Why is naturalism considered scientific and creationism is not ?

[Youwerecreated]

Science has built theories that have only one presupposition in Mind.

Key terms.

1. Random
2. Chaos
3. Chaos system
4. Chance
5. Unguided
6. Complexity
7. Logic

They even have produced theories for some of these terms why ? it seems obvious they have to explain away these terms and evidences that are observed in nature to be able to say design is not a viable explanation.

They can't have a designer because many of the theories taught in schools would have to be redefined or go away or worse yet allow the teachings of design and creation in school.

They have to show what they teach in schools are possible but does it really stand up to logic ?

Ironic given that none of your "creationism" has managed to "stand up to logic".

It is logical to assume a designer. Because you don't understand the abilities of the designer does not mean the assumption is illogical.

 

[Youwerecreated]

Science has been trying to figure out the designers methods and repeating it. They will not eliminate the designer if they unlock the mystery only strengthen the view it took intelligence and design to make it happen.

 

[Derideo_Te]

Science has built theories that have only one presupposition in Mind.

Key terms.

1. Random
2. Chaos
3. Chaos system
4. Chance
5. Unguided
6. Complexity
7. Logic

They even have produced theories for some of these terms why ? it seems obvious they have to explain away these terms and evidences that are observed in nature to be able to say design is not a viable explanation.

They can't have a designer because many of the theories taught in schools would have to be redefined or go away or worse yet allow the teachings of design and creation in school.

They have to show what they teach in schools are possible but does it really stand up to logic ?

Ironic given that none of your "creationism" has managed to "stand up to logic".

It is logical to assume a designer. Because you don't understand the abilities of the designer does not mean the assumption is illogical.

It is never logical to imagine a fantasy and then delude oneself that this fantasy was responsible for everything you see.

 

[Derideo_Te]

Science has been trying to figure out the designers methods and repeating it. They will not eliminate the designer if they unlock the mystery only strengthen the view it took intelligence and design to make it happen.

Science has been doing nothing of the sort. Your delusion is threatened by science making factual discoveries that eliminates any involvement by your mythical "creator".

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

This I have spoken about before but this is something some should read up on, it was an evolutionist that presented a death blow to the theory of neo darwinism and it dealt with the problems of mutation fixation.

Also read up on Dr Lee Spetners book on mutations.

Mutation Fixation: A Dead End for Macro-evolution
by E. Calvin Beisner, M.A.

Most arguments against the possibility of mutation as a mechanism for evolution revolve around two premises: that mutations are almost always harmful, and that the idea of their improving rather than harming organisms is contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that matter and energy naturally tend toward greater randomness rather than greater order and complexity. These are two sides of the same coin, actually, the latter arguing from principle and the former from empirical observation.

Rarely, though, do arguments against mutation as the mechanism for evolution consider at once the many conditions that must be met if mutation is to bring about macro-evolutionary change (that is, change from one basic kind of life to another). Yet examining the probabilities of these conditions all being met together provides excellent evidence against evolution and in favor of creation.
NINE CONDITIONS FOR MUTATION FIXATION

Fortunately, geneticist R.H. Byles has made the job easy for us by discussing nine important conditions in an article on the subject.

Mutation Fixation: A Dead End for Macro-evolution

the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that matter and energy naturally tend toward greater randomness rather than greater order and complexity.

What is more complex, an acorn or a mighty oak tree?
A fertilized human egg or you?

 

[daws101]

The Second Law of Thermodynamics - CMI Mobile

It is a meaningless philosophical diatribe. Philosophy is proven irrelevant by more philosophy and, as philosophy has no solid mathematical or scientific foundation, it is necessarily meaningless.

There is simply no way to philosiphicalize to an answer of how life began. There is limited opportunity to theorize onto it. Thermodynamic laws don't provide any basis for proving it either way. At best, they put some restraint on how it came about. Observation of something is required.

I am forever overwhelmed by how a few subatomic particles and a few forces of nature so quickly expands into the complexity of the periodic table of elements. That plethora of seemingly simple set of elements explodes into an extrordinary number of chemicals which further combine into a seemingly infinite variety of organic and inorganic forms.

And for all we know, the circumstances of the early Earth was both complex and significantly different in ways that we cannot begin to imagine. We may have, over the past hundreds of years of investgation, by one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of scientists, run across, picked up, examined, and tossed away the very evidence simply because they had no clue what they were looking at. And that is assuming it even has survived the geological processes that churn the very ground beneath our feet. We know where oil came from, and yet to look at it, it bears no resemblence to the very creatures from which it came.

We can hypothesize, to the end of days, but without some theoretical or empirical basis, it remains simply that, a hypothesis. A book, written by men, is not the basis for a hypothesis. The repeatable observations and recipes, from a book, written by a cook or blacksmith, have far more relevance.

For me, it is enough to learn what others have already figured out instead of chasing after an answer that is confined to some moment long lost in history.

The day the Sun no longer shines, the Earth's core solidifies, the wind stops, and life still continues on will be the day that some mysterious force is shown as violating the laws of thermodynamics. Until then, it is all just physics, chemistry and biology.

Finally back in front of my computer. I was in Vegas and just could not respond on my phone it was a major pain in the you know what.

Itfitzme thank you for the information on physics it really is not a subject That I am as well versed in as I should be. That said philosophy in science it exists andnecessary for building theories and coming up with assumptions. I believe many come in and suggest only empirical evidence should be accepted that is not the case because only empirical evidence can be interpreted wrong. Philosophy plays a large part in science all you need to do is look at theories that are filled with conjecture. Many people are affected by the bias when interpreting evidence and their assumptions.

If we just relied on empirical evidence we wouldn't get very far in science. Still you need to have sound logic to properly interpret if you lack sound logic you will get too many bad assumptions and faulty interpretations.

I will post this and show how important logic and philosophy really are in performing good science.





The Design Argument

Does the intricate design of the universe serve as evidence for the existence of God?

Imagine walking in the desert and coming across two small stones in close proximity to each other. Most probably, you would think nothing of it. Two stones randomly sitting beside each other is no big deal.

You continue your walk in the desert and stumble upon three rows of stones piled up in a brick-layer fashion. Chances are you would quickly surmise that someone was here and arranged these stones in this manner. It didn’t just happen.

You continue your walk and happen to find a watch lying in the middle of the desert. Would you suspect that a windstorm somehow threw these pieces together and randomly created a watch?

Somebody made that watch. It didn’t just happen. Design implies designer.
DID THE UNIVERSE HAVE A DESIGNER?

The intricacy of design in our world is staggering—infinitely more complex than a simple brick wall or a watch. Dr. Michael Denton, in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” describes the intricate organization of nerve cells in the brain [pp. 330 - 331].

There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain. Each of the 10 billion cells sprouts between 10,000 to 100,000 fibers to contact other nerve cells in the brain, creating approximately 1,000 million million connections, or, 10 to the 15th power.

It is hard to imagine the multitude that 1015 represents. Take half of the United States, which is 1 million square miles, and imagine it being covered by forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. On each of the 10,000 trees, which are on each of the one million square miles, there are 100,000 leaves. That’s how many connections are crammed inside your brain. And they’re not just haphazardly thrown together. They form an incredibly intricate network system that has no parallel in the industrial world.

Imagine walking by that in the desert! The natural response when perceiving design of such mind-boggling complexity is to conclude that there must be a designer behind everything who created it. None of this just happened.
RANDOM WRITING SAMPLE

Rabbeinu Bachya, in his major philosophical work “The Duties of the Heart” [10th century] presents this argument in the following manner:

Do you not realize that if ink were poured out accidentally on a blank sheet of paper, it would be impossible that proper writing should result, legible lines that are written with a pen? Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.

Since this seems impossible in the case of letters whose formation is conventional, how can one assert that something far subtler in its design and which manifests in its fashioning a depth and complexity infinitely beyond our comprehension could have happened without the purpose, power, and wisdom of a wise and mighty designer? (“The Duties of the Heart,” The Gate of Oneness, Chapter 6)

The two most common objections to this argument go as follows:

The argument is too simple. There seems to be a big jump from concluding that someone must have made rock formations in the desert to concluding that there is a Creator who must have made the universe.

What about evolution? Over a very long period of time everything could have come about as a random occurrence! With millions of years to play around with, isn’t it possible for some kind of order to emerge just by chance?

Let’s address these two objections.
ADDRESSING ARGUMENT NUMBER ONE

The principle “design implies designer” applies across the board, whether the designer is a Bedouin nomad piling rocks in the desert or the Infinite Source of all existence. Intellectually it is the same logical process. In fact, there is more reason to assume a designer in the latter case since the level of design is much higher.

Simplicity is not an inherent fault in an argument. Perhaps the reason why some people take issue with this application of logic is due to the accompanying consequences.

Since the Bedouin doesn’t make any moral demands on our life, there is no resistance to drawing the logical conclusion that someone designed that rock formation. But when the conclusion points to God, cognitive dissonance kicks in, creating an instinctive opposition to what one perceives to be threatening. [See the previous article in this series: “Seeing the Elephant”

When the interference of cognitive dissonance is removed, what is the objective standard of design that we need to see in order to conclude something was created? What we need is a control experiment that determines this threshold of design in a case that has no threatening consequences. “The Obvious Proof”, a book by Gershon Robinson and Mordechai Steinman, delivers a compelling presentation of the design argument, and describes such a control experiment involving millions of people concluding the necessity of a designer.

The laboratory consisted of theaters across the globe that showed the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In the film, American scientists living in a colony on the moon discover during a dig the first evidence that intelligent life exists on other planets. What did they find? A simple monolith—a smooth, rectangular slab of rock. The Americans keep this significant discovery secret, afraid of the widespread culture shock and social ramifications this would have without proper preparation.

Thousands of film critics and millions of moviegoers went along with the film’s basic assertion, agreeing that intelligent creatures other than man must have created this smooth, rectangular monolith. It didn’t just randomly appear. Free from all emotional and intellectual bias, in the comfort of darkened theaters with popcorn in hand, people unanimously agreed that a simple, smooth slab with a few right angles was conclusive proof of intelligence.

When the conclusion does not point to God, everyone realizes that the simplest object can serve as the threshold of design, the point at which one concludes an object could not have come into existence by random accident. The universe, infinitely more complex than a monolith, had to have been created.
WHAT ABOUT RANDOM EVOLUTION?

Given enough tries over a long period of time, isn’t it possible for complex structures to emerge randomly? After all, with sufficient trials even improbable events eventually become likely.

Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, uses a national lottery to illustrate this point [“Origins”, Bantam, p.121]. The odds of winning the lottery may be 10 million to one. Winning would be incredibly lucky. But if we were to buy a lottery ticket every day for the next thirty thousand years, a win would become probable, (albeit very expensive).

But what are the odds of life coming about by sheer chance? Let’s take a look at two examples to get a sense of the odds involved in random evolution.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, writes in his book “A Brief History of Time”:

It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys hammering away on typewriters—most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Similarly, in the case of the universe, could it be that we are living in a region that just happens by chance to be smooth and uniform?

Well could it be?

In response to Hawking, Dr. Gerald Schroeder, a physicist, calculated the odds of monkeys randomly typing an average Shakespearean Sonnet in his book “Genesis and the Big Bang.” He chose the one that opens, “Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?”

There are 488 letters in the sonnet ... The chance of randomly typing the 488 letters to produce this one sonnet is one in 26 to the 488th power, or one in 10 to the 690th power. The number 10690 is a one followed by 690 zero’s! The immense scale of this number is hinted at when one considers that since the Big Bang, 15 billion years ago, there have been only 10 to the 18th power number of seconds, which have ticked away.

To write by random one of Shakespeare’s sonnets would take all the monkeys, plus every other animal on earth, typing away on typewriters made from all the iron in the universe, over a period of time that exceeds all time since the Big Bang, and still the probability of a sonnet appearing would be vanishingly small. At one random try per second, with even a simple sentence having only 16 letters, it would take 2 million billion years (the universe has existed for about 15 billion years) to exhaust all possible combinations.

Robert Shapiro cites Nobel laureate Sir Fred Hoyle’s calculation of the odds of a bacterium spontaneously generating [p.127]. At first Hoyle and his colleague, N. C. Wickramasinghe, endorsed spontaneous generation, but reversed their position once they calculated the odds.

A typical bacterium, which is the simplest of cells, is made up of 2,000 enzymes. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe took the probability of randomly assembling one enzyme and multiplied that number by itself 2,000 times to calculate the odds of a single bacterium randomly coming together. Those odds are 1 in 1040,000. Hoyle said the likelihood of this happening is comparable to the chance that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

These are the odds of just a single, simple cell, without which evolution cannot even get started. Never mind the odds of more advanced compounds like an organ or all the enzymes in a human being.

Shapiro writes:

The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle.

For all intents and purposes, an event with the probability of 1 in 1040,000 qualifies in real-world terms as impossible.
SOME THINGS ARE IMPOSSIBLE

Imagine you are the presiding judge over a murder trial. Ballistic tests match perfectly with a gun found in the possession of the accused. The odds of another gun firing the bullet that killed the victim are let’s say one in a billion.

The defendant claims that it is a sheer fluke that his gun happens to match the ballistics tests and that there must be another gun out there that is the real murder weapon. “After all,” he says, “it is a possibility.”

The defendant’s fingerprints are found all over the victim’s body. He claims there must be another person out there who happens to have astonishingly similar fingerprints. Again, it is possible.

There are also eyewitnesses who testify to seeing a man gunning down the victim who looks just like the defendant. The defendant claims there must be another person out there in this big world who looks just like him, and that man is the real murderer. After all—it’s not impossible.

You are the judge, and you need to make a decision. What do you decide?

In the pragmatic world of decision-making, odds this high are called impossible. One needs to weigh the evidence and come to the most reasonable conclusion.

Does the universe have a Creator? Look at the design, look at the odds and look honestly within. Where does the more rational conclusion lie?


Intelligent Design Argument

let me get this straight, you post a link a site that is diametrically opposed to what you believe as proof of something there is no quantifiable evidence for.
wow! how desperate are you?

 

[daws101]

Science has built theories that have only one presupposition in Mind.

Key terms.

1. Random
2. Chaos
3. Chaotic system
4. Chance
5. Unguided
6. Complexity
7. Logic

They even have produced theories for some of these terms why ? it seems obvious they have to explain away these terms and evidences that are observed in nature to be able to say design is not a viable explanation.

They can't have a designer because many of the theories taught in schools would have to be redefined or go away or worse yet allow the teachings of design and creation in school.

They have to show what they teach in schools are possible but does it really stand up to logic ?

The Biblical God Concept - A Logical Disproof

The logical disproof of the Biblical god concept to be presented involves malice toward none, is not an attack on particular religions nor a statement against religion in general, and is solely in the interest of enlightenment to the good.

It involves only three definitions, each of which is self-evident. One is of a being, a second is of worship and the third is of a Biblical type god.
The definition of a being is that of a perceiver who cannot know whether its perceptions have anything to do with an external reality. Of course Descartes defined himself as this type of entity on the basis of obviousness. Very exactly, in that we have no way to test whether our perceptions have anything to do with an external reality we cannot know whether they do. Additionally, however, our experiences suggest that when we dream or hallucinate we internally generate perceptions that seem very real but have nothing to do with an external reality. Accordingly, especially with empirical suggestions that we sometimes internally generate perceptions that seem very real but have nothing to do with an external reality, we cannot rule out that it is our nature to do so all of the time. Therefore, our definition of a being is self-evident.
The definition of worship is veneration to the extent that its object is assumed to exist. In that one cannot worship something without acknowledging its existence this definition of worship is entirely consistent with the actual meaning of the word.
The definition of a Biblical type god is that of a perfect (in goodness) being who holds that it is right for others to worship it. This is entirely consistent with the Biblical god concept.

We shall proceed with a logical technique that involves reduction ad absurdum. That is, we shall first assume that a Biblical type god exists and from this using only logic arrive at a self-contradictory (absurd) proposition. This will leave only that a Biblical type god does not exist and the disproof will be complete. As such, assume that a Biblical type god exists.

By definition it holds that it is right for others to worship it. By the definition of worship they must acknowledge its existence to do so. Accordingly, the Biblical type god holds that it is right for others to acknowledge its existence. However, they are beings. By definition it is impossible for them to acknowledge the existence of anything more than perceptions. Therefore, the Biblical type god holds that it is right for them to do something that is impossible. At the same time, by definition it is perfect. In this it does not hold that it is right for others to do something that is impossible. Consequently, we have both that the Biblical type god does and does not hold that it is right for others to do something that is impossible.

This is the absurdity. Our only alternative is that a Biblical type god does not exist.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

It is incidental that the Biblical type god would not know whether others existed. Notwithstanding, in its perfection it would not decide that they did much less that they did as perceived. Moreover, in that it would not decide that any who might exist would exist as perceived it would not decide that any who might exist were imperfect. That is, it would not decide that any who might exist were its subordinate. In this, a perfect being would not hold that it was right for others to worship it and the Biblical god concept is again self-contradictory.

Analogously, of course, the Jesus concept is self-contradictory.


As set forth at the beginning there is no vindictiveness in this writing. It is soley in the interest of enlightenment to the good. As it pertains to enlightenment to the good it is meant to convey that meaningful development as the entities we are may only be realized in the form of internal rewards. That is, it may only be realized through decisions that challenge the self in goodness of motive. Only these afford fulfillment in effort independently from certainty of result.



John Jubinsky

MA–Mathematics, CPA


The Biblical God Concept - A Logical Disproof | The Rational Response Squad

 

[YWN666]

Oh good gawd.

That was every failed, juvenile creationist argument (to include the silly "blind watchmaker") cut and paste. Although this time, the blind guy was in the desert.

You are not using your logical thinking to see the importance of logic.

Coming from a creationist, your talk about logic is pretty humorous. Creatioinism is anti-logic.

 

[itfitzme]

The Second Law of Thermodynamics - CMI Mobile

It is a meaningless philosophical diatribe. Philosophy is proven irrelevant by more philosophy and, as philosophy has no solid mathematical or scientific foundation, it is necessarily meaningless.

There is simply no way to philosiphicalize to an answer of how life began. There is limited opportunity to theorize onto it. Thermodynamic laws don't provide any basis for proving it either way. At best, they put some restraint on how it came about. Observation of something is required.

I am forever overwhelmed by how a few subatomic particles and a few forces of nature so quickly expands into the complexity of the periodic table of elements. That plethora of seemingly simple set of elements explodes into an extrordinary number of chemicals which further combine into a seemingly infinite variety of organic and inorganic forms.

And for all we know, the circumstances of the early Earth was both complex and significantly different in ways that we cannot begin to imagine. We may have, over the past hundreds of years of investgation, by one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of scientists, run across, picked up, examined, and tossed away the very evidence simply because they had no clue what they were looking at. And that is assuming it even has survived the geological processes that churn the very ground beneath our feet. We know where oil came from, and yet to look at it, it bears no resemblence to the very creatures from which it came.

We can hypothesize, to the end of days, but without some theoretical or empirical basis, it remains simply that, a hypothesis. A book, written by men, is not the basis for a hypothesis. The repeatable observations and recipes, from a book, written by a cook or blacksmith, have far more relevance.

For me, it is enough to learn what others have already figured out instead of chasing after an answer that is confined to some moment long lost in history.

The day the Sun no longer shines, the Earth's core solidifies, the wind stops, and life still continues on will be the day that some mysterious force is shown as violating the laws of thermodynamics. Until then, it is all just physics, chemistry and biology.

Finally back in front of my computer. I was in Vegas and just could not respond on my phone it was a major pain in the you know what.

Itfitzme thank you for the information on physics it really is not a subject That I am as well versed in as I should be. That said philosophy in science it exists andnecessary for building theories and coming up with assumptions. I believe many come in and suggest only empirical evidence should be accepted that is not the case because only empirical evidence can be interpreted wrong. Philosophy plays a large part in science all you need to do is look at theories that are filled with conjecture. Many people are affected by the bias when interpreting evidence and their assumptions.

If we just relied on empirical evidence we wouldn't get very far in science. Still you need to have sound logic to properly interpret if you lack sound logic you will get too many bad assumptions and faulty interpretations.

I will post this and show how important logic and philosophy really are in performing good science.





The Design Argument

Does the intricate design of the universe serve as evidence for the existence of God?

Imagine walking in the desert and coming across two small stones in close proximity to each other. Most probably, you would think nothing of it. Two stones randomly sitting beside each other is no big deal.

You continue your walk in the desert and stumble upon three rows of stones piled up in a brick-layer fashion. Chances are you would quickly surmise that someone was here and arranged these stones in this manner. It didn’t just happen.

You continue your walk and happen to find a watch lying in the middle of the desert. Would you suspect that a windstorm somehow threw these pieces together and randomly created a watch?

Somebody made that watch. It didn’t just happen. Design implies designer.
DID THE UNIVERSE HAVE A DESIGNER?

The intricacy of design in our world is staggering—infinitely more complex than a simple brick wall or a watch. Dr. Michael Denton, in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” describes the intricate organization of nerve cells in the brain [pp. 330 - 331].

There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain. Each of the 10 billion cells sprouts between 10,000 to 100,000 fibers to contact other nerve cells in the brain, creating approximately 1,000 million million connections, or, 10 to the 15th power.

It is hard to imagine the multitude that 1015 represents. Take half of the United States, which is 1 million square miles, and imagine it being covered by forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. On each of the 10,000 trees, which are on each of the one million square miles, there are 100,000 leaves. That’s how many connections are crammed inside your brain. And they’re not just haphazardly thrown together. They form an incredibly intricate network system that has no parallel in the industrial world.

Imagine walking by that in the desert! The natural response when perceiving design of such mind-boggling complexity is to conclude that there must be a designer behind everything who created it. None of this just happened.
RANDOM WRITING SAMPLE

Rabbeinu Bachya, in his major philosophical work “The Duties of the Heart” [10th century] presents this argument in the following manner:

Do you not realize that if ink were poured out accidentally on a blank sheet of paper, it would be impossible that proper writing should result, legible lines that are written with a pen? Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.

Since this seems impossible in the case of letters whose formation is conventional, how can one assert that something far subtler in its design and which manifests in its fashioning a depth and complexity infinitely beyond our comprehension could have happened without the purpose, power, and wisdom of a wise and mighty designer? (“The Duties of the Heart,” The Gate of Oneness, Chapter 6)

The two most common objections to this argument go as follows:

The argument is too simple. There seems to be a big jump from concluding that someone must have made rock formations in the desert to concluding that there is a Creator who must have made the universe.

What about evolution? Over a very long period of time everything could have come about as a random occurrence! With millions of years to play around with, isn’t it possible for some kind of order to emerge just by chance?

Let’s address these two objections.
ADDRESSING ARGUMENT NUMBER ONE

The principle “design implies designer” applies across the board, whether the designer is a Bedouin nomad piling rocks in the desert or the Infinite Source of all existence. Intellectually it is the same logical process. In fact, there is more reason to assume a designer in the latter case since the level of design is much higher.

Simplicity is not an inherent fault in an argument. Perhaps the reason why some people take issue with this application of logic is due to the accompanying consequences.

Since the Bedouin doesn’t make any moral demands on our life, there is no resistance to drawing the logical conclusion that someone designed that rock formation. But when the conclusion points to God, cognitive dissonance kicks in, creating an instinctive opposition to what one perceives to be threatening. [See the previous article in this series: “Seeing the Elephant”

When the interference of cognitive dissonance is removed, what is the objective standard of design that we need to see in order to conclude something was created? What we need is a control experiment that determines this threshold of design in a case that has no threatening consequences. “The Obvious Proof”, a book by Gershon Robinson and Mordechai Steinman, delivers a compelling presentation of the design argument, and describes such a control experiment involving millions of people concluding the necessity of a designer.

The laboratory consisted of theaters across the globe that showed the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In the film, American scientists living in a colony on the moon discover during a dig the first evidence that intelligent life exists on other planets. What did they find? A simple monolith—a smooth, rectangular slab of rock. The Americans keep this significant discovery secret, afraid of the widespread culture shock and social ramifications this would have without proper preparation.

Thousands of film critics and millions of moviegoers went along with the film’s basic assertion, agreeing that intelligent creatures other than man must have created this smooth, rectangular monolith. It didn’t just randomly appear. Free from all emotional and intellectual bias, in the comfort of darkened theaters with popcorn in hand, people unanimously agreed that a simple, smooth slab with a few right angles was conclusive proof of intelligence.

When the conclusion does not point to God, everyone realizes that the simplest object can serve as the threshold of design, the point at which one concludes an object could not have come into existence by random accident. The universe, infinitely more complex than a monolith, had to have been created.
WHAT ABOUT RANDOM EVOLUTION?

Given enough tries over a long period of time, isn’t it possible for complex structures to emerge randomly? After all, with sufficient trials even improbable events eventually become likely.

Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, uses a national lottery to illustrate this point [“Origins”, Bantam, p.121]. The odds of winning the lottery may be 10 million to one. Winning would be incredibly lucky. But if we were to buy a lottery ticket every day for the next thirty thousand years, a win would become probable, (albeit very expensive).

But what are the odds of life coming about by sheer chance? Let’s take a look at two examples to get a sense of the odds involved in random evolution.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, writes in his book “A Brief History of Time”:

It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys hammering away on typewriters—most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Similarly, in the case of the universe, could it be that we are living in a region that just happens by chance to be smooth and uniform?

Well could it be?

In response to Hawking, Dr. Gerald Schroeder, a physicist, calculated the odds of monkeys randomly typing an average Shakespearean Sonnet in his book “Genesis and the Big Bang.” He chose the one that opens, “Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?”

There are 488 letters in the sonnet ... The chance of randomly typing the 488 letters to produce this one sonnet is one in 26 to the 488th power, or one in 10 to the 690th power. The number 10690 is a one followed by 690 zero’s! The immense scale of this number is hinted at when one considers that since the Big Bang, 15 billion years ago, there have been only 10 to the 18th power number of seconds, which have ticked away.

To write by random one of Shakespeare’s sonnets would take all the monkeys, plus every other animal on earth, typing away on typewriters made from all the iron in the universe, over a period of time that exceeds all time since the Big Bang, and still the probability of a sonnet appearing would be vanishingly small. At one random try per second, with even a simple sentence having only 16 letters, it would take 2 million billion years (the universe has existed for about 15 billion years) to exhaust all possible combinations.

Robert Shapiro cites Nobel laureate Sir Fred Hoyle’s calculation of the odds of a bacterium spontaneously generating [p.127]. At first Hoyle and his colleague, N. C. Wickramasinghe, endorsed spontaneous generation, but reversed their position once they calculated the odds.

A typical bacterium, which is the simplest of cells, is made up of 2,000 enzymes. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe took the probability of randomly assembling one enzyme and multiplied that number by itself 2,000 times to calculate the odds of a single bacterium randomly coming together. Those odds are 1 in 1040,000. Hoyle said the likelihood of this happening is comparable to the chance that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

These are the odds of just a single, simple cell, without which evolution cannot even get started. Never mind the odds of more advanced compounds like an organ or all the enzymes in a human being.

Shapiro writes:

The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle.

For all intents and purposes, an event with the probability of 1 in 1040,000 qualifies in real-world terms as impossible.
SOME THINGS ARE IMPOSSIBLE

Imagine you are the presiding judge over a murder trial. Ballistic tests match perfectly with a gun found in the possession of the accused. The odds of another gun firing the bullet that killed the victim are let’s say one in a billion.

The defendant claims that it is a sheer fluke that his gun happens to match the ballistics tests and that there must be another gun out there that is the real murder weapon. “After all,” he says, “it is a possibility.”

The defendant’s fingerprints are found all over the victim’s body. He claims there must be another person out there who happens to have astonishingly similar fingerprints. Again, it is possible.

There are also eyewitnesses who testify to seeing a man gunning down the victim who looks just like the defendant. The defendant claims there must be another person out there in this big world who looks just like him, and that man is the real murderer. After all—it’s not impossible.

You are the judge, and you need to make a decision. What do you decide?

In the pragmatic world of decision-making, odds this high are called impossible. One needs to weigh the evidence and come to the most reasonable conclusion.

Does the universe have a Creator? Look at the design, look at the odds and look honestly within. Where does the more rational conclusion lie?


Intelligent Design Argument

Progression of knowledge and Really Big Numbers

Pythagorus was a philisopher. *Today, the pythagorean theorem is taught in grade school.

Education duration, in years.

Grade school. 12 years
Undergrad GE. 2 years
Bachelor's of science 2 years
Master's of science 2 years
Doctorate of philosophy specialization 3 years
Doctorate of philosophy thesis 3 years
** *(They are then allowed out in public)

Year of education to achieve PhD, ~24 years. *Number of minutes, 12.6E+06.
Number of seconds, 7.57E+08.
*
Philpsophy comes after the science is said and done. *After*7.57E+08 seconds of intensive study and examination, then we get to be all philosophical.

And as science has progressed, specialization has become more and more restrictive because the knowledge base has expanded. *

There are some 83 official doctorate degrees, in the US. Each PhD student pursues a personally defined specializes thesis. *For 2008, there were 48.8E+03 awarded, each, presumably, with a unique thesis, in the US.

*"It is hard to imagine the multitude that 10^15 represents.", is not a measure of nature.

Nature is full of hard to imagine numbers. These are just a few.

Stars: * * * * * * * **10E24 stars
Sand: * * * * * * * * *10E19 grains
Distance across known universe: 8.8E26 m
Avagadro's Number: 6.0221415E23 molecules/mole
Dia hydrogen atom: *1.06E-10 m
Dia hydrogen nucleus: 2.40E-15 m
Non-repeating digits in PI. oo
Repeating digits in 1/3. * * *oo

Age of the earth: * * 1.432E+17 seconds
Age of the universe: *4.345E+17 seconds

Number of bacterium possible by doubling each 30 minutes for half the earth age of

1.432E+17 seconds/60=2.38667e15 minutes

2.38667e15/2= 1.199e+15 minutes.

1.199e+15/30=3.9778e+13 cycles.

2^3.9778e13=Infinity,

at least to the best Google calculator can do.*

This is an interesting study of classification and naming of numbers.

Large Numbers at MROB

Wiki, of course, discusses large numbers

Large numbers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The universe is full of really big numbers. That they are "unimaginable" is simply perception. And, as I've stated before, the "fallacy of shit don't just happen", is not proof of anything.

All that has to happen is for one bacterium to form. The it is two, then four, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 2^14, 2^15, and on it goes. All that had to happen was for it to happen, one time.

Take a can of your favorite chili and put it in a bowl. Cover it. Put the bowl in aside, in a warm and shady spot. Come back in a few days. It is just that easy for mold, fungi, and bacteria to grow.

 

[Derideo_Te]

The Second Law of Thermodynamics - CMI Mobile

It is a meaningless philosophical diatribe. Philosophy is proven irrelevant by more philosophy and, as philosophy has no solid mathematical or scientific foundation, it is necessarily meaningless.

There is simply no way to philosiphicalize to an answer of how life began. There is limited opportunity to theorize onto it. Thermodynamic laws don't provide any basis for proving it either way. At best, they put some restraint on how it came about. Observation of something is required.

I am forever overwhelmed by how a few subatomic particles and a few forces of nature so quickly expands into the complexity of the periodic table of elements. That plethora of seemingly simple set of elements explodes into an extrordinary number of chemicals which further combine into a seemingly infinite variety of organic and inorganic forms.

And for all we know, the circumstances of the early Earth was both complex and significantly different in ways that we cannot begin to imagine. We may have, over the past hundreds of years of investgation, by one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of scientists, run across, picked up, examined, and tossed away the very evidence simply because they had no clue what they were looking at. And that is assuming it even has survived the geological processes that churn the very ground beneath our feet. We know where oil came from, and yet to look at it, it bears no resemblence to the very creatures from which it came.

We can hypothesize, to the end of days, but without some theoretical or empirical basis, it remains simply that, a hypothesis. A book, written by men, is not the basis for a hypothesis. The repeatable observations and recipes, from a book, written by a cook or blacksmith, have far more relevance.

For me, it is enough to learn what others have already figured out instead of chasing after an answer that is confined to some moment long lost in history.

The day the Sun no longer shines, the Earth's core solidifies, the wind stops, and life still continues on will be the day that some mysterious force is shown as violating the laws of thermodynamics. Until then, it is all just physics, chemistry and biology.

Finally back in front of my computer. I was in Vegas and just could not respond on my phone it was a major pain in the you know what.

Itfitzme thank you for the information on physics it really is not a subject That I am as well versed in as I should be. That said philosophy in science it exists andnecessary for building theories and coming up with assumptions. I believe many come in and suggest only empirical evidence should be accepted that is not the case because only empirical evidence can be interpreted wrong. Philosophy plays a large part in science all you need to do is look at theories that are filled with conjecture. Many people are affected by the bias when interpreting evidence and their assumptions.

If we just relied on empirical evidence we wouldn't get very far in science. Still you need to have sound logic to properly interpret if you lack sound logic you will get too many bad assumptions and faulty interpretations.

I will post this and show how important logic and philosophy really are in performing good science.





The Design Argument

Does the intricate design of the universe serve as evidence for the existence of God?

Imagine walking in the desert and coming across two small stones in close proximity to each other. Most probably, you would think nothing of it. Two stones randomly sitting beside each other is no big deal.

You continue your walk in the desert and stumble upon three rows of stones piled up in a brick-layer fashion. Chances are you would quickly surmise that someone was here and arranged these stones in this manner. It didn’t just happen.

You continue your walk and happen to find a watch lying in the middle of the desert. Would you suspect that a windstorm somehow threw these pieces together and randomly created a watch?

Somebody made that watch. It didn’t just happen. Design implies designer.
DID THE UNIVERSE HAVE A DESIGNER?

The intricacy of design in our world is staggering—infinitely more complex than a simple brick wall or a watch. Dr. Michael Denton, in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” describes the intricate organization of nerve cells in the brain [pp. 330 - 331].

There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain. Each of the 10 billion cells sprouts between 10,000 to 100,000 fibers to contact other nerve cells in the brain, creating approximately 1,000 million million connections, or, 10 to the 15th power.

It is hard to imagine the multitude that 1015 represents. Take half of the United States, which is 1 million square miles, and imagine it being covered by forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. On each of the 10,000 trees, which are on each of the one million square miles, there are 100,000 leaves. That’s how many connections are crammed inside your brain. And they’re not just haphazardly thrown together. They form an incredibly intricate network system that has no parallel in the industrial world.

Imagine walking by that in the desert! The natural response when perceiving design of such mind-boggling complexity is to conclude that there must be a designer behind everything who created it. None of this just happened.
RANDOM WRITING SAMPLE

Rabbeinu Bachya, in his major philosophical work “The Duties of the Heart” [10th century] presents this argument in the following manner:

Do you not realize that if ink were poured out accidentally on a blank sheet of paper, it would be impossible that proper writing should result, legible lines that are written with a pen? Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.

Since this seems impossible in the case of letters whose formation is conventional, how can one assert that something far subtler in its design and which manifests in its fashioning a depth and complexity infinitely beyond our comprehension could have happened without the purpose, power, and wisdom of a wise and mighty designer? (“The Duties of the Heart,” The Gate of Oneness, Chapter 6)

The two most common objections to this argument go as follows:

The argument is too simple. There seems to be a big jump from concluding that someone must have made rock formations in the desert to concluding that there is a Creator who must have made the universe.

What about evolution? Over a very long period of time everything could have come about as a random occurrence! With millions of years to play around with, isn’t it possible for some kind of order to emerge just by chance?

Let’s address these two objections.
ADDRESSING ARGUMENT NUMBER ONE

The principle “design implies designer” applies across the board, whether the designer is a Bedouin nomad piling rocks in the desert or the Infinite Source of all existence. Intellectually it is the same logical process. In fact, there is more reason to assume a designer in the latter case since the level of design is much higher.

Simplicity is not an inherent fault in an argument. Perhaps the reason why some people take issue with this application of logic is due to the accompanying consequences.

Since the Bedouin doesn’t make any moral demands on our life, there is no resistance to drawing the logical conclusion that someone designed that rock formation. But when the conclusion points to God, cognitive dissonance kicks in, creating an instinctive opposition to what one perceives to be threatening. [See the previous article in this series: “Seeing the Elephant”

When the interference of cognitive dissonance is removed, what is the objective standard of design that we need to see in order to conclude something was created? What we need is a control experiment that determines this threshold of design in a case that has no threatening consequences. “The Obvious Proof”, a book by Gershon Robinson and Mordechai Steinman, delivers a compelling presentation of the design argument, and describes such a control experiment involving millions of people concluding the necessity of a designer.

The laboratory consisted of theaters across the globe that showed the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In the film, American scientists living in a colony on the moon discover during a dig the first evidence that intelligent life exists on other planets. What did they find? A simple monolith—a smooth, rectangular slab of rock. The Americans keep this significant discovery secret, afraid of the widespread culture shock and social ramifications this would have without proper preparation.

Thousands of film critics and millions of moviegoers went along with the film’s basic assertion, agreeing that intelligent creatures other than man must have created this smooth, rectangular monolith. It didn’t just randomly appear. Free from all emotional and intellectual bias, in the comfort of darkened theaters with popcorn in hand, people unanimously agreed that a simple, smooth slab with a few right angles was conclusive proof of intelligence.

When the conclusion does not point to God, everyone realizes that the simplest object can serve as the threshold of design, the point at which one concludes an object could not have come into existence by random accident. The universe, infinitely more complex than a monolith, had to have been created.
WHAT ABOUT RANDOM EVOLUTION?

Given enough tries over a long period of time, isn’t it possible for complex structures to emerge randomly? After all, with sufficient trials even improbable events eventually become likely.

Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, uses a national lottery to illustrate this point [“Origins”, Bantam, p.121]. The odds of winning the lottery may be 10 million to one. Winning would be incredibly lucky. But if we were to buy a lottery ticket every day for the next thirty thousand years, a win would become probable, (albeit very expensive).

But what are the odds of life coming about by sheer chance? Let’s take a look at two examples to get a sense of the odds involved in random evolution.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, writes in his book “A Brief History of Time”:

It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys hammering away on typewriters—most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Similarly, in the case of the universe, could it be that we are living in a region that just happens by chance to be smooth and uniform?

Well could it be?

In response to Hawking, Dr. Gerald Schroeder, a physicist, calculated the odds of monkeys randomly typing an average Shakespearean Sonnet in his book “Genesis and the Big Bang.” He chose the one that opens, “Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?”

There are 488 letters in the sonnet ... The chance of randomly typing the 488 letters to produce this one sonnet is one in 26 to the 488th power, or one in 10 to the 690th power. The number 10690 is a one followed by 690 zero’s! The immense scale of this number is hinted at when one considers that since the Big Bang, 15 billion years ago, there have been only 10 to the 18th power number of seconds, which have ticked away.

To write by random one of Shakespeare’s sonnets would take all the monkeys, plus every other animal on earth, typing away on typewriters made from all the iron in the universe, over a period of time that exceeds all time since the Big Bang, and still the probability of a sonnet appearing would be vanishingly small. At one random try per second, with even a simple sentence having only 16 letters, it would take 2 million billion years (the universe has existed for about 15 billion years) to exhaust all possible combinations.

Robert Shapiro cites Nobel laureate Sir Fred Hoyle’s calculation of the odds of a bacterium spontaneously generating [p.127]. At first Hoyle and his colleague, N. C. Wickramasinghe, endorsed spontaneous generation, but reversed their position once they calculated the odds.

A typical bacterium, which is the simplest of cells, is made up of 2,000 enzymes. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe took the probability of randomly assembling one enzyme and multiplied that number by itself 2,000 times to calculate the odds of a single bacterium randomly coming together. Those odds are 1 in 1040,000. Hoyle said the likelihood of this happening is comparable to the chance that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

These are the odds of just a single, simple cell, without which evolution cannot even get started. Never mind the odds of more advanced compounds like an organ or all the enzymes in a human being.

Shapiro writes:

The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle.

For all intents and purposes, an event with the probability of 1 in 1040,000 qualifies in real-world terms as impossible.
SOME THINGS ARE IMPOSSIBLE

Imagine you are the presiding judge over a murder trial. Ballistic tests match perfectly with a gun found in the possession of the accused. The odds of another gun firing the bullet that killed the victim are let’s say one in a billion.

The defendant claims that it is a sheer fluke that his gun happens to match the ballistics tests and that there must be another gun out there that is the real murder weapon. “After all,” he says, “it is a possibility.”

The defendant’s fingerprints are found all over the victim’s body. He claims there must be another person out there who happens to have astonishingly similar fingerprints. Again, it is possible.

There are also eyewitnesses who testify to seeing a man gunning down the victim who looks just like the defendant. The defendant claims there must be another person out there in this big world who looks just like him, and that man is the real murderer. After all—it’s not impossible.

You are the judge, and you need to make a decision. What do you decide?

In the pragmatic world of decision-making, odds this high are called impossible. One needs to weigh the evidence and come to the most reasonable conclusion.

Does the universe have a Creator? Look at the design, look at the odds and look honestly within. Where does the more rational conclusion lie?


Intelligent Design Argument

The "slackjawed yokel" defense is no more relevant than any of your other delusions as to the existence of your mythical "creator".

 

[itfitzme]

"For all intents and purposes, an event with the probability of 1 in 1040,000 qualifies in real-world terms as impossible.
SOME THINGS ARE IMPOSSIBLE"

You are confusing impractical and statistically insignificant with impossible. Impossible is P(E) == 0. Anything P(E) > 0 is, by definition, possible.

This is what I mean by playing word games, wallking definitions across definitional sets, why philosophy isn't mathematically precise in describing nature, and, by it's nature, a failure at proving anything.

The probability of A is 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 is really small. In practice, in human terms, in manufacturing, really small is impractical. What is impractical is, for all intents and purposes, considered impossible. Therefore, A is impossible.

It is a meaningless proof that relies of similarity of definitions to mutate, evolve, from one real definition to complete nonsense. The difference is that, in human thought, anything can evolve. In reality, nature, there are some things that really are impossible, like a person literally walking on water. And there are things that, while constrained by real natural laws, are difficult, they are not impossible. Evolution is constrained, not impossible.

I understand. It wasn't your fault. You were trained, you were lied to.

Now that you know, it is now your fault. Going forward, you have no excuse.

 

[Youwerecreated]

Ironic given that none of your "creationism" has managed to "stand up to logic".

It is logical to assume a designer. Because you don't understand the abilities of the designer does not mean the assumption is illogical.

It is never logical to imagine a fantasy and then delude oneself that this fantasy was responsible for everything you see.

How would you prove its only fantasy ?

 

[Youwerecreated]

Science has been trying to figure out the designers methods and repeating it. They will not eliminate the designer if they unlock the mystery only strengthen the view it took intelligence and design to make it happen.

Science has been doing nothing of the sort. Your delusion is threatened by science making factual discoveries that eliminates any involvement by your mythical "creator".

Yes they have. They have been going on the presupposition that there is no designer. They are trying to show natural undirected processes are the cause eliminating the possibility of a designer. They have to show that chaos produces order seen in nature.

 

[Youwerecreated]

This I have spoken about before but this is something some should read up on, it was an evolutionist that presented a death blow to the theory of neo darwinism and it dealt with the problems of mutation fixation.

Also read up on Dr Lee Spetners book on mutations.

Mutation Fixation: A Dead End for Macro-evolution
by E. Calvin Beisner, M.A.

Most arguments against the possibility of mutation as a mechanism for evolution revolve around two premises: that mutations are almost always harmful, and that the idea of their improving rather than harming organisms is contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that matter and energy naturally tend toward greater randomness rather than greater order and complexity. These are two sides of the same coin, actually, the latter arguing from principle and the former from empirical observation.

Rarely, though, do arguments against mutation as the mechanism for evolution consider at once the many conditions that must be met if mutation is to bring about macro-evolutionary change (that is, change from one basic kind of life to another). Yet examining the probabilities of these conditions all being met together provides excellent evidence against evolution and in favor of creation.
NINE CONDITIONS FOR MUTATION FIXATION

Fortunately, geneticist R.H. Byles has made the job easy for us by discussing nine important conditions in an article on the subject.

Mutation Fixation: A Dead End for Macro-evolution

the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that matter and energy naturally tend toward greater randomness rather than greater order and complexity.

What is more complex, an acorn or a mighty oak tree?
A fertilized human egg or you?

What is your point ?

 

[Youwerecreated]

It is a meaningless philosophical diatribe. Philosophy is proven irrelevant by more philosophy and, as philosophy has no solid mathematical or scientific foundation, it is necessarily meaningless.

There is simply no way to philosiphicalize to an answer of how life began. There is limited opportunity to theorize onto it. Thermodynamic laws don't provide any basis for proving it either way. At best, they put some restraint on how it came about. Observation of something is required.

I am forever overwhelmed by how a few subatomic particles and a few forces of nature so quickly expands into the complexity of the periodic table of elements. That plethora of seemingly simple set of elements explodes into an extrordinary number of chemicals which further combine into a seemingly infinite variety of organic and inorganic forms.

And for all we know, the circumstances of the early Earth was both complex and significantly different in ways that we cannot begin to imagine. We may have, over the past hundreds of years of investgation, by one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of scientists, run across, picked up, examined, and tossed away the very evidence simply because they had no clue what they were looking at. And that is assuming it even has survived the geological processes that churn the very ground beneath our feet. We know where oil came from, and yet to look at it, it bears no resemblence to the very creatures from which it came.

We can hypothesize, to the end of days, but without some theoretical or empirical basis, it remains simply that, a hypothesis. A book, written by men, is not the basis for a hypothesis. The repeatable observations and recipes, from a book, written by a cook or blacksmith, have far more relevance.

For me, it is enough to learn what others have already figured out instead of chasing after an answer that is confined to some moment long lost in history.

The day the Sun no longer shines, the Earth's core solidifies, the wind stops, and life still continues on will be the day that some mysterious force is shown as violating the laws of thermodynamics. Until then, it is all just physics, chemistry and biology.

Finally back in front of my computer. I was in Vegas and just could not respond on my phone it was a major pain in the you know what.

Itfitzme thank you for the information on physics it really is not a subject That I am as well versed in as I should be. That said philosophy in science it exists andnecessary for building theories and coming up with assumptions. I believe many come in and suggest only empirical evidence should be accepted that is not the case because only empirical evidence can be interpreted wrong. Philosophy plays a large part in science all you need to do is look at theories that are filled with conjecture. Many people are affected by the bias when interpreting evidence and their assumptions.

If we just relied on empirical evidence we wouldn't get very far in science. Still you need to have sound logic to properly interpret if you lack sound logic you will get too many bad assumptions and faulty interpretations.

I will post this and show how important logic and philosophy really are in performing good science.





The Design Argument

Does the intricate design of the universe serve as evidence for the existence of God?

Imagine walking in the desert and coming across two small stones in close proximity to each other. Most probably, you would think nothing of it. Two stones randomly sitting beside each other is no big deal.

You continue your walk in the desert and stumble upon three rows of stones piled up in a brick-layer fashion. Chances are you would quickly surmise that someone was here and arranged these stones in this manner. It didn’t just happen.

You continue your walk and happen to find a watch lying in the middle of the desert. Would you suspect that a windstorm somehow threw these pieces together and randomly created a watch?

Somebody made that watch. It didn’t just happen. Design implies designer.
DID THE UNIVERSE HAVE A DESIGNER?

The intricacy of design in our world is staggering—infinitely more complex than a simple brick wall or a watch. Dr. Michael Denton, in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” describes the intricate organization of nerve cells in the brain [pp. 330 - 331].

There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain. Each of the 10 billion cells sprouts between 10,000 to 100,000 fibers to contact other nerve cells in the brain, creating approximately 1,000 million million connections, or, 10 to the 15th power.

It is hard to imagine the multitude that 1015 represents. Take half of the United States, which is 1 million square miles, and imagine it being covered by forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. On each of the 10,000 trees, which are on each of the one million square miles, there are 100,000 leaves. That’s how many connections are crammed inside your brain. And they’re not just haphazardly thrown together. They form an incredibly intricate network system that has no parallel in the industrial world.

Imagine walking by that in the desert! The natural response when perceiving design of such mind-boggling complexity is to conclude that there must be a designer behind everything who created it. None of this just happened.
RANDOM WRITING SAMPLE

Rabbeinu Bachya, in his major philosophical work “The Duties of the Heart” [10th century] presents this argument in the following manner:

Do you not realize that if ink were poured out accidentally on a blank sheet of paper, it would be impossible that proper writing should result, legible lines that are written with a pen? Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.

Since this seems impossible in the case of letters whose formation is conventional, how can one assert that something far subtler in its design and which manifests in its fashioning a depth and complexity infinitely beyond our comprehension could have happened without the purpose, power, and wisdom of a wise and mighty designer? (“The Duties of the Heart,” The Gate of Oneness, Chapter 6)

The two most common objections to this argument go as follows:

The argument is too simple. There seems to be a big jump from concluding that someone must have made rock formations in the desert to concluding that there is a Creator who must have made the universe.

What about evolution? Over a very long period of time everything could have come about as a random occurrence! With millions of years to play around with, isn’t it possible for some kind of order to emerge just by chance?

Let’s address these two objections.
ADDRESSING ARGUMENT NUMBER ONE

The principle “design implies designer” applies across the board, whether the designer is a Bedouin nomad piling rocks in the desert or the Infinite Source of all existence. Intellectually it is the same logical process. In fact, there is more reason to assume a designer in the latter case since the level of design is much higher.

Simplicity is not an inherent fault in an argument. Perhaps the reason why some people take issue with this application of logic is due to the accompanying consequences.

Since the Bedouin doesn’t make any moral demands on our life, there is no resistance to drawing the logical conclusion that someone designed that rock formation. But when the conclusion points to God, cognitive dissonance kicks in, creating an instinctive opposition to what one perceives to be threatening. [See the previous article in this series: “Seeing the Elephant”

When the interference of cognitive dissonance is removed, what is the objective standard of design that we need to see in order to conclude something was created? What we need is a control experiment that determines this threshold of design in a case that has no threatening consequences. “The Obvious Proof”, a book by Gershon Robinson and Mordechai Steinman, delivers a compelling presentation of the design argument, and describes such a control experiment involving millions of people concluding the necessity of a designer.

The laboratory consisted of theaters across the globe that showed the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In the film, American scientists living in a colony on the moon discover during a dig the first evidence that intelligent life exists on other planets. What did they find? A simple monolith—a smooth, rectangular slab of rock. The Americans keep this significant discovery secret, afraid of the widespread culture shock and social ramifications this would have without proper preparation.

Thousands of film critics and millions of moviegoers went along with the film’s basic assertion, agreeing that intelligent creatures other than man must have created this smooth, rectangular monolith. It didn’t just randomly appear. Free from all emotional and intellectual bias, in the comfort of darkened theaters with popcorn in hand, people unanimously agreed that a simple, smooth slab with a few right angles was conclusive proof of intelligence.

When the conclusion does not point to God, everyone realizes that the simplest object can serve as the threshold of design, the point at which one concludes an object could not have come into existence by random accident. The universe, infinitely more complex than a monolith, had to have been created.
WHAT ABOUT RANDOM EVOLUTION?

Given enough tries over a long period of time, isn’t it possible for complex structures to emerge randomly? After all, with sufficient trials even improbable events eventually become likely.

Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, uses a national lottery to illustrate this point [“Origins”, Bantam, p.121]. The odds of winning the lottery may be 10 million to one. Winning would be incredibly lucky. But if we were to buy a lottery ticket every day for the next thirty thousand years, a win would become probable, (albeit very expensive).

But what are the odds of life coming about by sheer chance? Let’s take a look at two examples to get a sense of the odds involved in random evolution.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, writes in his book “A Brief History of Time”:

It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys hammering away on typewriters—most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Similarly, in the case of the universe, could it be that we are living in a region that just happens by chance to be smooth and uniform?

Well could it be?

In response to Hawking, Dr. Gerald Schroeder, a physicist, calculated the odds of monkeys randomly typing an average Shakespearean Sonnet in his book “Genesis and the Big Bang.” He chose the one that opens, “Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?”

There are 488 letters in the sonnet ... The chance of randomly typing the 488 letters to produce this one sonnet is one in 26 to the 488th power, or one in 10 to the 690th power. The number 10690 is a one followed by 690 zero’s! The immense scale of this number is hinted at when one considers that since the Big Bang, 15 billion years ago, there have been only 10 to the 18th power number of seconds, which have ticked away.

To write by random one of Shakespeare’s sonnets would take all the monkeys, plus every other animal on earth, typing away on typewriters made from all the iron in the universe, over a period of time that exceeds all time since the Big Bang, and still the probability of a sonnet appearing would be vanishingly small. At one random try per second, with even a simple sentence having only 16 letters, it would take 2 million billion years (the universe has existed for about 15 billion years) to exhaust all possible combinations.

Robert Shapiro cites Nobel laureate Sir Fred Hoyle’s calculation of the odds of a bacterium spontaneously generating [p.127]. At first Hoyle and his colleague, N. C. Wickramasinghe, endorsed spontaneous generation, but reversed their position once they calculated the odds.

A typical bacterium, which is the simplest of cells, is made up of 2,000 enzymes. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe took the probability of randomly assembling one enzyme and multiplied that number by itself 2,000 times to calculate the odds of a single bacterium randomly coming together. Those odds are 1 in 1040,000. Hoyle said the likelihood of this happening is comparable to the chance that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

These are the odds of just a single, simple cell, without which evolution cannot even get started. Never mind the odds of more advanced compounds like an organ or all the enzymes in a human being.

Shapiro writes:

The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle.

For all intents and purposes, an event with the probability of 1 in 1040,000 qualifies in real-world terms as impossible.
SOME THINGS ARE IMPOSSIBLE

Imagine you are the presiding judge over a murder trial. Ballistic tests match perfectly with a gun found in the possession of the accused. The odds of another gun firing the bullet that killed the victim are let’s say one in a billion.

The defendant claims that it is a sheer fluke that his gun happens to match the ballistics tests and that there must be another gun out there that is the real murder weapon. “After all,” he says, “it is a possibility.”

The defendant’s fingerprints are found all over the victim’s body. He claims there must be another person out there who happens to have astonishingly similar fingerprints. Again, it is possible.

There are also eyewitnesses who testify to seeing a man gunning down the victim who looks just like the defendant. The defendant claims there must be another person out there in this big world who looks just like him, and that man is the real murderer. After all—it’s not impossible.

You are the judge, and you need to make a decision. What do you decide?

In the pragmatic world of decision-making, odds this high are called impossible. One needs to weigh the evidence and come to the most reasonable conclusion.

Does the universe have a Creator? Look at the design, look at the odds and look honestly within. Where does the more rational conclusion lie?


Intelligent Design Argument

let me get this straight, you post a link a site that is diametrically opposed to what you believe as proof of something there is no quantifiable evidence for.
wow! how desperate are you?

Do you think a creationist would disagree with these arguments made by ID ? Crationists make the same arguments.

You should have this straight by now. I have said in the past I agree with ID on many points, most importantly irreducible complexity.

 

[Youwerecreated]

Oh good gawd.

That was every failed, juvenile creationist argument (to include the silly "blind watchmaker") cut and paste. Although this time, the blind guy was in the desert.

You are not using your logical thinking to see the importance of logic.

Coming from a creationist, your talk about logic is pretty humorous. Creatioinism is anti-logic.

Provide the evidence that shows the theory of creation is anti-logic, and take the points on.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

This I have spoken about before but this is something some should read up on, it was an evolutionist that presented a death blow to the theory of neo darwinism and it dealt with the problems of mutation fixation.

Also read up on Dr Lee Spetners book on mutations.

Mutation Fixation: A Dead End for Macro-evolution
by E. Calvin Beisner, M.A.

Most arguments against the possibility of mutation as a mechanism for evolution revolve around two premises: that mutations are almost always harmful, and that the idea of their improving rather than harming organisms is contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that matter and energy naturally tend toward greater randomness rather than greater order and complexity. These are two sides of the same coin, actually, the latter arguing from principle and the former from empirical observation.

Rarely, though, do arguments against mutation as the mechanism for evolution consider at once the many conditions that must be met if mutation is to bring about macro-evolutionary change (that is, change from one basic kind of life to another). Yet examining the probabilities of these conditions all being met together provides excellent evidence against evolution and in favor of creation.
NINE CONDITIONS FOR MUTATION FIXATION

Fortunately, geneticist R.H. Byles has made the job easy for us by discussing nine important conditions in an article on the subject.

Mutation Fixation: A Dead End for Macro-evolution

the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that matter and energy naturally tend toward greater randomness rather than greater order and complexity.

What is more complex, an acorn or a mighty oak tree?
A fertilized human egg or you?

What is your point ?

My point is your Second Law error was an error. Do you see it yet?

 

[Youwerecreated]

It is a meaningless philosophical diatribe. Philosophy is proven irrelevant by more philosophy and, as philosophy has no solid mathematical or scientific foundation, it is necessarily meaningless.

There is simply no way to philosiphicalize to an answer of how life began. There is limited opportunity to theorize onto it. Thermodynamic laws don't provide any basis for proving it either way. At best, they put some restraint on how it came about. Observation of something is required.

I am forever overwhelmed by how a few subatomic particles and a few forces of nature so quickly expands into the complexity of the periodic table of elements. That plethora of seemingly simple set of elements explodes into an extrordinary number of chemicals which further combine into a seemingly infinite variety of organic and inorganic forms.

And for all we know, the circumstances of the early Earth was both complex and significantly different in ways that we cannot begin to imagine. We may have, over the past hundreds of years of investgation, by one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of scientists, run across, picked up, examined, and tossed away the very evidence simply because they had no clue what they were looking at. And that is assuming it even has survived the geological processes that churn the very ground beneath our feet. We know where oil came from, and yet to look at it, it bears no resemblence to the very creatures from which it came.

We can hypothesize, to the end of days, but without some theoretical or empirical basis, it remains simply that, a hypothesis. A book, written by men, is not the basis for a hypothesis. The repeatable observations and recipes, from a book, written by a cook or blacksmith, have far more relevance.

For me, it is enough to learn what others have already figured out instead of chasing after an answer that is confined to some moment long lost in history.

The day the Sun no longer shines, the Earth's core solidifies, the wind stops, and life still continues on will be the day that some mysterious force is shown as violating the laws of thermodynamics. Until then, it is all just physics, chemistry and biology.

Finally back in front of my computer. I was in Vegas and just could not respond on my phone it was a major pain in the you know what.

Itfitzme thank you for the information on physics it really is not a subject That I am as well versed in as I should be. That said philosophy in science it exists andnecessary for building theories and coming up with assumptions. I believe many come in and suggest only empirical evidence should be accepted that is not the case because only empirical evidence can be interpreted wrong. Philosophy plays a large part in science all you need to do is look at theories that are filled with conjecture. Many people are affected by the bias when interpreting evidence and their assumptions.

If we just relied on empirical evidence we wouldn't get very far in science. Still you need to have sound logic to properly interpret if you lack sound logic you will get too many bad assumptions and faulty interpretations.

I will post this and show how important logic and philosophy really are in performing good science.





The Design Argument

Does the intricate design of the universe serve as evidence for the existence of God?

Imagine walking in the desert and coming across two small stones in close proximity to each other. Most probably, you would think nothing of it. Two stones randomly sitting beside each other is no big deal.

You continue your walk in the desert and stumble upon three rows of stones piled up in a brick-layer fashion. Chances are you would quickly surmise that someone was here and arranged these stones in this manner. It didn’t just happen.

You continue your walk and happen to find a watch lying in the middle of the desert. Would you suspect that a windstorm somehow threw these pieces together and randomly created a watch?

Somebody made that watch. It didn’t just happen. Design implies designer.
DID THE UNIVERSE HAVE A DESIGNER?

The intricacy of design in our world is staggering—infinitely more complex than a simple brick wall or a watch. Dr. Michael Denton, in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” describes the intricate organization of nerve cells in the brain [pp. 330 - 331].

There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain. Each of the 10 billion cells sprouts between 10,000 to 100,000 fibers to contact other nerve cells in the brain, creating approximately 1,000 million million connections, or, 10 to the 15th power.

It is hard to imagine the multitude that 1015 represents. Take half of the United States, which is 1 million square miles, and imagine it being covered by forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. On each of the 10,000 trees, which are on each of the one million square miles, there are 100,000 leaves. That’s how many connections are crammed inside your brain. And they’re not just haphazardly thrown together. They form an incredibly intricate network system that has no parallel in the industrial world.

Imagine walking by that in the desert! The natural response when perceiving design of such mind-boggling complexity is to conclude that there must be a designer behind everything who created it. None of this just happened.
RANDOM WRITING SAMPLE

Rabbeinu Bachya, in his major philosophical work “The Duties of the Heart” [10th century] presents this argument in the following manner:

Do you not realize that if ink were poured out accidentally on a blank sheet of paper, it would be impossible that proper writing should result, legible lines that are written with a pen? Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.

Since this seems impossible in the case of letters whose formation is conventional, how can one assert that something far subtler in its design and which manifests in its fashioning a depth and complexity infinitely beyond our comprehension could have happened without the purpose, power, and wisdom of a wise and mighty designer? (“The Duties of the Heart,” The Gate of Oneness, Chapter 6)

The two most common objections to this argument go as follows:

The argument is too simple. There seems to be a big jump from concluding that someone must have made rock formations in the desert to concluding that there is a Creator who must have made the universe.

What about evolution? Over a very long period of time everything could have come about as a random occurrence! With millions of years to play around with, isn’t it possible for some kind of order to emerge just by chance?

Let’s address these two objections.
ADDRESSING ARGUMENT NUMBER ONE

The principle “design implies designer” applies across the board, whether the designer is a Bedouin nomad piling rocks in the desert or the Infinite Source of all existence. Intellectually it is the same logical process. In fact, there is more reason to assume a designer in the latter case since the level of design is much higher.

Simplicity is not an inherent fault in an argument. Perhaps the reason why some people take issue with this application of logic is due to the accompanying consequences.

Since the Bedouin doesn’t make any moral demands on our life, there is no resistance to drawing the logical conclusion that someone designed that rock formation. But when the conclusion points to God, cognitive dissonance kicks in, creating an instinctive opposition to what one perceives to be threatening. [See the previous article in this series: “Seeing the Elephant”

When the interference of cognitive dissonance is removed, what is the objective standard of design that we need to see in order to conclude something was created? What we need is a control experiment that determines this threshold of design in a case that has no threatening consequences. “The Obvious Proof”, a book by Gershon Robinson and Mordechai Steinman, delivers a compelling presentation of the design argument, and describes such a control experiment involving millions of people concluding the necessity of a designer.

The laboratory consisted of theaters across the globe that showed the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In the film, American scientists living in a colony on the moon discover during a dig the first evidence that intelligent life exists on other planets. What did they find? A simple monolith—a smooth, rectangular slab of rock. The Americans keep this significant discovery secret, afraid of the widespread culture shock and social ramifications this would have without proper preparation.

Thousands of film critics and millions of moviegoers went along with the film’s basic assertion, agreeing that intelligent creatures other than man must have created this smooth, rectangular monolith. It didn’t just randomly appear. Free from all emotional and intellectual bias, in the comfort of darkened theaters with popcorn in hand, people unanimously agreed that a simple, smooth slab with a few right angles was conclusive proof of intelligence.

When the conclusion does not point to God, everyone realizes that the simplest object can serve as the threshold of design, the point at which one concludes an object could not have come into existence by random accident. The universe, infinitely more complex than a monolith, had to have been created.
WHAT ABOUT RANDOM EVOLUTION?

Given enough tries over a long period of time, isn’t it possible for complex structures to emerge randomly? After all, with sufficient trials even improbable events eventually become likely.

Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, uses a national lottery to illustrate this point [“Origins”, Bantam, p.121]. The odds of winning the lottery may be 10 million to one. Winning would be incredibly lucky. But if we were to buy a lottery ticket every day for the next thirty thousand years, a win would become probable, (albeit very expensive).

But what are the odds of life coming about by sheer chance? Let’s take a look at two examples to get a sense of the odds involved in random evolution.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, writes in his book “A Brief History of Time”:

It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys hammering away on typewriters—most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Similarly, in the case of the universe, could it be that we are living in a region that just happens by chance to be smooth and uniform?

Well could it be?

In response to Hawking, Dr. Gerald Schroeder, a physicist, calculated the odds of monkeys randomly typing an average Shakespearean Sonnet in his book “Genesis and the Big Bang.” He chose the one that opens, “Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?”

There are 488 letters in the sonnet ... The chance of randomly typing the 488 letters to produce this one sonnet is one in 26 to the 488th power, or one in 10 to the 690th power. The number 10690 is a one followed by 690 zero’s! The immense scale of this number is hinted at when one considers that since the Big Bang, 15 billion years ago, there have been only 10 to the 18th power number of seconds, which have ticked away.

To write by random one of Shakespeare’s sonnets would take all the monkeys, plus every other animal on earth, typing away on typewriters made from all the iron in the universe, over a period of time that exceeds all time since the Big Bang, and still the probability of a sonnet appearing would be vanishingly small. At one random try per second, with even a simple sentence having only 16 letters, it would take 2 million billion years (the universe has existed for about 15 billion years) to exhaust all possible combinations.

Robert Shapiro cites Nobel laureate Sir Fred Hoyle’s calculation of the odds of a bacterium spontaneously generating [p.127]. At first Hoyle and his colleague, N. C. Wickramasinghe, endorsed spontaneous generation, but reversed their position once they calculated the odds.

A typical bacterium, which is the simplest of cells, is made up of 2,000 enzymes. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe took the probability of randomly assembling one enzyme and multiplied that number by itself 2,000 times to calculate the odds of a single bacterium randomly coming together. Those odds are 1 in 1040,000. Hoyle said the likelihood of this happening is comparable to the chance that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

These are the odds of just a single, simple cell, without which evolution cannot even get started. Never mind the odds of more advanced compounds like an organ or all the enzymes in a human being.

Shapiro writes:

The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle.

For all intents and purposes, an event with the probability of 1 in 1040,000 qualifies in real-world terms as impossible.
SOME THINGS ARE IMPOSSIBLE

Imagine you are the presiding judge over a murder trial. Ballistic tests match perfectly with a gun found in the possession of the accused. The odds of another gun firing the bullet that killed the victim are let’s say one in a billion.

The defendant claims that it is a sheer fluke that his gun happens to match the ballistics tests and that there must be another gun out there that is the real murder weapon. “After all,” he says, “it is a possibility.”

The defendant’s fingerprints are found all over the victim’s body. He claims there must be another person out there who happens to have astonishingly similar fingerprints. Again, it is possible.

There are also eyewitnesses who testify to seeing a man gunning down the victim who looks just like the defendant. The defendant claims there must be another person out there in this big world who looks just like him, and that man is the real murderer. After all—it’s not impossible.

You are the judge, and you need to make a decision. What do you decide?

In the pragmatic world of decision-making, odds this high are called impossible. One needs to weigh the evidence and come to the most reasonable conclusion.

Does the universe have a Creator? Look at the design, look at the odds and look honestly within. Where does the more rational conclusion lie?


Intelligent Design Argument

Progression of knowledge and Really Big Numbers

Pythagorus was a philisopher. *Today, the pythagorean theorem is taught in grade school.

Education duration, in years.

Grade school. 12 years
Undergrad GE. 2 years
Bachelor's of science 2 years
Master's of science 2 years
Doctorate of philosophy specialization 3 years
Doctorate of philosophy thesis 3 years
** *(They are then allowed out in public)

Year of education to achieve PhD, ~24 years. *Number of minutes, 12.6E+06.
Number of seconds, 7.57E+08.
*
Philpsophy comes after the science is said and done. *After*7.57E+08 seconds of intensive study and examination, then we get to be all philosophical.

And as science has progressed, specialization has become more and more restrictive because the knowledge base has expanded. *

There are some 83 official doctorate degrees, in the US. Each PhD student pursues a personally defined specializes thesis. *For 2008, there were 48.8E+03 awarded, each, presumably, with a unique thesis, in the US.

*"It is hard to imagine the multitude that 10^15 represents.", is not a measure of nature.

Nature is full of hard to imagine numbers. These are just a few.

Stars: * * * * * * * **10E24 stars
Sand: * * * * * * * * *10E19 grains
Distance across known universe: 8.8E26 m
Avagadro's Number: 6.0221415E23 molecules/mole
Dia hydrogen atom: *1.06E-10 m
Dia hydrogen nucleus: 2.40E-15 m
Non-repeating digits in PI. oo
Repeating digits in 1/3. * * *oo

Age of the earth: * * 1.432E+17 seconds
Age of the universe: *4.345E+17 seconds

Number of bacterium possible by doubling each 30 minutes for half the earth age of

1.432E+17 seconds/60=2.38667e15 minutes

2.38667e15/2= 1.199e+15 minutes.

1.199e+15/30=3.9778e+13 cycles.

2^3.9778e13=Infinity,

at least to the best Google calculator can do.*

This is an interesting study of classification and naming of numbers.

Large Numbers at MROB

Wiki, of course, discusses large numbers

Large numbers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The universe is full of really big numbers. That they are "unimaginable" is simply perception. And, as I've stated before, the "fallacy of shit don't just happen", is not proof of anything.

All that has to happen is for one bacterium to form. The it is two, then four, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 2^14, 2^15, and on it goes. All that had to happen was for it to happen, one time.

Take a can of your favorite chili and put it in a bowl. Cover it. Put the bowl in aside, in a warm and shady spot. Come back in a few days. It is just that easy for mold, fungi, and bacteria to grow.

Big numbers in nature is not a problem even if you work from 6,000 to 12,000 years either. It is the order to which complex things came in to existence that is the problem.

 

[Youwerecreated]

It is a meaningless philosophical diatribe. Philosophy is proven irrelevant by more philosophy and, as philosophy has no solid mathematical or scientific foundation, it is necessarily meaningless.

There is simply no way to philosiphicalize to an answer of how life began. There is limited opportunity to theorize onto it. Thermodynamic laws don't provide any basis for proving it either way. At best, they put some restraint on how it came about. Observation of something is required.

I am forever overwhelmed by how a few subatomic particles and a few forces of nature so quickly expands into the complexity of the periodic table of elements. That plethora of seemingly simple set of elements explodes into an extrordinary number of chemicals which further combine into a seemingly infinite variety of organic and inorganic forms.

And for all we know, the circumstances of the early Earth was both complex and significantly different in ways that we cannot begin to imagine. We may have, over the past hundreds of years of investgation, by one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of scientists, run across, picked up, examined, and tossed away the very evidence simply because they had no clue what they were looking at. And that is assuming it even has survived the geological processes that churn the very ground beneath our feet. We know where oil came from, and yet to look at it, it bears no resemblence to the very creatures from which it came.

We can hypothesize, to the end of days, but without some theoretical or empirical basis, it remains simply that, a hypothesis. A book, written by men, is not the basis for a hypothesis. The repeatable observations and recipes, from a book, written by a cook or blacksmith, have far more relevance.

For me, it is enough to learn what others have already figured out instead of chasing after an answer that is confined to some moment long lost in history.

The day the Sun no longer shines, the Earth's core solidifies, the wind stops, and life still continues on will be the day that some mysterious force is shown as violating the laws of thermodynamics. Until then, it is all just physics, chemistry and biology.

Finally back in front of my computer. I was in Vegas and just could not respond on my phone it was a major pain in the you know what.

Itfitzme thank you for the information on physics it really is not a subject That I am as well versed in as I should be. That said philosophy in science it exists andnecessary for building theories and coming up with assumptions. I believe many come in and suggest only empirical evidence should be accepted that is not the case because only empirical evidence can be interpreted wrong. Philosophy plays a large part in science all you need to do is look at theories that are filled with conjecture. Many people are affected by the bias when interpreting evidence and their assumptions.

If we just relied on empirical evidence we wouldn't get very far in science. Still you need to have sound logic to properly interpret if you lack sound logic you will get too many bad assumptions and faulty interpretations.

I will post this and show how important logic and philosophy really are in performing good science.





The Design Argument

Does the intricate design of the universe serve as evidence for the existence of God?

Imagine walking in the desert and coming across two small stones in close proximity to each other. Most probably, you would think nothing of it. Two stones randomly sitting beside each other is no big deal.

You continue your walk in the desert and stumble upon three rows of stones piled up in a brick-layer fashion. Chances are you would quickly surmise that someone was here and arranged these stones in this manner. It didn’t just happen.

You continue your walk and happen to find a watch lying in the middle of the desert. Would you suspect that a windstorm somehow threw these pieces together and randomly created a watch?

Somebody made that watch. It didn’t just happen. Design implies designer.
DID THE UNIVERSE HAVE A DESIGNER?

The intricacy of design in our world is staggering—infinitely more complex than a simple brick wall or a watch. Dr. Michael Denton, in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” describes the intricate organization of nerve cells in the brain [pp. 330 - 331].

There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain. Each of the 10 billion cells sprouts between 10,000 to 100,000 fibers to contact other nerve cells in the brain, creating approximately 1,000 million million connections, or, 10 to the 15th power.

It is hard to imagine the multitude that 1015 represents. Take half of the United States, which is 1 million square miles, and imagine it being covered by forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. On each of the 10,000 trees, which are on each of the one million square miles, there are 100,000 leaves. That’s how many connections are crammed inside your brain. And they’re not just haphazardly thrown together. They form an incredibly intricate network system that has no parallel in the industrial world.

Imagine walking by that in the desert! The natural response when perceiving design of such mind-boggling complexity is to conclude that there must be a designer behind everything who created it. None of this just happened.
RANDOM WRITING SAMPLE

Rabbeinu Bachya, in his major philosophical work “The Duties of the Heart” [10th century] presents this argument in the following manner:

Do you not realize that if ink were poured out accidentally on a blank sheet of paper, it would be impossible that proper writing should result, legible lines that are written with a pen? Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.

Since this seems impossible in the case of letters whose formation is conventional, how can one assert that something far subtler in its design and which manifests in its fashioning a depth and complexity infinitely beyond our comprehension could have happened without the purpose, power, and wisdom of a wise and mighty designer? (“The Duties of the Heart,” The Gate of Oneness, Chapter 6)

The two most common objections to this argument go as follows:

The argument is too simple. There seems to be a big jump from concluding that someone must have made rock formations in the desert to concluding that there is a Creator who must have made the universe.

What about evolution? Over a very long period of time everything could have come about as a random occurrence! With millions of years to play around with, isn’t it possible for some kind of order to emerge just by chance?

Let’s address these two objections.
ADDRESSING ARGUMENT NUMBER ONE

The principle “design implies designer” applies across the board, whether the designer is a Bedouin nomad piling rocks in the desert or the Infinite Source of all existence. Intellectually it is the same logical process. In fact, there is more reason to assume a designer in the latter case since the level of design is much higher.

Simplicity is not an inherent fault in an argument. Perhaps the reason why some people take issue with this application of logic is due to the accompanying consequences.

Since the Bedouin doesn’t make any moral demands on our life, there is no resistance to drawing the logical conclusion that someone designed that rock formation. But when the conclusion points to God, cognitive dissonance kicks in, creating an instinctive opposition to what one perceives to be threatening. [See the previous article in this series: “Seeing the Elephant”

When the interference of cognitive dissonance is removed, what is the objective standard of design that we need to see in order to conclude something was created? What we need is a control experiment that determines this threshold of design in a case that has no threatening consequences. “The Obvious Proof”, a book by Gershon Robinson and Mordechai Steinman, delivers a compelling presentation of the design argument, and describes such a control experiment involving millions of people concluding the necessity of a designer.

The laboratory consisted of theaters across the globe that showed the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In the film, American scientists living in a colony on the moon discover during a dig the first evidence that intelligent life exists on other planets. What did they find? A simple monolith—a smooth, rectangular slab of rock. The Americans keep this significant discovery secret, afraid of the widespread culture shock and social ramifications this would have without proper preparation.

Thousands of film critics and millions of moviegoers went along with the film’s basic assertion, agreeing that intelligent creatures other than man must have created this smooth, rectangular monolith. It didn’t just randomly appear. Free from all emotional and intellectual bias, in the comfort of darkened theaters with popcorn in hand, people unanimously agreed that a simple, smooth slab with a few right angles was conclusive proof of intelligence.

When the conclusion does not point to God, everyone realizes that the simplest object can serve as the threshold of design, the point at which one concludes an object could not have come into existence by random accident. The universe, infinitely more complex than a monolith, had to have been created.
WHAT ABOUT RANDOM EVOLUTION?

Given enough tries over a long period of time, isn’t it possible for complex structures to emerge randomly? After all, with sufficient trials even improbable events eventually become likely.

Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, uses a national lottery to illustrate this point [“Origins”, Bantam, p.121]. The odds of winning the lottery may be 10 million to one. Winning would be incredibly lucky. But if we were to buy a lottery ticket every day for the next thirty thousand years, a win would become probable, (albeit very expensive).

But what are the odds of life coming about by sheer chance? Let’s take a look at two examples to get a sense of the odds involved in random evolution.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, writes in his book “A Brief History of Time”:

It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys hammering away on typewriters—most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Similarly, in the case of the universe, could it be that we are living in a region that just happens by chance to be smooth and uniform?

Well could it be?

In response to Hawking, Dr. Gerald Schroeder, a physicist, calculated the odds of monkeys randomly typing an average Shakespearean Sonnet in his book “Genesis and the Big Bang.” He chose the one that opens, “Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?”

There are 488 letters in the sonnet ... The chance of randomly typing the 488 letters to produce this one sonnet is one in 26 to the 488th power, or one in 10 to the 690th power. The number 10690 is a one followed by 690 zero’s! The immense scale of this number is hinted at when one considers that since the Big Bang, 15 billion years ago, there have been only 10 to the 18th power number of seconds, which have ticked away.

To write by random one of Shakespeare’s sonnets would take all the monkeys, plus every other animal on earth, typing away on typewriters made from all the iron in the universe, over a period of time that exceeds all time since the Big Bang, and still the probability of a sonnet appearing would be vanishingly small. At one random try per second, with even a simple sentence having only 16 letters, it would take 2 million billion years (the universe has existed for about 15 billion years) to exhaust all possible combinations.

Robert Shapiro cites Nobel laureate Sir Fred Hoyle’s calculation of the odds of a bacterium spontaneously generating [p.127]. At first Hoyle and his colleague, N. C. Wickramasinghe, endorsed spontaneous generation, but reversed their position once they calculated the odds.

A typical bacterium, which is the simplest of cells, is made up of 2,000 enzymes. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe took the probability of randomly assembling one enzyme and multiplied that number by itself 2,000 times to calculate the odds of a single bacterium randomly coming together. Those odds are 1 in 1040,000. Hoyle said the likelihood of this happening is comparable to the chance that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

These are the odds of just a single, simple cell, without which evolution cannot even get started. Never mind the odds of more advanced compounds like an organ or all the enzymes in a human being.

Shapiro writes:

The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle.

For all intents and purposes, an event with the probability of 1 in 1040,000 qualifies in real-world terms as impossible.
SOME THINGS ARE IMPOSSIBLE

Imagine you are the presiding judge over a murder trial. Ballistic tests match perfectly with a gun found in the possession of the accused. The odds of another gun firing the bullet that killed the victim are let’s say one in a billion.

The defendant claims that it is a sheer fluke that his gun happens to match the ballistics tests and that there must be another gun out there that is the real murder weapon. “After all,” he says, “it is a possibility.”

The defendant’s fingerprints are found all over the victim’s body. He claims there must be another person out there who happens to have astonishingly similar fingerprints. Again, it is possible.

There are also eyewitnesses who testify to seeing a man gunning down the victim who looks just like the defendant. The defendant claims there must be another person out there in this big world who looks just like him, and that man is the real murderer. After all—it’s not impossible.

You are the judge, and you need to make a decision. What do you decide?

In the pragmatic world of decision-making, odds this high are called impossible. One needs to weigh the evidence and come to the most reasonable conclusion.

Does the universe have a Creator? Look at the design, look at the odds and look honestly within. Where does the more rational conclusion lie?


Intelligent Design Argument

The "slackjawed yokel" defense is no more relevant than any of your other delusions as to the existence of your mythical "creator".

Do you have a problem with logic or no ?

 

[Youwerecreated]

"For all intents and purposes, an event with the probability of 1 in 1040,000 qualifies in real-world terms as impossible.
SOME THINGS ARE IMPOSSIBLE"

You are confusing impractical and statistically insignificant with impossible. Impossible is P(E) == 0. Anything P(E) > 0 is, by definition, possible.

This is what I mean by playing word games, wallking definitions across definitional sets, why philosophy isn't mathematically precise in describing nature, and, by it's nature, a failure at proving anything.

The probability of A is 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 is really small. In practice, in human terms, in manufacturing, really small is impractical. What is impractical is, for all intents and purposes, considered impossible. Therefore, A is impossible.

It is a meaningless proof that relies of similarity of definitions to mutate, evolve, from one real definition to complete nonsense. The difference is that, in human thought, anything can evolve. In reality, nature, there are some things that really are impossible, like a person literally walking on water. And there are things that, while constrained by real natural laws, are difficult, they are not impossible. Evolution is constrained, not impossible.

I understand. It wasn't your fault. You were trained, you were lied to.

Now that you know, it is now your fault. Going forward, you have no excuse.

There are many things working against macro-evolution, however the counter part micro happens within a group and there is no doubt in that. My question would be why ?