AN opportunity for the religious to provide their evidence

[torridon]

But unlike the lottery, your faith in unguided evolution involves much more than just one unlikely event.  For evolution to work, every discrete step involved in the development of major organs, bones, joints, brain cells etc.  not only has to be generated by random events, it has to be tested by whether it alone can provide sufficient benefit to enable a species to survive extinction.  Equivalent to me winning the lottery every week of my life, and my descendants for the rest of their lives too.

Just your incredulity again.  I'm sure this must have been mentioned already, but your incredulity is not an argument, it is just your incredulity.  Luckily for us all, this incredulity problem you have does not seem to afflict people working in the relevant life science fields, it only seems to be an issue for some people of faith.  So which came first, does incredulity lead inexorably to faith, or does faith lead to incredulity ?

[Alan Burns]

Just your incredulity again.  I'm sure this must have been mentioned already, but your incredulity is not an argument, it is just your incredulity.  Luckily for us all, this incredulity problem you have does not seem to afflict people working in the relevant life science fields, it only seems to be an issue for some people of faith.  So which came first, does incredulity lead inexorably to faith, or does faith lead to incredulity ?

My goal is the truth.

[Nearly Sane]

My goal in the truth.

that's a really crappy fortune cookie you got tonight, Alan.

[Sebastian Toe]

My goal is the truth.

Is it the truth that based on the following......

I believe that the process of evolution is guided by God.  It needs a lot more than random copying errors to drive it.  I am aware that some Christians do believe in Darwin's theory, which shows that faith is not entirely dependent on the validity of this theory.  But I am certain that God did not just light the blue touch paper of the big bang an then stand back.  God is intimately involved with life as we know it, a.

...at some point during this 'guiding' of evolution specifically in humans, God added a soul to each and every one, when they didn't have one beforehand . Just like that?

[torridon]

Just your incredulity again.  I'm sure this must have been mentioned already, but your incredulity is not an argument, it is just your incredulity.  Luckily for us all, this incredulity problem you have does not seem to afflict people working in the relevant life science fields, it only seems to be an issue for some people of faith.  So which came first, does incredulity lead inexorably to faith, or does faith lead to incredulity ?

My goal is the truth.

When we design new drugs we don't just release them on an unsuspecting public in hope and faith that they will be effective, we test them in blind trials to discover the truth about them. It pays to keep an open mind and a choice to follow a faith is a choice to close the mind to truths that lie outside the faith.  If you really want to know truth, faith is the first thing to ditch, it is ultimately a false friend that might be superficially rewarding but for a genuine truth seeker it is an impediment.  By fixating on what we want to be true, we blind ourselves to what is actually true.

[Walter]

My goal is the truth.
When we design new drugs we don't just release them on an unsuspecting public in hope and faith that they will be effective, we test them in blind trials to discover the truth about them. It pays to keep an open mind and a choice to follow a faith is a choice to close the mind to truths that lie outside the faith.  If you really want to know truth, faith is the first thing to ditch, it is ultimately a false friend that might be superficially rewarding but for a genuine truth seeker it is an impediment.  By fixating on what we want to be true, we blind ourselves to what is actually true.

well said ,torri

[ekim]

My goal is the truth.
When we design new drugs we don't just release them on an unsuspecting public in hope and faith that they will be effective, we test them in blind trials to discover the truth about them. It pays to keep an open mind and a choice to follow a faith is a choice to close the mind to truths that lie outside the faith.  If you really want to know truth, faith is the first thing to ditch, it is ultimately a false friend that might be superficially rewarding but for a genuine truth seeker it is an impediment.  By fixating on what we want to be true, we blind ourselves to what is actually true.

On the other hand, if the believer's motivation is to 'Seek first the Kingdom....' by persisting with a particular method towards that end, then faith is the last thing to ditch.  Faith could be seen as a series of blind trials to discover the truth or otherwise of 'the Kingdom'.  Until that 'truth' is revealed it will simply remain a belief.  Alan's efforts to prove that his God exists by physical and mental means is doomed to failure, I suspect.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

My goal is the truth.
When we design new drugs we don't just release them on an unsuspecting public in hope and faith that they will be effective, we test them in blind trials to discover the truth about them. It pays to keep an open mind and a choice to follow a faith is a choice to close the mind to truths that lie outside the faith.  If you really want to know truth, faith is the first thing to ditch, it is ultimately a false friend that might be superficially rewarding but for a genuine truth seeker it is an impediment.  By fixating on what we want to be true, we blind ourselves to what is actually true.

Wait a minute...who's this we, who is part of it and who is out?........and what part in testing drugs have you played?...

I kind of see what you mean by not really wanting to find the truth... You have to kind of have it forced upon you...

Other than that, another set of platitudes cobbled together to make your readership go Aaaaah...In my humble opinion.

[floo]

Wait a minute...who's this we, who is part of it and who is out?........and what part in testing drugs have you played?...

I kind of see what you mean by not really wanting to find the truth... You have to kind of have it forced upon you...

Other than that, another set of platitudes cobbled together to make your readership go Aaaaah...In my humble opinion.

Is your hangover really bad this morning?

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Is your hangover really bad this morning?

You are just a wrecker of nice things Floo.

[floo]

You are just a wrecker of nice things Floo.

I have never had a hangover, but I wouldn't have described it as nice!

[Alan Burns]

My goal is the truth.
When we design new drugs we don't just release them on an unsuspecting public in hope and faith that they will be effective, we test them in blind trials to discover the truth about them. It pays to keep an open mind and a choice to follow a faith is a choice to close the mind to truths that lie outside the faith.  If you really want to know truth, faith is the first thing to ditch, it is ultimately a false friend that might be superficially rewarding but for a genuine truth seeker it is an impediment.  By fixating on what we want to be true, we blind ourselves to what is actually true.

But by deliberately excluding anything outside the scope of material science you may well be missing the key to unlock the truth.

[wigginhall]

It's the hybridization of science and religion that I find weird.  It's a bit like Frankenstein!   I still don't get it why Christians try to justify their ideas by means of half-baked stuff from biology and cosmology.   If you have your faith, fine, why adulterate it with scientificalistic stuff?

[Brownie]

Posted by: Floo
I have never had a hangover, but I wouldn't have described it as nice!


You are dead right there!
It feels like terminal influenza, floo, a real penance/punishment!

You can have a hangover with things other than alcohol though, some medications produce them, they usually carry a warning in the small print.  I'm pretty sure I haven't had the latter but have experienced the former in days gone by, sufficient to put me off for life.

[Walter]

It's the hybridization of science and religion that I find weird.  It's a bit like Frankenstein!   I still don't get it why Christians try to justify their ideas by means of half-baked stuff from biology and cosmology.   If you have your faith, fine, why adulterate it with scientificalistic stuff?

they wrongly believe that by applying science wherever they think appropriate gives their wrong thinking some kind of credibility.
A bit like Clinton wheeling out 'pop royalty' in her presidency campaign.

[torridon]

But by deliberately excluding anything outside the scope of material science you may well be missing the key to unlock the truth.

There isn't 'material science', there is just 'science', and it refers to our accumulated understanding of how things work as derived through research methods.  If you want to include knowledge outside that domain, then it is going to be less reliable - if it does not stand up to testing then it is probably wrong, if it is not testable, then it is speculative.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

I have never had a hangover, but I wouldn't have described it as nice!

No by nice, I refer of course to the beauty of my own discourse...or something like that.
You spoil the ambience of the mood I establish by bringing accusations of alcohol abuse.

You might be right but I am suave and suaveness is all.

[Enki]

It's the hybridization of science and religion that I find weird.  It's a bit like Frankenstein!   I still don't get it why Christians try to justify their ideas by means of half-baked stuff from biology and cosmology.   If you have your faith, fine, why adulterate it with scientificalistic stuff?

Yes, Wiggs, I agree wholeheartedly.

It tends to distort one(science) and, by association, seems to belittle the other(Christianity).

[Walter]

No by nice, I refer of course to the beauty of my own discourse...or something like that.
You spoil the ambience of the mood I establish by bringing accusations of alcohol abuse.

You might be right but I am suave and suaveness is all.

I was in an ambience recently, it had flashing blue lights and everything.

[Brownie]

Oh very droll  .

(There is much science in the Bible, did you know that?  Nicholas M told me.  He is currently explaining it all to us over on St Thad's. Fascinating.)

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

But unlike the lottery, your faith in unguided evolution involves much more than just one unlikely event.  For evolution to work, every discrete step involved in the development of major organs, bones, joints, brain cells etc.  not only has to be generated by random events, it has to be tested by whether it alone can provide sufficient benefit to enable a species to survive extinction.  Equivalent to me winning the lottery every week of my life, and my descendants for the rest of their lives too.

You fundamentally misunderstand how evolution works, and for that matter how the reference point error works too.

Imagine a single cell organism that copies its DNA as it self-replicates. Every now and then the copying will be imperfect, and mutations will occur. Often those mutations will be harmful or will have no effect, but sometimes they will be beneficial for subsequent generations. There's no-one there though with a set of blueprints hoping that one day the organism will evolve into albatrosses or sharks or people. Over time complexity builds and speciation occurs until we arrive at the flora and fauna we happen to observe today, but there's no reason to suppose that different organisms entirely wouldn't have emerged had the mutations and the environmental pressures been different.

This is where you keep going wrong. It's not that "every step" has to be just right for the end result to be little old you at all; rather it's that every step happened to produce you (and albatrosses and sharks) but could just as easily have produced different organisms entirely. Your problem is solipsism - you assume that all along you were the intended end product, then marvel at the unlikelihood of all the necessary intermediary steps happening by chance to get there.

This is the lottery winner's fallacy, or the reference point error. Until and unless you grasp that though, you'll continue to have it all ass-backwards.       

   

[Walter]

Blue,
it really puzzles me why you and I know that but AB doesn't. The information is available to everyone, its not a secret.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Walter,

Blue,
it really puzzles me why you and I know that but AB doesn't. The information is available to everyone, its not a secret.

Faith. It can drive those who have it into the most fantastically convoluted thinking when they first commit the category error of thinking that science can validate it even conceptually, and second they distort and twist what science actually has to say so as to jemmy it into the faith-shaped hole they create.

So far as I know AB et al will accept what science has to say when, for example, it tells them that germs cause disease but they'll reject entirely what science has to say when they think it conflicts with their faith beliefs. 

[wigginhall]

Blue - thanks for that.   I was struggling to formulate this error, but you have done it perfectly.   AB assumes that evolution has a goal, and the goal is humans.   This in itself produces a circular argument, since goals are always intelligent, which is what AB is trying to show. 

Once he assumes that humans are the goal, then he can describe various improbabilities.

It is a bit like the deck of cards.  If I am dealt 13 spades in a bridge game,  I can marvel at the improbability, but as we know, if you deal out four hands of cards, each hand is improbable, and each hand actually occurs, but not as a goal.

Similarly, my own birth is very improbable, if you compute all the generations which led up to me, but of course, I was not the goal, but the (accidental) end-point! 

Just to add that AB conceals this idea of a goal, typical of his dishonest arguments.

[wigginhall]

My wife just pointed out that just as a dealt sequence of 52 playing cards is almost certainly going to be unique, since there are so many possible sequences, so humans are never identical (except twins), since the combinations are so many.   Of course, none of them are intended, unless you are dealing off the bottom of the pack.

Cue Richard Feynman famous joke: "I was walking through the car park and I saw the number plate ARW 357!  Can you believe how unlikely it is that I should see that particular one, out of all the millions that exist?"

Of course, it would be amazing if he had predicted it.