T.J_Runyons Evolution Rubrick

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From an article I wrote five years ago. You may want it to stop at modernism but most humans are not cut out that way. If they think there is nothing to the faith of their fathers, they won’t choose nothing. They will choose something sillier.

SATURDAY, JUNE 22, 2013
Summer Solstice in Neo-paganism and Irrational Re-mystification of The Physical Universe
I note with interest that 20,000 people, many of them neo-pagans, descended on Stonehenge to celebrate the Summer Solstice. Young people in America usually can’t make it to Stonehenge, but there are also a small number of people in this country who claim to be pagans, and attempt to re-mystify the Solstice into some kind of spiritual experience as a part of that.

This was all so predictable, and predicted by such men as C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer long ago. The radical secularism imposed on the West by our elites via education, the media, and over-reaching courts, was never going to fulfill the highest needs of man. Man is a spiritual being who longs for something to worship. Radical secularism, aka modernism, does not answer the inner desire of man to worship something. When a culture rejects God, something else will fill that void, it will not stay empty.

Modernism was always destined to be a short phase in the West, for it saws off the philosophical branch on which it rests, and results in the post-modernism we now see about us. An age in which the very existence of truth is scoffed at and reason itself is suspect.

In this post modern age, some have filled the spiritual void of man with state-worship, some with self-worship. For those among us who are skeptical of state power, and whose self-esteem falls short of the level of narcissism required for self-worship, there is neo-paganism. Often this is connected to some sort of vague environmentalist religion. In other words, the neo-pagans resort to the physical universe and nature to meet their spiritual needs.

We only thought that the debate between Monotheism and polytheism was settled thousands of years ago. Actually it was settled, intellectually speaking, but remember post-modernism is skeptical even of reason and the intellect. Instead, it exalts desire and will as the highest knowable truth. Once our culture took reason and intellect off of the throne, monotheism lost the foundation on which it won the cultural battle in previous generations.

So now we have people trying to re-mystify the Solstice as part of neo-pagan worship. It makes no sense intellectually. Today there is nothing mystical about the Solstice. It is the result of well-understood gyrations in the earth’s orbit around the sun. It is a physical phenomenon completely predictable by astronomers. We not only know when it will happen, but also completely understand why.

But adherents of neo-paganism are trying to wind-back the state of mankind’s knowledge in the mystical sense. They desire to go back to a time when these things were not well-understood, and thus awe-inspiring on a mystical level. It is a longing for the awe of the natural world humanity held in ages gone by, before the men in lab coats took all that from mankind with their antiseptic answers for everything. One need not be a neo-pagan to have some sympathy with that position.

While I am sympathetic to the desire of man to worship, no matter my feelings on the matter I cannot indulge an intellectually unsupportable position in an effort to meet this deep emotional need. Rather, I want my mysticism not only to be comforting, but also truly mystical. I am just not cut out to shoe-horn it in where it does not belong just to draw emotional comfort from something that I know intellectually is false.

I want my mystical faith to be real, in a way that is really beyond the men in the lab coats, even if it means believing in a God who has inconveniently specific rules for my personal behavior. Rules which I frequently run afoul of, necessitating a continual reliance on the substitutionary atonement of Christ for my failings. In Christ, this event can be placed in its proper perspective. It is a testimony to the orderliness of the cosmos, and the regulation and order established by the Creator and Lawgiver. I worship not the clock, but the clock maker.

As an end note, the God of the Bible explained all of this to His believers long ago. At a time when the physical cosmos did indeed appear to be mystical, and was basically universally believed to be so by the children of men across the whole earth, there was in one small band of humans an exception. Among the Hebrews was a Prophet named Jeremiah who related this message from God above…10 Hear what the Lord says to you, people of Israel. 2 This is what the Lord says:
“Do not learn the ways of the nations
or be terrified by signs in the heavens,
though the nations are terrified by them.

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To notify him, use his handle with the “at” sign: @dga471.

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Thanks @swamidass

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No, the electron and muon are different fundamental particles in the Standard Model. However they are both leptons, meaning particles with spin-1/2 and are not affected by the strong force. Both are fundamental particles, so both are considered point particles. There are other differences between the muon and electron. For example, the muon is 200 times more massive than the electron, and is very short-lived: within 2.2 microseconds it will decay away. Whereas electrons are indefinitely stable particles, as far as we know.

A fun fact about electrons and muons: while the magnetism of the electron has been found to agree between theory and experiment to 12 decimal places, the magnetism of the muon was measured about a decade ago and found to be off by 3 sigma from its predicted value in the Standard Model. Because of that, people are currently rerunning the experiment with greater precision (3 sigma is not enough to count as a discovery). It is possible that the muon may hold a hint to explaining what is wrong with the SM.

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I think we should be careful not to take the “zero-size”-ness of fundamental particles too far. Zero-size simply means that in our theory we consider them to be points. But other physical parameters associated with an electron, for example, are spatial, such as its electric and magnetic fields. Electrons also constantly move in space; an electron in an atom has a probability “cloud” which extends in space around the nucleus. One could thus argue that the probability cloud of an electron is closer to our traditional understanding of what “size” is.

Thus I don’t see any major philosophical or theological problems coming out of its pointlike nature. Other consequences of quantum mechanics, such as energy-time uncertainty or “spooky action at a distance” are far more philosophically interesting.

Intuitively, the pointlike nature of fundamental particles makes sense to me: we think of everyday spatially extended objects as being “made” of something smaller - a body is made of cells. Cells are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. You keep going down until you hit the limits of our knowledge - quarks and electrons. At this point you can no longer talk about volume or size, because that would imply that the fundamental particles have some deeper structure which we don’t know yet.

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If you separate this between Common Ancestry and Universal Common Ancestry, you’ll even get the YECs on board with the former! In fact, YECs tend to accept more evolution here than OECs (i.e., YECS view “kind” usually around family, while OECs generally stick closer to species and genus).

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A post was split to a new topic: Thinking about Cosmology and CMB

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@T.j_Runyon - How can we have a “process” without a well defined mechanism. This breaks down into an axiom that life emerges from life.
I wouldn’t call such a general statement as a theory. Add assumptions of methodological materialism and it becomes an unfalsifiable tautology.
I would love to hear @swamidass opinion in this.

I look at evolution as a set of competing theories which cannot be unified into one. Sometimes Common descent comes across as a PR stunt to establish that a unified consensus theory actually exists.

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The Neutral Theory of Evolution is very well defined.

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Goodness gracious. This irrelevant nitpicking is getting old. If you don’t like it then change it to the thesis that new species emerge as the modified descendants of pre-existing ones.

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The mechanisms are described in number three. You can accept number two without any knowledge of the mechanisms.

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Be nice. I think he is trying to figure it out.

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I apologize.

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There is a reason for the nitpicking. Scientists often claim evolution is as settled as the theory of gravity in public forums. You yourself mentioned 2 as what they are referring to when they make this claim.
Is is too much to expect from a well established theory that it be well defined and make testable claims? Put yourself in the shoes of. Non-specialist who is told “evolution is as true as gravity” and think about it.
I am just pointing out that it might be useful for an honest communication to stop talking about evolution as one theory, but rather many competing theories regarding how “modified descendants” emerge and new species are formed.

Instead , what we get is authoritarian assertions that evolution is true followed by just so stories/artistic renderings of what is supposed to have happened.

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This is a bizarre statement and accusation of dishonesty. We are honest. The only theory that makes sense of the data without invoking God’s action is common descent.

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Common ancestry makes testable claims. And I agree evolutionary theory is composed of multiple theories. I’m separating UCA and the theory itself here.

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Larry Moran explains that well here:

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I am not accusing you of dishonesty. But guys like this guy are-

Because of his sustained and oft confusing campaign. Claims like this one below become the norm.
"The theory of evolution encompasses the well established scientific view that organic life on our planet has changed over long periods of time and continues to change by a process known as natural selection."

The smaller claims of common descent are very often used to establish “natural selection” as the overarching guiding force of evolution. I don’t know if this happens accidentally… however I have seen this bait and switch very often in public discussions of evolution.

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Well that is a real problem. They should talk more about The Neutral Theory of Evolution and other non-Darwinian processes.

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If that is done, which I know it is because ive witnessed it before, then yes, they are in the wrong. Evidence for common ancestry isn’t evidence for mechanism.