Excellent, you have actually added to my point. To predict you would have posted here 24 years ago, and have it come true would be a huge long shot; now, tie that in to the fact that all of the previous stuff that I posted had to occur for you to do that, and it only adds to the incredulety.
Again, I’m not saying it didn’t happen, just that if it did (evolution), it was incredibly happenstance, IMHO.
Again, there just seems to be too many situations that had to happen a certain way for us to be here, to deny an intelligent design.
Patrick Ashley
‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ -Edmund Burke
Pashley, I’d have to second what Gaudere said about Christian tenets. Is creationism in the classical creeds, for instance? Not really - the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds say that God the Father created everything (‘all that is, seen and unseen,’ in the language of the Nicene Creed) but they don’t say when or how. I’d say creationism hardly seems to be a tenet of Christianity as a whole, but only of a certain subset.
And I’m only amused (used to be disgusted, but…) at being called an anti-religious zealot for concluding that the theory of evolution is supported by the weight of the evidence. Thirty years since I came to know the Lord, and the moment I say the obvious about creation and evolution, a certain class of my brethren and sistern considers me an outcast.
As Groucho said, I’ve been thrown out of better clubs than that one.
Patrick, take the lottery example. There are 5 million tickets bought and 7 million possible number combinations, so the odds are seven million to one against me winning, and a 2 out of 7 chance that no one will win at all. Now, say I did win; did that require divine intervention? Why or why not?
Given an enormous universe, millions of planets, multiple means in which life could be created, and billions of years, life occured in at least one part of the universe. Did that require divine intervention? Why or why not?
Right, and if I had never found this board and was reading the Onion at 12:18PM, that would be an incredible happenstance too. If I was struck by lightning at 12:18PM, that is an incredible happenstance too. If I was chugging a Coke, or scratching my nose, or staring out the window, or any one of billions of other things that could have happened, that would be an incredible happenstance too. If you have a trillion possibilities and one of them happens, the odds of it happening is a trillion to one…but one of them had to happen, it just happened to be that particular one. Do you see why speaking of the “unlikelyhood” of one specific thing that has already happened is a tricky thing, even when we know the odds (which we don’t, for the likelyhood of life)?
Adam hasn’t had a valid point regarding the Bible as scientific fact since he admitted to not having read the entire thing yet maligns those who don’t believe exactly like he does.
Hey, I saw an amazing license plate on the way to work today: RDT-724. Can you imagine the odds against that? :rolleyes: (Tip of the hat to the late R.P. Feynman.)
No, seriously, let’s look at Pashley’s list:
We’re not at ‘just the right distance’ about the sun, and our elliptical orbit is far from mathematically perfect. The zone in which a planet of Earth’s size and composition would support Earth-style life is believed to be about 30 million miles wide, IIRC, and Earth is near the inner edge of that zone. And given the astounding number of stars and (probably) planets in the universe, the likelihood of one planet of roughly this size, in the ‘right’ range of distances from a medium-sized yellow star, is all but certain.
Who knows what the ‘right ingredients’ are? We know that life here is carbon-based; is carbon the only possible chemical basis for life? AFAIK, there’s nothing magical about carbon.
Unless and until we hear from another civilization, we won’t know for sure, and maybe not even then. We’re just a single data point, and that’s not enough to draw a conclusion from.
The improbability of life forming out of some primordial ‘soup’ is a subject I’m not particularly expert on, but I know that parts of the difficulty have been overstated, as the creationists’ odds neglect the tendency of certain molecules to persist, once formed.
This is another ‘how do we know the odds without another case to compare it with’ situation. Life as we know it is amazingly tough and resilient; living things are able to flourish in the most improbable circumstances on earth - near the hot sea vents, in crevices deep within the earth, etc. This certainly suggests that the odds of life, once established, to survive Ice Ages, radiation, etc. are excellent. But the odds that life, once formed, would be this tough and resilient? Who knows - we have no standard of comparison. We’ve got a single data point, and that’s not good for much.
OTOH, why bother to discuss probability here? Gaudere’s point was that any particular predicted outcome would have been an ‘amazing’ longshot, but once born, the odds that she’d be doing something today at 12:18pm were quite excellent. So the actual outcome isn’t amazing at all, despite what the odds against would have been if anyone had predicted it.
Like the license plate. I was certain to see a considerable number of license plates on my way to work. An advance prediction that I’d see a particular one (excepting the ones I regularly see) would be astounding, if correct. So in a sense, whatever I experienced would be amazing. Yet there’s nothing remarkable at all about the fact that I was certain to see a number of extremely improbable plates.
Enough of voting for the lesser of evils - vote Cthulhu 2000!
Perhaps you haven’t read the information at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html to see attacks on his logic, and IMO his science. I don’t know what, if any, “lab” work he has done, I only know of his published works like Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. If this is indicative of his research, I doubt he has ever been published in a science journal.
Kudos to Tom for pointing out that the Dark Ages (which is just a slight misnomer) was not caused by the Church. I was going to point this out when I read it, but he did a much better job. Indeed, probably the only people involved with science were men of the cloth- eg Roger Bacon, Copernicus, to name a couple. No one else could afford to.
Also, let me reiterate, as both a Christian and as a scientist who holds evolution to be true, that those viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. Science and religion answer two different questions.
While creationists, even YE-C, could do some science without impediment from their bias, in the long run, I think that working from a false paradigm is counterproductive.
It’s not how you pick your nose, it’s where you put the boogers
Adam, I suggest you read the “Creationism questions” thread. The entirety of molecular biology shows traces of life’s past, and if you don’t understand the past, you don’t understand the present. For example, suppose you want to understand the function of lens crystallin, and how its functions are related to its structure and sequence. Mollusc crystallins are entirely different from vertebrate crystallins. Why? If you’re an evolutionist, you know that there are historical reasons why that is the case. If you’re a creationist, you have no idea why that’s the case.
To draw a parallel to a recent column, suppose you wanted to know why railway tracks were such-and-such distance apart. Is it because that’s the perfect distance? Or is it just a historical accident? Without a thorough knowledge and understanding of the past, you can’t make sense of the present.
Incidentally, it’s ironic that you would ask whether you can still cure cancer if you don’t believe in evolution. Cancer is entirely an evolutionary disease, in which cells evolve the ability to live as parasites on the body under the pressure of natural selection.
Ah, fuck it. I knew there was a reason I avoid posting in GD. I always say shit wrong.
What I was trying to say is that I feel that because creationism is not science, trying to pose it as such could have a detrimental effect on the scientific community as a whole.
Somehow I expressed that in a way that made me sound like I was making an ad hominem attack on creationists and religious people every where. I do feel that Creationists Are People Too. They are people who love their families, work hard, enjoy warm sunny days and steal cable like all good-hearted people.
Anyway, now that I convinced both ARG and tomndebb that I’m some religion-hating nutjob science geek I’m gonna bow out and head over to GQ. Or maybe the Pit. I get less abuse there.
Gypsy: Tom, I don’t get you. Tom Servo: Nobody does. I’m the wind, baby.
Monty, c’mon, look at the C&P. I hold no brief for Adam’s view of religion, faith, the bible, etc. His specific point that someone may be a YEC and still perform good work in science is, however, a point that some of us should consider from time to time.
hardcore, Behe’s popularly published books are part and parcel with his philosophy for which he can rightly be criticized. I do not have the time to look it up right now, but when we were wrasslin with Phaedrus, I searched out a number of Behe’s papers and discovered that he is pretty well regarded in his work for his specific investigations. For example, his feistiest opponent is H. Allen Orr who has said of Behe
There is more to Behe than his popular treatises (which I certainly think are in error).
Nah, Alpha, I was just picking on your post because it was conveniently close. I did not take your statement as an attack on Creationists as people. I just noted its similarity in phrasing to some of the back-and-forth that went on with batgirl. I think we “rational” evolutionists (atheistic and theistic, alike) should be careful not to insist that because we disagree with the logic on one aspect of one science, that our “opponents” are incapable of acting logically in any other arena.
Ben: I assume you disagree with Tom and I, regarding whether or not a YEC could “still perfom good work in science.” (To quote Tom)
I should go and win a Nobel Prize, just to prove you wrong.
tomndebb, my biggest problem with accepting that Behe does fine work outside of his philosophical meanderings is statements by him like this:
Now this is so completely untrue, it simply staggers me. I find hundreds of such papers with a measly web search, so I have to wonder about his research methods or his honesty. Perhaps he is more careful with his mainstream work, but I wouldn’t be this careless posting to a message board.
I am not so sure that you can easily segregate his popular books into philosophy instead of science. He certainly is trying to make his case for “irreducible complexity” on scientific grounds, not philosophical. He fails miserably, but that is because the logic is flawed and the science doesn’t support it. He considered the argument scientific, stating that the discovery of design is “so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science,” rivaling “those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur, and Darwin.”
Single Dad:
I was being slightly facetious, and I suppose I didn’t express that well. I’m sorry about that. My point was that the web page that was linked to made it clear that they had no interest in defending any specific position, and so you can expect your request for evidence for creationism to remain unfulfilled.
pashley: Don’t you think that the idea that this universe just happened to have a god that wanted to create life is quite a coincidence? I mean, just what is the chance that God would exist at all, let alone that It would want us to exist?
Gaudere: I think that you may have confused pashley by saying “who would take a bet [that I would post at this exact time]?” You see, if someone had predicted exactly which planets would develop life, and which would not, and was right 100% of the time, that would be very unbelievable. But we’re not talking about first predicting an event, and then having it happen. We’re talking about something that definitely has happened, and trying to look back with hindsight and say “Now, what was the chance of that happenning?” If I could make a bet now about whether you’d post, I’d obviously win. And someone would have to be really stupid to take the other end of the bet, no matter how unlikely your posting may seem, just as no matter how unlikely life developing on Earth may seem to someone, they would have to really stupid to bet that it won’t happen, because it already did. I think that was your point; correct me if I’m wrong.
Ryan, I was just trying to point out that looking at life developing after it has happened and saying that its “unlikelyness” is proof of divine intervention is not a very poweful argument. It seems superficially highly unlikely that I would be doing exactly what I did at 12:18pm, given the sheer number of variables that would have to perfectly coincide to achieve that result, and Patrick even tried to use my remark as further “proof”. He is arguing that the sheer number of variables needed to procure life exactly as it is on this earth is immense, and I was trying to point out that if you look at one specific result, everything looks highly unlikely. If you are aware that there are many possibilities and one of them had to happen, even though the odds for that specific result is a trillion to one, it does not “require” divine intervention. Life could never have developed anywhere at all…and perhaps the odds for that occurence would be a trillion to one. Would that require divine intervention too, to buck such odds?
I think you get my point, Ryan, but perhaps I am expressing myself unclearly.
[Moderator Note: The next person who multiposts is going to be fed to vampire slugs. I’d put in a winky here, but I’m not even sure if I’m kidding. I’ve already cleaned up one quadruple post, one triple post, and two double posts all in the past hour in just this thread. Trust the CGI! Only hit submit once! Please look to see if the “post count” goes up, and if it did, you post went through, even if it doesn’t show!]
No, I never said that a creationist couldn’t perform good work in science. I said that they are working under a serious handicap.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that creationists tend to be underrepresented in the sciences, and when they do go into science, they tend to go into engineering or computer science- I have actually spoken to one or two creationists who said that they wanted to go into fields like chemistry and biology, but because of their beliefs chose computer science instead.
That’s part of the problem with creationists becoming scientists- a lot of them decide not to go into science because they are afraid of it shaking their beliefs. To draw an analogy, the question isn’t whether a flat earther is smart enough to become an astronaut- the question is whether an astronaut can remain a flat earther once he sees the earth from space. Or, for that matter, how a flat earther could be an astronaut for so long and never happen to look out the window. Part of what I found so strange about batgirl was that she has a PhD in molecular biology, but mysteriously is unaware of basic facts of that field which are relevant to deciding between creation and evolution. It’s as if you met a dentist who had never used a dental mirror. You think to yourself, jeez, that’s weird- I guess you could develop a dental technique that did ok without a dental mirror. Then you find out that they have no idea what a dental mirror is- they know everything else about dentistry, they have a successful practice, but they’ve never heard of a dental mirror. What’s going on? They went to dental school- didn’t any of their teachers talk about dental mirrors? Well, maybe their teachers assumed everyone already knew about dental mirrors or something. But wait a minute- don’t dentists get advertisements in the mail from dental mirror manufacturers? Don’t they read articles on new dental techniques, and don’t a lot of those articles make reference to dental mirrors? What’s going on here?
Gaudere: I apologize for the triple post. But, it looks like you’ll have to feed everyone to the slugs, since we’ve all been multi-posting. Keep up the good work, BTW.
The odds that the unviverse exists the way it does today, all starting from absolute nothingness, all being born into existence by sheer randomness, is impossible. There really cannot be calculated odds. It’s impossible…cannot be done without Divine intervention. I realize this is why many evolutionists say that God got the “ball rolling.”
Well, I did make challenges which were relevant to her job. How can she read the scientific literature and not deal with protein homology when maybe what? A quarter of the papers contain homology diagrams? How did she take all those classes for her PhD and not have any teacher mention the basic facts of protein homology? Clearly she comes out ok, but it’s hard for me to see how she never came across the topic in work or school. Like I said, how does the flat earther astronaut avoid looking out the window? I must admit that I don’t know.
Actually Adam, the fact that we are here to observe a Universe makes that Universe inevitable. It is no surprise that life exists in a Universe which is capable of supporting life.
Now, if you could show that the Universe is actively hostile to life (as we know it) and we are here ANYWAY, then direct Divine Intercession would be a better possibility.
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
“You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason.”
