links for 2007-05-29
Posted by Adam on May 30th, 2007
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The ESV on your iPod. “Bringing the gospel to your heathen iPod!”
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Evolutionary Psychology Primer by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the
May 30th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Interesting choice of 2 websites to be thinking on at one time. What’s the relationshgip between the 2? They are diametrically opposed, antithetical and mutually exclusive. One asserts that there is a God who is the creator and sustainer of all that is. The designer and Master planer. The other posits, just as emphatically that there is no god and we (and all that is) are here by cosmic accident and the random process of natural selection, totally devoid of any plan or design. Allegience to one necessarily requires total rejection of the other. Trying to hold to both at the same time is an exercise in futility and intellectual folly.
What am I missing here? I don’t get it.
May 31st, 2007 at 9:06 am
OK, if your going to try to say something smart, you should at least spell it right….
relationshgip = relationship
planer = planner
:-]
dad
May 31st, 2007 at 10:15 am
Dad, the problem with your criticism is, of course, the idea of allegiance to an idea. You have probably heard the aphorism, “The map is not the territory.” It is to God and Reality that I give my allegiance, not to the maps we have devised to describe and understand them.
If one map accounts for significant features of the land that another fails to note, it’s best to carry them both and consult each where it’s appropriate and useful. The Bible is an excellent but (necessarily) incomplete map. It tells us that God created the world, but it does not account for how it was done (laws of physics, genetics and so on). Evolution offers us a viable model for one aspect of how it happened but fails to tell us who is responsible for designing the process. This too is incomplete.
Rigid allegiance to one or the other set of ideas would greatly diminish one’s capacity to understand what is and place artificial, static limits on it. I believe it is best to stay open to constant revision and refinement of our ideas instead.
That’s just my perspective on the situation.
-Adam
May 31st, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Adam,
OK, I get your map analogy, but when you hold two maps that give you not just a “different perspective”, but conflicting conclusions about which way to go, you need to trust one, and lay the other aside. Your life could depend on the choice of which map to follow.
Tooby & Cosmides say,
“But what did the actual designer of the human brain do, and why?
When we are talking about a home computer, the answer to this question is simple: its circuits were designed by an engineer, and the engineer designed them one way rather than another so they would solve problems that the engineer wanted them to solve; problems such as adding or subtracting or accessing a particular address in the computer’s memory. Your neural circuits were also designed to solve problems. But they were not designed by an engineer. They were designed by the evolutionary process, and natural selection is the only evolutionary force that is capable of creating complexly organized machines.”
It’s clear to me that they have written “The engineer” completely out of the equation. I think that is a dangerous perspective, and I just don’t want you to get “lost” in the process, looking at the wrong map.
Thanks for talking.
Love you much.
dad