Atheists believe in miracles more than believers

[cladking]

I already rebutted that.

And I've shown dozens of experiments that "prove" it. A semantical argument does not trump experiment.

 

[Valjean]

Yet it's impossible to predict in advance or even to explain after the fact which of these characteristics will or have created success.

I disagree. What features would be advantageous in a given environment is eminently predictable, as is how they benefited those displaying them.

Rather those that survive are simply pronounced to be more fit, more adapted, and more naturally selected. The miracle is that this isn't a circular argument because nature selects only the finest.

No, nature selects the fittest; those best suited to their situation. Why they prevailed is usually obvious.

 

[Valjean]

It's true that offspring differ in size, color, etc. But this does not equate to evolution, for instance, fish evolving to apes in the long run.

Yes, clear, obvious differences take many generations. But small changes do accumulate, do they not? There's nothing to stop the slow changes.

If I put a tiny red dot, the size of this period/full stop [.], on a large movie screen every twenty years, soon (relatively) the whole screen would be bright red, wouldn't it?

 

[leroy]

But you're not showing or refuting anything. You're simply defining simultaneous.

In fact I did share a paper in previous post defending simultaneous causation

https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEC...of causation,with temporally extended cause C.

the point that I am making is not that simultaneous causation is real beyond reasonable doubt, the point that I am making is that “we don’t know” is simultaneous causation is a thing or not………..my point is that it is far from “obviously true” that causes necessarily precede their effects………that is an open question that may or may not be true

That's exactly what you're doing. You're saying that cause and effect can be simultaneous because you say so, but that's incoherent for the reason I gave you. If cause didn't precede effect, there'd be no basis for calling one the cause and the other the effect or even to believe that either affected the other.

Í´ll go with THE German philosopher Immanuel Kant´s example

Imagine a heavy ball resting on a soft couch causing a curvature.

Cause: the ball

Effect: the curvature

We know that balls cause curvatures in couches we know that curvatures don’t cause balls. …….. it seems to me that this would still be obviously true even if the ball caused the curvature immediately.

Obviously Kant has a more detailed explanation, but in my opinion it is not necessary, it seems obvious to me

You were referring to quantum entanglement earlier as an example of simultaneous causation. Presumably, you mean that when an observer observes a quantum particle in one place and collapses the quantum wave function there, that causes the other particle with which it is entangled to collapse in a predictable way at the same time however distant it may be.

And wouldn’t that be an example of simultaneous causation?..........

 

[leroy]

Yes, clear, obvious differences take many generations. But small changes do accumulate, do they not? There's nothing to stop the slow changes.

If I put a tiny red dot, the size of this period/full stop [.], on a large movie screen every twenty years, soon (relatively) the whole screen would be bright red, wouldn't it?

Well we do observe “small changes” caused by “lamarckian mechanisms “does that mean that Lamarkinian evolution is true? Does that mean that we evolved through the mechanisms proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck? ……did the human eye evolved by Lamarkinian Evolution?

Obviously not (or at least not necessarily) obviously small changes + time don’t necessarily imply big changes


Observed Epigenetics would be an example of Lamarkinian evolution at a small scale (small changes)…………. Does this automatically proves that everything evolved through that mechanism?



This is not supposed to be controversial, just answer “yes Leroy you are correct inthe context of evolution small changes don’t necessarily imply big changes”

 

[Valjean]

While I don't necessarily agree, it's certainly true that there is no evidence to support the notion that species change gradually as a result of survival of the fittest.

This is patently wrong. There is plenty of observed evidence of this very thing happening.

It certainly seems apparent that species change and hardly impossible that there are not many limitations to the type and degree of this change but if it were possible to witness such changes in real time we would not see fish turning into humans.

No, in our own lifetimes we would see mostly minor changes and little actual speciation, but we're not talking about a few centuries. We're talking about hundreds of millions of years.
Nobody's claiming to have witnessed such radical changes.
You continue to deny the fact that small changes accumulate.

I believe we would instead see sudden changes that in the long run can create virtually anything living to capitalize on every single possible niche in the environment. Species cooperate to create the largest possible diversity. "Competition" is for food and resources in the here and now.

Sudden changes do occasionally occur, and we're not talking about just twenty or thirty years. The sudden environmental change that would drive sudden change is rare.
Species coöperate to create diversity? What evidence is there for that? How would it occur?

Competition is an ongoing, continual process of adaptation to changing conditions, not just a competition for resources.

Nature doesn't care which species gets the meal and doesn't care which is more fit. Individuals are where the real and important differences lie and they are equally fit because nature doesn't waste resources making individuals for food.

Huh? What are you talking about? Aren't long haired, compact individuals better fit for a cooling climate, or well camouflaged individuals more likely to avoid predation?
Nature does select, and the evolutionary change is in populations, not individuals.
"...waste resources making individuals for food?" What does that mean?

Fish don't evolve into apes but it is entirely possible that apes have fish-like ancestors in their past. A fish is a fish is a fish but change in species is very highly complex, far more complex than we can imagine.

No, it's just accumulated, small adaptations.
New species don't just magically pop into existence.

At one time there were no land animals and now there are.

Your point?
Do you think they just magically poofed into being?

 

[Valjean]

How would you explain selection? You said selection works on the alleles or traits. How would you say the selection process is understood by scientists to occur?

This has been explained to you a hundred times. You should have learned it in middle school, if not before.

 

[Valjean]

Right now within species, humans remain humans, don't they? (Birds remain birds, etc.)

But in a few million years?
You keep thinking in terms of "right now." Haven't we explained a hundred times that we're not talking about your individual experience, in a single lifetime?

It would be hard to impossible I suppose to track fish or mudskippers to see if they might evolve to a different form. Here is a question, though: how do you think the Bible writers knew that there were no fish or land animals at a certain point?

We can track changes through fossils or genetics -- but you already know this.
The Bible writers knew nothing. They were just making up stories of how things came to be. Stories involve change.

 

[Valjean]

Such as ?

Stop asking questions you already know the answers to.

 

[gnostic]

Yet this "compelling evidence" is based on the assumption that the fit are more likely to survive.

Every organisms died, none live forever…there are no exceptions to that natural law…whether it by old age, disease, killed (either by other organisms or by accident), and so on.

The fitness that you are referring to as “survival”, is misunderstanding Evolution. As I said every organisms died, without exception…the fitness is not about being strong, fast, intelligent, etc, but it is really more about reproducing and maintaining the population…those with traits that more suited to changed environment, will more likely reproduce successfully and past the traits to succeeding generations.

What you have repeatedly mistaken, is thinking the “survival” is about the individual organism, but really evolution is about the survival of the population for succeeding generations.

While it is true, that different organisms will have different lifespans, some live and will die sooner than others, while others will live longer.

For instances, some families and species can live for centuries…some even thousands of years. Take for instance the Great Basin bristlecone pine (species Pinus longaeva), grown in western US states, Utah, Nevada & California. One of them, nicknamed Methuselah has been dated 4855 years old.

This species (Pinus longaeva) is those of individual trees, non-clonal, trees that each have a single root.

There are some groups of vegetation, including trees, of which they covered acres of land, but actually all shared a single root, and they can be great deal older than Methuselah.

What clonal tree means, a clonal colony is a single root can grow dozens, hundreds or thousands of trees, each one is genetically identical to each other, eg identical DNA, because they are all clones, that grow from one root. Each trees may lived a couple of thousands of years, and then died, but the root itself many times older than a non-clonal tree like methuselah. New trees can sprouted from the root.


I found out about these clonal plants when I was looking at the oldest living trees, when I was googling for the oldest trees, and found about clonal colonies. I had never heard of them before

An example of clonal tree. I would suggest that you look up Pando (nickname), which is a grove of quaking aspen colony, where one root has more 47,000 trees or stems (all clones), in one of the national forests in Utah, that grow around 106 acres of land.

This 80,000-Year-Old Aspen Grove Clones Itself

Not only is this organism one of the oldest on Earth, it is also a contender for other extreme titles.

www.treehugger.com

If you think blue whale is the largest animal in the world, which is true, these clonal trees are the largest living organism, Period!

 

[Pogo]

Stop asking questions you already know the answers to.

When the sun stops in the sky and the billygoats end their story.

 

[YoursTrue]

Yes, clear, obvious differences take many generations. But small changes do accumulate, do they not? There's nothing to stop the slow changes.

If I put a tiny red dot, the size of this period/full stop [.], on a large movie screen every twenty years, soon (relatively) the whole screen would be bright red, wouldn't it?

There is nothing beyond conjectural reasoning to show that (some, or a few) fish changed microscopically over eons of time to become humans. You can say otherwise, you can tell me I don't understand, but understanding does not mean I believe the conjectures. Or that the conjectural reasoning is true. Thanks.

 

[Valjean]

Yet this "compelling evidence" is based on the assumption that the fit are more likely to survive. Without ever defining a single characteristic of a single individual who ever lived its fitness is simply assumed to be correlated to the amount of its genes in the pool.

Huh? What are you talking about? Speed, protective coloration, insulation, endurance, diet, physiology -- all are advantageous in certain situations. Are you not aware that selective breeding has created most of the crops and livestock species that we see today?

What does the amount of genes have to do with anything?

This isn't science. It could become science by merely demonstrating an ability to predict which individuals will survive leading to a gradual change.

Individuals don't evolve. Populations do. Beneficial changes gradually increase as a percentage of a population.

In the meantime it remains the most popular facile explanation for change in species despite the fact that species don't become any more fit despite this ongoing force to produce fitness.

Yes, they do, and any schoolchild could cite examples.
Do you understand what's meant by fitness?

History shows again and again that popular beliefs fall by the wayside when real science steps in.

Yes. religious magic, for example.

Just as you earlier defined religion as superstition and science as reason you now define change in species as survival of the fittest based not on empirical data nor experiment but on definition and observation.

No, it's entirely based on observation.

 

[Valjean]

All homo omniscience see what we believe and experience reality only in terms of our beliefs.

No. We used to do that, and we got nowhere. It wasn't till we abandoned untested belief and adopted the scientific method that real progress and understanding took off.

I am homo omniscience so I experience reality in terms of my beliefs. Deductive reasoning almost always works if definitions remain constant. Inductive reasoning is a more slippery slope because abstraction are wholly symbolic, have fluid definitions, and are always case specific. Some are better than others at it, but I avoid even trying.

Yet it's inductive science that moved us from oxcarts to jetliners.

I believe all belief is superstition hence I try to avoid beliefs in my models. The only true knowledge is experiential knowledge anyway so who needs abstractions and inductive logic.

Yet this superstition has rarely led to consensus, or to useful technology or understanding of the world.

In order to communicate we must have beliefs. All sorts and types of belief. We must believe we can differentiate between "to", "two", "too", and "tu tu" to even try to understand language.

Homo omnisciencis communicates much differently than any other species including the extinct homo sapiens. This affects our perceptions of reality. It affects the way we think. It affects every individuals' estimation of his own knowledge today and all the way back to when the species suddenly arose ~2000 BC.

Nobody can avoid having beliefs and many people never question their beliefs.

Science is a tool, a methodology, wholly dependent on its metaphysics. It is reductionistic and none of the things that describe life or how it changes has even yet been defined. That makes EVERYTHING not based in experiment a belief system rather than fact. Your belief, for instance, that religion is superstition has never been shown experimentally so using such a definition is the very epitome of a circular argument; homo circularis rationatio.

Isn't experiment an important part of the scientific method?
Just believing something because it seems right doesn't accomplish anything.

 

[Valjean]

Still a circular argument.

If I define an object circling a distant star as green cheese it will remain green cheese until such time as it is proven otherwise. You have assumed the conclusion based not on experiment but the interpretation of evidence in terms of your definitions. This is the nature of thought.

Huh? You're just spouting nonsense. A distant object is what it is, regardless of our opinion on the matter.
In science conclusions are based on observation, facts and experiments.

 

[Valjean]

So it boils down to semantics…………….. ok if in your own personal mind causation means “something with space time”………..then tell me what other word should I use? All I am saying is that “something” supernatural is responsible for the existence for the natural world ……….usually “cause” is an appropriate term, but feel free to invent and share your own personal word to substitute “cause”

How are you correlating "cause" and "supernatural?"

Please let’s avoid 100+ of semantic discussions……….just tell me how should I substitute the word “cause”

Ok you are not being asked to expalin why physical reality excists, you are jsut ebing asked to provide an alternative that is better than mine

My alternative being “the physical/natural word exists because due to the intervention of a nonphysical thing.

The only alternatives I can think off are

1 the physical world came from nothing

2 the physical world has always existed (for an infinite amount of time)

3 something else that I haven’t thought off

So what alternative do you suggest and why is it better than mine?



Please please, quite your impulse of making a semantic game out of this

You're the one playing semantic games. Sloppy words = sloppy thinking = stupid ideas.

 

[YoursTrue]

No. We used to do that, and we got nowhere. It wasn't till we abandoned untested belief and adopted the scientific method that real progress and understanding took off.

Yet it's inductive science that moved us from oxcarts to jetliners.

Yet this superstition has rarely led to consensus, or to useful technology or understanding of the world.

Isn't experiment an important part of the scientific method?
Just believing something because it seems right doesn't accomplish anything.

So where's the scientific method showing how fish evolved eventually to be humans.

 

[gnostic]

You don't get to define any word. You can use any definition you choose and then expect people to parse it that way but the meaning of no word is fixed and assigning definitions as you did reflects ONLY your belief.

"Superstition" still means; "2 : a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary" and this still applies to scientific beliefs too. This is the definition many people intend when they use the word. Indeed, most people are not saying that all religious beliefs are superstitions when they use the word. Most people are usually referring to ideas like ghosts and goblins. I personally believe all certainty of any type underlies superstition. But then like with everything, I might be wrong and everything I believe might apply only some of the time even when I'm right.

I find that you are cherry-picking only definitions you wanted.

How about including the 1st definition that you didn’t quote?

You tell @It Aint Necessarily So that he cannot define any word, meaning, not of his own choosing…but that’s exactly what you are doing, by ignoring the other definition that you had conveniently left out. it is double standards. You are being terribly dishonest.

What dictionary did you use, and what is (the missing) definition 1 for superstition?

The most common definition to “superstition“, often included something relating to belief in the supernatural, whether it be supernatural being or supernatural event.

Here are some of the definitions from various dictionary:

Religious belief or practice considered to be irrational, unfounded, or based on fear or ignorance; excessively credulous belief in and reverence for the supernatural.​

​

A widely held but irrational belief in supernatural influences, especially as leading to good luck or bad luck, or a practice based on such belief.​

Oxford English Dictionary​

That from the older Oxford dictionary. The following 2 come from the current and updated editions (British & American editions):

excessively credulous belief in and reverence for the supernatural.​

​

a widely held but irrational belief in supernatural influences, especially as leading to good luck or bad luck, or a practice based on such belief​

​

Oxford Dictionary of English​

​

excessively credulous belief in and reverence for the supernatural beings.​

​

a widely held but irrational belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such belief.​

​

New Oxford American Dictionary​

other…

A belief or beliefs, not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, that events may be influenced by one's behaviour in some magical or mystical way.​

​

Wikitionary​

a : a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation​

​

b : an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition​

​

Merriam-Webster Dictionary​

belief that is not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, but is connected with old ideas about magic, etc.​

​

Cambridge Dictionary​

While we can acknowledge the older definitions, but it best to keep up to date with modern contexts and usages in the English language or any other languages for that matter.

If It Aint Necessarily So cannot use definition he has, then why should you be allowed to use only one you have accepted?

But the problem isn’t the definition you had quoted, it is the one you omitted that make you dishonest by only quoting the one you wanted.

Are you going to ignored the above definitions, where the commonalities of these associate superstitions with ”supernatural” elements, like the concept of god (entity or being), luck (causation) & magic (action or event), which Natural Sciences don’t do?

Natural Sciences stu nature, not the supernatural.

 

[gnostic]

Well we do observe “small changes” caused by “lamarckian mechanisms “does that mean that Lamarkinian evolution is true? Does that mean that we evolved through the mechanisms proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck? ……did the human eye evolved by Lamarkinian Evolution?

Why are you bringing up Lamarkinian inheritance & Lamarkinian evolution?

We are living in the 21st century, both Genetics and Evolution have been updated greatly since the days of Gregors Mendel (Law of Inheritance) and Charles Darwin (Natural Selection), that include modern biology, as neither Mendel, nor Darwin, knew anything about DNA and proteins in the way biologists know them today with molecular biology.

Molecular biology, biochemistry and other more modern biological fields, provide much better understanding than the 19th century, especially in regards to law of inheritance and Natural Selection.

Although both Mendel & Darwin are considered founders of respective Genetics and Natural Selection, today’s biology have gone beyond what they knew back then.

 

[Valjean]

Of course some are more suitable but in point of fact it is irrelevant because individuals can adapt. Individuals have consciousness, not rabbits, and not some rabbits. Rabbits by definition have consciousness but no rabbit is by definition more fit than another. Until such time as this is established experimentally or gradual change in species is actually observed then all you have is an hypothesis. Defining survivors as being more fit is simple nonsense. It would be as self evidently false if I maintained they were more conscious or if I postulated they were less rabbit.

We're not talking about conscious, adaptive choices. We're talking about physical differences that would be reflected in an organism's genes; differences that could be inherited and passed down to one's offspring.

Experiment always suggests the survivors that lead to change in species ACTUALLY ARE less like the rest of their species than those which die. Remember the upside down flies? Where is your evidence for gradual change caused by fitness? Where is YOUR experiment? You want to extrapolate the effect of mass murder in the lab with minimally conscious microbes to to apply to all life including those with brains and complex behavior. You have no experiment to underpin your beliefs. Observation and experiment argue against your position.

Biology is full of confirmatory experiments. Did you not do any in high school biology?

How did we get chihuahuas and bulldogs from wolves, or maize from teosinte?