It can be useful and even necessary to put people into categories in order to anticipate what political policies will best serve. That process can require making generalizations whose fit to any particular individual does not entirely reveal the underlying complex reality. For example given an auditorium with 500 people it can be useful to know how many of them are atheists compared to how many of them maintain belief in some sort of spirituality. The problem of course is that 500 people can have 500 different opinions and narrowing them down to only 2 opinions can be problematic. Making that process even more difficult is that many people have not given much thought themselves into which category they might best fit. Many people, especially on social media lately, might be using assumptions about “science” and “religion” that are not consistent with formerly well established schooling or documents.
Keeping these complications in mind it can still be useful to sort large numbers of people into whether they believe miracles are still possible and what exactly they believe was possible in the distant past.
Lately there are 2 main categories, those who believe miracles are possible at all, and those who believe no miracles are possible ever. The group that believes miracles are possible at all appears recently to assume that humans can therefore order miracles to solve problems in our daily lives. The group that believes no miracles are possible ever tends to believe that on a previously molten planet, devoid of any intelligent designer, the first assembly of life was possible despite overwhelming scientific evidence that can never happen.
So there appears the necessity of the third category consisting of people who believe there had to be at least one event that defies currently established science, that is a “miracle” however distant in the past, but at the same time that group should realize that humans are highly unlikely to order any miracles today, if that is even possible at all. Especially lately that third category is not very popular, although at one time it was the largest group by far. Social media, as it tends to be dominated by people with no more mental or social development than children aged 5, is making things worse. Most people on social media, whether they believe in the miracles of any god, or they believe in the miracles (or unrealistic expectations) of any science, like to believe humans can direct the solution to any problem that might arise.
There are 2 different types of proof involved for two different things.
The proof that any individual has a “spiritual” nature remains beyond the reach of any laboratory instrumentation. Many people have a sense that their “I am” or their sense of “self” is something no mere machine can have. It is a long established distinction that mere machines lack something that sentient beings have. Ancient philosophers believed that the only way to perceive the “self” is for it to turn in on itself. That still appears to be correct. So “spirituality” by that definition continues to depend on individual reports with no laboratory confirmation. As it would turn out, that spirituality is a major influence on morality and the reason atheists and some in science find themselves too far to the political left opposing long established morality.
The other type of proof is well within the reach of logic, mathematics, science, and laboratory instrumentation. It is the proof that life cannot assemble itself on a previously molten planet by any agency in the current catalog of lifeless or “unintelligent” agencies.
Atheism was never taken very seriously before Darwin because of that perception that there is a spiritual quality in individuals. Then too people had been breeding plants and animals more or less wittingly, and successfully, for centuries before the Bible was put in writing. The one and only thing Darwin added to the “science” of the matter was the expression “natural selection.” Over time it has become obvious that it is of no use proving something many hoped it would eventually prove, the origin of life itself.
It cannot because in order for natural selection to work as Darwin thought there must be a complex array of interdependent systems to gather, store, and utilize energy, and PROTECT and manage reproduction. Before that array of systems exists the cold, cruel lifeless universe just marches relentlessly toward entropy. In order for there to be life there must be dramatic local reversals of entropy, engineered by that complex array of interdependent systems. Trivial reversal of entropy like rain clouds cannot create life. Even a dramatic reversal of local entropy like the formation of a new star does not create life since life is apparently not possible on stars.
As any lifeless agency constructs a molecule, the larger the molecule gets, the higher the probability the same agency breaks that molecule. Long before anything even remotely resembling life is constructed that probability reaches P=1, or absolute certainty. When P=0 (absolutely cannot happen) or P=1 (absolutely must happen) it makes more sense to speak of “certainties” rather than “probabilities.” It is important to understand that “probability” at those particular points is not the question.
Establishing facts in a democracy can be fraught with difficulties. People on social media often attempt to establish facts by the number of people who claim to believe them. It is a sort of “democracy of education” that is not working. Depending on nothing more than the popularity of an idea is called the logical fallacy of “argumentum ad populum.” For one thing establishing something is a certain fact is not always possible. Although science is capable of establishing some things with considerable certainty, statistical analysis is usually not so certain because there are too many variables that cannot be controlled or held the same across tests, clouding the results. Because social media employs mistaken notions of science and religion there is a war between science and religion there, if not also in the halls of better learning. An argument often seen on social media is that if science was successful 50 years ago then it must necessarily also be successful today. The irony is that in their attempts to prove no miracles are possible ever they require people believe several “scientific” unrealistic things.
Even with all that, a major obstacle to establishing that life absolutely could not assemble itself from a lifeless universe is still that group of people who believe humans can order miracles today. It is not the fact that matters, it is the political implications of the fact. The fear is that those people cannot be encouraged because they will not “follow the science.” The fear is that they will make a nuisance of themselves attacking science.
The extent to which the world has changed in 2 thousand to 3 thousand years is often sorely misunderstood in modern times. In the very distant past some people were possibly several times more cruel and violent than even the Nazis of the 1940s. It was not just individuals, it was whole societies. The people of “God” were less cruel and violent than their opposition. There is the possibility on close inspection that the people of God used exaggeration more than they depended on actual “miracles.” Those devices will likely not work in the modern world as they perhaps did in the distant past. The dependence on miracles is serving their opposition more lately.
Therefore until the bad science gets worse than the bad religion, if it hasn’t already, the truth will continue to suffer.
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