What if the Theory of Evolution is Right? (Part I)

Strawman Alert! 

One of the most absurd of creationist claims about this process is that all mutations are bad.

No one on this thread has claimed that.

Just a few posts back this was inferred by Rickett2222, who shared with us his "wisdom" that since mutations would cause life to degrade and crumble as the generations went by, evolution could not happen! I don't believe I need to direct you to material on natural selection as well to show why this is a false guess.

Elroch, for about the third time in the last 100 posts, you have been arguing with a group that has fled the scene weeks ago.

Actually, I was referring to a post in the middle of the previous page, a mere three hours earlier!

Also, there are others who are not gone for good, I am sure.

pawnwhacker - First - if "atheism is simply a state of being without theism. Nothing more. Nothing less." and as I have stated sevceral times, Darwinism is the best means of teaching the relationships between living organisms in a classroom, you have no objection to people beleiving otherwise?

Second - do you disagree with any of this statement?

“There is no god. There is no soul or purpose in our universe except those we have made for ourselves, just random events competing for optimal outcomes. What appears to be negative entropy is just a phenomenon resulting from vast amounts of time, space and opportunities. If you drop a sufficiently large number of saucers, a cup will be formed. I am just a soulless mass of proteins, enzymes and lipids called life and there are no ethical demands except the ones I created for myself.”

Your quote is needlessly dogmatic. 

Try this: "Meaning, purpose,and ethics need not derive from God...". Even though this is by no means a self-evident truth, one can make a rational argument for it.  I understand why you would want to phrase it that way, and it's still true when phrased that way, but I really do mean that they *do not* derive from or depend on being created by God. I'll wait a moment to explain why.

For many, meaning, purpose and ethics as a matter of fact DO derive from God. Many would assert the contemporary atheism owes a huge debt to the Judeo-Christain ethos, and thoughtful atheists do in fact acknowledge this. In fact, those who believe that meaning, purpose, and ethics do derive from God are simply *mistaken*. (It's much more reasonable to claim that *specifically what some people find meaningful* and *the specific purposes some people choose for themselves* and *the specific morality some people follow* are derived in part from our Judaeo-Christian history.) The reason they're mistaken is that *creation* is not what confers meaning or purpose, and that *creation* is not what makes actions ethical. The religious believer chooses his purposes for himself; he finds meaningful whatever he finds meaningful and, to some extent, chooses what to find meaningful; he learns from other people what is ethical and, to some extent, chooses what to find ethical. He simply makes different choices than I do: he chooses to adopt purposes that he thinks God has for him; he finds meaningful worshiping the God he thinks exists or he finds meaningful living a life in accord with what he thinks God commands or desires; he chooses to accept as ethical the rules he thinks God tells him are ethical. But it's still up to him. If God exists and created us, we *still* have to choose our own purposes, find meaningful whatever we find meaningful (and to some extent choose what we find meaningful), and find ethical what we are taught to find ethical and to some extent what we choose to find ethical. The act of creation does not make you find anything meaningful or give you a sense of purpose or make you ethical--if it did, it would be hard to understand why some people lacked a sense of meaning or purpose or why some people were not ethical, as the act of creation would have given them a sense of meaning and purpose and would have given them a sense of ethics, too.

As I've said over and over, only to have it drowned out by red font pleonastics, You keep using this word. What do you think "pleonastics" means? I want the Enlightenment Project (developing an enduring ethos based only on reason) to be successful. As a scientist, is depresses me that I've seen no objective evidence that it has. I'm not sure what the Enlightenment Project is, but the development of a reasonable secular ethics has surely succeeded. What *hasn't* yet happened is that that secular ethics has been *accepted by the overwhelming majority of people*, even though in its most important elements it surely *is* accepted by the overwhelming majority of people. The overwhelming majority of people surely do accept that not only their own welfare but other people's welfare matters; the overwhelming majority of people surely do accept that randomly killing other people is wrong and that raping women is wrong and that assaulting other people is generally wrong, and so on. The more detailed the ethical theory, the more disagreement there is likely to be with its details; but in its fundamentals, secular ethics is what practically everybody follows.

For the thoughtful atheist, one can read Jean Luc Ferry's "A brief history of thought". The task is to develop a rational and loving ethos out of the ashes of Nietzsche's thorough decontruction of the Enlightenment Project (and Christianity too, to be fair). 

Can it be done? I doubt it, but I honestly want to be wrong. I want to live in peace, watch my grandchildren grow up, pursue those things which seem to be good to me, all free of totalitarian oppression. 

I just don't seeany objective evidence that atheists can pull it off. But I'm rooting for you!

Well, that was just a metaphor indicating that random change can introduce an ordered result.

Strawman Alert! 

One of the most absurd of creationist claims about this process is that all mutations are bad.

No one on this thread has claimed that. About three thousand posts ago I gave a couple of specific examples of favorable mutations in humans: sickle trait (someone beat me to it, but I agreed with it), adult lactose tolerance are two that come to mind. Racial traits, assuming that they MUST have been caused by mutation, also infer positive features. Examples: people of African descent are almost never are diagnosed with Hemochromatosis or celiac disease. And a black with Tay-Sachs syndrome? Maybe it has happened somewhere, but in the spirit of the thread I'm too lazy to look it up. 

Elroch, for about the third time in the last 100 posts, you have been arguing with a group that has fled the scene weeks ago. There are no young-earthers here, no flat-earthers, no backwater yahoos. The people you are addressing likely have qualifications exceding your own, except for stochastics. Everyone here,to my knowledge, acknowledges the role of evolution in some shape or form on our planet. 

I've yet to link my first quote to any creationist site. I've provided plenty of links to those right wing religious works like "The Selfish Gene" and "Scientific American". 

So just lay off the silly stuff. 

pawnwhacker - First - if "atheism is simply a state of being without theism. Nothing more. Nothing less." and as I have stated sevceral times, Darwinism is the best means of teaching the relationships between living organisms in a classroom, you have no objection to people beleiving otherwise? Most self-professed atheists are also supporters of a scientific view of reality, so most self-professed atheists do defend evolutionary theory. Some of *those people* do not object to people's believing otherwise, and some do object; but probably overwhelmingly most of them do object to having Creationism or ID theory taught in science classrooms as though either were a well-established scientific theory.

Second - do you disagree with any of this statement?

“There is no god. See below. There is no soul or purpose in our universe except those we have made for ourselves, just random events competing for optimal outcomes. See below. What appears to be negative entropy is just a phenomenon resulting from vast amounts of time, space and opportunities. It's more that it results from physical law working on subsystems that are *not* closed but instead have lots of energy pouring into them. You might have in mind, though, that if there are billions of Earthlike worlds, then the probability of life's evolving on some one of them goes up. If you drop a sufficiently large number of saucers, a cup will be formed. Well, not really. But if you have a sufficiently large number of collections of simple molecules each of which has a small chance of forming complex molecular replicators over billions of years, then the probability that one of them will do so is much larger than is the probability that *the only one in existence* (if there were only one) would. Similarly, if there are large numbers of mutations and recombinations of genes occurring in a population, then the probability that some of them will be beneficial and spur on evolution is higher than if you only had a few of them. I am just a soulless mass of proteins, enzymes and lipids called life and there are no ethical demands except the ones I created for myself.” And, of course, the ethical demands that the other people living in the same society you live in make on you.

Whether or not to agree with "There is no God" is complicated by the *radical* differences in how different people think of God and in what they mean by the word "God." If we are speaking of the Abrahamic God, I imagine most self-professed atheists would agree that there is no God, and I sure would, although rather many might allow for the *possibility* that there is, as I would.

Random events don't compete; they occur. But there's a difficulty with speaking of "random" events. Think of firing photons at a half-silvered mirror. Half of them pass through; half of them are reflected. Which ones pass through and which ones are reflected seems random, in that (a) we can't predict which ones will do which and (b) we can't discern any reason why *this* one passes through but *that* one is reflected, and yet the pattern of events is anything but random: we can quite confidently predict that about half will pass through and half won't--their behavior as ensembles is nonrandom--and that they won't instead fly up to the ceiling or fly off to Jupiter (even if it's possible for one to do so once in a very great while). Their behavior isn't just *utterly random*; it's just that it seems indeterministic and unpredictable as to which ones will do which. In that sense, yes, we are speaking of random events. As to their competing--large collections of these nonrandom ensembles do better or do worse than other, similar large collections, with how well they do partly determined by accidents and partly determined by how well they are suited to their environments, and we label that "competition" when it's really just some of them surviving and reproducing better than others. With all of that understood, yes, random events compete for optimal outcomes.

I note that the *atheistic* part of your statement is, "There is no God." (And on the use of the word "atheist" that includes strong and weak atheism, even that must be amended to, "No God is believed to exist, even if there is one.") It would be possible for an atheist to believe in objective morality or in objective meaning or in objective purpose or in objective morality (although I would disagree on each count). It would even be possible for an atheist to believe in souls or spirits (although I don't). It would be possible for an atheist to be a nonmaterialist. What probably makes it seem as though all of the things you've connected are believed by all atheists is that the nontheists here all (I think) are also materialists and also believe in self-ordained meaning, purpose, and ethics (or group-ordained, in bramdakota's case). But really, the only atheistic part of what you've written is the first sentence. (I concede that you will encounter self-professed atheists who say things like, "All atheists believe there are no souls," or, "All atheists are materialists," and so on. But it is important not to mix together separate issues.)

Good point, I guess. There are also atheists who claim that we are only machines being controlled by puppet-master genes, In one sense, Dawkins would say that we are; in another sense, he would strenuously disagree. but I would never hold YOU to such a ridiculous position. You are far too intelligent for that sort of thing. In one sense, I would say that we are; in another sense, I would strenuously disagree.

Likewise, I'm under no obligation to defend anything I haven't asserted. No, you're not. The difficulty is that we are having conversations with several other people at once, over multiple threads, and what constitutes a good reply to one person might not constitute a good reply at all to a second person whose beliefs are similar but not the same as the first person's.

I have no qualms with your definition. I have read the entire piece. It is cogent and welcome. It's just that I find many atheists that aren't as forgiving and more than a few that are not aware of what they don't know. Never mind the ephemeral stuff (theology), but even in the material world.

Consider everything that we can be reasonably sure that we know. Now consider all the things that remain to be found out. From the depth of what you are writing about I feel you have already given this some thought. We are babies getting our first glimpses of old man universe. Yes current science constitutes our best bet in the quest for knowledge. You can search believing in a real or imagined god or no god at all. The trick is to just keep looking.

We know that order can arise for disorder. In John Conway's Game of Life, one may begin with a rather disordered-looking pattern but, applying the game's few simple rules repeatedly, arrive at an ordered (and, often, beautiful) pattern after the passage of many generations.

MindWalk, an interesting book you'd enjoy is "Fashionable Nonsense" by Sokal and Bricmont (both card-carrying atheists, I assure you!). The authors reveal how postmodernists use concepts and analogies, many of which they don't even understand, to obfuscate and baffle rather than clarify. I probably would enjoy it. I assume the "Sokal" is Alan Sokal, famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for the Sokal Hoax?

I will note that while authors are under an obligation to try to write clearly and precisely, so as to be understood by their readers, readers are under the mirror-image obligation to try to understand authors as the authors intend. So, when I read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I find his way of writing terribly misleading--read literally, it's postmodernist, but if you read carefully, you can see damned well he doesn't intend it that way--but at least I can understand what he means. When it comes to postmodernists, they use buzzwords and catchphrases whose meanings I cannot make out, and it seems as though they have learned to use big words and to string those big words into sentences and paragraphs but have not learned how to make their meanings clear. Where I do understand them, I find them absurd. And where I don't understand them, I find them needlessly obfuscatory. And yet, everything they write seems to be based on a kernel of truth: it is possible for people to disagree on the interpretations of words and sentences. Words and sentences do not have objectively determined meanings. Well, true enough. But it's not as though we didn't have intersubjectively agreed-upon meanings of words, dictionaries, or standard syntax, so as to be able to understand each other, and it's not as though the states of affairs whose obtaining sentences assert didn't really either obtain or not obtain!

There's a postmodernist essay generator here: http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/ It produces meaningless essays that sound just like real postmodernist essays.

Dawkins is not a postmodernist, but he employs the same technique. I've never observed that in Dawkins. He seems like a model of clarity to me. I do think that his handling of philosophical arguments for the existence of God could be better, although I think he gets his conclusions about them right.

He maintains:

“The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.”

Excerpt From: Dawkins, Richard. “The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition.” Oxford University Press, 2006. iBooks.

This material may be protected by copyright.

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/kNkmU.l

But no, we're not really machines, except if he wanted to use a metaphor he has the education to state simply: we are LIKE machines. But he doesn't say that, because it would be too clear. The passage clearly states in the plainest terms possible: we ARE machines created by our genes. I think that if you think of a machine as something manufactured by a sentient entity, then yes, you'll want Dawkins to say that we are *like* machines. On the other hand, if you think of a machine as a whole whose operation is determined by the operations of its parts, then you'll have no problem with Dawkins's saying that we *are* machines. Does Dawkins say what he means by the word "machine"?

Now people can argue all day long what Dawkins REALLY meant. It make Biblical exegesis seem so prosaic, given that the Bible was written in ancient languages and in some cases pieced together rather precariously.

Dawkins speaks in the lingua Franca and does not appear to know how to construct a clear sentence.

"But you don't understand! His intellect operates at such a high level he writes both literally and metaphorically (just like the Bible!)".

They said that about the pomo's for years until Sokal and Bricmont dealt them the death blow.

So, do you believe you are a machine? Kind of like a machine? A machine with a heart of gold? A tin man waiting for the wizard of Oz to give it a testimonial? It depends on what you mean by "machine." If you mean a manufactured item constructed by a sentient entity, then no, I don't think I am. If you mean a whole whose operation is determined by the operation of its parts, then yes, I think I am.

Would you care to clarify your own position?