Ragabul wrote:Supposedly C. S. Lewis got into a debate with some female theologian about the content of Miracles that really shook him up or maybe it didn't. The little snippet in Wikipedia about it:
I've always tried to find a transcript or summary of this debate but never have so I've never known what exactly was the issue at hand which is pretty irritating.
I've heard that rumor as well, and as far as I've found, she was primarily focused on criticizing his poor word choice and undeveloped points, less a bayonet to the soul. The "CS Lewis DEMOLISHED by FEM-LOGIC and FACTS" thing appears to be ye olde clickbait.
Aside from the standard criticism towards "god of the gaps" type arguments that you just put forward, another issue with this is trying to reserve for humans a unique physical/biological role that truly separates them from animals. If there is a true difference it can only be at a spiritual level and thus not identifiable by science or pure logic.
There's a book by Sy Garte, a retired biochemist, called "In His Hands," about his progression from being raised in a secular Jewish household, by two literal Marxists, to becoming a scientist, to a Methodist. He briefly goes into some of the major, possibly fundamental, roadblocks in the study of origin and life and human behavior. I suspect some, if not most, if not all, of them will be puzzled out. And I suspect abiogeneis, for example, will require such a specific and exponentially unlikely series of events to occur that the anthrophic principle will be hard pressed to rationalize it. But the point is that it would be unwise to assume our current understanding of biology is remotely sufficient to make any definitive empirical claims about human uniqueness, either way.
That said, you're probably right. But that's a philosophical deduction.
My personal opinion is that there is no kind difference and that the difference is one of degree. The difference between us and animals is that our faculties are such that we have the capacity to be stewards of ourselves and nature. We don't have different faculties than animals. Our faculties allow us to realize more about the world and exercise more control over it. To put it another way, we are the only species so far as we yet know that has ever actually realized that evolution is working on us and in the world and have knowingly turned that process to our advantage. Call this the ability to engage in complex abstract thought which is what things like "smokeless fire" and "fireless smoke" and so on that you are describing are. This might be emergent but we are learning more and more that mystifying emergent behavior occurs in animals as well. Something as basic as a school of fish or a flock of birds and the way they move is emergent. It takes more than mere emergence to prove we are categorically different.
I forget the term for it, but I did recently hear about an alternative to pure Neo-Darwinism, that in essence claims that by the nature of the constraints of life, certain anatomical outcomes were inevitable, as opposed to pure chance of mutation and survival. So that if life was rewound to the UCA, and allowed to play out again, it would result in humans again, or beings quite like us. Such that as the Darwinian rules played out on the geological time scale, these overarching rules average out to general outcomes. Which even in a secular framework would imply we are meant to be the stewards of nature, as the laws of nature ensured the eventual existence of beings who could be aware of this with a compulsion to do so. No idea of the academic value or acceptance, I imagine "mocked with derision," as the Big Bang theory was, but its all well beyond my pay grade.
To go back to the stewardship thing, the "made in the image of God" thing only makes sense to me in three possible ways. 1) We have some kind of utterly unidentifiable divine spark that metaphysically animates us and can never be logically or scientifically identified. 2) We are the only thing in creation given an explicit role of steward because we are the only thing capable of understanding what being a steward means and thus are like God in the sense that we are meant to be stewards of the Earth in the way that he is the steward of the entire cosmos. 3) Both of these at once since they aren't mutually exclusive.
In a sense, humans are the Imago Dei regardless of what the final cause is. Either there is a person of God, in which case it's literally true as an aspect of our creation, or, there isn't. In which case the pantheists are right and the universe itself fulfills all the criteria for a blind, idiot God, being eternal, self-caused, containing all knowledge, capable of all possible acts. Which in turn would make our uniquely complex behavior a fractal of reality, as our species-level intellectual goals have their end points in immortality, omniscience, omnipotence, and creation. Whether these transcendental goals are top-down or bottom-up doesn't matter in that regard.
My own stance is closest to 2. I am not in anyway an orthodox Christian. I have fundamental uncertainty about the divinity of Jesus for one thing which is like Christian make or break. The closest I can get is to say something like "I'm Jewish adjacent" which is to say I roughly believe in a God that matches the Jewish description of Yahweh, but since I'm not a Jew but a Gentile I don't have to do all the Chosen people stuff but can be "righteous among the nations" by sticking to the Noahide Code. And the Noahide Code is a pretty dang good set of general principles anyway.
I'm inclined towards 3, as 2 could/would result in philosophical zombies, thus making us some weird form of white blood cell for the "body" of DNA, as well as the overall weakness of the biological hypothesis for our consciousness and behavior. Though with the current thinking that low-level reality is fundamentally probabilistic, so only pseudo-deterministic on our scale, there's some wiggle room for a totally naturalistic explanation for us.
Dawkins is not worth reading unless you are reading his stuff on evolution. He is an excellent evolutionary biologist, writer, and debater and a poor moral philosopher.
I believe he was the one that introduced the concept of "biological scaffolding," to attempt to silence any possible claim of irreducible complexity in nature. Such that even if we found some anatomy that appears to meet the standard, there must have been supporting anatomy to get it to that point that has since "fallen away." Which is both a brilliant argument and weaselly.
Whereas his philosophy seems to hinge on not being able to conceptualize a God that isn't just a very powerful, invisible human.
Sometimes it's nice to have an author write in an established universe, like Stackpole and Allston writing the Rogue Squadron books or Mitchell writing the Ciaphas Cain novels for 40k, because they can skip the whole "explain the universe" thing and focus on the plot and character work of their story.
I know, I know, getting very specific in my dislikes now.
