Practical Consequences (Humans)

by dhw, Sunday, November 01, 2009, 12:41 (5500 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George has drawn our attention to an article by Greta Christina, which attempts to debunk some of the beliefs held by religious moderates. She trots out the usual "God-of-the-gaps" argument, as if the atheist faith in chance and still unknown natural laws was not also a gap-filler, but then she moves onto three specific areas. In each of them, she understandably attacks the religious position (I have no quarrel with the argument that there is no scientific evidence for God), but seems blissfully unaware that all her comments apply equally to the atheist position. -1) Evolution guided by God.
She ignores the problem of the origin of life, and prefers to deal with what she sees as faults in the design: blind spots, bad backs and knees, the slowness of change. And that, she says, "isn't how things designed by a conscious designer, or even things tinkered with by a conscious designer, work." Bearing in mind that no human in the whole history of humankind has ever succeeded in designing a self-replicating, adaptable form of life, let alone one that has emotion, memory, consciousness, imagination etc., how the heck does she know how it works? In any case, has she ever come across a consciously designed machine that didn't eventually go wrong? And how does she know the intentions of the designer? Maybe he meant it to go wrong, so that individual creatures wouldn't live for ever, or maybe - as Matt suggests - he's not perfect, or - as Frank suggests - he's not all-powerful. She also talks about the gradualness of evolution with its occasional rapid jumps: "exactly as we would expect if evolution were an entirely natural, physical process of descent with modification." So how much experience does she have of other evolutions? Has she been to other inhabited universes to inspect their natural evolution? And did she find that self-replicating molecules managed spontaneously over billions of years to turn themselves into dinosaurs, rabbits, humans? Our scientists are mystified by innumerable facets of the process. Without a precedent, and at least until it's all been understood (assuming it will be), how can anyone talk of what one would expect? -2) An immaterial soul that animates human consciousness.
Virtually the same problem. She writes: "I acknowledge freely: We don't yet understand consciousness very well." And "the basic questions of what exactly consciousness is, and where exactly it comes from, and how exactly it works, are, as of yet, largely unanswered." But everything apparently points to it being "an entirely biological process". Of course we know that it involves a biological process ... even the most fundamental fundamentalist would acknowledge that. You can't get a TV picture without a TV set, but does that mean the TV set is the origin of the picture? Until all the above questions are answered, the belief that the process is ENTIRELY biological is just as much faith-based as the belief that something else is involved. So why attack X's theory when your own theory is still so riddled with gaps? But see 3):-3) A sentient universe.
She says she's going to repeat what she said in 2), and comes up with a classic: "We don't yet understand what consciousness is. But we do know that, whatever it is, it seems to be a biological product of the brain." Look closely at that statement: we do know that it seems to be...Is "seems to be" knowledge? What we do know is that she thinks her theory is correct. And since the universe doesn't have a brain that she can see, and since she believes the brain is the one and only source of consciousness ... a theory whose "seemings" have so far come up against a barrage of unanswered questions ... the universe can't be sentient.-As I said at the beginning, in my view she's right that there's no scientific evidence to support the claims that God directs evolution, that there is an immaterial soul, that the universe is sentient. In my view she's wrong to say "the evidence actively contradicts them." Her assumptions that she knows how a designed life ought to be, how evolution normally works, and how consciousness will eventually be explained, do not constitute evidence, any more than do the assumptions of believers who consider the many unsolved mysteries to be indicative of a conscious power beyond our comprehension.