[asa] Re: [asa] Rejoinder 7E from Timaeus – to Gregory Arago

While the thought of Teilhard de Chardin isn't simply an updated Bergsonian
theory, it has some Bergsonian influences.

Shalom
George
http://home.neo.rr.com/scitheologyglm

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu>
To: <asa@lists.calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 10:14 AM
Subject: [asa] Rejoinder 7E from Timaeus – to Gregory Arago

> Timaeus had forgotten to reply to Gregory, and thus he sent me this last
> evening.
>
> He notes that Henri Bergson "did not accept a wholly mechanical model of
> living nature, whereas it seems that all three of the camps in our current
> debate do. I do not know what an updated Bergsonian evolutionary theory
> would look like, but if someone should be able to pull it off, I would
> read it with great attention."
>
> My comment: I don't know whether there is any such thing out there today
> (an updated Bergsonian theory), but I can say that Bergson was very
> influential on at least one of the leading science/theology writers of the
> period between the world wars--I mean Arthur Holly Compton. You would be
> very interested, Timaeus, in Compton's Terry Lectures, "The Freedom of
> Man," (given 1931, pub 1935). I don't recall whether Bergson is even
> directly mentioned in that book, but work I've been doing on Compton (as
> yet unpublished) reveals that Bergson was probably the single most
> important influence on Compton's theology of nature, elements of which are
> expressed in that book.
>
> Ted
>
> *************
>
> To Gregory Arago:
>
> I apologize for short-changing you by only replying once so far, and only
> briefly, to your many posts. The reason that I have not replied to you
> often is twofold: (1) Often, though you have referred your comments to my
> discussion, you have been addressing or challenging others, e.g., George
> Murphy, so I have let your main addressee carry the conversation; (2)
> Often your comments are so close to mine in spirit that I cannot think of
> anything to say other than “I agree”, or “Good point!”
>
> Nonetheless, I have found your replies interesting and thoughtful, though
> sometimes a little hectic in style and therefore a bit hard to follow.
>
> I will try to comment briefly on a few points:
>
> On Oct. 2, you wrote:
>
> “Timaeus wrote: “Drop the grand claims of self-sufficiency for the
> Darwinian mechanism, to make room for another cause, on another level of
> causation: intelligent design.”
> In reply, I implore Timaeus: Drop the claims of bottom-up causation
> represented by such examples of Mt. Rushmore, Easter Island, a mousetrap
> and the ‘Welcome to Victoria’ floral arrangement (Meyer’s fav); these
> things have nothing other than analogy to do with ‘intelligent design’
> being proposed in ‘biology!’ The conception of ‘intelligent cause’ in
> IDM-ID is not merely of an intelligence,’ it is of a mysterious
> (extra-earthly or non-earthly) intelligence (i.e. another level of
> causation) that is not within ‘science’s’ domain to study.”
>
> Mt. Rushmore is not bottom-up causation, but top-down causation, as is all
> “design” causation. Of course, that is not to deny that two levels of
> explanation can be simultaneously true. The lights on a neon sign reading
> “Eat at Joe’s” are due BOTH to impersonal natural causes (the laws of
> electricity, causing mindless electrons to flow necessarily through the
> neon-filled letters), AND to design (neither the meaningful English
> sentence nor the layout of the electrical parts would exist without
> intelligence). The NCSE people insist that only “bottom-up” causation
> exists in nature, or at least that science is only allowed to study
> “bottom-up” causation in nature. I maintain that this is irrational, and
> that a fully rational approach to causation should be more important in
> science than “methodological naturalism”. That is, I prefer “inference to
> the best explanation”, which allows for multiple levels of causation in
> science. But then, as my name i!
>
> ndicates, I am partial to ancient philosophy, which possessed such
> subtlety, in contrast to much modern philosophy of the period running from
> Bacon through to Darwin. And on your last sentence, while science cannot
> study the Creator (or the Demiurge or the Prime Mover) directly, it can
> study the effects of the same directly.
>
> You criticize me, and ID, for being too mechanical in the conception of
> nature. I think this is a potentially valuable criticism. I think that
> there are two reasons why ID has leaned strongly towards mechanism: (1)
> There are many features of biological systems which do in fact seem to be
> explicable wholly in mechanical terms; (2) Mechanical language guarantees
> that ID will not be accused of importing “spiritual” or “supernatural”
> causation into science. If you regard the flagellum as a very complex,
> well-engineered machine, which works entirely by acid chemistry and the
> laws of physics, you cannot be faulted descriptively or accused of
> importing theology, yet you can still work in the notion of design. But I
> agree that the mechanical understanding of nature leaves many problems,
> not to mention religious problems. For example, if we could use
> biochemistry to create a human being from scratch, with all the working
> biochemical parts, would that human being have a !
>
> soul? Is soul nothing other than the working arrangement of the parts of
> the whole? ID has no answer to this, and ID Christians do not seem to me
> to have publically addressed it. (However, I have privately spoken to one
> Christian ID biologist who has criticized ID on this point.) I have
> mentioned in passing Henri Bergson, whose evolutionary thought has been
> scorned as “unscientific” by atheist-Darwinists and TE-Darwinists alike.
> Yet Bergson, whatever his faults, at least did not accept a wholly
> mechanical model of living nature, whereas it seems that all three of the
> camps in our current debate do. I do not know what an updated Bergsonian
> evolutionary theory would look like, but if someone should be able to pull
> it off, I would read it with great attention.
>
> On Oct. 7 you asked about immanence/transcendence in relation to ID and
> TE. There is not a one-to-one correspondence in the case of ID. (I can’t
> speak for TE.) ID is compatible with either the immanence or the
> transcendence of the designer. This is due to the very simple fact that
> ID cannot say anything about the designer that does not follow directly
> from the design itself. If I am in an airplane and look down on a
> football field at night, and see a huge display of lights spelling out the
> name of the football team, I can tell that the spelling of the name was
> designed, and not by accident, but from that distance I cannot see whether
> someone has laid out a bunch of torches in a letter pattern
> (“transcendent” designer), or whether a group of people walking about
> with torches have voluntarily arranged themselves into the letters of the
> name (“immanent” designer). All I can be sure about is that the word
> “Minnesota Vikings” did not occur due to the accidenta!
>
> l blowing by a windstorm of torchstands into a letter pattern, followed by
> the accidental lighting of every one of the torches through conditions of
> atmospheric dryness plus static electricity.
>
> On Oct. 21st you ask me to take up a “challenge” regarding human-made
> versus non-human-made, but I’m simply not sure what the challenge is. Are
> you talking about the distinction between natural and artificial objects?
> If so, I agree that there is a distinction between natural and artificial
> objects, and never denied it. But I don’t get the point in relation to ID
> or TE. Is the point that the design inference only works for artificial
> objects, and doesn’t work for living systems? That wouldn’t be sound as
> an a priori declaration. One could hold that living systems are quite
> different from artificial objects in some respects, but not in all
> respects. For example, living things come into existence via generation
> rather than manufacture, but the model which governs the generation may be
> a designed model (ID), rather than an accidentally produced one
> (Darwinism). But possibly I just don’t understand what you are driving
> at.
>
> As for your interest in continental philosophy, I agree with you that much
> of the North American discussion about evolution is based on heavily
> Anglo-American understandings of nature, which go back ultimately to the
> mechanistic thinking found in Hobbes and Descartes. The complete contempt
> for Bergson in Anglo-American circles is noteworthy, for example. His
> view of life is derided as “unscientific”, or “mystical” or the like, and
> thus incompatible with modern science (understood as materialism and
> mechanism). And of course Greek science is considered to be utterly
> unworthy of consideration (even though modern biology, with its inability
> to finally escape teleological thinking despite its ferocious allegiance
> to materialism, is finally coming to think that maybe Aristotle wasn’t
> such a moron after all). Anglo-American thought generally is Procrustean
> and narrow, focused on materialism and mechanism on the metaphysical side,
> and on the formal correctness of argu!
>
> ments (preferably these days with symbolic logic) on the epistemological
> side. It is the pathetic ghost of what once was the richness of European
> philosophy and theology. And the one thing which North America has been
> taking from Europe over the last 30 years – the line of thought running
> from Heidegger through Derrida and Foucault, which dominates thought in
> the Humanities and Social Sciences in North America now – is the most
> culturally destructive possible borrowing from Europe; it is nothing less
> than the taking of the poisons which have killed Europe into the
> bloodstream of North America. I wish that North American academics would
> pay much more attention to the whole history of European thought, and not
> simply to the trendy nihilism of French imitators of German philosophy.
> On this subject, the Sokal hoax exposed the intellectual vacuousness that
> Anglo-American thought in the Humanities and Social Sciences has sunk to,
> and on the more serious moral-political si!
>
> de of the problem, Allan Bloom’s book, *The Closing of the A!
> merican
> Mind*, is still relevant. And not just TE, but ID and neo-Darwinism, are
> largely oblivious to these larger philosophical and cultural problems.
>
> I see a thin ray of hope, however, when biologists like Sternberg and
> Denton start talking about Platonic forms in biological contexts. It
> means that at least some of the natural scientists are starting to recover
> the philosophical depths of old Europe, even if the humanities scholars
> and social scientists are currently drowning themselves in modern European
> nihilism. It will be the greatest of ironies if the modern scientists
> rather than the modern humanists are responsible for restoring our
> fullness of understanding of the world, but the world is filled with
> ironies these days.
>
>
>
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Received on Wed Oct 22 10:56:53 2008