The Holy Trinity

[Vile Consort]

Bryn

It may be, of course, that the answer is much simpler and staring us all in the face but we just cannot see it.


VCC

It's staring me in the face and I can see it. No creator. No plan. No superstitious beliefs of any description.

And no asking "why" - because no answer I've ever heard to "why" is any answer at all.

[Magnificat]

a priori [/I]assumption that a god is involved.

MC

1 ) Could it be that as He had already recently intervened through Jesus Christ to show us how He wished us to live that He wanted the new religion and His church to become firmly established? After all Saul became St Paul who did so much to spread the gospel of Christ throughout the first century world. Once the Christian church had been established it would obviously have to be up to humans to decide whether to abide by its teachings and to eschew evil for good in accordance with the free will, I believe, He had originally given us.

You could have asked why, if they went against His laws of creation which they did, He allowed Christ to perform miracles. Presumably it was because Jesus being God in human form was able to do such things and in doing so would convince His followers that He was indeed God and that His teachings should be believed and His apostles encouraged to spread the gospel and set up the His church.

2) It's obviously up to you whether you believe that our world was created or not. I believe it had to be to for it to make any sense at all.

VCC

[Magnificat]

I can't open the comments, so can't read what you've seen. Do you recall the website's name (Answers in Genesis? The Discovery Institute? The Templeton Foundation? - there are many very well funded organisations dedicated to proving Darwin wrong. The Templeton Foundation has assets that compare favourably with a small country. And their leading lights are far from being ‘unthinking’.)

What a long reply based on comments I couldn’t read! Remember this, the person who can show Darwin was wrong will (I absolutely guarantee) pick up a Nobel Prize and become very rich from the likes of the Templeton Foundation.

Pab,

Thanks for this.

The site referred to is newgeology.us

I might have been confused about natural selection and random chance but certainly my idea of a design for all life as we know it would have to include evolution as I hope I have made clear.

It is the complexity of it all that leads me to the conclusion that the whole thing was intended by a creator; and even leaving God and religion out of it ( although Richard Dawkins himself recently requested His help when, on being asked, he couldn't remember the full title of Darwin's original 1859 publication!! ) I do seem to have the support of science at least in the Anthropic principle which suggests the ordering of the the universe towards allowing the existence of human life.

Consensus in anything always worries me, however, especially when dissenters are rubbished and ridiculed by a majority who are convinced that all the available evidence shows that they must be right because so often in the past such people have often been proved to have been correct all along usually long after they and the people who scoffed at them have died.

It certainly looks like Darwin was right; but could it possibly be that you just might not be around to see that Nobel Prize awarded?

VCC.

[Pabmusic]

Pab,

Thanks for this.

The site referred to is newgeology.us

I might have been confused about natural selection and random chance but certainly my idea of a design for all life as we know it would have to include evolution as I hope I have made clear. .

Yes you have. Thanks for the website address.

It is the complexity of it all that leads me to the conclusion that the whole thing was intended by a creator; and even leaving God and religion out of it … I do seem to have the support of science at least in the Anthropic principle which suggests the ordering of the the universe towards allowing the existence of human life...

I can understand your view. It is the complexity of life that leads many to feel as you do. That’s where the “pure chance” thing comes from. Even the cosmologist Fred Hoyle was flummoxed. He said that the chance of a complex example of life arising by natural selection was like a hurricane blowing through a scrapyard and assembling a jumbo jet! It’s a misguided analogy, based on a lack of understanding (but then it seems he was also mistaken about the nature of the universe, which is far more serious since it was his field of expertise. He coined the expression “Big Bang” as a derisory jibe at something he didn’t accept. Big Backfire.).

Darwin and Wallace were the first people to realise that it’s not pure chance (I say the first, but Democritus had suggested that life evolved more than 2,000 years ago). But complexity needs huge spans of time to develop, and this gave Darwin a real headache, especially when William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin – one of the greatest physicists ever) very carefully calculated the age of the sun, showing that it was merely tens of thousands of years old. Thompson did his maths correctly, but he assumed the sun consumed hydrogen by combustion. It doesn’t. It converts hydrogen to helium by nuclear fusion – a process unknown then. Nuclear fusion takes very much longer than combustion. (By a nice irony, the scientist who delivered a paper to the Royal Society announcing the revised age of the sun based on nuclear fusion was Darwin’s son, Sir George Darwin. A very old Lord Kelvin was in the audience. The calculation has been refined still further in the last 100 years, and stands at 4.7 billion years.)

Life had begun on the Earth by 3.4 billion years ago. Plenty of time for natural selection to work, of course, but it still doesn’t explain the complexity bit. Look at it this way. Complex things do not appear suddenly (jumbo jet in a junkyard) – the chances of such a thing happening are astronomically unlikely (yet, of course, this is exactly what believers think happened).

Think of life as being a bush (a tree is often used, but I’m picturing a symmetrically round bush). We occupy one leaf, each other species occupies a leaf unique to itself. We look around and see all the different leaves, and are amazed (and delighted) by the number of different leaves. But the bush hasn’t always been like this. Each new growth of leaves pushed the limits of the bush further out and the old leaves disappeared, so that the inside of the bush is now devoid of leaves. But there once were leaves there – though not quite so many, of course. As you trace the bush’s life history backwards, you realize that all branches come from one point.

Now, to that image add something that’s not true of bushes. Suppose that with each new expansion the leaves become more and more complex, so that today we see very complex leaves. But if we had seen the bush in its early days, we’d have seen fewer, less complex leaves. Perhaps you can see that all that is required of natural selection at any stage is that each leaf be slightly different that the leaf that came before. But because this is combined with a continued diversification through splitting, it is almost inevitable that leaves will become more complex.

Complexity arises slowly. But we’re used to that, and we could turn again to J B S Haldane for an example. A woman once said to him that she could not imagine how anything as complex as a human could develop from simple beginnings, becoming increasingly complex. Haldane responded, “But madam, you did it yourself, and it only took you nine months!”

Natural selection does not work quickly, but even that has to be put in context. Several posts ago there was a discussion of cases when it has been quite rapid. 8,000 years for a small deer-like animal to become the whales. Just a few hundred years for northern Europeans to continue to produce lactase long after weaning. There’s an event that creationists love, known as the Cambrian explosion. About half a billion years ago we suddenly find numerous fossils of early vertebrates – they appear very suddenly. Very suddenly? Well over about 100,000 years – that’s fast.

You see complexity because you live at a time when life is complex. `It’s had at least 3 billion years to become so.

As far as the anthropic principle goes (I thought we'd covered this already) there seems to be a correlation between the environment we inhabit and our ability to inhabit it. You say you accept natural selection, well that's exactly what you'd expect if we'd evolved by natural selection. Why therefore do you suppose the universe (this gynormous entity) was created to fit us? The evidence is that we fit it. But even if I'm wrong, why are you so sure it's the other way round? (Rhetorical question: I suspect you take that line because that's what you'd like to be true. But that's no good way to discover what's real.)

…although Richard Dawkins himself recently requested His help when, on being asked, he couldn't remember the full title of Darwin's original 1859 publication!! ….

Just to add some context (and to illustrate how Dawkins is considered fair game for disingenuous reporting) this followed the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s press release about attitudes to Christianity in the UK. The RDFS commissioned a MORI poll of people who in the 2011 census had given their religion as ‘Christian’. It suggested that, of the 59.3% of the population who had ticked that box, only 54% of those (ie some 38% of the population) were ‘Christian’ by any usual understanding of the term. Many said that they considered themselves ‘Christian’ because they considered themselves ‘good people’.

One of the many questions asked of interviewees was to name (among other things) the first book of the New Testament. Only some 35% of those questioned (who all had called themselves Christians, remember) could name Matthew. In response, the Daily Telegraph (which has run a long-standing anti-Dawkins campaign) asked him to name the long Victorian subtitle to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. He couldn’t remember that it was “or the Preservation of Favoured Species in the Struggle for Life”. So the Telegraph elevated Darwin’s scientific treatise to a religious text.

Now I hold no brief for Richard Dawkins, but it is (I suggest) impossible to equate the one with the other. Science is not a religion and Darwin’s book is not the bible. However, it is surely reasonable to expect ‘Christians’ to know Matthew. This is a version of the ‘straw man’ fallacy, where you construct a proposition that is not accurate then spend time demolishing it.

Consensus in anything always worries me, however, especially when dissenters are rubbished and ridiculed by a majority who are convinced that all the available evidence shows that they must be right because so often in the past such people have often been proved to have been correct all along usually long after they and the people who scoffed at them have died.

It certainly looks like Darwin was right; but could it possibly be that you just might not be around to see that Nobel Prize awarded? .

There is no absolute scientific consensus on evolution, there are many ‘controversies’ still. Does evolution work mainly at the group level? (per Steven J Gould and others). I think this has probably been answered to most people’s satisfaction – no, it works at the genetic level (as per The Selfish Gene). But there are many more. Is there any mechanism other than natural selection that can explain diversity? Sexual selection? (also Darwin’s idea). Genetic drift? And if so, what proportion of evolution is attributable? There are many more highly esoteric questions about molecular biology (is there any function of our ‘dead’ DNA – most of our DNA has been switched off? But there is no suggestion at all that the fundamental ideas of Darwinian evolution are not correct. It's just too late and there's so much evidence. The usual scientific definition of evolution is “change in the frequency of alleles (different types of genetic material) within populations over time”. What there is no evidence of (quite definitely so) is that natural selection does not happen at al so it must all be wrong.

So the chance of all Darwinian evolution being proved wrong is negligible. No doubt it will be refined for many years yet, though. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity could be said to have shown Newton’s Theory of Gravity to be ‘wrong’, but that’s not really so. Einstein refined Newton in the light of further research. The same will happen with Darwin occasionally (though surprisingly infrequently, it seems) but the fundamentals have just too much evidence now that to deny them would be perverse.

[Richard Tarleton]

1 ) Could it be that as He had already recently intervened through Jesus Christ to show us how He wished us to live that He wanted the new religion and His church to become firmly established?

Magnificat - I've become increasingly interested in why people believe in God. For you it makes sense - but did you, as it were, arrive at this conclusion yourself, did you inherit it from your parents and the society around you, or did God reveal Himself to you? Because, after all, you can't prove the existence of God, it's a matter of faith and belief. Dawkins coined the word meme in The Selfish Gene, to describe "self-replication units of transmission" for cultural and other ideas - I hope I've got this right. Obviously the diminishing band of elderly people I see going to my local village church on a Sunday have not all grappled with these basic concepts, they go to church because it's what they've inherited from their parents and grandparents and it's part, albeit a diminishing part, of the community in which they've grown up. In his provocatively titled lecture Viruses of the Mind Dawkins looks at the way religious ideas replicate themselves, looking for analogies in computers and medicine. This is actually quite a topical question, given the spread of religious extremism and its undesirable consequences.

I spent years - especially given my upbringing and the schools I was sent to - attempting to believe, but there was nothing there. I have become happier as I've got older, knowing this to be the case.

[Magnificat]

Magnificat - I've become increasingly interested in why people believe in God. For you it makes sense - but did you, as it were, arrive at this conclusion yourself, did you inherit it from your parents and the society around you, or did God reveal Himself to you? Because, after all, you can't prove the existence of God, it's a matter of faith and belief. Dawkins coined the word meme in The Selfish Gene, to describe "self-replication units of transmission" for cultural and other ideas - I hope I've got this right. Obviously the diminishing band of elderly people I see going to my local village church on a Sunday have not all grappled with these basic concepts, they go to church because it's what they've inherited from their parents and grandparents and it's part, albeit a diminishing part, of the community in which they've grown up. In his provocatively titled lecture Viruses of the Mind Dawkins looks at the way religious ideas replicate themselves, looking for analogies in computers and medicine. This is actually quite a topical question, given the spread of religious extremism and its undesirable consequences.

I spent years - especially given my upbringing and the schools I was sent to - attempting to believe, but there was nothing there. I have become happier as I've got older, knowing this to be the case.

Richard,

I suppose I inherited a simple faith from my parents and from the fact that this country's culture is based on Christianity and Christian moral values.

I was baptised and confirmed and involved with my local parish church quite deeply up to age 13/14 and then decided it was a load of rubbish and drifted away coming back again at about 30 after gaining some experience of life and starting to think about what I believed much more deeply which I have been doing ever since.

I've tried to follow as best I could what the scientists and theologians had to say about it all especially the evolutionary science and developments in genetics and anything about cosmology and how the universe was formed.

To keep this short and to the point, I have come to the conclusion from my own experiences of life that being just the sum of my genes is much too shallow a reason for my being here. I am much more than this.

I have had no supernatural experiences whatsoever but I know very rational people who have and I am open minded about it; but, for the reasons I've outlined previously, our universe, our scientific understanding of it and our very existence within it, proves to me that there must be creator - God if you like. The universe, in my opinion, was set up to provide a home for life, even if it evolved through a process of natural selection with no need for outside interference.

As far as Christianity is concerned, although I have some problems with the doctrine this is really a problem for the Church not for me as an individual Christian and follower of the historical Jesus and what He taught and the hope He provided for human beings. I think that the dwindling band of worshippers you refer to is more a reflection of the fact that people these days are so much better off materially that they think that they do not need the hope that Christianity provides, except, the clergy tell me, until it comes to dealing with death and then they turn to the Church.

In this respect I cannot accept the physical resurrection of the body ( at least my body, Jesus was special ). You could see everlasting life as the passing on of your genes through succeeding generations but I believe I have an immortal soul. I don't see my soul as being the same as my conciousness or awareness or as a set of electrical connections in the brain. I see it as something that inhabits the whole of my body and gives it shape and form ( my personality if you like ) and which departs at death leaving the dead physical body behind as a useless shell. I have no idea as to what life after death is like ( the Father's house has many mansions -universes? ) perhaps I shall encounter my maker in a perfect universe somewhere.

I am now comfortable in the Church of England. It is an intellectual branch of Christianity and with Christianity in general which, although it has its fundamentalists, is no longer extreme and medieval in outlook.

VCC

[Pabmusic]

Magnificat, I have to announce that I’m going away for about a week, so I shan’t be able to continue our discussion beyond this post. Thank you for engaging so willingly in this discussion; I have enjoyed it immensely.

I have just a few final points to make, though.

Richard,

I suppose I inherited a simple faith from my parents and from the fact that this country's culture is based on Christianity and Christian moral values.

I understand entirely. Be careful though in attributing moral values to religion, since our morality today is very different from what it was 100 years ago, and that in turn was different from the 18th century (and so on). Morals change within societies over time but I am not aware that religions issue revised moral codes every few years.

To keep this short and to the point, I have come to the conclusion from my own experiences of life that being just the sum of my genes is much too shallow a reason for my being here. I am much more than this.

And you are. You are the sum of your genes, but also of your memories, your understanding, wishes, regrets, likes and dislikes, empathy towards others, outright love for others, the entirety of the interactions you have with the world around you. The world is the precise way it is because you are in it, and it will retain a memory of this long after you leave it: it will not revert to what it was before you existed (your immortality, really). The chance that you would ever have existed was hugely remote, but here you are (your DNA, passed to you by your parents equally, allows for a truly enormous number of possible ‘you’s – but they would actually have all been someone else. It was you who won the lottery of life).

Somewhat paradoxically, the one part of you that is, in a sense, immortal is your body. Atoms are not destroyed and every one of the trillion or so that comprises you will continue to exist in one form or another. Thomas Hardy has a poem that begins “Portion of this yew is a man my grandsire knew…” He was right in a way.

I have had no supernatural experiences whatsoever but I know very rational people who have and I am open minded about it; but, for the reasons I've outlined previously, our universe, our scientific understanding of it and our very existence within it, proves to me that there must be creator - God if you like. The universe, in my opinion, was set up to provide a home for life, even if it evolved through a process of natural selection with no need for outside interference.

I know this is how you feel, and believe me I don’t want to destroy any comfort you find in this. It is your use of “prove” that I find galling. Where there are at least two possible explanations for the same phenomenon, you cannot be sure of anything without testing them. And how do you test the supernatural? So how can you be so sure the supernatural exists at all? Surely, the very most you can say is that you prefer to believe the supernatural explanation because it makes more sense (for whatever reason) to you. But that just isn’t proof at all.

Thank you again for engaging in this discussion. I shall end with Vaughan Williams' great-uncle's closing paragraphs of On the Origin of Species, for no reason other than that I love the phrase "there is grandeur in this view of life":

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependant in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

[Richard Tarleton]

And thank you both, at least for now, from me. I'm printing off the key parts of this debate in a text doc for careful study - it now runs to about 30 pages -after which it will be tucked into my bookshelf alongside some other important texts.

[Serial_Apologist]

A possible sideline here comes courtesy Madeleine Bunting's fine series of essays on Radio 4 at 10.45 each evening this week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b040hyvg/The_Essay_The_Retreating_Roar-Salvation/