<<Jim Bell first proposed that the rapid appearance human culture was
evidence -- similar to the rapid appearance of first life and the rapid
appearance of phylla in the Cambrian era -- for God's intervention in
history. >>
That's not what I said. I said the *sudden* appearance of *modern man.* Jim
Foley misinterpreted this as the "rapid development of culture." I went to
great lengths to clarify this. In fact, when you posted an actual quote,
that's what I said. Now, the "rapid development" of human culture is a clue to
the KIND of man which suddenly appeared, but the length of time of the
development is not the issue.
Sudden appearance, for me, is the key.
<<It is fair and proper to say that attempted naturalistic explanations are
still very sketchy. You do well when you cite sound objections to those
attempted naturalistic explanations. But phrases like "cannot be
explained..." (especially given science's track record for explaining the
unexplainable, and given the fact that many scientists DO disagree with
you) tend to shift the focus away from the evidence and create
meta-arguments.>>
Here is why I disagree. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, calls evolution "a
fact." What he means is that, considering all we know, it would be "perverse
to withhold" the judgment that naturalism explains how life arose.
Well, why can't I approach it the other way? When I say "cannot be explained,"
that's exactly what I mean. All we know about how natural systems works makes
it, for me, "perverse" to assume that naturalism must hold the explanation.
Another way to put it: Why must the PRESUMED explanation be NATURAL, until
proven otherwise? This is simply an a priori judgment, not based on anything
in the facts that I can see.
So not allowing my phraseology is, it seems to me, not playing fair.
This is Phil Johnson's main point in RITB, one I absolutely agree with:
"That life evolved by a combination of chance and necessity is axiomatic for
naturalistic science and *requires no proof.* Science does not need a good
theory (that is, a theory genuinely backed by empirical testing) to defeat
creationism (theistic realism). *The battle has been won in the definitions,
before the empirical testing even gets started.*" [pg. 107, emphasis added]
Returning now to the sudden appearance of man, I'd like to quote Walker Percy,
who Jim Foley thankfully led me back to. Percy is probably a TE, as the
following passage indicates. I leave aside that issue, however, to focus on
two things: man's *sudden appearance* (as it relates to my "exploding
evidence" theory):
****
<<This capacity for language seems to be, in the evolutionary scale, a
relatively recent, sudden, and explosive development. A few years ago, it was
thought to have begun to happen with Homo erectus perhaps a million years ago.
Now, as Julian Jaynes at Princeton, among others, believes, it appears to have
occurred in Neanderthal man as recently as the fourth glaciation, which lasted
from about 75,000 to 35,000 years ago. During this same period, especially
around 40,000 years ago, there occurred an explosive increase in the use and
variety of new tools. The human brain increased in weight about fifty-four
percent, much of this increas occurring in the cortex, especially in those
areas around the Sylvan fissure implicated in the perception and production of
speech. There are new structures, not present or else extremely rudimentary in
even the highest apes. Moreover, recent experiments have shown that if one
destroys this cortical region in other primates, it has no effect on
vocalization, which is mediated not by a cortical but rather by the limibic
system.
What does this mean? It means, for one thing, that there occurred in the
evolution of man an extraordinary and *unprecedented* event which in the scale
of evolutionary time was as sudden as biblical creation and whose consequences
we are just beginning to explore. A fifty-four percent increase in brain
weight in a few thousand years is, evolutionarily speaking, almost an
instantaneous event. Anatomically speaking, it is perhaps not too much to say
that this spectacular quantum jump is what made man human.
What is important to notice is that this change is not merely yet another
evolutionary adaptation or adventure, however extraordinary. Man is not merely
another organism which has learned to utter and understand sounds. Langauge is
apparently an all-or-none threshold. As the linguist Edward Sapir said, there
is no such thing as a primitive language. Language is unlike bird's flight.
Some birds are superb fliers; others are lousy. But every normal human has the
capcity for uttering and understanding an infinite number of sentences in his
language, no matter what the language is....What I am saying, along with
Pierce, Langer, Cassirer and Chomsky, is that once man has crossed the
threshold of language and the use of other symbols, he literally lives in a
new and different world.>> [Walker Percy, "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" in
Sign Posts in a Strange Land, pgs. 118-119, emphasis added]
****
Man appeared in "a new and different world" SUDDENLY, EXPLOSIVELY. And, as
Percy notes, this was UNPRECEDENTED.
That's what we have to deal with. And that is exactly how the formation of the
animal phyla, and the cosmos itself, arrive. Each of these origins resists
naturalistic pathways. So I don't have any problem saying naturalism "cannot
explain" them.
Jim