Mormons and Evolution

13 Responses to “Who keeps science and religion separate?”

1. comment number 1 by: BrianJ
   July 19th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
   

   “So if anyone is declaring separation between science and religion, it seems to be God.”

   Beautifully worded (as I expect from you).

2. comment number 2 by: Mark Butler
   July 19th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
   

   Christian, You have made several strong and I believe untenable assertions about the intent of God and his chosen trustees. As contrary evidence, allow me to quote a few sections from the official Aims of a BYU education:

   Brother Maeser, I want you to
   remember that you ought not to teach even
   the alphabet or the multiplication tables
   without the Spirit of God.
   –Brigham Young

   The founding charge of BYU is to teach every subject with the Spirit. It is not intended “that all of the faculty should be categorically teaching religion constantly in their classes, but . . . that every . . . teacher in this institution would keep his subject matter bathed in the light and color of the restored gospel.”

   This ideal arises from the common purpose of all education at BYU–to build testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. A shared desire to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118) knits BYU into a unique educational community. The students, faculty, and staff in this community possess a remarkable diversity of gifts, but they all think of themselves as brothers and sisters seeking together to master the academic disciplines while remaining mastered by the higher claims of discipleship to the Savior.

   A spiritually strengthening education warms and enlightens students by the bright fire of their teachers’ faith while enlarging their minds with knowledge. It also makes students responsible for developing their own testimonies by strenuous effort. Joseph Smith’s words apply equally to faculty and students at BYU: “Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity–thou must commune with God.”4 Students need not ignore difficult and important questions. Rather, they should frame their questions in prayerful, faithful ways, leading them to answers that equip them to give “a reason of the hope that is in” them (1 Peter 3:15) and to articulate honestly and thoughtfully their commitments to Christ and to his Church.
   …
   The intellectual range of a BYU education is the result of an ambitious commitment to pursue truth. Members of the BYU community rigorously study academic subjects in the light of divine truth. An eternal perspective shapes not only how students are taught but what they are taught. In preparing for the bachelor’s degree, students should enlarge their intellects by developing skills, breadth, and depth: (1) skills in the basic tools of learning, (2) an understanding of the broad areas of human knowledge, and (3) real competence in at least one area of concentration. Further graduate studies build on this foundation

   …

   Breadth. BYU undergraduates should also understand the most important developments in human thought as represented by the broad domains of knowledge. The gospel provides the chief source of such breadth because it encompasses the most comprehensive explanation of life and the cosmos, supplying the perspective from which all other knowledge is best understood and measured. The Lord has asked his children to “become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people” (D&C 90:15); to understand “things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations . . . ; and a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms” (D&C 88:79).

   “Because the gospel encourages the pursuit of all truth, students at BYU should receive a broad university education [that will help them] understand important ideas in their own cultural tradition as well as that of others” (Mission Statement). Specifically, BYU undergraduate students should be educated in the following broad areas of human knowledge:
   …
   Science–the basic concepts of the physical, biological, and social sciences, and a recognition of the power and limitations of the scientific method- preferably through laboratory or field experience.
   (Aims of a BYU Education, retrieved July 19, 2006)

   See http://unicomm.byu.edu/about/aims/

   Now I did not see anything about keeping religious and scientific knowledge apart, or in separate spheres, instead the explicit admonition is to integrate them as much as possible. This has been the direction of the Presidents of the Church from Brigham Young onward. There is a very good book entitled Educating Zion (John W. Welch (ed), BYU, 1996) that demonstrates that intent rather abundantly.

   If I can find a few relevant quotes online I will refer to them later.

3. comment number 3 by: Mark Butler
   July 19th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
   

   Now note that the above quoted document says that “students should not ignore difficult and important questions. Now with respect to free will and anything remotely spiritual, even the stochastic suggestion of it, that is precisely what science does. There is no proof, there is only a need to operate from methodological libertarianism rather than methodological determinism, to consider that just maybe, maybe God is actually alive and we are too. That he is not a possibility that can’t even be considered, not even en passant in a science class, particularly a quantum mechanics or a biology class. Instead nearly every BYU scientist seems to preach methodological atheism - oh no we can’t possibly consider the possibility that God can lift a finger, not even in abstract, information theoretic, or statistical terms.

   Now let me quote from Jeffrey R. Holland speech, entitled Educating Zion:

   Surely we of all people are moved by that “indomitable urge”–that’s Ortéga y Gasset’s phrase–to expand life, to enlarge it, to improve it. That is our hope, our heritage, our theology. From the beginning, ours has been a soul-stretching belief. “Thy mind, O man!” said the Prophet Joseph Smith, “if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity.” Only then, he said, could we “contemplate the mighty acts of Jehovah in all their variety and glory.”

   “The mighty acts of Jehovah”? I have believed that BYU should be one of the “mighty acts of Jehovah.” To be less than that for his purposes and his people seemed to me a blasphemy.
   With such aspirations for us all, I suppose it isn’t surprising that sometimes in the dark of the night I feel we are not measuring up. Soaring is, after all, difficult work. And yes, I did remember that Nauvoo, the city of Zion, had been laid out to feature two Latter-day Saint monuments: a temple and a university. But I also knew that scholastic tension between the sacred and profane had marked most of this world’s history, and if the dream weren’t really attainable, then why have a BYU at all?

   The fraction of the Church’s youth we can serve decreases dramatically each year; we have a fixed BYU student numerator and an exploding Church membership denominator. So the only challenge we can ever address is the qualitative one. And if we can’t win that war–if Jerusalem really can’t find and fellowship Athens and seal her firmly into the family group sheet–then let’s stop holding all these cottage meetings in Provo.

   Would it not, I wondered, be better to use the tithing resources of the Church in a more fundamental way–missionary work or temple building or humanitarian aid, say–and let our students attend any one of a thousand other universities that don’t pretend to such millennial aspirations? If BYU were ever to look and act just like any other university, who needs it? Not, I was certain, the tithe payers of the Church.
   …
   As I have already said, the most conspicuous and fundamental reason for a “school in Zion” is plainly and simply because it is our theology. You know the verses: “Do the work of printing, and of selecting and writing books for schools in this church, that little children also may receive instruction before me as is pleasing unto me” (D&C 55:4). “Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly in . . . things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; . . . a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms” (D&C 88:78­79). “Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). “Study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people” (D&C 90:15). Such knowledge will rise with us in the Resurrection, we are told, and most sobering of all is the warning “It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance” (D&C 131:6), for “the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” (D&C 93:36), and “light and truth forsake that evil one” (D&C 93:37). So part of the message of that restored gospel of Jesus Christ, part of the light now shining into what had been dark ages indeed, is the divine counsel that “to be learned is good if [we] hearken unto the counsels of God” (2 Ne. 9:29).
   …
   And of course, gathering the stuff of learning, the things of learning, or even the students of learning was not enough. So reason number three. What any true Zion would need–and the present world needs even more–is those educated and spiritual and wise who will sort, sift, prioritize, integrate, and give some sense of wholeness, some spirit of connectedness to great eternal truths. At the turn of the twentieth century, Josiah Royce, writing about the great intellectual achievements of our time, observed that man has, “through the richness of the intellectual quest, become more knowing, more clever and more skeptical.” But we have not, Royce warned, “become more profound or more reverent. Nor have we found a way to put our learning in the context of the eternal.”

   Everyone in this room knows as well as I that from Royce’s day to this, the problem with higher education has been the perpetuation of dividedness, separateness, departmentalization, specialties, subspecialties, and subspecies of subspecialties. Universities in this nation are disasters, informational Nagasakis, higher educational Hiroshimas. The “watchmen on the tower” cry out for those who will integrate, coalesce, clarify, and give both order and rank to important human knowledge. This generation has students who may not dare to ask the great human questions because their answers appear to be somewhere in the bottom of an academic dumpster, one nearly exploding at the seams from curricular cramming. “The connectedness of things is what the educator [must pursue],” said Mark Van Doren. “No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does.”39

   So I am convinced that the Lord needs a “school in Zion” now, even more than a century ago, to help a generation, indeed to help an entire Church membership, sort through much intellectual nonsense that is inevitably in an inert swamp of facts. More than any time in human history our students need–as Matthew Arnold needed–a Latter-day Saint Sophocles to teach them, to whom they would gladly give “special thanks [for an] even-balanced soul, / . . . Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.”40
   …
   That is the real merging we someday have to do here–not only organizing and pruning and prioritizing the world’s knowledge all about us, but also fusing gospel insights and gospel perspectives into every field and discipline of study. One faculty member recently wrote me saying, “We need–without arrogance but with energy and daring–to try [to] integrate faith and scholarship in our writing and in our teaching and improve it until it stands on its own merit. . . . We especially need to get over merely trying to imitate others or win their approval. Too many [here] are still worrying whether what they write or say will pass the judgment of [a particular university] (of all places!).”
   “We ought,” he concludes, “to more fully find a way, a unique way, to combine the best of traditional scholarship with the religious and moral questions and perspectives intrinsic to that scholarship and to the restored gospel. That ought to be not an avocation, but a central part of our scholarly work.”
   The echo of President Kimball’s inaugural charge is in the air. “[Your] light must have a special glow. You [must] do many things [here] that are done elsewhere, but you must
   do them better.”
   (Jeffrey R. Holland, A School in Zion, BYU devotional, September 1988)

   Now I don’t know who you are taking your rhetorical clues about the mission of BYU from, but it certainly does not seem to be Jeffrey R. Holland or Spencer W. Kimball. There are a lot more where those came from. Do I really need to supply further evidence that what you suggest is the diametrical opposite of what the Presidents of the Church and Trustees of BYU intend?

   See http://unicomm.byu.edu/about/foundation/ for comparable addresses.

4. comment number 4 by: Mark Butler
   July 19th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
   

   A few shorter quotes:

   From David O. McKay:

   In making religion its paramount objective, the university touches the very heart of all true progress. By so doing, it declares with Ruskin that “anything which makes religion a second object makes it no object–He who offers to God a second place offers Him no place.” It believes that “by living according to the rules of religion, a man becomes the wisest, the best, and the happiest creature that he is capable of being.”
   …
   It is evident, then, that true religious training must include instruction in relation to God and to his laws and government and also in relation to man’s duty to man.

   Such teaching is given effectively not necessarily in a formal theology class, but in literature, art, geology, biology, and other classes. Teachers in the Church university are free to associate with scientific truths the revealed word of God. Thus all facts may be viewed by the students not through the green glass of prejudice or doubt, but in the clear sunlight of truth.

   It is the aim of this university to make students feel that life is never more noble and beautiful than when it conforms to the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ
   (David O. McKay, The Church University, BYU address, 1937)

   Ernest L. Wilkinson:

   In the meetings of the board of trustees, President David O. McKay has often suggested that the greatest opportunity for a teacher at this institution is to teach some principle of the gospel in a class in chemistry or geology or sociology. In that respect, we have more freedom of speech in this university than we would have in a public institution, for there we would be forbidden to teach Mormon doctrines.
   The second step is that of a constant emphasis upon the basic religious nature of all knowledge. To accept the common authorship of God for all spheres of learning is the cornerstone of LDS education.
   (Ernest L. Wilkinson, The Calling of BYU, BYU faculty address, 1962)

   Spencer W. Kimball:

   The Lord seems never to have placed a premium on ignorance, and yet he has, in many cases, found his better-trained people unresponsive to the spiritual and has had to use spiritual giants with less training to carry on his work. Peter was said to be ignorant and unlearned, while Nicodemus was, as the Savior said, a master, a trained one, an educated man. And while Nicodemus would in his aging process gradually lose his prestige, his strength, and go to the grave a man of letters without eternal knowledge, Peter would go to his reputed crucifixion the greatest man in all the world, perhaps still lacking considerably in secular knowledge (which he would later acquire) but being preeminent in the greater, more important knowledge of the eternities and God and his creations and their destinies. And Paul gives us the key: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44). “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:11).

   It is interesting to note that most of us have a tendency to want to ape the ways of our neighbor, in styles or curricula or universities. If New York or Paris speaks, the dresses are lengthened or shortened; if San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury speaks, men’s hair grows longer, beards appear, and baths are less frequent. If the Joneses have a Cadillac, all want Cadillacs. If a nation has a king, all want a king. We seem reluctant to establish our own standards, make our own styles, follow our own patterns, which are based on dignity, comfort, and propriety.
   …
   We have been speaking of mind and spirit and body, of the immortal man and the mortal man. We have been speaking of earthly things and spiritual things, of time and eternity. Of the two, the spiritual development is the greater, for it is permanent, lasting, and it incorporates all other proper secular development.
   The Lord inspired Nephi to correlate the secular and the spiritual, when he said, “To be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God” (2 Ne. 9:29).
   …
   It would not be expected that all of the faculty should be categorically teaching religion constantly in their classes, but it is proper that every professor and teacher in this institution would keep his subject matter bathed in the light and color of the restored gospel and have all his subject matter perfumed lightly with the spirit of the gospel. Always there would be an essence, and the student would feel the presence.
   (Spencer W. Kimball, Education for Eternity, BYU Faculty address, September 1967)

   There are many ways in which BYU can tower above other universities–not simply because of the size of its student body or its beautiful campus, but because of the unique light BYU can send forth into the educational world. Your light must have a special glow, for while you will do many things in the programs of this university that are done elsewhere, these same things can and must be done better here than others do them. You will also do some special things here that are left undone by other institutions.

   First among these unique features is the fact that education on this campus deliberately and persistently concerns itself with “education for eternity,” not just for time. The faculty have a double heritage which they must pass along: the secular knowledge that history has washed to the feet of mankind with the new knowledge brought by scholarly research–but also the vital and revealed truths that have been sent to us from heaven.

   This university shares with other universities the hope and the labor involved in rolling back the frontiers of knowledge even further, but we also know through the process of revelation that there are yet “many great and important things” (A of F 1:9) to be given to mankind which will have an intellectual and spiritual impact far beyond what mere men can imagine. Thus, at this university, among faculty, students, and administration, there is and must be an excitement and an expectation about the very nature and future of knowledge that underwrites the uniqueness of BYU.

   Your double heritage and dual concerns with the secular and the spiritual require you to be “bilingual.” As LDS scholars, you must speak with authority and excellence to your professional colleagues in the language of scholarship, and you must also be literate in the language of spiritual things. We must be more bilingual, in that sense, to fulfill our promise in the second century of BYU.
   …
   Charles H. Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly, voiced a fervent hope when he said that:

   “one day a great university will arise somewhere, . . . I hope in America, . . . to which Christ will return in His full glory and power, a university which will, in the promotion of scientific, intellectual, and artistic excellence, surpass by far even the best secular universities of the present, but which will at the same time enable Christ to bless it and act and feel perfectly at home in it.”

   Surely BYU can help respond to that call!
   …
   Education on this campus deliberately and persistently must concern itself with “education for eternity,” not just for mortal time. You and your faculty have a dual heritage which you must pass along: the secular knowledge that history has amassed over the centuries, along with new knowledge brought by scholarly research–but also the vital and revealed truths that have been given to us from heaven.

   This university shares with other universities the hope and the labor involved in rolling back the frontiers of knowledge, but we also know that, through divine revelation, there are yet “many great and important things” (A of F 1:9) to be given to mankind which will have an intellectual and spiritual impact far beyond what mere men can imagine. Thus, at this university among faculty, students, and administration, there is, and there must be, an excitement and an expectation about the very nature and future of knowledge. That underlies the uniqueness of BYU.
   (Spencer W. Kimball, Installation and Charge to the President, BYU, November 1980)

   I trust I have made my point.

5. comment number 5 by: Mark Butler
   July 19th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
   

   As a final matter, I radically dispute the idea that all spiritual evidence is private. None of the prophets ever taught that was the case. Quite the contrary, they taught that all things testify that there is a God. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to come up with elementary arguments against the atheist or agnostic world view.

   One also does not have to declare defeat in the search of public scientific evidence for the spiritual world before the battle is engaged. How much effort was required to discern what we know about quantum mechanics? A million man hours from Newton till now? And how many hours have we put into understanding the natural laws of the spirit? Since John A. Widstoe, apparently not very many.

6. comment number 6 by: Christian Y. Cardall
   July 20th, 2006 at 5:25 am
   

   Mark, thanks for the quotes, all of which I have read with interest.

   While I have used the word “separate”—which if nothing else had the virtue of getting your attention!—I think with regard to BYU, perhaps the better s-word to keep in mind in “subordinate.” I quote myself from the post:
   

   As for BYU, its value seems to be to teach students to maintain a robust personal spiritual epistemology while learning to successfully use scientific and other modern and postmodern methodologies only as tools—and not as the basis of an entire worldview—where useful in temporal endeavors. Students learn to keep the application of these worldly approaches limited in scope and subordinate in general to personal spiritual epistemology.

   I think a rereading of your voluminous quotes with this statement of mine in mind will show very significant resonance, and perhaps allow them to be read in a new light. I will not attempt an exhaustive analysis, but note for instance the emphasis on personal testimony and acquiring superior eternal truth; to mastering academic disciplines while being mastered by discipleship; the reference to both the power and limitations of the scientific method; multiple references to Jacob’s “to be learned is good if they hearken to the counsels of God”; and an injunction to become “bilingual” in the secular and spiritual (not, I note, an injunction to devise a single integrated, so-to-speak, uber-language!). All of this kind of talk connotes awareness of both a degree of separateness and a hierarchical valuing of epistemological approaches (note that hierarchy is not possible without distinction!).

7. comment number 7 by: Christian Y. Cardall
   July 20th, 2006 at 5:48 am
   

   True, there is some lofty and dreamy language by Brother Holland in your quotes that may be closer to the true melding you seem to have in mind. You also mention a book, I gather on BYU’s mission, edited by John Welch. Perhaps apologetics and ancient studies are, not surprisingly, the area in which such a true melding has actually been attempted—with the mixed and uneasy results one always has mixing oil and water, I think. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for and keenly interested in FARMS-type work, even though in occasional past posts at The Spinozist Mormon I have expressed uneasiness with how the endeavor’s role is sometimes conceptualized and executed.

   But in the physical and social sciences I think the kind of meld you have in mind is simply not tenable because of the following fundamental two-pronged dilemma: (a) existing revelations are not clear and specific enough to give guidance towards new publicly testable approaches, and (b) individual believing scientists do not have authority to publicly declare new and more specific revelation that would be relevant. It is fine, and adequately fulfills the mandates quoted above, for a professor to bear testimony to her class on evolutionary biology that she knows God is responsible for our being here even if the details of what exactly his role was have not been revealed. This is, after all, the approach Pres. Hinckley approved for use in the article on evolution in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism: quoting scripture saying the Lord will reveal these kinds of details when he comes again—and quoting a statement made by the First Presidency in advising General Authorities to avoid the kind of synthesis with then-current secular understandings B.H. Roberts had attempted: leave anthropology, geology, etc., which do not have a direct bearing on salvation, to scientists and their methods.

8. comment number 8 by: Jared
   July 20th, 2006 at 8:38 am
   

   And how many hours have we put into understanding the natural laws of the spirit?

   That would be very interesting, but how could we even approach the matter in a way that was not either self-deceiving or offensive to God? For example, Elder Oaks has written that science (which in a way works by signs–his observation) is not the appropriate way to approach the gospel, the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, etc. (I quoted part of what he wrote here.

   If he is correct, then it suggests to me that any scientific investigation into spiritual laws would only give ambiguous results at best. At worst, well, witness the recent study on prayer that showed slightly worse outcome for patients prayed for!

9. comment number 9 by: Mark Butler
   July 20th, 2006 at 9:20 am
   

   Notice that I said the “natural laws of the spirit” as opposed to the “divinely established laws of the spirit” - they are quite different. The former properly belongs in the domain of science, in its most general sense the analysis of what cannot be otherwise - natural law and necessity.

   The latter properly belongs in the domain of soteriology and eschatology - what will be, because the Lord has ordained it to be the case, and because he has power unto the fulfilling of all of his words, through persuasion, long suffering, and yes, the greatest technology in the universe, the spiritual body being the prime example (cf. Col 3:20-21).

   Now if you want to study the natural laws of the spirit, the first place to start is probably quantum mechanics and the metaphysics of free will, with an eye to explaining how spiritual phenomena and other manifestations of divine power are even possible in the context of natural law.

   As I said, without free will, there is no such thing as divine power. No such thing as morality either. Everything either just is (stays the same or endlessly rotates), or degenerates into chaos. Nothing can be meaningful, unless there is an intelligence there to both give meaning and receive it, to make will manifest in the world, and not just stand idly by while the world goes on its way.

   I really haven’t read Schopenhauer, but I really like the title of his book The World as Will and Representation. That is also the core idea of Ockhamist theology and metaphysics, and to somewhat lesser degree to all Christian theology.

   If one takes divine will out of the matter, how can the world ever be different from what it would have been otherwise, in a way that signifies anything worthwhile? Communication and semiology are all about the purposeful and creative modulation of a carrier or medium to represent meaning. Accidents do not compose symphonies. The artifacts of an accident or necessity carry no meaning or added value. Same old, same old, or arbitrary chaos, all the time.

   The only beauty in a chaotic system is the fractal reflection of the underlying natural laws. How much more so the beauty of a system that is actually designed according to creative principles of unbounded complexity, order, and structure. Where as you ascend through the levels, you see not just the same pattern repeated over an over again, like a fractal, but new varieties and themes that are unprecedented by the underlying medium. Where if you rotate horizontally, you see the work of individual artists composing their part of the system according to true Christian liberty - ordered liberty in harmony with the whole, but not solely determined or derived from it.

10. comment number 10 by: Mark Butler
    July 20th, 2006 at 10:10 am
    

    Now the really odd thing about Bailey’s current position is that he appears to be contradicting his old one:

    Over
    twenty years ago Sterling McMurrin lamented that no one had yet seriously attempted to place Mormon theology on a scientifically rigorous and philosophically acceptable foundation (McMurrin 1965, 46). In light of what has happened in fields of science since 1965, as well as the recent trend towards conservatism in the Church, perhaps it is time to systematically examine this
    subject.
    …
    Two aspects of the creation definitely permit the possibility of a divine hand altering the natural course of events. One of these is that evolution on earth was guided by a supreme being, whose ultimate goal was to produce a species resembling himself. Nothing in current scientific knowledge would rule out this notion. Some would even argue that such divine intervention is a logical explanation of the sudden spurts and branches that are observed in the fossil record. The recently popular theory that asteroids or interstellar comets colliding with the ancient earth precipitated sharp evolutionary changes is a no less dramatic explanation of the sudden disappearances of previously successful species.

    Now the philosophy of God is a most remarkable guide to understanding the philosophy of men, and to the degree that any theory rests on methodologically atheist and anti-libertarian presumptions, it is a worldly philosophy, having an appearance of the truth, but denying the power thereof.

    So my problem here is many LDS scholars are perfectly pleased to let the philosophies of men guide their understanding of the philosophy of God, but often rarely to let the philosophy of God guide their understanding of the philosophies of men. Divine inspiration is a shorter route to truth, even the demonstrable truths of the strictly natural world, than aping the artisans of the East.

11. comment number 11 by: Mark Butler
    July 20th, 2006 at 10:28 am
    

    That is David H. Bailey, “Scientific Foundations of Mormon Theology”, Dialogue, Vol.21, No.2, p.61-79 (1988), by the way.

12. comment number 12 by: Jared
    July 20th, 2006 at 11:27 am
    

    I don’t see it as a contradiction. There is a distinction between claiming to have scientific proof of the hand of God in nature and hypothesizing that God used certain events in natural history to accomplish his purposes.

    So my problem here is many LDS scholars are perfectly pleased to let the philosophies of men guide their understanding of the philosophy of God, but often rarely to let the philosophy of God guide their understanding of the philosophies of men.

    I’m sure there is a spectrum. That an LDS scholar defends the use of methodological naturalism (or atheism, as you call it) and recognizes it as an important tool does not imply he/she is therefore ruled by an atheistic worldview.

    Back to above:
    …the first place to start is probably quantum mechanics and the metaphysics of free will, with an eye to explaining how spiritual phenomena and other manifestations of divine power are even possible in the context of natural law.

    Obviously that’s not my field. But ultimately any explanation will have to square with experimental observations. Which brings us back to the quesiton of how one experiments with manifestation of divine power.

13. comment number 13 by: Mark Butler
    July 20th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
    

    I didn’t say prove the existence of divine power. For one thing, we have reason to believe that divine Power (with a capital P) is a contingent phenomena not subject to ready expirimentation.

    I mean we should adopt a metaphysics and working theories of the natural world that allow any room for the *possibility* of divine power. The place to start is in the metaphysics (and indeed physics) of free will. You cannot possibly learn anything about free will if you start from the assumption that it is impossible.

    Free will has certain statistical artifacts which are different from both determinism and tychism. They are often hard to find to to the prevalence of local background noise, but on a global scale, they are unmistakable if one actually looks for them. If on the other hand, one starts from anti-libertarian axioms, all the evidence of free will reduces to an unwarranted assumption of greater counter-libertarian scientific theories. Watching scientists make such assertions on the flimsiest of evidence (usually none at all) provides for rather sardonic entertainment.

    It is worth noting that theistic non-interventionists as brilliant as Paul Davies inevitably speculate about the existence of natural laws no one has ever heard of before, to account for the source of biological complexity. Davies is a quasi-Deist - God creates the natural laws, winds up the clock, and then watches what happens from then on. That is a nice theory, unfortunately it has no mathematical rigor whatsoever.

    Stuart Kauffman, Biocomplexity and Informatics Chair, at the University of Calgary, advocates a similarly mysterious approach, a fourth law of thermodynamics, where “life arises spontaneously; it self-organizes orthogenetically; it complexifies in accordance with an inherent “law” of diversification; and it miraculously produces “autonomous agents” (aka organisms or living systems) that go about doing thermodynamic work and reproducing themselves.” (Peter Corning, in an ISCS review of From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning)

    Now given the right form, I could agree with that, but first we need more rigorous standards for measuring information and entropy, particularly filtering out noise below the thermal noise margin, and a proper formulation of statistical thermodynamics that accounts for information as a quantity rather distinct from “negentropy”, something akin to the algorithmic complexity theory definition of complexity, adjusted for thermal and epistimelogical considerations.

    Complexity is not heat, nor is it cold. The problem with the traditional definition of negentropy is that it is the negative integral of the change in the entropy - i.e. like potential it lacks an absolute foundation. That will not do for complexity theory. Information must be zero in a perfect vacuum at absolute zero, and it also must be zero in a uniform gas at any temperature whatsoever, states that differ rather radically in entropy.

    If you take a hot gas and cool it down, you have to remove immense amounts of entropy, and yet the thermally filtered information content of the gas does not change.

    Now if you take something with definite structure and put it in the chamber, the structure will last forever at absolute zero, quite a long time at normal temperatures, but dissapate almost immediately at high temperatures. The entropy of the gas will increase slightly in the process.

    This is a typical example of information (known structure) being converted into entropy (statistical fuzz, that which is unknown). The information has not strictly gone anywhere, it has just become mixed with entropy (thermal noise) to the degree that it is is indistinguishable therefrom - like a thousand people talking in a hall at once - you might make out a few nearby voices, but the rest blend into the general background chatter, slightly raising the temperature of the room.

    Once you (or whoever or whatever) have lost track of it is is no longer statistically available to be converted into energy, at least not very efficiently, because it is unpredictable. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always stays the same or increases - this is a phenomenological concept - what is happening is that energy that you know about in detail, is being converted into energy that you do not know about in detail (thermal noise, or heat).

    However energy is measured in different units than entropy. The latter is measured either in bits or Joules per degree Kelvin. i.e. how much free energy is lost with the loss of a given number of bits is proportional to the temperature. Complexity however, is not proportional to the temperature, like enthalpy is, it is more directly correlated with the Gibbs free energy. If you recall delta G = delta H - T delta S, where H in the enthalpy (typically U + PV), T is the temperature, S is the entropy, and G is the Gibbs free energy.

    But the free energy is measured in joules, and we want something measured in bits, something that the loss of causes an increase in entropy. And for that I suggest the noise filtered algorithmic information complexity of a system. Noise filtering means two things - first you filter out the “information” content of all thermal noise (entropy), and then you filter out the information content of anything that lacks a function, i.e. that the system can operate indifferent to its presence or absence, e.g. the spatial noise of grains of sand on a seashore.

    Now you have the algorithmic information complexity of the system, literally an approximation of the smallest number of bits you can use to communicate the structure of a functioning system to an ignorant third party such that they could duplicate it in principle. The “source code” of all the consequential aspects of the system in other words.

    Now what we have actually done here is simply raised the definition of the noise margin to exclude not just strictly thermal noise, but to exclude any noise not necessary for the system to function. The decay of sand grains on the seashore increases entropy to be sure, but as a the pattern of sand grains has no functional complexity, we filter it out the same way we filter out thermal noise, just at one level higher in abstraction. (JPEG picture compression operates this way, by the way)

    Now I maintain that what remains is a monotonically stable or decreasing quantity in the absence of free will or some similar form of teleology. If you take such a structure and smash it, you get an increase in a combination of spatial and thermal entropy. If you refrigerate it, it just stays the same. If you bake it, it gradually degrades, also increasing net thermal entropy in the world. If you clone it a thousand times, you hardly increase the algorithmic information complexity at all - just add the line, ‘repeat 1000 times’.

    Now if you pick a pair, one control, and one test, and tweak one bit in the test device at random, and then put the device to a functional test, and then throw out the one that works the most poorly, the maximum possible information gain, if the test device turns out to be advantageous is one bit. It is much more likely though that the test system will either fail or the bit flip will be inconsequential.

    Now where did the information gain come from? From the random flip of a coin? Hardly - randomness is the antithesis of functional information, it is only useful for creating noise. The information comes from the test environment - the structure thereof gets reflected, under proper conditions in the structure of the device. Once all the structure of the environment has been reflected in the device structure, natural selection stops or goes down hill.

    Or in other words, the algorithmic complexity of the device + environment system remains constant or decreases. At first the device may have relatively little algorithmic complexity, and then it may gradually acquire all the algorithmic complexity of the environment, but the algorithmic complexity of the whole system does not increase, it only gets mirrored, in a way not that different than the way it stays the same when you clone a device an arbitrary number of times.

    Thus natural selection at best can only cause the algorithmic complexity of the environment (including that of natural law) to be mirrored in the algorithmic complexity of a non-willing device or “organism”. Then the device reaches maximal internal complexity, equivalent to the algorithmic complexity of the surrounding environment, and evolution by natural selection stops.

    In short, either Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a law of nature, or it is a creative expression of free will, because there isn’t the available information out there to be acquired by natural selection. It seems rather untenable to suggest that it is a manifestation of Beethoven’s genes anyway.

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