It is what creation is pointing to beyond itself. Nature is simply doing its job. It is directing our attention upward. (Dewitt, Pg
69)
No. There is no teleology in nature. In academic circles, this died off soon after Darwin wrote
Origin of Species. I find this line so insulting to all natural processes on our planet! What an insult to photosynthesis or respiration! What an insult to one element turning into another element (nuclear transmutation)! What an insult to nucleation in crystallography! These are some of the most amazing processes ever, some of which are crucial for the origin of life on Earth. Crudely attaching a "purpose" behind a biological mechanism is what theistic evolutionists do. It's simply unnecessary and unhelpful in understanding the planet. I've mentioned this in blogs past. We can filter our science through a Nordic or Wiccan perspective just as we can with a Christian perspective. That's fine for fun, but it's completely useless for discovery.
Adam and Eve or Genetic Evidence?:
If one wants to knock the foundation out from under Christianity all one needs to do is talk in detail about
the historicity of the "First Adam" .. Let's set aside the historicity of the "Last Adam" (Jesus) for
now. Let's look at the historicity of "Adam and Eve" because if this story didn't take place then Christianity fails before it gets going. Dan writes,
This reminds me of an exchange I recently had with my son Micah. "Daddy", he said, "I wish Adam and Eve never disobeyed God." "Me too, buddy - me too." I told him. I love at such a young age, he is learning to connect the dots between his sin and the sin nature he inherited from the first human, Adam. (Dewitt, pg 78)
Dan had mentioned once in an email that he was intending to read Jerry Coyne's book,
Faith Vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible. In this book Coyne writes,
Science has completely falsified the idea of the idea of a historical Adam and Eve, on two grounds. First, our species wasn't poofed into being by a sudden act of creation. We know beyond reasonable doubt that we evolved from a common ancestor with modern chimps, an ancestor living around six million years ago. Modern human traits - which include our brain and genetically determined behaviors - evolved gradually. Further, there were many species of proto-humans (all called "hominins") that branched off and died before te ancestors of our own species remained as the last branch. As many as four or five species of humanlike primates may have lived at the same time! Some of these extinct groups, like the Neanderthals, had culture and big brains, and were "modern" humans in all but name. Theologians, then, are forced to square the sudden incursion of sin with the gradual evolution of humans from earlier primates. More important, evolutionary geneticists now know that the human population could never have been as small as only two individuals... (Coyne, pp 126-127)
So when Dan uses the phrase "the first human, Adam" he is in conflict with discoveries in modern genetics. You would think there would be no wiggle room here, but of course there is. As we know religious apologetists are doing their job when squaring dogma with discoveries in science that point against said dogma. There is a handful of other theories for what "Adam and Eve" /really/ were in the Bible since there was no actual historicity to "the first man" as laid out in Genesis. Many liberal Christian theologians now consider the "Adam and Eve" story a metaphor. Though they still consider the gospel based on the historicity of "the Last Adam". So Jesus must have died for a metaphor if there was no actual "first Adam". Sounds like a pointless death to me.
On pages 106-107 Dan writes,
It's the sort of prejudice illustrated in a statement skeptics often make to Christians, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." While this might sound logical, it's often a way of saying that no amount of evidence could lead the skeptic to accept something supernatural.
If evidence points beyond nature it is summarily disqualified as never meeting the floating standard of extraordinary evidence. The term is left nebulous, arbitrary, and elusive- conveniently undefined, so that evidence for the resurrection remains always out of reach and unobtainable.
I have brought up this Carl Sagan metric for extraordinary evidence to Dan before in our email exchanges. First, take a step back and think about how science works and again compare that to this line of thinking in Dan's quote above. Science, as a method, pursues at excruciating levels to filter out as much bias as possible when formulating theories so that errors are not glossed over. This is at the very heart of science. This is why science as a discipline is extremely competitive and why scientists have a peer-review process. Christians aren't going about this search for /truth/ the same as scientists. As I said before it's backwards: starting with answers and retrofitting everything we know to these answers.
To approach anything scientifically we expect to have extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. Dan once asked me in these emails what I meant by "extraordinary". I responded and apparently he wasn't satisfied with my answer or wasn't listening since he calls this a "nebulous, arbitrary, elusive" requirement. I simply answered with : extraordinary evidence = extra amounts of evidence. Sure, I didn't put a number to the specific amount of evidence I was referring to but with something as extraordinary as a member of our species coming back to life after being dead for three days we need more than what Dan lays out in his book. We need a lot more! Especially with this being the most important event in history, with all our fell-fire fates on the line.
Also, I would like to take what Dan is saying here and throw it back to the very foundation of his faith - The "First Adam". If we know, as I pointed out, through modern genetics that there was never a "first human" and are left with these "nebulous, arbitrary, elusive" theories postulated, without evidence, by liberal theologians for the "First Adam" then why isn't this an issue? Why is the very bedrock of the Christian faith some elusive, vague, nebulous mystery with zero, yes ZERO historicity behind it. We must just brush past the historicity of "the origin of sin" then be expected to take on board - the "Last Adam", the gospel, the resurrection, God's plan for our species and so on? This is just another example of "special pleading" in all it's glory.
So when Dan writes,
The incarnation and the resurrection are the historical events from which all of history derives its meaning. All our hope and all our longing is summarized in the simple words of a college student sitting in a coffee shop: - "Duh, Jesus."(Dewitt, pg 111)
That's not the full sentence. It's - "Duh, Jesus ... apparently died for a metaphor." If we cannot pinpoint the historicity of "The First Adam", "The Fall", "Original Sin" then all else is meaningless - Even the incarnation and resurrection events that according to Dan have enough historical evidence to accept the whole story.
Make no mistake about it Dan Dewitt believes not only in a literal "First Adam" (which has been disproved by genetics) but a literal "Garden of Eden". He brings it up in detail on page 119,
I don't think our nostalgia is the result of living in the sloped savanna near a water source that contributed to our survival. It is the ache of our hearts for a place where man and God once walked in peace, where human relationships were harmonious, and where death was not victorious.
It's often the case New Christians become very literal in their arguments when preaching to the choir about these important things like "the first human" but then use this vague, nebulous description of human origins when talking with skeptics. Look at a chart of hominid evolution and please point to me where precisely "the first human" is or where "the soul was seated" or when we became 100% made in the "image of God". It's silly and over-simplistic in the face of what we know about our origins through science. Hold them to an answer on this. They are very slippy when pinned down. They cannot have it both ways. The burden of proof is on those that claim a book has the answers OVER what modern genetics tells us. Let's hear something about this sometime from a New Christian somewhere. Please!
Para-Mechanisms or Currently Unknown Mental Processes?:
On pg. 64 Dan writes,
Why
is it so breathtaking to view a vibrant sunrise, or witness a deed of
kindness, or hear of an act of heroism? Why do these things strike us
with more force than the Law of Gravity? If they cannot be explained in
scientific categories, then why do they seem so important.
This
is good. This cuts right to the heart of the author's misunderstanding.
Let's break it down. First though, I must say that to gain a much more
balanced perspective (a little less anthropocentric) I have recommended
before that Dan read books written by authors such as Frans de Waal,
Jane Goodall, or Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (to name just a few), which
will help cast a more accurate viewpoint on "human nature". Humans are not the only
species that experiences many of these things Dan suggests are
solely human-centered. In Moussaieff's book
The Pig That Sang to the Moon he
explains in great detail coming across a pig on a beach, smiling and
singing to the moon with an expression that can only be described as joy
or pure bliss. We think we are special. In some ways we are (we have the big brains in nature), but not
these ways. Not on the emotional front. We are living among multiple species of emotional creatures. We are not the only species that has these core-emotional
subjective experiences. And the more complex the subjective experience the
more complex the neuroprocesses. It's really that simple.
Let me explain a little bit more about mental processes in our species. Take something
like qualia for example. When
philosophers or theologians say there's this immediate, private qualia,
they are simply
just ignorant about what goes on behind this impression. What goes on is
something which involves
numerous complex processes that they just don't understand. So let's not
get ahead of ourselves, Christians. Not so fast with your answers to
all things all the time. Humans don't understand these processes yet. I feel as
if some day we will and we will by studying artificial intelligence. Gilbert Ryle said in his book
The Concept of Mind that,
The language of 'volitions' is the language of para-mechanical theory of mind.
*Remember
we should be working outward from a place of humble ignorance. We have
no answers to start and are trying to find answers (through centuries of
scientific discoveries) not starting with answers (given to us in a
book) and working to select and choose data that support that answer
we've predetermined. This is not a healthy way to get to the truth. We've figured this out centuries ago.
My friend, Forrest Rice (Gog) wrote me regarding some passages he read from
Christ or Chaos. He comments on the core of the book. Here's a few things he said regarding substantive dualism and "ghost organs" such as "souls" "spirits" and "minds".:
I never understood this "problem" about mindless
causes preceding/causing/descending from/whatever, etc... minds. Why
does a rational mind creating a mind ensure that it's rational? Couldn't
you just as well have a rationally minded deity create an irrationally
minded person?
Isn't
the truth that sometimes our minds act rationally, sometimes
irrationally, and that the origins of the mind (whatever that means)
have nothing much you do with it? I mean, the etymology of words doesn't
tell us what their actual uses are in any particular context, so who
cares if the current norms have nothing to do with the original uses?
Something similar is happening here. There's just this insane assumption
that isn't remotely close to being a necessary condition, and Dan takes
it as obvious. It's not obvious!
I'll take it
further: Who cares if our bodies are made up of mindless mechanisms
which purely arose from mindless self-replicating molecules? That's not
what we're talking about when we're discussing what it means to have a
rational mind. That just means that, basically, one acts and/or forms
beliefs in accordance to the faculty of reason. You don't look at
biological mechanisms to understand that. You see how human beings
interact with each other and the world. We trust this faculty over a
random shot in the dark because it can be demonstrated to allow us to be
far more likely to understand, manipulate, account for, and predict
phenomena. In fact, there's not even a "view" C.S. Lewis has built his straw
man out of. It's just circular nonsense that no thinking person would
subscribe to. To deny the faculty of reason means you can't even say,
"Minds are unreliable because they came from mindless processes." That's
a paradox and self-defeating (doesn't it look like we're giving a
reason here?). So, if reason is an imperative, isn't that more important
than if a deity endowed us with it? I think it's REASONABLE to say that
our ability to reason isn't necessarily dependent upon having a
rational deity instill us with it. I don't have to have "faith" in
reason.
There are quite a lot of problems in this book that stem from categorical errors and language. Forrest (Gog) continues to addresses this in our exchange regarding Dan's book --
A perfect example of how language misleads us given by Gilbert Ryle from his book "The Concept of Mind":
Basically,
If I say, "I'm attending to what I'm reading", we might think two
seeming occurrences are simultaneously going on: reading and attending.
But if I say, "I'm reading attentively", only one seeming occurrence is alluded to.
Both
sentences mean the same thing though, only there is an adverb use for
'attend' in the second sentence rather than the regular verb use that's
in the first sentence. The second form of expression is less misleading
than the first though, when philosophizing at least, because no occult
occurrence is seemingly defined in addition to the reading.
This
book totally demolishes the myth of "the ghost in the machine ". So this "sky daddy theory" is largely the result of not
being able to navigate basic grammar. "We aren't just physical stuff" -
Okay, how are we defining 'stuff'? If you want to play the language-game
of physics and evoke paramechanistic "things" in addition to
mechanistic things, then you're just going to lose. Some stuff just
isn't anything like other stuff! But that's a linguistic distinction,
not a "beyond" or "outside of" or "supernatural" distinction. The stuff
found in Super Mario bros, for example, just isn't the kind of stuff
physicists study. But you don't need to explain Super Mario bros stuff
in paramechanical terms. Maybe you explain it in terms of Koopa Troopas
and mushroom kingdoms. Sorry, No "soul thing" exists in the way
physical entities exist.
The Gilbert Ryle book Gog and I are speaking of was written in 1949 and is skyrocketed to one of my top five favorite books ever written. This is just a brief passage from the opening chapter called "Decartes' Myth",
Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake of a special kind. It is namely, a category-mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type of category (or range of types of categories), when they actually belong to another. The dogma is therefore a philosopher's myth.
I must first indicate what is meant by the phrase 'Category mistake'. This I do in a series of illustrations:
A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks 'But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.' It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen. (Ryle, pp 15-16)
Another great excerpt from Ryle's The Concept of Mind demonstrates the problem with categorical mistakes (as Dan makes in this book, as all substantive dualists do),
Now the dogma of the 'Ghost in the Machine' does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these are other analogous conjunctions are absurd; but, it must be noticed, the argument will not show that either of the illegitimately conjoined propositions is absurd in itself. I am not, for example, denying that there occur mental processes. Doing long division is a mental process and so is making a joke. But I am saying that the phrase "there occur mental processes" does not mean the same sort of thing as "there occur physical processes", and therefore, that it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two. (Ryle, pg. 22)
Conclusion: (Christ or Chaos?):
Dan hinges the book on a counter to Carl Sagan's quote,
The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.
Forrest (Gog) had this to say about the Sagan quote and Dan's interpretation,
I don't think it's a clear proposition. I don't know what to make of it anymore. For
example, some people would define 'cosmos' to include the measurable
universe. If the statement means, basically, all that we can (i.e. makes
sense to) measure or hope to measure, and/or represent mathematically,
then Sagan is right. Depends on the use of 'thing'. Dan
wants to say non-measurable para-mechanical things and processes exist
and those exist "outside" of what's measurable. He's committing a
linguistic category error. I
would say Sagan is less misleading than Dan. But I see metaphysical
"propositions" to usually be muddled unclarities to begin with. I just
wouldn't make utterances like that.
... Later Gog writes back,
Thinking about it now, I think Sagan's quote was somewhat poetic anyway. It seemed to be used more to set the tone of the show than to be some grandiose unassailable truth anyway. Funny,
how atheists can't be poetic to theists, but any time atheists
point out an absurdity in the bible, it's automatically only because
atheists aren't understanding poetry. Whatever.
Overall I feel like Dan's second book in his ____ or ______ series falls flat on a lot of levels. I won't bother addressing the false dichotomy of this title and the last book because he's already addressed it and you can find several YouTube videos of Dan discussing his first book
Jesus or Nothing. However, This book, in my humble opinion, is simply over-simplistic and distorts what we can and can't do with the theory of evolution. There is no "purpose" or "willing" by evolution, the cosmos, or any deity. There is no cosmic purpose, but that doesn't lead to nihilism. In his essay called "Navigating Past Nihilism" Sean D. Kelly writes,
The meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to "the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country." - these are genuine meanings. They are, in other words, completely sufficient to hold off the threat of nihilism, the threat that life will dissolve into a sequence of meaningless events. But they are nothing like the kind of universal meanings for which the monotheistic tradition of Christianity had hoped. Indeed, when taken up in the appropriate way, the commitments that animate the meanings in one person's life- to family, say, or work, or country, or even local religious community- become completely consistent with the possibility that someone else with radically different commitments might nevertheless by living in a way that deserves one's admiration.
By limiting the options to Jesus or nothing or Christ or chaos we are ignoring the rich array of other options out there. We are also, ignoring (as Kelly writes in the same article),
many different lives of worth. Life can steer directly between these two wordviews and avoid nihilism and monotheism. We do not need 'one grand cosmic meaning' to counter nihilism. 'Local-level meaning' is the best meaning because it's based on verifiable real things. It's in front of you. it's never "out there" like the ghostly-afterlife destinations or sky daddy tales. We have real ape-meaning on a local ape-level with our fellow ape-species.
There is a central push behind Dan's arguments in these books that flirts with appeal to emotion. He isn't out right saying it but I catch a undertone of the sentiment that - We /must/ believe in 'the God of our fathers' because if not .... ??? ... how scary!!! .. Look, without God we're all just atoms in the void of a meaningless cosmos! To this I say, Please. Who cares? We can deal with this. Truth doesn't care what we think or feel and we should always be keeping our eye towards believing as many true things as possible in our lives.
I understand. We all have dads and so we extrapolate this to think our specific ape species has some ape(human)-looking dad "somewhere out there" who cares for us and so on, but this is completely wishful thinking for some based on zero evidence. However, not for others like atheist Christopher Hitchens, who, despite this upcoming New Christian book title suggesting otherwise, didn't have an ounce of faith in any of this sort of fantasy. I tend to agree with Hitchens, who thought it to be quite horrifying if it were true to have a celestial commander or dictator. No thanks.
Lastly, I did notice that
Christ or Chaos doesn't mention hell at all. In his book we are not given that glimpse of the future for Dan's atheist main character Zach. Maybe this will be in upcoming books... that being Zach burning forever in a lake of fire. I look forward to that conclusion unless Dan decides to convert his main character to Christianity before the conclusion of Zach's story.
In the end we see that this is all really just a mix of category errors, misuse of language, and fundamental misunderstandings of scientific theories. I like Dan as a person. He's funny and engaging but we deeply disagree on these things and I feel it's important to get out the message as he feels it's equally as important to get out his message. We, Gog and Magog, had our say (for starters) in this blog, but I suggest you pick up his book and read it for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Are our options really only - Jesus or Nothing; Christ or Chaos?
Sources:
