Re: Evolution: Is this Progress?

Apropos my previous post on Climate Science, let me expand a bit more on a thread I started the first of this year.  If you will recall, I was arguing that secular scientists, especially those studying evolution, refuse to permit any argument into their discipline grounded in what I called extra-causal explanations, such as teleology, artistic concepts of beauty and mystery, or theological concepts like Divine Intervention. At the same time, their own discipline permits quasi-causal concepts like "randomness" and "probability." There is a good reason for this, but it is not the reason the secularists think. In the same way a Christian believes in a loving, active God, secularists believe that physical phenomena behave in ways that can be measured and analyzed. Their science is the development of formal rules and methodologies to investigate the physical world in conformance with this belief. As a result, the phenomena they study does, in fact, behave in ways that can be measured and analyzed, but largely due to reasons expressed in the cliche that for someone with a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. Where they find phenomena that do not conform with their expectations, by and large they simply eliminate it from their studies.  For instance, in the old days, artistic categories of form and perfection were understood and utilized by philosophers, theologians, and scientists in describing and understanding the world around them. But at some point, scientists fell prey to the notion that Beauty was only in the eye of the beholder, and so they reduced physical objects to more objective criteria like shape, color, density, motion, and the like. All else was outside science's parameters, not because artistic categories were invalid or wrong, but because it just wasn't what the scientists wanted to do with the physical world. I know this sounds like a criticism of science, but I actually think it points us to the merit in excluding certain concepts from all types of science. The world is such an immensely complex thing that without rigorous conscription of a science's objects and methods, it would be simply impossible to make any progress.  It is therefore the mark of a good sphere of scientific research that it demand a set of very strictly defined phenomena, together with a methodology appropriate to the phenomena as defined.  Contemporary attempts to make progress in such mushy areas as "Cultural Studies" make this point rather well.  But on the positive side, evolutionary science is also a good example. Continue ..... The phenomena evolution seeks to study are the observed multiplicity of species. Where did all these species come from? What happened to species that have become extinct? What will happen to various species in the future? Evolutionary science investigates this and other questions with a toolbag of concepts like "survival," "fitness," "ecosystems," "randomness," and "probability," and in so doing, constrains itself to physical phenomena, per se.  As such, theological concepts like Divine Intervention are inappropriate, not because they are wrong, but because such concepts are more suited to a wider field than mere physical phenomena, a field as big and as complex as the Universe itself. To put it another way, the will of God is largely inexplicable. As a result, derivative concepts like Divine Intervention or Creationism just cannot help us to understand the concrete details of processes like evolution.  Such concepts will not yield any kind of a quantifiable answer at all, much less one that fits within anything calling itself science. It is with God and theological concepts, however, that the secular evolutionist usually goes wrong when he insists, in the name of his science, in passing judgment on such things. In so doing he oversteps the bounds of the very scientific discipline he has created. If the objects of evolutionary science are pre-defined so as to exclude God from consideration, then the evolutionary scientist can say nothing about God or Creationism or Divine Intervention without exiting his discipline. Such theological concepts are simply defined out of the scientist's vocabulary, ab initio, and he ought to stand mute on such questions - at least insofar as he tries to speak as a scientist.  Immanual Kant called such attempts as this amphibolies of reason, which result from extrapolating from one category of thought into another irrelevant sphere.  He might just as well have pointed out what the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes: "[God] has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end."  Evolutionary science is not about ultimate beginnings or ends, but about physical processes in the here and now. If the scientist wants to talk about ends or beginnings, he must use other more theological language, for his discipline is not geared towards that sort of thing. But if the evolutionist may not delve into theological matters, the same is not true in reverse. The processes of evolution that our scientists discover can help us appreciate the Divine better, just as the deeper understandings of cosmological physics and quantum theory can bring us to a greater sense of awe: of God, because of what He has wrought.