Creation, Evolution, and faith

I'm coming into this thread quite late, and I'm not able to review all the ground that has presumably been covered. I appreciate kbertsche's participation here, and his first post in this thread deserves close attention. So that's where I'm starting now. I would consider this line of argument to be a misuse of the term "faith", and a misrepresentation of scientific endeavor.I'll grant that a hard-line atheist's use of the term "faith" will be skewed to draw attention to the absurdity of beliefs held in direct contradiction to observed facts. (To the extent that there are people who indulge and promote this sort of absurdity, such skewing does not constitute a "straw man".) But with respect to people who hold religious beliefs that do not conflict with observable fact, that skewed view of "faith" is a distortion; in any case, this non-absurd form of faith has nothing to do with science.Meanwhile, kb's argument is an attempt to equate the non-absurd form of religious faith (involving, say, beliefs about afterlife, the soul and other intangibles) with the thought processes that are involved in scientific research, and I would say this is wrong. Apart from the familiar notion of "Non-Overlapping Magisteria", I would cite an important difference between the cognitive realms of "building a mental image of the unknowable, based on current awareness" (religious faith) vs. "predicting outcomes of real events, based on incomplete knowledge" (empiricism).Kb's reference to "evidence... finally becoming overwhelming" has nothing to do with any established definition of "faith". When measurements of acceleration due to gravity, radioactive decay rates, the speed of light, etc, keep coming up consistently in agreement with established formulas, we are not switching to accepting those formulas "on faith" -- they are solved problems and established facts. If the measurements start coming out differently, it will be jarring news indeed, but it will be a matter of having a new problem to solve, rather than a matter of "challenging our faith".(Years ago, I read a wonderful science fiction story, called "Brain Wave", written by Poul Anderson in 1954: the premise was that the solar system, in it's rotation around the Milky Way galaxy, suddenly brought the Earth into a section of space where certain "constants" of electro-chemical conductance were slightly but abruptly shifted. The result was that all biological neuronal systems on Earth suddenly became more efficient and powerful. People and animals were suddenly a lot smarter. It's a great read, if you can find it. I think of it now, because the author effectively used the story line and characters to clarify the distinction between "religious" vs. "scientific" responses to such a jarring event.)As for the last point in kb's item #2, I'll grant that we could readily find practitioners of scientific research whose thought processes fit that description, being "convinced" that a theory is true despite "loose ends" (beyond the normal sense of reasoning under uncertainty) -- perhaps I would be inclined to behave that way myself (or might give the appearance of doing so), and maybe the Darwin quotations chosen by kb are "proof" that Darwin himself was that way. As I see it, a scientist who accepts this sort of "certainty" is at risk of failing to be scientific.But here we must distinguish between the "performance" of an individual practitioner (who can make errors in judgment), and the "competence" of the scientific method, which will override and overcome the foibles of any one misguided individual, as other individuals take a neutral or adversarial approach to that person's work. The competence of science works because it does not abide faith, or any sort of unfounded trust in people or ideas. Nothing is sacred; this is the important thing, and the discriminating factor relative to religious faith.(I use the terms "performance" and "competence" on analogy from the field of linguistics: performance is what we observe in physical occurrences of language use, while competence represents the underlying system on which performance is based. Performance is susceptible to errors, imperfections, and unavoidable physical constraints that limit its fidelity, whereas competence is the extrapolation or abstraction -- we might call it an idealization -- that comes from aggregating and structuring all the evidence that performance provides. So it is with the practice of science: individual attempts have their limitations, but there is systematicity in the aggregate.)

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Thanks for the replies, kbertshe. My main response is that you are ignoring the distinctions I was trying to explain: (a) constant, unwavering belief based on religious faith vs. contingent, transitory belief based on available, incomplete information; and (b) a lack of objectivity that might arise from personal limitations of some individuals performing science vs. a complete absence of faith that results from the aggregate competence of thousands of people employing the scientific method. No, they do not have the "same basic meanings that they have in a religious context." Of course scientists use the words "faith" and "belief" when they write and speak, because these are common words in the language that get used in lots of contexts -- including metaphor, which is a common rhetorical strategy used whenever people write about science and scientists for the general public.When a scientist says "I believe this equation is correct," it's clearly not the same sense being used by the Christian who says "I believe that Christ loves me." It's the difference between "I believe it will rain tomorrow" vs. "I believe my soul is eternal."I think the difference is clearly shown in the quotes you extracted from Smoot's book (which I assume was written for a general audience): if Einstein's "belief" in the notion of a static universe were at all comparable to the religious use of "belief", then Einstein himself would not have changed his position in the face of Hubble's observations. Instead, there would have been (and there would still be) competing and irreconcilable "sects" in the field of physics: the Einsteinist "static" believers and the Hubbelian "expansion" believers.Physicists today do not sort themselves into those two groups, because the notion of belief in science is very different from belief in religion. It's a mistake to confuse or conflate these two distinct senses of the word.{AbE: I suppose it's possible that you personally regard your religious faith as comparable to your practice of science -- you feel that your religious beliefs are evidence-based, and in the event that new evidence comes along, you would be inclined to change (or at least adjust) your religious beliefs accordingly. My understanding is that this approach to religious belief is not shared by all who consider themselves religious believers -- indeed, you may be in the minority in this regard.}Edited by Otto Tellick, : (more complete quotation at start of 2nd paragraph)Edited by Otto Tellick, : added final paragraph

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Thanks for that interesting bit of news. But it seems to me that if this were actually a good example of the "contingent, transitory nature" of religious belief, Waltke would not have felt (or been) compelled to resign his position. I wasn't asserting an absence of contention -- quite the contrary. I was rather asserting an absence of devotion to dogma. Thanks for demonstrating how hard it is to avoid using the word "believe". Is this a "contingent" belief on your part, or "dogmatic" belief? And if such a small sub-group does in fact still exist, I wonder whether they do so on the basis of new evidence they are finding, rather than simply rejecting (in the manner of dogmatic belief) the evidence for an expanding universe. If the latter, I would say these people have lost their qualifications as scientists -- like that handful of people with degrees in physics or geology who are active YECs. {AbE: Lest this be misconstrued as the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, my point is simply that such people have stopped applying the scientific method to support their position, and this should be clear enough on objective grounds.} Dying out is quite a different thing from settling on a common position, especially in those cases where the members of a "dead-end" sect did not die of old age. (Is it any wonder that we don't see a lot of Huguenots these days?){AbE: Here's a relevant wikipedia factoid about the "surviving" Huguenots, who simply stopped identifying themselves as such:

quote:

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Most of the Huguenot congregations (or individuals) in North America eventually affiliated with other Protestant denominations, such as the Presbyterian Church (USA), Episcopal Church, United Church of Christ, Reformed Churches, the Reformed Baptists and the Mennonite Church.

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I would say that this is still not a case of "settling on a common position."}Edited by Otto Tellick, : addition at end, as notedEdited by Otto Tellick, : added to middle paragraph, as noted

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Thank you again, kbertsche. I think this bit explains your position in a way that I find quite agreeable: The "different question" idea is a nice way to look at these things, though it does tend to run aground when the answers to those "reason and purpose" questions are used in attempts to "fix" the answers on the "mechanism" questions -- a good case in point being the Pope's pronouncement that condoms should not be used, period (and AIDS prevention does not constitute an acceptable excuse).I won't argue against the notion that one person's subjective experience or internal interpretation of (reports about) events would qualify as evidence in that individual's perspective; also, I have no disagreement with people like yourself who lead sensible lives and also happen to hold personal beliefs about things that lie far beyond the reach of objective verifiability. I think I do understand your point of view here, and it seems reasonable to assume that this is a common part of the human condition, applicable to people who pursue empirical research as well as everyone else.It seems to me that the fundamental problem, afflicting both non-theistic science and non-scientific theism, arises when one or another belief becomes hard-cast and inflexible, whether due to one's ingrained habits of thought or to the vested interests of some institution (whether secular or religious). The problem is intensified (potentially to the level of a dangerous threat) whenever these ingrained habits and vested interests are broadcast as "exclusive truth" in spite of contradicting evidence, sensible alternatives and/or reasonable opposition. (Case in point, again: the Pope's pronouncement on condoms.)I think a lot of the vitriol you receive/perceive from skeptics can be attributed to their common perception (based on history and current observation): that non-scientific theism poses the greater threat, owing to its far greater preponderance of mental habituation and institutional vested interests. And of course, this also combines with a skeptic's "common sense": that making assertions far beyond the reach of objective verifiability (let alone arguing about their relative "truth") is at best inconsequential, and arguably nonsensical.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

That is a remarkably strange perspective, and just a little bit of consideration would seem to show that reason and logic do not give it much support at all. How can anyone possibly attribute "inerrancy" to sequence of sentences in a given language, when many (most? all?) people are likely to make mistakes in trying to understand or interpret those sentences? What does "inerrancy" really mean in that kind of situation?The strangeness of that proposition is driven home when we acknowledge that it was not God Himself who put ink to parchment in creating the first draft of the text, and even if He did have any sort of "direct" influence on the physical authors, His "truth" was nonetheless tempered and mitigated by the limitations of the language being used. Ambiguity, indeterminacy, vagueness, and limited expressive capacity are standard attributes of every human language, and Ancient Hebrew is certainly no exception. These attributes afflicted the initial composition, and they doubly (or exponentially) afflict any subsequent translation to another language. Trying to understand the text in a way that "reveals the absolute truth" of what was written (i.e. an "inerrant interpretation") strikes me as a fool's errand.But this is probably straying off-topic.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Ah, here we are, back at the OP topic again (funny how that happens... ) You seem to be asserting that "scientific atheists" must certainly have their own brand of metaphysics. Maybe that's true. Maybe I do as well -- but I'm not sure, because to me, the universe is simply something that I don't fully understand.I don't know whether the universe is self-generated (whatever that might mean), and I'm sure I've seen statements by Dawkins and the rest to the same effect. Does admitting that we don't know constitute a metaphysical position on the subject?Saying that the universe is "self-operating and self-sustaining" also seems fairly meaningless. Stuff is and stuff happens, and I don't see any need for an attribution of "self-hood" at the level of the universe as a whole.If you want to say that my limited comprehension must necessarily constitute a form of metaphysics, or that all humans must intrinsically hold to one or another sort of metaphysical system (and therefore "evolution requires faith" as per the OP in this thread), then I'd want to say that you are equivocating about what the term "metaphysics" refers to, and you seem to still be trying to attribute an inappropriate sense of "faith" to skeptics, and even to scientific endeavor generally.Maybe it's just a difference in personalities, combined with an unavoidable tendency to project one's own habits of thought onto others whose habits may in fact be quite different. As a habitual skeptic, I would assume that if I show you cause to doubt some personal belief of yours, you would generally do so, and I'd have a hard time understanding you if you didn't. Meanwhile, as a person of faith, you might be assuming that I hold a lot of things on faith in my own mind, and I might have a hard time convincing you otherwise.Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Don't be silly, kb. There can be only one basis for asserting that a given set of scratches are actually symbols that communicate meaning in a given language, and that would be an ample and uncontestable record of similar scratches that were obviously made by users of the given language. This entails that we already have objective evidence regarding those language users -- they are not imaginary, and clearly not "an additional irrelevant element." They are known to exist.We know enough about how (human) language works, and how any written representation of it must work, so even if we don't know the specific language that was written, the patterns and distributions of elements would make any writing system recognizable as such, and there's nothing irrelevant or unnecessary about postulating a human origin for marks.Lennox's analogy is as lame as the ones used to push Intelligent Design. Whatever point you're trying to make, that analogy doesn't help.Anyway, I'm still puzzled: how do you figure that when someone says "I don't know why the universe/life/mankind exists," this constitutes a metaphysical position about existence?Having asked that question, I will point out my own position (indicated by my login name and signature), which I do admit is metaphysical: it's up to us, as emergent life forms with sentience and self-awareness, to figure out for ourselves what our purpose should be, and to work hard toward making sure we can accomplish that purpose. I think that focusing on unobservable, unverifiable notions is not the right way to pursue this, and limiting ourselves to assertions made in 2000-year-old texts is simply a mistake.I have some amount of faith that we can do this, once enough of us become sufficiently mature that we don't just push this responsibility away onto some unknowable and imaginary external entity.That's just my own personal position -- it's not a basis for scientific pursuit, but it is at least a position that poses no obstacle to pursuing science.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.