Disproving god with the laws of logic

[freethinker44]

Genetic mutation is random.
Natural selection is random.

How DNA splices at conception has variables.
The offspring, even within the same litter, might not have identical traits.... demonstrating that genetic qualities are not 100%...one copy to another.

As the offspring develop, their lives will not be identical.
One might be eaten while trying to cross a river...another might fail in a fight for food.

None of this disproves God.

God may have initiated this process....so His immediate 'hands on' influence is not required.

Genetic mutation is sometimes random and sometimes caused by variables in the environment but the variables are still random so it either random mutations or developed mutations from random events, still random either way.

Natural selection is not random at all.

An analogy I would use is a funnel and different sized marbles, where natural selection is the funnel and genetic mutations are the marbles. If you drop the marbles into the funnel only those that can fit through the hole can move on to the other side. Natural selection is like a funnel forcing random mutations through a hole and only those that are fit to go through can be used for further procreation while those that cannot are discarded.

You are completely right thoug, none of this disproves a god, some versions of god maybe but it isn't definitive .

 

[Thief]

Your funnel analogy doesn't work in your favor.

In the same way some of your marbles fit and some don't.....
Some offspring live to eat, sleep, drink, and procreate.

Random events are natural selection.

God did it.

 

[freethinker44]

Natural selection isn't random. Genetic mutations are random. There is nothing random about something being selected, if natral selection was random life would need to have a god because without the environment choosing which genes are best suited to further the species.

Natural selection works with or without a god, god could have started it or it could have been completely natural, either way works. But don't misrepresent the theory and try to make it sound like it says something it doesn't.

Just out of curiosity, can you reference any NON intelligent design scientist who specializes in evolution who would say natural selection is random. I would be interested in seeing how well their research is going. I bet you don't find any though, because natural selection isn't random.

 

[Vile Atheist]

Random events are natural selection.

You DO know natural selection is not a random process? Just making sure.

Here's an overly-simplified explanation of what natural selection is.

You have a population of a certain organism in a certain environment. Those organisms are not going to have the same traits because of genetic mutation. As a result, you have a pool of different traits. Some organisms will be well-suited to the environment and some won't. The ones that are not well-suited will be more likely to die or to at least not reproduce and pass on their unfavourable traits.

The members of the population with favourable traits DO survive and reproduce and pass on their favourable traits to the next generation. Each subsequent generation gets more and more adapted to the environment.

The pressures of natural selection is exactly what causes populations to evolve until they become so genetically different from their original starting point, they can no longer produce viable offspring with members of that same population. Thus, they become their own species.

 

[Thief]

Natural events are random.
Earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, drought, flood, etc.etc.etc.
The 'mutations' that happen to be able to ...will survive.
They reproduce.
Their genetics pass on to the offspring.
All events are random.

 

[Kurt31416]

...I believe the first law makes gods existence impossible. It is the law of identity, that something cannot be something and not something at the same time. These laws are absolute, and christians would claim they are the physical manifestation of gods mind. Now, in order for these laws to be absolute, they must be objective. So they are true regardless of personal opinion or whether or not any mind is there to judge them at all...

Ok, is the statement "This sentence is a lie." true, not true, or both?

 

[freethinker44]

Ok, is the statement "This sentence is a lie." true, not true, or both?

That statement is self refuting and violates the law of exluded middle, which says a statement is either true or false without and middle ground. That statement is not logically true.

 

[Kurt31416]

There is no law of excluded middle in fundemantal math/logic. There's a million ways to construct a self-reference, strange loop paradox. The Russell Paradox, the Berry Paradox, on and so on. Chaitin used the Berry Paradox to prove Algorithmic Information Theory.

"This sentence is a lie." is the Liar's Paradox is Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, what Godel proved with the most fundamental picky logic/math known to man in 1931.

All axiomatic systems, all math/logic (at least those capable of including the natural numbers 1,2,3...), are incomplete. Always places where the logic/math breaks down.

 

[The Neo Nerd]

I think what they are trying to say is natural selection is governed by the rules of survival of the fittest. Now survival of the fittest isn't always about the strongest it's about which particular animal is most suited to survive in a given environment.

That being said natural selection isn't random, natural selection will NOT favour an animal that has inferior survivability. If there is any exceptions to this rule please let us know.

Please confirm your understanding of this particular fact.

-Q

 

[Amill]

Natural events are random.
Earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, drought, flood, etc.etc.etc.
The 'mutations' that happen to be able to ...will survive.
They reproduce.
Their genetics pass on to the offspring.
All events are random.

I still fail to see how natural selection is random. And it isn't always driven by changing environments. Sometimes those animals are forced, either by overpopulation, or by competition with other species, to adapt to different environments or to just try and find different food sources. That's not very random.

 

[Thief]

Nature is a collection of random events.

If you survive the drought....you get to pass your genes to your offspring.
If you survive the plague...likewise.

What's so deep about that?

 

[Kurt31416]

Historical Introduction --- A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics


G.J. Chaitin's 2 March 2000 Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture. The speaker was introduced by Manuel Blum. The lecture was videotaped; this is an edited transcript which appeared on pp. 12-21 of a special issue of Complexity magazine on ``Limits in Mathematics and Physics'' (Vol. 5, No. 5, May/June 2000).

...So this is the idea that mathematics should be absolutely black or white, precise, absolute truth. This is the traditional notion of mathematics.

Black or White
The real world we know is an absolute mess --- right? --- everything's complicated and messy. But the one place where things should be absolutely clear, black or white, is in pure mathematics.


So this is sort of what Hilbert is saying, and he proposed this as a goal, to have this formalization of all of mathematics and eliminate all the problems. Now this was a program, this was not supposed to be something you did over a weekend. Hilbert proposed this as a goal for putting mathematics on a very firm foundation. And he and a group of very bright collaborators, including John von Neumann, set to work on this, and for a while, for thirty years, it looked sort of encouraging. And then --- this is a quick summary of a century of work --- then as I'm sure all of you know there were a few little problems!

The problems are 1931, Kurt Gödel, and 1936, Alan Turing.

1931 Gödel
1936 Turing
They showed that it could not be done, that there were fundamental obstacles to formalizing all of mathematics and making mathematics absolutely black and white and absolutely crystal clear. Remember what Hilbert is proposing is that we should formalize all of mathematics so that everyone on planet earth can agree that a proof is either correct or incorrect. The rules of the game should be absolutely explicit, it should be an artificial language and then mathematics will give you absolute truth. ``Absolute truth'' should be underlined in a very beautiful font and you should hear the angels singing when you say these words! This was the thought that we mathematicians have absolute truth. It's ours --- no one else has it, only us! That was the idea.

So it turns out this doesn't quite work. Why doesn't it work?
Gödel shocked people quite a bit by showing that it couldn't work. It was very, very surprising when Gödel did this in 1931. And Turing went I think more deeply into it. So let me give you a cartoon five minute summary, my take on what they did.
Gödel starts with ``this statement is false'', what I'm now saying is a lie, I'm lying. If I'm lying, and it's a lie that I'm lying, then I'm telling the truth! So ``this statement is false'' is false if and only if it's true, so there's a problem....

Chaitin, Exploring RANDOMNESS

Math is not the skeleton of the Universe.

 

[freethinker44]

Right, but the theorem doesn't say that the statement is true or not true, it says it is unprovable.
When applied to things that are purely conceptual it holds up, but these statements cannot be given any kind of physical charactstics. When they are they no longer need logic to be explained this statement doesn't apply. Can you show me a liar who doesn't lie. Can you show a gowho isn't a god. Once these ideas take on physical traits their absurdity becomes apparent.
God isn't a logical paradox because god claims physical traits which can be shown to be false or impossible.

 

[Kurt31416]

The mutations are mostly random. The mixing of the male/female genes is mostly random, but natural selection, acting on it is mostly non-random.

Keep in mind, there are two kinds of random, statistically random, like if you roll dice, and algorithmicly random which removes the lucky rolls, like rolling boxcars a dozen times in a row. As the number of rolls approaches infinity the two become the same.

Algorithmic randomness, that pure randomness, is the same thing as complexity, information density, Occam's Razor, and entropy. And the most random, most complex, highest information density, most Occam's Razor, and highest entropy way you can say something, in or out of math, is eternally unknowable, no matter what.

 

[Thief]

Right, but the theorem doesn't say that the statement is true or not true, it says it is unprovable.
When applied to things that are purely conceptual it holds up, but these statements cannot be given any kind of physical charactstics. When they are they no longer need logic to be explained this statement doesn't apply. Can you show me a liar who doesn't lie. Can you show a gowho isn't a god. Once these ideas take on physical traits their absurdity becomes apparent.
God isn't a logical paradox because god claims physical traits which can be shown to be false or impossible.

God is spirit.

What physical trait do you think He claims?

 

[freethinker44]

God is spirit.

What physical trait do you think He claims?

"sigh"

If god exists as anything other than an idea that people have, then he exists as a physical being. By physical I don't mean there is a huge disembodied head floating around in space, I mean anything that exists in any physical way. For example, numbers do not physically exist. You can count objects and assign numbers to something, but they are completely conceptual and have no physical impact on the physical realm. Spirits would be physical, even though you cannot touch them or see them and they have no physical body, energy is also a physical trait. So, if god has any power at all outside the minds of men, he is physical. Even if god only exists in mens minds but exists as a separate conscious being that can influence minds to perform his physical functions for him, that is still a physical manifestation of himself.

 

[Kurt31416]

Right, but the theorem doesn't say that the statement is true or not true, it says it is unprovable.

Yes, but it's proved that it's unprovable. Is it true or false? Chaitin, who clearly says it's the same thing as the liar's paradox continues,

"So there are two possibilities. Either it's provable or it's unprovable. And this means provable or unprovable from the system that Hilbert had proposed, the final goal of formalizing all of mathematics.

Well, if it's provable, and it says it's unprovable, we're proving something that's false. So that's not very nice. And if it's unprovable and it says it's unprovable, well then, what it states is true, it's unprovable, and we have a hole. Instead of proving something false we have incompleteness, we have a true statement that our formalization has not succeeded in capturing.
So the idea is that either we're proving false statements, which is terrifying, or we get something which is not as bad, but is still awful, which is that our formal axiomatic system is incomplete --- there's something that's true but we can't prove it within our system. And therefore the goal of formalizing once and for all all of mathematics ends up on the floor!"

When applied to things that are purely conceptual it holds up, but these statements cannot be given any kind of physical charactstics.
When they are they no longer need logic to be explained this statement doesn't apply. Can you show me a liar who doesn't lie. Can you show a gowho isn't a god. Once these ideas take on physical traits their absurdity becomes apparent.

When Godel went to be sworn in as a citizen, on the fast track, with all his supporters there, including his comical sidekick, Al Einstein, he lectured the Judge for 45 minutes on the incompleteness of the US Constitution.

You can use the self-reference strange loop system to punch holes in any logical system. For instance, in the Epistle of James, he's talking about honoring the Written Law, and the Written Law says not to judge your brother. So, what does it say about itself? The Written Law says not to judge by the Written Law.

Or for instance, the no objective reality of the Quantum Theory. Well, are the equations of the Quantum Theory itself an objective reality? Where does the Quantum Theory make that exception?

I suppose even the old saw about God saying some stone will never be lifted, can he then lift it? is the same thing.

God isn't a logical paradox because god claims physical traits which can be shown to be false or impossible.

Depends on the God. The God of Einstein, Jefferson, Spinoza, to a large extent, the Samaritans, and definitely the historical Jesus as found in the Gospel of Thomas has no such traits.

 

[Thief]

Strange that someone should mention rolling dice.....

With pencil and paper....choose three points...at random.
Label each corner with two numbers...choosing from one to six.
Choose a fourth point..at random...within the triangle.
Roll one cube...having discarded the mate.

Whatever number comes up....
Measure from the random point within the triangle, halfway to that corner... chosen by the roll of the die. Mark that point.
Repeat.

As the day goes by, a pattern will form.
You will see within the random boundaries, a collection of triangles.
Some overshadow, some overlap.
But all share the same proportions as the original (randomly) formed geometry.

Random events repeat.
But the exact replication won't be there.
No one calculates the flight of a dandelion seed....but they reproduce.
Unless of course the random flight pattern drops the seed unto a poor conditions.

 

[freethinker44]

Depends on the God. The God of Einstein, Jefferson, Spinoza, to a large extent, the Samaritans, and definitely the historical Jesus as found in the Gospel of Thomas has no such traits.

The deist god isn't really a god at all, its just a personification of nature. In my opinion, why go through the trouble of calling it god, why not just let it be nature.

 

[Kurt31416]

What's in a word. I prefer "Living Father" like Jesus. The Living standing for giving the Universe life, making it work, and Father because we are all children of the Universe.