Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Starting Science From God: An Evening Talk in Chicago on June 6.

FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 7-9 PM
STARTING SCIENCE FROM GOD
with physicist Ian Thompson

Many of us sense there is something real beyond the scope of naturalistic science. But what? Must mental and religious lives always remain a mystery and never become part of scientific knowledge? Can theism ever be connected with science?

Professor Ian Thompson will explain a new rational approach to combining science and theism. He presents theism as a scientific theory, explaining its basic postulates, consequences and predictions as simply as possible and without paradox. Dr. Thompson shows how a following of core postulates of theism leads to novel and useful predictions about the psychology of minds and the physics of materials which should appear in the universe. 

We will see if those predictions agree with the world as we observe it, both externally in nature and internally in our minds. In fact, they mesh surprisingly well with the structure of reality already revealed by modern quantum field theory and by theories of developmental stages in human minds. 

The result is a promising new rational theory encompassing theology, psychology and physics. 

Dr. Ian Thompson is a nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey in England, where until 2006 he was Professor of Physics. For more information see his website, Ian Thompson

LOCATION: 77 W. Washington St., 17th floor,
                 Chicago, Illinois.
DATE:         Friday, June 6, 2014
TIME:         7-9 PM; refreshments 6-7 PM.
FEE:           $10. 
Many of us sense there is something real beyond the scope of naturalistic science. But what? Must mental and religious lives always remain a mystery and never become part of scientific knowledge? Can theism ever be connected with science?

Professor Ian Thompson will explain a new rational approach to combining science and theism. He presents theism as a scientific theory, explaining its basic postulates, consequences and predictions as simply as possible and without paradox. Dr. Thompson shows how a following of core postulates of theism leads to novel and useful predictions about the psychology of minds and the physics of materials which should appear in the universe. 

We will see if those predictions agree with the world as we observe it, both externally in nature and internally in our minds. In fact, they mesh surprisingly well with the structure of reality already revealed by modern quantum field theory and by theories of developmental stages in human minds. 

The result is a promising new rational theory encompassing theology, psychology and physics. 

Dr. Ian Thompson is a nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey in England, where until 2006 he was Professor of Physics. For more information see his website, Ian Thompson

LOCATION: 77 W. Washington St., 17th floor,
                 Chicago, Illinois.
DATE:         Friday, June 6, 2014
TIME:         7-9 PM; refreshments 6-7 PM.
FEE:           $10. 

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Theistic Science

One common alternative to the theory of natural selection is the theory of intelligent design. The intelligent design theory, however, is deliberately limited, as it does not attempt a causal explanation. It tries to develop techniques to examine physical organisms and then to determine whether or not that examination provides evidence for the existence of an intelligence in the coming to be (or design) of those organisms. Strictly, it is neutral on whether the intelligence is God or whether it might be previously-existing extra-terrestrial beings who have (say) genetically-engineered the organism. Because intelligent design theory does not produce causal accounts, it is often criticized as lacking in predictive power. It does make general ‘structural’ predictions about the forms expected to occur within living organisms, but it will never, it seems, yield the detailed prior and conditional probabilities necessary to form Bayesian arguments of the kind that many scientists use to assess the likelihoods of the hypotheses they are considering.

Intelligent design theory has generated an extraordinary amount of animosity from mainstream (naturalistic) scientists. They often accuse it of being false. Then they simultaneously accuse it of being non-scientific because non-falsifiable!  

By comparison, the theistic science that I advocate on this blog is advocating a much stronger theory than intelligent design since it cannot be neutral about ‘the nature of the designer’. We start from the assumption that God exists, as being itself and life itself, and argue that causal explanations of evolution cannot be purely natural.

Another common alternative to natural selection is creationism, where different species are created individually and specifically by God according to the first chapter of Genesis that culminates in the creation of man (and woman). These acts of creation, with apparently whole new populations of plants or animals coming into existence, would have been rather spectacular to watch!  Are such special creations possible according to theistic science?  The answer, I have argued, is no.

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Evolution within Theism: a Summary of the Main Options

1. God cannot create self-sustaining organisms immediately: nothing else is life itself.

2. God cannot create robust theistically-sustained organisms immediately:
  •  God cannot create permanent beings that are fully formed, except insofar as there are prior physical events that form the foundation and outer framework for the dispositions of the new being. What God can immediately create are physical events themselves. Everything else takes longer. There are no instant adults.
  • To create permanent and robust individuals, they must be developed so that, at every stage of their life, they have a substantial history of physical actions in the past and mental and spiritual lives built on that.
  • Since not even God can create history afterwards, this means that a longer and slower process of creation is needed if a race of people is to be developed who have fully-developed and long-lasting characters to be loved and to love God in return.
  • Hence some process of ‘descent by modification’.
When spiritual or mental ideas are produced immediately, they do not ‘have a life of their own’. Rather, they disappear again when the attention goes elsewhere, unless some physical effect has been produced. (Our memory must involve such effects.)

Hence, for biological evolution, the main theistic options are:

Theistically-filtered evolution:
  • The very fact of discrete degrees means that plants and animals must receive specific cognitive and affective dispositions, according to their biological form.
  • Even if God took no active involvement in the history of our earth’s species (as Darwin wanted), beings will still be favored if their forms well receive mental life.
  • This gives a tendency of evolution to make beings approach full mental reception.
  • We hope that this is a tendency toward the human form. I think so.
Theistically-driven evolution:
  • If God took active involvement in biological history, then he could specifically change the genetic structure of species, so that new species were born. And do this widely, to make a new population. This is driving the production of new species.
Thus we have three competing theories:
  1. neo-Darwinian theory: random mutations, genetic drift and recombination, natural selection (no influence from God, except perhaps through physical laws),
  2. theistically-filtered evolution: random mutations, drift and re-combination, so there is both natural and theistic selection (God gives influx by laws of discrete degrees)
  3. theistically-driven evolution: preselected and random mutations, genetic drift and recombination, along with both natural and theistic selection.
To be decided between by comparing the observed evidence with the various predictions of the several theories.

Note that these theories 2 and 3 go beyond the avowed scope of Intelligent Design theorists. They want 'merely' to first establish that intelligence was involved in the production of biological species. Here, in 'theistic science', we want to go further, and investigate the causes that produced the species (whether divine and/or spiritual and/or physical).

More discussion in a previous blog post.
And see also discussions by Jon Garvey on Theoretical Preferences and related posts.

Points from Chapter 26: Evolution of the book Starting Science From God.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Thinkers or Lovers? Anthropology for Persons

R.J. Snell, here, asks in the blog of the Society for Christian Psychology:
Is “love” enough around which to re-habilitate the necessary edifice of human self-understanding and normativity with any level of exactness and perspicacity?
I’d suggest yes, if, and only if, an exploration of love reveals something (1) intelligible, (2) normative, (3) structural, (4) self-referentially consistent, and (5) defining of our anthropology. To put it another way, I’m not suggesting we examine love abstractly, but that we examine our own concrete selves and subjectivity as the access point, and in so doing will discover human nature and human norms, but in a way less guilty of reifying our identity into “thinkers,” and without the tendency to force our own selves into correspondence with any theory about human nature. At the same time, it seems right to me that the basic impulse of the Western tradition—which is to identify a basic isomorphism between the way we are (our natures) and the way we ought to be (teleology)—is valuable and true. Ethics not rooted in the way we actually are is either groundless or ideological or both; politics out of keeping with our nature is either false or violent or both; accounts of flourishing unmoored from human nature tend to be unserious or oppressive or both.
The task, then, is to discover human nature as it actually is, and as it actually is in our own concrete empirical selves, and to rehabilitate normative accounts of our well-being and flourishing. And to do so by an analysis of love, but an analysis which is concrete, intelligible, and differentiated.
Something of a steep task, I suspect.

I have begun to describe work on this task:


And Section 20.4 (Persons and their Identity) of my book (Starting Science From God):

The system of discrete degrees that comes from an analysis of theism suggests a possible solution to the problem of continued personal identity. In Section 6.5 we saw that, within an ontology of multiple generative levels, there was a sense in which the continued identity of a person could be attributed to some prior degree, especially if this prior degree were relatively unchanging. So, if the prior degree were strictly unchanging during a person’s lifetime, then we would have a means of identifying our personal identity both during our growth and changes in this life and possibly also after the death of our physical bodies. There would then be a core in us that would be the basis of our continued existence, and that could said to be our ‘true self’.

This core, according to our basic theism, is our most fundamental love. For God this core is the divine love. That is clearly his core and the basis of his continued divine identity. For us, it is the love that is the most prior generative degree that can be said to be ‘us’ rather than ‘someone else’. That love is the most constant underlying disposition in our life. It is like Plato’s ‘self-moving soul.’ Let us call this most constant underlying disposition our principal love. Because the principal love produces our life, it is recognizable by its effect of producing a ‘theme of our life’. We agree with Hume that this identity is not immediately apparent to our introspection, but that does not make it any less real. Along with dispositions in general, our principal love can be tested by examining skills, character, and performances when there are few or no external constraints, by examining affections in action and in the voice, and so on. Just as physicists test dispositions by experiments and not by mere inspection, so our own identities could be inferred by examining all our characteristic actions more easily than by introspection.

This concept of personal identity as principal love would be most useful to psychology and theology if that love were completely unchanged during our lifetime: from birth to death and even after bodily death. This would require it to keep all the same intrinsic properties even though its effects and relations may vary. Its relation to us will certainly vary as we grow up and later die. It would also be most useful if we could assume that no two people had the same principal love. Then we could be sure not to confuse any two people. Theistic religions claim that we have some kind of continued identity that survives bodily death. I offer the concept of principal love as a candidate for the needed kind of identity.






Thursday, February 27, 2014

Charles Tart, on "Toward a Post-Materialistic Science"

Charles Tart has a recent post "Toward a Post-Materialistic Science – Materialism and Science", discussing a recent "small, working conference" he went to, and the ideas there for trying to improve science.

He reminds us
that Promissory Materialism is not a scientific theory, because scientific theories are generally required to be capable of falsification, and there is no way you can falsify the belief that anything will be explained in material terms someday.
So, in am important sense, the description in "post-materialist science” is redundant! He thinks science, by its 'true' nature, can deal with the new topics needed. Though, of course, there might still be "denial [that] can reach the level of the unethical and/or pathological". He gives a good example.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Is Naturalism a Conclusion from Science, or was it Presumed at the beginning?

David Tyler has been been commenting on a paper by Massimo Pigliucci about issues in the theory of evolution.

We should pay attention to Tyler's conclusions:
A science that presumes naturalism MUST necessarily end up as an atheistic science. It fails as science because this approach presumes what it then claims science has confirmed. This means that naturalistic science is not objective and is not able to follow the evidence wherever it leads. For example, this is why the advocates of abiogenesis focus their efforts on chemical evolution, as this is the only avenue that naturalistic science permits researchers to follow. Consequently, the information characteristics of life are underplayed and they hope for information to arise by currently unknown emergent processes. The evidence however, points to complex specified information being fundamental to life, which naturalistic science cannot concede. By contrast, theistic science does not prescribe or predetermine outcomes, but it can handle natural processes as well as recognise intelligent agency. We will make progress when multiple working hypotheses can be tested without prescribing philosophical presuppositions for science. This is where education should be heading, not enforcing naturalism as the essence of science.
In particular, we do need 'multiple working hypotheses': some based on naturalism, and some based on theism. This is to include the theistic science I have already suggested.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Evolution by Natural or Theistic Selection?

I have previously discussed how biological evolution can occur within a theistic framework, in my post Theistically Filtered Evolution and Theistically Driven Evolution.

I now recommend that you read a very useful discussion about the adequacy of natural selection (Darwinism) as the sole means of evolution (after mutations, drift, and other natural processes). This is from The OFloinn, who often takes a refreshing view of old issues.  (See, for example, his detailed history of the astronomies of Ptolemy and Galileo: "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown")

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Is God Simple?

The question of whether God is 'simple' is recently being discussed, again.

We all agree that 'God is One', and has an essential unity. The issue is whether there is any kind of internal structure to God.

The discussion started with David Bentley Hart's recent book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.  One reviewer summarizes Hart's view as
First, there was a consensus among ancient philosophers and theologians regarding the simplicity of God. Divine simplicity can be stated in many ways, but it basically means that God has no parts. Or you could just say that God is immaterial (since anything material can be divided). Second, this consensus was shared by nearly all the world’s oldest religions. Third, this consensus is crucial for the Christian faith. It is, in fact, the only way to make sense of God, and thus it is fundamental for everything that Christians believe and say about the divine.
This kind of view, Vincent Torley reminds us, is a theological consensus. Torley quotes the Thomist philosopher Edward Feser:
As I have indicated in earlier posts, the doctrine of divine simplicity is absolutely central to classical theism. To say that God is simple is to say that He is in no way composed of parts – neither material parts, nor metaphysical parts like form and matter, substance and accidents, or essence and existence. Divine simplicity is affirmed by such Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes. It is central to the theology of pagan thinkers like Plotinus. It is the de fide teaching of the Catholic Church, affirmed at the fourth Lateran council and the first Vatican council, and the denial of which amounts to heresy. (Classical theism, September 30, 2010.)
It should be noted that not only Christians, but Jews and Muslims, have traditionally affirmed the doctrine of God’s simplicity. According to the article on Divine Simplicity in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “the roots of [the doctrine of God's] simplicity go back to the Ancient Greeks, well before its formal defense by representative thinkers of the three great monotheistic religions— Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” It adds:
…representative thinkers of all three great monotheistic traditions recognize the doctrine of divine simplicity to be central to any credible account of a creator God’s ontological situation. Avicenna (980–1037), Averroes (1126–98), Anselm of Canterbury, Philo of Alexandria, and Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) all go out of their way to affirm the doctrine’s indispensability and systematic potential.
I [Torley] might add that the doctrine of Divine simplicity isn’t an invention of medieval theologians. It actually predates Christianity:
Christianity is in its infancy when the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 B.C.E.– 50 C.E.) observes that it is already commonly accepted to think of God as Being itself and utterly simple. Philo is drawing on philosophical accounts of a supreme unity in describing God as uncomposite and eternal.

However, is it true?

Let me quote from George Porteous's book Emanuel Swedenborg: As a Philosopher, Metaphysician, and Theologian (text here), written in 1874:

Metaphysicians, since the sixth century, have all agreed that the Divine Being "is without body, parts, or passions," that He is a divine simplicity, divine essence or unity. The assertion that God is without parts, passions, and a form, amounts to the bold and blank declaration that "there is no God." It is this doctrine of the metaphysicians that is the basis of all that extreme imbecility exhibited and generated by the school-men and book-men respecting the nature of God and the faculties of man. The only hopeless mystics have been these metaphysicians. Though they lost the play of wisdom and insight, they endeavored to retain its gravity. They clutched at the reputation of being wise on the subject of Deity, and still they profess to know nothing of Deity! They built upon denials and assertions; and, in the words of the incomparable Droll—
     "They knew what's what, and that's as high As metaphysic wit can fly."
To every human note of inquiry they answered—"Mum!" To the painful utterances of struggling souls—to the voice wailing after God, "O that I might find Him," these cold men of the schools replied, "The substance of all our knowledge concerning God is the knowing what he is not, rather than what he is," and more modernly expressed by Bishop Beverage, "We cannot so well apprehend what God is, as what he is not."
God is represented on the one hand as a "pure idea," and on the other as a pure divine simplicity; now, as a "luminous abyss, without bottom, without shore, without bank, without height, without depth, without laying hold of, or attaching itself to anything—pure infinity then as a "formative appetency," a "metaphysical ens," an "infinite point," "the great ether of the universe." And solemnly let us repeat it, the framers of these definitions maintain that we cannot do better, when thinking (?) of God, than to think of Him after the fashion indicated above! Think of a luminous abyss, of a bottomless, fathomless, shoreless, bankless, depthless being! Truly this is mockery to the thought.
In striking contrast to this medley of absurdities, Swedenborg comes as a liberating angel, giving us, if not the absolutely true or final views, at least such views of God as redeem the nature of the Divine from the misapprehensions of a dull, scholastic theology, and an imbecile metaphysics, and show how God in himself exists, and what attitude He maintains to man. He clearly demonstrates that a being without body, parts, or passions, is not a being at all. His reasoning on this point, though more profound and less rationalistic and materialistic than John Locke's, is substantially the same. This great and gifted English philosopher has stated that whatever "has no form and parts has no extension, and having no extension, has no duration, and thus no existence." This is the severe logic of material reasoning: but it contains a spiritual application. Apply this reasoning to the doctrines currently taught about God. If God is without body, parts, or passions, He has no existence; for, as before observed, that which has no form, extension, and no duration, has no existence—no being—is not. When we say, " Our Father who art in heaven," we are, according to the stem logic of the preceding argument, addressing a nonentity. Do not mistake us. We are not insinuating for a moment that God has material parts or passions; all we are bent on advocating is, that God is a personality—is the infinite Divine Substance—is the only real substantial Being, with parts, and affections, and form, in ever hallowed and sublime activity. And this is Swedenborg's doctrine; yet without a knowledge of his doctrine of discrete degrees, and the nature of life, influx, and form, it is impossible, in the brief space allotted to a lecture, to give you anything approaching a clear and candid view of his position. Sufficient, however, has been advanced on the nature of God, as stated by Swedenborg, to quicken thought, and suggest volumes for your meditation.


Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Why was I repelled by ideas of God and Spirituality?

I think back to when I was a teenager 'in the grip of scientism', and how I felt various reactions to proposed ideas about mind or spiritual things:

I remember feeling almost a gut distaste when those things were mentioned. I felt ill! I felt I had stomach ulcers! It was like feeling that the whole ground you are standing on is about to give way. It was like seeing your life's problems in front of you as a terrible tangle that I could never solve even in a lifetime.
I thought that there were indeed some terrible ideas that science had managed to banish from everyday life (eg. witchcraft, magic, I thought), notions that should be banished, on peril of making the world worse. (This is similar to Sagan's later banishing the 'demon-haunted world').

I do not feel that it was 'group think' as such. I was scientifically oriented, but knew that I could still change things in science by new discoveries. I could imagine changing the way the group thinks, just like my heroes of Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, etc. (I may have been naively optimistic about the likelihood of that, but I knew it possible, so I was not committed to group think.)

For the same reasons I was not just about preserving the status quo, as such. I could change that. Perhaps I was still preserving science or scientism, though at the time I did not see it.


On reflection now, I conclude:

Each of us has adopted some various ideas as unconditionally true (whether about science, or religion, or agnosticism, or whatever). And that these ideas become attached to our manner of feeling what is good and what is distasteful. We develop a feeling for those ideas as good, and 'good' becomes defined as what agrees with those ideas. Conversely, any opposing ideas give rise to distaste and unease and uncertainty and anxiety. So we fight back! That is what the pseudo-skeptics are doing. They are fighting back against ideas which (in their own minds) are upsetting.


What should we do?

You may well ask whether this is the correct way that our affections and ideas should be organized? Should we be able to become so emotionally attached to ideas which have (in the end) a high chance of being wrong? Should not we keep some kind of flexibility?

Now in my life I can generalize that each of us, as we grow up, is seeking for something to be taken as 'unconditionally good'. Something that be a foundation on which to build one's life. It may be religion, or science. It may be 'creativity as such' (it was for me at one point), or art, or community commitment, or saving the whales, or whatever.


Theistic View


Even taking a religious viewpoint, this is necessary. We have to make some kind of commitment or other: some kind of affirmation of trust in what is good and faith in what is true. On a religious view, humans are 'designed' to have to make such affirmations: preferably to what is good in God and true from God of course. 

Though, as we see so often these days, these same kind of commitments are now being made to other things that should not be affirmed in the same way. Nowadays, there is so much seemingly-angry commitment to atheism or materialism or science. We are intended to make some commitment.


Adapted from a skeptiko post