Darwinism doesn't explain consciousness

One would hope that conventional wisdom could always be questioned without fear of reprisal. When it comes to Darwinism though, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Professor Thomas Nagel, a philosopher and atheist, discovered this after publishing his recent book called Mind and Cosmos.

This is just some of what Joseph Brean tells us in yesterday's National Post:

The vicious reception handed Mind & Cosmos, which urges deep skepticism about evolution’s explanatory power, illustrates the perils of raising arguments against intellectual orthodoxy.

One critique said if there were a philosophical Vatican, Prof. Nagel’s work should be on the index of banned books for the comfort it will give creationists. Another headline proclaimed Prof. Nagel is “not crazy.”

The book has won a British booby prize for “Most Despised Science Book” and prompted sneering remarks the author is centuries behind the times, and somehow missed the Enlightenment.

“What has gotten into Thomas Nagel?” tweeted Steven Pinker, the Canadian cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Pinker also called Mind & Cosmos “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.”

Prof. Nagel’s thesis is provocative, no doubt. In just 128 pages, Mind & Cosmos argues the modern scientific story of the origin of life through evolution is “ripe for displacement” and it represents “a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense,” which will be seen as “laughable” in a couple of generations.

Its main failing, he argues, is it fails to account for how consciousness fits into the natural order. Instead, it regards it as an afterthought, an accidental quirk, a trinket on the tree of life, less important to life’s story than the random physical mutations of genes.

By putting physics at the top of a scientific hierarchy, he argues, modern Darwinism offers a dogmatic system of thought that is intoxicating precisely because it offers the illusion of freeing us from religion.

“For a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works,” he writes in the book, which is subtitled “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.”

“I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program [about the origin of life] as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.”

He acknowledges he is a scientific “layman,” however well read, but his point is not a scientific one. It is a philosophical one about the limits of a science that subordinates biology to physics. He calls it “reductive materialism” and argues the more we learn about life, the less believable it gets, and the more central mind and consciousness seem to the true picture.

Believing, as Darwinists do, life arose first from accidental chemical reactions in the primordial ooze, and, once established, progressed via the mechanism of natural selection to create all the wonders of human consciousness, “flies in the face of common sense,” Prof. Nagel writes.

Prof. Nagel says his book is meant to be a defence of “the untutored reaction of incredulity.”
‘I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten’.

Consciousness is the second great puzzle for the atheists (how the universe began being the first).

Great article. Well worth reading it all.

Before the Big Bang

The European Space Agency Planck space probe is providing some pretty awesome new information about the beginning of the Universe:

"The findings released Thursday bolster a key theory called inflation, which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a fraction of a second.

The Big Bang is the most comprehensive theory of the universe’s beginning. It says the visible portion of the universe was smaller than an atom when, in a split second, it exploded, cooled and expanded rapidly, much faster than the speed of light.

The European Space Agency’s Planck space probe looked back at the afterglow of the Big Bang, and those results have now added about 80 million years to the universe’s age, putting it 13.81 billion years old."

Did you get that? The universe began as something "smaller than an atom". And after the Big Bang, we had a universe.

In other words, before the Big Bang = one atom. After the Big Bang = universe.

I'm still waiting to see how the atheists can provide us with an answer, that explains this amazing scientific feat, that isn't God.

The Universe

If you need a proof of God please look at the picture below. It was taken from the Hubble telescope. It's title is Hubble Deep Field Image Unveils Myriad Galaxies Back to the Beginning of Time.

I'd love to hear Richard Dawkins give us his explanation as to what caused the Big Bang.

For more spectacular pictures of God's Universe see the Hubble website.

Our greatest treasure is Jesus in the Eucharist

Last night was the third and final talk given by Father Terry Donahue for our Lenten Mission.

Fr. Terry spoke about the Eucharist. How the transformation of the bread into Our Lord's Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, is called Transubstantiation. The Host only looks like bread. It becomes the Body of Christ in fact.

How do we draw strength from Jesus? By the Eucharist which is our greatest treasure: Jesus in the Eucharist. Jesus is wholly present in the Eucharist, spiritually and bodily.

Why would Jesus give himself to us in this way? Because of Love. Love adapts itself to the beloved`s needs, always putting others first.

Pictures taken from the three nights of the Mission

Advice to the Cardinals and to Catholics: the quickest way to irrelevance

George Jonas gives some advice to the Cardinals in the Vatican as they set out to choose the next Pope and head of the Cahtolic Church.

Jonas tells us he is neither a Catholic nor religious. Nevertheless, I think his advice may be divinely inspired.

"Dear cardinals, the next Pope must be willing and able to restrain predatory priests. He must be willing and able to clean house. But there’s a difference between fumigating the church and blowing it up. Fashionable as blowing things up has become, you’re not in the fashion business. You’re in the faith business. Restoring the church and hijacking it aren’t the same thing. Appearances and vocal demands to the contrary, you don’t have to be up-to-date.

I say this knowing that hardly a week goes by without a person accusing the church of being insufficiently up-to-date, or of unfairly restricting some human desire or ambition. Complaints may range from sexual matters to points of ritual. Some people may demand that the church approve of divorce, or maybe of contraception or abortion, or the ordination of women and homosexuals, or whatever else would bring the church’s doctrines more in tune with the complainers’ own philosophies.

All such complaints boil down to one thing. It is that the moral teachings, or sometimes the mysteries, of a given religion restrict some of the complainers’ worldly ambitions. The usual code-word expressing this complaint is “relevance.” The complainers worry that the church is becoming “irrelevant” to their lives. Only if the church agreed with their views on contraception or whatever would it become “relevant” again...

Jonas then gives us an example of this "irrelevance" by way of Tolstoy's character Helene Bezuhov from the book War and Peace, whose:
"standard is held up by men and women who, having acquired the liberty to do as they please, now demand religion to also applaud their moral choices. They want their churches, their priests, even the very Vicar of God, to approve and endorse what they do, or else they threaten him with irrelevance. God Himself becomes irrelevant unless he can be used to rubber stamp human desires – because, as Tolstoy points out, that’s what God is for, at least as far as Helene Bezuhov is concerned. That’s how it was in 1812 and that’s how it is in 2013.

Helene would be reassured to know that her heritage lives on. Her standard is held up by men and women who, having acquired the liberty to do as they please, now demand religion to also applaud their moral choices. They want their churches, their priests, even the very Vicar of God, to approve and endorse what they do, or else they threaten him with irrelevance. God Himself becomes irrelevant unless he can be used to rubber stamp human desires – because, as Tolstoy points out, that’s what God is for, at least as far as Helene Bezuhov is concerned. That’s how it was in 1812 and that’s how it is in 2013.

I’ve little doubt that the Countess Bezuhov’s spirit will attend the conclave in Rome, right along with the Holy Spirit. Both will be available to the cardinals, and we can only hope they’ll listen to the right one.

As I mentioned before, I’m not religious. If I were, however, I think I’d have something more important to worry about than God’s relevance to me. I’d worry about my relevance to God. And in the unlikely event that the cardinals asked me, I’d say that worrying about what’s relevant instead of what’s right is the quickest way to irrelevance."

Amen to that.

Lenten Mission (Part 2)

Below is part two of our Lenten Mission at the Annunciation of Our Lord Parish in Ottawa. Father Terry below speaks to a parishioner after his talk. The audio is below that. 

In last night's segment, Fr. Terry talks about Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and her Little Way and about God's love for us.

Thanks to Maureen Ward for the audio below and yesterday's audio as well. We will post tonight's talk tomorrow.

The Existence of God

 Fr. Terry Donohue is giving our Parish a Lenten mission for three nights.

Last night Father Terry explained the intellectual reasons for believing God's existence, and for believing that Jesus is, who he says he is. His talk last night, was "from the head" approach as he said.

He uses physics and philosophy in this part one of his talks.

Tonight and tomorrow night he'll speak to the Faith aspect for the existence of God.

Here are his five reasons for the Existence of God that he goes into detail on:

- The need for an uncaused cause

- The universe had a beginning

- The fine-tuning of the laws of nature

- Modern day miracles

- Moral obligation

It's a great talk and it leaves me with two questions I'd love to ask Richard Dawkins.

1) How does Dawkins explain the origin of life (I think even Dawkins admits he can't answer this question)?

2) How does Dawkins explain bone fide modern day miracles?

Fr. Terry also does a great job in discussing the Resurrection.

The Catholic Church and hope

The Catholic Church I know and love became my rock in a time of personal struggle and crisis. I felt deep sadness when I read Janice Kennedy's view of the Church which she has grown so disillusioned with. It sincerely made me feel very bad for her and I would like to give her hope that it needn't be that way.

After my own absence from the Crunch for thirty five years I returned to it in my quest for healing and found a new conversion along the way. After myriad psychological and new age "help", and whatever else I could get my hands on, in order to relieve my suffering, it was the Church in the end that saved me.

I began anew a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and did this through his Church, and by his Church, the same Church that Jesus began over 2000 years ago. For the first time in my life I felt God reaching out to me and enveloping me with his Love and his Grace.

I renewed myself in the Sacraments of his Church with regular confession and the Holy Eucharist and began to attend Mass daily whenever I could. I listened to homilies by humble, funny and wise priests who filled my soul with the knowledge and faith that I am loved by my God, regardless of my sins.

I found a gentle and kind spiritual director who guides me on my spiritual path, a man of the cloth who has soothed my soul and given me hope that we truly are children of God.

The Church is not perfect. That is because man is not perfect. The Church is divinely inspired but there are men within her ranks that may be arrogant or evil or do bad things. This is the nature of humanity. It should come as no surprise that there are people within her sphere like this.

But I also believe we should not throw the baby out with the bath water. I believe we should embrace the good that we see within the Church and do our best to weed out the bad. We must pray that the God who takes care of us all, help us along this path to find healing from within.

I love the Church and I love what she has done for me in my life. I hope Janice Kennedy can rediscover it as well.