A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe. It is intended to be the 21st century successor to the ancient worldviews of Materialism and Idealism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's also a Theory – of – Everything that covers, not just matter & energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.
Post 139.November 20, 2024
Cosmology and Evolution
THEISM vs DEISM vs ACCIDENTALISM
In his 2021 book, Return of the God Hypothesis, historian & geo-physicist Stephen Meyer makes a detailed case (science-based and non-scriptural) for Intelligent Design (ID) in evolution as opposed to Dumb Accidents (DA)¹. He's “comfortable with the standard evolutionary story, but with a theistic spin”(Wiki). So he is touting Christian Theism, but tolerantly admits that Agnostic Deism (intelligent but absentee design) also fits the evidence. In my view, the primary difference between Theistic Creation and Deistic Design is Teleological Evolution² (front loaded with criteria set in the beginning) versus Divine Intervention (with a few miracles sprinkled into the process ; mostly done to validate prophets, but also to change social and weather patterns to annihilate unruly humans). Ignoring that proviso, his argument sets the philosophical Design³ inference against the un-designed serendipity cosmology of Atheism.
He even quotes a Catholic theologian who makes a deist-like argument in favor of Intelligent Design . Surprisingly, Denis Lamoureux uses the term "Evolutionary Creation"⁴ in contrast to the Genesis account of Instant Creation. He says "God organized the big bang so that the deck was stacked", and "lets it unfold deterministically" to produce life. That sounds more like a cosmic computer Programmer than the magical spoken-command creation of Genesis. Ironically, the theologian also says that "to invoke a specific instance of design after the initial creation would imply a violation of natural law by invoking the activity of a 'God of the gaps'⁵". Hence, he thinks pseudoscientific Intelligent Design arguments should be termed "interventionist Design Theory", implying that the supposedly omniscient creator had to make post-creation corrections after his seven day opus, divinely assessed as “good” and “very good” in Genesis.
Meyer then argues against the theologian by asking "are laws creative?" Obviously, natural laws (regularities) alone would simply repeat the same patterns over & over. So he astutely concluded that "laws are the wrong kind of entity to generate the informational features of life" (e.g. DNA). However, fixed laws (criteria ; limits) plus fortuitous jostling (competition) would combine stability with variability to produce Natural Selection as postulated by Darwin. Conjecturally, randomness (e.g. energetic vibrations) shuffles the original “deck” (initial conditions) into novel combinations, then natural Laws (rules of the game), such as thermodynamics, would weed out the lawless (unfit) forms.
1. Accidentalism : “a philosophical theory that some events occur without a cause, or that events can happen by chance or haphazardly. It's related to other theories such as indeterminism and tychism. ___Google AI overview”
2. Teleological Evolution : The idea that evolution progresses with a specific goal or purpose in mind, implying a directed path towards a predetermined outcome : a program. Divine Intervention assumes that the Genesis Creation was incomplete, and requires occasional tweaks to keep it on course. Darwinian Evolution postulated that the world is self-designing by means of Random Variation (mutation) and Natural Selection (weeding out the unfit), implying fitness criteria.
3. Design : “The word design refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something – its design.” ___ Wikipedia
Three Scientific Cosmologies
Blog Post 139 continued . . . click Next
Return of the God Hypothesis
The Synthetic Tendency in the Universe
Stephen Meyer
Historian & Geo-physicist
and Philosopher
“Three key scientific discoveries that supported theistic belief : Origin of Cosmos ; Fine Tuning ; Origin of Life ”
4. Evolutionary Creation The notion that the world is being gradually created by means of natural laws and causal forces, in a manner similar to the execution of a computer program. The laws are both initial settings and condit-ional criteria that limit the extent of changes. Causation is a combination of direct exchanges of energy, and forces such as gravity to bind separate parts into systems, along with a general expansive force, now known as Dark Energy.
5. God of the Gaps : A religious theory which says that features of the world that cannot be ex-plained in scientific terms must be attributed to the actions of a designing deity. The cause of the Big Bang is unknown, so it could be interpreted as the “let there be light” creative command in Genesis. If that is unacceptable, some other Causal agent could fill the gap.
NEXT
BACK
Forum
