Sunday, October 8, 2023

Biology Does Not Establish God's Existence

How genetic, dietary, environmental, behavioral, and psychological factors all shape the life and adaptiveness of an organism in various ways, and in different animals at that, can be a subjectively fascinating thing.  Non-rationalists, though, only make assumptions if they believe they can know that either God directly created living things or if they evolved from a common ancestor, regardless of whether that ancestor was itself created by God directly or came about due to abiogenesis (an uncaused cause exists either way, so this is about the origin and nature of life rather than God's existence).  General sensory perceptions are subjective and potentially illusory, and the typical person might not necessarily get the chance to interact with many creatures and thus investigate hearsay about them, but living things can have many forms and abilities that are rather strange or useful.  What does not follow is that God himself must have personally fitted each animal to a specific environment or that they must have evolved adaptations to a given environment.

Cave bats are capable of using echolocation in their dark environments for hunting and navigation.  Creatures of the bathypelagic (midnight) zone of the ocean, 1,000-4,000 meters below the surface where no light from the sun penetrates the waters, might sport bioluminescence that provides a major advantage in luring or spotting prey.  Octopuses can camouflage to match their surroundings.  Despite how well matched these animals are to their respective environments, it does not logically follow that one can know God exists or that evolution occurred/occurs just from observing how these organisms behave and adapt.  None of this is even mere probabilistic evidence for either concept!  Not only are the two not in conflict with each other, but both God and evolution would be capable of bringing about life forms of a given kind, and thus either is compatible with our observations of living things.

There is an uncaused cause that exists by logical necessity, so this is not to say that the existence of a divine being of some kind is unverifiable, or worse, impossible, nor is it to say that the existence of macro-evolutionary developments is anything more or less than an unverifiable logical possibility (for anything that does not contradict logical axioms could be or could have been true, no matter how strange it is).  If macro-evolution did occur, though, the existence of an uncaused cause means it was a theistically caused evolution or at least theistically permitted evolution, but the mere presence, diversity, and environmental effectiveness of creatures--and there is nothing about seeing creatures in the natural world that even means they exist as anything but mental perceptions to begin with--is not what establishes God's existence.

Since the universe creating itself, the universe always existing, and the universe or any other thing that is not logically necessary coming into existing without a cause are all logical impossibilities (these facts depending on logical necessity and not the natural world), it is not even true that atheism is possible, and thus atheistic evolution is eliminated from possibility.  As for how whatever animals, including humans, came to exist in their current forms, either direct theistic creation or theistic evolution is possible, and there is absolutely no way to know while under human limitations which is the case; memory and the senses prove only that perceptions and evidences are there, making actual historical events (other than that at some point the uncaused cause created time and matter or started a causal chain that led to them) and scientific paradigms utterly unverifiable.  Evolution, if it occurred, would be a historical and scientific phenomena that would be perceived through potentially illusory sensory experiences.

No, scientific observtion and certainly not the fallacies of inductive reasoning cannot demonstrate whether it is direct creation or theistic evolution that produced the biodiversity we can see today, with all of its environment-specific behaviors and advantages.  This is like how no amount of sensory observation could ever demonstrate that one is living in a digital simulation of the natural world instead of actual nature or vice versa.  Not only is proof reserved for logical truths instead of mere scientific ideas (though the truth about all sensory matters is governed by the laws of logic even if a great deal is unknowable), but all perceived evidence, which cannot prove anything except that perceptions exist, would look exactly the same in either case.  As it is neither logically necessary for direct creation or theistic evolution to have specifically happened over the other, for both are possible, the only options involving God can only be verified on the level of possibility.

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