This is a more philosophical and scientific treatment of the evo-bible conflict, not focussed on fundamentalist concerns of age of universe, 6 days etc. For the fundamentalist approach, relating to their problems of age of universe and 6 days etc, see:
Also: The focus is now on consciousness rather than only free will. I used to assume that c was not an issue, not part of the religion science divide, but it is, so this has to be the starting point of the book/article. The article as it was originally didn;t mention c or nmc, just fw. The article in the googleDoc version (embedded on the site) has quotes of Darwin etc re fw, but now I'll have also re c, particularly nmc.
AR: I don;t need to mention mindless materialist idea in an evo bb book for religious people, but it can be as part of a warning for certain types of readers, tha tthey won;t find anyhting comprehensible/interesting in this book. And I can predict how they would answer on the color test, or make it a prerequisite for reading the book! :)
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AR: Inserted material re Wallace, Jaynes re emergence of mind was not a natural event explicable via materialistic science etc etc from section "“Mind of the gaps”, and stages in the evolution of the concept of “mindless materialists” of mindless materialsits paper/googleDoc"
It belongs in the article Quantum Kabbalah and the Instant Retroactive Universe: "And God Said, 'Let there have been a Big Bang' ” which starts with: Part I: Science, Atheism and biblical Religion" and it fits into the subject matter of the first page. There, I speak of God and soul as not being part of physics and so expected not to be in the evo/bb theory, but now i need to ad re consciousness also (and re ff of course) so all that fits into the subject matter of the first page,
In 1864, Wallace published a paper, "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection'", applying the theory to humankind. Darwin had not yet publicly addressed the subject, although Thomas Huxley had in Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.
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email: Sun, Nov 17, 2019, 11:43 AM, Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 9:56 PM
In the beginning... God was bored/And god saw all that was created... And it was very boring.
The meaning of the creation account is that it was a free wiiled act, and the result was what was desired. Etc
Meaning of Eden account is my vort re response to theodicy (and establishing the problem in the first place by the idea of an omnipotent creator).
And the juxtaposition is re instant universe idea because of free will
Idea is to separate into 2 books:
one with Mind = the Retro Un, though with other title? eg title can be"the evolutionary significance of consciousness' [I have a page of this, AOJS convergence talk etc: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/andgodsaidlettherebemeaning/evolutionary-significance-of-consciousness] but that is not exactly what i mean, more like "Genesis is an account of the emergence of meaning and the onset of purposive activity in a created universe"; mind emerged not so long ago, indeed some humans today may stil lack it... moral responsibility requires consciousness, fw, not just brain, so Breishis begins with later stage emergence, not early hominid. See other page of this site embedded on the left: "Let there be meaning";
the other book is without Mind, ie the evo BB timing is due to emergence of biological human but no stress on mind: see https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/andgodsaidlettherebemeaning/editing-organizing-the-evo-book-instant-universe.
Newer notion of mine is for RetroUn to be re conscioisness, and inst un is without.
To ensure that readers understand the context, and to eliminate mc readers at the outset, I can place in the preface:
Readers who do not understand/agree with the following are not advised to read the book:
The entire book is predicated on:
the existence of a non-material consciousness
which is known (by at least some humans) directly via introspection
is irreducible
and is fundamental, indeed all else is known via c.
There is free will (libertarian, etc...agent causation etc), for at least some humans
There is an 'ought'.
The assumption is made that there is a creator of all, a concsious enttiy who created the universe and us according to an act of its Will (and we are beings created in its age in the sense of having some degree of free will), and which is the ground of being for the ought, etc.
....
For RetroUn re conscioisness: two newer ideas to put in:
A) Before c, there's "red in tooth and claw" but no pain etc; pain sorrow joy only began with first conscious being.
So the point is not only that free willed choice began late, and that from the outsider perspective Meaning and Purpose began only with its emergence, but even emotion etc only began late.
Since free will is the way in which mind is able to influence the physical universe, perhaps these were simultaneous, or perhaps first was consciousness then free will.
So the stages are
mechanical unfolding of the initial state according to the laws of nature (which can be said to exist at all only due to the existence of the Mind behind its creation);
emergence of c within the created universe so there is now passive experience by a c of the events reported in the brain;
self-awareness, an I";
the ability of the "I to influence events, via "fw";
the intuition of good and evil as a criterion for choosing how to act
B) i. One can magine that the universe is a dream of God, and we ar echaracters in that dream. However the characters in our dreams do not have their own c. Of course if we are extermeely sophistcated complex, then the neurons involved in creating the characters in our dream might be sufficient to have a consciosness emerge which is that of the dream-character not us! And so it can be for the drema characters in God;s Mind, ie us.
ii. I God can imagine the univrse and us as a dream why bother creating it physically, and wha tis the meaning of a real physical external universe if :"en od milvado"? So the answer could be that by definition when 'sepaate' consciousnessess emerge wihtingGod's Mind (according to God;s own plan), then that is what is consdered to be a real 'external universe'.
iii. A universe can be said to eist only when thr is a consicoisness aware of it, and so the physical universe and us beings can be said to exist only when ither God is aware of us as a separate entity, or peraps when we emerge as separaate consciousnesses within God's MInd.
Sun, Jul 23, 2006, 1:34 AM
to me
Shavua tov Avi,
We finally have the technical shell of our BHTCommunity Internet discussion forum set up. I would like to post your manuscript "The Evolutionary Significance of Consciousness" later entitled "Future Science,,,," for readers to comment on. Tzvi Freeman, my partner is setting up the forum wants the authors of the posted papers to revise their manuscript in accordance to the feedback. Shall we go ahead and post the paper? We shall moderate the site to screen out crazy or hateful comments.
I have two files. The more recent (by three days) is the "Future Science, directed evolution." This is the version we would use? I like the earlier title better.
Bvrakhah,
Ilana
ILANA ATTIA, Managing Editor
B'OR HA'TORAH Journal of Science, Art & Modern Life in the Light of the Torah
Published by SHAMIR, 6 David Yellin Street, POB 5749
Jerusalem, Israel
Tel/fax 972-2-642-7521
info@borhatorah.org www.borhatorah.org
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Inbox
x
Thu, Nov 30, 2006, 11:39 PM
to me
Avi, I dropped the idea of the idea discussion forum, mainly because I don't have time to do it properly. Tzvi Freeman, the same person who nudged me to begin with, now is suggesting that we do the discussion forum under the aegis of Chabad.org, which is the best Jewish site in cyberspace, mamash. Could we put up your "The Evolutionary Significance of Consciousness"? It would require you to dialog with the participants. Should be fun!
ILANA ATTIA, Managing Editor
B'OR HA'TORAH Journal of Science, Art & Modern Life in the Light of the Torah
Published by SHAMIR, 6 David Yellin Street, POB 5749
Jerusalem, Israel
Tel/fax 972-2-642-7521
info@borhatorah.org www.borhatorah.org
new volume! B'OR HA'TORAH 16 (2006)
Call for Papers
Seventh Miami International Conference on Torah & Science
December 2007
Make a standing order and receive every new volume of B'OR HA'TORAH when it comes out!
From: Tzvi Freeman [mailto:tFreeman@chabadonline.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 9:40 PM
To: Ilana Attia
Subject: Re: RE:
I'm still waiting for your go-ahead on this project. We would really like to host a forum for BHT people at chabad.org. All we need is a list of names, titles and email addresses--and then we'll work out an introductory letter and it's ready to go. We could have this in a week's time, mamesh.
--
--Rabbi Tzvi Freeman for Chabad.org
On Nov 24, 2006, at 12:31 AM, Ilana Attia wrote:
Tzvi,
The forum idea has been weighing heavy on my mind for many months but I absolutely had no time to work on it. Please send me the links to the sites you mentioned where academic papers are posted on Chabad.org. thanks!
How do you like having one full-time job?
Shabbat Shalom, Ilana
B'OR HA'TORAH Journal of Science, Art & Modern Life in the Light of the Torah
Jerusalem, Israel
info@borhatorah.org www.borhatorah.org
Call for Papers
December 2007
Avi I Rabinowitz
Sat, Dec 2, 2006, 7:07 PM
Ilana, hi Yes, its ok, but I'd prefer if instead of including the article they have a link to it on my website, but with the discussion on their site. Failing t
Ilana Attia
Sat, Dec 2, 2006, 11:27 PM
Avi, two thank you's! Thank you for your agreement to make a link and your conditions for replying to comments. I'm going to try to talk with Professor Branover
We can clearly see that Wallace, co-founder of the theory of the evolution of humanity including the human brain, was an nmc, and felt that the nmc associated to the human brain was outside the realm of the laws of physics (and that nmc is more fundamental than the material universe) and that its emergence in association to human brains could not be explained via laws of the material universe.
We would say to this that there is no a priori reason to assume that nmc emerged globally across all humanity simultaneously, nor that it is associated to all human brains today.
Bergson: nature possesses the ability to be creative in a way which transcends the causality and entropic limitations taught by physics.
W. K. Clifford: Besides his works on mathematical physics (curved physical space and theories of matter) he wrote on philosophical matters, and was both a proponent of evolutionary theory and clearly nmc.
Presumably Huxley, Clifford and Bergson - like Darwin - assumed human bodies evolved via naturalistic processes, however given that they all agreed that humans are associated to nmc, presumably they would have agreed that materialistic/naturalistic theories and processes are insufficient to explain or model all of reality, however there was no naturalistic scientific theory as yet available which claimed that it could indeed explain all of reality.
du Nouy: the biophysicist Lecomte du Nouy in his book "Human Destiny"writes of the evolution of humans as a significant step in the evolution of the cosmos - significant because conscious (hu)man(ity) has "escape[d] from the grasp of the physico-chemical and biological laws".
AR: Clearly he is referring to nmc, a phenomenon which is not subject to the laws of physics, and to its emergence at a particular time in the not so distant past. We would claim that without knowing exactly what nmc is and how it emerges there is no a priori justification for assuming that all humans at that time acquired it, nor that all humans at present are associated to it.
Jaynes: points out that most of our intellectual processes can occur independently of consciousness, and thus he postulates that consciousness arose in humans after all intellectual abilities evolved. Jaynes quotes from ancient Greek writings to show that the writers were not conscious as we know it. Julian Jaynes “THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND”
http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Jaynes%20Bicameral%20Mind1.htm
He speaks of the notion that consciousness is non-material (eg “it has no location”) and could not have emerged via material evolutionary processes, but emerged at some point in history:
Introduction: The problem of consciousness: ….“...led many scientists back to a metaphysical view. The interiority of consciousness just could not in any sense be evolved by natural selection out of mere assemblages of molecules and cells. There has to be more to human evolution than mere matter, chance, and survival. Something must be added from outside of this closed system to account for something so different as consciousness.
Such thinking began with the beginning of modern evolutionary theory, particularly in the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naiveté, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so. The discontinuities were terrifying and absolute. Man’s conscious faculties, particularly, “could not possibly have been developed by means of the same laws which have determined the progressive development of the organic world in general, and also of man’s physical organism.” [8] He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture. Indeed, it is partly because Wallace insisted on spending the latter part of his life searching in vain among the seances of spiritualists for evidence of such metaphysical imposition that his name is not as well known as is Darwin’s as the discoverer of evolution by natural selection. Such endeavors were not acceptable to the scientific Establishment. To explain consciousness by metaphysical imposition seemed to be stepping outside the rules of natural science. And that indeed was the problem, how to explain consciousness in terms of natural science alone…In reaction to such metaphysical speculations, there grew up through this early period of evolutionary thinking an increasingly materialist view.
Here (last paragraph of “Book 2”) he speak of a zombie civilization:
“consciousness…is not necessary for making judgments or in simple thinking. It is not the seat of reason, and indeed some of the most difficult instances of creative reasoning go on without any attending consciousness.……necessary to conclude that consciousness does not make all that much difference to a lot of our activities. If our reasoning has been correct, it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but who were not conscious at all. … a civilization without consciousness is possible...”
AR: Re Jaynes’ “some metaphysical force had directed evolution….at the beginning of consciousness”+ “a civilization without consciousness is possible”: we would claim that there is no reason to simply assume that all humanity at that time acquired nmc, ie transitioning from ‘zombies’ to nmc’s, nor that all all humans today posses it - even those biologically-genetically descended from those who did acquire it back then might not be associated to it.
..
3. The effect of the big-bang theory and its implications: After millenia during which most thinkers assumed nmc existed and that it was not necessary to defend its existence, finally a candidate for a full theory of the emergence of everything from nothing was proposed - a scientific origin theory composed of combining the big bang theory, notions of entropy, the evolutionary theory etc - and one could not anymore ignore the issue of whether humans were associated to nmc, eg by simply implicitly assuming it exists despite not being part of existing theories.
At this point, some scientists and philosophers adopted pure materialism, and saw the material ‘big bang’ (singularity with its space-time energy content etc) as the source of all, and that which is not part of the big bang in the theory - eg nmc - did not actually exist. Others ignored the issue of consciousness. Some proposed a role for consciousness in quantum theory and thus enfranchised it within physics in a sense, but in fact it was not ever actually part of physics theory (ie the agent of ‘collapse’ was not itself encompassed in the theory); furthermore other than the very prominent pioneers of quantum theory most (later) theoretical physicists disparaged this notion.
Now that there were finally naturalistic theories which could be combined to produce an explanation for the emergence of the brain all the way from ‘almost-nothingness’, many accepted that science was tending towards materialism and eliminated mind altogether so that science could now claim to have a model for everything, with non-materialist scientists often feeling that they had to hide their beliefs.
However prominent physicists in all periods, eg contemporaries such as Andre Linde and Ed Witten, are unabashedly in the nmc camp (see extensive quotes and discussions of nmc from the physics and physicist point of view in the accompanying paper “Why Consensus..”), as also prominent physicists like Wheeler, and Davies who wrote prolifically as a physicist populizer of ideas combining science and mind, and it would not be legitimate to say that a material view of reality is scientifically preferred, and indeed any nmc knows such a theory is in fact incorrect. However materialists began to feel that physics and neuroscience was adequate to the task of explaining everything of relevance regarding humans, and that there was no no need of non-material phenomena or causes to explain anything, and then claimed nmc did not in fact exist.
Preface
The materialistic scientific theory is inadequate, and the Bible is not purporting to give a centific theory of the material universe, quite the opposite, it is iving exactly the complementary aspect to that,at all levels. ie :
science cannot speak of why the universe exists, but the Bible does,
sicence cannot speak of the 'before' but Genesis does,
science cannot imply a purpose to existence but the Bible exactly does,
similarly science cannot encompass the mind, how it orginated, why etc, but tha tis exactly the purview of the Bible in genesis.
science self-limits to that which is provable, mind is beyond that, and but it is known for a fact 9to nmc's) and religion goes a step further, beyond wha tis known self-known, and is about revelation etc.
Material added here from Mind articles
Descartes
re God creating universe and laws of nature and letting the laws bring about the order in the universe
God created
somewhere in the imaginary spaces [with] matter sufficient to compose ... [a "new world" in which He] ... agitate[d] variously and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that there resulted a chaos as disordered as the poets ever feigned, and after that did nothing more than lend his ordinary concurrence to nature, and allow her to act in accordance with the laws which he had established.
Descartes does this "to express my judgment regarding ... [his subjects] with greater freedom, without being necessitated to adopt or refute the opinions of the learned".
He goes on to say that he "was not, however, disposed, from these circumstances, to conclude that this world had been created in the manner I described; for it is much more likely that God made it at the first such as it was to be."
..
Why did Descartes, who attempted to reject any notion which he did not absolutely KNOW to be true, remain fixed on the idea tha tther eis a God, and why was a God necessary as part of the proces of bringing the univers einto existence?
I would think that ti was because he recognized so clealry the distinction between mind and matter, and tha t a theory of matter - such as physics, and all scineces - could never aspire to explain encompanss or model mind. And since as he indicated, mind incontrovertibly exists, and is fundamental, he diaspire don the one hnd to construct a smuch a spossible of e physical material theroy of the enmrgence fn formaiton of the matetril aspect of reality, but knew that there would alsway need to be a nonmaterial aspect which would also be presumeably the sourc eof the nmc associated to humans.
Darwin:
Bergson, Whitehead, Thomas Huxley, James, Eddington
The History of the "Conflict": when it seemed to conflict, and in which way, and for whom
For fundamentalists, the issue is 6 day vs a long process, and in general the age of the universe, however to most philosophers, scientists the issues are different.
These latter categories do not believe in any case in the divine origin of each word in the bible, nor are they particularly interested in readings of the bible which do assume this - to them the issue of "science vs religion" is much more general, as we have seen vis a vis the issue of the big bang, which was actually considered by them to support the essential novel teaching of genesis, the non-eternity of the physical universe (and also perhaps the notion of a development rather than an instantaneous emergence of a completed universe).
For example, to philosophers and scientists there is a very fundamental aspect of the difference between the teachings of science and of the bible which is very pertinent - science focuses on an explanation of the material universe and its development, including attempts at modeling or explaining its emergence 'from nothing". However if one is not a materialist, then there is an essential aspect missing - the mind (or 'consciousness', or 'self-awareness'). Science cannot at all encompass this non-material phenomenon, and since the ver fact of the existenc eof some non-materiality is of profound significance formt he philosophicla and scientific persepctive, this is a fundamental flaw of any calim of a scientific 'theory of absolutely everything". And since nmc\s know that nmc is fundamental, it is that whereby al the material univers eis known and via which it can be said to exist, then this problem is all the more acute.
And so th bible, which can be read as describing the emergenc eof a human with aspects of mind, and causality-tanscending free will, is of potentioally great interest, whether fomr a literary or philosophical or ... point of view...
...
1. Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius etc: It is difficult to assess what they felt vis a vis modern notions of materialism, since to the ancients nature was suffused with what today we would call nmc, and so even if they considered all to be matter it would not necessarily mean “matter without nmc”. However, some of them may have been ontological materialists.
Cartesian conjecture: Humans are conscious (nmc), inanimate entities are not, non-human animals are non-conscious automata.
2. Darwin: Humans descend from non-conscious beings. However Darwin did not hold a materialistic view of humanity and seemed to assume some constituent element of our reality that today would be considered religious, and it does not seem that he would have proposed that all that is human can derive from purely-materialistic aspects of biology (see appendix for quotes). As there was not yet a full theory of the emergence of the material universe - as eg later implied by the big bang theory - it was not necessary to include a discussion on how this extra aspect would emerge. Presumably if he lived today Darwin would not have disagreed with the idea that materialistic notions would not suffice to explain or model all of reality.
Thomas Huxley's extension: a paraphrase: Our bodies are machines. Did not accept free will but he was “not among materialists, for I am utterly incapable of conceiving the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that existence”. Humans are ‘nmc automata’ (as are perhaps animals).
Bergson: nature possesses the ability to be creative in a way which transcends the causality and entropic limitations taught by physics.
W. K. Clifford: Besides his works on mathematical physics (curved physical space and theories of matter) he wrote on philosophical matters, and was both a proponent of evolutionary theory and clearly nmc.
Presumably Huxley, Clifford and Bergson - like Darwin - assumed human bodies evolved via naturalistic processes, however given that they all agreed that humans are associated to nmc, presumably they would have agreed that materialistic/naturalistic theories and processes are insufficient to explain or model all of reality, however there was no naturalistic scientific theory as yet available which claimed that it could indeed explain all of reality.
3. The big-bang theory and its implications: After millenia during which most thinkers assumed nmc existed and that it was not necessary to defend its existence, finally a candidate for a full theory of the emergence of everything from nothing was proposed - a scientific origin theory composed of combining the big bang theory, notions of entropy, the evolutionary theory etc - and one could not anymore ignore the issue of whether humans were associated to nmc, eg by simply implicitly assuming it exists despite not being part of existing theories.
In addition, after all previous time when the issue of nmc was confused with talk of a ‘soul’ or of a ‘life-force’ etc, there was finally the possibility of a cleaner Cartesian division between “mind” which was not incorporated in science, and “body/matter” which is what science deals with.
At this point, some scientists and philosophers adopted pure materialism, and saw the material ‘big bang’ (singularity with its space-time energy content etc) as the source of all, and that which is not part of the big bang in the theory - eg nmc - did not actually exist. Others ignored the issue of consciousness. Some proposed a role for consciousness in quantum theory and thus enfranchised it within physics in a sense, but in fact it was not ever actually part of physics theory (ie the agent of ‘collapse’ was not itself encompassed in the theory); furthermore other than the very prominent pioneers of quantum theory most (later) theoretical physicists disparaged this notion.
Now that there were finally naturalistic theories which could be combined to produce an explanation for the emergence of the brain all the way from ‘almost-nothingness’, many accepted that science was tending towards materialism and eliminated mind altogether so that science could now claim to have a model for everything, with non-materialist scientists often feeling that they had to hide their beliefs.
However prominent physicists in all periods, eg contemporaries such as Andre Linde and Ed Witten, are unabashedly in the nmc camp, as also prominent physicists like Wheeler, and Davies who wrote prolifically as a physicist populizer of ideas combining science and mind, and it would not be legitimate to say that a material view of reality is scientifically preferred, and indeed any nmc knows such a theory is in fact incorrect.
4. The present conjecture:
Given its self-evident existence, it is inconceivable that intelligent thinkers can deny the existence of nmc and so one is forced to conclude that materialists (as exemplified by eliminative materialists and perhaps including all material monists such as physicalists) do not have the type of consciousness they say does not exist, and are "material-conscious automata" (we’ll say they are “mc’s”); alternately, what they lack is only the “nmc-self-awareness” aspect and so they are "non-self-aware nmc automata";
In contrast, non-materialists (dualists/idealists/panspychists, and probably neutral monists etc) have the type of "consciousness" they claim exists - they are "nmc-self-aware automata" (we’ll say they are ”nmc’s”). [Of course if ‘true free will’ exists they are autonomous-nmc”.]
There is a biological difference between “mc’s” and “nmc’s” (and it is worthwhile performing experiments to attempt to identify it).
A compelling case has been made for the lack of need for nmc in physics and cosmology, and indeed physics deals only with that which can be proven - whereas nmc is notoriously incapable of being proven to exist. So it may well be that in the present era we finally reach the conclusion that there is nothing of relevance that physics has to offer on the topic of nmc, and physics and physical cosmology are inevitably capable of dealing only with the material aspect of reality, which is ‘derivative’ relative to the fundamental aspect, that of nmc., and that those presenting naturalistic theories of reality are ontological materialists who see reality via their own limited scope and erroneously attribute to reality their own materiality.
Possibly, if ordinary scientific methodology aiming at publicly-verifiable results is not equipped for the study of nmc, it will be necessary to utilize as instrument a suitably-trained nmc to investigate its own nmc - which is particularly appropriate for a phenomenon which is directly known by one’s own nmc, and (to nmc’s) is ‘the self’.
Terminology/Abbreviation: “mc” vs “nmc”: Materialists say they too possess ‘consciousness’, just that it is material (ie physical, no different than any other physical entity or process etc). We will refer to this as a “material consciousness”. Furthermore however, in line with our proposition that why are correct ontologically about themselves, and that this is not merely a statement of philosophical opinion, we will refer to materialists themselves as “mc’s”. Similarly, those who would categorize themselves as non-materialists are presumed to indeed be associated to a non-materialist consciousness, and so we will refer to them as nmc’s.
OC = abbreviation for “In the context of the ontological conjecture”: occasionally we will use this to denote aspects of the paper which depend on this conjecture being correct, as opposed to most of the paper which can be read as being independent of it.
Explanation of the role of Nagels and Chalmers:
When physicists read the works of philosophers they should keep in mind differences similar to that between physicists and mathematicians - namely the distinction between that which is intuitive and that which is proven, or that which is accepted as obvious and self-evident by many physicists but has not been rigorously formulated to the satisfaction of philosophers.
We can apply this to our case, when reading philosophical writings relating to materialism vs non-materialism by nagel and Chalmers..
Nagel: The essential point re consciousness in his article "What it is like to be a bat" was likely largely obvious to many nmc's, and does not seem to contain anything that would be novel to a deep-thinking nmc physicist, but the very fact that it caused such a storm indicates that it seems to have opened the eyes of some, and it is interesting to try to determine why and in what way and to whom.
We can speculate that it was sufficiently clearly and philosophically formulated that it benefitted those who were presumably in the above-described category of nmc but not-yet-nmc-aware, or nmc but hadn't thought it all through enough. Also, that it formulated the issues more philosophically-rigorously and so benefitted philosophers. Also, perhaps some mc's began to understand not what nmc is but rather than nmc's discussing consciousness meant something completely different than they had thought they were discussing.
Chalmers: Similarly for the work of Chalmers. Nmc's wondered about the type of humanity prior to the emergence of nmc, and books by Koestler and Jaynes and others explored various aspects of the notion of earlier humans being fundamentally different than later humans, and writers analyzing the biblical creation and eden accounts in this light could see it as an echo of this emergence. So the notion of early humans being 'zombies' was clear to nmcs, but of course not to mc's, and nmc's did not realize that not all their audience was nmc, and those mc's hearing these views did not realize they were ontologically different than those expressing the views, and the language used by both types was misleading and ambiguous in the ways we outlined earlier. And so it created an opening for rigorous philosophical formulation of the distinctions, such as by Chalmers, some of whose points might seem obvious to many nmcs who contemplated these issues, but they did not realize that it was not obvious to all, and that it needed to be made explicit and more rigorous, as with Chalmers' analysis, distinctions, explanations and clarifications.
Nagel: His point in his "Mind and Cosmos" was obvious to scientists like Bergson and Eddington and the quantum physics founders, and later to Wheeler, and was implicit in the profound popular-physics writings of Paul Davies, and mathematicians like Rudy Rucker ("Infinity & the Mind", though much of that is about brain, with some Platonistic spects). To many philosophers however all this perhaps needed to be stated rigorously, and also they possibly didn't feel they were expert enough in the science aspect etc (as per Nagels' modestly self-deprecatory prefatory statements).
Importantly also, we need to keep in mind the (non-)analogy to the case of a non-color blindlecturer propounding deep notions about colors, where the lecturer is not aware that they are relying on the audience members' sharing their primitives, but where the audience containing also some color-blind members who do not share them. Analogously, of course we can see that the previously-named writers were nmc's talking to nmc readers, but not realizing that there were mc's among the readership to whom what they said was incomprehensible or nonsensical, and not realizing that some of the intended meaning of their ideas was supplied not by the words explaining them but rather by the innate intuitive nmc-understanding of the readers - and therefore these ideas could not be comprehensible to mc's.
..
Footnote: One is reminded of the anecdote re proofs of the non-existence of God or disproof of the ancient date of the bible etc: experts in each scientific profession (physics, biology, archaeology, literary criticism) knows the limitation of its own science and understands their specialty is inadequate to the task of a rigorous proof but thinks maybe the others have succeeded in disproving it.
Another relevant aspect is the difference between two eras: after mc's claimed that everything about humanity could be explained 'scientifically' vs before, when it was not possible for mc's to claim all could be explained. In the earlier era, what to nmc's was the obvious lack of mind as ingredient supplied by evolutionary processes to humans was not an issue, it was assumable by nmc's that it would eventually arrive, as per eg the quantum-physics approach of Davies and perhaps Eccles and later Penrose, but generally when the big bang became accepted by mc's as a complete theory - along with evolutionary theory - providing the basis for a theory of all, and many of them pushed atheistic materialism as a result, it became intellectually necessary to make the point clear to them that nmc's did not at all feel there was a complete theory, and maybe this was impossible within science. And that created an opening for the books by Nagel.
Given all the above, one therefore needs to keep in mind the different grain/mind types - (nmc, mc, nsa-nmc, and the last category: nmc's who hadn't previously sufficiently thought about it) - the difference between philosophers and scientists, and the difference between eras, and analyze the way that readers of Nagels and Chalmers understood the issues before and after reading those works.
For example, how each type was affected by the arguments:
what the terms mean to each type;
what aspect of the argument is added intuitively unconsciously by nmc's that is not added by mc's.
what was explained that is obvious to nmcs, but phrasing it so that the last category finally got it;
at which point did mcs understand that what is being said is not what they thought - albeit it still seems nonsensical to them.
Also to analyze the difference in the effect of the arguments on philosophers, and on those scientists to whom it was intuitively obvious, as well as their perception of whether it was novel or explicating earlier notions.
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mind-based understandings
If there is mind somehow logically prior to the physical universe, that is very much like the medieval philosophical conception of god as the ground of being of the universe, and also the idea of god the creator - not the same idea, and not with all the trappings of the notion of god or creator, but in that direction.
If mind is fundamental and ‘prior’, then deep mind-based intuitions may be granted more credence by a non-materialistic than by a materialist - for example the notion of there being some sort of transcendent meaning to life, and purpose to the existence of the universe, and a real moral responsibility and some particular significance to human life, maybe to all life, etc.
Religion is "in this direction", but maximally, making claims that have not been verified, maybe have even been contradicted, so the above is not necessarily religion, it is more like a metaphysical extrapolation based on the knowledge that sevex exists, and it is the type of extrapolation which seems natural for sevex-beings to perform. For many people, the above is indeed their ‘religion’.
religion
Classical religion is a further extrapolation of this process, for example, since human brains communicate with each other via speech and symbols etc, maybe if there is a mind which 'caused' the universe it can also communicate with our minds - to sevex-brains this would not seem unreasonable if indeed there is an underlying mind-aspect to the universe. And if the content of that communication would be passed along to others, one arrives at the format of most classical religions.
Science-religion conflicts
It could be useful in resolving science-religion conflicts in schools and society if the conflict were recognized as being based on deeper more fundamental differences, and if there could be an investigation to find the degree to which the conflict is based on the materialist non-materialist divide, and each side could agree on its location in the scheme outlined above:
the provable to all: science
the known by all but not provable to anyone (which might be an empty set, or it is the notion “I exist”, or is just the content of Godel incompleteness theorem);
the known but not provable but not all consider it to be known, ie sevex etc
the believed but not known (and certainly not provable) eg religion etc.
.........
Utilizing the 'mindless materialist' insight/paradigm, or simply an acknnowledgement of the mc/nmc divide, to help resolve "science-bible conflicts"
Example: evolutionary theory
Sevex is associated to human brains but could not “evolve” due to selection pressures etc since it is not material (as pointed out by Eccles and others). As such, evolutionary theory too is incomplete, basically for the same reason that physics is complete, that, and this needs to be taught in intro science class. The admission of this fact would resolve most of the issues some Biblically-religious people have with it, and might resolve otherwise intractable conflicts in schools and in society.
And for those students interested in following up on that point heard in their intro to science class, a religious studies class can introduce that which 'fills the gap' according to religion, and ID class can do the equivalent, as can various other approaches, including a materialist atheist presentation. However, underlying all of this would be the recognition that science deals with what can be proven, and then there is the realm of what is known but cannot be proven, and after that the realm of that which is deeply intuited but is not known and certainly not provable, and it would be helpful if religion also accepted its place in this scheme, so that it would self-admittedly be described as dealing with that which is believed but not known and not provable. And if atheist materialism would self-admittedly be presented as from the reality experienced by non-sevex, and not only dealing exclusively with that which can be proven, but just as importantly negating all that cannot.
If this type of self-limitation on both sides is feasible, it would be a useful way to eliminate much of the intractable aspect of the "science-religion conflict".
For example, the atheist materialism would see natural law producing humans via evolution etc, and biblical religionists an agree that if there was no god and no creation and only natural law operated, and if only natural law were accepted as explanations for fossils etc, then there would have to be some process unfolding according to natural law which would lead to the development of humans since they aren’t found in the earlier fossil record, and they could agree that if indeed a universe existed in which all operated according to natural law, it could include the production of human physical bodies via a mechanism such as suggested by evolutionary theory. (Neither side would claim that minds and souls would arise this way since atheist materialists do not believe they exist and biblical religionists believe these can originate only by divine action.)
Both sides would agree that they cannot prove their own views, so there would be no conflict.
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7. Cosmological implications:
a. To nmc physicists, the absence of sevex as a component in the big bang means it cannot be naturally produced later, and this represents a deep flaw for any theory intending to be truly a theory of everything; of course this objection is not comprehensible to mc’s.
b. There is acausality potentially implied by the existence of that which did not exist always, and since nmc is beyond the usual level of physical cause-effect and is the root of sevex which is that which provides physical existence and is self-known, it may provide clues towards an eventual theory of why there is existence, ie why there is a universe at all.
MESH: Cosmological implications:
When physicist-brains - the main tool for arriving at physics theories and models - are fully convinced about some fundamental aspect of our reality, but differ irreconcilably, this may well be a matter of relevance for science as a whole rather than only for neuroscience. Even cosmology may be impacted.
Even moreso, there is a qualitative difference between a universe (or 'reality') correctly described by materialism/naturalism or by one which enfranchises sevex.
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The role of ‘mind’ according to the ‘inventor’ of physics
Descartes showed that eliminating consciousness from descriptions of events and interactions in the universe enables us to delineate a separate mechanical level of the universe and its operation, and then to decipher 'laws of physics' regarding them. It was a very great discovery indeed to realize that there is this 'mechanical level' to the universe and that so much could be understood by focusing only on that.
However it would seem that mc’s misunderstood this project, and think that the discovery was that sevex-consciousness does not exist! And they mistakenly believe that the project of finding naturalistic mind-free “laws of nature” succeeded due to the rejection of the very existence of sevex-consciousness; they therefore believe that when one obtains a complete description of the mechanical level, a full theory of physics, we have a full theory of the universe/reality!
They do not understand - and misconstrue and even parody - Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" and his brilliant forensic identification of two levels, the mechanical and sevex, and the deep concomitant realization as mystery the fact that they operate in tandem/are coordinated.
They would not understand Descartes the sevex who says something like 'the mysterious mind-aspect has been cleanly eliminated from physics, a beautiful and elegant excision which leads to wonderful deep understanding of the physical universe, but of course the mystery remains, and consciousness is still the most profound aspect of reality' - mc’s think this type of statement is absurd, and primitive, a throwback to pre Cartesian times, and a confusion to be fought, whereas it is really what Descartes meant.
In physics models, one can only get out what is put in. Classical general relativistic cosmology treats the universe as a ‘cloud of dust’ i.e. non-interacting particles of matter, which would seem to be ignoring too much and yet nevertheless the result is the very fundamental big bang model of expanding space. And so one can ignore so much and nevertheless arrive at an essential feature.
However within this expanding space is only the matter we placed in the model, non-interacting dust, and so if we do not add it into the model, the universe which emerges would lack electromagnetism and all other forces, and so never produce structure, eg stars, planets and humans.
Similarly, of course the model ignores sevex, and so since sevex is sui generis - qualitatively ‘other than’ matter - the universe which emerges obviously will not contain sevex. Clearly the Cartesian splitting off of mind and matter works exceptionally well in modeling and explaining the material content of the universe and spacetime. To materialists the fact that there is no ‘need’ for sevex in producing the material universe as we know it basically confirms their feeling that it doesn’t exist.
However to non-materialists sevex is a fundamental component of reality and will be relevant to a ‘more-fundamental’ version of cosmology, and its absence in standard cosmology is not an indication that sevex-consciousness was not present or underlying the universe all along, and the lack of its need in explaining the physical universe is just another example of Descartes’ discovery. This attitude is incomprehensible to materialists.
MC physicists cannot understand how it is that nmc physicists and philosophers know that the physical cosmology theories are structurally-inadequate at the task of producing a theory of ‘everything’ including of reality and cosmology at the deepest level.
The classical Friedmann solution of Einstein’s equations - which produced the “big bang model” of Gamow etc, suggesting that the universe as we see it now developed from an initial point-like state - is based on a model which assumes that the universe now is composed solely of non-interacting point-like particles of matter (‘dust’) spread evenly through all of space. No galaxies. No stars. No planets. No brains. And yet, the result is a universe with all these in it.
This is an extremely impressive success of the Cartesian approach of separating ‘mind’ from ‘matter’, and striving for a theory of matter alone. It was not at all clear in his time how that could be done or that it would work, but work it did, spectacularly, to produce physics as we know it today , and cosmology.
And, evolutionary sociobiology can fill in the gaps to indicate how there arose also brain-states of rational thinking, emotions, and ‘a sense of meaning and purpose’ or of moral responsibility, pain or pleasure, a sense of fulfillment an of spiritual elevation, compassion and love, brain-states which are reported as “I believe in God, creator of all” and “I am feeling God’s love right now” etc.
However materialists misunderstood this success to mean that the nmc level of reality is non-existent.
What they do not and cannot understand - being biologically unequipped to understand this intuitively - is that the big bang model, following Descartes’s approach, deliberately leaves out the nmc level of reality. Thus it does not include nmc-level experience such as that related to brain-states of emotions, and no nmc-level aspect of ‘a sense of meaning and purpose’ or of moral responsibility, the nmc-experience-level of pain or pleasure or sense of fulfillment or of spiritual elevation, compassion or love, etc.
In sum, the physical cosmology model includes only what was included in the initial ‘dust’ state of spacetime matter-energy. Clearly, this model though spectacularly successful at predicting or retro-dicting many physical features cannot give rise to the non-material level of existence which we know to exist for a fact, and so cannot possibly give rise to the non-material ‘experience-level’ we enumerated above, aspects of the deepest level of reality which were absent in the model of the initial state.
And so it is not possible to ‘explain’ to nmc physicists why physical cosmology, despite its spectacular incredible successes, is a woefully incomplete tool in exploring the deepest levels of our reality, as opposed to the deepest physical levels of the material-universe, and so unfortunately discussion of this topic between mc’s and nmc’s is unavoidably sterile.
Some have attempted to convince others that indeed physics & cosmology are inadequate in this way, but failed because:
1. they did not unabashedly state that the phenomenon they are referring to is an avowedly non-scientific non-material one, and
2. they did not take into account that many of the critiques originated with materialists who cannot be expected to comprehend what is being said, and as a result of this inability offer absurd counter-arguments, creating a futile dialogue.
It is interesting that modern cosmology is built as solutions of the Einstein field equations, and that after Einstein was eventually convinced of Friedman’s solution he accepted this (plus the physical components supplied eg by Gamow) as a model for the ‘evolution’ of the universe, and yet he spoke and wrote frequently - not in scientific publications or paper-presentations of course - about what we can refer to as ‘cosmic Mind’ and so on. In other words, he clearly did not think that the success of the new cosmological theories based on his general relativity field- theory of space-time matter-energy was in contradiction to this belief.
The author would propose that he did not imagine that this theory could in any way describe that aspect of reality, which is the most fundamental, in other words it is the author’s conjecture that Einstein did not somehow naively believe that his field equations predicted or led to the emergence of a cosmic Mind and a human ability to sense it.
Thus the author further conjectures that Einstein would have agreed that:
1. the type of ‘mind’ he was referring to is qualitatively other than the material and is not (at present either) amenable to ‘scientific’ analysis;
2. similarly, the ability of humans to sense it is not includable in his theory of space-time matter-energy, and
3. the cosmological model cannot produce at a later point in the time-evolution of the universe what was not ‘placed in it’ at the outset (ie ‘the big bang’), and v.v. (ie will not be present in a big bang derived from a present-state of the universe comprising only ‘dust’ in spatially-expanding spacetime) and so the fact that scientific theory does not encompass ‘comic mind’ nor a human ability to sense it in some way is not to be taken in any way as a conta-indication.
B) There may be hints which would be useful in crafting newer theories of cosmology. For example:
There are implications as to what a big bang must be like in order to produce sevex as opposed to one lacking it, as the materialist proposes ours does.
In a reality in which there can be some element of non-materiality, there is potentially a difference between the reason that a sevex-possessing universe would exist than there would be for a purely-material universe.
In an age where physics is asking and starting to answer questions such as "why does something exist rather than nothing", if sevex can exist despite it being non-material, and it is self-referential in some sense, then we cannot exclude the possibility that these types of properties are relevant - eg perhaps a sevex-associated-entity is more likely to emerge into existence than one that is purely-material (though there would presumably not be a way ever to prove that ‘nothing’ can exist, and so perhaps this question is not really scientific…).
In general, given that science as a whole including cosmology rely on the human brain as its primary tool for discovery, the fact that the brains of two cosmologists can differ as to what is the most fundamental aspect of our reality imparts a wider significance to the mc/nmc 'dispute'.
How important is the difference between a universe which is purely-material and one which possesses sevex-consciousness? Probably materialists would agree with non-materialists that the difference is vast, and the significance of the existence of a non-material self-evidently-existent phenomenon would be considered profound by all. However, given that sevex is non-provable, the realistic question has to be as stated in the section-title.
But even so, we can ask: how important is it that there is such a sharp difference between the views of trained physicists as to what is the ultimate nature of our universe/reality- whether it is material or non-material? Of course, to materialists the views of the non-materialist physicist may be a matter for psychiatric analysis or evolutionary sociobiological investigation as to why that hallucination exists, but it has no cosmological significance. In contrast, a non-material physicist can make the case that the very fact that sevex is self-known (even to a discerning probing intellect, and even when not affected by hallucinogens) and it is sui-generis in being non-material, makes its existence extraordinarily significant - indeed, it can be potentially a foundational element in a far-future cosmological theory - albeit too mysterious now to be a subject of scientific investigation.
...
What about non-material consciousness – if there were no mc’s and all physicists agreed nmc existed and was more basic to our reality than is the material, would it be considered part of physics - indeed a fundamental aspect of the universe which plays a role in cosmology - or would the fact that it is unprovable render it non-physics?
But if the latter, then what would physics have to say about it? Would the consensus be that it is the most fundamental aspect of our reality but is not accessible to the tools of physics and therefore physics does not aspire to describe the totality of our reality, only the segment of it which deals with the objectively provable? Or would it be ignored by physicists during work-hours? Or enfranchised as "too deep for physics"?.
However of course there is far from a consensus, indeed many physicists are certain nmc does not – and perhaps cannot – exist. Does the fact that nevertheless many prominent physicists are deeply convinced that it not only exists but is the most fundamental aspect of our reality militate for its inclusion in physics? Or perhaps it could still be ignored since physics is only about consensus and provability? If so, then are nmc physicists supposed to think of physics as incomplete and non-fundamental, or limited? or perhaps they can legitimately include it in physics and thus accept that physics is not necessarily a consensual pursuit?
Does ‘sevex’ (non-material consciousness) belong in a study of physics?
Three options:
i) If panpsychism is true, then one can merrily do physics and cosmology without regard to consciousness, since it is a background, ever-present, and in some sense ignorable for physics as a study of the material universe. But if panpsychism is not correct, then the existence of consciousness may be considered really a physics problem, ie how consciousness attaches to some human brains.
ii) Or maybe it is the opposite: if panpsychism is true, then consciousness is so basic it needs to be studied by physics, if physics is a study of the ultimate level.
iii) Or the answer is that physics is limited to a specific type of entity and doesn't include that which to a conscious being is the most fundamental aspect of existence, nor does it deal with the most significant aspects of life (eg meaning etc).
In any case, we study the laws and make models etc but those don't exist anywhere except in our heads, what really exists are electrons etc. So how come we don't have a theory of the universe which includes laws? Because it would need a theory of brains and thinking and of logic etc, so physics is of course incomplete in that sense, and it gladly relegates such questions to the field called "philosophy of physics", and most active physicists don't ever read what is written there.
However, reductionist physicists will say that even “the laws of physics” as a brain-construct of humans arises from the initial conditions of the universe, ie using evolutionary socio neurobiological considerations we can eventually find out why brains evolved as they are and why human brains came to think of finding what it calls ’laws of nature’ and even why it came to formulate these specific laws, and all follows from the initial conditions etc just that tracing the precise path is perhaps too complex and would require so much processing power that it would consume resources more dramatically than even bitcoin mining does.
Sevex position: Eliminating consciousness from physics is justified as a tactic but this lacunae should be acknowledged not denied: if consciousness is so fundamental and cannot arise from matter, then how did it arise in the physical universe? It seems absurd to postulate a big bang composed solely of energy etc without consciousness! So cosmology as presented in accepted physics is lacking a fundamental aspect of reality.
However, physics has succeeded to spectacularly by eliminating mind , and cosmology too, (and consciousness has been introduced by quacks, and new-agers, speaking in the name of physics and misleading the public etc), and also: the study of formerly-philosophical topics like time and space etc, that people are afraid to ruin this by reintroducing consciousness, and that is a good approach, but it is silly to be in denial that there is an elephant in the dept. It is really only due to the presence of elmats that the rest are so intimidated that the word consciousness is not ever heard in the halls of physics depts.
If nmc exists but is not incorporatable into physics, then physics is incomplete, but in a way that it doesn't care about, a way in which philosophy is NOT incomplete; this fact should be noted and taught in intro physics classes.
Perhaps if it is discovered that materialists and sevex brains are differently constructed/wired in a way which is relevant to this distinction, there can be an agreed-upon nomenclature and set of definitions, including in-built caveats such as "sevex-brains may consider physics to include study of phenomena which are known to exist but are not provable – such as sevex-'consciousness' - though materialist brains declare that no such phenomena exist".
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3. Fundamentality of nmc & the status of physics:
i. Why for nmc physicists, physics cannot aspire to be the field which deals with the most fundamental level: To many non-materialist physicists the central issue in the dispute with materialists about the difference between reality and the universe involves not merely the existence of one specific phenomenon (nmc) but rather that it is an aspect of ‘the ultimate nature of reality’ (for example as exemplified in the writings of Einstein and Eddington). As such, for the nmc, nmc should be considered not as a topic for philosophy or metaphysics but rather as an important part of a broader form of physics/cosmology, an essential component in a future theory of everything, and the impetus for an eventual redefinition of the meaning of “the universe” to include that which now is instead relegated to non-physics discussions of ‘reality’.
ii. Why for nmc physicists, physics cannot aspire to be the reductionist’s ultimate level: Physicists tend to reductionism and assume eg that not just chemistry but also biology and psychology eventually reduces to or arises from physics/cosmology, and so they leave investigation of anything biological to the biologists and concentrate on physics, which they will consider to be the most fundamental level even of biology. However there is a lacunae in that nmc - which is not the same as the "consciousness" that their mcs speak of - is fundamental; though nmc’s know it exists as fact, it is left out of physics, and since they know it to be the most fundamental level of our reality certainly a fully-comprehensive cosmological theory or model which excludes it cannot really be complete [We'll briefly point to possible ways in which the nature of nmc itself may include clues towards creating a more comprehensive theory.]
If nmc physicists internalize that physics is not capable of modeling nmc, so that nmc is the only non physics phenomenon which does not reduce to physics, then nmc must be considered either to be part of a larger-scope physics, or of a new field which is 'deeper' than physics. Mc’s however of course fundamentally disagree with all this.
iii. Why for nmc physicists, physics may be less ‘’complete” than mathematics and philosophy: Though physicists often feel that their subject is the one which explores the deepest levels, philosophers may feel the same about their subject area, and since they do indeed discuss the topics of both material and non-material consciousness they can in that sense make a claim to provide a complete framework for an analysis of the deepest levels of reality.
Similarly, many mathematicians also perhaps believe the most fundamental aspect is that covered by mathematics - certainly the Platonists among them might feel this is so and they by definition believe in the existence of a non-material consciousness, and mathematics as a discipline is not considered to exclude the possibility of the existence of a Platonic realm, so that though only some believe it exists this belief is not as anathema in mathematics departments as belief in nmc is in physics departments. Thus mathematics may perhaps lay a ‘completeness’ claim similar to philosophy.
In sum, since the topic of a non-material consciousness is not usually the considered to belong in physics departments, physics is in fact less fundamental and less complete than philosophy or perhaps mathematics - or even perhaps psychology.
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MESH: The purview of physics, fundamentality and reductionism, consensus and proof:
Even if it is agreed that physics will include only that which is provable to all physicists and therefore is consensual, this divergence in understanding regarding the purview of physics as being “limited to the material” or not limited since there is nothing else than the material is itself very fundamental - and according to the thesis explored in the previous paper it is inherently intractable. Rather than this militating for ignoring the issue, the author feels strongly that the very fact of the existence of such a deep and significant difference is notable and ought to be made public, and find its way into the body of significant facts known to the physics community. Though mc physicists may disagree.
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It could be useful if physicists, mathematicians and philosophers listed a hierarchy of what is factually known in an 'objective' or 'extra-personal' sense according to the criteria of their professional field. For example, physicists might list as follows:
1. that which is provable to all other physicists (according to the professionally-accepted notion of what constitutes proof);
2. That which all physicists know but cannot prove (maybe an empty set?);
3. That which many physicists state that they know but cannot prove, and other physicists deny exists (eg 'consciousness')
4. That which almost all physicists believe is true but agree that they cannot prove to be true (eg that there is one underlying fundamental law of nature?) .
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MESH:
4. Is physics necessarily incomplete?
It would be interesting to clarify among both materialist physicists and non-materialists the relationship between ‘exploring the bounds of our reality’ and ‘discovering the content, structure & laws of the universe’ (including whether one of these two is more ‘fundamental’ than the other, or if they are at all different, or whether both have meaning).
The reductionist view sees physics as being the fundamental level, so that physics (including cosmology) encompasses all that there is. Materialists see consciousness (the type claimed by dualists, idealists etc, ie ‘sevex’) as either non-existent or at best they will state that whatever sevex is, it is necessarily some epiphenomenon perfectly explainable within physics, and so reductionism can be maintained. However non-materialists see sevex as sui generis, non-physical and more fundamental than the material universe.
Physics generally tends to deal only in the provable, and this would exclude non-material consciousness, a phenomenon which is admittedly unprovable even according to its proponents. Even moreso, it is contentious in that it is claimed not to exist by some prominent physicists. Physics is a collective endeavor of materialists and non-materialists and so perhaps must avoid discussion of that which is in dispute in this way.
However there is no way this author can avoid feeling certain regarding the existence and fundamentality of non-material consciousness (‘sevex’), in agreement for example with the expressions by various prominent contemporary physicists (such as eg Witten and Linde), and so by eliminating nonmaterial consciousness from the purview of physics we render the latter necessarily incomplete, and negate the possibility of embracing reductionism, and even more-so remove physics from its pedestal (earned by being ‘the most fundamental’ in terms of reductionist structure and explanation).
From the sevex (non-materialist) point of view there is a complete separation of mind and matter and so physics can provide a complete treatment of the material universe, though not of ‘reality’ which includes ‘sevex’ (non-material consciousness).
Is a materialistic physics incomplete if there indeed exists:
a) the type of consciousness which Ed Witten and Andre Linde refer to - and which those like Dennet deny exists
b) the Mind which Eddington and Einstein spoke of but is never mentioned in physics departments?
Eccles, Penrose and others are in a middle ground, finding reasons to consider it eg as a quantum gravity phenomenon, however it is not clear whether their approach satisfies the non-materialist claim of it being qualitatively other than the material. Eddington wrote long ago about the mind-like quality associated to quantum physics, but it may be more correct to say not that there are mind-like qualities to elementary particles but rather to the theory and model which describes them. Furthermore, of course those theories and models exist in our minds and so rather than considering the natural quantum entities and processes to themselves have mind-like qualities, we would say that an nmc contemplating quantum physics may feel that its characteristics are somehow reminiscent more of ‘mindstuff’ than of ‘material things’.
Note: Of course, even the old classical conception of a particle as a material ‘thing’ was a conception in a mind, as is ‘material’ and ‘thing’.
And so, nmc is not really encompassed in physics, but quantum physics perhaps provides a hint that the two are not as mutually exclusive as implied in the classical ‘mind-body’ divide. Certainly from the minimalist perspective implied by the non-disprovability of solipsism, if we only deal with what we know as fact, ie our own sevex, and treat physics as a way of ordering a specific category of mind-contents (what we consider as ‘sensory impressions’), then there is no contradiction between mind and matter, since matter is only a construct of mind, and the fact that even materialist physics is led to a theory reminiscent of mindstuff is perhaps heartening.
At present however, physics is indeed incomplete to non-materialists. On the one hand sevex cannot be proven to exist, and indeed is contentious due to the existence of materialist physicists, and science in general is built on consensual provability, however on the other hand without incorporating sevex physics can hardly be touted as it would like to see itself - as that which can provide a potential theory of everything - and instead can only provide a theory of everything material.
Should the above issue be at all discussed by physicists or only by philosophers?
What is considered legitimately within physics and what is excluded? What is the scientific status of something fundamental about the universe - or about 'our reality' – that is known as fact by all physicists but cannot be proven, should it be taught as part of a physics course? What about if not all physicists agree that it exists, but the ones who do, say it is incontrovertible fact despite it not being susceptible to proof – should an introductory physics class mention this topic and explain the problematics of it truth status, or ignore it and leave it to the philosophy department's courses to mention this?
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1. The difference between the mc/nmc camps & the correlation to the (probably irresolvable) difference in definitions of 'reality':
Materialists (Eliminative/hard/ontological etc) may state that there is “consciousness” however they mean by it something very different than do non-materialists (dualists, idealists, panpsychists etc); they not only deny the existence of nmc, they don’t even know what this could mean. They speak of ‘the universe’ as including all that exists - ie including ‘consciousness’ as they would define it - so that for them at least in this respect there is no difference between the two terms ‘reality’ and ‘the universe’.
To nmc’s however, whereas a ‘table’ is material, ‘experiencing it’ is not, and so ‘experience’/‘the experiencer’ aren’t part of “the universe” as defined by the materialist, indeed they are more fundamental than the material, and so there’s a very significant difference between ‘reality’ and ‘the universe’.
Not only is nmc not at all the same as the materialist’s ‘consciousness’, to mc’s it is an ‘alleged phenomenon’ which does not actually exist - maybe cannot exist - or it is an illusion, nonsensical. The nmc considers “mc” to be not a “c” at all, it is merely material brain-activity, which to the nmc is qualitatively different than ‘consciousness’.
Given this nmc/mc divide, it is almost impossible to unequivocally and consensually define the difference between the terms ’reality’ and ‘the universe’.
The importance of nmc’s being clear about what they mean by “consciousness”: A problem nmc physicists face is that they use terminology which is somewhat neutral, and thus invite irrelevant responses from materialist physicists who might for example try to show that what the nmc’s are stating contradicts physics or is not included in it, or that it is counter-scientific or against logic.
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MESH:
“The universe” vs “Reality”
What name is appropriate for a discipline which DOES cover everything, including “non-material consciousness”?
Though we have a word "universe" to refer to the aspects which are provable, how should we refer to the totality including consciousness/mind – is 'reality' the appropriate word, or do we need a different term since materialists would not agree to use that term in that way?
Authors from Lucretius to Descartes, and in modern times Eddington and Bridgman, and Penrose more recently, have discussed mind & matter – or deliberately separated them carefully in order to avoid dealing with one or the other - and some used use the words "Reality" and "Nature" in the titles of books discussing matters that are in large part about physics and cosmology, and so the title could have used the term "the universe".
What is or is not encompassed by the terms "nature", "reality", "the universe", "physics" and "cosmology”, and in what do they differ? Much of the works of these authors would today be termed "philosophy of physics" – is that a subject on its own or is it a discussion of issues which belong in physics just that they are not yet settled, agreed upon universally, proven, accepted by consensus?
How does consciousness and self-awareness fit into this schema?
Does physics, which intends to describe "the universe" encompass all of "reality", or is it self-limiting to "things", which materialists contend is all there is, so that there is in fact no self-limitation involved? If it is indeed only about "things", then is there a different definition of what physics encompasses according to the materialist and non-materialist, even if only in the sense of whether or not there is a self-limitation?
One can utilize a phraseology which avoids the need for explicit mention of any self-limitation, for example "science is a programmatic attempt to discover naturalistic explanations for objectively-observable (or 'provably-existent') phenomena" which is interpreted by the materialist as encompassing everything and by the non-materialist as implying a self-limitation.
MORAL BEINGS AND PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY
Moral activity, could begin only upon the emergence of the first true 'moral being' - a being possessing sufficient intelligence and foresight to understand the consequences of its actions, equipped with a moral sense to know the difference between good and evil actions, and endowed with the free will to choose between the two.Clearly there can be no moral choice in a being lacking consciousness and self-consciousness. It therefore behooves us to ask where along the evolutionary chain the phenomenon of consciousness and self-consciousness arose, and then when there arose a moral consciousness.
As the eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky writes, self awareness is quite possibly unique to human beings: "Self-awareness is, then, one of the fundamental, possibly the most fundamental characteristic of the human species. This characteristic is an evolutionary novelty: the biological species from which mankind has descended had only rudiments of self-awareness, or perhaps lacked it altogether."
If self-awareness arose only in the human humans, or possibly is present in a rudimentary form in 'the species from which mankind has descended', moral consciousness could only have arisen in one of these two species. Although not everyone might agree on definitions of intelligence, consciousness, morality and so on, certainly no-one would consider any animal - even the highest ape - as morally responsible for its actions . This is because no species other than man seems to posses the requisite combination of free will, intelligence, and analytic ability which can allow us to consider their actions as freely chosen. According to Darwin - in agreement with earlier writers: "of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important."
Julian Huxley saw the emergence of moral consciousness as a turning point in the evolutionary process itself: "It is only through social evolution that the world-stuff can now realize radically new possibilities. Mechanical interaction and natural selection still operate, but have become of secondary importance. For good or evil, the mechanism of evolution has in the main been transferred onto the social or conscious level...The slow methods of variation and heredity are outstripped by the speedier processes of acquiring and transmitting experience...And in so far as the mechanism of evolution ceases to be blind and automatic and becomes conscious, ethics can be injected into the evolutionary process....it becomes possible to introduce...moral purpose into evolution."
According to Erich Fromm [italics in original]:"....The religious need is rooted in the basic condition of existence of the human species.......the human species can be defined as the primate who emerged at the point of evolution where instinctive determination had reached a minimum and the development of the brains a maximum . This combination.....had never occurred before in animal evolution and constitutes, biologically speaking, a completely new phenomenon. " Using the terminology of Victor Frankl , one could say that the human being is unique in that it is driven at its most basic level by "the will to meaning". No other member of the evolutionary chain can be so described - and thus man is qualitatively different than his evolutionary forebears.
One could say that until the emergence of man, there was no moral activity on earth, no free willed choice, and thus no true purpose - at least from the point of view of Gd - to the existence of the universe. We can now begin to consider what methodology would be the most logical to employ in creating a purposive universe.
A POSSIBLE CREATION SCHEDULE
After creating the 'initial singularity', big bang, and natural law, Gd could 'sit back and watch' creation develop along the path it was designed to follow. Matter would emerge from the initial energy, atoms would be built up from the matter, and stars would form from the atoms. Planets would assume shape and finally after billions of years of 'waiting', life would emerge .
Then, after a few billion more years, after the extinction of the dinosaurs, with the amoeba finally evolved via the ape into the human being, the long wait would be over, and the drama of moral activity could begin. With the emergence of the first moral being, the universe could begin to be considered meaningful, to be working towards the achievement of some purpose.
The Importance of Mind in the Universe
Following Wigner andVonNeumann and others who speculated that consciousness is required to effectuate the collapse of the wave function, my BH article "Free Will" sets out the speculative thesis that since free will is beyond both determinism and quantum randomness, it is uniquely suited to be that active ingredient of consciousness which collapses the wave function; moreso, since it is moral responsibility which is the fundamental philosophical motivation for assuming the existence of free will, that it is morally-responsible free will which underlies the collapse.
The article also points out that since until that, from the perspective of the God of the Bible, until the emergence of morally-responsible free will, all events are either determined or random, and so the universe is purposeless. Fotnote 6 mentions Wheeler's idea tha tth euniverse may have emerge dinto existence due to an act of the consciousness of a being within the universe....mentions that perhaps consciousness was inherent in the universe and humans tapped into it when their brains became sufficiently developed......
ie the creation of the universe begins with the first collapse of the universal wave-function by a free willed moral being [who in the Bible is Adam].
Aside: Note re the age of the universe:
The application of this idea to Genesis, ie the account of the creation of the universe and of Adam, is made explicit in the BH article "And God Said: "Let there have been a big bang" submitted to BH with the Free WIll article but ony published in issue #13]
according to this model, in some sense the universe is only as old as free-willed moral choice. This point, that Adam was the first morally-reponsible free willed being and that this can lead to a discrepancy between the age of the universe as seen by science and by biblical religion, was also made in my "Quantum Physics and Halacha" lecture at the Miami conference in 19xx, and later in the articles [Hebrew xxx, Englisxxx] [the point is made at the conclusion of the article]. The age of the universe can be calculated from different perspectives - and afer all there are known to be 70 facets of torah [see eg the 'perspectives' sections (p12-13) at the end of the big bang article].
Intelligent Design
ID does not mean necessariyl that it is necesary to invole the existence of God n order to explain the emergenc eof humanity. A more scientific version is that Mind is central to ......and also the emergenceof the universe into physical reality ....and consiousness was present in the universe from the outset, and our consciousness is derived from that, and our brain is the antena which alows us to be conscious by taping in to the universal consciousness.... and therefore perhaps mind needs to be taken more into account in...and plays a central role in.evolutionary mechanisms....
Possible Future Convergence of Science and Religion/Biblical Origin Accounts (some of this exists in some other file?)
There may eventually be a convergence of the two types of description. As we begin to analyze complex systems, and come up with a theory of mind, and if it turns out that the universe is some type of organic whole, and that it mirrors mind in some manner, then it is possible that phenomena which was formerly relegated to 'religion' or 'the supernatural' will come to be seen as part of 'the natural order'. For example: the effect of mind on the body, concentration during meditaiton or prayer, group effect of mind concentration, the effec tof mind after the body dies, the group effect of all these after-death miond-residuals, the effect of that which was the prescursor to mind on the origin of the universe, temporal transcendence of this Mind so that its eventual emergence can effectuate the big bang (like Wheeler etc). 'COmmunication' between this mind and human minds.
Possible Future Directions for a Scientific Theory of Origins
There may well be some natural mechanism which causes self-organization, and can explain the emergence of the complexity underlying both the galactic and stellar structure in the large and inorganic, and the molecules and cells of our bodies in the small and organic. A natural ‘guiding hand’ to evolution such as this would deepen the seeming teleology of the evolutionary process, and would make the scientific origin theory seem like an account of creation.
The nature of consciousness is a scientific enigma:
INSERT
The inability of scientific theory to account for the evolution of consciousness is a serious lacuna of origin theory.
INSERT (Eccles etc)
Sir John Eccles, [ Nobel Prize for medicine in 1963] The Wonder of Being Human 1984, pages 36-37:
…. nowhere in the laws of physics or in the laws of derivative sciences, chemistry and biology, is there any reference to consciousness or mind….its emergence is not reconcilable with the natural laws as at present understood...
Second, all materialist theories of the mind are in conflict with biological evolution. Since they all (panpsychists, epiphenomenalists, and identy theorists) assert the causal ineffectiveness of consciousness per se, they fail completely to account for the evolutionary expansion of consciousness, which is an undeniable fact. There is first its emergence and then its progressive development with the growing complexity of the brain. Evolutionary theory holds that only those structures and processes that significantly aid in survival are developed in natural selection...
Eccles, John C. and Daniel N. Robinson (1984), The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind (New York: The Free Press).
Gregory:
If the brain was developed by Natural Selection, we might well suppose that consciousness has survival value. But for this it must, surely, have causal effects. But what effects could awareness, or consciousness, have? (1977, p. 276, emp. added).
Gregory, Richard L. (1977), “Consciousness,” The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance, ed. Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith (Oxford, England: Pergamon), pp. 273-281.
Eccles and Robinson, 1984, p. 17,18:
We believe that the emergence of consciousness is a skeleton in the closet of orthodox evolutionism.... It remains just as enigmatic as it is to an orthodox evolutionist as long as it is regarded as an exclusively natural process in an exclusively materialist world.
Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles The Self and Its Brain, (1977, p. 129). “the emergence of full consciousness...is indeed one of the greatest of miracles”
Eccles and Robinson (1984, p. 37):
[A]ll materialist theories of the mind are in conflict with biological evolution.... Evolutionary theory holds that only those structures and processes that significantly aid in survival are developed in natural selection. If consciousness is causally impotent, its development cannot be accounted for by evolutionary theory .
Evolution geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky et al 1977, p. 453
“In point of fact, self-awareness is the most immediate and incontrovertible of all realities. Without doubt, the human mind sets our species apart from nonhuman animals”
A complete theory of evolution must account for the emergence of consciousness. Since consciousness is the most complex phenomenon and of an entirely different qualitative level than any other phenomenon, the theory accounting for it will presumably be far more sophisticated than the present day origin theory, and indeed may be of an entirely different qualitative level.
As consciousness involves elements of self-reference and holism, is the source of subjectivity and crosses the mind-body divide, presumably the theory of it will do so as well. As such the complete origin theory will possibly take on features more reminiscent of some of the underlying themes of the Eden account.
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Inappropriateness of quoting a scientific critique of BB theory, and using that as a support of creationism
There are many assumptions underlying the big bang theory, there are plenty of discussions of these assumptions; there are various weaknesses of the theory, and there are critiques: these are well-known and acknowledged by scientists, indeed they come from scientists, there are many quotes from scientists availabel on the web, and all these scientists are constantly seeking to improve the theory.
Obviously none of the scientists quoted as critiquing the big bang theory meant that they are therefore choosing the biblical account of creation over the big bang theory, or are giving up seeking a scientific theory and simply concluding that it is beyond human understanding, merely that there are holes or flaws they feel ought to be addressed.
Science looks for rationalistic explanations, and scientists assume such can be found, and try to create them. The assumptions they make are all part of this program, and make sense from within it.
It is a tribute to science and scientists that they are willing to seek holes in scientific theories, and to change these theories: the fact that the theories have flaws and need to be changed is not an indication that the scientific pursuit of a theory of cosmology is wrong-minded, it simply means that scientists are constantly innovating to make the theories progressively better.
When scientists critique cosmological theory, obviously they are not saying that they are therefore choosing the biblical account of creation over the big bang theory, merely that there are holes or flaws in the scientific theory which they feel ought to be addressed in order to develop a better scientific theory.
Clearly the same scientists would have far sharper critiques of the biblical creation account etc than of the big bang theory, so it is hypocritical to quote them as somehow undermining the scientific approach in favor of the fundamnetalist/literalist interpretation of breishis.
The flaws in present scientific cosmology theory will eventually be addressed and a better SCIENTIFIC theory will emerge; of course that will also be flawed, and analysis will lead to yet a better theory: we may never reach apoint where we know absolutely everyhing we need to know about cosmology, but maybe we will - in any case it is in my view naive/absurd to suppose that a scientific theory will EVER emerge which proves that the universe emerged as described in breishis according to a literal reading and in six days, and 6,000 years ago, with proof that it was the work of a God. It is a forgone conclusion that the scientific search for rationalistic explanations will lead to rationalistic explanations, not to God or breishis. And this is not in any way a problem for religion or for the torah. I make this point [in various ways] in my Instant Universe book, maybe I should send an extract as an article to balance this one.
Rambam said about Aristotle's theory of the eternal universe, that since his proof is flawed, one need not accept it as true and therefore one can believe in creation.. Perhaps those who believe in fundamentalist/literalist interpretation of breishis believe that although no scienific theory will ever lead directly to the literal reading of breishis, nevetheless eventually all scientific theories of cosmology will prove to be flawed - and they will always seek out and hold to these flaws so as not to feel obligated as rational people to accept any scientific theory of cosmology.
In my lectures and writings I pointed out the following incredible irony: The big bang theory was originally taken by scientists as being 'too genesis-like' since it overturned the concpet of an eternal universe, which was the central counter-Torah tenet of philosophy - indeed this alleged contradiction was the central reason Rambam wrote the moreh nevuchim. They were not concerned withthe issue of the 6 days or the 6,000 years, and considered the centrla idea of breishis to be creatio ex nihilo, and that this was vindicated by the big bang theory. However, somehow later on the big bang theory was considred by religious people to be a contradiction to breishis because they felt that one needs to interpret the 6 days literally and that the torah meant us to count up the numbers and arricve at an age of 6,000 years.
So whereas some scientists viewed it as as problematic because it was pro-torah, some religious people (due to their literalist/fundamentalist inteprretation of brieshis) considered it problematic because it was anti-torah! As I've said in my lectures, I think that these scientists understood the meaning of breishis better than did those religious people.
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Is Evolutionary Theory Correct?
Was there sufficient time etc?
In an infinite universe with the appropriate initial ingredients and laws, the evolution of the purely physical aspect of humanity is inevitable.
However in order to determine whether or not evolutionary theory is the correct explanation for the emergence of humanity here in our universe, with our laws of nature, we need to examine the following:
1. Do the known laws of nature and the conditions as they were on Earth really permit a process of evolution of progressively more complex entities?
2. Is there something about what we call life that is not purely physical, and therefore no natural system could produce life?
3. Was there really sufficient time to allow for the evolution of life?
4. Is there something unique about humanity so that even if some natural system could produce life, it could not produce humanity
5. If there was sufficient time, and the laws allow the evolution of humanity as outlined by the theory of evolution, did humans actually emerge that way?
Some people - particularly religious critics of evolutionary theory - somehow expect that science should already have all the answers, and today. It does
not. Evolutionary theory is still very young. In a few hundred years science will presumably know a lot more about how life emerged.
We do not yet know the mechanisms whereby evolution takes place etc, and so we do not know how to compute the relevant probabilities, we also do not yet know how many planets there are and what conditions are necessary in order to allow for the emergence of life on a planret, and therefore we do not know whether or not it is reasonable that somewhere in the universe – specifically, here on Earth - life should evolve.
We also do not know yet enough about chaos and attractors and their possible role in guiding evolutionary processes, and other possible natural mechanisms which would do so, let alone the possible role of (a primordial) consciousness, about which we know virtually nothing, in the emergence of life and of humanity.
Evolutionary theory is a MODEL, an ATTEMPT to find a naturalistic answer, a mechanism which perhaps could have given rise to what we see about us. It is simply too early to determine whether or not the laws of nature actually permit the emergence of life, and of humanity; and it is certainly premature to discuss whether or not there is some way we could determine if it actually happened in that way.
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We also do not know yet enough about chaos theory and attractors, complexity, quantum gravity etc and their possible role in guiding evolutionary processes, and other possible natural mechanisms which would do so We know virtually nothing about consciousness, let alone about the possible role of (a primordial) consciousness [see below] in the emergence of life and of humanity
We do not yet know everything we need to know about cells, and about the mechanisms whereby evolution takes place, etc, and so we do not know how to compute the relevant probabilities of for example cellular life emerging from the inanimate mineral world. We also do not yet know how many planets there are and what conditions are necessary in order to allow for the emergence of life on a planet, and therefore we do not know whether or not it is reasonable that somewhere in the universe - specifically, here on Earth - life should evolve. We do not know whether there are mutiple-universes, or areas of the universe with different laws of nature some of which will inevitably permit life to evolve etc. We also do not know yet enough about chaos theory and attractors, complexity, quantum gravity etc and their possible role in guiding evolutionary processes, and other possible natural mechanisms which would do so We know virtually nothing about consciousness, let alone about the possible role of (a primordial) consciousness [see below] in the emergence of life and of humanity.
For the moment, according to the scientific establishment it is so far the best naturalistic theory of the emergence of humanity.
The most complex entity we know is the human brain, and the highest-level interaction/phenomenon is consciousness. To many people it seems unlikely that consciousness can arise at some late stage in the universe’s existence without it having been present at its inception. All the more so regarding free-willed consciousness; it seems to many of those who believe in the existence of this phenomenon that it cannot have evolved from any non-free-willed-conscious prior state. And so that there must have been some aspect of free-willed consciousness existent at the outset: indeed the very emergence into existence of the universe is itself a non-causal event of the same type as are free-willed choices.
Free willed consciousness by its very nature is inherent “intelligent” and motivated, a higher-level proces. As such, if it was present at the inception of the universe, it is likely that it played some role in the future development of that universe. Therefore, the directedness that lies at the root of free-willed conscious choice should be factored in to the equation of evolution as a teleological agent. An evolutionary process involving such an agent in some way would likely show a greater tendency to the emergence of complexity, life, intelligence, and consciousness than would a purely random process driven by a universe devoid of all consciousness.
The present theory of evolution/big bang is a very convincing one under the assumption that there is neither a God, nor directedness to evolution. The Biblical creation account is on the other hand a fitting one for a universe created by a creator desiring the operation of free-willed moral choice.
The two perspectives do not conflict, they supplement each other, and there are also major points of overlap. When consciousness - and more so, free will - is finally scientifically understood, the resulting future scientific theory of origins and the religious/biblical view of origins will possibly merge even more.
The Scientific and Biblical Cosmologies Will Never Be Identical
It is certainly unlikely that through experiment, science will eventually prove that the correct cosmological model can be best described precisely as follows: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, ... one day, day four...... God rested... etc.
Even the fundamentalist is unlikely to claim that the scientific method, if applied correctly, will eventually lead inevitably to this picture of the origin of all.
· What model for universal and human origin does the fundamentalist expect scientific theory to arrive at? If this model is NOT the same as the creation account, then how does the fundamentalist explain this discrepancy?
· What account would scientists accept as a reasonable Genesis creation account for a creating God to give to the Jews at Sinai 3,500 years ago? Given that the universe is as it is, ie God if one exists at all is definitely hidden. If there was a divinely-revealed creation account, there are certain assumptions that a scientist could reasonable expect about it: it would not explicitly constitute a proof of God; it would be comprehensible to contemporary humans; etc…. If the actual creation account is different than this scientifically-expected account, how does the traditionalist explain the discrepancy?
FROM ID project description FILE:
What Science Is and Isn't
A Chinese Communist and a Hassidic American may disagree about whether or not there is a God, whether or not life has meaning - or what its meaning is, whether one ought to marry for love or for other reasons, and on much else, however they can agree that objects fall to the ground, will agree on the speed at which they fall, as well as that the sun gives of light and heat and so on.
For the sake of this discussion, let's define 'objectively exisiting physical phenomena' as those which can be agreed upon by all (or at least by 'reasonable people')(without quibbling about each of these words). Issues related to whether or not there is a God, and whether or not life has meaning, or what its meaning is, and what the meaning of love is will, in contrast, be referred to here as 'subjective' or 'supernatural' or 'spiritual'. To many people, including to many students in science classes, the subjective/spiritual issues are more interesting and important than the 'objectively exisiting physical phenomena', but nevertheless with a bit of training they too can agree on the distinction between the two categories.
When we find a concise mathematical equation which predicts/describes objectively exisiting physical phenomena, for example Newton's or Einstein's law of gravity, or the laws of electricity, for our purposes here we'll call these 'naturalistic explanations' for the phenomena (though of course there's a difference between a description or equation and an explanation).
Note that a person may believe that there is a God, that God created the universe and the laws of nature, and that the explanation for why there are laws of nature at all lies in the fact that God created them; one may also believe that humans can understand the laws of nature only due to God's granting of this ability to humans.. However, even if one believes all this one does not need to explicitly invoke the existence of God in order to write down the laws of gravity or of electricity, and thus they constitute 'naturalistic explanations'. Physics (science) is the programmatic effort to find such naturalistic explanations for all objectively exisitng phenomena
Note however that when we say "Physics (science) is the programmatic effort to find naturalistic explanations for objectively exisitng phenomena " we do not mean to imply either that there ARE phenomena which are NOT objectively existent (eg subjective or supernatural or spiritual) or that science cannot deal with them, nor do we mean to imply that there are NO such phenomena - our statement simply does not refer to such, it refers only to objectively exisitng phenomena. Science also does not say that there are no other explanations for these objectively exisiting phenomena, nor even that science provides the 'best' explanation; it is simply the naturalistic explanation. Science does not claim that a natrualistically-describable universe necessarily emerged without God etc, it makes no statements about the reason anything exists, nor about the possible existence of a God.
When making statements about the past science essentially is saying 'if all happened according to the laws of nature, then it happened this way', but science cannot of course say what actually occurred, ie whether there was some supernatural event involved. Even if science has an explanation for why something would have occurred in the past, it may actually have occurred in a different way, supernaturally, but that doesn't mean that science is wrong, since it is only saying what would have happened if the known laws of nature were the only causes operating. Even if eventually explanations are found for everything, this in no way constitutes a proof of the non-existence of a creator etc and so the issue of this or that naturalistic explanation is not relevant to the question of the existence of a creator.
Intelligent Design (ID): The issue of ID has nothing to do with religion, or atheism; it should be an issue for science to deal with, without the involvement of any religious or atheistic agendas. So far it has proven very useful to pursue a programatic search for naturalistic explanations. As a result, there's a confidence in most scientists that there is still much about the universe and humanity which will be explained in this way if the effort is made and so they wish to continue to explore. They feel that even regarding problems which are intractable today, there's no way one can rule out the possibility of finding a naturalistic explanation, and they are motivated to continue to research these problems.
From the scientific point of view of course it may be that the universe will turn out to have been designed, but then science will wish to detect the designer and to discover how the designer came to be. An atheist who is a true scientist should not shy away from such a prospect, it would be an incredibly exciting discovery for science, but on the other hand religious people would have to expect that the resulting scientific theory of that entity could be far from the religious conception of God [eg perhaps it would be closer to the science fiction conception of a super-alien]. The bottom line is that the questions of science have to be dealt with from the scientific perspective, and sothe issue of whether or not there is scientific evidence of design (rather than philosophical or metaphysical etc indication of the existence of God or of divine design) should be treated purely from the scientific perspective, and atheists and religious people should be open to science's taking things to wherever they honestly lead.
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Attempting to Arrive at 'Neutral' Statements
It's hard to find one presentation of international news which all viewers will agree is unbased. Similarly re religion/science. Even among those who agree that science should be neutral regarding religion, there will not necessarily be agreement as to what constitutes a neutral position. Similarly, the law requires public schools to reflect separation of religion and state, but of course this does not mean favoring atheism, and what is taught in public schools as 'neutral' is viewed by many religious people as 'atheist'.
Often in order to create statments which satisfy two radically different positions one needs to use such neutral terms, and terms which have different meanings to the different sides, so that it is essentially an empty statement. I am looking to formulate statements regarding science and religion, eg regarding ID, which can be viewed by both sides as neutral, and which nevertheless have content.
What is an 'objective' statement of science re the big bang and evlution? A possibly neutral treatment of the issue can be something like the following:
To the extent that 'scientific' means 'provable' then atheists and religious people have to appreciate that their beliefs in the non-existence or existence of God are equally 'non-scientific'.
Religious people should admit that when one seeks naturalistic explanations for the universe and humanity, one is led to something like the theories of the big bang and evolution, and that from the scientific perspective the holes in a theory do not point to the necessity for accepting te lack of a naturalistic explanation, only to the need for a better naturalistic explanation. The atheist should admit that although it seems untenable to them, to most people including to many scientists it seems logically possible that the universe could have been created by God as a big bang designed carefully to produce humans via evolution; also, if there is a soul, it is a spiritual entity and not physical and could not evolve and so God could have implanted in humans separately from the process of evolution, when the human body/brain evolved to the complexity sufficient to become capable of associating itself to that soul.
Science should not take sides and deal with whether or not there is a God or a soul or if the universe was created or emerged on its own - science's mandate is to attempt to arrive at better and more accurate naturalistic explanations, honestly confronting the difficulties in theories, and when stuck, not to give up but rater to attempt to overcome all obstacles, revising theories or paradigms as needed until a more satisfactory naturalistic explanation is found.
It would be interesting to test the above statements on people on either side, and based on the responses to hone them so as to produce statements which are acceptable to both religious people and atheists.
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As we begin to analyze complex systems, and come up with a theory of mind, and if it turns out that the universe is some type of organic whole, and that it mirrors mind in some manner, then it is possible that phenomena which was formerly relegated to 'religion' or 'the supernatural' will come to be seen as part of 'the natural order'. As a result there may eventually be a convergence of the scientific and spiritual types of description of our universe.
The Evolutionary Significance of Consciousness: MORAL BEINGS AND PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY
Moral activity, could begin only upon the emergence of the first true 'moral being' - a being possessing sufficient intelligence and foresight to understand the consequences of its actions, equipped with a moral sense to know the difference between good and evil actions, and endowed with the free will to choose between the two.Clearly there can be no moral choice in a being lacking consciousness and self-consciousness. It therefore behooves us to ask where along the evolutionary chain the phenomenon of consciousness and self-consciousness arose, and then when there arose a moral consciousness.
As the eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky writes, self awareness is quite possibly unique to human beings: "Self-awareness is, then, one of the fundamental, possibly the most fundamental characteristic of the human species. This characteristic is an evolutionary novelty: the biological species from which mankind has descended had only rudiments of self-awareness, or perhaps lacked it altogether."
If self-awareness arose only in the human humans, or possibly is present in a rudimentary form in 'the species from which mankind has descended', moral consciousness could only have arisen in one of these two species. Although not everyone might agree on definitions of intelligence, consciousness, morality and so on, certainly no-one would consider any animal - even the highest ape - as morally responsible for its actions . This is because no species other than man seems to posses the requisite combination of free will, intelligence, and analytic ability which can allow us to consider their actions as freely chosen. According to Darwin - in agreement with earlier writers: "of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important."
Julian Huxley saw the emergence of moral consciousness as a turning point in the evolutionary process itself: "It is only through social evolution that the world-stuff can now realize radically new possibilities. Mechanical interaction and natural selection still operate, but have become of secondary importance. For good or evil, the mechanism of evolution has in the main been transferred onto the social or conscious level...The slow methods of variation and heredity are outstripped by the speedier processes of acquiring and transmitting experience...And in so far as the mechanism of evolution ceases to be blind and automatic and becomes conscious, ethics can be injected into the evolutionary process....it becomes possible to introduce...moral purpose into evolution."
According to Erich Fromm [italics in original]:"....The religious need is rooted in the basic condition of existence of the human species.......the human species can be defined as the primate who emerged at the point of evolution where instinctive determination had reached a minimum and the development of the brains a maximum . This combination.....had never occurred before in animal evolution and constitutes, biologically speaking, a completely new phenomenon. " Using the terminology of Victor Frankl , one could say that the human being is unique in that it is driven at its most basic level by "the will to meaning". No other member of the evolutionary chain can be so described - and thus man is qualitatively different than his evolutionary forebears.
One could say that until the emergence of man, there was no moral activity on earth, no free willed choice, and thus no true purpose - at least from the point of view of Gd - to the existence of the universe. We can now begin to consider what methodology would be the most logical to employ in creating a purposive universe.
A POSSIBLE CREATION SCHEDULE
After creating the 'initial singularity', big bang, and natural law, Gd could 'sit back and watch' creation develop along the path it was designed to follow. Matter would emerge from the initial energy, atoms would be built up from the matter, and stars would form from the atoms. Planets would assume shape and finally after billions of years of 'waiting', life would emerge .
Then, after a few billion more years, after the extinction of the dinosaurs, with the amoeba finally evolved via the ape into the human being, the long wait would be over, and the drama of moral activity could begin. With the emergence of the first moral being, the universe could begin to be considered meaningful, to be working towards the achievement of some purpose.
The Importance of Mind in the Universe
Following Wigner andVonNeumann and others who speculated that consciousness is required to effectuate the collapse of the wave function, my BH article "Free Will" sets out the speculative thesis that since free will is beyond both determinism and quantum randomness, it is uniquely suited to be that active ingredient of consciousness which collapses the wave function; moreso, since it is moral responsibility which is the fundamental philosophical motivation for assuming the existence of free will, that it is morally-responsible free will which underlies the collapse.
The article also points out that since until that, from the perspective of the God of the Bible, until the emergence of morally-responsible free will, all events are either determined or random, and so the universe is purposeless. Fotnote 6 mentions Wheeler's idea tha tth euniverse may have emerge dinto existence due to an act of the consciousness of a being within the universe....mentions that perhaps consciousness was inherent in the universe and humans tapped into it when their brains became sufficiently developed......
ie the creation of the universe begins with the first collapse of the universal wave-function by a free willed moral being [who in the Bible is Adam].
Aside: Note re the age of the universe:
The application of this idea to Genesis, ie the account of the creation of the universe and of Adam, is made explicit in the BH article "And God Said: "Let there have been a big bang" submitted to BH with the Free WIll article but ony published in issue #13]
according to this model, in some sense the universe is only as old as free-willed moral choice. This point, that Adam was the first morally-reponsible free willed being and that this can lead to a discrepancy between the age of the universe as seen by science and by biblical religion, was also made in my "Quantum Physics and Halacha" lecture at the Miami conference in 19xx, and later in the articles [Hebrew xxx, Englisxxx] [the point is made at the conclusion of the article]. The age of the universe can be calculated from different perspectives - and afer all there are known to be 70 facets of torah [see eg the 'perspectives' sections (p12-13) at the end of the big bang article].
Intelligent Design
ID does not mean the conclusion that it is necesary to involve the existence of God n order to explain the emergenc eof humanity. A more scientific version is that Mind is central to ......and also the emergenceof the universe into physical reality ....and consiousness was present in the universe from the outset, and our consciousness is derived from that, and our brain is the antena which alows us to be conscious by taping in to the universal consciousness.... and therefore perhaps mind needs to be taken more into account in...and plays a central role in.evolutionary mechanisms....
Possible Future Directions for a Scientific Theory of Origins
There may well be some natural mechanism which causes self-organization, and can explain the emergence of the complexity underlying both the galactic and stellar structure in the large and inorganic, and the molecules and cells of our bodies in the small and organic. A natural ‘guiding hand’ to evolution such as this would deepen the seeming teleology of the evolutionary process, and would make the scientific origin theory seem like an account of creation.
The nature of consciousness is a scientific enigma:
INSERT
The inability of scientific theory to account for the evolution of consciousness is a serious lacuna of origin theory.
INSERT (Eccles etc)
Sir John Eccles, [ Nobel Prize for medicine in 1963] The Wonder of Being Human 1984, pages 36-37:
…. nowhere in the laws of physics or in the laws of derivative sciences, chemistry and biology, is there any reference to consciousness or mind….its emergence is not reconcilable with the natural laws as at present understood...
Second, all materialist theories of the mind are in conflict with biological evolution. Since they all (panpsychists, epiphenomenalists, and identy theorists) assert the causal ineffectiveness of consciousness per se, they fail completely to account for the evolutionary expansion of consciousness, which is an undeniable fact. There is first its emergence and then its progressive development with the growing complexity of the brain. Evolutionary theory holds that only those structures and processes that significantly aid in survival are developed in natural selection...
Eccles, John C. and Daniel N. Robinson (1984), The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind (New York: The Free Press).
Gregory:
If the brain was developed by Natural Selection, we might well suppose that consciousness has survival value. But for this it must, surely, have causal effects. But what effects could awareness, or consciousness, have? (1977, p. 276, emp. added).
Gregory, Richard L. (1977), “Consciousness,” The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance, ed. Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith (Oxford, England: Pergamon), pp. 273-281.
Eccles and Robinson, 1984, p. 17,18:
We believe that the emergence of consciousness is a skeleton in the closet of orthodox evolutionism.... It remains just as enigmatic as it is to an orthodox evolutionist as long as it is regarded as an exclusively natural process in an exclusively materialist world.
Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles The Self and Its Brain, (1977, p. 129). “the emergence of full consciousness...is indeed one of the greatest of miracles”
Eccles and Robinson (1984, p. 37):
[A]ll materialist theories of the mind are in conflict with biological evolution.... Evolutionary theory holds that only those structures and processes that significantly aid in survival are developed in natural selection. If consciousness is causally impotent, its development cannot be accounted for by evolutionary theory .
Evolution geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky et al 1977, p. 453
“In point of fact, self-awareness is the most immediate and incontrovertible of all realities. Without doubt, the human mind sets our species apart from nonhuman animals”
A complete theory of evolution must account for the emergence of consciousness. Since consciousness is the most complex phenomenon and of an entirely different qualitative level than any other phenomenon, the theory accounting for it will presumably be far more sophisticated than the present day origin theory, and indeed may be of an entirely different qualitative level.
As consciousness involves elements of self-reference and holism, is the source of subjectivity and crosses the mind-body divide, presumably the theory of it will do so as well. As such the complete origin theory will possibly take on features more reminiscent of some of the underlying themes of the Eden account.
We do not yet know the mechanisms whereby evolution takes place etc, and so we do not know how to compute the relevant probabilities, we also do not yet know how many planets there are and what conditions are necessary in order to allow for the emergence of life on a planet, and therefore we do not know whether or not it is reasonable that somewhere in the universe – specifically, here on Earth - life should evolve.
We do not know whether there are mutiple-universes, or areas of the universe with different laws of nature some of which will inevitably permit life to evolve etc.
We also do not know yet enough about chaos and attractors, complexity, quantum gravity etc and their possible role in guiding evolutionary processes, and other possible natural mechanisms which would do so, let alone the possible role of consciousness about which we know virtually nothing, in the emergence of life and of humanity - especially if there was a primordial consciousness [see more on this below].
We do not yet know everything we need to know about cells, and about the mechanisms whereby evolution takes place, etc, and so we do not know how to compute the relevant probabilities of for example cellular life emerging from the inanimate mineral world.
Evolutionary theory is a MODEL, an ATTEMPT to find a naturalistic answer, a mechanism which perhaps could have given rise to what we see about us. It is simply too early to determine whether or not the laws of nature actually permit the emergence of life, and of humanity; and it is certainly premature to discuss whether or not there is some way we could determine if it actually happened in that way.
For the moment, so far, the big bang and evolutionary model (or theory) is the best naturalistic theory of the emergence of humanity.
The most complex entity we know is the human brain, and the highest-level interaction/phenomenon is consciousness. To many people it seems unlikely that consciousness can arise at some late stage in the universe’s existence without it having been present at its inception. All the more so regarding free-willed consciousness; it seems to many of those who believe in the existence of this phenomenon that it cannot have evolved from any non-free-willed-conscious prior state. And so that there must have been some aspect of free-willed consciousness existent at the outset: indeed the very emergence into existence of the universe is itself a non-causal event of the same type as are free-willed choices.
Free willed consciousness by its very nature is inherent “intelligent” and motivated, a higher-level proces. As such, if it was present at the inception of the universe, it is possible that it played some role in the future development of that universe. Therefore, the directedness that lies at the root of free-willed conscious choice should be factored in to the equation of evolution as a teleological agent. An evolutionary process involving such an agent in some way would likely show a greater tendency to the emergence of complexity, life, intelligence, and consciousness than would a purely random process driven by a universe devoid of all consciousness.
The present theory of evolution/big bang is a very convincing one under the assumption that there is neither a God, nor directedness to evolution. The Biblical creation account is on the other hand a fitting one for a universe created by a creator desiring the operation of free-willed moral choice.
The two perspectives do not conflict, they supplement each other, and there are also major points of overlap. When consciousness - and more so, free will - is finally scientifically understood, the resulting future scientific theory of origins and the religious/biblical view of origins will possibly merge even more.
For example: the effect of mind on the body, concentration during meditaiton or prayer, group effect of mind concentration, the effec tof mind after the body dies, the group effect of all these after-death miond-residuals, the effect of that which was the prescursor to mind on the origin of the universe, temporal transcendence of this Mind so that its eventual emergence can effectuate the big bang (like Wheeler etc). 'COmmunication' between this mind and human minds.
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Mutual Respect for Scientific Theory and Jewish Biblical Creation:(No Contradiction)
Misusing a scientific critique of BB theory as a support of creationism
There are many assumptions underlying the big bang theory, there are plenty of discussions of these assumptions; there are various weaknesses of the theory, and there are critiques: these are well-known and acknowledged by scientists, indeed they come from scientists, there are many quotes from scientists availabel on the web, and all these scientists are constantly seeking to improve the theory.
Obviously none of the scientists quoted as critiquing the big bang theory meant that they are therefore choosing the biblical account of creation over the big bang theory, or are giving up seeking a scientific theory and simply concluding that it is beyond human understanding, merely that there are holes or flaws they feel ought to be addressed.
Science looks for rationalistic explanations, and scientists assume such can be found, and try to create them. The assumptions they make are all part of this program, and make sense from within it.
It is a tribute to science and scientists that they are willing to seek holes in scientific theories, and to change these theories: the fact that the theories have flaws and need to be changed is not an indication that the scientific pursuit of a theory of cosmology is wrong-minded, it simply means that scientists are constantly innovating to make the theories progressively better.
When scientists critique cosmological theory, obviously they are NOT proposing that one should as a result choose the biblical account of creation over the big bang theory - they are merely indicating that there are holes or flaws in the scientific theory which they feel ought to be addressed in order to develop a better scientific theory.
Most likely the same scientists have far sharper critiques of the biblical creation account etc than of the big bang theory, so it is hypocritical to quote them as somehow undermining the scientific approach in favor of the fundamnetalist/literalist interpretation of breishis.
The flaws in present scientific cosmology theory will eventually be addressed and a better SCIENTIFIC theory will emerge; of course that will also be flawed, and analysis will lead to yet a better theory: we may never reach apoint where we know absolutely everyhing we need to know about cosmology, but maybe we will - in any case it is in my view naive/absurd to suppose that a scientific theory will EVER emerge which proves that the universe emerged as described in breishis according to a literal reading and in six days, and 6,000 years ago, with proof that it was the work of a God. It is a forgone conclusion that the scientific search for rationalistic explanations will lead to rationalistic explanations, not to God or breishis. And this is not in any way a problem for religion or for the torah. {Note: see discussions in my book "The Instant Universe".]
Rambam said about Aristotle's theory of the eternal universe, that since his proof is flawed, one need not accept it as true and therefore one can believe in creation.. Perhaps those who believe in fundamentalist/literalist interpretation of breishis believe that although no scienific theory will ever lead directly to the literal reading of breishis, nevetheless eventually all scientific theories of cosmology will prove to be flawed - and they will always seek out and hold to these flaws so as not to feel obligated as rational people to accept any scientific theory of cosmology.
There is an incredible irony in all this: The big bang theory was originally taken by scientists as being 'too genesis-like' since it overturned the concept of an eternal universe, which was the central counter-Torah tenet of philosophy - indeed this alleged contradiction was the central reason Rambam wrote the moreh nevuchim. These scientists were not concerned with the issue of the 6 days or the 6,000 years, and considered the central idea of breishis to be creatio ex nihilo, and that this fundamental torah-concept was vindicated by the big bang theory. However, somehow later on the big bang theory was considred by religious people to be a contradiction to breishis because they felt that one needs to interpret the 6 days literally and that the torah meant us to count up the numbers and arrive at an age of 6,000 years.
So whereas some scientists viewed the big bang theory as problematic because it was pro-torah, some religious people (due to their literalist/fundamentalist inteprretation of brieshis) considered it problematic because it was anti-torah! [See more extended discussion of all these points in my book "Einstein's blunder and the god who plays dice"]
[Note: As I've said in my lectures, I think that this may mean that some scientists understood the meaning of breishis better than did some religious people.] [Ilana, I'm sure the above is a problematic sentence - it'd probably be a death sentence!]
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Is Evolutionary Theory Correct?
In an infinite universe with the appropriate initial ingredients and laws, the evolution of the purely physical aspect of humanity is inevitable.
However in order to determine whether or not evolutionary theory is the correct explanation for the emergence of humanity here in our universe, with our laws of nature, we need to examine the following:
1. Do the known laws of nature and the conditions as they were on Earth really permit a process of evolution of progressively more complex entities?
2. Is there something about what we call life that is not purely physical, and therefore no natural system could produce life?
3. Was there really sufficient time to allow for the evolution of life?
4. Is there something unique about humanity so that even if some natural system could produce life, it could not produce humanity
5. If there was sufficient time, and the laws allow the evolution of humanity as outlined by the theory of evolution, did humans actually emerge that way?
Some people - particularly religious critics of evolutionary theory - somehow expect that science should already have all the answers, and today. It does
not. Evolutionary theory is still very young. In a few hundred years science will presumably know a lot more about how life emerged.
We do not yet know the mechanisms whereby evolution takes place etc, and so we do not know how to compute the relevant probabilities, we also do not yet know how many planets there are and what conditions are necessary in order to allow for the emergence of life on a planet, and therefore we do not know whether or not it is reasonable that somewhere in the universe – specifically, here on Earth - life should evolve.
We do not know whether there are mutiple-universes, or areas of the universe with different laws of nature some of which will inevitably permit life to evolve etc.
We also do not know yet enough about chaos and attractors, complexity, quantum gravity etc and their possible role in guiding evolutionary processes, and other possible natural mechanisms which would do so, let alone the possible role of consciousness about which we know virtually nothing, in the emergence of life and of humanity - especially if there was a primordial consciousness [see more on this below].
We do not yet know everything we need to know about cells, and about the mechanisms whereby evolution takes place, etc, and so we do not know how to compute the relevant probabilities of for example cellular life emerging from the inanimate mineral world.
Evolutionary theory is a MODEL, an ATTEMPT to find a naturalistic answer, a mechanism which perhaps could have given rise to what we see about us. It is simply too early to determine whether or not the laws of nature actually permit the emergence of life, and of humanity; and it is certainly premature to discuss whether or not there is some way we could determine if it actually happened in that way.
Proponents of democracy are fond of saying that democracy is a terrible political system - except when compared to all other political systems. Even critics of evolutionary theory can perhaps agree that for the moment, so far, the big bang and evolutionary model (or theory) is the best naturalistic theory of the emergence of humanity.
The Scientific and Biblical Cosmologies Will Never Be Identical
It is certainly unlikely that through experiment, science will eventually prove that the correct cosmological model can be best described precisely as follows: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, ... one day, day four...... God rested... etc.
Even the fundamentalist is unlikely to claim that the scientific method, if applied correctly, will eventually lead inevitably to this picture of the origin of all.
· What model for universal and human origin does the fundamentalist expect scientific theory to arrive at? If this model is NOT the same as the creation account, then how does the fundamentalist explain this discrepancy?
· What account would scientists accept as a reasonable Genesis creation account for a creating God to give to the Jews at Sinai 3,500 years ago? Given that the universe is as it is, ie God if one exists at all is definitely hidden. If there was a divinely-revealed creation account, there are certain assumptions that a scientist could reasonable expect about it: it would not explicitly constitute a proof of God; it would be comprehensible to contemporary humans; etc…. If the actual creation account is different than this scientifically-expected account, how does the traditionalist explain the discrepancy?
FROM ID project description FILE:
What Science Is and Isn't
A Chinese Communist and a Hassidic American may disagree about whether or not there is a God, whether or not life has meaning - or what its meaning is, whether one ought to marry for love or for other reasons, and on much else, however they can agree that objects fall to the ground, will agree on the speed at which they fall, as well as that the sun gives of light and heat and so on.
For the sake of this discussion, let's define 'objectively exisiting physical phenomena' as those which can be agreed upon by all (or at least by 'reasonable people')(without quibbling about each of these words). Issues related to whether or not there is a God, and whether or not life has meaning, or what its meaning is, and what the meaning of love is will, in contrast, be referred to here as 'subjective' or 'supernatural' or 'spiritual'. To many people, including to many students in science classes, the subjective/spiritual issues are more interesting and important than the 'objectively exisiting physical phenomena', but nevertheless with a bit of training they too can agree on the distinction between the two categories.
When we find a concise mathematical equation which predicts/describes objectively exisiting physical phenomena, for example Newton's or Einstein's law of gravity, or the laws of electricity, for our purposes here we'll call these 'naturalistic explanations' for the phenomena (though of course there's a difference between a description or equation and an explanation).
Note that a person may believe that there is a God, that God created the universe and the laws of nature, and that the explanation for why there are laws of nature at all lies in the fact that God created them; one may also believe that humans can understand the laws of nature only due to God's granting of this ability to humans.. However, even if one believes all this one does not need to explicitly invoke the existence of God in order to write down the laws of gravity or of electricity, and thus they constitute 'naturalistic explanations'. Physics (science) is the programmatic effort to find such naturalistic explanations for all objectively exisitng phenomena
Note however that when we say "Physics (science) is the programmatic effort to find naturalistic explanations for objectively exisitng phenomena " we do not mean to imply either that there ARE phenomena which are NOT objectively existent (eg subjective or supernatural or spiritual) or that science cannot deal with them, nor do we mean to imply that there are NO such phenomena - our statement simply does not refer to such, it refers only to objectively exisitng phenomena. Science also does not say that there are no other explanations for these objectively exisiting phenomena, nor even that science provides the 'best' explanation; it is simply the naturalistic explanation. Science does not claim that a natrualistically-describable universe necessarily emerged without God etc, it makes no statements about the reason anything exists, nor about the possible existence of a God.
When making statements about the past science essentially is saying 'if all happened according to the laws of nature, then it happened this way', but science cannot of course say what actually occurred, ie whether there was some supernatural event involved. Even if science has an explanation for why something would have occurred in the past, it may actually have occurred in a different way, supernaturally, but that doesn't mean that science is wrong, since it is only saying what would have happened if the known laws of nature were the only causes operating. Even if eventually explanations are found for everything, this in no way constitutes a proof of the non-existence of a creator etc and so the issue of this or that naturalistic explanation is not relevant to the question of the existence of a creator.
Intelligent Design (ID): The issue of ID has nothing to do with religion, or atheism; it should be an issue for science to deal with, without the involvement of any religious or atheistic agendas. So far it has proven very useful to pursue a programatic search for naturalistic explanations. As a result, there's a confidence in most scientists that there is still much about the universe and humanity which will be explained in this way if the effort is made and so they wish to continue to explore. They feel that even regarding problems which are intractable today, there's no way one can rule out the possibility of finding a naturalistic explanation, and they are motivated to continue to research these problems.
From the scientific point of view of course it may be that the universe will turn out to have been designed, but then science will wish to detect the designer and to discover how the designer came to be. An atheist who is a true scientist should not shy away from such a prospect, it would be an incredibly exciting discovery for science, but on the other hand religious people would have to expect that the resulting scientific theory of that entity could be far from the religious conception of God [eg perhaps it would be closer to the science fiction conception of a super-alien]. The bottom line is that the questions of science have to be dealt with form the scientific perspective, and sothe issue of whether or not there is scientific evidence of design (rather than philosophical or metaphysical etc indication of the existence of God or of divine design) should be treated purely from the scientific perspective, and atheists and religious people should be open to science's taking things to wherever they honestly lead.
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Attempting to Arrive at 'Neutral' Statements
It's hard to find one presentation of international news which all viewers will agree is unbased. Similarly re religion/science. Even among those who agree that science should be neutral regarding religion, there will not necessarily be agreement as to what constitutes a neutral position. Similarly, the law requires public schools to reflect separation of religion and state, but of course this does not mean favoring atheism, and what is taught in public schools as 'neutral' is viewed by many religious people as 'atheist'.
Often in order to create statments which satisfy two radically different positions one needs to use such neutral terms, and terms which have different meanings to the different sides, so that it is essentially an empty statement. I am looking to formulate statements regarding science and religion, eg regarding ID, which can be viewed by both sides as neutral, and which nevertheless have content.
What is an 'objective' statement of science re the big bang and evlution? A possibly neutral treatment of the issue can be something like the following:
To the extent that 'scientific' means 'provable' then atheists and religious people have to appreciate that their beliefs in the non-existence or existence of God are equally 'non-scientific'.
Religious people should admit that when one seeks naturalistic explanations for the universe and humanity, one is led to something like the theories of the big bang and evolution, and that from the scientific perspective the holes in a theory do not point to the necessity for accepting te lack of a naturalistic explanation, only to the need for a better naturalistic explanation. The atheist should admit that although it seems untenable to them, to most people including to many scientists it seems logically possible that the universe could have been created by God as a big bang designed carefully to produce humans via evolution; also, if there is a soul, it is a spiritual entity and not physical and could not evolve and so God could have implanted in humans separately from the process of evolution, when the human body/brain evolved to the complexity sufficient to become capable of associating itself to that soul.
Science should not take sides and deal with whether or not there is a God or a soul or if the universe was created or emerged on its own - science's mandate is to attempt to arrive at better and more accurate naturalistic explanations, honestly confronting the difficulties in theories, and when stuck, not to give up but rater to attempt to overcome all obstacles, revising theories or paradigms as needed until a more satisfactory naturalistic explanation is found.
It would be interesting to test the above statements on people on either side, and based on the responses to hone them so as to produce statements which are acceptable to both religious people and atheists.
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