Saturday, April 27, 2013

So You Think Evolution And Religion Are Compatible Huh? My Challenge To Theistic Evolutionists



When it comes to the theory of evolution there are four basic positions a theist can take:
  1. Evolution is a natural process that was started by god in the beginning; 
  2. Evolution is partly natural process that god occasionally interacts with and guides; 
  3. Evolution is a process that is completely guided by god at every step; or, 
  4. Evolution is false and doesn't happen. 

If you're a theist, your approach to evolution is going to fall under one of these four categories. The naturalist position of course is that evolution is a totally unguided process that never needs supernatural intervention. I praise all theists who have accepted evolution as fact despite the many obstacles that they face. That being said, for those theists who take a position between 1 and 3 above it opens up a new book of difficult questions, perhaps even harder than the traditional problems of evil. 

I have a list of 10 questions that popped into my head recently that I think highlight some of the problems of trying to incorporate theistic evolution with theistic beliefs. I wouldn't say the two are impossible to reconcile, but asking the following questions below to various theists has yielded a wide range of contradictory answers that I think theists should stop and try very hard to come up with definitive answers for.

  1. When did the soul appear? Did it literally appear all of a sudden? 
  2. Did god say *poof* one day and man suddenly received a soul? 
  3. Did the soul evolve and appear gradually? 
  4. Was there literally one generation of human beings that had souls whose parents didn't? 
  5. Did the soul come early in human evolution or late? 
  6. If it came late, why did god wait tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to create the soul? 
  7. What about original sin? How do we get original sin if there never was a literal Adam & Eve? I know that only Christianity has original sin, but if we don't have it, how do you make sense of Christian theology without it? 
  8. If god gave man a soul suddenly and waited until late in human evolution to do it, that means that all the human beings who died before humans got their soul possessed the same cognitive functionality in order to consciously suffer as much as their descendants did who did have souls, and yet they were not compensated for the suffering they endured. How can this be reconciled with standard Christian or Islamic doctrine that basically says heaven compensates all the suffering that humans experience? 
  9. What about animal suffering? Biology and neuroscience shows us that animals consciously suffer as most mammals have a prefrontal and neocortex. If animals consciously suffer and have no souls, why do they suffer and why isn't there suffering compensated? How could a wholly good god create beings who could consciously suffer and then just plan for them to die with no compensation to them?
  10. Why create human beings through a long slow process that involved numerous mass extinctions that caused millions of species to suffer and die who had varying levels of consciousness to experience this suffering? It seems unnecessarily cruel.

I've never heard a theist give me a satisfactory answer to a single one of these answers let alone all 10. Many of these questions should be easy to answer since they cover the same area: the soul.

I'd like to propose these questions as a challenge to any theist willing to take them on who can give reasonable definitive answers that are compatible with the concept of an all-knowing, all-powerful and especially an all-good god.

Any one up for the challenge?

(Please also check out my Evolutionary Argument Against God here.)

21 comments:

  1. Why not, I'll tack a crack (as a 'theistic evolutionist' myself).

    1. Whenever the first man appeared, and it did appear all of a sudden.

    2. Man is a composite of body and soul, so that it doesn't make any sense to me to refer to man 'receiving' a soul, since there isn't anything which we can refer to as 'man' which doesn't already consist of a subsistent soul. It is more appropriate, from my way of thinking, to say that man is a soul than it is to say that he 'has' a soul.

    3. The soul did not evolve or appear gradually (which is a consequence of it's being metaphysically simple - i.e., non-composite, and therefore un-evolvable).

    4. I would say so, yes. I certainly can't see any significant problems with saying so from my perspective as a Christian theist.

    5. First, I don't know what it means to refer to something as 'human' if it doesn't consist of a subsistent soul, so I don't know if the question is asking at what point in 'human' evolution the soul instantiates, or whether it is asking at what point in evolution there appeared organisms with subsistent rational souls (i.e., humans). The first question is, to my mind, incoherent. The second can be answered: relatively late.

    6. There may be any number of reasons for this. Perhaps God knew that it would be best to wait (for instance because he knew that in all the nearest logically possible worlds where human beings appeared at any other time, earlier or later, there would have been more suffering in the world, or human beings would have gone extinct, etc). However, to say that God 'waited' is to speak anthropomorphically, since God is, on the classical Christian view, outside of time. Therefore, perhaps we can say that God decided to instantiate the human race only under certain conditions, and those conditions were met only very recently, from our temporal vantage point, in the cosmic-time since the big bang. Notice as well that objecting that God could have been more efficient is a worthless objection: after all, there is no reason to think that God would value efficiency. Efficiency is a value for a being with either limited time, or limited resources, or both, but God is not limited in either of these respects, so he has no reason to value efficiency apart from some sort of aesthetic appeal. Perhaps he was less efficient precisely to satisfy an aesthetic value knowing that efficiency had to be sacrificed in order to create a more beautiful world in other respects.

    7. As you may have guessed, there is no tension here on my view. I would just affirm a literal Adam and Eve in the sense that there was a first man, and a first woman, who are uniquely the parents of the whole human race, and who committed original sin.

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    1. 8. It is important to understand that on the traditional Christian view of the soul, the subsistent soul of human beings is what accounts for not just rational-behavior (machines can exhibit rational-behavior) but rational deliberation, reflection, intuition and so on. It is how the Christian explains consciousness (here meaning apperception or 'perceiving that one perceives'). It makes no sense to me, therefore, to talk about pre-human animals who were rational in the same sense as human beings are rational. Animals certainly have a soul in the literal sense, but they do not have subsistent rational souls, and thus animals are not able to intuit the truths of logic or reflect existentially upon their lives or even become aware of their own awareness.

      9. This is just the classical problem of natural evil. However, I maintain that it is through sin that death and suffering was introduced into the world (if not through Adam and Eve, then through the angelic fall, or perhaps through efficient causality working backwards from Adam and Eve's act, or any other thesis which intelligent theists have tentatively put forward). The point being that this question poses no special challenge. Moreover, you may be wrong to think that animal suffering is really the same kind of suffering that we human beings go through. Dr. William Lane Craig has noted, for instance, that there are three different levels of pain perception, and though we have all three levels, animals only have the first two (they are not, as we are, aware that they are in pain when they are physically in pain). That doesn't do away with the whole problem of animal suffering, but it does mitigate it.

      10. One could explain God being constrained to do it this way because of the angelic fall, even while God did not intend it to occur this way. If the angelic beings were created to participate in establishing a good cosmic order, and if some of those beings rejected their vocations and chose to play the cosmic-antagonist, then it could be that God allowed them to exercise their free will even to the extent of allowing animals to suffer and die naturally.

      I have answered these questions in a very straightforward way and from my own perspective. However, having been a different kind of theistic evolutionist years ago, I would like to point out that I could have given you a very different set of answers half a decade ago. These questions are not impressive challenges to almost any version of theistic evolution, and I can imagine answering them from a variety of theistic-evolutionary points of view.

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    2. Thank you for replying. Let be briefly respond to you.

      1. "Man" or humans never appeared all of a sudden. If you have to believe that a fully developed human was born from a non fully developed human overnight, then that is not compatible with evolution.

      2. Same problem as no. 1. If man is a soul than soul must have appeared gradually as man slowly evolved over literally millions of years.

      3. You're maintaining the soul appears overnight.

      4. If the soul appeared in one generation, then that generation's parents were just as "human" as their kids, and they certainly were consciously aware of themselves and could suffer. But if they had no soul, their suffering was for no ultimate reason because when they died there was no reward of an afterlife.

      5. In nature we see all levels of consciousness, from simple to complex. We have complex consciousness, but it didn't arrive overnight, it evolved slowly as the evolutionary process describes. It's like if you became a "man" at 18, were you not a man just 24 hours before? At 17.99 years you were just as capable.

      6. We have to speak in temporal terms because of our language. I could've said that god planned to give man a soul after X number of years from the beginning but even that uses temporal terminology. I think the whole concept of god is anthropomorphic actually and we all humanize god. If god chose vanity over efficiency, then he deliberately chose the way that involves excess suffering for animals and humans. This points to a god who is either tinkering, or at least partly sadistic or indifferent.

      7. When did this take place, where did it take place and what evidence do you have that it did take place?


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    3. 8. That doesn't answer the question, it avoids it. The "pre-human animals" I'm talking about are the generations of humans that did not have souls, but were still consciously suffering and dying horrible deaths, as per god's plan. You seem to be saying that the soul is inextricably tied to human evolution, but you say it appears overnight. Rational human beings did not appear over night. We have evidence that even Neanderthal man had some rational capability. So as we were slowly evolving into modern day humans, there must've been periods where we had varying degrees of rationality, that were about as equal as ours today, and certainly more than any other non-human animals alive today, and we were consciously suffering. If the afterlife is the compensation for our suffering, god left out the thousands of generations before humans had souls.

      9. Adam and Eve never existed, and we know that from genetics as well as the greater evolutionary picture. But if you have evidence they did exist, I'd like to hear it. Your alternative that an angel fell and this brought in suffering means that suffering was in the works before life even got started. Why make humans and animals suffer for what an angel allegedly did? Besides if god chose to use evolution to bring about mankind, there is no way there could not have been suffering, since evolution involves a rather cruel survival of the fittest scenario. So Adam and Eve and the angel falling make no sense.

      Finally it is amazing how many theists hold onto William Lane Craig's arguments. He's been thoroughly refuted on his claim that animals don't consciously suffer. It is simply not true that only advanced mammals have a prefrontal cortex. In fact, animals as wide ranging as opossums, guinea pigs, and rats all contain a prefrontal cortex or a neo-cortex. And this is attested by the majority of the scientific community. So it is simply not the case that non-primate lower mammals are not aware of their pain and suffering as apologists like Craig make it out to be.

      Watch this video for more information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLSwRcvX72M

      10. I don't think god could be constrained to do anything. Why should one angel's alleged fall force god to choose evolution with its necessary suffering? Was god otherwise going to just create the world as-is the way genesis describes? It seems to be that your explanation is another attempt to explain suffering in the world now that Adam & Eve have been thoroughly debunked. You're basically saying that before god's plan could get started, an angel screwed it up. Some plan.

      It seems to me the case that theistic evolution encourages one to believe in the absurd scenario Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron put forward of how they think evolution should work: that one day an ape gave birth to a human being with fully formed rational faculties and a fully formed soul. Nothing could be further than the truth. If that's not the case, then at least theistic evolution forces one to tweak the evolutionary story in such a way that it makes divine intervention more practical and less pragmatic.

      I still think that evolution is not compatible with an all loving god, because it deliberately involves gratuitous suffering by conscious beings for which there are no rewards to compensate them.

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    4. Craig has responded to critics, and in any case the point I was making was about apperceptive pain which I think we can prove without reference to the prefrontal cortex at all.

      Your responses to each of the ten points reflect a palpable misunderstanding of a number of things. First, I said that a human being is a composite of both body and soul. The biological theory stipulates that the body of human beings evolved gradually, and doesn't say anything about the soul. Suppose there was a man-like organism that God decided to breathe life into in such a way that that one man-like organism became a man (had a subsistent rational soul). Would that man-like organisms man-like parents then inherit a subsistent rational soul? I can't see why they would (hence obviously I deny 4, and can't even think what an argument for 4 would look like - can you?). I'm suggesting, therefore, that the subsistent rational soul was created by God immediately and that this is what animated the first man and the first woman, who were homosapien organisms.

      Your fifth point seems to presume that consciousness as we experience it is something which could have evolved. I think this is just confused or naive. I don't think consciousness as we experience it is something which could evolve, for many of the same reasons I think artificial intelligence will never be apperceptive. As one of the greatest Logicians of all time, Kurt Gödel once said: “Consciousness is connected with one unity. A machine is composed of parts” [6.1.21] and again that “I don’t think the brain came in the Darwinian manner. In fact, it is disprovable. Simple mechanism can’t yield the brain. I think the basic elements of the universe are simple. Life force is a primitive element of the universe and it obeys certain laws of action. These laws are not simple, and they are not mechanical.”[6.2.12]


      To your sixth point, I think that the Christian doctrine of God, at least the Catholic doctrine of God, is of a thing which could not logically possibly be less anthropomorphic. I would challenge you to find any way in which it could be less anthropomorphic than it is. Notice that the doctrine states that God is metaphysically simple, such that there is no real distinction between God and his nature, or even between God and any one of his superlative attributes. It stipulates that in God there is no potentiality at all, and that God is pure act. It stipulates that God is not material, not temporal, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent. Perhaps you could say "yes well, wouldn't it be less anthropomorphic if we said God wasn't personal?" I think God's being personal can be analytically proved, but I would be comfortable conceding that if you felt that was the most anthropomorphic thing Catholics ever say about God.

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    5. Also, as a philosopher of time myself, I think we can translate tensed propositions to tenseless propositions, and I think it is trivially easy to conceive of something from the atemporal perspective.

      To your point about the genetic data which militates against a literal Adam and Eve, I have too much to say, and I'll just redirect you to an article by Catholic Philosopher Dennis Bonnette: http://socrates58.blogspot.ca/2012/04/dr-dennis-bonnette-debunks-argument.html

      Most of the rest of your comments seem confused in such a way that I think careful rereading of my first two posts would set you straight. For instance when you say: ""Man" or humans never appeared all of a sudden. If you have to believe that a fully developed human was born from a non fully developed human overnight" or when you say: "The "pre-human animals" I'm talking about are the generations of humans that did not have souls, but were still consciously suffering and dying horrible deaths" you seem to be missing the point that what defines a human being is a composite of a (an evolved) body and an unevolved soul. If that's the definition of a human being, then your statements are incoherent or at best confused. Perhaps you don't like the definition? That's fine, but recall that I was being invited to share my view on each of these points, so it seems entirely legitimate that I employ definitions which I recognize and according to which I think about such issues. Try the experiment yourself: think through how each of your objections look given my understandings of the terms and concepts in play - would you be impressed with your rebuttals if you were me?

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    6. THERE ARE TWO THEORIES ABOUT HOW THE UNIVERSE AND FAUNA AND FAUNA ON EARTH CAME INTO BEING.
      THE ONE THEORY IS THAT GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE AND ALL FAUNA AND FLORA ON EARTH.
      THE OTHER THEORY IS THAT OF EVOLUTION.
      WHICH THEORY IS SUPPORTED BY SCIENCE? I BELIEVE THAT SCIENCE SUPPORTS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION.
      WHY DO I BELIEVE THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION? ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN.
      ALL FAUNA AND FLORA (IE: ALL LIVING CREATURES INCLUDING HUMANS AND ALL PLANTS) COME INTO BEING BY A PROCESS OF EVOLUTION.
      IN THE CASE OF LIVING CREATURES INCLUDING HUMANS THE MALE INDULGES IN SEX WITH THE FEMALE AND EJECTS SEMEN INTO THE VAGINA OF THE FEMALE. THE SPERM SWIMS TOWARDS THE EGG IN THE WOMB AND ENTERS. CELL DIVISION OCCURS AND AT THE END OF THE PREGNANCY AN INFANT IS BORN. THIS IS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS.
      IN THE CASE OF ALL FLORA A SIMILAR PROCESS OCCURS. A PLANT IS FERTILIZED BY THE WIND, BIRDS, INSECTS AND SOME ANIMALS. SEEDS ARE PRODUCED BY THE PLANT. WHEN SEEDS FALL ON THE GROUND AND WATER IS APPLIED TO THEM THEY GERMINATE AND A NEW PLANT IS BORN. THIS IS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS. ONE DOES NOT NEED TO BE A SCIENTIST TO GRASP THE OBVIOUS. IF YOU CAN NOT GRASP THE OBVIOUS CONSULT A BIOLOGIST. SIDNEY COAD WILLIAMS HEALTH AND PEACE ACTIVIST.

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    7. IF YOU INSIST ON SUPPORTING THE THEORY OF CREATION WHICH CLAIMS THAT GOD CREATED HEAVEN AND EARTH AND ADAM AND EVE THEN THE CONFUSION STARTS BECAUSE THERE ARE MANY GODS AND MANY RELIGIONS. WHICH RELIGION IS CORRECT? RELIGION IS REPORTEDLY ABOUT LOVE AND CORE ANCESTRY. SOME RELIGIOUS LEADERS DO NOT PROMOTE LOVE AND PEACE.

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  2. Thank you for responding.

    I hope you’re finding this dialogue as interesting as I am. Anyway…

    I fully acknowledge that we define our terms differently. This is always a problem in these kinds of disagreements. I’m arguing that your definition is not compatible with evolution.

    So first, Craig even admits higher primates are exempt from his own argument. So do chimps, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans not count? Does god not care for them? They consciously suffer and are not given the reward of an afterlife. If heaven is god’s way of justifying or compensating all the suffering in the world, then god knowingly allowed animals to evolve who could consciously suffer for no reason. That is cruelty, and is not compatible with a wholly good and omnibelevolent god. If you watched that link I sent, you’d notice that this also applies to other animals besides higher primates. This makes it even worse for Craig and other theists who borrow his arguments. Link me to his responses to the critics.

    1. “I said that a human being is a composite of both body and soul. The biological theory stipulates that the body of human beings evolved gradually, and doesn't say anything about the soul.”

    That’s because there’s no evidence for the soul. If there was it would be incorporated into our scientific understanding of reality. If our bodies evolved slowly, as you seem to acknowledge, then so did the brain and so did consciousness. Of course I deny that a human being is a body + soul. Considering we evolved gradually, but got the soul overnight, according to you, there must have been generations of beings, we’ll call them proto-humans, who had higher cognitive faculties than apes today, meaning they certainly could consciously suffer, and they had no souls. You have to face this prospect if you accept theistic evolution.

    And if god gave us souls “immediately” in our evolution, that means we had souls for about 250,000 years, maybe longer. Are you prepared to deal with the possible consequences of believing that?

    2. “Suppose there was a man-like organism that God decided to breathe life into in such a way that that one man-like organism became a man (had a subsistent rational soul). Would that man-like organisms man-like parents then inherit a subsistent rational soul?”

    You don’t understand what number 4 means. Why are you trying to make it seem as if I’d think the existence of a soul would be retroactive? You’re scenario basically suggests that a non-human literally became a human by god breathing a soul into it. What was this “man-like” being’s characteristics? Did he have intelligence? Could he be rational? Was he moral in any way? Did he have language? Was he smarted than a Neanderthal? Why wouldn’t god make it so that full human beings evolved naturally without his need to intervene?

    You’re insisting homo sapiens literally appeared overnight, but just two of them. All the other “man-like” beings stayed the way they were I suppose. Did they die out or evolve into something else? And who did the first two human’s kids have kids with? Were there conflicts between these first two humans and the other non humans? If there was a genetic bottleneck that caused the population to go down to two “man-like” beings, what caused the bottleneck? Did god create a disease or a natural catastrophe so his grand scheme could be actualized? I hope to get coherent answers since this is a very interesting hypothesis that no serious biologist believes.

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  3. 3. “Your fifth point seems to presume that consciousness as we experience it is something which could have evolved. I think this is just confused or naive.”

    Consciousness can’t evolve? Umm, animals are conscious, they evolved. You acknowledge the brain evolved, that’s where consciousness exists. We see throughout the animal kingdom various levels of conscious awareness. It’s pretty simple: as the brain evolved, so did our consciousness. You can quote mine Kurt Gödel all you want to get ideas that reinforce your view, is it going to mean anything to me? Not really. I can do the same thing myself. Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker writes, “No feature of consciousness has ever been discovered that does not depend 100% on neurophysiology. Stimulate the brain with chemicals or an electrical current, and the person’s experience changes; let a person’s experience vary, and you can measure the changes in chemistry or electrophysiology. When a brain is damaged, the person’s mental life is diminished accordingly, and when the brain’s activity ceases, the mind goes out of existence.” Does that help?

    4. “I would challenge you to find any way in which it could be less anthropomorphic than it is.”

    Why? God is already demanding, incomprehensibly jealous beyond reason, & that means he’s also insecure that he might not be getting the attention he wants. He’s capricious, sometimes indifferent, sometimes hateful (Psalm 5:5, Psalm 11:5, Lev. 20:23, Prov. 6:16-19), and sometimes loving, all temporal tantrums that seem very human (and immature) to me. So what if he has no physical body? This can be best explained I feel because he doesn’t exist. But the god of the bible is just about as anthropomorphic as many other invented gods that litter history’s pages. I mean for crying out loud, you believe Jesus was god and he was an actual human being!

    5. When it comes to Adam & Eve’s historicity and the genetic bottleneck it must have occur, it’s funny that I never hear any mainstream biologists ever mention evidence that’s “potentially compatible with a literal Adam and Eve.” Here’s a study that says human population never went below 1200 people sometime between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. That would’ve occurred waaay after humans originally evolved some 250,000 years ago. So your theory that the soul came in the beginning doesn’t appear compatible with the evidence.

    http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/how-big-was-the-human-population-bottleneck-not-anything-close-to-2/

    6. “you seem to be missing the point that what defines a human being is a composite of a (an evolved) body and an unevolved soul.”
    No I don’t like that definition because it is not compatible with standard evolutionary theory. I understand you have your views, that’s fine. All I’m saying is that your views are not compatible with science and are therefore troublesome. If I held your beliefs, I would be forced given my arguments to either deny the science that shows theistic evolution to be problematic and simply have faith that it somehow all makes sense, or I’d have to seriously reexamine what it is I actually believe to be true regarding evolution. If I were a Christian, I’d pick number 1 on my list of approaches to evolution that “Evolution is a natural process that was started by god in the beginning”. But I’d have to believe also in a god that is sometimes intentionally cruel but nevertheless is still the boss and find a way to live with it. Or, I’d become an atheist/agnostic or at least a deist. That’s honestly what I’d do if I were you.

    With these question my goal is to get theistic evolutionists like you to seriously think about what it is you believe and be entertained at what ideas you come up with to explain what many of us naturalists know is simply not compatible with the evidence.

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  4. Craig's response to critics: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/do-animals-suffer-in-the-same-way-humans-do

    My response: Again, my argument doesn't stand or fall with Craig's because I hold a similar position on different grounds (as I'm now saying for the third and hopefully final time).

    "I’m arguing that your definition is not compatible with evolution."

    Logically incompatible? Really? There's no logically possible world in which evolution is true and in which there exist organisms with subsistent rational souls which didn't evolve? Perhaps you would care to demonstrate the logical entailment?

    "So do chimps, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans not count? Does god not care for them? They consciously suffer and are not given the reward of an afterlife."

    Ok, for the sake of a critical thinking experiment, let's say that chimps, gorillas and other closely related species had souls which were subsistent. Let's suppose God compensated them in heaven. Would that be resolve the paradox - and is that logically compatible with Theistic Evolution? Clearly it would.

    "That’s because there’s no evidence for the soul. If there was it would be incorporated into our scientific understanding of reality. If our bodies evolved slowly, as you seem to acknowledge, then so did the brain and so did consciousness."

    There is quite a lot of evidence for the soul, but often it is evidence not amenable to scientific verification or falsification. Here's the presumption you are willing to make which I am not so quick to make: that if the brain evolved slowly by gradual steps that consciousness also did so. However, consciousness as we experience it is apperceptive, and cannot be produced by an evolutionary process in principle. Take J.P. Moreland's argument from consciousness for the truth of the Theistic world view in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology in order to get at least an idea of why I, and other philosophers, would say that. I would also recommend reading up on Descartes' argument from the presence of language against animal's having the kind of rational intuition or 'thoughts' which human beings have. I take it that Godel's incompleteness theorums also evidence the same point, that rational intuition is irreducible to naturalistic description. Also, and especially, please do read Donald Davidson's arguments against animal congnition (of the sort which might qualify as conscious in the apperceptive sense).

    Here's an article with Descartes and Davidson: http://www.iep.utm.edu/ani-mind/#SSH1bi

    Bonnette furthers Descartes argument in some respects in his critique of ape-language studies: http://drbonnette.com/Ape-Language_Studies_Part_I.html

    Also, you simply must find and read: Davidson, Donald. "Rational animals." dialectica 36, no. 4 (1982): 317-327.

    "And if god gave us souls “immediately” in our evolution, that means we had souls for about 250,000 years, maybe longer. Are you prepared to deal with the possible consequences of believing that? "

    Yeah.

    "What was this “man-like” being’s characteristics? Did he have intelligence? Could he be rational? Was he moral in any way? Did he have language? Was he smarted than a Neanderthal? Why wouldn’t god make it so that full human beings evolved naturally without his need to intervene?"

    He wasn't a moral agent, he didn't have language, he wasn't rational, he was smarter than a Neanderthal - full human beings by definition could not have evolved any other way. If they evolved, and they have a subsistent rational soul, then this is how it happened.

    "You’re insisting homo sapiens literally appeared overnight"

    Clearly I'm not.

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    1. "All the other “man-like” beings stayed the way they were I suppose. Did they die out or evolve into something else? And who did the first two human’s kids have kids with? Were there conflicts between these first two humans and the other non humans? If there was a genetic bottleneck that caused the population to go down to two “man-like” beings, what caused the bottleneck? Did god create a disease or a natural catastrophe so his grand scheme could be actualized? I hope to get coherent answers since this is a very interesting hypothesis that no serious biologist believes."

      Read the article to which I have already linked you for more.

      "Umm, animals are conscious"

      Not in the apperceptive sense (i.e., not as we experience consciousness, which is what I was careful to say).

      "Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker writes, “No feature of consciousness has ever been discovered that does not depend 100% on neurophysiology. Stimulate the brain with chemicals or an electrical current, and the person’s experience changes; let a person’s experience vary, and you can measure the changes in chemistry or electrophysiology. When a brain is damaged, the person’s mental life is diminished accordingly, and when the brain’s activity ceases, the mind goes out of existence.” "

      This is a classic fallacy. Notice that correlation doesn't license the inference to causal relation (unless one, in Humean fashion, just thinks that causal relations are nothing other than correlations). Steven Pinker has been called on this for that quote more times than I can count.

      "Why? God is already demanding, incomprehensibly jealous beyond reason, & that means he’s also insecure that he might not be getting the attention he wants. He’s capricious, sometimes indifferent, sometimes hateful (Psalm 5:5, Psalm 11:5, Lev. 20:23, Prov. 6:16-19), and sometimes loving, all temporal tantrums that seem very human (and immature) to me. So what if he has no physical body? This can be best explained I feel because he doesn’t exist. But the god of the bible is just about as anthropomorphic as many other invented gods that litter history’s pages. I mean for crying out loud, you believe Jesus was god and he was an actual human being!"

      Recall that Theistic Evolution is not necessarily coextensive with Christian Theism. It sounds to me like your problem is that you confuse theistic evolution with Christian Theism. Now, I don't see any antinomy between Christian Theism and Evolution either, so I'm happy to go along with you here and clear up difficulties you think exist in a Christian affirming evolution - however, let's try to be clear when we think through these issues together. Certainly nothing you have said touches theistic evolution. Moreover, it doesn't touch Catholic Theology either, since Catholic Theology normatively states that anthropomorphic language in the Bible is predicated of God metaphorically - it isn't even predicated analogously, it's predicated metaphorically. Now, it's appropriate metaphor, and I think all these claims make good sense. For instance, the claim that God is jealous is really the claim that God, for our good rather than his good, desires that we love him - since that is the end for which we exist (the telos of our nature). It is unhealthy for us, therefore, to fall short of that. God is jealous precisely so far as he loves us, and because he does he wants the best for us, and the best for us consists in our living with a joyful awareness and acceptance of Him for which we were made to love. He doesn't require or desire that love because he is lacking in anything, but rather he created us out of his over-abundant love in order that we might participate in the mystery of the divine life of the trinity. That's all theology 101 stuff.

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    2. "When it comes to Adam & Eve’s historicity and the genetic bottleneck it must have occur, it’s funny that I never hear any mainstream biologists ever mention evidence that’s “potentially compatible with a literal Adam and Eve.” Here’s a study that says human population never went below 1200 people sometime between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. That would’ve occurred waaay after humans originally evolved some 250,000 years ago. So your theory that the soul came in the beginning doesn’t appear compatible with the evidence."

      Sorry, I've tried to make heads or tails of this argument, but I can't. Could you reiterate this argument, preferably in the form of premises leading to a conclusion? Thanks.

      "6. “you seem to be missing the point that what defines a human being is a composite of a (an evolved) body and an unevolved soul.”
      No I don’t like that definition because it is not compatible with standard evolutionary theory. I understand you have your views, that’s fine. All I’m saying is that your views are not compatible with science and are therefore troublesome."

      Again, if you could write out an argument in premises which, in a logically valid way, lead to that conclusion, I would appreciate it. It seems to me that no such argument exists, and certainly you haven't obviated it yet.

      "But I’d have to believe also in a god that is sometimes intentionally cruel but nevertheless is still the boss"

      Well, that's not logically entailed is it? In fact, we can show that it isn't logically entailed by imagining a single logically possible world where it isn't true. Perhaps you're uncomfortable with the fall of spiritual beings as a way of promoting the free will defense even before human beings were around to commit original sin. Let's use another example then. Let's say that in the actual world God created, he created free human agents. Let's suppose one of them built a large hadron collider like sciency machine which was able to create a kind of bubble-universe from out of something like a quantum vacuum state (that's definitely sci-fi, but if you have any imagination at all, and you like science, then you should be able to follow). Now, suppose the free agent has the ability to fine tune the parameters of that mini-verse such that the values of it's basic physical constants and quantities are set within the life-permitting range. That universe (or mini-verse) evolves life like ours, and in fact we have evolved in just such a universe/miniverse. Perhaps all the problems of animal suffering and evil in the world are due, then, to the choices of one human or human-like free agent who couldn't care less that he has caused suffering. Would God be the one responsible for the suffering in the universe we observe then? No, clearly not, since God has only allowed that suffering to come by way of free agents acting freely immorally. God wouldn't have to be intentionally cruel. Do you see the point? The point is that you can't go around making these broad-brush-stroke statements about hidden or implicit entailments like this and expect to be taken seriously by any halfway decent philosophers. You have to exercise more rigor and diligence in thinking through these issues with me if you want to learn anything, even if you think you'll only be learning something 'about' my views.

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    3. For the record, I am enjoying this discussion, but I do have to note that your arrogance can be off-putting, whether intentional or not. For instance, notice you say "With these question my goal is to get theistic evolutionists like you to seriously think about what it is you believe and be entertained at what ideas you come up with to explain what many of us naturalists know is simply not compatible with the evidence." Notice that by saying that the naturalists like yourself 'know' that there is some incompatibility (which, I pause to remind you, you haven't spelled out as of yet) you are implicitly saying that you know you're right about both naturalism and the incompatibility right off the bat. Now, I'm a Theist who believes he knows that Theism is true, and a Christian who believes he knows that Catholicism is true, but I don't engage you in discussion adopting a van Tillian presuppositionalist prejudice, do I? No. I adopt an attitude of open-mindedness and dialectical charity. I try to interpret your arguments in the most charitable way, and then try to respectfully give a response to them.

      Moreover, finally, on this point it seems very clear to me that no naturalist knows there is an incompatibility between evolution and Theism, or evolution and Christianity. I invite you, again, to try to put into a logically coherent and compelling argument, with premises and a conclusion, any line of reasoning which concludes thus.

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    4. I love your detailed responses man I really do. Sorry about being so arrogant at times. From my perspective as a naturalist it’s just very hard for me to keep a straight face when I hear educated adults believe in things I stopped believing when I was a kid. But we’re not here to trade insults but have an intellectual debate. So I mean no offense to you personally.

      First, Craig never addresses the objections I’m raising here so he’s irrelevant other than that he admits higher primates have third level pain awareness, and if primates do, certainly our hominid ancestors and cousins did too.

      “There's no logically possible world in which evolution is true and in which there exist organisms with subsistent rational souls which didn't evolve?”

      I’m not terribly concerned about logically possible worlds. I’m concerned about the actual world. But no, I don’t think there’s a logically possible world where all the life gradually evolves in a process that requires suffering that isn’t logically necessary for some adequately compensating good and where a wholly good god also exists. It would make all animal and human suffering a means to an end (that the animals don’t get to have) and that just would make god a mere utilitarian.

      “let's say that chimps, gorillas and other closely related species had souls which were subsistent. Let's suppose God compensated them in heaven. Would that be resolve the paradox - and is that logically compatible with Theistic Evolution? Clearly it would.”

      But that’s not the world we live in, unless you believe every animal is going to go to a heaven where they can be happy forever. All I need to show is that there is one world – the actual world – where gratuitous animal suffering exists and is not compatible with a wholly good god. That’s basically what my blog post was about. If this world exists, god as he is traditionally known, cannot exist.

      You need to explain how conscious animal suffering is compatible with a wholly good and perfectly just god without resorting to hypothetical world scenarios; you need to explain it in this world, the actual world.

      “However, consciousness as we experience it is apperceptive, and cannot be produced by an evolutionary process in principle.”

      This is a bold statement. Many naturalists like me believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the physical brain. Take away the brain, you take away the consciousness. Damage the brain, and you damage/affect the consciousness. This is basically property dualism. Descartes essentially thought animals were machines, with not even second level pain awareness, so I’m hesitant to adopt his ideas seriously. His language test I don’t think pans out because other non-human hominids like Neanderthals had the physical and genetic ability for speech & language, and it evolved. (See below)

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    5. “He wasn't a moral agent, he didn't have language, he wasn't rational, he was smarter than a Neanderthal - full human beings by definition could not have evolved any other way. If they evolved, and they have a subsistent rational soul, then this is how it happened.”

      I asked if this man-like being was moral in any way, you seem to be saying no, he had no moral sense what so ever. Well then how did he evolve to get to that point of being “man-like” if he wasn’t moral at all? We’re social beings, all social beings have a basic behavioral code or “moral” aspect at least to a certain degree. It’s funny you should say he didn’t have language but was smarter than a Neanderthal, because we have evidence that Neanderthals may have had language. After sequencing Neanderthal DNA, we’ve learned they had the FOXP2 gene which is critical for language. "From the point of this gene, there is no reason to think that Neandertals did not have language as we do," says Planck Institute geneticist Johannes Krause. Also, their throats were physically capable of speech, like humans. The scientists say that the FOXP2 gene that Neanderthals and humans both share (that chimps don’t fully have) must have evolved before humans and Neanderthals split more than 300,000 years ago.

      So our proto-human ancestors had the physical and genetic ability to speak at least 300,000 years ago before we were even recognizably human. So your theory of the man-like being not having any language or morality doesn’t pan out. Since our language ability is dependent on the FOXP2 gene (people with defective FOXP2 genes have trouble speaking) it’s a genetic mutation that evolution selected for its survival benefits, there’s no need to invoke a god breathing a soul into a man-like being to allow him to acquire language. Evolution by natural selection can do it on its own. See the article below:

      http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cave-speak-did-neandertal

      If language can evolve, I see no reason why consciousness couldn’t either. Clearly, being conscious of your environment would give you a survival advantage, and the higher and more accurate the perception, the greater the advantage. We see in nature many levels of consciousness from extremely rudimentary forms that fish, amphibians and reptiles have, to higher levels that birds and mammals have. The higher up on the evolutionary scale you go, the more sophisticated the consciousness becomes, exactly what you’d expect if it had evolved.

      ***Now when it comes to linking articles, please at least explain or summarize the gist of it for me. I don’t have time to read 30 pages of information to get a few paragraphs that are relevant to me.

      “Read the article to which I have already linked you for more”

      Which one?

      "You’re insisting homo sapiens literally appeared overnight"
      “Clearly I'm not.”

      Um, I think you are. You wrote “I'm suggesting, therefore, that the subsistent rational soul was created by God immediately and that this is what animated the first man and the first woman, who were homosapien organisms.” You seem to be making the case that when god breathed the soul and made the first full “human”, it happened at one moment. When I said “overnight” I meant happening at one moment. Am I wrong at interpreting your views?

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    6. “Not in the apperceptive sense (i.e., not as we experience consciousness, which is what I was careful to say).”

      I’ve never tried to make the case that animals have the same exact level of cognition as humans do. Clearly human minds perceive deeper. I don’t have to show that animal cognition is equal to that of human’s; I just have to show that animals can consciously suffer and be aware of their suffering. But, if you define apperceptive as, “able to relate new percepts to past experience” then clearly higher primates are apperceptive. They can recognize themselves in mirrors (something human toddlers can’t do), they can empathize with another being’s suffering. This would also be true of hominids and other “man-like” beings that didn’t have souls.

      Check out de Waal, F.B.M. & Aureli, F. (1996). Consolation, reconciliation, and a possible cognitive difference between macaques and chimpanzees. In A.E. Russon, K.A. Bard, and S.T. Parker (Eds.), Reaching into thought: The minds of the great apes (pp. 80-110).

      Or check out his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals.html

      “This is a classic fallacy. Notice that correlation doesn't license the inference to causal relation (unless one, in Humean fashion, just thinks that causal relations are nothing other than correlations). Steven Pinker has been called on this for that quote more times than I can count.”

      So you don’t think that damage to the physical brain that appears to negatively affect someone’s mental abilities is a causal relation but is instead a mere correlation whereby it’s not evident that the physical cause resulted in the mental effect? So for example, I smash a baby in the head and it becomes brain dead. No one observing this can infer that me smashing the baby’s head has a direct causal relation with the baby being brain dead? How does this work under your view?

      “Recall that Theistic Evolution is not necessarily coextensive with Christian Theism. It sounds to me like your problem is that you confuse theistic evolution with Christian Theism.”

      The point I made about god’s anthropomorphic nature had little to do with theistic evolution. I was merely responding to your challenge: “I would challenge you to find any way in which it could be less anthropomorphic than it is.”

      “For instance, the claim that God is jealous is really the claim that God, for our good rather than his good, desires that we love him - since that is the end for which we exist (the telos of our nature). It is unhealthy for us, therefore, to fall short of that.”

      Do you literally mean it’s unhealthy for us in this world? Because as you can recall, belief in god does not necessary help one physically or even mentally. And belief in a false god could benefit a person just as well. Many Mormons are extremely happy people. I know. There’s a Mormon missionary center a half-mile from where I live and I’ve encountered them. They’re extremely jovial people. They believe in a physical god who lives on a planet somewhere no scientist can confirm exists, so it’s clearly a false god. But that doesn’t stop them from being happy. Nor does it stop Muslims, Sikhs and polytheists from being happy as a result of their faith in a false god.

      Jealousy is a human emotion (actually animals have it too) and it is a negative emotion. Besides, I also said god is capricious, indifferent, hateful and sometimes loving. Those would be the traits you’d expect of a god made in man’s image, as are pretty much all other descriptions of all other gods.

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    7. “he created us out of his over-abundant love in order that we might participate in the mystery of the divine life of the trinity.”

      Using the evolutionary process that guarantees immense gratuitous suffering and cruelty. Shouldn’t we be paying our respects to the millions of species that had to suffer and die just so that we could evolve? I’m well aware of the “theology 101” stuff, I personally think it’s rubbish.

      “Sorry, I've tried to make heads or tails of this argument, but I can't. Could you reiterate this argument, preferably in the form of premises leading to a conclusion? Thanks.”

      I generally don’t do syllogisms and from what I wrote it’s pretty clear to me. The things you are pretty much forced to believe in, as per your Christian faith, are not supported by the evidence, and actually stand in contrast to much of it evidence. If we have no evidence for Adam & Eve actually existing, how do you explain original sin, which your responses to my challenges depend on?

      “Again, if you could write out an argument in premises which, in a logically valid way, lead to that conclusion, I would appreciate it. It seems to me that no such argument exists, and certainly you haven't obviated it yet.”

      I’m borrowing an argument here from an atheistic philosopher on how the existence of gratuitous uncompensated natural evil and suffering shows an all-good god cannot exist. Remember, this argument work under the presumption that heaven compensates the suffering endured in this world.

      1. If there were an all-powerful and all-good god, there would not be any natural evil in the world unless that evil is logically necessary for some adequately compensating good.
      2. There is some natural evil in the world and some of that evil is not logically necessary for any adequately compensating good.
      3. Therefore, there can’t be a god that is all powerful and all good (which the Christian god must be).

      Premise two is what I’m defending here, that natural evil – like conscious animal suffering which is not compensated in any way is what god created or at the very least, allowed to happen. He could stop it, but chooses not to. Since evolution requires suffering, why did god choose evolution to create man instead of another method involving less suffering especially to animals?

      On god’s cruelty:

      “In fact, we can show that it isn't logically entailed by imagining a single logically possible world where it isn't true.”

      The other logically possible world must not contain evolution since it requires suffering. And no, your argument doesn’t work. All we need to do is show one world that contains that which an all-good god is not compatible with and it destroys god in all possible worlds since god must exist in all possible worlds. That world is the actual world.

      “Perhaps you're uncomfortable with the fall of spiritual beings as a way of promoting the free will defense even before human beings were around to commit original sin.”

      Yeah, because it’s not backed up by a shred of evidence. And the whole idea that an angel failing to accept his vocations from god resulting in hundreds of millions of years of animal and human suffering is self evidently absurd as an explanation – at least to me it is.

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    8. “Let's say that in the actual world God created, he created free human agents. Let's suppose one of them built a large hadron collider like sciency machine which was able to create a kind of bubble-universe from out of something like a quantum vacuum state (that's definitely sci-fi, but if you have any imagination at all, and you like science, then you should be able to follow). Now, suppose the free agent has the ability to fine tune the parameters of that mini-verse such that the values of it's basic physical constants and quantities are set within the life-permitting range. That universe (or mini-verse) evolves life like ours, and in fact we have evolved in just such a universe/miniverse. Perhaps all the problems of animal suffering and evil in the world are due, then, to the choices of one human or human-like free agent who couldn't care less that he has caused suffering. Would God be the one responsible for the suffering in the universe we observe then? No, clearly not, since God has only allowed that suffering to come by way of free agents acting freely immorally. God wouldn't have to be intentionally cruel. Do you see the point?”

      What a hypothetical. So the human free agent creates a universe and in that universe beings evolve and suffer. Ok. Is the suffering in that bubble universe caused by a human in that universe, or is it created by the human that created the universe? I’m not sure on that point. But basically, the idea that a single person can sin, and everyone and every animal can suffer as a result of that is a perversion of justice. We don’t punish entire races for the act of one person. We don’t punish entire families for the act of one member. We used to, until we progressed and learned how illogical and unjust that was. God hasn’t caught up with that yet.

      “God has only allowed that suffering to come by way of free agents acting freely immorally.”

      That says nothing about natural evils, which is the topic on hand here.

      Natural evils like cancer, cystic fibrosis, smallpox, malaria according to some theistic views have to be designed. God doesn’t merely “allow” them, they don’t naturally exist, god creates them when one man sins. But if you believe that god was going to use evolution from the start to bring about humans, they it logically entails that suffering and disease were always part of the plan since evolution requires it. So would god be responsible for the suffering we see in the world? Hell yes. It is logically possible that he could’ve exempted animals from that suffering; of course, but he wouldn’t then be able to use evolution as a means. He could have punished only the person(s) who sinned. He could have chosen not to punish anyone for an original sin and instead only punish individual willful acts that cause harm. It is obvious from the scientific perspective, that we cannot have a world in which there isn’t suffering especially if there is any kind of notion like free will and an evolutionary process. Feeling pain lets us know danger is present. If we didn’t feel pain, we’d cut ourselves, burn ourselves, and be more likely to die as a result. Evolution determined that being able to sense your environment ensured an organism’s survival. Under naturalism there’s no mystery there, only theism forces us to dwell upon these conundrums.

      “I don't engage you in discussion adopting a van Tillian presuppositionalist prejudice, do I?”

      All of our view are presuppositionalist. You “know” theism is true and what makes me happy (god) and what does not, even though we’ve never met. I’ve experienced this many times with theists and do find it arrogant, but I’m not going to hold your feet to the fire over it since it’s your nature as a very religion person.

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  5. Simple. Scriptures that claim all this bunk about the nature of humanity's difference from animals being that we have souls, was written by the flawed hands of man's understanding of god or the gods. This flawed set of common human beliefs was very humanocentric and inaccurately depicted the nature of life. Therefore, all life has a soul which measures in proportion to the suffering that they are capable of experiencing. And god did not create man, man shaped pre-existing spirits into god or gods. I am not a christian, nor am I any real mainstream religion but I do believe in spirits. I suppose you could call me a theist, but I don't like that term because it feels like a derogatory slur atheists use as an inside insult of religious people.

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    1. Sounds a bit like Mormonism. Mormons believe we were all spirit children first, and then we were given physical bodies here on earth.

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