>Jim Bell writes:
>
>>This is precisely the same sort of "materialist gap" I see in the evolutionary
>>field. Some of the top evolutionary minds--e.g., Tattersall, G. R. Taylor,
>>etc.--admit that the sudden emergence of man cannot currently be explained
>>through pure materialism. They hold out for an eventual "something (natural)"
>>that WILL explain it.
>>
>>That looks just like faith to me.
>
>So what if it looks like faith? The question is, at what stage do we know
>that there is no materialistic explanation for a phenomenon?
Since I read the First Things article last night allow me to comment on this.
(Again, this is from the November First Things: "Atheism in the Gaps" by Barr;
disclaimer, my comments are not based on reading the book.) According to Barr,
Roger Penrose's discussion is based on Godel's theorem which shows that a
proposition can be stated using the axioms and theorems of a mathematical
system that cannot be proven in that system, but which to a human observer
"outside" the system can clearly be seen to be true.
If you believe his argument, he has in effect proven that it is impossible for
a computer to duplicate the activities of the human mind, since a computer is
essentially a mathematical system that cannot stand outside itself looking in
the way that humans do with their capacity for irony, etc. (The way it was put
in the book _Godel, Escher and Bach_, human's can comprehend sentences such as
"The sentence 'this sentence is true' is false" which deal with
self-referential contradictions. I mention this only because the author o that
book, a computer scientist, was attempting to use Godel to say that computers
_can_ duplicate the feats of the human mind.)
Again per Barr, Penrose's point is that the mind is a machine like our current
computers. He doesn't give up his materialist assumption however; he postulates
that the mind is a machine of a wholly different type that will require a new
level of physics to create. This seemed to Barr, and to me (since I believe
everything I read :-), to be absurd.
So I see your analogy Jim, but I think that there is a difference between
postulating a entirely new mechanics that we have no concept of today (as
Penrose appears to have done) and working through a number of issues in an
immature field such as developmental biology. One requires a whole new leap in
a field of study, the other incremental growth in a field of study.
I think that Penrose's work, if I understand it correctly, reinforces the
assertion often made here that science hasn't ability to comment on
metaphysical concerns. Simply put, consciousness is metaphysical in nature and
cannot be explained through the scientific assumption that we're machines. So
while I wouldn't be willing to say that the physical emergence of humanity
won't be explained through naturalistic mechanisms, I would be willing to say
it can never address the metaphysical emergence of the same.
(Now that I've pronounced so confidently on Penrose's work, I'll have to read
his book :-).
Steve Anonsen
Software Architect
Great Plains Software
Fargo, ND
FYI, Steve Clark introduced me to the reflector when I met him at a conference
at Calvin College this summer. Hi Steve!