Searching for GOD...

[Gordon]

You seem to be presuming that your analogy enables you to conclude that things naturally adapt to their environment.
They do in some cases, as illustrated by the example of the puddle.

But human creativity illustrates that "natural" environments can be intelligently manipulated to enable intentional outcomes, so your analogy is not universal.

Surely though this 'human creativity' is just an example of the adaption of our species: after all, our ability to manipulate the natural to attain a certain state of affairs within the environment that we operate in is, fundamentally, no different to other species manipulating the natural within their environment on the same basis, such as other species that can use tools (e.g. some corvids).

You seem inclined to see the supernatural everywhere you look: a bias that blinds you to more grounded explanations that are supported by evidence and inclines you towards groundless religious superstitions.

[Alan Burns]

Surely though this 'human creativity' is just an example of the adaption of our species: after all, our ability to manipulate the natural to attain a certain state of affairs within the environment that we operate in is, fundamentally, no different to other species manipulating the natural within their environment on the same basis, such as other species that can use tools (e.g. some corvids).

You seem inclined to see the supernatural everywhere you look: a bias that blinds you to more grounded explanations that are supported by evidence and inclines you towards groundless religious superstitions.

Yes, I do see evidence of the supernatural everywhere.  I find the evidence overwhelming, particularly when contemplating my own freedom to think.  My imagination can soar far above anything which would be entirely determined by past events.

If my thought dreams could be seen,
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.  - Bob Dylan

[torridon]

Yes, I do see evidence of the supernatural everywhere.  I find the evidence overwhelming, particularly when contemplating my own freedom to think.  My imagination can soar far above anything which would be entirely determined by past events.
..

Ironic, this, coming from Mr Predictable himself.  You seem remarkable for your lack of imagination, if anything.

[ippy]

Yes, I do see evidence of the supernatural everywhere.  I find the evidence overwhelming, particularly when contemplating my own freedom to think.  My imagination can soar far above anything which would be entirely determined by past events.

If my thought dreams could be seen,
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.  - Bob Dylan

I suppose like a lot of us that enjoy the 'Star Wars' series of films by letting go of reality for as long as the film lasts, I'll guess their'll always be the odd few that don't want to let go, like the two here on this thread, shame.

ippy.

[Sebastian Toe]

I know evil exists because I know good exists.
You can't know one without the other.

Again, not answering the question.

A reminder of one of your previous statements...

I am in agreement with the views expressed by CS Lewis in being convinced that the secular drift in our modern society is a result of people being deceived by the forces of evil which are prevalent in this world.

My question to you was and still is
What specifically are "the forces of evil", and how specifically do they deceive people?

It's a pretty straight forward query.
So far you have responded that you use prayer to recognise evil and that you know that evil exists...because good exists.
What you have singularly failed to do is address the actual question.

How on earth you are going to manage to persuade people about your message if you blatantly avoid answering straight forward questions?

Do you have a hidden agenda?
Are you possibly an agent of those "forces of evil "?
Both are possibilities based on your responses thus far!

[Gordon]

Yes, I do see evidence of the supernatural everywhere.  I find the evidence overwhelming, particularly when contemplating my own freedom to think.  My imagination can soar far above anything which would be entirely determined by past events.

Sadly, I suspect your imagination has already got the better of you.

[Stranger]

Yes, I do see evidence of the supernatural everywhere.  I find the evidence overwhelming...

Such a shame you can't actually point to any of it without making school kid level mistakes in logic and basic reasoning.

[Outrider]

Yes, I do see evidence of the supernatural everywhere.

How does that work?  Something is evidence for something else because there's either an established pattern of one thing leading to the other, or there's a demonstrable logical link from one to the other - by definition the supernatural is deemed such because it bypasses those ideas and has no logical explanation.  How can something, then, be evidence for the supernatural?

At best you can conclude that we can't explain something - that's not evidence of the supernatural, it's just evidence that we don't know currently.

O.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

The usefulness of the analogy lies in its ability to expose a widespread bias in our thinking.  Spud's post a couple of pages back was a classic example of that mistake - basically the Earth being so improbably in some sort of goldilocks situation leads to the unwarranted and rather lazy inference that the situation was designed to be 'just right' for life on Earth.  It's always worth challenging lazy thinking.

Gordon I have to report there were two Z's in your last post.
I am of course referring to the sleep it induced in me and not the letter count.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

You seem to be presuming that your analogy enables you to conclude that things naturally adapt to their environment.
They do in some cases, as illustrated by the example of the puddle.

Baby steps now Alan, baby steps:

First, read again what I said. I presume no such thing – rather I merely said that the fact of your environment suiting you does not imply that it was set up that way for you rather than that you are adapted for it. Clear now?

Second, in the case of life however we do have the vast, exhaustively tested, overwhelming evidence of evolution that tells us exactly that we’re adapted for our environment. There’s debate about whether life began on land or in the sea, but in either case whatever that life was would only have had to have been suited to its local environment at that time. That’s why people like Spud marvelling at the co-incidence of there being just the right amount of rain for humans now is so daft.

Still, on the positive side I’m pleased you seem to have abandoned your dead end of “but a puddle is simple and life is complex” as if that had anything to do with the force of the analogy. God stuff.   

But human creativity illustrates that "natural" environments can be intelligently manipulated to enable intentional outcomes, so your analogy is not universal.

Ah, but now you’ve gone off the rails again. The universality is in just assuming that environments are intentionally there for the convenience of whatever inhabits them. It’s a basic mistake of creationists especially – sometimes known as the lottery winner’s fallacy.   

[Spud]

Spud,

Different argument to your rain mistake, but the analogy with complex life fails because jumbo jets didn't evolve from, say, Sopwith Camels. Once Wallace and Darwin gave us a process that removed incredulity from the picture reasoning people who had believed complex life implied a creator dropped the idea.

Ah![/torymp]

[Spud]

Spud,

Like AB, you’ve missed the point. The analogy illustrates the wrongheadedness of the puddle thinking the hole fits him, rather than the puddle fitting the hole. It’s the same mistake you made when you used the right amount of rain for you existence being significant.

I didn't say anything about the amount of rain for my existence, but for the puddle's.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Spud,

I didn't say anything about the amount of rain for my existence, but for the puddle's.

That’s not true. In Reply 41271 you said:

“Sorry to sound patronising, sometimes it's easy to slip into thinking that intelligent design seems so obvious that anyone who denies it must be suppressing the fact of it.

Rain wouldn't be possible if the earth wasn't the right distance from the sun - it would either be ice or vapourize. Shall we say it has the appearance of having been designed ('made' prompts the question of how, which I don't know)? The alternative would be that it wasn't designed but came about by chance, which is fine if it were just one aspect, but there seem to be countless examples of apparent design. Really the only reason I can see for not believing in a designer is that we can't see one.” 

You were replying to Outrider’s Reply 41245 when he said:

“Depends on your interpretation of 'made' - if it occurs naturally, like rain, without a conscious input is that 'made'?  There is an outside possibility that it's in some way infinite and didn't 'start' at all, although I'm not in that camp mysefl.

I don't see how that follows. Rain falls, consistently, which is an example of 'order' but isn't indicative of a conscious controlling influence.  Order is necessary for something to be stable enough for us to emerge within it, but that's not evidence for a conscious creator, it's just evidence that the current stability of natural laws has been the case for some time.

I've heard this argument from believers of a number of stripes, that at some level there are some (in some formulations, all) atheists who actually 'know' that it's true but somehow push it down?  Quite apart from how patronising that is to level at someone, I've not come across anyone who admits fitting into that category; there are believers who follow what they feel are the precepts of their faith, believers who think they should but admit that they fail to one degree or another, and non-believers.  I don't know of anyone who describes themselves as a believer that deliberately flouts the rules.”

There's no reference to Adams’ puddle here. Adams’ puddle wasn’t introduced until later on when torridon brought it up in Reply 41276:

“All you need is a little puddle :

http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=12540” 

[bluehillside Retd.]

Spud,

Ah![/torymp]

?

[Alan Burns]

Second, in the case of life however we do have the vast, exhaustively tested, overwhelming evidence of evolution that tells us exactly that we’re adapted for our environment.

In retrospect we can certainly observe that species mutated to adapt to changing environments.
But there is no way of knowing that every beneficial mutation needed to adapt was generated by purposeless unguided forces.

[Stranger]

In retrospect we can certainly observe that species mutated to adapt to changing environments.
But there is no way of knowing that every beneficial mutation needed to adapt was generated by purposeless unguided forces.

Argument from ignorance fallacy.

You seem to know nothing at all about logic and care about it even less.

[SusanDoris]

In retrospect we can certainly observe that species mutated to adapt to changing environments.

Quite wrong. No species has ever created its own mutations to adapt to an environment. If a species is lucky enough to have one or more random mutations which just happen to make it able to survive a change in environment which comes up, then it will stand a better chance of surviving.

[torridon]

In retrospect we can certainly observe that species mutated to adapt to changing environments.
But there is no way of knowing that every beneficial mutation needed to adapt was generated by purposeless unguided forces.

.. but, if you insist on factoring some sort of divine intentionality into the evolutionary process, then I'm afraid you have to accept that said divine force must therefore, at least, also allow all deleterious mutations, many of which cause random cancers etc. If you want to be honest, you cannot pick and choose like this. 

[Spud]

AB,

Seems unlikely, but let’s see shall we?

Nope, thought not. Forget life, forget puddles – try to focus in the point being made here: the point is that any “something” and its environment co-existing does not imply that the environment was put there for the convenience of the something. Got it now?

But a puddle forms when enough rain falls in the area to fill a hole up. Clearly the puddle forms by chance, and it can't say that the hole is there for the sole purpose of it forming. But if the rain only fell in the hole and nowhere else, it would suggest (not prove) that it fell there by design. Gideon asked God for a sign in Judges 6:33-40 which happened in the same way: he laid a fleece on the ground overnight; in the morning it was soaked, but the ground around it was dry. To be totally sure this was God's doing, the next night he asked for the ground around the fleece to be wet and the fleece itself dry.

OK, back to life and to puddles then – the point here is that each is adapted to its environment, not the other way around. The relative complexity of each is for this purpose neither here nor there.     

Irrelevant, but yes.

What you're doing here is declaring, on the basis of certain scientific evidence, that life evolved by chance over billions of years, like the rain falling over a large area gradually filling up a hole, and saying that this refutes the watchmaker argument (hence when I did an impression of the MP in the Commons when someone comes up with a winning argument). If I think the evidence doesn't point to that, then for me the watchmaker argument still stands.

Sorry I've not replied earlier, my wifi wasn't able to connect to the site for a while.

[Alan Burns]

How does that work?  Something is evidence for something else because there's either an established pattern of one thing leading to the other, or there's a demonstrable logical link from one to the other - by definition the supernatural is deemed such because it bypasses those ideas and has no logical explanation.  How can something, then, be evidence for the supernatural?

At best you can conclude that we can't explain something - that's not evidence of the supernatural, it's just evidence that we don't know currently.

O.

But when you come across something which is impossible to explain in material terms, you can't just hide behind the "can't be explained" banner.  If something is impossible to be defined within the limits of material science, you need to come to terms with the possibility, or probability that the supernatural exists.

[Gordon]

But when you come across something which is impossible to explain in material terms, you can't just hide behind the "can't be explained" banner.

Why not? Turn the clock back to, say, 1000 years ago and those alive at the time would find familiar phenomena such rainbows impossible to explain accurately in terms of why they actually occur. 'Can't be explained' (with the insertion of 'yet' before 'be') is a far more sensible position to adopt than is leaping to the supernatural, although back then, in the relative infancy of scientific methods and study, the cultural bias towards religions/woo is understandable - but in modern times abandoning 'can't yet be explained' or 'don't currently have enough information', given that we know that knowledge and methods of enquiry are incremental, is just plain naive.

I'm perfectly happy to accept 'can't yet be explained' or 'don't yet know' as a holding position without in any sense intending to hide - but then, and unlike you, I'm not trying to create a gap into which any old religious woo can be inserted.   

If something is impossible to be defined within the limits of material science, you need to come to terms with the possibility, or probability that the supernatural exists.

Science ain't finished yet, Alan, so this is your incredulity messing up your critical thinking abilities yet again: by the way, how's the bespoke method(s) for investigating the supernatural coming along?

[Stranger]

But when you come across something which is impossible to explain in material terms, you can't just hide behind the "can't be explained" banner.  If something is impossible to be defined within the limits of material science, you need to come to terms with the possibility, or probability that the supernatural exists.

Illogical nonsense.

It's literally impossible to know whether something can be explained in material terms, without claiming to be omniscient about the material universe.

This is one of the major school-level logical blunders you make all the time. All we can say is that something is impossible to explain within our current understanding of physics (which we currently know is incomplete). Even if we had a tested "theory of everything", we still couldn't know that that was all there was to know about the material world.

If something can be made to make logical sense, we can't know that there isn't a material explanation.

If something doesn't make logical sense (such as your nonsense version of "free will"), it's impossible anyway, regardless of any posited supernatural realm.

The only escape is to say that the supernatural can include the logically impossible, so it could include (say) square circles. If you go down that route, then logic is literally useless and you can't possibly have a reasoned argument for it.

You continually make the simple, basic mistake of confusing logical impossibility with the limits of the material world. As I said before, you seem to understand nothing at all about logic (hence all the fallacies) and you care about it even less (hence you never respond when people point out your fallacies).

[Owlswing]

. . . hence you never respond when people point out your fallacies

Would not "Phallsies" be more appropriate as what you are talking about is "argument by or from a cock-up"?

[Outrider]

But when you come across something which is impossible to explain in material terms, you can't just hide behind the "can't be explained" banner.  If something is impossible to be defined within the limits of material science, you need to come to terms with the possibility, or probability that the supernatural exists.

Flying was scientifically impossible until we learnt more about science.  Heart transplants, immunisations, computers, supersonic flight, smart-phones, survival in space, industrial-scale agriculture, travel to other planets... all impossible, until we learnt more and suddenly they weren't.

That something is beyond our current understanding is no indication that it is beyond any possible explanation.

Or, as Arthur C Clarke would have it "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Any sufficiently advanced technology (or science) is indistinguishable from magic...

O.

[torridon]

But when you come across something which is impossible to explain in material terms, you can't just hide behind the "can't be explained" banner.  If something is impossible to be defined within the limits of material science, you need to come to terms with the possibility, or probability that the supernatural exists.

Better to say, 'can't be explained yet' and endeavour to seek understanding.  The alternative is to remain in some child-like world of make-believe where we just accept that magic happens.  In that case, we never make any progress.