Christianity and evolution are logically incompatible

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@viole

Ok, I am not a biologist. So, you might have a point.

It might require understanding evolution some before declaring it is inconsistent with Christianity.

@viole

Do you really think God drove things in such a way, including climate change, volcanoes, asteroids, etc, so that a rat looking like critter could get out of its stinking hole to eventually become the very reason God created the whole Universe for and incarnate into one of them?

Really?

It is pretty consistent with the God I understand from Scripture. You might appreciate this article,

A Lutheran’s Artistic Tree

[Timothy_Horton]

@colewd

Ok can you explain how you got from primates to humans?

Er Bill, humans are primates.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

So then how do you get from primates to apes. So there.

[gbrooks9 (George)]

@viole

My impression is that evolutionary theists are neither theists nor evolutionists. They deny the necessarily impersonal character of evolution and, at the same time, turn God into a being who creates by trial and error.

@Viole,

This is not a universal stance. I completely reject the idea that God creates by “trial and error”. In fact, if @swamidass insisted on such a position, I wouldn’t have left PeacefulScience.Org long ago.

So where did you get this idea that Christianity contradicts God-Guided Evolution? Maybe you are not familiar with that phrase?

[gbrooks9 (George)]

@viole

Do you really think God drove things in such a way, including climate change, volcanoes, asteroids, etc, so that a rat looking like critter could get out of its stinking hole to eventually become the very reason God created the whole Universe for and incarnate into one of them?

@Viole,

So you don’t think a global flood is a kind of climate catastrophe?

How about blood filling the entire Nile watershed?

[John_Dalton]

@Rumraket

What is “effective” about consciousness?

Well, what I said was that it is an effective way for us to interact with the natural world. It provides us with many advantages in doing so. The first dictionary definition I see is “successful in producing a desired or intended result.” People with damaged consciousness will have much more difficulty surviving, etc.

[John_Dalton]

@dga471

That’s not how explanations work. To adopt an example from Alvin Plantinga: if you come across tractors on Mars, you deduce that there must have been humans or aliens who somehow got there and built it.

Because we have certain knowledge of tractors that does not apply to consciousness.

@dga471

You cannot say, “We have no way of understanding how these beings got there, therefore the tractors must have mysteriously appeared there naturally.”

But I haven’t said this. I don’t think there’s any reason to think it could not have evolved naturally like other useful capabilities, however.

@dga471

Secondly, it’s not too great of a mystery that God could be responsible for consciousness. After all, God is supposed to be a personal and conscious being himself. It seems to make more sense that a conscious being can produce more conscious beings, compared to unconscious processes making conscious beings.

God himself is a mystery. We don’t know if he exists, even. Such a concept has no explanatory power. In the end, we’re left with the same problem we started with. The proposed explanation just adds an extra layer of mystery.

@dga471

We don’t have a detailed, mechanistic, reductionist explanation of how God creates conscious beings. But why expect that such an explanation exists, when God is supposed to be a simple, immaterial being? Why do we think that immaterial things can be reduced to smaller parts like an atom being reduced to protons and neutrons? In fact, one of the central tenets of classical theism is Divine Simplicity - that God cannot be reduced to parts, otherwise he wouldn’t be God. If God cannot be reduced to parts, I doubt that the means by which He creates the world (including consciousness) can be reduced to smaller mechanisms (especially when we’re talking about consciousness, which probably also has an immaterial component).

All of this sounds very mysterious to me. I haven’t gained any insight into how “God” explains consciousness.

@dga471

(We don’t have such an explanation either for natural processes creating consciousness, by the way. Nor do we have such a detailed explanations for the many just-so evolutionary psychology explanations that have been brought up here and elsewhere for taking into account the existence of religion and experiences of beauty.)

I agree, but I haven’t said we do.

[John_Dalton]

@T.j_Runyon

I’m making a very modest argument. That the existence of conscious beings is more expected on Theism than naturalism. How it was created is beyond the point. All other evidence held equal consciousness is more probable on Theism than naturalism. Very modest and most naturalist scholars would agree.

That’s fine, but I don’t see the importance. I’d say you have an idea which was developed with the benefit of foreknowledge of consciousness. That it favors the idea of the development of consciousness doesn’t seem surprising.

[Roy (30-year veteran)]

@T_aquaticus

@viole

i am an atheist because I fully embrace the theory of evolution by natural selection.

I arrived at disbelief by a completely different route. I was raised in the church so I just fell into christianity as a product of how I grew up. During those years I fully accepted evolution and didn’t see any reason why they should conflict with one another. However, the “problem of evil” (which you seem to be hinting at) was one of the questions I struggled with and it was a part of my journey out of the faith.

I’m an atheist because when I sought the Christian god I discovered it wasn’t there. Nor were any others.

[Jordan (Jordan Mantha)]

@John_Dalton

God himself is a mystery. We don’t know if he exists, even. Such a concept has no explanatory power.

Can you unpack why you say the concept of God has no explanatory power? I can understand why an atheist or agnostic would say it has less explanatory power, but none? When I look up explanatory power it seems to mean an ability to explain the world around us (accounting for both present and future observations, establishing causal relationships, and being “hard to vary”). I’m pretty sure by those criteria the concept of God has some explanatory power at least, though I’m sure people will disagree with how much relative to other conceptions (like no God).

[T_aquaticus]

@T.j_Runyon

That conscious beings makes more sense on Theism.

This is probably where a lot of people part ways. What “makes sense”? How do we determine that? To many atheists, invoking an unevidenced and undetectable entity to explain something doesn’t make sense. I think this difference in opinion has to do with how people approach a question, and the method they use to judge the answers. Atheists tend to use a type of skepticism where you start with facts and then move towards a conclusion, and this doesn’t work well for theistic explanations.

[John_Dalton]

Well, let’s use consciousness as an example. If you assert that action by God explains it, that’s a claim on your part. Why should I accept it as an explanation? What’s the evidence for it, or how does it help us understand consciousness? If the assertion is simply on the order of “consciousness needs an explanation, and if there was a God, he could have created it”, I am entirely unsatisfied. I don’t see any convincing evidence that God exists, myself. If I do accept that God could have done it, I’m now left with the problem of determining what accounts for God. The normal definitive arguments about timelessness, etc. don’t help me–I’m left with a mystery that’s even bigger than the one I started with, that is, of how consciousness could have arisen–it seems relatively trivial to me in fact. If the assertion is not as I describe there, then what is it?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

It is hard to judge what makes “sense” of sentients because we can hardly characterize what it is. It is mystery, on of the grand ones.

I seem precisely zero explanitory power in generic theism or a generic god.

Now, a trinitarian or Christian God is a different thing, as this comes with many entailments. From that starting point, in the nature of this sort of God, it seems to mark out or induce a notion of creaturely personhood within creation, which does entail consciousness of some sort.

The best objection to this seems to be that this begs the question if atheism is true. If conscious humans invented the Trinitarian God, inducing consciousness from this is just because we embedded our self identity into a man made God. It begs the question.

My rebuttal to this is that a trinitarian notion of God is a paradoxical outlier among world religions, and is frankly bizarre. Especially considering its history, it was not formed with this in mind but to resolve a whole different set of questions, and it remains a hard concept for most people (including Christians) to grasp. It does not arise in a manner that matches this atheist rebuttal.

So do atheists have a worse account of how consciousness arises or what it is? Well, no. I haven’t given an account of the how or the what. None of of us knows that question. I gave rather an account of why it exists. This why is answered if the trinitarian God is real, remains a complete contingent mystery without this God.

Now perhaps the same case could be made from a different theological system. I’d be curious to learn about it. It does not work, for example, with paganism or Hinduism. Perhaps some other systems have the same quality.

(Curious @Andrew_Loke and @rcohlers and @terrellclemmons thoughts on this)

[John_Dalton]

Perhaps unsurprisingly I haven’t picked up much about Buddhism in all my time in Asia, but I have gleaned that they focus heavily on consciousness. It might be interesting to know what they think. Maybe I’ll try to look into it.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Buddhism exemplifies this challenge. They hold that God is one, but undifferentiated and impersonal. Their teaching is that personhood is an illusion, and Nirvana is achieved as we abandon or consiousness into the great undifferentiated unconsciousness. This is attractive to a lot of atheists because matches their notions of death. It does not explain why personhood exists in the first place. It some complex abberation of the truth (non personhood) that there is no explanation for. In this sense Buddhism hits the same strengths and weakness of atheism.

[T_aquaticus]

@swamidass

Now perhaps the same case could be made from a different theological system. I’d be curious to learn about it. It does not work, for example, with paganism or Hinduism. Perhaps some other systems have the same quality.

I know little about Hinduism or Buddhism, so I will probably embarrass myself, but from what I do know there is an idea of a spiritual consciousness in those religions. A conscious soul separate from the body seems to be a common feature in many different religions.

You also mention the mysteriousness of consciousness, which I think is an important part of the discussion. At least for me, I’m fine with mysteries. If we don’t know how something came about, then we don’t know. I don’t see a reason why we need to invent an answer just so we can have an answer. I suspect that many atheists feel the same way.

[gbrooks9 (George)]

@swamidass

I seem precisely zero explanitory power in generic theism or a generic god.

Now, a trinitarian or Christian God is a different thing, as this comes with many entailments. From that starting point, in the nature of this sort of God, it seems to mark out or induce a notion of creaturely personhood within creation, which does entail consciousness of some sort.

@swamidass

This was my position as well … for the longest time.

And then I started focusing on the “grand mystery of consciousness”… and I made a leap of faith that the minimum requirement for at least one divine entity was that it be the source of the field of consciousness.

It’s not quintessentially logical… but much of metaphysics isn’t quintessential logic anyway.

[dga471 (Daniel)]

@John_Dalton

Because we have certain knowledge of tractors that does not apply to consciousness.

You missed the point of the example, which is that you cannot argue that explanans (thing explaining the phenomenon) is invalid because it is “more mysterious” than the explanandum (the phenomenon to be explained).

@John_Dalton

I don’t think there’s any reason to think it could not have evolved naturally like other useful capabilities, however.

I think there could be good reasons for why consciousness would be advantageous in evolution. But that doesn’t explain how it came about in the evolutionary process. (I could argue that being able to teleport would also be advantageous for survival, but that doesn’t prove that teleportation could have evolved naturally.) The fact that we have no idea how consciousness arises from the material points to the incompleteness of purely evolutionary explanations for it.

@John_Dalton

God himself is a mystery. We don’t know if he exists, even.

What do you mean by mystery? We don’t believe that we know everything about God, but we do know some things (among others):

• God is omnipotent
• God is one
• God is intelligent
• God is immaterial and incorporeal
• God is personal and conscious
• God is eternal
• God created the universe

Now two important points:

1. These traits of God were not merely made up for the sake of satisfying this argument from consciousness. These are all traits of God in classical theism, which can be justified using other arguments. So it would be inaccurate to say that we created this idea of God for the pure sake of explaining consciousness. (Notice also that theism doesn’t explain consciousness to the level of detail that we want it, which further weakens the argument that theism was specially made up for that purpose.)
2. These traits of God (and others) are sufficient to show how God could have created consciousness. We don’t know how he did it, but at least we know have some being or some thing that seems to have the ability to do it. (Similar to how we wouldn’t know how exactly those aliens created tractors on Mars, but at least they have the general capability.) It becomes much less of a mystery than on the naturalist account of things.

Of course, you can disbelieve that God exists for whatever reason. So here, we’re not making the argument here that consciousness proves the existence of God. Rather, it seems that @T.j_Runyon and others are merely arguing that assuming theism, consciousness can be explained better than assuming naturalism. Thus, theism “predicts” consciousness better than naturalism does.

[gbrooks9 (George)]

@T_aquaticus

I know little about Hinduism or Buddhism, so I will probably embarrass myself, but from what I do know there is an idea of a spiritual consciousness in those religions. A conscious soul separate from the body seems to be a common feature in many different religions.

@T_aquaticus

I’ll improve your background inventory of knowledge by sharing with you my personal anecdote of when I was lectured by a 2nd generation Hindu a decade ago.

We were talking about karma and reincarnation. I pointed out to my new Hindu friend that Westerners tend to reject the versions of reincarnation or even Karma that do not specify the survival of this consciousness we might call “the soul”.

Boom! My Hindu friend was all over me! “What is it about Westerners that fixate on personal memories? That fixate on consciousness? Why can’t karma and reincarnation simply be about the mathematical sum of positives and negatives … without memories, without self, without this ‘soul’ thing?”

I had to laugh. The assessment was perfectly accurate. But I had to confess to my interlocutor that the “personhood”, the “self”, has always been a fixture (for good or ill) of Western thinking. And that try as hard as I could, I found metaphysics that didn’t include a recognition of “self” seemed like a pretty big waste of time!

[John_Dalton]

@dga471

You missed the point of the example, which is that you cannot argue that explanans (thing explaining the phenomenon) is invalid because it is “more mysterious” than the explanandum (the phenomenon to be explained).

I don’t see how the example sheds any light on that, and as I pointed out, it refers to an argument that I’m not making.

@dga471

The fact that we have no idea how consciousness arises from the material points to the incompleteness of purely evolutionary explanations for it.

I wouldn’t say it that way. Certainly, it points to the current incompleteness of any explanation. I don’t see why you’re singling out “purely evolutionary explanations”.

@dga471

we do know some things

I don’t see how, really. None of those things seem certain or known to me.

@dga471

So it would be inaccurate to say that we created this idea of God for the pure sake of explaining consciousness.

Sure. I didn’t say that, to be clear.

@dga471

We don’t know how he did it, but at least we know have some being or some thing that seems to have the ability to do it. (Similar to how we wouldn’t know how exactly those aliens created tractors on Mars, but at least they have the general capability.) It becomes much less of a mystery than on the naturalist account of things.

I just don’t see it this way, I think because of our different conceptions of what is “known”. Those things aren’t known to me. To me it seems you have created a hypothetical entity which could serve to explain consciousness if it existed. I don’t see how it makes anything less of a mystery.

@dga471

Of course, you can disbelieve that God exists for whatever reason. So here, we’re not making the argument here that consciousness proves the existence of God.

Sure.

@dga471

Rather, it seems that @T.j_Runyon and others are merely arguing that assuming theism, consciousness can be explained better than assuming naturalism. Thus, theism “predicts” consciousness better than naturalism does.

Yes, but I’m not impressed by the value of this argument, as I’ve said a few posts above.