It’s such a pleasure to read this -- I feel a little less alone in how I understand reality. Thank you for making this a very good day. And it’s not even 8AM.
I'm on Team Ripperger here. If living organisms change over time, it is by degeneration and mutation, growing less and less perfect and less pure over time. Devolution away from the perfect creation, not evolution toward the higher.
Just look at entropy. If I leave certain molecules together what is the chance that they will form a car by themselves? So creation to a higher form can't happen by chance.
I have long thought that while the evidence that men came from apes is rather limited, the evidence that that is the direction we are headed in is growing every day.
Perhaps more directly militating against evolution though is the mechanism, which must be frameshift mutation. My understanding is that the rate at which frameshift mutation benefits the offspring is rather close to 0. By basic natural selection theory, these mutations will never accumulate. In fact if 'natural selection' exists then we may well say that its purpose is to prevent evolution, to weed out offspring which deviate from the pattern.
I used to believe in evolution guided by God but it was merely propaganda which as a medical student and doctor, I imbibed richly. Now I am older and I hope more discerning by the Grace of God, I fall in with fr Ripperger. God created everything in 6 days and then He rested. I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem which belief one holds as long as one is a faithful Catholic and know that God created all BUT I do agree that these scientism explanations seem to often be used as a wedge to drive believers away from bathe One True God and Faith. St Michael, defend us in battle⚔️
Interesting. I still maintain that the two cannot ultimately be reconciled. I've listened to Fr. Ripperger's talks on evolution, and I'm sure there's more to his issue with evolution than just randomness. Regardless, thanks for giving creationism a fair shake.
"In other words, God created on those six days all the forms for every species."
William M. Briggs is a "Young Earth Evolutionist" confirmed.
One thing I've never heard YECs address is how, exactly, creation occurred. Did entropy suddenly reverse itself, and poof, a cloud of hydrogen atoms spontaneously fused together to create necessary heavy elements, which combined to create the necessary molecules, etc., and where there had been nothing but a cloud of H there was suddenly now a horse? Or was there some vast factory, in which the first exemplars of all the species were manufactured at the same time, complete with the knowledge necessary to fulfill their given ecological role (it being not only humans that must learn the fundaments of their species-specific behavior)? I don't believe I've ever heard YECs attempt to describe the actual mechanism by which this abrupt creation was accomplished.
That's not to say there are not problems with the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which there absolutely are. Irreducible complexity is a gaping lacuna in present evolutionary thinking.
I rather like your suggestion - the various species are all present at the beginning in the realm of platonic forms, which serves as a sort of design library whose various blueprints are accessed by means of decision trees guided by physical causality. This seems to reconcile the tension quite nicely.
Radical solipsism rulez! 😂 I was today years old when I learned universal is personal; to each our own, akin to Christopher Fuchs' private wavefunction.
Indeed. Perhaps this is merely an aesthetic preference at root, but I find such a non-explanation deeply intellectually unsatisfying.
It also raises ethical questions about God. Creating a universe that gives every indication of being many gigayears old and being ordered according to rationally legible law when it is really thousands of years old and ordered by divine whim seems like a cruel prank. The claim that a God who would do such a thing, in effect lying with the whole of creation, should be trusted, strains credulity. "The entire cosmos I made is a lie but my book can be believed" is quite the test of faith.
Easier by far for me to believe that YECs are merely making a category error when they attempt to interpret a book meant to be understood at the mythic and allegorical level using the tools of rational analysis. That requires only that human reason is fallible, not that God is a liar.
Agreed. The more that I dig into the 'evidence' for 'scientific' positions the flimsier it seems. It's all a proxy of a proxy of a proxy and a few strange bones.
I don't think that I advanced that position. It should be noted though that a literal biblical interpretation would not consider itself 'evidence dependent'. Attacking the evidence for a position whose one boast is 'evidence' is quite a strong attack. Attacking a position which has never made itself dependent on evidence is not so impressive.
But, I would say that the literal interpretation of scriptural descriptions of cosmology has produced accurate predictions and has resisted falsification. It predicted that the universe had a beginning despite most philosphies predicting the 'steady state eternal' universe. It predicted that the 'simpler' lifeforms existed before the more complex and the rather late appearance of man, which I should point out Darwin created his theory post hoc with this knowledge. It predicted that the Earth was 'hung on nothing'(Book of Job I can provide a more specific reference if desired) when most philosophies understood the Earth to be physically supported in some way.
Science is falsified and adopts new positions basically daily, as much as there can be said to be any 'scientific consensus' about any basic facts. But, I would be curious what great predictions the evolutionary long earth theory has made that have been discovered to be true, rather than rearranging itself after the fact to accomodate discoveries.
Agreed. Everyone has a bias on most issues. The only reasonable way to live is to state the bias up front and work with it not imagine yourself to be some rational creature in a void.
The universe looks gigayears old to, essentially, everyone who has made it their purpose in life to gather and understand the evidence provided by nature. Geology, physics, astronomy, genetics, all converge on timescales much longer than that insisted on by YECs.
At an epistemic level, YECs commit the error of reasoning from an assumed conclusion, and making the evidence fit it, rather than reasoning to the conclusion from the evidence.
Finally, the idea that a rationally understandable universe is somehow metaphysically incompatible with God, the soul, or otherwise compels naive materialism seems quite absurd to me. I have absolutely no trouble rejecting a mechanical worldview, while also accepting the evidence provided by several centuries of the accumulated fruits of human reason as applied to the natural world.
Saxon Cross had a very good take on this recently btw. This insistence by a certain breed of Christian on YEC has done much to turn people off of Christianity. Reddit atheism is cringe, but so is being told "just trust me, bro", which in the end is what the YEC argument comes down to.
That's a very postmodernist, relativist approach, which taken to its logical end leaves us unable to approach truth at all, since in the end that approach reduces all statements and beliefs to socially contingent motivated reasoning.
You're also being extremely uncharitable to scientists. Certainly, many of them are bought men who will say whatever is in their pecuniary interest to say. Many others are conformists or simple cowards. All of this was on display during the pandemic. Then again, many were none of these things at all, and spoke out against all of it on ... wait for it ... scientific grounds. They demonstrated that masks were ineffectual, that the infection mortality rate was negligible, that lockdowns were much worse than useless, warned of the potential dangers of the mRNA shots, and then followed up by tracking the damage those shots indeed did. They did all of this using the analytical tools provided by centuries of scientific advance, along with the reasoning capabilities of the human brain, not on the basis of "I read X in an old book therefore X is true because the book says it is."
Would it be too much of a stretch to surmise the psychopaths are leftover ‘creatures of the non-rational but genetically and physiologically “human” sort’? 🤨
Reminder: In Thomistic metaphysics, potentia have existence; indeed, all things, except God, are mixtures of the potential and actual. God is pure actuality. This reminder is all we need.
But too much for me today and it seems more trouble than its worth, no?
It's early, I'm tired, and I have lots of stuff today and no energy for weed walking.
My reach exceeds my grasp. That's what lawyers coping with science do.
Your essay would benefit from ( but I do not expect it or criticize its absence) an easy to understand statement of its essential points and conclusions.
In what world does Ripperger live? It's been known for uncounted millennia that organisms have it in them to generate new life which is not like themselves. Is a mule a donkey? Is a chihuahua a wolf? How does he think animal breeding, let alone evolutionary pressures over millions of years, works?
The problem stems from a very deep error arising from the ontology of 'nothingness'.
The belief that 'nothing' can 'exist' is both logically incoherent and, at the same time, empirically false.
Thomists never seem to notice the problem of 'nothingness' because they start with the existence of the 'absolute something' and assume it does not participate in 'everything' (the alien god).
Therefore, to make 'God' seem an Absolute Other with special qualities inaccessible to 'existing things' (except via 'revelation').
There is - and was and always will be - something.
'Nothing' is an incoherent idea that comes from tricking the neocortex into 'belief without the possibility of proof'.
That being said, the entire wrangle around 'new species' comes from the fact that 'species' is a human mental construct that wants to be 'pure and inviolable' when all the evidence is that 'species' simply isn't pure or inviolable. What empirical - objective - condition would one place on allocating one similar group of living things to a 'species' and excluding the other that would apply to all cases.
The Burgess Shale Event seems to suggest that species just appear. If you want a 'cause' for such appearances, why call it 'God' unless you have an axe to grind?
'God' is an 'explanation' that only works if you stop thinking about the problem. If you do, then 'God' - as the originator of species - becomes simply another problem in need of explanation.
And all the question-begging about the 'self-caused cause' doesn't work if you're not already predisposed to accept such phantasms.
I sometimes wonder if there isn't a biological basis for the inclination to 'grand theory' versus 'local theory'. Wouldn't it be interesting if those grand folks and their high-powered electro-magnets found the part of the brain where the predilection for 'grand theory' could be turned on or off?
We can speculate and create theories but ultimately we are not able to understand the power and possibilities of an omnipotent and eternal entity. As soon as someone can explain an amoeba how we built a skyscraper we can contemplate the possibility to find a valid theory.
Otherwise as a mortal and fallible person I would like to believe in Ripperger's idea.
> Now evolution, if true, need not be caused by uncountable “random” mutations that produce unpredictable forms.
Which cause are we talking about here? There are four causes in Aristotelian metaphysics, the mistake you're making hear is the modernist of of treating the first cause as the only "real" one.
I like this a lot Briggs. My problem with Ripperger is that his arguments are mainly definitional and only convincing within the Thomistic framework.
Examples:
Proportionate causality- he assumes that the evolved form is 'greater' than its cause the non-evolved form and thus cannot be contained in the non-evolved form
Resemblance and operation- it is all a matter of degree and he provides no reason, at least in his precis why the chips should fall on his side and not another
Finality- very much in the eye of the beholder and only meaningful within the Thomistic system, indeed we might well say that Natural Selection was invented specifically to militate against this principle and so using Finality to settle the question is actually begging the question
His invocation of the principle of Economy seems entirely subjective. I mean while we might could argue from economy if we had divine knowledge in our position the answer: 'We just don't know enough to know which is really simpler.' feels rather strong, not to mention proving that the divine is invariably parsimonious seems to belong rather more to the deistic God of Philosophy than the God of Scripture who exercises His freedom sometimes just to remind us that He is free to do as He pleases.(But perhaps having my training in the school of Luther and Calvin my objections to Thomism might be thought to be 'baked in')
I rather like your solution of created but unactualized potential. The solution that I had in mind was similar, which is just to recognize that emergent properties from combination in certain ways is a part of the created essence.
It’s such a pleasure to read this -- I feel a little less alone in how I understand reality. Thank you for making this a very good day. And it’s not even 8AM.
I'm on Team Ripperger here. If living organisms change over time, it is by degeneration and mutation, growing less and less perfect and less pure over time. Devolution away from the perfect creation, not evolution toward the higher.
Just look at entropy. If I leave certain molecules together what is the chance that they will form a car by themselves? So creation to a higher form can't happen by chance.
I have long thought that while the evidence that men came from apes is rather limited, the evidence that that is the direction we are headed in is growing every day.
Perhaps more directly militating against evolution though is the mechanism, which must be frameshift mutation. My understanding is that the rate at which frameshift mutation benefits the offspring is rather close to 0. By basic natural selection theory, these mutations will never accumulate. In fact if 'natural selection' exists then we may well say that its purpose is to prevent evolution, to weed out offspring which deviate from the pattern.
I used to believe in evolution guided by God but it was merely propaganda which as a medical student and doctor, I imbibed richly. Now I am older and I hope more discerning by the Grace of God, I fall in with fr Ripperger. God created everything in 6 days and then He rested. I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem which belief one holds as long as one is a faithful Catholic and know that God created all BUT I do agree that these scientism explanations seem to often be used as a wedge to drive believers away from bathe One True God and Faith. St Michael, defend us in battle⚔️
Can’t edit: the One True God and knows not know
Interesting. I still maintain that the two cannot ultimately be reconciled. I've listened to Fr. Ripperger's talks on evolution, and I'm sure there's more to his issue with evolution than just randomness. Regardless, thanks for giving creationism a fair shake.
"In other words, God created on those six days all the forms for every species."
William M. Briggs is a "Young Earth Evolutionist" confirmed.
Yet you can't deny our hon'ble Sgt Briggs is an astute shadchan (matchmaker / marriage broker), mayhaps second only to God himself 🙂
One thing I've never heard YECs address is how, exactly, creation occurred. Did entropy suddenly reverse itself, and poof, a cloud of hydrogen atoms spontaneously fused together to create necessary heavy elements, which combined to create the necessary molecules, etc., and where there had been nothing but a cloud of H there was suddenly now a horse? Or was there some vast factory, in which the first exemplars of all the species were manufactured at the same time, complete with the knowledge necessary to fulfill their given ecological role (it being not only humans that must learn the fundaments of their species-specific behavior)? I don't believe I've ever heard YECs attempt to describe the actual mechanism by which this abrupt creation was accomplished.
That's not to say there are not problems with the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which there absolutely are. Irreducible complexity is a gaping lacuna in present evolutionary thinking.
I rather like your suggestion - the various species are all present at the beginning in the realm of platonic forms, which serves as a sort of design library whose various blueprints are accessed by means of decision trees guided by physical causality. This seems to reconcile the tension quite nicely.
💬 design library whose various blueprints are accessed by means of decision trees guided by physical causality 🔥
Kinda universal set containing every single thing incl itself 😏
My universal set includes all the things not included in your universal set 😏
Radical solipsism rulez! 😂 I was today years old when I learned universal is personal; to each our own, akin to Christopher Fuchs' private wavefunction.
Always remember, you are not the center of the universe. Except in your own reference frame.
Strikes as unco trite 😝 I’d better try to habituate into my ridiculously self-centric rom the outré notion that universal is ref-frame dependent 🤸
Indeed. Perhaps this is merely an aesthetic preference at root, but I find such a non-explanation deeply intellectually unsatisfying.
It also raises ethical questions about God. Creating a universe that gives every indication of being many gigayears old and being ordered according to rationally legible law when it is really thousands of years old and ordered by divine whim seems like a cruel prank. The claim that a God who would do such a thing, in effect lying with the whole of creation, should be trusted, strains credulity. "The entire cosmos I made is a lie but my book can be believed" is quite the test of faith.
Easier by far for me to believe that YECs are merely making a category error when they attempt to interpret a book meant to be understood at the mythic and allegorical level using the tools of rational analysis. That requires only that human reason is fallible, not that God is a liar.
Agreed. The more that I dig into the 'evidence' for 'scientific' positions the flimsier it seems. It's all a proxy of a proxy of a proxy and a few strange bones.
And the evidence for a literal biblical interpretation is...?
I don't think that I advanced that position. It should be noted though that a literal biblical interpretation would not consider itself 'evidence dependent'. Attacking the evidence for a position whose one boast is 'evidence' is quite a strong attack. Attacking a position which has never made itself dependent on evidence is not so impressive.
But, I would say that the literal interpretation of scriptural descriptions of cosmology has produced accurate predictions and has resisted falsification. It predicted that the universe had a beginning despite most philosphies predicting the 'steady state eternal' universe. It predicted that the 'simpler' lifeforms existed before the more complex and the rather late appearance of man, which I should point out Darwin created his theory post hoc with this knowledge. It predicted that the Earth was 'hung on nothing'(Book of Job I can provide a more specific reference if desired) when most philosophies understood the Earth to be physically supported in some way.
Science is falsified and adopts new positions basically daily, as much as there can be said to be any 'scientific consensus' about any basic facts. But, I would be curious what great predictions the evolutionary long earth theory has made that have been discovered to be true, rather than rearranging itself after the fact to accomodate discoveries.
Agreed. Everyone has a bias on most issues. The only reasonable way to live is to state the bias up front and work with it not imagine yourself to be some rational creature in a void.
The universe looks gigayears old to, essentially, everyone who has made it their purpose in life to gather and understand the evidence provided by nature. Geology, physics, astronomy, genetics, all converge on timescales much longer than that insisted on by YECs.
At an epistemic level, YECs commit the error of reasoning from an assumed conclusion, and making the evidence fit it, rather than reasoning to the conclusion from the evidence.
Finally, the idea that a rationally understandable universe is somehow metaphysically incompatible with God, the soul, or otherwise compels naive materialism seems quite absurd to me. I have absolutely no trouble rejecting a mechanical worldview, while also accepting the evidence provided by several centuries of the accumulated fruits of human reason as applied to the natural world.
Saxon Cross had a very good take on this recently btw. This insistence by a certain breed of Christian on YEC has done much to turn people off of Christianity. Reddit atheism is cringe, but so is being told "just trust me, bro", which in the end is what the YEC argument comes down to.
That's a very postmodernist, relativist approach, which taken to its logical end leaves us unable to approach truth at all, since in the end that approach reduces all statements and beliefs to socially contingent motivated reasoning.
You're also being extremely uncharitable to scientists. Certainly, many of them are bought men who will say whatever is in their pecuniary interest to say. Many others are conformists or simple cowards. All of this was on display during the pandemic. Then again, many were none of these things at all, and spoke out against all of it on ... wait for it ... scientific grounds. They demonstrated that masks were ineffectual, that the infection mortality rate was negligible, that lockdowns were much worse than useless, warned of the potential dangers of the mRNA shots, and then followed up by tracking the damage those shots indeed did. They did all of this using the analytical tools provided by centuries of scientific advance, along with the reasoning capabilities of the human brain, not on the basis of "I read X in an old book therefore X is true because the book says it is."
Would it be too much of a stretch to surmise the psychopaths are leftover ‘creatures of the non-rational but genetically and physiologically “human” sort’? 🤨
💬 Only stupid people ask these questions
*and*
💬 You’re an ignorant poopy head for rejecting my favorite hypothesis
I dare you to double-delete w/o double-mercy 😇
Reminder: In Thomistic metaphysics, potentia have existence; indeed, all things, except God, are mixtures of the potential and actual. God is pure actuality. This reminder is all we need.
This made it clear for me.
Smart man, Briggs!
But too much for me today and it seems more trouble than its worth, no?
It's early, I'm tired, and I have lots of stuff today and no energy for weed walking.
My reach exceeds my grasp. That's what lawyers coping with science do.
Your essay would benefit from ( but I do not expect it or criticize its absence) an easy to understand statement of its essential points and conclusions.
In what world does Ripperger live? It's been known for uncounted millennia that organisms have it in them to generate new life which is not like themselves. Is a mule a donkey? Is a chihuahua a wolf? How does he think animal breeding, let alone evolutionary pressures over millions of years, works?
The problem stems from a very deep error arising from the ontology of 'nothingness'.
The belief that 'nothing' can 'exist' is both logically incoherent and, at the same time, empirically false.
Thomists never seem to notice the problem of 'nothingness' because they start with the existence of the 'absolute something' and assume it does not participate in 'everything' (the alien god).
Therefore, to make 'God' seem an Absolute Other with special qualities inaccessible to 'existing things' (except via 'revelation').
There is - and was and always will be - something.
'Nothing' is an incoherent idea that comes from tricking the neocortex into 'belief without the possibility of proof'.
That being said, the entire wrangle around 'new species' comes from the fact that 'species' is a human mental construct that wants to be 'pure and inviolable' when all the evidence is that 'species' simply isn't pure or inviolable. What empirical - objective - condition would one place on allocating one similar group of living things to a 'species' and excluding the other that would apply to all cases.
The Burgess Shale Event seems to suggest that species just appear. If you want a 'cause' for such appearances, why call it 'God' unless you have an axe to grind?
'God' is an 'explanation' that only works if you stop thinking about the problem. If you do, then 'God' - as the originator of species - becomes simply another problem in need of explanation.
And all the question-begging about the 'self-caused cause' doesn't work if you're not already predisposed to accept such phantasms.
I sometimes wonder if there isn't a biological basis for the inclination to 'grand theory' versus 'local theory'. Wouldn't it be interesting if those grand folks and their high-powered electro-magnets found the part of the brain where the predilection for 'grand theory' could be turned on or off?
I don't believe in the 6x 24h theory.
Let's take the example of the formation of the planet earth:
-either God used his power and it appeared in an instant, and therefore not in 24 hours
-either God did not need to perform a miracle and it was formed as we are told in millions of years. Still not in 24 hours.
We can speculate and create theories but ultimately we are not able to understand the power and possibilities of an omnipotent and eternal entity. As soon as someone can explain an amoeba how we built a skyscraper we can contemplate the possibility to find a valid theory.
Otherwise as a mortal and fallible person I would like to believe in Ripperger's idea.
I'm all for interrogating the sacred priors presumed by our intelligentsia.
> Now evolution, if true, need not be caused by uncountable “random” mutations that produce unpredictable forms.
Which cause are we talking about here? There are four causes in Aristotelian metaphysics, the mistake you're making hear is the modernist of of treating the first cause as the only "real" one.
I like this a lot Briggs. My problem with Ripperger is that his arguments are mainly definitional and only convincing within the Thomistic framework.
Examples:
Proportionate causality- he assumes that the evolved form is 'greater' than its cause the non-evolved form and thus cannot be contained in the non-evolved form
Resemblance and operation- it is all a matter of degree and he provides no reason, at least in his precis why the chips should fall on his side and not another
Finality- very much in the eye of the beholder and only meaningful within the Thomistic system, indeed we might well say that Natural Selection was invented specifically to militate against this principle and so using Finality to settle the question is actually begging the question
His invocation of the principle of Economy seems entirely subjective. I mean while we might could argue from economy if we had divine knowledge in our position the answer: 'We just don't know enough to know which is really simpler.' feels rather strong, not to mention proving that the divine is invariably parsimonious seems to belong rather more to the deistic God of Philosophy than the God of Scripture who exercises His freedom sometimes just to remind us that He is free to do as He pleases.(But perhaps having my training in the school of Luther and Calvin my objections to Thomism might be thought to be 'baked in')
I rather like your solution of created but unactualized potential. The solution that I had in mind was similar, which is just to recognize that emergent properties from combination in certain ways is a part of the created essence.