How can you possibly be an athiest?

[yavoon]

well its a theory. I dont see why u'd hate on science for not having it right instantly tho. I mean abiogenesis is a baby theory, even newer than evolution which is relatively new. and I'm confident it will change lots in the next 100 years like most of science will.

and umm I dont know wut u mean by information? bacteria doest contain information? really ur kinda clinging onto this "information thing" through thick n thin. but all I'm asking is that u read atleast some terrtiary stuff on what scientists are actually proposing.

[Sava]

Lincoln are you trying to make a case for "intelligent design" by stating that the combinations of DNA needed for life is improbable?

Remember, a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters will eventually rewrite Shakespeare.

[Lincoln]

I have to go to bed. Maybe I can ctch up with this thread tomorow. Good night yavoon.

[Lincoln]

Originally posted by Sava
Lincoln are you trying to make a case for "intelligent design" by stating that the combinations of DNA needed for life is improbable?

Remember, a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters will eventually rewrite Shakespeare.

No, not really. It is not the combination that is so hard to come by as is the translation and operation of the particular combination. Read my post on the top of the previous page (or maybe the one before). I have to go to bed now. See you later...

[yavoon]

do u have no shame? u admittedly didnt even know ABOUT the steps proposed in abiogenesis and u r lecturing w/ authority on its likelihood? I mean, damn.

[Vesayen]

Im going to read all posts tonight and craft a massive response tommorow.

[Sava]

Originally posted by Lincoln


No, not really. It is not the combination that is so hard to come by as is the translation and operation of the particular combination. Read my post on the top of the previous page (or maybe the one before). I have to go to bed now. See you later...

Yeah, NP. I was just going to make fun of you if you were trying to support Intelligent Design due to probabilities. G'night.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
Rubbish. I am pointing out that you should not use science to describe phenomena which science was never intended to describe. Just as one should not describe black holes using Newtonian physics.

As I said, without a common ground, you can make up whatever you feel like, such as an infinite, personal being that exists outside of this dimension.

Then, it will be up to you to make a case for it, not merely stating some sort of infinitely small possibility for such an entity. That's why I referred to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
Should we disbelieve in Black Holes because we don't have a working theory of them?

Black holes can be at least derived mathematically. If you can derive god from the equations of a scientific theory, then we talk.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
Should I disbelieve in supersymmetry because there is no evidence for it? (In fact this is a nice example because many physicists believe that it exists purely on asthetic grounds.)

We are on shaky grounds here. However, unlike god, supersemmetry can be falsified.

Rogan, you are grasping straws desperately.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
What about the Higgs boson, which only has indirect evidence?

Is the Higgs boson omnipotent? Does it contravene laws of physics? [I use "laws" here as defined in a prior post, so lets not go over it again.]

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
Do you truely only believe in things which have been 100% proven by science? Since nothing has that would be a shame - then where is your cut-off? 95%? 99.9%?

Things aren't proved in science. You should know that. On the other hand, however, there's zero (0) evidence for your god. Nothing. Zilch. So why are you clinging on it? That, as I said, requires a contradiction in your fundamental position.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
No - I am saying that you should be aware of what the evidence tells you - not what your prejudices tell you. Many theories appear on the surface to describe physical phenomena in the same way - you should consider all the possibilities. Just because the Standard Model has never been proven wrong does not make it right.

Okay, but you still need some kind of position as to what to deal with evidence. Do you look at the source? Do you probe a bit if that piece of evidence runs contrary to established theories? You probably at least want to see that repeated, right? When somebody comes up to you and say, "Look, miracle!" You'd probably be skeptical about it, no?

When A.A. Michaelson stunned the world by finding the absence of ether, people scrambled to fix the prevailing theory by adding ad hoc hypotheses, not trying to replace it with a new model. That's how science works. Not every bit of new evidence requires a completely new theory. I'd say the space contraction thing worked quite nicely for Newtonian Physics. Of course, Einstein then came along and scraped the whole thing.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
My counter-example was not intended to be physically rigorous. I am fairly sure I could come up with a Lorentz covarient description if you like, but would you really care?

Okay. That means we aren't talking science anymore, and going into metaphysics or theology.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
That depends on your definition of 'science'. In principle I agree - the correct formulation of science should accept that there are things which cannot be described by laws (which sounds remarkably like you are conceeding my point ), but the formulation of science many people (and many on this board) worship is one where science is infallible and everything can be described by physical laws. I am at a loss as to why you think regularities preclude a non-predictive sector - I am not saying that there are no laws which are applicible for many physical processes.

How do you go about changing the "ToE" without changing everything else? As far as my understanding goes, if you mess with the basic constants too much, we'd be wiped out, poof, gone. If the "ToE" changes in such a way that nothing else is effected, does it matter at all? If something changes, but there is no effect to the universe, so that it cannot be detected, that change might as well not have occurred as far as we are concerned.

[I use "ToE" loosely to refer to the basic foundation of this universe, not any human formulation of it.]

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
This has got nothing to do with it.. I am sure that these theories are only approximations of the 'true' theory -- clearly these approximations will break down in certain parts of space-time. What of it?

You are positing that will never be able to amend these theories or come up with new ones. Sure, black holes now post a big theoretical problem, but there is some recent alternative explanation involving the Bose-Einstein Condensate. So that's one way of doing it. Sure, we now have the problem of figuring one which one is right - or rather, both are wrong. It's all part of science, however.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
But do you honestly believe that physics will one day describe all physical phenomena? Your 'inductive' leap is quite a big one!

It's like this. If there's something out there we cannot detect and sense, something that's unknowable, something that will forever lies outside our sphere of knowledge*, this something is not what we should bother about. Talking about the unknown is a bit silly if you ask me.

* Knowledge does not include things such as metaphysics. It's just tossing around hypotheses that can't be verified.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
It is not a 'God of the Gaps' argument, because God is so much more than that, but if I can get you to acknowledge the 'Gaps', maybe you will wonder about that is in them.

Certainly there are gaps, we don't know everything there is to know. Yet, we know a lot more than we used to 50 years ago. What we knew 50 years ago was a lot more than what we know 100 years ago. Unless you are suggesting that for one reason or another we will run into a wall, perhaps due to physical limits**, there is no reason to believe that such gaps will remain there forever.

The "god in the Gaps" argument is just saying that "what we don't know is god," or "god is the unknown." The proponents have always shroud this god of theirs in the darkness. Whenever science finds out something, they never acknowledge their mistake, they just shift their god. So you see it's not an argument we (atheists) deal with seriously, because it is not just a cop-out, but it could never be wrong.

** "Cannot know" is not the same as "do not know." Something we cannot know is by definition unknowable.

[QUOTE] Originally posted by Rogan Josh
Well, the classic example, which I have often mentioned on these boards, is free-will. If you have true free-will, it can never be explained by physics, since if it were explainable by a predictive model, it would no longer be free-will. So there have to be 'Gaps'. [Although I will confess, that some atheists hold the view that they have no free-will, which is a perfectly logical viewpoint to hold.]

You will first to define freewill. Then, unless the choices to be made for a decision is infinite, I don't see how a probabilistic model couldn't work.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
I don't understand the 'emeralds' comments. Non-predictivity, does not equal non-observability.

It's a thought exercise about how observations could fail to reveal facts about the objective reality. If you believe something like that though, you might as well be a brain in a vat.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
If the letter sequence dictates what the physical laws will be, it dictates how everything will behave and nothing can violate its rules. Can you violate the laws of phyics?

No. However, if you are suggesting that the laws of physics change, and there is no way we can find out the meta-laws, as it were, governing these changes, there wouldn't be any science at all. In fact, there probably wouldn't be any humans or other lifeforms.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
I find the second part curious - are you implying that because I can't come up with an internally consistent physics theory which described a different world to our own (which incidentally isn't true - I could come up with such a theory fairly easily) then it can't exist? By that token, judging by some of the 'physics' discussed here, acceralation due to gravity on the Earth's surface cannot be 9ms^-2.

Okay, let me rephrase that.

Laws of physics are not self-contradictory. In other words, these laws must hold true throughtout - if you disagree, go ahead and formuate a model how these laws can vary while nature can still be stable.

So, by known laws of physics (or science, rather), if you put a layer of water 1500 meters thick encasing the earth in the atmosphere, lifeforms underneath will be crushed. That is one of the problems with the Noachian Flood. Yet YEC's (Young Earth Creationists) insist that it is true, which is something that requires violating laws of nature as far as I can tell. An entity that could do that would be omnipotent, or at least pretty damn powerful.

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
It is no different, but I hope you have a clearer idea of where the applicibility of your senses break down! Perhaps you can predict for me, what my response to your next post will be?

"You are a moron." :lol"

But you surely are not suggesting our senses are temporally invariant?

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
So do you conceed that your "assumption of regularity" is indeed an assumption?

Of course.

But even the existence of a god requires regularity. Otherwise, how could you tell this god actually exists?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Lincoln
You cannot answer the questions. Yet you still cling to a blind faith in materialism inspit of ANY evidence that points to intelligent design. You are a man of faith Ranger. Have you ever though of becoming a theologin?

1. So you can tell me where your god came from? Great! I am all ears.

2. Where is this evidence you speak of? You still have failed to address a number of thorny questions I raised in "The Great Information Debate." Judging from the date of the last post, you had more than 10 months to do so. You haven't.

3. So, how did you "trash" my arguments in the aforementioned thread?

[Urban Ranger]

Jack,

Originally posted by Lincoln
I will ignore your first paragraph because it simply is not true. You did not prove that information comes from randomness and neither can you. If I am wrong then please demonstrate how that it is done.

This should be an indication of how Lincoln has always acted in debates. He simply ignores rebuttals, evades questions, shifts goal posts, and is not above throwing logical fallacies about. Take a look at "The Great Information Debate" for a sample.

[Ramo]

What happens when you find a theory that explains the evidence better than another? I would expect science to use that explanation before anything else.

That's right. The theory that best fits the experimental evidence usually wins out in the specific scientific community eventually.

Everybody:
Has anybody actually seen macroevolution?

Since I don't think there's any substantive difference between micro and macroevolution, yes I have.

[BeBMan]

UR, where is this mysterious "The Great Information Debate"?

Is that the thread title? I searched it, but no results came up.

Do you have a link to this thread?

[Urban Ranger]

The Great Information Debate

Sorry, I thought I posted the link in this thread. Maybe it's in the one on Creationism. So, by request:

The Great Information Debate

'Poly's search function appears to be not functioning properly.

[Ben Kenobi]

Sava:

Remember, a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters will eventually rewrite Shakespeare.

Do the calculations sava. How long would this take?

More time than we have. That is one of the problems of evolution in that we simply do not have time for random probability to form complex molecules.

Ramo:

That's right. The theory that best fits the experimental evidence usually wins out in the specific scientific community eventually.

So what about the hypothesis of God's existence?

Since I don't think there's any substantive difference between micro and macroevolution, yes I have.

What do you base this assertion on? Could they not be two seperate things entirely?

As for observing macroevolution, does the lack of direct observation render this an untestable hypothesis? Is it possible to disprove macroevolution, Ramo?

[BeBMan]

Thanks UR