Other Than "The Bible Tells Me So," Your Single Best Argument for Creationism

[minorwork]

The number of times it had to have happened convinces me.

But you don't know that number. You presume to know it with no given event that could show you wrong. You need from your view a means to show it invalid for it to be considered knowledge.
This intelligence you're speaking of has many connotations but few denotations. What is your working definition that applies to your posts here? Mine is informed by the following, though not yet fixed with your posts in mind. I favor

"…[intelligence] denotes, first of all, a quality that is intellectual and not emotional or moral: in measuring it we try to rule out the effects of the child's zeal, interest, industry, and the like. Secondly, it denotes a general capacity, a capacity that enters into everything the child says or does or thinks; any want of 'intelligence' will, therefore, be revealed to some degree in almost all that he attempts; a weakness in some limited or specialized ability for example, in the ability to speak or to read, to learn or to calculate is of itself by no means a sign of defective intelligence. Thirdly, intelligence is by definition an innate capacity: hence a lack of it is not necessarily proved by a lack of educational knowledge or skill" (Burt, 1957, p. 64-65).
Intelligence is not defined by behavior but by prediction. ~ Jeff Hawkins
"I define [intelligence] as your skill in achieving whatever it is you want to attain in your life within your sociocultural context.by capitalizing on your strengths and compensating for, or correcting your weaknesses.” ~ Robert Sternberg, Cognitive psychologist

 

[savagewind]

What? No unsuccessful acts at all? For each intentioned act that is successful, I've had hundreds, sometimes thousands of unsuccessful attempts, but then that's how to learn banjo riffs.

What is an act of conformity? Why does it(?) require this help thing? Doesn't anything get done without help in your view? If not then you have gained not a thing because there is no exception in your view of acts that are not in conformity.

LOL. You are not paying attention. I said that I can play the lottery but each time I do it I expect to lose.
So listen, please. Billions upon billions upon many more billions of acts succeeded for good. OK?
Now, calculate along with those many, many billions all the acts that did not succeed.


So it isn't that anything good happened. I believe because SO MUCH good happened.

An act of conformity just means that when anything came up to any other thing they conformed together for something good. That happened a mindboggling number of times.

Your adding in the unsuccessful meet-ups just goes to prove MY point.

 

[savagewind]

But you don't know that number. You presume to know it with no given event that could show you wrong. You need from your view a means to show it invalid for it to be considered knowledge.
This intelligence you're speaking of has many connotations but few denotations. What is your working definition that applies to your posts here? Mine is informed by the following, though not yet fixed with your posts in mind. I favor

"…[intelligence] denotes, first of all, a quality that is intellectual and not emotional or moral: in measuring it we try to rule out the effects of the child's zeal, interest, industry, and the like. Secondly, it denotes a general capacity, a capacity that enters into everything the child says or does or thinks; any want of 'intelligence' will, therefore, be revealed to some degree in almost all that he attempts; a weakness in some limited or specialized ability for example, in the ability to speak or to read, to learn or to calculate is of itself by no means a sign of defective intelligence. Thirdly, intelligence is by definition an innate capacity: hence a lack of it is not necessarily proved by a lack of educational knowledge or skill" (Burt, 1957, p. 64-65).
Intelligence is not defined by behavior but by prediction. ~ Jeff Hawkins
"I define [intelligence] as your skill in achieving whatever it is you want to attain in your life within your sociocultural context.by capitalizing on your strengths and compensating for, or correcting your weaknesses.” ~ Robert Sternberg, Cognitive psychologist

Ouch! LOL

 

[savagewind]

Doesn't anything get done without help in your view?

You'd have to define "help" for me to be able to answer that. Also, it's a double negative. I don't know if I can answer a double one correctly.
If it was thus; Does anything get done without help; I say yes, things get done without help of the intelligent kind. But everything that gets done has energy and time which are helps. Aren't they?

An object at rest stays at rest, so it needs some help. Right?

 

[minorwork]

LOL. You are not paying attention. I said that I can play the lottery but each time I do it I expect to lose.
So listen, please. Billions upon billions upon many more billions of acts succeeded for good. OK?
Now, calculate along with those many, many billions all the acts that did not succeed.


So it isn't that anything good happened. I believe because SO MUCH good happened.

An act of conformity just means that when anything came up to any other thing they conformed together for something good. That happened a mindboggling number of times.

Your adding in the unsuccessful meet-ups just goes to prove MY point.

Yet you are unable to cite each instance of good other than of your own experience. You and I have to assume facts not in evidence to put stock in your proclamations that are absent measurable instances that you've witnessed even, much less addressing those I have or others. Can you not limit yourself to your own experiences without the use of facts not in evidence?

You say good happens. OK, so what does that say about a single best argument for creation? I've said my argument is for a creation constantly occurring while I'm aware of which I model a future vision of it and project it a tenth of a second into the future so I can function effectively in the physical to walk a crowded sidewalk or drive a car without having an accident doing either. My senses error correct my model of Creation projecting the correction a tenth of a second into the future.

Your conformity explanation has provided this reader with no examples, references, connotations or denotations. You really expect me to understand what you're talking about when it appears that you don't either?

 

[savagewind]

Yet you are unable to cite each instance of good other than of your own experience.

Each one of billions? LOL
Here is one. Hydrogen met oxygen and what a marriage that was! You should have been there. Why weren't you?

 

[savagewind]

And let us not get into the private parts of Hydrogen or any of the other elements that Oh my goodness me! fit together like a puzzle.

 

[savagewind]

God says it was the Hydrogens who met oxygen. That is because a man (Oxygen) can have two wives, but a woman may have only one.

 

[savagewind]

And he doesn't have to be a good one.......but the woman has to.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Hydrogen met oxygen and what a marriage that was!

Ménage a trois.

 

[Polymath257]

God says it was the Hydrogens who met oxygen. That is because a man (Oxygen) can have two wives, but a woman may have only one.

What about hydrogen peroxide? H_2 O_2?

 

[stevevw]

This is not what science is or is about, and there are no scientific glasses. Scientists are rational skeptics and empiricists. So am I. And wherever you use reason and evidence rather than faith, so are you.

I agree but it is not the science itself but some of the people behind the science that use it. A rational idea can be applied to something which will help support a person's and bolster their belief about something. The thing about science is that because many places great credence in it some take it on face value and so science can be a powerful tool to influence people. A form of herd mentality and groupthink can set in like any topic but because it has credibility it is easier to be misapplied. Get enough promoting their particular ideas and it starts to become a belief more than verified science. Just look at all the ideas out there that are held up as being theories when they are not ie multiverse theory, string theory etc. These types of ideas are open to speculation and because they have been used so much in science they are influencing the thinking.

It is becoming a case of not whether one of those theories will be correct but something along those lines is correct and the criteria for verification is becoming a little blurred. People are believing these ideas whether they have been verified or not.ie Richard Dawkins support for Lawrence Krausse's idea of nothing. Dawkins has been going around promoting it like a disciple and many people begin to believe it is something that is scientifically verified because these two high profile scientists are promoting it. Its the same for a lot of the ideas out there at the moment because they address a lot of the difficult areas that science is finding hard to come up with an answer to.

Many agree with you. The rovers made an effort to find proxies of life, but found none (I think I recall hearing about a false alarm, but that's an indistinct memory that may well be wrong).

So do I from memory or it might have been about another distant planet that they claimed had some signatures that represented water. And from memory, I think some were celebrating that they had found water only later to have to qualify that it wasn't or most likely wasn't.

Still, there may be life there yet. Or not. We don't know.

They need the starship enterprise.

Europa and Enceladus are considered moons of interest, as is Gannymede and Titan.

Would it matter to you if we found extraterrestrial unicellular life in the solar system? I'd be thrilled.

Not really as life could be anything, the Bible does not mention it either way. Many believers can live with evolution and alien life and I don't think this is the basis for belief. These are circumstantial considerations that do not affect the fundamental message of belief.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

The thing about science is that because many places great credence in it some take it on face value and so science can be a powerful tool to influence people. A form of herd mentality and groupthink can set in like any topic but because it has credibility it is easier to be misapplied. Get enough promoting their particular ideas and it starts to become a belief more than verified science.

When I flick the switch, I get light at night. I see no polio around me. I can communicate with you almost instantly whatever part of the world you are in. That's how I decide that science is on the right track. And I think I'm probably in the majority there.

I encourage modern scientists to continue with their program of investigating and speculating. It's made life longer, healthier, safer, more comfortable, and more interesting. What more are you hoping for from this methodology?

 

[Polymath257]

God says it was the Hydrogens who met oxygen. That is because a man (Oxygen) can have two wives, but a woman may have only one.

I think I'll choose to be the carbon in methane. CH_4.

 

[LukeS]

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And let's keep it to your single best argument. Don't want to be all over the map.

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EDITED TO NOTE: Because this is in the "EVOLUTION Vs CREATIONISM" forum and one may wish to base an argument for creationism on a perceived shortcoming of evolution, please keep in mind that abiogenesis (the natural process by which life arises from non-living matter) is NOT a part of evolution. Evolutionists don't care how life first came into being, be it through abiogenesis or the hand of god.

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Ok for a philosophic argument, non evolved complexity is a sign of creation.

Ill say that temporal flow and the phenomenal "living present" ( occurring within the presentism of A series time) is a product of people having memory and expectation;

...whereas the noumenal world has the property of eternalism (B series time, tenseless, all at once time).

A-series and B-series - Wikipedia


Because there is no process in eternalism, then there is no evolution in the noumenal world, because evolution requires tensed process. (first bacteria, then fish, then later on amphibians etc)

Therefore the complexity of human life is created, as it is not (under these presuppositions) the product of a process of evolution.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Ok for a philosophic argument, non evolved complexity is a sign of creation.

Ill say that temporal flow and the phenomenal "living present" ( occurring within the presentism of A series time) is a product of people having memory and expectation;

...whereas the noumenal world has the property of eternalism (B series time, tenseless, all at once time).

A-series and B-series - Wikipedia


Because there is no process in eternalism, then there is no evolution in the noumenal world, because evolution requires tensed process. (first bacteria, then fish, then later on amphibians etc)

Therefore the complexity of human life is created, as it is not (under these presuppositions) the product of a process of evolution.

You seem to be saying that from the perspective of outside of the mind - from the noumenal world - time is an illusion and that therefore change is impossible, meaning that evolution is impossible. Is that correct?

If so, doesn't that same manner of framing reality preclude an act of creation, which is also change?

 

[LukeS]

You seem to be saying that from the perspective of outside of the mind - from the noumenal world - time is an illusion and that therefore change is impossible, meaning that evolution is impossible. Is that correct?

If so, doesn't that same manner of framing reality preclude an act of creation, which is also change?

1 Yes that's correct.

2 I suppose so, unless God is "outside of the argument" somehow.

I think maybe God could create a "block of eternity" ex nihlo, which is a change from nothing, but which itself is unchanging.

I am reminded of that "flatland" idea. The apparent temporality of the fossil record may be an intersection of a different dimensional reality into our world.

We are like flatlanders to whome a sphere appears as a small dot, then a larger circle etc and then a smaller circle and then another dot which vanishes. But the Sphere exists in higher dimensions, all as one.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

I think maybe God could create a "block of eternity" ex nihlo, which is a change from nothing, but which itself is unchanging.

OK, but is that an argument for creationism? Don't you need to find a way to contend that that probably happened rather than merely might have?

All ex nihilo claims suffer from the same logical difficulty - how can that which exists have an effect on that which does not exist causing the latter to come into existence from nothing?

That's not a problem for creationism per se. Pantheistic and panenthestic ideas of gods have them creating our reality from the subtance of themselves. What they create is not substance, which is presumably eternal, but its particular arrangement similar to human acts of creation, and reminiscent of the First Law of Thermodynamics - energy is neither created nor destroyed.

I am reminded of that "flatland" idea. The apparent temporality of the fossil record may be an intersection of a different dimensional reality into our world.

That's an interesting exercise in imagination. And yes, we can conceive of time as all laid out already, with past, present and future all existing in some reality not available to our sense, just our imaginations, as our consciousness moves from instant to instant.

But that doesn't make the fossil record go away, nor the relationships between the fossils, nor their implications, which is pretty much what you would need to do if you want to advocate for creationism. How do we account for their existence in a creationism scenario? Were they created to deceive us into believing that we evolved?

 

[Polymath257]

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Ok for a philosophic argument, non evolved complexity is a sign of creation.

Ill say that temporal flow and the phenomenal "living present" ( occurring within the presentism of A series time) is a product of people having memory and expectation;

...whereas the noumenal world has the property of eternalism (B series time, tenseless, all at once time).

A-series and B-series - Wikipedia


Because there is no process in eternalism, then there is no evolution in the noumenal world, because evolution requires tensed process. (first bacteria, then fish, then later on amphibians etc)

Therefore the complexity of human life is created, as it is not (under these presuppositions) the product of a process of evolution.

OK. It is standard in cosmology to talk about the universe as a four dimensional manifold: three dimensions of space and one of time. This viewpoint is closest to the 'B' theory of time, but isn't quite the same. It does imagine ALL of space and time together, past, present, and future, together as a single entity.

In this viewpoint, the universe simply exists. It doesn't begin to exist. It doesn't end. Since all of time and space is in this single geometric structure, the universe simply *is*. Time is part of the universe, as is space, and, of course, all the stuff we see around us, throughout time.

Again, this is *absolutely standard* when doing modern cosmology.

However, in this manifold, there is a directionality for time: causality within the manifold happens from earlier times to later times. So causality is also within the universe.

Our consciousnesses, like you say, are the result of how entropy changes with time *within* the universe, so is dependent on the fact that we have memories of the past and not the future (even though the future 'exists' in this structure).

Is this a good picture of what you are describing?

Now, why you think that evolution doesn't happen *within* that space-time manifold, I do not know. Again, just as we can talk about north and south on a globe, we can still talk about the past and the present in space-time. And just as the geography of the Earth changes as we go further north, the specifics in space-time change as we go to the future.

So, species *do* change over geological time. If you slice space-time at two different times, the species will be different. And *that* is all that evolution says.

 

[Polymath257]

That's an interesting exercise in imagination. And yes, we can conceive of time as all laid out already, with past, present and future all existing in some reality not available to our sense, just our imaginations, as our consciousness moves from instant to instant.

But that doesn't make the fossil record go away, nor the relationships between the fossils, nor their implications, which is pretty much what you would need to do if you want to advocate for creationism. How do we account for their existence in a creationism scenario? Were they created to deceive us into believing that we evolved?

Yes, if we look at things from the perspective of space-time, what the laws of physics do is describe the shape and patterning (of matter and energy) of this space-time manifold.

Now, we *could* imagine a different time dimension and perhaps even extra spatial dimensions. We could then postulate that there is a higher dimensional being that knows how to construct 'universes' such as ours: four dimensional structures of space-time patterned with matter and energy.

And, perhaps, the 'laws of physics' that work in this higher dimensional structure do not have a conservation law which prevents the formation of these universes 'ex nihilo'.

But, of course, if we are speculating like this, we can go further and speculate that there is a whole society of these higher dimensional beings that create universes as works of art and *our* universe is just one of many that these beings have produced. We can even wonder if our universe is the product of an art student that has since (in the extra dimension of time, mind you) forgotten about us completely. His 'hand prints' will still be on our universe and we (in *our* time) would still see 'divine intervention' because of where this art student placed his 'hands'. But in *reality* our universe is completely forgotten and in an attic somewhere.

So, yes, we can speculate. It is easy to do so. And it gets us precisely nowhere. if anything, we would still need to figure out hte 'laws of nature' o fhis higher dimensional space, wouldn't we?