Not all the time one can say that there is a fallacy:
And with someone that has even a fallacy named after him, (a form of an a combination of Argument from Authority with the Ad nauseam one) we have already many examples of his dishonesty, so many that one can not help pointing at the obvious: honesty is not a property one can say Gish has.
You guys amaze me - I don’t know where you get the stamina to keep arguing these same points over and over for years and years. ::Raises a glass to the Straight Dope Ignorance Fighters::
I see that you have read and understood the text at least on the surface and thats great. I hope you have analyzed it yourself and not relied solely on the commentaries. Nothing wrong with commentaries to point out things you might not have thought of but they are not the last word. You are in your case and I am in mine. The great thing about the Bible is we can all be experts. Its a big collection of books but not really that big. Its a little shorter than the Harry Potter series.
I am not going to debate Bible contradictions with you at least not now on this thread but when the Bible is talking in symbols it will always give you a literary cue. In this instance “On the seventh day God rested from his labor”.
On the one hand we have a writer smart enough to craft a work that would stand for thousands of years (the ultimate bestseller) but on the other hand he writes that that God had to take a whole day to rest. It dosent add up except as a literary cue.
I understand and agree.
Yes it is a usefull tool for learning what works and what doesnt I am certainly not saying simulations are worthless but I am saying they are not absolute proof of anything.
For example Uranus was discovered with errors in the calculations even tho they were small. But then the errors that led to the discovery of Pluto were large.
Getting the right answer is not always indicative of understanding the process.
I see nothing unlikely about it given such a small amount of variables and a target to shoot for.
The mutations (the real ones) are random in every sense of the word in Darwininan evolution. One of the other problems I see with the Weasel program is that there are no neutral and no negative mutations. There is nothing for it to compete against.
In short natural selection is a very messy business and the Weasel describes it in a very tidy way.
Please give me a link to the best simulation you know of that is explained on a university website.
I need no such reassurance I think many atheists assume that all those who believe in some sort of ID only do so for the comfort.
Its not always so comforting when you those you love living in ways that you consider wrong. Its not that the lights out…shows over view is so comforting but it would be a nice alternative to thinking someone like yourself would be in an unpleasant place forever. And then compare that to those I am close too.
I think many atheists have very good emotional reasons to feel the way they do just like many Christians.
That’s not what ad hominem means.
It would have been ad hominem if I’d said “Gish’s mom dresses him funny, therefore his arguments are false”, or “Gish kicks puppies, therefore his arguments are false”, or even “Gish comes from Kansas, therefore his arguments are false” (it’s true he comes from Kansas, but, assuming there was some negative connotation, it would still be an irrelevant attack about some other detail of the man, therefore ad hominem)
But when the subject under discussion is already the arguments put forward in support of creationism by Mr Duane Gish, it’s not ad hominem to say that he has a tendency to put forward misleading arguments.
It might be an overgeneralisation (it was one sentence, after all)
It might even be factually incorrect (I don’t think it *is *incorrect -so we could debate this if you like), but it’s not ad hominem.
This is incorrect - the mutations in the weasel progam are random.
Both of these statements are true, but missing the key point that it’s meant to be a very, very simple analogue of the process, in order to be illustrative of a general mechanism. If it was more complex, you’d be able to complain that it was too messy to be able to be sure what’s really occurring.
The real world really is a messy place, but even in a really messy domain, a slight statistical leaning tends to have a measurable effect - consider a weighted die - starting with a perfectly fair die, I drill the tiniest hole in one side (let’s say the side with one spot on it) and insert the tiniest speck of a lead weight in there - the weight is so very small that it makes hardly any difference to an individual throw - certainly the die doesn’t noticeably flip and land on six (i.e. one spot facing down) every time, and it’s still easily possible to roll a 1 (i.e. with the weighted side uppermost)
But perform ten million throws of the die, and, because there’s a tiny weight on the one-spot, it’s quite certain that more sixes will be rolled than any other number.
Say what?
That is why we don’t have any differing churches nor splintergroups nor obscure sects in Christianity, the book is so concise and easy to interpret.
So the whole bit from “In the beginning…” is all symbolic?
What is your criterium to establish whether to take stuff literally or not?
If it sounds rather silly then it is symbolic?
A writer? As in 1?
You really should read some bible analysis books.
Which was funny, because you were also equivocating between Dawkins and Gish.
Shifting the goalposts again:
This entire argument was because you disagreed that there could be a scientific account for altruism. You understand or at least linked to a decent summary of altruism and just declared that it failed on its premises, so Voyager gave you a recommendation to a longer book which explains the concepts and methodology in greater detail, which you rejected with an ad hominem attack.
I don’t have a copy of the Selfish Gene or The Evolution of Cooperation to hand since I borrowed them from the library. I doubt I can improve on the summary you linked yourself, but I remember two powerful arguments.
The first is that Selfish Gene theory is essentially a restatement of kin selection – one is likely to be evolutionarily predisposed to preserve one’s own genes (this is an amoral statement), whether they exist in one’s own body, the body of one’s twin, sibling or cousin, to varying degrees. There are various strategies for gene preservation in societies: in fact, without such strategies, stable societies would not form. These are known as evolutionarily stable strategies. They are not necessary the ideal strategies for every individual practising such a strategy.
Another is that stotting behaviour (jumping in front of predators) may be beneficial to each individual genetic strategist, as it discourages the predator by making a cost/benefit analysis: the stotter is easier to catch due to being closer, but also healthier than the average group because it is willing to take such a risk. The stotter that lives will have offspring which are more difficult to catch for a predator on average.
Well, I’m glad of your honesty, but this isn’t a trivial point for me. If pain is a necessary component of free will and free will is the ideal state, then we are being punished in the afterlife by having our free will stripped of us. If free will and knowledge can exist without pain, then we are being punished in this life unnecessarily. If this life is a test, God has set the parameters knowing precisely who will fail the test, both in terms of biology and environment, due to God’s omniscience. If the fall explains the imperfection of our existence, then the teleological argument falls apart.
That’s really good - thanks.
Slight shame that it’s presented a bit confrontationally, as it makes it less palatable for presenting to someone who hasn’t been trotting out a bunch of watchmaker canards, but I guess the author probably had valid reasons for wanting to pitch it that way.
That the Bible has multiple authors, and that there are multiple versions of stories has been know for centuries. But the authorship of Genesis is not why it is wrong - it is wrong because it contradicts the best available data.
Or this passage was included to support the already existing and very important concept of Sabbath. What better reason for the people to follow it than that God himself did. The Christian Sunday is in no way as significant as the Sabbath - books of prayers and rituals for holidays are full of extra things to say if the holiday falls on the Sabbath, for instance.
Of course not - they just support the correctness of the hypothesis.
Neither of those things have anything to do with simulations. When I was a kid, before the Oort cloud was discovered, it was known that Pluto was too small to explain the orbits of the inner planets. And calculations were always inaccurate before computers. Babbage created the Difference Engine because of a study showing that the mathematical tables England depended on were full of errors. That the gravitational equations work is demonstrated by all our space probes.
I got the impression that “mutations” which did not advance the move to the solution were generated - otherwise I find it hard to understand why it took even an hour to reach the right answer. There are tons of neutral mutations in our genome, inside our junk DNA, for example, which is used to measure the time since we diverged from the ancestors of another animal. Negative mutations don’t last long due to selection pressure.
And remember, this is not a model of evolution, just of ways that random processes can produce results which pure randomness cannot produce.
I was describing genetic algorithms. Simulation is used in industry - we’ve got well over a thousand cpus doing simulations pretty much full time. Just search for genetic algorithms. The ones I read assume specific domain knowledge, not related to GAs, and might be confusing.
This is not a creationist/evolution split. There are plenty of theists who totally accept evolution but who also believe in a god who silently guided the process to create us. This is the position of the Catholic Church. For instance, mammal became dominant when the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Was that just luck, or did the hand of god cause it? There is no way of knowing. However both sides of that issue accept the asteroid hit, that dinosaurs (except for birds) went extinct long before man appeared, and this all happened a long time ago. You can do just as good science with the goal of understanding god’s subtle handiwork was you can without god belief. When you are convinced you know the answer in advance, and reject evidence which contradicts, that is when you do bad science.
Which made me think of one aspect of messiness not considered in this program of GAs in general - that in the real world, the success function keeps changing. Features that get selected for to reproduce in a warm environment win - oops, the environment just turned cold.
It is clear that if you changed the selection function for Weasel in the middle of a run, the program would eventually converge on a new answer. I don’t know how IDers handle this problem. Mostly by ignoring it, I guess. Does God twiddle with the design to put fur on the elephant?
“twiddle?” Why in the world would “twiddling” be required?
There is no doubt that there can be a lot of variation within an animal’s kind. God certainly did not create lon-haired dogs and short-haired dogs as seperate kinds, why would long-haired and short-haired elephants be any different?
I can’t help but wonder what that ‘Loving God’ thinks of his defenders when they pick a fight, then skulk away unable or unwilling to defend him? I bet he’s not impressed. That’s gotta cost them a few brownie points, don’t you think?
No, but we did.
Kind is not well defined. Woolly mammoths and regular elephants are certainly different species, and I doubt they could mate, you your average Hebrew might consider them different kinds. But this gets to the point that creationists believing in the flood also believe in rapid evolution and speciation quite beyond anything accepted by science.
Basically, if they accept that woolly mammoths evolved, they might as well give it up.
The thing that evolutionists fail to appreciate is that gene sequencing has done for evolutionary theory what space flight did for heliocentrism. We are no longer in the realm of speculation based on indirect observation, we now can see directly the way in which the genome has changed over millions of years and how the tree of life branched. To deny evolution is to say that the sun revolves around the earth but the devil has deluded all of NASA to make it look the other way around.
Some of the more with-it creationists used to say that evolution was not a science, since it could not be falsified -any fossil could be shoved into the record some way. Sequencing however was an excellent opportunity to falsify evolution, since if the sequencing did not support the fossil record it would be a serious problem. Of course it did support evolution. And we all know the response “that doesn’t prove it,” as if that statement made any sense at all.
Feh. All this “sequencing” only shows that the Designer used a standard template. We already knew that, from all the evidences the evolutionists say supports monkeys turning into people. A common plan does not mean an actual family relationship!
(Hey, somebody’s gotta keep up the Creationists side until one wanders back to speak for themselves.)