“Crashes and” Burns,
But it is not personal incredulity, it is based on the logical impossibility for any purely material entity to achieve conscious awareness.
Except there's no good reason to think it's “logically impossible" at all, and your only ground for asserting otherwise is
precisely your personal incredulity. If you want your claim of logical impossibility to be taken seriously then you’d need to demonstrate it rather than just assert it. Oh, and your conjecture "soul" is still logically incoherent by the way.
Conscious perception requires an single entity of awareness which can't be defined in material terms.
No it doesn’t – as you’d realise if you took off the blinkers of “faith” and bothered to look at the evidence that undoes you.
I can't apologise for or retract something which I sincerely believe to be true.
Yes you can. When you get something wrong that’s called a mistake (and one of your countless mistakes by the way is to think that your sincerity has anything to do with the veracity of your various claims and assertions – it doesn’t). When the mistake is pointed out to you (as torri did when he gave examples of you precisely science denying despite your claim to the contrary) then the only honest course of action left to you is to withdraw the untruth, and perhaps to apologise for it.
Please consider this illustration of my logic:
Imagine that a microscopic, but highly intelligent alien race came to this earth. They come across an automated car production line. They will correctly observe that every event occurring in the car production line has a natural observable cause. They would see human beings as just a collection of material elements all reacting to natural forces. They may discover other production lines producing other types of vehicle, similarly driven by natural forces acting on material elements. They may discover historical evidence of previous production lines used to produce vehicles which no longer exist. What will not be apparent is that every event in the production line was intelligently controlled and manipulated to produce a previously conceived specific goal.
That’s just the daftness of Paley’s watch re-stated, and it betrays your utter ignorance of how evolution actually works.
Human scientific discovery also fails to see the bigger picture behind the apparently naturally occurring events which brought life into existence.
So you think you know better than “human” scientific discovery then do you? Are you seriously suggesting the little old Alan and his book of ancient stories somehow knows about a supposed “bigger picture” than people who actually do science haven’t thought about?
Where on earth does such ocean-sized arrogance come from?
And the life on this earth is far more complex than any man made vehicle.
Most life at least, yes. So what point do you think you’re making here?
Can you honestly assume that all the countless billions of apparently naturally occurring but specific events needed to bring us into existence all just happened by chance?
Stop. Seriously, just stop. If you want to turn up here and critique evolutionary theory by displaying such utter ignorance of what it actually says then you will continue to make a fool of yourself.
Is that really what you want? Really?
Yet again:
First, evolution doesn’t happen by “chance” at all. Genetic mutations do (let’s not make your head explode by discussing here the nuanced nature of randomness by the way – for this purpose, at the level of chemistry at least it’s random) but the interactions of those mutations with their environment is anything
but chance.
Second, you’ve (once again) made the schoolboy error of assuming that evolution is
purposive, that we (and presumably other life too) were in some unfathomable way an end game it was working towards all along and so the odds against getting there were unfeasibly high. Your solipsism here though lets you down – if a different self-aware species had evolved that had a third eye on the back of its head, ran backwards to avoid barking its shins on coffee tables, and could take flight at will with big feathery wings to avoid the dragons and a (not very bright) member of that species said “Can you honestly assume that all the countless billions of apparently naturally occurring but specific events needed to bring us into existence all just happened by chance?” what kind of bozo would you think him to be?
Can you assume that all beneficial mutations were chance events?
Can you assume that any beneficial mutation was a chance event?
More ignorance. See above.
