Theistic evolution vs. Darwinism (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, May 24, 2013, 09:56 (4010 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The degree of intelligence you need to create the universe and life by panpsychism is certainly equivalent to the concept of 'my God'. You are literally arguing for God without using the term or concept. Think of God without the religious overlays, as I do, and you are at the same stage of my thought process. We are in almost full agreement, except for the terminology.-Alas, you have overlooked two small obstacles to our reaching agreement: 1) My panpsychist variant dispenses with any kind of god (see below), and 2) I find all three hypotheses (your god, the atheists' chance, and my panpsychist variant) equally impossible to believe. My agnosticism leaves me open to exploring all avenues, but I have yet to find one that leads to enlightenment!-However, if you don't find it too frustrating, I'd like to go on exploring my panpsychist avenue. As I've pointed out before, A.N Whitehead ... the leading figure in process theology ... blended forms of panpsychism and panentheism, though I can't claim to have understood what it was/is all about. His version has your God at its centre, whereas mine has no single universal intelligence, let alone one with a purpose. Your first cause energy is self-aware and supremely intelligent, and that is your great leap. My panpsychist first cause energy is blank: it makes matter which changes and eventually reverts back to energy, but through the process of change ... this is the leap ... it BECOMES aware within individual units of matter. This gives rise to individual intelligences, and these over vast periods of time cooperate in manipulating matter to form the universe and life. There is no god of any kind ... only the different sorts of intelligence (the variety is manifest throughout the organic world, from plants and bacteria to ourselves). -Unlike materialism, this panpsychist hypothesis allows for psychic experiences, since energy is not bound forever to the materials in which it is embedded. The ability of individual intelligences to communicate would explain most of what we have come to regard as mystic experiences, but they have grown as it were from the bottom up ... accumulating through the ages ... not from the top down, i.e. a single intelligence to which we somehow return. 
 
All three hypotheses lead logically to life and evolution once the basic premise has been accepted, but how we interpret the whole process will depend on that original leap of faith.-Nebulous? Yes, of course. Far too nebulous for me to take the leap. But I think both theists and atheists might find it difficult to ask questions of this hypothesis that are not equally applicable to their own.
 
*******-BBELLA: I agree with your statement above, David. In my view, you are both literally arguing for each others ideas. The only difference seems to be in your minds image of the process. One sees a personage (with unknown physical characteristics) when you imagine the process, and the other imagines the process without the one personage. It just seems to me you are both imaging the same process in your mind, one just calls that process God while the other calls it panpsychism. I could only hope we might all come this close with my own imaging of the process, which I am sure Tony and others here probably feel the same. In some sense, this is how we, as an "intelligent" race of beings, should always work out our differences. Your patience with each other is a great model for society .Not to say you were that far apart in the first place...but still, even a minor difference in view is able to cause a war.-I had drafted my reply to David before seeing your post, BBella. We're certainly both dealing with the same results - universe, life, evolution - but in David's hypothesis they are all the consequence of deliberate planning by a single, eternal intelligence that has an overall purpose and vision. In my panpsychist hypothesis, there is NO single intelligence, NO overall purpose, NO overall vision. And not what David in his reply to you calls a "quantum mind" (I equate personality with mind, not with body, so in that sense, David's God IS a personage, even if he is "a person like no other person"). Instead the process has unfolded through different, individual forms of intelligence, all embedded in different forms of matter, cooperating and working things out as they go along.
 
However, I need to keep stressing that I do not believe in it, any more than I believe in chance or in David's eternal deity. And so, while we agree that the universe, the Earth, life and humans are all here and got here somehow, there is no agreement between us on the processes that enabled it to happen. David holds fast to one, and I juggle with them all. But perhaps it's our very differences that make us model citizens of the world, since differences are a far greater test of patience and tolerance than agreements could ever be!