Quotes: Short and Interesting

Precondition for Science - 2024 November

 

Scientific investigation proceeds because scientists assume for the sake of their research that what they are studying is orderly and reflects some rational purpose. ... In other words, they treat them as if they were engineered, as if they were designed. ... This is the essence of much of scientific investigation today. We treat things as designed so we can understand them. And that's why Intelligent Design is ... a science starter. It's actually the precondition for being able to do science. - John West •••

ID the Future podcast: John West in Turin, Italy: Intelligent Design’s Roots and Fruit : 8:10

 

(Quote context and citations are in the note links).

 

Morality - 2024 October

Unless ultimate reality is moral, we cannot morally condemn it. - CS Lewis

 

Religion [is] toxic when it elevates its theological views and its doctrines above … our need to love and serve one another. [Science is toxic when it does the same with its views and doctrines. There are] rational scientific world views, which … see human beings as disposable pawns in the march of progress. That's wrong as well. - Julian Baggini, humanist •••

From Unbelievable?: Science, faith and the future of humanity Denis Alexander v Julian Baggini : 16:30, lightly edited

Julian Baggini is a humanist, so his observation is significant both for followers of faith and followers of science.

 

Understanding - 2024 July

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. - John von Neumann

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. - Richard Feynman

If you understand [God], it is not God you've understood. (Si comprehendus non est Deus.) - St. Augustine

 

Persistence of being - 2024 April

[Prompt: The Darwinian evolutionist's view is that we arrived at our current identity by an purposeless, unguided process which is just fitness to survive.]

We could say instead that the pattern of reality is persistence of being. If I say that, you are in the religious world again. The idea that survival is something - the idea that beings want to continue to exist, this idea is a religious idea! You have to go into the religious realm to understand the idea that being has a tendency to persist and to perpetuate itself. - Jonathan Pageau •••

Re-enchanting podcast: Re-enchanting just about everything : 10:40

 

Another quote:

In conversation, the atheist wants you to remain in a secular material sphere. They say, give me a proof of God that is equivalent to the proof of this chemical formula. That is a ridiculous idea - you cannot prove the existence of being from its constituents. It’s not possible, and the problem scales all the way up.

The idea, for example, that the UK [country] exists in a scientific way, the way the atheist wants me to prove that God exists, is the same problem. You can’t prove that these giant beings exist, these beings that exist over thousands of years. … You can’t prove that higher beings exist from the basics. For the same reason you can’t do this with God.

The atheist is smug because they think that they got you, but they are missing how reality lays itself out in our experience. - Jonathan Pageau : 16:15

 

Wandering - 2024 Feb

If you don't know where you're going, you'll wind up somewhere else. Not all those who wander are lost. - J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Reverse Engineering

Some see biology as a science no different from chemistry or astronomy or geology. [However], biology is reverse engineering a technology far more advanced than ours. - Brian Miller •••

ID the Future podcast: Evolution’s Demigods: Reviewing the Tour/Cronin Debate : 30:30

 

Scientific Explanations

The great deception of modernism is that the laws of nature explain the world to us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing. - Ludwig Wittgenstein •••

Quoted by John Lennox in a talk on YouTube (5:10). (Original German quote at goodreads.)

See also: Two Kinds of Explanations

 

Dark Matter

Dark matter is the caloric [fluid] of our times. - Stephan Wolfram •••

Dr Brian Keating's Into the Impossible podcast with guest Stephen Wolfram: Now I Understand Quantum Mechanics! : 23:10

Heat seems to flow from hot to cool places in a way that looks like the flowing action of fluids. In early days of studying heat, scientists theorized that heat was an actual fluid called “caloric” and temperature was a measure of its quantity in things. It turns out this model was very wrong. (It was at best an analogy.) Heat actually is a measure of the average physical motion of molecules, and this kinetic energy spreads around as described by (among other things) the second law of thermodynamics.

Similarly, dark matter in the today's standard cosmological model probably is another analogy. There are certain things we have observed which are normally expected to come from gravity, however, we can't see enough matter to make the amount of gravity that would be required. Since gravity comes from matter, the thinking is that these effects should come from another strange and hidden kind of matter - dark matter.

However according to Wolfram, dark matter is likely to be as true as caloric fluid was. What is now called dark matter may instead turn out to be a feature of the microscopic structure of space like how heat turned out to be a feature of the microscopic structure of matter.

 

Antidote - 2023 Dec

If you grow up in a Christian house, it’s a bit like being introduced to the antidote before you know what the poison is. - Milton Jones •••

Unbelievable? podcast: Can Christians do comedy? : 6:50

 

Solutions

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell •••

Sowell, Thomas. A Conflict of Visions. William Morrow & Co, 1987.

The context is about fixing problems in society. There are no perfect solutions, but carefully balanced compromises will bring the most benefit.

 

Science: its power and limits - 2023 Nov

Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts them together to see what they mean. - Jonathan Sacks quoted by John Lennox •••

Science is powerful because it limits the questions it can answer. It cannot give us meaning, and it cannot give us a value. A scientific explanation is rarely if ever a complete explanation. - John Lennox •••

Science DOESN'T Explain What You Think It Does : 20:10, 20:30

Complete explanations include the purpose, which science cannot provide.

 

Relationships

We find our true selves only in relationship. - Jonathan Haidt •••

Podcast: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God

  • The Meaning Crisis: Why we're all religious deep down : 14:20

 

Most Fundamental Theory - 2023 September

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the rise of science is not that the early scientists searched for natural laws, confident that they existed, but that they found them. It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again. - Rodney Stark •••

Quoted from How the West Won (Rodney Stark, 2015) via the article Science, Scripture, and the Image of God

 

Clarity

Contrast is the mother of clarity. - Oz Guinness •••

 

Deep Ideas - 2023 July

More ideas are dependent on a deep idea than the number of [those which] are dependent on a shallow idea. - Jordan B. Peterson •••

From the Jordan B. Peterson podcast EP 376 at 25:02

(Paraphrasing related discussion:)

This is related to the dependency network in the citing of scientific works. Those highly cited [most often referenced] are deeper works than those less cited; they are the deeper fundament. This network of references is a measure of the depth of an idea. Religious axioms are the deepest fundament [because they are most highly referenced].

 

Theory and Purpose

Scientists have learned over the centuries that when a fundamental theoretical impasse is encountered, we do not blame nature. We must blame the theory that fails to account for the observed natural phenomenon. - Stephen J. Iacoboni •••

From the article: Something Is Missing from the Materialist Framework. Quoting a bit more:

[In a materialist framework] all the seemingly designed function in the biosphere is simply a result of randomly generated structures. What is not an illusion ...is the nearly unfathomable complexity of function carried out ...in every living creature since life first arose. No one argues the fact that function is real.

[However, function without context is meaningless.] Purpose is only served when the entire series of [living] molecular events achieves the end, the telos, that it was designed to accomplish: benefit the host.

[Does] function emerge out of randomly generated structures? You might call [it] a mechanical operation, but it is not a function. Function only has meaning when it serves a purpose, and purpose only materializes when it serves a self.

[Regarding materialist theories of the origin of function] Scientists have learned over the centuries that when a fundamental theoretical impasse is encountered, we do not blame nature. We must blame the theory that fails to account for the observed natural phenomenon.

 

Science and Consensus

[The] scientific method depends not on the existence of a mythical consensus but rather on structured scientific debates. If there is a consensus, science challenges it with new hypotheses, experiments, logic, and critical thinking. Ironically, science advances because it believes it has never arrived; consensus is the hallmark of dead science. - Rav Arora & Jayanta Bhattacharya •••

From the article The Illusion of Consensus which talks about pseudo-consensus which was orchestrated around COVID-19 and vaccines.

 

I personally am a solid supporter of vaccines because of the long and clear evidence of benefit that vaccines bring. (I got the COVID-19 jab.) Even so, vaccines are complicated. Although they clearly bring benefit to the population, they also adversely affect a small percentage with complications.

This is simply the truth of medicine and statistical effects - you can have both a good effect on the average person and a bad effect on persons at the statistical edge. It usually cannot be known ahead of time where each person will place in the statistical spread, so we treat the whole group to benefit the group as a whole.

As individuals we accept the treatment because on average we will benefit. We also accept the risk of an adverse result to ourselves because (among other reasons) we KNOW that our community WILL benefit even though some individuals in the community might not.

 

Engineered Body

  1. [Darwinian evolution] requires all the hard problems to already be solved before it can do anything. How do you solve all the hard problems at the beginning? [before evolution can do anything] -Steve Laufmann •••

 

From an ID the Future podcast: The Human Body As a Marvel of Engineering - Episode 1769

The human body is a marvel of engineering. It is made of many systems that are fundamentally interdependent. Human life itself is impossible without multiple systems existing simultaneously and mutually supporting each other. By analysis of this evidence, the mechanism of Darwinian species evolution is impotent to have produced it. Using the lens of engineering however, a better interpretation is that these systems were designed.

Time markers:

  1. 13:20 - Evolution already assumes the existence of life. This is an insurmountable problem scientifically. See also Darwinian Evolution and the Gaps.
  2. 21:20 - Equilibrium is the end result [of nature's selection]. The forces of physics and chemistry are always pushing towards equilibrium [i.e. death]. See also Natural Selection is not an Agent.
  3. 42:20 - See also The Probability of Life.
  1. If there is something going on that is called natural selection, it is not selecting. So to the extent nature can select anything, it will select everything for death. -Steve Laufmann •••

 

From an ID the Future podcast: The Human Body As a Marvel of Engineering - Episode 1769

The human body is a marvel of engineering. It is made of many systems that are fundamentally interdependent. Human life itself is impossible without multiple systems existing simultaneously and mutually supporting each other. By analysis of this evidence, the mechanism of Darwinian species evolution is impotent to have produced it. Using the lens of engineering however, a better interpretation is that these systems were designed.

Time markers:

  1. 13:20 - Evolution already assumes the existence of life. This is an insurmountable problem scientifically. See also Darwinian Evolution and the Gaps.
  2. 21:20 - Equilibrium is the end result [of nature's selection]. The forces of physics and chemistry are always pushing towards equilibrium [i.e. death]. See also Natural Selection is not an Agent.
  3. 42:20 - See also The Probability of Life.
  1. Life is an unknown! We can observe life, we can describe it, but we can’t explain it. … Life certainly appears to be an immaterial quantity. If you kill a cell, but leave all of its parts intact with no physical damage to the cell, you cannot start it again. Life always comes from life; it never comes from non-life. -Steve Laufmann •••

 

From an ID the Future podcast: The Human Body As a Marvel of Engineering - Episode 1769

The human body is a marvel of engineering. It is made of many systems that are fundamentally interdependent. Human life itself is impossible without multiple systems existing simultaneously and mutually supporting each other. By analysis of this evidence, the mechanism of Darwinian species evolution is impotent to have produced it. Using the lens of engineering however, a better interpretation is that these systems were designed.

Time markers:

  1. 13:20 - Evolution already assumes the existence of life. This is an insurmountable problem scientifically. See also Darwinian Evolution and the Gaps.
  2. 21:20 - Equilibrium is the end result [of nature's selection]. The forces of physics and chemistry are always pushing towards equilibrium [i.e. death]. See also Natural Selection is not an Agent.
  3. 42:20 - See also The Probability of Life.

Expert disagreement - 2023 April

When the [scientific] experts disagree, you get to make up your own mind. -Eric Hedin •••

From an ID the Future podcast Eric Hedin on Probing the Limits of Science - Episode 1739 23:40

When scientific experts cannot agree on the correct scientific model then personal choice on the available models is reasonable and acceptable.

 

Word-based

This is a word-based universe [both] scientifically and religiously. … There is more than the material world. - John Lennox •••

From a Unbelievable? podcast Is God Dead? hosted by Justin Brierley and with Dave Rubin. 58:50

Also on the episode:

  • I’m always interested in the phrase "God's dead" because it seems to assume that he was alive once. … [However,] The God I believe in is eternal, and that raises problems for the deadness. - John Lennox 23:00
  • Faith is a step into the light that is evidence-based. - John Lennox 1:12:00

 

False Hypotheses - 2023 February

A false hypothesis is better than none at all for that it is false does no harm at all. But when it fortifies itself, when it is accepted universally and becomes a kind of creed that nobody may doubt, that nobody may investigate, that is the disaster of which centuries suffer. - Goethe •••

"That of course is when science turns into religion" - Phillip E Johnson

Goethe quoted by Phillip E Johnson in a talk about Darwinism on Trial 1:00:16

 

Designed performance - 2023 January

Every cell in our bodies is wildly more sophisticated than anything else humans have ever made. Biology is insanely complex, but never needlessly complex. Everything you find in biology is there for a very specific reason. Nature is an amazing designer and manufacturer. - Ralph DiMeo •••

From a podcast of Mark in the Wild interviewing Ralph DiMeo. 8:30 (lightly edited)

Ralph has built a company that makes some of the best wool outerwear garments you can get. He is infectiously excited by wool. He has a very interesting blog on his website that overlaps product performance with personal life.

Ralph seems to take a standard view of biological origins of wool, but he also has a perspective of it being an engineered material.

 

These two views are an interesting contrast. The standard origins view explains minor biological diversification, but it doesn't provide scientific explanations of origins. It has nothing to say about ultimate origins (of life), and it doesn't explain origins above the level of species. This impotence of the standard view, therefore, stalls biological research since it doesn't support explanations for the complex engineering seen in biology.

Taking a full engineering perspective of biology is actually very different from the standard model. This functional view of biology is now being applied in systems biology and it is a source of dramatic progress in biological research.

Engineered products (all of them) do not come from sources of randomness. Engineered products are designed products because they require foresight.

 

Reading the Bible - 2022 October

A Christian shouldn’t simply think that they must read the Bible. Instead think of what you should get out of the Bible when you read it. - Darren Twa •••

From a Sunday talk.

Continuing:

When you read the Bible, ask yourself, "What does this teach me about the value system of God, and what does it teach me about relationships?"

The Bible is not just a book of theology. Even if it was, just believing correct theology does not lead you to good living or to Christian maturity. Look instead for what will help you understand right values and the application of these values.

 

Consciousness - 2022 September

Your consciousness is the part of you which deals with what is not yet determined. - Jordan Peterson •••

From a Dave Rubin Report interview 48:00 (lightly edited)

Context:

In the morning when you wake up your consciousness emerges - from nothing in some sense. That which you will do is not pre-determined for the day. All those things you do which are habitual and deterministic are unconscious. They have turned into habit and you don’t have conscious control of them.

However, your consciousness is that part of you which deals with what is not yet determined. When you wake up you are concerned with a field of potential in front of you. That field of potential is the future - what could be but what is not yet. As a consequence of the choices that you make guided by your ethical aims, you transform that potential into actuality. You literally do that with your consciousness.

I think that is the reflection of the image of God in man. I think this is put forth in the earliest sections of Genesis because that’s what God does. He is a structure who confronts nothingness with consciousness - the Logos. He extracts out order from potential.

There is the interesting repetition in Genesis of the idea that if you confront potential with truth (the Logos) then the order that you produce is good. This is a really interesting ethical claim. You take this potential, and you interact with it morally. The consequence is that you produce reality, and the reality is good.

Humans are a microcosm of what God did.

 

Other quotes on consciousness

Maturity - 2022 July

It’s very difficult to mature until you have children. The reason it’s hard is because you’re not mature until someone else is more important than you. It’s possible this could happen with someone like your spouse but not like with children. - Jordan Peterson •••

From the Jordan Peterson podcast 13:40

 

about Instagram - 2022 June

I don’t want to waste my life peering into the windows of other peoples lives. - Ayo Tunde •••

 

Information

To learn something, to acquire information, is to rule out possibilities. To understand the information conveyed in a communication is to know what possibilities would be excluded by its truth. - Robert Stalnaker

Information is the realization of one possibility to the exclusion of others within a reference class of possibilities. Information is measured via probabilities: the smaller the probability, the greater the information. - William Dembski •••

From a talk on YouTube by William Dembski

 

Reason - 2022 Mar

So long as reason remains faithful and faith remains reasonable, both reason and faith should be held in high regard and encouraged to cooperate. - Holden and Haun •••

Holden, Joseph M, and Christopher T Haun. “How Do We Understand the Relationship Between Faith and Reason.” The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR, 2021, p. 33.

 

Materialism - 2022 Jan

Materialism is a weak flame that is blown out by the breath of mature thinking. - Martin Luther King Jr. •••

King, Martin Luther, Strength to Love, Fortress Press, 2010

Materialism is neither a deduction of logic or a fact of experience; it is a metaphysical prejudice. It cannot be justified from first premises. - David Bentley •••

 

Modernism

People are not relativistic about medicine, science and technology. [but] They are relativistic about ethics and religion. That is not post-modernism; that’s modernism. - William Lane Craig •••

Apologetics and the Next Generation 6:30

 

Modernism is all relativistic about "truth". Therefore, this point is surprising because as a society we don't have a consistent view of our world. In some cases (ethics and religion) we are squishy about things, but in others (medicine, science and technology) we act as if truth is absolute.

The difference is that for the latter there often is testable evidence repeatable by anybody, so we think scientifically about it. However for ethics and religion we act as if it is non-testable, in the realm of opinion.

I think that ethics and religion is testable. However, in these areas people often want what they want such that they don't care about evidence.

 

Consciousness - 2021 Dec

My definition of consciousness is intentionality, the capacity to be about some thing. - Michael Egnor •••

This capacity includes qualia and emotions.

Note that in contrast a rock is non-living and is never about something.

Mark Solms & Michael Egnor Discuss Materialism and Neuroscience 40:00

Consciousness is deeply related to our unique human ability to tell and understand stories. - Darren Twa •••

From a private conversation.

 

Scientific Endeavor

I take the classic philosopher’s definition of science which is: the systematic study of natural effects according to their causes.

I think that God is the ultimate cause of nature and the ultimate cause of us. So I think that understanding God and understanding the spiritual aspects of our soul is a scientific endeavor. I think if we leave that aspect out, our science is incomplete. - Michael Egnor •••

 

Church and Jesus

The institutional church and Jesus are always related but they’re not the same exact thing. - Audrey Assad •••

 

Ancestors

Science does not need humans to share a common ancestor with monkeys - materialism does. •••

 

Evil and Good - 2021 Nov

We Christians sometimes talk about the problem of evil. ("If there is a good God why is the world such a mess?") But actually for the atheist there is the problem of good. If the world is random and chance and meaningless, why do we all instinctively call some aspects of it good? - NT Wright   •••

The Ask NT Wright Anything podcast Episode 92

The gates of hell are locked from the inside. - C.S. Lewis

 

Thinking About Thinking

Any theory that invalidates thinking cannot be true because you reach it by thinking. - C.S. Lewis   •••

This context was a talk by John Lennox:

"What do you do science with? You do it with your mind. Evolution suggests that the mind is the end product of a mindless thoughtless randomly-driven process. If that is the case, why should we trust our mind for doing science? Why should we believe that our mind is rational enough to be able to do science?

"If our computers were the result of a random chance-driven process, we would not trust them for anything. For the same reason any materialistic explanation for our mind means that we can’t trust it for science or for truth."

 

Lennox

God is the explanation for why there are scientific explanations. - John Lennox

My biggest argument for thinking that human beings are special is that God became one. - John Lennox

 

Science Denial

Ignoring the evidence from the fossil record that points to intelligent design is a kind of science denial. - Gunter Bechley   •••

Context:

"In my view the fossil evidence clearly points to intelligent design because the observed changes happened much too quickly to be explained by an unguided naturalistic process. They have to be explained with an Intelligent agent.

"For me personally a lightbulb went on when I discovered that this is not based on an argument from ignorance, not based on a kind of god-of-the-gaps argument, but is based on a rational inference to the best explanation. We know that only intelligent causes can cause this effect [sudden infusions of specified complex information]. We look at the evidence and see that this evidence clearly points to this cause.

"So, ignoring the evidence from the fossil record that points to intelligent design is a kind of science denial."

Evolution News (at 33:30)

 

Living Things Try

Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, defined living things as things that strive for their own perfection. This distinguishes living things from non-living things because a rock does not wake up and try to be a better rock. Whereas, living things to degrees of success try to make themselves better examples of what they are. So the information in living things is directed to ends, but you don’t see this in non-living things. - Michael Egnor   •••

Context: There is information in living things that is different than what is seen in naturally produced things, such as rocks.

The Mind Matters podcast interview of Robert Marks by Michael Egnor

 

Arguments - 2021 Oct

Rational arguments don’t create belief, but the lack of them destroys conviction. - C.S. Lewis

 

A perceptive observation - 2021 Aug

The test of whether you love God is whether you love your neighbor. -Jay Richards   •••

ID the Future podcast (at 4:10): Jay references the greatest commandments as given by Jesus (in Matthew‬ ‭22:35-40‬).

 

Culture - 2021 Sept

Christianity is the operating system of our social structures. - Jordan B Peterson

 

Kinds of Knowing - 2021 Aug

Participatory knowing gives you a field of affordances. Perspectival knowing makes certain affordances salient to you perspectively, giving you a situational awareness. The situational awareness tells you which skills from your procedural knowing you should bring to bear. Once those skills are in action, you are getting the right kind of causal interaction with the world for your propositional evidence. - John VerVaeke   •••