Darwinian Psychologists Deny Consciousness and Free Will – and Have to Resort to Storytelling

It’s hard to get free will and consciousness from rocks.




Joel Kontinen

If we believe that matter is the only thing that exists, we’re heading towards great trouble, as the immaterial realm is anything but imaginary.

Thus, consciousness and free will are hard dilemmas for evolutionists.

In 2014 Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times in which he admitted that consciousness was a “ghostly thing” - seen from a Darwinian perspective, that is.

If this evolutionary conception of consciousness were applied coherently, it would mean the end of the idea of self.

However, recently two psychologists tried to navigate around this skerry. Writing in The Conversation, David A Oakley (Emeritus Professor of Psychology at University College London) and Peter Halligan (Hon Professor of Neuropsychology at Cardiff University) attempt to explain away both consciousness and free will:

“It’s easy to assume that these contents of consciousness are somehow chosen, caused or controlled by our personal awareness – after all, thoughts don’t exist until until we think them. But in a new research paper in Frontiers of Psychology, we argue that this is a mistake.

We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated ‘behind the scenes’ by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. All this happens without any interference from our personal awareness, which sits passively in the passenger seat while these processes occur.

Put simply, we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them.”

This has repercussions for the idea of free will:

“We argue that free will and personal responsibility are notions that have been constructed by society.”

This sounds like an excuse to avoid being accountable for our actions, and is very unbiblical notion.

Source:

Oakley, David A. and Peter Halligan. 2017. What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind? The Conversation (22 November).

Synthetic Life Would Prove That Intelligent Design Works

Ours cells are anything but simple. Image courtesy of Mariana Ruiz (public domain).





Joel Kontinen

Some scientists have a strong bias against the supernatural. This became obvious during the recent Royal Society meeting New Trends in Evolutionary Biology. They were unwilling to accept real design even though evolutionary explanations do not work.

While Neo-Darwinian mechanisms cannot explain nanomachines or the other intricate features of the cell, for instance, participants were unwilling to acknowledge that genuine design is the one and only credible explanation of the wonderful integrated systems in biology.

This same bias is also seen in the attempt to create life in the lab.

The goal is to “prove pretty decisively that life is nothing more than a complicated chemical system” as Mark Bedau, a philosopher of science at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, puts it in a recent article in New Scientist.

But chemicals don’t turn into life.

Geneticists have made some remarkable breakthroughs. They have removed the DNA of a microbe and replaced it with the genome of another microbe.

That is a far cry from creating life.

Instead of modifying existing organisms, their real quest is to make life from scratch:

“A more ambitious effort starts with nonliving, chemical ingredients – sometimes familiar nucleic acids and lipids, but sometimes radically different structures such as self-assembling metal oxides. The researchers aim to coax these chemicals across the Darwinian threshold where they begin to replicate themselves heritably and evolve – the key criteria for calling the system alive. If this can be achieved, the implications would be enormous.”

They seem to be blind to the enormous amount of intelligent designing they are putting in their effort. Whereas the Darwinian watchmaker is absolutely blind, the attempt to make synthetic life is clearly teleological.

It has an explicit goal, and that is something that Darwinian processes cannot have. So, ironically, if they do manage to create synthetic life, they will simply prove that intelligent design works.

We shouldn’t forget that the naturalistic origin of life is wrought with severe problems.

Darwinians have suggested many solutions, such as water world, molecular midwives, RNA world etc., but they all require many lucky turns of events and none of them works.

Moreover, complexity does not increase gradually and spontaneously.

Source:

Holmes, Bob. 2016. The world in 2076: Human-made life forms walk the earth. New Scientist (16 November).

Theology Professor Michael Horton: “Blind Faith in Naturalism Is Running the Show”

The Bible tells us about the God who stepped into real history. El Greco: Christ carrying His cross (1580). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

What is blind faith? It might have to do with relying on an explanation without examining whether the model actually describes reality correctly. One might choose to have blind faith because it could feel more comfortable than faith based on facts.

Professor Michael Horton discusses Christianity and naturalism in the December issue of Christianity Today.

“We live in a world that assumes reason is unbiased, when in fact our reason itself is enslaved to naturalism: a denial of the world's dependence on God for its creation and preservation, much less redemption,” he writes.

Echoing the words of Harvard biology professor Richard Lewontin, he goes on to say:

“Any valid argument or evidence ... must have a naturalistic explanation, even if that explanation is the least reasonable…

Left to ourselves, we use reason so irrationally that we determine that God cannot enter history, even before we examine whether he has done so. Again, it's not ‘neutral reason’ running the show here, but a blind faith in naturalism.”

In 1997 professor Lewontin wrote in The New York Review of Books that scientists often choose to make up “unsubstantiated just-so stories” because they “have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism… Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

There is a name for this approach. It is called blind faith.

Sources:

Horton, Michael. 2011. Why We Need Jesus. Christianity Today (2 December).

Lewontin, Richard. 1997. Billions and billions of demons. The New York Review of Books, p. 31 (9 January).

Rejecting Christianity leads to an irrational worldview

James W. Sire, an associate professor of English, discusses worldviews in The Universe Next Door, a textbook used in over a hundred universities and collages. Over 250, 000 copies have been sold.



Joel Kontinen

Rejecting Christianity leads to an irrational worldview. This is the basic message in James W. Sire’s book The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalogue. Sire, an associate professor of English, defines worldview as ”a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or unconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world.”

According to Sire, naturalism, so popular with atheists, is anything but rational: “If Darwin’s naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it.” (p. 84).

Atheism does not lead to rational thinking but to nihilism that leads to meaninglessness. Not all naturalists are nihilists, however, because they are inconsistent. In other words, they do not believe in their own worldview. If they were to believe it, in a meaningless universe suicide would be as acceptable a decision as watching a film produced by Walt Disney (pp. 93-94).

Sire also criticises biblical interpretation based on ”theistic” existentialism. Theologians following in the footsteps of Rudolf Bultmann do not want to hear about new discoveries that support the historical reliability of the Old Testament (pp. 124-125).

Few academic textbooks are as easy to read as The Universe Next Door. A well-documented book, its 1976 edition includes an index and almost 20 pages of endnotes.

Source:

Sire, James W. 1976. The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalogue. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Harvard biologist admits: We know nothing about brain evolution

Joel Kontinen


Science journals have featured countless stories about the evolution of the human brain. Scientists are puzzled since humans have much bigger brains than any other species. Their suggested explanations have often been mutually exclusive. For instance, the old text book explanation relied on eating meat but a few years ago an article in New Scientist, a popular science magazine, suggested that eating starch was the secret of brain growth.

But both explanations fail to answer why other meat or starch eating species do not have big brains.


At the recent AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) annual meeting in Boston, Richard Lewontin, a distinguished biology professor at Harvard University, acknowledged that stories about human brain evolution have not been based on facts. Reporting on the meeting for the journal Science, Michael Balter quoted Lewontin as saying, “We are missing the fossil record of human cognition, so we make up stories."

The title of Balter’s article seems to be an admission of sorts: “How Human Intelligence Evolved--Is It Science or ‘Paleofantasy’?”

According to professor Lewontin, it is fantasy. Lewontin suggests that there is much cause for pessimism in the study of human origins.

Science reporter James Randerson of Britain’s Guardian newspaper was even more brunt, saying, “We know nothing about brain evolution.” Randerson went on to summarise Lewontin’s reasons for pessimism. “The handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so” cannot tell us whether any of them were our ancestors. We “do not have the have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means”. Moreover, we do not even know which hominids walked upright and which did not.

Lewontin is well-known for his outspokenness. In 1997 he wrote in The New York Review of Books that scientists often choose to make up “unsubstantiated just-so stories” because they “have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism… Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Obviously, the scientific community cannot ignore Lewinton’s recent conclusions. If the ruling paradigm (naturalism or the view that nature is all there is) leads us into a blind alley, might there be something wrong with it?

Sources:

Balter M. 2008. How human intelligence evolved -- Is it science or 'paleofantasy'? Science 319:1028.

Lewinton, Richard. 1997. Billions and billions of demons. The New York Review of Books, p. 31, (9 January 1997).

Randerson, James. 2008. We know nothing about brain evolution. Guardian February http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/02/the_distinguished_biologist_pr.html



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