“Apprehending Beauty”
March 26th 2008 09:41 am
For those of us who have debated whether morality is objective, this blog post takes it to another level: beauty is objective, too. One reader, responding to Gene Veith’s post on Aesthetics & American Idol, writes,
“Learning to subjectively like what is objectively good at first bounced off of my 3am quick-read blog-scan. But then I realized that this exact thing happened to me and I shall anecdote-ize it thus:
“When first I approached Milton’s Paradise Lost I knew that I ’should’ treasure it as a sublime and beautiful epic of written art. But i could only (at first) force myself to appreciate it from the outside, like looking at an utterly alien thing that all others considered beautiful. You look at it sideways, squint a bit, trying to see what they see… but it is unutterably alien. Perhaps you see an angle here or there that has a symmetrical form that is pleasing, a curve here, a line there… but the whole is so beyond your current vantage point that the beauty is lost by your own unelevated perspective.
“Then, after forcing yourself to merely ‘mentally ascribe’ the designation of beauty to the form, you slowly achieve the ability to connect the slivers of recognizable traits of beauty that you CAN see from your current state.
“This is achieved in literature by reading more…. “
More at Apprehending Beauty — Cranach: The Blog of Veith
Posted by Tom Gilson under Arts and Culture | Tags: Beauty | 
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SteveK responded on 30 Nov 1999 at 12:00 am #
qqqCharlie (and DL)
I\’ll use Charlie\’s comment as an opportunity to repeat what I said earlier. DL never commmented on my logic and so it will give him another crack. Will DL say the laws of logic are dependent of something physical?
Now my comment from before:
SteveK responded on 26 Mar 2008 at 6:35 pm #
My thoughts are that beauty is objective in the same way that meaning is objective. You can’t test for meaning via empirical science or verify it via predictive models without resorting to a tautological circle.
Is all meaning subjective or objective? According to some on this blog, it’s all subjective because science can’t detect it and predict it - but what does that do to knowledge? It makes all knowledge subjective, including scientific knowledge and so the whole argument collapses under its own weight.
doctor(logic) responded on 26 Mar 2008 at 10:49 pm #
Let’s see if changing this comment a bit let’s WP post it…
This is yet another “gut instinct” definition of what is objective.
It says a facet of culture is objective if immersion in that culture causes me to acquire a taste for that facet of culture.
Since I can only have one set of tastes at a time, I will always conclude that this definition is consistent (i.e., I don’t simultaneously like and dislike X). But if I step outside of my own personal feelings for a moment, I’ll see that “objective” in this sense has nothing to do with objectivity, say, in the scientific sense. The latter is concerned with what is the case independent of my opinion. Under the former, two contradictory facets can simultaneously be objective depending on who is doing the perceiving (or in which order the taste was acquired by a single individual).
IOW, I think this sort of gut definition is just a reflection of the fact that taste can be acquired. Immerse yourself in classics that you find tolerable, and you’ll probably end up with a deeper appreciation for the classics. Immerse yourself in Chinese cuisine that you think you “ought” to like, and I quite expect you’ll come away with a better appreciation of Chinese cuisine. Therefore, Chinese cuisine is objectively good?
This is quite relevant to morality. Immerse yourself in a moral culture you tolerate, and I expect you’ll eventually come to appreciate that culture even more.
Let’s not confuse potential for acquired taste with objectivity.
SteveK responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 1:18 am #
DL:
Without resorting to assuming that which you intend to conclude, please tell us how you know your ‘gut instinct’ definition is the correct one.
One could also immerse themselves in the study of logical positivism or empiricism so to acquire a taste for it’s apparant objectivity.
Tom Gilson responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 7:03 am #
Objective aesthetics are if anything more controversial than objective morality, so I wasn’t expecting anything like full agreement with this. I hope it is at least an encouragement for some readers to pursue better literature, art, music, and so on.
Unlike the case of morality, I don’t know of a strong independent argument for objective aesthetics, a kind of theistic proof based on demonstrable aesthetic realism. I believe there are higher and lower degrees of beauty, best exemplified at the extremes (Macbeth vs. Desperate Housewives, say, or Yosemite vs. a poorly kept landfill). I think it’s likely that every culture has a sense of higher and lower beauty, and based on my limited knowledge there are worldwide commonalities there in spite of worldwide diversity.
This worldwide variety makes it hard to imagine a really satisfying universal aesthetic theory. I’m sure someone has tried to develop one, and maybe they’ve succeeded; it’s way out of my field and I don’t know. From my position of relative ignorance I can see problems in trying to do it: if for example you want to say that “good” music worldwide shares common features, they would have to be rather abstract, like unity-within-diversity or interplays of consonance and dissonance. But when I enjoy music, I enjoy the music, not the unity-within-diversity.
I still believe some things are really more beautiful than others, in a very culturally conditioned way of apprehending that beauty. To support this belief I turn to my knowledge of a creative, God, who surely did not mean just moral goodness when he called all things good in Genesis. I know I can’t stand on that ground to prove a point to someone who doesn’t believe in God–there’s no common ground on which I could hope to come to agreement–so I’m not going to try.
I think this parallel is too weak to go anywhere with it, though:
The point is true for most people–we assimilate moral moods from around us. I don’t think that says much in regard to all of our previous discussion on moral reality (for those who have not been here for it, we’ve had discussions on that topic here over the course of many months that would take hundreds of pages to print out). It’s part of the background knowledge we’ve worked with throughout all that discussion.
Charlie responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 10:17 am #
Hi Tom,
I agree most heartedly with your last comment here. I think there are indicators of the objectivity of beauty, but proving it, or even getting to the table would be difficult. Everything I could point to, even the fact that uncultured babies from around the world will show a preference for beautiful faces, regardless of their race or culture, could be waved away (illegitimately, in my view) as a biological adaptation. As an aside, though, and as a slight argument against myself, have you seen that the infamous peacock tail has recently been studied and Darwin’s cause for cold sweats is still a mystery? Sexual selection does not explain it, so there seems to be no explanation for a biological advantage of any kind (just-so stories are never long out of reach, however).
Anyway , as with abstract objects, I think that which I find intuitively suggestive about aesthetics at this point will one day make itself rigorously known to me. That’s my version of the argument from the past successes of science.
doctor(logic) responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 3:09 pm #
Steve,
I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere by pretending that everything is a gut instinct. You’ve never had the experience of having a guess be wrong, or of seeing an optical illusion? That’s a non-starter.
It looks to me like you recognize that you’re using gut instinct to determine what is objective, so now you want to make everything look like gut instinct in order to level the playing field.
doctor(logic) responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 3:12 pm #
Tom,
The ways you would try to substantiate objectivity of aesthetics are really about commonalities among humans. You’re talking about what is intersubjective, not what is objective.
I agree that there are many things that are intersubjective, including much of morality. I just don’t think intersubjectivity is relevant to the question.
doctor(logic) responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 3:29 pm #
Charlie,
I haven’t heard anything about this. Nonetheless, this comment is rather useless. You’re pointing to a gap as if to discredit the lack of gap around the gap. Of course, there will always be at least some gaps in our predictive understanding of the world, so you can keep playing this game forever. But what’s the purpose? You can’t explain things by saying they’re still unexplained by science, and you can’t explain the gap by referring to a theory you don’t have (i.e., the mind of God). If you’re going to explain using references to theories we don’t have, then I’ll just explain the gap (and, indeed, everything) using the Theory of Everything.
Tom Gilson responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 3:32 pm #
Actually I am talking about what is objective. But you’re right, too: to demonstrate objective aesthetics, apart from prior agreed knowledge of God, I don’t know of any way one could proceed except by the intersubjective route. Getting from there to objective would be difficult indeed.
So does that same difficulty apply to morality? Recall that in all I’ve written about objective morality, the conclusion has never been that objectivity is proved. Rather my conclusion has always been that objectivity is necessary in order for us to hold on to any ordinary sense of the words “right” and “wrong.” Without objectivity, “That’s good and right” inevitably analyzes to “I really agree with that” or “I really like that;” and “That’s wrong!” analyzes to “I don’t like that!” Further, when one gets to levels larger than the individual, the ruling definition of what counts as right and wrong is determined by power. All of that, to me, runs so counter to what we know to be true of life and humanity, it cannot be true.
Subjective morality is not proved wrong, but it’s shown to be something completely other than what we have all understood it to be; and the power equation in there makes it actually opposite of what most of us have understood it to be.
The same does not apply to aesthetics. If one person says Christine Aguilera is good, someone else says the Chicago Symphony playing Beethoven is good, and someone else says Eminem is good (speaking of their aesthetic aspects in every case), that may bend, but it does not break our common understanding of what “good” means (aesthetically).
You can accept subjective morality and in the process overturn the entire meaning of right and wrong, good and bad. You take your choice, you pay your price. The cost of accepting subjective aesthetics is not much by comparison. So as an argument for transcendent reality or theism, there really isn’t a lot of parallel between the two.
(I am of course open to being corrected by someone who can state a coherent picture of objective aesthetics, but in the meantime, I’m content to let us all just take our position on it and let it be.)
Tom Gilson responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 3:36 pm #
Charlie, what’s the rest of the story on the peacock and the sweats?
As another aside here (getting way off topic) peacock and sweats remind me of a blue and white beverage can I have sitting here on my desk. I picked up in Korea about 15 years ago. It’s called Pocari Sweat. I’ve never had the courage to open it!
Charlie responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 3:47 pm #
Hi DL,
Thanks for your considered input. The remark about “uselessness” was particularly edifying.
Coming up.
I’m not playing a game, but thanks for the characterization.
You might notice where I said that I don’t have an explanation for beauty? Or that I said I don’t formulate an argument for its objectivity? No?
That’s not far off from what you and many others around here do (like, for instance, when you justify naturalism on the basis that nobody has yet proven, to your satisfaction, that undirected abiogenesis can’t occur). Then again, if it’s just your personal opinion, who cares what your personal epistemology entails? Somehow, though, it greatly troubles you what mine does.
SteveK responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 3:50 pm #
DL
I am not trying to make everything gut instinct. Tom said it best in his last comment.
Make something like morality subjective and that forces you to alter your meaning of good and evil - which if you’re like most people you will refuse to do. So you are left to decide which one makes the most sense and I’m afraid science can’t help us here.
Charlie responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 4:02 pm #
Link removed:
“It is curious that I remember well time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over, but I have got over this stage of the complaint, & now small trifling particulars of structure often make me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!’”
Darwin, F., (Ed), Letter to Asa Gray, dated 3 April 1860, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, John Murray, London, Vol. 2, p. 296, 1887; 1911 Edition, D. Appleton and Company, New York and London, Vol. 2, pp. 90–91.
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-2743.html
His answer, of course, was sexual selection.
Paul responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 4:28 pm #
Tom! I have an empty can of Pocari Sweat right behind me. I’ve saved it for literally 25 years, ever since I lived in Japan.
We can’t really be that similar, can we?! ; )
I believe it’s Japanese, as they have a wonderful ability to mistranslate English into absurdist poetry. I have a T-shirt that say “Wed. It’s Fine Day Scooter Time,” and my favorite, because I used it for the title of the last track on my CD, “Mind of Easy Tripper.”
Tom Gilson responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 4:42 pm #
The similarities are indeed amazing, except that apparently somebody was brave enough to open your can!
“Mind of Easy Tripper”? LOL!
doctor(logic) responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 5:52 pm #
Charlie,
Ha! Funny. Actually, I think abiogenesis is presently unexplained. My position is that predictive naturalistic theories are the only ones with any explanatory power. (Remember, God could be quite natural by my definition, if only he were predictable like people are.)
Now let’s contrast this with the creationist position which is that God did it, God is not predictable, and therefore abiogenesis is inexplicable.
doctor(logic) responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 6:15 pm #
Tom,
I think your argument for objective morality is question-begging. (Yes, we’ve been over this before.) You’re defining morality as objective morality from the start.
What is the “ruling definition” you’re talking about here? Do you mean the law?
Moral relativism doesn’t say that might makes right. Moral relativism is describing morality as it appears to us.
All laws are imposed by power. However, we are aware that some laws feel wrong or unjust. Therefore, we can distinguish power from morality. And moral relativism does not contradict this.
If I feel that all other persons ought to do X, that is not an indication that, objectively, all other persons ought to do X. And I don’t require objectivity to impose my desires. I require power, even if it is only power over the empathic feelings of other people.
You keep saying there’s a contradiction between moral relativism and our experience, but I can’t find one anywhere.
Paul responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 6:16 pm #
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~prinzler/sitefiles/audio/mind_of_easy_tripper.mp3
doctor(logic) responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 6:28 pm #
Steve,
No, it doesn’t force me to do anything of the kind. If you see one kid pushing another one around, do you intervene because the bully’s actions were objectively wrong? No. You don’t even think about the issues of objectivity. It just feels wrong, and you react to it.
Take abortion. When you consider public policy, you are driven by feelings about the desires of God, feelings about souls in embryos, feelings about your ideal society, feelings about purity and sanctity. You don’t even think about objectivity. Abortion just feels wrong, so you oppose the policy.
The whole issue of objectivity is a theological one, not a moral one. I don’t think anyone’s gut instincts about right and wrong are being powered by theology.
Indeed, objectivity makes zero difference to moral decision-making. I don’t care whether actions have no objective moral status. That has nothing to do with what I’m willing to put up with. I’m not going to tolerate torture just because it’s objectively right. And if it has no objective moral status, I’m still not going to put up with torture.
The thing that’s really at stake here is the aesthetics of your theology. If you cannot show morality (and God’s morality in particular) to be objective, then God looks like a tyrant, and your theology loses its aesthetic appeal.
Charlie responded on 27 Mar 2008 at 9:04 pm #
Hi DL,
Not funny, but accurate. This is just one of many examples.
Notice your faith-based inclusion of the word “presently”. This nonpredictive, non-theory of unintelligent abiogenesis still exists in your mind as a possibility - nay, probability. And as such, is a necessary grounding for the rest of your naturalistic theory - if there was no unintelligent abiogenesis, and you can’t predict what the first life was, or was like, you really can’t claim support for the unintelligent unfolding of subsequent life. If you’d like, you can really spare me the “evolution is supported by many different lines of experiment, etc” stuff, as without a prediction about first life these lines are meaningless for your project.
Likewise for the theory we don’t have to explain the fine-tuning of the universe.
We’re well aware of your position. Your positions on explanation, knowledge, predictiveness, etc. do not encompass all of knowledge or explanations and do not stand up to scrutiny when examined even for their own consistency.
Abiogenesis is explicable. God created man to be in loving communion with Him, and to enter into a shared creativity with Him and He created the rest of the biosphere in aid of this.
Sometimes explanations come in terms of testimony rather than future predictiveness (by which at one point you meant “preferentially predicted outcomes, but then watered down to mean “are consistent with” and then watered down to mean “are predicted to be true”) - as we’ve seen demonstrated.
Is this wild-goose chase over yet?
You said to Tom,
This is false. He is using the word in the way people who use it mean it. You have admitted this yourself, as have all of your supporters here.
You are ignoring it. Our experience is that morality is objective, as you’ve admitted, and your claim is that we only experience it as such because we are ignorant, or haven’t thought about the issue properly.
—
You said to Steve:
Yes, it does make you change the meanings of words. Or, in this case, avoid them altogether as you redefine the problem to be one of pragmatic action rather than of rational judgment.
False again. For many years I was pro-choice on abortion and euthanasia.. I am not now, because I know these to be objectively wrong and not just a matter of opinion and feeling.
This is your feeling. Or your intuition. This is not based upon a predictive, statistical investigation. In fact, you are ignoring the fact that you have been corrected on this matter many times over.
I predict you will ignore it again.
Who says that your cares are the measure of how other people make their decisions?
That’s funny - you always said that we observed/needed an objective morality and so we invented God and our theology to ground it. Which do you really feel/intuit to be the case?
SteveK responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 1:51 am #
DL, help me out here. In fact, everyone help me out with this.
DL says moral judgments are subjective. He asks me to use reason, logic and objective predictive/repeatable methods to test my ‘gut instinct’. But wait! If knowledge of moral judgment is entirely subjective then there exists NO externally objective means by which I (or anyone) can know this to be true.
This means DL’s knowledge of morality can only be knowledge gained by subjective means - otherwise known as ‘gut instinct’.
So why does he continue to try and use objective means to convince us? If DL is right then it’s impossible to do this.
Comments?
Charlie responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 4:16 am #
Hi Steve,
It took me a minute but, by Jove, I think you’re right.
DL’s arguments imply that every statement about action preferences, even about a preference for a particular flavour of ice-cream, a particular radio station, a particular vacation spot, and a particular recreational activity, is a moral statement. Therefore, to say that morality is only subjective is to make a moral judgment, ie: that action is wrong to me but not necessarily wrong. Yes, I agree that this is a moral judgment in and of itself.
And yes, I see that - by DL’s standards- that means it is an entirely subjective judgment, ie: gut instinct.
Have I matched your reasoning on this?
Or is there more?
On this same subject, DL recently told us that it is a scientific fact that beliefs about actions (moral feeling) cause physical, chemical and neurological changes in the subject. As before, this sounds like prima facie evidence of objectivity. As I asked DL then:
Tiring of not receiving an answer to this question, I answered it myself:
We wrangled this point a little, but nothing was said to defeat the contradiction implied: if the mind is material then morality is objective. But we actually know that the argument defeats both propositions: neither is the mind material nor is morality subjective.
doctor(logic) responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 7:17 am #
Charlie,
You’re saying that theistic evolution is impossible. I must have missed your proof of that. You’ll have to give it to us again.
And if you’ll recall, my definition of “natural” does not exclude the non-material. If God created the first life, that could be predictive. It just isn’t.
Again, where’s your argument to back up this statement?
We don’t “have to” explain anything, but it would be nice to explain fine-tuning. God cannot do it. God is more fine-tuned than the universe, so how are you going to explain the unknown in terms of the more unknown?
It’s like you’re trying to fit the data points we see to an infinite order polynomial (which you call “God”). Every time we find a new data point you claim that your God solution is consistent with it, but you’re still unable to predict anything because you’ll need an infinite number of data points before you find the mind of God.
That’s not explaining, Charlie. That’s making reference to an explanation you don’t have. You’re fine tuning God at every turn, but you never make a prediction.
Now compare this with Standard Model physics. In the Standard Model there are 19 parameters that are fine-tuned (i.e., have wildly different magnitudes). However, having fit the theory to the data, we now make superb predictions. So why is it that a God theory that’s been fine-tuned far more than the Standard Model (but which can’t make any predictions at all), can explain the Standard Model?
This is not a theory that you have. That’s a theory you would like to have. It’s a vague mess.
It’s like me explaining fine-tuning using the Theory of Everything (which I don’t have). The ToE utilizes only a small number (3?) similar constants and accounts for all the observed physical constants through symmetry breaking. There. Problem solved for naturalism, right? If God is allowed to be explanatory, then so is a ToE. But I suspect we both reject the latter as explanatory. So why are things different for the mind of God?
Apparently not.
We did?
So what one feels in those pragmatic situations is not morality then? Morality is only rational analysis based on the assumption that morality is objective? That’s question-begging, and quite absurd. Most moral reasoning tends to assume that one ought to be consistent about one’s moral actions, but that doesn’t mean that there are objective rules.
So… you had no morality before reaching this conclusion, didn’t even know what morality was, could not define the word, didn’t know what right and wrong meant, etc?
doctor(logic) responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 8:03 am #
Steve,
This is incorrect.
You guys refuse to define the terms subjective and objective, that way you can use them differently from one senstence to the next.
I guess I’m the only one here who cares enough about the answers to pick a definition of objectivity and stick to it.
So I’ll define it again because no doubt you’ve forgotten the definition I’m using.
I am an entity that has a notion of ’self’. So I can, at least to some degree, identify entities that are not my self. Now, suppose I observe some object external to my self, and observe a property of that object. That property is OBJECTIVE if it belongs to the object itself, and is not just an artifact of the way I interact with the object’s other OBJECTIVE properties. If I observe an OBJECTIVE property of an external object, there’s no reason why my faculties cannot superimpose SUBJECTIVE information to my observation.
Example: I can observe a painting, and while the colors and the brushwork may be OBJECTIVE, the aesthetic beauty of the painting is SUBJECTIVE. I may find the painting pleasing because it is relevant to my past experiences, and my past experiences are not in the painting. Indeed, those experiences may be OBJECTIVELY mine, and therefore my aesthetic reaction to the painting will be OBJECTIVELY SUBJECTIVE.
Now everything (objective and subjective properties) appears to us through the window of our own subjective experience, and that’s what makes it non-trivial to decide what it subjective and what isn’t. However, there are several things we can do.
First, we can look to see whether a property is respected by entities that lack subjectivities. When non-sentient objects interact, they respect each others’ mass, color, length, density etc. So that provides solid positive evidence that such properties are objective.
Second, we can show positively that a property is subjective. My peanut allergy would be subjective by my definition. I can show objectively in a lab that I am allergic to peanuts. Yet, the allergy is in me, not in the peanuts themselves. Peanuts do not contain “allergicness” that only some people can sense. A detailed understanding of me and peanuts will show that peanuts contain a protein (that’s OBJECTIVE), my adverse reaction to peanuts is SUBJECTIVE (relative to me), and that, OBJECTIVELY, I have such a SUBJECTIVE allergy because of my blood chemistry. This is a systems approach to to objectivity and subjectivity.
In the case of morality, we find that morality only affects entities that have subjectivities, and those entities often can’t agree on what actions are right and wrong. So there’s no positive evidence that morality is objective. Furthermore, evolutionary biology shows us that other primates and other animals evolved moralities of their own, so there’s mounting positive evidence that morality is subjective.
Please bookmark this. This must be the 4th or 5th time I’ve gone over this. This is what I mean by the objective-subjective distinction.
In fact, maybe we should table this whole discussion until you guys define what objective and subjective mean to you, and how you test for each.
doctor(logic) responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 8:24 am #
Charlie,
When we present the sensory mechanism with McDonalds food or country music, there are physical changes, so that means that gastronomic taste and taste in music ontologically exist? Yep. They do. No argument here. However, we’re not talking about whether good and evil exist, or taste in food and music exist, but whether they are objective, and whether they are more than subjective reactions to objective stimuli. Is the taste of fish eggs good whether or not anyone exists to eat them?
It is obvious that all these human tastes have existence, and now quite obvious that they objectively cause physical changes within our brains and bodies. However, just because burritos change our body chemistry doesn’t mean that burritos objectively taste good or bad. Burritos objectively have a taste to humans (which varies per person), but that’s a completely different question from whether they have a taste independent of subjective entities. Burritos do not taste good or bad in and of themselves. They can only taste good or bad to a person.
Now look back on your own response to your own question and substitute “pleasing gastronomic taste” for moral taste. Try to imagine eating maggot-ridden garbage, and you’ll “feel distress” without being anywhere near such “food”. Therefore taste in food is non-physical? That’s clearly absurd. Do you not think it is possible for the neural networks in your head to activate when not eating food and thereby imagine eating food? Of course it can! And fMRI proves it.
So much for your proof of non-materialism.
Charlie responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 10:08 am #
Hi DL,
Non sequitur. I said that without a theory of unintelligent abiogenesis, and a predictable explanation of what first life was, you have no support for your inference to naturalism from evolution. Since you have no theory of that first life you have no objection to the fact that it was front-loaded ready to unfold via the guidance of the initial conditions. The snapshots that are the fossil record say nothing to refute this.
.This is a nonsense statement. If you attempt to back it up as meaning anything it will be easily refuted. For instance, I am more “fine-tuned” than the Haiku poetry I wrote, but I am still the explanation for it.
Too wrong. 1) Your theory of explanation/prediction is a failure. 2) I am not without predictions. For instance, because the universe is the product of a rational mind it will continue to be consistence and logical. Because God created the universe and declared everything good then everything in the biosphere will be useful and necessary in its intended state. If something is a logical necessity of the real world it will also prove to be a reality of the real world.
God is not “finetuned” post hoc. God is described in His revelation. And your prediction theory is a failure.
It’s not a theory but an explanation. What’s so vague and messy about it?
Got any confirmation for this? I have for mine.
Yep. Time again you all have admitted that when people describe morality they are talking about a normative principle discernible by rational beings. When they say “this is wrong” they mean it actually is wrong. You have claimed that they are wrong to think this, are ignorant of the truth, and are being influenced by semantic limitations. What you haven’t done is argued that when people say “this is wrong, or this is evil” that they actually mean to say “it is my subjective feeling that this brings me less pleasure than other options, weighed against my broader considerations, and that I choose to impose my feelings on you against your feelings because I have the power to convince or subdue you”.
Non sequitur. Read the context and the assertion I addressed. Your definition of morality forces you to change the meaning of the words. In this case to try to make a demonstration you had to avoid the words altogether and create a select case into which you could shoe-horn a very limited idea of morality.
For a guy with doctor and logic in your handle you sure succumb to a surprising number of logical fallacies. How does this follow from my refutation of your assertion I by intuition and feeling)?
Yes, I had a sense of morality and right and wrong. I had, as you assert, a gut instinct about abortion. That gut instinct told me something that was contrary to what I reasoned later to be true.
Your claim on this count and on the repeated allegation that we choose a theology based upon our how it matches up to our already-held feelings is falsified.
Were you going to bother to address which chicken came before which egg according to your gut feelings? Did we invent God to ground our sense of objective morality, or do we invent objective morality to give God aesthetic appeal?
Charlie responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 10:25 am #
The question isn’t whether the taste exists, but whether it reflects an objective reality. And it does. No argument here.
Taste is defined only by its apprehension. That does not weigh upon the objectivity of the matter of fish and chemicals and receptors.
That’s right. So what? Things only look good or bad to lookers and sound good or bad to hearers - we’ve said this countless times. Ignoring “good and bad” (subjective opinions about objective facts) you would still, in any normal and honest moment, trace the physical, chemical and neurological changes to the reception of a physical, material, objective stimulus.
Yay! Yes, so much for my argument. You just proved it and made the exact case I made to you over a year ago.
Nothing was received into the brain to cause this change. There was no material exchange of goods. There was only “imagination”. Yes, you’ll now beg the question and call “imagination” material, but you lose all grounding in reality as soon as you try to create a causal chain. What particle collision, whether deterministic or random, caused the imagination? Once you boil it down to a particle collision, of course, you destroy any foundation for reason and science as you bury yourself in the completely causally detached cocoon of your own brain. But go ahead, defend materialism all the way into the vat. We know that that conclusion is false. too.
Charlie responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 11:14 am #
DL,
I’ve defined “subjective” many times over, several times in response to your offering of your definition at the tail end of long discussions of the subject. I appreciate your desire to settle the definition before the conversation this time. As with morality, I’ll go with the way I think the word is used in normal language and the way I resume others are using it when they discuss it.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/subjective
SteveK responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 11:54 am #
DL:
We have one huge data point that predicts everything rational…the knowledge that logic is necessary, not contingent. By definition that means logic transcends the materialistic causal chain and points to an immaterial mind. Guess who’s mind that is?
SteveK responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 12:57 pm #
DL:
First you say
You’re asking if there are objective reactions to the objective stimuli. Charlie has given you the answer many times. Yes. I hope we can all agree on that.
Then you say this
Now you are asking a different question, which is fine. No longer satisfied with finding an objective, predictable reaction, you are now looking for ‘objective taste’ independent of the food. Why the change? Why is this now the criteria?
OK, fine. If this is the complaint then I ask you to consider your statement except insert ‘propositions’ for ‘burritos’, ‘truth value’ for ‘taste’ and ‘true or false’ for ‘good or bad’.
Is truth subjective? According to your method of argument - yes. You have changed the definition of ‘objective’ somewhere in midstream. First it was a reaction to objective stimuli, now it is something completely different.
Let’s try this:
You say burritos objectively have taste (not taste good or bad). Describe for us the method you used to know this. What data do you collect and what does your prediction model look like? We’ll apply this same method to the question of ‘good or bad taste’.
SteveK responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 1:33 pm #
I think DL has already answered, in part, my last request for an explanation.
Let’s look at your claim that “burritos objectively have taste” (not taste good or bad) using the above statment.
a) How did you observe the property of taste?
b) How did you determine that this property belongs to the burrito itself, and was not just an artifact of the way you interacted with the burrito’s other objective properties?
doctor responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 4:18 pm #
Charlie
This is my point. You agree with me that morality is well-defined even before we do a philosophical analysis. Therefore, no matter how the analysis turns out, that existence doesn\’t go away when we find that morality is just preference and taste. You say it is more than just taste, but that\’s just a bare assertion. Tom\’s argument for the objectivity of morality was that it would destroy the meaning of morality. As we\’ve just shown, that argument holds no water.
As for the definition of objective versus subjective, you\’re still not making any sense.
For a start, what is the operational definition? Are you using all the dictionary definitions at once?
Completely wrong. If you like the taste of broccoli, is that dislike in the broccoli? That\’s the point!
The point is NOT whether there\’s a third-party view in which the interaction between you and the broccoli is objective. The question is whether the badness of broccoli is in the broccoli. And it isn\’t!
No causal chain? How about all the experiences that created the mind in the first place?
doctor responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 4:36 pm #
Sorry, Steve, but this is just psychobabble. What is logic necessary for? Rationality? What does that have to do with transcending materialistic causal chains?
And as I said to Charlie, the question here isn\’t whether a third party could objectively explain why something feels morally right or wrong to me, or why something tastes good or bad to me. The point is whether the thing I feel good or bad about has that goodness or badness in itself. It\’s not a question of whether someone could objectively show that I would feel bad watching an execution. That doesn\’t make the badness of execution in the execution itself. (Even if it is objective that I have that feeling.)
Again, we\’re not talking about whether subjective feelings have an objective basis (under physicalism, they would), but whether an individual\’s subjective feelings about an object are a signal of something basic within the object, or whether those feelings are a reaction to other basic objective properties of the object.
I know that I experience taste in a subjective way. All my experiences will be from my perspective. That doesn\’t mean that the subjective feeling isn\’t representative of something in the burrito itself.
I know that some aspects of the taste of burritos are objective because I can detect the taste of a burrito when I cut myself off from the other aspects of a burrito (e.g., in a blind taste test).
In fact, I can break this down into many other sub-tastes like saltiness, sweetness, tartness, hotness, consistency, etc. Each of these attributes can be tasted independently.
However, I cannot taste goodness or badness without also tasting the other things. For this reason, there\’s no positive evidence that the goodness or badness of burritos is anything but my own personal subjective reaction to the other objective properties of the food.
Pretty simple.
Now do the same with morality. I don\’t feel as though an action is good or evil in the absence of other objective information about the action. So there\’s no positive evidence that it is more than just my personal subjective reaction to the objective facts of the case (what, what, where, etc.).
doctor responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 7:07 pm #
Charlie,
Your quote speaks for itself, IMO. The goose chase is quite unnecessary. Just write what you really mean and we\’ll be fine.
I am saying that God does not exist and he\’s not a person. You haven\’t seen God. You haven\’t heard from him. You haven\’t interacted with him. You have simply interacted with the world and interpret natural events as messages from an imaginary friend.
It\’s not even as formal as making a scientific theory. Do you have any friends whom you know but can\’t predict anything about them? Will they zip off at the speed of light or travel through time? Will they change their mass? Are they invisible? Do they eat bugs? I suspect not.
No, when we know a person, we can predict what they will do, where they will go, how fast they will go, what they sound like, how they will react to certain events, etc. But you know nothing of God whatsoever. You can\’t see him or touch him, and you cannot identify his actions. You think you know God\’s invisible feelings. And, of course, you are quite willing to believe in the interpretations of others. Those interpretations you can read about in your holy books, or listen to in church. But there\’s no difference between God and an imaginary friend.
What did God do today? What did he not do today?
Gee, have you ever heard of an ecosystem?
This is the clincher. You really don\’t understand evolution at all. Suppose sharks eat all the other life in the ocean. What are they going to eat? As they deplete their food supply, their population will fall, and their prey will return. And symbiosis is predicted by evolution. The fact that you don\’t know these things just shows that you don\’t understand the theory.
Moreover, they are not predicted by your theory. You still have not said why God can\’t create anything useless. Like an appendix! Or cancer!
doctor responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 7:30 pm #
Charlie,
Ah! So this is okay then?
Hoorah! I\’ve explained everything! Nothing will be a mystery again!
Saying that X is the cause of Y is not explanatory if there are no predictions. If I say a car crash was caused by a post-it note in the trunk of the car, I have not explained the crash. If there is a unique one-time law of physics that says that this particular crash would be caused by this particular post-it note, that doesn\’t explain the crash. Even if it were the cause. Sorry.
For your God theory to be explanatory, God would have to be in communion with us, but he isn\’t. And the environment isn\’t helping us communicate. Which is why (conveniently) your theory doesn\’t own up to any predictions at all (otherwise it might be \”scientific\”).
(tongue in cheek) The existence of local physics confirms the ToE. The ToE affects life completely because there would be no life, no universe without it.(/tongue in cheek).
Yep.
My naturalism is not the same as physicalism (for the zillionth time) is based on what constitutes an explanation. A God theory could explain things if the theory were predictive, e.g., if God has a personality like a humans do. So the first life could be explained to my satisfaction by a god. You just lack a predictive theory of said god. Your god is the hidden post-it note that causes the car crash. It\’s not explanatory because if you make it explanatory, it can be falsified, and you can\’t tolerate that.
Charlie responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 10:15 pm #
I wrote it. Each time.
So although we must be fine I\’ll say it again. You claim to base your naturalism (which is not physicalism, let\’s not forget for a moment) on evidence and scientific findings. You have a faith-based belief that undiscovered explanations will also meet your naturalistic demands and further support your worldview. This faith is grounded upon the fact that science has so far supported your naturalism. But it hasn\’t. What science has not shown, in any way, is that naturalism is true. In fact, it can\’t address the question at all, and can\’t even support naturalism in its own claims (re: mindless, unguided atelic evolution) without knowing just what preceded the first living forms capable of Darwinian evolution (for instance). So there is no naturalistic basis in science from which to infer naturalism, from which to presume it holds at more fundamental levels, which would be necessary to support the contention that what science does know supports naturalism, from which your faith-based predictions draw their support, etc. A nasty circle which eats its own tail. Short form - you can\’t express faith in naturalistic unintelligent abiogenesis (or fine-tuning, or the origin of the universe, or the explanation of gravity, etc.) based upon the previous naturalistic explanations because those are not supported without the ones you are presuming. You are adhering to a philosophical position and calling it science, but it is not. When you withdraw to a true scientific position you are not addressing any of the issues you wish to in your philosophy.
And what you\’re saying is nothing but your unsubstantiated gut feeling.
No. And God is not in that category, either.
Your omniscience is striking at an all-time high today. I know a lot about God, but certainly not everything.
He sustained the universe and He did not act contrary to His nature. He did not do anything unloving or illogical.
Your attempts at sarcasm would be more impressive if you dealt with the issues. You might have noticed that in addition to speaking precisely about ecosystems I used the exact word. You should go back to your pretense that God is an imaginary friend - at least there you don\’t expose your inability to read as well.
Nice try. When in doubt, accuse your opponent of ignorance (thanks, I\’ll take it from here now). Unfortunately, you don\’t understand logic at all, your pseudonym notwithstanding. The shark just ate all the other life in the ocean in your scenario. So where did the prey return from? Oh yes, abiogenesis, of course.
This is exactly the type of scenario I had in mind, but on a much less fundamental, and life-dominating level - so other than your fallacious conclusion you supported my argument beautifully.
False. Symbiosis is retrodicted into the theory. As I said, and you demonstrated, your theory would end in no life. The arms race would result in one master species which would eradicate all of life, itself included. But that doesn\’t happen. Why? Because of feedback loops, limits on development, checks and balances. You know, design. That\’s what I predicted when I said that God made man to enter into a loving and creative relationship with him and designed the rest of the biosphere in aid of this. It wouldn\’t do for bacteria to dominate the planet to the exclusion of so-called higher life (as is far more likely under your theory). But it sure makes sense that they are intrinsically necessary at virtually every level of life to accommodate such a scenario.
The appendix isn\’t useless. The fact that you think so shows you are mired in 19th century proofs and are ignorant of modern medicine. Cell growth and development is a good thing, and when it goes out of control it is a bad thing. It isn\’t useless, but becomes deadly when unchecked, which is cancer. Cancer and death are not good, and they are unnatural, but they are a necessary condition since the Fall.
Actually, I\’ll make another prediction. Cancer will be found to be an aberration of a very good process, probably even more surprising and unique than mere growth and development. That\’s what science actually keeps finding - that things we thought were bad are actually good in their natural state and proper function.
Yeah, that\’s fine with me. Just don\’t claim it\’s proven and go around teaching it as a theory, or anything like that. If you\’re happy with it why should I care?
And where was your demonstration that my point was vague and messy. I must have missed it in your sarcasm. Is this all you\’ve returned for?
It is explanatory if X tells me that X is the cause of Y. And I gave you predictions. I\’ll give you another DL-approved prediction - I predict that X caused Y is true.
You keep apologizing. Is that because you never demonstrate what you set out to? If Driver says \”I reached for my cell phone and went off the road\” then the crash is explained. I\’ll throw in some DL-approved predictions, too. I predict when drivers are distracted they can crash their cars. I predict that Driver is telling the truth because why would he lie?
Yes He is.
It\’s not a theory and my predictions are sound.
And I can answer the same question about God without my tongue embedded in my cheek.
Zillions? So what? I never said it was. What is it about my discussion of your naturalism that makes you think I\’m equating it to physicalism? And, since you\’re so inclined to educate, would you care to remind me just what it is that makes your view not physicalist? I believe it was because you believe in abstract, non-physical objects like numbers, right? I think it is. So that leads me to another question - are numbers objective? Can we know objective facts about mathematics, geometry and logic? (Heads up, Paul.)
It is explanatory, but not all explanations are based upon the MES, and you can\’t tolerate that.
So, I\’ve waded through lots of assertions and smoke-blowing, but little substance.
Let\’s see where we left off…
Oh yes, we proved together that your theory of mind destroys your materialism. Did you have any further thoughts on that?
We also determined that you were wrong when you made your claim that gut instincts about morality lead to theological moralizing.
And I\’m still wondering which gut instinct you\’ve chosen to settle on - do we invent God to explain our perception of objective morality, or invent objective morality to explain God? Or do we actually invent God to explain the fin-tuning, as you once said? And where then, does that leave your latest claim about God\’s aesthetics?
And you didn\’t explain what objectivism was and how I supposedly contradicted myself on it with regards to morality.
But your sarcasm was better than ever, so good job on that.
doctor responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 10:27 pm #
Charlie,
As for morality, it seems your point is that the unexplained element of human morality is the philosophical conclusion that morality is objective. Sorry, but a philosophical conclusion about the nature of morality is not morality. And so Tom\’s argument still falls.
So if I feel that an act is good or bad, that\’s got nothing to do with morality? Now there\’s a theory that doesn\’t match human experience.
No, although some of that information is genetic. No, what I am saying is that the sight and sensation of food, and of spoiled food or unpleasant odors is in the past experience of the person doing the imagining. What a person imagines is some combination of their past experiences or of their abstractions from past experiences.
Charlie responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 11:18 pm #
Hi DL,
Can you make this point make sense? Perhaps explain your conclusion, or put it in context so that I know what you are meaning to say and so that I can respond?
===
What\’s this supposed to mean? Could you try to draw your inferences from what I write so I could somehow follow your train of logic?
Then when was it physically determined?
Thank you for this coherent, and yet incomplete and incorrect answer. You\’re still dodging. What caused the imagination? Rather, what is the \”imagination\”?A particle bumping into another particle? What causes the abstraction? Follow the logic boldly and you will find there is no correspondence to reality in your theory and such an imagination is not linked to any externally existing food-stuff in any way but is merely the result of one electron moving and striking another. The content of the perceived thought is not the cause, and, therefore, is unrelated to the resulting nausea.
This, of course, is not possible. Which means that the imagination is not a physical reaction to anything.
SteveK responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 11:18 pm #
DL:
How did you arrive at the opposite conclusion given the following statement by Charlie?
Note the bold portion where Charlie says the subjective opinion has everything to do with morality. The mystery we are trying to get resolved is you don\’t think morality is objective, yet you think taste is objective. Why?
doctor responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 11:24 pm #
Charlie,
Your statements show that not only are you not listening, but again that you don\’t understand evolutionary biology.
What faith in unintelligent abiogenesis? Is this the faith you attributed to me when I said that abiogenesis was unexplained?
If you believe that restating facts explains those facts, then you can be a supernaturalist. You do, so you are.
My naturalism isn\’t something I prove based on the success of science and the utter failure of superstition. It\’s simply a rational belief in what constitutes an explanation. Naturalism isn\’t explanatory to a naturalist because naturalism is an abstraction. Meanwhile, anything and everything is explanatory to a supernaturalist. It\’s amazing how much is explained when you have no standards for explanations.
Don\’t go too far out on a limb now.
The shark evolved to fit into a niche. That\’s where the species came from in the first place. It didn\’t evolve out of nowhere. Prior species were in approximate equilibrium, so the sharks evolved advantages are incremental. As they breed and consume prey, they consume energy which must be replenished by feeding. But with so many sharks, and the prey depleted, the sharks become their own competition. There is insufficient prey for the sharks to live and breed so sharks begin to die as they hunt for the remaining (fittest) prey. The predators of the young sharks also begin to die out as the prey population falls. Meanwhile, with a reduced prey population, the prey\’s food supply is at an all time high, and the prey\’s offspring survive at a higher rate because they\’re too small for the sharks to eat. Moreover, if a species is too deadly, it will kill off its food supply before it has a chance to mate or find more food. Evolution creates its own feedback mechanisms.
Not design. Evolution. You see only what you want to see. Where are all the ID scientists, huh? If they made real predictions and had real explanations, they would be rewarded. They don\’t do that because they got nothin\’. Except you.
Cancer is an aberration of a good process?!! Notify Nature immediately!
But cancer isn\’t a good process. Are you saying God couldn\’t stop cancer? This is another non-prediction. By this definition, there\’s nothing you cannot interpret as being an aberration of a good process. It\’s unfalsifiable. The trademark of superstition. You\’re saying the world is as good as the world is. You\’re deluding yourself - you will look around you and always see confirmation because you\’ve ruled out falsification from the start.
Your predictions can\’t get any more vague and messy than being unfalsifiable.
Yes! At last! You get it. But what if you simultaneously disclaimed any correlation between driver statements and truth, and disclaimed the idea that driver distraction would be correlated with car crashes? Then the whole explanation would collapse and be non-explanatory. That\’s the point of the post-it note example. Unless I were to predict that post-it notes in the trunk cause cars to crash, my theory would be non-explanatory.
If God were predictable (like a person), then God would be explanatory, and natural by my definition, despite his not being physical. Predictability is what counts, not physicality. Good of you to finally ask.
Charlie responded on 28 Mar 2008 at 11:49 pm #
On ecosystems, rather than reprint it on this page, I\’ll just link to my thoughts on the subject form a while back.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/id-and-gaia/#comment-50633
I have to leave in a few minutes, DL, so will have to get to your most recent comment later.
Charlie responded on 29 Mar 2008 at 12:15 am #
Actually, this one\’s easier than I anticipated:
===
Yep. You said unexplained …currently. You expressed the faith before and continue to harbour it.
Okay, my mistake. Science does not support your world view, you do not base your world view upon science, and you have no faith in science\’s ability to find naturalistic answers to all natural questions. Maybe we have more in common than I thought.
Oh, I\’m sorry, did you want more? What did evolution do today? What\’s it going to do tomorrow?
===Evolution does not such thing. Your story-telling reached its appropriate conclusion at the end, but you ignored it. Life would never have advanced to sharks if your theory were true. The struggle for existence would have left one winner and one loser (you remember Darwin\’s theory required replacement and extinction?) right off the bat. And the one winner would be the next loser as it would cost itself its ecosystem. There are no niches to fill if your theory were followed logically.
===Sorry, it\’s just at the prediction stage right now. Somebody else will have to verify it.
!!!
!
===
You have to learn about the explanation. God is not in the business of stopping cancer or stopping death. Death, which is not good and is not natural, is now necessary.
===
Not so. It just happens to fit the facts.
====
Potential falsification is not the trademark of explanations. It isn\’t even necessary for scientific explanations, the recent interweb fascination with Popper notwithstanding. And scientific explanations do not encompass all explanations (or even a small portion) as your own admissions reveal.
===
No answer then.
===
Oh, so we both get it. After all these attempts you realize that revelation and testimony is explanatory. Good stuff.
===
So only that which explains, by your definition (today) of explanation, exists? You\’d believe in the non-physical if it were explanatory, by your definition? Is anything non-physical so-explanatory?
Where does you latest definition leave abstract entities?
Okay, now I really must go. Any subsequent comments will have to wait.
Charlie responded on 29 Mar 2008 at 3:27 am #
I\’m back and about to turn in but, just for fun, decided to highlight this one transaction:
DL challenged for a prediction:
He received these examples of predictions:
His reply was to continue challenging, as though these predictions could be made into non-predictions by refusal to face them:
At March 28th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Charlie said of this prediction
At March 28th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
DL\’s very next response quoted this same paragraph and said:
This was his sole response to the point and its explication.
This display of interest in reading and comprehending arguments explains a lot about these \”dialogues\”.
Remember, this is the guy who said that to be an explanation A had to preferentially predict B. As this failed he said A had to be somewhat greater than noise at predicting B. In order to allow in intuitively acceptable explanations he then had to allow that an explanation was \”predictive\” if someplace, anyplace, in the background knowledge there was room for prediction. Finally the test lay in shambles as DL said an explanation was predictive if it was predicted to be true.
But look how stringent the \”formal\” test becomes when \”dispassionately\” applied to explanations DL does not want to admit. Not that the test was ever legitimate in the first place, but DL\’s adherence to it is selective to the extreme.
Charlie responded on 29 Mar 2008 at 3:28 am #
ps. I forgot to mention that I repaired a typo or two in my quotes of myself.
doctor responded on 29 Mar 2008 at 9:43 am #
Charlie,
You\’re speaking from ignorance of biology. Imagine the first life on the planet. There are countless niches, even for single-celled life. So some of the single-celled life evolves to function better in its local physical environment. Then there are niches for single-celled life that eats other single-celled life. But a predator cannot be well adapted to all the niches. So that means there will have to be many predators. And once there are predators, there will be predators of the predators, and their specializations will make them poorly suited to feed on the original prey. At each stage, the system regains approximate equilibrium. Even at this simple stage, if a single-celled animal is too effective, it will kill off all the surrounding prey, and be unable to travel to other ecosystems (or even to other areas of its original physical environment).
By the time an ecosystem is as evolved as those in our oceans, there are countless niches. There are niches of physical conditions, e.g., deep oceans, or volcanic vents, warm water at the surface, etc. There are niches between species, e.g., animals that feed on plankton, animals that feed on small fish, animals that feed on schools of fish, animals that feed on mammals, and many more levels. Now suppose that one super-species evolved to rapidly eat all the fish in the middle oceans (including itself). That species would run out of food, be unable to breed, and could not wait for the young of smaller species to grow into fish worth eating. The super-species cannot chase all the young fish in the sea, so after the super-species has killed itself off, the young fish will grow into adults. And rapidly because all its predators were gone.
This is beside the point because such a species would have to be adapted to too many conditions simultaneously (cold water, warm water, deep water, shallow water, fresh water, etc.).
The ideas you\’re selling are from a retired ID guy who publishes on faith web sites. If this old crank could prove design, he\’d have a Nobel prize. Something should be tipping you off at this point. If it\’s too good to be true, it probably isn\’t true. You\’ve been suckered.
doctor responded on 29 Mar 2008 at 10:06 am #
Charlie,
As for your so-called predictions, let\’s look at them again.
You say that everything is necessary and useful for the purpose of man being in communion with God.
You say that rattlesnake venom is good because it helps rattlesnakes maintain the balance in its ecosystem.
But is this really a prediction? What if we killed-off all the rattlesnakes? Would not another species of snake supplant it?
Why did God make rattlesnake poison deadly to humans? That seems counterproductive to the living in communion with God thing. Now here you have a couple of choices. You could say that humans don\’t have to live long to be in communion with God. In which case, who cares about the balance of the environment? Or else you could say that the world is less good than it ought to be by design (because of the fall). So you end up with the prediction that the world is as good for communion as it actually is. If we find the world is better than we thought then it is better. If it is worse, then it is worse.
You also said that even cancer will be seen as an aberration of something good. I think that\’s doublespeak. An aberration of something good is something BAD!
Meanwhile, evolutionary biology predicts common descent, whereas divine design does no such thing. It also predicts other definite outcomes for experiments (http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA210.html). Also, genetic algorithms prove that evolution works in principle.
No. There could be a god out there who is responsible for inexplicable events, and who acts in such an unpredictable way that the inexplicable events fall into no pattern. But any entity that does this defeats our ability to see it or reason to its existence. My naturalism isn\’t about denying supernatural phenomena. In fact, one might say that my naturalism says that a few things must be supernatural. My naturalism is really saying that supernatural events always look like inexplicable events, and so we can never reason to their cause. It also says that as soon as a non-material entity becomes predictable, it becomes natural (by my definition).
Charlie responded on 29 Mar 2008 at 10:40 am #
Wrong tack, amigo. You don\’t have a theory about first life and you don\’t know the environment. You don\’t know what first life was or what niches were involved. If life was generated once then it is far more likely to die and join the vast majority of entities in the universe and become non-life again.
You are presuming that this fragile first life somehow established itself well enough and lasted long enough to spread out into different niches …doing what? Let\’s presume converting chemicals into fuel. And then one lucky one became a predator. This predator is far more likely to have been swamped by the existing organisms than to have established itself. If it were to become the dominant form then it would do so by destroying the others. Your explanation predicts such destruction and replacement - mine doesn\’t. Your explanation is more likely to result in destruction and nonlife, mine isn\’t.
For a guy with no theory and no faith you sure have a lot of explanations. Not necessarily. A theory that says that every variation, however deleterious will be weeded out and any variation, however beneficial, will apply at the beginning. It is far more likely that, of two choices of life, one will be weeded out at the beginning. If natural selection is going to select a predator and propagate predation it would predict that their changes would make them better predators of more prey - not less. They would destroy their food resources.
Other ecosystems? You are not talking about first life in a primordial soup, or in a subterranean rock now - you are talking about all-at-once creation. There are no ecosystems in your theory. You have rigged the game and are ignoring obvious implications and are claiming this is \”knowledge\” of biology. It isn\’t. It is speculating and story-telling. This is fine, if that\’s the kind of theory you have faith in, but it does not make your scenario the more likely. The most likely is that if life emerges it disappe