Theory of Evolution Should have never been a part (Civ3)! Part 2

[Draco aka Se7eN]

Please dont twist words here, i never said i knew everything, only a fool would think he knew everything.

I said i knew what you all were talking about, i understand what your talking about. If i didnt then i would have asked.

Perhaps i didnt say those exact words which i didnt, but gezz do i have to treet you like babies. I dont take everything you say literaly. I try to look at it how you see it.

I know all of you would just absolutly love to believe that im a total freaking ******. Believe whatever you want to if it makes you feel better. In your minds it would make perfect sense if i were a uneducated inbred retarded hick from alabama. Oh and i cant forget, im not as evolved as you are.

Im sure your gonna respond to this post like a bunch of sheep.

[loinburger]

This is getting ridiculous, Draco. You could at least have the common courtesy to cram your idiocy into one post, rather than spamming up the board with your ignorant trolls...

I know all of you would just absolutly love to believe that im a total freaking ******.

I see you're finally talking reason, Draco. I'd give you a cookie, but they're choke hazards, and I'm too tired to cut up your food for you.

Oh and i cant forget, im not as evolved as you are.

Anomalies do occur, Draco; that's how evolution works. Thankfully for the rest of humanity, there is probably little chance that you will succeed in spreading your idiot gene.

[Lung]

Originally posted by Draco aka Se7eN

What a shallow victory indeed. "We Evolutionists are correct because we assert that it is so, and are so goddamn stubborn that we will not even consider any opposing argument! We win!"

How pathetic, Draco. Is that the best you can do? Substituting your own words with Evolutionists is truly pathetic. The phrase you used is the one used by your mob, the Creationists.

Ethelred has been saying for months how Creationists resort to putting their own words in the mouths of evolutionists as a last resort. All you've done is prove him right

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
Yes, light would take infinite time. However, the model that was fashionable at the time was that the Universe had been, was, and always would be. The proof of the impossibility of this was what I presented.

You meant the dilemma? There seems to be something missing in there.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Draco aka Se7eN
Urban Ranger, some how you found out how to have even less commen sense than Loinburger.

Example

quote:

Originally posted by Draco aka Se7eN
There are plenty of smart people who dont have perfect grammer and spelling like all you 250 iq genious scientists who have access to labratories and a mountain of information. LOL

You found us out, rats! We are these vicious scientists who happen to lurk about around game boards so we can pounce on any creationists who might just happen to pop up

You didnt actually take that literaly did you? I hope you didnt

Can't you tell I was being sarcastic? This really calls your ability to comprehend simple matters into question.

I didn't think of you as a ****** before, but I need to reevaluate as new evidence comes into light.

[Lung]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
I didn't think of you as a ****** before, but I need to reevaluate as new evidence comes into light.

The evidence so far is looking rather damning

[Rogan Josh]

Sorry for not posting - I was away for the weekend.

Where were we?

BTW, KrazyHorse is absolutely correct (of course!), there is not problem with an infinite mass universe. The problem is with an infinite amount of stars in an infinitely long steady state, the night sky would be rather bright - you would see the light from the stars any way you looked.

A much better problem is the cosmological constant, which has been measured (from astronomical observations) to be exceedingly small. However, with our current model of how particles get their mass - the Higgs mechanism - the cosmological constant should be huge. In fact, it should be so huge that it should curl up the universe to approximately the size of an orange.

This is one of the biggest problems in astroparticle physics today.

[Jack the Bodiless]

Originally posted by Draco aka Se7eN
There are still Evolutionists, after all, and the evidence has been mounting against them for centuries!

And here is what I said in the original thread...

Draco aka Se7eN:

You claim to be a veteran of this type of dicussion, but it's obvious that you are not. Have you never even visited www.talkorigins.org ? So far, every single "fact" you have posted on this thread is false!

Before you go any further, I suggest you read "How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments?". Read ALL of it, slowly and carefully. And then read every article in the "FAQ section".

The problem you face is threefold:

Firstly, in the century and a half since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, not a single shred of genuine scientific evidence that contradicts the Theory of Evolution has ever been discovered. Yes, I'll say that again, just to make sure it sinks in: In the century and a half since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, not a single shred of genuine scientific evidence that contradicts the Theory of Evolution has ever been discovered. All creationist claims to the contrary have been investigated and shown to be false.

Secondly, Biblical creationism cannot be true. There is no creationist explanation for the sequence of the fossil record (all creationist attempts, such as "Flood sorting", have failed). Similarly, the worldwide "Great Flood" wasn't even noticed by many ancient civilizations supposedly destroyed by it. And so on...

Thirdly, there is no such thing as "creation science". Many creationists use invented qualifications (e.g. "Doctor" Kent Hovind, and various "Professors of Christian Apologetics"). A handful have genuine degrees in unrelated fields such as electrical engineering. A very few have successfully gained degrees in biology or geology, but all these people were already religious fundamentalists and creationists, none were subsequently "convinced by the evidence". I have found only one with a PhD in paleontology, and none so far with any sort of qualification in Evolutionary Biology, the science of evolution itself.

Creationism consists of ignorance, deceit and propaganda. And nothing more.

You didn't reply to that: by then you had been utterly defeated on every issue. However, it seems that creationists have a "reset" facility, that wipes out any knowledge they might accidentally have picked up in a previous discussion and allows them to make the same blind assertions all over again!

So quit wasting our time. You can't make any further progress unless you manage to do what no creationist has ever succeeded in doing: to come up with even ONE piece of GENUINE scientific evidence which contradicts evolution.

Of course, Biblical creationism would still be false, but at least we'd then have something to discuss.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless
However, it seems that creationists have a "reset" facility, that wipes out any knowledge they might accidentally have picked up in a previous discussion and allows them to make the same blind assertions all over again!

They have amazing facilities that allow them to overlook anything unfavourable, even on the same page!

[Jack the Bodiless]

Rogan:

I would say it was the other way round - you can't have free will without a God. Or to paraphrase your statement: You can't have free will with physical laws (as we currently understand them) that control every sub-atomic particle.

...Why not?

In my experience, discussions involving "free will" often go off the rails due to inadequate definitions of terms. What exactly is the will supposedly "free" of? If it's "free from determinism", but the factors which determine our actions are far too numerous and complex for us to allow for, then we're actually saying that our wills are free from OUR ability to determine the causative factors: not a controversial statement. "Free will" is an expression of the limitations of the observer, there is no reason to assume it's an actual feature of the mind being observed.

That doesn't hold water. You are arguing that murder is always disadvantageous to the society or the individual (aren't you?). This is not true. Assume a circumstance where you could murder a fellow human being who has no impact on the world - say for example someone you found on a desert island who had been shipwrecked years ago and long forgotten - who has something advantageous to you - say a priceless object from the ship which washed up on the beach with him. You could kill him without anyone ever finding out and profit from it. Neither you nor society loses out from his murder. Is it still wrong? Of course it is.

...Why is it wrong? (I'm not questioning that it IS wrong, merely asking why).

If it's wrong because it "breaks God's rules", then it's wrong because it breaks society's rules. If it's wrong because it causes an innate sense of "wrongness": that's an emotional reaction, explicable by evolved social instinct just as easily as God-implanted conscience. You seem to be implying that, without a God, we would be perfectly logical robots. I see no reason to make that assumption: even in a purely naturalistic Universe, things can be "wrong" because they feel "wrong".

I did not say that you were immoral. I did not imply it either - I instead implied that if there is no God, then your morality os merely a genetic artifact left in your DNA by the needs of evolution. It has no basis in rational thought and your 'beliefs' in what is right or wrong are all illusions.

If it's "a genetic artifact left in your DNA by the needs of evolution", then it isn't an "illusion". It's chemistry.

[Ethelred]

Rogan seems to be ignoring questions he finds inconvenient or perhaps he feels they would require a great deal of effort to deal with.

Or maybe he just has decided to ignore me.

However Urban Ranger has asked similar questions and he has ignored those as well.

[Rogan Josh]

Let me put it another way. There are 3 broad possibilities (as I see it):

1. There is no God, and there is no mechanism within the quantum mechanical (or other) effect in our brain to allow free will. In other words, althought the particle interactions in our brains cannot be predicted (due to the non-deterministic effects of QM) the probabilities of certain eigenfunctions is not affected by any mechanism of 'free-will' but are chosen randomly according to physical laws.

By this definition our freewill is an illusion. Our decisions and thoughts are merely consequencies of our initial conditions and random uncontrolled fluctuations.

I have no problem with this from a scientific point of view. It is perfectly reasonable and I cannot present any logical reasoning against it. Believe it if you want and I will not criticise.

However, I do not believe this to be true, because I feel more than this. I think therfore I am. This is of course, no more than a gut instinct.

2. The set up is like (1.) except there is some mystical goings on as to which eigenfunction is chosen in our brain when the wavefunctions collapse. This is not according to any physical law (otherwise it could be predicted - at least in terms of random numbers) but the choice of which eigenfunctions are chosen defines who we are.

I will come back to this one after (3.)

3. There is a God, and we individually have souls. The presence of our souls in the universe, allows us to influence the the workings of our brain (possibly via the collapse of wavefunctions in our brain) via interaction through God. It is therefore our souls who determine who we are. Obviously the brain is also critical, in that the possible eigenfunctions chosable are dictated by physics. Remove the brain (or part of it) and we cease to function as one would expect.

Now I don't see this as being terribly different from (2.) except it is willing to add a supernatural cause. The problem with (2.) is you need to come up with some mechanism which is not deterministic and not based on random numbers. The easiest way to do this is to make the numbers non-random, ie influenced by an outside source. However, that outside source cannot be physical itself since it too would be bound by physical laws (by definition). There seems to be no attempt to explain what this outside source is. I realise that there may be some other explaination than 'God' but I have yet to see anyone even present an alternative.

Which of these beliefs do you espouse, or is there something entirely different?

[Jack the Bodiless]

Which of these beliefs do you espouse, or is there something entirely different?

Personally, I'd go for 1 as the most likely and parsimonious.

In case 2 (and 3 is basically a specific version of 2), where there is a supernatural "X factor" at work, then either the effect is random or it is not. If it's random, it's effectively just noise, causing "fuzzy thinking". If it's non-random, then by definition it's imposing a bias on decisions, causing them to correlate with environmental factors in a specific manner: hence, it isn't independent from environmentally-imposed determinism. If it isn't random, it isn't independent, therefore it isn't "free".

It seems to me that such a bias could just as easily be explained by environmental genetic or social programming as by an environmentally-guided supernatural "X factor".

[Ethelred]

1. There is no God, and there is no mechanism within the quantum mechanical (or other) effect in our brain to allow free will. In other words, althought the particle interactions in our brains cannot be predicted (due to the non-deterministic effects of QM) the probabilities of certain eigenfunctions is not affected by any mechanism of 'free-will' but are chosen randomly according to physical laws.

By this definition our freewill is an illusion. Our decisions and thoughts are merely consequencies of our initial conditions and random uncontrolled fluctuations.

This is the same as your second version except in that you give an undefined mystical interaction with all of the above. You third version is, as you said, little different from the second. The only difference is that unnamed mystical interactor now has a name, the soul. The soul still is bound by what ever properties it was given by its creator. For the soul to have free will it must be unbound from the controll of the creator. For that to happen the creator must not be able to predict the actions of the created. This again puts us right back at the start. In need of a way to be freed from perfect predictablity.

I do think that Free Will is more a human concept than a complete reality. However in a purely predictable universe there is no possibility of Free Will except as a concept.

[Rogan Josh]

Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless
In case 2 (and 3 is basically a specific version of 2), where there is a supernatural "X factor" at work, then either the effect is random or it is not. If it's random, it's effectively just noise, causing "fuzzy thinking". If it's non-random, then by definition it's imposing a bias on decisions, causing them to correlate with environmental factors in a specific manner: hence, it isn't independent from environmentally-imposed determinism. If it isn't random, it isn't independent, therefore it isn't "free".

That is not quite what I was getting at with (2.). I agree with you that if the 'X factor' can be described by physical laws in our 'traditional' sense then it is also specific, and therefore not free. Somehow it needs to be something which is not governed in this way. That is why I was asking what it could be. The only explanation or possibility that I could come up with was God. Number (2.) then was supposed to be some non-God interaction wich somehow contains the properties to allow such a non-programed interaction. (Although then one wonders if this property would not fit the definitions of 'God' anyway.)

Originally posted by Ethelred
This is the same as your second version except in that you give an undefined mystical interaction with all of the above.

No - not really. The point here is that in (1.) you cannot have free-will by definition. Everything you do is determined by the workings of the physical laws in your brain. Even the randomness introduced by QM does not alter this, because it must randomly pick one of its eigenfunctions. The word 'randomly' in the previous sentence then precludes 'free-will'.