Intelligent Design

 

Sir Fred Hoyle

After considering what he thought of as a very remote probability of evolution he

concluded:

“ If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being

deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at

the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be

the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to

think of...[9] ”

Hoyle calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the

simplest living cell was one in 10^40000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe

is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (10^80), he argued that even a whole universe full of

primordial soup would grant little chance to evolutionary processes. He claimed:

The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could

be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently

nonsense of a high order.

 

What you believe matters.

 

A survey lead by the Catholic professor William D. Antonio found that 88% said that what you do matters, not what you believe.

 As long as I’m good, it doesn’t matter what the church teaches.

What really matters is to be a good person.

It’s a clear favoring of ethics over doctrine.

    Kant said religion comes down to ethics. Kant drove a wedge between doctrine and ethics. Kant approach to ethics had a profound impact on contemporary thought and society.

Kant believed that moral reasoning should be autonomous and independent of external authorities or doctrines. He argued that individuals should use their rational faculties to determine what is morally right, rather than relying on prescribed doctrines.

We can see here his subjective approach to morality. He believed that external doctrines or authorities were a coercion on true moral action made freely and rationally. He believed in a moral law, moral principles that should apply to all rational beings in all situations; contrasting with doctrines, which may be specific to particular cultures, religions, or contexts.

He argued that rational beings have the capacity to discern universal moral laws through the use of their rational faculties. 

In essence, Kant believed that moral principles are not derived from external sources, such as religious doctrines or societal norms, but from the inherent rationality and autonomy of individuals. This rational foundation for morality allows for the establishment of universal and objective moral laws that apply to all rational beings. 

Kant’s approach neglect the reason’s limit and objective truth.

Ethics, however, are in fact funded on fundamental doctrine. So when doctrine becomes marginalized, we are in fact undermining those ethical principles. 

Being a good person is being a loving person. 

What is love? It is not a feeling or a sentiment, not a private subjective conviction. Love is willing the good of the other as other. Love gets you out of the black hole of your own subjectivity, your own ego centrism. If I’m kind to you so that you might be kind to me it is not love, it is just indirect egotism. Real love is I want your good for you, period, no reciprocation required.

Love is a participation in God’s way of being. We can love the other as other as participation in God’s own love. Love we so admire in ethical order is a theological reality described by doctrinal truths. Aristotle’s virtues did not mention love.

To love is to respect the dignity and the freedom and the inherent worth of every individual. This is not self-evidently true. What makes it true is a theological doctrine: every person has been created by God and destined for eternal life.

Taking God out of the equation, one has Socrates, Aristotle, Plato who believed that people should do what they are told, that malformed children can be left to die, that slavery was natural. Then in our time you have Lenine, Hitler, and Mao Tse Tung who with their atheist regimes left 10 of  millions corpses. Lenine said if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

What you believe always depends on certain doctrines.

Yes, what you believe does matter.

The Soul Part 2

 

 

 

          When does the rational soul’s presence in the body begin? At conception. For the soul is the form—the essence, nature, structure, organizational pattern—of a living thing, an organism.

Of course, the features essential to human beings as rational animals are not fully developed until well after conception. Rationality, locomotion, nutrition, and the like are present even at conception “in potency” or as inherent potentialities. But a zygote is not a “potential human being” or a “potentially rational animal.” Rather, it is an actual human being and thus an actual rational animal, just one that hasn’t yet fully realized its inherent potentials.

          All of this is confirmed by science. The reason is that the notions of DNA, of the gene, and so forth are utterly suffused with goal-directedness and potentiality. It is no accident that terms like “encoding”, “information”, “instructions”, “blueprint” and the like are often used to describe the workings of DNA; therefore involve directedness of something toward an end beyond itself, and thus final causality.

Being the form of the body, the soul is necessary as long as the living organism is. Hence it leaves when the organism dies, not severe brain damage and not a person’s lapsing into a “persistent vegetative state”. As Plato and Aristotle agree, for something to fail to instantiate a form or essence perfectly does not mean that it fails to instantiate it at all. For a zygote, being a human organism and thus in possession of the form or essence of a human organism(i.e. a rational soul), has the same right to life that any innocent human being has. If one agrees that every innocent human being has a right to life, then you cannot consistently fail to take a “pro-life” position and thus favor outlawing all abortions  (and all forms of euthanasia also) just as you’d favor outlawing any other form of murder.

          The rational soul functions and exists independently of matter, so could not have been generated by  purely material processes. In principle, evolutionary theory could explain how living things got to such a level of complexity that it was possible for an animal to exist which was capable of having a rational soul. We have already shown that there is a God, and that the rational soul, unlike any other kind of soul, is ordered toward the knowledge of God. Thus we have a ready explanation of the existence of rational souls: direct creation by God. An evolutionary process itself, like everything else that exists, would have to be sustained in being by Him from moment to moment anyway. An appeal to God is thus theoretically natural, even inevitable.

          At every point in Aquinas’s account of the soul, as at every point in his arguments for God’s existence, the appeal is to what follows rationally from such Aristotelian metaphysical notions as the formal and final causes of a thing. There is no appeal to “faith,” or to parapsychology, ghost stories, near-death experiences, or any other evidence of the sort materialists routinely dismiss as scientifically dubious.