Having critiqued Dawkins and scotched the design argument it is worth potshotting in reverse gear at the ‘notorious’ evo-news website, which I often have cited because they often have useful information about evolution. Unlike the creationists of yore they adopt a more sophisticated approach to evolution and have consistently exposed the fallacies of the Darwin paradigm. That said, the fallacies in reverse of the design gambit misplayed are evident over time in this blog which obviously has a bias toward religion, theism, and the implications so supposed of ‘design’.
Here the issue of materialism is misconstrued despite the cogent use of the meme to beat Darwinists over the head. They are right that Darwinism (and science) can’t really solve the problem of mind in the sense of hard science. But does it follow that we should reject materialism as such? The issue is one of a consistent framework from bottom to top, material stuff as in physics, and the point at which that fails or seems to fail and the great distinction of spirit and matter sneaks in trying to make a comeback. In an age of quantum mechanics it may be true that materialism fails in the ascent toward higher complexity although the implication therefore is not a religious or theistic one. The natural world is all of a piece, we consider, and this, if not material in the sense of physics bids fair to be ‘material’ in some generalized sense unknown to us, and this can’t be faked with spiritual terminology. It is pointed out that science can’t do consciousness, but religious design theorists can’t either. The issue of evolution is thus hoist on its own petard as we equate evolution with Darwinism and seem to reject science/evolution. But evolution is or ought to be far more general and taken as the clear progression of species in deep time in a macroevolution whose dynamics is still unclear to us. But the implied inference of the facts of evolution, their mechanisms apart, in deep time is a strong inference to the empirical reality of ‘evolution’, whatever its mystery which is not theistic. Atheism is thus a basic sanity of semantics if not theology but it may fail as we find in nature, at its core a creative mystery that is neither classic physics or theology. There the Kantian dilemma or antinomy seems to rule and the antinomial is a double-edged sword that disciplines the design argument against theological sneak attacks even as it undermines the staid platitudes of scientism.
Despite Miller’s claims, neither human reason nor free will evolved because neither is generated by material processes.
Source: Kenneth Miller on Consciousness and Evolution | Evolution News
1848+: The End(s) of History 