Mukunda Goswami wrote:
Regardless, biological texts worldwide, generally refer to randomness as the cause for the existence of today's complex universe and its varieties of life.
This is an interesting conflation of biology and metaphysics that allows an atheist agenda to hijack evolutionary theory, and that interestingly, devotees seem to have difficulty discerning, although the Catholic Church has picked up on it.
The "cause of the universe" is not a biological question. It's not even a physics question. It's a metaphysical question.
Professor Richard Dawkins, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" and perhaps the most vociferous contemporary proponent of evolutionary theory, agrees.
In a video I watched of him the other day he made this exact point: biology has its unifying theory in evolution - physics on the other hand, does not. How do we get a universe that can support evolution? That's the metaphysical question. Dawkins mentioned the infinite universes theory as the the leading proposal, but it has no experimental support, and so far no planned experiments that can prove or falsify it. As such, Dawkins did not mention it as a doctrine, but rather as the leading in a field of so-far purely speculative hypotheses.
American scientist Carl Sagan once famously said that "to make an apple pie from scratch you have to start by making the universe".
It's not necessary to attack the idea of infinite universes on empirical grounds, for in reality it has no empirical grounds to support it; rather the question to pose is: "Why is such a metaphysical claim conflated with the empirical theory of evolution?"
The two are quite distinct.
Here is an exchange that I had today with Gauranga Kishore:
GK: Darwinism is a theory of the origin of species that is specifically non-theistic, it posits random mutation and natural selection as the two mechanism responsible for the creation of living organism.
[My note: non-theistic and atheistic are two different things. The statement above is correct. Evolutionary theory makes no claim about the origin of the universe, and is thus non-theistic. When someone asserts that there is no God, which is not scientifically provable, it becomes an atheistic dogma]
SP:The universe is deterministic and infinite complexity arises from the massive repeated interaction of simple principles. Chaos is just massive complexity. "Random" is a word used to describe it, but it's just a word.
The question is this: where does the stochastic system come from?
Is it self-manifested, or does it have a cause? If it is self-manifested then Darwinian evolution has no cause, which is the atheist's metaphysical definition of "random".
Otherwise, Darwinian evolution is indirectly caused by the direct cause of the universe.
According to Vedic metaphysics the Param Brahma is the direct cause of the cosmic manifestation, therefore He is the indirect cause of Darwinian evolution.
GK: I agree that Darwinism is, in theory, science and not metaphysics, but in practice it has become metaphysics.
In this context random took on the metaphysical connotation of atheism, the randomness of Darwinian evolution was contrasted with the idea that we were created by God.
If God created the world, with certain laws, with the intention of it ultimately producing conscious living organisms, then it is innapropriate to use the word random. And in that sense we don't have Darwinian evolution.
I don't think the intention of random in this context has to do with scientific determinism.
SP: And here we get to the crux of the matter.
The real argument is not against Darwin's empirical explanation, it's against extended metaphysical claims made using this as support.
In other words, we're not against evolution, we're against atheistic evolution - and evolution is not intrinsically atheistic.
My contention is that evolution became atheistic because the church allowed it to, or even forced it to - on several fronts.
1. By trying to fight on empirical ground, asserting the creation model of the Bible as their empirical explanation. This was something that was bound to fail, because empirically it's weak. As is the Bhagavatam version. Neither contains dinosaurs or epochs with different forms of bodies. Evolution does. A counter-explanation has to account for these things.
2. By trying to control society politically and viewing science as a threat to that control. Just as Buddha rejected the Veda in order to depose the corrupted brahmanas and effect a social revolution, science was the philosophical system that was used to throw off the stranglehold of the Catholic Church, which propped up the feudal system. This was replaced by today's liberal democracy, which is based on similar principles to the scientific method.
Religion gets into trouble when it is wedded to a) a particular empirical model b) a particular political structure.
If the empirical model is disproved or superseded, or the political structure becomes corrupted, then religion gets kicked out along with it.
I think that it's important to recognise the valid progress of science and liberal democracy, and point out it's failings, or excesses.
Darwinian evolution is an elegant explanation. It may be wrong, but it should be treated scientifically. As an empirical explanation we should look for areas where it can explain things and make testable predications, and look for evidence that can falsify or modify it.
If you attack it on empirical grounds, or even attack the scientific method itself, don't be surprised when the counter attack takes the form of a metaphysical counter-offensive.
Acknowledging it within its bounds helps keep it within its bounds, and it is this exceeding of bounds (linking it with unscientific metaphysical assumptions) that is the real crux of the matter.
It's not meant to be a doctrine, it's meant to be a working hypothesis. I prefer to keep it scientific and stop it from escalating into a Holy War.
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I prefer to talk about Darwin's theory of evolution, or evolutionary theory. "Darwinism" seems to be a code word for evolutionary theory + an atheistic metaphysical belief system.
Happy to deal with them separately, each on its own merits.
I stumbled across this which
I stumbled across this which might be of some interest to you and your readers.
Here's an extract:
'The next step in the evolution of human thought I would like to see is the widespread embrace of doubt not in the service of religion, but in the spirit of getting at the factual truth. Putting aside the larger discussion about whether anything can even be totally known or finally decided, and whether what we perceive as existence is something else entirely, perhaps giving our assumption of knowledge an air of supreme arrogance, if something is factual as far as we can tell given the limits of our knowledge and perception then we know it as much as we can know anything and can act accordingly. But if we are still unsure of something, then instead of filling that gap of knowledge with superstition, religion or dogma, we ought to just let it alone.
Perhaps the greatest leap in human cultural evolution will be the ability to just let the gap sit there and stare back at us until we can fill it with something we know. This is, perhaps, the most difficult thing for the human brain to do, to let true uncertainty linger and perhaps even fester'.