Man, the Hairless Ape

What makes humans different than non-human animals? We clearly have much in common with the great apes; I’ll use them as a counterpoint.

There’s definitely evidence that apes can make fairly long term plans, but humans invest in 401(k)s, train years for the olympics, etc. This is a difference in degree and not kind, just like many other ape/human differences. It makes me wonder, are humans just supercharged simians? Human exceptionalism would demand a difference in kind.

There are a few “difference in kind” attributes of humans of which I’m aware: the ability to purposefully teach, to direct the development of the surrounding environment, and many more. All the examples which come to mind seem to relate to imagining a certain end and controlling variables in order to bring it about. This seems to be the key trait which the great apes lack.

So does this mean that manipulation in service of imagination (let’s call it imagulation!) is the great delineator? Do all ideas of human exceptionalism hinge on this ability?

It’s interesting to think on how this could relate to the idea of man being created in God’s image. Certainly “imagulation” is something deeply associated with God. I really am trying to give evolution a fair shake, to try and avoid bias in my exploration of naturalistic origin explanations, but these sorts of observations make it very difficult. I can easily understand an imagulating creator making imagulating beings, but environmentally-directed mutations don’t seem to be a likely imparter of such an ability. Maybe someone can explain? Help!

UPDATE 5/25/08: I recently came across this page on the Great Ape trust website. None of the videos surprised me very much, as they all seemed like behavior I’d seen before and could easily label as behavioral conditioning. All the videos, that is, until I saw the “novel sentences” video where a bonobo, Kanzi, displays behavior that I could only describe as “imagulating”! I’m officially placing an extra tally mark in the “Evolution” column.

This actually quite surprised and delighted me; what an amazing thing to see! Philosophically however, I’m not quite sure how to group the “differences in kind” between great apes and humans anymore. If anyone out there has an idea as to what the through-line may be, I’d be excited to hear it.

God and Economics

This post discusses one of Ludwig von Mises’s key insights which formed the basis for the differentiating factor of the Austrian school of economics.  It’s an interesting article, and I couldn’t help but notice many parallels between Mises’s arguments and those of theists.

I found it particularly interesting that Karl Popper was referenced.  I’ve found his “Black Swan” criticism of certainty within deductive empiricism to be a helpful illustration of how “random hypothesis” procedures can’t be transferred to explorations about morality, logic and other universal concepts.  One can never reach a useful theory through only trial and error; one must begin with some reasonable a priori principles.  This line of reasoning can be employed to show the weaknesses of naturalistic explanations of uniquely human traits; nature has only trial and error mechanisms, and thus the complexity and harmony of human intelligence, aesthetic appreciation and morality aren’t explained by it.

The recent subprime loan crisis in the U.S. provides an interesting economic anecdote for this principal.  Some of the brightest mathematical minds of our day were employed by investment banks to model behaviors of borrowers, and their models showed that a strong return with an acceptable amount of risk could be reached via certain “packaged” combinations of high quality and low quality loans.  These models were pimp-slapped by reality when defaults on loans reached levels far outside of the historical norms used as a given, and the economic carnage is expected to reach into trillions of dollars.

Here’s hoping we can find a way to limit the intellectual carnage caused by similar ill-advised confidence in empiricism in theistic/atheistic discussions.

Humanity: Kickin’ mammal butt, taking names

I’ve been thinking: if evolution is true, why is it that humans are so far advanced past even the most advanced mammals in intelligence?  There’s no great buildings erected by simians, or photorealistic art created by whales, or exponentially increasing medicinal breakthroughs helmed by dogs.  If all mammals share a common ancestor, we would expect to see a roughly similar level of intelligence development among them all.  There are certainly some non-human mammals who are smarter than others, but nowhere near the order of magnitude between humans and the most advanced mammalians.

One could argue that a whale has hugely more advanced intelligence than a paramecium, but I don’t think it’s a fair comparison.  A paramecium hardly has resources for intelligence, but whale and elephant brains are huge compared to ours.  Many scientists believe brain size can be a decently accurate indicator of intelligence, so what’s up with these lazy beasts?

One could also argue that our fine motor skills allow us to better express our intelligence, but it wouldn’t be too hard for an elephant to utilize their trunks to make intelligible markings on the ground indicating a language of some sort, or markings indicating abstract mathematical reasoning.  Could it be that these creatures are so beyond us that we just don’t comprehend the subtleties of their grand superiority?  I doubt it; I’m no Einstein by any stretch of the imagination, but I can appreciate his transcendent intelligence.

Any time I try to put on an evolutionary perspective, I find myself thinking: if this is true, why do I perceive beauty in a sunset, or feel gratitude, or desire meaning and autonomy?  You won’t see much discussion of these sorts of questions in Talk Origins and similar evolution apology sites.  I wonder why?

Who Made God?

I often observe people bringing out the “who made God” question, so let me just throw this out:

The Kalam Cosmological Argument clearly explains how it is that the creative force behind the universe needs no creator but the universe does, and if someone claims they’ve found a way to disprove this argument, you can be practically assured they don’t truly understand it.

Is it a cop-out to say the physical world needs a cause, but the same doesn’t apply to the creative force behind it? Well, no: the physical world is such that to claim it’s origin is inherent within itself is to claim actual infinite regresses can physically exist, which is illogical, even if one posits cyclical universes. Even quantum virtual particles, the popular basis for the atheist version of “creatio ex nihilo”, are effects that require prior causation. It’s clear that the cause of the universe must not be bound by the universe’s temporal and causative constraints, and thus must exist “outside” of it, perhaps in another dimension of some sort. Far from being a dodge or an argument from convenience, it’s simply the only logical assumption (at this point in human knowledge).

That this creative force is likely the Judeo-Christian God is fodder for a different post, but the Kalam Cosmological Argument link does touch on certain reasons as to why this is probable.

Who made God? That’s like asking what the color blue smells like, or how many married bachelor’s are there, or from where do atheists derive their objective morality.

The Purpose-Driven Strife

I’ve been thinking much lately about how Naturalism could possibly account for humanity’s well-documented desire for purpose. I think this topic is pretty central to the tension between Naturalists and Theists, so it makes sense that discussion about meaning between the two camps tends to get ugly fast. I’ll try to make this post as open as possible considering it comes from a Theist.

I assume most Naturalists would begin their argument from the point of view of evolutionary adaptation, perhaps even describing this desire for purpose as a spandrel. In trying to imagine what environmental factors could cause a species to develop an overwhelming desire for a meaningful existence, though, I’m pretty lost.

Perhaps this desire for meaning could possibly be related to an instinctual drive to continue humanity’s gene pool, in a “selfish gene” (Richard Dawkins) sort of way. In seeking meaning, humans desire their everyday efforts to contribute to something greater than and outside of themselves, which may be an expression of their genes attempting to gain maximum reproduction. This doesn’t seem quite resonant with experience, though, in that there are manifold instances of human desire for purpose being satisfied by situations not only quite harmful to gene replication, i.e. war, setting records in extreme sports, etc., but even utterly neutral to said replication, i.e. Dawkins himself saying he finds meaning in feeling “privileged to be allowed to understand why the world exists”.

There are some who say it’s futile to seek purpose in life since there really is none beyond self-created existential purpose. However, this flies in the face of the beliefs and actions of such a great majority of history that it seems to me ignorant or prejudiced. Meaning seems to be one of the major driving forces of human history, and this doesn’t make much sense in a Naturalistic world.

Theists, however, can speak of purpose quite comfortably. It’s a cornerstone of their beliefs, and is woven throughout much of their arguments.

The question comes down to, as usual, to what does the available evidence point? And as usual, I’m pretty convinced the experiential arrow points to Theism, but I’m open to other ideas.

Keep them coming!

Open Letter to Suby

The following is in reaction to a commenter on my last post:

Suby, I first off must say your lack of vitriol is refreshing. Thanks.

You mention the Bible, so I’ll speak specifically of Christianity.

I’ll readily admit that most Christians have conclusions created before they see evidence. I’d add that most atheists, scientists, researchers, etc., also do this. Welcome to the true scientific method, which is: conjecture, refutation, conjecture, refutation…

Note that Christians have specific conjectures that are generally systematic; there’s not a great preponderance who claim that God is evil, or that green men run around rooms when no one’s looking. To say so is to show an ignorance (which is commonplace) of the systematic, logic-based quality of Christianity. Logic doesn’t make something true, but Christianity does have concrete barriers of possibility, so it doesn’t have the mark of utter randomness one sees in, say, Greek mythology.

You spoke of “stringent measures” taken by scientists, but you seem to have more faith in the lack of human fallibility than do other scientists and atheists. For instance, Karl Popper, atheist scientist, said “All scientific statements are hypotheses, or guesses, or conjectures, and the vast majority of these conjectures … have turned out to be false. Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement; … our knowledge, our doctrine, is conjectural; … it consists of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths.” Bertrand Russell, the old-school king of atheism himself, said “All inductive arguments in the last resort reduce themselves to the following form: ‘If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true.’ This argument is, of course, formally fallacious. Suppose I were to say: ‘If bread is a stone and stones are nourishing, then this bread will nourish me; now this bread does nourish me; therefore it is a stone, and stones are nourishing.’ If I were to advance such an argument, I should certainly be thought foolish, yet it would not be fundamentally different from the arguments upon which all scientific laws are based.”

All this is not to attack science; I’m simply pointing out that faith in the accuracy or completeness of science is just that, faith; it wasn’t that long ago that scientists thought friction was caused by “interlocking asperites” instead of chemical bonding (and that’ll probably be proven false also). My recommendation is to avoid Scientism, and to embrace true knowledge wherever it may be found and whatever ramifications it may have.

Regarding the Bible, with all due respect, you mention many “facts” that are false. For instance, you say that it has been “changed so many times” as if it has been a linear translation, but in actuality, most objective scholars are very impressed with the level of accuracy between modern translations and the earliest manuscripts, which are, as you may not know, still the source of modern translations. The common idea of the Bible as a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy is just erroneous.

Regarding Biblical interpretation, again, with as many Christians as there are in the world, there’s a significantly narrow range of interpretation that makes up orthodoxy. There’s little evidence of “convenient” interpretation (not that it doesn’t exist, just like there are scientists who conveniently intepret tobacco study data, for instance).

I just googled “atheist errors” and quickly found a site that listed pages and pages of them, but that doesn’t mean they’re accurate. Many religious people slander atheists without a concern for accuracy, just as many people say the Bible is full of contradictions without concern for accuracy. The Bible is a complex book, and requires contextual reading for an accurate understanding. If you can show me any true contradictions, I’d love to hear about them, I’ve been looking for one for about ten years now.

My main point is that atheists often have preconceived conclusions and hold fast to them through faith despite contradictory evidence, and claim a monopoly on truth, yet this is the behavior of which they accuse Christians. Lets all stop pretending that we’re not fallible, stop smearing those who think differently than us as less dedicated to logic and reason, and have real conversations that could lead to profound conclusions to which we would otherwise never come.

I’m open-minded and ready to truly take in the substantive arguments you may have; I hope you feel the same.

James Cameron, Christ’s Body, and Gullibility

James Cameron is coming out with a new documentary in which he claims the body of Jesus Christ has been discovered in an ancient tomb. I find the claim ridiculous. Please note that I critique his claim not because of it’s content, but because of it’s intellectual lameness. If someone presented credible evidence that Jesus Christ did not raise from the dead, that would pretty much cause me to leave the Christian faith. Such has never been presented, though. Anyway:

Cameron claims he has DNA evidence to backup his description of the body as that of Jesus Christ. Pretty obvious problem here: DNA only works as evidence if one has a credible sample with which to compare. Since no sample of Jesus’ DNA was preserved from his time on Earth, what could Cameron possibly be thinking? Probably something along the lines of “people are wowed by science, so I’ll appear more credible if I say I have DNA evidence”.

I have some ocean-front property in Montana to sell, and I have ten scientists with DNA expertise who will vouch for what a great deal it is. In fact, they’ll do so in PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS!! (the gold standard of truth)

UPDATE 2.25.07: It seems that Cameron’s DNA claim is not that the body is that of THE Jesus, but that a “Mary” in the tomb is specifically not related by blood to the body labeled “Jesus” (both incredibly common names). In Dan Brown-esque fashion, he’s apprently pushing a marriage between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. To put this in perspective, imagine someone 2000 years from now discovered side-by-side burial spots labeled George and Barbara. From this and little else, they inferred they had discovered the final resting place of Bush 41 and his wife. Amazing.

Beauty and Evolution

How does one explain beauty if one believes in a materialistic (purely physical) universe? There have been heroic attempts to explain away human physical beauty as nature’s means of selecting the most vigorous agents for replication, but how does one explain the pleasure one feels when looking at a great painting? What possible evolutionary value could that have?

It hasn’t escaped my notice that evolutionists vary rarely speak about aesthetics in terms other than human anatomy and sexuality. You won’t see much ink spilled (or pixels lit) about the evolution of music appreciation. When contemplating aesthetics, Darwin-worshippers tend to get very ponderous and ill-defined, because their theory fails to explain heaping swaths of the human experience.

I would be greatly impressed at anyone who has a plausible materialistic theory for how man came to appreciate non-anatomical beauty. When we look at the things that define man, abstract aesthetics, self-conciousness, forethought, magnanimous selflessness, it seems that something quite key is missing from evolutionary theory.

Perhaps that something is truth.