I don’t consider death as a design defect. Any creator who is going to allow new children to be born needs to introduce death, otherwise we would be up to our asses on people. Plus, to advance you need new blood. Remember that in the Bible immortality and no children were the default, only changed by the supposed sin. What was God thinking? Did he intend to design a static world?
I can just hear them now. Our demonstrated ability to create life (which is coming soon) and to create a conscious intelligence doesn’t mean that God didn’t do it also. Would it have a soul?
I’m not too worried about it. There will always be a kill -9 in the OS.
Mutations are (essentially*) random, selection certainly isn’t.
‘Being tall’ can be described as a strategy, employed by giraffes. Doesn’t mean anyone is being tall on purpose.
That’s really, really weak (and yes, a retreat into semantics). If I say that a printer is ***trying ***to eject a page, that’s just a convenient way of describing what’s happening. If you want to be silly, almost any verb can be twisted to try to impose intent.
*I say ‘essentially’ random to avoid another semantic diversion. Randomness doesn’t necessarily mean uniform distribution (the sum of a pair of six-sided dice is more likely to be 7 than 12), neither does it mean that any outcome is possible (a single six-sided die will never roll a 7)
I don’t take the book out, because I respect books and it would not be good for the book for me to repeatedly throw it across the room. I don’t trust Dawkins as a Constitutional scholar, but I do trust him as a biologist.
Most of us don’t think about how immensely old the universe is and how young we are. SF shows like Star Trek make the same mistake, since most races are close to the same age (or don’t care about anything.) I have two novels which I will start sending to agents when I have five free minutes where the ultimate mystery revolves around the answer to this question.
I fell into the common trap of assigning terms that imply purpose. Mutations are random, and not all species do this. But when the mutation does arise, it is likely to be successful because it works.
The models are mathematical models describing what happens, and the simulations are a way of finding out what the implications are given changing various variables, because the models are probably way too complicated for closed form solutions. The simulations test the model. If you claim the model describe evolution, but simulating it provides results different from what we see in reality, your model is bad. I’ve written quite a few simulators in my life, and you don’t hardwire in answers, just some basic input output relationships.
Only in the sense that falling objects in the real world are bound by the law of gravity, etc. Modelling something isn’t the same as deciding in advance what the precise outcome will be.
Well, whether Samir’s understanding of evolution is cartoonish or your understanding of Samir’s premise is, you have not refuted anything presented to you, nor supported anything you have claimed.
Sorry, that’s not the criterion that Voyager was propounding:
It’s not that the books are written by creationists, it’s the fact that the arguments are not valid. As for whether Dawkins deliberately lied: I doubt it. First of all, the link you gave leads to the Alliance Defense Fundwebsite, which is a Christian organisation explicitly set up to fund lawsuits defending freedom to practice Christianity. If the lawyer’s argument was legitimately based on the right to unabridged free speech, then it may have been an honest mistake on the part of Dawkins. Second, my copy of the God Delusion makes no mention about exemptions for “hate speech”. Such an argument is mistaken: there is legislation prohibiting hate speech in the UK, but not in the US. Perhaps my edition is just a later printing?
If atheists believed as you do they wouldn’t be atheists! I don’t think they are trying to tear a Christian to shreads, just showing why they cannot accept your beliefs. Belief isn’t evidence. Too much of the stories can be proven to have not happend as written, just believed, and most Atheists have read and studied the Bible, which many found not to be true,and there is no proof for Christianity…just belief in the authors of the Bible who were writing their beliefs of what some other human taugh,or told them.
One thing that stands out to me about the fact of evolution is: Many of our illinesses were cured by scientists who used animals (yes, even rats) to experiment on. And no, we were not directly made from Chimpanzees but have a common ancestor, and share most of the same genes.At least that is how I understand it.
Perfect has been described before as a blank sheet of paper. I suppose a creator without limits could have designed us to take up no space and consume no resources. Or designed our world with infinite space and all the resources renew themselves everyday. And we could have little natural video kiosks everywhere that explain how things function. We could be like the people in the movie WALL-E.
If you knew you could make this world painless but it would be very boring would you make the deal?
To answer your questions I think He was thinking they (Adam and Eve) will get their chance. And no He knew what they would do with their chance.
Besides I already said I didnt believe in a literal genesis.
Good question I suspect it wouldnt but if it became self aware to the degree that we are I am not going to say its impossible.
I think you misread me. I dont always phrase things the best.
Here is your hypothetical:
The system is closed to the outside world. You have no concern that the AI cannot harm us or anything else in anyway.
The AI becomes self aware to the same extent that you are but it is causing itself much suffering but at the same time is experiencing much joy.
Do you hit the kill-9?
Not really trying to make a point here. Whatever your answer is it would not be proof or counter proof of anything. I am curious tho.
I concede that the argument was weak but not really really weak that is two too many reallys when I pointed out the semantics in my own argument and besides my follow up question indicated that I did understand Voyagers argument.
I dont see any criteria listed there. Oh except for context and I gave you the whole book.
What are you suggesting? That he did not do his homework?
If so perhaps you could tell me if he makes a habit of this.
The link was a legal brief signed by a judge. And the link I gave you to the book was on an atheist website.
I do not know why your book is different from the website book perhaps someone told Dawkins that court records are generally a matter of public record and he took it out but that is just a guess.
Well that is surprising what if it is a book on how to kill people or something?
Books are not sacred in any way in my…er…book.
I am no Constitutional scholar but I could read the opinion and ruling just fine and it was way short for a legal opinion.
I just trust people or I dont and I dont trust Dawkins and I could easily fill the whole page with reasons why but I picked that one because it is not ambiguous in any way.
Ever watch Babylon 5 it was my favorite. Followed by Lost in Space and although I watched evey episode of Star Trek as a kid I never did like any of the spin offs.
Great so you are an author too I will you still talk to us little folk when you outsell Stephen King. BTW somebody told me he wrote another Dark Tower book and I really dont have time to read fiction these days but somehow I think I will find the time.
Reading his (along with Straub) The Talisman is a great way to stimulate thought on these kinds of subjects if you havent read it I recommend highly.
I was trying to think of a better answer for you last night and what I should have said is that I have never thought of reconciling a literal genesis with a 4 billion year old earth. I actually do think of the immensity of space and time and try to wrap my head around it.
In the first chapter of the first book (Genesis) of the collection of books we call the Holy Bible it does indeed talk about more than one genesis and it is hard to miss but people have been letting others tell them what the Bible says for so long that the paradigms are hard to beat.
This is what I mentioned to Gagundathar asked me for my own theory of how we got to where we are. You know the post that convinced half the board that I was nuts. Maybe I will try to write out the whole thing sometime and convince the other half.
But these are very much thoughts in motion and I cannot promise that the opinion I have today will be the same tomorrow.
It was a (not really really) weak argument on my part and as a counterpoint I offer that maybe one day we will have better words.
But your argument is circular. It works because it is successful and it is successful because it works.
You still have to explain how the least likely of selections scenarios is all around us. And yes I did the math on the Stanford website which makes it possible in the monkeys case but still not likely. You will have a whole different and even less favorable set of odds in some of the other things we see in nature.
BTW here is you a chance for some semantic revenge if you are so inclined.
EColi ekes out a living by consuming its host but if you really want to thrive follow the example of Lactobacilli by helping your host be all it can be.
If I am to accept Darwin in toto I have to accept that Lactobacilli blindly found a way to both satisfy its needs and keep its host happy and healthy.
We are going to need alot of math.
I do understand that the answers are not predetermined but to state what you said another way: You fiddle with the parameters until you get what you want.
So today, while talking about our discussion, someone mentioned the Weasel program and I googled it this eve. I assume you know more about it than I do but some may not.
BTW if anyone has a problem with the Wiki link I will find another. Wiki is good place to start but for some things it is a bad place to end.
The whole point of “natural” selection is that the gene does not know what it is selection in fact natural selection is really a misnomer and more the product of the English languages limitations. No entity is selecting anything and nothing is being selected as has been stated several times just on this page it is a random mutation so what exactly is Darwin trying to prove here.
I could have told him that if you give a computer any set of letters, integers, symbols or maybe just ones and zeros and tell it to keep randomly selecting them until it gets a particular set that it will do just what was asked of it.
Then why shift the goalposts and extrapolate from one flawed argument of Dawkins to refuting the Selfish Gene? I never said that one erroneous argument disproved an entire canon of work, I said most users would address claims by Dawkins exactly as claims by Gish: on their merits.
This is an ad hominem.
Not to mention:
You linked the judge’s opinion, not the complaint filed by the lawyers. The text of the complaint can easily be found on the same site and is as follows:
Article 7 and 11 encompass freedom of religion and freedom of speech respectively. So it’s misleading at best to state that “freedom of speech is exactly the grounds the Nixons sued on”, because there were several grounds: equal protection, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. By your criterion, we can dismiss every argument of yours as false because of that misleading statement.
It has an introduction explaining why he chose the word “Delusion” and admitting it is not a valid term in the academic sense, but conveyed the general thrust of his argument adequately. I’d need a copy of the first edition to make accurate comparisons though.
Is there pain in heaven?
Edit:
There are pretty much innumerable texts on Darwinian evolution. If you want a good treatment for the evolution of altruism, check out “EVolution and the Theory of Games” or “The Evolution of Cooperation”.
My mother grew up during the Depression when she got a book a year for her birthday. She taught me. I’ve got 5500 SF books, but this is still in my bones.
Read some Bible analysis and you will see where the two contradictory stories come from. Neither story is anywhere close to the physical evidence.
Say a person is found after having fallen from a five story window. Did he jump or was he pushed? It is hard to tell, but if someone confesses and gets the layout of the apartment wrong, things the dead person is the wrong sex, and says it happened hours before it actually did, you know you don’t have the culprit.
This is true for many hill-climbing strategies. What it isn’t is optimal.
Just an observation. If a parasite kills its host long term, but lets it live long enough to reproduce, it is win/win. After an organism successfully reproduces, it doesn’t matter. Look at salmon.
I
Yes and no. When you simulate something like a process, you often have millions of free variables, and a set equation giving you an output given a set of inputs. Through various means you can twiddle the input parameters through their allowable ranges to find something like the best collection for the best result - then you try to implement your process using these parameters. (Massive over-simplification.)
If you are looking at an existing process, you again take known relationships and see what combinations of parameters give results which you actually have observed. After filtering for plausible sets you can measure some on real things (like mutation rates) to see if your model predicted the parameters we actually see. If it does, you may have a good model, if not, you have more work to do.
What do you think natural selection is selecting for? The Weasel program as the link and Dawkin state, is not a model of evolution but just a disproof that highly unlikely results can’t be obtained by mostly random means. There is no goal in evolution and natural selection except reproduction. The great diversity of life indicates that there are many, many ways in which a gene can propagate itself. When you want a goal, genetic algorithms work the way the weasel program works, with selection based on some level of goodness, with small changes across generations, and usually with ways of two answers combining for more diversity.
I’ve reviewed a lot of papers on these. The interesting things are that they work without any detailed algorithms on how to solve a problem, but they are a lot slower than solutions using detailed algorithms. In my area they are in universities only, not in industry. If there were a designer he’d be a fool to use evolution, unless he had a lot of time on his hands. He could have done much better in other ways.
I think a bit problem for the religious is that evolution states that we as human beings are just one of many solutions to how to reproduce. Clearly the world ticked on for quite a while without any intelligent species, and could have gone on much longer. In the short run we are very successful. In the long run we’ll see. If you feel the need for reassurance that humanity as we are is not accidental, you need a designer or creator. I don’t have that need. You and I are just as much accidents as humanity - a different position, a different time, a different day, and neither of us would have been here to worry about it - someone else with the same name and different genes would be. (Not the same name if the sex was different.) Does that bother you? If not, then the accidentness of humanity shouldn’t bother you either.
Any person with even a basic grasp of logic and reason can easily and thorughly debunk the premise of this thread, as has been done here. Perhaps this has already been discussed (I haven’t parsed the entire thread) but the question, at this point, should be: Why do creationists keep trying to prove their beliefs scientifically? The foundation of their belief is not fact or science, it’s faith. The minute we prove creation scientifically, and therefore the existence of God, is the minute faith disappears and, with it, the entire purpose of a heavenly reward.
Creationists: Your belief in creation makes no sense whatsoever. Most of you believe because you’re afraid not to. You were taught to be God-fearing even before you were taught to be God-loving. So, when asked why you believe your answer should be “because I want to.” It’s the only logical, honest response you can offer. So give up trying to prove it. It can’t be done. Besides, you shouldn’t even want to.
Selection doesn’t require a controlling entity in order to have direction. Competition for resources can create direction, differential vulnerability from harm can create direction, and so on.
For a very familiar example, consider giraffes and acacia trees - the giraffes that are a little taller than their peers, however slightly, are likely to enjoy slightly better access to food - it doesn’t have to be a cut-and-dried difference for every individual, just a statistically better one - even if the pool of individuals with genes for slightly increased height are just 1% better at gathering food, that plays out to a slightly higher survival rate as a group, and over time, that means the ‘slightly-taller’ genes prevail.
So selection has occurred, and direction has been created, just because one function is a bit easier for some than others.
If you want to model something like that in a computer, you don’t just throw a bunch of random nonsense in a box - you create analogous starting conditions and constraints, then run the model - yes, it’s artificial and simplified, but it’s still an artifical representation of a real-world phenomenon.
Car manufacturers might use fluid dynamics models to compute efficient vehicle body shapes - the software needs to artificially mimic the behaviour of moving air and solid objects, but that doesn’t mean the real-world wind is an artifact of some intelligent agent, or that it’s imaginary.
I’ve read it (well, skimmed it) and it looks to me like you read the abstract and no further. The author offers a reasonable explanation of how altruism offers an evolutionary advantage, so altruism isn’t a problem and I’m not sure why you feel the explanation “fails”. If you’re going to try to use altruism as a counter-argument to evolution, you’ll have to do better.
There’s nothing specifically Canadian about me calling you on this - my argument hails from the Land of Reason, a nice tidy little country under constant attack from Religionvania and Ignoranda.
Please explain what you mean by shifting the goalposts.
I never attempted to refute The Selfish Gene twould be hard as I dont know what is in it. I may have disagreed with an argument taken out of The Selfish Gene unwittingly. But of course I dont have a problem with you picking out an argument from any source including The Selfish Gene and presenting it as your own. I just requested that you not use Dawkins as a reference.
It does occur to me now that I should have been more specific so please dont use Dawkins name in an attempt to give an opinion more weight. It will have the opposite effect on me.
BTW you committed two textbook strawman fallacies in the first paragraph of your post.
And?
Mangetout was ad hominem (to the man) by saying Gish said “things that are demonstrably false, misleading or downright dishonest.” in post 449 of this thread.
Kobal2 went straight “to the man” in post 448 with “You’re going to bring Gish into the mix, a debater so dishonest”
And I ran poor ole Gish down the road a few times myself in this thread so yes I think that the above posters had every right and possibly even obligation to give their honest opinion on the mans character and track record.
And none of us three committed a fallacy because we were not refuting an argument we just gave an opinion that can easily be backed by using Gishs own words, I do find it odd thought of all the ad hominem attacks on this thread (many more than I have listed) you chose mine to criticize.
Would you care to explain why.
First of all I am not holding myself out as an expert and I am not writing a book. Most authors put a good deal more thought into a book then I do to a message board.
So there are two differences there.
Second I did look at the links and you are absolutely right the Nixons did sue on the several grounds one of them being freedom of religion.
I was wrong and I apologize for my mistake.
However the evidence for my accusation did not change due to my error. Because the judge did not rule in their favor on the grounds of religious discrimination as we can see in his opinion he did not base his decision in any way on the Nixons religious rights.
But Dawkins argument was that religion receives preferential treatment or as he put it “undeserved respect”. His argument is based on what the Nixons got not what they asked for.
So my accusation remains at least for the moment but I like to think I am a fair person. If you can find where Dawkins retracted his statements and apologized for his mistake without blaming someone else for his mistake I will withdraw my statement about him on those grounds.
But to give you fair warning I may reinstate it on another part of one of his books.
I will however refrain from mentioning any off the cuff tweets he may have made.
The honest answer is I do not know I am pretty certain that the descriptions given in the Bible are symbolic and not to be taken literally.
But I think there will be the pain of watching others go through what we are going through now. But that we will understand and that will prob augment most of it.
This is so much better because you are giving me alternatives but you are asking me to debate some books.
Read the books, decide what agree with, prepare a paraphrase of the same and get back to me.