{"id":650,"date":"2008-06-24T11:53:50","date_gmt":"2008-06-24T11:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2008\/06\/24\/fundies-and-limited-deities\/"},"modified":"2008-06-24T11:53:50","modified_gmt":"2008-06-24T11:53:50","slug":"fundies-and-limited-deities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2008\/06\/24\/fundies-and-limited-deities\/","title":{"rendered":"Fundies and Limited Deities"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I hear, via the Panda’s Thumb<\/a>, that Uncommon Descent has a new
\nposter. And he’s off to a rollicking good start, with a post
\nexplaining why Christians who accept the fact of evolution are
\nincoherent and deluded. (As usual, I don’t link to UD, due to their rampant
\ndishonesty in silently altering or removing links.)<\/p>\n

I am, perhaps, not the best person to respond to his claim, given
\nthat I’m not a Christian. But his argument is so inconsistent, and so
\ntypical of a type of argument that constantly occurs in fundamentalist
\ngibberings that it doesn’t take a Christian theistic evolutionist
\nto point out its glaring errors.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the things that has always struck me as very odd about many
\nfundamentalists is that they insist on an omniscient, omnipotent deity
\n– a deity without any limits of any sort; and yet simultaneously, all
\nof their discussions of this supposedly limitless being are based on
\nsuch a limited<\/em> notion of what their deity can do.<\/p>\n

Cudworth’s argument is based on the idea that religious
\nevolutionists view evolution as God’s tool for creating life – and
\nthen requiring God’s use of “tools” to be incredibly limited:<\/p>\n

\n

I would not have a problem understanding evolution as God’s “creation
\ntool,” if TEs conceived of evolution as a “tool” in the strict sense.
\nA tool in the strict sense is fully in the control of the tool-user,
\nand the results it achieves (when properly used by a competent user)
\nare not due to chance but to intelligence and skill. But Darwin’s
\nmechanism leaves room for neither intelligence nor skill; it is the
\nunconscious operation of impersonal natural selection upon mutations
\nwhich are the products of chance. It follows that Darwinian evolution
\nis not a tool, but an autonomous process, and therefore out of God’s
\ncontrol.<\/p>\n

This has a theological consequence. If evolution is out of God’s
\ncontrol, it is incompatible with the notion of providence – the notion
\nthat God provides for the future needs of the earth and its
\ninhabitants. God can hardly, for example, provide for the need of
\nHagar in the desert, if he can’t even guarantee that the human race,
\nof which Hagar is a member, will ever emerge from the primordial seas.
\n(The radical contingency of the Darwinian mechanism is captured well
\nby Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould, when he wrote that if the tape of
\nevolution were rewound and played again, the results would be entirely
\ndifferent. Once God sets a truly Darwinian process in motion, he has
\nno control over whether it will produce Adam and Eve, a race of
\npointy-eared Vulcans, or just an ocean full of bacteria.)<\/p>\n

A non-providential God is clearly not an orthodox Christian God, and
\nit therefore appears that theistic evolutionism generates heretical
\nChristianity. As I see it, the only way for theistic evolutionists to
\nescape this consequence is to argue that mutations seem like chance
\nevents from the human perspective, but from God’s perspective are
\nforeordained. But in that case, “evolution” is really just the
\nactualization of a foreseen design over a very long time frame; the
\n“purely natural causes” spoken of by the TEs are really just the
\nunrecognized fingertips of the very long arm of God. This view, which
\nwe might call “apparent Darwinism,” fails to get God out of the
\nprocess of natural causation, which was (as Cornelius Hunter has
\nargued) Darwinism’s historical raison d’etre. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So – Cudworth’s problem is that when a theistic evolutionist
\nrefers to evolution as “God’s tool”, they’re being incoherent –
\nbecause an omnipotent deity’s use of tool is inherently constrained to
\nthe simple human version of a tool, where a tool is something directly
\nmanipulated by the human being, and produces a predictable
\ndeterministic outcome, leaving clear markings indicating its use.<\/p>\n

Suppose you’re an omniscient, omnipotent deity. And suppose that
\nyou want to create a self-sufficient system of living beings. Why
\nwould you be constrained to the same kinds of decisions, devices, and
\nprocesses as your limited creations?<\/p>\n

I argue that Cudworth is the one who’s incoherent. Let me pick out
\none line that I think does a particularly good job of describing not
\njust the problem with his argument, but of the problem with so many
\nfundamentalist arguments: “Once God sets a truly Darwinian process in
\nmotion, he has no control over whether it will produce Adam and Eve, a
\nrace of pointy-eared Vulcans, or just an ocean full of bacteria.”<\/p>\n

Cudworth argues for an omnipotent<\/em> deity – and in support
\nof his omnipotent deity, he argues that the omnipotent deity
\ncannot<\/em> do something relatively simple!<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, Cudworth’s definition of “tool” doesn’t
\neven work for human beings!<\/p>\n

One thing I’ve been working on for fun, and which I’ll eventually
\npost to the blog, is an evolutionary programming system. It’s a simple
\nprogramming language, where each language construct can be mutated.
\nYou provide an initial input (in the form of a simple program), and
\nan evaluation function (another simple program), and let it go.
\nEventually, you’ll get a result that satisfies the evalution function
\namazingly well. I’ve used my little toy to create things like a square
\nroot function, using the following evaluation function: (The
\nsystem tries to minimize the result of the evaluation function.)<\/p>\n

\n# A minimizing evaluation function which puts an \"input\" into\n# register 0, and reads a result from register 1. It produces a 0\n# result when the program generates the square root of register 0\n# in register one for all values.\ndef Eval(prog):\n# dev will be the sum of the deviation between the\n# result squared and the target number for the first\n# 20 primes.\ndev = 0\nfor i in primes(20):\nprog.reset()\nprog.setRegister(0, i)\nprog.execute()\nresult = prog.getRegister(1)\n# Add the difference between squaring the \"result\"\ndev += (result * result - i)\nreturn dev\n<\/pre>\n
 No two runs produce the same result. I’ve gotten a simple
\nbinary search like square root; something close to newton’s method
\n(basically computing a slope, and using that to converge faster),
\nand some things that only work for limited ranges of values
\n(which was cool – it “found” the limits of the evaluation function
\nand produced something that worked specifically for the stuff that the
\nevaluator tested.)<\/p>\n
 I’d call my evolutionary programming system a tool, and I’d say
\nthat I’ve used my tool to generate interesting programs. According to
\nMr. Cudworth, my system isn’t a tool at all. How can Cudworth describe
\nwhat I built? It’s clearly not<\/em> a tool, because like his
\ndescription of evolution, it doesn’t produce a specific result – in
\nfact, it produces a different result each time I run it on the same
\ninput. And yet, it’s not truly random, either. If I give it the
\nevaluation function above, I can absolutely guarantee that it
\nwill<\/em> eventually produce something that computes square
\nroots.<\/p>\n
 Evolution is an amazing tool. Set up correctly, it can be used to
\nproduce an adaptive, self-regulating system with pretty much any
\ndesired set of properties. Why would an omnipotent deity not<\/em>
\nmake use of such a great tool? And if I<\/em> am not constrained to
\nMr. Cudworth’s definition of tool, then why would an omnipotent
\ndeity have to work within those constraints?<\/p>\n
 If Cudworth (or any other fundamentalist) wants to make arguments
\nin favor of an unlimited deity, then he really needs to
\nstop basing his arguments on the inherent limits of what said
\nunlimited ominpotent deity can do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I hear, via the Panda’s Thumb, that Uncommon Descent has a new poster. And he’s off to a rollicking good start, with a post explaining why Christians who accept the fact of evolution are incoherent and deluded. (As usual, I don’t link to UD, due to their rampant dishonesty in silently altering or removing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intelligent-design"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-au","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}