern science' do not encourage goodwill on the part of your interlocutors.

    "Even if we grant you your evolutionary biology, historical geology, and conventional cosmology, that doesn’t create any negative presumption in human history regarding the role of supernatural factors. Indeed, we’d expect the supernatural factors to increase over time, for Christians can pray, unlike Trilobites."

    Thank you, you've just granted my whole argument!

    Remember, one of the original charges you laid against theistic evolutionists is that they are inconsistent to both accept miracles and complain that the YEC mature creation scheme would make God deceptive, since if they accept the ex nihilo creation of mature fish in the miracle of the loaves and fishes, how can they rule out that happening at the start of creation.

    But I think we've established the consistency between accepting supernatural influences in the context of real history and at the same time insisting that, from the appearance of real history and the long unfolding of natural processes, we should in fact infer real history.

    And the mature creation view is still not off the hook, because as I explained above you just can't get around the arbitrariness of postulating when real history actually starts.

    You may dispute the last one, but I think at least it's obvious that theistic evolutionists are absolved of the charge of inconsistency. There's nothing intellectually or religiously dishonest about their position. And the burden of proof is on the mature creationist to show that their division between real history and apparent history is not arbitrary.

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  9. "And by what non-circular method do you establish the rate of light speed, or the rate of cosmic expansion?"

    The speed of light is calculated from Maxwell's theory using two other constants, the vacuum permittivity and vacuum permeability. Amazingly, these last two have nothing to do with rates or time, and their value is measured using electrical capacitors.

    The speed of light is a constant built into the structure of the Universe, along with the gravitational constant and the two constants mentioned above, and a few others. It really does allow us to non-circularly track the passage of time (or, if you like, the development of the Universe, if you hold to some view that time doesn't really exist).

    And even granting that the size of fundamental physical quantities is conventional, the thing they are measuring (like the above constants) is not, so there is no way to argue that the biblically derived age of the Earth is compatible with the scientifically derived one, or that we can explain away the scientifically derived one as just a 'conventional one', because biblical life durations are given in years who size was determined by rotations of the moon, which makes it directly comparable to the scientific one.

    Unless of course you're an antirealist about science, which you may have stated somewhere in our previous exchanges.

    "Actually, I could simply dispute temporal metrical objectivism."

    Fine. Then the biblically derived age of the Earth is not in conflict with the scientific one, but neither does it trump the scientific one.

    And I found it very intriguing that you link to a book by Robin Le Poivedin to argue for temporal metrical conventionalism. He is, of course, the author of "Arguing for Atheism" and would probably argue that his view of time and the laws of nature are inconsistent with the biblical doctrine of creation. Secular philosophers can be a two-edged sword.

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