Searching for GOD...

[Alan Burns]

AB,

No-one's "hiding", and dear god but you struggle. I'm trying to think here of a way to explain your mistake in even simpler terms than the ones I've used already. Should I try it in pictograms or something? How about through the medium of expressive dance maybe?

Focus here - really, really try to focus: THE SMALLNESS OF THE PROBABILITY HAS NO SIGNIFICANCE AT ALL UNLESS YOU CAN SHOW FIRST THAT WE WERE THE INTENDED OUTOME ALL ALONG NO MATTER HOW SMALL THAT PROBABILITY HAPPENS TO BE. Now write that down. A lot. And when you've finished writing it down a lot, write it down some more until it finally sinks in.   

To put it another way, even if hypothetically there was a golf course with that many blades of grass and the ball landed one of them, that blade of grass would no more be able to reason that it was specially selected than you can reason that you were specially selected.

Is this sinking in yet? That we exist is just dumb luck. Lucky us. That another species could have existed instead would be just dumb luck for that species. Lucky them. Your whole mind-numbing, buttock-clenching, 24-carat, fur-lined, ocean-going fuck up in thinking here is in just asserting you to have been the "goal" a priori, and then marvelling at the odds against that goal being achieved. Yet again: THE NUMBERS ARE IRRELEVANT, NO MATTER HOW LARGE THOSE NUMBERS ARE. Really, make the odds against your existence as large as you can imagine them to be - take Tegmark's number and add to it as many zeroes as you like if you wish - it will still have no significance at all for the mistake in LOGIC you're making.

(Here Blue buries his head in his hands and starts weeping quietly in sheer bloody exasperation at Alan Burns's boneheaded inability to grasp a perfectly simple point in logic...)                 

So how could you discern intentional outcomes without having knowledge of a source of intention?
What evidence would you look for?

[Nearly Sane]

So how could you discern intentional outcomes without having knowledge of a source of intention?
What evidence would you look for?

Dunno. How would you?

[ippy]

AB,

No-one's "hiding", and dear god but you struggle. I'm trying to think here of a way to explain your mistake in even simpler terms than the ones I've used already. Should I try it in pictograms or something? How about through the medium of expressive dance maybe?

Focus here - really, really try to focus: THE SMALLNESS OF THE PROBABILITY HAS NO SIGNIFICANCE AT ALL UNLESS YOU CAN SHOW FIRST THAT WE WERE THE INTENDED OUTOME ALL ALONG NO MATTER HOW SMALL THAT PROBABILITY HAPPENS TO BE. Now write that down. A lot. And when you've finished writing it down a lot, write it down some more until it finally sinks in.   

To put it another way, even if hypothetically there was a golf course with that many blades of grass and the ball landed one of them, that blade of grass would no more be able to reason that it was specially selected than you can reason that you were specially selected.

Is this sinking in yet? That we exist is just dumb luck. Lucky us. That another species could have existed instead would be just dumb luck for that species. Lucky them. Your whole mind-numbing, buttock-clenching, 24-carat, fur-lined, ocean-going fuck up in thinking here is in just asserting you to have been the "goal" a priori, and then marvelling at the odds against that goal being achieved. Yet again: THE NUMBERS ARE IRRELEVANT, NO MATTER HOW LARGE THOSE NUMBERS ARE. Really, make the odds against your existence as large as you can imagine them to be - take Tegmark's number and add to it as many zeroes as you like if you wish - it will still have no significance at all for the mistake in LOGIC you're making.

(Here Blue buries his head in his hands and starts weeping quietly in sheer bloody exasperation at Alan Burns's boneheaded inability to grasp a perfectly simple point in logic...)                 

Sorry Blue, but I have to say if you do do the dance would there be any way we could all see it?

ippy

[Enki]

But there is one coincidence from which you can't hide behind an infinite number of chances.

The cosmological constant is a measure of the ratio of dark energy forces of expansion against the pull of gravity.  Physicists have recently been able to model how critical this constant is with respect to the formation of galaxies and stars.   The universe had only one go at this, and it had to be right first time in order for galaxies and stars to form.

Max Tegmark:
“How far could you rotate the dark-energy knob before the “Oops!” moment? If rotating it…by a full turn would vary the density across the full range, then the actual knob setting for our Universe is about 10^123 of a turn away from the halfway point. That means that if you want to tune the knob to allow galaxies to form, you have to get the angle by which you rotate it right to 123 decimal places!

That means that the probability that our universe contains galaxies is akin to exactly 1 possibility in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 . Unlikely doesn’t even begin to describe these odds. There are “only” 10^81 atoms in the observable universe, after all.

Although I am not a particular supporter of Max Tegmark,(especially as to his view that we live in a mathematical universe), I really do think that, if you are going to quote him, you should not simply cherry pick that which seems to suit your faith position.

Here he is again, referring to your chosen cosmological constant, but with an entirely different slant on it, a slant which you quite conveniently forgot to mention.

Our universe appears surprisingly fine-tuned for life in the sense that if you tweaked many of our constants of nature by just a tiny amount, life as we know it would be impossible. Why? If there's a Level II multiverse where these "constants" take all possible values, it's not surprising that we find ourselves in one of the rare universes that are inhabitable, just like it's not surprising that we find ourselves living on Earth rather than Mercury or Neptune. George objects to the fact that you need to assume a multiverse theory to draw this conclusion, but that's how we test any scientific theory: we assume that it's true, work out the consequences, and discard the theory if the predictions fail to match the observations. Some of the fine-tuning appears extreme enough to be quite embarrassing—for example, we need to tune the dark energy to about 123 decimal places to make habitable galaxies. To me, an unexplained coincidence can be a tell-tale sign of a gap in our scientific understanding. Dismissing it by saying "We just got lucky—now stop looking for an explanation!" is not only unsatisfactory, but is also tantamount to ignoring a potentially crucial clue.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/multiverse-the-case-for-parallel-universe/

So perhaps it is you that needs to stop hiding behind your rather stultifying approach and open your mind to the possibilities that science presents.

[SusanDoris]

Sorry Blue, but I have to say if you do do the dance would there be any way we could all see it?

ippy
[/quoteDitto!! ]

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

So how could you discern intentional outcomes without having knowledge of a source of intention?
What evidence would you look for?

Not my problem. If you want to turn logic on its head by asserting a god with a plan a priori, marvelling at the unlikeliness of that plan coming to fruition without divine intervention and calling that evidence for "God" how you'd justify that dog's breakfast of bad reasoning is your job to unravel. Good luck with it though.

In the meantime however, to get back to the point do you now understand why your circular reasoning is wrongheaded? 

[Spud]

You are confusing the natural and the artificial.

Not really. Just as bits of metal don't have a tendency to form jumbo jets on their own, chemicals don't have a tendency to form birds (or RNA molecules or whatever one thinks was the most distant ancestor of birds). Neither can form through natural processes alone.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Spud,

Not really. Just as bits of metal don't have a tendency to form jumbo jets on their own, chemicals don't have a tendency to form birds (or RNA molecules or whatever one thinks was the most distant ancestor of birds). Neither can form through natural processes alone.

One of them can - or at least they can if you accept the vast body of evidence that tells us exactly that. 

[ProfessorDavey]

... chemicals don't have a tendency to form birds (or RNA molecules or whatever one thinks was the most distant ancestor of birds).

Chemicals most certainly do have the tendency to react together to form more complex molecules - indeed if the more complex molecule is the most energetically efficient state then they will do this automatically (self assembly) and you will need to provide energy to prevent them forming these more complex molecules.

[Gordon]

Not really. Just as bits of metal don't have a tendency to form jumbo jets on their own, chemicals don't have a tendency to form birds (or RNA molecules or whatever one thinks was the most distant ancestor of birds). Neither can form through natural processes alone.

I just love how you creationist types wear your ignorance with pride.

[SusanDoris]

I just love how you creationist types wear your ignorance with pride.

Ah, I like that! Very neatly put!

[Outrider]

Not really. Just as bits of metal don't have a tendency to form jumbo jets on their own, chemicals don't have a tendency to form birds (or RNA molecules or whatever one thinks was the most distant ancestor of birds).

We have precisely one example of an environment in which birds have occurred, and it appears from the available evidence that it has come about via an iterative process of chemicals interacting with one another; that's a 100% record, so far.

Neither can form through natural processes alone.

You can suggest that, you can believe that, you can claim that, but what you haven't done (and possibly can't do) is actually show that this is the case.  It's difficult in the best of circumstances to prove a negative, which means that whilst there's a logically viable alternative explanation to 'a god did it' what reason is there to accept an 'explanation' that essentially says 'magic, innit'.

In terms of being able to investigate and assess and review, what is there to show that the magical claim of, say, Christianity (or the Abrahamic faiths more broadly) is the correct explanation and not the Egyptian magical claim of Re or the Mesopotamian magical claim of the waters dividing into Apsu and Tiamat?

O.

[Spud]

We have precisely one example of an environment in which birds have occurred, and it appears from the available evidence that it has come about via an iterative process of chemicals interacting with one another; that's a 100% record, so far.

Let's start at the beginning. I think the argument goes, to get DNA, you need proteins, but you can't get proteins without DNA. Could RNA create proteins then? Lots of effort has shown that nucleotides can be synthesized. But these are randomly arranged and don't code for anything. So far then, the evidence suggests it is impossible for the first ever cell to form naturally.

Over to you.

[Stranger]

Let's start at the beginning. I think the argument goes, to get DNA, you need proteins, but you can't get proteins without DNA. Could RNA create proteins then? Lots of effort has shown that nucleotides can be synthesized. But these are randomly arranged and don't code for anything. So far then, the evidence suggests it is impossible for the first ever cell to form naturally.

Firstly (and purely logically), not having a current explanation does not mean that something is impossible.

Secondly, what we do have is copious evidence that simple life started on earth at a certain time and under certain conditions and then evolved into more the more complex and diverse life we have today. As has already been pointed out, the idea that a god created the universe that could just about but not quite do the job of making humans, and it then needed some extra god-magic to kick life off or nudge evolution along is totally illogical.

Thirdly, what you need to get natural selection going is replication with variation and inheritance, which could be something as simple a single strand of RNA, like, for example, this:

NNNNNNUGCUCGAUUGGUAACAGUUUGAAUGGGUUGAAGUAU–GAGACCGNNNNNN

Where the 'N's are 'don't care' and the other letters are standard for RNA (it's is called RC3). Research is ongoing (for example: How RNA formed at the origins of life) but we have absolutely no reason to conclude that abiogenesis is impossible, and, as I keep on pointing out to Alan, you'd really need to claim to be omniscient about nature to be sure that something was impossible through natural means.

The start of life may be very probable (which is suggested by the fact that it started on Earth pretty much as soon as the conditions were suitable to sustain it) or very improbable - we only know that it happened at least once and the universe is very, very big, with lots of chances, as far as we can tell.

[Outrider]

I think the argument goes, to get DNA, you need proteins, but you can't get proteins without DNA.

As with that whole 'difficult to prove a negative' thing, it's difficult to categorically state that you can't get proteins without DNA - certainly that's the only way in which we currently see them being produced, but that's not to say that it hasn't happened before via a different method.

Could RNA create proteins then?

We know from observed examples that RNA codes for proteins.

Lots of effort has shown that nucleotides can be synthesized. But these are randomly arranged and don't code for anything.

If you have enough randomly arranged nucleotides, then all you need is one of those to include a mechanism for some form of replication and you have the starting point for evolution by natural selection... and if you're randomly producing them then although the vast majority do not code for anything, a small few will.

So far then, the evidence suggests it is impossible for the first ever cell to form naturally

No, it suggests that it's not a common occurence, but then we knew that it wouldn't be because we have had billions of years on the planet in favourable conditions and we think so far that it's only happened here once.

O.

[ProfessorDavey]

Let's start at the beginning. I think the argument goes, to get DNA, you need proteins, but you can't get proteins without DNA. Could RNA create proteins then? Lots of effort has shown that nucleotides can be synthesized. But these are randomly arranged and don't code for anything. So far then, the evidence suggests it is impossible for the first ever cell to form naturally.

Over to you.

Nonsense - sure, we don't know which came first (RNA or proteins), but there has been a huge amount of work on credible theories on each being the primary entity. For many decades proteins appeared to be the most likely to have come first, but recently there is new work (on the basis that RNA is able to catalize reactions like proteins) that RNA may have come first.

The point is that, while we don't yet understand the detail, the evidence suggests that it is entirely possible for a cell (a more complex structure again) to form naturally.

[Walter]

I really hope god has been found while I was away !

Or is he still in lockdown ?

[Stranger]

I really hope god has been found while I was away !

Or is he still in lockdown ?

Well, both Alan and Spud seem to think they're omniscient, so maybe one of them is god. Come to think of it, if god was illogical and irrational, that could explain quite a lot about the world....   

[Spud]

Well, both Alan and Spud seem to think they're omniscient, so maybe one of them is god. Come to think of it, if god was illogical and irrational, that could explain quite a lot about the world....   

Don't be silly, there is no way I would have thought of making weeds for humans to pull up. My friend says the reason God made weeds is that when we pull them up, it breaks up the soil so we can plant seeds.

[Spud]

Nonsense - sure, we don't know which came first (RNA or proteins), but there has been a huge amount of work on credible theories on each being the primary entity. For many decades proteins appeared to be the most likely to have come first, but recently there is new work (on the basis that RNA is able to catalize reactions like proteins) that RNA may have come first.

The point is that, while we don't yet understand the detail, the evidence suggests that it is entirely possible for a cell (a more complex structure again) to form naturally.

For a cell to form, all its components need to function properly.

Claim: Irreducible complexity has been demonstrated to not be valid.
Response: As soon as the evidence points to a system, that requires a minimal number of essential parts, where, if one of them is removed, the system becomes non-functional, the system is irreducibly complex.
Even science peer reviewed papers of science journals mention many such systems. Many laboratories and science teams for example have dedicated considerable efforts to investigate and elucidating what might be the minimal number of parts to have a primordial cell, which would require several functions all at once, and together, that is reproduction, obtaining energy, getting rid of toxic waste, protecting itself from environmental dangers ex, radiation, temperature fluctuations, acid/base conditions, self replication, and means of cellular repair of all of these mechanisms, intracellular communication between all its parts the prior knowledge that it would need all these components and the ability of ALL of these to function fully and simultaneously from day one because malfunctions of, or incomplete versions or not fully functional parts would have lead to immediate or almost immediate death.

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1299-abiogenesis-the-cell-is-irreducibly-complex

[Outrider]

For a cell to form, all its components need to function properly.

Yes, but the first cells were not the same as our cells, and there were intermediate structures between full-on cells and mobile proteins...

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1299-abiogenesis-the-cell-is-irreducibly-complex

The whole of this article relies on the idea that the complex cells emerged, fully formed, from nothing which is not what evolutionary theory predicts, so it's a straw-man argument in the first place.  It's just the 'how much use is half an eye' argument all over again.

O.

[ProfessorDavey]

For a cell to form, all its components need to function properly.

But the simplest cells are merely membrane enclosed units in which certain metablolic processes can occur within that membrane enclosed space.

And membranes self assemble so provided you have the right phospholipids within primordial metabolic 'goo' as they self assemble they will enclose the other molecules needed for life.

It is actually pretty straightforward to recreate the conditions on the earth at the time life arose and in doing so generate both the required macromolecules for life and also end up with them enclosed within a membrane.

There is a family straightforward primer here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9841/

[Spud]

But the simplest cells are merely membrane enclosed units in which certain metablolic processes can occur within that membrane enclosed space.

And membranes self assemble so provided you have the right phospholipids within primordial metabolic 'goo' as they self assemble they will enclose the other molecules needed for life.

It is actually pretty straightforward to recreate the conditions on the earth at the time life arose and in doing so generate both the required macromolecules for life and also end up with them enclosed within a membrane.

There is a family straightforward primer here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9841/

Very interesting. I've read the first section, 'The first cell' (took a while to digest it but got there in the end). initial reaction was, maybe it's possible? I wondered (but haven't got the patience to look it up so thought I'd ask) if vesicles like intracellular ones can form spontaneously in a test tube?
Note that this would all rely on a human to engineer the conditions necessary, like heating the water and passing the vapour through the correct concentration of gases to form polypeptides.

[ProfessorDavey]

Very interesting. I've read the first section, 'The first cell' (took a while to digest it but got there in the end). initial reaction was, maybe it's possible? I wondered (but haven't got the patience to look it up so thought I'd ask) if vesicles like intracellular ones can form spontaneously in a test tube?
Note that this would all rely on a human to engineer the conditions necessary, like heating the water and passing the vapour through the correct concentration of gases to form polypeptides.

No - all the human is doing is reproducing the conditions that would have occurred in primordial times.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Spud,

Very interesting. I've read the first section, 'The first cell' (took a while to digest it but got there in the end). initial reaction was, maybe it's possible? I wondered (but haven't got the patience to look it up so thought I'd ask) if vesicles like intracellular ones can form spontaneously in a test tube?
Note that this would all rely on a human to engineer the conditions necessary, like heating the water and passing the vapour through the correct concentration of gases to form polypeptides.

Or perhaps like the conditions obtained at geothermal vents.