VladtheDestroyer
Active member
Recently Dr. Ron Garret wrote the following on his web blog, in an effort to steel-man the Christian creationists position. I told him that I think he's got it pretty much covered, but thought I would post it here in case anyone else has anything they would change or add:
"For now I want to present the argument for the opposing point of view to the best of my ability. If I am going to claim that my explanation is the best one available, I have to be willing to put it up against the strongest alternatives. So if you are an advocate for one of these alternative and I get something wrong here, let me know in the comments.
The claim that all of our subjective experiences can be accounted for by the behavior of atoms is not only wrong (this argument goes) it is manifestly absurd, a category error. Subjective experience is a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon than anything an atom (or large groups of atoms) could possibly produce. Atoms simply move around according to deterministic laws. Nowhere in those laws is there anything even vaguely resembling everyday human subjective experiences like consciousness, love, shame, pride, joy, anger, sadness. Atoms have no moral agency, and cannot acquire moral agency simply by being aggregated into sufficiently large collections. There is something qualitatively different between human experience and the deterministic behavior of atoms.
Moreover, our very existence cannot be accounted for simply by Atoms Doing Their Thing. Life is so mind-bogglingly complex that it cannot have been brought about by mere chance and deterministic laws. Biological evolution can explain some of the characteristics of life, but it cannot explain how life arose in the first place, or how the universe itself arose in the first place. To explain those it is necessary to hypothesize a Creator (or at least a creator). Given that, it seems plausible that the reason we are here is that the Creator wanted us to be here, that we exist to fulfill some kind of purpose. Moreoever, it seems plausible that the Creator has revealed that purpose to some of us, and that the people to whom that revelation has been made wrote it down so they could share it with the rest of us, and that is the reason holy texts exist. These are not the results of humans making **** up out of whole cloth, they are the instruction manuals for life given to us by the Creator, because we are not expected to just figure it all out on our own.
That's about as far as I can get with steel-manning the religious position in general."
From the post "Seeking God in Science part 5" by Ron Garret"For now I want to present the argument for the opposing point of view to the best of my ability. If I am going to claim that my explanation is the best one available, I have to be willing to put it up against the strongest alternatives. So if you are an advocate for one of these alternative and I get something wrong here, let me know in the comments.
The claim that all of our subjective experiences can be accounted for by the behavior of atoms is not only wrong (this argument goes) it is manifestly absurd, a category error. Subjective experience is a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon than anything an atom (or large groups of atoms) could possibly produce. Atoms simply move around according to deterministic laws. Nowhere in those laws is there anything even vaguely resembling everyday human subjective experiences like consciousness, love, shame, pride, joy, anger, sadness. Atoms have no moral agency, and cannot acquire moral agency simply by being aggregated into sufficiently large collections. There is something qualitatively different between human experience and the deterministic behavior of atoms.
Moreover, our very existence cannot be accounted for simply by Atoms Doing Their Thing. Life is so mind-bogglingly complex that it cannot have been brought about by mere chance and deterministic laws. Biological evolution can explain some of the characteristics of life, but it cannot explain how life arose in the first place, or how the universe itself arose in the first place. To explain those it is necessary to hypothesize a Creator (or at least a creator). Given that, it seems plausible that the reason we are here is that the Creator wanted us to be here, that we exist to fulfill some kind of purpose. Moreoever, it seems plausible that the Creator has revealed that purpose to some of us, and that the people to whom that revelation has been made wrote it down so they could share it with the rest of us, and that is the reason holy texts exist. These are not the results of humans making **** up out of whole cloth, they are the instruction manuals for life given to us by the Creator, because we are not expected to just figure it all out on our own.
That's about as far as I can get with steel-manning the religious position in general."